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Links and Notes for May 8th, 2026

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</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="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/americas-suicide-pact" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">America’s Suicide Pact</a> <bq>Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control. Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit. There is a word for these people. Traitors. These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.</bq> <bq>They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.</bq> <bq>Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.</bq> <bq>[...] the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.</bq> <bq>The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics. The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.</bq> <bq>Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/08/highly-protected-opcw-confirms-it-buried-critical-evidence-in-syria-chemical-weapons-probe/" source="Scheer Post" author="Aaron Maté">‘Highly Protected’: OPCW Confirms It Buried Critical Evidence In Syria Chemical Weapons Probe</a> <bq>The concession came during a legal battle with Dr. Brendan Whelan, a veteran OPCW inspector and senior member of the team that deployed to Syria for the Douma mission. Whelan and another Douma team member, Ian Henderson, raised concerns about the manipulation of the investigation’s findings. After their complaints became public, the OPCW leadership publicly disparaged the two dissenting inspectors and penalized them for alleged breaches of confidentiality. Whelan successfully challenged his censure before the Geneva-based Tribunal of the International Labour Organisation (ILOAT), which recently awarded him damages and instructed the OPCW to withdraw its impugned decision.</bq> <bq>The Germans’ assessment was included in the Douma team’s initial report, which Whelan authored with the help of fellow experts and, after peer approval including the team leader, prepared for publication in June 2018. But senior OPCW officials subverted that document and tried to rush out a replacement, doctored version that falsely claimed evidence of chemical weapons use. Whelan thwarted the release of the bogus substitute only after discovering it at the last minute and sending an email of protest. But when the final report was released in March 2019, after Whelan had departed the Organization, the OPCW again excluded any mention of the Germans’ expert opinions, or even that they had been consulted. Instead, the report claimed that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine [chlorine gas].” Had the Germans’ findings been published, they would have explicitly contradicted this conclusion.</bq> <bq>[...] no recognized toxicologist has gone on record to state that the Douma victims’ visible symptoms and reported rapid deaths are consistent with chlorine gas exposure.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/09/genocide-is-still-the-political-test-that-matters/" author="Nate Bear" source="Scheer Post">Genocide Is Still The Political Test That Matters</a> <bq>The (very) dark, although not unsurprising lining to the cloud, is that the far-right Reform party is on course to win a large number of seats. Unsurprising because neither Labour nor the UK’s state-corporate media went after Reform with the rabid, ferocious intensity they went after the Greens. Why? Because Reform’s imperialist, hyper-capitalist, bigoted policies aren’t a threat to the establishment. Reform’s promises to mass deport brown people, build private prison camps, privatise what’s left to privatise of public services, plough money into the war machine, support Israel, and cut taxes for oligarchs, are supported by a right-wing establishment. What the establishment fears are threats to their power and wealth. What they fear are those who will redistribute wealth, expand the social welfare state and tax millionaires to do it. And with Zionism so deeply ingrained within western institutions of power, they fear anti-Zionists.</bq> <bq>The Labour party has effectively criminalised support for Palestine. An anti-genocide and community activist in the UK is facing fourteen years in prison having been charged under terrorism laws for social media posts. For tweets! And an NHS GP, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, has been arrested numerous times for tweets opposing Israel and genocide and is facing years in prison. Meanwhile, another NHS GP, a Jewish Zionist who served in the IDF and claimed he didn’t kill enough babies, has faced no consequences and is still a practicing doctor. And of course the Labour government provided funding, support and arms to Israel during the genocide, which included daily spy flights feeding back info to the Israeli army, helping fuel their genocidal assault. An assault that continues to this day, with the majority of Gaza now living in tents among rats and disease atop the wasteland of their former homes. It’s a disgrace. More than a disgrace. Gaza is a moral collapse, and should be at the centre of all of our politics.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-paradigm-shift-of-war-part-1/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">The Paradigm Shift Of War: America's Loss (Part I)</a> <bq>Donald Trump crows about destroying the Iranian Air Force, but the IRGC doesn't have an Air Force. It has an Aerospace Force, largely unmanned and almost entirely underground. He crows about destroying the Iranian Navy, misunderstanding what their Navy is. It's a bunch of fast attack boats hidden also underground, not a bunch of ungainly ships waiting to be hit. This is a paradigm shift, and 'America', mashallah, is in deep shit.</bq> <bq>These bases are never coming back. Mark my words, or actually, mark their words. As former CENTCOM Obergruppenführer Frank McKenzie said in a report to his literal Jewish bosses (JINSA), “The United States will not be able to maintain these bases in a full-throated conflict, because they will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack. It is the simple tyranny of geography.” This was in 2024, and his 'contingency' is exactly what happened.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.unz.com/article/the-emperor-has-no-clothes-and-no-cards/" author="Pepe Escobar" source="The Unz Review">The Emperor Has No Clothes and No Cards</a> <bq>The whole Hormuz game, played to perfection by Iran, has had very little impact on Chinese imports, as much as restricting exports of Nvidia H100 and H200 to “control” Chinese AI had next to zero impact. After all, China de facto ignores Nvidia. The DeepSeek V4 model uses local chips. And the H200 is not sold in China.</bq> <hr> I think a lot about nice people who hold abhorrent views. I am deeply disappointed not only in the shallowness of their worldview but in their lack of awareness of how crude and cruel it is. Their worldview doesn’t hold up to any serious analysis nor is it in any way built on a principle that can be called moral or ethical. It amounts to “I’ve got mine jack” and they celebrate those who commit much bigger moral crimes than theirs as if that somehow excuses their own. They loathe their fellow man and suspect them of crimes in inverse proportion to their willingness and capability to execute them. And so, they exalt predatory, venal, dead-eyed billionaires, and revile immigrants and single black mothers. They give the first group infinite second chances, while denying the second ever a first one. They do this because to question it would cause them to question the morality of how they live, and they can’t bear thinking about the mountain of skulls on which their lifestyle depends. In most cases, they are literally incapable of comprehending it. My disappointment in them teeters toward disgust. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/15/roaming-charges-go-down-moses/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Go Down, Moses</a> <bq author="Norman Mailer" source="Miami and the Siege of Chicago">We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches–the cross was well-designed! A land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; a nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small–the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state, it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia–life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.