<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</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="#design">Design</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.kunstler.com/p/slouching-toward-peace" author="James Howard Kunstler" source="Clusterfuck Nation"> Slouching Toward Peace</a> <bq>That squawking you hear is Iran getting dragged kicking and screaming out of its jihad delirium into something that might look like reality-based relations with the rest of the world. <b>They have to loudly declare that it’s not happening, even as it’s happening, to gaslight their own home folks, who might be getting a little sick of economic free-fall</b> — and probably sick of the IRGC regime itself. And, of course, they know that the Lefty-left half of the USA is rooting for this whole business to fail so they can get their mitts back on the levers of power to avoid prison.</bq> It is absolutely incredible how accurately he writes about the administration he supports while thinking that he's writing about Iran. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RuPvv0maCQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9RuPvv0maCQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Some More News | Cody Johnston" caption="Here's What Happens When MAGA Is Confronted With Reality"> <bq>I don't know like law stuff, but it's weird that these people will just say they're gonna do something, a bunch of other serious people are like, "Well, I think that's illegal," and then they just do it. And then like a year later, some report comes out that says: "Yep, illegal, shouldn't have done that." And then we just move on. Because <b>I guess we never had a way to stop them in the first place. It was just an honor system this whole time, where politicians just assumed they would get in trouble if they did something wrong.</b> But the moment we didn't do anything after January 6th, Trump realized that wasn't the case. He realized that the easiest way to drag people over that line from reality to fantasy is to just do it. <b>Just do the stuff because nobody will bother to punish you afterward.</b> Because they're afraid they'll be seen as too partisan. And then your fantasy world is made real. Easy as that. The good news is that this hasn't fully worked. Or, rather, everyone who isn't Trump is getting screwed. These meatballs haven't taken over reality so much that they no longer feel the need to explain themselves [...] They clearly don't feel like they're above the law yet, although some of them are getting pretty close. But <b>the consequences are rolling in, at least for lower levels.</b> You can't just, you know, arrest someone for making a joke about Charlie Kirk. And it turns out the law still agrees with me there, and people are now winning lawsuits over that. That's great. After all, the entire point of laws is to prevent future crimes that hurt others. <b>If you don't get in trouble for arresting someone for their free speech, then you're signaling that you can do that again.</b> And so, to follow that logic, if we perhaps don't want a future where politicians and officials can do whatever they want and get zero punishment besides an awkward deposition or two, well, then <b>we're gonna have to go hard with accountability after this.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C6L3_xMOeg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/_C6L3_xMOeg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="Discussing European Censorship w/ Yanis Varoufakis & Mehran Khalili"> Hasan ended by quoting Rick from Rick and Morty about his and Yanis's detractors, <bq>Your boos mean nothing. I've seen what makes you cheer.</bq> From the comments, <bq>Watching a Twitch streamer and a former finance minister casually bond over being too subversive for Western governments to let them into the country is peak content. Keep fighting the good fight.</bq> And, <bq>i live in southern europe and experienced the exact era Yanis participated in and was shunned for. I will never forget, that <b>german newspapers at the time started calling the southern european countries P.I.G.S. (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain).</b> It was a whiplash. They kept saying we were the laziest and most useless europeans. But corporations, at the exact same time, were coming here in droves because apparently we were much harder workers than french or germans. We often didn't take vacations and worked extra hours with no pay bc we are poor and desperate to climb the ladder. Yanis is right, <b>when americans think of Europe they think of this blob of utopian worker rights...... Reality was very different esp. after 2008 and with the austerity governments.</b> In fact , my government just passed a part bill that says - if you own a car or a bike, you are not entitled to unemployment. Don't ask me whats the logic. Just know <b>Europe has been sliding towards brutal anti labor laws for decades and is now trying to completely end social security, immigration, everything.</b> I dont joke when i say i have more hope for US youth, than European ppl rn.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/27/fnhq-j27.