Links and Notes for October 9th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Brazil’s Angry Tide and the Struggles Ahead by Vijay Prashad (ZNetwork)

“Brazil’s size, industrial capacity, raw minerals (such as critical minerals), agricultural resources, and diplomatic reach give its political direction continental significance. A government that subordinates these assets to Washington’s priorities would weaken the space available to neighbouring countries seeking their own paths of development.”

“The Left cannot answer this merely by advertising government achievements. It must connect those achievements to a credible programme for changing everyday life, and explain which interests prevent further advances. A worker struggling with debt needs more than reassurance that the economy is performing well. This has been the problem for Lula, whose programme for the future does not seem to promise more than what has been delivered till now.”

Same old story. Might as well be describing the Biden administration’s domestic policy.

“The runoff cannot be won through negotiations among party leaders alone. It requires organised activity in workplaces, neighbourhoods, universities, and rural communities, with a programme people can recognise in their own lives. Transport, wages, housing, debt, public healthcare, and the time consumed by work must become the substance of a democratic campaign. Defence of sovereignty becomes tangible when it is connected to the ability to use Brazil’s wealth for the needs of its people.”

Lula’s Defeat Wasn’t Inevitable by Antonio Martins (ZNetwork)

“Lula’s government and the Brazilian left suffered a disaster in Sunday’s election. Contrary to every poll, the president finished the first round 2.2 million votes behind Flávio Bolsonaro—and, more significantly, 3.4 million votes below his total four years ago, when the machinery of the state was working against him and in favor of his opponent. His vote share declined in 98 percent of Brazil’s municipalities.”

“Throughout its four years in office, Lula’s third government was almost invariably associated with the Centrão. Here lies its first accommodation: accepting the limits imposed by conservative institutions; avoiding, as much as possible, any attempt to strain those limits through popular pressure; and believing only in the modest changes that could be squeezed through openings in Congress.”

Sounds like the weak-tea left in many other countries.

“[…] the executive branch then backed away from the fight. It remained associated with an institutional world widely seen as corrupt, elitist, and indifferent to ordinary people’s struggles. In doing so, it forfeited its credibility as a vehicle for the protest vote. On Sunday, it reaped the bitter fruits.”

“[…] the philosopher Moysés Pinto Neto and other writers have drawn attention, in their first analyses of October 4, to the fragmentation of the public sphere produced by Big Tech platforms. Through their algorithms, these platforms present each person with a different view of social reality. As a consequence, it becomes much harder to identify common material problems and demands—for example, the fight for labor rights or for a properly funded public health system. Voters no longer embrace such demands, these authors argue, because they no longer see themselves as part of a collective. Instead, they tend to value the identities assigned to them by neoliberal subjectivity”

“Moysés seems to confuse this danger with inevitability. He fails to see that the left’s answer cannot be adaptation. On the contrary, it must strengthen the possibility of politics as collective action.”

“The same state that disburses 1 trillion reals a year to enrich a small class of rentiers could instead spend money to extend the Family Health Strategy to every Brazilian, at a cost of 30 billion reals; provide full-day public schooling and childcare to all adolescents and children—and, especially, relief to their mothers; achieve universal sanitation while cleaning up polluted urban rivers; multiply metro systems; begin transforming the urban peripheries; and undertake many other urgently needed projects.”

“It is far too early to say, suggests a recent text by Álvaro García Linera, the thinker who served as vice president of Bolivia under Evo Morales. His central hypothesis is that this political current will prove short-lived. At a moment when the entire world is once again talking about sovereignty and protecting national economies, the far right offers a stale, recolonizing neoliberalism. Its submission to the United States is as blatant and pathetic as Flávio and Eduardo Bolsonaro’s overtures to Donald Trump. Its project amounts to something like every man for himself: greater inequality, capitalism without limits, devastation, and supremacism.”

Warum wir die Neutralitätsabstimmung nicht gewinnen konnten by Christoph Pfluger

“Natürlich könnten wir als Schweiz Kriterien für einen neutralen Staat in Zeiten hybrider Kriegsführung formulieren. Aber daran werden die Regierung und die Räte nicht einmal denken. Lieber sich im Nebel der Unklarheit «durchwursteln», wie Bundesrat Cassis es formulierte, bzw. sich immer tiefer in hybriden Schützengraben verschanzen, Wirtschaftsgranaten abfeuern, Informationsdrohnen losschicken und dabei immer brav und streng legalistisch neutral bleiben.”

“Nach der krachenden Abstimmungsniederlage können wir die Neutralität nicht mehr verteidigen, sei es nun eine schweizerische, eine kompromisslose oder eine echte. Der Begriff ist vergewaltigt, verbraucht und vorbei. Jetzt muss etwas Neues kommen. Ich sage es nicht gerne: Aber jetzt braucht es eine Offensive, einen Angriff auf das NATO-Netzwerk, das die Abstimmung gewonnen hat und mit der Integration in die NATO beschleunigt fortfahren will.”

“Die «Fixpreis»-Geschichte mit dem F-35 ist nur die Spitze des Eisbergs. Es kann nicht sein, dass unsere VBS-Leute und ihre teuren Anwaltskanzleien so dumm sind, dass sie sich von den Amerikanern derart haben hereinlegen lassen. Und so hinterhältig sind die Amis auch wieder nicht, dass sie den Schweizern einen Vertrag mit einem unsichtbaren, milliardenteuren Fallstrick vorgelegt hätten.”

Sag niemals nie.