</bq> We are deeply and thoroughly trained not to recognize the violence that we either commit or upon which our personal thriving rests because otherwise the machine wouldn't be efficient enough to run. It runs at a profit only because of the violence and the plunder. So, we are trained from birth to not recognize this inherent vice as a vice. Instead, we see in this violence as necessary and principled, as the minimum violence required to repulse the assaults of our myriad enemies. <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/iran-and-the-tunnel-missile-war-part-2/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Paradigm Shift: Iran and The Tunnel/Missile War (Part 2)</a> <bq>In the future, kids will ask what a fighter jet is, and we'll say ‘a drone with a person inside it’ and they’ll think we’re insane. This is the paradigm shift Iran more than anyone has ushered in. [...] Then our future kids will also ask, ‘wait, you just parked those human drones in the open?’ and ‘you parked them on the ocean?’ and think we’re even more senile. Airbases and aircraft carriers are too exposed for the modern era.</bq> <bq>The NYCrimes goes onto make up some percentages of missiles and missile launchers destroyed (source: trust me bro). The ‘intelligence’ sources the NYCrimes is stovepiping are duplicitious and dumb, and because they refuse to be actual reporters and just listen to Iran, these ‘journalists’ stay dumb. As an IRGC spokesperson said during the war (via Thomas Keith), “Most of the missiles currently being fired were produced over a decade ago.” Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Arachchi directly responded to these jumping, meaningless percentages (dividing what they know little about by what they know zero) by saying, “Also the CIA is wrong. Our missile inventory and launcher capacity are not at 75% compared to Feb 29. The correct figure is 120%. As for our readiness to defend our people: 1,000%.”</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=149958" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Darf man mit Höcke sprechen? Man darf nicht nur, man muss!</a> <bq>Man muss Höcke und noch viel mehr seine Forderungen ja nicht mögen – will man sich aber ernsthaft mit ihnen auseinandersetzen, sollte man dem Mann doch zumindest zuhören und versuchen, zu verstehen, was ihn antreibt. Das schaffte der Podcast sogar weitestgehend und dafür sollte man Ben dankbar sein. </bq> <bq>Nimmt man all diese Versatzstücke zusammen, ergibt sich ein Bild, ja schon fast ein Stereotyp. Höcke ist ein Idealist, dessen Ideal vollkommen anachronistisch ist. Ich kann aber durchaus verstehen, dass sich viele Menschen mit diesem Ideal identifizieren oder es zumindest als Gegenentwurf zum Modernismus attraktiv finden. Für mich gilt das freilich nicht. Selbst wenn man die im Vergleich zu heute eher einfach strukturierte Welt der Vergangenheit gerne wieder hätte – man kann die Uhr nicht zurückdrehen.</bq> <bq>Wer verstehen und nicht nur Vorgedachtes nachplappern will, muss sich ein eigenes Bild machen und das geht nun einmal nur, wenn man auch die Möglichkeit dazu bekommt. Dafür sind Medien ja eigentlich da. Aufgabe von Medien ist nicht die Indoktrination des Publikums, sondern das Angebot möglichst ungefilterter Fakten, aber auch Geschichten, aus denen man sich dann seine eigene Position bilden kann.</bq> <bq>Ich persönlich finde es da viel spannender, mich beispielsweise mit gegenseitigem Respekt mit überzeugten Anhängern der AfD oder auch der Grünen zu unterhalten, und dabei herauszufinden, warum sie diese oder jene Position vertreten. Denn erst wenn man das versteht, kann man auch in die eigentliche inhaltliche Debatte gehen und vielleicht sogar sein Gegenüber überzeugen. Wer gar nicht erst mit Andersdenkenden spricht, wird natürlich nie jemanden überzeugen, das ist klar.</bq> <bq>Hätte Gaus mit Höcke gesprochen? Vermutlich ja. Seine Nachfolger beim Fernsehen verabscheuen das echte Gespräch und veranstalten lieber Tribunale gegen Andersdenkende.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/theyre-attacking-online-anonymity" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">They're Attacking Online Anonymity, And Other Notes</a> <bq>It’s all I felt, I feel, it made me feel. My feelings, my feelings, my feelings. We’re watching Jewish feelings get treated as so supremely important that upsetting Jews by opposing an active genocide is treated as a hate crime. The victims of genocide are regarded as infinitely less important than a Jewish Australian feeling offended by anti-genocide sentiment in a Facebook group. This is crazy, hysterical bullshit, and it should be treated as such.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-not-about-blood-libel-its-about" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">It's Not About "Blood Libel", It's About Narrative Control</a> <bq>The mass media have been rapidly churning out articles about alleged sexual abuse by Hamas in the wake of the New York Times report [about systematic Israeli rape in its prisons], which is some mighty interesting timing to say the least. Israel announced it’s quintupling its propaganda budget and now we’re seeing the news cycle actively manipulated to advance Israeli information interests, and we’re just expected to clap along and pretend we’re seeing real news stories about real things.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> Generating profits for capital used to be a tactic that served the strategy of making people’s lives better. Now it is the strategy. <hr> <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/the-old-guard-samuel-moyn-gerontocracy/" source="Harper's Magazine" author="Samuel Moyn">The Old Guard</a> <bq>The story of Tithonus no longer feels so outlandish, because our society postpones death to an unprecedented degree. Unlike immortals, we still pass. But the great majority of us, and not only the bad, now die old. In whatever nursing home he was parked in, Tithonus must have looked much like we increasingly do, as doctors continuously defer our mortality. We are approaching a time when a legion of Tithonuses will live in our midst.</bq> <bq>Whereas the median age of those eligible to vote in America is about forty-seven, the median age of actual voters is about fifty-two. If you filter out presidential elections, when participation is higher across the generations, the median age of voters rises from fifty-two to about fifty-five. The numbers get far worse in primaries and special elections, when the younger vote plummets even further but seniors dependably turn out. In 2024, the alarming median age of a primary voter was sixty-five. In New Mexico, it was seventy-one.</bq> <bq>This issue is often brushed aside even more quickly than the problem of aging politicians. After all, whether or not to vote is entirely up to individuals. Young people who don’t vote—at least those eighteen or older—have no grounds to complain about disappointing results when they could have shown up on Election Day.</bq> No, they couldn't have. Most people have to go to work on election day (a Tuesday). Increasing lines and waits at polling places or closing them near where people live and work reduces participation even further. <bq>Ultimately, though, the abstention of the young owes less to these practical obstacles than to their alienation from politics itself.</bq> This is presented pretty much without evidence. <bq>According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-four fell by 68 percent during the same period.</bq> <bq>By 2019, this inequality had reached a dire state. Americans under forty, representing 37 percent of the adult population, held a mere 5 percent of America’s wealth. Those over fifty-four, representing a comparable slice of the adult population, held 72 percent of the wealth.</bq> <bq>A lot of the motivation for hoarding money and assets as people age is a fear of mistreatment when their physical decline makes reliance on others unavoidable, and the prospect of ever-longer life spans may leave people terrified of running out of money. In response, the evidence shows, a great many decide to hold on to their wealth.</bq> Combine this natural fear with being in a society that not only does nothing to assuage it but actively feeds it. Not only does the society feed insecurity, it actively encourages its members to never, ever, ever think that they have enough money, that they must continue to hoard and consume. <bq>Cities are graying, with more elderly people living in them than in the countryside, and young workers are being pushed to the peripheries of cities despite commuting downtown for fun or employment. Even in suburbs, housing patterns are not uniform, with the elderly preferring to live where there are fewer children, thus fleeing obligations to pay for schools.</bq> <bq>[...] it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much.