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Links and Notes for October 31st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</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> <img src="{att_link}what_day_is_it._it_s_the_day_we_burn_this_fascist_oligarchy_to_the_ground._my_favorite_day.webp" href="{att_link}what_day_is_it._it_s_the_day_we_burn_this_fascist_oligarchy_to_the_ground._my_favorite_day.webp" align="none" caption="What day is it? It's the day we burn this fascist oligarchy to the ground. My favorite day." scale="40%"> <bq quote-style="none">"What day is it?" asked Pooh. "It's the day we burn this fascist oligarchy to the ground," squeaked Piglet. "My favorite day," said Pooh.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}no_food_for_you_until_the_democrats_let_us_take_away_your_healthcare.jpeg" href="{att_link}no_food_for_you_until_the_democrats_let_us_take_away_your_healthcare.jpeg" align="none" caption="No food for you until the Democrats let us take away your healthcare" scale="50%"> They had a Halloween party the night before the SNAP shutdown. <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1olq5s2/trump_and_friends_feast_hours_before_cutting_snap/" author="" source="Reddit">Trump and friends feast hours before cutting SNAP benefits. "May the odds be ever n your favor."</a> The title includes a citation from The Hunger Games, which is a lovely touch. <img src="{att_link}trump_s_gatsby_halloween_2025.webp" href="{att_link}trump_s_gatsby_halloween_2025.webp" align="none" caption="Trump's Gatsby Halloween 2025" scale="60%"> I didn't check whether this picture is real or generated by AI. It's not the only one I've seen and it seems wholly in character for Trump and his cadre. In that post, a commentator wrote, <bq>Gatsby-themed, no less. Seems like a huge “let them eat cake” move.</bq> To which another cited The Great Gatsby, <bq>They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.</bq> Nothing has changed in 100 years. The careless people of the roaring 20s are the careless people of whatever this decade will be called. My partner asked why they're allowed to do that during the shutdown, that if their party had been canceled for lack of funds, they might have been inspired to solve some problems instead. There is no shutdown for them. They can make funds appear out of nowhere, whenever they need them. Need $40B for Argentina? Here ya go. Wanna throw a big party? Here ya go. Wanna remodel your big, white house? Here ya go. There is no problem to fix with SNAP, as far as they're all concerned. It's all so abstract for them. People who aren't really people aren't going to get something that they never deserved in the first place. Who cares? What's to solve. This is the situation they've all been looking for. They don't care, not necessarily because they're cruel (they are) but because they literally believe that there's nothing to care about. There is no problem. This is they system working as intended. Why lift a finger to stop it? As chethinks wrote somewhere on Twitter, <bq>i grew up on free cheese and powdered milk and waiting for your friends to leave the store so they wont see me pay with stamps.. that shit aint as glamorous as it sounds. i promise.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/trumps-plan-to-lock-homeless-in-concentration" source="Substack" author="Lee Camp">Trump's Plan To Lock Homeless In Concentration Camps Becomes Reality</a> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOPo1eoPtNM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/BOPo1eoPtNM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lee Camp" caption="UNREDACTED: Trump Begins Labor Prisons For The Homeless!"> This is a great episode where Lee really hits his stride. The article covers some of the same ground. <bq>So the good dear leaders of Utah — having realized their plan to house the homeless had worked spectacularly — Did what any good Americans would do. They ended the program. They ended the program and replaced it with the old tried-and-true policy of police officers hitting homeless people with sticks while yelling “move along”. And the good leaders of Utah were sure this would not cause homelessness to shoot back up.</bq> <bq>There are 15 million empty homes in the United States. None of them must be used to house people who need a roof over their heads. They must remain empty or capitalism collapses and the Viet Cong pour over the hills.</bq> <bq>It’s illegal to house the homeless in 47 of the 50 US states. If you were to help out a homeless person for just one night, capitalism would collapse and the Viet Cong would pour over the hills.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/irelands-presidential-election-was-a-left-wing-landslide/" source="ZNetwork" author="Daniel Finn">Ireland’s Presidential Election Was a Left-Wing Landslide</a> <bq>[...] from a parliamentary speech Connolly delivered in May on the occasion of Europe Day, where she highlighted European complicity with the destruction of Gaza:<bq>I am certainly not using my words to celebrate Europe Day. I say so because it [Europe] has completely lost any moral compass, if it ever had one. . . . When we look at Europe, I have said repeatedly I am a proud European. I have intimate connections with Germany through my family and the German language. I am not here to protest that I am European. I am here to use my very short time to say that I am ashamed to be European, with its current leadership and with [Ursula] von der Leyen standing shoulder to shoulder and in solidarity with a war criminal. . . . I am ashamed to be here looking at this speech and what I am reading about Palestine and I do not use my own words because they do not suffice any more. According to the Red Cross, the situation in Gaza “will haunt us” for decades because nobody will be able to say we were not aware.</bq></bq> <bq>In September, the BBC asked her to comment on Keir Starmer’s assertion that Hamas could play no part in a future Palestinian government. She insisted that it was not Starmer’s call to make: “I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country. The Palestinians must decide in a democratic way who they want to lead their country.”</bq> <bq>The same interviewer asked Connolly if Hamas forces had committed war crimes on October 7, and she agreed that they had: “What they did was absolutely unacceptable. Both sides have committed war crimes, and hopefully both sides will be held to account.” She also said Israel was “acting as a terrorist state.”</bq> <bq>The idea that Hamas is beyond the pale while Likud is not may well be taken for granted at the EU summits that Martin frequents, but many of his fellow citizens who have watched a genocide unfold in real time for the past two years would beg to differ. Connolly refused to back down and the controversy had no impact on public opinion, with her support continuing to rise.</bq> <bq>[...] the TDs, senators, and councilors on whom McGregor was counting didn’t want to touch him with a barge pole. Just as he was gearing up to campaign for the nominations, he lost an appeal against a civil judgment that found that he had raped a woman named Nikita Hand in 2018. The court heard testimony from an emergency room doctor about the extreme brutality of the assault to which Hand had been subjected. The gruesome details of the case made it especially galling that McGregor and his supporters like to present themselves as the defenders of Irish women against the menace that immigrants allegedly pose to their safety.</bq> <bq>This champion of the Catholic right [Steen] has made an inspiring journey from her childhood days in Ballsbridge, one of Dublin’s most affluent inner suburbs, to the mansion she now shares with her husband in Blackrock, one of its most affluent outer suburbs.</bq> Lovely sarcasm. You don't see it enough these days. <bq>In her victory speech, Connolly spoke for the part of Irish society that wants to spend the coming years discussing issues that really matter instead of paranoid, conspiracist drek:<bq>I will be a president who listens, reflects, who speaks when necessary, and a voice for peace. A voice that builds on our policy of neutrality. A voice that articulates the existential threat posed by climate change. . . . Together, we can shape a new republic together that values everybody, that values and champions diversity, and that takes confidence in our own identity, our Irish language, our English language, and the new people who have come to our country. I will be an inclusive president for all of you.</bq></bq> <bq>The way that Connolly expresses herself while saying things like this — confident and articulate, without being aggressive or bombastic — is also part of her appeal at a time when dysfunctional caricatures of masculinity, from Trump to McGregor, are clogging up the landscape.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-death-house" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Death House</a> <bq>Gaza does not mark the end of the settler colonial project. It marks, I fear, its final phase. Western states, enriched by their own occupations and genocides — in India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America — are returning to their roots as they face a global climate crisis and the obscene levels of social inequality that they engineer and sustain.</bq> <bq>“Many States, primarily Western ones, have facilitated, legitimized and eventually normalized the genocidal campaign perpetrated by Israel,” the U.N. report, compiled by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, reads. “By portraying Palestinian civilians as ‘human shields’ and the broader onslaught in Gaza as a battle of civilization against barbarism, they have reproduced the Israeli distortions of international law and colonial tropes, seeking to justify their own complicity in genocide.”</bq> <bq>We will see this again. The same mass killing. The same demonization of the poor and the vulnerable. The same tropes about saving Western civilization from barbarism. The same callous indifference to human life. The same lies. The same billions of dollars in profits extracted by the war industry that will be used to suffocate not only those outside our gates, but those within them.</bq> <bq>They will use disproportionate violence to keep the desperate at bay. They will steal the fertile land, the aquifers and the rivers and lakes. They will seize by force the rare earth minerals, natural gas fields and oil. And they will kill anyone who gets in the way. Damn the United Nations. Damn the international courts. Damn international humanitarian law.</bq> <bq>Gaza, unless there is a rapid reversal in how our societies are configured and ruled, is a window into the future. It is not a freakish anomaly. War will be the common denominator of human existence. The strong will take from the weak.</bq> This period of relative peace into which I was born will be deemed by historians as an interregnum. We convinced ourselves that it would last forever but didn't put in the work. The assholes never sleep. <bq>When life is reduced to subsistence level, when disease and malnutrition is endemic, resistance can be broken.</bq> <bq>We must, through civil disobedience, shut down the machine. We must remake the world. This means removing the ruling global class. It means demolishing a society constructed around the mania for capitalist expansion. It means ending our reliance on fossil fuels. It means enforcing international law and dismantling Israel’s settler colonial and genocidal rule. If we do not succeed, Palestinians will be the first victims. But they won’t be the last.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/10/us-penal-regime-prisons-policing/" source="Jacobin" author="David Garland">Why the US Has Such a Brutal Penal Regime</a> <bq>[...] there are about a thousand civilians killed a year by police in the United States since we’ve begun to count it. According to [criminologist] Franklin Zimring, that’s almost five times the frequency per capita of Canada, twenty-two times that of Australia, forty times higher than Germany, and more than 140 times the rate of police shooting deaths in England and Wales.</bq> <bq>[...] the US has a number of punishments — the death penalty, life imprisonment without prospect of parole — which in all European nations have been long since abolished and prohibited by the European Convention on Human Rights. We also sentence people more frequently to incarceration, and we sentence them there for longer periods.</bq> <bq>[...] we have all these collateral consequences, like a criminal record that is public and commercially available. You can go on the internet and pay $20 and find out anyone’s criminal rap sheet. That criminal record lasts pretty much forever. In other countries, that information is not public. It’s only available to the criminal justice system officials, and even then it’s time-limited. Similarly, we disenfranchise felons, depriving them of a vote, in every state apart from Vermont, New Hampshire, and DC. Again, that’s not a practice you find elsewhere.</bq> <bq>In one police department in Missouri, offenders who have been tasered have to pay $25 toward the cost of using the taser.</bq> <bq>[...] the key story that I tell in the book — and this is where political economy impacts communities with criminogenic consequences — is that we have in this country some of the most immiserated, disadvantaged neighborhoods of any developed country. We have segregated, cumulatively disadvantaged communities, in which there’s been long-term joblessness, in which youth are chronically unemployed, in which housing is terrible and income support is absent — apart from women with dependent children, and even then, it’s miserable. Very poor housing, very poor schools, nothing in the way of work. In these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that many stressed-out families are not capable of supervising their adolescent children. It’s not that surprising that young men end up in illegal economies, in drugs and burglary and armed robbery and so on; it’s not surprising that street gangs form, and that levels of violence in these communities are amplified by the conditions of life there.</bq> <bq>The leading cause of death for black, non-Hispanic men in the age groups one to nineteen and twenty to forty-four is homicide.</bq> <bq>Violent crime is not the whole of the crime story. There’s a lot of crime committed by well-to-do corporate and white-collar criminals that doesn’t attract much attention. So you have to think in terms of selective criminalization, the targeted deployment of law enforcement resources, and so on. But everywhere in the world, penal power, such as the use of policing and punishment by the authorities, is always directed downward. It’s always targeted at poor people, pretty much in every developed country. If you look at Australian numbers, British numbers, Canadian numbers, German numbers — the French don’t provide racial statistics, but if you look closely at who’s in the prisons — pretty much everywhere concentrates penal power on racialized minorities as well.</bq> Instead of arresting and prosecuting them, they elect so-called white-collar criminals to office or give them Nobel peace prizes, people who cause untold misery and death with actions from which they extract massive personal profit. <bq>[...] we know that it’s a general feature of penal states and penal power that they are directed downward against the poor and against stigmatized ethnic minorities. That’s sometimes where most of the crime is, but in most states it’s also where most of the enforcement effort is.