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Links and Notes for September 18th, 2026

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#design">Design</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> I guess it's my political side that forces me to acknowledge that technology is largely incidental to solving the major problems facing us. Technocracy is a poison promulgated by those who are technically proficient, wielding the hammer they have and expounding their importance by calling everything a nail, and deeming any counterarguments as squishy, wishy-washy humanistic thinking. <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=155988" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Die Brandmauer ist ein Trojanisches Pferd</a> <bq>Hält man die Brandmauer aufrecht, bindet man sich auf Ewigkeiten an unbeliebte Koalitionsoptionen, die langfristig die Zustimmungswerte noch weiter in den Keller treiben und die AfD auf der anderen Seite noch stärker machen. Das geht dann wohl so lange, bis die AfD irgendwann die absolute Mehrheit hat. Um die Brandmauer niederzureißen, ist es jedoch wahrscheinlich ohnehin zu spät, und wenn man sich die Umfragewerte anschaut, würde dies auf Bundesebene wohl ohnehin eher auf eine für die CDU alles andere als wünschenswerte Juniorpartnerschaft in einer blau-schwarzen Koalition hinauslaufen.</bq> <bq>Paradox ist bei der ganzen Sache übrigens, dass die Architekten der Brandmauer selbst zumindest bei den Stimmen der Wähler gar nicht großartig von ihrem Bauwerk profitieren. So scheint man sich in der SPD ja offenbar damit abgefunden zu haben, Wahlergebnisse um die 10 Prozent als „stabilen Erfolg“ zu verkaufen; für eine ehemalige Volkspartei ist dies ein Offenbarungseid. Aber es geht ja auch nicht um Zustimmung und nicht um den Wähler – es geht um die reine Machtarithmetik. Solange SPD und Grüne über der Fünf-Prozent-Hürde abschneiden, sind sie bei intakter Brandmauer als Regierungspartner gesetzt und können am Futtertrog eines riesigen Versorungssystems verweilen.</bq> <bq>Da ich nur wenig inhaltliche Schnittmengen mit der CDU und der AfD habe, könnte mir deren politische Zukunft eigentlich herzlich egal sein, und ein baldiges Ende der erratischen Ära Merz löst bei mir sicher keine Trauer aus. Was bleibt, ist ein gewisser Fatalismus.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/double-entry-wound/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">Double-Entry Wound</a> <bq>What looks like suicidal behavior for a nation is very profitable for corporations. Just look at their DNA, which is not constitutional or even common sense, it's double-entry bookkeeping. The whole point of double-entry is that every account has two sides, a credit and a debit. But the media for humans only reports one side, which misses how the inanimate actors of history actually operate.</bq> <bq>[...] when you look at the news, do the double-entry calculation. Note that every 'loss' the nation of America reports is a gain on the corporate side of the ledger. Try re-reading the news that way, as accounts. When the news says, "Iran war has cost Pentagon [over] $38 billion" read it the other way, "Iran war has earned over $38 billion," for the military industrial complex. When the news says US National debt is $40 trillion that's actually a credit on the other side of the ledger, corporations (and other nations) hold that debt as assets. And when you hear about America's ruinous personal debts, note that this just makes them into debt slaves for corporations, and very profitable assets.</bq> <bq>Losing wars are great for corporations selling war machines. Losing wars (and slowly) is, in fact, the best outcome possible. If you win a war, and quickly, where's the profit in that? But these wars that drag out, expending expensive weapons on poor people, they make incredible profits on the inhuman side of the ledger. These wars are reported to humans as the US wasting money, when it is in fact corporations tasting blood, and loving it.</bq> <bq>America is not in control of itself, Corporate AI is. If you see things that way, then you see all the flashing signs so relevant to human (death, rising prices, declining resources) as either irrelevant or actually good. Corporations do not care about human death, rising prices are profits to them, and declining resources just mean business is booming.</bq> <bq>The corporations would rather end the world than have a bad quarter, so White Empire proceeds, from disaster to disaster [...]</bq> <bq>America is not a real country, and Americans are not relevant people. America is run by Corporate AI, and it dies as it lived. Profitably.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/09/trump-may-indeed-be-worst-president-in.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Trump May Indeed be the Worst President in American History and Maybe That's Not All Bad</a> <bq>[...] originally, the loudest complainers all seemed to be the last people on earth who should have been casting stones in any given direction- Neocon Never-Trumpers who mostly just seemed cheesed off that Trump preferred attempting to build casinos in Pyongyang to a Second Korean War and vain shitlibs who bitched about the concentration camps at the border six months after their hero, Barack Obama, built them.