</bq> Society could also teach them about an obligation to a shared community that has given them so much, but I guess that's immediately off the table as too much to expect. <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/an-ai-ipo-impact-update-the-anthropix-effect-may-be-5-trillion/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">An AI IPO Impact Update: The AnthroPix Effect May Be $5-Trillion+</a> <bq>This will only get more dramatic in the coming weeks and months. Money will increasingly flood out of a host of financial nooks and crannies, and into anything with any connection to what's coming. The money has to come from somewhere, the appetite is immense.</bq> <bq>Combining what I'm seeing—the huge NAV premium and price behavior of DXYZ, the recent private market price increase of Anthropix [Antrhopic, Open AI, SpaceX] names, and the pre-IPO bidding wars in luxury real estate markets—it is clear my outsized estimate of the likely market cap of these names—a staggering $4 trillion total—was too low. I've adjusted the slides on my sim to allow larger numbers, and I now think it very likely we will be above $5 trillion in market value, and higher numbers remain possible. At the higher end we are approaching the inflation-adjusted market cap of all IPOS since WWII, including dot-com.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/15/trump-accounts-and-the-no-economist-left-behind-test/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Trump Accounts and the No Economist Left Behind Test</a> <bq>The key point here is, contrary to the way they are discussed in the media, stock returns don’t fall from heaven. They are related to the real economy. If someone is putting on a clown show, they can claim whatever stock returns they want, but if they want to be serious, they have to say where they come from.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-what-if-were-in-an-ai-bubble-part-1/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">Premium: What If...We're In An AI Bubble? (Part 1)</a> <bq>OpenAI accounts for $718 billion of Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon’s backlogs, meaning that OpenAI’s collapse would leave Oracle destitute, Microsoft and Amazon short-changed, Cerebras without 80%+ of its revenue, and CoreWeave without a major client and in breach of loan covenants guaranteed by OpenAI’s revenue.</bq> <bq>Data center construction now makes up a larger chunk of all construction spending than commercial real estate. OpenAI has made promises that total over a trillion dollars, and Anthropic $330 billion. NVIDIA represents 8% of the value of the S&P 500, and that valuation is based on the idea that it will never, ever stop growing, which is only possible if data center construction never stops. CoreWeave, IREN, Nebius, and Nscale all rely on hyperscaler contracts that are related to OpenAI, and if those contracts go away because OpenAI does, they’re screwed.</bq> <bq>[...] for me to be wrong, all of these data centers will have to get built, OpenAI will have to make and raise $852 billion in the next four years, the underlying economics of generative AI will have to improve in a dramatic and unfathomable way, and do so in such a way that it creates hundreds of AI startups that can substantiate $400 billion of annual compute revenue. For NVIDIA to continue growing its revenues at an historic rate, it will also have to, by 2028, be selling over $1 trillion in GPUs, which will require there to be funding to buy these GPUs, at a time when hyperscaler cashflows are dwindling and banks are worried they’re “choking” on AI data center debt.</bq> <bq>Everybody is pressuring everyone else to “integrate AI,” to “get every engineer AI,” to “become more efficient using AI,” with token spend becoming some sort of vulgar status symbol despite the whole point of the AI push being that workers can be replaced, or enhanced, or, I dunno, something measurable. In the end, all that’s being measured is how many tokens employees are burning, leading to Amazon staff deliberately setting up “agents” to burn more tokens to seem more “engaged with AI” than they really are, all because dimwit managers and executives don’t understand what people do at their jobs and can only comprehend Number Go Up.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/05/15/hiip-m15.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Bond markets send out a warning</a> <bq>US economists have warned that there will be upward pressure on prices in every sector of the economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has said that the price of freight transportation, which feeds into the cost of every commodity—from groceries to industrial products—had increased by 8.1 percent in April. Joseph Brusuelas of the global consultancy firm RSM told the FT this week’s “hot” inflation reading showed that there was inflation “pressure in the pipeline” and that it was going to be “some time” before inflation peaked.</bq> <bq>On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that global oil reserves, which have so far kept the oil price from going up more than it has, were being run down at a record pace. It said that stockpiles of crude and refined oil fell by almost 4 million barrels a day in April. This is more than the combined daily consumption of the UK and Germany.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/15/roaming-charges-go-down-moses/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Go Down, Moses</a> <bq>Housing Market on the Brink: Home sellers now outnumber buyers by 630,000, the largest gap in US history. At the same time, home foreclosures have climbed by 18% over last year, with banks repossessing 42,000 homes a month.</bq> <bq>$109 billion: the amount Americans spent on lottery tickets in 2025, more than they shelled out on movies, concerts, books, and sporting events combined. It’s the Crap Shoot Stage of Capitalism.</bq> <bq>John Lancaster in the LRB on the world’s third biggest business, money laundering:<bq>If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big? Money laundering is a little like drug cheating in sport, where the current state of legal enforcement always lags behind the current state of malfeasance. We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. We are drunks looking for our keys in a big empty space with a single torch, and all we can find is evidence of the rare occasions when other people lost their keys.</bq></bq> <bq>On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock and another $15 thousand to $50 thousand worth in March. Then, on May 8, Trump told Americans to “Go out and buy Dell,” a company in which he now owned millions worth of stock.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-20200714/" source="Quanta Magazine" author="Natalie Wolchover">How Gödel’s Proof Works</a> <bq>His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.</bq> <bq>Gödel’s main maneuver was to map statements about a system of axioms onto statements within the system — that is, onto statements about numbers. This mapping allows a system of axioms to talk cogently about itself.</bq> <bq>Gödel numbers are integers, and integers only factor into primes in a single way. So the only prime factorization of 243,000,000 is 26 × 35 × 56, meaning there’s only one possible way to decode the Gödel number: the formula 0 = 0. Gödel then went one step further. A mathematical proof consists of a sequence of formulas. So Gödel gave every sequence of formulas a unique Gödel number too. In this case, he starts with the list of prime numbers as before — 2, 3, 5 and so on. He then raises each prime to the Gödel number of the formula at the same position in the sequence (2243,000,000 × …, if 0 = 0 comes first, for example) and multiplies everything together.</bq> <bq>Conversion into symbols is also possible for the metamathematical statement, “There exists some sequence of formulas with Gödel number x that proves the formula with Gödel number k” — or, in short, “The formula with Gödel number k can be proved.” The ability to “arithmetize” this kind of statement set the stage for the coup.</bq> <bq>By definition, sub(n, n, 17) is the Gödel number of the formula that results from taking the formula with Gödel number n and substituting n anywhere there’s a symbol with Gödel number 17. And G is exactly this formula! Because of the uniqueness of prime factorization, we now see that the formula G is talking about is none other than G itself. G asserts of itself that it can’t be proved.</bq> <bq>[...] although G is undecidable, it’s clearly true. G says, “The formula with Gödel number sub(n, n, 17) cannot be proved,” and that’s exactly what we’ve found to be the case! Since G is true yet undecidable within the axiomatic system used to construct it, that system is incomplete.