Links and Notes for September 11th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Design
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

THE HOUTHIS DESTROYED SAUDI ARABIA'S PIPELINE by HasanAbi (YouTube)

In case you’re wondering who this Hasan Piker dude is that literally everyone seems to be complaining about, here’s a pretty good starter video. The power brokers and their media don’t like him because he’s just reporting the facts (as far as possible) and re-adding context to deliberately spun reports.

“Those Russian ‘kidnappers.’” by Patrick Lawrence | Helmut Scheben. (The Floutist)

“According to official figures, the U.S. military transported several thousand children, ostensibly for the sake of their safety, from Vietnam to the United States as the Vietnam War ended in April 1975.1 “Operation Babylift” made headlines at the time because the first plane carrying Vietnamese children crashed near Saigon. Almost half a century later, in December 2021, CNN reported that the U.S. military had brought 1,450 children from Afghanistan to the United States. This generated no more political attention than a traffic report or a weather forecast would do.”

“No journalist from a major Western newspaper ever thought of referring to all these removals as “child abductions” or “deportations.” Quite the opposite. Protecting the defenceless has always been a precept of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions regulate the protection of civilians, including children, in war.”

“But this does not apply to Russia. When the Russian army evacuates parentless children and young people from Ukrainian combat zones, this cannot be considered a humanitarian action because Russia, in the person of Vladimir Putin, is devoid of any humanity and compassion. This twisted logic is evidently the basis for the propaganda fictions that have been fabricated by numerous human-rights NGOs and circulated in major Western media since the beginning of the Russian intervention in February 2022.”

“Most of these nongovernmental organisations are not what their names suggest: They are not independent of government funding and government pressure groups. Many engage in regime-change operations according to the intentions of the West. And this is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. India has revoked the licenses of fully 15,000 NGOs in recent years.”

“It is astonishing, however, to note the legal flexibility the tribunal in The Hague displays to accommodate the government in Kiev. Ukraine joined The Hague court only in 2024. The Zelensky government made it clear at the time that only Russian criminals should be prosecuted. Ukraine does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction over members of the Ukrainian army or its volunteer militias.10 Kiev evidently fears investigations into atrocities allegedly committed by the Ukrainian army and its militias against the population of Donbas since 2014 under the guise of its “Anti–Terrorist Operation.””

“Today, the rule in Brussels is: Whoever disagrees with us is waging covert warfare. The Continent’s new media law, the Digital Services Act, which the E.U. passed in October 2022, de facto allows Brussels to delete and ban anything that could question its own truths.”

“In 2022, the first year of the war, approximately four million Ukrainian residents fled to Russia, including 730,000 children. They were registered in Russian databases. The vast majority of these minors came to Russia with legal representatives: parents, guardians, and tutors.”

“According to their statements, the Russian authorities are cooperating with Kiev government and Ukrainian aid organisations to return children to their distant or missing parents. The government of Qatar, in cooperation with Moscow, is financing most of the necessary logistics. The Red Cross and various U.N. organisations are involved. However, this cannot be publicly mentioned on the Ukrainian side, because then the image of “kidnapper Putin” would no longer hold.”

In Praise of the Houthis by Norman Finkelstein (Substack)

“In the 1930s, when the enlightened West abandoned the Spanish Republic, international brigades of volunteers went there to fight the nascent forces of fascist barbarism. They covered themselves with glory. (Fully three thousand Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, more than a third of them Jewish.)

“This time around, Fate appointed the Party of God and the Houthis. The Houthis possessed intimate knowledge of exalted Western values, on the one hand, and Gaza’s martyrdom, on the other. The US had enabled Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen that left nearly one hundred thousand children dead and gone.

“Rousseau famously observed that the most—indeed, only— truly civilizing impulse in human beings is not reason but the natural, inborn capacity for pity, and that the more society “progresses,” the more refined its rational faculty, the more its natural capacity for pity is stifled.

“Who, in a decent world, would not choose one dagger-in-hand Houthi risking life and limb in defense of defenseless Gaza over ten thousand Harvard-educated, elegantly coiffed Antony Blinkens adroitly lubricating the gears of Israel’s murder machine?”

Finkelstein Responds to Heated Question About the Houthis. by Xpoliton (YouTube)

“From my first conscious moments in my own life, my parents loathed the Germans. They didn’t loathe the Nazis. They loathed—they hated—the Germans. In fact, I vividly recall my father once recommended me a book on the Nazi Holocaust. And I asked him, you know, what makes this book special? And he said to me, I liked it that the author didn’t talk about Nazis. He talked about Germans.

“Now, my parents were very decent human beings. The apple did not fall far from the tree. But I could understand that sentiment. The only Jews the Houthis have known are the Israelis. It’s a regrettable fact that they don’t know, have never experienced, any other kinds of Jews. I remember I once asked my mother, just out of curiosity, did you ever meet, did you ever come into contact with a German who was decent? And she said to me, she thought hard and she said, “I remember one German soldier. He had a kind of guilty look on his face.” That was all she could remember. One. So it doesn’t surprise me that she loathed all Germans.

“Do I wish the Houthis were more discriminating in their in their slogans? Of course I wish it. But do I understand where it comes from? Yes. And will that slogan of theirs color my appreciation of the fact that, alone among the world’s peoples, they are resorting to armed force to stop the genocide in Gaza? I have to ask myself the question, how would my parents have felt if this rag tag army happened to be situated on a point in the world’s map where they could inflect the outcome of the final solution. And these people—this rag-tag people hailing back to the Middle Ages—they were investing all of their physical resources and moral energy to stopping the extermination. How would my parents react? Would they ask, “What are their political slogans?” I don’t think so.”

Western Civilization Is A Phony Pop Star by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Our society isn’t what it pretends to be.

“Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world.

“Our pundits wag their fingers at the “tyrannical regimes” in empire-targeted nations while our own rulers murder, starve and terrorize disobedient populations in order to dominate the planet.

“In school they teach us that we are lucky to live in a free society where the people command the government with their votes and we have the right to express ourselves in whatever way we choose, when in reality wealthy oligarchs control the entire electoral process and our expression is aggressively manipulated through a complex system of censorship and propaganda.

“We have no integrity.”

“And as denizens of the western empire we’ve got a long, hard journey ahead of us if we are to eliminate all the conflicts and contradictions between the type of society we claim to be and the type of society we actually have. In practice we’re about as incongruent with our theoretical values as any civilization could possibly be. We are an empire of frauds.”

Macklemore speaks out after being dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour following his ‘Free Palestine’ speech; says Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft rallied other stadium owners and gave Ed Sheeran an ultimatum: if Macklemore stayed on tour, then Ed would not be able to play in their venues. by Macklemore (Reddit)

“[…] I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

“The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.