“«Das NATO-Netzwerk in der Schweiz» beschreibt ein dichtes Gewebe von Beamten, hohen Militärs, Parteileuten, NGOs, Thinktanks und allen grossen Medien, die ziemlich gezielt und offensichtlich koordiniert auf die wachsende Integration in die NATO […]”

“Ich will nicht, dass die Schweiz in einen Krieg getrieben wird, auch nicht an den Rand eines Konflikts. Wenn schon, will ich, dass die Schweiz dazwischen steht und vermittelt.”

F-35: Der Neutralitäts-Killer aus den USA? Was dem Volk versprochen wurde, droht zur Illusion zu werden by Daniel Funk (Bewegung für Neutralität)

“Wer dem Volk verspricht, die Sicherheit und Eigenständigkeit der Schweiz zu stärken, muss sich daran messen lassen. Wenn die gewählte Lösung zugleich neue Abhängigkeiten schafft und Zweifel an ihrer Eignung für die eigenständige Landesverteidigung aufwirft, reicht der Verweis auf moderne Technologie nicht aus.”

The Pentagon is eating Silicon Valley by Matthew Petti (Reason)

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a dry run for great power conflict. Although American military tech executives tried to make a big show of their contribution to the Ukrainian war effort, products from Palantir and Anduril proved mediocre compared to homegrown Ukrainian systems. “It’s almost impossible to develop something that works without the contact with the problem space,” Ukrainian technologist Andrey Liscovich told Weinberger, arguing that American technology companies lose their nimbleness in his country. And the challenge facing Ukraine is not really about making weapons smarter; it’s about producing them cheaply at scale. In other words, great power conflict is an issue of physical bottlenecks, not intelligence.”

How the Shahed Drone Became the New AK-47 by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“It is likely inevitable now that lonely teenage lunatics in Akron, Ohio will build a Shahed of their own in their stepdad’s basement. I can only urge them to consider the data center two towns over as a target instead of the children’s hospital down the street and pray to Kali that the grid goes down before it can take us all down with it.”

Mamdani And The Zionist Shakedown by Margaret Kimberley (Black Agenda Report | Scheer Post)

“Israel and the New Yorkers who publicly support its actions are never satisfied. The scant evidence of increases in what is called anti-semitic activity comes from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the New York Police Department (NYPD) accepts those claims at face value. UJA Federation of New York was singularly unimpressed by Mamdani genuflecting and gave the game away.”

“While the Mayor’s plan has a number of positive elements, including some increased security funding for Jewish institutions and expanding proven programs, it fails to address a central issue that the Mayor himself has perpetuated: rhetoric that demonizes and delegitimizes Israel inevitably leads to the targeting of Jewish New Yorkers.”

“There you have it. Jewish groups may complain about being unsafe and demand greater police presence or funding increases for their organizations, but in the final analysis they expect support for zionism and silence about war crimes and genocide. The only definition of anti-semitism they want has nothing to do with reports of swastikas being painted on sidewalks. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition that equates anti-zionism with anti-semitism is what they want to hear from Mamdani, while also not turning down any of the extra money. The Zionist Shakedown would make the mafia blush.”

The House Of Saud Is On Fire by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“What I struggle to understand is why the White Empire would do this when they could just chill and live for a hundred years as undeserved statesmen. All of their avowed enemies – Iran, China, Russia – would happily trade with them. I have my explanations, but one of the things I didn’t understand from the Quran makes sense now, in this context. The Quran says God just hardens some peoples hearts and there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s just things unfolding as they should. As the Quran says, “Then why, when Our punishment came to them, did they not humble themselves? But their hearts became hardened, and Satan made attractive to them that which they were doing,” (6:43). Or, even more directly to our current moment,”

“When they are told, ‘Do not cause corruption in the land,’ they say, ‘We are only promoters of peace,’ but it is they who are really causing corruption, though they do not realize it…”

A Culture of Death by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“This is a cruel and unusual descent into barbarism, a glorification of government killing and an invitation to cultivate a culture of fear and death. Civilization advances when it restrains violence, even in response to terrible crimes. Barbarism advances when violence becomes an instrument of public spectacle and collective gratification.

“The military’s involvement makes the proposal still more grotesque. The Department of Defense exists to defend the country against external threats, not to transform the execution of prisoners into a propaganda production. The armed forces should not be reduced to stagehands for a political morality play in which the government celebrates its power over a captive’s life.

“A free society should be especially suspicious when government seeks to dramatize its capacity to kill. The Framers understood that all government power must be confined and limited, not worshiped. Publicly celebrated executions would encourage the opposite attitude: Reverence for the state’s ability to destroy rather than respect for its obligation to protect.

“A government that wishes to demonstrate moral seriousness should protect the innocent, prosecute crime fairly, provide due process and confine dangerous offenders securely. Life imprisonment incapacitates a murderer without requiring society to pretend that killing is an act of healing. It also leaves open the possibility of correcting a wrongful conviction.

“None of this diminishes the suffering of murder victims or their families. Their losses are profound, and their endless grief deserves compassion rather than political exploitation. But the state does not honor victims by imitating the violence that destroyed them. It honors them by establishing a system of justice that refuses to confuse vengeance with virtue.”

Journalism & Media

Russia, Satan, and the Parviscient Crowd by Edward Curtin

“For many years, U.S./ NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well. We know what the U.S. response would be, but when Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.”

“[…] it has become even clearer that the deep-rooted hatred of Russia by Americans is as strong as ever, and that the U.S. government, no matter who is president, will continue in its efforts to destroy Russia. It makes no difference what changes have taken place in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union or the end of the U.S- backed Boris Yeltsin presidency in the 1990s that so damaged the country. The U.S. ruling class wants nothing less than total control over Russia.”

