<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-04/nobody-trusts-the-banks-now" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Nobody Trusts the Banks Now</a> <bq>Relationship businesses in general are on the decline. In a world of electronic communication and global supply chains and work-from-home and the gig economy, business relationships are less sticky and “I am going to go into my bank branch and shake the hand of the manager and trust her with my life savings” doesn’t work. <b>“I am going to do stuff for relationship reasons, even if it costs me 0.5% of interest income, or a slightly increased risk of losing my money” is no longer a plausible thing to think.</b></bq> Yeah, put a fork in it. It's done. The financial business model needs to be trashed and reimagined. Nearly everyone involved has such a poisoned mindset that there is no hope of salvaging anything from it. So, well, yeah; fuck you very much. The system incentivizes the worst behavior. <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/04/you-are-reading-this-thanks-to-semiconductors/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">You Are Reading This Thanks to Semiconductors</a> <bq>In 2020, <b>the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee decried that China was facilitating ‘digital authoritarianism’ because it has ‘been willing to go into smaller, under-served markets’</b> and ‘offer more cost-effective equipment than Western companies’, pointing to countries under US sanctions such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe as examples.</bq> Yeah, but Trump, ammirite? We definitely need to let this kind of nonsense continue because we have to stop the Republicans. At this point, I can't even remember who was in charge of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2020---it doesn't even matter. Just that the most powerful nation on Earth---which will not shut up about free markets and capitalism---calls China authoritarian for selling better products at better prices under far-better conditions to customers that the West would like to keep. Instead of considering that they've been outplayed in the markets---on their vaunted "level playing field"---they seek ways of using economic and military pressure to force their competitors from the field. <bq><b>There is nothing anti–Western or even anti–American in what is going on in the non–West as we are considering this today. I think the non–West altogether would welcome American and European participation in the making of a new world order suited to our century.</b> But this cannot mean a continuation of half a millennium of Western superiority or 75 years of American hegemony. This means one thing: It is up to Americans and Europeans to decide if they will participate in this grand project or stand against it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/04/patrick-lawrence-europes-fate/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Europe's Fate</a> <bq>Europe still has a chance to admit the truth about <b>NATO</b> and act according to this truth. This alliance <b>is outdated, it is in no way to be described as defensive, and proves now to be an incalculably destructive force.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/03/who-is-fighting-whom-in-sudan/" source="Scheer Post" author="As`ad AbuKhalil">Who Is Fighting Whom in Sudan?</a> <bq>The two generals (Abdel Fattah Burhan who leads the Sudanese Army and Hamidti who leads the Rapid Support Forces, RSF) followed in the footsteps of other Arab despots who knew that the way to Congress’s heart passes through Tel Aviv. <b>Against the wishes of the Sudanese population, both generals established open relations with the Mossad.</b> And while they did not allow a U.S.-picked technocrat to exercise power as a prime minister (Hamdouk), they went ahead and ousted the civilian component from the government to rule without a civilian façade. <b>This coup of 2021 (by the two generals with Mossad support) didn’t trigger sanctions in Washington, and the U.S. administration continued to have excellent relations with both generals. The two generals resorted to force and the military shot and killed protesters to secure the new coup. The U.S. did not mind the use of force</b>; it has other considerations, including an ever-expansive role in Africa — always in the name of fighting terrorism, which never seems to end or even diminish.</bq> <bq>Each side serves as a regional patron to a different group. But the UAE’s close relations with Israel underlines the Mossad patronage of Gen. Hamidti. Gen. Burhan, on the other hand, is sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Egypt. The conflict in Sudan is a domestic, regional and international conflict. <b>The U.S. and its media, wary of a Russian role in Africa, have exaggerated the part played by the Wagner group and all but omits the influential roles of U.S. allies in the region.</b></bq> <bq>There is no end in sight in Sudan; somebody from outside the country is fueling the conflict. <b>In the Middle East, we often used to say, when the U.S. evacuates its personnel, it is usually a sign of a sinister plot by Washington against that country.</b> The U.S. has just evacuated its personnel.