<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, Music, & 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="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <img src="{att_link}what_a_year,_huh._girl,_it_s_been_two_weeks.webp" href="{att_link}what_a_year,_huh._girl,_it_s_been_two_weeks.webp" align="none" caption="What a year, huh. Girl, it's been two weeks" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/23/the-sun-sets-on-the-syrian-kurdish-rebellion/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The Sun Sets on the Syrian Kurdish Rebellion</a> <bq>Perhaps if Assad were a better chess player, he would have provoked Turkey by defending the Syrian Kurds, thereby preventing a deal and forcing his Russian allies to provide air support while the Syrian Arab Army entered Idlib to fight the remainder of the HTS and its allies. <b>But Assad began to allow the Russians to do his strategic thinking and therefore conceded a point of strength in the hope that the Turkish government would cease its attempt to overthrow his government.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/martin-luther-king-jr-is-the-leader" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Martin Luther King, Jr. is the Leader We Need</a> <bq>King was born into a paradox, by nature a peaceful man brought up under an unjust system. <b>Was it moral to follow the law in a world that forced him to sleep in a car because motels wouldn’t accept his family</b>, or “concoct an answer” for his weeping six-year-old daughter when she asked why an amusement park was closed to her?</bq> <bq><b>One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.</b> I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/19/fifty-eight-years-later-the-truth-about-mlks-murder-still-terrifies-america/" source="Scheer Post" author="Edward Curtin">Fifty‑Eight Years Later, the Truth About MLK’s Murder Still Terrifies America</a> <bq>After King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, William Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, wrote in a post-speech memo:<bq>Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful, demagogic speech that he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. <b>We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.</b></bq></bq> <bq>Because MLK, in his Riverside Church speech, spoke clearly to what he identified there as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government” and continued to relentlessly confront the government on its criminal war against Vietnam, he was <b>universally condemned by the mass media and the government that later — once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat — praised him to the heavens.</b> This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.</bq> <bq>In that 1999 Memphis civil trial (see complete transcript and Douglass) brought by the King family, <b>the jury found that King was murdered by a conspiracy that included government agencies.</b> The corporate media, when they reported it at all, dismissed the jury’s verdict and those who accepted it — including the entire King family led by Coretta Scott King — as delusional.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://theindependentink.substack.com/p/fascism-you" source="The Independent Ink" author="Mr. Fish">F(ascism) YOU!</a> <bq>Thus began a program of state sponsored violence and the maligning of any group attempting to organize resistance against the tyranny of repression institutionalized by the capitalistic model, <b>as if there was something radical and profoundly subversive and terribly rude about victims of oppression realizing the injustice inherent in their situation and scheming to change it.</b></bq> <bq>[...] who are made to suppress their own natural tendencies towards self-preservation and self-determination in deference to the greed, narcissism, and innumerable prejudices of the privileged class, should know better; they should know, quite simply, that <b>since being rich is better than being poor (ask anybody) then it logically follows that rich people must be better people than poor people</b> and that civilization, in the interest of being the best that it can be, must always choose as its architects—and reward as its beneficiaries as it dies a little more everyday—the better men.</bq> <bq><b>The fact that Eugene Debs, for instance, is either completely unknown or considered a kook by many who have merely overheard his name in bogus conversations about kooks and somebody like Theodore Roosevelt is immediately recognized and considered a hero for giving birth to both modern-day Imperialism</b> and the Teddy Bear is truly indicative of a system deliberately structured to guarantee subordination of any group or class preferring social justice and pluralism over the politics of the Big Stick, state propaganda, and the sort of rugged individualism that discourages the formation of any organized form of self-government capable of nurturing a meaning of life unrelated to the stock market or the status quo.</bq> <bq>[...] whenever the United States decides to directly supply the training and the financial backing and the weaponry to other countries containing potential struggles for self-determination and sovereignty unrelated to American big business, whether it’s in Palestine or Turkey or the Philippines or Saudi Arabia or Brazil or Chile or Guatemala or Nicaragua or Argentina or Haiti, etcetera, <b>the atrocities are always reported to be committed either in self-defense or in the interest of the health and wellbeing of the civilians on the ground</b> in or around the area [...]</bq> <bq>[...] when one recognizes the weaponry and the method of warfare that the United States typically uses to attack other countries with—namely from drones or the dropping of bombs from 15,000 feet up to avoid the possibility of any retaliation whatsoever and <b>the targeting of civilians and their infrastructure so that after all the immediate killing and after the proper sanctions are put into place to starve all the survivors to near and actual death near and actual death</b> for some time, American corporations can invade the country with blueprints under one arm and investors under the other without facing any resistance whatsoever, all around them homeless people and neighborhoods needing immediate gentrification just like home!—<b>one should have no problem labeling America the Beautiful as a world class scumbag</b> [...]</bq> <bq>After all, <b>we the people will take freedom and democracy in whatever form the power structure makes available to us.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2026/01/16/russia-blasts-us-at-un-security-council-on-iran/" source="Consortium News" author="Joe Lauria">Russia Blasts US at UN Security Council Over Iran</a> Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia: <bq>“Today’s meeting, convened by our American colleagues, is nothing but yet another attempt to justify blatant aggression and interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. And if the Iranian authorities do not ‘come to their senses’ – as Washington put it – then <b>the US will resolve the Iranian problem in their favorite way, namely through strikes geared towards overthrowing the undesirable regime.</b></bq> <bq>The U.S. and its ‘cheerleaders’ are actively exploiting the economic and social problems of ordinary Iranians, caused by the unlawful sanctions pressure imposed on Iran by Western countries. <b>They are using sanctions to stir up public tensions and destabilize the domestic political situation.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>Nebenzia said the U.S. brought Iranians to speak to the Council [...] who had lived in the U.S. for 20 years</b> in order “to serve the positions of those who convened this meeting and <b>have nothing to do with issues of international peace and security.</b>”</bq> <bq>He said: “In general, what is happening now is nothing but <b>an embarrassment and a farce, a shoddy show unworthy of the members of the Council.</b>”</bq> <bq>In the past two weeks of unrest, Darzi said, the “United States regime is responsible “<b>Peaceful protests that began on 28th of December 2025 with legitimate economic demands were deliberately hijacked by organized armed groups</b> and transformed into violent riots.” The [sic] led to attacks on mosques and police stations, and beheadings and burning innocent people alive, Darzi said.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/17/trumps-war-on-journalism-officials-proudly-defend-raiding-a-journalists-home/" source="Scheer Post | The Dissenter" author="Kevin Gosztola">Trump’s War On Journalism: Officials Proudly Defend Raiding A Journalist’s Home</a> <bq>[...] <b>the Trump administration has long treated reporters who solicit information like they are criminals.</b> The Pentagon’s media policy, which was developed at the direction of Hegseth, initially stated, “Any solicitation of [military] personnel to commit criminal acts would <b>not be considered protected activity under the 1st Amendment.</b>” Back in June, when Trump was angry that the news media was publishing information about U.S. military strikes on Iran, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused reporters of “helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks.”</bq> <bq>FBI raid was part of a fishing expedition. It doesn’t matter whether the Trump administration is able to access Natanson’s devices and access chats with her sources. <b>Officials know that there are 1,000 sources or more, who will clam up, watch their backs, and probably stop talking to the news media.</b> The Trump administration may eventually identify several of the alleged sources and bring cases against them. Or the administration may retaliate against the alleged sources by firing them or revoking security clearances. Regardless, <b>journalists see the FBI raid as “a jarring new step aimed at limiting news organizations’ ability to gather information that the government does not want to be made public.</b>” That’s the goal of the Trump administration—to spread fear and <b>stop journalists and their sources from informing citizens.</b> And it can be traced back to not just Obama but also President Richard Nixon’s administration.</bq> <bq>Combined with the decades-long attack on whistleblowers and national security journalists under a law that treats them no different from enemy spies, it’s <b>a deadly weapon to be wielded against the free press, especially by a president who muses about journalists being beaten, jailed, and even raped in prison.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-magic-system-of-zionism" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Magic System Of Zionism</a> <bq>If a man who’d never heard of Israel or Palestine were shown footage of the genocide in Gaza, he would reflexively recoil in horror and say what he was looking at was a bad thing. <b>If somebody then ran up and explained to him that what he just said was actually a hateful act of religious persecution, he would be very surprised and confused. Because he hadn’t been indoctrinated into making that association</b>, in the same way you haven’t been indoctrinated into associating criticism of the Indian government with an attack on the religion of Hinduism.</bq> <bq>It isn’t surprising to learn that Weiss views her operations as a kind of magic. On paper she and her ilk shouldn’t be able to do what they do. <b>Forcefully dropping a foreign ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization and violently hammering it into place against every organic impulse of the region is freakish enough, but then convincing the rest of the world to support this?</b> To the point that it actually affects our interpersonal relationships and interactions on the other side of the planet? It shouldn’t work. But it does. I don’t really know what magic is, but it makes sense that some Zionists would see it that way. Because <b>from the outside looking in all that mass-scale psychosocial manipulation kind of does look like an inexplicable sort of wizardry.