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">US violates ceasefire, launches strikes against Iranian sites in the Strait of Hormuz</a> <bq><b>The US launched a new round of strikes on Iran on Friday</b> in the most explicit indication yet that the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has collapsed into an escalating and open conflict. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said its <b>aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz.</b> A report by Al Jazeera said the US strikes were near the Iranian port of Sirik. Al Jazeera also reported that Iran said it had “succeeded in neutralizing” the attack and pledged to retaliate in a statement shared by the ISNA news agency. The statement said, <b>“We emphasize that this aggression will not go unanswered, and our response will be swift and decisive at a time and place of our choosing.”</b> An Iranian parliamentary security official, Ebrahim Azizi, accused Washington of <b>attacking “in the middle of negotiations once again”</b> and said the US president had shown no commitment to negotiation or ceasefire principles.</bq> <bq>Iran said the drone strike was part of its effort to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz and <b>warned that ships using routes outside Tehran’s approved framework would not be guaranteed safe passage or insurance coverage.</b> [...] Other reporting on the same incident says Iranian officials framed the move as a response to insecurity in the waterway and to <b>what Tehran describes as continued US aggression, with Iran later warning vessels to use only routes authorized by Tehran.</b> <b>Iran has once again rejected the American claim to maritime authority in the Strait of Hormuz.</b> Reuters reported that Tehran insisted it had the right to control shipping there and warned Gulf states not to side with Washington after the cargo ship incident. The Iranian line is that the strait lies within a contested security zone and that <b>the US and its allies are using “freedom of navigation” language to mask coercive control over a vital strategic waterway.</b> The dispute over the strait is a key issue over whether the MOU means anything in practice.</bq> <bq>Reports over the last week have shown that, far from receding, the conflict is broadening with <b>Israeli attacks continuing in Lebanon, and Gaza remains under near-constant assault despite talk about a ceasefire and peace agreements.</b> Just as it has in Gaza, the ceasefire framework contained in the MOU is emerging as a <b>formal cover for the continuation of the imperialist war</b> by other means.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7w3xsZu_nA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/e7w3xsZu_nA" source="YouTube" author="HasanAbi" caption="This Is a Fever Dream" width="560px"> <bq><b>Chatter:</b> [...] there's a human behind it and clearly they have mental illness. <b>Hasan:</b> Yeah, the best kind. Please keep making these videos. I don't care how many rivers are rerouted. I don't care how much your electricity prices skyrocket as a direct consequence of funding this initiative. This is the greatest initiative of all time. Oh my god. Thank you so much for making this. I want to see if there's more.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://nooneshappy.com/article/data-brokers-surveillance-pricing/" source="No One's Happy" author="">Data Brokers Part 2: Surveillance Pricing</a> <bq><b>The price now varies by where you are (ZIP-code pricing), by the device you hold (Mac users are comparatively charged more than PC users), by the loyalty app you’re logged into</b>, by whether the site remembers you, and finally by the whole profile attached to your name.</bq> <bq>Every loyalty program works the same way: you are paid a small, certain discount in exchange for the information used to find the largest price you will tolerate. <b>The card, the app, the account are sold as the way to save money, and they do lower the price — today. They are also the richest stream of behavioral data a seller collects about you, the raw material that makes the personal price possible in the first place.</b></bq> <bq>Every move that once marked a smart buyer now marks a known one. <b>The harder you work to win, the more legible you become to the thing you are trying to win against.</b> And the system does not only read you; it shapes you, nudging you toward the habits that make you easier to price next time.</bq> <bq><b>A surplus-extracting price lands hardest on the people with the least room to refuse, and those people are, overwhelmingly, the poor.</b> They are the ones who cannot wait for the sale, cannot buy in bulk, cannot pay the yearly rate instead of the monthly one, cannot drive to the cheaper store, cannot afford to walk away — and every one of those constraints reads, to a pricing model, as willingness to pay. The sociologist David Caplovitz gave this its name sixty years ago, in a book called <i>The Poor Pay More</i>: the poverty premium, the long-documented fact that <b>the same goods cost more for the people who can least afford them.</b></bq> <bq>George Akerlof won a Nobel for the case of the used car, where the seller knows the quality and the buyer does not, and showed the gap can be corrosive enough to wreck an entire market: the good cars withdraw, the lemons remain, trust drains out. Joseph Stiglitz won a Nobel for showing that <b>once information is asymmetric, markets are not efficient in a clean sense.