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/30/john-pilger-the-coming-war/" source="Scheer Post" author="John Pilger">The Coming War</a> <bq><b>There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner.</b> Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.</bq> <bq>No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. <b>The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.</b></bq> <bq>Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of <b>Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.</b> Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and <b>scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.</b></bq> <bq><b>Professor David Miller</b>, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, <b>was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide</b> — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.</bq> <bq>Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. <b>Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.</b></bq> <bq>According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 <b>Obama dropped 26,171 bombs</b>. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed <b>the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.</b></bq> <bq>With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, <b>Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.</b></bq> <bq>When <b>Hillary Clinton</b>, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she <b>laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’</b></bq> <bq>Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. <b>Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.</b></bq> <bq><b>In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’.</b> Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.</bq> This horseshit all started with Obama, this pivot to Asia. To be precise: it was his secretary of state Hillary Clinton who sent us on our way. <bq>Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. <b>It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War</b> – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.</bq> <bq>Obama and his administration knew full well that <b>the coup</b> his assistant secretary of state, Patricia Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 <b>would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.</b></bq> Obama and Clinton again. Trump and Biden are just following the path laid by them. <bq>I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; <b>I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22 : that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/30/chris-hedges-the-enemy-from-within/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">The Enemy From Within</a> <bq>America is a stratocracy , a form of government dominated by the military. <b>It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored.</b> Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia.</bq> <bq>The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is <b>a circular system of corporate welfare.</b></bq> <bq>nearly every socialist leader walked away from their anti-war platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. <b>The handful who did not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.</b></bq> <bq><b>After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin lobbied to be integrated into western economic and military alliances.</b> An alliance that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO — which the U.S. had promised it would not do beyond the borders of a unified Germany — and have made it impossible to convince countries in eastern and central Europe to spend billions on U.S. military hardware. <b>Moscow’s requests were rebuffed. Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None of this made us more secure.</b></bq> <bq><b>They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay.</b> Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.</bq> <bq>[...] the war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.</bq> I always think of Gandalf fighting the balrog in the Lord of the Rings. The U.S. is the balrog, an echo of another day, still incredibly powerful, but defeated, throwing its whip upwards to destroy as much as it can on its way down. It's whip curls around Gandalf's leg and takes him down, too. <iq>Fly, you fools!</iq> indeed. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmd-GuBHxxw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Dmd-GuBHxxw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Fellowship of the Ring - You shall not pass! Gandalf! Fly you fools!"> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/05/06/the-kremlin-did-not-kill-itself-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The Kremlin Did Not Kill Itself</a> <bq>Your rulers do not care what race you are. They do not care if you are gay, transgendered or nonbinary. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to have in your gun. They do not care whether you are allowed to have an abortion or not. They do not care if you are racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic. They do not care about diverse representation in politics or media, and they do not care about any lack thereof. <b>All they care about is that we all keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful and keep us poor and powerless.</b> And they will happily keep us arguing as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about so that we don’t turn our attention to the things they do care about.