This page shows the source for this entry, with WebCore formatting language tags and attributes highlighted.

Title

Links and Notes for July 10th, 2026

Description

<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#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="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/the-political-assassination-of-graham" source="The Floutist" author="Patrick Lawrence">“The political assassination of Graham Platner.”</a> <bq>I don’t think Platner ever identified as a social democrat, but this is what he is whether or not he says so. Universal health care, affordable housing, poverty and the rampant inequality that causes it, the corporatization of everything, above all the sequestration of those who hold political power: These, fundamental to social democracy the world over, were what Platner stood for or four-square against. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he used to tell reporters covering him. “And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.” We have just watched the oligarchy strike back.</bq> <bq>None of the allegations leveled against Platner will ever have to be substantiated. Jenny Racicot will never file charges of rape. There is no need of any of this: The function has been served.</bq> <bq>The various allegations various women have made since Platner began his rise in national politics last year—not before, please note—are he-said, she-said matters that, honestly, have been given a place in the national discourse only because those in elite quarters have found them useful.</bq> Preferring one opinion over another based on gender is not in any way different than doing so based on race. It is unjust when, in the absence of any evidence, a man's opinion is assumed to be correct rather than a woman's, and it's wrong when the roles are reversed. Unlike many others, I neither welcome nor celebrate simply turning the tables and retaining the injustice. <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/a-tale-of-two-funerals-irans-and-americas/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">A Tale Of Two Funerals: Iran's And 'America's'</a> <bq>'Americans' seem to have given up on protesting their forever wars, which is actually a bad sign for them. It means 'Americans' have given up on 'America'. Their choices are just genocide or diet-genocide, pro-war war criminals or anti-war war criminals, people in the Epstein files or other people in the Epstein files, rainbow corruption or White corruption. 'America's' ruling oligarchs have given up on even lying convincingly to their people and their people can't be convinced to show up, either in protest or support. They've just given up. It's all circuses and no bread, and the government can't even pay for the circuses, they're all corporate sponsored.</bq> <bq>I realize, as I get older, that funerals are not for the dead, they're for the living, they stitch people together around a wound rather than leaving a wound festering.</bq> <bq>[...] speaking from the 1970s as if he was reading the headlines today, Khamenei said, The pages of the world's newspapers are filled with the bluffs of our national leaders for this very reason. Someone who only has a few hours, or at most days, left before his government is removed from power will bluff to the very end. He will say that he is defeating his enemies, overcoming his opponents, that everything is under control and that his government will continue to rule regardless.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.donotpanic.news/p/a-250-year-old-death-machine-is-nothing" source="¡Do Not Panic!" author="Nate Bear">A 250-Year-Old-Death Machine Is Nothing To Celebrate</a> <bq>Built from the bones of slaves atop the bodies of the indigenous, fueled by the blood of the poor, it has created the most deeply unequal society in the west ruled by a new class of billionaire kings.</bq> Damn, bro. <bq>The only country to use a nuclear weapon, the marauding, murderous invader of dozens of sovereign nations, and the single greatest cause of instability in the modern world.</bq> <bq>[...] the US, having taken on empire status, and having seeded financialised capitalism around the world, is not just an objectively negative force in the world, but the greatest obstacle to true human flourishing in existence today.</bq> <bq>[...] the US commits acts of such wanton evil that its position as the head of the global international order is surely a sick joke. In Vietnam, interviews with US soldiers found that the rape and murder of children and women “was so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran.” The rape of Iraqi women and children was also routine, with only a few high profile cases ever prosecuted, including the gang rape of 14 year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi whose father, mother and sister were slaughtered in front of her by US soldiers, before she was then murdered.</bq> <bq>The USA is death, it carries death like a mascot everywhere it goes, and everything it touches dies. On July 4th, there is nothing to celebrate, only millions to mourn.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/independence-day-drag" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Independence Day Drag</a> <bq>Fascism is not only a poisonous political movement. It is a poisonous cultural and social movement. It eliminates the space for those who do not submit to the narrow definitions of what it means to be a citizen, a man, a woman or a patriot. It ruthlessly crushes independent lives and identities. It leaves in its wake loneliness and trauma. Fascism begins with the marginalized and demonized, but it does not stop there. It destroys community after community until we are orphans in our own land.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/04/requiem-for-america-on-the-fourth-of-july/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Requiem for America on the Fourth of July</a> <bq>The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.</bq> Railroaded like the J6 people. Administrations are not against railroading in principle; they're just against railroading their own. <bq>It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.” Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chomsky.info/1995____-2-3/" source="Covert Action Quarterly" date="1995" author="Noam Chomsky">A Few Words on Independence Day</a> <bq>Independence Day was designed by the first state propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), created during World War I to whip a pacifist country into anti-German frenzy and, incidentally, to beat down the threat of labor which frightened respectable people after such events as the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) victory in the Lawrence, Mass., strike of 1912.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/yankee-doodle-dandy-is-done-and-dying" source="Substack" author="Patrick Lawrence">“Yankee Doodle Dandy is done and dying.”</a> <bq>We remain indeed caught between our mythologies and the forces of history, but I did not anticipate how addicted the nation remains to myths and delusions even when they are understood to be myths and delusions. Americans will someday learn to live without their exceptionalist consciousness, but this will come only when the world forces them to do so, not before.</bq> <bq>Empire as a Way of Life (Oxford, 1980), the last book William Appleman Williams, 1921–1990, wrote and published? It is not ranked among his major works. Those appeared during Williams’s peak years as a an historian of foreign policy at the University of Wisconsin. But it has been major to me since I first read it. From its title on through its 240 pages, it presses the bitterest of truths upon us: Living in an empire, we all partake of its fruits. No, we are not all possessed of the imperial personality, but empire is our way of life. Short of exile this cannot, for now, be helped. Half a millennium ago the fruits of empire were gold, sugar, cotton, slaves, dominion. In our time they are oil and numerous other resources, cheap labor, favorable terms of trade, the projection of neoliberal orthodoxy, profit by way of the incessant exploitation of others.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/well-at-least-lindsey-graham-is-dead" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Well, At Least Lindsey Graham Is Dead</a> <bq>The only positive thing about the Iran war heating up again is that Lindsey Graham won’t be around to enjoy it. [...] Lindsey Graham is dead, and it is good that he is dead. May his omnicidal ideology soon join him in the arms of the cold, cold ground. May the insane, insatiable god he worshipped cease to gain recognition on this planet.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://mattbivens.substack.com/p/a-year-of-torturing-iran" author="Matt Bivens, M.D." source="The 100 Days">A Year of Torturing Iran</a> <bq>Imagine if Russia, fed up by the steady escalation of NATO-directed Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow, retaliated by bombing London. Imagine those Russian bombs killing hundreds of carefully selected top British officials and scientists. At their homes. With their families. The world would be aghast, right? Yet Israel can do what others cannot. Consider that the Hamas sneak attack of October 2023 killed about 1,200 Israelis (and took more than 250 hostage). Yet while the murder of those 1,200 Israelis was denounced with all appropriate dismay, the murder of 1,200 Iranians (including many children) last summer was mostly met with a shrug.</bq> <bq>Imagine if China one day announced a plan to drive American oil experts to zero, kill off our agriculture and crash our economy, even to the point of not letting us export, say, cowboy hats — all with the stated explanation that they wanted us to rise up and throw Donald Trump out a second-floor window.