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/05/photographic-memory-is-a-myth-heres-what-research-really-says-about-remembering/" source="Scheer Post" author="Gabrielle Principe">Photographic Memory Is A Myth – Here’s What Research Really Says About Remembering</a> <bq>Beliefs about “perfect memory” shape how people judge students, eyewitnesses, patients and even themselves. They influence legal decisions, educational practices and unrealistic expectations about what human minds can – and should – do. Letting go of the camera metaphor could be a step toward better understanding how memory works. The brain is not a roll of film, it’s a storyteller – one that edits, interprets and reshapes the past in light of the present.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl" author="Allen Ginsberg" source="The Poetry Foundation">Howl</a> <n>In case it's not clear, the following citations, though extensive, do not comprise the entire poem.</n> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,</pre></bq> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,</pre></bq> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,</pre></bq> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,</pre></bq> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica</pre></bq> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void</pre></bq> <bq><pre style="font-size: 80%">I’m with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night</pre></bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/rhythm-and-reason" source="The Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Rhythm and Reason</a> <bq>[...] sometimes it helps to break our problems down into subproblems, and it seems to me that the subproblem of how to maintain our distinct human practices across the ruptures of technological revolutions —maintaining, that is, the things we have more or less always done in all human cultures, and that are widely seen as constitutive of human social existence as such—, might be significantly illuminated by comparison of our most recent AI revolution to the revolution in musical recording, broadcast, and production that precedes it.</bq> <bq>The mechanization of music in fact begins not in the late 20th century with synthesized instrumentation, but in the late 19th century with the innovations of Edison, Marconi, and others in recording and broadcasting. Within a few decades of their discoveries, a fundamentally new way of experiencing music moved in to replace the old one. Music ceased to be primarily ritual, participatory, collective, generated each time anew, and instead became a product, experienced passively and often in isolation, bought and sold in standardized units.</bq> <bq>[...] The purpose of this music is to help sustain the illusion that this new order is quite enough for a human life, indeed that it is an honor and a distinction to have the chance to participate in it. We eggheads are used to interpreting the conduct of our mid-century suburban dentist in terms of “false consciousness”. We try not to lay it all on him personally — he’s just expressing class-appropriate tastes, and could not do otherwise. But there’s always a lingering sense, even for the most consistent of historical materialists, that the consumer of mid-century mass musical entertainment is something of a sucker.</bq> <bq>When I was a child in the 1980s, FM radio was saturated with “smooth jazz”, and corporate Muzak could still be heard in department stores and other public spaces. All of this music, or most of it, was played by real musicians, indeed highly competent musicians, on more or less traditional instruments. But I had no idea of that. I simply could not imagine any group of human beings coming together and creating these sounds. Like the consumer under capitalism who assumes that cuts of meat naturally appear in the world wrapped in cellophane, it seemed to me that smooth jazz must somehow be spontaneously generated out of the mall’s sound system itself.</bq> <bq>[...] so much writing today appears to me as the textual equivalent of smooth jazz.</bq> <bq>I hear of the latest scandal of someone getting caught using AI for a piece in the Guardian or the Times, and I think: who gives a shit? As with the music piped into malls in the 1980s, for the most part when I read the Times it never even crosses my mind that a human being strung those words together in the first place, and it seems to me a greater shame to be compelled to follow these strings back to human intention than to account for them by appeal to mechanical production.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/things-have-jobs-and-digital-devices-are-made-to-track-you" source="Aeon Essays" author="Carissa Véliz">Things have jobs and digital devices are made to track you</a> <bq>Mixed in the flour that bakes digital technology sit two original sins pervading most gadgets, apps and platforms alike: surveillance and prediction; more specifically, surveillance at the service of prediction. Both lead to social control.</bq> Also a third: filtering in the service of propaganda, forming not only what you know but how you about those things you're allowed to think about. <bq>LinkedIn, one of the least toxic social media platforms we have.)</bq> I'm sorry, what did you write? LinkedIn isn't toxic? It is nearly solely responsible for the destruction of the white-collar job market, and the rise of AI-generated slop posing as serious commentary. How much more toxic does something have to be? <bq>[...] starts encompassing millions of people from around the world, including thieves, drug dealers and human traffickers, not to mention swathes of terrifyingly ordinary trolls who silence people they don’t like (women, often). Where did Barlow think fairness was going to come from?</bq> This kind of write is forever mentioning the usual suspects---the official enemies---who have next to no influence relative to the censors and propagandists that run the whole show. <bq>One rather depressing hypothesis is that Thiel is nothing more complex or sophisticated than an opportunist; someone who is mostly interested in earning money and gaining dominance over others; someone who is fighting for freedom for himself and his buddies, not caring if it comes at the price of slavery for everyone else. Sometimes Ockham’s Razor is right, [...]</bq> How do you write something like this, in this day and age? That should be the first thing you think of: that he's a grifter rather than a messiah. There are no messiahs and there are a whole lot of grifters. Every one of these people has more than adequately demonstrated that they don't believe in anything that doesn't make their own personal number go up. <bq>We should be asking more questions of our prophets. We should be less naive about prediction and surveillance, and we should demand safer products that can be more supportive of democracies.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/bitter-lessons-from-the-isspresso" source="Mars For The Rest of Us" author="Maciej Cegłowski">Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso</a> <bq>It’s not enough to tell NASA that you plan to put your payload on a truck and drive it to Kennedy Space Center for launch; you have to analyze the g-forces for every crane movement and specify how fast the truck will go. Any conceivable failure mode has to be identified in a Hazard Report, along with the proposed fix, and that fix has to be certified.</bq> <bq>There is a truism in aerospace: when you pay $500 for an aviation-certified thumbtack, what you’re really paying for is the ten binders of compliance documents, certifications, and tests that accompany it through the production process, along with a promise that someone will go to jail if any part of that process is falsified.</bq> <bq>Figuring that out took me several weeks and a few thousand dollars. My mistake was believing that the power system really was decoupled—that nothing in the house could affect things upstream of the junction box. That is what the inverter specs and circuit diagrams all said. That is what customer support told me. But it wasn’t true.</bq> <bq>This is the class of problem all those NASA interface requirements are trying to forestall. If you’ve ever had a faulty wiring harness in your car (hello Jeep owners!) you know what a nightmare it is to try to chase down intermittent, poorly localized faults. NASA inflicts eye-watering certification costs on itself and its partners to avoid trying to diagnose this stuff in space, where half the systems can’t be powered off, and where there’s a high chance of killing the crew if you break something.