</bq> <bq>Centrist shills humiliated by a motor-mouthed neanderthal who made their precious empire look tacky with his self-indulgent hissy-fits and poorly planned political hooliganism, all ending in a diabetic boomer riot at the Capitol which Manuel Noriega could have planned better at the ass end of a Contra crack binge.</bq> <bq>Barack Obama on the other hand out-deported Trump hand over fist, killed way more fucking Muslims, and essentially built the drones and border camps that made the Oval Office the idiot-proofed death arcade that Trump recklessly molested in his first term like a drunken priest in a candy shop. The worst thing that Barack Obama achieved however, was making American power look like a friendly investment on the world stage again while he murdered teenagers in Yemen and validated neo-Nazis in the Donbass. Quite frankly, just like Kennedy, he made evil sexy.</bq> <bq>The only good news here is perhaps the most obvious. These sick fucks are betting the farm on a belligerent child molester who now seems to embody everybody's definition of the worst president in American history. These new elites and the old ones they conspire with are in a mad rush to save a sinking ship with dangerously new and unstable technology. The amount of data centers they are practically tripping over each other's jackboots to build, which represent only a fraction of the raw power it will take to essentially automize the biggest empire in human history, is quite simply unsustainable.</bq> <bq>So, this is how it ends, dearest motherfuckers, but this is also how it begins because when the last Ceasar chokes to death on the ashes of charred microchips and child pornography, those of us who have prepared ourselves and are preparing ourselves for a stateless, post-civilization existence will be there to build something new and old on the ruins. It won't be easy but that doesn't mean that it can't be fun. Afterall, here's where we get the opportunity to make it right. And round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away towards a new horizon....</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAn5iP8peEg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/zAn5iP8peEg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="HE TRIED TO GET ME CANCELLED AFTER OUR INTERVIEW"> This is very good, wide-ranging analysis of many relevant and interesting topics. He really got rolling. <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/09/no-empire-wins-fight-with-houthi-rebel.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="exile in happy valley">No Empire Wins a Fight with a Houthi Rebel</a> <bq>[...] everybody appears to be playing their chosen roles in what very much looks like the beginnings of another American sponsored forever war in the Middle East but everybody but Ansar Allah appears to be dragging their feet when they aren't busy desperately trying to the stomp out the fire they started. The Saudis seemed to spend weeks actively pretending like none of this was even fucking happening even with blood up to their tits. After launching 121 airstrikes on Houthi territory in Yemen in one day, Saudi officials made the absurd claim that their dickless proxies inside Yemen were behind those Top Gun attacks even though it's common knowledge that those Keystone fedayeen can't even operate a hot air balloon, and even with a third of their country in flames, Riyadh continues to try to downplay the rapidly expanding carnage in the international media when they acknowledge it all.</bq> <bq>The most powerful empire on the planet and one of their most depraved attack dogs in the Middle East appear to be afraid of a third world militia that governs a territory smaller than Massachusetts in the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula.</bq> <bq>To put it succinctly, these bearded Arab bad men appear to be unbreakable. The United States and Saudi Arabia have been waging total war against these motherfuckers for decades and every bomb we drop just seems to make them stronger. For nearly seven years, between 2015 and 2022, America financed and facilitated a genocidal siege against Yemen and the Saudis systematically carried it out. Thousands of tons of American made ordinances battered the ancient hillside villages and tightly populated port cities of that tiny nation while a total blockade cut the survivors off from an outside world that stood by and watched it happen with their hands in their pockets. Somewhere between 230,000 and 380,000 people were killed. 150,000 of them from direct acts of violence, the rest from treatable disease and famine. 70% of the dead are believed to have been children under the age of 5. But the Houthis didn't flinch. Even beneath a driving rain of relentless bombing, they kicked the shit out of the Saudis and the best mercenaries' oil can buy on the ground, rarely giving up more than an inch of territory before taking it back. Contrary to western propaganda, their exists very little evidence of Ansar Allah receiving anything in the way of significant funding from Iran or anyone else for that matter. Nearly every weapon they wield they either lifted from dead bodies and dead regimes, or they made themselves amongst the ruins from literal garbage and the bombs that dropped on their heads.