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EFPdcSot0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-9EFPdcSot0" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="DRM News" caption="FULL SPEECH: PM Carney’s Most Inspiring Remarks at Davos — Greenland, Trump Tariff Threats | AQ1B"> Don't bother watching this speech. It's self-serving trash that boils down to: We are only dissatisfied with a system once it starts being disadvantageous to us. The exploitation of others never bothered us in the least. He never names the U.S. or Trump. He just complains that things are hard for his poor country, which is one of the predators but is scared that it might end up as prey. If you didn't know enough context, you'd think he was complaining about Russia and China. Carney's main example of authoritarianism is communism. I thought for a second that he thought Russia was still communist. Or that China was. He names the glorious institutions of the WTO, the UN, the COP ... the UN is the only one that has any humanitarian inclinations, mostly thwarted by its authoritarian structure. The WTO and COP are tools for extraction from the poor and weak. And then the second half is a boring speech given to a board of directors by a boring, boring CEO. It's incredible that this was considered to be groundbreaking. They probably got boners because he quotes Václav Havel and they were blown away by his erudition. This is a speech given by a middle king to other middle kings. This is one of the other leaders bitching about how Cersei is going nuts in King's Landing. This is pathetically <i>Game of Thrones</i>. He ended with a sales job for Canada, talking about how it's the best at so many things. He brags about its <iq>public square</iq>, which, like, no. Remember the trucker protest? They canceled all of those people's bank accounts. This is not the speech of a humanitarian. This is not the speech of a man with principles. This is just more of the same: he represents people who are content---blissfully or deliberately---to have their lifestyles built on a pile of skulls---on the backs of the poor, the weak, the subjugable---but will complain when there is even the threat that they might be treated in the same way. Being a humanitarian, being a socialist, being a leftist, means being willing to give up personal benefits based on injustice to others. It means being just as incensed by injustice to others as injustice to ourselves. He's realizing that his country may no longer be under the umbrella, that the price extracted for staying under the umbrella may be too high. As long as the price was the lives and well-being of others, he was fine with it. That's not a principle. That's digusting. I don't remember Carney saying anything big about Palestine. Or the kidnapping of Maduro. I bet if I would dig a bit, I would find veiled approval. Let's stop kidding ourselves. Overall, it was a fitting speech for a former Goldman Sachs bigwig. He's a jackass. And, oh God, he's boring. Fifteen minutes is ten minutes too long. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/24/we-tolerated-their-violence-abroad-now-we-see-its-victims-here/" author="Joshua Scheer / Chris Hedges" source="Scheer Post">We Tolerated Their Violence Abroad. Now We See Its Victims Here</a> Reposted from a tweet by Chris Hedges <bq><b>The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis</b>, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, <b>would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province.</b> They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. <b>It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison.</b> Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called <b>imperial boomerang</b>. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But <b>before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices.</b> Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, <b>we tolerated, and often celebrated</b>, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. <b>The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/01/minneapolis-pretti-ice-murder-trump/" author="Ben Burgis" source="Jacobin">Trump and ICE Are Driving the Country Off a Cliff</a> <bq>Alex Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital in Minneapolis. One of his colleagues there told the New York Times that the “default look on his face was a smile.” Now he’s dead at the age of thirty-seven — the same age as Renee Good, who was murdered a little over two weeks earlier in the same city. <b>Both were American citizens. Both were shot to death by federal agents in the streets of Minneapolis while they were unarmed.</b> Subsequent statements by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE and the Border Patrol, have emphasized that Pretti had a gun on him at the beginning of the altercation. But Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara has said that Pretti, who had no criminal record, <b>had a valid permit to carry the gun. And the video evidence is decisive. He never tried to pull it, and it had already been confiscated before they killed him.</b> Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” But this is extraordinarily disingenuous, and not just because openly brandishing guns is very common in protests held by the American right. And <b>even if it had still been on his person when he was shot, it would have been entirely irrelevant. We haven’t repealed the Second Amendment and passed a law mandating that anyone caught with a handgun can be executed on the spot, even if they never draw it.</b> He was holding neither a gun nor a protest sign but a phone. He was there as a legal observer, <b>using his phone to record what the agents were doing and deter them from committing abuses — a form of civic engagement that’s entirely legal under the First Amendment.</b> The agents only found the gun after he’d been knocked to the ground and brutalized for the crime of trying to help a woman who’d been knocked over and pepper-sprayed near him moments before. It’s worth emphasizing that we know all this because <b>the murder occurred on a crowded street in broad daylight, filmed by multiple people.</b> The DHS’s statement, never quite claiming he had drawn the gun but vaguely gesturing at a “violent” struggle and the officer who shot him supposedly fearing for “his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers,” is unlikely to be believed by anyone who watched any of those videos. Indeed, one of the most striking parts of all this is that <b>these particular lies don’t exactly seem to be intended to be believed.</b> Instead, it feels like the point is just to give the hardcore supporters of the current administration something to hang their hat on when a “libtard” tries to give them a hard time about this. Better to say something anyone with access to the internet can see for themselves isn’t true than to be left with nothing to say at all. But <b>this feels like a few steps from simply bragging about killing Pretti for being an annoying, disobedient thorn in the agents’ side.</b> After Renee Good was murdered, opinion polls showed that only about a third (and in some polls far less than a third) of the public believed the administration’s story. That didn’t stop <b>Vice President J. D. Vance from relentlessly smearing Good, a mother who was shot while trying to drive herself and her wife and the family dog away from the scene, as a “domestic terrorist.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/01/radically-confronting-americas-federal.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">Radically Confronting America's Federal Gang War Will Require Civilian Militias</a> <bq>America is in the grips of an epic gang war the likes of which it has never seen before. <b>Masked and heavily armed thugs stock the streets of some of America's biggest cities with total impunity, thousands of them, tossing houses door to door, dragging unarmed civilians screaming from their vehicles before shoving them into unmarked vans</b>, lighting up anyone who dares to resist and straight up murdering people on camera before sauntering off from the scene of the crime like swaggering cowboys and daring shocked bystanders to do something about it...</bq> <bq>There is no difference, morally speaking, from the mob kidnapping you for refusing to kick up to the local protection racket and the feds dragging you out in cuffs for refusing to kick up to their latest war. Well, there is one difference and <b>the difference is that fucking badge.</b> That shiny little piece of bling that tells you that this gang operates with the protection of the state, itself little more than a convoluted construct defined by its seemingly mythical ability to sanction acts of violent disorder in the hallowed name of 'Law and Order.' <b>We as citizens (a fancy word for victims) have all been carefully groomed in that state's compulsory school system to divide criminal organizations up into two distinct classes: those who commit crime and those who use fighting crime as an excuse to commit crime.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/25/how-minnesotans-became-palestinians-top-5-ways-they-are-occupied/" author="Juan Cole" source="Scheer Post">How Minnesotans became Palestinians: Top 5 Ways they are Occupied</a> <bq>Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti may have their lives taken without the killers being held responsible. Under the logic of occupation, any time an occupation soldier kills a native it is always a form of self-defense and therefore no culpability attaches to it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-you-want-different-outcomes-you" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">If You Want Different Outcomes, You Have to Do Different Things</a> <bq>[...] I watch all the rage and horror unfolding over another execution in the streets of Minnesota and I see so many of the same bad ideas and misguided attitudes, and I do feel a kind of despair. People call for violence against state forces, and I think that’s a terrible idea; you can’t beat them, and the more damage you do, the more the Trump administration will respond with military force that will effortlessly overwhelm you.</bq> I do not think that this is infinitely true. The Trump administration has shown its face to the world more than other administrations. They have now killed two. People outside of the U.S. are disgusted. They are turning away. How do you stop Trump? Hitting him in the wallet. How do you stop the oligarchs? Hitting them in the wallet. Nothing else has a chance. There are no unions, there is no solidarity. The U.S. has guns. Well...use them. Force the fight. Arguing that you would lose the fight is the same strategy we've witnessed for so long. Force the fight. Make them win their pyrrhic victory. Make them lose face before the world. Make them Israel. Make them ostracize themselves. There will be victims and there will be a lot of them. But watch the stock market tumble. Watch it not recover. Watch them squirm. I honestly don't know that there's another way. Media is captured. Social media has been coopted. <bq>[...] starting a half-assed guerrilla war in the streets of the Twin Cities or loudly calling for a general strike that will not be joined by vast majorities of working people put as at an even greater disadvantage. Keep protesting, defend yourselves in the streets, and also do politics and do it well. Again, I laid out my vision of how to do such a thing in my second book. Maybe my prescriptions are also naive or misguided, but they represent an attempt to think clearly in the face of injustice.</bq> I think that a guerrilla war is exactly the ticket. ICE members are just like the IDF: they're in it as long as no-one shoots back. They're not as tough as they look. The more damage and hellfire that Trump rains down on Minnesota, the worse it gets for him, the worse it gets for his whole class, the harder it is for his fake media to hide. People won't join in, but they will have a tougher time ignoring it. They'll be forced to choose. At least we'll see where people stand when women and children are being slaughtered in drone attacks by their own government. It's an awful way but it's unclear that there is another, other than complete and total subjugation. But I don't think that U.S. citizens have it in them. <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/intolerable-things" author="Hamilton Nolan" source="How Things Work">Intolerable Things</a> <bq><b>Regular people, decent people, faced with intolerable things. That’s who all of the people that you see on the breathless cable news coverage of these protests are.</b> People at the donut store on Saturday morning watch a man get thrown down and shot. People laying in bed on Saturday morning have to throw open their doors to passersby choking on tear gas. People planning to go out to breakfast end up spending all day standing on icy sidewalks hollering at cops in riot helmets. <b>It’s not as if they signed up for this. This is where they live. The federal government has invaded their city with heavily armed, masked secret police. It would be weird if everyone just carried on going to brunch.</b></bq> <bq>Watch what is happening in Minneapolis. Watch what they are going through. I’m leaving today, but I don’t think it will matter too much. <b>The rest of America is going to be like Minneapolis before you know it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/only-idiots-believe-the-war-propaganda" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Only Idiots Believe The War Propaganda About Iran</a> <bq>There is nothing you can say to convince me that the Trump administration is telling us the truth about Iran. <b>There is nothing you can say to convince me that the mass media are telling us the truth about Iran.</b> There is nothing you can say to convince me the people who just spent two years incinerating Gaza have kind-hearted intentions for the Iranian people. [...] There is nothing you can say to convince me that I should help the US and Israel manufacture consent for a regime change war by criticizing the Iranian government in the middle of a frenzied war propaganda campaign. <b>It is not okay to be a grown adult in the year 2026 and still believe US regime change interventionism in the middle east will lead to positive outcomes.