</b> Economics has worried over that imbalance for fifty years. <b>Surveillance pricing does not perfect the market. It builds, on purpose, the exact asymmetry that economics spent half a century learning was a market failure, and sells the result as efficiency.</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/26/leyw-j26.html" author="Philip Guelpa" source="WSWS">Extreme heat has devastating effects on agriculture and workers</a> <bq>Increasing heat and drought negatively impact the ability of soil to support crops. In addition to insufficient water, <b>hot and dry soil bakes hard, reducing its ability to absorb the occasional intense rain, which rapidly runs off and/or causes erosion, stripping nutrient-rich topsoil.</b> This will be compounded by the imperialist war against Iran, which has resulted in a severe reduction in the available supply of fertilizer during the critically important planting season in the northern hemisphere. As previously reported, <b>such extreme climate conditions can negatively impact riverine fisheries, as well as those in the oceans</b> [...]</bq> <bq><b>Scientists are now warning that this year will see a “Godzilla” El Niño, that is more intense than any yet experienced</b>, which will intensify the already devastating effects of global warming. Record-breaking heatwaves have already been experienced this year in India and Europe. In India, as of late May, temperatures had crossed 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). <b>The human body can withstand 35 degrees C, beyond which it can no longer cool itself.</b> The country recently experienced 40 consecutive days when the high temperature exceeded 40 degrees C. <b>The callous indifference of the ruling class is typified by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a long-time climate change denier</b>, who told a group of students, “Climate has not changed. We have changed. Our habits have changed.”</bq> <bq><b>The capitalist system has clearly demonstrated that it is incapable of undertaking the necessary measures to address the existential crisis.</b> The world’s food supply along with workers, both agricultural and industrial, will be severely impacted. Meanwhile, <b>the ruling class is willfully downplaying the danger and instead hurtling toward world war.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/26/wobd-j26.html" author="Thomas Scripps" source="WSWS">Europe burns in record 40℃ heatwave as climate funding targets missed by trillions</a> <bq>Cities across Western Europe have been hotter than much of the Middle East this week. <b>The worst European heatwave in history</b> has pushed temperatures as high as 44.3 degrees Celsius in France—its hottest ever day—and broken records in half of Europe’s 850 cities with over 50,000 residents. <b>Rare red heat alerts have been issued across swathes of France, Britain, Spain and Italy, with the heatwave now moving north and east towards Germany, Poland and the Balkans.</b> More than 50 French departments have registered temperatures above 40℃ (104°F), including Paris. The UK announced its hottest ever June day of 36.9℃, while Spain has reached 42℃ and Italy 41℃.</bq> <bq>Humidity levels mean <b>the “real feel” is frequently several degrees warmer</b>, leaving tens of millions of people suffering heat in the low 40 degrees in countries utterly unprepared for such temperatures: buildings and cities are not designed to keep cool and only 20 percent of homes have air conditioning. <b>“Tropical nights”, when the temperature does not drop below 20 degrees, or 30 degrees in parts of France, give no relief.</b></bq> <bq>Every aspect of society is under strain. French medics reported a 20 percent spike in emergency department visits and hospital admissions, reaching “saturation” in Paris. <b>Rates of cardiac arrest have quadrupled</b>, increasing substantially among younger people. UK hospitals are declaring critical incidents as <b>medical machines, cooling and IT systems fail.</b> The scandal of “corridor care” has been made a deathtrap.</bq> <bq><b>In France, nuclear reactors have been taken offline or had their output reduced as rivers connected to their cooling systems overheated.</b> More than 68,000 homes were left without power in the west of the country after a transformer was damaged.</bq> Switzerland did the same with Betznau because the Aare is too hot and too low. <bq><b>The cause of the heatwave is an “Omega block”: a horseshoe-shaped band of low pressure around the affected area is dragging in hot air from Africa in the south and trapping it in a “heat dome”.</b> The high pressure also interferes with cloud formation, allowing the sun to beat down.</bq> <bq>Capitalist enterprises are loathe to abandon to their rivals the potential fortunes represented by fossil fuels and their associated industries. According to Oxfam, <b>just six of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies are projected to make profits of $96 billion in 2026</b>—that is $3,000 a second. <b>The fruits are enjoyed by the world’s richest 10 percent (with an average wealth of PPP$1 million), and particularly the richest 1 percent (average wealth $6 million)</b>, whose overall ownership-based emissions—shares etc.