Links and Notes for July 31st, 2026

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Design
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Roaming Charges: History Hurts by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

TALKING TO NORM FINKELSTEIN by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“David Duke isn’t bright enough to originate a term.”

European governments demand crackdown on migrants after 99 die trying to reach Spain by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)

“The European Union has effectively abolished the right to asylum for those seeking to enter the continent by building external borders patrolled by heavily armed guards that even the fascist Trump would be proud of. As a consequence, over 32,000 refugees and migrants have been recorded as dead or missing while trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe since 2014, according to the Missing Migrants Project.”

“Sanchez responded by blaming the events in Ceuta on “people smugglers.” But the fact of the matter is that the scenes of desperation in North Africa can only occur because the EU has blocked off all legal routes into the continent. The real criminals sit in government offices in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid, because their contempt for basic democratic rights, and their funding for authoritarian regimes in Africa to keep migrants out, create the social misery that forces people to take desperate measures. Their policies are no better than those of the fascist Trump, whose ICE thugs stalk the streets of American cities to seize immigrants, whether or not they have the legal entitlement to remain in the US, and routinely use deadly force against their victims.

“The Libyan coast guard and blood-drenched military dictatorship in Egypt both receive billions in EU funds to carry out what is euphemistically referred to as “pullbacks” of migrants seeking to reach Europe. This process includes the creation of concentration camp-style facilities where torture and slave-like conditions have been exposed, and “desert dumps,” where the EU’s bought-and-paid-for thugs simply abandon groups of starving migrants in the Sahara Desert.”

“[…] the EU is determined to gain the upper hand through deals with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Angola and other countries to open up the exploitation of cobalt and other critical minerals necessary for its “clean energy” transition. It aims to ensure that European imperialism, not its rivals in the US or China, seizes the lion’s share of resources for key industries of capitalist “growth,” like EV production, renewable energy, AI data centres, and hi-tech manufacturing of digital equipment. Workers labouring in the mines, processing facilities, transportation and other sectors in these countries, which are among the poorest in the world, have no rights and earn a pittance.”

“Social life in Europe is not under “attack” by “invading” immigrants, but by a financial oligarchy that demands unchecked power to accumulate wealth and wage wars of aggression to capture natural resources, cheap labour, markets, and geostrategic influence, whether against Russia in Ukraine or Iran in the Middle East.”

”I’m Not Political” Just Means “I Support The Status Quo” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Every part of your life is dramatically affected by the political actions of others. Your political inaction is an action, and it’s an action in favor of the political status quo.

““I don’t do politics” means I support genocide. It means I support war. It means I support injustice and exploitation. It means I support ordinary people getting poorer and sicker while the biosphere dies and the billionaires turn into trillionaires. It means I support our headlong plunge into mass extinction and dystopia.”

“Inaction is an action, and when things are profoundly unjust, it’s an action in support of injustice. If your house is burning and you don’t take action to remove yourself and your loved ones from danger, your inaction isn’t neutral. Your decision not to act is itself an action of immense consequence.”

Who’s Really Afraid of the DSA? by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy)

“DSA backed candidates won three out of 26 House elections in deep red districts during New York’s recent Democratic primaries along with a smattering of other recent primary wins in other liberal-progressive strongholds across the country.

“In other words, a big red nothing affecting elections that no Republican was ever going to win anyway. For Stalin’s sake, their Lenin, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor of the wealthiest city on earth, elected overwhelmingly by rich, white, trust-fund hipsters attempting to stamp a red star on the once brown neighborhoods they’re rapidly gentrifying with luxury lofts and vegan cafes.

“None of this is likely to have any effect whatsoever on flyover country but that is the target audience for a good 90% of the GOP intelligentsia’s breathless coverage of what has to be the world’s bougieist revolution. That’s because the GOP doesn’t fear the DSA. The GOP fears rogue Republicans and disenchanted independents who are growing increasingly impatient with a party held hostage by the personality cult of a now exposed Zionist pedophile and his pointless, bullshit forever-war with Iran.”

“[…] the DSA’s game has never been about revolution, it is about giving revolutionary cachet to an existentially counter-revolutionary party, and this has been the long con going back to the organization’s inception.”

“[…] since the DSA’s inception, we have only seen the Democratic Party move farther to the right than we have ever believed possible while the Republican Party has essentially mutated into some crude form of cable television monarchy complete with a reality show President and a televangelist State Department.”

“As for the DSA’s other celebrity radical, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for all his fiery rhetoric, the man has hardly proven himself to be much more than a red-tinted DNC shill during his short career as mayor of the wealthiest city in human history. When he isn’t busy posing with Donald Trump for glorified photo-ops, Mamdani has backed Governor Kathy Hochul’s strongarm strikebreaking tactics against nurses and railroad workers while keeping the NYPD’s multi-billion-dollar budget and billionaire Zionist commissioner completely intact.”

It has been 7 months, my friend. But OK. Put the pressure on, I guess.

“I also can’t just sit by silently and watch them get grifted by the oldest capitalist party on earth, the party of Jim Crow and Super Predators, the party that once included Donald Trump and Jeffry Epstein amongst its gilded donor class.”

“The two-party system is a rigged game at a bankrupt casino, and the DSA is just another slot machine near the exit. Do yourselves a great big goddamn favor, dearest motherfuckers, keep walking. We’ve got limousines to light in the parking lot.”

Nicaragua moves to ban “Yankee” agents from elections as Trump policies hit economy by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)

“Ortega’s charge of US interference is not fabricated. It was confirmed within days by Damon Wilson, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA’s regime-change arm in civilian dress, who announced that the NED “will continue supporting those who peacefully defend fundamental freedoms” in Nicaragua.

“The record of its interference is extensive. Between 2014 and 2017, the NED funded 54 projects in Nicaragua at a cost of $4.1 million, according to opposition-aligned journalist Benjamin Waddell. In 2020 alone it disbursed $1.57 million.

“During the 2018 social protests, student and NGO leaders financed by these programs traveled to Washington to openly receive instructions.

“Marxists extend no defense to organizations operating as instruments of US imperialism. But the working class must be clear about what this measure is and whom it will be used against.

“The timing is key to understanding its purpose. The reform is being pushed through at a moment of increased confrontation with Washington and accelerating social crisis.”

The Ukraine Delusion by Nate Bear (¡Don't Panic!)

“Ukraine is a state with a standing army supported by empire fighting another state with a standing army. Palestine has been denied statehood despite the 1947 UN two-state partition agreement (putting aside whatever one thinks about the legitimacy of that agreement), has no standing army to defend itself and Palestinians are fighting a colonial occupation armed by empire. If anything, Ukraine is far more similar to Israel than it is to Palestine. Indeed, in 2024 Zelensky proclaimed Israel as the ideal model for Ukraine, saying he wanted Ukraine to be a “big Israel.”

“Both Ukraine and Israel are proxies at the tip of the imperial spear, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. You don’t have to be the invader to be a tool of imperialism. Sometimes being the invaded is more useful as it imparts a moral surety that helps shield your imperial role from critical analysis. I would argue this is exactly what has happened in the case of Ukraine.

“None of this is to say I don’t have sympathy with ordinary Ukrainians. I do. I think they’ve been sold down the river, by both Europe and their own leaders, and have been coerced into fighting a war a majority now want to end with negotiations. The average Ukrainian is quite different to the average genocide-supporting Israeli who upholds apartheid.