</b> It is not okay to live in a post-Iraq invasion world and still not understand that we are being lied to about Iran. <b>It is not okay to have lived through what these monsters did to Libya and still believe forcibly toppling the Iranian government is a moral and just cause</b> to get behind. <b>It is not okay to have just watched these freaks turn Gaza into a gravel parking lot</b> pervaded by the smell of rotting corpses <b>and believe they have noble intentions</b> for the people of Iran.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-us-is-pushing-so-many-regime" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The US Is Pushing So Many Regime Change Agendas It's Hard To Keep Up</a> <bq><b>Starvation sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is widely considered both normal and ethical to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force.</b> Deliberately impoverishing an entire nation so that it erupts in conflict and civil war is one of the most evil things you can possibly imagine, but it’s <b>the go-to Plan A for the US empire when it comes to removing foreign leaders who refuse to kiss the imperial boot.</b> From Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen to Syria to Venezuela to Cuba to Iran, these last couple of years the US has been in <b>a mad scramble to eliminate governments and resistance groups which attempt to insist on their own sovereignty.</b> There’s a new excuse every time, but the end goal is always the same: the furtherance of planetary domination. <b>The US empire is the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on this planet. If any regime is in need of changing, it’s that one.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/when-will-trump-attack-iran/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">When Will Trump Attack Iran?</a> <bq><b>Nobody knows who Trump's going to bomb least of all Trump.</b> The US military is always bombing somebody, but even the garrulous generals are shocked at how trigger-happy Trump is. <b>He's just flinging carrier groups across the oceans without a care in the world.</b> Make no mistake, American Presidents are all war criminals and America is always hitting somebody, but Trump is hitting them all at once. Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, fucking Greenland, everybody can get some. Every US President is violent, but Trump's velocity is different. <b>Trump needs constant attention, so that means constant aggression, in every direction.</b></bq> <bq>In the morning, <b>Trump reads the papers and wonders why he's not in them. Then he does something crazy to get attention.</b></bq> <bq>The strategic calculus is that Iran can clapback at the US base Qatar across the thin Persian Gulf, tank oil markets, and hit Trump where it hurts, in the stock market. But <b>Trump isn't doing calculus, it really depends what side of the bed he wakes up in the morning.</b> He doesn't trust committees, he doesn't trust consultants, he doesn't read reports. Trump just goes by his gut, which sometimes just surprises him, and thus us.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/george-orwell-quote-used-to-spread-propaganda-sort-of-missing-the-point/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">J6ers Wishing They Had Thought Of Branding Themselves 'Legal Observers'</a> This supposed satire magazine has lost the plot so hard that it can literally not tell what it's supposed to be supporting anymore. I guess they're trying to make fun of the civilians shot at point-blank range by federal troops in the streets of Minneapolis. This is the expected level of stupidity, coarseness, and monstrousness of late. But the joke they're trying to make doesn't even make sense because the J6ers were all pardoned by the president while legal observers are being shot dead and then smeared as terrorists. J6ers were persecuted for a time but none of them were flat-out murdered. And then they were all pardoned. Why would they want to be legal observers, who are actually risking their lives? J6ers and Babylon Bee-ers are much too much of pussies to put themselves on the line like that. <hr> The article <a href="https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/rhetoric/framing/kirby/2026/01/28/the-kirby-frame.html" author="Anthony Moser" source="Moser's Frame Shop">The Kirby Frame</a> makes a similar argument as I made in <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=6004">Be the white cat</a>, though it's a bit more muddled, I think. <bq>But if you do that, <b>you are stepping into their context.</b> You are now having a discussion about the value of autistic people. <b>When you negate their frame, your arguments are shaped like their arguments</b>: if they say autistic people are costly, you cite economic statistics about work. <b>You are responding as though</b> they are acting in good faith, as though they are your audience, as though <b>they might change their mind if you prove that what they’re saying isn’t true.</b></bq> The article includes 10 excellent examples, like the ones below. <bq>Frame: This public service costs too much, it isn’t making money Negation: It’s actually very efficient and it could make more money Kirby: <b>THEY ARE ATTACKING THE VERY IDEA OF PUBLIC SERVICES</b> Frame: ICE is targeting criminals Negation: No, they’re targeting ordinary people! Kirby: <b>THEY’RE WHITE SUPREMACISTS DOING ETHNIC CLEANSING which is why they’re saying everybody who isn’t white is a criminal</b> Frame: Food stamps are used by undeserving / Black people Negation: Actually many people on food stamps are deserving / white Kirby: <b>THEY ARE STARVING PEOPLE ON PURPOSE. They are using racist tropes to justify it bc many people will find that persuasive. Everyone deserves to eat</b></bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLbaqkDpaLE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/YLbaqkDpaLE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="JOE IS SO GONE..."> This video was fine but it contained an absolute banger of a revolutionary call from Hasan. <bq>What has stopped you from giving up? Not only am I a unimaginably stubborn person, but I also have a firm belief in my fellow man. I believe in you guys in this community. I believe in people that I haven't met yet. <b>I believe in the kindness of strangers. I know that we can overcome this.</b> I can't just give up. And I know neither can you. <b>Pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.</b> Revolutionary optimism. Cuz at the end of the day, what do you do? What do you do? You just give up. We can't afford to give up. And <b>even if someone like myself could afford to give up quite literally</b>, you know, off, go somewhere else, stop streaming, put my money in the stock market, S&P 500, baby, 18% growth, year-over-year, hell yeah. <b>I don't want to live in a world where these delusional losers win.</b> I don't want to live in that world. That world sucks. I think one of the most annoying parts about this is that <b>these delusional losers don't even realize that they are actively and aggressively pursuing a world that is worse than the one that we live in right now.</b> I don't want to live in that world.</bq> Investing is helping <i>them</i>. I like the <iq>Pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will</iq> so much that I looked it up. It comes from <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessimismo_dell%27intelligenza,_ottimismo_della_volontà" author="Antonio Gramsci" source="Wikipedia">Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà</a>, <bq> In un editoriale pubblicato su "L'Ordine Nuovo" nell'aprile 1920, Gramsci attribuisce il motto a Romain Rolland:<bq>La concezione socialista del processo rivoluzionario è caratterizzata da due note fondamentali, che Romain Rolland ha riassunto nel suo motto d'ordine: - <b>Pessimismo dell'intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà.</b></bq></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <img src="{att_link}precarious_market.webp" href="{att_link}precarious_market.webp" align="none" caption="Precarious Market" scale="65%"> <hr> <a href="https://entropicthoughts.com/nvidia-stock-crash-prediction" source="Entropic Thoughts" author="Chris">Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction</a> <bq>Here we are valuing a 31-day call option for Nvidia, with a strike price of $170. The market price is $18.68, but our code returns $24.74. This means our guess for the implied daily volatility of 4 % is too high. <b>If we try various values for the volatility, we’ll eventually find that 2.2 % leads to an option price of $18.53, which is fairly close to the market price.</b> This daily volatility corresponds to a yearly volatility of 35 %. If we look up other people’s calculations for the 30-day at-the-money implied volatility of the Nvidia stock, we’ll find they’re at something like 36 %. Definitely close enough. For answering the question about Nvidia dropping below $100, we don’t want the 30-day at-the-money volatility, though, but the 340-day far out-of-the-money volatility. <b>The 340-day $100 strike call options sell for $92.90 in the market. To get that price we need to feed our model a daily volatility of 3.1 %.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/01/china-capitalist-development-urbanization-unemployment" source="Jacobin" author="Dominik A. Leusder">China Came Late to Capitalism but Early to Its Pathologies</a> <bq><b>The number of households with single inhabitants has grown markedly over the last years, rising to 107 million, or over 21 percent, of all households nationally</b> [...]. A 2020 national census paints a more urgent picture, registering around 125 million people living alone. This development has raised concerns over loneliness. A few young developers responded by creating an app named “Are You Dead?”, where users failing to manually “check in” for two consecutive days will trigger the app to alert their emergency contact. Though little more than a social experiment, it <b>reflects anxieties very familiar to other industrial societies as they approach or experience economic maturity: mass loneliness and alienation and rising social cleavages.</b></bq> <bq>Within China, but also advanced capitalist states, a distinctive pattern is developing in which modern high-productivity sectors are flourishing, while low-productivity services or informal sectors stagnate and experience persistent underemployment and barriers to labor reallocation. The former are dominated by asset owners and capital holders (now also the highest income earners) who thrive amid asset price inflation, while <b>the latter sectors comprise much of the wage-dependent population chafing under worsening cost-of-living pressures, exacerbated by the increasingly large consumption shares of the wealthy.</b></bq> <bq>Then, amid the economic downturn from 2020 onward, as opportunities for social advancements evaporate, many young people get stuck. Those who just get by with several jobs are lucky: <b>the youth unemployment rate diverged sharply from the headline figure, and it is probably not a good sign that the government discontinued the relevant data series after it reached just under 22 per cent in 2018</b> [...]. For comparison, the current rates in Italy and Germany are around 19 percent and 7 per cent respectively. On top of that, young people in more developed prefectures see the financial benefits of higher educational attainment eaten up by higher housing costs.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>many young people still pay 30–50 percent of their monthly income on rent.</b> Meanwhile, price-to-income ratios remain among the world’s highest, implying at least 30 years but <b>in big cities up to 122 years worth of full income to be able to purchase a 90-square-meter apartment.</b> As in the West, the top two income deciles own the majority of assets (~63 per cent by a 2020 estimate) and housing assets play an outsized role.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/28/kyrs-j28.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Gold price spiral and Japanese bond market selloff signal deepening financial turmoil</a> <bq>[...] the selloffs in the $7.3 trillion government bond market have been getting wilder and more frequent since the Bank of Japan moved away from its low-interest rate regime in March 2024. <b>On nine occasions the movement has been worse than the average.</b> But even by that metric the selloff of January 20 stood out. In response to the election announcement by Takaichi, <b>the rise in the yield on the 30-year bond was eight times the average daily trading range over the past five years.</b> <b>The turmoil in the Japanese market has major implications for the US Treasury market</b> and its capacity to keep funding ever-expanding US debt. It is now at $38 trillion and set to rise even further with the announcement by Trump that he is seeking a military budget of $1.5 trillion. <b>Japanese investors hold 13 percent of the US Treasury market debt.