</bq> <bq><b>It’s obnoxiously self-righteous and condescending for older generations to worry about how the new generations are turning out.</b> Imagine being left a bat shit insane civilization and a dying world by the people who made it that way and having to listen to them bitch about how your generation isn’t doing it right.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/05/03/bono-is-doing-illustrations-for-the-atlantic-now-because-everythings-fake-and-stupid/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">Bono Is Doing Illustrations For The Atlantic Now, Because Everything’s Fake And Stupid</a> <bq>You see things like this all the time under the shadow of the US empire, and individually they don’t look like much, but once you start noticing them you come to recognize them as symptoms of the profoundly diseased civilization that we are living in. One where our heart strings are pulled in the most obnoxious ways imaginable to get us to support capitalism, empire and oligarchy, <b>where we are manipulated into espousing values systems which benefit powerful sociopaths under the cover of noble-sounding causes.</b> Where we are trained like rats to support systems that are driving our species toward extinction because our rulers gave lip service to humanitarianism and waved a rainbow flag.</bq> <bq>This is what dystopia looks like. [...] Like <b>military industrial complex-funded feminist rock operas about drone operators and Cookie Monster helping Samantha Power psychologically colonize Iraqi children.</b> Like Bono coming home from singing a heartfelt number about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to illustrate a cover for a war propaganda piece in The Atlantic.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/05/11/trump-on-ukraine-i-dont-think-in-terms-of-winning-and-losing-i-think-in-terms-of-getting-it-settled/" author="Eric Boehm" source="Reason">Trump on Ukraine: 'I Don't Think in Terms of Winning and Losing—I Think in Terms of Getting It Settled'</a> <bq>During a chaotic and at-times combative interview on Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump made at least one sensible point: Ending the war in Ukraine is more important than the notion of who wins it. "Do you want Ukraine to win this war?" asked CNN's Kaitlan Collins at one point during a broader discussion of how Trump would handle the now 15-month-old conflict if he returns to the Oval Office. <b>"I don't think in terms of winning and losing," Trump said. "I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people." Later, he stressed that same point: "I want everybody to stop dying. They're dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying."</b> That is…entirely sensible. More than that, <b>it's probably the most humanitarian message that a leader of the United States could send.</b></bq> The reactions in the U.S. were, predictably, ignorant; shockingly so. He apparently put on quite a Trumpian display. Cherry-picking one of the few sensible things he said probably gives the wrong impression. The statement is important, though. It's one the democrats could never make. Still, I honestly don't know what to think. Trump is an obviously terrible person who should not be running the country. He does say he wants to end the war and does not want to start another one. That actually puts him ahead of Biden and the Democrats. I'm flabbergasted. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/13/ffsf-m13.html" author="Fred Mazelis" source="WSWS">Jordan Neely’s murder on the New York City subway and the terminal crisis of capitalism</a> <bq><b>The fundamental responsibility for Penny’s actions lies with the ruling elite of New York City, and with American capitalism as a whole. The homeless and the mentally ill have not increased in numbers as if by magic.</b> They are produced by the terminal crisis of capitalism. Wall Street, the giant hedge funds, the billionaires and their political representatives stand condemned by this murder. It is their system that regularly and increasingly produces tragedies such as the needless death of Jordan Neely. The Democrats have no answer to the social crisis. They are split between so-called “moderates” like Adams and “progressives,” including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. <b>The divisions are purely tactical and rhetorical, however, with Ocasio-Cortez, public advocate Jumaane Williams and others simply using “left” rhetoric to obscure their own responsibility.</b> Some Democrats, including City Council president Adrienne Adams, as well as various pseudo-left politicians, have hastened to depict the murder of Neely, who was black, by Penny, who is white, primarily in racial terms. This conveniently ignores the role of Adams, who is African-American, and of at least some, if not most, of the passengers on May 1. <b>The focus on race obscures the most fundamental class issues—above all the responsibility of the profit system.</b></bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/03/chris-hedges-julian-assange-and-world-press-freedom-day/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Julian Assange and World Press Freedom Day</a> <bq><b>Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador?</b> Under what law did Donald Trump criminalize journalism and demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Under what law did the CIA violate attorney-client privilege, surveil and record all of Julian’s conversations both digital and verbal with his lawyers and plot to kidnap him from the Embassy and assassinate him?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/05/04/multiple-us-officials-confronted-about-us-assange-hypocrisy-on-world-press-freedom-day/" source="" author="Caitlin Johnstone">Multiple US Officials Confronted About US Assange Hypocrisy On World Press Freedom Day</a> <bq>It is good that activists and journalists have been doing so much to highlight the US empire’s hypocrisy as it crows self-righteously about its love of press freedoms while persecuting the world’s most famous journalist for doing great journalism. Highlighting this hypocrisy shows that <b>the US empire does not in fact care about press freedoms at all, save only to the extent that it can pretend to care about them to wag its finger at governments it doesn’t like.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/05/11/tucker-carlson-is-lying-to-you/" author="Matt Welch" source="Reason">Tucker Carlson Is Lying to You</a> <bq>On Tuesday night, the man who was until last month the most popular cable news host in the country told a Twitter audience of 122 million viewers and counting that, "at the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie—a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind." Then Tucker Carlson told a revealing lie of his own: "<b>The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it.</b> That's not a guess—it's guaranteed. Every person who works in English language media understands that. The rule of what you can't say defines everything. It's filthy, really. And it's utterly corrupting."</bq> The author goes on to pick the nit that not <i>all</i> <iq>English-language media</iq> subject their employees to this---in particular, the magazine Reason does not. However, you could also understand the statement as hyperbole on Carlson's part, in part to shield him and his own ego from having partaken in the lie for so long. <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/teslas-magnet-mystery-shows-elon-musk-is-willing-to-compromise/" source="Ars Technica" author="Gregory Barber">Tesla’s magnet mystery shows Elon Musk is willing to compromise</a> <bq>In the US, government agencies—especially the Department of Defense, which needs powerful magnets for gear including aircraft and satellites—have been <b>keen to invest in supply chains domestically and in friendly places like Japan and Europe.</b></bq> It's terrible how casually political and partisan science and tech publications are. So smart but so dumb. China is not unfriendly; they're just not vassals. Japan is definitely a junior partner. <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/jehs-rip-2001-2023" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">“JEHS”, RIP (2001-2023)</a> <bq>Plainly, <b>this grand dame could not have aspirated a vowel if you had put a gun to her head.</b> It was not her fault, of course —if you want all the phonemes of the world available to you in adulthood, I’m told, you should learn Berber in infancy; otherwise, tough luck—, but somehow it did drive home for me something else I’ve long known, but only acknowledged to myself with shameful delay: that <b>I am, and always will be, notwithstanding all my dabblings, a lifelong Anglophone.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/05/beau-is-afraid-ari-aster-a24-wunderkind-film-review/" source="Jacobin" author="Eileen Jones"><i>Beau Is Afraid</i> Is a Referendum on Director Ari Aster, Cinema’s Latest Wunderkind</a> <bq>The film is supposed to be a comedy, according to director Ari Aster, just so you know. <b>That’s a popular move being made lately. Insufferable dramas that test all your endurance to sit through are actually marvelous comedies</b> — if only you’re highbrow enough to get the jokes. I’ve read that Tar is a hilarious “ blast ” for the cognoscenti, too. Paul Thomas Anderson said so.</bq> <bq>My own tolerance for this kind of thing is minimal. I was the only one in the screening room watching the latest Aster opus. Other people, <b>ordinary filmgoers who don’t have to watch three-hour art films of epic repulsiveness know better than to blow their hard-earned leisure time on a silly monstrosity like <i>Beau is Afraid</i>.</b></bq> <bq>This fancy, frivolous love of sickness is such a preoccupation of the healthy. If you’ve always done fine in life, you can afford to wallow excitedly in the sick and the crazy and the abject. <b>It’s the people who have never lived in any real state of hardship or chaos</b> — weren’t raised in circumstances defined by mental illness, say, or alcoholism, or abuse, or mayhem of any kind — <b>who want to make a film like <i>Beau is Afraid</i>. I hate these people. Trauma tourists, every one of them.</b></bq> <bq>Watching Beau Is Afraid feels more like having the filmmaker himself sitting next to you, <b>endlessly nudging you to make note of the thirty-seven tiresome production design curlicues he’s inserted into every single scene.</b></bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey" source="New Yorker" author="Ted Chiang">Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?