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Links and Notes for March 7th, 2025

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<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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/donald-trumps-reverse-kissinger-strategy/" source="ZNetwork" author="Vijay Prashad">Donald Trump’s Reverse Kissinger Strategy</a> <bq>[...] it is important to understand that Trump is attempting to pursue a Reverse Kissinger Strategy, namely, to befriend Russia to isolate China.</bq> <bq>What the United States is now doing is attempting to break the relationship established between China and Russia since 2007, when Putin made his official break from the United States at the 43rd Munich Security Conference. Good cooperation between China and Russia has moved swiftly, and the two countries have a security agreement underlying the transfer of goods and services in roubles and renminbi. Breaking up this relationship will not be easy, but it is now the strategy Trump has decided to attempt to carry out.</bq> <bq>Remember, these are men of ideological purity. [Zhou En-lai] joined the Communist Party in France in 1920, long before there was a Chinese Communist Party. This generation didn’t fight for 50 years and go on the Long March for trade’. This view captures not only Zhou En-lai and Mao Zedong, but also Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They, too, have been steeled in a struggle against the United States over the course of the past decade. It is unlikely that a few baubles will attract Putin to adopt Trump’s reverse Kissinger strategy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/what-are-the-possibilities-for-peace-in-ukraine/" source="ZNetwork" author="Vijay Prashad">What Are the Possibilities for Peace in Ukraine?</a> <bq>Those countries that directly share a border with Russia’s west are – from north to south – Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan (Lithuania and Poland share a border with the Kaliningrad Oblast, which is a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea). Three of them (Finland, Estonia, and Latvia) are members of NATO and of the EU, while one of them (Norway) is a NATO member but not in the EU.</bq> <bq>To begin with, the assertion that one cannot trust a neighbour is the worst way to build confidence between the peoples of neighbouring countries. Neither the EU nor NATO (without full US military backing) can subordinate Russia and force it to bow before Ukraine. A British cabinet minister said last year that his country would last only six months in a full-scale war with Russia. Meanwhile, a Kiel Institute for the World Economy report suggests that Germany is spending its money buying weapons but does not have a standing army capable of self-defence, let alone winning an offensive war against Russia. Europe, without the United States, is a shadow.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/roger_harris/2025/03/05/trumps-dtente-with-venezuela/" source="Antiwar.com" author="Roger D. Harris">Trump's Détente with Venezuela</a> <bq>Biden embraced his predecessor’s unilateral coercive economic measures, euphemistically called sanctions, but with minimal or temporary relief. He certified the incredulous charge that Venezuela posed an immediate and extraordinary threat to US national security, as Trump and Obama had before him. Biden also continued to recognize the inept and corrupt Guaidó as head-of-state, until Guaidó’s own opposition group booted him out.</bq> They just straight-up recognized an arbitrary different person as president rather than the democratically elected one. The height of condescension: All of the countries that recognized Guaidó instead have fealty to a democratic principle. They will wave the flag of democracy when it benefits them, as a purely Machiavellian tool. <bq>According to Grenell, Trump no longer seeks regime change in Venezuela, but wants to focus on advancing US interests, namely facilitating deportations of migrants, while halting irregular migration to the US and preventing inflation of gas prices. Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis suggests that Trump’s strategy is to adroitly use sanctions. Rather than driving Venezuela into the arms of China and Russia, Trump wants to incrementally erode sovereignty, compel sweetheart deals with foreign corporations such as Chevron, and eventually capture control of its oil industry.</bq> This is extremely awful but it's not regime change. It's a difference without a distinction. The country is still not allowed to be in charge of itself. But it gets to choose a leadership that isn't really in charge. Those are the choices on the table. <bq>The government is incrementally mitigating the economic dominance by the oil sector. It has also made major strides towards food self-sufficiency, which is an under-reported victory that no other petrostate has ever accomplished.</bq> <bq>[...] the collapse of the US-backed opposition leaves Washington with a less effective bench to carry its water. The opposition coalition is divided over whether to boycott or participate in the upcoming May 25 elections. The USAID debacle has now left the squabbling insurrectionists destitute. (Venezuela never received any humanitarian aid.).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/01/patrick-lawrence-speak-claudia/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Speak, Claudia!</a> <bq>Big Ag deserves it. I grow heartily sick of corporate America’s neoliberal insensitivities and coercions on these kinds of questions. Trying to force Mexico to accept GM corn from the U.S. is akin to Washington’s disgraceful efforts to make the Japanese accept imports of California rice back in the 1990s—tactlessly dismissive of who knows how many centuries of farming culture, rural culture, village culture, however it is best to think of it.</bq> <bq>Read the Sheinbaum government’s message with me. Isn’t it, “Come home. You are Mexicans and you are welcome and you are respected. Be Mexican. This is your country as much as ours”? Isn’t she showing Mexicans by example that it is time to recenter the national consciousness — that the nation and its people are no longer to act as the appendage of anyone else but simply to be themselves?</bq> <bq>In my read, Sheinbaum’s aspiration, stated most broadly, is finally to break Mexico out of the cycle of underdevelopment identified back in the 1960s and 1970s by Andre Gunder Frank and other such adherents to dependency theory. Dependency theorists held that developing nations were forever to be “developing” — a permanent periphery whose place in the global order was to provide cheap labor and resources to the wealthy of the world — the metropoles, in the language of the time.</bq> <bq>Mexico for Mexicans: Stay with this thought and pose a question along with me. Does this not suggest the commander-in-chief of the MAGA movement ought to be in full, exuberant sympathy with Claudia Sheinbaum and the Mexico she proposes to work toward? It is fair to ask this, but the thought seems ridiculous given the tenor of U.S.–Mexican relations so far in Trump’s second term. We will see over time whether Trump’s grand project means in practice that Mexico and the rest of the world must dedicate to making only America great.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/zionism-is-strangling-free-speech" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Zionism Is Strangling Free Speech In Australia</a> <bq>You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the authoritarian dystopia that Australia has become than a news report about a man getting criminally charged for normal political speech with a law that is normally used to jail people who speak impolitely to the police.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/07/democrat-opposition-change-trump-second-term/" author="" source="Washington Post">What should the Democrats do now?</a> <bq>Trump is now significantly stronger politically than he was before being impeached twice, indicted four times and convicted once. What should this make Democrats think? Not, one hopes, that the people have proved themselves unworthy of self-government. Alas, some are already indulging this interpretation, much like the East German official in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Solution,” who informed a restive citizenry that they “had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts.” As Brecht sardonically noted, “Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVZWdtiHcqM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JVZWdtiHcqM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Glenn Reacts: Defunding Universities over Speech is a MAJOR 1A Violation"> This is a fantastic seven-minute refresher on what the first amendment means in the U.S.---specifically what entails a first-amendment violation. It's more than you think. <bq>Consider this hypothetical: the US government or, let's say a state government, opts to provide unemployment benefits to people who get fired, lose their job. Obviously, it doesn't have to provide unemployment benefits. It decides that it's going to. Imagine a law enacted by a state, say Massachusetts, that said, 'if you support Donald Trump or express support for the Republican party, you will be ineligible to receive unemployment benefits. The only people eligible to receive unemployment benefits are those who take an oath to support the Democratic party.' Everybody would immediately understand why that's unconstitutional. And yet, you could justify that law based on the same distortion, the same warped rationale, as is being offered for the Trump administration's actions this week, which is, 'oh, look, the government doesn't have to give you unemployment benefits. You can't claim that it's a violation of your constitutional rights if the government takes unemployment benefits away from you.' And the obvious answer is: the state has the right to terminate unemployment-benefits programs for everybody if it wants, but it can't withdraw them or deny them as punishment for a particular view. Nor can it condition receipt or the right to have those benefits on affirming a particular view. So, the fact that federal funding is optional doesn't mean the government has the constitutional right to deny it to certain universities that allow a certain type of protest.