“Ed is my friend. I’ve known him for 13 years. We’ve shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I’ve grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we’ve had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I’m writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as l told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can’t change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

“Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

“Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words
“Free Palestine” and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn’t get past his public facing, “I don’t take sides.”

“And I get why people don’t. Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I’ve lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn’t leave you in the middle.

“What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, “Free Palestine” becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that’s why this time it became so important to silence me.

“And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying “Free Palestine” gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn’t protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

“I hope this isn’t the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn’t disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

“When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there’s a phrase in Arabic:

“لا شكر على واجب

““La shukra ala wajeb.” There is no thanks for a duty.

“That stayed with me. Because that’s what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

“Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn’t, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.

“I didn’t need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.

“Free Palestine.

“But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour l’ve ever been on.”

Since I took the trouble to copy/paste this from nearly a dozen Twitter screenshots, I obviously think it’s very good. I only quibble with the word “neutrality” because that word is loaded with international meaning, and that word is currently up to a vote in Switzerland, where Macklemore’s ethical argument is being twisted to apply to situations in which the oppressor and oppressed aren’t as clear.

Even in the case of Israel and Palestine, Switzerland should not participate in unilateral sanctions (as several EU countries have just done). Sanctions never hurt the intended targets. And a country that sanctions cannot be involved in putting an end to the violence in anything other than a violent way, be that violence economic or military.

Switzerland should be free to condemn wrongdoing in the world, but it should not take part in one side or the other. Being neutral doesn’t mean not condemning, it just means not taking part. Switzerland can and should condemn the Russian invasion, it should condemn all of the U.S. invasions, it should condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, but it should not become involved to the degree that military or economic support is called for. It should restrict itself to humanitarian aid and diplomacy.

Macklemore dropped from Ed Sheeran tour for saying “Free Palestine” by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Rapper Macklemore booted from tour for pro-Palestinian remarks, other bands drop out in solidarity by Erik Schreiber (WSWS)

“In an act of cowardice, Sheeran acquiesced to this censorship. However, this capitulation to blacklisting rapidly backfired. Showing principle and backbone, Sheeran’s other supporting acts, as well as his touring band, abruptly quit the tour in solidarity with Macklemore, putting the entire tour in question. This has a certain significance. The artists are clearly aware that public opinion has shifted, against Israel and its crimes, as part of a general radicalization.”

Yes, Pink, Supporting Genocide Should Be Lonely — The Macklemore Scandal Just Got Worse by Lee Camp (Daily Dose of Sanity)

“Pink claims she’s standing up for her people, the Jewish people, but of course this is both provably untrue and fucking stupid. I’m Jewish. I’m opposed to genocide. I’m opposed to apartheid states. I’m opposed to ethnic cleansing. I’m opposed to land theft. I’m opposed to racism. And all those reasons are the reasons I oppose every − single − thing − Israel does. When you try to shut down awareness of Israel’s unbelievably vomitous crimes — and awareness is what Macklemore is bringing — you are not defending Jews. You are only defending the murder of innocent people.”

‘I don't use my platform for politics’ — Ed Sheeran's hypocrisy exposed by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

“‘There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics.’‘ My audience includes young people, often children of all backgrounds. The absolute audacity of the man. So if a young child hears free Palestine, the most oppressed besieged population on earth should be free and we should stop killing them. That’s going to upset the kids going to your gigs. Teddy photos. Are you insane? Are you drunk?

“And also, there’s a reason I don’t use my professional platform for politics. You did a fundraiser in the Ukraine, mate. What platform did you use then? Uh, or did you not know you were there? Maybe because you don’t know what’s going on. You’re just a daisy in the breeze. Maybe you just flew into Kiev and said, “I stand with you. I love you.”

“You’re a liar. You’re a horrible, horrible liar. That’s what you are.

“And I am so delighted that somebody who’s tried to make his whole career beige, beige as possible. I don’t take sides unless the side is expedient for my career. I’m so delighted that people like you’s time has come. You cannot blend in to the background when it comes to a genocide. You lying, disingenuous piece of ginger.”

Ms Rachel responds to Ed Sheeran by Caroline Baniewicz (YouTube)

Norman Finkelstein Reveals Shocking Discoveries While Researching History of Israel’s Gaza Obsession by Tucker Carlson (YouTube)

At about 3:47,

“in 2004, he’s having a conversation with senior U.S. Officials, and he describes Gaza as, quote, a huge concentration camp. Now, bear in mind, the first individuals I mentioned, that’s fifties, early mid-sixties. Concentration camp had a very definite resonance. And yet, those are the words that leapt to mind, or those are descriptions that leapt to mind. Giora Eiland is Israeli, he’s Jewish, he is the chief of Israel’s National Security counsel, as a Jew and as an Israeli, surely he knew. The resonance of describing a parcel of land as a concentration camp. That’s the descriptive he used. Now. Here’s the, not footnote, but here’s the big qualifier. That was Gaza in its best days. That’s a fact. That was in Gaza in it’s best days.”

At about 12:10,

“When Operation Protective Edge Ended In 2014, it was 51 days, I believe it began July 7 and ended August 26, I’m pretty sure. When it ended, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, his name was Peter Moorer, he went to Gaza. Now bear in mind the job description of the head of the ICRC, the International Committee on the Red Cross. Is basically to tour war zones. He walked out of Gaza and he said, never in my life have I seen the level of destruction that I saw in Gaza. Now just to give your listeners, a juxtaposition. That means placing side by side. In Operation Protective Edge, 18,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. Morris said, I’ve never seen levels of destruction like that. In Gaza now, 325,000 homes were destroyed since October 7th. In protective edge. There was left behind roughly 2.5 million tons of rubble. In Gaza now, 61 million tons of rubble. Back then, it was unparalleled in conflict zones in 2014. Now, it’s not even a blip on the screen. Compared to what Israel has done.”

At about 20:22,

“Norman: If you take the accumulation, the cumulative effect of what Israel has done, you don’t look at it discreetly—this action, this action, this action, this action. You take the total picture. Israel’s, the density and the rate of Israel’s bombing in Gaza, unprecedented in modern conflict. In some cases, even as far back as World War II, if you take the worst cases in World War II like Dresden, the intensity and rate of destruction is higher in Gaza. That’s a fact.

“Tucker: Than Dresden?

“Norman: That’s correct. That’s correct. Not just Dresden, there’s Dresden and a couple of other major cities, but they’ve slipped my mind. Number of children killed.

“Tucker: Oh, that’s shocking what you just said.