“People do not like to be told they have not done their homework and are victims of propaganda. They would have to do research to arrive at a rounded conclusion. But the average person does not want to do research; they prefer to arrive at conclusions based on consulting the corporate mass media, which are the propaganda arms of the ruling class. And these media present an enormous kaleidoscope of historical contextless information that floats through their minds […]”

“[…] the US Project to Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map: 204 atomic bombs, 66 cities. (September 15, 1945). This latter project, formulated when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany, shows the depth of the nihilistic hatred for that country. This fear and hatred has been central to U.S. propaganda ever since and have slowly poisoned Americans’ minds toward Russia and its leaders.”

I TOOK QUESTIONS FROM NYU JOURNALISM STUDENTS by HasanAbi (YouTube)

This is actually quite good, even though it’s almost 90 minutes and a relatively unstructured format. The questions are well-thought-out, Hasan’s answers were eloquent, just, and intelligent, and the host Chenjerai Kumanika is a journalism professor at NYU and was also very, very good.

Ukraine can’t bomb all the bad posts away by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“X recently announced that it was implementing liveness checks on its accounts. A liveness check is some kind of proof that an account is being run by a physical human with a body — usually a short webcam video or a biometric pass. They’re becoming increasingly popular in the age of autonomous AI, which can now consistently beat other tests like CAPTCHAs (a moment of silence for Lord Inglip).

“We have evidence that X has been using liveness checks, but this is the first public announcement, suggesting it’s now being used on many more accounts — and possibly catching a lot more automated accounts. When were the checks rolled out? According to the page source on X’s Help Center, it was on October 8th, the same day as the first Yandex data center was bombed.”

“The idea that all the bad political opinions people see online are Russian bots has persisted for more than a decade now. But bombings outside Moscow can’t blow away all the posts you don’t like. And that’s doubly true on global platforms that are now openly allied with authoritarian governments. The call is coming from inside the house. We’ve known for years who’s manipulating what you see online, and they’re not running server farms in Siberia, they’re running the apps.”

Labor

The War Against Accumulated Capital by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Due to a combination of wildly successful capitalist mythology and the susceptibility of our political system to money’s influence, America has spent the past half century doing everything possible to nurture, rather than hinder, the creation of a tiny number of staggering fortunes. We have crushed organized labor, deregulated industry, slashed taxes, and unleashed corporate power. Decades of steady progress on this front has created enormous wealth, and ensured that a sickening proportion of that wealth sits in the pockets of a few dozen billionaires.”

“It is not your imagination. It is not vibes. We are, measurably, blazing new frontiers in inequality.”

“If we do not do something about the fact that a handful of centibillionaires are indistinguishable from the White House now, this is our future.”

“It offers one of the most clear-cut policy choices you will ever encounter: A one-time tax of a small portion of the wealth of 200 individuals who can easily afford it that can pay for health care for hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens; or, allow an entire state’s health care system lapse into crisis in exchange for keeping more billions in the bank accounts of billionaires.”

“The California Teachers Association, the firefighters, and the building trades have all broken with the bulk of other unions in the state to come out against Prop 40. I cannot find words to express my contempt for the leaders of those unions for so easily allowing themselves to be used as tools of the class of people who will be delighted when unions are entirely eradicated from the state of California. Patsies.”

“If the billionaires want to make it their life’s work to run around the world fleeing taxes, let them flee. What a sad life that would be for a group of people who could be doing anything.”

“Either we take a lot of money away from the rich or we all learn to love life under digital feudalism. Those are the stakes. Time to stop fucking around.”

Economy & Finance

Spectacular collapse of Australian AI firm’s public float by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Jun Ben Liu, the portfolio manager at Ten Cap, which describes itself as a boutique investment management firm, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that she was steering clear of the Firmus IPO because of the “unprecedented lack of detail” and enormous structural risks, adding that 97 percent of the data centre capacity Firmus had promised had yet to be built.”

The company doesn’t exist. It hasn’t done anything. It doesn’t know how to do anything. “Unprecedented lack of detail”—why are they so nice and generous to these obvious scams? Are they afraid of being sued? What is even going on?

Listen to these details:

“Others have been concerned about the level of debt. The model of the so-called neo-clouds like Firmus is to borrow money against the contracts they have with major AI companies to buy chips and then use the rent from those chips to pay back the loans.

“In the case of Firmus, however, there were concerns about the debt levels involved. Firmus was expected to carry $US30 billion in debt in 2028, six times its forecast of $US5 billion in operating earnings.”

They have no money. They are up to their eyeballs in debt. They haven’t even shown that they have any idea of how to provide the service they would need to provide in order to earn money to pay back the debt. This is ridiculous.

This is, by the way, the business model of most of the AI companies in the U.S. as well. There are only a handful of companies that actually even do anything—e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI—but they have similar or worse ratios of debt to income.

“[…] the comments of one investment manager who said that while investors still believed in AI, they were not prepared to “pay any price for companies that spend huge amounts on data centres, depend on a few big customers and promise profits years from now.””

I mean, duh. Get-rich-quick mania is always amazing to watch in real time. This kind of statement is so obviously true, but people also know that a lot of people don’t know that it’s true, and they’re leveraging the Greater fool theory (Wikipedia) to get in and get out with a bag of cash before the ceiling caves in. Any interest in markets that look like this is purely speculative.

“Noting that the warnings about inflated valuations are getting louder, Bloomberg pointed to a projection by Bain & Co that the AI industry would need to generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify the massive amounts of capital being deployed to build data centres. Placed within this context, the Firmus IPO collapse is a pointer to what is building up within the AI boom.”