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/03/liberal-delusions-ukraine-trump-zelensky/" author="Ingar Solty" source="Jacobin">Liberal Delusions Won’t Save Ukraine</a> <bq>They concluded that Russia was obviously not only about to swallow up all of Ukraine but is eventually going to attack the rest of the post-Soviet world, including non-NATO states like Georgia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan, and even NATO ones like the Baltic states and their Russian minorities. The discourse analysts engaged in this kind of fearmongering and legitimization of Western militarization not only despite the obvious gap between alleged will and capability. They have kept spinning that narrative despite the additional and obvious contradiction that — much like the Russian historical record of (geo-)political interests and verbalized demands — the Russian military-strategic approach at the beginning of the war pointed to rather different war aims. Few would set about to conquer a nation-state of, at the time, still forty-four million people and 233,000 square miles, which is almost twice the size of Germany, with 190,000 soldiers. By comparison, in 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland (which was comparatively smaller in size and population and much less well defended) with 1.5 million soldiers who were supported by air attacks conducted by almost nine hundred air-raiding bombers and more than four hundred fighter planes. When Germany started its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, it deployed three million soldiers, the largest invasion force assembled in world history, which nevertheless soon fortunately failed in its objectives.</bq> <bq>[...] why take the time to engage with global and regional history, international political economy, imperialism theory, and war studies just to find oneself in the uncomfortable position of being at odds with the propaganda and power of Western liberal states and state media and their interests? It’s easier to follow and perpetuate the Holocaust-relativizing narrative that Putin is like Adolf Hitler, his war in Ukraine is a “war of annihilation” (as German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Berthold Kohler relativized Nazi Germany’s Eastern war of annihilation, which in less than four years killed twenty-seven million Soviets); that Russia plans to invade Europe; and that, unless Europe becomes “fit for war” and “prepared for war with Russia” by 2029, turning itself into an authoritarian garrison state, Russia will be conquering Poland and marching toward Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, as the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (a Green) predicts.</bq> <bq>The most ludicrous liberal takes readily blamed the US president’s move — i.e., the colonial exploitation of Ukraine at this historic juncture of geopolitical rivalry, state formation, and war — on Putin, i.e., the leader of a country with an economy the size of Italy, “having the United States in his pocket.” In other words, analytically liberals let the tail wag the dog while politically still barking up the wrong tree — and doing so in the dumbest kind of binary reductionism imaginable.</bq> <bq>Diving deeper into a world of pathological delusion is their way of not having to admit that they erred politically, and morally, as ever more lives were forcefully thrown into the meat grinder. This refusal is their way of not having to face up to a complete redoing of their academic education (which could lead to an epistemology capable of explaining the reality of war) and thus overhauling the way they make sense of the world.</bq> <bq>We are against Trump, Trump — because he and Biden have already won everything that there was to be won short of a nuclear World War III — wants to end the unwinnable war through negotiations, so we are against negotiations and in favor of continuing the war. And now we (the very same people who prevent our children from playing cowboys and Indians, who teach them that masculinity is toxic and who train them to verbalize things instead of roughing each other up) also empower the EU to sacrifice the European welfare states and democracies on the altar of war-producers like Rheinmetall, Thales, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.</bq> Damn. Incredibly well put. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-plunder-of-ukraine-a-story-of-debt-greed-and-betrayal/" author="Elizabeth Kucinich" source="ZNetwork">The Plunder of Ukraine: A Story of Debt, Greed, and Betrayal</a> <bq>Ukraine—arguably Europe’s most resource-rich nation—has been driven into debt and is now being systematically carved up by the international community. War or no war, Ukraine loses.</bq> A European Congo. <bq>What we are witnessing is colonization. Ukraine is being absorbed into the Western financial empire—not as an equal partner, but as a debt-ridden state forced to surrender its sovereignty in return for economic survival.</bq> A subject of the USA rather than Russia. It was never a choice of free or not. It was a choice of rulers. <bq>The international community failed to stand for peace when it mattered most, allowing Ukraine to be drawn into war and driven into an ever-deepening financial hole. Now, they must redeem themselves—not by offering more predatory loans, not by coveting and extracting Ukraine’s resources, but by enabling true economic sovereignty for Ukraine. That means canceling odious debts, rejecting privatization schemes that benefit only foreign corporations, and ensuring Ukraine’s vast natural wealth remains in the hands of its own people. Anything less continues the war against Ukraine by other means.</bq> The debts, privatization schemes, and seizing of natural wealth were the point of the war, though, so it's unlikely that they won't come to pass. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/goliath-stoops-to-conquer" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Goliath Stoops to Conquer</a> <bq>The side in a conflict that can reliably inspire this sort of deranged behavior in mainstream politicians is not an underdog. The side in this conflict that’s cheerfully gutting Ivy League universities because their students had the temerity to oppose a horrific slaughter is not an underdog. The side that’s ruined the careers of people in politics because they simply said out loud that there is a pro-Israel lobby, that like all countries Israel has a lobby in the United States, is not an underdog. The country that’s currently occupying a large piece a Syria, contravening all manner of international laws with impunity because it knows its unique status in American politics makes it totally unaccountable, is not an underdog. I’ll again invoke someone I’ve brought up before, an Israeli reservist I once met who very calmly and directly said that moral considerations about the Palestinians made no difference to him and that he felt no obligation to defend moral indictments of Israeli actions. The Jews have often been powerless, now they are powerful, and so they now act as a powerful people do, he said. They take land because they want it, and they need no ethical or historical pretext for doing so. They make war because they think it is in the best interest of the Israeli people and their security, but either way, they make war when they want to and can be disciplined by no one. He said that the Jews have the whip hand now and they’ll use it as it was once used against them. And while I certainly find this attitude nihilistic and disturbing, it also reflects honesty and integrity. If the response is simply that Jews have been oppressed throughout history and so have a right to act as though they still are, well, I find that very bold coming from the side that mocks the idea that the legacy of slavery plays a large role in the ongoing struggles of African Americans. If you think a history of oppression entitles people to grab land, I hope you’ll cheer if an Indian reservation decides to annex a few neighboring towns. Would only make sense, right? Here on Earth Prime, in anything like a reasonable timeframe, Israel enjoys greater safety and security than almost any country you can possibly name. Here in the United States, Jews flourish economically and academically and socially to such a degree that you can make a good case that they’re the most successful ethnic group on our planet, bar none. That will not change anytime soon, and good for them.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-moral-balance/" author="Craig Murray" source="ZNetwork">The Moral Balance</a> <bq>There is simply no evidence of Putin having territorial goals beyond Ukraine and the tiny enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is perfectly fair to characterise Putin’s territorial expansion over two decades as limited to the reincorporation of threatened Russian-speaking minority districts in ex-Soviet states. That it is worth a world war and unlimited dead over who should be mayor of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking city of Lugansk is not entirely plain to me. The notion that Putin is about to attack Poland or Finland is utter nonsense. The idea that the Russian army, which has struggled to subdue small and corrupt, if Western-backed, Ukraine, has the ability to attack Western Europe itself is plainly impractical.