“Norman: Number of Children killed. If you take all combat zones in the world, combine for the years, say, 2020, 2021, 2020, 2021, and combine them. All the combat zones, more children killed in Gaza. Amputees. Child amputees! I’m not sure if it’s child or maybe it’s all amputee. It’s now the densest concentration of amputees anywhere in the world. Schools. 97% of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed or severely damaged. Targeting of hospitals. Targeting of medical personnel, targeting of UN workers, targeting of journalists. They’re all in a totally different category. They’re in a total different universe than the closest second, closest third, closest fourth. So then what are you to conclude when you add up, as I said, you take the cumulative picture I don’t see how you can possibly reach any other conclusion. The one qualification I would make is, it’s not so much a qualification, it is a clarification. I don t believe Israel’s goal is genocide. Its goal is empty out Gaza. They were very clear about that. They want to ethnically cleanse Gaza. But the means they are using their modus operandi is the destruction of the Gazan population until they leave. Now you could say, but they can’t leave because the border is sealed and nobody wants them, and that’s true. So they will continue killing until they achieve their goal. And if it’s to kill everybody, they will kill everybody. They are dead set on, for once and for all, solving the Gaza question.”

At about 58:37,

“An argument is quite complex, it has major premises, minor premises, it’s very complicated to work out, and it requires a classroom to do that, and requires a text to go over together. And so it’s really a wondrous experience to be a college professor. It’s a responsibility, but it’s also an experience that I was significantly denied that opportunity. I don’t take it so much personally, as I think I could have inspired many more young minds, not propagandized them. I’m totally against propaganda in the classroom. I’m pretty much a stickler about that. Not propagandize them, but trying to convey to them the choice. Of the life of the mind, and I think I was deprived of that right because of political considerations.”

ABDUL CAN'T BELIEVE SHE WON'T ASK A REAL QUESTION by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Abdul: We all due respect, I this is the third time you’ve asked about a a Twitch streamer in California. I’ve done four events in Michigan this week. You know what didn’t come up? Twitch streamers in California. You know what did come up? Grocery prices. The fact that people can’t see a doctor. The worry that they have about the quality of air and water.”

“Abdul: I’m not interested in having a conversation about streamers in California because they are not raising the prices of gas and groceries. I’m more interested in having conversation about tariff policies and trade wars we shouldn’t be fighting, about hot wars with Iran, about AI, which I know we were supposed to talk about right now.

“So, let’s actually talk about the issues that are affecting people instead of getting distracted by whatever the president says we should be talking about. Their whole game is to make us fight culture wars so that we don’t pay attention to the fact that the president has made $2.2 billion. His family has made even more. How about your family in Michigan? How about your ability to afford the basic things? How about the ability to believe that you could see a doctor without having to potentially fall into medical debt? Those are the conversations that people are having. Those are the conversations I’m interested in having. So, yeah, I’m not all that interested in having a conversation about a streamer, forgive me, when people can’t afford their gas and their groceries.”

“Abdul: […] right now in our economy, we spend about a fifth of the whole economy on healthcare. It’s already coming out of our back pockets and it’s going into the back pockets of CEOs of pharmaceutical companies and drug companies and insurance companies and big hospitals. That’s where it’s coming from. That’s where it’s going under medicine right now. All of this could be reduced to, …

“Hasan: Have you considered praising Israel and saying Israel is good? Maybe then we would shut the up. Have you also considered praising insurance CEOs and saying that the current for-profit health care system that everybody despises is actually the best possible system we could have? There’s a reason why this line of attack is never directed at Democrats and Republicans that want to continue the current system. Have you noticed that when those Democrats go on shows like this, they’re never asked, “Hey, what are you going to do about skyrocketing premiums? Why is healthcare still for profit in the only OECD nation where these problems persist? Notice how when a Democrat is pro-Israel, they’re never asked, “Why are you so pro-Israel? Why are you at odds with 90% of your base?” Have you noticed that it’s not working anyway? But they’re still hammering it. Michigan Senate forecast by the Economist chances of winning. August 15th, Mike Rogers was at 50%, Abdul Say was at 43%. Right now, Abdul Alad is at 64% to Mike Rogers at 36%. This stuff is not working. And yet, they’re still hammering it over and over again. And part of the reason why it’s not working is because Abdul is playing it perfectly, constantly reframing the conversation back to issues that matter, unafraid to attack the argument itself, unafraid to attack the framing itself to turn around and say, “Do we really care about this or do you want people to care about this?” And they’re failing to care about it because I’m outside. I’m going on the campaign trail. I’m meeting the voters where they’re at and not a single one of them brings this up as a significant issue.”

“Hasan: The question of how are you going to pay for it is valid if and only if you ask that same question to those who are also demanding $1.5 trillion in expenditures for the American military. The question of how are you going to pay for it is never asked when when a politician is demanding tax cuts for the super wealthy. The question of how are you going to pay for it is never asked when it comes to politicians advancing larger and larger spending bills for the American military. There is no how are you going to pay for it for the billions of dollars of assets that have been lit on fire in the straight of Hormuz. No one ever says, “Hey, where’s this money going?””

“Hasan: They only ask how are you going to pay for it if it’s money going back to regular workers. [Trump’s $5000 giveaway] is illegal. It’s not going to happen. Trump is lying about it. But once again, directionally, it is still pro working class. I know so many of you are negatively polarized uh towards Trump, but understand what I am saying. I’m not saying Trump is actually honest about giving $5,000 to every single American. He’s lying. He’s lied. The total amount of money that he has lied that he was going to give back to the regular folks in America is now up to almost $20,000. He said this with the Doge cuts, dividends are going to be paid off to every single American worker. to the tune of thousands of dollars. That was a lie. He said this with the tariffs refunds. He said tariffs are going to circulate money back into the pockets of the average worker. It actually shot up uh prices. It got destroyed by the Supreme Court. And now all of the taxable revenue collected as an entry fee in the form of tariffs is going back to those same corporations who jacked up your prices. But ultimately, any initiative, whether directed by the Republican administration or the Democratic party, any initiative that recycles money into the pockets of the working class is immediately hit with how are you going to pay for it?”

With Mideast on fire, oil prices are poised to explode by Karthik Sankaran (Responsible Statecraft)

“As the market grapples with new shocks to oil supply, it has less robust buffers than it did in the early days of the war. Seaborne storage on tankers has been depleted, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has released about 130 million barrels, and the world’s largest importer, China, is increasing imports to 7.2 million barrels per day, up from a low of 6 million barrels in June (and against prewar daily imports of almost 12 million barrels).

“The impact on the prices of refined petroleum products has been particularly stark. The price of diesel in America has hit all time highs above $6 per gallon, reflecting not just the conflicts in the Middle East but also the war in Europe, where Russia and Ukraine have been exchanging strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure, hitting Russian refining capacity. Ben Cahill, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, estimated recently that seaborne refined product exports from Russia and the Middle East had fallen from roughly 8 million to 4 million barrels daily since February 2026.”

“While the disruption of urea supplies was offset by increased production in Egypt and Nigeria, the price of phosphate (the production of which depends on sulfur from the Gulf) remains high, as noted by Michael Werz of the Council on Foreign Relations. Werz points out that prices could lead to farmers skimping on phosphate for a second straight season, potentially exacerbating food shortages in 2027. And all this is happening ahead of what could be the strongest El Nino phenomenon ever, threatening farmers across the Global South. The World Food Program projected in early August that almost 50 million more people could be pushed into acute hunger as a result of the weather pattern.”