Just for context, the entire AI industry made $50B in 2025, which is.83% (< 1%) of the revenue required five years from now. That revenue is required to just cover the capital investments made so far—and expected to be made in the next five years. 2026 saw over $1T of investment. No-one expects total revenues to be even 10% of that. The money is being invested in the feverish, quasi-religious hope of a miraculous increase in revenue in the next couple of years. People are already jumping ship from U.S. providers that are getting too expensive. 60% of tokens are coming from open-weight models, not OpenAI or Anthropic. None of this is going to work.

Environment & Climate Change

It Won’t Fly by George Monbiot

“An analysis by the Royal Society found that meeting existing UK aviation demand (never mind future growth) with energy crops “would require around half of UK agricultural land”. That’s the opposite of sustainable. “Sustainable aviation fuel” can also mean synthetic fuels made from captured CO2 and green hydrogen. But the Royal Society found that for existing aviation, we’d need to use between five and eight times the UK’s entire renewable electricity capacity.”

“If Heathrow expansion goes ahead, passenger numbers in the UK are forecast to rise from 299 million in 2025 to 491 million in 2050. As other sectors decarbonise, the proportion of climate breakdown caused by flying climbs and climbs, until planes account for almost all of it.”

“The only effective strategy is to reduce demand. There’s a progressive means of doing so: the frequent flyer levy. Wealth and flights are strongly linked. In 2024, 48% of England’s population did not fly at all. But 5% of the population took five or more flights abroad, and these account for 33% of all journeys. Increasing demand has been almost entirely driven by frequent flyers, who are highly concentrated in the highest income quintile. The levy would not be charged on the first flight someone took in any year, but it would escalate with every additional flight. This is just, proportionate and – unlike all the techno-bollocks – immediately dispatchable. Otherwise, we continue to subsidise a wealthy, selfish minority with our money, our health, our wellbeing and the degradation of the living planet.”

Medicine & Disease

How the Government Forces Doctors to Defraud Our Seniors by Matt Bivens, M.D. (Substack)

“Every patient formally “admitted to observation” status is declared to be receiving exclusively “outpatient” care. Medicare Part A thus won’t pay for it, and Medicare Part B only pays for some of it, after copays and such.”

“We doctors would continue to tell people they were being “admitted to the hospital.” The patients still went upstairs. They still got the same care.

“But on the back end, a giant bureaucratic machine was starting to adjust the paperwork. When the bills came, Medicare would now tell patients that their doctor had put in orders clarifying that this had never been a real admission.

“I would tell a patient, “I will admit you to the hospital.” Medicare would come along a few months later to say, “Your doctor misled you about that, and now you owe thousands of dollars.””

“From the 1950s to the 1990s, insurers worked to discourage unnecessary hospitalizations, or to cut hospitalizations shorter. That has arguably been a helpful reform. It’s kept down costs for all of us, and freed up hospital beds for those who need them.

“But the low-hanging fruit from that approach was picked clean long ago. These days, there is thus a slick new game: If Medicare can’t safely prevent hospitalizations, it will instead pretend they did not happen and refuse to pay for them.”

“Even when a patient ends up staying in hospital for an entire week, if they were started off in “observation” and no one thought to flip them to “inpatient” status, they still don’t punch their ticket with three midnights, and are thus forced to pay for rehab out-of-pocket (or, often, simply not go to rehab, and get dumped back at home to struggle along as best they can).”

“The NOTICE Act was the opposite of a solution: It was not meant to solve a problem, but to undercut attempts at complaining about it.”

“Never mind that these are completely arbitrary redefinitions of ancient words, being offered solely because Medicare wants to renege on its bills. Like the character of the priest in “The Trial”, case managers across the nation recognize the dishonesty while insisting on the necessity. Signatures are collected, lying and deceit are the universal principals, and later we all sit around and complain about why no one trusts their doctor anymore.”

“With each passing year, Medicare expands the list of diagnoses that “no longer make inpatient.” Acute pancreatitis? Admit to obs. Diabetic ketoacidosis? Obs. Lisinopril-induced angioedema of the tongue requiring ICU-level airway watch? Obs. Cellulitis requiring IV antibiotics? Obs. Non-operative pelvic fracture? Obs. Non-septic urinary tract infection in a 99-year-old? Obs.”

“Medicare audits hospitals that (in Medicare’s view) seem too aggressive with billing inpatient cases. Medicare sends out RACs (Recovery Audit Contractors), MACs (Medicare Administrator Contractors) and UPICs (Unified Program Integrity Contractors), who demand documentation and explanation, tie up hospital admin staff, and — most critically — freeze all payments during reviews. Hospitals run on tight margins, and are terrified of the idea of having payments frozen while some saucy bureaucrats poke around for a few weeks.”

““What is Condition Code 44?” you ask.

“I might reply that K., the man accused of an unknown crime by an unknown government agency, also wondered about the meaning of arcane lapel badges worn by his unknown judges.

“The main thing to know about Condition Code 44, or the three-midnight rule to qualify for rehab, or the two-midnight rule to qualify for inpatient, or the smug insistence that some very ill people a doctor keeps in hospital overnight for care were slyly kept out of the hospital on paper, is that it’s all an arbitrary abuse of power by a bureaucracy looking to not pay its bills.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Kermit says Sacred Reich beats Metallica

Kicking off yet another show in their “residency” in Las Vegas, James Hetfield announced to a packed audience that he and his band would not be challenging power in any way that evening.

The crowd roars its approval, knowing that Metallica hasn’t challenged anything since And Justice for All… in 1988, which included One (antiwar) and the title track (corruption). Soon after, they lines up with the record companies against Napster.

As one, the crowd exhorts Hetfield to get on with playing songs like Disposable Heroes so that they can all ignore the meaning of the lyrics together.