</bq> <bq>The plain truth is that the Western powers interfere far more in other countries than Russia does, through massive sponsorship of NGOs, journalists and politicians, much of which is open and some of which is covert. I used to do this myself as a British diplomat. Revelations from USAID or the Integrity Initiative leaks give the public a glimpse into this world. Yes, Russia does it too, but on a much smaller scale. That this kind of Russian activity indicates a desire for conquest or is a cause for war, is such a shallow argument it is hard to believe in the good faith of those promoting it.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/even-more-assaults-on-free-speech" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Even More Assaults On Free Speech To Silence Criticism Of Israel</a> <bq>They often cannot seem to comprehend why anyone would think it’s a compelling point that they are pushing the continuation of a war that they themselves would never agree to fight in, which is just so very revealing. It shows that they see the idea of other people fighting and dying in a war as a completely different and unrelated category to the idea of themselves fighting and dying in a war. It shows that they don’t view the people who fight in wars as fully human, with dreams and fears and families just like they have, who don’t want to die a violent death any more than they do. It’s genuinely never occurred to them to put themselves in the shoes of the people who are fighting and dying and getting their limbs blown off, and to think about what it would be like if the same thing were happening to them. It’s like a video game to these people. They don’t see it as real in the same way their own lives are real. A war is something they watch unfold on social media and cheer and boo like a sporting event, not something involving real people who are just as capable of suffering and loss as they are.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/if-trump-blows-it-on-speech-the-world" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is Screwed</a> <bq>Forget Khalil. He’s not the issue. The problem is Trump officials pledging to throw masses of people out of the country for offenses not yet committed and on vague pretexts like being “aligned with Hamas.” As Coward put it (see accompanying interview), “What does that mean?” Similarly, what does it mean to be a “Hamas sympathizer,” and what constitutes “aiding and abetting violations [of] immigration laws,” a standard Trump just decided to employ to deny relief to some federal student loan holders? This use of vague language mixed with speech-code concepts is similar to the techniques employed by the politicians Trump and Vance ran against or criticized last year, like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Britain’s Keir Starmer or the censorship zealots at the Barack Obama-created Global Engagement Center. The cultural targets are different, but both sides would be embarrassed to realize how nearly identical their arguments justifying their crackdowns are.</bq> <bq>The worst thing is what a tremendous self-own this is. After Britain passed its hideous Online Safety Act and began railing against “illegal content,” American speech advocates laughed out loud at the Orwellian absurdity of that term. Now Trump is threatening to cut school funding over “illegal protest”? Did he get the idea from Starmer?</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYREOIpqIFM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/tYREOIpqIFM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="AcTVism Munich" caption="Prof. Richard Wolff - The Decline of the US Empire & Germany's Economy"> At about 35:00, <bq>Zain Raza: We have seen the emergence of AI like China's DeepSeek, which you mentioned, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. And there's a major transformation taking place across the global economy. Many industries are being affected. The world economic forum's "future of jobs" report 2025 anticipates that, by 2030, AI and other information-processing technologies will transform 86% of businesses, leading to the creation of 170 million new roles worldwide, while making 92 million existing jobs redundant. Can you talk about whether the promise of technology to free humanity from drudgery and mundane tasks, so that it can engage in creative and intellectual pursuit, is finally being realized by this AI-transformation? Professor Richard Wolff: Yes, I will give you a very old answer, because this is a very old question. And the old form of the question is: every technology---whether it is the power loom or modern chemistry or atomic energy or electricity---any of the major breakthroughs were always defended on the grounds that they could relieve labor drudgery---the need to sweat your body to feed your body, all of that---and they have always disappointed. America is arguably one of the most advanced technological societies and I can assure you, as an American worker---which is what I am---we are exhausted. We work more hours. We work faster. The liberation of technology is something we can only think about in the future because no-one in their right mind would talk about it now. In other words, the problem has never been technology. The problem is capitalism. What do I mean? It means you only install a technology---a new one---if, and to the degree, that it enhances the profits of your business. I'm now going to give you a simple example, simple arithmetic. Imagine you're a producer. You have 100 workers in your factory or your office or your store and a new technology comes across---AI, it doesn't matter---and so suddenly, to produce the same number of goods, to charge the same price as before, you don't need a 100 workers, you can make do with 50. The capitalist says 'wonderful!' He fires 50 workers, and he says to the others, 'here's the new machine; here's the new technology. You now produce twice what you used to produce.' He sells the same output at the same price, so he gets the same revenue, but he enjoys a wonderful profit because the 50 workers he used to have to pay, he doesn't have to pay anymore, so he keeps that portion of the revenue for his own profit. All right. Now, that means that 50 people are unemployed. They are desperate. They will go look for work, because otherwise they don't live. And they will offer to work at a lower wage or they will work harder or they will work more hours. They create the difficulty for the working class because of what the employer did. Now, here's the punchline. Suppose it [were]n't a capitalist business. Suppose it was a worker co-op run, by communists or socialists or just decent people. Here's what the alternative was. Taking the machine, which makes every worker twice as productive and give everybody a 4-hour working day instead of an 8-hour working day. Because, in a 4-hour working day, they can produce the same number of goods, sell them at the same price, bring in the same revenue as before. The capitalist profit won't go up, but the workers would have enjoyed a spectacular increase in their leisure, in their time to be creative, to have a family, to be active politically in the community. More people would benefit much more from that way of dealing with technology. And then we would have seen what the technology promised: the liberation of human beings from labor. The reason we don't have that, is not the fault of the technology, it's that we're holding on to a capitalism that has outlived its usefulness in human history.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-elites-big-lie-on-inequality/" author="Dean Baker" source="ZNetwork">The Elites’ Big Lie on Inequality</a> <bq>The reality is that there is no “the market” out there generating inequality. The government structures the market, which is infinitely malleable and can produce almost any outcome we want. Over the last half-century, we have increasingly structured markets in ways that generate more inequality — a reality that our economic policy debates largely refuse to acknowledge.</bq> <bq>But the merits or disadvantages of monopolies in specific circumstances obscures our understanding of the broader pattern: These are government policies with enormous implications for the distribution of income. We will spend over $650 billion this year (or $5,000 per household) for drugs and other pharmaceutical products that would likely sell for less than $100 billion in a free market without patent monopolies. As far as the impact on inequality, we can take the example of Bill Gates. He would likely still be working for a living if the government did not threaten to arrest people who copied Microsoft software without paying him a licensing fee.</bq> <bq>Given that sales taxes are the norm, we could argue the special exemption for financial transactions is a government intervention, and that taxing sales of stock in the same way as we tax sales of shoes and furniture would be a more “free market” policy.</bq> <bq>Our corporate governance rules make it far easier for CEOs and other top executives to pull down incredibly high paychecks than is the case in Europe or East Asia. Again, this is simply how the government structures the market – we are not choosing between government intervention and a supposedly free market. It is understandable that people who approve of the rise in inequality claim that it is just the natural workings of the market. After all, blaming the market sounds much better than saying we rigged the market to redistribute income upward.