Journalism & Media

The bombarding of childhood by Natalia Kucirkova (Aeon)

“[…] pace is not a minor stylistic feature of children’s media. It is one of the ways media imagine the child. Is the child a consumer to be retained, a nervous system to be stimulated, a vessel to be filled with educational content – or a person whose attention is still forming, and who therefore needs time to arrive?”

“[…] spend five minutes watching what many young children watch, and you will see how fast, loud and bright everything on the screen has become. It does not matter whether the child is watching on a smartphone in the car or on a television at home. The screen has inherited the adult logic of media design.

“That logic is, for the most part, the logic of the attention economy. It overwhelms and overshouts, making it easier for the screen to steer the viewer. The attention economy has introduced a host of small design features for shortening time. The Like button is faster than writing an appreciative comment. A progress bar tells us how many minutes remain in an article before we have decided whether to read to the end. Increasingly, AI appears beside long documents with an offer that sounds helpful but carries a philosophy: this text is long; would you like a quick summary?”

“In the animated TV series Paw Patrol (2013-), for instance, a rescue is clear and reassuring: someone is in trouble, pups assemble, each uses a skill, and order is restored. Yet the movement from problem to rescue to resolution is often so efficient that the child is swept along by urgency rather than invited to dwell on responsibility or care for the other. Similarly, in the app-based game Hot Wheels Unlimited, building tracks and racing cars may suggest creativity and problem-solving, but the dominant rhythm is acceleration: boost, race, crash, win, unlock, repeat.”

“[…] good children’s media give a child time to complete an act of attention. Bad media keep interrupting that act before it can become a memory or play.”

“Like energy drinks, fast media promise more capacity than the child actually has: more attention is supposed to lead to better performance. Fast media feel like an extension of the child’s energy, but the bargain is unsustainable and unhealthy. What looks like support can become dependency, and what promises engagement and learning is actually compulsion.

“Children need media that do not merely occupy them, instruct them or keep them quiet. They benefit and grow from stories and shows that preserve children’s capacity for inwardness and their relation to others.”

Economy & Finance

The Hater’s Guide To AI Debt (Part 1) by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“[…] while everybody wants to make the AI bubble really complex, it’s actually super simple: hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested to make single-digit billions of dollars maybe, some day, if AI data centers actually get built at scale and OpenAI and Anthropic can afford to pay for their compute.”

There is no plausible path to them being able to pay for even 10% of the bills they’ve incurred.

“The unbelievable cost of building AI data centers is such that everyone that does so only appears to lose money, to the point that the richest companies in the world are running a deficit, and the AI compute specialists are hemorrhaging billions of dollars a quarter on the off chance that they might make it back by the year 2030.

“Not to worry, though. The combined might of private credit, investment banks and global bond markets have funded over $500 billion in AI-related debt issuance in 2026 alone, across a combination of regular bonds, convoluted special purpose vehicles, convertible notes (IE: loans that convert into stock), delayed-drawn term loans, and direct lending, with a worrying amount of the same names — such as asset managers like Blackrock and Blackstone and Japanese banks MUFJ and SMBC — popping up across a vast majority of the deals.”

“Every hyperscaler, data center SPV, and neocloud will need to raise money during an era of abject chaos and ever-climbing prices: interest rates are spiking for literally everybody, and NVIDIA just raised its prices by 15% as a result of DRAM costs skyrocketing, which has increased the cost of GPUs and basically every other imaginable thing that goes in a data center.”

This is all happening in the context of a looming oil crisis, as the empire that sustained the distribution network simultaneously itself crumbles and tears down the distribution network.

Rates Vs. Straits by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Ghalibaf is also saying that the ‘natural’ federal funds rate (r*) will have to answer to nature, which is healing after centuries of colonization. The natives have taken control of the Strait of Hormuz after 500 years and either Iran can sell oil freely or no one can. This is the SOH risk premium, and Iran sets it, not some banking cartel in America.”

“The real reality is that US gasoline prices are up 27%, and diesel prices are up 40% (!) since last year. The US uses some bullshit inflation measures, but the correlation between gold and the price of a cow has been stable for millenia, and the price of ground beef (RIP) is up 10%. None of these numbers are 2% and people know it, however much smoke central bankers try to blow up their asses. Black smoke, white smoke, it doesn’t matter what billows out of the Fed this week. Shit is literally on fire and people know it.”

“If you assume an inflation even slightly ‘anchored’ to physical supplies, you should have rates closer to 5% now and going up to 8%. And if we’re being honest about inflation, diesel increases of 40% (and skyrocketing) means rates should be way higher because the engine of your economy is literally on fire. More like the Voelker era rates of up to 15%, dealing with a smaller supply shock. I actually don’t know what the ‘real’ numbers should be because the system is so bullshit. It’s like a house on fire and all you control is the AC.”

Environment & Climate Change

Diese Folgen hat der Rekordsommer 2026 by Felicitas Erzinger (SRF)

“Ist das ein Vorgeschmack auf künftige Sommer?

“Ja, es ist ein klarer Vorgeschmack. Es entspricht dem, was die Klimamodelle für die Zukunft voraussagen. In einer um drei Grad wärmeren Welt, auf die wir aktuell ungefähr zusteuern, wäre das ein durchschnittlicher Sommer. Rund jeder zweite Sommer dürfte noch heisser werden, einige wären auch trockener. Auf jeden Fall etwas, worauf wir uns besser vorbereiten sollten.”

“Wie können wir uns in Zukunft im Umgang mit Wasser anpassen?

“Gerade was die Trockenheit angeht, ist es wichtig, Wasser möglichst zu speichern. In den Städten, auf landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben, aber auch im Wald – also in der ganzen Landschaft. Mit Gräben, Becken, Teichen und so weiter. Und man muss die doch grossen Datenlücken punkto Wasserverbrauch in der Schweiz schliessen. Denn nur wenn man weiss, wie viel die Landwirtschaft, die Industrie, die Kraftwerke und die Trinkwasserversorgung brauchen, kann man entscheiden, wer wie viel Wasser bekommt, wenn das Wasser knapp wird.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Inspiration from Jay Maisel by Santa Fe Workshops (YouTube)

“I love optical illusions I love things that are not what they seem to be. I love tricking you. I love being tricked. I love sensory images. I would like people to appreciate my work for what it is. It’s as simple as that. It’s about beauty. It’s about beautiful imagery.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

A friend wrote to me about a job interview,

“Today, we had an online interview and we found the guy was answering our questions using ChatGTP and had a browser open. We asked him to share the screen to do some coding (after 30 minutes discussion) and we all saw his chat.”

This world we have created is an unmitigated catastrophe.