ALL Art Is Political When You Live In A Genocidal Dystopia by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“But we do not live in a healthy world. We live under a tyrannical world-eating empire that is fueled by human blood and suffering. That is our reality, and your art is either real about reality or it isn’t. You’re either telling the truth about reality or you’re normalizing it.

“It’s easy for the rich and the propaganda-addled to believe we are living in a healthy world where everything’s basically fine, but for everyone whose eyes are open to the reality of our situation as a species, it’s a five-alarm fire. A real artist is in tune with reality, and in this particular slice of spacetime our reality contains horrors that should be treated with the same urgency as we would have if our clothing caught fire.

“Telling artists to shut up about politics is telling them to stop being artists and start being propagandists for the empire. It’s telling them, “Don’t say anything unless you have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. Your job isn’t to incite, your job is to distract and sedate. Your job isn’t to blow on the embers of human brilliance, your job is to play the fiddle while we smooth the pillow of a dying world.”

“Fuck that. Make art. Be brilliant. Fight the empire. Free Palestine.”

Annie Dillard should have won the Nobel by Jonas Gardsby (3QuarksDaily)

“[…] you have Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with its bilateral paired chapters, “An Expedition to the Pole” which invented the now popular braided essay, “Total Eclipse” which tells the same story four times through different levels of consciousness, and the nonfiction collage For the Time Being. She reinvented the form each time she wrote it, carving a trail that others then followed and developed in their own ways. Essayist and editor Brian Doyle said her work “changed the direction of American writing.””

“When Ted Chiang was asked about a religious text he loved, he said, “I can’t really point to a conventional religious text as an atheist” and instead named Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “Reading that book gave me maybe the closest that I’m likely to get to understanding a kind of religious ecstasy.””

“Her intense, even relentless questioning demands fidelity to truth, but the bigger the question the less likely a final answer. Instead, she finds provisional answers, workable answers that “furrow deeper into the mystery.””

“Couple this international scope with her focus on deep time, and you get one of the most complete portraits of our species that appears in any literary body of work, a portrait stretching from early hominids millions of years ago up to the present, inducing readers to feel the profound reality that each of these billions of souls is or was as real and important as you the reader.”

“In China, where her name is “synonymous with excellent writing,” a reviewer said, “She opened a window for human existence.” A Mexican translator said her writing “transports us into the realm of an almost inexpressible mystery.” Her Persian translator said, “Dillard taps into the bottomless ocean and gives us the slippery fish that escape our grasp, which only literature can help us lay hold of.” A French reviewer rejoiced that “her infinite attention,” now translated, “can be ours.” Her Swedish publisher told me in his office, at what he calls “the other, more progressive literary academy in Stockholm,” that work like hers is the reason he became a publisher.”

Up a Creek by David Schurman Wallace (The Baffler)

“The print ad revenue that for decades sustained magazines like The New Yorker dried up, sucked into Meta and Google’s ad labyrinths. The reader’s patience, willingness, or capacity to read at all has been drained too, as writing in general competes with video algorithms. Everyone knows this. Good, long, serious articles still get written. But to observe the current against them is not simply nostalgia or sour grapes. The way we access information, the way we think, is still changing.”

It’s not just changing, it’s being changed, to make sure that rent flows in all the usual directions. And that it certainly does not flow toward those producing the value but toward those best positioned to capture it. And those who capture it use the power engendered by that wealth to ensure that they will continue to capture it, even though their only contribution is in rent capture rather than in production of value.

“The father and son Gelvins, Ed and Stanley, are prospectors, gold-crazy like so many in the uppermost latitudes. They have gone through the effort of disassembling a backhoe, flying the constituent pieces with their own plane out to a remote prospecting claim, and then reassembling it in the wild to move earth more efficiently. The book ends with McPhee’s paean to the Gelvins’s elaborate mining setup, which in the end, he admits, will not yield much paydirt: Probably no one will actually use [the gold]. Investors will draw it into their world and lock it in an armored cellar, while up here in these untravelled mountains a machine-made moonscape will tell the tale.”

“McPhee chose to keep a low profile—his picture has never appeared on a book jacket. When he appears in his writing it is self-effacing, the benign interviewer who prompts answers more interesting from his subjects than anything he could say himself. A disjunction has occurred today, where “creativity” is believed to come from within, as self-expression, and not from an enduring experience in the outside world. McPhee reminds us of the value of a sustained looking, and that even unassuming and unlikely things can yield the unexpected.”

“Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have. For McPhee, writing is a fundamentally formal enterprise; artistry comes from the selection and shaping of the material. What does the self have to do with writing, other than its obligation to become skilled enough to show the audience what it’s seen?”

“I truly believe the world is made of music” by Mary Cadwalladr (The Hinternet | Mary's Universal Musurgy)

“[…] one of the effects of aggressive market segregation, of algorithmic genre slotting, and of the reduction of art to content, is that we have over the past 50 years or so entirely lost the social persona of the bard or raconteur, who was never so much a documentarian as a sublimator. Inevitably, the bard, the storyteller, the musician, was a liminal figure, neither entirely of this world nor of the world whose mythical events he calls down in song. A bluesman might play for pay in a louche den of thieves, and might be involved in some low-level illegalities himself. But he was not generally of the same counter-nobility of cut-throat outlawhood as some in his audience were, and as were the personages brought to life by his songs.”

“The result is ultimately an offense to art, and a confusion of categories — as when Georgia prosecutors look to rap lyrics as evidence of RICO violations. One should not be too judgmental when these lawmen fail to understand that the language here is at an epic register generally beyond the purview of legal forensics, since the whole conceit of the genre over the past several decades, which has been imposed by commercial dictate and acquiesced in willy-nilly by a good number of artists, is that one must always “keep it real”, from which it is not too hard to derive the corollary, that lyrics are straightforward declarative sentences. But music was never supposed to keep it real! On the contrary, it’s what keeps us transcendent.”