“Yet despite the wishes of a majority of Ukrainians, Europe and Zelensky refuse diplomacy and continue to fight, incurring enormous costs on Ukraine and ordinary Ukrainians. Of course, enormous costs are being inflicted on Russia too, but these costs have not been, and will not be sufficient for a “good peace.” And any costs that would really bite risk an uncontrolled, catastrophic escalation.”

China hat die Weltwirtschaft einmal mehr gerettet by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Der Ölpreis ist ein Mysterium. Zu Beginn des amerikanisch-israelischen Angriffskriegs gegen den Iran hatten sämtliche Experten und Branchenkenner eine mittelfristige „Explosion“ der Rohölpreise von 150 US-Dollar und mehr vorausgesagt. Obgleich sich die Versorgungslage seit März noch einmal deutlich verschlechtert hat, wird Öl zurzeit für rund 80 US-Dollar gehandelt, was dem langjährigen Durchschnitt entspricht. Wie konnten die Experten so deutlich danebenliegen? Die Antwort ist ebenso einfach wie für viele überraschend: China – der mit Abstand größte Ölimporteur der Welt – hat binnen Wochen seine Importe halbiert und so das weltweite Verhältnis von Angebot und Nachfrage wieder ins Gleichgewicht gebracht. Ohne diesen Importrückgang würden die Preise tatsächlich durch die Decke gehen und die Weltwirtschaft ins Chaos stürzen.”

“Sowohl Saudi-Arabien als auch die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate verfügen über leistungsstarke Pipelines, mit denen sie die blockierten Lieferwege zum Teil umgehen können. Zusammen kommen diese Pipelines auf eine Förderleistung von sieben Millionen Barrel pro Tag, was rund ein Drittel der durch die Blockaden wegfallenden Mengen ausgleicht. Hinzu kommt die Freigabe der nationalen Ölreserven durch die USA, Japan und mehrere EU-Staaten, die rund 2,5 Millionen Barrel pro Tag entspricht und damit die nötige Importmenge abermals reduziert. Doch auch mit diesen Notmaßnahmen bleibt noch ein Defizit von zehn Millionen Barrel pro Tag übrig. Und hier kommt China ins Spiel.”

“China hat seine Ölimporte auf dem Seeweg seit Beginn des Irankriegs von rund zwölf Millionen auf rund fünf Millionen Barrel pro Tag gesenkt. Das sind rund 60 Prozent und entspricht in der Summe mehr als zwei Drittel des noch offenen Defizits. Um diese unglaubliche Menge einmal zum besseren Verständnis einzuordnen: Der Rückgang der chinesischen Ölimporte entspricht in Summe fast der gesamten Menge an Öl, das die EU importiert, und ist mehr als die kompletten Ölimporte Indiens.”

“Ohne den massiven Rückgang der chinesischen Importe wäre die Weltwirtschaft heute eine andere. Und was für westliche Beobachter besonders merkwürdig erscheint, ist, dass China diesen Importstopp offenbar still und leise und ohne eine echte Notlage vollzogen hat.”

“Doch wie hat China dies überhaupt hinbekommen? Zum Teil verfolgt China klassische Einsparmethoden. So wurden zahlreiche Inlandsflüge gestrichen und durch das in China hocheffiziente Netz von Schnellzügen ersetzt. Mehr Gütertransporte gingen offenbar auch von der Straße auf die Bahn.”

“Viel plausibler ist die Erklärung, dass China ein großes eigenes Interesse daran hat, dass die Weltwirtschaft stabil bleibt. China ist als „Fabrik der Welt“ darauf angewiesen, dass den eigenen Kunden das Geld nicht ausgeht, weil sie es bei horrenden Ölpreisen in die Kassen der ölexportierenden Staaten überweisen müssen. Wie kein anderer Staat der Welt denkt China strategisch im großen Rahmen und hat – wohl auch als einziger Staat der Welt – auch die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen, solche „Großstrategien“ überhaupt umzusetzen.”

El Cid of the Left? Abdul El Sayed, Victor in Michigan Primary, Faces Racism over his Name by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)

“As for Abdul El Sayed, the senatorial candidate, he is no mean shakes as a man of science either, having authored over 100 scientific papers and an important book on medicine and systems theory, which JD Vance wouldn’t be able to understand. He is a Rhodes Scholar and was an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University.

“One of the incidents that impelled El Sayed to go into politics was the lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan, by a penny-pinching and ignorant Republican governor, Rick Snyder.

“As a physician and a man of science, Dr. El Sayed cares about ordinary Americans. Trump and Vance signally do not.

“So we’d be lucky to have a president El Sayed, who wouldn’t feather his nest to the tune of billions on the backs of tax payers the way Trump has, and who wouldn’t gut the most advanced medical establishment in the world, the way Trump-Vance have. Because he is a servant of the All-Merciful.”

Journalism & Media

How Social Media Invented the ‘World’s Most Racist Country’ by Martín Mosquera (ZNetwork)

“Stadiums are one place where Argentine racism manifests itself in the most exaggerated way. Racist chants have become normalised within the local football culture. Furthermore, Argentines who regularly travel to the World Cups are not a sociological cross-section of the country. They largely belong to the upper-middle and upper classes, among whom classism and racism are expressed in a particularly crude manner.”

That goes for probably all countries. Most countries have societies that privilege assholes and the world cup stadiums’ ticket prices filter for these privileged assholes.

“One example was the English Football Association’s sanction on [Uruguayan player] Edinson Cavani for writing “gracias, negrito” to a friend [on social media]. An affectionate use of Río de la Plata Spanish was interpreted as a racial slur. An affectionate use of the term ended up being sanctioned because an English institution transposed its own code regarding racial language into a different linguistic context.”

Linguistic imperialism; imposing language codes on its subjects.

“Applying, even implicitly, a US-imported binary racial classification leads to scrutinising the faces and skin tones of Argentine players to decide whether they are Black enough. Failing to fit a stereotypical image of Blackness, the national team is then declared white. Yet the Argentine national team is mixed-race and socially from below, composed overwhelmingly of players from working-class homes in the provinces and urban outskirts. Society, for the most part, identifies with them because of their backgrounds and recognising a shared sense of belonging, not because they represent a fantasy of white purity.”

Class trumps race, for God’s sake.

“The underlying problem is what sort of left is taking shape when it can so readily participate in campaigns of national stigmatisation. Internationalism is hollowed out when solidarity between peoples is replaced by a competition to prove who occupies the morally correct position. Racism must be combated and denounced wherever it appears. But a left that cannot distinguish between combating racism and stigmatising a people ends up pushing people who are neither racist nor right-wing towards reactionary positions.”

Hank Green’s anti-AI AI psychosis by Ryegrass an Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Even though his fans have spent the weekend rehashing arguments about the ethics of AI use — it’s bad for the environment, it steals from artists, authors, and researchers, it supports a fascist oligarchy, it makes stupid boring garbage, etc. — I actually think there’s a more interesting takeaway here. Something illustrator Megan Ruiz touches on in a response video she made about the Green drama. “You were up against a deadline,” Ruiz asks. “Are we putting out things for the sake of it or are we putting out things on the internet because we want to educate or inform people?””

To make money, duh.

“Imagine you ran a company that wanted to replace every magazine, newspaper, radio station, TV channel, and movie studio. And imagine you wanted to do that in every country on Earth simultaneously. And imagine you realized you could make a lot more money than those industries ever did if you didn’t pay anyone to make all of that content. But there’s a problem. Your billions of unpaid user-workers, across vastly differently-sized economies around the world, need to keep making content and that content needs to be just good enough that advertisers don’t complain. So imagine you create a product that those same user-workers have to pay for the privilege of using that constantly pressures them to stay productive, and has all the tools they might need to make passable internet content. Problem solved!”