—account for 77 percent and 44 percent of total emissions respectively. <b>Burning fossil fuels to fill the pockets of the rich increasingly means burning human beings to death for profit</b>—another way the capitalist system spitting out wars, pandemics and deaths of despair is toxic to human life. <b>Society cannot afford the greed of the oligarchy</b>, which must be expropriated. <b>It cannot afford the anarchy of the market, which must be replaced with democratic planning.</b> The only means of accomplishing this is a <b>world socialist revolution</b> carried out by the international working class.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/06/18/drinking-movies-down-and-out-at-cannes/" source="The Paris Review" author="Inney Prakash">Drinking Movies: Down and Out at Cannes</a> <bq><i>All of a Sudden</i> (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2026), <b>a work of subtle but extraordinary spiritualism whose three-hour-plus runtime recalls the slow, graceful descent of a feather.</b> The film is about the director of a senior care facility named Marie-Lou, who by happenstance befriends Mari, a theater director with six months to live. Marie-Lou is attempting to institute a real-world care protocol called Humanitude in her workplace, while Mari is directing a one-man experimental production about the Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, who was responsible for reforming and then abolishing psychiatric asylums in Italy.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0Ssi-9wS1so" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="KEXP" caption="Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)"> A drummer. A guitarist. A pre-recorded and banging bass line. Otherworldly costumes. See <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/25/qoiy-j25.html" author="Louis Girard" source="WSWS">The success and worldwide recognition of math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine</a>. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/computer-world" source="The Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Computer World</a> <bq>The grammarian Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī of circa 400 BCE is at once a straightforward manual of Sanskrit grammar, but also, by its author’s own lights, <b>an elaboration of the elementary constituents or as it were the “particles” of reality — it just happens that these particles are linguistic and not material.</b></bq> <bq>I have previously said far too many times that <b>it would be a strange historical coincidence if the nature of reality just happened to be one we had to wait for the arrival of Space Invaders and Pac-Man to be able to see.</b> That is, it would be surprising indeed if the technologies that did so much to shape the adolescent minds of Musk, Bostrom, Chalmers, and I suppose of me too, just happened also to be the clavis for unlocking the nature of the universe. And I have often pointed out, at a historicizing octave that these other Gen-Xers seem innately unable to hear, that we’ve seen this all before — <b>in the 17th century, notably, it was the horological art, with its vanguard technology of clockworks, that most insistently suggested itself as model and epitome of the cosmos.</b></bq> <bq>“The cosmos is a computer” will come to ring truer, for experts and commoners alike, and will possibly shape the way external reality is seen in the 21st century even more comprehensively than the clockwork image shaped the 17th. But if we wish to understand why this image is so compelling, <b>we would do better not to suppose, as Bostrom et al. seem to have done, that it is because we are getting things uniquely and unprecedentedly right, but because the computer in fact is a far more impressive instrument than the clock.</b></bq> <bq>You can still get your Ph.D. on Kafka or Lucretius or whatever, at least for now, but already you must prepare yourself for a life strung along on postdocs that are —if you’re lucky!— only distally related to Kafka or Lucretius, <b>while your actual work-tasks in fact look more like low-end data-entry or data-management than like anything we would have recognized as “research” as recently as 15 years ago.</b></bq> <bq>That’s how you police the boundaries of analytic philosophy: <b>if anyone arrives in its realm bearing the sort of basic knowledge of arts, culture, and literature that comes automatically with a basic education</b> in Latin America, say, or in Europe or in many other parts of the world but decidedly not the United States, you can be sure they’ll be taught very quickly to hide that earlier Bildung in order to <b>conform to the expectations of the dominant Anglo philosophical culture into which, tragically, they have sought to move.</b> Rule Number 1 of that culture is that <b>you must abandon your interest in culture, and how it works.