It did not begin with AI. The groundwork was laid when we built a world where results were rewarded without regard for principle or effort.

People learned what most of our societies very clearly value: appearance above substance.

Since the number of people who know how to keep society going at the current level is a rounding error, and everything seems to work fine anyway, what’s the harm if you cheat a little or a lot to get what you didn’t earn and can’t possibly understand?

Everyone else is doing it.

Only your own principles stand in your way.

Best not to have any principles, whispers society.

Just consume and cheat your way to the top.

You’ll sleep like a baby in your king-sized bed in your king-sized home on the gold coast.

He wrote back,

“It is so annoying, we expend more than 3-4 hours interviewing a guy, who when you ask to write the type of a board game 8x8 replies: ‘I need to search how to do it.’”

It has been like this for a while. So much so that I remember this satirical article from a year ago about it. It’s quite funny.

“Some will say I should have prepared better. To them I ask: prepared how? By memorizing things? By practicing drawing pathways by hand like some kind of monk illuminating a manuscript? The whole point of AI tools is that I no longer need to retain information in my biological memory. My biological memory is for other things now. Important things. Like my Netflix password and the location of my car in parking structures.”

“I have fought with every kind of activist in my life; no group is more aggressive, nasty, and vindictive than the “disability rights” people who insist that they get to speak for everyone who has ever dealt with a disability. Luckily, I was born to do this, and I like it, and we will see who’s more comfortable in this kind of fight in the months to come as the book is released. I do all of this for a lot of reasons. One reason is that I have paid a high price for my own disability and thus will not defer to a bunch of self-diagnosed ivory tower theater kids who playact infirmity as a surrogate for having a personality. Another reason is because I look out at the world and see people like the young lady in this video (YouTube), and I see that, incredibly, she and people like her have essentially no presence in the “neurodiversity” or “disability rights” world; the depth of their impairment is too inconvenient for those who insist that autism is a superpower, the ones who stare into their selfie cams and brag about being “neurospicy.” And if anyone thinks that they can bully me out of doing this kind of advocacy by inventing misogynistic motives for what I’m doing, with no evidence whatsoever, they are out of their fucking minds.”

What make a Makó by Elizabeth Goodspeed (It's Nice That)

“[…] there’s another slightly unfashionable term lurking around all this: selling out. The idea of selling out has always been a little puritanical (artists have to make money!), but I do wonder if we lost a useful concept when we replaced “selling out” with the frictionless corp-speak of “partnerships” and “collaborations”. “Selling out” at least acknowledged that commercial transactions came with potential consequences – the risk of diluting an artist’s work, or changing how we perceive them and their larger body of work. Instead, we pretend that an auteur can auction off their authorship while still emerging with it perfectly intact: Makó supplies his Makó-ness, the sitter supplies a face, the brand sponsor supplies a check, and everyone goes home as cool as ever. Yorgos Lanthimos can make a Squarespace ad whose primary creative proposition is that it looks like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie; Makó can make a Capital One activation whose primary proposition is that you get to be inside a Makó. In both cases, the artist’s value has gone from shaping a creative concept to being the concept.

“This isn’t to say that serious artists shouldn’t make commercials! David Lynch made plenty of them. But there’s a big difference between giving artists money because you like their work and are excited to see what they come up with, and giving them money just because you want the pedigree of their name attached to yours.”

Technology & Engineering

Using AI for Weapons Development by Bruce Schneier

After citing an Anthropic report where they claim to have discovered Yemenis using Claude to design missiles, Schneier writes,

“Expect more of this. AI systems democratize expertise and capability. Most of the time that’s a good thing, but sometimes it’s not.”

This is just classic Bruce Schneier tone-deafness because he has a “side”. I can’t help but note that he’s never once written an article warning of how AI is being used to build weapons for the U.S. because this doesn’t bother him. After all, the good guys need weapons.

Not Using A Smartphone Burdens Others by Josh Blackman (Reason)

“For a full day, no one can bother me. I get no emails asking me to do things. If someone writes something about me, I won’t see it till Saturday night. And if the Supreme Court issues some emergency ruling, I don’t have to deal with it. Then again, text messages from friends will often disturb my solitude. They will text me a link to a social media post, that I can’t open for a full day. They will text me, “Can you believe what Justice X did”? I could ask what happened, but that defeats the point of the separation. So I spend a full day wondering what happened. Still, the benefits have been clear. People often ask me how I maintain such a productive rate of output. Turning off for a full-day helps me be much clearer for the rest of the week. It is rejuvenating.”

Wow. Imagine if he would just do it right. I can’t believe that people can’t unplug for social contact for more than a day, or for more than an hour. This guy doesn’t seem very enlightened. Maybe he is compared to his social circle but he seems deeply addicted to me, if this is what he’s proud of.

It goes on,

“At the same time, there are costs to going smart-phone free. I still have to function in society. Invariably, I burden others. If I need to use an uber, I have to ask someone else to call it from me. (A few times, I’ve actually scheduled an uber to pick me up at a hotel the night before, so I hope it pray a car actually shows up at the appointed time.) If I need directions, I have to ask someone else to check Google Maps. (I usually download offline directions, but they do not always work.) Virtually any place that involves a check-in requires scanning a QR code. (When I drop my kids off at the daycare at the gym, I have to borrow the attendant’s phone to sign them in.) Ordering food is extremely hard, as most places only take orders over an app. Traveling without a smartphone is a trip. I can still download boarding passes, and print them out, but if there are any disruptions, I have to keep myself glued to the airport monitors.”

This is the voice of privilege. I use paper boarding passes and it’s really easy to get one. Just pick it up at the counter when you check your bag. What’s the problem? Chat with someone, for God’s sake. I don’t need my phone to get food. I go to the grocery store and make dinner. I don’t have to scan myself in anywhere I go because I don’t have kids at daycare nor do I go to a gym. I went to the lake for a swim. I have a season pass on an actual card, not my phone. I already know where it is, so I don’t need a map, and I rode my bike there, so I didn’t need an Uber.

LLMs & AI

But do you use keyboard shortcuts? by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn’t have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton.

“If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver’s seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation’s drive-train.

“Seen in this light, bosses’ insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you’re not relying on their skill – you’re doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you’re too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you’re in the driver’s seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.”

Of AI and Washing Machines by Austin Jones (Austin's Journey for Meaning)

“When your hamper is full or your drawers are empty, you need to wash your clothes. The task is to wash these clothes, and the point of the task is to make clean clothes. So, you can automate this task and get the output with way less effort. Your teacher assigned you a paper, so you must create a paper to complete this assignment. So, you can automate this task and get the output with way less effort. WRONG. This is an extremely harmful misconception of modern output measured schooling. The purpose of an assignment isn’t for you to make the work. No one will ever read your paper on The Great Gatsby — that’s not the point. The purpose of an assignment is for you to learn: learn the material, learn how to form an argument, learn how to pull apart a book or an idea. In automating the thinking out of the task you have starved yourself of the entire reason you were given it.”