</b> The fear is that at least some of this money will be returned home if Japanese interest rates rise sharply. World markets and the US market in particular have been able to finance growing government debt at lower interest rates than would be justified by their deficits <b>because of the availability of cheaper money from Japan.</b></bq> <bq>“<b>If the yen slides hard, Japan has to defend it, and the fastest lever is selling reserves</b>, including Treasuries. That’s how a Japan problem turns into higher US yield at exactly the wrong moment,” he said. <b>The Japanese government and the central bank are compelled to try to maintain the yen’s value because a major fall increases costs for industry</b> which relies heavily on imports for oil and many other raw materials as well as industrial components. It also increases the rate of inflation for consumers which has already started to rise.</bq> <bq>At the centre of those vulnerabilities is the growth of debt. <b>Total global public debt is expected to reach more than 100 percent of global GDP over the next three years</b>, according to the International Monetary Fund. <b>There are two major components of the expected increase—rising military spending and increased interest payments.</b> In the US, the annual interest bill is rapidly approaching $1 trillion, more than doubling over the last four years, with a similar increase in the cost of servicing debt on Germany and Japan. <b>No amount of financial manoeuvring can get around this problem.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/haters-guide-oracle/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">The Hater's Guide to Oracle</a> <bq><b>Oracle, a business borne of soulless capitalist brutality, has tied itself existentially to not just the success of AI, but the specific, incredible, impossible success of OpenAI</b>, which will have to muster up $30 billion in less than a year to start paying for it, and another $270 billion or more to pay for the rest…at a time when <b>Oracle doesn’t have the capacity and has taken on brutal debt to build it.</b> For Oracle to survive, OpenAI must find a way to pay it four times the annual revenue of Microsoft Azure ($75 billion), and <b>because OpenAI burns billions of dollars, it’s going to have to raise all of that money at a time of historically low liquidity for venture capital.</b> Did I mention that <b>Oracle took on $56 billion of debt to build data centers specifically for OpenAI?</b> Or that the banks who invested in these deals <b>don’t seem to be able to sell off the debt?</b></bq> <bq><ul>Oracle’s stock is tied to the company “Oracle,” which is currently destroying its margins and <b>annihilating its available cash to buy GPUs to serve a customer that cannot afford to pay it.</b> <b>Oracle has taken on ruinous debt</b> that can only be paid if this customer, which cannot afford it and needs to raise money from an already-depleted venture capital pool, actually pays it. <b>Oracle now owns part of one of its largest cloud customers, TikTok, which loses billions of dollars a year</b>, and the US entity says, per Bloomberg, that it will “retrain, test and update the content recommendation algorithm on US user data,” guaranteeing that <b>it’ll fuck up whatever makes it useful, reducing its efficacy for advertisers.</b> <b>Larry Ellison’s entire financial future is based on whether OpenAI lives or dies.</b> If it dies, there isn’t another entity in the universe that can actually afford (or has interest in) the scale of the compute Oracle is building.</ul></bq> <bq><b>The only way out is if OpenAI becomes literally the most-successful cash-generating company of all time within the next two years</b>, and that’s being generous. This is not a joke. This is not an understatement. <b>Sam Altman holds Larry Ellison’s future in his clammy little hands</b>, and there isn’t really anything anybody can do about it other than hope for the best, because Oracle already took on all that debt and capex.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/24/fwzp-j24.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">The EPA sets the value of human life and health at zero: A further comment</a> <bq>[...] the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under the Trump administration, has made a fundamental change to how it evaluates air pollution regulations. According to internal agency emails and documents, <b>the EPA plans to stop calculating the monetary value of health benefits</b>—such as avoiding premature deaths, heart attacks and asthma attacks—when setting limits for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone. At the same time, <b>the agency will continue to fully account for the compliance costs faced by industry.</b> The result is a regulatory framework in which <b>pollution controls are systematically framed as economically unjustified, regardless of their impact on public health.</b></bq> <bq>The EPA has also moved to <b>rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which established that greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health and welfare and provided the legal basis for regulating climate pollution under the Clean Air Act.</b> In addition, the administration has proposed eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) for most industrial sectors, removing a key source of facility-level emissions data relied upon by regulators, researchers, and the public.</bq> <bq>Taken together, these measures mark a shift away from managing the health impacts of industrial pollution. <b>The likely outcome is a steady increase in preventable illness and death in the United States, alongside a growing contribution to global health risks related to climate change.</b> By mid-century, the cumulative effects of these policies are expected to <b>add substantially to the global burden of disease</b>, particularly among working-class populations and poorer countries that are least equipped to absorb the consequences.</bq> The perfect victims of empire. <bq>Under the Obama and Biden administrations, this system produced a regulatory compromise. <b>Emissions standards for vehicles and power plants were strengthened</b>, and the social cost of carbon was used to justify those rules in economic terms. At the same time, <b>regulations were designed to limit disruption to corporate profitability.</b> Even when the Biden administration proposed increasing the social cost of carbon to reflect updated science, climate protection remained <b>framed as a problem of economic optimization rather than a public health necessity.</b></bq> <bq>The past five decades of environmental regulation in the United States were not the product of benevolent governance or abstract concern for social welfare. It emerged from sustained worker struggles, mass opposition to industrial pollution, and popular pressure that forced limits on corporate activity. These <b>regulations represented concessions—hard-won and contested—that constrained profit-making to blunt its most destructive effects on health and social life.</b> What is now taking place at the EPA marks the abandonment of even this constrained settlement. The agency’s current trajectory means the discarding of gains wrested from earlier struggles. <b>The EPA will not “balance” health impacts against economic costs; it will remove them from consideration.</b> It will renounce its own regulatory authority, dismantle oversight capacity, and evade responsibility. <b>Profitability is no longer even partially offset by social constraint—it stands alone as the sole organizing principle of policy.</b></bq> <bq>Climate-related harm is cumulative, irreversible in key respects, and inseparable from the conditions of work, health, and survival for large sections of the population. Abandoning regulation in this domain is not a neutral retreat; it is <b>an assertion that the social costs of environmental breakdown are acceptable so long as short-term profitability is preserved.</b> What is being dismantled is not merely a regulatory framework, but the <b>legacy of struggles that once imposed limits on capital in the name of human survival.</b></bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2026/01/24/a-very-short-post-about-heroin-voice/" author="Doug Muir" source="Crooked Timber">A short post about heroin voice</a> <bq>“RFK Jr. used to be a junkie” isn’t a secret either. He’s admitted to several years of heroin addiction: basically, “It was the Eighties, man”. <b>I would bet a modest amount of money that he used heroin both more and longer than he’s now willing to admit</b>, but whatever. It’s relevant to his current position, not because he used to be an addict — there’s no shame in that — but because <b>he grew into one of those ex-addicts who believe, that since they Triumphed Over Addiction through some combination of Clean Living and Personal Awesomeness, they’re now uniquely entitled to tell the rest of us how to behave.</b> If you’ve ever spent much time around twelve-step programs, you’ll know the type — mercifully rare, but instantly familiar. Anyway! <b>RFK Jr. doesn’t have a weird voice because of vaccines. And it’s not genetic either. It’s heroin voice. He has a weird voice because he used to be a junkie.</b></bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72656" source="Language Log" author="Victor Mair | M. Paul Shore">Authenticity of pronunciation</a> <bq><b>Zero Attempted Authenticity (ZAA)</b>: Broadcaster simply pronounces foreign nouns, or their conventional alphabetical transcriptions, according to the <b>typical alphabet-letter sound values of his or her native language.</b> Generally not an honorable way to go.</bq> <bq><b>Non-Xenophonetic Authenticity (NXA)</b>: Broadcaster pronounces foreign words <b>as closely as possible to the foreign original while staying within the phonetic repertory and normal sound-patterns of his or her native language</b>, but not being bound by that native language's typical alphabet-letter sound values.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/oversocialization-the-shackles-of" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">Oversocialization, the Shackles of the Millennial Generation</a> <bq>Success in elite educational and professional milieus increasingly depends on an almost obsessive attunement to other people’s judgments, shifting norms, and invisible rules, so the habit of self-surveillance never switches off. Instead of arriving at a stable sense of having “made it,” <b>these individuals internalize the idea that their status is always provisional, always subject to reassessment by peers who are just as anxious and competitive as they are.</b></bq> <bq>The result is <b>a life lived under continuous internal audit, where confidence would require ignoring exactly the social signals they’ve spent years learning to decode.</b> Fortunately, there is a renegade scholar who wrote cogently about this condition decades ago. <b>Unfortunately, his name was Theodore Kaczynski.</b></bq> <bq>I myself am not an anti-modernity guy, though <b>I am a “we need to count the costs of modernity” guy</b>, and I don’t think a return to pre-industrial society is possible or even preferable. But like many cranks, Uncle Ted occasionally put his finger on something real. And, indeed, <b>I am [a] big proponent of the idea that we can and should embrace good ideas from bad people</b>; the idea that to say “I agree with X about on issue but not others” is to endorse X in general is emblematic of an age of useless liberal moral hygiene theater and a maddeningly common bit of illogic.</bq> <bq>Oversocialization, in this sense, is less about being polite than about <b>being haunted by the possibility of being impolite</b>; to be oversocialized is not to be considerate of others but to be <b>motivated by the fear of appearing to be inconsiderate of others.</b></bq> <bq>[...] to be clear, this is a thing that was done to them, not something they did. <b>Oversocialized people are often annoying and frequently could do more to be self-critical, but they’re ultimately products of their environment.</b> And for the kinds of people I’m writing about today, the environment relentlessly points in the direction of anxiety, insecurity, and constant self-questioning. Ultimately, <b>no one suffers more due to their condition than they do themselves.</b></bq> <bq><b>I feel exhausted by living among people who are incapable of experiencing ordinary human conflict without internal crisis</b>, I terribly miss the wisdom that says that <b>difficult people are ultimately often the most rewarding to know</b>, and I feel very real sympathy for those who cannot leave themselves alone, who cannot simply enjoy anything because they spend every waking moment overanalyzing whether they said or did the right thing when what they said or did was perfectly anodyne.</bq> <bq>We’re a generation of people who apologize when someone else bumps into us, <b>a generation that compulsively rereads sent emails for unintended tone crimes</b>, a generation that lies awake replaying conversations from three years ago, convinced that there were unforgivable faux pas that we were not aware of at the time but that everyone else noticed and filed away for future use.</bq> <bq><b>Millennials do not experience social life as a series of shared rituals and negotiated expectations; we experience it as a minefield.