<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#design">Design</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trumps-iran-war-us-oil-shortage-deception/" source="ZNetwork" author="Jack Rasmus">Trump's Iran War US Oil Shortage Deception</a> <bq><b>When the US government releases crude oil supply from the SPR it doesn’t charge the oil companies anything for the oil.</b> They get the oil for free. No cost. They then can sell it for export at the then prevailing market price—i.e. $100 per barrel or more if April to June 17. Or, they can refine it and sell it in the US domestic market—again at the $4.50/gallon price instead of prior $2.92/gallon. In both cases <b>there’s no costs of production for the drilling and other pre-refinery production. And if for export, no costs of production at all. Lower or no cost mean windfall profits.</b> <b>In the first quarter of 2026 the 27 major US oil companies reported windfall profits of $40 billion.</b> That was before the Iran war and the price escalation. Soon they’ll report second quarter 2026 profits. Analysts except that to be $60 to $80 billion additional profit windfall. So the US big oil companies in just the first half will realize more than $100 billion further profit from the Iran war. <b>While the US consumer puts out $69 billion and cuts other spending and/or his savings by that amount.</b></bq> <bq>Defenders of the SPR scam will argue the oil companies don’t realize 100% profit. They have to return the free oil from the SPR at a higher rate that they received. Typically they are required to return 1.2 barrels for every 1 barrel they take. True. But <b>they can wait up to two years to replace the 1.2 barrels. So they wait until the price per barrel falls more than 20% in order to pump their own oil to send to the SPR.</b></bq> <bq>The US SPR release is actually a profits scam to enrich the oil companies, who will have realized windfall profits of more than $100 billion in just the first six months of 2026. In contrast, US households have paid out of pocket $69 billion. US businesses more. <b>Much of the SPR free oil was likely re-exported by the US oil companies at significant profit.</b> US oil companies’ refinery output should have increased the supply of gasoline and distillates but didn’t. That moderate refined oil output increase was also likely mostly re-exported.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/24/htzz-j24.html" source="WSWS" author="Yuan Darwin, Saman Gunadasa, Keith Jones">Swelling student protests rattle India’s far-right government</a> <bq>The Indian government’s own Labour Force Survey has found that the country’s unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 45 years, a figure so politically explosive that the Modi government initially suppressed it. Of the more than 10 million young people entering the labour market each year, only a tiny fraction secure formal sector employment. <b>This is not an accident or a temporary dysfunction—It is the structural outcome of a capitalist order that generates spectacular wealth for 229 billionaires, whose combined net worth exceeds $1 trillion, while condemning a generation to permanent precarity.</b></bq> <bq>Both the Noida workers’ agitation and the current student protest movement erupted outside the traditional establishment structures, the unions and the ostensible opposition parties. <b>This is a reflection of the depth of the social crisis and the popular alienation with the entire establishment, “left” and right, and carries within it the seeds of something genuinely threatening to the BJP government and the capitalist ruling class as a whole.</b> But it also poses the central danger—as already evidenced in the politics of the CJP leadership—with which every such movement is confronted. Unless aimed at mobilising the working class on a socialist and internationalist program, mass protests, however militant and defiant, <b>remain vulnerable to being brought under the control, diverted and ultimately dissipated by bourgeois and pseudo-left political forces.</b> That is what happened to the mass uprising in Sri Lanka in 2022.</bq> <bq>Society is rent by unprecedented and growing social inequality; an oligarchical ruling class is embracing far-right authoritarianism; and the rights of working people are under relentless attack, while <b>the government declares that there is “no money” for public services even as it pours massive resources into rearmament and war.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/24/the-generation-that-refuses-to-crawl/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The Generation That Refuses to Crawl</a> <bq>The name mocks the Bharatiya Janata Party, but it also captures something of the experience of a generation that has been told repeatedly that it is excessive, ungrateful, unemployable, and somehow personally responsible for the failure of the economic system, which they see as <b>a precarious system that should give them jobs, but which —as the ruthless capitalist system—treats them as disposable.</b></bq> <bq><b>If those who rule India see its unemployed youth as cockroaches, then the cockroaches will assemble.</b> The name mocks the Bharatiya Janata Party, but it also captures something of the experience of a generation that has been told repeatedly that it is excessive, ungrateful, unemployable, and somehow personally responsible for <b>the failure of the economic system, which they see as a precarious system that should give them jobs, but which —as the ruthless capitalist system—treats them as disposable.</b></bq> <bq>The young protesters are not in revolt because they possess shorter attention spans or a special cultural aversion to authority. They are in revolt because capitalism cannot integrate them into dignified economic life. They have been told to study, acquire degrees, learn new skills, remain competitive, and become ‘entrepreneurs.’ Their families have borrowed money, sold land, postponed medical treatment, and reduced household consumption to pay for education and coaching. <b>At the end of this punishing journey, many discover that the promised job does not exist. Others find only temporary contracts, unpaid internships, platform work, or jobs whose wages bear no relation to their qualifications.