</a> <bq><b>The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important.</b> If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.</bq> <bq>[...] if you imagine A.I. as a semi-autonomous software program that solves problems that humans ask it to solve, the question is then: <b>how do we prevent that software from assisting corporations in ways that make people’s lives worse?</b></bq> You can't. Not within the current system. <bq>Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism? Just to be clear, when I refer to capitalism, I’m not talking about the exchange of goods or services for prices determined by a market, which is a property of many economic systems. When I refer to capitalism, <b>I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others.</b></bq> There are no legal mechanisms or ethical roadblocks in western society. Causing suffering is fine if you can tell yourself a story that you're not at fault. Stealing the same. Sociopathy is rewarded. There is nothing in place to stop or even slow those people using AI as a lever. <bq>whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; <b>I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work.</b></bq> <bq><b>I’m criticizing the ever-growing concentration of wealth among an ever-smaller number of people</b>, which may or may not be an intrinsic property of capitalism but which absolutely characterizes capitalism as it is practiced today.</bq> <bq>Some might say that it’s not the job of A.I. to oppose capitalism. That may be true, but it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism, either. Yet that is what it currently does. <b>If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.</b></bq> <bq>In effect, they are intensifying the problems that capitalism creates with the expectation that, when those problems become bad enough, the government will have no choice but to step in. <b>As a strategy for making the world a better place, this seems dubious.</b></bq> <bq><b>Accelerationism</b> says that it’s futile to try to oppose or reform capitalism; instead, we have to exacerbate capitalism’s worst tendencies until the entire system breaks down. <b>The only way to move beyond capitalism is to stomp on the gas pedal of neoliberalism until the engine explodes.</b></bq> It's an enticing idea, especially to those who are unhappy with the current system <i>and</i> will be largely shielded from the subsequent carnage. For the hoi polloi, though, there will be lotsa and lotsa collateral damage though. <bq><b>The doomsday scenario is</b> not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s <b>A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value.</b> Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s helpful to clarify what <b>the Luddites</b> actually wanted. The main thing they <b>were protesting</b> was <b>the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices.</b> They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry.</bq> Whoa ... that sounds familiar. <bq>Whenever anyone accuses anyone else of being a Luddite, it’s worth asking, <b>is the person being accused actually against technology? Or are they in favor of economic justice?</b> And is the person making the accusation actually in favor of improving people’s lives? Or are they just trying to increase the private accumulation of capital?</bq> <bq>[...] we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But <b>what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work? What is the point of greater efficiency, if the money being saved isn’t going anywhere except into shareholders’ bank accounts?</b></bq> <bq>In the United States, per-capita G.D.P. has almost doubled since 1980, while the median household income has lagged far behind. That period covers the information-technology revolution. This means that <b>the economic value created by the personal computer and the Internet has mostly served to increase the wealth of the top one per cent of the top one per cent</b>, instead of raising the standard of living for U.S. citizens as a whole.</bq> This is an excellent point to remember: the previous revolutions about which we've all been encouraged to be excited for utopian reasons have actually ended up being quite detrimental to overall well-being. Well, that's not quite right; but they've contributed to an increasing inequality rather than decreasing it. The personal-computer revolution, the social-media revolution---all of these things have been coopted and used to further the existing power base. We should be very leery of the next "revolution"----or, at the very least, we should approach it with eyes open, perhaps accepting its inevitability, but at least no longer being hoodwinked into being excited about it. It is the rare technological revolution that was an unalloyed good---vaccines come to mind---but things like fossil fuels, the automobile lifestyle, nuclear power/weapons, these have all been twisted into something much, much worse than it could have been, simply because the technology was made to serve the interests of capital rather than the interests of humanity. Imagine if we'd actually had sane and moral people in charge of the introduction of these technologies! We'd have long since found a solution for storing or ridding ourselves of nuclear waste, we'd never have developed weapons, we'd still be living in walkable communities, we wouldn't be facing a decade of elevated CO2 combined with a supercharged El Niño getting ready to change life as we know it---even in the short term. <bq>I’m not blaming the personal computer for the rise in wealth inequality—I’m just saying that <b>the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible.</b></bq> <bq>The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is <b>if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately.</b> We haven’t had those policies for the past forty years, [...]</bq> <bq>The productivity software that ran on personal computers was a perfect example of <b>augmentation rather than automation</b>:</bq> <bq><b>A.I. will certainly reduce labor costs and increase profits for corporations, but that is entirely different from improving our standard of living.</b></bq> <bq>[...] we can’t evaluate A.I. by imagining how helpful it will be in a world with U.B.I.; we have to evaluate it in light of the existing imbalance between capital and labor, and, in that context, <b>A.I. is a threat because of the way it assists capital.</b></bq> <bq>In 1976, the workers at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation in Birmingham, England, were facing layoffs because of cuts in defense spending. In response, the shop stewards produced a document known as <b>the Lucas Plan, which described a hundred and fifty “socially useful products,” ranging from dialysis machines to wind turbines and hybrid engines for cars, that the workforce could build with its existing skills and equipment rather than being laid off.</b> The management at Lucas Aerospace rejected the proposal, but it remains a notable modern example of workers trying to steer capitalism in a more human direction. Surely something similar must be possible with modern computing technology.</bq> <bq><b>In General Electric’s annual report from 1953, the company bragged about how much it paid in taxes and how much it was spending on payroll.</b> It explicitly said that “maximizing employment security is a prime company goal.” The founder of Johnson & Johnson said that the company’s responsibility to its employees was higher than its responsibility to its shareholders. <b>Corporations then had a radically different conception of their role in society compared with corporations today.</b></bq> <bq>If there is any lesson that we should take from stories about genies granting wishes, it’s that <b>the desire to get something without effort is the real problem.</b> Think about the story of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which the apprentice casts a spell to make broomsticks carry water but is unable to make them stop. The lesson of that story is not that magic is impossible to control: at the end of the story, the sorcerer comes back and immediately fixes the mess the apprentice made. <b>The lesson is that you can’t get out of doing the hard work.</b></bq> <bq>The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. <b>That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/05/how-ought-we-think-about-ought-thoughts.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Mike O'Brien">How Ought We Think About Ought Thoughts?</a> <bq>Note that, unlike some other formulations, <b>this version of normativity does not require normative beings to have any beliefs or reflective attitudes about norms; it only requires the capacity to learn and apply norms aptly.</b> (Indeed, many human customs are followed without beliefs or reflective attitudes about the reasons for those norms; Andrews cites the example of a Mapuche man preparing a corn dish in which ashes are added before cooking, explaining to an observer simply that “It’s our custom”, apparently unaware that such a step is necessary to release niacin and avoid potentially deadly malnutrition.)</bq> Most people live lives of pure ritual and magic, not understanding the reasons for most things, and never thinking to ask. No-one is aware of the knife-edge of many things that magically go right every day so that they can enjoy the incredible luxury of their daily lives. They drive vehicles composed of thousands of pieces, not one of which can they even conceive of how it was created or how the tools that built the machine that built it were created or how the materials that created those tools were mined and refined or how the energy was obtained or delivered or stored. The pump gas that comes from thousands and thousands of kilometers away while drinking coffee and eating chocolate---none of which is available anywhere close to here. Lives of magic, indeed. <hr> <a href="https://thewalrus.ca/worlds-oldest-ultramarathon-runner/" author="Brett Popplewell" source="The Walrus">The World’s Oldest Ultramarathon Runner Is Racing against Death</a> <bq>Then he smiled and paraphrased a quote from his childhood hero, Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who led the first crossing of Greenland on skis: “If it’s difficult, I’ll do it right away. If it’s impossible, it will take a little longer.”