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva" author="" source="Wikipedia">Tuva</a> <bq>Tuva[a] or Tyva,[b] officially the Republic of Tyva,[c] is a republic of Russia.[9] Tuva lies at the geographical center of Asia, in southern Siberia. The republic borders the federal subjects of the Altai Republic, Buryatia, Irkutsk Oblast, Khakassia, and Krasnoyarsk Krai, and shares an international border with Mongolia to the south. Tuva has a population of 336,651 (2021 census). Its capital city is Kyzyl, in which more than a third of the population reside.</bq> Tuva is like the Russian Iceland. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/theyre-launching-a-new-cointelpro" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">They're Launching A New COINTELPRO For The 21st Century</a> <bq>[...] whatever measures they roll out while the Republicans are running things will remain in place when the Democrats are in power, because as we have discussed here many times before, it is the Democratic Party’s job to prevent leftward movement in the United States. This will be one of those many, many times the Republicans did something evil and the Democrats just quietly kept it running in the background to protect the interests of the capitalist empire. Because that is their job. But the fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to. They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children. They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing. Keep pushing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.donotpanic.news/p/its-not-terrorism-when-we-do-it" author="Nate Bear" source="¡Do Not Panic!">It's Not Terrorism When We Do It</a> <bq>Yesterday Pete Hegseth triumphantly tweeted a picture of Iran’s Chabahar maritime port tower collapsing following an attack by the US regime. The image bore a striking resemblance to the collapse of the towers on September 11th. Despite the fact this was, like most of the attacks on Iran, an attack on civilian infrastructure, it will not be labelled as such by the western media and political class. They will never call it terrorism or a war crime, despite the fact that it was both. Whether a civilian tower, a bridge, or a school full of children, western actions that result in mass murder will always simply be the product of a “strike.”</bq> <bq>The underlying psychology behind the double-standard is rooted in arrogance and supremacy: they’re the bad guys, and they do terrorism. We’re the good guys, and we “conduct strikes.”</bq> <bq>Those strikes can be genocidal, they can reduce entire cities to dust, destroy hospitals, schools, universities, water treatment plants, grain silos and the means of life for two million people. They can kill tens of thousands of children in all manner of sadistic and gruesome ways, they can wipe out entire bloodlines, but they are never labelled terrorism. They are, and always will be, simply strikes. Because terrorism is bad, and we’re the good guys.</bq> <bq>[...] the western mind, in matters of imperialism requires dissonance. It requires references to “strikes” not terrorism, to “wars” not genocides and to “foreign policy,” not imperialism. This is especially true of the professional media mind which must filter, process and present the news from the imperial core. My guess is that some of the benign, consent manufacturing language is intentional, and some is simply the product of subconscious western supremacy and the dehumanisation of the periphery. Because to fully internalise the evil committed by the system you not only live within but help uphold would require the instant rejection of that system. And well, you’ve got bills to pay.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trump-killed-those-us-troops-in-jordan" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Trump Killed Those US Troops In Jordan</a> <bq>The Iranians are dying for their country. The Americans are dying for Israel, for money, and for geostrategic control. Not a single American life in the United States is being protected by the actions of US service members in the middle east. They’re not defending their homeland, they’re attacking people who are defending theirs.</bq> <bq>Everyone thinking of joining the US military should refrain from doing so, and everyone who is already in the US military should do everything they possibly can to get out. Because there is nothing worse than killing and dying for rich bastards who will never give a fuck about you.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://coreyrobin.com/2026/07/15/the-icky-and-the-sticky/" author="Corey Robin" source="">The Icky and the Sticky</a> <bq>For me, the archetype is this sort of reporter, the ambitious weenie who’s wanted since college to be an insider of some sort, whether as a staffer or politician or journalist, yet who hasn’t had a thought in their head that hasn’t been handed to them by the idiot conventions of the day. There’s something about that marriage of intensity and ambition to what seems to me the most pathetic and picayune projects that just makes me wonder, and wonder more, how such people exist.)</bq> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_(1999_film)">Pick Flick</a>. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/you-cant-solve-half-a-problem/" source="ZNetwork | How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">You Can't Solve Half a Problem</a> <bq>Americans today are living in the socioeconomic rubble left by the failure of the incrementalists. The Democratic Party, dazzled by the passing success of Clintonian triangulation theory, has been institutionally unable to recognize that that era has passed, and a new and more brutal period of political war has settled upon us. As a result, we have all been subjected to the humiliating spectacle of mainstream liberal institutionalists harrumphing about norms as an increasingly fascist Republican Party gleefully smashes up all of their hallowed traditions with hammers. The destruction of the Trump era, of course, does not affect the material lives of Democratic political leaders one bit. They suffer only mild chagrin. Regular people pay a higher price.</bq> <bq>Incrementalism, by definition, solves only part of a problem, which to the regular people who suffer the genuine consequences is the same as not solving the problem. What does this mean, concretely? It means that you need to give people decent health care that they can afford, rather than boasting about taking minor steps down the long road towards that goal. It means that you must give people wages that they can live on, rather than boasting about small economic gains that still leave them too broke. It means that you must attack the power of billionaires until the billionaires do not have too much power any more, rather than advocating for modest tax increases that leave an oligarchy substantially in place.</bq> <bq>You’ll never get more. You will get beaten, because you did not attack your opponent with enough force to stop him from coming back and beating you. Moderates seem not to comprehend that it takes roughly the same amount of political capital to do a little bit of good as it takes to do a lot of good. It is almost as hard to raise taxes on billionaires by 5% as it is to raise taxes on them by 90%, because it is the direction that generates the opposition, more than the magnitude.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2026/05/national-orchestration-and-provincial-competition-chinas-industrial-policy-for-ai-dominance/" source="American Affairs Journal" author="Farrell Gregory">National Orchestration and Provincial Competition: China’s Industrial Policy for AI Dominance</a> <bq>When it comes to China, America’s worst habit is assuming that they think and behave just like us. What was the misguided belief that China would liberalize politically as it developed economically if not a projection, or mirroring, of our own attitudes onto a country and civilization with its own distinct internal logics? If the United States is going to truly compete with China in the race to achieve AI leadership, as we believe it should, and gain the technological edge that seems to be contested only between our two countries, then we need to understand exactly what we are competing against.</bq> It sounds like it's being reasonable, but it's still so wrong. The framing of competition is the one that the author will never be able to get away from, in the same way that a fish doesn't know what water is. The idea of supportive competition toward a common goal is absolutely inconceivable for the American mind. Everything is a zero-sum game. Everything ends in nuclear war---the superpower version of flipping the table---if they don't get their way. <bq>Known as China’s “digital valley,” Guizhou’s total computing power is projected to reach 190 exa-FLOPS this year across more than fifty data centers, with participation from hyperscalers such as Baidu, Huawei, Tencent, and NetEase. While substantial in the Chinese context, this puts Guizhou’s compute hub in a middle position relative to U.S. hyperscalers.</bq> <bq>For perspective, Guizhou’s AI compute capacity, aggregated across multiple sites, is roughly comparable to forty-seven thousand H100 GPUs for low-precision workloads, which is equivalent to about a quarter of the compute xAI controls at its one Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee. China’s relative dearth in AI compute reflects both the enduring effects of U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips and American frontier AI companies’ deep conviction about compute scaling.</bq> <bq>The speed at which this infrastructure was built also illustrates the regulatory inversion between China and the United States at the physical level. Equivalent data center buildouts in the United States face permitting timelines, environmental review, and grid interconnection queues that can stretch to a decade, forcing the adoption of off-grid power generation.