“[…] if you dig deep into why so many people feel that way, you will find the answer is social media every time. You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy. I watch Green’s videos and I’ve definitely noticed the same mania I, myself, have felt so many times begin to crop up. A new project, a new initiative, a new video, a new post, a new company, new, new, more, more.”

Hahahahaha …. and I have so many unfinished projects because I think I’m addicted to doing sports outside. I mean, I’m over praying for rain so that I can keep my ass inside and get some stuff done. I’m on a plane right now, winging my way to the U.S. to be with my family, and I’m kind of grateful to be trapped in a seat where I can finally not only catch up on my reading and writing, but get ahead on it.

“As AI usage becomes something fewer and fewer people will be comfortable admitting they use, Silicon Valley reactionaries will absolutely try and spin it as something edgy and dangerous. It will not work in the long term, the same way none of their messaging and would-be social engineering really sticks, but it will mean that in approximately five months, there’s going to be an extremely tedious national conversation about whether or not using an AI is actually the new punk rock.”

People in the midwest know what a livestream is by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“You’re going to no doubt see all kinds of posts this week claiming that Piker and socialist creators like him are not only small and irrelevant, but also coastal elites that are only watched by coastal elites. As if voters in a state like Michigan don’t have the internet. As if working class people couldn’t possibly watch completely free livestreams on their phones or whatever. This was a big Dem talking point after the DSA upset in New York City back in June. That something like that could only happen in New York because, uh, only people living in cities know about Twitch? Only people in cities would vote for a person of color?

“It’s a ridiculous notion that’s only going to feel more ridiculous the further we trudge our way into the midterms, but I’ll just put this link here for posterity: While campaigning in Wisconsin this week, a guy recognized Piker on the street and gave him a tomato from his backyard. So, yeah, I’d say this stuff is breaking through.”

Paying for News is Cheaper than Not by Hamilton Nolan (How Stuff Works)

“The public demand for journalism still exists, and the civic need for journalism still exists, but the economic model that made it possible to have the number of journalists necessary to provide the level of news coverage that the public was used to in the 20th century has been utterly smashed by big tech. The combined value of the entire United States newspaper industry today is about $20 billion, while the combined net worth of the two guys who started Google is $345 billion. These things are related.”

“From the perspective of the tech companies, the outcome is perfect: They have figured out how to get all of the money from the news business, without having to create any news.”

“The problem is we end up with an expanding universe of commentary that is about a shrinking universe of actual information. If you cut in half the number of journalists reporting new information and double the number of people writing opinions about that information, you have created an information environment that is objectively less valuable for citizens.”

LLM-based tools will make this at least an order of magnitude worse.

“Health care? Transportation? Housing? Each industry has its own characteristics, but all are examples of the ways that privatization of public goods ends up producing huge profits for private companies while leaving the public with less access to what they need. In each case, a rational democratic nation that genuinely wanted to produce the highest quality of life for its citizens would intervene to (at least partly) remove these public goods from predatory private markets, and prioritize public funding in order to meet the public need.”

“An unfortunate outcome of more and more journalists going this route is that readers find themselves faced with an ever-increasing number of appeals for money. That can be annoying. It can also leave everyone worse off. When you read three independent publications, it’s easy to pay for them all; when you read thirty, and they all ask for money, it’s easier to just say “ugh” and not pay for any of them.”

Economy & Finance

Enshittification Relies on Broken Economic Math by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“[…] most people, I think, experience it as a sort of ambient deterioration in the smoothness of life—a series of tiny obstacles to daily living being erected where formerly there were none.”

I fight this by carefully curating my desires, sifting needs from wants, and ruthlessly examining wants for outside influence, to ensure that the value accrued is worth it, either to me or someone else in my community.. By wanting less, by preferring those things that are free, by living outside, by communing with nature.

“The way that America’s version of capitalism proves its utility is by adding up all of the profits created by the privatization of public goods without subtracting the value that has been destroyed by the same activity. We have created the largest enshittifying machine in world history by employing a financial logic that leaves out half of the equation.”

“Across our economy, externalities are simply ignored. Their costs fall on the public’s shoulders. This is not a novel observation— “privatize profits and socialize costs” is what makes the “too big to fail” business model so successful. What is remarkable is the extent to which our government regulations, our views of common sense business practices, and our whole conventional wisdom about the way that material progress should rationally unfold all seem to proceed calmly towards oblivion without even trying to calculate what should be on the “minus” side of the ledger.”

Preach it, Mr. Nolan. This is, of course, achieved not without effort. History’s greatest propaganda machine ensures that the sheep don’t look up (Wikipedia).

“[…] we gape at a beloved national sporting event that fails to make itself dramatically less enjoyable in the name of corporate branding. All that money they’re leaving on the table!”

“The governor of Louisiana can brag that Meta is spending $50 billion on a gargantuan data center in one of the poorest areas of his state, but everyone uneasy about its impacts have no comparable figure of its costs to lay on the other side of the scales. It is not that it is impossible to calculate and incorporate such a number; it is that our system is not built to try. These uncalculated costs do not accrue to corporate balance sheets and are not reflected in stock prices, and therefore contribute to the eerie feeling of seeing the stock market reach new all time highs at the same time that we fear that the industry powering it may destroy us all.”

“When Americans look at a big fun public event in another country and wonder, sincerely, “Shouldn’t this be more enshittified?” it is not a sign of our superior economic insight. It is a sign that capitalism is making us fucking insane.”

We used to be able to buy things in this country by Danny Katch (Revolution for Cowards)

“Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item that costs $5.99, and navigate the emotional complications of feeling like both a suspected criminal and an entitled ass.”

“When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works.”

“What’s happened to going to the Walgreens or Target is a store-sized version of what’s happened to living in America. It’s the experience of being subject to the decisions of a ruling class that responds to every challenge with authoritarianism, greed, and the same levels of poise and wisdom as an inbred Pomeranian.”

“In fact, it’s estimated that ORC accounts for only five percent of inventory shrink. An industry economist told the New York Times that the fifty-instead-of-five percent error was comparable to “the census claiming that nearly half of the U.S. population lives in the state of Rhode Island.””

“Industry research indicates that engaged “front-line employees” are more important for preventing shoplifting than sensors and security cameras. But employees are the one security measure that managers’ hate to pay for.”

“Self-checkout and locked up products may both be driven by management’s desire to reduce staffing, as Mull notes, but in combination they create a nonsensical system: have your staff walk around unlocking cases and handing customers items they will then not pay for because your staff will not be working at the checkout machines.”

“Studies show that when customers encounter locked up products, they assume it’s because there is a major theft issue. Of course we do. We may think companies are immoral, but that’s because we assume they are coldly dedicated to their bottom line, not making billion dollar decisions based on something someone sent them on Facebook.”

The More You Buy, The More You Lose by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“Blackwell being “10x better” than Hopper does not appear to have made any AI startups profitable (or even more profitable), it does not appear to have lowered anyone’s costs in a way that we can measure using dollars and cents, and as a result, I feel very little when I’m told that Vera Rubin provides “up to 10x more tokens per megawatt,” especially as that was with DeepSeek R-1, a year-and-a-half-old open source model.”

“Hyperscalers will have sunk over $1.3 trillion dollars into generative AI by the end of 2026, and have plans to spend a trillion dollars more next year. On a very rational level, nothing that large language models (LLMs) have done, do or will do in the future can or will ever bring in the more than $2 trillion (or more) in brand new revenue that will be required to make any of this worth it.”