</b></bq> <bq>The government would like to isolate the protests as the emotional outburst of an impatient generation. It will alternate between ridicule, repression, promises of consultation, and attempts to divide the movement. The young will be told that they lack experience, that foreign forces are misleading them, or that their protest damages the nation’s image. But <b>there is nothing anti-national about demanding that a country provide its youth with useful work.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the young people in the streets are not asking merely to survive inside the cracks of a decaying system. They want to live, to work, to use what they have learned, and to contribute to society with dignity.</b> Their anger is generational in its appearance but profoundly class-based in its content. The task before the Left is neither to romanticise this anger nor to lecture it from a distance, but to enter into dialogue with it, <b>help it identify the structure behind its suffering, and join its immediate demands to a programme capable of creating millions of secure and socially useful jobs.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert-22-venezuela/" source="TriContinental" author="">Red Alert no. 22: Truth Amid the Rubble</a> <bq>A major bridge and several roads were damaged in the state of La Guaira, where the earthquake struck the hardest of the six impacted states, making it extraordinarily difficult to move rescue equipment and teams into affected areas. <b>Continuous rainfall and nearly 800 aftershocks have further complicated rescue operations while the partial collapse of the Caracas airport has forced international rescue teams to arrive via more distant airports</b> and then travel by road.</bq> <bq>Despite the devastating toll on human life, the country slowly began to recover. After a 75% contraction in GDP between 2013 and 2021, <b>Venezuela’s GDP grew by around 9% in 2024 and again in 2025. It moved from importing more than 70% of its food supply in 2017 to producing 96% domestically by March 2026.</b> Oil revenue, which had fallen from $93 billion in 2012 to $4.2 billion in 2020, had recovered to around $18 billion in recent years.</bq> <bq>Every genuine humanitarian contribution deserves recognition, regardless of its source. But humanitarian gestures cannot be separated from the broader political reality nor from the historical record. <b>The United States continues to impose sanctions that have systematically weakened Venezuela’s economy, restricted its access to international finance, blocked imports of critical goods, and frozen billions of dollars belonging to the Venezuelan people.</b> One cannot simultaneously praise humanitarian assistance while maintaining policies that make humanitarian emergencies more severe.</bq> <bq><b>Sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures are often politically effective precisely because they are invisible.</b> Unlike bombs, they rarely produce dramatic images. Instead, they slowly erode public health systems, infrastructure, productive capacity, and state institutions over many years. When disaster eventually strikes, <b>weakened institutions are then presented as evidence of governmental incompetence rather than the cumulative effect of deliberate economic warfare.</b></bq> <bq>The most meaningful humanitarian gesture today would not be another statement of concern. It would be <b>the immediate lifting of all unilateral coercive measures and release of Venezuela’s frozen sovereign assets for reconstruction.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/thomas_karat/2026/07/21/everyone-is-a-foreign-agent-now/" source="Antiwar.com" author="Thomas S. Karat">Everyone Is a Foreign Agent Now</a> <bq>In a corner of the Saarland, a man ran a blog. It carried no advertising and charged nothing to read. It was funded the way a busker is funded, by whoever chose to drop something in the hat – €60,038.65 in voluntary donations over sixteen months. <b>On four occasions in 2023 the blog embedded videos from RT, the Russian state channel the European Union had banned.</b> That is the entire factual basis of a case that climbed to the Court of Justice of the European Union and produced, on 2 July 2026, a judgment that should frighten anyone in Europe who publishes anything.</bq> <bq>[...] the very donations that keep an independent site alive are what a court can treat as a “professional” income stream – which lifts the offender into the aggravated bracket. <b>The reader-funded writer, the one with no corporate backing and no advertiser to please, draws the longer sentence precisely because he is independent.</b> Independence is reclassified as aggravation.</bq> <bq>The Council controls who goes on the list. <b>The Court has now ruled that anyone who touches what the listed outlets produce is a criminal.</b> The net expands every time the list does, and no further judgment is required to make it happen.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9IV09cvXx4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/T9IV09cvXx4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Some more news | Cody Johnston" caption="The Military-Industrial Complex Is A $1 Trillion Scam"> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/TrueAnonPod/posts/episode-566-dont-165266716" author="TrueAnon" source="Patreon">Episode 566: Outside the Trains Don’t Run on Time</a> <bq>We take a look at the administration's construction of the left-wing terror narrative, the judicial tools they’re using, Prairieland, and the greater landscape.</bq> This episode discusses the federal reaction to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention_center_incident" author="" source="Wikipedia">2025 Prairieland ICE detention center incident</a> <bq>he United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas said that eleven individuals set off fireworks and vandalized parked vehicles and a guard structure outside the center. ICE officers called local police; when they arrived, Lieutenant Thomas Gross of the Alvarado police drew his pistol and pointed it at two people running away from him. A protester, Benjamin Hanil Song of Dallas, fired several shots; one shot struck Gross above his collarbone.[4][5][6] Gross returned fire as the protesters scattered and fled. He sustained non-life-threatening injuries and was released from a hospital within hours.</bq> The shooter was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Others in the group---none of whom injured anyone, or even attempted to---received 50-70 years. This is Cambodia. This is Khmer Rouge. This isn't even a slippery slope. This is down in the mud at the bottom of the slope. We're not getting to fascism; we're there. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE4YWEIzrPU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/EE4YWEIzrPU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="I'M LOSING IT LISTENING TO ABDUL TALK TO TRUMP VOTERS"> <bq><b>Interviewer:</b> Are there issues beyond sort of Medicare for all, which is your core, that you think have the potential to win over disaffected Trump voters in a general election? <b>Adbul El-Sayed:</b> Corporate monopoly, the corruption of our food system, the role of AI in society, the onslaught of data centers. You think about who's taking money from these corporations. Unfortunately, it's Democrats and Republicans. I always wonder why there's so much opposition to this in the Democratic party. And I keep coming back to the same answer, which is it's just laziness. [Ed.: Also, a deep lack of principle] It's laziness and it's this sort of elitism. The laziness part is well, if we can't get money from corporations, then we're actually going to have to have a message and go talk about our message anywhere and everywhere. I've done 450 public events. I challenge my opponent in this race to say how many events she's done where she's actually taking questions. You've got to do the work, it turns out. And then the elitism part is, well, the corporations are rich and they throw the fanciest parties and if I don't take their money I'm not going to be invited to the party. Like fuck your party. Who cares? You got the the the best room on the Titanic and don't realize that the whole Titanic is about to go down. I don't know man. I just I like I really struggle to like to to understand the psychology of it. <b>Interviewer:</b> It seems to me that you are interested in something deeper than just winning this election that it is actually fighting for some sort of change. <b>Adbul El-Sayed:</b> Losing this primary is not the worst outcome for me. <b>The worst outcome is that I get the job and I fail to deliver.</b> That's the worst outcome. So I don't want to fight for the job and in the process hamstring myself from doing the work. <b>I don't want to have been one of those senators that, you know, you had this power and then you sold out and then you can't even account for why you were there.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/31/erxv-j31.html" author="Kate Randall" source="WSWS">Tens of millions face Medicaid cutoff, as Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” work requirements lock into place</a> <bq>[...] the machinery for the most sweeping restructuring of Medicaid since the program’s founding six decades ago has locked into place, stripping coverage from millions of people. The vehicle for this liquidation is the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), signed into law by President Trump on July 4, 2025. The legislation cuts federal Medicaid spending by an estimated $911 billion over 10 years and is projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to leave 7.5 million more Americans without health insurance by 2034.</bq> <bq>The policy compels adults aged 19–64 enrolled through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion to document at least <b>80 hours per month of work, community service, education or job training—or, alternatively, monthly income of at least $580, the equivalent of 80 hours at the $7.25 federal minimum wage—or lose their coverage.</b> More than 20 million adults are enrolled through the expansion in the 41 states that adopted it. Verification is required at least every six months, with states free to demand monthly reporting.</bq> This is very Clinton-esque. The workfare programs he started were all like this. I remember when Rudy Giuliani did something similar in NYC in the 90s. Immediately, most of the parks-service employees were fired because it was so much cheaper to have people on "community service" do their jobs, either not paying them at all or paying them a pittance. <bq>Nor does steady work guarantee safety: Among adults who met the 80-hour threshold in one month, roughly one in 10 failed to meet it consistently over the following six months. <b>A seasonal roofer, a laid-off autoworker, a home health aide with no pay stubs, a rideshare driver with no employer, a cancer patient whose exemption paperwork arrives a week late—Data for each will be fed into an apparatus built to find reasons for termination.</b> In Arkansas, the vast majority of the 18,000 people terminated were working or exempt. They lost coverage because they <b>could not navigate the bureaucratic gauntlet.</b> Only about 1,900 ever got their coverage back.</bq> <bq>Self-attestation is permitted only through 2027. After that, the medically frail may attest to their own condition just once per enrollment period. Those flagged as non-compliant receive a mailed notice and 30 days to prove otherwise before disenrollment—<b>a system that presumes stable housing and reliable mail and internet access among the poorest people in the country.</b> For this massive undertaking Congress appropriated a total of $200 million to be divided among the states, against a CBO estimate that implementation will cost state governments $65 billion over a decade. <b>This is the mechanism working as designed: the administrative maze is not a defect but the instrument through which the “savings” are generated.</b></bq> <bq>The Socialist Equality Party insists that <b>the defense of Medicaid cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that is destroying it.</b> Healthcare is a social right, not a commodity or a privilege to be earned through 80 hours of documented labor. The $326 billion being clawed from the sick is a down payment on war. <b>The fight against austerity is therefore inseparable from the fight against imperialist war and the drive to dictatorship.</b></bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzjHNSRgHJ8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/KzjHNSRgHJ8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="™hashtagjrupp" caption="You Are NOT Immune to AI Propaganda (Even If You Think You Are)"> Damn man, people are just watching so much crap. The way I avoid watching AI video is that I never even see stuff like this. If I watch or listen to a video, it's by someone I know. And it's boring. And it's usually educational. I don't watch random shit by random people. Turns out that's a good tactic because these AI videos are good. Like, they look pretty real, at least superficially. Real enough to catch you if you're only half paying attention. Hey, maybe <i>this video</i> was AI-generated! Damn.... <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/29/yxeh-j29.