</b></bq> <bq><b>Social media collapses context, audience, and time into a single, ever-present tribunal.</b> You’re never just talking to a friend, online. Instead, you’re inevitably also performing in front of a (real or hypothetical) crowd that may include your boss, your enemies, your ex, your high school classmates, and strangers who hate you on principle. The lesson you learn, very early, is that <b>everything you say can be misinterpreted, screenshotted, and resurrected later as evidence of moral failure.</b></bq> <bq>So we live in a strange inversion: <b>maximal freedom where guidance would help, maximal constraint where looseness would be humane.</b> We don’t know how to build a good life, but we’re certain we’re doing it wrong. We don’t know what society expects of us, but we’re positive we’re failing to meet those expectations. <b>Oversocialization fills the void left by the collapse of substantive norms.</b></bq> <bq>Most of our heroes from pop culture are indifferent to the opinions of others, but we ourselves are exquisitely sensitive to social feedback, real or imagined. We yearn to be disaffected but delayed text responses feel like an indictment. A vague comment becomes a threat, silence becomes condemnation. <b>Oversocialization trains you to read absence as meaning and meaning as judgment.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/an-age-of-chimeras" source="Hinternet" author="Hinternet Editorial Board">An Age of Chimeras</a> <bq>There has been, in effect, an industrial revolution of language. It can now be produced, mechanically and in great surplus, in just the same way Chinese factories produce cheap plastic toys. <b>Almost all of what gets churned out is literal garbage, destined never to be read, while perversely the ease with which it can be produced also incentivizes its overproduction.</b> University syllabi and annual productivity reports are now bloated beyond any imaginable human proportions, and while most academics continue to play along poker-faced, we all know that we all know where all that text-bloat is coming from. <b>It is language by machines and for machines, and it all foretells a very near future in which the human intermediaries will be cut out of the arrangement altogether.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>students now describe as “prompts” the paper “topics” (as we used to call them) assigned to them</b> — the same language we also use to describe the instructions fed into our machines for the production of AI images. Across all domains what we are seeing, plainly, is a machine-human convergence, or, more precisely, <b>a largely unconscious concern on the human side to approximate the “style” of the LLMS, itself an approximation of older human style.</b></bq> <bq>Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis [...]</bq> <a href="https://beruhmte-zitate.de/zitate/131153-quintus-ennius-wie-ahnlich-ist-uns-der-affe-dieses-ausserst-scheu/" author="Quintus Ennius" source="zitiert bei Cicero, De Natura Deorum I, 97">Wie ähnlich ist uns der Affe, dieses äußerst scheußliche Tier!</a> (How like us the ape, this utterly hideous animal!) <bq>For the most part, however, writers have not yet understood that this is our plight, and so <b>have mostly retreated into denial</b> — into kitsch fantasies of a pre-digital writerly idyll of fountain pens, ink-pots, notebooks, throw-pillows, and a “nice hot mug of cocoa”. It is mostly towards the sustenance of such a fantasy that Substack seems to be veering in recent months, with the result that it now <b>often seems to have about as much to do with writing as LinkedIn motivational sales porn has to do with making money.</b> This turn is to be deplored, and resisted, not simply by continuing to write, but by <b>continuing to write in a way that reflects the reality of the cultural-technological conjuncture in which we find ourselves.</b></bq> <bq><b>The effervescent youth —or, which amounts to the same, the brainrotten youth— do not waste time with “AI-free” certifications.</b> They are neither afraid of AI, nor subordinate to AI, but simply take AI as given, as a feature of our reality and as a powerful enhancement of our own irreducibly human potentialities.</bq> They are doing no such thing. They are cruising on instinct. Some worry about how dependent and dumb they're getting, anecdotally but they are not having a quiet revolution, nor are the preternaturally unfazed and untouched by the predations of a mind-warping tool promulgated by tech billionaires intent on more money and control, no matter the cost to others. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/no-healthy-person-wants-to-rule-the" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">No Healthy Person Wants To Rule The World Or Become A Billionaire</a> <bq><b>Michael Parenti has passed away after a luminous life advancing powerful ideas and insights about the abusive dynamics of human civilization and how best to address them. He did not die a wealthy man.</b><fn> The mainstream papers did not report on his departure from our world. Only a relatively small percentage of the population is aware he ever lived. But everyone knows who Elon Musk is. Everyone knows who Jeff Bezos is. Who Bill Gates is. The best of us live and die in relative obscurity, generally being subjected to scorn and derision from the ruling establishment the entire time. The worst of us become plutocratic demigods. It’s an uphill battle. You spend your life swimming against the current of dystopia, and you are not handsomely rewarded for your efforts. You’ll get deplatformed, censored and smeared. You might even get shot by government agents for standing up for the disempowered. And you’ll definitely never be a billionaire. But it’s absolutely worth it, and you should do it. Fighting for truth and justice in a civilization made of injustice and deceit is the only way to live. It’s the only way to feel satisfied with your efforts during this life. The only way to be sure that when you are on your deathbed you can look back and know you spent your time here in a right and admirable way. It costs a lot to fight for a healthy world. But it costs a lot more not to.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2026/01/24/the-value-of-things/" author="Bob Nystrom" source="Stuff with Stuff">The Value of Things</a> <bq>Generative AI, when wielded deftly, can be an amazing tool for creating things with utility faster and more easily than you ever could before. But it can’t generate meaning. The giant matrix of floating point numbers in a rack of GPUs in some data center does not love you. Another story: When my brother and I were growing up, we were really into movies. We made short videos (hilariously bad), learned how to do special effects make-up (actually tolerably good), and all sorts of stuff like that. We dreamed about growing up and becoming another pair of Hollywood brothers like the Zuckers or Coens. Many years later, as a birthday present, I wrote my brother a screenplay for a short horror film about a mythological siren. I toiled on it every night after the kids went to bed for weeks. It’s one of my favorite gifts. I don’t know if we’ll ever get a chance to shoot it. We live on opposite sides of the country and he can’t handle the gloom of Seattle any more than I can handle the politics of the South. It’s likely this screenplay has zero utility. But it still has a ton of meaning because I sweated every single word in that stack of 12-point Courier pages. Today, with the help of ChatGPT, I could probably put together a feature-length screenplay in a tenth of the time. It might even be an objectively better screenplay for a better movie. But because I made the screenplay in a tenth of the time thanks to ChatGPT’s help, it would hold only a tenth of the meaning for my brother. If my hypothesis that meaning comes from time sacrifice is true, then by making us more productive, AI eliminates meaning.</bq> <bq>The high level point is just that the more we automate the process of making a thing, the less of ourselves we put into it. And an object with less of ourselves in it is often valued less by the person who receives it. That’s all I’m saying.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <img src="{att_link}there_is_exactly_one_generation_that_can_rotate_a_pdf._the_knowledge_dies_with_us.webp" href="{att_link}there_is_exactly_one_generation_that_can_rotate_a_pdf._the_knowledge_dies_with_us.webp" align="none" caption="There is exactly one generation that can rotate a PDF. The knowledge dies with us." scale="75%"> <bq>holy heck i'm training a zoomer kid to use the computer at work and it's exactly like training a boomer There is exactly one generation that can rotate a pdf and there will never be another. The knowledge dies with us.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/on-programming-with-agents" source="Zed Blog" author="Mikayla Maki">On Programming with Agents</a> <bq><b>To use an LLM effectively is to constrain the space of possible next tokens until only the correct answer remains.</b> The labs did half the work during training; we do the other half with careful prompting and a powerful agent harness.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>defining "correct" has always been the hard part. It requires domain knowledge and judgment</b>—knowing which tests actually matter, when an abstraction is worth the complexity, whether an API will make sense to the next person who reads it. <b>LLMs can help us write the code. They can't tell us what to build or why.</b></bq> <bq>Watch for signs the agent is off-track: unexpected file changes, repetitive attempts at the same fix, or TODO comments where real code should be. When you see these, stop and try to understand why the agent ran aground. <b>Ask the agent why it did something, export the thread to ask another agent about what happened, and look at the code yourself.</b></bq> This sounds so fucking tedious. Do we really think programmers are managers now? <hr> <a href="https://addyo.substack.com/p/how-to-write-a-good-spec-for-ai-agents" source="Elevate" author="Addy Osmani">How to write a good spec for AI agents</a> <bq>[...] <b>describe what you want to build, and let the agent draft a spec while exploring your existing code.</b> Ask it to clarify ambiguities by questioning you about the plan. Have it review the plan for architecture, best practices, security risks, and testing strategy. The goal is to <b>refine the plan until there’s no room for misinterpretation.</b> Only then do you exit Plan Mode and let the agent execute. This workflow <b>prevents the common trap of jumping straight into code generation before the spec is solid.</b></bq> This kind of workflow assumes that you have existing code. <bq>The better strategy is iterative focus. Guidelines from industry suggest decomposing complex requirements into sequential, simple instructions as a best practice. <b>Focus the AI on one sub-problem at a time, get that done, then move on. This keeps the quality high and errors manageable.</b></bq> This sounds so tedious. I can't help but wonder whether it's even worth it to learn any of this way of working. All previous generations of software tries to meet the users where they were; AI coding tools demand that the user meet them where they are. This suggests to me that we are still in the very early stages of development of these tools, if there are even to be later stages of development. <bq>By structuring the work into modules - and using strategies like spec summaries or sub-spec agents - you’ll navigate around context size limits and the <b>AI’s short-term memory cap. Remember, a well-fed AI is like a well-fed function: give it only the inputs it needs for the job at hand.</b></bq> This reads like a self-help book. Are these really meant to be tools for engineers? <bq><b>This three-tier approach is more nuanced than a flat list of rules.</b> It acknowledges that some actions are always safe, some need oversight, and some are categorically off-limits. The agent can proceed confidently on “Always” items, flag “Ask first” items for review, and hard-stop on “Never” items.</bq> The three-tier approach is blindingly obvious, though, no? Why do you have program this yourself? Why do you have to include this in a prompt? Isn't it odd that "do not reply to questions about Israel and report those who insist on it to the authorities" is baked into the the model but "don't post secrets and passwords into public repositories" isn't? I'm quite certain that my priorities are not at all aligned with those of the companies purveying this kind of software. <bq>This means having a second agent (or a separate prompt) review the first agent’s output against your spec’s quality guidelines. Anthropic and others have found this effective for subjective evaluation. You might prompt: <b>“Review this code for adherence to our style guide. Flag any violations.”