“Google, for example, has $811 billion in contracted future spending commitments as of its latest quarter, increasing by a dramatic $661 billion ($478 billion or so in the latest quarter) in the last 6 months, and Meta has over $237 billion in non-cancellable contractual commitments.”

“hyperscalers have borrowed a bunch of money to fund AI, to the point that it’s pushing them into cash-flow negative territory, and every time they raise more money, bondholders become more worried about them paying it back, especially given that both Amazon and Google have now gone cash-flow negative as of their latest quarters.”

“Take CoreWeave, the perennially debt-raising no IT loads refused neocloud, which has raised  over $23 billion in the past two years with bond spreads that communicate a near-existential anxiety about the future of the company. Their previously-mentioned $1.25 billion bond raise — raised a little over a month ago — is now trading over 200bps higher than issuance when it was already at a 9.625% yield, which genuinely brings into question how future debt raises will go considering it’s guiding $31 billion to $35 billion in capex for a year and still has yet to build most of the capacity it needs to fulfil its massive backlog.”

“Nobody seems to want to discuss that every data center we’re describing is 2 to 3 years in the future, and the market is becoming increasingly impatient and showing signs of non-compliance with the greater AI narrative. The theoretical payoff for anyone buying a GPU in the last 12 months is that sometime in the year 2030 you will, in theory, make somewhere between 30% and 40% gross margins, assuming that you have had near-constant utilization of your GPU infrastructure from an industry where effectively every customer is either an unprofitable AI lab or a hyperscaler trying to keep their theoretical future compute off their balance sheet.”

“Forgive me if I feel a little dismissive, but it’s a little hard to take any of this seriously! This theoretical data center with theoretical funding built by a SoftBank affiliate to rent GPU capacity to a SoftBank investment with the backstop of an OpenAI investor that stands to make hundreds of billions of dollars is equal parts ridiculous and fantastical.”

“Though it’s kind of a straggler in the cloud space, Oracle still has a ton of experience in building data centers, and if it can’t get these done within a reasonable timeframe, I struggle to see how SB Energy — a company that has, as a reminder, never built a data center before — is meant to build the largest data center campus in history […]”

“Every time one of these insane theoretical deals is announced it’s discussed like building gigawatts or raising hundreds of billions of dollars is both easy and effectively already done. It doesn’t matter that NVIDIA claimed it was investing $100 billion in OpenAI last year to build 10GW of data centers in a deal that never happened (despite CNBC claiming the first $10 billion would close within a month of the announcement!), or that OpenAI can’t afford it, or that OpenAI has been part of no less than three different announced-then-never-completed deals.”

“ AI data centers are taking 18-to-36 months to build, and capacity is clearly coming online at such a slow rate that it’s hard to understand why people are still buying more GPUs, other than the fact that once they stop everybody has to admit that it was all kind of a huge waste of money. The media remains ill-prepared for this moment, because of (to quote Ed Elson) a cult-like worship of the wealthy, where the assumption is always that they’ll work it out, and anything they say that doesn’t work out is just a result of the complexity of businesses.”

“The only truly useful use case I’ve found is on the Bloomberg Terminal’s ASKB feature, which takes natural language and turns it into BQL code to make requests of Bloomberg’s datasets. It’s genuinely useful! It’s also something I imagine that could be done with any number of different LLMs.”

Yes, these things are very useful. The natural-language UI can be powerful, especially when you can verify the result of what you’d asked it to do. It’s faster to have the tool write a query for “get me the last two months of departmental data for these three companies, grouped by revenue-growth rate, and ordered by department size,” which, even if it gets it wrong, will probably hand you something close enough to the shape of what you need for a competent analyst to drag it over the finish line much more quickly than they would have been able to write it themselves.

The AI Demand Bubble by Ed Zitron (Where's Your )

“What hyperscalers have actually done is demolish their free cash flow and purchased hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of GPUs, TPUs, and XPUs to support a customer base dominated by two customers that are now accounting for the vast majority of their revenue growth and quite literally cannot afford to pay their bills without a near-infinite flow of venture capital investments.”

“This is the single-worst capital misallocation in the history of business. Every single story you’ve read about the “incredible growth” of these cloud platforms is an embarrassing misread of three companies that are misleading investors that will more than likely be forced in the next year or two to have to restate revenues, cut remaining performance obligations, and admit that they’ve drastically overbuilt capacity.”

“The fact we’re talking about compute futures is a joke. The fact we’re talking about AI factories is a joke. Almost every aspect of the AI bubble is a joke, and in the end, investors and the general public will be the punchline. The rich will have gotten richer, the banks will have harvested fees, the hedge funds will have traded and taken profits, the private credit funds will have gotten their fees, and anyone who didn’t have an active inside track will be fucked.

“All of this could’ve been avoided, but the world has a cult-like obsession with the wealthy, believing that the CEOs of the largest companies in the world could never make a bad decision, and that any executive is automatically smart by virtue of being rich and powerful.

“And oh, how silly that’ll look in retrospect.”

Dollar fears prompt US-Japan yen rescue operation by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Japan is now the largest foreign holder of US Treasury bonds, with a stock of $1.2 trillion. On top of this, it holds $1.2 trillion in US equities and around $300 billion in corporate bonds, bringing its total holding of US financial assets to almost $3 trillion. If large amounts of this money are pulled out it could cause turbulence in US financial markets.”

““Ironically,” it continued, “what begins as a currency crisis in Asia could become a debt crisis in the United States. The greatest danger is not merely a falling yen; it is the possibility that one of America’s largest creditors may no longer be willing—or able—to finance America’s expanding fiscal excess.””

Hedge fund collapse a “cautionary tale” for AI boom by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“[…] while it was an extreme case, the activities of Situational were not fundamentally different from what is taking place across Wall Street—the use of borrowed funds in order to juice profits to ever higher levels in the expectation that share prices will continue to rise. In the case of Situational, it has been estimated that for every dollar it provided from its own capital it borrowed an additional three or four dollars to make its trades.”

“Situational reported a 67 percent loss in the value of the assets in the stocks that it held in July prompting margin calls from its financial backers. It held hundreds of millions of dollars in Bloom Energy and Sandisk which dropped by about 40 percent from the beginning of June. Stocks in Oracle and AMD in which it had significant holdings were each down by about 20 percent in July.

“Overall, according to the NASDAQ index of global semiconductor stocks, there was a $3 trillion loss in market value in July.”

Science & Nature

Radiation Tradeoffs for Mars by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars for the Rest of Us)

“A Mars-bound spacecraft can expect to be hit by a half dozen or so proton events of unknown duration and severity. The spacecraft that carried Curiosity to Mars (at around the midpoint of a solar cycle) recorded five solar proton events during its eight month transit, and this seems like a reasonable baseline to work from for a human mission.”

“Our ability to give a crew early warning depends on our planet’s position relative to the spacecraft. On a long-stay mission trajectory, where Earth usually sits along the lines of magnetic flux that connect the Sun and the spacecraft, the warning time can be as little as 22 minutes. On a short-stay profile, where the crew is on the far side of the Sun from Earth, there might be no warning at all.”

“Astronauts en route to Mars experience a cosmic ray flux about seven times higher than on the International Space Station.”

“[…] we have no guarantee that the peak of a solar cycle will line up with energetically favorable launch windows for Mars, which recur on a ~15 year cycle.”