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/01/chainsaw-diplomacy-javier-mileis-argentina-destruction-is-nightmarish-model-for-musk-doge/" author="Alan MacLeod" source="Scheer Post">Chainsaw Diplomacy: Javier Milei’s Argentina Destruction Is Nightmarish Model for Musk, DOGE</a> <bq>Upon his assumption of the presidency, Milei immediately removed rent controls, leading to the cost of housing in Buenos Aires increasing by 135% in one year. Price controls on key goods were also rescinded, leading to food becoming unaffordable to millions of people, who are now forced to scavenge in the streets. Utility rates have exploded: spending on gas for cooking and heating, for example, increased by 715% between December 2023 and October 2024. The outcome has been mass destitution. Poverty has risen to 53% of the population, the highest seen in decades. New pro-business laws currently being considered would increase the workday from eight hours to twelve and allow companies to pay workers not with cash but with tickets that can only be redeemed in certain supermarkets or shops.</bq> <bq>While social spending has been cut to the bone, money going to the country’s security forces has been drastically ramped up. The budget for the police, spying agencies and the military—the very groups that will handle any challenges to Milei’s rule—has more than tripled. He has also proposed selling off Argentina’s existing prisons and allowing the construction of mega-jails housing up to 6,000 people each.</bq> Charming. <bq>President Trump, however, squashed the rebellion even as it was starting. “I thought it was great,” he said of the email, echoing Musk’s reasoning. “We have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government, so by asking the question ‘tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying are you actually working. And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired,” he said, adding that “a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.”</bq> What a ludicrous shitshow. <bq>The commitment to serving Washington’s interests has been a rare constant theme of Milei’s presidency. He has regularly invited top American military commanders to the country, pledged to purchase U.S. military hardware, and begun the construction of an American naval base in the far south of the country. This base will allow Washington to surveil and control the Antarctic region and shipping traffic passing by Cape Horn, South America’s southernmost point.</bq> <bq>Last week, Milei also declared two days of national mourning over the deaths of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, two children Israel claims (with little evidence) were killed by Hamas. His decision earned him accolades from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who described him as a “dear friend.”</bq> Two days! That's just creepy and weird. Kinda tryhard. <bq>[...] if Milei and his actions in Argentina truly are a model for Musk, Americans should be deeply concerned. His maladroit slashing of his country’s government and social services has sparked chaos, poverty, and uncertainty in Argentina. His policies, however, have greatly enriched those at the top of society. Musk’s erratic and sweeping cuts bear a striking resemblance to Milei’s. Argentinians are watching Musk’s moves with a sense of déjà vu: they have seen this one play out before.</bq> What a clown. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/we-have-never-been-brodern" source="Hinternet" author="Thomas Peermohamed Lambert">We Have Never Been Brodern</a> <bq>Spanish, I argued, was still in the thrall of the great Golden Age poet Góngora, who delighted in making as many weird little transpositions of this kind as possible. Góngora never writes things like “it was late April”; instead, he writes “en campos de zafiro pace estrellas” —literally, “in fields of sapphire it grazes stars” — the rationale being that in order for celestial grazing to occur in the sapphire (i.e., daytime) sky, the sun must be in the constellation of Taurus (i.e., the most obviously ruminant sign of the zodiac) which would clearly make it late April, or perhaps early May. When my students pointed out that this was insane, I countered that we are happy to accommodate this kind of thing in English provided the text is packaged as high modernism — as when Joyce writes “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” The difference is simply that Spanish has let these strange, literary logics creep out into rather less heightened forms of prose.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/a-world-historical-upgrade" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">A World-Historical Upgrade</a> <bq>The original Sanskrit term cited by the last guy to usher a world-destroying device into history, the story of which delighted tens of millions of middlebrows throughout the Oscar season of a recent past —who seem still to believe that history itself is one giant biopic—, is कालः, which can mean “Death”, but more generally means “Time”: Krishna identifies himself as Time/Death to remind Arjuna of the all-pervasive force that consumes all things, and foils the vainglorious ambitions of all mortals. This is Time as simple duration, but we can also understand it, and are compelled by current events to understand it, as history. The revolution that has left us with a thoroughly memeified politics has indeed destroyed a world, [...]</bq> <bq>As regular readers will know, something broke in me during our successive covid lockdowns a few years back, a break that I chronicled in a 2023 article in Harper’s, which won the praise of Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s current director of the National Institutes of Health. I was never an anti-vaxxer, I was never tempted in the slightest by conspiracy theories about what was “really” going on; but what was really going on, in plain view, was already quite disconcerting enough. The Zoomification of human contact, the QR-code menus, the obligatory scannable vaccination apps on what had become de-facto obligatory smartphones: all of this, much more than the underlying epidemiological reality, struck me as the truly great tragedy of 2020-21.</bq> <bq>[...] what had transformed me into some kind of bureaucracy-hating romantic, was not that we were still under the reign of a clunky and impersonal but nevertheless somewhat human system of paper-shuffling and form-filling and license-renewing, but that we were in the course of moving beyond that and into something far more streamlined and sleek, which is to say far more hostile to the continued existence of real human souls within its gears.</bq> <bq>I was talking to a thoughtful young man from India not long ago who told me that most of the people he knows back home can’t wait to see the human judges within the Indian justice system replaced by AI — this is the only way, he said, that they can hope to eliminate corruption. For me this conversation was a moment of rare epiphany, where I grasped in an instant what I now take to be the real stakes of the present moment: we are at the boundary between a world of regular corruption, where sin is still possible, which is really just another way of saying a world where human beings can still be human, and a world that looks essentially little different from the world of Minority Report.</bq> <bq>When I have declared that I hate bureaucracy, I have been thinking romantically about an impossible return to some sort of anarcho-communalist idyll, where order is preserved by honor, good will, and human charity. But this tends to be heard only as a hatred of bureaucracy tout court, and when the tech vanguard hears it, they declare that they hate bureaucracy too, but in fact they only hate it because for them it is a system that is still too human, in need of replacement not by honor, charity, etc., but by full automation and universal surveillance.</bq> <bq>It should go without saying that of course I would rather spend days on end in a sexual-harassment-prevention workshop run by incompetent, bumbling, know-nothing goofballs from over in HR, than have my irises scanned by a machine designed to detect microtraces of any prohibited affect or longing.</bq> I suppose this is, once again, an argument in which it is implied that not capitulating to a master is not on offer. But Justin had already designated a return to such an <iq>idyll</iq> as <iq>thinking romantically</iq> just a few lines above. <bq>[...] much comes to depend on whether or not you are prepared to call Trumpism “fascism” — since it is a universally accepted truth that you must not look for common ground with a fascist, and if that label can be made to stick, then the Schmittian stance of absolute opposition becomes practically unassailable.</bq> <bq>I am a sappy Will Rogers-style American, a Leibnizian eirenist, and a Christian humanist: I never met a man I didn’t like, I believe all disagreement is only apparent and results from confusion in the way we deploy our terms, and I believe we are all equal before God. I have family members and loved ones who are MAGA voters. If you are an American and that is not the case for you, I would suggest that perhaps you do not know a sufficient number of your countrymen. I am not a bartender, and I am not a soldier in a civil war, and I find that I can only say, once we have agreed upon the correctness of the f-word: “Okay, but, practically speaking, what now?”</bq> <bq>[...] the part of the currently unfolding coup that I am calling the Upgrade, the part that is, I have come to believe, historically inevitable, is not intrinsically fascist, though it has piggy-backed on fascism to achieve its ends. The result is a mostly new hybrid species of irony-poisoned, rabidly irrationalist, jocular fascism, most commonly delivered in a protective shell of plausible deniability.</bq> <bq>The quilt has been torn to pieces, and to delight in Chingy in 2025 one must also endure a bottomless feeling of loss, as an elderly Ukrainian or Russian might, circa 1992, have watched an old clip of some Soviet estrada star belting out some high notes after being pinned with a People’s Artist of the USSR medal.</bq> This reminds me of that Putin quote, <iq>Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.