</bq> <bq>[...] future human missions to space will have the same cost profile as big space telescopes do today—a few hundred million spent to launch stuff, and billions spent inventing equipment and trying to get it to work right.</bq> <bq>The defining feature of a human mission to Mars is that risks are sequential and cumulative. Every link in the chain has to go right, or the mission fails. This means early visits to Mars will have safety and reliability requirements that make the Space Station look like a middle school science fair. These requirements will be especially tight for the surface part of a mission. Any equipment that lands on Mars will have to demonstrate that it can launch from Earth, sit dormant for six months, survive entry and landing, and then work in partial gravity and dust without breaking for 17 months. Machinery that is pre-positioned on Mars in advance of the crew (a common risk-cutting measure in mission designs) will also have to prove that it can sit out in the weather for two or more years.</bq> <bq>There needs to be a mechanism for relaxing rules to adapt to changing conditions, or else the space program will fossilize in its own paperwork.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reclaimthenet.org/france-moves-to-break-encrypted-messaging" author="Ken Macon" source="Reclaim the Net">France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging</a> <bq>[...] an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.</bq> I would imagine that having a lock on my door is also a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services? Are you even listening to yourself? <bq>Aurélien Lopez-Liguori, the RN deputy who opposed the amendment, made the technical objection bluntly. “This is a total misunderstanding of what encryption means. The decryption keys are at the level of users’ devices. The key isn’t centralized somewhere within the platform. You would then have to set up backdoors for all communications, which would go far beyond the scope of fighting drug trafficking. The first hacker to come along would have access to our communications,” he warned. Translated into engineering terms, his point was the one cryptographers have been making for thirty years. There is no such thing as a backdoor only the good guys can use.</bq> <bq>What’s underway in France isn’t really a debate about whether intelligence services should have tools to investigate serious crime. They already do. They have the RDI authority to compromise individual devices, the surveillance algorithmique they expanded last year, satellite interception powers, traditional wiretaps, metadata access, and the cooperation of every French telecom operator. The new fight is about whether the one category of communication that currently resists state interception, secured by mathematics rather than by promise, should be reshaped so that resistance disappears.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> People arguing for the efficacy of AI in design are implicitly accepting the limitations imposed by the AI, on top of those already imposed by the target platform. If you're targeting a UI framework that doesn't support animations, then including them is going to be an uphill climb. If rounded corners are not supported (CSS1), then you're going to be doing a lot of work to get what you want, or you're just going to have to accept that you're not going to get what you want. The confluence of your team's members' skills and the capabilities of their tools, frameworks, libraries, and target platforms has always defined what you can build. Saying everything is a "skill issue" is an infantile response that lets tools and platforms off the hook for not accommodating other ideas. LLM-based coding harnesses can make you more efficient if you take the well-worn path and stop fighting the design limitations imposed by the tool. More than ever, you are encouraged to stop thinking, to stop bringing your own designs, to simply take what's offered. This isn't the first time this attitude has influenced software. We've had wave after wave of application builders that support only a few designs (visual as well as architectural) that allowed you to quickly get to easy destinations. As with the output of LLM-based coding harnesses, those tools delivered development speed but often at the cost of limitations on flexibility in customization of look-and-feel as well as on maintainability. For example, even if having multiple languages is a requirement (should), then what is the likelihood that this requirement will be implemented when the tools don't support them? Will the developer really accept that the productivity gains earned by building the rest of the app the "easy" way will be eaten up by having to add a feature manually? And please don't say "but AIs can generate multi-language UIs!" That's not the point. Think of something else that you might want but that the LLM-based coding harness keeps nudging you away from, either with initial ignorance or weaponized incompetence. To be clear: this has always been the case! Tools and team capabilities have always imposed limitations! I mean ... obviously! All I'm asking is that you be aware of the degree to which including the output of LLM-based coding harnesses will affect not only what you build but what you can build. This is a simple evaluation, in that sense. Instead of just picking up the tool and experiencing buyer's remorse because you didn't think it through ... think it through. Figure out how you're going to get the work done that you'd like to get done, or at least be aware up front which work you most likely won't be able to get done. Be realistic about the limitations of your tools and team. Just saying "it's a skill issue" is a moronic response for all but the simplest tasks. Building up skills is also an investment. Some tasks take a lot more time with some tools, while the same tools allow you to be extremely efficient on other tasks. <hr> I think one oft-overlooked risk of AI is that you're spending your time training the models for other teams (at other companies) rather than building up know-how in your own team. You think you're being clever by pouring your knowledge into your system prompts, but you're fighting a desperate rearguard action, trying to get a tool that forgets everything every time you start a new prompt to do something the way you got it to do it that one awesome time. You have no guarantee that it will continue to get it right. Contrast this with how it works to build knowledge in a team. Once you've agreed on how to do something, you don't have to keep telling team members to do it. They just do it. They've learned it. They started pushing you to remember to do it. There's a feedback loop. You're building domain knowledge. None of that synergy happens with AIs. You don't build your own domain knowledge and the AI doesn't either. You can't learn to trust an AI but you will begin to do so anyway because people can anthropomorphize a bowling ball so we're kind of doomed. <hr> <a href="https://blog.k10s.dev/im-going-back-to-writing-code-by-hand/" author="" source="k10s devlog">Im going back to writing code by hand</a> <bq>Vibe-coding makes you feel like you have infinite implementation budget. You don't. You have infinite LINE budget (the AI will generate as much code as you want). But you have the same finite complexity budget as always. The architecture can only support so many features before it buckles, regardless of how fast you wrote them. The <c>CLAUDE.md</c> scope section is you saying no in advance, before the velocity high convinces you to say yes.</bq> <bq><c>ra[3]</c> is Alloc. <c>ra[2]</c> is Compute. <c>ra[0]</c> is Name. These are magic numbers. The only thing connecting index <c>3</c> to "Alloc" is a comment and the column order defined in <c>resource.views.json</c>:<code>{ "nodes": { "fields": [ { "name": "Name", "weight": 0.28 }, { "name": "Instance", "weight": 0.15 }, { "name": "Compute", "weight": 0.12 }, { "name": "Alloc", "weight": 0.12 }, ... ] } }</code> Add a column between Instance and Compute? Every sort, every conditional render, every place that says <c>ra[2]</c> or <c>ra[3]</c> is now silently wrong. The compiler can't help you because it's all <c>[]string</c>. And the JSON config can't express sort behavior, conditional rendering, or custom drill targets, so those live in Go code that hardcodes the positional assumptions from the JSON. AI generates this pattern because it's the shortest path from "fetch data" to "render table." A <c>[]string</c> satisfies any table widget immediately. Typed structs require more ceremony upfront. So the AI picks the fast path, and six months later you're debugging why sort puts "Name" values in the "Alloc" column. What to do instead: Put this directive in your CLAUDE.md:<code># Data Representation - NEVER flatten structured data into <c>[]string</c>, <c>Vec</c>, or positional arrays. - All data flows as typed structs (FleetNode, PodInfo, etc.) until the render() call. - Column identity comes from struct field names, not array indices. - Sort functions operate on typed fields, never on positional access like <c>row[3]</c>. - The ONLY place strings are created for display is inside <c>render()/view()</c> functions.