</bq> Bingo. <bq>[...] the disparities of race have lessened in the prison. It used to be the case that African American men were eight-to-one more likely to be in prison compared to white men. Now it’s five to one. It’s still scandalous, but it’s less so than it used to be.</bq> <bq>The idea that we would respond to social problems by investing in communities, with federal funding for urban centers, by providing jobs or social workers, psychiatrists, or medical care, and so on — that had already been taken off the table as the old politics. What we were looking for was a means of responding to [crime] that was not redistributive, not transferring from taxpayers to the needy, but that instead took some other form.</bq> <bq>In this country, all of the incentives are to lock people up and keep them off the streets. And because the public doesn’t care about poor black people, and because poor black people aren’t organized and have very little political representation — except for a month in the summer of 2020 — the public shrugs and says, “If they didn’t want to do the time, they shouldn’t have done the crime.”</bq> <bq>[...] the story I’m telling is about political economy, not just the welfare state. A major part of the story is about how the labor market in this country provides fewer protections and less provision for working people than pretty much any of the other developed countries do, in terms of workers’ rights, trade union rights to organize, the provision of decent wages, and the security of tenure for people who are in employment. We have a much more precarious, more flexible labor market, with the consequence that working people in this country are much more insecure than is the case elsewhere. And their income is much less stable over time.</bq> <bq>[...] in New York City, we’ve seen quite massive reductions in the number of people sent to jail. At its highest point, fifteen years ago, there were about 21,000 people on Rikers Island. Now there are about six thousand. During that time, crime rates have continued to go down.</bq> <bq>There are a whole bunch of things that can be done that fall way short of structural change at the level of the economy but still positively impact the lives of hundreds and thousands, and sometimes even millions, of people. My claim is that without structural change at the level of political economy, America’s penal state will never look like that of Canada or Britain, let alone that of the Nordic countries. But within the American bandwidth, there’s a lot of variation and possibility for progressive, important change.</bq> <bq>If we abolish the public police, it would impact rich people, but it wouldn’t be devastating for them. It would be an existential disaster for poor people. Because crime would continue to exist — we simply wouldn’t have tax-funded protection that police provide, however poorly they provide it today. Similarly, prisons exist even in peaceable, highly developed, highly egalitarian societies like Norway and Sweden. They have about a tenth of the incarceration rate we do, but they still have incarceration. Because ultimately, in any criminal system, you need measures that deal with noncompliant offenders.</bq> <bq>The reason to have the prison is basically that most penal sanctions — fines, community sanctions, probation, supervision — rely on the cooperation and compliance of the offender. The offender’s going to show up and take part in the program, or come to the court and pay their fine, or attend the supervision. If they decide not to comply, what do you do? Either you say, “You don’t want to comply? That’s fine; it was just a suggestion.” Or, realistically, you say, “This is the law. You have to comply, and we will enforce compliance.” How will we do that? We no longer use corporal punishment; we no longer use the death penalty; we no longer use banishment routinely. What we’ve all, as modern societies, come to use is confinement and incarceration. We can do that in a variety of better and worse ways; we can do it to a greater or lesser extent. Obviously the United States is doing it in ways that are utterly unacceptable. But the idea of doing without prison is something else entirely. The prison is a feature of modern society that has a whole bunch of explanations and reasons for its existence. The problem with the United States is not that it has prisons; it’s that it has terrible prisons that are way overused and impose lengthy sentences for way too many people in conditions of confinement that are altogether intolerable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/10/31/roaming-charges-122/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Grave Disorders</a> <bq>One big reason why Mamdani continues to connect with NYC residents, even amid the manufactured hysteria slandering his campaign: The average rent in New York City is $3,811, making the income required for rent to be affordable in the city at $152,440. This figure is $91,140 above the median wage.</bq> What's the median rent, though, just to be clear that we're comparing apples to apples? The figures were cited from <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/10/29/us-cities-affordable-for-single-people-one-income/" author="Jessica Coacci" source="Fortune">These are the U.S. cities where Americans can actually afford to live on a single person’s income—and the ones out-of-budget for singletons</a>, which doesn't provide any additional detail, sources, or links for these figures. <bq>Moshik Temkin: “Completely ignored in the madness of this mayoral campaign in NYC is the fact that Mamdani already defeated Cuomo in the primary and he IS the Democratic candidate. If Cuomo had won and Mamdani then decided to run as an independent, establishment Democrats would lose their minds.”</bq> Citing Donald Trump from Truth Social, <bq>I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!</bq> The Trump account is referring to a recent post that Bill Gates made about how we probably won't go extinct from climate change. He wrote this because he is a jingoist-asshole-billionaire-oligarch who thinks that mankind's highest calling is to improve the market capitalization of Microsoft. Therefore, we can't let China win the completely fictitious AI wars that Microsoft has bet a large part of its fortune and market cap on. Therefore, we need more AI data centers. Therefore, we need more electricity. But we need to build them in AMURKA to keep those yellow Chinese hordes from pouring over the hills, and AMURKA doesn't like solar and wind anymore so it looks like it's going to have to be more fracked natural gas, so we're going to have to soften the message on that. Which is going a long way to say that Billy-boy is triangulating to fight a bunch of straw-man arguments against people who think mankind will go extinct when, as Billy-boy is saying, we absolutely won't, because what Billy-boy wants to say is that, instead, we will all---well, not all of us, right, Billy-boy?---suffer immensely in climate-migration and water-resource wars as the population is decimated. But that's OK! Because we had too many useless people anyway! So, all's well that ends well. Anyway, climate change isn't as big a deal as the most extreme predictions (although it really probably is) and therefore, Trump rounds that up to saying that it doesn't exist and that he was right about everything all along. The point Gates is making is: Buy MSFT. Oh, and use AI in absolutely everything. <bq>According to a survey by the University of Chicago, only 52% of Americans believe in human-caused climate change, a drop from 55% in 2017. Belief among Democrats has fallen 5 points since then, while belief among Republicans has grown by 9 points and, among Independents, by 16 points. (42 percent of young Republicans now believe in anthropogenic warming, logging only slightly behind the rest of the country.)</bq> You see? Billy-boy's just getting on board with public opinion, baby. The people aren't feeling it, for some reason. I mean, they're feeling it in that it's just f@&king hotter now, but their TVs are cooing them, lulling them---OK, let's be honest: FOX News is shouting them---into somnolence, a digital and unending stream of soma that convinces them to mistrust their lyin' eyes. <bq author="Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor">Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty. second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two three The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop. Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe. That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight. For two to four minutes, Boyd will remain conscious while the State of Alabama kills him in this way. When the gas starts flowing, he will immediately convulse. He will gasp for air.</bq> This is capital punishment in the U.S. The eighth amendment to the Constitution of the United States doesn't exist in any real way. <bq author="Jean-Paul Sartre">Never believe that [idiots] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [idiots] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.</bq> While St. Clair replaced Sartre's use of the world anti-semite with fascist, I've replaced fascist with [idiot]. I think this lovely paragraph applies even more broadly to "idiot" than either "anti-semite" or "fascist". <bq>E. Jean Carroll on Donald Trump: “I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.”</bq> Charisma, which is a weird magnet: it attracts some like a black hole, while it repels others like an impenetrable barrier. <bq>Richard Beck on Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, a noir called Shadow Ticket: “One detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.” </bq> A lot of work---a lot of propaganda---goes into making sure that this remains the case. While a nice-sounding take, it is superficial and blames the victim. <bq author="Doris Lessing" source="The Golden Notebook">Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/ice-agent-panics-after-realizing-there-more-children-than-he-has-flash-bangs/" author="" source="The Onion">ICE Agent Panics After Realizing There More Children Than He Has Flash-Bangs</a> <bq>“Oh God, send for backup—there’s, like, 30 under 6!” the embattled agent said as he tossed one of his last remaining stun grenades at a group of girls playing hopscotch and emptied his pepper-ball rifle into a crowd of kindergartners. “I’ve zip-tied a few, but they just keep coming! There’s so many of them [...] At press time, the desperate ICE agent was seen lowering his head in silent prayer as he called in an airstrike on his location.</bq> <hr> If you were a country, would you rather be Ukraine or Palestine? After the U.S. orchestrated a coup in Ukraine, it allied itself with the United States and NATO, deciding that it would help threaten Russia with NATO's weapons. Russia spent 8 years after that coup trying to find an alternative solution in which that threat were reduced. The United States and Ukraine pushed harder until they forced Russia’s hand. It’s believable that Russia would honor a peace treaty since they clearly very reluctantly entered a war in the first place. This is evident in how quickly Ukraine and Russia nearly came to a peace treaty mere weeks after Russia's invasion. Israel, on the other hand, is the diametrical opposite of reluctant to continue the utter annihilation of Palestine. That is the expressed goal. Israel wants the land and resources. They do not want the people. They have broken every ceasefire and arrangement in the past; It would be madness to believe that they would be interested in abiding by a peace treaty. The only terms on which Israel would accept peace is through the utter annihilation of their enemy. That's not a peace treaty, though. That's surrender and extermination. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/cheney-should-have-died-alone-in" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Cheney Should Have Died Alone In A Cage</a> <bq>Dick Cheney, arguably the single government official most responsible for the expansion of US warmongering and militarism in the 21st century, has died. The worst worst war sluts of the US empire have issued statements expressing their condolences, including Democrats like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi. Because if there’s one thing that can bring Democrats and Republicans together, it’s war crimes and the slaughter of millions of middle easterners. Dick Cheney died far too old and far too free. The fact that such monsters get to pass away in their eighties surrounded by loved ones instead of alone in a cage is an indictment of our entire civilization. In a truly sane society, Richard Bruce Cheney would have lived a life of relative obscurity, working as a gardener or something without ever getting anywhere close to power. In a fairly sane society, people would have realized what a monster Cheney was before he could do any major harm in Washington, and he would have been driven out of any town he tried to enter. In a slightly sane society, he would have been punished for the rape of Iraq and lived out the rest of his life in a cell in The Hague. But we do not live in a truly sane society, or in a fairly sane society, or even in a slightly sane society. We live in the sort of society that lets a man unleash a chain of events which kills millions and displaces tens of millions causing more human suffering than the mind can possibly comprehend, and then live out the rest of his life in comfort and privilege, with zero consequences of any kind.</bq> <bq>[...] New swamp monsters have stepped in to fill his shoes and advance the same murderous and tyrannical agendas he advanced, confident that they too will suffer no consequences and live long and comfortable lives in reward for their loyal service to the US empire. Dick Cheney left a stain upon our species that we will spend the rest of our lives trying to scrub out. All decent people want our world to move in the exact opposite direction he spent his entire blood-spattered career working to steer us toward. All decent people want to undo everything that Dick Cheney was.</bq> Perfect obituary. <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/shut-up-mother-shut-up-pleads-george-w-bush-to-dick-cheney-skeleton-dressed-in-suit/" author="" source="The Onion">‘Shut Up, Mother! Shut Up!’ Pleads George W. Bush To Dick Cheney Skeleton Dressed In Suit</a> <bq>[...] a distraught George W. Bush shouted, “Shut up, Mother! Shut up!” at the skeleton of Dick Cheney dressed in a suit, sources confirmed Friday. “I’m not your little boy anymore, Mother, so why must you constantly criticize me?” said the trembling 43rd president of the United States, accusing Cheney’s remains of cruelly mocking his paintings as “girlish” and “unbecoming of a boy his age.”</bq> <bq>You’ve spent your whole life trying to make me feel small, but I’m grown now. I’m a man, Mother, a man ! Hush now, I didn’t mean to raise my voice, Mother, honest. Let Georgie come and give you a kiss.” At press time, the former president was reportedly guiding Laura Bush toward the attic while murmuring, “Mother’s finally ready to meet you.