</bq> None of those reasons is the actual reason why nothing gets done in the U.S.. The real reason is that no-one does anything in the U.S. because one wants to do it, or because it would be useful, but because there is a high margin of profit associated with it. The delays are all because they're waiting for the profits to show up for themselves not for being able to provide any benefit. <bq>Imagine the same level of orchestration in America: coastal cities such as New York, Miami, San Francisco, and Boston offer vouchers for compute, while each city operates a local fund with billions of dollars to invest in promising firms. At the same time, the federal government incentivizes clustering data centers and power generation in land-abundant western states such as Montana and Wyoming. And above all this, Washington sets various targets for AI integration into private firms by specific deadlines.</bq> What a paucity of vision! It's the colonization of the U.S. Coastal powerhouses deem what is to be done with valuable but powerless inner regions. <bq>[...] such an arrangement may appear incoherent or tyrannical in its overreach, or at the very least, as counterproductive to our traditional understandings of American innovation.</bq> Sure buddy. What color is the sky in your world? Is it blue there, too, where American companies are interested in innovation and getting things done rather than in stock buybacks? <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-the-memory-crisis/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">The Hater's Guide to the Memory Crisis</a> <bq><bq>The lawsuit points out that between 1998 and 2002, these same three companies, Samsung, Hynix (the predecessor of SK Hynix), and Micron, took part in a criminal conspiracy to fix the prices of DRAM sold to major American computer companies. After the Department of Justice prosecuted the case, Samsung pleaded guilty and paid a $300 million fine, Hynix pleaded guilty and paid $185 million, and Micron avoided a fine by reporting the conspiracy and cooperating. As a result, several Samsung executives went to prison. The trio of companies was also investigated by the Chinese government during a RAM price spike between 2016 and 2018.</bq>To be clear, I am not saying — nor can I prove — that there is any kind of price-fixing or collusion going on. Nevertheless, there are three companies that effectively make all the world’s RAM, all raising prices at the same time, all seeing record profits, all riding high at a time when everybody else is suffering as a direct result.</bq> <bq>What makes this particular memory crisis so distinctly dangerous is that it isn’t a result of consumer demand so much as it is capital expenditures from very large companies making bets that don’t connect with reality.</bq> <bq>[...] the capex spend of four of the largest companies of the world — all of whom are now funding their capex using debt — has now led to the single-largest increase in the price of consumer electronics in history, for the most part thanks to one company, NVIDIA, becoming the largest purchaser of HBM in the world because those four companies are buying so many GPUs. To give you an idea of how bad that is, NVIDIA takes up roughly 65% of all high bandwidth memory, with the other 35% (mostly) going to specialist ASICs from Google and Amazon, and AMD’s Instinct line of AI GPUs.</bq> <bq>The memory industry has gambled its financial future on the idea that there’s near-infinite amounts of capital available for data center capex, adjusting its supply chains and fabs to focus on scooping up demand that’s increasingly only made possible by the availability of debt. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have turned NVIDIA into a single point of failure for the entire tech industry, creating a painful present for consumers and a brutal future for suppliers, all because they decided to spend more than a trillion dollars on a dead end industry.</bq> <bq>The longer that hyperscalers sustain this pace, the larger the return needs to be, and at this point, none of them have disclosed their AI revenues, which heavily suggests there’s yet to be a dollar of profit. Yet the more they commit, the more committed they have to be. Pulling back at this point will prove to the markets that they’ve committed to too much capacity. Yet not pulling back means that hyperscalers will continue to turn their free cash flows negative in pursuit of an indeterminate goal. It’s a vicious cycle made worse by the fact that every spin of the capex wheel increases the price of just about every consumer electronic in the world, creating a market-wide inflation for what amounts to a speculative asset bubble.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/how-can-capitalism-deal-with-a-heat" author="Slavoj Žižek" source="ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS">HOW CAN CAPITALISM DEAL WITH A HEAT WAVE?</a> <bq>[...] when the privatization of water is on the neoliberal agenda: the owners of water‑supply companies get richer while the mass of those who need water gets poorer. The underlying logic of this paradox is clear: for something to count on the market, it has to have value, and value is an attribute of only those objects that are scarce – if they are freely and abundantly available, they cannot be sold and have no value. The most precious wealth of a society consists precisely of objects that are freely available, like water or air, but they do not count as values that make you rich. If water is easily available, nobody gets rich from it; if its supply is controlled by private companies, those who own these companies get rich, so in a technical sense of wealth as embodied in values, there is more wealth in society, since freely available water doesn’t count as wealth.</bq> <bq>If a resource like water or air is commonly available as a free gift of nature, it doesn’t count as wealth – it only counts as such when it differentiates me (who owns or controls it) from others, when it gives me a superiority over them. In other words, wealth counts as wealth only if there are those who are not wealthy. We encounter here a properly Hegelian paradox formulated already by Epicurus: “Poverty, if measured by the natural end, is great wealth; but wealth, if not limited, is great poverty.” If water is freely available, we are all equally poor on account of our great wealth; if only some people possess and control water, their excessive (unlimited) wealth means the poverty of others.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Workplace "flexibility" isn't</a> <bq>Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok. In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum). This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.</bq> <bq>[...] as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.</bq> <bq>But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.</bq> <bq>Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car).</bq> <bq>Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay.</bq> <bq>In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted. What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/17/roaming-charges-when-farce-repeats-itself/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: When Farce Repeats Itself</a> <bq>The median US home is now more unaffordable to the median American than at any point in history. In 2016, the mortgage rate was 3.5% and the average new home cost $350,000. Today, the rate is 6.5% and the average new home costs $540,000. This is perhaps the key reason that 49% of young adults now live at their parents’ home. Up from 37% in 2019.</bq> <bq>The promise of AI is that the overwhelming majority of the population will suffer and will have their life’s work taken from them. A tiny number of people will get richer than anyone’s ever gotten and the physical environment will be completely degraded. It’ll be rendered ugly through data centers and dry through water use. Everything about the future that AI promises is worse for the overwhelming majority of the people, but it empowers and enriches a tiny percentage of the population. That’s so crazy that only a society that worships money could even live with that for one day without resorting to revolution.</bq> This is why it's very difficult to write off Tucker Carlson: because he says things like this to a very large, very receptive audience which would otherwise never hear something this Marxist. He probably followed up with something about the Great Replacement, but he's doing some good work for the cause as well. It's great to point out how fine the powers-that-be are with everyone's lives but theirs being ruined. It's not going to happen, of course. AI as they conceive of it is a pipe dream. And, even if it were to come about that 50% of the population loses their jobs, the powers-that-be would not just be safe in their palaces with their indestructible stock market. Without considering the feasibility, just consider how OK they are with a plan that devastatingly immiserates most of the population while enriching the already overwhelmingly rich and powerful. They're not even pretending anymore. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/the-plight-of-the-martian-farmer" source="Mars For The Rest of Us" author="Maciej Cegłowski">The Plight of the Martian Farmer</a> <bq>[...] the biospherians were sane and competent, and they achieved something that has eluded everybody else, then and since. They built a large-scale habitat and lived inside it for two years in conditions of full material closure, growing their own food, recycling their own waste, and maintaining a breathable atmosphere in a completely sealed environment. Their large complex of greenhouses leaked less air than even the Space Shuttle, and the 17 months they spent inside before needing to supplement the atmosphere with outside oxygen remains the absolute record for survival in an environmentally closed system.