“Don’t you see that this is the endpoint towards which we’ve been moving for quite a long time? We’ve taken all the cleverness of technology-mediated mash-up and collage aesthetics, and we’ve allowed the ever-improving technologies this aesthetic relies on to seize control and absolutely to run it into the ground, with such destructive effect that it is at this point impossible to identify intact elements of enduring aesthetic value among the wreckage.”

“[…] you encountered even such a towering artist as Tina Turner for the first time via her output circa 1984, you could not have guessed how alive she had been, how full-spectrum her music had been, just one decade earlier. And now, some decades beyond that, we have young people strapping themselves into their personalized experience-machines and listening to entirely synthetic aural content whose most obvious aesthetic ancestor is VHF static, yet doing so not as avant-garde gesture or affectation, but as passive and complacent consumer behavior of the sort record-industry executives of previous generations could only have dreamt.”

“[…] first of all let me say how happy I am to know that I remain perfectly illegible to those who would like to think of politics as a matter of algorithmic slotting. Who gives a shit “what” I am, politically? To be perfectly frank I just never think about that, when I’m working within the methodological constraints of what is by now a fairly disciplined listening practice. I just want to understand, in a deep way, why the 20th century sounded the way it did. This is the guiding question of all my work, and like it or not, on considering both the place of religion in Western and especially American life, and the transition to postcolonial independence throughout Africa and the Caribbean, we find that these processes have much to tell us that helps us along towards an answer.”

“What I love about all those popular musical performers —Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and indeed T. L Barrett too— who sound the depths of their own sinful natures only then to repent and attempt to limit themselves to worship music, is that they actually understand the full power and mystery of music. They know the tritone and the blue notes and the pelvic thrusts actually are summoning up dark forces, and to that extent they take the art as seriously as it in fact deserves to be taken. The liberal secular idea that it’s all “just music”, and that we can expose ourselves to all of its varieties without any concern for the fate of our soul, is of course not only an affront to Plato, but to what just about every musician of any style knew in their hearts right up until the great secularization that accompanied the neoliberal takeover of music production and that demoted music to the status of just another commercial product.”

Steer (The Free Dictionary)

“A young ox, especially one castrated before sexual maturity and raised for beef.”

TIL from a meme that a steer is a castrated bull. The meme was making fun of someone for not having known that, which strikes me as unfair. I mean, of course it does: I’ve gone over five decades since learning how to read without learning it. In my defense, I am not a cattle rancher.

I Analyzed 2,500 YouTube Videos to Understand Why RedLetterMedia Are Internet Darlings by Prithwish Nath (Plain English)

“On paper, this approach should break every rule of the YouTube metagame:”

• There’s no search traffic for “Neil Breen.” In fact, most search traffic involving him only materialized after RedLetterMedia’s videos.
• Neil Breen isn’t the only niche, “so bad it’s good” trash they cover. All the ‘Spotlight’ episodes are like this — thoroughly cursed, bad movies made immensely entertaining by their discussion. Otherwise, there’s no trending topic hook here, no SEO juice. These are about as niche a topic as one could get.
• And as we’ve already seen, all their titles are deadpan, zero-clickbait (“Best of the Worst: Twisted Pair…” etc.) instead of algorithm-optimized keyword bombs.
• But that’s the point. It’s not about Neil Breen himself.

“When RLM covers someone like him, they’re not optimizing for discovery — they’re just making a video about a movie that they found weird and presented it as a panel of friends getting drunk and discussing a bad movie together.

“And it works because they’ve trained their audience for authenticity.”

“If the YouTube metagame is about chasing what’s popular, RLM’s is about making things popular on their own terms.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Poor enshittified souls by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“I’m a humanist, and I tend to find quite a different set of questions interesting, like “what the hell is going on inside the heads of all the people involved in enshittifying things?” or “why is enshittification generally treated as a legitimate thing for companies to do?”. While money and political power are often excellent answers to this, they’ve never been able to stop me from thinking about it.”

“To fully understand a phenomenon, then, you need to understand these beliefs, mentalities and attitudes. Strongly held beliefs can absolutely override material pressures: the Pope was able to partially reverse the Magna Carta by putting England under interdict, and excommunication was, for the longest time, a serious threat. People, in general, believe in their religions, believe in their political ideologies and act accordingly […]”

“There’s a culture of deference to the tech industry when it comes to legislation, regulation and the social consequences of the things they’re producing, as though wishing to have input into their activities will stop them from ushering in the new software-based golden age that they believe will happen. It’s considered legitimate, in that sense, for tech people to do whatever they want for whatever reasons they might have, even if it leads to enshittification: ordinary people are not held to have the authority to point out that something has enshittified, and it is in fact often believed that if the tech companies do something, that means that it’s for the best even if our puny minds can’t understand why and find it annoying or downright destructive to our lives. We’re expected to shut up and take what we’re given.”

“[…] there’s also a distinct thread in the industry of people who’ve bought the eschatological argument, in weak or strong form. Tech is the future, it will radically change things, and thus any development in tech is progress towards the future. Changes in technology, whatever they are, can often seem to developers to be a good in and of themselves, especially when they play into patterns about resume-driven development. If you hold that belief, your contribution to enshittification will look to you, from the inside, as though you’re making progress. This is exacerbated by the fact that tech people often live in quite isolated bubbles, interacting primarily with other tech people and often never having to use the software that they’ve written.”

“[…] we are en masse creating people who are incurious, deeply ignorant of the parts of the world outside their very limited experience and who are either willing to ignore the effects of the work they do or who simply cannot see it.”