“Great media, pieces that make you cry (laughing or otherwise) take a long time and alot of work. I don’t mean work in. I mean work in preparation. Social media may have obscured this fact, but moments of greatness, even brief, have thousands and thousands of hours backing them. And AI is making those thousands of hours seem less and less worth it.”

“Delegation is a very important skill. But you can’t delegate away your own purpose. So, text your mom, write your papers, be a human, but let the machines wash the clothes.”

They want you to be scared of AI in a very specific way by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“[…] we have to take all of this with a massive grain of salt because a cult of losers who think you can turn a computer into god infiltrated the highest levels of San Francisco society and now it’s impossible to know who’s compromised. Making matters even worse, this cult believes you can turn a computer into god and, also, believes that they might inadvertently kill all of us by accident in the process. Some members of the cult are fine with this and some aren’t. But it means that roughly the same folks saying we need to build artificial general intelligence are also warning that we’re moving too fast. To make matters worse, they’ve realized that telling people their products could bring about a Skynet doomsday scenario is actually a really good way to raise money from investors, many of whom are in their idiotic little cult.”

“I am thoroughly convinced that lawmakers do not understand any of this. I just do not think that the same elected leaders who were asking Mark Zuckerberg if Facebook was “like a floppy disk” back in 2018 are really capable of wrapping their heads around a psuedo-religious cult wriggling its way into the halls of American power. If they were, we wouldn’t have all the other religious cults in there!

“But that hasn’t stopped House Democrats from drafting a letter begging President Donald Trump for “global framework to guide the development” of AI. And, obviously, their letter mentions that America needs this because it has to compete with China. I’m sure by the time this is all done those boneheads will have found some way to make it about banning teenagers from using Instagram. Which is all they really seem to care about.”

“There are plenty of things to be worried about when it comes to AI, though. Data centers destroying the environment, or breaking the electrical grid. AI automation, even if it sucks and doesn’t really work, replacing human labor, even in the short term. Mindless AI agents bricking dinner reservation sites, online ticket queues, marketplaces, or even taking down whole chunks of the internet. Visual slop filling up our feeds. A massive recession when the AI bubble finally pops. They’re all real, already happening, and do not require an eschatologic belief in artificial general intelligence to address.”

“I’ll end this here with a little conspiracy theory courtesy of Hacker News that I have decided I will believe until I see proof to the contrary. “OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly asking for slowdown in AI research,” one user wrote. “Translation: We see this technology not being any more useful than what it is now, no AGI is coming, and the first one to accept this and slow down the dollar burn rate will incur the wrath of the market. So let’s say this big boogeyman technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together.””

That’s extremely plausible. They’re desperately seeking a way off this merry-go-round where they remain in power but the carousel slows down before it kills their companies.

Anthropic just admitted AI is buggy and called it the apocalypse by Mo Bitar (YouTube)

“‘Pace the frontier’ just means ‘fix the bugs’.”

“It’s just a Python loop and a chatbot. It’s not sentient.”

Maybe people just can’t tell because they’re that dumb.

every AI ceo all of a sudden by Man Carrying Thing (YouTube)

“ai even taking the “stand at bus stop and scream at me about the apocalypse” jobs”

““I have created a cardboard cutout in the shape of the Torment Nexus. Oh my god, what have I done? This must be how Oppenheimer felt.””

THE AI INDUSTRY IS FREAKING OUT by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“The other attitude demonstrated by some of the hedge fund managers that want open weights and want uh the newest versions of AI to be readily available for everyone in the marketplace so that they can continue making their uh shittier versions of of AI products uh better overall that believe that the gloom and doom and the the ‘let’s you know let’s slow down this AI process’ coming from the frontier models CEOs is actually a way to engage in regulatory capture.

“They believe that um the the Frontier model owners have actually hit a a point where they can’t continue advancing and they’re simply lying about how dangerous the AI is to demand regulation from the government so that they can engage in regulatory capture and ensure that the smaller models like the the less advanced models that are out there that are using the older technology are never competitive with the frontier models.”

We Must Create the Shit Machine by Pete Reynolds (McSweeney's)

“Could the Shit Machine END WORLD HUNGER? It’s NOT IMPOSSIBLE in the most LITERAL SENSE, which is all the justification we need to invest an AMOUNT OF MONEY that would OTHERWISE BY ITSELF END ACTUAL WORLD HUNGER.

“Could it CURE CANCER? We DON’T KNOW, which is the same as: YES.”

How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“When an industry that is eating itself alive through “hyperscaling” demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its “rogue AI hacking” story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do:”

I don’t like LLMs by Martin Fowler

“[…] there is one emotion that dominates − one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me − often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance − and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.

“That’s not enough to make me feel we should avoid them. As Jessica Kerr put it “not only are they useful, it is irresponsible not to use them…. They’re more thorough, as well as faster.” This contradictory reaction comes through in polling, where people say they find these models are useful, but also that they think they will be bad for society.

“Much of this may be because LLMs are young − we haven’t trained them to grow up yet. Maybe I’ll like them once they mature. (I hope we get to find out.) But I’m not encouraged when I think of the kinds of environments that cultivate them. I’m wary of the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture, and these LLMs are their products, so naturally lean toward their world-view. When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, treating them as conscious beings with their own will. They are (software) machines, developed by people working in corporations. While the agents’ behavior aren’t explicitly programmed, they are nurtured with the values of their creators.”

Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

“Over at OpenAI, ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote in an internal message that publishers would face an “existential threat” from commercial products trained on news content that can be used to substitute news providers. One Microsoft document even described a “doom loop,” news orgs said, “that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”

““It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” that document said.

“Data from both firms shows that this prediction was accurate. Microsoft recorded 83–93 percent drops in click-through rates for some news plaintiffs, and 51–94 percent drops for others. Add to that reporting on low click-through rates from ChatGPT search results and news organizations’ own reporting on traffic declines. Suddenly, it becomes easier to see how declining news revenue could ultimately rob chatbots of the abundant streams of reliable information that supposedly makes them such groundbreaking tools.

“Meanwhile, “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use,” Hecht acknowledged in a Microsoft document.”

“ “AI companies remain powerless to break out of this ‘doom loop,’ because, while the industry as a whole would benefit if every company paid to sustain the continued production of the creative works their technology depends on, each individual company is better off taking content for free while others pay,” news groups argued.”

Programming

XPath for custom types in .NET by Gérald Barré (Meziantou's blog)

“XPathNavigator doesn’t require XML. It’s an abstraction that lets you expose a node-based view of any hierarchical data. When you evaluate an XPath expression, the navigator walks through the nodes and properties of your data structure.