</bq> <bq>Like in any subsistence society, life in the biosphere became entirely centered on food. There was a regular schedule of feast days (American holidays and crew birthdays) to offset the constant gnawing hunger. The biospherians ate so many sweet potatoes their skin turned orange from the beta carotene.</bq> <bq>In the Ocean, the biospherians engaged in a battle of wits with stowaway octopi who had been accidentally introduced into the habitat and whose voracity was only eclipsed by their cunning. After the first few weeks they were never seen, but their depredations continued.</bq> <bq>The difference in approach also affects your mindset. Are you an engineer or a farmer? If it’s the latter, you gain access to a very deep store of expertise and knowledge, but at the price of full control and understanding. If it’s the former, then you are hanging a giant KICK ME sign on your back to taunt Mother Nature, like every Silicon Valley startup that has so far ventured into vertical farming and found itself obliterated.</bq> <bq>The interesting thing about Biosphere 2 is that it was built by a bunch of barely rehabilitated theater majors, but has so far blown all comparable attempts by European and American space agencies out of the water. Until someone can do better at closed system living, the burden of proof will be on NASA to show why hippie-in-a-van organic farming should not be the default approach for long-term living on the Moon or Mars.</bq> <bq>NASA says it takes 50 square meters to grow enough calories to feed one person. That area is more than twice what you need to generate oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide for one human, so in planning our farm we can treat food as the limiting factor, confident that air replenishment will take care of itself.</bq> <bq>[...] even great Martian weather is marginal for potatoes, and if there’s any dust in the air, first the potatoes and then you are going to die.</bq> <bq>This dome would initially leak at every joint, and the amount of work needed to seal it is completely unreasonable, even on Earth. De-leaking Biosphere 2 took months of sedulous effort (a lot of it was done by burning incense and following the smoke), and that was in a design where the pressure differential between inside and outside was tiny. Nor did anyone have to do the work while wearing a space suit.</bq> <bq>Those grow lights will also need power (although they help heat the dome!) and you can see how this all starts to get a little bit hard to assemble and maintain with robot labor 200 million miles from Earth.</bq> <bq>[...] a crew living on Mars will have to spend most of its time hiding under several meters of rock to avoid getting all the cancer.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHktgFNRa4s" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/mHktgFNRa4s" source="YouTube" width="560px" author=" ILFamilyInstitute | Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath" caption="Neuroscientist Warns: Screens Are Undermining How Children Learn" date="January 15, 2026"> <bq>That leaves us with two options. Option one, when you know something is wrong, do better. So we could just say, hey, mea culpa, get some of this tech out of schools, go back to what we know works, some analog methods. Cool. Or two, we could redefine our terms. We could redefine what it means to be an effective learner. I want to end with one quick story here. Think back to your childhood, to your schooling. I guarantee all of us at one point took a test on reading-comprehension. And the way it looked is this. Here's a passage of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12 questions about that passage. Most of them are inferential, not factual. They're asking you to go beyond what you just read to see what you understood. Cool. Last year, the SATs had a reading-comprehension section. Here's what it looked like. Here is a single sentence of 75 words. Here is one question---fact-based---about that sentence. Next. Here is another sentence of 75 words. Here is one question about that sentence. Next. Last year, they redefined reading comprehension to mean 54 short sentences with one question about each. That is skimming. That's not reading. Why would we ever do that? Because what do kids do on computers? They skim. So rather than determining what we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That's not progress. That is surrender.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/we-are-addicted-to-plastics-and-goddess-help-us.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Mike Bendzela">We Are Addicted To Plastics And Goddess Help Us</a> <bq>Coal gives us heat, smelting of metals, and electricity generation. Oil gives us liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Natural gas (methane) adds to that mix the ability to synthesize nitrogenous fertilizers from mere air, which compounds are then incorporated into our very bodies. Energy expert Vaclav Smil has famously pointed out that this fossil carbon allows us to prop up modern civilization on four mighty pillars: Concrete, steel, ammonia, and plastics. Given that even wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells depend utterly upon the products and processes of this fossil carbon substrate, it should be apparent that “green” technologies really aren’t so green after all. They’re just the latest users of fossil carbon.</bq> <bq>Hormuz makes me think: What happens if the supply of petrochemicals used to create plastics were to be cut off? Will one start one’s seedlings in egg carton cells? Will one have to erect fencing to keep pests off the plants, go back to mulching with tons of hay, hand-cultivate weeds around every planting, hand-water with buckets? The horror.</bq> <bq>[...] it cannot be denied that plastic is Evil. It is largely unrecyclable. Row cover fabric can be reused a few years, as well as some pots, but they degrade over the years and must be trashed. It’s just about impossible to salvage and reuse plastic mulch. Globally, hundreds of millions of tons of plastic are thrown away every year, and only a small portion of this is “recycled.” I use scare quotes because I learned recently that plastic is never really recycled but “downcycled,” meaning the wasted plastic becomes the raw materials for lower-quality plastic products, which in turn break down and finally may be recycled no more. And at every point of this cycle, dreaded microplastics are released into the environment. These are known quaintly as novel entities. PFAS, polymers, nanomaterials. They are all contaminants. Novel entities reside in my brain now, even as I type on this plastic device.</bq> <bq>Today, he has a continuous glucose monitor (CGM); he attaches a sensor to his upper arm, which continually monitors his blood sugar and transmits the level electronically to a “reader” is his pocket, letting him know what his blood glucose is within about a five-minute window. This is far superior to waiting for glucose to show up in urine. He wears this sensor for ten days, then he disposes it and attaches a new one. These are ordered online and shipped to the house through a circuitous supply chain.</bq> <bq>As of this writing, Hormuz has been closed for 115 days, Don has about a 90-day stock of supplies in the bathroom cabinet, and France has seen its hottest day in history. We can only sit here and guess whether or when we will begin feeling the heat of an interrupted petrochemicals supply chain.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2532809-5-graphs-that-show-how-heatwaves-are-getting-more-dangerous/" author="Jacklin Kwan, Alec Luhn" source="New Scientist">5 graphs that show how heatwaves are getting more dangerous</a> <bq>Strong heat stress almost never occurred at night before 1998. But now, nighttime temperatures in western Europe and other places are increasing at double the rate of global warming as a whole. A drop in body temperature triggers sleep. If the environment is too hot, it is harder to fall asleep, as well as to enter a state of deep sleep. And loss of sleep over several nights in a row can hinder reaction time and boost anxiety and stress. “If you don’t get cooling periods at night, which we define in this country as less than 20°C at night, sustained temperatures without cooling have worse impacts,” says Montgomery. The hottest summer ever seen led to apocalyptic scenes in Europe in 2022. Wildfires broke out in France, Portugal and Spain. Italy’s longest river, the Po, ran dry in places, and wrecks of Nazi ships full of explosives were discovered as the Danube fell to record lows. In the UK, temperatures exceeded 40°C (104°F) for the first time.</bq> <bq>[...] in the case of urban heat, trees can make a big difference. They create areas of shade, and they also draw moisture from the soil, which then evaporates from their leaves, cooling the environment. Neighbourhoods with tree canopies can be as much as 10°C cooler than similar places.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/new-york-is-the-first-state-to-impose-a-data-center-moratorium/" author="Ashley Belanger" source="Ars Technica">New York bans data center construction for a year, rattling AI industry</a> <bq>Possibly providing a blueprint for other statewide bans, New York’s bold anti-AI stance was viewed as “a striking setback for artificial intelligence companies that politicians once courted for investment,” the Post reported. [...] Although her office insists that she isn’t anti-AI, she believes that she must take steps to ensure responsible growth of the industry in New York, where electricity prices are among the highest in the US. On Tuesday, Hochul indicated that she also planned to repeal sales tax exemptions for data centers.