</bq> <bq>Another 250+ civilians were slaughtered, but the Houthis simply expanded the Red Sea blockade and shut the entire waterway down. Within months Trump was signing a ceasefire with these proud pirates even as they continued nail the Israeli targets we had supposedly been bombing Yemen to protect.</bq> <bq>Seeing the writing on the temple walls written in the blood of cowards, Israel seems to be stepping up their involvement behind the scenes, but it can only get worse for them from here as they are already stretched far too thin killing other people's children closer to home and their MAGA golem is currently drowning in two feet of water in another strait one desert over.</bq> <bq>[...] history is the key to comprehending this movement, not politics. No empire, state or army can crush a movement whose history predates empires, states and armies. The Houthis cannot be removed from the land because they belong to the land and not vice versa. There's is a culture determined by localism and bioregional spirituality above praxis or dogma and that is how you survive an empire. I can't help but to feel like we can all learn from this example, like Ansar Allah is our era's equivalent to the Seminole Nation or the Zaporizhian Sich. This may not be traditional anarchism, but what exactly is traditional anarchism? Some one-horse union regurgitating the religiosity of a few dead white Russians? Give me an unbowed tribe with an inextinguishable fire over the campus flavor of the 19th century any day. I'm a Queer hillbilly. My people want justice in the holler right now and Zaydi Muslims are the only tribe getting it in 2026. Maybe it's time we all started fighting back like a Houthi rebel.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFy2dLtkEds" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bFy2dLtkEds" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lee Camp" caption="China Dares The U.S. To Treat Billionaires Like They Do"> <bq>As founder of Chinese property giant Evergrand, Quei, uh, that's his last name, hid the company's debts while inflating its assets. After defaulting on $300 billion in loans, Everrand's collapse triggered a massive downward spiral in the Chinese housing market. And he was one of the richest men in China with a net worth of $45 billion. But after being brought in for numerous charges, he has been sentenced to life in prison. So basically, China took a billionaire who did what billionaires do, which is pillage, lie, defraud, exploit all of us, and they put him in prison and they took away his money.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/theres-no-good-reason-why-poverty" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">There's No Good Reason Why Poverty Should Still Exist</a> <bq>[...] people who’ve managed to thrive under capitalism assume the system is working fine because survivorship bias and just-world fallacy cause them to believe that everyone’s getting exactly what they deserve. If I have more than I need it’s because I worked hard to obtain it. If you have less than you need it’s because you didn’t work hard enough.</bq> <bq>[...] those who’ve been working their fingers to the bone just to survive in this shitshow know that money doesn’t actually reward hard work. In our society, money rewards being born into the right family, being cruel enough to exploit the working class, being sociopathic enough to externalize the costs of industry onto the environment, and being ruthless enough to crush anyone who is in competition with you.</bq> <bq>As Buckminster Fuller said many years ago, “It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting high technology from weaponry to livingry.” He was correct then, and he is correct now. We can still have a world like this. It’s not too late to change.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfBQ0Q7S7eY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/FfBQ0Q7S7eY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="MY GREATEST INTERVIEW EVER"> Hasan Piker's interview on Axios was really very good. They really let him talk. I don't think they meant for him to look this good. I honestly think they have no idea what's going on. <bq><pre>00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:11 - React Starts 00:03:06 - Provocative vs Reckless 00:07:06 -Campaign Trail 00:12:31 - AOC 00:17:02 - Blowback 00:32:10 - America Worse than Al-Qaeda 00:34:53 - We Are Charlie Kirk 00:38:58 - Violence 00:51:50 - Israel is a Nazi Country 01:00:40 - China 01:10:18 - Mao Zedong 01:18:04 - Chinese History 01:30:09 - Tibet 01:33:08 - LA Elections 01:33:51 - Interview Ends 01:34:01 - YT Comments 01:35:07 - Additional Commentary</pre></bq> He really did cook. He set right up in that guy's kitchen and delivered his messages without making any mistakes. He showed what a reasonable, empathetic, well-educated, and socialist person looks and sounds like. This is the interview to show people who think that they hate socialism and Hasan Piker. I can't believe how eloquent and practiced his answers were. Eight hours a day of practice only explains a bit of it. He is truly a very, very