</iq> <bq>I am basically certain that the career I thought I was going to have until retirement will not exist 2-3 years from now — more than a decade too soon for comfort. I can have no idea what sort of livelihood, if any, I will be cobbling together at an age when until recently I continued to imagine I was going to be coasting through a comfortable and respectable late-career middle-class sinecure. These jobs we once boasted of getting, because they were “cushy”, have now been exposed as bullshit jobs, and those who continue to see them as a source of meaning in their lives have been exposed as bullshit people, and most days it feels like all of us, except perhaps the massage therapists and others whose continued earnings depend directly on their fleshliness, are on the verge of being fired.</bq> <bq>[...] the promise articulated by Leibniz as he contemplated the potential applications that might someday be made of his reckoning engines: to assign to these mechanical prostheses all of the bullshit work we might once have been expected to perform, in order to devote ourselves exclusively to those activities that are truly conducive to human thriving — thinking, imagining, creating, and most of all experiencing, the one thing we can be certain machines do not do, and, correlatively, the one thing that we ourselves do as an end in itself rather than with an eye to expected utility.</bq> Except that too many people have accepted a society in which "experiencing" has also been quantized and monetized. <bq>In this connection I will be happy to see the academic humanities, as we currently know them, collapse. It was a grave mistake to model humanistic inquiry on the positive sciences, to start extracting “research results” from us humanists as if we were making human ears grow on the backs of lab rats or whatever, and there is no better thing to be done with faux-humanistic alienated “knowledge production” of this sort than to outsource it to machines. This is certainly what Leibniz would have wanted. Once we effect this change, or once this change is imposed on us, there may be some small hope of returning to the lost meaning of humanism, by focusing our efforts and our attention on the awakening and cultivation of capacities that machines will never have. You say these capacities are useless? Very well then, let the machines be the utilitarians. We human beings have better things to do.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1j8kgzo/class_struggle/" author="" source="Reddit">Class struggle 💪🏿💪🏽💪🏻💪 ☭</a> <img src="{att_link}eugene_debs_absolute_unit.webp" href="{att_link}eugene_debs_absolute_unit.webp" align="none" caption="Eugene Debs Absolute Unit" scale="75%"> <bq>I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY9a6w07Jt0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/DY9a6w07Jt0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Professor Asma's Guide To Unusual Knowledge" caption="Embrace the Absurd!"> <bq>Meet Harry Bensley, the masked man who attempted to walk around the world in an iron helmet for a bet, and Alfred Jarry, the eccentric playwright behind Ubu Roi who lived as a parody of his own creation. These two historical oddballs pushed reality to its limits, blurring the line between performance and existence. In this video, we explore how their lives embody the principles of absurdist philosophy and existentialism. Were they rejecting the search for meaning or proving that life’s only real meaning is the one we create? From Bensley’s impractical odyssey to Jarry’s surreal antics with bicycles and pistols, their stories challenge the structures we take for granted.</bq> Jarry, in particular, was the real deal, a raging alcoholic and absolutely dedicated to the life of an absurdist. <hr> Charisma is an underrated stat. <bq>Charisma is underrated in the engineering space. A charismatic engineer is often labeled as a "charlatan" or "all bark no bite" or "a sales guy", but what the people who say that often gloss over is the fact that a charismatic engineer is often really labeled as a CEO.</bq> Perhaps a better word than "underrated" is "unnoticed". It's the stat that hides itself. Part of the power of charisma is that people don't notice that it's working on them. They also don't credit it when they think it's not working on them. Its effect is to draw attention to the subject, but it doesn't control whether that attention is positive or negative. Charisma lives by the old adage: "There is no such thing as bad publicity." One name proves this: Trump. The man has, undeniably, a ton of charisma. It works on everyone, in that no-one thinks of what he does in terms of charisma (the stat hides itself). The effects vary from devotion/fealty to him to revulsion/fealty to bringing him down. Either way, his charisma is so strong that there are only a handful who haven't changed their lives because of him. Many credit him with laughably too much power and purpose, but they differ on whether they're full MAGA and loving it or full RESISTANCE and dedicating every tweet to bringing him down. The excrescence that is Musk is in the same ballpark. Just because I called him an "excrescence" doesn't mean that his charisma works on me. I honestly never really cared that much about him, one way or the other. I don't see a huge difference between him and any of the other self-selected, tech-billionaire overloads to whom our society considers it useI just wanted to use the word. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-begging-you-not-to-make-up-your" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">I'm Begging You Not to Make Up Your Mind About Complex Medical & Legal Decisions Based on Celebrity Media</a> <bq>Lutz has a request for those who wax self-righteous about the rights of the severely disabled without understanding their challenges. She writes<bq>What if, before defunding or eliminating any educational, vocational, and residential settings, policymakers were forced to spend even a short amount of time with those who rely on such models and their families—to sit with my twenty-four-year-old son Jonah, for example, while he sucks his thumb and watches the same thirty-second clip of Elmo’s World over and over, to observe the swelling of cauliflower ear where he hits himself in the head, to listen to me enumerate our greatest and most hard-fought victories: toileting, shoes, haircuts, plugging in his iPad when it dies instead of throwing it out the window of a moving vehicle? Could they really walk away from that experience completely unaffected?</bq></bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-so-hard-to-build-a-jet-engine" source="Construction Physics" author="Brian Potter">Why it's so hard to build a jet engine</a> <bq>Trying to make something cheap while you’re pushing the boundaries of performance makes things even more difficult. You need to worry about things like minimizing maintenance costs, eliminating expensive materials or components, and having a design that can be manufactured inexpensively and minimizes costly expert labor. (And if you do require expensive components or labor, you need to spread it as thinly as possible.)</bq> <bq>To be attractive to airlines an engine needs to be as efficient as possible, minimizing fuel consumption and the amount of maintenance it requires. High fuel efficiency requires high compression ratios and engine temperatures, which in turn require extremely efficient compressors, components that are both incredibly strong and incredibly lightweight, and materials that can withstand extreme temperatures. And a commercial jet engine must successfully operate hour after hour, day after day, for tens of thousands of hours before being overhauled.</bq> <bq>It’s not that building a working commercial jet engine itself is so difficult. It’s that a new engine project is always pushing the boundaries of technological possibility, venturing into new domains — greater power, higher temperatures, higher pressures, new materials — where behaviors are less well understood. Building the understanding required to push jet engine capabilities forward takes time, effort, and expense.</bq> <bq>The jet engine is a type of heat engine : it converts heat into useful work. Like a steam turbine or an internal combustion engine, the jet engine works by taking some working fluid (in this case air), compressing it, heating it, and then expanding it, extracting work from the heated fluid in the process.</bq> <bq>[...] a jet engine operates on the Brayton cycle . Air is taken into the front of the engine, then run through a compressor, increasing the air’s pressure. This compressed air flows into a combustion chamber, where it’s mixed with fuel and ignited, producing a stream of hot exhaust gas. This exhaust gas then drives a turbine, which extracts energy from the hot exhaust as it expands, converting it into mechanical energy in the form of the rotating turbine. This mechanical energy is then used to drive the compressor at the front of the turbine.</bq> <bq>By 1950 jet engines, including the J57, had almost universally changed to axial compressors, which compress the air along the length of the engine through a series of compression stages.</bq> <bq>Pratt had to figure out how to weld sheet metal. ‘With the multiplicity of joints in sheet metal parts of a jet, the distribution of stresses is one of the most important considerations. A weld becomes an actual design factor rather than a mere fastening device,’ Horner said. He referred to many of the issues in converting to jets: things like relatively large diameter parts with very thin walls and all of the compressor and turbine components and airfoils with ‘a great variety of aerodynamic shapes of such awkward dimensions that our designers often complain that they have neither a beginning nor an ending.’</bq> <bq>[...] that sheet metal and oddly shaped stuff needed a lot of tools. To build the little J30, Pratt needed 5250 tools. By 1952 when Horner spoke, the J57 had 20,000 tools.