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/lexception-francaise" source="The Hinternet" author="Mary Cadwalladr">L’Exception française</a> <bq>En 1964, le monde anglophone, à l’inverse, n’a guère perçu l’intérêt de chanter une réconciliation sentimentale avec les Allemands. Les Allemands avaient été défaits, et l’on ne répond pas à une défaite par la fraternité, mais par le paternalisme ; non par la réconciliation, mais par la reconstruction ; non par la redécouverte d’une histoire commune, mais par l’imposition d’une nouvelle histoire nouvelle sous un nouvel empire.</bq> <bq>J’en suis venu à penser qu’à travers la chanson française d’après-guerre on peut entendre, pour peu qu’on y prête l’oreille, le souci de la France de préserver son ancienne identité continentale contre l’emprise de l’ordre atlantiste dominé par les États-Unis.</bq> <bq>Sur le plan des paroles, Brel continue de s’appuyer sur les reprises du passé simple (« Bien sûr nous eûmes des orages »), un temps verbal qui avait alors pratiquement disparu de la langue parlée. Il est impossible d’imaginer Françoise Hardy, occupée à raconter les petites histoires de ce que faisaient « les garçons et les filles de mon âge », recourir à un eut ou à un fut.</bq> <bq>Sans doute le plus contre-culturel de tous les chansonniers de l’ancienne génération, Ferré semble avoir souffert de l’absence d’une forme musicale qui lui permît d’exprimer adéquatement sa propre philosophie de l’existence. Anarchiste convaincu, il adopte à la fin des années 1960 une femelle chimpanzé nommée Pépée et exigea qu’elle fût traitée en égale au sein du foyer Ferré.</bq> <bq>[...] la mort de Pépée inspira ce qui est sans doute, très sérieusement, la pire chanson du XXᵉ siècle : « Pépée » (1969). Et contrairement à la mauvaise chanson de Cabrel brièvement évoquée plus haut, « Pépée » est mauvaise d’une manière qui exige tout simplement qu’on l’entende au moins une fois.</bq> <bq>Mais la chance, elle, relève du domaine public de l’histoire — de cette même histoire qui fit de la France un lieu de résistance à l’ordre trans-Atlantique émergent de l’après-guerre, où des lignées de chants beaucoup plus anciennes continuaient encore d’ordonner le monde autrement.</bq> <bq>Ces lignées de chants ne survécurent guère plus d’une dizaine d’années encore, et dès la fin des années 1960, avec des artistes comme Gainsbourg et Ferré, on commence déjà à entendre leur signal s’affaiblir. Comme tant d’autres phénomènes — Internet, Uber, la financiarisation de l’enseignement supérieur —, les bouleversements de la modernité atteignent systématiquement la France avec une dizaine d’années de retard. Le protectionnisme culturel n’est parfois qu’une nuisance. Dans le cas de la chanson d’après-guerre, il fut rien de moins qu’une période de grâce.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://edwardcurtin.com/hoping-with-paul-simon-that-the-gate-wont-be-closed/" source="" author="Edward Curtin">Hoping with Paul Simon that the Gate Won’t Be Closed</a> <bq>“There is but one freedom,” Albert Camus wrote in his notebook, “to put oneself right with death. After that, everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved – and not the reverse.”</bq> <bq>When Paul sang the following stanza, their applause became a massive roar: And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls In tenement halls” And whispered in the sounds of silence As they gathered up their empty picnic baskets, the crowd’s physical hunger seemed satiated. And as they turned to go, the flashing of their cell phone screens were like fireflies in the gathering gloom. Their only warning being for a hard rain coming. America is hard to find.</bq> <bq author="Philip Rieff" source="The Triumph of the Therapeutic">For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out from one cage into another.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQK2U-KrhuA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dQK2U-KrhuA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="NPR Music" caption="Flea and the Honora Band: Tiny Desk Concert"> TIL that Flea has his own jazz band, where he plays trumpet as well as bass. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/tuesday-poem-508.html" author="Bronislaw Maj | Jim Culleny" source="3QuarksDaily">Tuesday Poem: An August Afternoon</a> <bq>An August afternoon. Even here is heard the rush of the glittering Raba. We look at the mountains, my mother and I. How clear the air is: every dark spruce on Mount Lubon is seen distinctly as if it grew in our garden. An astonishing phenomenon—it astonishes my mother and me. I am four and do not know what it means to be four. I am happy: I do not know what to be means or happiness. I know my mother sees and feels what I do. And I know that as always in the evening we will take a walk far, up to the woods, already before long.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://oalgar.com/post/822054735899197440/poetry-is-when-an-emotion-has-found-its-thought" author="Robert Frost" source="The Blog">Poetry is when an emotion...</a> <bq>Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42869/i-am-waiting-56d22183d718a" author="Lawrence Ferlinghetti" source="The Poetry Foundation">I Am Waiting</a> <bq>I am waiting for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder</bq> <bq>I am waiting to see God on television piped onto church altars if only they can find the right channel to tune in on and I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder</bq> <bq>I am waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs and I am waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody</bq> <bq>I am waiting for Childe Roland to come to the final darkest tower and I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference in a new rebirth of wonder</bq> <bq>I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last long careless rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn to catch each other up at last and embrace and I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder</bq> Literal goosebumps at the end. Lovely. I've chopped out the bits I like but the poem's not that long. Do it the honor it deserves by reading it in its entirety. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/" source="The Atlantic" author="Rose Horowitch">The End of Reading Is Here</a> <bq>By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong. Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.</bq> <bq>Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it.</bq> <bq>In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word.</bq> <bq>This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.</bq> <bq>“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010.</bq> <bq>A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year. Successive waves of education reforms have led districts to favor short passages over full books, the better to mimic multiple-choice reading-comprehension exams. Many of the most popular school curricula now rely on excerpts.</bq> <bq>In a New York Times survey, more than 80 percent of elementary-school teachers said students receive a school-issued device by the time they enter kindergarten. Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school.</bq> <bq>According to a recent data analysis by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor who studies generational change, by eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media. For much of that time, it appears, they are watching videos, often at 2x speed.</bq> <bq>Like many 20-somethings, my friends and I have mostly moved on from texts, preferring to send one another voice recordings instead.</bq> JFC what an absolutely obnoxious thing to do. <bq>Maybe McLuhan and Postman weren’t wrong in predicting that our society would become postliterate. They were merely early. The world that these theorists foresaw half a century ago is now here. The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.</bq> <bq>One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.</bq> <bq>Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.</bq> <bq>“Before you can even get to ‘What’s the larger point?,’ it’s: ‘Is this ironic?,’ what a metaphor might mean, just trying to get the very words and grammar to get them to notice everything, so that they can hopefully then make the larger connections.”</bq> <bq>At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”</bq> These people are lost, essentially foreign speakers of their mother tongue, the only language they know. There have always been large parts of the population who essentially function like this, but these are university students. <bq>That students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read.</bq> <bq>Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me.</bq> <bq>[...] for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.</bq> <bq>Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age. “So many people, particularly in the academic and journalistic circles, think of him as a political revolutionary,” Roderick Hart, a communications professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “And I see him much more as a rhetorical revolutionary.”</bq> <bq>Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.</bq> <bq>By evaluating my arguments and discarding those that aren’t convincing, I find the ones that are. Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning.</bq> <bq>The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text.</bq> <bq>Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year.</bq> <bq>[...] many Americans are proudly postliterate. The president has spoken about his taste for bullet-pointed briefings, and aides have said he likes pictures and charts. The world’s richest men brag about getting their information from X posts, podcasts, and conversations with chatbots. Young people who seek wealth and influence are encouraged to mimic them.</bq> <bq>Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day. After Texas’s ban went into effect at the start of this past academic year, a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance-2" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">The Decline of Deviance 2</a> <bq>On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely. Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos. Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.</bq> <bq>We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.</bq> Serendipity can be useful, educational. <bq>[...] people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.</bq> <bq>[...] you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike. And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone. I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around. Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.</bq> <bq>The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard. Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe? How about 30 million more of those? How about an anteater licking a watermelon? Will that keep your attention for another three seconds? Wait, don’t go yet!! We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!</bq> <bq>People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”. That did become possible, but it didn’t become desirable. Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone? Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country? Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck.</bq> <bq>Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience. When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you. You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s. You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times. You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.</bq> <bq>I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs. They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke. I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous. Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.</bq> <bq>When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk. When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.</bq> <bq>The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay. If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm. If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else.</bq> <bq>Unfortunately, when every interesting person chooses comfort over creativity, we end up with four different Spider-Man 2s.</bq> <bq>As William James wrote 100 years ago: We have grown literally afraid to be poor.<bq>We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. [...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have,</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-reasons-why-you-dream-of-making-things-by-hand" source="Aeon" author="Joshua Habgood-Coote">The radical reasons why you dream of making things by hand</a> <bq>Roughly 21 centuries later, in Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues that apprenticeship in a métier – a job or skill – ought to be a central part of a child’s education. His rhetoric explicitly connects crafts with heritage: ‘Cultivate the heritage of your fathers! But if you have lost that heritage, or if you never had it, what should you do? Learn a skill [métier]!’ For Rousseau, the point of this apprenticeship is to gain insight into social relations, and crucially to learn the distinction between jobs that are held in high esteem and those that are actually useful.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrF_gt3cYRY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/yrF_gt3cYRY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Meditations for the anxious mind" caption="why we call everyone a narcissist now"> <bq>Maybe the real narcissist is a culture that treats inconvenience like emotional abuse. We've been taught that anyone that makes us feel bad is fundamentally broken but, sometimes, they just live in a world that doesn't revolve around you.</bq> <bq>The problem today is what I call the main character to narcissist paradox. Culture encourages main-character energy and condemns narcissistic behavior. So, we put ourselves at the center of our story and act surprised when others do the same in theirs. We're the main characters. They're the narcissists. And the flaws we can't see in ourselves, we project onto them. And that's why we call everyone a narcissist now. It's because they're not following our script and doing exactly what we want them to do. But we're not self-centered. We just know our own worth. It's everyone else who's got the personality disorder.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/thompson-vonnegut-ice-9" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">Thompson, Vonnegut, Ice 9</a> <bq>The ecosystem and climate appear to be collapsing. And the tech industry has eaten the world, and more importantly, a lot of peoples' brains. The nihilism comes in because, of course, our measure of mental wellbeing is in the ability of a person to pretend that none of this is happening and that, to paraphrase Vonnegut, "everything is fine, just fine".</bq> <bq>Much as chronic pain or Ehlers-Danloss disease might make you unsuitable for jobs where you have to stand for long periods, chronic caring or Hunter Thompson's disease makes you unsuitable for jobs where you have to ignore the quality of what you're putting out.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/misery" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Misery</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc-misery.webp" href="{att_link}smbc-misery.webp" align="none" caption="SMBC Misery" scale="75%"> <bq>God, why the hell is everyone so miserable? You structured your economy so that poets, painters, and writers have the worst money-to-talent ratio of anyone, then tasked them with talking about what life is like! All of your greatest stories are brought to you by a scorned underclass who already hated themselves before they were told they deserve nothing because their job isn't real.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/subjective" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Subjective</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_-_subjective.webp" href="{att_link}smbc_-_subjective.webp" align="none" caption="SMBC - Subjective" scale="75%"> <bq>Zorgax, what is consciousness? How can the physical give rise to the subjective? Look, the connection between physical and mental processes is straightforward the problem is that the full idea, even if compressed into fundamental concepts is juuuuust a bit too large for the human brain. You're smart enough to know it happens, but incapable of understanding. It's like a puppet who sees the hand go in, but lacks the cognitive capacity to imagine the fingers! Humans, uniquely, are obsessed with souls and consciousness and "the subjective" and it's all down to about a half-cup shortfall of grey matter!</bq> <hr> <a href="https://etymology.substack.com/p/slop-realism" author="Adam Aleksic" source="The Etymology Nerd">slop realism</a> <bq>If “slop” is the precipitate of optimization, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of slop. Suppose you want to make your interests undiscoverable, so you prioritize illegibility. Now you’ve incentivized me to produce ambiguityslop (which is arguably why the word “vibe” became a buzzword last year). Or perhaps you want to gatekeep your interests—now we’re back at tasteslop. Slop realism is the understanding that, like capitalism, “slop” is a Moloch—a structure we are forced to participate in, which worsens society. While there is still something to be said for actual authenticity, whimsy, and taste, even your personal preferences are being measured and targeted in a way that will only generate more slop with time.</bq> This reminded of <a href="https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-annotated" author="Bill Hicks" source="Genius.com">On Advertisers and Marketing</a> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9h9wStdPkQY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Bill Hicks on 'Marketing'"> <bq quote-style="none">By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. (Kill yourself.) Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good. Seriously. No this is not a joke. You’re [going], “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.” Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags! “Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.” Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet. “Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill’s very bright to do that.” God, I’m just caught in a fucking web. “Ooh, the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…” How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you? “What didya do today, honey?” “Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight.” [snores] “Yeah we just said, you know, is your baby really too loud? You know?” [snores] “Yeah, you know the mums will love it.” [snores] Sleep like fucking children, don’t ya. This is your world, isn’t it?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://improvesomething.today/responses-to-problems/" author="Brian Kerr" source="Improve Something Today">Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)</a> <bq><ol>Pushing problems around: Making things better here by making them worse there. Preserving problems: Who’d lose out if the problem were solved? [...] know who they are and include them in your plan. Promoting new problems: What problems do we create by solving this problem? [...] give up the illusion that you’ll ever finish solving problems. [...] people who can ignore problems, when they choose to, live the best lives.</ol></bq> <hr> <a href="https://laphamsquarterly.substack.com/p/extracts-fc4" author="Grace Andreasen" source="Lapham's Quarterly">Extracts: On Revolutions</a> <bq author="Henry Clay" date="1842">An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.</bq> <bq date="1871" author="Mikhail Bakunin">To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.