</bq> <img src="{att_link}18c08e5363a485beac7a7510aa42bc4d.jpg" href="{att_link}18c08e5363a485beac7a7510aa42bc4d.jpg" align="none" caption="It is better to go skiing and think of God than to go to church and think of sport." scale="50%"> <img src="{att_link}quote-never-stop-because-you-are-afraid-you-are-never-so-likely-to-be-wrong-never-keep-a-line-fridtjof-nansen-104-86-83.jpg" href="{att_link}quote-never-stop-because-you-are-afraid-you-are-never-so-likely-to-be-wrong-never-keep-a-line-fridtjof-nansen-104-86-83.jpg" align="none" caption="The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.." scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/it-only-counts-when-it-hurts" author="Freddie deBoer" source="SubStack">It Only Counts When It Hurts</a> <bq><b>Were I a 5’2, 110-pound woman who was walking through that tunnel for the first time, I would likely be afraid of a homeless man shouting to himself or at me, and it would be perfectly natural and defensible if I was.</b> It would not be defensible to call the cops. It would not be defensible to wish him harm. It would demonstrate a lack of character to not want better for him. But <b>simply to be a little scared of him would be natural.</b> Because despite a popular myth, people with some kinds of mental illness really are more likely to be violent, and someone who lives on the street is vastly more likely to have one of those conditions. Your responsibility is to control your fear and act responsibly. <b>But the risk of violence is genuinely higher with a homeless person. I’m sorry, folks.</b></bq> <bq>But right now I’m just trying to get to the preconditional understanding that some things in life are bad, and mental illness and homelessness are among them, and it simply does no good for anyone to act like we should be blasé and desensitized to the outward expressions of them in our urban spaces. And, indeed, <b>to make your support contingent on a false picture of who the severely mentally ill really are is to demonstrate that your compassion only encompasses those who are not really sick.</b></bq> <bq>A movement that insists that homeless men ranting on the train should be seen as a regular and unproblematic part of life is, for one thing, a movement that hates mass transit - if you tell ordinary people that taking the subway or the bus means that they’re going to be exposed to chaos and instability, and they have no right to complain about it, then <b>people will stop taking public transit, they’ll stop voting to fund public transit, and public transit will wither and die.</b></bq> <bq>[...] that kind of oh-so-cool attitude will simply convince regular people that our movement doesn’t care about them and can’t be trusted to establish basic order. <b>It’s an unfortunate habit of progressive people to act as though, since we are the ones who speak for the rights and interests of the marginalized, those who aren’t marginalized have no rights or interests that we should protect.</b> But to protect the marginalized requires us to appeal to the majority. It’s the only way we <i>can</i> protect them.</bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither" source="Semi-analysis" author="">Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"</a> <bq>While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly . Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. <b>They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.</b></bq> <bq>The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to <b>one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop.</b></bq> <bq>In both cases, low-cost public involvement was enabled by a vastly cheaper mechanism for fine tuning called <b>low rank adaptation, or LoRA, combined with a significant breakthrough in scale ( latent diffusion for image synthesis, Chinchilla for LLMs).</b> In both cases, access to a sufficiently high-quality model kicked off a flurry of ideas and iteration from individuals and institutions around the world. In both cases, this quickly outpaced the large players. These contributions were pivotal in the image generation space, setting Stable Diffusion on a different path from Dall-E. <b>Having an open model led to product integrations, marketplaces, user interfaces, and innovations that didn’t happen for Dall-E.</b></bq> <bq>Part of what makes LoRA so effective is that - like other forms of fine-tuning - it’s stackable. Improvements like instruction tuning can be applied and then leveraged as other contributors add on dialogue, or reasoning, or tool use. <b>While the individual fine tunings are low rank, their sum need not be, allowing full-rank updates to the model to accumulate over time.</b></bq> <bq>it doesn’t take long before the cumulative effect of all of these fine-tunings overcomes starting off at a size disadvantage. Indeed, <b>in terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants</b>, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT</bq> <bq>[...] the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. <b>Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.</b></bq> <bq>And in the end, <b>OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question.</b> Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/cynthia-rudin-builds-ai-that-humans-can-understand-20230427/" source="Quanta" author="Allison Parshall">The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes</a> <bq>[...] <b>it’s really hard to troubleshoot models if you don’t know what’s in them. Sometimes models depend on variables in ways that you might not like if you knew what they were doing.