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the broad transition of the present moment from physics to information science may prove at least as significant as the previous transition from vital forces and sympathies to classical mechanics. But <b>if we find that we are still more or less convinced of our own historically unprecedented rationality</b>, and confident in our ability to commit ourselves only to real entities and not to constructed or imaginary ones, <b>this can only have something to do not with the state of our knowledge but with our place in a knowledge tradition that understands itself as correct by definition</b> (a common weakness of what are more properly called <b>faiths</b>).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-polite-kind-of-racism" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Polite Kind Of Racism</a> <bq><b>The acceptable type of racism is the kind which considers it fine and normal to drop bombs on Muslim families overseas.</b> The kind which sees starvation sanctions as a minor issue whose <b>pros and cons are assessed solely on the basis of whether they will be successful or unsuccessful in achieving regime change.</b> The kind which <b>views imperialist extraction from the global south as the natural order of the world</b>, with centrists and progressives <b>squabbling only about how evenly that plunder should be distributed among westerners.</b> <b>The unacceptable type of racism is the kind which affects other westerners.</b></bq> <bq><b>Western racism falls into two distinct categories because our entire civilization is built upon the polite kind, whereas the impolite kind is useful to the powerful only as a wedge issue to keep western populations divided against each other.</b> Mainstream western politics is often just a culture war between one major party which embraces both the polite and impolite kinds of racism against another major party which only embraces the polite kind of racism, thereby <b>ensuring that no political energy goes toward ending the polite kind of racism.</b> The polite kind of racism is much more important to the powerful in the 21st century, because it’s an absolutely foundational component to their rule rather than merely a useful tool. <b>Without the imperialist extraction of labor and resources from the global south at extortionate prices, you wouldn’t see sprawling megacorporations turning millionaires into billionaires and trillionaires who then use their wealth to manipulate western politics to promote their own agendas.</b> Without nonstop military expansionism and the abuses of the western intelligence cartel, the managers of the western empire could not dominate our planet. That’s why every few years westerners get to vote on whether or not to advance the impolite kind of racism in their society, while <b>the polite kind of racism never appears on the ballot.</b> You’re allowed to vote on whether or not your government will become more abusive to immigrants and other marginalized members of your society, but <b>you’re never allowed to vote on whether or not war, militarism and imperialist extraction will continue.</b> This expression of racism (or white supremacism, or xenophobia, or western supremacism, or whatever you want to call it) is considered too important to be left to the will of the electorate.</bq> <bq>The only way to see things this way would be to <b>view those who live in the global south as less human than people who live in the United States.</b> That’s the only way it could possibly make sense in your mind to see the abuses of your country’s domestic police forces as worse than the demonstrably more egregious abuses of the US war machine. You’d have to <b>view a school full of Iranian children being blown up by the US Navy as less worthy of attention and opposition than an American being beaten by a police officer in the United States.</b> You’d have to assume those Iranian lives don’t matter.</bq> <bq><b>Westerners live in the most savage and murderous civilization on earth.</b> We don’t feel like we are savage and murderous because we outsource most of our violence and slavery to overseas operations, but that’s what we are. <b>We go about our lives consuming products made by wage slaves under an oppression machine that is defended through constant mass military slaughter, and then we wag our fingers at a viral video of some schizophrenic saying racist things</b> in order to feel nice feelings about ourselves. That’s what western life is, right there.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260622-00/?p=112451" author="Raymond Chen" source="The Old New Thing">In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words</a> <bq>Tony [Krueger] <b>worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that.</b> He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.” [...] Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, <b>it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).</b> [...] Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. <b>Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony.</b> I think he’d appreciate it.