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/china-doesnt-talk-about-america-at-all/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">China Doesn't Talk About America At All</a> <bq>America always talks shit about China, but China just makes shit and barely talks about America at all. It's a bit embarrassing, don't you think? You spend all your time hating on someone, and they don't bother to hate on you in return. America gets no shout-outs in China's latest Five-Year Plan, not even in opprobrium. All China says, obliquely, is “A profound shift is taking place in the international balance of power,” while America violently loses its shit about the same situation. China continues, “Breakthroughs are accelerating in the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation,” while America is deindustrializing Europe and trying to defibrillate its economy with an AI bubble. These nations are not the same and you can see it on the page. China's sticking to its vision, while America is lashing out in a blind rage.</bq> <bq>In response to America's retardation and Europe's deindustrialization and the whole White Empire's disintegration, China only position is, “All this has created positive factors enabling China to make proactive moves in the international arena and shape a favorable external environment.” Or as Napoleon said, when your opponent is defeating themselves, let them be. While the White Empire is distracted to disintegration with multiple land wars in Asia, China is fighting no one and focused on improving life for its own citizens. This leads to very different outlooks and very different documents. American policy documents are very Empire focused and they're desperate to restart the Cold War, with China as the new red scare to drive new spending. China, on the other hand, just doesn't think like this. They're focused on their own business.</bq> <bq>In military matters China says, “The principle of building the armed forces through diligence and thrift must be fully implemented to ensure that military development is efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable.” That's not how America talks about their military, they just shovel money at it. But China already knows that their military is technically superior to America's, if unblooded, and they have no need to inflate their military budget because they're uncorrupted by blood money.</bq> <bq>China already proved that you can make AI more efficiently with DeepSeek, but OpenAI is pretending that never happened, to keep up their GPU grift. But China has no need to inflate an AI bubble because they're also not corrupted by tech money.</bq> <bq>America's goal is world domination, while China simply says, “Meeting the people’s aspirations for a better life is the immutable goal of Chinese modernization.” These are very different propositions. In many ways, America is talking past China. China isn't trying to overthrow America, they're just trying to grow their own civilization back to the relative position they were in before colonization.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/buckle-up-america-the-zohran-era" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Buckle Up, America. The Zohran Era is Here</a> <bq>Zohran Mamdani became New York City’s Mayor last night. At the victory party, his once-pal, podcaster Hasan Piker – who was also seen last night embracing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – said this in an interview: “We are in the heart of the imperial core*. This is the country that defeated the U.S.S.R., unfortunately.” Piker has said so many ostentatiously crazy things that even Mamdani had to denounce him, so he can be left aside. Look however at the beaming face of the young woman interviewing him. She has no clue what he just said. That’s why last night was a prime historical horror story.</bq> This is the same stupid take that everyone at Reason had. It's absolutely pathetic that Taibbi leads with this bullshit. His decline continues. He keeps piling on more and more evidence that there is nothing left of the inspiring journalist and writer who once wrote so inspiringly about the people versus the oligarchy. There remains only a shell of a hack and a loser who lazily reiterates FOX News talking points, in what I fear is a deliberate move to protect what he considers to be his subscription base. That's the generous interpretation; the less-generous interpretation is that he seriously believes this prattle and is just another middle-of-the-road middle-aged man who forgets all about the hoi polloi once he gets a big enough nut. There is absolutely no substantive coming from him anymore. I fear that those days are completely over. I also just noticed that his RSS Feed is still named "TK News with Matt Taibbi". Sad. It's the absolute saddest thing that irony is still dead, that sarcasm is still dead, and that a journalist who we once thought might carry the mantle of Hunter S. Thompson---who was really writing well---doesn't even have a sense of humor, irony, or sarcasm anymore and just hot-takes off of the literal meaning of an offhand joke by a Twitch streamer as if it had not only any political valence but were also an actual expression of Piker's full and honest opinion. You could try listening to more than four seconds of him before you snip them loose from context and play gotcha journalism, Taibbi, but I fear you've long since learned which side your bread is buttered on. I don't think there's anything more to see here. it's over.. I can unfortunately picture chortling at <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/mamdani-moves-mayors-office-under-childrens-hospital/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Mamdani Moves Mayor's Office Under Children's Hospital</a> or <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/state-department-issues-travel-advisory-for-new-york-city/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">State Department Issues Travel Advisory For New York City</a> because he's now so smooth-brained. It's a tragedy for a good writer. Oh, wait, you don't get it? Those headlines are hilarious because Mamdani is literally a terrorist. Because he's Muslim. Also, he's in Hamas. Which hides under hospitals and behind children, as we all know because Israel told us a million times. If you don't think all of that's hilarious, then ICE is on its way. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/eugene-debs-and-all-of-us" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Eugene Debs and All Of Us</a> <bq>On Saturday night, I witnessed a ballroom full of stout Midwesterners—railroad men and laborers, college professors and students, retirees and young parents—stand and say, in unison, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” There, in the salt-of-the-earth town of Terre Haute, Indiana, I saw the line of solidarity that runs from America’s deep past into its future. It’s still running. Have no fear.</bq> <bq>They’ve stolen our money, and they’ve stolen our time, and it’s about time we start acting like the workers who didn’t have labor law!” she hollered. “We’ve been sold a bill of goods in this country that we’re divided. We’re divided by gender, we’re divided by race, we’re divided by who we love, we’re divided by where we worship or whether we worship at all. And now they’re trying to tell us that we’re divided by Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Let me tell you something: I don’t give a fuck about politics! We’re workers. When we act together, the politics come to us.”</bq> <bq>Here’s what Eugene Victor Debs said: ‘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.’ Debs said that over 100 years ago,” Sanders thundered. “And the only thing that has changed is that instead of people on the top being worth hundreds of millions, they’re now worth hundreds of billions.” “And then Debs said this. He said, ‘In every age, it has been the tyrant, the oppressor, and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people.’</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://indi.ca/cash-is-pease/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">Cash Is Peasant</a> <bq>With cashless you are effectively renting your money from the bankers and wankers that run the place, into the ground, not coincidentally. They make the money up on their screens and you believe it on another screen, and there's nothing backing anything. No backstop if the electricity fails or government flails out at enemies. You don't own your own money without cash, instead you are owned by things. It is a rentier economy, and you rent everythings, including the means of subsistence.</bq> <bq>Convenience is just control in a red dress, dressed to impress, but leaving you heartbroken and economically depressed. Sri Lanka's economy completely blew up in a dollar crisis in 2022 because we were blowing out so much USD, and all the card transactions weren't (and aren't) helping. But we can't help ourselves, because the bourgeoisie like their convenience, and the country is whored out to tourists. It's all just rentier predation in a red dress.</bq> <bq>The rush to replace cash with card (and card with digital) is not necessarily bad, but any improvement in the hands of capitalists just leads to further oppression of the working class, as Marx said. A hammer in the hands of a builder is very different from one in the hands of a bludgeoner, and capitalism is the rule by the latter, unfortunately.</bq> <bq>The historical problem is always that rich rentier classes will eventually enslave so much of the population that the king can't do king shit (like raise armies or build pyramids). To rectify this, a king would periodically forgive the debts, or—as in Greece—a dictator would emerge to free the people from rank oligarchy. You can see how modern propaganda has got this twisted, because the oligarchs like debt slavery. The ‘rules-based order’ is really just rule by property, in property's interests, which only compounds and gets more and more carnivorous in its late stages.</bq> <bq>Cash was king, and its overthrow by cashless is not apolitical. I'm not saying you couldn't have a cashless society which is empowering, but in this society where the people do not have power, it merely entrenches and enriches the propertied interests. They collect rent on every transaction and can throw you out of the whole system if you protest.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/first-brands-are-the-cockroaches" source="Racket News" author="Eric Salzman">First Brands: Are The Cockroaches Coming Home to Roost?</a> <bq>The sales pitch for private credit firms is that they are more nimble and more knowledgeable than banks for specialized lending. Unlike banks, private credit funds do not take deposits and are not subject to the same safety and soundness checks as federal and state banks are, and hence, can take more risk.</bq> What could possibly go wrong? <bq>[...] banks have responded to the loss of loan market share to non-banks by increasing their lending to these same entities — making loans to NDFIs the fastest-growing category in US banking.</bq> That's all it takes to do an end run around regulation? Piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. <bq>Whether it’s a private credit lender, a collateralized loan obligation (CLO) manager, a high-yield loan fund manager, or a hedge fund, the need to invest all that new money in order to earn management and performance fees is paramount. Due diligence more or less flies out the window, “hot” deals are chased [...]</bq> <bq>JP Morgan is not caught up in First Brands’ collapse, but said in an earnings call that it should serve as a warning of what’s to come: “I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”</bq> <bq>[...] fuel his company’s expansion. With regard to the latter, the private credit markets afforded First Brands what is called “off-balance sheet” financing, which generally involves a company selling short-term receivables, or invoices, from customers such as Walmart to a third party to immediately receive payment. This is often referred to as “invoice factoring.”</bq> Isn't this what the Wirecard Scandal was doing in Germany? <bq>This type of business has been done for centuries so that companies such as First Brands can manage their supply chain cash flow timing. Because the transactions involve the sale of an asset (the receivable or invoice), the transaction is not recorded as debt, hence, “off-balance sheet financing.” It has been alleged but not proven yet that First Brands “double pledged” invoices. This would be akin to pledging your house as collateral to two or more different mortgage lenders, with each lender unaware of the other’s lien on the property.</bq> That's what I believe was behind the Wirecard Scandal in Germany as well. <hr> I'd recently heard about a book called Rich dad poor dad but I had no idea what it might be about. So I checked out the reviews at Amazon and chose to show the "most critical" ones. The review <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1XG0Y2F8LHR1U?ie=UTF8" author="" source="">Rich Dad is rich because he's a swindler</a> wrote the most about the book itself. <bq>Most of the book attempts to motivate the reader to learn more- to get a financial education - BUT doesn't provide the education! If you aren't doing well, it's because you didn't want it enough. It's because you didn't educate yourself enough. It's because you didn't understand the reading. Etc. etc. Much like many multilevel marketers insist that you'd be making tons of money "if only." In fact, he has an entire chapter devoted to telling the reader that their failures are because of their fear, cynicism, laziness, bad habits, and yes, arrogance. For those who aren't familiar, the Poor Dad is his biological dad, who is constantly made an example of because he isn't an entrepreneur- he's educated, he works for a living etc. The Rich Dad is his childhood friend's dad, who is a big entrepreneur in his home town. The Rich Dad imparts his wisdom to Kiyosaki and his childhood friend through inscrutable one-liners. For example, poor dad recommends that Kiyosaki stay in school because of his fear that Kiyosaki won't find a safe, secure job if he doesn't. Rich dad pays his employees pennies and enjoys their living in fear which the author says <iq>sounded cruel at the time...</iq></bq> <bq>He waxes on about how Rich dad left school at 13 but had educated people working for him. About 180 pages in, he does give a short example of how he used a $2k loan spent on a foreclosed home and sold the house below market value gaining a $40k profit in the space of five hours. But this is pretty much the only concrete example in the book. He justified this by saying if the home purchase fell through, he could easily re-sell the house at market value and charge a loan processing fee to boot. Later on, he tries to motivate the reader to the entrepreneur path by telling them that the alternative to retirement plans and 401ks is the "silver bullet" - blowing one's brains out.