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Major global selloff in chip stocks</a> <bq>The memory group SanDisk dropped by 14.2 percent yesterday after an 11 percent fall on Monday. So far this month <b>it has lost more than 50 percent of its market value, but its share price still remains four times higher than it was at the start of the year.</b></bq> Frothy. <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing</a> <bq>In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. <b>Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.</b> It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – <b>you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.</b> I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. <b>I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/theyre-shooting-at-everyone-the-yossarian-effect-in-capital-markets/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">They're Shooting at Everyone!: The Yossarian Effect in Capital Markets</a> <bq>SpaceX provided the initial disturbance in this complex and tightly-coupled system. Its enormous valuation, combined with a relatively small public float, created a rebalancing problem. <b>Funds do not keep idle piles of cash waiting for a major new listing. They sell what they already own to buy what they want to or must own, and they sell the most liquid names (because it's easy), and usually the winners (to lock in gains).</b> That meant selling semiconductors and other AI winners to fund SpaceX purchases, as I have cautioned previously was coming. Its subsequent addition to the Nasdaq-100 index triggered another round of forced reallocation, made more violent and systemic by all the ETF-abetted leverage in the system, like SOXL, but especially single-name ETFs. When SpaceX itself began falling, the pressure evolved, but the damage had been done.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/welt/groenland-an-usa-erst-mal-aufraeumen/" source="InfoSperber" author="Politiken">Grönland an USA: Erst mal aufräumen</a> <bq>Grönland ist mit dem Problem nicht allein. Auch andere ehemalige Standorte des US-Militärs sind stark verschmutzt. <b>Die USA haben sich bisher stets geweigert, die Verantwortung für Personen- oder Umweltschäden zu übernehmen</b>, die sich aus ihren Stützpunkten oder deren Abfall ergeben, ausser bei ihren eigenen Veteranen. Mit Informationen gehen sie sparsam um. <b>Transparenz über Verschmutzungen gibt es nicht.</b></bq> <bq>Eine Sprecherin des Pentagons ging 2008 so weit, zu sagen, die USA hätten schliesslich auf Grönland und anderswo die freie Welt verteidigt. <b>Andere könnten beitragen, indem sie den Abfall wegräumten.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/becoming-the-stranger" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Becoming the Stranger</a> <bq>By 2050, over 1 billion people will find themselves “at threat of being displaced” due to “environmental change, conflict and civil unrest.” <b>By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people may find themselves “left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 [years].”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/26/jcad-j26.html" author="Robert Stevens" source="WSWS">Almost 400,000 flee as heatwave wildfires rip through Europe</a> <bq>President Emmanuel Macron activated the European Union’s civil protection mechanism, securing aircraft and personnel from Croatia, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with Germany sending helicopters and rescue teams. <b>That the head of state of one of the world’s largest economies must appeal across the continent for aircraft in an emergency forecast for months is an admission that no capitalist government across Europe maintains the means to protect its population.</b></bq> <bq>The engulfing of much of southern Europe by forest fires, worse than any before, is the result of <b>world governments’ failure to do what is needed to restrict carbon emissions and global heating, compounded by decades of defunded forestry and civil protection.</b> It is not just in the hotter climates that fires have broken out, but also in the north from the UK to Norway. <b>Britain, the sixth largest economy in the world, possesses no aerial firefighting capability of any kind.</b> In the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland, a blaze burning since July 15 has required more than 500 firefighters to tackle it. Scottish National Party First Minister John Swinney has asked Andy Burnham’s UK Labour “government for military assistance in aerial support... and we await a response.” <b>North Wales and the Upper Severn are the first parts of Britain to declare a drought, having received just 3 percent of its average July rainfall</b>, with a fourth heatwave forecast for the coming week.</bq> <bq>Since 2022, the number of wildfires has risen by 57 percent across the WHO European Region. <b>Portugal and Spain have suffered a 100 percent increase in wildfires this year compared with 2025.</b></bq> Oh, neat. Isn't that where everyone was buying their second homes? What a shame. <bq>The World Health Organisation estimates extreme heat has killed some 200,000 people in Europe in four years, <b>deaths it said were for the most part “entirely preventable.”</b> <b>They are not prevented because society’s resources, controlled by the super-rich capitalist class and governments which serve their interests, have been allocated elsewhere.</b> The same governments now appealing to one another for water bombers against the flames are pouring hundreds of billions into rearmament. <b>Six of Europe’s leading oil companies made $21.7 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, 43 percent up on 2025.</b></bq> Armaments, Oil, and AI. Throw in a little crypto. That's where the money goes. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTGc3MHtvAw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/jTGc3MHtvAw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="9NEWS" caption="Marmot researchers combat record die-off with a little creativity: marmot tears beer –– and OnlyFans"> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/homer-and-other-guslars" source="The Hinternet" author="Hinternet Editorial Board">Homer and other Guslars</a> <bq>The Sundiata epic of the Malinke people, describing heavily mythologised historical events that took place in the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, was transcribed first into Arabic, and then, by the end of the nineteenth century, was published in French editions compiled by colonial administrators. The Olonkho tradition of the Sakha or Yakut people of north-eastern Siberia only began to be recorded in the early twentieth century, when Polish and Russian ethnologists, and a good number of penal colonists turned ethnologist as a way to bide their time, began to notice <b>the extraordinary feats of memory and recitative endurance of which a certain class of Sakha bards, the olonkhosuttar, were capable.</b></bq> <bq>The author, or authors, of these latter texts is surely lost forever in the dark abyss of time. <b>We cannot know who Homer was, or who the many generations of Homers were whom we collectively call by that name.</b> But if we want to get some idea of what it may have been like to be there at ‘Western’ literature’s genesis, we could probably do no better than to visit a Balkan bard and listen to his hours-long wedding song. This was Milman Parry’s central insight.</bq> <bq>A decade Parry’s junior, Lord was already far along in his research on the oral poetic tradition of <b>the Balkan guslari, who into the twentieth century were spinning out poems with many thousands of lines telling the epic history of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and of the great showdown at that site between the Ottoman Sultan Murad I and the Serbian Prince Lazar.</b> From 1933 to 1935 Lord and Parry spent the greater part of two years travelling through Serbia and Montenegro, to the remotest rural locations they could find, where epic tradition still survived largely uncorrupted. Their greatest discovery was of a humble guslar by the name of Avdo Međedović (1875–1955), <b>a Slavicised Albanian Muslim whose recitation of a 12,000-line poem entitled The Wedding of Smailagić Meho would come to serve as the centrepiece of their collection.</b></bq> <bq>[...] ethnomusicologists such as Mieczyslaw Kolinski in Poland, and Alan Lomax and Charles Seeger (father of Pete) in the United States. Lomax and Seeger in particular were interested in <b>folk-musical traditions as the lifeblood of culture passed down across the generations through techniques deeper than language.</b> They saw the study of these traditions as a key part of the project of bringing to light the true parity of all human cultures, as against <b>the hierarchised ladder of relatively more and less advanced cultures that had predominated since the Enlightenment.</b></bq> <bq>although the story is known in advance, as are the formal constraints on how it may be told, nonetheless <b>the singular works are to a certain extent ‘spontaneously generated’ each time a bard sets about reciting them — much like the ‘freedom within constraints’ that is often invoked to characterise improvisation in both the jazz and the Indian raga traditions.</b> The formulae in the Oral Formulaic Hypothesis are therefore not so much scaffold as building blocks, adjustable pieces that can be rearranged and built upon each time anew. Transcription or phonographic recording freezes one such version in time, and <b>typically turns it into the canonical and ‘correct’ version, but when it gets frozen, and in which particular arrangement, is a highly contingent matter.</b></bq> <hr> <bq quote-style="none" author="Joseph Heller" source="Catch-22">“They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly. "No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. "Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked. "They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone." "And what difference does that make?”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTC6p6h_8tg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/RTC6p6h_8tg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="NPRMusic" caption="Renée Fleming & Béla Fleck: Tiny Desk Concert"> They're all good but man, that third song <i>Blackest Crow</i> hits hard. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://idle.news/blog/the-forgotten-bargain/" source="The Idle Gazette" author="Leo Umilio">The Forgotten Bargain.</a> <bq>The prosecution counts vacation days, early retirements, the thirty-five-hour week, the August in which entire countries go conspicuously dark, and concludes that Europe is a continent living beyond its means, subsidizing its naps with borrowed money. The defense counts the same things and calls them civilization. Both sides are doing accounting, and the accounting misses the asset entirely. <b>The vacation days are not the wealth; they are the fence around the wealth. The wealth is a capacity: the trained, maintained, intergenerationally transmitted ability to do nothing productive with one's time, on purpose, at length, without guilt, and without narrating it afterward as recovery, recharging, or self-care. Call it strategic idleness.</b></bq> <bq>Benjamin Franklin had already supplied the catechism in Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748): <b>"time is money," three words that sound like a proverb and operate like a curse, because anything that can be converted into money can be squandered, and a squanderable hour can never again be an innocent one.</b> Under this dispensation the American mind can forgive almost anything. It forgives failure generously; failure is a stage of the journey. It cannot forgive unproductive contentment. <b>The unemployed man is a project; the idle man is a heresy. He is not failing to produce. He is declining to, which is far worse, because it implies the whole cathedral was optional.</b></bq> <bq>The productivity arrived on schedule. It doubled, and doubled again, and kept doubling. <b>The grandchildren are here, and they are answering email at eleven at night. What happened is not that the bargain was broken; broken bargains get litigated. The bargain was forgotten, which is cleaner.</b> The gains were converted, decade after decade, into more production, larger inventories, and the felt obligation to want things nobody had yet thought to want, and <b>the destination was quietly deleted from the itinerary while everyone admired the speed of the vehicle.