“To make your custom types work with XPath, you need three things:”

1. A class implementing IXPathNavigable (the entry point)
2. A class implementing XPathNavigator (the traversal logic)
3. A way to expose your data through these interfaces

The Story of VS Code | Official Documentary by Visual Studio Code (YouTube)

This 90-minute documentary shows how Visual Studio Code was developed alongside TypeScript and is still purely browser-based. It’s quite a story.

Interview with Big Data engineer in 2026. by Kai Lentit (YouTube)

“Companies don’t actually have big data they have medium data. Big data is anything that crashes Excel.

“We actually have two big datas…for fault tolerance. Two wrongs don’t make a right….except in a distributed database.

“15-million-row dataset has 800 columns. The rows aren’t wide. They are panoramic. If the join fits in memory, it belongs in Postgres.

“Our architecture preserves every invariant except the budget. Our cloud bill was $340,000. We don’t know if the processing even ran; that was just observability.

“We support real-time processing, of course, unless the event arrives early, late, duplicated, malformed, reordered. Consistency was too hard, so we went with ‘immediately inaccurate’. 70% of records are accurate. That’s higher than the weather forecast. The numbers are not wrong. They are early. Wait two, three, maybe…four days, they will be late. It’s almost interactive analytics. ‘Final numbers’ mean numbers we have stopped refreshing

“…The slide says we handle billions of events. It does not say we handle them well.

“It is only truly idempotent if all availability zones go down equally during the outage.

“The dashboard is green because the job that checks if the dashboard is wrong is red. Ah, what happened here? Let me quickly roll back…30 billion events.

“A production workaround becomes durable the moment the engineer who wrote it leaves.

“Yes, We removed an unused column, and it broke Portugal.

“The bug has existed for eight years. At this point, it’s an interface.

“HDFS is not dead. It’s waiting for someone with root access.

“We migrated from cron to Airflow for reliability. Then we wrote a cron job to check if Airflow silently died.

“We are a data-driven company, of course. Every week somebody reads the invoices out of PDFs and types the data into Excel.

“Whenever we lose a backup, we reconstruct what the customer did from the logs. No, that’s one of our industry’s best practices. Our customers didn’t even know. To be honest, most of our customers don’t even use our product anyway.

“Our recommendation pipeline had three hours of Kafka lag. So technically it was a real-time recommendation for your past self.

“We anonymized the data…by removing the column ‘name’. We persist it in places nobody knows how to query.

“A backfill is when you fix one historical bug by introducing a brand-new historical bug.

“We still use protobuf. Yes, we are still confused, but at least confused…strongly typed.

“Some say data is the new oil. *chuckles* We cannot stop producing it, and we will pay to clean it up for years. From what I see, data is the new asbestos.

“A soft outage is when the checkpoint directory grows faster… …than S3 versioning can bill.

“I am on-call today, yes, as you can see. Oh, I turned my phone off. If it burns, it burns. I don’t have keys to the servers anyway. What am I gonna do?”

The Climb Was the Safety Feature by Christian Ekrem

“A single prompt can give you a deployed app with auth, a database, a landing page and a dark mode toggle, responding in under a hundred milliseconds. It looks great. It is at the top of the tower, no argument from me.

“Nothing about it tells you whether the builder climbed, and as such: you can have no assumptions as to how experienced or otherwise trustworthy the author of the software is. The accident is free now, so the proxy is dead, and impressive implies nothing at all anymore. The signal went away subtly enough that most of the industry is still acting as if it’s there. Hiring managers still weigh portfolios, and reviewers still go easy on a PR that looks clean. Ladder code looks exactly like climbed code from the outside.

“To be fair, the signal had been eroding for fifteen years; Rails scaffolding and Firebase both let people ship things they hadn’t entirely climbed to. What’s new is the height. Squarespace never handed anyone a payment integration or a shell with production tokens in its environment. The ladder now reaches the tall elements.”

“The playground people were smarter than us about this. Instead of banning ladders they wrote a rule with two variables in it: how easy the ascent, and how far the fall. The easier you make the climb, the more protection you owe at the top. Our industry has spent three years making the ascent easier for everybody and has not, as far as I can tell, recalculated a single fall.”

“[…] we handed out ladders to all of it at once. The same tool that scaffolds a hobby project will scaffold a payment integration without a flicker of hesitation, and the two outputs look the same.”

“[…] stop reading impressive as competent. In hiring, in review, and, hardest of all, when your own ladder output looks better than it should. Ask instead how far the fall is and who is standing underneath.”

On learning programming in an age of LLMs by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“Do I think that AI enables people to develop faster than they can keep up? This remains to be seen. Software developers have already, for decades, been working on top of abstractions they didn’t understand. If you were a web developer, you didn’t know much about compiler programming. If you were a compiler programmer, you didn’t know much about integrated circuit design. And if your job was to engineer integrated circuits, you wouldn’t know much about the levels of abstraction above you.

“A good rule of thumb was: Understand the level of abstractions directly below the one you work in, as well as the one above. That would enable you to troubleshoot most problems.”

“When I started my career, for years I balanced a knife’s edge of getting things done while learning on the job. Beginning in 1999, I wrote COM components in C++, not understanding much of what I was doing. Somehow, I still made it work, even to a degree that I managed to eliminate any obvious memory leaks.”

“How do I learn a completely new programming language today? Again, my experience is useless to someone new to programming in 2026: I’ve now seen so many programming languages that if I run into a new one, I can usually pick it up from perusing existing code and looking up the few things that aren’t immediately clear.

“But that’s presupposing that the language in question is ‘normal’. If I had to get back into APL, I’d at least have to find a tutorial.”

A good friend of mine is learning LISP by writing his own LISP runtime. That’s not a “normal” language for me, so it’s been fun following along with him, and learning a bunch of stuff about LISP and macros that I didn’t know before. When he sends me examples in Rust, I can easily read those without having to ask too many questions.

Design

The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped by Jo Sprague

“On the rebuild of Firefox.com, working with Mozilla and the team at Lincoln Loop, I built the whole system in modern, native CSS with no preprocessors. Custom properties are exported straight from design files, native CSS is written once with no hacks, and it works in every modern browser, with a minimal branded stylesheet giving legacy browsers basic, accessible branding.

“Together we built a design system of more than 70 components and 25 page templates, implemented as Wagtail components so the site’s content team can assemble pages without engineering help. The site currently supports 19 locales.

“There’s one honest footnote. We did end up with PostCSS in production, used for a single job: inlining @import statements. Native @import still has terrible performance characteristics in some browsers, and on a site like this one that matters more than architectural purity. The authored CSS is still plain, native CSS. Nothing in it depends on a build step to be valid or to make sense. The build only flattens what the browser would otherwise fetch serially.

“That distinction is worth keeping in mind when someone tells you a project is “no build step.” What matters is whether the source you write is the language the browser speaks, or a dialect that only exists until compilation.”