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}far_manager_is_blocked.png" href="{att_link}far_manager_is_blocked.png" align="none" caption="Far Manager is blocked" scale="75%"> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager" source="Wikipedia">Far Manager</a> is a perfectly legitimate and well-known Windows application that even has a Wikipedia entry. Because its developer hosts the web site in Russia, the URL has been banned by the URL-security service used by my company. <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">Cargo Culture</a> <bq>A single conversation with a regular person would likely have them tell you that <b>they wish their shit worked better or that the internet wasn’t so full of scams</b> and pop-ups and slop and misinformation. <b>They wish there weren’t so many ads.</b> They wish their apps weren’t confusing and full of dark patterns and ways to trick them into subscriptions or clicking ads or being annoyed.</bq> <bq><b>OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup could disappear tomorrow and the world’s financial systems would continue unabated</b>, other than the brutal hit to the stock market and screeching of venture capitalists. That’s because <b>their actual relevance is, in and of itself, symbolic.</b> OpenAI and Anthropic combined to less than $20 billion in annual revenue in 2025 representing 89% of all AI startup revenues, and spent at least $30 billion on compute on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Their services are sold using the very same cargo cult mentality that got us into this mess — <b>organizations adopting AI at scale and demanding that people use it because “AI is so powerful,” or, put another way, somebody they respect or like suggested it’s the future, and because none of these executives actually build anything or do any work, they have no idea what to do other than whatever it is that everybody else is doing.</b> <b>Our economy is dominated by companies run by people who didn’t build and who don’t participate in the products or services they sell.</b> They have little or no practical experience about what it was that made the company a success, and their “daring” initiatives usually boil down to “fire a bunch of people and flatten the organization” or “spend a bunch of money because it’s the thing to do.” <b>They do not know what AI does</b> other than the fact it can write code or write copy or generate stuff, but because everybody is “doing AI,” they too must “do AI,” which means “everybody that works for me must do this, and also we must add this somewhere, somehow.” But <b>that’s all the modern tech industry can do: an impression of something they think is successful in the hopes that they’ll be successful too.</b></bq> <bq>Both companies are now jousting to make much the same product by giving away API credits and free weeks of access to create the symbolic aura of an “essential” product to continue convincing VCs and the public markets that they’re “building the future” rather than <b>effectively paying their customers to use their products.</b> The “popularity” of AI has come entirely from social pressure and endlessly-discounted access, and <b>the very second that they charged the actual costs, their customers started freaking out and kvetching</b> about whether AI has ROI. <b>Our economy is dominated by people who have only a symbolic understanding of the world — Business Idiots with little interaction with productivity or production who do not know how value is created</b> and thus can only create facsimiles of valuable companies. Perhaps they’re lucky enough to have businesses that effectively run themselves, or monopolies that can survive having 98% of their free cash flow spent on AI data centers that only lose money, or are <b>smart enough to stay out of the way of the people who actually do work.</b></bq> <bq><b>It’s very clear OpenAI moved around numbers to make things look better than they are, and I believe that inference costs are being dumped in sales and marketing.</b> <b>How else are you to explain how a company spends more than 43% of its revenue ($5.73 billion) on sales and marketing — more than the Coca-Cola corporation, which has three ad agencies</b> and a vast web of different print, digital, and physical ad spend. Microsoft had $500 million of “sales and marketing” spend too. What do you think that is? OpenAI spending $500 million on sales and marketing through Microsoft? Or itemizing promotional spend or the inference from free users as a sales and marketing cost? If you disagree, please <b>explain in any level of detail how OpenAI has spent $5.67 billion on sales and marketing.</b> Its first major advertising campaign was in September 2025. If it’s spending $250,000 a year on its 500 sales staff, that’s still only $125 million. Unless OpenAI is one of the single largest accounts in digital advertising, <b>I think it’s far more likely that there are actual costs being hidden.</b> This is the kind of thing a company does when it has <b>utter loathing for its investors and the general public</b> — a brazen attempt to bury costs to make things feel better for an audience that’s directly incentivized to take any shred of proof that things are okay, <b>even if said “thing” is the suggestion that a company that lost $21 billion only actually lost $8 billion.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/ai-and-liability.html" author="Bruce Schneier" source="">AI and Liability</a> <bq>Earlier this month, <b>a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries.</b> Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that <b>the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.</b>”</bq> <bq>More generally, <b>liability concerns could mean that many current use cases for agents won’t be commercially viable.</b> Companies may not be able to profitably operate AI lawyers, doctors and media influencers if they are held responsible for what they say and do. <b>We’re OK with this outcome. There’s nothing in the law that requires us to accommodate AI systems if they are fundamentally untrustworthy</b>, just as we don’t need to accommodate untrustworthy human systems. Any company that won’t stand by the statements its agents make—whether human or AI—doesn’t deserve users’ time or money.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> I think that most people will look at an LLM-based tool demo, where, e.g., a chat interface lets you search for "All PDF invoices from last month over 5MB" and they will <i>never wonder whether they've been shown all of the desired results</i>. That is, my immediate thoughts are always "how did they achieve this?" or "which folders are they searching?" or "how can I be sure that my invoices are actually in those folders?" or "how does it even identify an invoice?" whereas most people just delight in the list of results. People don't ask themselves whether something is correct. They never did! Their scam radars are completely broken. They've always implicitly trusted the eminently and provably fallible heap of shambolic software we've always produced. Until the advent of LLM-based tools, all of this admittedly also terrible software was <i>deterministic</i>, meaning that, if it was configured correctly, it was always going to deliver the expected results, the same way, every time. If you didn't get results that you expected, you could "debug" to determine which initial condition was not satisfied: e.g., the folder where you put invoices wasn't in the search folders, or you weren't actually putting all of the invoices in one of those folders, or you were producing invoices that didn't match the pattern that you were using to identify invoices (e.g., files starting with "invoice_"), or whatever. These all sound technical, but they're also <i>solvable</i>. Fix the input and the output will be fixed, every time. With LLMs, this is all non-deterministic now, with these hard, technical limits expressed as hopeful instructions that are taken as suggestions. The results might include most of the files you were looking for, which is kind of amazing for a natural-language search. But "most" isn't good enough if you have real work to do. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/git/comments/1ueubip/why_git_is_so_hard_to_learn_and_how_best_to_teach/" source="Reddit" author="">Why Git is so hard to learn and how best to teach it.</a> <bq>Any student given the choice will use a GUI version like desktop.</bq> What's wrong with that? Are there use cases that they can't cover using a UI? Is there some reason they need to use the command line? My students generally end up using VSC Git UI (or VS Git UI) but I start off by recommending SmartGit because it's much better at visualizing and handling the kinds of problems that students tend to produce. Merge conflicts have a lot of inherent complexity that there is no way around teaching. Once you've internalized it, you wonder what the big deal is, but I've met many developers and students who need a lot of time to grok it. And many never do. They just do what that XKCD says: nuke it from orbit and start again. But a good UI (like SmartGit) offers insight into the code base, at a glance, that, even if it doesn't help the student, helps me to help them solve their problem relatively quickly. <h id="design">Design</h> <img src="{att_link}img_4630.jpeg" href="{att_link}img_4630.jpeg" align="none" caption="The SBB wants to sell me a ticket I already have" scale="50%"> The SBB ticketing app is offering me to the "City Wetzikon ZH" option, even though it <i>knows</i> that I already have those zones in a monthly ticket. They will never, ever, ever add a feature that would save money for the user. They will always err on the side of selling you the same zones multiple times. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://theonion.com/nba-players-share-the-one-thing-theyd-change-about-the-league-if-they-were-commissioner-for-a-day/" author="" source="The Onion">NBA Players Share The One Thing They’d Change About The League If They Were Commissioner For A Day</a> The eleventh one is absolute gold. It had me laughing out loud. It's by Boban Marjanović, who looks like this, <img src="{att_link}boban.webp" href="{att_link}boban.webp" align="none" caption="Boban Marjanović" scale="50%"> And he writes, <bq>I would demand…a companion. Someone…like me. You must create them for me, imbue them with a soul. For my burden is not my monstrosity, but the fact that I must carry it alone.</bq> If you're not catching the reference, that is a citation from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein" author="" source="Wikipedia">Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus</a> by <i>Mary Shelley</i>. No notes. 🧑‍🍳