</b></bq> <bq>Richard Burton, in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), circled around the Arabic notion of kayf, which he rendered as "the savouring of animal existence": <b>the capacity to sit in the shade, fully awake, wanting nothing, narrating nothing, and to experience this not as waiting but as the thing itself.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the aesthetic tradition reserves a word, ma, for the interval, the deliberate emptiness between things, and treats that emptiness as a component of the form rather than a gap in it.</b> This is idleness folded inside labor: attention dilated until production becomes almost incidental to the act, a residue the work leaves behind rather than its purpose. The productivity mind cannot dismiss this, because the output is inconveniently superb. It cannot absorb it either, because the ratio is a scandal: <b>sixty years of a man's mornings against a bowl you could approximate by machine before lunch.</b> So it does the third thing, which is to museumify. It makes documentaries. <b>It puts the word craftsmanship on the marketing pages of software that ships weekly.</b> It invokes the shokunin at conferences, from the stage, to an audience checking email. <b>It admires Japanese patience the way one admires a tiger at the zoo: sincerely, at a remove, with no intention whatsoever of living with it.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the industrious answer, the one held with the most conviction and defended with the most contempt: <b>time is for converting into money, which is converted into devices that save time, which is reinvested, immediately and in full, into more work.</b></bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://retobaettig.substack.com/p/customer-driven-innovation-or-why" source="Substack" author="Reto Bättig">Customer-Driven Innovation: Or Why Iteration is the Validation</a> <bq>Heavily regulated, resource-heavy, or state-controlled industries remain traditional seller’s markets with rigid pre-launch compliance requirements. <b>Industrial manufacturing, medical devices, and automotive B2B still demand exhaustive validation and near-perfect initial deliverables.</b></bq> <bq>Customers now demand maximum delivery timelines of 4 weeks, with <b>a strong preference for functional iterations within just two weeks.</b></bq> Um, ok. That sounds super-stressful. Who's paying for that stress? Is the customer paying for it? This starts to sound more like consulting than product-development. The focus should be to build something small but useful quickly without wasting time working on something no-one wants. But who is paying for this pace? I can't imagine most markets' customers are willing to pay for what it will actually cost. That means that the product-developer is responsible for figuring out how to amortize the uncompensated cost over a horizon where it can actually make a profit, or at least break even. <bq><b>Chinese business customers demonstrate remarkable tolerance for unfinished, imperfect first-version solutions — but only when suppliers deliver instant, reliable resolution to emerging issues.</b> Walter Wang shared a striking example of this operational service philosophy: “If there is a problem, we sometimes just give the customer a new machine — it is cheaper.”</bq> Um, sure, of course they like that! The customers are involved in the product-development process, working with the developer to build a product that fits their requirements rather than highly generalized ones. The preference is always to adjust the product to your own requirements rather than to adjust your preferences to what a product offers. If you've been doing this for a while, then you know that, while the customer does bring a lot of deep domain knowledge to the table, they also bring institutional inertia, with processes that have gathered dust and might actually benefit from being updated to conform to a more generalized process. The question I have here is still: who's paying for this seemingly impeccable approach to product-development, where the customer gets a tailored solution built by attentive, professional experts? Who's paying for this stressful pace? For the additional staffing required to not even have downtime? For the redundancy in the team to make sure that there will always be someone who not only knows what's going on but can advise optimally? This is alpha and beta testing in production. <bq>As long as suppliers maintain immediate physical or digital proximity to fix issues rapidly, customers actively participate in real-world product testing. A large industrial machinery company confirmed this approach is standard practice: <b>they ship core equipment first, then finalize on-site software configuration and iteration at the customer’s location.</b></bq> <bq>Yao, Office Manager at Swissnex Shanghai, shared a compelling practice from e-commerce giant Pinduoduo: <b>all software developers are required to complete months of frontline customer support rotations.</b></bq> <bq>Chinese market strategy prioritizes MTTR — Mean Time to Resolution above pre-emptive perfection. Product launches are not final milestones; they are <b>live extensions of the R&D process.</b></bq> While this sounds ideal in theory, it's hard to nail down legally. What are guarantees in disputes? What is a purchased feature and what is a change request? Who owns the patents of any inventions that occur along the way? Are they shared? Who owns the developed product? <bq>Minor post-launch errors are not heavily penalized if engineering teams can deploy OTA (over-the-air) fixes within hours. <b>Months of theoretical pre-launch validation are replaced with rapid, real-world iteration.</b></bq> This is how major video-game releases have worked for decades. Giant, post-launch patches. Customers put up with it, but don't like it. It's an industry joke. I also wonder at how many customers you can simultaneously do this kind of iteration? One, two, many? How much staff do you need? Who's paying for all of this? <bq>The Friction of Distance: <b>Autonomous local teams positioned close to end customers are inherently faster and more operationally effective than distributed global teams.