Replacing Pull Requests with Delta by Nathan Sobo (Zed Blog)

There’s an eight-minute video showing how this feature works. It’s fine. The problem I have with it is that the code-change that they make is to add something to the UI. They ask the agent to build it, with no mention of consulting any sort of style guidelines. They just accept whatever the agent throws back because “it looks good.” No-one cares are about any consistency or guidelines. They never did. Just as bosses feel that AI frees them from annoying developers, developers feel that AI frees them from annoying designers and guidelines. More than ever, people are now able to do other people’s jobs, jobs that they never thought were that difficult or worth anything in the first place. This is a good explanation for why your apps are starting to look weird and inconsistent: there is no longer anything guaranteeing consistency or fluency in the design.

“Delta is built on DeltaDB, which extends Git’s content-based versioning with incremental versions based on deltas. It records edits between commits alongside messages from humans and agents, preserving how the code evolved throughout a thread. A commit remains the checkpoint you push, pull, and build from. DeltaDB retains the work between those checkpoints.”

Aren’t the deltas just auto-commits then, conceptually? It’s preserving a much higher granularity of information than you would with just commits. Is that really beneficial? Isn’t that too much noise? Aren’t we supposed to be writing the story of how the code was built rather than pushing every last detail of every last draft that was ever written about it, in the order it was written? I don’t see how that’s very helpful. It reminds me of Fossil, which I wrote about in Rebase Considered Essential way back in January of 2020.

Fun

fugleramme

E-Ink birds

“BirdNET-Go listens on a mic and handles the classifier. Fugleramme polls its api, matches each species to an illustration, then packs them onto a page, and redraws only when the birds change − on an Inky Impression e-ink panel, and as a web kiosk serving the same view. There’s an admin page that lets you configure what to show, and automatic updates and such.”

This. Is. Awesome.

i will be DAMNED if i lose to a CONCEPT by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

“T-Rex: Cards on the table. I needed to have inner peace days ago and I most definitely new it right now.
Dromiceiomimus: Buddy − I think it you want to be at peace you. or must either solve what’s troubling you learn to accept it, so that you can simply exist without worry.T-Rex: Right. Okay. I can do this. I will simply achieve peace by making peace with everything that’s preventing me from achieving peace! EASY!
Utahraptor: So − how’s achieving enlightenment going?
T-Rex: Not great! I’m beginning to suspect that it’s task that may take my WHOLE LIFETIME to complete − and this is even WORSE − one of those BALONEY tasks that can NEVER be completed because it turns out the attempt. the JOURNEY, is more important than the destination!!
Utahraptor: Oh, God, I hate those tasks!
T-Rex: EVERYONE DOES!! The purpose of journeys is to REACH DESTINATIONS! Dying in the middle of one is just LOSING to a JOURNEY, and a journey is an INANIMATE CONCEPT that doesn’t even know you’re aliveا ARGH!! I WON’T LIE, folks! am really QUITE FAR from INNER PEACE RIGHT NOW!!”

Waste 2 by Zach Weinersmith (SMBC)

“We have assembled the world’s most pre-eminent scientists, philosophers, linguists, artists, and architects. We are here to find a way to tell anyone anytime in the next 100,000 years to stay away from this place of burial of nuclear waste. We may not make it use current language, which may drift, nor symbols, which may invert, and yet…

“[Janitor] Make it look like a dog’s butthole!

“What was that?

“[Janitor] The entryway. Make it look like the butthole of a dog.

“Cancel the conference. Cancel everything}

“[Newspaper headline] Local janitor saves government $14,000,000. “Like a butthole.””

The hover-over text is “Seriously though, next time there’s a problem like this just call me.”

Honestly, this is already a better idea than the glow-in-the-dark cats[3].

Olivia Rodrigo Releases Fantasy Tabletop Game ‘The High Winter Elves Of Girlville’ (The Onion)

“The High Winter Elves Of Girlville really takes everything I’ve learned about fantasy roleplaying, player empowerment, and robust character creation, and boils it down into one amazing pen-and-paper system,” said Rodrigo, who told the podcast’s hosts that she had found the game as satisfying in one-shot sessions as it was in the months-long campaigns she hosted with an adventuring group that included Madison Hu, Billie Eilish, and Tate McRae.”

““Well, I guess I’m mostly interested in her new album, but this might be cool, too,” said 15-year-old fan Jamie Mahoozi, one of hundreds who lined up outside the Brooklyn hobbyist shop Twenty Sided early Friday morning to be among the first to purchase the game’s deluxe box set, which contains an Olivia Rodrigo–branded dice bag and a miniature of Valford the Girly Mage designed by the musician herself. “Maybe I’ll put it on the shelf in my bedroom. I don’t really know.”

““I like that all the goblins and wizards and stuff can go to prom together, though,” she added.”

Landlord Takes Hornets’ Side (The Onion)

““Look, I empathize with both perspectives on this matter, but at the end of the day, the hornets were here first,” said the 56-year-old building owner, informing the resident who had requested the removal of an active wasp nest that due to municipal leasing ordinances, his hands were tied. […] I saw on the security camera that you were waving your arms around pretty violently when they swarmed you.” Morton went on to warn the tenant this was strike two, citing a previous incident in which the resident had accused a toilet of being clogged.”

Video Games

Discovering BLACKWOOD: Ambitious game on a smaller scale (Silent's Blog)

“The gameplay of Blackwood mashes two very distinct loops together: the daytime DVD store activities are more than a minigame, and they make for a significant portion of Anton’s life. Depending on the player’s wishes, it can play like a role-playing game: the apartment lets you shower and prepare breakfast, watch TV, surf a limited range of Internet websites, or just smoke on the balcony and ponder. During that time, Blackwood asks the player to manage the entire store, with stock, maintenance, and some degree of “customer relations” all being part of it. At night, Anton takes on contracts, customizes his guns, and takes part in “events” like the fighting/arena competitions.

“This concept gives the game an ambitious dichotomy and grants the player some freedom. As long as you can keep up with the payments, it’s up to you to decide how to balance the two lives Anton has, so there’s no rush to go through the selection of missions the game offers at the moment. None of the missions are time-gated, and side contracts cycle after several days, making it impossible to miss out if you spend a few days focusing on the DVD store. In a way, this makes sense role-play-wise – it’s logical not to take on “side gigs” like this every other night.”

“[…] an ambitious game done by a smaller team on a low budget, that doesn’t try to bite off more than it can chew and knows exactly what it can or can’t do. The overall package has some rough edges, but everything is perfectly playable. In a way, it reminds me of RoboCop: Rogue City – that game knew exactly where its strong and weak spots were, and rolled with any jank it displayed. With Blackwood, it’s similar: you will certainly notice some “indie Unity game” taste to it, with NPCs awkwardly walking about or getting stuck, lighting looking severely off at times, or animations not always connecting as they should.”