“The education task is similar in nature, and aims to see that the people whom we hire to write software are well-rounded individuals who have a decent grasp of the world outside of software. At present, a lot of the people whom we train to do things with computers have extremely limited exposure to anything outside of computer touching: it’s literally all they do, to the complete exclusion of the humanities or even mathematics or the natural sciences. This produces a lot of software engineers who are dull, incurious and fatally ignorant about the way the world or anything outside their very limited viewport works, which in turn leads to people trying to “disrupt” fields without knowing the first thing about the damned things.”

“Software should be something that you only ever study along with something else, either as a dual-major or as a postgraduate certificate: something structured with the clear expectation that you’ve learned something else in considerable depth. I’d even extend this to the more “coding-as-apprenticeship-trade” type of education: as well as learning to code, you should learn how to weld, how to operate a lathe or how to build a house. I genuinely think that this would be good for both individual software developers and for society as a whole.”

How could I not agree? This is a description of my life’s arc so far and I turned out awesome. I took all of the shop classes in high school even though I was strongly advised not to by what I now understand to be an elitist snobbery pervading the world of education. I’d spent my life up to that point learning how to build things from my dad, who knew everything about building and fixing pretty much anything that was around in the 70s and 80s. He taught me that understanding the world was not only possible but necessary, that there was no magic to designing or building things, that it could be learned and that it was hard but worthwhile work. I dumped applications to leading technical universities into the trash without even applying to them because they struck me as arrogantly long and demanding. I went to a liberal-arts college where I majored in mathematics, with a minor in physics (with two electronics courses) but also an undeclared second major in computer science, and a generous smattering of other courses like Russian Avant Garde Literature and Painting. I had so many AP and college credits I could have cashed in that I never did because why would I want to avoid learning stuff? Instead, I several times took five credits instead of four because I couldn’t not take a course that was only being offered that semester. I did not always excel in the classic sense! My grades were sometimes great, sometimes not. It didn’t matter because I was learning everything I wanted to learn.

“We desperately need to put paid to the idea that “tech” has a special role and special legitimacy in our world as it stands, and integrate computers and the people who work with them into healthier, more productive and above all less apocalyptically minded social roles.”

Software engineers don’t get to be Luddites about AI by Sean Goedecke

“I’ve written about the Luddites a few times, but in short: they were a group of professional textile workers who found themselves displaced by the advent of textile automation like power looms, knitting frames, and shearing machines.”

That is the technocratic interpretation of Luddites. That elides entirely the socioeconomic thrust that formed the major part of Luddism. The Luddites destroyed machines because the fruits of their labor were appropriated by those who owned those machines.. That suddenly sounds startlingly like what we have today. Although the author seems content to fight straw-men and idiots online, many engineers can rightly be called Luddites but using the correct definition of Luddism rather than the definition that conveniently makes Luddites look like crybabies and elides the exploitation that they were fighting, which continues unabated to this day. It’s a tragedy that this guy says that he’s “written about the Luddites a few times” and he’s still happily chirping the myth about them that his masters in the technocracy are promulgating.

Knowing Wrong From Right In Ithaca by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“While the accusations of the civil suit are recognized, her mental state is characterized as “unquestionably very drunk and very high.” Was she? I wasn’t there. Neither was David. And what constitutes “very drunk and very high”? Wiggly, if even close to accurate, the solution to this problem isn’t found in Jane Doe but in the failure of any Chi Phi white knight saving the damsel from depravity.”

“As dreadful as all that is, I’m also interested in what didn’t happen. No one, apparently, acted to end the encounter. Instead — as the group message indicates — men celebrated. “I fucking love chi phi,” one brother wrote. “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” he said later. “Shop still open?” asked another.”

“Much as I agree with David that this “locker room talk” is repugnant, it’s childish posturing. But since it does give notice to the rest of the brothers, David questions why none of them stood up to save Jane Doe. What David doesn’t ask is whether Jane Doe wanted or needed saving? Jane Doe went to Chi Phi voluntarily in search of group sex. In David’s paradigm, the sex itself is depraved, but that doesn’t impose his moral judgment on Jane Doe. She’s allowed to want group sex, even if it grosses David out. She’s allowed to want to get drunk and high, even very drunk and high, and want group sex.

“[…citation removed…]

“Granted, her civil complaint now asserts that it went too far, beyond what she wanted. But when she said “no,” it stopped, and then it restarted when she wanted more. Contrary to the deeply-held belief of some moral arbiters, some woman want and enjoy sex. They are allowed to, even though it isn’t about love, marriage or procreation.”

“One point of criminal law is to draw bright lines between conduct that’s lawful and conduct that’s criminal. The law enables a person to know that it’s a crime to force another person to ingest alcohol and drugs against their will. This is an eminently reasonable law, and more importantly, a bright line that distinguishes legal and illegal conduct. It has nothing to do with the degree of intoxication leading to incapacitation, whether real or claimed.

“But the law similarly recognizes that people (which includes women, despite some people’s view that they are too frail and helpless to be allowed to make their own choices) are entitled to do what they want to do, even when it comes to sex. Some people, women included, prefer things consider kinky. Others do not. To each his or her own.

“It’s neither David’s, mine or the boy’s of Chi Phi’s place to tell a woman where the line is drawn beyond which she can’t get drunk, high or have sex with as many people as she wants. This doesn’t mean she wasn’t sexually assaulted, even raped, that night. I wasn’t there and I have no clue what really happened. I know what people are saying, but post hoc talk is cheap and rarely reliable.

“But condemning the male students for falling short of David’s version of morality for not being Jane Doe’s savior is no more valid than condemning Jane Doe for being a slut. While the law seeks to draw bright lines, morality is squishy enough to lay blame on whichever side you prefer. This might be good enough for church, twitter or the New York Times, but not for me.”