</b></bq> We have had deterministic tools that do this for decades. The latest versions are incredibly fast, good, and nuanced. They run in real-time. You don't need an LLM for this. The only ones who think that they need an LLM for this are those whose only tool is an LLM. They are basically working with a simple text editor and praying that the LLM fills in all of the cracks of their own deficiencies in not only understanding the tools before them, but also relieves them of the burden of informing themselves about the tools that might be available. Instead, they sit safely and ignorantly in their little cocoon, in the tiny world revealed to them by their AI friend. <bq>Simon Willison humorously <b>likened working with AI agents to “a very weird form of management”</b> and even “getting good results out of a coding agent feels uncomfortably close to managing a human intern”. You need to provide clear instructions (the spec), ensure they have the necessary context (the spec and relevant data), and give actionable feedback.</bq> It <i>is</i> management. <hr> <a href="https://cekrem.github.io/posts/programming-as-theory-building-part-ii/" source="" author="Christian Ekrem">Programming as Theory Building, Part II: When Institutions Crumble</a> <bq>It’s not just that people are losing the ability to build theories. It’s that <b>the institutions where theory-building happens—our teams, our companies, our profession—are being systematically degraded.</b></bq> <bq>There’s a darker psychological dimension here too. Mike Monteiro recently pointed out that <b>the AI industry’s success depends on convincing people they’re inadequate.</b> Every time you open Google Docs and see those “Help me write” buttons, the message is clear: you probably can’t do this yourself. We are not being built up by helpful tools. <b>We’re being torn down by tools that insist we can’t function without them.</b></bq> <bq>The difference matters. Boilerplate generation, documentation summarization, test scaffolding within an established pattern—these don’t require theory-building. They don’t involve the architectural decisions and domain understanding that give a codebase its coherence. <b>Using AI for these is like using a calculator for arithmetic: it frees up mental energy for the work that actually matters.</b></bq> <bq>But that framing misses what institutions actually are. They’re not just machines for producing output. They’re where expertise gets built, where decisions get made well, where people actually connect with each other. <b>Speed those things up too much and they stop working.</b></bq> <bq><b>What we’re fighting for isn’t just our individual craft (though that matters). It’s the institutions that make software development a profession rather than just a job.</b> The mentorship that turns juniors into seniors. The processes that keep codebases coherent over time. The relationships that make a team actually work.</bq> <bq>This is the other half of what Monteiro was getting at: once you convince people they can’t express themselves, it’s that much easier to convince them they can’t govern themselves. <b>The path from “let AI write your code” to “let AI make your decisions” to “you’re not competent to have a say” is shorter than we think.</b></bq> <bq>Software development teams that fully embrace “reflexive AI usage” will find their expertise pipelines broken, their decision-making processes hollowed out, their human connections atrophied. The theory will die. The code will remain, but nobody will understand it. And then the institutional knowledge will be gone, and no amount of AI will bring it back. In my previous post, I wrote: <b>“When the dust of this Null-Stack Vibe Bonanza has settled, they’ll once again be looking for senior developers.” I still believe that. But I’m less certain there will be any institutions left to produce them.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/18/who-pays-for-the-ai-bubble/" source="CounterPunch" author="Bradley Kaye">Who Pays for the AI Bubble?</a> <bq>It is not obvious to casual observers what has paid for the emerging AI bubble. <b>Corporate welfare, soft loans, local tax abatements, and outright cash transfers have flooded into the sector, while the robber barons behind today’s platforms get away with grand theft larceny under the euphemism of “economic development.”</b> The money is public, the upside is privatized, and the risks are socialized, as usual. What is remarkable is not that this is happening, but that there is <b>virtually no sustained mainstream coverage of the arrangements that are underwriting the so‑called AI boom.</b></bq> <bq><b>Behind every press release celebrating “AI transformation” was a matrix of land deals, tax holidays, free electricity, and infrastructure upgrades paid for by people who will never own a share of stock in these companies.</b> In other words, the AI boom is not just a technology story; it is a classic story of public money being used to inflate private asset prices.</bq> <bq>This is not an isolated data point. It is an early crack in what is increasingly recognizable as an AI asset bubble, inflated by government largesse and investor credulity, and now deflating in real time.</bq> E.g., Oracle. <bq>A non‑profit watchdog, Subsidy Tracker (run by Good Jobs First), documents that <b>in 2021 Apple was awarded a 39‑year incentive package in North Carolina worth up to $845 million.</b> The deal is supposed to generate around 3,000 high‑paying jobs, which sounds impressive until you notice that the state receives only a fraction of that value back in tax revenue over nearly four decades. The rest is, simply, <b>a wealth transfer to a company already sitting on hundreds of billions in cash.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>an $8 billion package in Indiana in 2024 for massive data center campuses.</b> On Amazon’s own corporate website, these projects are framed as the company “investing $15 billion in Northern Indiana” to build out data centers and advance AI technology, with glossy language about jobs and community impact. <b>What quietly disappears in that narrative is the fact that a very large share of that “investment” is in fact the public’s money, handed over in advance in the hope that the company might someday repay it</b> in the form of employment and ancillary economic activity.</bq> <bq>They understand that <b>state power, deployed correctly, can furnish them with land, electricity, water, and tax write‑offs on a scale that no private investor could ever match.</b> The mythology is that their fortunes arise from singular genius and entrepreneurial risk‑taking. The reality is that <b>they function as highly sophisticated grifters, arbitraging public budgets, gobbling up smaller firms like sharks among guppies, and then taking credit for innovations they simply purchased.</b></bq> <bq>Sam Altman’s throwaway line on Jimmy Fallon, “I can’t imagine raising a baby without using ChatGPT” was presented as a cute, futuristic quip. The audience laughed. The host laughed. The idea that an infant’s early life might be mediated by a proprietary chatbot was treated as a punchline, not as a symptom of a deeper cultural exhaustion. <b>If mainstream media has any attitude toward AI’s encroachment into everyday life, it is mostly giggles and bemused awe at the “existential threat,” framed in terms that flatter the industry rather than interrogate it.</b></bq> Also, Sam Altman is medically stupid. <bq>Almost all Google results have become a swamp of sponsored links, SEO‑farm pages, and AI‑generated filler that you must slog through before finding the information you wanted, if it appears at all. The product had to be “enshittified” to satisfy shareholders. The user’s experience deteriorates; the company’s profits climb. <b>All this will end up doing in the long term is pushing users towards AI. A majority of teenagers already report using ChatGPT more often than Google.</b></bq> This is more evidence of complete and utter capture of an entire generation rather than some sort of sign that they've voted with their feet by moving away from Google. You can move from Google to DuckDuckGo and experience absolutely no negative effects. But they've moved to a "search engine" that's even more capable of controlling their every thought---until they don't have any thoughts anymore. I'm quite wary---if not, to be honest, sick to death---of people pointing out what teenagers are doing as if they were somehow acting independently of the immense cultural machine that exists to mold them. <bq>What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought.” The AI bubble feeds precisely on this despair. <b>It offers the spectacle of thinking—a torrent of fluent text, polished images, smooth interfaces—without the underlying labor of understanding.</b></bq> <bq><b>The more power is entrusted to platforms and politicians, the less people feel obliged to cultivate any power of their own.</b></bq> <bq>The myth of “free market” capitalism needs to be challenged at every turn, and the AI bubble makes the stakes clearer than ever. The oligarchs fronting this wave are not solitary geniuses injecting their personal creativity into the world. <b>They are the beneficiaries of corporate welfare on a historic scale. Their fortunes depend on state‑backed credit, captured regulators, pliant local governments, and a population kept too busy and too precarious to organize meaningful resistance.</b></bq> <bq><b>AI will not “solve” the core problems facing most people: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, debt burdens, climate instability, crumbling public infrastructure.</b> At best, it will give them slightly better customer service chatbots while their public schools and hospitals continue to decay.</bq> <bq>Flush with tens of billions in public money and preferential treatment, the firms at the center of the 2025 boom have already burned through colossal sums with little to show for it beyond inflated valuations and a glut of mediocre products. <b>The year will go down as one of the great episodes of taxpayer‑funded speculation in recent memory.</b></bq> <bq>If there is a silver lining, it might be this: every bubble, eventually, bursts. When it does, the question will be <b>whether the social anger it releases can be redirected from scapegoats and cultural panics toward the actual architecture of corporate welfare and capital accumulation.</b> The AI bubble is a mirror. It reflects not our technological genius but our political cowardice.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/the_problem_is_culture" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">The problem is culture</a> <bq>The key virtues being expressed tend to be novelty, independence, ambition, a bias towards action and building something rather than nothing. The key is to throw time, energy and resources into creating something new and brilliant that changes the world, no matter how many lives or anything else are thrown away in the process. This is, in short, an <b>honour culture, where engineers compete for glory on the field of open-source software, aiming to be elevated in the eyes of their peers and the industry.</b> It's a culture that would be recognisable to Achilles or Beowulf almost immediately once you got them caught up on the context: <b>the goal is to make a name for yourself that will be remembered for ages to come.</b></bq> <bq><b>Our heroes, by and large, are maintainers, people who quietly did the work of keeping alive the things our predecessors built that were valuable and improving on them when needed.</b> They're also whistleblowers and dissidents, people who held the line on the fact that what someone else did was wrong and dangerous and would not be silent about it, often at the cost of their careers or even lives.</bq> <bq>[...] the culture stresses production over the work of maintenance and reproduction: the person who first creates something is honoured and gains much status, while <b>the dozens of people who quietly work for years or decades on keeping it working, updating it to keep up with times changing and developing new uses for the thing are largely forgotten</b>, despite the fact that they're the ones that actually make the thing valuable to people.</bq> <bq>[...] being embedded in tech culture means that coding agents start seeming remarkably useful: after all, <b>you clearly can create new things with them, which you can use to gain glory and social standing in the eyes of your peers.</b> And ephemerally, they will work, which by the standards of the culture of tech, means that coding agents work "well": <b>they allow for the accumulation of glory and social standing exceptionally effectively.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>if you don't know why something failed, you haven't fixed it or prevented it from happening, but merely set yourself up for a bigger disaster to come.</b> To build something that can be truly called reliable, then, takes multiple prototypes, lots of work on eliminating bugs, learning from previous projects, <b>a lot of institutional logic and constant monitoring and maintenance.</b></bq> <bq><b>In the framework of the long work, then, there is very limited point or value in what a code agent produces.