“If it turns out missions are limited to the period around solar maximum, that ties Mars exploration to the 11 year solar cycle and makes many exploration paradigms (like the inbound crew relieving and potentially rescuing active crew) impossible. It also means there may be decades when we can’t go to Mars at all.”

“NASA insists that having a unisex career limit is an ethical stand, but it’s possible that Mars missions will only be feasible for the least radiologically sensitive astronaut cohorts, and that this may cut across some politically uncomfortable lines.”

“To gather enough data to make these tradeoffs, we need to perform long-duration animal tests outside the Earth’s magnetosphere, and eventually send some volunteers up there to get irradiated. This necessary research program front-loads Mars exploration with years of ISS-like missions to nowhere. On the bright side, it gives NASA something to do while we wait for the 15 year Mars transit cycle and the 11 year solar cycle to sync back up again in our sunset years. But the upshot is that we should just! send! robots!”

How to survive boiling water by Jane A. Cook (Taxa)

“The most robust way to check is by sequencing their DNA, but sequencing is expensive. A simpler, cheaper way to check is with PCR, which amplifies small regions of DNA unique to a species. I downloaded the BC30 genome and selected two regions of its genome that didn’t match other species in the NCBI database. Using Primer3, I generated two pairs of PCR primers, short stretches of DNA to bind to either side of my region of interest.”

“To produce spores at scale, manufacturers grow bacteria in vats of nutrient-rich broth. If the nutrients are not replenished, the bacteria eventually start to starve, triggering the sporulation process. Around 24 hours later, the bacterial broth is treated with enzymes to kill any remaining, non-sporulated cells. The mixture is concentrated, washed with water, and finally, in a fantastic twist of irony, pasteurized.”

“While unhappy microbiomes can be unhappy in their own way, we do not have a consensus on what a “healthy” gut microbiome looks like, either. In collaboration with a continent-wide consortium in Africa, our lab helped catalogue the species found in healthy adult women across the continent. We found over 1,000 new species relative to what had been previously described in studies focused on Western countries.”

“[…] pasteurized milk is not the same as sterilized milk. Pasteurization heats to ~60C for a few minutes. While the microbes that we worry about causing infection can’t survive this, some heat-tolerant bacteria and proteins can – those are what will eventually break down the milk, even if it isn’t opened to the air. Heating to 140C, on the other hand, makes milk effectively sterile, killing even the heat-tolerant bacteria. But this process, used to produce “ultra-high temperature” or UHT shelf-stable milk, does some odd things to the proteins that subtly change the flavor, color, and texture of the milk.”

Bounced landing (Wikipedia), Touch-and-go landing (Wikipedia) and Go-around (Wikipedia)

“If the pilot brings the aircraft to a full stop before taking off again, it is known as a “stop-and-go”. If the aircraft’s wheels do not touch the ground, it is known as a “low pass”. Both a touch-and-go landing and a low pass are types of go-around. An unplanned touch-and-go landing is also called a “rejected landing” or “balked landing”.”

“In aviation, a go-around is an aborted landing of an aircraft that is on final approach or has already touched down. A go-around can either be initiated by the pilot flying or requested by air traffic control for various reasons, such as an unstabilized approach or an obstruction on the runway.”

“Initiation of a go-around may be either ordered by air traffic control (normally the local or tower controller in a controlled field) or initiated by the pilot in command of the aircraft for a variety of reasons, such as an unstabilised approach, improperly executed landing (“bounce”), mechanical issue, sudden wind change, unsafe flight condition, or traffic on the runway.”

Why the interest? This happened to me on the way to the U.S. this year. We came down pretty hard, bounced back up, then accelerated away quickly, went around, and landed 15-20 minutes later, on the second attempt.

“Many modern aircraft, such as most Boeing and Airbus aircraft, have autothrottle/autothrust systems that will set go-around thrust if they are engaged.”

“Go-arounds occur with an average rate of 1–3 per 1000 approaches.”

Lucky me.

Environment & Climate Change

AI Wants Your Land, Water, Power by Robert Hunziker (Scheer Post)

“Bernie Sanders has an interesting take on ownership of resources: “The foundation of AI is based on our collective human intelligence. Our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images, and ideas span generations. The reality is that Big Tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their AI models without permission, without acknowledgement, and without compensation. The creative work of many millions of people – writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary people- has been stolen by the wealthiest people in the world.”

And people are just fine with that because they’ve been ordered to be just fine with that by the history’s most effective propaganda machine.

More Than Half of Earth’s Migratory Bird Species are Declining by Peter Marra – Nathan W. Cooper (CounterPunch)

“A bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) leaves its breeding grasslands of North America for the Pampas of South America. A Newell’s shearwater (Puffinus newelli) spends months soaring across the North Pacific before returning to the Hawaiian Islands to breed. A spoon-billed sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea) travels from Arctic Russia to the rapidly disappearing tidal mudflats of Southeast Asia for its nonbreeding season.”

“The results are sobering. We found that more than half of the world’s migratory bird species are declining because of an array of threats, including habitat loss, invasive species that harm birds, collisions with buildings, hunting, the pet trade, toxic pesticides and, in some cases, being caught in commercial fishing nets. But our study offers a second conclusion with more hope. The science around migratory birds has changed dramatically over the past two decades, and conservation can help save these incredible species – if governments act before they become endangered.”

Oh, great! Wait. Yeah, they’re not going to do that. Because they’re no money in it for them personally. Too bad for you, birds.

“Around the world, conservation initiatives repeatedly demonstrate that when threats are identified and addressed, bird populations recover. The pesticide DDT almost caused the extinction of species such as the bald eagle, peregrine falcon and osprey, but humans stepped in, banned its use, and all species recovered.”

That’s not happening anymore. Now they would accuse the birds of interfering with the economy. And migratory birds don’t even live there! An even easier political target. A layup.

“Next spring, bobolinks will once again return to North America’s grasslands. Newell’s shearwaters will navigate thousands of miles of open ocean back to Hawaii. Spoon-billed sandpipers will once again attempt one of the world’s most extraordinary migrations. Whether future generations can continue to see these magnificent migrations will depend on the choices of current generations and the steps they take to save them.”

There’s always video of birds for them, I guess.

«Das wäre alles nicht passiert …» (InfoSperber)

«Das wäre alles nicht passiert …»

“S’écheresse et canicules provoquent des mégafeux.

““Et dire que rien de tou ça ne serait arrivé…si on avait installé une bonne clim!””

Medicine & Disease

The system should be on trial too. by Katelyn Jetelina and Nikki Sapiro Vinckier (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Postpartum psychosis, what Clancey had, is a psychiatric emergency. But it’s not the emergency people usually picture in their minds, like a heart attack. A mother can move from disorganized and incoherent to composed within the same day. Some women have arrived at appointments looking put-together while privately losing touch with reality: hearing voices, experiencing delusions or paranoia, or losing sleep beyond what’s required for caregiving, with judgment eroding.”

“Our fragmented health system means that one doctor rarely knows what another doctor is doing or has done. No information is shared, including prescriptions, so a patient’s full picture is often lost. And because of this, people fall through the cracks.

“In the U.S., all the responsibility lies on the patient. In other words, a mother is expected to recognize and monitor her own psychiatric state while sleep-deprived, still physically healing, and keeping a newborn alive. This is often when she is least able to carry the responsibility.”