</bq> <bq author="Dolores Ibárruri" date="1936">It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.</bq> <bq author="George Bernard Shaw" date="1903">Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.</bq> <bq author="Hannah Arendt" date="1970">The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.</bq> <bq author="Leo Tolstoy" date="1893">Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.</bq> <bq author="Marcus Tullius Cicero" date="63 BC">Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.</bq> <bq author="Havelock Ellis" date="1921">All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/07/the-czinger-21c-might-be-the-wildest-car-we-drive-all-year/" source="Ars Technica" author="Bradley Iger">The Czinger 21C might be the wildest car we drive all year</a> <bq>Traditionally, a vehicle begins as a set of performance targets and packaging constraints. Engineers then develop components that satisfy those requirements within the limitations of established manufacturing processes.</bq> <bq>Those processes—casting, forging, stamping, and machining—impose constraints of their own, particularly around geometry. Complex shapes tend to be costly or impossible to produce using these methods, and mass reduction is typically achieved through iterative refinement rather than holistic optimization.</bq> <bq>[...] components are developed to a point where any reduction in material would compromise structural integrity, and any addition would be unnecessary mass. The resulting geometries often resemble branching lattice structures or organic skeletal forms that are more reminiscent of biological growth patterns than machined metal parts. Once a design has been finalized, massive printers can then construct the component from powdered metals.</bq> <bq>“The goal is for this manufacturing process to be the way everything is built,” Morice said. “It’s vehicle-agnostic, so you can build a Czinger, you can build parts for an Aston Martin, a Bugatti, and so on, all in the same space with zero turnover time. It’s really the golden goose of manufacturing.”</bq> <bq>The super bike-esque exhaust note is reminiscent of the Lamborghini Temerario, though it’s even more visceral here thanks to Czinger’s heightened focus on weight reduction (which undoubtedly impacts the amount of sound-deadening material used), as well as this engine’s higher redline.</bq> The car is fucking annoyingly and stupidly loud. <bq>The 21C’s real significance lies in the technologies that created it and the possibilities that those technologies represent for everything that could come next.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/china-recovered-its-first-reusable-rocket-and-showed-a-new-way-to-do-it/" author="Stephen Clark" source="Ars Technica">China recovered its first reusable rocket and showed a new way to do it</a> <bq>The proliferation of Chinese rocket companies, scattered across four land-based spaceports and multiple ocean-going launch platforms, should set up China to quickly ramp up its launch cadence. “It probably won’t be but a few years before they’re able to achieve a much higher launch cadence,” Galbreath said. “They also have more launch sites than the United States currently, so if you couple their number of sites with reusability, they could surpass us in terms of launch rate, which in and of itself is more of a pride thing. But it’s the capability that’s being launched as a result of that that could actually have a significant impact on our competition, and if we got to it, a conflict. “There’s nothing wrong with competition as long as it’s peaceful,” Galbreath said. “That can drive innovation, but I’m concerned that the historic example of Chinese behavior has not always remained peaceful. So, we have to look at everything they do carefully. On the one hand, they’re competing with SpaceX, but we know that because of the way China has organized its military, its space capabilities, all under military control, that there is significant utility that their armed forces will receive from this race.”</bq> What the hell are you talking about? You interviewed a U.S. government official and asked their opinion of China's space program? And that official accused China of having <iq>not always remained peaceful?</iq> That is rich. <hr> <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/" source="The Telegraph" author="Nicole Mowbray">The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends</a> <bq>[...] companion apps are aggressively advertising on the platforms children frequent – whether that’s online gaming or YouTube. “These apps are created to get data and make money out of people. They want people invested in a character and consistently using it,” says Chambers. He believes that there is an element of manipulation in the apps’ inherent design: “They encourage users to buy their ‘partner’ virtual gifts – roses, jewellery, virtual boxes of chocolate – which only exist in the app. While that may seem odd to older people, for young people, buying digital assets is quite normal: they’re used to paying for a uniform for a game or a new gun on Fortnite. Ultimately, they’re monetising human loneliness and reinforcing human loneliness to make more money.”</bq> <bq>According to a recent report by the charity Internet Matters, two thirds of children aged nine to 17 now use AI chatbots regularly for everything from homework to emotional advice – usage which has grown significantly since the start of 2024. The charity’s research also found that children classed as “vulnerable” were more likely to use AI chatbots than their “non-vulnerable” peers – at 71 per cent and 62 per cent respectively – and nearly three times as likely to engage with companion-style AI chatbots.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/microsoft-secure-boot-has-been-broken-for-most-of-its-existence/" author="Dan Goodin" source="Ars Technica">Microsoft’s Secure Boot has been broken for a decade and no one noticed until now</a> <bq>The prospect that attackers have had the means to bypass Secure Boot for more than a decade through what amounts to hack-by-numbers scripts isn’t much of an endorsement of the mechanism proposed by Microsoft in partnership with hardware makers. As mentioned earlier, a key contributor to this debacle is its complexity. “This is a solid rebuke of the entire secure boot model,” HD Moore, a firmware security expert, CEO and founder of runZero, and a long-time critic of Secure Boot, said in an interview. His complaints include Microsoft being the de facto root of trust for the entire UEFI platform, the inability of the protection to scale sufficiently, and the ability for components to boot even after top-level certificates expire. “The end result is a huge number of unknown (to everyone but Microsoft) signed things that bypass Secure Boot—some of which can then be used to boot other things—and both have normal security bugs and other mistakes that mean they can be used to boot nearly anything,” Moore added. “The whole ecosystem is somewhat broken and needs a reboot.”</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers?</a> <bq>If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible?</bq> <bq>[...] we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company. The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBLvzATPxv8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/pBLvzATPxv8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="FatherPhi" caption="the cups are see through"> <hr> <a href="https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/" author="Nikhil Suresh" source="Ludicity">AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making</a> <bq>Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory.</bq> <bq>[...] the internally-facing chatbot, or for the more daring company, the customer-facing chatbot. The story is always the same. For the former, I’ve never seen substantial internal uptake from inside a business. Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible.</bq> <bq>I am very confident that almost every report at a company about “massive AI productivity gains” is untrue as a matter of brute fact. Even if some companies are seeing clear gains, this is the exception, not the norm. With that assumption in place, we can talk about the dynamics at play, and how it has become impossible for many organisations to stay focused on things that actually matter to their long-term (or even short-term) health.</bq> <bq>[...] the broader reality is so much worse: people who have no background in the technology at all actually believe what they are saying. As a general rule you should avoid getting into business with a liar, but if you must, you can at least reason with them even if only in private. A true believer is much more threatening because they are impervious to even inducement by self-interest.</bq> <bq>Despite the substantial prevalence of true believers, many of the people running large AI initiatives, or making public statements about them, do not believe what they are saying. There are “heads of AI” who read this blog, at companies with $1B+ in annually recurring revenue, who have written in to say they believe their job is totally fraudulent but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organisation.</bq> <bq>Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. And getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired.</bq> <bq>[...] we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.</bq> <bq>Many companies have actively publicized that this is their new hiring policy – when a member of staff requests additional headcount, they must demonstrate that they have tried to use AI first. The part that’s being left out is that if you say you used AI and still need the help, you will be labelled “bad at AI” and potentially laid off.