</b> For example, with the power company in New York, we gave them a model that depended on the number of neutral cables. They looked at it and said, “Neutral cables? That should not be in your model. There’s something wrong.” And of course there was a flaw in the database, and if we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it, we would have had a serious problem. <b>So it’s really useful to be able to see into the model so you can troubleshoot it.</b></bq> It should be obvious that we should not be blindly using unverifiable results, and yet here we are. <bq>These are high-complexity models. They’re neural networks. But <b>as long as they’re reasoning about a current case in terms of its relationship to past cases, that’s a constraint that forces the model to be interpretable.</b> And we haven’t lost any accuracy compared to the benchmarks in computer vision.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s much harder to train an interpretable model, because you have to think about the reasoning process and make sure that’s correct. For low-stakes decisions, it’s not really worth it. Like for advertising, if the ad gets to the right people and makes money, then people tend to be happy. But <b>for high-stakes decisions, I think it’s worth that extra effort.</b></bq> <bq>The explanations have to be wrong, because if their explanations were always right, you could just replace the black box with the explanations. And so the fact that <b>the explainability people casually claim the same kinds of guarantees that the interpretability people are actually providing made me very uncomfortable</b>, especially when it came to high-stakes decisions.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>when we find a tiny little model for predicting whether someone will have a seizure, I think that’s beautiful</b>, because it’s a very small pattern that someone can appreciate and use. And <b>music is all about patterns. Poetry is all about patterns. They’re all beautiful patterns.</b></bq> <hr> <media src="https://www.youtube.com/v/xoVJKj8lcNQ" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ" source="YouTube" author="Center for Humane Technology" width="560px"> <bq>When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities. You have to help create the language, the philosophy, and the laws because they're not going to happen automatically. If it confers power, it will start a race. If we do not coordinate, that race will end in tragedy.</bq> What is interesting is that they come so close, but still don't understand or address the fact that the second and third points follow only because of the utter failure of our system to be able to accomplish anything driven by any impetus other than the profit motive. <bq>Where's the harm? Where's the risk? Be kind with yourselves. It's going to feel like the rest of the world is gaslighting you.</bq> That's how contrarians (or conspiracy theorists) always feel. <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://www.fast.ai/posts/2023-05-03-mojo-launch.html" source="Fast AI" author="">Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades</a> <bq><b>Swift</b> has gone on to become <b>one of the world’s most widely used programming languages</b>, in particular because it is today the main way to create iOS apps for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, and Apple TV.</bq> Slow down. That's not even a little bit true. I'm starting to suspect that the unnamed author of this piece on a site called "fast AI" is either a shill or an AI or a combination of the two. <bq>This seems wise, not just because Python is already well understood by millions of coders, but also because after decades of use its capabilities and limitations are now well understood. <b>Relying on the latest programming language research is pretty cool, but its potentially-dangerous speculation because you never really know how things will turn out.</b> (I will admit that personally, for instance, I often got confused by Swift’s powerful but quirky type system, and sometimes even managed to confuse the Swift compiler and blew it up entirely!)</bq> This is just muddled reasoning. Accept the extremely limited status quo because the supposedly more useful alternatives are scary. What? <bq>There has, at this point, been hundreds of attempts over decades to create programming languages which are concise, flexible, fast, practical, and easy to use – without much success. But somehow, Modular seems to have done it.</bq> What the fuck are you talking about? Are you a fool or an AI? <bq>The key is that Mojo builds on some really powerful foundations. Very few software projects I’ve seen spend enough time building the right foundations, and tend to accrue as a result mounds of technical debt.</bq> You mean like building on Python with no solution for parallelization? <bq>At its core is MLIR, which has already been developed for many years, initially kicked off by Chris Lattner at Google.</bq> This is the second time the article has said this. I think the unattributed asshole wrote this with an AI. <bq>By simply outsourcing that to an existing language (which also happens to be the most widely used language today)</bq> That is absolutely false. Python is not the most-used language today.