“[…] reflects how little research investment is directed toward women’s health as a whole. In fiscal year 2023, NIH categorized approximately $4.6 billion as funding for research on women’s health, roughly one-tenth of its nearly $45 billion biomedical research budget. And even that figure understates the problem: a Nature analysis found that conditions disproportionately affecting women, including migraine, endometriosis, and anxiety disorders, receive far less funding relative to the burden they cause. And female-dominant diseases are underfunded more severely than male-dominant ones are.”

“We also need to normalize how common perinatal mood and anxiety disorders are. Depression, anxiety, rage, intrusive thoughts, and difficulty bonding don’t make someone a bad or dangerous parent. Removing the shame makes people more likely to name what they’re experiencing and ask for help before a crisis.”

“The trial cannot answer the larger question of how a labor-and-delivery nurse repeatedly sought psychiatric help and still reached this point.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

The Stranger Who Didn’t Do Christmas by Peter Bach (CounterPunch)

“As the firelight danced in the wind, he sat for a while on a cold bench, thinking.

“Across the world, others sat in darker places—shelters, trenches, far from home—caught in wars that made this quiet corner feel impossibly distant. He knew that.

“He still didn’t know what any of this meant. But he’d enjoyed every strange, surreal, and unexpectedly human moment. There was something oddly beautiful in it all—so many people trying, each in their own way, to bring light to the dark.

“He looked up at the stars. They looked brighter now. Or maybe it was just him.

“Then, almost without thinking, he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out an old matchbook, and lit a tiny candle he found tucked beside it.

“It flickered once, then held steady.

““Merry Christmas,” he said softly.

“To no one in particular.”

the 'death' of literature and the rise of Pale Fire by Man Carrying Thing (YouTube)

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Skewered! by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“When literature is subordinated to politically salient norms, in particular, the rougher edges of the imagination, whether of the author or of his characters, tend to get polished away. Thus Soviet renditions of Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1880) typically leave out the line in which the peasant Terenty, a repository of true-to-life folk wisdom, condemns sparrows as evil birds who served the Jews by carrying nails to Christ’s crucifixion in their beaks. And as with the censorship regime shaped by the imperatives of socialist realism, so too with the approach to the arts and literature that prevails under the regime of what has helpfully been called “managerial humanities” — that is, the approach that currently dominates in universities and in publishing throughout the Anglosphere.”

“The strain of progressive authoritarianism exercised in the name of managerial humanities supposes, in particular, that it is not just possible, but desirable, to extirpate, or at least greatly to reduce, the inner thrum of imaginative transgression.”

“I remarked at the time, philosophy was handmaiden to theology; later, with the rise of empiricism and positivism, it was demoted to the role of handmaiden to science; now, it seems, philosophy is fast becoming handmaiden to the human resources department).”

“A remote-controlled drone operator commits acts of violence unimaginable to a knight in the era of Renart, yet is able to do so, we may imagine, while fantasizing about nothing more than the additions he will soon make to his Funko Pop! collection.”

“I note that I am particularly attached to a religion that, just like the forms of secular authoritarianism I have identified, very much considers the contents of its adherents’ inner lives as lying within the purview of its moral imperatives, no less so, in fact, than its adherents’ actions.”

“[…] societies that have succeeded, to some extent, in muting such imaginative representations do not at all seem to have succeeded in reducing their own reliance on real violence as a condition of social preservation. On the contrary, they are likely the most violent the world has ever known.”

IT’S DIGNITY STUPID by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“And my idea is that Mamdani’s demand that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested if he visits New York should be read in a similar way. Mamdani is well aware that our justice system, national and international, is deeply corrupted and biased; however, he is no less aware that the demand for justice should not be dismissed because of these facts, and that when (as an exception, as it were) some legal body does its proper duty, it should be unconditionally supported.”

“What follows is a simple and straightforward logical implication of these facts:

““[Mamdani] It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant. And I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large. While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon. And we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people. That is my commitment to you.””

“The ICC, the only universal criminal court, issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu with a large majority of votes, and the warrant also includes key figures of Hamas (who were already killed by Israel). While Israel and the US practice the policy of killing or arresting the leaders of states which are in conflict with them, measures which are not grounded in any legal frame, they ignore internationally recognized legal decisions which should bind them. If we don’t talk about this publicly again and again, such a situation will be – and already is – gradually normalized.”

“If the ICC were to be really autonomous and consistent, it should add Trump to the arrest list. But what we should worry about even more is the hypocritical role of most European states which, while in principle supporting the ICC decision, do everything possible to avoid a situation in which they will be compelled to enact it. What they do is like agreeing that a well‑known criminal should be arrested but collaborating with the criminal to make sure he will not be arrested.”

“The protests brought together Hindus and Muslims, women and men, and they are carried out in a non‑violent Gandhian way, just with a non‑Gandhian spirit of irony and comedy – say, when the protesters encounter a police barrier with water cannons, they ask the policemen to shoot water at them and then dance in the shower. Their enormous achievement is that they broke the spell of Modi’s Hindu nationalism: they devastated its ideological hegemony, people now laugh at it openly, they are no longer afraid of Modi and his state power even if they are beaten by the police.”

“Recall the origin of the notion of human rights: yes, when first formulated they were biased, silently privileging white rich men – however, instead of rejecting the notion of human rights as ideological mystification, was it not much more productive to gradually erase this bias and expand them to women, the poor, other races…? Each of these steps, even if not fully actualized, provided women, slaves, etc., with full human dignity. And the same goes for Mamdani’s declaration: it provides the victims of war criminals like Netanyahu with full human dignity and thereby makes it much more difficult to ignore their plight. As Ernst Bloch once said6: “People do not live on bread alone – especially when they do not have it.””

Incentives are for losers by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.

“Often, these are the people who are most insistent that the incentives ought to be obeyed. They are quick to swear that good grades, cash, prestige, etc. are inherently valuable, or that they are useful proxies for value. The incentive-obsessives feel this way because they have to. Like the government of a failing nation, they must swear that their currency is real, and they must lash out at anyone attempting to participate in an alternative economy, lest the whole fraud come crashing down upon itself.”

“On the psychology side, we called this discovery the illusion of explanatory depth. As I’ve written before, people seem to understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better. Everyone knows how to use a toilet, for example, but they mistakenly think they also know how a toilet works.

“I think this illusion is inevitable, given the architecture of the mind. According to predictive processing theory, the mind is always trying to guess what’s going to happen next, and it only updates its guesses when its expectations don’t match its experience. If you run that algorithm for a while, you’ll end up with a model of the world that is good enough, even if it’s not particularly good. You don’t notice the errors in your model until you run smack-dab into them, and every time you correct one, you assume that you’ve gotten them all.”

“[…] I’m willing to bet that everyone feels like they have a coherent system of ethical and religious beliefs right up until you ask them any specific questions.”

“I had assumed that the answer to every dilemma was “more research”, and that eventually, all of the experiments being presented inside the hotel would solve the problems outside of it. But as I ate canapés in a ballroom mere feet from so much misery, I started to wonder whether any of us were even trying to make progress, or whether we were just publishing papers.”

“Shout out to this post from Tal Yarkoni and this tweet from Alice Maz, which I saw long ago and no doubt spiritually inspired this post:”

“Only morons and cowards “respond to incentives.” Healthy people do what they want to do if reasonably practical, great people do what they want to do no matter what.”

“In the 1970s, a pair of psychologists recruited a bunch of seminary students to give a short lecture, either about career opportunities for seminary graduates, or about the story of the Good Samaritan. Some of them were told that they were late to give their lecture and they should hurry, or they were told they were on time or early. On their way to the building where they were supposed to deliver their talk, all the participants passed by a man slumped over in a doorway, groaning and coughing in the December cold. The participants in the “hurry” condition were less likely to stop and help; the content of their talk did not matter. As is common for studies from this era, there aren’t enough participants to be certain these results are robust, but I’m optimistic you could find an effect like this again.”

