Links and Notes for August 14th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.
[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩
Table of Contents
- Public Policy & Politics
- Journalism & Media
- Labor
- Economy & Finance
- Science & Nature
- Environment & Climate Change
- Medicine & Disease
- Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
- Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
- Technology & Engineering
- LLMs & AI
- Programming
- Design
- Sports
- Fun
- Video Games
Public Policy & Politics
Horrific conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln: The ruling class’s contempt for the troops it sends to war by Kevin Reed (WSWS)
“Five thousand sailors live and work on the nuclear-powered Lincoln in 12-hour shifts, beneath a flight deck that fills the ship with deafening noise day and night—sleeping in berthing compartments stacked three bunks high, eating in galleys that serve 15,000 meals a day, exercising in gyms often hotter than 100°F.”
“The Lincoln itself embodies this history. Launched in 1988, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the carrier has served American imperialism through the entire period of war that opened with the Gulf War of 1991. On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on its flight deck and infamously declared beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” That was a lie.
“Twenty-three years later the same ship—with dysfunctional air conditioning, moldy showers, broken toilets and malfunctioning laundry facilities—has been at sea 268 days, logged more than 10,000 sorties against Iran and is now involved in blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Family members, including a Navy-veteran father who told MS NOW his son had personally seen the damage, have reported holes worn through the Lincoln’s flight deck after months of heavy bombing missions.”
“The enlisted sailors aboard the Lincoln, like those across the Navy, are drawn overwhelmingly from working class and lower-middle-income families across the country. They enlist straight out of high school or community college for a steady income, health insurance and the chance at technical training and money for education. A sailor at the lowest enlisted rank, after four months’ service, draws base pay of $2,407.20 a month—for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, on a warship in a combat zone.”
Busifikatsiya by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)
“Although they are eager to feed more Ukrainians into the war, Europe’s leaders will do so as quietly as possible. At least for now, they won’t be dragging young men out of low-key jobs at cafes and construction sites and stuffing them into buses. They know this would be dangerously unpopular — in part because they’ve been watching the Zelensky government grow ever-more hated while doing that very thing to Ukraine’s citizens back home.”
“In past, inconvenient information about our proxy war in Ukraine has been scrubbed from the Internet. We know this courtesy of an investigation by U.S. Congressional staff, which found that the FBI — working in tandem with the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU — had flagged “thousands of accounts to remove” from Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
“Early in the war, the Ukrainian spy agency arranged to have more than 5,000 American critics deleted from Facebook. It’s incredible that’s not a bigger story.
“So, why haven’t busifikatsiya videos — with their damning window into the fear and violence we’re supporting — also been more diligently scrubbed? Perhaps they soon will be. For now, however, it’s likely we can see them because American officials, like the European Union officials, have been demanding exactly this: They want more busifikatisya.”
Journalism & Media
youtube after announcing these new rules by Man Carrying Thing (YouTube)
- Monetization only after 8,000 watched hours.
- 20M qualifying views of shorts in the last 90 days.
- Views will be counted if any frame of the video has been viewed, even for long-form videos.
Number will go up for YouTube but it will be fake.
Labor
Economy & Finance
When the Shortage is the Strategy (No One's Happy)
“When global supply chains broke down in 2020, the average markup over cost jumped from 56% to 72% in a single year — the fastest increase since 1955. [] Corporate profits have risen 50% since; real hourly wages, only 3%. [] As far as the general public knew, who was to say whether it was the pandemic creating shortages, or higher upstream commodity pricing. Few knew, and it certainly wasn’t a priority. Corporate profits drove more than a third of inflation from the start of the pandemic, and 53% of it by mid-2023 (after supply chains had recovered). In the forty years before, they drove 11%.”
“Since 2020, the same pattern has played out across at least eleven major consumer categories. Eggs, cars, rent, groceries, gasoline, auto insurance, lumber, shipping, building materials, pharmaceuticals, baby formula. Each with its own supply shock, each with the same result: prices went up, profits hit records, and when the constraint eased, the prices stayed.”
“Of 22 companies reviewed, half adjusted executive bonuses upward to exclude tariff costs from performance calculations. [] Meaning consumers paid the tariff through higher prices, the company got the money back, and the executives were scored as though the tariff had never happened.”