</bq> <hr> I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks back, about the economy and AI. I've included some lightly edited citations below. Everyone should be nervous. The economy is even more ridiculously stupid than it usually is. Just utterly fake and fantastical and fabricated. It's hard even to say what is going to implode first. You think it'll be AI or Crypto or both ... and then it's car-loan companies collapsing because they CDO-ed and CDS-ed ALL THE THINGS, like, AGAIN, and there are now billions of dollars worth of margin calls unwinding their way through a financial system woefully unprepared for it. It should be fun watching the Trump administration try steering the ship of state through those choppy waters because money has to go where it will be used, and they only know how to give it away to those who just want to have it. <bq>Friend: They are betting they can keep the tech AI bubble going for two more years</bq> That's a long time, I think. They need to make some money appear but it's an uphill battle. They need more time to unwind their positions. Sam Altman is a Svengali. I've never seen anyone collect more money for less value. He's a fool, of course. Like, just utterly, sadly dumb to listen to. He has no coherent worldview. He's used to people assuming he's smart, so he has this intelligent-sounding style, which works fine until you pay attention to what he's actually saying. Hey! That's just like ChatGPT. What an odd coincidence. But people give him lots of money. So, I guess he wins capitalism. <bq>Friend: By aggressively cutting the rates they can prolong it. But hard to imagine it would last much longer</bq> Especially with how aggressively they've had to raise prices lately. It's like they forgot that you have to capture the market before you start milking it. They think they can skip steps. We'll see. It's the same with Hegseth and Trump at their latest rally with the generals. They think that they can get crazy-stupid before they take authoritative control. They have to get utter control first before you can go all Kim-Jong-Un or Ferdinand Marcos. Otherwise people aren't scared enough not to just laugh you out of the room. Back to AI: you have to get people hooked before you raise prices. They think people are hooked because they believe their own hype. That's a mistake, I think. Same with the Trump administration and that whole coterie of fools. They're believing their own hype before the suckers do. Rookie mistake. It shows how over-the-hill Trump is now. A younger Trump would never have screwed up an easy con like this one. <hr> Every company seeks to be successful. Each company should be clear on what that means to it. A company that is successful has found approval. But from which groups? And how much power and wealth do those groups have? Are they willing of able to transfer enough value back to the company to be able to compensate it for the value that it provided? Is the exchange of value sustainable? That is, is the amount of value the company requires as input in order to create the value it generates, which it uses to gain approval from one or more groups---and thus, success---sufficient to keep the cycle going? Any company must be realistic about which groups are available and what their relative power and wealth are---i.e., to what degree are they able to provide commensurate value as an expression of their approval. In the world of 2025, wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of those who tend to approve of high-margin, low-input, quick-return investments---except for AI, which seems to be a mass psychosis---so companies with principles or a purpose have to tread very carefully here, lest they go out of business or lose themselves to the Borg. That is, one must find groups that both align with one's principles and are also have the means to be able to sustain the symbiotic relationship outlined above. If they don't have means, then the company succeeds only for a short while, which is small comfort. If the company seeks the approval of groups that will force it to compromise its principles, then it has succeeded on other terms than those which it set out for itself. The latter is the common case. Remember, this is a world that promoted Elizabeth Holmes's company Theranos to a $23B valuation before it finally collapsed like a soufflé. Her company was to build a biomedical tool that would disrupt and revolutionize the medical-testing industry. Her and inner circle's utter lack of any experience in the field was viewed as a positive because that meant they weren't tainted by what came before. Theranos sought success through pretending to provide disruptive innovation. It was obviously utterly uninterested even in the field in which it purported to be disrupting, as evidenced by the fact that its machines utterly failed to work. Often, the more useful innovation is sustaining innovation, which provides increased value and satisfaction to existing customers without throwing away everything that came before. Also often, the only real change sought by purveyors of so-called disruptive innovation is to line themselves up as the benefactors of a system in place of the existing players. The problem they see is that they personally are not getting paid. Their only aim is to change that. They will wreak all sorts of havoc, selling all sorts of scams, in order to remediate that deficiency. Whether customers benefit from the new constellation doesn't matter at all. This pattern repeats often enough. Cable TV was a mess. Streaming TV fixed it, right? Of course not. It's just as big and expensive and inscrutable a mess as it ever was but there are now different groups of people benefitting from the mess. Or it's the same groups of people, acting under different corporate identities. A player like Netflix was able to carve out a piece for itself. Uber also disrupted just long enough get rid of all competitors and then jumped prices right back up to where they were before it existed, this time with the added benefit of impoverishing the people that perform more of its work, deeming them independent contractors, which conveniently frees Uber of an societal obligation to its employees. You'll often find that "innovation"---disruptive innovation---consists mainly of finding a possibly temporary loophole past regulations that benefit everyone but disruptive innovators. There's a lot of fancy language to dress it up, but much of what we fete as disruptive innovation is really just piracy and plunder in a pretty dress. It's the worst elements of our society being rewarded for using their sociopathic gift of not having any empathy at all to brazenly break the laws---juristic and moral---that the rest of us follow. <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics" author="" source="Wikipedia">Trickle-down economics</a> <bq>rickle-down economics, also known as the horse-and-sparrow theory [...] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.</bq> I learned this from Bruce Ware in this two-hour discussion, where he joyously described how "trickle down" is actually a much more generous characterization than the original one of portraying the everyone who's not rich as sparrows who have to pick undigested oats out of the shit of a horse---rich people---that's been fed so much that it is literally incapable of processing it all---i.e., the rich can't even do anything with all of the money that the state is ensuring they get that some of it is bound to slip through their fingers or, in this analogy, slide largely untouched through their digestive tract---and, to be clear, the plan is for the poor to pick their food out of the shit of the rich. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRmsacWQn-g" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/SRmsacWQn-g" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bad Faith | Briahna Joy Gray" caption="Drs. Wolff & Ware DESTROY Gavin Newsom on AIPAC/Housing/Economy (w/ Richard Wolff & Butch Ware)"> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/07/hdil-n07.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Elon Musk, world’s richest man, awarded $1 trillion pay package</a> <bq>In 1965, a typical CEO made 20 times the pay of an average worker. This figure reached 122 in 2016 [sic. Presumably 2006] and grew to 348 by 2016. In the past 12 months alone, the 10 richest US billionaires became approximately $700 billion richer. Over this period, their wealth grew by a staggering 40 percent, from $1.79 trillion to $2.5 trillion. Earlier this week, the Oxfam charity reported that since 2020, the inflation-adjusted wealth of the ten richest men in America has increased six-fold. Elon Musk, whose wealth stood at $33 billion in March 2020, has since surged to $469 billion, a 14-fold increase.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/07/cowp-n07.html" author="Claude Delphian" source="WSWS">“We’re reaching a tipping point”: Unpaid air traffic controllers calling off sick as US government shutdown continues</a> <bq>US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy warned Wednesday of “mass chaos” if the government shutdown continued. “You will see mass flight delays. You’ll see mass cancellations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it, because we don’t have the air traffic controllers.”</bq> Big-brain move here: just replace air-traffic controllers with AI, baby. AI is so awesome, and so flawless now, so, like, who wouldn't want to have an AI land their plane? Oh, what? You say they can't do that? Why not? Oh. They're not flawless? Like, not even close? Really? But why are we using AI in so many other places then? What? I can't hear you. Speak up. Because those places don't do anything important. Huh. Interesting. So AI is only good for stuff that doesn't matter? Wait, my job doesn't matter? Not really, no. Why else would people think it could be replaced by a digital tombola? Wake-up moments are harsh, ammirit? Welcome to the thunderdome, bitch. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/07/cowp-n07.html" author="Claude Delphian" source="WSWS">“We’re reaching a tipping point”: Unpaid air traffic controllers calling off sick as US government shutdown continues</a> <bq>[...] morale was already low before the government shutdown, due to long-term staffing shortages previously reported by the WSWS. Years of mandatory overtime and stagnant wages also contributed to poor morale, severely aggravated now by failing to get paid at all. “I work with people that are working a second job at night and are just calling in sick in the morning when they can’t go to the job that doesn’t pay them because they’re too tired,” said one approach controller who handles traffic at a major US airport.</bq> <bq>The system has never fully recovered and has lurched from crisis to crisis until now. This 2025 federal government shutdown could become a crisis that the aviation system will not recover from, requiring a large number of permanent flight reductions. Such an event would massively impact the economy as well as jobs in the entire aviation industry and adjacent industries such as freight.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect" source="Wikipedia">Overview effect</a> <bq>The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus". The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer's self concept and value system, and can be transformative. Immersive virtual reality simulations have been designed to try to induce the overview effect in earthbound participants.</bq> <bq>Author Frank White, who in the 1980s coined the term overview effect after interviewing many astronauts, said that the overview effect is "beyond words", requiring experience to understand, even likening it in this regard to Zen Buddhism.[9] He said that astronauts' very first views of the planet were generally very significant, adding that some experience the effect "in a moment" while in others it grows over time; and generally that the effect "does accumulate".</bq> Is this just a U.S.-American thing? Like, does it require your focus to be so localized that you experience a greater effect because the gap between what your worldview was before and what you perceive from space is much larger? <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/06/lmlj-n06.html" author="Thomas Scripps" source="WSWS">Capitalism failing on all 45 indicators of climate progress</a> <bq>The United Nations’ “Emissions Gap Report 2025” shows the planet is on course for 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial average by the end of this century based on current policies. If current climate commitments are implemented, temperatures will still rise by 2.3-2.5 degrees. This is a looming catastrophe for billions around the world. The Earth has not yet passed the 1.5 degree warming mark for a sustained period and already this has led to historic droughts, heatwaves, floods, wildfires, storms and ocean acidification; widespread crop failures, species extinction and the more extensive spread of disease.</bq> <bq>[...] the projections are based on “overshoot” models which assume temperatures will rise higher than their end-of-decade figure, then be reined in by the removal of massive quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. This relies on technology and methods unproven or potentially harmful at such a scale.</bq> Pretty much everything is a fairy tale now. We can't be straight about what AI can or could do. We can't be straight about what the economy is doing or for whom. We can't be straight about what is happening to the climate. Our inability to acknowledge reality--- because there is significant short-term gain to be had by some in not acknowledging reality---drastically limits our ability to plan. OK. It is diametrically opposed to our ability to plan. OK, people are making plans, but only for how they personally can make more money---I'm thinking of those Golgafrinchans stuffing dead leaves in their tracksuits---while screwing over everyone else. Their short-term gain eclipses everything, including the future survival of their own future selves, even just a few years from now. Instead, they fervently believe that (A) everyone who suffers isn't really a person or is a being incapable of feeling suffering so you don't have to worry your pretty little head about it at all if you and your lifestyle are either the direct or proximate cause of that suffering because it;'s like worrying about whether a rock feels bad when you step on it to cross a river and (B) some smart person or people is going to altruistically invent something that saves you from yourself because you don't understand technology or engineering and are incapable of distinguishing it from magic. You won't waste a single second wondering whether any of those cogs keeping your world going should be compensated in any way commensurate to their contributions because you already fervently believe that this is always the case because, I mean, look at how much value you're extracting from society for seemingly no value in return, there must be a reason for it, otherwise you'd be a bad person and you're not a bad person, you're a good---if not great, if not the greatest---person because otherwise why would you have been rewarded so richly, right? So if they aren't being compensated, it's their own fault: either they're losers and mooches or they just don't get how things work and that's on them. <bq>To limit warming to 1.5 degrees, the report explains, carbon emissions need to be cut by 55 percent in the next ten years, and then 66 percent in the subsequent fifteen, while 5-15 years’ worth of carbon emissions are removed from the atmosphere. This is a civilizational challenge which the increasingly barbaric capitalist system is incapable of meeting in a world divided into competing nation states, with the major imperialist powers escalating trade and military war to secure the right of the financial oligarchy to plunder essential resources.</bq> <bq>If world governments are to meet 1.5 degree-aligned end-of-decade targets, and stay on track through to 2035, these are just some of the steps which must be taken:<ul>Coal generation must be phased out more than ten times faster, closing 360 average-sized coal-fuelled power plants a year. Deforestation must be reduced nine times faster. Affordable and reliable public transport systems in the world’s heaviest emitting cities must be constructed five times faster, building 1,400 km of light and metro rail and bus routes every year. Solar and wind power’s share of electricity generation must be expanded at double the recent rate. Consumption of beef, lamb and goat in high-consuming regions must fall five times faster.