</b> Language, cultural, and timezone fragmentation kill iterative speed. Distributed teams are only justified for highly specialized, protected IP — they should be the exception, not the standard model.</bq> This is the kind of tautology that LLMs are super-strong at writing, Reto. Your slip is showing. <hr> <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/led-light-pollution" source="IEEE Spectrum" author="Paul Bogard">We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies</a> <bq>Already, the use of digital controls for interior lighting has become commonplace in some European cities, Drosihn says. By integrating DALI with occupancy sensors and building-management systems that monitor HVAC, electrical systems, and security networks, <b>a skyscraper can become a dynamic participant in the urban environment—dropping a floor’s interior lights to zero the moment the last person leaves.</b> As a result, electronic controls combined with LEDs can act like a dimmer switch for a city’s entire skyline.</bq> <bq>In 2019, France introduced a nationwide law to reduce levels of light pollution, setting rules about both public lighting (preventing light from being projected above the horizontal) and private lighting such as stores, which are required to turn off their exterior and shop window lights after 1 a.m. In addition, <b>an increasing number of French communities dim or turn off municipal lights after midnight to save energy and reduce carbon emissions.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6HEes8daw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/vS6HEes8daw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Destin | Smarter Every Day" caption="The PROBLEM with Capitalism - 316"> <bq>The reason we got into this in the first place is, if we go back to this thing and we start to look at it and think about it, the natural progression of just extracting as much as you can without regard to quality or your community, <b>the natural progression is to send the means of production somewhere else and basically gut your local community and their ability to produce things.</b> And so, I think what I've learned through this whole thing, I wanted to know if I could make something in America because I'm an engineer, and I thought this was a technical problem. <b>It's not a technical problem. This is an ethical problem.</b> <b>If greed takes over and you have people at the top that, I want to use strong language. They're not good people.</b> Ultimately, that trickles down in a way that trickle-down economics that I was promised when I was in school doesn't. <b>You trickle the encrappification down to all of society and it's horrible.</b> So what really needs to change is <b>this short-term thinking where I just gut my local community in the name of profit.</b> We need to change that and start thinking about long-term. What does it look like to have an injection molder in my community? <b>What does it look like to just have a good product on the shelf where I live?</b> That's the kind of thing we need to think about. That long-term thinking looks like it's foolish in the short-term, but it's not.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/TrueAnonPod/posts/episode-565-show-164973997" author="TrueAnon" source="Patreon">Episode 565: Reunion Show</a> About Meta Glasses: <bq quote-style="none"><b>Brace:</b> Why would you wear these unless you're a creep? <b>Liz:</b> Yes. They are 100% only creep-certified. <b>Brace:</b> You are a creep. <b>Liz:</b> What are you recording? <b>Brace:</b> Get out of here with this! Don't record me! <b>Liz:</b> They should be illegal. Mark Zuckerberg should go to jail. It's been long enough. We've put up with this guy for long enough.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://nooneshappy.com/article/with-ai-the-oddly-specific-survives/" source="No One's Happy" author="">With AI, The Oddly Specific Survives</a> <bq>There’s no minimum the content has to clear before the model starts paying attention. <b>The first few documents don’t just contribute to the model’s picture, they are the picture. Whoever bothered to write them set the default answer.</b> On a crowded topic it becomes a numbers game you are unlikely to win. Researchers who tracked a model through its training found that how often a fact appeared predicted whether the model could recall it, with a correlation of 0.93. [] <b>The relationship is log-linear: a fact mentioned 1,000 times beats one mentioned 100 times by about the same margin that 100 beats 10.</b> Where two versions of a story compete, the model leans toward the one told more often, and you become one voice against however many already exist.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605932.html" source="" author="Xi Jinping">Full text: Keynote speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at opening ceremony of 2026 World AI Conference</a> <bq>We often say in China, <b>"A single string cannot make music, and a single tree does not make a forest."</b> AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation.</bq> <bq><b>As ancient Chinese observed, "A man of wisdom adapts to changes; a man of knowledge acts by circumstances."</b> With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must ensure its development is for the positive, for good and for humanity. We must make its oversight and governance precise and effective, and constantly refine measures to forestall loss of control. We should always guide AI development with human wisdom and international consensus, so that <b>AI can truly become a mighty force that increases the well-being of humanity and advances human civilization.</b></bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://mlugg.co.uk/posts/incremental-compilation-internals/" source="" author="Matthew">Inside Zig's Incremental Compilation</a> <bq><b>Semantic analysis is the most difficult part of the compiler to handle incrementally.</b> Perhaps unsurprisingly then, this is where language design starts to matter a lot: while I am pretty confident that most modern languages could support incremental compilation similar to how we do, certain design decisions can make that much more difficult. <b>Zig has had its design tweaked over the years (sometimes controversially) specifically so that it is easier to support fast incremental compilation.</b> The name of the game here is to split up your compilation into a bunch of pieces which you can mostly analyze independently of one another, and, crucially, <b>where the dependencies that do exist between those pieces can be easily modeled in a dependency graph.