Nvidia ♥️ SEC Securitization Rules by Paul Kedrosky
“The investment-grade market is saturated, requiring either new sources or new ratings approaches”
That sounds ominous for everyone except those seeking to avoid the risk from which they seek to profit. The public is going to be left holding the bag. Again. And people will be ordered by public officials and the media to wring their hands and wonder how it happened, while those who caused it and who benefitted massively plan the next round.
Science & Nature
Environment & Climate Change
Medicine & Disease
Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
National Symphony Orchestra faces calamity in Washington D.C. by Fred Mazelis (WSWS)
“Jean Davidson, who recently left her position as executive director of the NSO, was quoted by the Post as warning that the crisis was so sharp that the orchestra could cease operations. “What an international embarrassment it would be for the National Symphony Orchestra of the United States to fold—and it’s very possible that could happen,” she said. “This is an orchestra that has never played as well as it’s playing now under Gianandrea Noseda, which just makes it even more tragic.””
“Orchestras that have closed include Honolulu, Syracuse, New Mexico, San Antonio, American Youth Symphony and Boston Philharmonic. The Philadelphia Orchestra declared bankruptcy in 2011. Detroit musicians struck for six months and took a 25 percent pay cut. Minnesota locked out its musicians for 16 months. As the ongoing crisis at New York’s Metropolitan Opera shows, the crisis and rot reaches to the very top of classical music in the US.
“This in turn reflects the overall trend in culture, that of crass commercialization and moral degeneration.”
“The fight for the NSO is a fight against the same oligarchy attacking autoworkers, teachers, health care workers and federal employees. The crisis of the NSO, the Kennedy Center, and the American orchestra is not a failure of management, a problem of audience demographics, or an accident of political circumstance. It is the logical product of a system that subordinates every human need to private accumulation. American capitalism—which has produced trillion-dollar fortunes while orchestras collapse, which can fund endless war while eliminating the NEA, which builds ballrooms for oligarchs while closing concert halls—is incompatible with culture.”
Male Desire and the S*xual Politics of Modern Cinema by Like Stories of Old | Tom van der Linden (YouTube)
0:00 Can the Male Still Gaze? 3:09 Quick Note on YT Censorship 3:48 On the Male Gaze 9:24 Women Looking Back 15:50 Men Gazing Inwards 22:55 The Enigma of Desire 30:43 This Flame in Us 39:53 Politits: the Politics of, well…
Madonna's Best Dance Breaks by PopCrush (YouTube)
This is an incredible compilation. She is 68 years old in 2026. That means she was already 43 years old in 2001. Her energy is incredible. The entire choreography is breathtaking.
Wet Leg: Tiny Desk Concert by NPRMusic (YouTube)
Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
WHY CONTAINMENT IS NOT ENOUGH by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)
“The conclusion that imposes itself is that a pause in development is not enough, because it cannot be global; it would merely widen the gap between those who effectively obey it and those who continue with development. The only solution I see is to do two things at once: to continue development and to accompany it with thinking—thinking that is more than simply gathering all the data and then analysing them.
“Thinking means reflecting on the meaning of these data and also analysing the extent to which the way we approach them is already biased. Such thinking compels us not only to focus on how to contain the threats, but also to envisage how we could change the situation that gives birth to them.”
“[…] it is not enough to contain the deadly excesses that threaten our survival. We should think about how to change capitalism’s basic coordinates without triggering a catastrophe of no lesser magnitude than the Khmer Rouge reign in Kampuchea or the regime in North Korea. This task cannot but appear impossible within the coordinates of the existing global system, but that fact makes it no less necessary.”
Fabulous — On Jason Arday by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)
“Nor is it only or primarily that history’s “softies” who supposed that at least some significant portion of the good of philosophy was located in the experience of inquiry and reflection itself. It was also the very hardest of the hard-nosed rationalists who supposed that it is the doing of philosophy, and not the production of philosophy’s results, that could be hoped to contribute most to human thriving. G. W. Leibniz, for example, dreamed of a day when we might outsource many of the onerous operations of the mind to machines —long division, for example, or actuarial tables—, but only so that we human beings might have more time left over for the good stuff: meditation on the good, the true, and the beautiful.”
“It is this same economy of grant-seeking, data-mongering, industrial production of “research results” that explains the enormous popularity of neo-utiltarian effective altruism — an ethical theory so simplistic, so philistine, so detached from the grand tragedy of human existence (and so painfully and obviously Anglo-American!), that its arguments really would be best left to the machines.”