</b></bq> <bq>The situation we're faced with, then, is one where <b>the code agent works "well" from the perspective of the tech culture that prioritises what is essentially competition between elites to do great deeds</b>, but doesn't do "well" at all in a culture that for all that it's close in domain to what software developers do, has very different attitudes and <b>discourages this kind of elite competition across the board in favour of a much more collaborative attitude.</b></bq> <bq>Willison even says as much in one of his blog posts:<bq>Since Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 came out in November and December respectively the amount of code I’ve written by hand has dropped to a single digit percentage of my overall output. The same is true for many other expert programmers I know. At this point <b>if you continue to argue that LLMs write useless code you’re damaging your own credibility.</b></bq>Let me stress: this is a blind spot in his thinking. It isn't being particularly wise, it isn't an indication that he knows more about the tools than the rest of us. <b>It's a cultural bias that holds his culture and its values to be superior to those of engineers, scientists or humanists and believes that he has nothing to learn from them.</b> I'm fairly certain that this isn't conscious as such, and that Simon doesn't consciously hold these beliefs, but this still leaves a bad taste in the mouth, all things considered.</bq> This expresses something I've been trying to put my finger on for a while now. Excellent. <bq>It's really rather hard to read this as anything other than "Simon and Jesse (who are male) are very clever and have the right experience, patterns of thought and temperament to make this very powerful technology work for them, whereas I (a woman) don't possess that". <b>The possibility that I have the capability but don't share the value system that makes code agents useful to them is pretty neatly excluded here</b>, and I can't help but read a bit of implicit sexism into it: <b>if I don't get the results that I find valuable from a code agent, it's because there's a flaw in me rather than the tool being not fit for purpose.</b></bq> This is similar to the criticism that you're a loser if you've not optimized your personal wealth as far as the law allows. People don't even bother to examine the morality of their investments because they never even consider that making money might have a moral dimension at all. People who do take advantage of the moral lacunae in the legal system will fight like mad to convince themselves that any other course of action would have been an impossibly stupid one to take. It makes them feel better about themselves as they either plunder directly, or benefit from others plundering on their behalf. The citation of Willison above, in which he expresses a truly vacuous and unquestioning mindset, is an example of this. He needs to put his moral qualms to bed, so he very much needs to believe that the utility of the morally questionable tools he's using is unassailable by anyone worth listening to. His posts on what he considers to be the negligible environmental effects of plowing so much energy into data infrastructure are made for similar reasons. But Meredith's observation that this all comes from the limited frame allowed by the predatory culture in which is he is steeped, puts the lie to all of it, regardless of whether Willison seems like a nice guy. He doesn't question his frame enough to be a reliable narrator. I've noted this on several occasions as well, but never had the words to explain it until now. <bq>[...] <b>site reliability and data engineers are regularly solving problems far thornier than what your average application developer deals with, but they're marginalised as "maintenance" done by people who "aren't real programmers".</b> I think it striking, for example, that a regular complaint that people like me make is that coding agents seem to really struggle with things like Terraform, Dockerfiles and CI/CD (you know, the things you'll probably be using to let someone actually use your app, which makes them more than a little important), yet this is almost never considered to be a major issue with what the tools can do: <b>so long as they can produce adequate Python or Javascript in volume, people are happy.</b></bq> <bq>To express other skills and virtues than success in writing new code that is "proper software", or to wish to write software in a different way, has the taint of femininity and is to be avoided: after all, <b>making a plate can be a masculine pursuit, but washing it is distinctly feminine. In short, maintaining and deploying code is gay and effeminate.</b></bq> <bq><b>The tech culture version of "well", then, has a distressing tendency to ignore an awful lot of important work because it's seen as being less prestigious and generally a job to be done by women or people who are otherwise less well-regarded than our prototypical software men.</b> The fact that the coding agents don't do at all "well" on what is easily half of the work that it takes to actually deliver a software solution to an end-user doesn't seem like an issue, and neither does the fact that <b>coding agents often introduce code patterns that make the delivery actively harder</b> (a problem that will likely have to be solved manually by said less-prestigious people).</bq> <bq>[...] <b>neither the thoughts of other professional cultures nor those of marginalised people in their own culture seem to matter much</b>: they aren't worth much of a thought. This feels arrogant and honestly quite distasteful.</bq> <bq><b>Code agents are the product of a certain culture with certain values, and make quite a lot of sense within the bounds of that culture</b>, where engineers are fighting for the honour and esteem of their peers in contests of cleverness and innovation: they let you produce more, innovate more and thus gain higher status. <b>For those of us outside the culture though, the tools really struggle to seem useful, and in fact make the entire tech culture seem vain, obsessed with pointless status games and perilously uncaring towards human life.</b></bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-estimate-work/" author="Sean Goedecke" source="">How I estimate work as a staff software engineer</a> <bq><b>As every experienced software engineer knows, it is not possible to accurately estimate software projects.</b> The tension between this polite fiction and its well-understood falseness causes a lot of strange activity in tech companies. For instance, many engineering teams estimate work in t-shirt sizes instead of time, because it just feels too obviously silly to the engineers in question to give direct time estimates. Naturally, <b>these t-shirt sizes are immediately translated into hours and days when the estimates make their way up the management chain.</b></bq> As they must! We are paid by the hour, by the day. We spend time. Schedules are necessarily based on time. There are deadlines. These things exist. Very few customers are happy with some random amount of functionality within a given time frame. This is a fiction promulgated by a web-based software that was constantly in "beta". It does not apply to 95% of the world's effort. <bq>We work on poorly-understood systems and cannot predict exactly what must be done in advance. <b>Most programming in large systems is research: identifying prior art, mapping out enough of the system to understand the effects of changes, and so on.</b> Even for fairly small changes, we simply do not know what’s involved in making the change until we go and look. <b>The pro-estimation dogma says that these questions ought to be answered during the planning process, so that each individual piece of work being discussed is scoped small enough to be accurately estimated. I’m not impressed by this answer.</b> It seems to me to be a throwback to the bad old days of software architecture, where one architect would map everything out in advance, so that individual programmers simply had to mechanically follow instructions. Nobody does that now, because it doesn’t work: programmers must be empowered to make architectural decisions, because they’re the ones who are actually in contact with the code2. Even if it did work, that would <b>simply shift the impossible-to-estimate part of the process backwards, into the planning meeting (where of course you can’t write or run code, which makes it near-impossible to accurately answer the kind of questions involved).</b></bq> <bq><b>Estimates are political tools for non-engineers in the organization.</b> They help managers, VPs, directors, and C-staff decide on which projects get funded and which projects get cancelled.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>teams will often start with the estimate, and then go and figure out what kind of software work they can do to meet it.</b> Suppose you’re working on a LLM chatbot, and your director wants to implement “talk with a PDF”. If you have six months to do the work, you might implement a robust file upload system, some pipeline to chunk and embed the PDF content for semantic search, a way to extract PDF pages as image content to capture formatting and diagrams, and so on. <b>If you have one day to do the work, you will naturally search for simpler approaches</b>: for instance, converting the PDF to text client-side and sticking the entire thing in the LLM context, or offering a plain-text “grep the PDF” tool. This is true at even at the level of individual lines of code. <b>When you have weeks or months until your deadline, you might spend a lot of time thinking airily about how you could refactor the codebase to make your new feature fit in as elegantly as possible.</b> When you have hours, you will typically be laser-focused on finding an approach that will actually work. <b>There are always many different ways to solve software problems.</b></bq> There are different ways but they are not <i>equivalent</i>. This line of argumentation makes it almost sound like you can just do the quick way instead of <iq>thinking airily</iq> about an <iq>elegant</iq> solution, which, to a manager sounds like <i>wasting precious company time and money that would be better spent on C-suite bonuses.</i> The quick (and dirty) solution very often---nearly always---engenders some technical debt, whether it's acknowledged or not. I like to get the quick solution in place as a <i>fallback</i> while I try to come up with alternative solutions that incur less technical debt within the available timeframe. Every solution divides the problem before you into the part that you've solved now and the part that you might need to solve later (potential technical debt). I write "potential" because often part of what you consider to be a drawback to a simpler, less elegant solution turns out to not be a problem in the medium- or long-term. This is a win because no-one did any unnecessary work. I think of any feature as being divided into the parts that are already implemented (the code) and the parts still to be implemented (the backlog). It's highly probable that the feature is useful to some users and for some use cases even though a backlog still exists. You may find that the potential use cases in the backlog never come to fruition. E.g. no-one cares that you can't configure something more precisely. After a while, you can drop that functionality from the backlog, especially if you've taken the product in a different direction. <bq>So how do I estimate, given all that? <b>I gather as much political context as possible before I even look at the code. How much pressure is on this project? Is it a casual ask, or do we have to find a way to do this?</b> What kind of estimate is my management chain looking for? There’s a huge difference between “the CTO really wants this in one week” and “we were looking for work for your team and this seemed like it could fit”.</bq> <bq>Finally, <b>I go back to my manager with a risk assessment, not with a concrete estimate.</b> I don’t ever say “this is a four-week project”. I say something like “I don’t think we’ll get this done in one week, because X Y Z would need to all go right, and at least one of those things is bound to take a lot more work than we expect. <b>Ideally, I go back to my manager with a series of plans</b>, not just one:<ul>We tackle X Y Z directly, which might all go smoothly but if it blows out we’ll be here for a month We bypass Y and Z entirely, which would introduce these other risks but possibly allow us to hit the deadline We bring in help from another team who’s more familiar with X and Y, so we just have to focus on Z</ul>In other words, I don’t “break down the work to determine how long it will take”. <b>My management chain already knows how long they want it to take. My job is to figure out the set of software approaches that match that estimate.</b></bq> <bq>[...] estimates are not by or for engineering teams. <b>They are tools used for managers to negotiate with each other about planned work.</b> Very occasionally, when a project is literally impossible, the estimate can serve as a way for the team to communicate that fact upwards. But that requires trust. <b>A team that is always pushing back on estimates will not be believed when they do encounter a genuinely impossible proposal.