</bq> <bq>[...] the engine arrangement that would be adopted for large commercial aircraft was a large, ducted fan at the front of the engine, an arrangement that became known as the turbofan. Today, virtually all large commercial aircraft are powered by high-bypass turbofans (engines where a very large fraction of air is routed around the engine rather than through it).</bq> <bq>The J57, which powered the B52 and whose commercial iteration powered the first wave of US jet-powered airliners, cost roughly $2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. 9 The J58, the engine that powered the SR-71 blackbird, cost closer to $7 billion. Between the 1960s and early 2000s, the average inflation-adjusted development cost of a new military jet engine has been $1.5 billion</bq> <bq>These huge costs mean that it can take 15-20 years for a new jet engine to make a return on its investment.</bq> Which means that there is a real danger that no-one will bother trying to work on such long-scale and enormous engineering projects anymore, not when you can target 8% margins by running scams and collecting poorly defined and poorly regulated subsidies on a quarterly basis. The incentive no longer exist to try big engineering projects under the economic system prevalent in the West. <bq>Small defects or failures that could be accommodated in other sorts of technology can be catastrophic if they occur in a jet engine. A mid-flight engine failure on a Rolls-Royce Trent-powered Airbus A380, where a turbine disk fractured and ripped apart the entire engine, was traced to a single oil pipe manufactured with a wall that was half a millimeter too thin. Pratt and Whitney has lost billions of dollars correcting manufacturing defects in its Geared Turbofan that resulted from a “microscopic contaminant” in the powder used to manufacture turbine disks.</bq> <bq>Engine manufacturers will also often try to improve performance of existing engines rather than developing all new ones from scratch. Rolls-Royce is still building off of the RB211, an engine first designed nearly 60 years ago. And the Rolls-Royce Olympus engines that powered the Concorde in the 1970s were scaled-up versions of an engine originally designed in the 1940s. Note that the J42 and the J48 were license-built versions of the Rolls-Royce Nene and Tay, and thus also a product of technology exchange. Like with commercial aircraft, it’s much easier and less risky to stretch and improve an existing engine design rather than start a new one from a clean sheet, and only the potential of huge performance gains can justify the latter.</bq> <bq>[...] the demands for taking off on very hot days and at high-elevation airports are major design constraints on engine performance.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/03/robotaxis-are-here.html" author="Abbas Raza" source="3 Quarks Dailyl">Robotaxis Are Here</a> This article cites Tomas Pueyo, a technocratic, self-selected know-it-all, <bq>Then, you’ll notice that self-driving cars are more convenient. You don’t need to talk with a human, manage their expectations, fear their driving skills, suffer their eating or smoking… You will start changing your habits, and instead of ordering an Uber or hailing a cab, you’ll default to Waymo or Tesla’s robotaxi. Then, you’ll notice that they tend to be cheaper! At first, they will be just a bit cheaper. Then, prices will drop more every year. You’ll forget about human cabs.</bq> I am so tired of these human-hating, billionaire, self-styled genius renaissance men who hat people so much that they can only envision a world without them. They can envision a world with self-driving cars but can't envision a world with public transportation. They want the self-driving cars because they are 100% aware that they will get to use them while the rest of the world, the hoi polloi, well ... who cares? <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1j9ypqu/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_cupertino/mhljej9/?context=3" author="" source="Reddit">Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino</a> It's become endemic in their auxiliary products on MacOS as well. <ul> Music: search is an embarrassment Notes: super-slow sync problems for years. Can't quickly auto-sync the simplest collaborations Photos: The People UI is an incoherent catastrophe. All of the links for "finding more photos" are at the bottom of a giant list of photos. Reminders/calendar: cannot consistently sync reminder status across MacOS devices. Spotlight: Cannot find a document, even by exact name, even if you've opened it dozens of times before. SLOP shows up first. </ul> Here's just a single recent example of stupid, sloppy bullshit from Apple in MacOS Sequoia. <img src="{att_link}make_up_your_mind_apple_jfc.png" href="{att_link}make_up_your_mind_apple_jfc.png" align="none" caption="Make up your mind Apple JFC" scale="50%"> The page very clearly shows iOS 18.1.1 is installed; the message below that indicates that version 18.3.2 is available. The dialog box proudly claims that 18.1.1 is the current version. Does "current" mean "latest"? Or is it just telling me in a confusing way that the version was untouched when I'd canceled the upgrade? How do mere mortals who don't do this for a living even know what the hell is going on even 10% of the time? <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> The pair of articles <a href="https://etymology.substack.com/p/survivorship-bias-and-the-algorithmic" author="The Etymology Nerd" source="Substack">survivorship bias and the algorithmic gaze</a> and <a href="https://etymology.substack.com/p/when-everything-becomes-a-fragment" author="The Etymology Nerd" source="Substack">when everything becomes a fragment</a> expresses, for me, a good argument for caution about the tools that you're using. AI is definitely a paradigm-shift for programming, but I think in a way that's not discussed very much. We focus very much on how AI enables people who couldn't program anything before to program something. The scope of what it allows them to program grows with each version. Until it doesn't. That is, technically, it might be capable of more but it's also very limiting by its nature---tending toward attractors in the data---and also because of guardrails in the tools. I've always brought the example that Microsoft would be foolish if it were to make Copilot just as good at helping you in Java as C#. In fact, when you ask about Java, it should suggest you do it in C# instead and offer an example. How can you not see that this is where we are headed? How can you not see that this is where we already are? <img src="{att_link}the_focus_funnel.webp" href="{att_link}the_focus_funnel.webp" align="none" caption="The focus funnel" scale="50%"> When we're talking about POCs for stuff that's already been done---but not by us---then, OK, it gets you off the ground faster (but usually only if there is a relatively decent programmer guiding it; otherwise, you only get as far as it can go on its own and your ability to "drive" it is limited). I think these are tools that can be used like DIY: I can replace a faucet with tools I buy myself but I'm not going to install a whole toilet. I probably could but I would have to know what I was doing. I just installed a new SSD into my 8.5-year-old iMac and that's something that most people would have to take it to a specialist to do. AI tools enable more people to get into building software, just like Excel did before them. There is no reason to believe, given that we have the experience, that AI tools will encourage people to build better tools or solutions than the Excel or PowerBI revolution did. In fact, given that its reinventing everything every single time, there isn't even much building on existing software going on. You're almost always starting fresh. Even when you have an existing codebase, you're shoving in as much context as you can, energy and cost budgets be damned and telling it to "reason about it." This is an incredibly hopeful endeavor. But, if you're innovating, then you have to be really careful about how you do that. The real paradigm shift in AI is that we've now moved from building stuff we can imagine to asking what we think the tool can build for us. We had local tools that told us what was possible---without filters---and we built stuff out of that. Now, we ask an online machine to filter the world's information for us. This can be a real time-saver, of course! But it can also eliminate possible solutions from our "gaze". This might happen innocently and naturally, as the machine decides against telling you about something that it not unreasonably has determined is statistically irrelevant. But it might also be just actively blocking certain ideas, technologies, and techniques. It almost certainly will do so, in fact. It almost certainly is already doing so. Web solutions are in React and Tailwind. People are being unreasonably hopeful about what these systems can do and how much information they're being presented with. They think that "it searches the web" now, or that "the latest information is being added". This is based purely on faith. There is no incentive for these companies to emphasize actually utility and empowerment to and for you but to focus on addicting you to their technologies and then jacking up the subscription prices. There is no reason to believe that the AI tools that we have are not on an enshittification track. Even the open-source ones aren't open-source enough to use---except for DeepSeek, which will probably be banned in Europe sooner rather than later. Serendipity plays no small part in innovation. It's mostly hard work, but there's always a kernel of luck, in which you had a good idea that was triggered by...what? If you only use tools that take you over well-worn grooves, where will you ever hear about something new? Or be inspired to think of something new yourself? And please don't bring the "you sound like an old man complaining about the new world passing