</ul></bq> <bq>In many countries, social life has been so distorted by the profit motive such that even the average person unavoidably uses more carbon a year than the global per capita limit if global heating is to be kept even to 1.5 degrees Celsius: roughly 2 tonnes of CO2. In Europe, the per capita emissions for the middle 40 percent income group was 10.7 tonnes in 2019, in North America 21.8 tonnes.</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/10/29/gwgs-o29.html" source="WSWS" author="Benjamin Mateus">Why the poor die 9 years earlier than the rich: An interview with Dr. Marc Cohen</a> <bq>The United States spends nearly $4.9 trillion a year on healthcare (more than $14,000 per person) yet achieves the shortest lives and highest inequality among its peers. A quarter of that spending is lost to administrative waste and market complexity, while less than 3 percent goes to prevention or public health infrastructure. The result is a system optimized not for health but for the extraction of profits. Public health, once conceived as a collective good, has become the “poor relation of medicine,” funded only when a crisis makes neglect impossible to ignore.</bq> <bq>As co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center at UMass Boston, his work bridges academia and policy, quantifying what ideology obscures: that the premature deaths of millions of older Americans are not accidents of lifestyle but outcomes of design. His findings expose the moral arithmetic of a system in which physical survival itself is stratified by wealth. In the following interview, Dr. Cohen reflected on what these data reveal about the nation’s priorities, the consequences of decades of privatization and what must change if longevity is to be treated as a social right rather than a financial privilege.</bq> <bq>Our report shows that more than half of older households in the lower 60 percent of the wealth distribution are below the Elder Index. This means they must cut back on basic necessities just to remain in their communities. Among those in the bottom 20 percent, roughly 90 percent fall below the Elder Index. Many rely on programs like Medicaid or SNAP for nutrition assistance, but those safety nets are under threat.</bq> <bq>These policies raise out-of-pocket costs for healthcare and food while imposing work requirement rules that push vulnerable people off programs they depend on. The idea that these are “able-bodied” individuals is simply false. Many are older adults with chronic conditions or disabilities.</bq> <bq>The demographics of these people are as follows: four in five are women, one in four are 50 or older, their average household size if 4.4 with no child dependents, 70 percent have a high school diploma or less, one in four live in rural areas, 79 percent have worked within the past five years and 30 percent are looking for work.</bq> <bq>[...] administrative burdens placed on recipients across states. What we found is when you make people constantly re-verify eligibility or provide extensive documentation, participation dramatically declines. People drop out not because they no longer qualify, but because they can’t keep up with the paperwork.</bq> <bq>What you just described—people who are above the federal poverty level but below the Elder Index—we refer to as living in the gap. Eligibility for most federal programs is based on the poverty line, so if you’re “in the gap,” you’re technically not poor enough to qualify for assistance, yet you can’t afford basic needs. You’re living on the edge—one crisis away from falling into poverty.</bq> <bq>I would argue that a health system operating under the current socio-economic structure of society seems to encourage shorter lives among the poor because they’re economically inconvenient to keep alive.</bq> <bq>I think it shows that, as a nation, we’ve come to accept an extraordinary level of income and resource inequality. Historically, we’ve tried to blunt its impact through the social safety net, but at some point we must ask, “When do we decide to close these gaps rather than just soften their consequences?” When you know that your fellow citizens, people who have worked their entire lives, are likely to live almost a decade less simply because of their economic position, that should trouble all of us. And this isn’t about people refusing to work. Many of those in the lower wealth brackets are working class Americans doing essential jobs: the person pumping gas, the grocery clerk, the home care aide. They keep society running, but their work doesn’t produce the kind of wealth that insulates against hardship. In a society like ours, where value is measured in capital accumulation, that kind of labor is invisible, even though it’s indispensable. And it is worth mentioning, that many of these jobs were deemed to be “essential” and these workers considered to be “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do we want people whom we deem as “essential” to have to give up on so many years of life?</bq> <bq>The social determinants of health—nutrition, housing, environment and the dignity with which people are treated—are all part of the same story. Together they reveal the real meaning of inequality; not just fewer years of life, but lives lived with far fewer options often accompanied by feelings of disrespect.</bq> <bq>I’ve argued for years that we need a true social-insurance model for long-term services and supports, where everyone pays in and receives a basic level of coverage when care is needed. What we have now barely qualifies as a “system.” In fact, I’ve been told that even calling it a system gives it too much credit.</bq> <bq>So, we say we value our elders, the people who built this country, but we entrust their care to a workforce that’s largely underpaid, undervalued and increasingly unstable. The people providing that care, many of them immigrants and women of color, are essential workers doing some of the hardest labor imaginable. They’re the backbone of the system, and yet the system doesn’t work for them either.</bq> <bq>In my experience, you also need an economic argument alongside the moral one. Policymakers need to see that inequality and underinvestment harm the economy. When workers must reduce their hours, turn down promotions, or leave the labor force to care for aging relatives, that affects employers, productivity and state revenues. There’s a direct cost to doing nothing.</bq> People are generally trained to be unprincipled, morality-free, ego-driven, and interested only in money. It doesn't matter how much other people suffer, as long as people don't know them personally and their own personal numbers keep going up. And the contrary applies as well: it doesn't matter how many people are helped by a policy if their own personal numbers go down. We are pretty much garbage, as far as basic morality goes. <bq>if you rely solely on the moral argument, it won’t be enough. We have 200 years of social policy history showing that change only occurs when moral conviction combines with economic pressure and grassroots demand. The real obstacle isn’t one ideology versus another but inertia. Doing nothing is the default.</bq> That bespeaks a society with a moral vacuum at its core. A failure full of immoral detritus that LARP as conscious beings. <bq>[...] given this level of corporate control and market distortion, how optimistic are you that policymakers will listen to such voices and empirical data instead of the corporate interests that profit from keeping the system just as it is?</bq> <bq>What concerns me most right now are the ongoing attacks on the social safety net. That’s what really keeps me up at night.</bq> But where do you think this comes from? The people in charge don't care about suffering, they don't care about economic loss for the state. Their personal number goes up, and their ideological scratch is simultaneously itched. Their dogma lines up perfectly with their self-interest, their sweet spot. <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-end-of-the-whisper" source="Hinternet" author="Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi">The End of the Whisper</a> <bq>The drama of Iblīs (called Satan, Shaitān, Azāzīl, Lucifer, the Adversary, the Accuser) is not a simple tale of rebellion. It is the story of intellect unmoored from humility. It is the tragedy of one who knew too much of himself and not enough of the mercy that made him.</bq> <bq>Theologians such as Al-Tabarī and Al-Ghazālī record that Iblīs’s devotion was unmatched, his worship unbroken across ages. He knew the names of the heavens, the natures of the stars. Knowledge, to him, was proof of worth. When the divine command came, “Prostrate before Adam”, he refused. His refusal was not ignorance but logic. “I am better than him,” he said, “You created me from fire and created him from clay.” (Qur’an 7:12). It was a philosophical statement, a hierarchy of substances. Fire rises, clay sinks; fire transforms, clay endures. The reasoning was impeccable, but divinity does not bend to human or jinn logic. It was the first instance of intellectual pride masquerading as truth.</bq> <bq>There is a cruelty in how God grants him what he asks. To be denied is to be forgotten; to be granted time is to live with the unbearable weight of endless memory. Knowledge demands remembrance, and remembrance sustains suffering. The gift of time becomes the curse of continuity.</bq> <bq>God, knowing what He made of him, allows him to persist so that humanity might see itself in the reflection, how the very faculty that elevates us also endangers us. Knowledge, when stripped of awe, turns to rebellion.</bq> <bq>Every interpretation risks distortion; every utterance risks vanity. Hence, the repeated Islamic invocation a‘ūdhu billāhi min ash-shayṭānir-rajīm (“I seek refuge in God from the accursed devil”) precedes recitation of scripture. The reciter must first expel the whisperer before approaching the Word. The structure of piety itself acknowledges the proximity between holiness and its corruption.</bq> <bq>Knowledge, language, and longevity form a triad of divine gifts turned into tests. Knowledge grants vision but demands humility. Language grants expression but demands integrity. Time grants continuity but demands remembrance of death. Iblīs’s blessings (knowledge, long life, eloquence) become his ruin because he hoarded them without surrender. The Word that animated him became the Word that condemned him.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxSJsFD-jKo" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/jxSJsFD-jKo" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Critical Drinker" caption="The Witcher Season 4 - A Show So Awful, It Broke Me"> The review describes, in a mocking tone---as if they'd been wholly made up by the show writers---plot points that come straight from the books. Their handling may have been botched in the show (dunno; didn't watch) but they came straight from the source material. The "Rats", Yennefer's search, Emhyr's plans, Ciri being in a gay relationship (in the books she was drugged and raped not seduced), Geralt's non-presence in the story, Ciri's positioning as the next witcher, the girl-boss feel, etc. You don't have to have read the books to make a review of the show but you're making it sound like the writers made up all of this out of whole cloth, when this is what the books were like. Your premise and conclusion are the same as always for you, but not appropriate this time. Critical Drinker has jumped the shark. He's AI now. <hr> Speaking of which... <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-is-still-starving-gaza-and" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Israel Is Still Starving Gaza, And Other Notes</a> <bq>I saw a clip of Joe Rogan telling Elon Musk that AI music is his “favorite music now,” gushing about how soulful and moving it is. Imagine admitting this about yourself in public. AI art is shallow, vapid sensory stimulation made for shallow, vapid people who don’t have enough depth and dimensionality in their consciousness to be moved by profound arisings from the human spirit. They’re just stimulus-response amoebas. If you tell me you love AI art I won’t try to convince you, I’ll just side-eye you, because while you may not realize it, you are telling me something very revealing about yourself. People who think AI art is awesome are the AI art of people.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> From a conversation with a friend from a few weeks back. In fairness, "LOL ur gay" crushed in the 70s and 80s as well. The shine was off that diamond of a joke by the time I got to university when seemingly everyone was gay (j/k ... but having grown up in a small village, I could only really think of one or two people I'd ever met who presented as gay enough for me to detect it, whereas it felt like half of the people I met were gay in those first couple of months). I think jokes are difficult because you need a certain level of mental nimbleness, meta-thinking, and background to understand a lot of them as they were intended. "HAWHAW he said 'retard'" is some people's sweet spot, whereas the joke is actually laughing at "people who would think that something is funny just because it has the word 'retard' in it." Saying "that person has no sense of humor" almost always means either "they're too dumb to get the real joke" or "they will be positively remunerated in some fashion for not getting the joke" (either directly in the form of a salary, or with cachet or standing in a group). This applies to those considered "classically" woke—who can't take jokes about myriad groups on whose behalf they feel/felt it is/was their duty to be offended—as well as the "nouveau"-woke snowflakes storming the stage in droves right now, who can't take a single joke about their tangerine tyrant because "it's not funny because he's trying to save us all", etc. <hr> Later, we were talking about the School of the Americas, which he'd just heard about for the first time ever, in connection with South American gangs. I mean, of course the MS13 furore is a lie. The only part of peoples' consciences left functioning tells them that they're supposed to do things for reasons, and especially when they want to do bad things. So the lizard-brained elites cook up something but they're not that smart and they're not invested in the endeavor, so they just make up stupid lies and then they work with all the other conscience-free assholes to make it truth. A bonus is that people who don't buy into it spend an inordinate amount of time trying to debunk these stories instead of enacting the revolution that we so sorely need. An excellent source for learning about the impact of the "School of the Americas" is William Blum. I read "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" just after 9-11 and they helped radicalize my ass. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/they-tortured-lambs-in-the-west-bank" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">They Tortured Lambs In The West Bank</a> <bq>Israel can’t keep going like this. Humanity can’t keep going like this. We need better systems. Better ideologies. Better motivators driving our behavior. All our systems which drive cruelty and abusiveness around the world need to go the way of the dinosaur. Zionism. Capitalism. Imperialism. All our competition-based systems which pit us against other people, other ethnicities, other countries, and our own biosphere. We need to move into collaboration-based systems which advance justice, equality, and well-being for all of earth’s creatures. Because what we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.html" author="Yossi Kreinin" source="" date="December 31st, 2015">People can read their manager's mind</a> I find this writing style a bit too stream-of-consciousness and jumbled. I feel like there’s a better essay hiding in there. The point is a good one, of course: be aware that you're not telling people one thing and rewarding another. If you're surprised when you consistently get the latter rather than the former, then check back to see whether this isn't happening to you. Introspection is called for. The rare employee will value the claimed goal enough to sacrifice all sorts of short-term reward, even if no long-term reward is in the offing. If they’re lucky, they manage a sea-change that ends up sluing the company ship around to be more in alignment with claimed goals. That’s more of a "I’m just gonna do my thing (A), which is what you say your thing is (also A), even though we both know that your behavior proves that you value (B) more, but you’re, like, ashamed of it, or whatever, so you keep pretending to want A. I will use the sheer force of my personality, reputation, and the fact that reality proves me out to achieve (A) eventually." Employees that keep their bosses honest and make them eat their vegetables, is what I’m saying. An unaddressed point in the essay would be why would someone do (B) while saying they want (A)? Are there perverse incentives or pressures? Is the behavior perhaps understandable when you know, e.g, the budget situation? Or the time pressure? Or the quality of available personnel? Or other externalities that have nothing to do with the quality of the product’s construction, but more the context within which the product exists? Like, we’ve known for years and years and years that we need better testing, that we need to be more aware of security. It’s just that the problem keeps getting bigger and bigger the longer you wait. There’s never any time for working on it, or not enough time, or it’s too hard to figure out how to plan how to get from where we are to where we want to go, and there are too many people around who don’t want to bother thinking about it, or being explicit about the reasons for decisions that they take, and just say "we can’t afford it", which may be _currently true_ or "true for the simplistic implementation that they’re capable of envisioning (stop the world and write a million tests)", so they hand-wave away _any_ possible improvements that might eventually lead to a situation in which we have both (A) and (B). <hr> A lot of people think in terms of solutions rather than requirements. For example, they'll say that they're working to "put their kids through college," but what they really want is for "their kids to have a good life." Going to collect is simply one possible way of achieving that goal but it's not the goal. Perhaps they might formulate the goal a little more concretely, as they want "their kids to be well-informed, well-educated, moral, and principled people." Now, it kind of feels like the college track might be an indoctrination program that might put them onto a track for success in their society but there's also a good chance that it will torpedo that goal. Maybe they'll say they want "their kids to have security, financial, physical, and mental." Hey, now what does college have to do with that? What does loading up on debt in the hopes that your kid will meet a nepo-baby whose parents will get your kid a good internship that they can hopefully leverage into a full-time position where they'll be a cog in the financial machine that is trying to scam people like their parents out of their saving in order to get a good Christmas bonus and maybe a toot of cocaine off an exotic dancer's boobs in the bathroom at the office Christmas party? This kind of thinking---accepting your requirements defined in terms of proposed solutions---ends up forcing people to choose from a menu of options prepared for them by people who don't have their best interests in mind. Those preparing the options have their own best interests in mind, so they only offer options where people's choices and behavior will end up benefitting other, already-rich-and-powerful people, rather than accomplishing their own goals, rather than fulfilling their own requirements. Their productive gains won't go to themselves, nor have they been trained to expect them to. They've been trained to pick menu 1, 2, or 3---and have been deeply indoctrinated against even considering order off-menu. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/07/roaming-charges-the-evil-dead/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Evil Dead</a> <bq author="Herbert Marcuse">The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a ‘biological’ need.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/new-physical-attacks-are-quickly-diluting-secure-enclave-defenses-from-nvidia-amd-and-intel/" source="Ars Technica" author="Dan Goodin">New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel</a> <bq>All three chipmakers exclude physical attacks from threat models for their TEEs, also known as secure enclaves. Instead, assurances are limited to protecting data and execution from viewing or tampering, even when the kernel OS running the processor has been compromised. None of the chipmakers make these carveouts prominent, and they sometimes provide confusing statements about the TEE protections offered. Many users of these TEEs make public assertions about the protections that are flat-out wrong, misleading, or unclear. All three chipmakers and many TEE users focus on the suitability of the enclaves for protecting servers on a network edge, which are often located in remote locations, where physical access is a top threat.</bq> <bq>This research shows that server-side TEEs are not effective against physical attacks, and even more surprising, Intel and AMD consider these out of scope. If you were expecting TEEs to provide private computing in untrusted data centers, these attacks should change your mind.</bq> <bq>The maker of the Signal private messenger assures users that its use of SGX means that “keys associated with this encryption never leave the underlying CPU, so they’re not accessible to the server owners or anyone else with access to server infrastructure.” Signal has long relied on SGX to protect contact-discovery data.</bq> <bq>“We don’t know where the hardware is,” Daniel Genkin, one of the researchers behind both TEE.fail and Wiretap, said in an interview. “From a user perspective, I don’t even have a way to verify where the server is. Therefore, I have no way to verify if it’s in a reputable facility or an attacker’s basement.” In other words, parties relying on attestations from servers in the cloud are once again reduced to simply trusting other people’s computers. As Moore observed, solving that problem is precisely the reason TEEs exist.</bq> <bq>TEE.fail works not only against SGX but also a more advanced Intel TEE known as TDX. The attack also defeats the protections provided by the latest Nvidia Confidential Compute and AMD SEV-SNP TEEs. Attacks against TDX and SGX can extract the Attestation Key, an ECDSA secret that certifies to a remote party that it’s running up-to-date software and can’t expose data or execution running inside the enclave. This Attestation Key is in turn signed by an Intel X.509 digital certificate providing cryptographic assurances that the ECDSA key can be trusted. TEE.fail works against all Intel CPUs currently supporting TDX and SDX.</bq> <bq>This weaker form of encryption wasn’t always used in TEEs. When Intel initially rolled out SGX, the feature was put in client CPUs, not server ones, to prevent users from building devices that could extract copyrighted content such as high-definition video. Those early versions encrypted no more than 256MB of RAM, a small enough space to use the much stronger probabilistic form of encryption. The TEEs built into server chips, by contrast, must often encrypt terabytes of RAM. Probabilistic encryption doesn’t scale to that size without serious performance penalties. Finding a solution that accommodates this overhead won’t be easy. One mitigation over the short term is to ensure that each 128-bit block of ciphertext has sufficient entropy. Adding random plaintext to the blocks prevents ciphertext repetition. The researchers say the entropy can be added by building a custom memory layout that inserts a 64-bit counter with a random initial value to each 64-bit block before encrypting it.</bq> <bq>“It’s a really hard problem,” Moore said. “I’m not sure what the current state of the art is, but if you can’t afford custom hardware, the best you can do is rely on the CPU provider’s TEE, and this research shows how weak this is from the perspective of an attacker with physical access. The enclave is really a Band-Aid or hardening mechanism over a really difficult problem, and it’s both imperfect and dangerous if compromised, for all sorts of reasons.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.20min.ch/story/ki-security-finger-weg-von-den-neuen-ki-browsern-103443168" author="Michael Andai" source="20min">Finger weg von den neuen KI-Browsern</a> The article largely focuses on the grievous security holes in these browsers, making them not browsers but data-exfiltration apps. In an age of unprecedented scammery, it is an affront that these tools even exist. But that's not even the worst of it. With a web browser, you type in an address and see the content hosted for that address. You trust your browser to deliver---unfiltered and unchanged---what you asked for. This implicit trust is extremely important, as the data your browser returns informs your worldview. These aren't web browsers. They don't find content; they produce content. You don't actually see any web pages themselves when you "browse" with these tools. Instead, you see summaries generated on-the-fly that serve as a "response" for your "request". To be clear: you type in a prompt and see what the LLM generated as a response for that prompt. I would imagine that a lot of the pictures and short videos included in these responses are also generated. You will not see anything that anyone actually produced, unfiltered. You are implicitly trusting that tool---and the company that produces it as well as the laws of the country where that tool's infrastructure "lives"---to deliver a reliable worldview. For those of who use the web without an algorithmic feed, this feels like a significant change. It feels like madness to even think of using a tool like this. For people who have already been trained to simply look at what they're shown, this is more of an increase in the level of control that platforms have already had over what their users see and hear. They've been trained to not give it a second thought. Although it's not technically a significant difference over what a Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram feed already did, it is a big step in the wrong direction down a road these people shouldn't even have been on in the first place. If you can train people to become accustomed to this, then it opens the door to further great leaps forward for controlling what they see and hear. The level of control over what people see and hear is already too high for comfort. However, while your ability to directly access content is sometimes impeded with a web browser, it has, until now, never been transformed or interpreted. This is very, very different. <hr> We wish to live in a glorious AI future but why do we believe that we are at-all capable of bringing it into being? We can't even make a predictable local search of a list in a venerable software like Outlook, which is in its 20th major release or so. When I search for "softwa", the top hit is a specific person whose position (not shown) includes the word "software". The contact groups that include the word "software" are listed below the mysteriously higher-priority entry. <img src="{att_link}search_outlook_contacts_for_softwa_.png" href="{att_link}search_outlook_contacts_for_softwa_.png" align="none" caption="Search Outlook contacts for 'softwa'"> When I type one extra letter---"softwar"---which should increase the score for the groups containing the word, it instead completely removed those groups and added a bunch of other users who also had the word "software" in their positions. <img src="{att_link}search_outlook_contacts_for_softwar_.png" align="none" caption="Search Outlook contacts for 'softwar'"> What is happening here? Is is so buggy because we don't know how to do this? Why do we think that we would be able to build AI that is better? Is it buggy because we've already added AI? These are simple things, and we're getting them all wrong. <hr> Speaking of buggy and user-unfriendly and just shockingly badly designed, there's the Sunrise cable-box software. So you're watching a movie. It's on a German channel, so you've fast-forwarded through the commercial blocks that it allows you to fast-forward through, and muted the ones that you can't. You're 14 minutes from the end of the movie but you get interrupted, so you pause it. The interruption lasts longer than the cable-box has patience, so it just stops the movie. Like, what? Who the f@&k do you think you are? Why does the cable-box have an opinion about how long I'm allowed to leave a movie paused? Only a moron would design it this way. Is it unable to keep the connection open that long? Connection to what? There is no real technical reason why it has to be this way, other than licensing stupidity or bloody-mindedness conjured up by marketing, sales, and a probably non-existent product owner. Fine, though. I can just press play again, right? Oh, if only it were that simple. No, no, no, you see...the software has not only decided that I wasn't allowed to leave the movie paused anymore, it has also decided that I was finished watching that movie. It just closed it off as finished and there is no "continue watching" option anymore. Cool. So, now I'm looking forward to fast-forwarding through all of the commercial blocks again---and muting the long, long blocks that I can't skip---so that I can get to the last 14 minutes of a so-so movie. Oh, if only it were that simple. Because, when I try to play the movie again, which is saved in my list, it tells me that there is no internet connection, so it's having trouble loading the movie. I should try again later. Instead, I try with a different movie. It loads up immediately. Wow. I guess my internet connection isn't down after all. No, I bet this movie is just so borked now that it can longer be replayed. Do you understand how stupid that is? This is a digital placeholder to a film that Sunrise has on its servers. When they threaten that they can only save the movie for a few months or a year, they are just being dicks. Or someone is. The movie exists. I pay money per month for access to these movies. They still want to control when and where and how I consume them. Another neat thing with the Sunrise box is that you cannot continue to listen to the radio while you search the TV guide. Instead, it insists on playing a random TV channel, which is full of trash. I want to listen to Swiss Radio Jazz while I search for this movie again. I was going to delete the movie out of my list of recordings, go back to the evening when it ran, "re-record" it---which is stupid, because I'm not "recording" anything, I'm making a bookmark to online content that exists on Sunrise's servers---and then see if it plays when it's "re-recorded". This is all so dumb. Anyway, I tried one more time to play the movie and it worked this time. Also, I was able to fast-forward through all of the commercial blocks that stopped me before, so somehow, it seems to have remembered that I'd already "watched" them. That's a better experience than expected but it was all so unnecessary. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1onwcdq/using_generative_ai_youre_prompting_with_hitler/" source="Reddit">Using Generative AI? You're Prompting with Hitler!</a> <img src="{att_link}you_re_prompting_with_hitler._genai_is_a_fascist_project._try_using_your_brain_instead_(1).webp" align="none" caption="Using generative AI? You're prompting with Hitler! GenAI is a fascist project! Try using your brain instead. Don't surrender your creativity to the tech-billionaires' control."> <hr> <a href="https://addyo.substack.com/p/conductors-to-orchestrators-the-future" author="Addy Osmani" source="Elevate">Conductors to Orchestrators: The Future of Agentic Coding</a> <bq>GitHub Copilot Coding Agent (Microsoft): This upgrade to Copilot transforms it from an in-editor assistant into an autonomous background developer (I cover it in this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQFIiB6xtIs">video</a>). You can assign a GitHub issue to Copilot’s agent or invoke it via the VS Code agents panel, telling it (for example) “Implement feature X” or “Fix bug Y”. Copilot then spins up an ephemeral dev environment via GitHub Actions, checks out your repo, creates a new branch, and begins coding. It can run tests, linters, even spin up the app if needed, all without human babysitting. When finished, it opens a pull request with the changes, complete with a description and meaningful commit messages. It then asks for your review. You, the human orchestrator, review the PR (perhaps using Copilot’s AI-assisted code review to get an initial analysis). If changes are needed, you can leave comments like @copilot please update the unit tests for edge case Z, and the agent will iterate on the PR. This is asynchronous, autonomous code generation in action. Notably, Copilot automates the tedious book-keeping: branch creation, committing, opening PRs, etc., which used to cost developers time. All the grunt work around writing code (aside from the design itself) is handled, allowing developers to focus on reviewing and guiding at a high level. GitHub’s agent effectively lets one engineer supervise many “AI juniors” working in parallel across different issues (and you can even create multiple specialized agents for different task types).</bq> This is poppycock. I don't think anyone can work this way. This is utterly idealized. Where is the part where the PR is utter trash? Can it really be a plausible job description to be herding these robot coworkers, waiting 30 minutes for responses and re-launching them with commands to fix up mistakes that the tool should never have made in the first place. I just don't believe that what is described here really works the way that it implies. That doesn't match my experience of these tools at all. My experiences are more like one that I just had right now where I pasted a photograph that I'd taken of a distinctive geological feature into Google Image Search. <img src="{att_link}unknown_hole_in_the_mountain.jpeg" href="{att_link}unknown_hole_in_the_mountain.jpeg" align="none" caption="Unknown hole in the mountain" scale="50%"> It churned for a few seconds and returned the following result. <bq>The image shows the Pic d'Ansabère, a mountain in the Pyrenees. The distinctive hole or breach in the rock formation is a notable feature of the mountain. The Pic d'Ansabère is located in the Aspe Valley, in the French Pyrenees, and is part of the Cirque de Lescun. It is known for its impressive rock formations, including the Grande Aiguille and Petite Aiguille d'Ansabère, which are popular with climbers. The Pic d'Ansabère itself is a popular hiking destination, offering panoramic views of the surrounding mountains. The peak reaches an altitude of approximately 2,360 to 2,371 meters.</bq> This is utterly wrong because the photo was taken in Switzerland. Is any of the rest of this information worth knowing or remembering? Do the mountains it mentions even exist? I'm not going to both finding out because it's not the answer to my question. This is just text, generated out of the ether. <info>Me: no it's in switzerland</info> <bq>The mountain feature in the image is "Le Marteau," located near Riddes in the canton of Valais, Switzerland. This distinctive geological formation is a natural arch or hole in a mountain ridge, giving it the name "Le Marteau," which means "The Hammer" in French. It is situated in the Swiss Alps.</bq> Again, very wrong. While Valais is in Switzerland, I did not take the photo there. It's still just guessing arbitrarily within the context it's been given. <info>Me: no it's in switzerland. It's near the Pragelpass, visible from near Silberen</info> <bq>The geological formation shown in the image is known as Le Marteau (The Hammer), a rock arch located in Switzerland. It is situated near the Pragelpass and is visible from the Silberen area.</bq> Note that it has copied the two highlighted parts from my context and has replicated my typo of Silbern in its answer. Not only is there no consideration going on, it's not even searching any information it has. There were no index-lookups here, no external sources. It just rehashed my text with a bit of other stuff in its training data and spit back something that most people would probably have accepted as believable. Instead, it's useless. My dopamine levels are at zero, which is why, apparently, I have no interest in "diving deeper into AI mode" to see if I can help this blind pig find a truffle. Out of curiosity, though, now that I've written it, I click the button and, lo and behold, <bq>The mountain with a hole in the image is the Martinsloch ("Martin's Hole"), a natural rock formation in the Tschingelhörner mountain ridge in the Glarus Alps of Switzerland. The hole is about 19 meters high and 15 meters wide. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, the sun shines through the Martinsloch and onto the church of the nearby village of Elm, creating a natural spectacle. This phenomenon is known as the "Sun of Elm".</bq> This seems a lot more convincing but I'm still a bit skeptical, so I search "Martinsloch" in Wikipedia, getting to the entry for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tschingelhörner" author="" source="Wikipedia">Tschingelhörner</a>, which writes: <bq>East of the main summit is the Martinsloch (lit. 'Martin's hole'), a triangular breakthrough, or hole 6 by 18 metres (20 by 59 ft) in diameter, through which the sun shines at particular times of the year.[2] The mountain is part of the Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.</bq> Hmmm, wait a second. Where is Elm from where I was? It's like way further up the valley, no? Or was it there? What does Martinsloch actually look like? I searched for "Martinsloch" on DuckDuckGo and got several images that all looked something like, <img src="{att_link}martinsloch_bei_elm.webp" href="{att_link}martinsloch_bei_elm.webp" align="none" caption="Martinsloch bei Elm" scale="50%"> Could that be the same hole but from the other side? Maybe. But isn't the "bridge" much thicker for Martinsloch than in my photo? Isn't the mountain much more prominent? I gave up on the search and decided to ask one of my colleagues, who knows the region much better than Google Gemini. I still haven't had a chance to do so, so maybe it's Martinsloch and maybe it's not. Maybe it doesn't matter. All I know is that I'm not going to blindly accept the fourth guess of a guessing machine, amazing as it is at producing realistic answers. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/openai-signs-massive-ai-compute-deal-with-amazon/?comments-page=1#comments" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">OpenAI signs massive AI compute deal with Amazon</a> <bq>Altman has also said that eventually, he would like OpenAI to add 1 gigawatt of compute every week. That ambitious plan is complicated by the fact that one gigawatt of power is roughly equivalent to the output of one typical nuclear power plant, and Reuters reports that each gigawatt of compute build-out currently comes with a capital cost of over $40 billion.</bq> Why even report that he said this? Did he also say that he's going to build faster-than-light spaceships? <bq>While these types of multi-billion-dollar deals seem to excite investors in the stock market, not everything is hunky dory in the world of AI at the moment. OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate is expected to reach about $20 billion by year’s end, Reuters notes, and losses in the company are also mounting. Surging valuations of AI companies, oddly circular investments, massive spending commitments (which total more than $1 trillion for OpenAI), and the potential that generative AI might not be as useful as promised have prompted ongoing speculation among both critics and proponents alike that the AI boom is turning into a massive bubble.</bq> No shit. The top comment sums up the article pretty well.: <bq>So OpenAI buys compute from Amazon who buys GPUs from Nvidia to implement that compute capacity who invests money into OpenAI so they can buy compute from Amazon who buys GPUs from Nvidia to...</bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/updates-bragawatts-nvidia-theater-me-stuff-etc/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">Updates: Bragawatts, Nvidia Theater, Me Stuff, etc.</a> <bq>[...] calling speculative multi-gigawatt data centers "bragawatts" is something I wish I had come up with. Nevertheless, it is a handy description. It is handy because it captures the idea that much of what is going is a kind of expensive posturing. Companies try to outdo one another with announcements of ever-larger data centers requiring ever more power. Will they ever be built? Who knows, but if they deter other entrants, then at least some of the mission is accomplished. But such mass deterrence strategies are inherently fragile disequilibria. If everyone shows up at the O.K. Corral armed to the don't-mess-with-me teeth, the result isn't peace, it's a gunfight. Or, perhaps, it is more like the old joke about always being sure to carry a bomb onto an airplane, because what are the odds of there being two bombs? amirite. The trouble, of course, is what happens in the aggregate: all these pseudo-rational behaviors incite more such behaviors, leading to, at best, what finance theorists call a "rational bubble". And bragawatts is as good a way as any of capturing that in compressed form.</bq> <hr> Over last summer, I helped a family member work through an interesting problem that I bet affects more people than you'd think. It started out with them asking me whether I'd gotten the mail he'd sent me that morning. I admitted that I had not and noted that I hadn't received anything for a while. We figured out that he thought he'd been sending me links just as regularly as he'd always done but that they'd stopped showing up in my inbox at some point. OK. Let's debug this. I'll go to their favorite news site and share an article via email to myself. Seconds later, the mail showed up in my inbox. OK, nothing wrong there. Hey, buddy. Fam. Can you show me how you're sharing articles with me? Sure, man. They did the same thing that I did, but on an iPad. When they shared the article via email, the iPad mail client opened and let them create a mail, which they sent. Since they were sending with a Gmail address, it asked them to log in. Cancel. Problem solved. OK. Bro, you gotta log in. It's asking you to authenticate. You can't send a mail through your server if it doesn't know who it's you. OKOKOK I'll log in. Pulls up ProtonPass---oh, yeah, they're using a password manager; I have done my duty to help the fam get secure---and loads in the password. Click. MFA request. No problem. They're ready. They enter the requested number and log in. Done, right? Oh, not quite yet. You see, what they've done so far is provided authentication credentials so that they have verified their identity and now have access to their account. However, their email client doesn't have access to anything. Those who know how this all works know what's coming up next. You gotta choose and approve the list of capabilities that you're going to grant to your Gmail account from that iPad email app. So, there's a list of things that the email client is requesting. I told him that he can approve them all. There's no button. Like, there's no "submit" button to grant permissions. It just stays on that screen. What the hell are you supposed to do next? Oh, wait. Buddy, try this. Turn the screen from landscape to portrait mode. Ah, there's the button. Now, it's visible. Click. Approved. The mail goes out. So do about 80 other mails that have been stacking up in their outbox for the last couple of months. That's kind of hilarious, of course. But I'm no longer thinking that this is my family member's inability to use simple technology. This shit is complicated. And, even if you understand each step, the visual design is so borked that you can barely figure out how to actually submit your preferences. There are a couple of things here. Google should absolutely be aware of what their UI for setting up email connectivity looks like in all of the common form factors---like, for example, an iPad in landscape mode, which is one of the most common devices being used in the most common orientation. Even if Google can't keep itself from adding so much whitespace to their UI that it pushes the submit button below the fold, they should be aware that iOS hasn't shown any scrollbars since ... forever and that a button pushed below the fold doesn't exist nor will there be a visual cue that there is more important content to be had with the flick of a finger. This isn't necessarily an easy UI problem to solve but it is a solvable problem. You could, for example, put the submit button in an area that is pinned to the bottom of the viewport, with the rest of the form in a scrolling container above it. The button is disabled until you've selected at least one privilege to grant. You, just as an example of something that would work. OK, so let's assume that Google doesn't get its shit together and my family member doesn't complete the login and authorization, so that their messages start to stack up in their outbox. Why doesn’t an email client show a message when you have old messages in your outbox? When it asks you to authenticate, why doesn’t it mention that you seem to have failed to authenticate several times and that you have a lot of messages waiting to be sent from e.g., the last six or eight weeks. That kind of message might get someone's attention, right? Like, if you saw this, would you still just click cancel if you saw this? <error>Cannot send mail You have failed to log in to your email account 15 times and have 78 messages waiting that can't be sent. You have not been able to send a message for 2 months. Please ensure that you follow all instructions to log in and authorize this client to send mail for you. Good luck. <div style="display: flex; justify-content: end; gap: 15px"><c style="display: inline-block">Nah, don't send mail</c><c style="display: inline-block">Let's log in for real this time</c></div></error> Hell, the client doesn't even have to only show this message when you try to send a message. It could show it in a banner at the top of the client. Maybe you don't want to show a message box. I get that. Don't interrupt the user. But sometimes you have to assume that the user might not know what they're doing. This kind of problem over such a long time is important enough to complain about a bit more strenuously. Instead, Apple's email clients show a subtle little lightning bolt next to the account when it's not connected. That's it. No-one is going to notice this. Hell, I don't even show that panel by default. <img src="{att_link}subtle_account-not-connected_icon.webp" align="none" caption="Subtle account-not-connected icon"> So, we can chuckle to ourselves that my family member doesn't know how to use technology but I think, if we're honest, we have to admit that we've failed people for no good reason. These aren't impossible problems to solve; they're actually no-brainers. We just don't seem interested in solving them, preferring to have a sexy and super-consistent design language for apps that no-one is able to use and that doesn't help its users avoid the most stupid cul-de-sacs that they might end up in. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://hakibenita.com/django-reliable-signals" source="" author="Haki Benita">Reliable Django Signals</a> <bq>Using signals dispatcher, we can dispatch a signal and have one or more receivers subscribe to it. In our case, the payment process can send a signal when it completes, and the order can subscribe to it and update its status. Using signals the payment module can communicate with other modules in the system without explicitly depending on them!</bq> Cool. Signals are .NET <c>events</c>. <bq><c>send()</c> differs from <c>send_robust()</c> in how exceptions raised by receiver functions are handled. <c>send()</c> does not catch any exceptions raised by receivers; it simply allows errors to propagate. Thus not all receivers may be notified of a signal in the face of an error.</bq> OK? I guess that there's a version where exceptions are just lost and then there's another version where they aren't lost, but also not collected as they are in other asynchronous frameworks. Also, there is no longer a guarantee that all receivers in a list will be notified. How does that help? The only answer to that you would have to guarantee that any registered listeners do not throw exceptions. I suppose you could wrap each handler in a <c>try</c>/<c>catch</c> handler, logging the exceptions of propagating them all at the end of the iteration. This kind of seems like something that should be offered by the framework, though. Maybe <c>send_robust_4_realz_bro()</c>. <bq>One prominent backend that has been developed in parallel with the tasks framework is the <c>DatabaseBackend</c> of <c>django-tasks</c>. The database backend maintains a queue in a database table, and provides a worker implementation to dequeue and execute tasks. It also comes with a built-in retry mechanism and a nice admin panel.</bq> This sounds like the .NET packages Quartz or Hangfire. <hr> <a href="https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2025/10/28/iongraph-web.html" author="Ben Visness" source="Spider Monkey">Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?</a> <bq>It may seem surprising that such a simple (and stupid) layout algorithm could produce such readable graphs, when more sophisticated layout algorithms struggle. However, I feel that the algorithm succeeds because of its simplicity. Most graph layout algorithms are optimization problems, where error is minimized on some chosen metrics. However, these metrics seem to correlate poorly to readability in practice. For example, it seems good in theory to rearrange nodes to minimize edge crossings. But a predictable order of nodes seems to produce more sensible results overall, and simple rules for edge routing are sufficient to keep things tidy. (As a bonus, this also gives us layout stability from pass to pass.) Similarly, layout rules like “align parents with their children” produce more readable results than “minimize the lengths of edges”.</bq> <bq>And finally, the resulting algorithm is simply more efficient. All the layout passes in iongraph are easy to program and scale gracefully to large graphs because they run in roughly linear time. It is better, in my view, to run a fixed number of layout iterations according to your graph complexity and time budget, rather than to run a complex constraint solver until it is “done”.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/10-kanban-boards/" author="Loren Stewart" source="">I Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance</a> <bq>Best All-Around Developer Experience: Choose SvelteKit for approachable syntax and excellent defaults. At 125.2 kB raw (54.1 kB compressed), SvelteKit delivers 3.26x smaller bundles than Next.js with progressive enhancement by default and minimal framework overhead. The compiler-based approach means less runtime code and cleaner component logic. With its focus on authoring in plain JS, CSS, and HTML, SvelteKit is best for developers from any background seeking readable code with few framework quirks.</bq> <bq>When you ship a native app to the App Store or Google Play instead of building a web app, you’re not just making a technical decision. You’re accepting a deal that would’ve been unthinkable twenty years ago. Apple and Google each take up to 30% of every transaction (with exceptions depending on program and category). They set rules. They decide what you can ship. They can revoke your access tomorrow with no recourse. You have no alternative market. You can’t even compete on price because the fee is baked into many transactions. Economist Yanis Varoufakis calls this “technofeudalism” in his book of the same name. The App Store isn’t a marketplace, it’s a fiefdom. Developers are digital serfs, bound to the cloud lords’ land (their platforms) with no exit. Users get locked into this too. The App Store is a curated garden where algorithms owned by two companies decide what you see. Your data gets harvested. Your choices get filtered. You’re not a customer with alternatives, you’re a subject in a walled garden. The web is different. No single company takes a cut, no algorithm curates your choices, and distribution is direct. Users can actually vote with their feet. It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest thing we have left to an open market where developers retain agency and users retain choice. When companies abandon the web to go app-only, they’re not making a neutral technical decision. They’re voluntarily moving their users from a competitive marketplace into a feudal system. And yeah, I know that sounds dramatic, but Varoufakis has spent years documenting how the economics of digital platforms have created exactly this dynamic.</bq> <bq>If you lean capitalist, app stores create an environment that is the opposite of what capitalism is supposed to be. Monopolistic rent extraction replacing competition and innovation. No market mechanism to challenge them. That’s not capitalism, that’s just extraction. If you lean anti-capitalist, technofeudalism is arguably worse than regular capitalism because at least capitalism has friction and regulatory handles. This has neither. It’s total private control with zero market competition. Either way, the web is the last place where economic activity can happen outside the thumb of tech oligarchs. Building web apps matters. Shipping small, fast, performant web apps matters even more, and most web traffic comes from the mobile web. Every kilobyte you save is another reason for teams to choose the web over building a native app subject to app store control and fees.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://antocuni.eu/2025/10/29/inside-spy-part-1-motivations-and-goals/" source="" author="Antonio Cuni">Inside SPy🥸, part 1: Motivations and Goals</a> <bq>Thanks to my work on PyPy, I came to the conclusion that Python is fundamentally impossible to optimize to the level of performance which I aim for. There are some features of the language which make Python "intrinsically slow" [...]</bq> <bq>Python semantics makes it intrinsically cache unfriendly. In Python <s>everything is an object</s> everything is a pointer, and objects are mutable by default. In CPython object references are implemented as PyObject * in C, which means that any time we do an attribute and/or item lookup we need to dereference a pointer. It is not uncommon to have to dereference 4 or 5 pointers to execute just a single line code: this is called Pointer Chasing and in short, it's Very Bad™ for performance because it destroys memory locality.</bq> <bq>The cost of loading values from RAM is very slow compared to the cost of computation itself. If you want to add two numbers which are already in CPU registers, you can do that in 1 cycle, but if you need to fetch those values from memory, the CPU must sit idle for hundreds of cycles while it waits for the data to be loaded. Since loading from RAM is so slow, CPUs store frequently used data into a "cache". Loading from the cache is much faster, and thus CPUs can execute many more instructions per second when they operate on cached data. Normally on modern systems we have three levels of cache: L1, L2 and L3. L1 is the smallest and fastest, then each level is bigger and slower than the previous; the RAM is the slowest. Loading an address of memory which is in the cache is a cache hit, else it's a cache miss. For multiple reasons which I cannot explain in this box, if the address A is in cache, then also all the values which are "close" to A are in cache. That's why having a good memory locality increases the chance of cache hits. On the other hand, when we follow a pointer there is a high risk of landing in a "far" region of the memory, and thus each pointer dereference is a potential cache miss.</bq> <bq>In the recent years, static typing and type checkers have become more and more popular in the Python community. Let's be clear: I think that given the constraints, the Python typing story is good enough and well designed. I wouldn't be able to do it better. But still, Python is not a language designed for static typing and, in absolute terms, the current situation leaves a lot to be desired. The static-vs-dynamic typing debate has been going on for decades. Let's try to examine the typical pros&cons of each. The first typical advantage of static typing is that the typechecker can prove (in the mathematical sense) that a certain class of bugs cannot happen in your program. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen in Python.</bq> <bq>[...] we need to treat Python type checkers more like linters than actual theorem provers -- which is still better than nothing, but very far from having the advantages of an actual sound type system.</bq> <bq>The second typical advantage of static typing is that the compiler can emit more efficient code.</bq> <bq>[...] another advantage of static typing is that IDEs and tooling can use type knowledge to assist development.</bq> <bq>[...] from some point of view, by using static typing in Python we get the worst of both worlds: zero guarantees, still slow, and it prevents patterns where dynamic typing is actually useful.</bq> <bq>Python's dynamic nature and expressivity plays a big part of why it became so popular: it allowed power users to write all the incredible libraries with very intuitive and high level APIs which we love. However, such expressivity comes with many problems in terms of performance, type safety and so on. SPy attempts to fix those problems by constraining the dynamicity into well defined places, without hurting performance.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSiXfBKElQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ViSiXfBKElQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Effect | TypeScript at Scale" caption="Effect 3.0: Production-Grade TypeScript"> <hr> <a href="https://matklad.github.io/2025/11/06/error-codes-for-control-flow.html" author="Alex Kladov" source="matklad">Error Codes for Control Flow</a> <bq>[...] it’s worth thinking about diagnostic reporting and error handling (in the literal sense) separately. There are generally two destinations for any error. An error can be bubbled to an isolation boundary and presented to the operator (for example, as an HTTP 500 message, or stderr output). Alternatively, an error can be handled by taking an appropriate recovery action.</bq> This is fine but I think that there are actually three destinations for errors, with the third often always being executed: logging and telemetry. An error must include enough information so that the runtime code can determine to what degree it can be handled. For example, an error for a missing file should include the file that was sought as well as the locations that were searched so that a caller can report the error to the user so that they can repair it, either by creating the file outside of the context of the program, or by using the caller's facilities to tell it to check a different location (e.g., adding it to a search path) and then trying again. The error must also include enough information that it can be displayed to the user, with both a clear indication of the reason that the user intervention is required and a clear indication of which interventions might lead to the error no longer occurring. These messages need to be translated to the target language and need to be understandable and actionable by the target audience. An error must also include enough information to log so that future archeologists can determine what happened to a clear enough degree. With enough information, the behavior of the program could perhaps be improved---in the case of a bug, inconsistency, or suboptimal or clunky behavior---or the UX could be improved---in the case of repeated user error or inefficiency. A lot of this information overlaps, of course. But it's good to remember the three use cases for any error you "throw" or "return". Is there are string resource for the message? Does there need to be? Is there an error code so that you could associate a string resource? Is there enough context for a user error message as well as a logging message? These are often not the same thing; the context for the user will almost certainly be higher-level than the context for the log (which might include a stack trace, context variables, etc.) <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SNExtznd4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/b_SNExtznd4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Ronny Chieng | Daily Show" caption="Ronny Chieng Meets Neo, the World’s Stupidest Robot Maid"> <hr> Dear DuoLingo: This is the third time in two weeks that your app has robbed me of the triple bonus that I earn every day. Today was particularly egregious, as I’m in the finals and need the points. Also, today I was able to select the bonus but the app lost it by the next screen. I can’t really put it any more generous way than: Get your shit together. This isn’t rocket science. I am a paying customer and these are absolutely basic features. <hr> <a href="https://theonion.com/medicaid-work-requirements-myth-vs-fact/" author="" source="The Onion">Medicaid Work Requirements Myth Vs. Fact</a> <bq>MYTH: Most people on Medicaid already work. FACT: Whatever. MYTH: “Able-bodied” is a vague term that ignores the complexities of many illnesses. FACT: “Able-bodied” is a massive improvement from the term they wanted to use. MYTH: Work requirements are confusing to navigate and hard to verify. FACT: Your family lawyer should be able to take care of it without much fuss. MYTH: Millions of people will lose benefits. FACT: That’s only Phase One. MYTH: Pregnant women are exempt out of a special concern for their well-being. FACT: After birth, the vessel may be discarded. MYTH: This will hurt countless innocent people. FACT: It’s broad enough it will probably get a couple real bastards, too.</bq>