Technology & Engineering

The Project of Software is Complete by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“What are the fruits of all of this vibe coding? What difference has it made? What is the great application that has emerged from all this liberated capacity? What new thing does our species now do with its hours that it did not do three years ago? What old thing does our species not have to do that it had to do three years ago? What chores have been eliminated, what friction has been smoothed over, what corner of ordinary existence been reshaped by the sudden arrival of hundreds of millions of amateur programmers? There’s been a great deal of activity, some of it quite frantic. There’s been a steady churn of half-built to-do apps and Wordle clones and boutique email clients that do nothing the old standbys can’t, weekend RPG projects that flare and vanish, and at the end of it, there’s a world essentially unchanged.”

“[…] the frontier of the periodic table is invented, not discovered. And this is what I mean by software being complete. We will keep building out of our desire to build, and we’ll have a lot of maintenance to do, but we won’t be building out of need. As I keep telling you, we live in an era of refinement we insist on calling an era of innovation.”

“There is no more true need for new types of software than there is need for new lines on the periodic table. The taxonomy is now a closed system; the great kingdoms and phyla of what code can do for human beings − communication, calculation, storage, retrieval, simulation, coordination − were largely determined decades ago, those taxonomic ranks have been filled in the 21st century thanks to the investment of trillions of dollars and the effort of our whole civilization, and what’s left to do is to pencil in new populations of programs within genera within phyla within kingdoms that have already been named.”

“Waymos drive themselves, but with a far larger amount of “calling home” for human guidance than the media wants to admit, and in tightly bound geofenced locales, and only in certain kinds of places in certain kinds of climates…. These are problems, some of them software-sensitive, but full self-driving is not ultimately a software problem; it’s the problem of a two-ton object moving through a physical world of infinite and lethal contingency, full of people who can and will sue, and no quantity of code will conjure the sensors, the redundancy, the regulations, the whole material and legal substrate that reality stubbornly withholds.”

“They keep the hype cycle going, they keep the churn of breathless media coverage and irresponsible speculation going, the kabuki of adding a little more CPU power and memory to phones that only need more because we keep making the software they run less efficient, then calling that innovation.”

“The bacterial colony fills the dish; the rumor reaches everyone who will ever want to hear from any point along it, the recent past looks exactly like the near future; we can’t shake the memory of the steep middle part, which persists long after the curve itself has gone flat. We are, I’m suggesting, standing on the (or a) plateau of software and convincing ourselves that we’re still climbing.”

“[…] while evolution has produced incredibly variety and some astonishing forms of life, it also has clear and insurmountable limits. We have bioluminescent algae and translucent deep sea creatures and carnivorous plants, but we don’t have birds that can fly to the moon or rabbits that can travel through time or frogs that shoot lava from their butts. Billions of years of evolution have led to some remarkable organisms, and we will see more, but evolution can only expand life into the adjacent possible, not the imaginable possible.”

“For most of the history of computing, the adjacent possible was enormous, the American frontier in 1800, the blank part of the map, Mendeleev’s periodic table. Every new category (the spreadsheet, the browser, the search engine, the social network, the smartphone) flung open a new wing of rooms that each had their own closets and each closet their own shelves…. But sooner or later you get to the point where you’re the explorer in an era of satellite photography, you know? You find that you’re a chemist trying to invent the 119th chemical because you want tenure or a grant or bragging rights − you’re looking to expand into the adjacent possible because you want to, not because you need to.”

“[…] a habit tracker has no next frontier. A meal-planning app is a leaf, not a branch, a completed structure rather than raw material for other things. The adjacent possible of software is looking pretty damned saturated to me; the new things we make have ceased to be the building blocks of newer things. The doors we open now open onto rooms we’ve already stood in.”

“This is why the vibe-coders, the newly minted programmers who can summon a working program by talking to a machine and have lofty ambitions about what they’ll accomplish, have with all their liberated capacity produced so stunningly little worth caring about […]”

“We want the end of cancer; that’s a problem of proteins and cells and the maddening three-dimensional origami of wet matter, and you can’t refactor a tumor. (You definitely don’t get to try that loop again….) We want limitless clean energy; that is (probably?) really a problem of confining a plasma hotter than the core of the sun inside a container literally made out of magnetism, and no elegant code can do that for you, no cool algorithm can change the bare physics.”

“Computer science is seductive because code is easy to manipulate. Code looks like it can be whatever we want it to be. It’s a “streetlight effect” type thing. In a world of non-compliant atoms we put our faith in code, which was so obedient. We built an abstraction layer on top of our planet and optimized that layer to perfection precisely because we couldn’t crack the base reality − and then, having perfected the abstraction, we told ourselves the pleasant bedtime story that the abstraction was where the future had been hiding all along.”

“At the heart of the large language model, you have a training corpus, software trained on the output of other software, symbols distilled from the accumulated symbols of our entire species, an abstraction whose raw material is other abstractions. When an LLM goes looking for something it inevitably finds itself, you might say. An LLM, can be a mirror that we mistake for the reality it reflects. And notice the direction that the hype points towards: not outwards, towards matter, towards things, towards our recalcitrant physical world, but inwards and downwards − into even more code!, more chips! more compute!”

“We’re pouring our money, our attention, and our most brilliant young minds into the most recursive, most inward-facing, most reality-indifferent technology ever constructed, and waiting for the Rapture.”

“I keep sharing this brilliant Kim Stanley Robinson essay, which systematically demolishes the idea that we will one day colonize other solar systems. I find it relevant and poignant because Robinson so artfully demonstrates that these dreams crash against the rocks of physics no matter how smart we are. Because yes, folks, there are problems so hard nobody can be smart enough to solve them.”

For space, it’s the radiation problem, the sewage problem, the microbe problem, recycling problems, nutrition problems, lack-of-gravity problems, etc.

“Show me! Show me LLMs slipping the surly bonds of earth and doing something out here in meatspace, in the world of atoms, in the grubby land of iron and sand and bone that we actually live in, rather than in the magical land of Honalee that is the increasingly unhinged imagination of Silicon Valley. Prove it. Show me something instead of constantly telling me what you think is going to happen and then rolling your eyes at my skepticism. I need proof because I’ve become quite sure that the answer to our exhaustion isn’t more of the thing that’s exhausted us.”

“Personally, I’m content to live in this world, so long as we’re willing to make life better for everyone with the tedious work of politics and solidarity, but I get why you might long for the stars. But wishing doesn’t make it so, and as the AI titan Peter Norvig once said, pursuing artificial intelligence can be like trying to reach the moon by climbing a tree: for awhile, you can report steady progress. I’m here suggesting that we’re coming very close to grasping the highest branch.”

How I Ditched Apple and Google For Harmony (OS) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The magic is that between phone and laptop, I can move files by just touching my phone to the screen, or grabbing them in the air (with a hand gesture) and literally air-dropping them across. You can replicate this functionality on Apple, but it’s slow and obviously hacked together. On HarmonyOS, the harmony is built in.