you by" argument. You're better than that. You're ready with well-reasoned arguments why this brave new world is better, for what and for whom. I'm not against anything generally; I just have questions that I would to have answered so that I know where I would use this tool. If the answer is "everywhere and for everything," then the bar is even higher for me, as I will then have even more trouble distinguishing your hand-waving and inability to express your argument from a scam. People are forever trying to waste your time, or commercialize your time, and you should be resisting it, and parceling out your attention very parsimoniously and carefully rather than just capitulating to whatever the algorithm or the ones shouting loudest tell you to. Perhaps I'm more resistant or ornery because I already do this with everything else. I choose the music to go in my playlists; I choose whether to listen to the radio or a random source to learn about new things, to expose myself to previously unheard music. But then, when I hear something I like, I add it and possibly its album to a playlist that I then listen to later, rating the songs, which allows newer good stuff to trickle into smart playlists that I use when I want to listen to a shuffled playlist of stuff that I personally have considered to be good. There is no algorithm, except as a very controlled input rather than the only input. I do this with news as well, generally following very specific video channels or blogs or newspapers with categorized RSS feeds (hundreds of them). My newsfeed is carefully curated but I also use Hacker News, Reddit, and newsfeeds from "mavens" to expand my palette and acquire new sources. As with music, I carefully control the algorithmic input. It's the same with movies and TV series. I make "watch later" lists and almost never just jump on what's being offered, unless I'd heard about it and was dying to check it out anyway. I sometimes use the curated movie selection at Mubi or on all of the channels on my UPC to choose movies that I might be interested in, but I almost always add them to a "watch later" list rather than just being steered into changing my priorities right then and there by circumstance. The fact that AI---and algorithms, in general---aren't deterministic makes them difficult tools for me to use for many things. I don't like the idea of having to pay 100%-focused attention to everything to make sure that I uncover the mistakes or the lies that are inherent to the tool. A search engine will also not deterministically return the same results. There was already slippage there. Wikipedia might have been edited since you last looked at it. Research relies on solid, unchanging citation sources. How do you do research, how do you build knowledge, when the sands are constantly moving about beneath your feet? From a comment on <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1j9l7ii/all_this_bad_ai_is_wrecking_a_whole_generation_of/mheyna8/">All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets | We were promised multimodal, natural language, AI-powered everything. We got nothing of the sort.</a> <bq>[...] you can accomplish detailed tasks with much less effort than it takes to detail them to an assistant, digital or physical. E.g. if I want to book a trip and have a travel booker app installed with my info saved, it legit takes me 30 seconds to book a flight, hotel, rental car etc and then I'm sure cuz I did it myself vs some janky ass AI doing it then me having for review it anyway to make sure it didn't fuck up. The utility would be at the ill defined margins, in making judgments on fuzzy things.</bq> I think this is an important point that is borne out by a lot of anecdotal evidence that coding AIs are good for prototypes. What you're describing is a sort-of prototyping of additional functionality for existing UIs. Once the value of the additional functionality has been determined, it can be converted to actual UI, which is more efficient to build, maintain, and use (rather than ad-hoc reinventing it with each query, as you do with LLMs). This is a common pattern: some tech starts off as software and, once a pattern has been established, migrates down to either FPGA-based solutions, or even then hardware-based solutions. Sometimes those hardware solutions are for slightly less-generalized hardware like graphics cards. Almost nothing starts out as a hardware-based solution. This notion of "virtualization during development" is already prevalent in industrial development, in which it's becoming ever more realistic to delay hardware development. It's acknowledged, though, that the ultimate goal is still to develop the hardware. That's kind of the difference versus the AI hype: virtualization in industrial development is considered a tool that makes development of the end-product more efficient; it's not ever considered as the end-result itself. Many AI vendors make a different argument, selling their products as creating the end-product directly, rather than a tool to help you build the end-product. I'm not saying that everyone is making that argument and that no-one is making the "AI as tool" argument, but that the loudest hype, especially from the more uninformed sources, make the nonsensical argument, which, unfortunately, has a negative side-effect on the whole area. From another comment on <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/1j9l7ii/all_this_bad_ai_is_wrecking_a_whole_generation_of/mhgvmoo/">All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets | We were promised multimodal, natural language, AI-powered everything. We got nothing of the sort.</a> <bq>there are legitimately a lot of helpful applications of generative AI. It's definitely a lot better than the NFT boom for example. Quick example: quickly writing rough drafts of emails or helping you past writers block, or generating quick images for ideating/brainstorming. For a lot of semi-technical questions (think high school or college homework-level) it can quickly solve a problem for you or run a calculation that isn't easily solvable with a basic calculator or google search so that you don't have to, as long as you are knowledgable enough at the subject to check its work (which is usually quicker than doing it from scratch). AI code assistants also speed a lot of people up. It's far too reductionist to say that the entire thing with AI is BS buzzwords even if gadget+AI from big tech companies hasn't worked out yet.</bq> Yes, a lot of people find it much more efficient to correct existing text than to produce their own text from a blank slate. Especially when working in a nonnative language (which is a loooot of people) or when you're not even that solid in your native language (also a looooot of people). <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/13/tools-colophon/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection</a> <bq>I decided that the descriptions were too long, so I modified the script to add “Keep it to 2-3 sentences” to the end of the system prompt. These new, shorter descriptions are now live—here’s the diff. Total usage was 283,528 input tokens and 6,010 output tokens for a cost of 94 cents.</bq> I'm not surprised that he asked it to shorten its descriptions. They were unbearably wordy. That's less interesting for me than that he, once again, wrote about how much it cost to run the tool. I think it's good that he explains how much it costs. I think it's a sign of how quickly we acquiesce to sea-changes in our lives without even noticing that anything has changed. I have never once had to think about how much using a tool costs me. This brave new world has commercialized keystrokes. We used to buy a tool and use it. It didn't phone home. You got an update when you bought it or when you downloaded and installed it. The next step was auto-updates. After that was subscription-based licensing, where you rented rather than owned software. Now, you neither own nor rent the software; instead, you pay for each move of your mouse. This is, of course, a coup for the companies running the software. It is a downgrade for a way of life, a way of creating. It commercializes and marketizes even more of what we do every day. Technology used to be empowering, e.g., releasing filmmakers from the burden and cost of obtaining film. Now, those same filmmakers---or the next generation of them---are once again yoked to a finite resources for which they have to pay as they go. The hope is that everyone will integrate these subscription-based, per-resource cloud resources into all of their creative workflows. This used to be the domain of B2B cloud services. Now it's coming for everything. Everything will be a subscription. You'll be dinged at every possible junction. You can either ignore the price as you work and be surprised at the bill at the end of the month ... or you can start changing your work patterns to accommodate the way the tools want you to work. This might actually be OK, though! It's how electricity works---but electricity is largely state-controlled and the prices are set at a point where most people hardly ever need to think about it. This is the case, at least for some. What about those for whom this is not the case? For those who turn off their air-conditioners because they can't afford to run it? Do we want to use this same pattern for innovation? I personally don't think so. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-search-engines-give-incorrect-answers-at-an-alarming-60-rate-study-says/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">AI search engines give incorrect answers at an alarming 60% rate, study says</a> <bq>Error rates varied notably among the tested platforms. Perplexity provided incorrect information in 37 percent of the queries tested, whereas ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 67 percent (134 out of 200) of articles queried. Grok 3 demonstrated the highest error rate, at 94 percent.