Well, well, well. I finally once again agree wholeheartedly with Scott. Well done.

What Is an Angel Shot? Explaining The Bar Safety Code (wikiHow)

TIL from a YouTube short that an Angel Shot is code for asking for help from bartending staff when a customer is feeling threatened. I guess this is real? The whole article is quite long and looks AI-generated but I’m not sure.

Technology & Engineering

US Tech Searches For Rules On AI; China Already Has Them by Madeline Carr (Scheer Post)

“China has already established an extensive system of AI rules, assessment, filing, technical standards and government oversight. Here’s how China’s AI governance system has developed in stages alongside the technology itself.

“Beijing’s 2022 rules on algorithmic recommendation services apply to technologies that select, rank, filter or recommend online content to users.

“They compel companies that use algorithms to examine how they work, to protect the personal information of users, to give users certain controls, and to introduce safeguards for workers, consumers, children and older people.

“China’s deep synthesis provisions, effective from January 2023, extended regulation to synthetic (or AI-generated) text, images, audio and video. AI companies must authenticate users, protect data, keep relevant records, assess their systems and identify synthetic material that could be mistaken for authentic content.

“The interim measures for generative artificial intelligence services were introduced in August 2023. These added rules for public-facing generative AI, particularly those that can influence public opinion or persuade users in other ways.

“The measures apply to the legality and quality of training data, users’ personal information, intellectual property and discrimination based on protected characteristics. The rules also cover transparency by AI companies and the accuracy and reliability of products.”

“An independent analysis by the U.S. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank has described the framework as China’s attempt to “to advance frontier safety without the need for heavy handed regulatory interventions.””

“Beijing has already surrounded its AI sector with public obligations, regulatory oversight and an evolving framework of risk assessment. A global debate that treats such governance as a future aspiration should at least recognise that one country is already ahead of the curve.”

LLMs & AI

Replacing everything with AI is a mental illness

“genuinely fuck whoever came up w the dumbass idea to replace THE DICTIONARY BUILT INTO GOOGLE with the ai overview’s definitions i hope everything in their life fucking sucks”

I’ve seen this a lot: people seem to want to just have one single tool to do everything so that they throw out or ignore tools that would deterministically and reliably come up with the right answer 100 times out 100 in favor of a tool that gets things right a bunch of the time. What’s the point of re-generating word definitions on the fly? You already had the word definitions. You don’t need to make them up again. It’s work no-one needs to have done.

Everyone Online Is Lying To You For Money, But AI Guys Are Lying The Most by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“The majority of these “mods” are basically just videos that an AI rendered, rather than actually playable games. And the games that are playable, like a much-hyped Pokémon fan game that was making the rounds last week, are so limited in features and full of so much AI jank that they barely count as a game.”

“There isn’t a lot of information about how Hood Warfare 2 was vibe coded, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s an AI rebuild of the studio’s original Hood Warfare game that came out in 2023. Most of the reviews on the game’s Steam page are racist jokes about Black people, but one genuine review reads, “This game is just filled with bot lobbies. Something fishy is going ok here I feel like. I think content creators are getting paid to promote it and play it their live streams.”

“The studio behind the game is also now promoting a Solana token on Pump Dot Fun. Which really lays out what’s happening across the AI content industry quite clearly.”

“It turns out the 2020 crypto boom did fundamentally change the way money worked on the internet, just not in the way its biggest evangelists had hoped. Instead of convincing the general population to embrace Bitcoin and blockchains, it created a new form of grifter capitalism that is spreading across social media, but has become particularly inescapable on Instagram, LinkedIn, and, obviously, X. There you will find vast cyber armies of men telling you “it’s so over,” whether that be Hollywood, social media, or society as a whole. And in their next post they’ll promise you that you too can achieve “generational wealth” and “escape the permanent underclass” if you follow their simple instructions. And almost every time their simple instructions amount to “lie to people on the internet.”

“But the AI age has made it extremely hard to tell where you are inside the digital matryoshka doll of lying.”

“A lot of ink has been spilled about the weird doomsday nerd sex cult running Silicon Valley and all the users suffering from AI psychosis, but not nearly enough has been written about the grifter nihilism that has wormed its way into the heart of not just AI or crypto, but social media, as a whole. The sad Verified dweebs generating fake views, fake money, fake comments, fake reviews, fake shares, fake clips, and now even fake influencers. And I just don’t know how long that can last. If the entire value proposition of social platforms is that, unlike TV or radio or newspapers, it’s able to instantly show us what is actually popular, actually viral, and actually attuned to our personal interests. Then the question is actually how much AI content — and paid-for promotional garbage — will users tolerate before social platforms feel just as fake and astroturfed as TV does?”

It happened a long time ago, man.

Sports

Swiss moderator wears Israeli colors to moderate a Switzerland-Israel match on Swiss TV

The Swiss women’s soccer team played Israel in a world-cup qualifier. It is bad enough that they played the match with nary a whimper of protest or mention that there might be people a bit upset that Israel continues to be absolutely unhindered in its participation in the rest of so-called civilized society despite its defiant depravity and murderousness.

But this lady could not have simply coincidentally chosen that wardrobe. She made a statement. It came across loud and clear: she supports Israel more than her home country.

Fun

Hyperoptimized Engineer 2026 by Kai Lentit (YouTube)

From a comment,

““Merge branch master into master… The merge contains zero changes and four conflicts” − The future, ladies and gentlemen.”

Chick Bongo Interviews Again | Flintwhistle by Graham Dot Zip (YouTube)

05 EightRingRoutine by 笹生明日香（ノエル） (YouTube)