clever and mentally agile guy. Kudos. He's also really, really funny (which is appealing to not just me but also people much younger than me). I love how excited he gets at looking back at how hard he cooked, with what palpable relief he sees that the out-of-context clips and reactions to those clips were completely off-base if you just watch one consecutive minute of the actual interview. At about 01:06:00, <bq>We do have mass elections in this country and the issue is, if you were to ask the average American citizen, 'do you think we should wage endless wars overseas or instead use a lot of that productive resource back here to rebuild an industrial base?' I know Americans would democratically vote for that. You know why? Because they voted for Donald Trump and that's precisely what he promised. The issue is he didn't actually abide by that promise. WHOO WHOO! Right-wing outlet glazing Trump's campaign acumen and flipping America-first back on his motherfucking head. Oh, do you understand? Do you understand me, Alec Thompson? Do you understand that? Oh my God, the chef is in. Oh my God. Everyone on Twitter can suck my left nut and I'll save the right one for some of the most heinous haters. Oh my God, this interview. The way that talking about this interview on Twitter on the Twitter timeline, you would think I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that this interview ever took place. I apologize. It's like, dude, what are you fucking talking about? It's 56 minutes of wall-to-wall bangers.</bq> At about 01:19:00, <bq>Piker: I've extensively talked about the dragnet operations that took place in Xing Jiang. I've extensively talked about the re-education camps and and how unacceptable that is. I do not think that those are what comprise the entirety of Chinese form of governance. What I'm talking about simply is on the economic side. I'm fairly certain that we could achieve certain elements of Chinese governance, whether it be control over capital, whether it be rapid industrialization and even urbanization as well, without having to engage in mass repression. Now, having said that, I I talked to you about how I love America, how I'm an American citizen. I mean, I love America regardless of the struggles that we have here as well. I mean, we have slave labor in our prison system still to this day, protected by the Constitution. Thomson: Are you are you equating that to what China is doing to the Uyghur Muslims? Piker: No, I'm not equating that. I'm just saying that's also an abject cruelty that takes place that we turn a blind eye to or outright support. I don't support it. I wish that we had a prison system that was more focused on rehabilitation totality of America.</bq> At about 01:30:00, <bq>I went to Japan as well. And yet, not a single person says, "Well, the current Japanese government is actually in favor of the the war crimes that took place there." It's like we pick and choose what crimes of certain countries that we are highlighting. And if the comparison is between Israel and China, yes, these are two very different countries with very different historic developments and and very different degrees of very different degrees of violence that's taking place.</bq> At about 01:32:00 <bq>I want what's best for everyone. I want people to have autonomy. I want people to express their sovereignty and to live their best lives. I'm not should be if Tibetans consider [...] a form of governance that is fully autonomous or fully sovereign from China to be the best version of Tibet then yeah sure. I'm look ... I don't have a say in the matter. I don't have a dog in this fight. What do you want me to say man? Like you think I'm going to go and and participate in like armed struggle to liberate Tibet? What is this conversation? You know what I mean? Brother! You're talking about Tibet in 2026. The CIA gave up literally like 60 years ago. The CIA gave up on Tibet and the the Tibet-liberation movement or whatever like 60 years ago. What are we talking about, man? What's next? You're going to talk about Quebecois liberation? Is that what is that what's coming up? Like it's just like it's so strange. It's like wow. Well, what do you think about the francophone oppression taking place in Canada right now? I don't fucking know. If they want to fucking separate, then they can. I don't care. Okay. I don't care. Like, what are we doing? What is this conversation?</bq> From a comment, <bq>The entire section is some of the most bad-faith readings I've ever heard from a journalist. If I'm racing someone in Mario Kart and say, "I'm going to rip your heart out and eat it." Axios would demand I answer for endorsing murder and cannibalism. It's framed like they don't know how Americans speak or how language works. Unbelievably dishonest.</bq> That is exactly right. Words are not just take out of literal context but are also deliberately misinterpreted as if sarcasm and irony didn't exist. This is just incredibly stupid, of course, but it is what dominates the discourse. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksA5O_JWebc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ksA5O_JWebc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chapo Trap House" caption="UNLOCKED: American Doctor feat. Mark Perlmutter and Thaer Ahmad"> Fantastic show. Sobering and dark, but an incredible interview with these two doctors. <a href="https://indi.ca/air-supremacy-was-white-supremacy/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Air Supremacy (Was) White Supremacy</a> <bq>As former War Secretary Robert McNamara said, "Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve." But they did it anyways, continuing the policy across Indochina, West Asia, and wherever they pleased. This didn't win wars, but if you were in the bomb business, it certainly made money. McNamara talked about his war crimes openly saying, "LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?" These are questions he could ask himself in documentary and not at trial before execution because that's your answer. The victors write the history, no great mystery there.</bq> <bq>The 21st century is the age of rockets and drones, not fighter jets and bombs. Fighter planes with men riding them is an antiquated as knights on horseback. Still quite capable of terrorizing civilians but useless against modern weapons. And I want to repeat, the Empire does not possess modern weapons. They have no hypersonic missiles in the field, few stand-off missiles in the arsenal (HIMARs), and a bunch of gravity bombs jerry-rigged with guidance systems (JDAMs). They are using fighter jets to loft missiles from afar, which is a like putting a cannon on a horse. Works, I guess, but hardly fit for purpose. They're a 20th century military trying to fight 21st century wars. Being the most expensive military is hardly a measure of capability. It's really just a measure of corruption now.</bq> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm_tA61v_vQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Mm_tA61v_vQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Cody Johnston | Some More News" caption="Why These Flock Cameras Are Worse Than You Thought"> <bq>I cannot stress this enough: nobody wants this, except for stupid and lazy cops, and the corporations who make this crap.</bq> <bq>This push against Flock cameras goes far beyond concerns about surveillance, but rather also stems from everyone looking around at a country that's been completely hijacked by billionaire tech CEOs and having enough. We have had so much bull (beep) forced upon us, the metaverse, AI, and now these god-awful data centers, that we're just done. Our cities are clogged with semi-functional delivery drones and Waymo cars that nobody really asked for. We are so beyond the days where Silicon Valley was actually inventing revolutionary technology to fix a common problem. And are now in this endless cycle of rich guys making wild promises about Mars bases and robot butlers in order to live off investor capital for the rest of their lives. Practically, everything they do is busted and (beep) and getting in the way. Elon Musk is diverting public transportation budgets so he can pretend to build a two-mile death tunnel for his own cars. SpaceX is dumping trash on the f@#&ing moon. The entire AI industry's pitch is that it will take all of our jobs and there's nothing we can do to stop them from building then enslaving God, at best. That's their selling point! No one asked for any of this or was asked permission. And now they're like, "Great news, everyone! We're putting up dystopian cameras everywhere you go without so much as a vote!" And we're f@#&ing sick of it. Everyone is so freaking sick of it. And frankly, we need to take this energy we have for Flock and extend it out to all this crap. I think we're all starting to realize that the tech industry is slowly inserting themselves as this fourth branch of our government that nobody wants. And if there's anything this moment of history should be known for, it's the rejection of that. Enough of this. Enough of these hollow money dipshits with zero experience hijacking our major infrastructure. Enough of this specific type of guy. We're so done. Everyone hates this.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6AmMeIqfBg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/-6AmMeIqfBg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BreakThrough News" caption="Vijay Prashad slams UN for not standing up to Trump"> <bq>What is the UN really good for today if not just a forum for people to make grandstanding speeches? United Nations is really in a difficult situation. United States has refused to provide visas for a second year running to the Palestinian delegation. That Antonio Guterez hasn't done anything creative to end the genocide in Gaza is revealing. When the United States started a war of aggression against Iran. Secretary General Antonio Gutirez could have flown into Tehran. Could have actually spent the next several months in Tehran, declared that this building in this building as a UN headquarters from Tehran and run operations from there. But he didn't do that. He hasn't gone in a sense to any of these places to challenge US President Donald Trump. Instead, he's opened a free lane for Mr. Trump to come to the UN General Assembly. It's extraordinary that the entire chamber didn't follow the Cubans out when the Cubans decided to walk out of the chamber in protest at the language used by Mr. Trump against Cuba. I mean, why didn't other countries walk out when he spoke the way he spoke about Iran? That's incredible. I don't see why the UN hasn't been creative in walking away from this kind of behavior. This needs to be met with resolute decision-making. They should have said, "Okay, this year meeting's no longer in New York. It's going to be in Geneva."