</bq> <bq>For the tests, researchers fed direct excerpts from actual news articles to the AI models, then asked each model to identify the article's headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL. They ran 1,600 queries across the eight different generative search tools. The study highlighted a common trend among these AI models: rather than declining to respond when they lacked reliable information, the models frequently provided confabulations—plausible-sounding incorrect or speculative answers. The researchers emphasized that this behavior was consistent across all tested models, not limited to just one tool.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://unplannedobsolescence.com/blog/hard-page-load/" source="Unplanned Obsolescence" author="Alexander Petros">Who's Afraid of a Hard Page Load?</a> <bq>Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore. Try browsing Wikipedia (or my blog ) on a decent internet connection and notice how rarely the common elements flash (this feature is called “paint holding”). And, if the connection isn’t fast, then the browser shows a loading bar! It’s a win for users, and one of the many ways that sticking with the web primitives rewards developers over time. So if you’re a bank, or a government, or pretty much anyone with engineering resources short of “limitless,” you will likely be better served by sticking to hard page loads (and the default HTML capabilities) as much as possible. It’s dramatically easier to implement and benefits from browser performance and security improvements over time. For page responsiveness improvements, try tweaking your cache headers, scrutinizing the JavaScript you send to the client, and optimizing your CDN setup. It always pays off in the long run.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ravendb.net/articles/ravendb-7-1-write-modes" author="Oren Eini" source="Ayende">RavenDB 7.1: Write modes</a> <bq>Sometimes you get a deep sense of frustration when you look at benchmark results. The amount of work invested in this change is… pretty high. And from an architectural point of view, I’m loving it. The code is simpler, more robust, and allows us to cleanly do a lot more than we used to be able to. The code also should be much faster, but it wasn’t. And given that performance is a critical aspect of RavenDB, that may cause us to scrap the whole thing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/git/comments/1j8mumh/how_to_add_files_to_a_large_repository/" source="Reddit">How to Add files to a Large Repository?</a> Git has opt-in support for handling large files. <ul> Use the <a href="https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone#Documentation/git-clone.txt-code--depthltdepthgtcode"><c>--depth</c></a> option to control how much history to clone (good for pipelines, where you're usually only interested in the tip, so <c>depth 1</c>) Whereas <c>depth</c> controls how much you clone (size of the <c>.git</c> folder), <a href="https://git-scm.com/docs/git-sparse-checkout"><c>sparse-checkout</c></a> controls the size of your working tree. Use <a href="https://git-lfs.com/">LFS (Large File Storage)</a> to store files. This will not remove large files from existing commits. This feature is seamless to enable and well-supported throughout the ecosystem. Once you've set up LFS for future commits, you can consider removing large files from already-existing commits using something like <a href="https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/">BFG</a> and then re-adding them with LFS. </ul> <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-port/" source="Microsoft" author="Anders Hejlsberg">A 10x Faster TypeScript</a> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNlq-EVld70" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/pNlq-EVld70" width="560px" source="YouTube" author="Anders Hejlsberg" caption="A 10x Faster TypeScript"> <bq>[...] we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage. By porting the current code-base, we expect to be able to preview a native implementation of <c>tsc</c> capable of command-line type-checking by mid-2025, with a feature-complete solution for project builds and a language service by the end of the year.</bq> The discussion <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1j94cxe/c_vs_go_concurrency_model/" source="Reddit">C# vs. Go Concurrency Model</a> led me to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43332830" source="HackerNews">A 10x Faster TypeScript</a>, which included a reference to <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411" source="GitHub">Why Go? #411</a>, which explains why Go was chosen, <bq>[...] the most important aspect is that we need to keep the new codebase as compatible as possible, both in terms of semantics and in terms of code structure. We expect to maintain both codebases for quite some time going forward. Languages that allow for a structurally similar codebase offer a significant boon for anyone making code changes because we can easily port changes between the two codebases. In contrast, languages that require fundamental rethinking of memory management, mutation, data structuring, polymorphism, laziness, etc., might be a better fit for a ground-up rewrite, but we're undertaking this more as a port that maintains the existing behavior and critical optimizations we've built into the language. Idiomatic Go strongly resembles the existing coding patterns of the TypeScript codebase, which makes this porting effort much more tractable.</bq> The following image, included by a commentator, demonstrates quite nicely how idiomatically similar Go and TypeScript can be. <img src="{att_link}go_vs._typescript_code.jpg" href="{att_link}go_vs._typescript_code.jpg" align="none" caption="Go vs. Typescript code" scale="75%"> If you read the rest of the justification, the similarities extend to the guts of the respective runtimes and their approach to memory-management and concurrency, but the visual illustration makes it much clearer that this is a port and not a rewrite. A C# version---with its slightly different concurrency model and also a focus on byte-code rather than native code---would have involved much more change than this. A version in Rust would have the focus on native-code generation but would have been a complete rewrite, as a lot of the concurrency and data-sharing possible in JavaScript would have to be explicitly allowed or worked around, something that you can't always (or completely) hide with helper functions. The additional guarantees required in Rust to ensure safety would have to appear explicitly. Sure, you'd have the safety then, but it's important to remember that, when you're doing a migration, you should make sure you focus on one migration at a time. Going from TypeScript to Go will improve some type-safety (though probably not even much) and massively improve speed with a native target. If you want the additional safety of Rust, then you'd do a separate migration step from Go to Rust. There is another, longer interview video here: <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qowKUW82U" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/10qowKUW82U" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Michigan TypeScript" caption="TypeScript is being ported to Go | interview with Anders Hejlsberg"> The interviewer is the guy who just published <a href="https://github.com/MichiganTypeScript/typescript-types-only-wasm-runtime">TypeScript types can run DOOM</a>. <hr> <a href="https://seeinglogic.com/posts/visual-readability-patterns/" author="Mark" source="seeinglogic">What Makes Code Hard To Read: Visual Patterns of Complexity</a> <bq>I’m just going to end with what a mentor once told me early in my career:<bq>the person who is most likely to read your code a month from now is you.</bq></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/593" author="Corey Mohler" source="Existential Comics">The Beginning and End of Philosophy</a> <img src="{att_link}thebeginningandendofphilosophy.jpg" href="{att_link}thebeginningandendofphilosophy.jpg" align="none" caption="The Beginning and End of Philosophy" scale="60%"> <bq>Heraclitus: Yes, there will be progress in philosophy, almost certainly. Thousands of years of work from the smartest men will amount to much. but you are forgetting one thing. 99% of humans are stupid idiots, and they will make progress too. The future will have stupidity beyond our wildest imagination. Think how stupid our leaders are now, and then picture thousands of years of progress in the realm of stupidity.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8E3arXq75Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/R8E3arXq75Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="SNL" caption="Trump, Musk and Rubio Meeting Cold Open - SNL"> On SNL, Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump was terrible. James Austin Johnson's is very, very good and is actually funny. He really stands out in Cold Opens these days. The one from March 8th was very good. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDtSQVj0qzg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/oDtSQVj0qzg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="SNL" caption="Founding Fathers Cold Open - SNL"> <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-3" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">How 3</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_-_how_3.jpg" href="{att_link}smbc_-_how_3.jpg" align="none" caption="SMBC - How 3" scale="75%"> <bq>There are whole teams who just think about spacecraft shape! No single human knows how to make anything. The information is latent in the organizational structure. Like a slime mold. Exactly! This is why we can't negotiate with it. There's no leader like they don't even have "a spacecraft". They're budding off multiple spacecrafts in different areas that don't communicate.</bq>