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2026/01/26/ai-generated-tests-as-ceremony/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">AI-generated tests as ceremony</a> <bq>When people wax lyrical about all the code that LLMs generated, I usually ask: <b>How do you know that it works? To which the most common answer seems to be: I looked at the code, and it's fine.</b> This is where the discussion becomes difficult, because it's hard to respond to this claim without risking offending people. For what it's worth, <b>I've personally looked at much code and deemed it correct, only to later discover that it contained defects. How do people think that bugs make it past code review and into production?</b> It's as if <b>some variant of Gell-Mann amnesia is at work.</b> Whenever a bug makes it into production, you acknowledge that it 'slipped past' vigilant efforts of quality assurance, but <b>as soon as you've fixed the problem, you go back to believing that code-reading can prevent defects.</b> To be clear, I'm a <b>big proponent of code reviews.</b> To the degree that any science is done in this field, <b>research indicates that it's one of the better ways of catching bugs early.</b> My own experience supports this to a degree, but <b>an effective code review is a concentrated effort. It's not a cursory scan over dozens of code files, followed by LGTM.</b> The world isn't black or white. <b>There are stories of LLMs producing near-ready forms-over-data applications. Granted, this type of code is often repetitive, but uncomplicated.</b> It's conceivable that if the code looks reasonable and smoke tests indicate that the application works, it most likely does. Furthermore, <b>not all software is born equal. In some systems, errors are catastrophic, whereas in others, they're merely inconveniences.</b> There's little doubt that LLM-generated software is part of our future. This, in itself, may or may not be fine. We still need, however, to <b>figure out how that impacts development processes.</b> What does it mean, for example, related to software testing?</bq> <bq>[...] <b>using LLMs to generate tests may lull you into a false sense of security. After all, now you have tests.</b> What is missing from this process is an understanding of why tests work in the first place. Tests work best when you have seen them fail.</bq> <bq>[...] the devil is in the details. What is the actual process when asking an LLM to follow TDD? <b>Do you ask the LLM to write a test, then review the test, run it, and see it fail?</b> Then stage the code changes? Then ask the LLM to pass the test? Then verify that the LLM did not change the test while passing it? Review the additional code change? Commit and repeat? If so, this sounds epistemologically sound. If, on the other hand, you let it go in a fast loop where <b>the only observations your human brain can keep up with is that test status oscillates between red and green, then you're back to where we started: This is essentially ex-post tests with extra ceremony.</b></bq> <bq>Having LLMs write unit tests strikes me as a process with little epistemological content. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the LLM never produces code in a high-level programming language. Instead, it goes straight to machine code. Assuming that you don't read machine code, how much would you trust the generated system? Would you trust it more if you asked the LLM to write tests? What does a test program even indicate? <b>You may be given a program that ostensibly tests the system, but how do you know that it isn't a simulation? A program that only looks as though it runs tests, but is, in fact, unrelated to the actual system?</b> You may find that a contrived thought experiment, but <b>this is effectively the definition of vibe coding. You don't inspect the generated code, so the language becomes functionally irrelevant.</b> Without human engagement, tests strike me as mere ceremony.</bq> <bq>Another option is to turn the tables. Instead of writing production code and asking LLMs to write tests, <b>why not write tests, and ask LLMs to implement the SUT?</b> This would entail a mostly black-box approach to TDD, but still seems scientific to me.</bq> This is what some people have been doing to generate new implementation for existing standards with extremely detailed specifications as well as well-defined and automatable testing harnesses. <bq><b>For some reason I've never understood, however, most people dislike writing tests</b>, so this is probably unrealistic, too. As a supplement, then, we should explore ways to critique tests.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://atmoio.substack.com/p/after-two-years-of-vibecoding-im" author="MO" source="">After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand</a> <bq>[...] you find that spec-driven development doesn’t work either. <b>In real life, design docs and specs are living documents that evolve in a volatile manner through discovery and implementation.</b> Imagine if in a real company you wrote a design doc in 1 hour for a complex architecture, handed it off to a mid-level engineer (and told him not to discuss the doc with anyone), and took off on vacation.</bq> <bq>Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation. <b>They are consistent with themselves and your prompt. But respect for the whole, there is not.</b> Respect for structural integrity there is not. Respect even for neighboring patterns there was not.</bq> <bq>After reading months of cumulative highly-specified agentic code, I said to myself: I’m not shipping this shit. I’m not gonna charge users for this. And I’m not going to promise users to protect their data with this. <b>I’m not going to lie to my users with this.</b> So I’m back to writing by hand for most things. Amazingly, <b>I’m faster, more accurate, more creative, more productive, and more efficient than AI, when you price everything in</b>, and not just code tokens per hour.</bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-buffalo-bills-are-a-mess-but" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">The Buffalo Bills Are a Mess, But Sean McDermott's Firing Was Totally Justifiable</a> <bq>The simple reality is this: <b>McDermott had nine years in Buffalo, eight of them with a once-in-a-lifetime talent at quarterback.</b> He consistently produced winners and won playoff games, but he couldn’t get over the hump, in a league notoriously invested in one and only one goal, a Super Bowl victory. And the way the Bills keep losing in the playoffs is the biggest problem of all: <b>McDermott is a defensive guru whose defense collapsed every single year. That’s just a fact.</b> For that reason, I’m sorry, the idea that his firing was some sort of terrible betrayal of the team or the fanbase or the local media is absurd.</bq> <bq>[...] the Jeremy and Joe Show (and its afternoon counterpart, Schopp and Bulldog) is about as good as it gets in local sports media, which is notoriously a cesspool. They’re smart and self-critical and, appropriately for Bills media, they have a certain kind of tragic sense of humor about themselves and the team. But I do think they’ve been among the many who have minimized the failures of the Bills defense, out of a sense of respect for McDermott that I sympathize with. Look, <b>the offense has been fine; I would remind you that they just put up 30 on a Broncos defense widely regarded as one of the three or four best in the league.</b> Of course you can poke holes at them for not doing more, but in the history of the NFL, <b>teams that score 30 points have won at an enormous rate.</b></bq> <bq>If you look at lists of the worst NFL defenses of all time, <b>the 2020 Detroit Lions are often listed as the very worst</b>, or certainly one of the three or so worst. <b>That team gave up 32.5 points a game.</b> In the Josh Allen era, <b>in playoff losses the Bills have given up 33.16 points a game.</b></bq> <bq>[...] my own preference, by far, would be to fire Brandon Beane before firing Sean McDermott. <b>No failure of Beane’s is more acute than his inability to bring in a single player at the trade deadline this year</b>, despite the reported availability of impact wide receiver Jaylen Waddle and much cheaper options like Rasheed Shahid, who is currently tearing it up for the Seattle Seahawks. I’m with you on that. But look: <b>a defensive head coach whose defense collapses year after year after year in the postseason is just not going to remain a head coach forever in this league.</b> Sorry. I know it’s a huge cliché, but <b>the NFL is a results business, and Sean McDermott didn’t get it done.</b></bq> <bq><b>Who would I hire?</b> I dunno. It better be an impact name, after all of this agita. I know people will call me crazy, but <b>my first call would be to Bill Belichick.</b> I know that his reputation is at low ebb after all the weirdness with his girlfriend and a bad season at UNC, but go watch this video breaking down Belichick’s last Super Bowl win, against a Sean McVay-coached Rams team that had crushed most of the league. <b>Whatever else you want to say about Belichick’s post-Tom Brady career, the man is a defensive genius for all time.</b></bq> <bq><b>Belichick is both a defensive schemer and the ultimate CEO-style head coach</b>, and he has the clout and confidence to go toe-to-toe with Beane in the event of a dispute. I know some people will scoff at this plan, and I know it’s risky. <b>But when you’re replacing a coach of Sean McDermott’s accomplishments, you have no choice but to think big.</b></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <img src="{att_link}robot_icon_by_syntaxterror.png" href="{att_link}robot_icon_by_syntaxterror.png" align="none" caption="Robot Icon by SyntaxTerror" scale="28%"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/catssittingdown/comments/1qprpg0/cat/" author="" source="Reddit">cat.</a> <img src="{att_link}cat.webp" href="{att_link}cat.webp" align="none" caption="cat" scale="90%"> <hr> <img src="{att_link}enby.webp" href="{att_link}enby.webp" align="none" caption="NY Times Spelling Bee thinks 'Enby' is a word" scale="30%"> I was mystified as to what the final four-letter word starting with "EN" might be, and finally landed on the four-letter combination "ENBY" and had to admit that I'd never heard of this short word before, which is, quite honestly, ... rare. What the hell does it even mean? The <a href="https://www.thefreedictionary.com/enby">Free Dictionary</a> doesn't know what it is. <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=enby&t=opera&ia=web" author="" source="">DuckDuckGo</a> returns a link to <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichtbinäre_Geschlechtsidentität" author="" source="Wikipedia">Nichtbinäre Geschlechtsidentität</a> (my settings prefer Swiss-German results), which is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary" author="" source="Wikipedia">Non-binary</a> (which is much less obviously related to gender than the German title), which allowed me to finally figure out that "enby" is a phoneticization of the letters "N" and "B". The only reason I'm pointing this out is that the NY Times's wokeness is still quite evident in this example, as they recognize a word that isn't in the dictionary but is <i>inclusive</i> and is, apparently, well-known enough among its customers, but they ignore <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3974#hall-of-shame">hundreds of other words</a> that I---and the dictionary---consider to be more or less common. They seem to be particularly stubbornly allergic to any word that might be construed as a slur. Already back in 2021, I wrote the following note into the article linked above. <info><b>Update 15.05.2021:</b> After over a year of playing this puzzle, the patterns are pretty clear. Proper words are allowed if it's a fruit, fish, plant, flower, type of cheese, or songbird. Or if it has something to do with Judaism and Jewish tradition. <i>Minyan</i> was in the puzzle yesterday, which is a word simply <i>everyone</i> knows and uses every day. What is glaringly obvious is the anti-science, anti-math bent to this whole puzzle. Building blocks of reality, like <i>pion</i>, <i>muon</i>, and <i>lepton</i> aren't recognized, but obscure cacti are, as well as all manner of lilies, like <i>canna</i> and <i>calla</i>.</info> Where Judaic---minyan or tallit---and LGBTQ words---enby---feature prominently, science words---pion, muon, monadic, molal, decile, egyptology, enqueue, lexeme, moonlet, lidar, nacelle, fairing---regular words---midden, menage, drily, lungful, lede, monofin, nictitate, olla, phaeton, geegaw, gibbet, lamplit, immanent, headball, gnomon, gnomic, zoonotic---some of which might feel rare, but some of which are regularly used---and, finally, quasi-slurs---golliwog, chink, flatulate, gypped, ladyboy, minge, niggly, octaroon, polygyny, raping---don't. They even allow words like "gully" but not "wadi", which seems a bit racist. It's unclear why they choose to recognize "tomtit" but not "woodlark". This is a decision that they've made. I wonder why. <hr> <ft>My uncle of almost the exact same age also just died. He was one of the most egoless, giving, and moral people I had the honor of knowing. He also did not die a wealthy man. That was never the point.</ft>