</bq> <bq>[...] the anonymous poll, where you can ask individuals to rate their opinion of an AI project’s success chances on a scale of 1 to 10. The typical split I have observed is half of those involved rating the project at a 3/10 and others at around an 8/10 – a clear bimodal split on a project that was already three years late. Bringing this data to a CEO can be an effective method of pointing out that some information is clearly being hidden from them on the state of the project.</bq> <bq>It is not uncommon to uncover worldview-shaking information in short order – with one client, we uncovered that staff were totally unaware they had been given licenses for AI tooling, which cast into doubt all productivity claims.</bq> <bq>Remember that you do not know what statements have been emitted prior to entering a room. There will sometimes be people that have publicly committed to statements like “I am 100x more productive than I was last year”, and some may even wish they hadn’t said that but are too embarrassed to walk it back. In an untested room, common sense like “LLMs should not be allowed to deploy code without human review” can kill your chances to make an impact before you’ve even started.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/13/the-tower-keeps-rising/" author="Armin Ronacher" source="">The Tower Keeps Rising</a> <bq>There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing. The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in documentation and code, but also in code review, conversations, arguments, and the experience of having to explain a change to somebody else.</bq> <bq>This was slow, and much of that slowness was waste but not all of it was. Some of it was the process by which your understanding became mine, and by which both of us discovered whether we still agreed about how the system worked. This friction synchronizes people.</bq> <bq>Agents now let us act in parts of the system where we would previously have needed other people and in code bases where the people would have revolted. When I look at some vibecoded scaled-up projects the codebases become Babel not because nobody can communicate, but because nobody needs to. Every developer has a tireless translator that can explain a corner of the tower and make whatever local alteration they ask of it. The changes keep landing, even as the architectural language that would let the humans reason about them together disappears.</bq> <h id="design">Design</h> <img src="{att_link}fielman_s_design_continues_to_be_terrible.webp" href="{att_link}fielman_s_design_continues_to_be_terrible.webp" align="none" caption="Fielman's design continues to be terrible" scale="35%"> The Fielmann web site continues to be an unadulterated train wreck. <n>I've deleted the private information from the screenshot, so there's a bit more "whitespace" than in the original.</n> <ol> The fonts are unnecessarily tiny. This web site is made for customers who have trouble seeing. WTAF. Look at how much whitespace there is! There is so much wasted space that could be filled with information, like the products that I'd ordered! Instead, the products I'd ordered are hidden behind a dropdown that you have to manually toggle. There is a ton of sexy whitespace available at the bottom, though. </ol> This is just so maddening. How is the world incapable of making a web shop after decades and decades of building web-shop front-ends? There should just be a standard way of doing it, like the way you can drive pretty much any car because the controls are all in the same place. <h id="sports">Sports</h> We weren’t planning on watching the Norway-England match anyway but the Switzerland-Argentina stream opened on 120 minutes with most of the extra time played to show us the score anyway. WHO RUNS THESE THINGS? DO THEY NOT CARE ABOUT SPORTS AT ALL? WTF. I think they’re just incompetent. We can have all of this amazing technology but it’s just being run by a bunch of monkeys. <hr> On the call against Embolo in the Switzerland-Argentina match. It was a fair call; a pathetic dive. But it also came conveniently when Argentina hadn’t seen the Swiss goal for about 40 minutes and Switzerland’s next goal was nearly inevitable. A match very much turned around by a single call, so I’m sure FIFA was pleased to be so influential. Argentina didn't have to worry about getting a double-yellow because the referee refused to give them yellow cards at all until very late in the second half, despite extremely hard tackles throughout. Some of the tackles were so hard that I was surprised not to see a red card a couple of times. But I'm surprised a lot this year because I don't even think I know the rules of soccer anymore. Studs-up used to be a red card. Now, it's sometimes just an indirect free kick. Tackling from behind used to be a red card; I guess players are tougher now. From a note I sent to a friend in German, Wir haben den Match gerade fertig geschaut. Mein Fazit: Die Schweiz musste gegen Argentinien und FIFA spielen. War ein tick zu steil. Die haben sehr gut gespielt. Akanji hätte früher zielen können, wenn er nicht so gerne mit dem Ball im 16m Bereich herumspielt statt zu schiessen. Die zweite gelbe Karte gegen Embolo war fair. Das war wirklich eine erbärmliche Schwalbe. Die erste Karte kann ich mich gar nicht erinnern. Ich weiss nur, dass zumindest in die erste Hälfte hat der Schiri (der Unparteiische dürfen wir dem sicher nicht nennen) fast nie gegen Argentinien gepfiffen, ganz zu schweigen denen eine gelbe Karte gezeigt. Die Schweiz hingegen räumte die für jede Bagatelle ein. Der Einfluss von FIFA wird bei jedem Tournier offensichtlicher. Ganz nebenbei ist die ständige Heulerei allerseits sehr schwer zuzuschauen. Es löscht mich gerade ab. <hr> I'm watching the Spain--Argentina final and there's a Spanish player on the ground. A bunch of players from both teams gather around the player (why?) and the Argentinians are apparently so pissed about it that they start shoving all of the Spanish players away. One of the Argentinians (Paredes) pushes a Spaniard hard, twice, the second time throwing him to the ground. The referee rightly shows him a yellow card. But what the hell was he thinking? Is he so undisciplined that all of a sudden knocking down a Spanish player is more important than anything else? You're in the World Cup final, FFS. You're at 0--0. Are you really willing to risk getting thrown out of the match and putting your team at a huge disadvantage? Are these people such mental midgets, such creates driven by impulse that none of that matters when the red curtain comes down and they have to start shoving people around like bullies on a playground? Was it a strategic yellow card? How childish can you be? The coach must lose years off of his life watching that kind of bullshit. These people are no better than toddlers. This has been how the whole World Cup has been played. Every time I popped in to a stream, I could catch, within minutes, a clump of screaming, crying babies surrounding the referees, pushing and pulling at him, demanding attention. I don't even know the rules of this game anymore. Why is this tolerated. It's annoying and contributes nothing to the game. It's like watching little ad-hoc court cases 50 times a match. None of these mental midgets ever did what the referee saw. They almost never apologize, they almost never own up to what they did. They always pretend that nothing happened. They always pretend that the ball went off the other guy. It is tedious. Later, in extra time at the end of the game, there is a flagrant foul by Argentina's Hernandez that tossed a Spanish player into the air like he'd been struck by a bull, and earned a deserved red card for it. Was he still on the field arguing his case minutes later? Of course he was, because there are no rules for toddlers. There was a crowd of screaming, bawling Argentinians around the referee, none of whom would be forced to accept what was obviously a flagrant and dangerous foul because toddlers don't have to accept anything that they don't like. The referee was like a beleaguered parent, helpless because there are apparently no rules anymore, and there are apparently no people with a shred of pride or honor playing international football. In the game itself, the Argentinian goalie should get a parade all for himself in Buenos Aires because he is the only thing keeping Argentina in the game under the Spanish onslaught on the goal. Sometime in the first half of overtime, Spain scored an obvious goal but the referee called a vague foul---or something, it's honestly no clear why the goal didn't count. They showed the replay twice and it showed and Argentinian player dropping to the ground for no reason while a Spanish player made a nice kick-flip to the goal, which was bobbled by the goalkeeper, giving up a rebound for a different player to bury. Why was it not a goal? Was it offsides? No. Was it a foul? Not according to the replay. What about VAR? Oh, sorry, VAR is only for Argentina. After the match, the fun continued, with Paredes thinking that he was in the cage match on the White House lawn. <img src="{att_link}paredes_begins_the_attack.webp" href="{att_link}paredes_begins_the_attack.webp" align="none" caption="Paredes begins the attack" scale="40%"> <img src="{att_link}paredes_subdues_his_opponent.webp" href="{att_link}paredes_subdues_his_opponent.webp" align="none" caption="Paredes subdues his opponent" scale="33%"> <img src="{att_link}paredes_finishes_his_opponent.webp" href="{att_link}paredes_finishes_his_opponent.webp" align="none" caption="Paredes finishes his opponent" scale="27%"> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PibUE4PlcYI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/PibUE4PlcYI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Onion" caption="Last-Ever Global Warming Report Released For Posterity"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRV-XzO_u0g" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/qRV-XzO_u0g" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kai Lentit" caption="Interview with a Longevity Maxxer in 2026">