</b> In the Zig compiler, we call these pieces “analysis units”, or I might sometimes just say “unit” for short. I’m going to ever so slightly simplify things here and tell you that the Zig compiler has four different kinds of analysis unit:<ul>The layout (size, alignment, etc) of a struct or union type. The type of a container-level declaration. The value of a container-level const declaration. The body of a runtime function.</ul>During semantic analysis of a particular unit, we populate a set of other units which this unit depends on.</bq> <bq><b>There is no state shared between code generation of different functions</b>, so we can have a queue of pending functions whose AIR needs converting to MIR, and process that queue across arbitrarily many threads.</bq> Linking is another tricky bit to make "updateable", <bq>A lot of the complexity here is actually just in moving things around. For example, if we want to add a function to the .text section, but there isn’t enough space, we need to expand that section. But the section might be surrounded by other sections, which we can’t just overwrite, so we’ll need to move something—either the <c>.text</c> section itself, or one of the surrounding sections. In doing so, <b>we’re going to change not only file offsets but also virtual addresses of everything we move—this means we’ll need to update symbol table addresses, re-apply relocations, etc.</b> That’s a lot to keep track of! (There’s also a similar problem for segments, one level up.) To solve this problem, Jacob Young introduced a nifty abstraction into the Zig compiler called <c>link.MappedFile</c>. It memory-maps the output file, but more importantly tracks a tree of “nodes” in that file. The root node covers the entire file, and child nodes refer to specific regions within their parent node. The API user can add nodes, or grow a node to a given size—in both cases, <b>if there is not space in the parent to trivially perform the operation, <c>MappedFile</c> deals with moving other nodes around to make space.</b> Whenever it resizes or moves a node, the implementation sets a “dirty” flag on that node, so that at some point the linker implementation can detect this and <b>apply any necessary fixups, e.g. re-applying relocations whose target moved.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we’ve made it to the end, and kept everything incremental along the way.</b> Files were lowered to ZIR with a simple per-file cache; semantic analysis of declarations kept track of a dependency graph to figure out what might have changed; code generation re-ran only for updated functions; and our linker wrote new code into the file without changing any other bytes.</bq> <bq>[...] it shows how much efficiency is still left to squeeze out. This 30ms zone is realistically not a big issue, but we can get rid of it nonetheless—firstly by <b>avoiding recomputing this data when the reference graph is unchanged</b>, but also by only recomputing what we need to when the references do change (that problem is called <b>“dynamic single-source shortest path” and is a fairly well-studied problem in graph theory</b>).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2026/07/30/the-complete-package-why-debugging-is-only-half-the-csharp-productivity-story/" author="Isaac Levin" source=".NET Tools">The Complete Package: Why Debugging Is Only Half the C# Productivity Story</a> <bq><b>Debugging is a reactive process.</b> While a robust debugger is essential for diagnosing a failing runtime state, <b>relying on it as your primary tool for catching errors is incredibly inefficient.</b> A highly productive workflow is proactive, <b>leveraging static analysis and structural code intelligence tools to prevent bugs</b> from being compiled in the first place.</bq> <bq>Using a standard string-based search-and-replace to rename a core domain model or an API endpoint is incredibly risky. A simple find-and-replace often over-corrects by modifying unrelated strings, variable names, or third-party properties that happen to share the same text. Conversely, it can miss occurrences hidden inside documentation comments or string-based route templates.</bq> I <i>weep</i> that it is even necessary to explain this. This is an utter failure of the software-developer-education system. This is one of the main reasons why some programmers are so delighted with LLMs: they have no idea that there were already-much better ways of doing what they do (poorly) with LLMs with tools that we've had for decades. <h id="design">Design</h> <a href="https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/japans-design-for-humans/" source="Nobody Wants This" author="">Japan's Design for Humans</a> <bq>It was enough to be able to relieve ourselves at clean public facilities wherever we went in the city and beyond. Again, the contrast with travel in the US couldn't be more stark. <b>It's not easy to find free, clean, accessible bathrooms in most American cities</b>, including popular tourist stops such as Boston, Nashville, and New Orleans. As with so much else in our nation, the basic toilet is largely a private good. <b>"Restrooms are for customers only" — the ubiquitous sign that adds anxiety to urgency — means using one costs at least as much as a cup of overpriced coffee.</b></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7IHInNJZvE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/I7IHInNJZvE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kai Lentit" caption="Interview with a Sysadmin in 2026 [Corporate]"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/lovethissmug/comments/1v74hz1/i_love_unhinged_4chan_replies/" author="" source="Reddit">I love unhinged 4chan replies</a> <img src="{att_link}a_divisive_joke.webp" href="{att_link}a_divisive_joke.webp" align="none" caption="A divisive joke" scale="75%"> This is legit a funny thing to say amongst old friends, amongst people who know each other well. My God, it's perfect. I have some good friends, though, who would beg to differ, who would claim that there is no place for such humor in the world, that there is no place for expressions of such mean-spiritedness. To them, I point to Exhibit A: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution" author="" source="Wikipedia" date="1917">Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution</a>.