“I have/had a lot of Apple devices – phone, laptop, Mac Mini powering a TV – but they never really connected this naturally. iOS is a different OS, Mac is a different OS, as is WatchOS and Apple TV. You could coax the hardware into collaboration, but they obviously evolved separately. HarmonyOS, because it started from scratch, was able to design an OS the way people use screens rather than the way people made screens. We transfer from screen to screen without thinking, and HarmonyOS does this naturally. I can have a video on my phone, show it to someone on a TV (it casts to Samsung easily), or edit it on my laptop. You can do this with legacy systems, but it’s janky. On HarmonyOS this is the base case. It’s built for multiple devices from the beginning. I have yet to scratch the surface of this functionality, but it already feels like a modern OS should. Easy.”

“I have a strong will to leave the White Empire’s tech stack, which is why I’ve done things this way, and so early. Someone with a real job or less understanding wife would not be able to do this, and someone wiser would just wait. Most of the problems come from me using HarmonyOS in ways it’s not intended to be used (yet), not anything wrong with the system. Once they release a global version they’ll have to iron all these issues out, they are non-issues in this way.

“So why am I doing this? I’ve always been an early adopter and now I’m an early orphan. I simply don’t want to use products made by child killers and pedophiles as much as possible. I find it shocking that you can’t completely avoid this – there seem to be load-bearing child sex rings – but I try, as much as possible, to deliver myself from evil, even if it’s far less convenient.

“I’ve discovered that the main way they corrupt you is convenience, which is why I’m happy to inconvenience myself (and my long-suffering family). As Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” He wasn’t talking about sideloading APKs, but that’s one way I interpret it.”

The Computer That Helped Win World War II Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications by B. Jack Copeland (IEEE Spectrum)

“Bletchley Park’s managers, no longer leery of Flowers’s ideas, soon wanted additional Colossi. He finished building the second one in June 1944, days before D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe. With 2,400 vacuum tubes—around 800 more than in Colossus I—Colossus II processed Tunny messages at an eye-watering speed of 25,000 characters per second.

“Its maximized timing-pulse rate was not far short of the performance of the first Intel microprocessor chip from the 1970s, more than 30 years later.

“Flowers conceded that “Colossus bore about as much resemblance to a modern computer as Stephenson’s [1829] Rocket locomotive did to the Royal Scot,” a state-of-the-art 20th-century train operating between London and Glasgow. But he emphasized that, nevertheless, Colossus “embodied all the basic features of a modern computer.” In Colossus, Flowers had pioneered clock pulses, bit-stream generators, control circuits, loops, counters, shift registers, interrupts, parallel processing, and more.”

LLMs & AI

The Session You Cannot Take With You by Earendil Engineering

“As a user you also may need to move a session because a model is retired, a service is down, a price changes, a policy blocks the next request (hello fable), a confidential phase must run locally, or an auditor needs to reconstruct what happened. Agents are also making sessions much longer. A coding or research session can accumulate days of decisions and evidence and a personal assistant may accumulate session transcripts going back years (presumably as we don’t have them for that long yet).

“The option to leave also creates discipline. If a provider knows that a user can continue elsewhere, it has to compete on model quality, price, reliability, and trust. If the user’s accumulated context can only be interpreted by one provider, it sets very unfortunate incentives.”

“The moral asymmetry is still hard to miss. The labs ask society to accept that machines may learn from the enormous body of work humans placed on the internet — often without advance, individual permission — while insisting that other machines must not learn from outputs the labs generate. The broadest version of that principle conveniently allows learning to flow into closed models but not back out of them.

“We think the default attitude toward distillation should move from hostility to support. Distillation can turn expensive frontier capability into smaller, cheaper, faster models that can run locally, offline, on constrained hardware, or under the user’s control. It can increase competition, preserve capability when an API disappears, and reduce the compute and energy required for common tasks.”

“We do not object to providers building better stateful APIs. We object to better performance being coupled to less user control. Stateful storage should be optional, hosted tools should be observable, compaction should be readable, agent communication should be auditable and ideally opaque reasoning is not opaque or at least should have a portable handoff. Distillation should be a path by which capability becomes more available, not a taboo used to justify ever higher walls.”

Programming

Go 1.27 interactive tour by Jesús Espino (Victoria Metrics)

“This is the headline of the release. A method declaration may now declare its own type parameters, independent of the receiver’s. Before Go 1.27, only top-level functions could be generic, so a generic operation on a type had to live as a package-level function instead of a method.”

When Go first came out, I didn’t even consider it as a viable programming language—it’s a low-level system language, supposedly—because I knew that I would be copy/pasting a lot of code or doing handstands to try to figure out how to avoid doing so, because it didn’t have generics. A few releases back, Go finally got generics—which probably caused all sorts of upgrade headaches—and now it’s getting generic method parameters. Cool. I think it’s great for them but it’s fascinating to watch the inevitable march toward reinventing all of the things that we already we knew we needed thirty years ago in order to create properly statically typed code while keeping repetition low.

Design

You might need to know about the CSS lh unit by Ahmad Shadeed

.content img {
  float: left;
  height: calc-size(auto, round(up, size, 1lh));
}

“Here is what’s going on with the above CSS snippet:”

• Using calc-size() to get the image’s height via auto.
• Using the round() function along with the size from calc-size() and the lh to round the image’s height to the nearest line.

Fun

No Refunds by Doug Stanhope in 2007 (Scraps from the Loft)

“The only drugs that are even popular anymore are all the… dummy drugs, all the drugs that make you more boring. All the mood stabilizer, antidepressant… Everyone’s got some mental disorder they’ve been diagnosed with, and they take a f*cking pill.

“They push them on me all the time. I’ve ruined so many relationships, ’cause, you know, ’cause I think. I f*cking think all the time, sorry.

““Oh, jeez, oh, you, you… It’s ADD.”

“No, it’s not ADD, I’m thinking. I’m thinking about a lot of stuff. That’s not ADD. Yeah, I stutter a lot and I f*ck stuff up, but I’m… That’s ’cause I’m always thinking.

““Well, you’re not listening to me.”

“‘Cause I’m thinking about something that’s more interesting than you! I’m trying to build a perfect Utopian society in my head, and what are you talking to me about? Bowling or what?

“And I do, I have a head that won’t shut the f*ck up.

“That’s where the ideas come from. Do you have a head like that? Do you have the brain that just won’t shut the f*ck up all the time?

“(applause)

“You learn to work with it.”

In another bit, he made a joke about this guy named Harry Levin, who is apparently such a terrible person that he said that even most Jewish people would agree that had Hitler succeeded in his goals, if it would have to a world where Harry Levin were never to have been born, then the Holocaust would have been acceptable collateral damage. JFC. He’s a madman but he’s brilliant.

We Seem To Be At An Impasse Over What $24.99 Worth Of Shrimp Looks Like by Ron Schwartz (The Onion)

“For the wrong done to me here today is clear to anyone with eyes. Just look at this so-called Captain’s Bounty! Show me—where is the bounty to be found? Almost all I see on this plate is parsley! Parsley and lies. And in what world does any of this constitute a “heaping helping” of mouthwatering shrimp? “Seasoned to perfection”? I suppose. But “piled high”? Don’t insult my intelligence.”

“So then, Kyle, where do we go from here? We both know there are plenty more shrimp in that kitchen of yours. I can hear them sizzling in the deep fryer right now. All that I have asked is for you to bring me three or four of those shrimp and put them on my plate, plus a couple more to replace the ones that fell on the floor when I dramatically waved the basket around to show the whole restaurant what injustice looks like.

“Yes, I will take another Sprite. That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all evening.

“It has been suggested to me by some, most notably my wife, that I break off negotiations entirely and, quote, “stop ruining our daughter’s graduation dinner.””