</code>Then your typed struct makes impossible states impossible:<code>struct FleetNode { name: String, instance_type: String, compute_class: ComputeClass, alloc: GpuAlloc, }</code>You can't sort by the wrong column when columns are named fields. You can't accidentally compare <c>Alloc</c> strings as names. The compiler enforces this for you. AI will always pick <c>Vec</c> because it satisfies the prompt faster. Your <c>CLAUDE.md</c> makes the typed path the path of least resistance.</bq> The point isn't that programmers weren't also doing this! Where do you think the LLM learned it? It was in the training data. But it's still short-sighted and wrong for nearly all serious work that must be maintained over any reasonable period of time. <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2026/05/11/when-ai-is-in-the-room/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">When AI Is In The Room</a> <bq><bq>A.I.-generated transcripts, which some video call apps allow users to turn on by default, preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes. And they show up in meetings that would otherwise not be recorded. In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable.</bq>One of the hallmarks of AI is its lack of humanity, its inability to distinguish between things that matter and things that don’t, or shouldn’t, in the course of discussion. To a bot, words are words, without regard to humor or sarcasm. People don’t speak the way we write, with the ability to review our words and correct them to be sure they accurately reflect our point or intentions. When memorialized by AI, and parsed at some later point in time during discovery, words spoken in jest or mistakenly used become just as conclusive as words written after thoughtful deliberation and careful phrasing.</bq> <bq>Sometimes, we enunciate poorly. or speak with an accent or in jargon shorthand. Will the AI get it? Will anyone notice or care at the time? But it may be critical years later when the specific words are the lynchpin between a win and a crushing defeat. That’s when the problem hits you square in the face. The AI bot wrote what it wrote, and it’s not as if you can put the bot on the stand and challenge its efficacy, its memory. its competence. It’s a machine, kids, and it’s going to do what machines do, which is whatever it’s programmed to do. Claude can be absolutely dead wrong, but it cannot lie.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/" author="Jason Koebler" source="404 Media">Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain</a> <bq>[...] the cognitive load of what other people’s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it’s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?</bq> <bq>[...] large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it’s people using AI talking to other people who are using AI. It’s influencer hustlebros who are teaching each other how to make AI influencers and have spun up automated YouTube channels and blogs and social media accounts that are spamming the internet for the sole purpose of making money. It is whatever the fuck “Moltbook” is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It’s AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that’s actually being run by a marketing firm. It’s fake Yelp reviews for real restaurants and real Yelp reviews for fake restaurants using AI-generated food images being run out of ghost kitchens.</bq> <bq>What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write.</bq> Why do I care? Because when I interact, I do so in the hope that I can learn from the person I'm interacting with, or that they can learn from me. I hope that we can perhaps build something mutually beneficial, where we grow out of the interaction. An AI cannot learn and it cannot grow. Other than the interaction, there is no beneficial side-effect. I do not want to waste my time. If it's a person, they may be wrong, but we can learn together. If it's an AI, it may also be wrong but I have to invest time to figure that out and that effort can't be leveraged by teaching someone else, because there is no-one else. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgVBqcqUGE0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JgVBqcqUGE0" width="560px" caption="AI layoffs are here. This is how you keep your job." author="Mo Bitar" source="YouTube"> <bq>If your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close a door and say, "Hey, Chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops, and I think it could change literally everything." And he's going to say, "What's a Real Loop?" And you will say, "Give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I'll show you." Now, you won't actually do anything because you can't do anything because nobody can because nobody knows what they're doing. But by the time he figures that out, you'll have a new title and an equity bump. What you want to be doing is automating. Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalist than the mention of automation. Drop names too, bro. Like, talk about specific team members you can automate out of existence. Be like, "Yo, I automated Gary, bro." Tag Gary in the message. Tag him in Slack in a very public channel. be like, "Yo, I just automated at Gary. His function has been Ralph looped." And tag your CEO in the same message. You think you're getting laid off after that, bro? Like, are you out of your mind? This is how you survive the storm. It does not matter who is right and it does not matter who is wrong. A storm is neither right nor wrong. Like, dude, if you're an AI contrarian at your company right now, like, what are you doing? Resign, dude. Resign voluntarily, man. This is highly disgraceful. The only place you should be talking about AI realism is here with me or with your dog. Do not let anyone, not even your own wife, hear you be negative or balanced about AI. Are you kidding me, dude? There's only one way to make money off being an AI realist. And I've already cornered the market and I'm barely getting by. Man, the most important thing, the absolute most important thing is that you are no longer going to do any work. Okay? You're not going to write any code. You're not even going to type. You're going to dictate. You're going to use a voice tool. You're going to speak to Claude. You're going to speak to your team on Slack. You're going to speak in meetings and workshops. And at no point are your fingers ever going to touch a keyboard because we have transcended labor, my friend. We have ascended. Engineering is no longer a craft. Engineering is a metaphysical practice now. We do not write code. We commune with code. We cleanse the repo of bad energy. We are philosophers of the codebase. And at this point, if you have a black turtleneck, put it on, okay? If you don't, get one. Get two. Have a backup turtleneck. Steve Jobs did not have a backup. That was his mistake. Now, I want to address the people in the comments who are about to type, "Hey, man, this is super messed up. This is cynical and it's bad advice. I would never do this." And I want you to listen to me, okay? This little Gandhi stance you're taking will not pay off. The CEO of your company is currently taking the Coinbase memo, and he's asking Chad GPT 5.2 to draft one for his own company. He needs the views, man. He needs an invitation to the All-In Summit. Okay. He needs Chamoth to mention him on the pod. He's in his office studying Brian's tweet. He is whispering, "We have made the difficult decision. We have made the difficult decision" out loud just to feel it in his mouth. And you taking a stance against AI will not change his mind. It will not change the trajectory of AI. It will not make a fartsswidth of difference. You want to take a stance, go be vegan, man. Go open an account on Threads. But at work in this climate, being a realist will get you canned, bro. You have one obligation, and that is to make sure there is a roof on top of your family's heads and food on the table. Stop being such a dick, dude, and provide for your family. And whenever it gets to be too much, come back here, okay? Because between you and me, you and I know what's actually true. And it's that AI is a calculator. It's not the singularity. It's a damn tool. Reasonable people know this. And now you know why everyone around you is pretending that AI is the second coming of consciousness. It's because they're getting promoted. They're keeping their jobs and you're not. Put on your turtleneck and I'll see you on the other side.