“I don’t like the state of academia, at all. I think it’s overrun with small-minded number-crunching managerial types —bourgeois “etiquette feminists”, “effective altruists”, and “race-realists” all being but variations on the same underlying mentality—, and that it is positively hostile to the life of the mind and the spirit.”
“Philosophy, and humanistic inquiry more generally, must aim for truth, but they must in part do so, as Friedrich Schiller among others understood, through the free play of the imagination, which expresses itself in part in storytelling — a human capacity far more noble, and far more fabulous, than any of these various subcurrents of the “managerial humanities” will ever be able to understand.”
Technology & Engineering
How do submarines know where they are? (YouTube)
A “fiber-optic gyroscope” and an “accelerometer”.
LLMs & AI
Practical Loop Engineering by Addy Osmani (Elevate)
“And as we’ve tried to see what patterns, what aspects of loop engineering are now a little bit more baked, I think we have a clearer idea of how you babysit it. I can now largely rely on the output of the primitives in Claude Code and Codex. We’ve come a little way. But at the same time, you need to be very diligent, because loop engineering where you kind of leave it sitting alone, and you haven’t really thought about whether the end goal or the constraints have been well defined, can leave you in a problematic state. This is why there’s nuance when deciding to use it for an evergreen codebase without users or as much historical complexity vs. say a brownfield bank codebase.”
He meant to write “greenfield” not “evergreen”, which is a bizarre mistake to make for someone otherwise seemingly well-versed in the vernacular of software engineering.
But it’s the highlighted phrase that is interesting because of the impression that the author gives that it’s … revelatory. The loop only works when you have a precisely defined end goal, presumably defined in a form that can actually work with the agent. This is no different than when doing any other task. These poor fools seem to be unaware that they are speed-running the development of project management, long after generations of people had already learned the same lessons. They think it’s an amazing admission that perhaps the LLMs won’t work if you don’t give them an end-conditions. It’s like trying to run git bisect without a test suite.
The rest of the article continues to express a faith in prose instructions being interpreted in as ironclad a manner as deterministic instructions formulated in “programming languages”.
— name: verify-frontend-change description: Verify any UI change end-to-end before declaring it done. — # Verifying frontend changes Never report a UI change as complete based on a successful edit alone. Verify it the way a human reviewer would: 1. Start the dev server and open the edited page in the browser. 2. Interact with the change directly. For a new control (button, input, toggle): click it, confirm the expected state change, and screenshot before/after. 3. Check the browser console: zero new errors or warnings. 4. Use the Chrome Devtools MCP, run a performance trace and audit Core Web Vitals. If any step fails, fix the issue and rerun from step 1 − do not hand back partially verified work.
Look at how hopeful that is! And imagine the artifacts you can expect from it. A developer who worked like this would be chided for not producing any tests, for not working with the view model properly, right? The code will have a new control in it that an LLM “interacted” with as proof that it works. What artifacts do you have to prove the continued functioning of the button? Nothing. This is not the way you should be developing code. We stopped developing code like this decades ago. That’s why we developed MVVM and similar architectural patterns: so we could test the logic of UIs without actually manipulating the UIs.
But the instructions above, were they to be interpreted as written by an LLM—which is not certain, despite the faith of so many developers—don’t ask for any testing artifacts. They just ask for the new control and that the LLM opens the page in a browser and interacts with it. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
And just look at how else these people are working,
“[…] if you don’t have a clear idea of what the end-state/done/good means for your completion, it may not be the right pattern for your work. For example, a vague goal would be “keep going until this UI design is good”. What does that mean? Good to who? How is it being evaluated? Tasks that require human taste, subjective design, or open-ended creative exploration aren’t a good fit.”
In what world is it OK for a serious professional to think in terms like that? Shouldn’t the developer be designing to a style guide instead of talking about a “good” UI? Unless the person is developing a style guide, in which case using an LLM would be silly, since you’re just going to get the same style guides that already exist, so you might as well just use one of those. By style guide, I don’t just mean fonts, color swatches, paddings, and responsive breakpoints; I mean UX instructions that describe how to handle situations like presenting a lot of tabular data, or manipulating multiple entities.