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/engineering-judgement-claude-paradox" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox</a> <bq>[...] it's hard not to come to the conclusion that in one way or another, I'm unusually good at getting adequate results out of these machines. I keep them on a tight leash, provide a lot of architectural input and model code, I tell them exactly what libraries and frameworks to use, I'm usually working on established codebases and I have approximately zero compunctions about rewriting large parts of what the coding agent generates (for that matter, I also generate code in very small chunks). None of this comes about because I'm particularly clever about using the coding agent: it's because I trust it significantly less far than I could throw it and I am not letting it do anything without being very sure that it's not going to do anything stupid (and even then I feel bad about giving it the access that I have).</bq> <bq>From the perspective of someone coming from a much more physical engineering discipline, this is quite simply bad systems design. A lot of this work is, in essence, writing an ad-hoc, messy and ill-defined compatibility layer that's meant to match a system that's constantly shifting and utterly lacking in stability: it's as though you're trying to design consistent pipe connectors between a distillation column and a catalytic cracker at an oil refinery when the catalytic cracker keeps on changing its design every other week and the width of the pipes isn't firmly defined at all. The vast bulk of the code we write is, in fact, glue code of this kind, desperately trying to make disparate system components work together when the interface between them was designed poorly to begin with and now keeps shifting on a regular basis.</bq> <bq>LLM tools are good at generating precisely this kind of glue code that, with better engineering of core systems components, we wouldn't have to write in the first place and that, in some sense, shouldn't be written.</bq> <bq>Producing robust, secure and above all useful systems simply isn't a question of coding: it's a question of engineering.</bq> <bq>Sure, Claude Code might be great at sorting out the whole Schema.org thing, but we'd much rather that Schema.org didn't exist at all so that we didn't have to write it in order to be minimally competitive in a job market that's basically turned into a content creator economy. This means that even when we acknowledge that a coding agent is useful for something, we treat the agent with a level of barely-concealed resentment because we don't want to be living in a world or working in an industry where what it's good at is valued anywhere near as much as it is.</bq> <bq>The watchword seems to be responsibility: you have to have worked on writing and deploying software products that you're responsible for, and where you have to deal with the consequences if they break, even if you're the only person affected.</bq> <bq>[...] seeing code as a thing that mediates between system components or as a constituent of a component rather than as an undifferentiated product starts to come naturally, which will naturally alter how you see coding agents. When a coding agent is producing code, which is the thing of value in itself, they look quite attractive. When you're using the agent to weld, bolt or rivet together two existing components, or to machine a new one which is going to sit in a larger system, the tool begins to look quite different, and honestly, much less attractive.</bq> <bq>[...] where someone who's merely interested in writing code is happy or scared that the coding agent can produce more code than them, as an engineer you want as little code, as few components and as few moving parts as possible: each component and each line of code introduces the potential for failure. In short, you're going to develop an acute sense for when not to write code that shouldn't be written. All of these points are going to introduce a dislike of coding agents in their current state. After all, the agents are overly verbose, unreliable, opaque when subject to analysis and have a tendency to prioritise the production of code over the design of the system. If, in this situation, you're going to use them at all, they're going to be used in a highly constrained manner, told exactly what to do and simply not used for certain critical tasks: a far cry from the claims of the vibe coders and everyone who tells us that they're going to revolutionise the profession. All told, you're liable to realise that what the coding agent is good for is mostly writing code that you shouldn't be having to write in the first place, and consequently use the coding agent only for that and as little as possible.</bq> <bq>[...] if you're dead-set on having people use LLMs for some reason, you might have your best engineers work on architecting the system, building the data model and working on defining and constraining the system as a whole. With that work being done, you can then get people who are more willing to use coding agents to fill in the blanks, do the stuff that annoys the good engineers but that you feel that you need to have for one reason or another and get them to extend the initial work within the constraints that your better engineers have built.</bq> <bq>[...] building systems that deliver value tends to go out the window as people with a systems engineering mindset get driven out of organisations in favour of people who are, for the most part, easily impressed by volume of code and the intense feeling of productivity that they engender, and you can see the results in almost every software product you use.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://ayende.com/203975-a/learning-to-code-1990s-vs-2026/" source="Ayende" author="Oren Eini">Learning to code, 1990s vs 2026</a> <bq>Each step up the abstraction ladder lets people build bigger, more ambitious things with less effort. That is mostly good. But there is a real asymmetry this time. The earlier steps abstracted away mechanical work — memory management, boilerplate, deployment plumbing. This step abstracts away the reasoning itself. And reasoning is what you need when the abstraction leaks, which it always eventually does.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs" author="James Shore">You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs</a> <bq>your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.</bq> <bq>The model isn’t a perfect representation of reality, but the overall message is right. You need AI that reduces your maintenance costs, and in proportion to the speed boost you get from new code. Without it, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. So, yeah, go ahead, chase improvements to your coding speed. But spend just as much time chasing improvements to your maintenance costs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-expertise/why-senior-developers-fail-to-communicate-their-expertise" author="Tuhin Nair" source="">Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise</a> <bq>Special cases, if conditions, new database tables, new components. All yuck yucks. The senior developer wants as little of this as possible, spending lots of time making sure they absolutely need to add more code. Because adding to a system is risking more complexity. Yes, yes, of course this is simplistic. There are senior developers who excel at taking on unsolved problems and finding new creative designs. But eventually, if you’re taking responsibility for a working system, you’re scared of complexity.</bq> <bq>[...] uncertainty is cruel because no strategy is guaranteed to work. When combined with time (compensation for marketing/sales, or payroll for founders, or data for product managers) it can feel like taking things to market as fast as possible is the only way to reduce uncertainty before a deadline. The more you can take to the market, the more you can get feedback from it, the more you can (potentially) reduce uncertainty. This loop, and all companies start with this loop, is about pure, raw, speed.</bq> <bq>Because once you have customers, both loops are running simultaneously. A business needs to both explore possibilities and serve customers at the same time.</bq> <bq>[...] here’s the magical phrase every senior developer must learn: ‘Can we try something quicker?’ The use of ‘quicker’ acknowledges what they’re really looking for; ‘something’ implies another way of achieving it; ‘try’ implies imperfection, but also the possibility of it being good enough. It perfectly cuts down to the requirement of the rest of the company, speed to reduce uncertainty, while allowing the senior developer to exercise their expertise: reduce, re-use, and if life is truly a blessing, avoid.</bq> <bq>What if we had one system just for speed? Everyone focused on bringing things to life could work here. AI agents, our own generated and unreviewed code, junior devs, marketing etc. We could call this the ‘Speed’ version of the system. It’s not meant to be understandable, the goal is getting things good enough to take it to the market for feedback. And then what if we had a second system focused on stability? We could call this the ‘Scale’ version of the system. It’s designed by senior developers to be stable, understandable, and scalable. The ‘Speed’ version allows the rest of the business to continue learning from the market, as the senior developers build a trailing version of the system that’s well-reviewed and understandable. Plus, the design of the 'Scale' version is influenced by what worked and what doesn’t work in the 'Speed' version of the system.</bq> This sounds lovely and sensible and will absolutely not be used, ever, as the business will try to stretch the "Speed" version to act as the "Stable" version but without the effort. <h id="fun">Fun</h> The hosts of the 2026 ESC are cartoon characters. The lady is a bony, large-lipped, giant-titted, shiny skeleton. <h level="3">Semifinal 1</h> Spoiler alert: not a single one of these songs was worth listening to even once. It was even more of a train wreck than usual. Was it always this terrible or just since they all started using AI to "fine-tune"? <dl dt_class="field"> Moldova 🇲🇩 Joyless trash. Sweden 🇸🇪 Utter trash. The singing ruined an occasionally reasonable electronic beat. Croatia 🇭🇷 Trash, but at least somewhat musical. Greece 🇬🇷 WTF. Utterly incoherent. This is not even recognizable as music. Portugal 🇵🇹 Absolutely not my kind of my music but it was at least a song. The five guys were sympathetic. They looked like they were doing karaoke at a team-building event. Georgia 🇬🇪 Utterly generic ESC semi-electronica song. Some decent group dance stuff. Italy A classic Italian disco song that was positively wholesome after the aural onslaught of the first six songs. Finland 🇫🇮 Generic ESC trash. Not as offensive as some of the others. It doesn't feel like Finland---more like Sweden. Montenegro 🇲🇪 Also a generic ESC song, which means it was trash. The aesthetic was OK. It was vampire-lesbian chic, which could be problematic but they all seemed to be in into it, so off you go. Estonia 🇪🇪 A straight-up 80s rock song. It was a song, like with a bridge, verses, and a chorus. This was fine. It might even be good if you squint hard enough. Israel 🇮🇱 Trash. Generic. He sang in French, English, and I believe a bit of Hebrew (probably when he wanted to say some deeply racist anti-Arab slurs). Nice to see that Israel made it, though. You'd think they'd be a bit too busy, what with all the conquering and invading and stuff. It wouldn't be the ESC without them. Germany 🇩🇪 <img attachment="just_as_a_good_a_picture_as_any_of_the_esc_2026.webp" align="right" caption="Just as a good a picture as any of the ESC 2026">A slutty dance number but with terrible dancing. The song sucks. It is beyond generic. Germany is filling in for the Russians' absence, because they liked to send a group of strippers too when they were still being invited. Belgium 🇧🇪 Relied too much on the singer's weak voice over a decent bass beat. Again, ruined by the singing and lyrics. Lithuania 🇱🇹 Something different. Operatic ESC. E-beat. Still trash. San Marino 🇸🇲 Generic ESC disco trash. Poland Gospel-style mixed with rap. Decent backup dancers. Unoffensive but not really good. Serbia 🇷🇸 Oh hey, the goth entry. They are at least pretending to play instruments. A bit of a Hellraiser aesthetic. Not a good song. The camerawork is disturbing. </dl> Estonia should move on. Maybe Italy. Maybe Portugal. <h level="3">Semifinal 2</h> The second semifinal was of slightly higher quality with 4 or 5 decent acts and a handful of not utterly offensive ones. <dl dt_class="field"> Bulgaria 🇧🇬 This is a terrible song that's trying to make some headway with dance moves and a lead singer with giant breasts and lips like a Zodiac boat. It will probably be enough to move on. Azerbaijan 🇦🇿 The first slow ballad, I think. It wasn't offensive but it was not good. Romania 🇷🇴 The song is called "Choke Me," so I guess that's promising. Operatic "metal" (who are we kidding, this is hard rock at most). It's a gimmick where two female lead singers ask to be punished. Sure, OK. This will probably also be enough to move on. Luxembourg 🇱🇺 Another ballad. Fully generic. This one is trying to be Björk, with the same look and the same bit of a speech defect. Not offensive but not good. Czechia 🇨🇿 A male ballad this time. He's by himself on stage but surrounded by mirrors. His voice isn't terrible but the song is. France 🇫🇷 It is utterly unsurprising that the singer simply repeats the chorus "Regarde moi" the whole time. It's an operatic ballad. Some decent dance choreography. This was probably one of the better songs so far. Armenia 🇦🇲 This is ESC quirky with a lot of tempo changes, strobe lights---oh sweet God the strobe lights---and a lot of yelling and fast, incoherent "music". Switzerland 🇨🇭 A blues song? Like, what? No frenzied pace? No screaming? It's a song? There is way too much strobing but her voice is good and the song ... is good? Did I change the channel by accident? Look, before you say it, I couldn't care less if Switzerland wins but they have, hands down, the best song so far. I would have Shazamed it if it had come on the radio. I also like Veronica's look: big 70s glasses and big, feathered 70s hair. Not slutty, which is a welcome change of pace from pretty much all of the other female acts. Cyprus 🇨🇾 She's fit so that'll be a whole bunch of votes right there. The song is generic and uninspiring. Lots of tanned skin on stage, though. The song feels really long. Austria 🇦🇹 Singing in German. Starts off with a cool top-down camera view, cartoon-like. Generic ESC stuff but relatively well-done. Not obnoxious. Whimsical costumes. The dance moves are kind of quaint and simple. A more human music, if that's the right way of putting it? Genuine, maybe? Latvia 🇱🇻 Another operatic ballad. This one's not terrible, so it should probably move on, given that all but three of the preceding songs were trash. Denmark 🇩🇰 A goth-y generic rock-ish song with a techno beat. His voice isn't bad but the song is. Mucho pyrotechnics. Australia 🇦🇺 Bro, another operatic ballad. This sounds like a Disney theme song. Her voice isn't bad, though. It's a bit of a Celine Dion vibe. Not my kind of music but hey, it wasn't actively painful to listen to. She's pretending to play a golden piano that you absolutely cannot hear. Wait, you could hear it for a bit...but then it kept playing even after she picked up the mic again. Ukraine 🇺🇦 Another operatic ballad, accompanied by a bandura (Ukrainian lute) for a hot second but you mostly can't hear it. She has a good voice but the song is quite generic. It's not really much worse than Australia, though. It is at this point in the evening that it becomes difficult to even tell them apart. She's got a set of lungs on her, though. United Kingdom 🇬🇧 Thank God, finally one that is unequivocally bad because the UK almost always sucks so hard. Christ almighty that was awful. Albania 🇦🇱 An operatic male with a bit more of a rock beat. Not a ballad. He's by himself on stage. Cool costume. Looks like Ibrahimovic. They have subtitles for his Albanian lyrics. I guess it was important to him. I didn't hate it. Malta 🇲🇹 This starts off as a 50s-style crooner by a guy in a sleeveless, leather outfit. He's singing in Italian and English. It's not really my thing but it's well-done and it's not demanding attention. His voice is good. Norway 🇳🇴 A good rock song with a structure that is very much like a song. His voice isn't bad; good stage presence. It's a bit bland but the bass line is good. It's a mediocre-to-good 80s rock song. Kind of a bit of a Billy Idol vibe to it. </dl> Switzerland should definitely move on. Also Malta. OK, fine, Norway. Also probably Austria. Maybe France. Latvia if you insist. Guess what, though? Switzerland didn't move on. C'est la vie. I will not be watching or even half-listening to the finals on Saturday because I am not a masochist.