</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La77M7U__gc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/La77M7U__gc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Dr. Daniele Ganser" caption="220 Milliarden? Wohin soll das alles führen?"> <bq>2014 waren die deutschen Rüstungsausgaben 30 Milliarden euro pro Jahr und jetzt sind wir bei 100 Milliarden. Jetzt wollen die das noch mal verdoppeln auf 220 Milliarden. Das ist eine Forderung der NATO und darum sage ich eigentlich meiner Meinung nach sollte Deutschland aus der NATO austreten und sich als neutrales Land positionieren. De facto ist es so, dass der Ukrainekrieg erstens mal provoziert wurde vom Westen mit dem Putsch 2014 und mit der NATO Osterweiterung. Also die NATO und die US haben sehr viel zum Ausbruch dieses Krieges beigetragen. Natürlich hat Kriegsrhetorik immer eine Funktion, nämlich dass man das Geld in die Rüstung in den Krieg umlenkt. Es ist völlig egal, wer dann am Schluss stirbt, weil die Händler des Todes sind nicht an der Front. An der Front sind die 20-jährigen, die aber dann keine Rheinmetallaktien besitzen. Einen März, einen Scholz, ein Pistorius oder diese Strack Zimmermann von der FDP, das ist fast nicht auszuhalten.</bq> <hr> <a href="" author="" source=""></a> <bq><bq>Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.</bq>So all Doordash has to do is return the money it stole and pay a microscopic fraction of its $13.7 billion yearly revenue in penalties, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to prison. Nobody was threatened with jail time. It wasn’t even a criminal case; it was an administrative enforcement action by New York City regulators. Doordash’s billionaire CEO Tony Xu is as free as a bird. A hundred and fifteen million dollars. What do you think would happen to you if you stole $115 million from your employer? Can you imagine that not being treated as a crime? Can you imagine going “Haha, ya got me! I’ll return the cash. Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and then paying a small fine and just going back to your life like it was no big deal? Of course you can’t. You know you’d be arrested, handcuffed, prosecuted for grand larceny, and then spend many years behind bars. Under capitalism it is strictly illegal for employees to steal from their employers, but if employers steal from their employees it’s not even a crime. It’s not even a petty misdemeanor. It’s perfectly legal.</bq> <bq>Employers stealing from employees is also plainly worse than the reverse because when an employer steals from an employee, they’re not just stealing their money. They’re stealing their labor. They’re stealing their time, which is the one thing you can’t make more of in this life. They’re stealing slices of your lifespan which you would otherwise be spending with loved ones and doing things that fulfill you. They’re actually stealing your life. And yet it’s only illegal for employees to steal from their employers. Employers stealing from employees? That’s just business.</bq> <bq>We live in a tiered society where the people actually turning the wheels of civilization through their sweat and toil are legally inferior to the parasitic middle men who skim the profits from their labor. This is not justice, and this is not equality</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/18/roaming-charges-132/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Say Hello to My Little Gear!</a> <bq>After more than a decade of grievance politics, Trump got a lot wealthier than he has ever been. The presidency was by far his most successful business venture. Perhaps his only successful enterprise. But the grievances of his base remain unaddressed, their lingering economic gripes compounded by the policies he put in place. At some point, the sense of betrayal is going to set in and the blowback will be fierce. Perhaps not against Trump himself, but almost certainly against anyone who tries to claim his MAGA mantle. There was always only the brand and the brand without the man is empty, a void filled only with debts that will never be paid.</bq> <bq>Since 2000, the value of the S&P 500 index has gained nearly 600%. In the same time span, worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%.</bq> <bq>Eric Schlosser on Trump’s Mystery Meat:<bq>The cuts of meat covered by Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.</bq></bq> <bq>CNBC: “The number of apartments renting for more than $50,000 a month in Manhattan has more than doubled compared with 2025, while the number renting for more than $100,000 a month is up sevenfold.”</bq> This is the trend. There are now enough obscenely wealthy and preening, venal people spending enough of their obscenely increasing money to be able to cater to only that market. <bq>Data centers in the United States will consume more natural gas than most countries within a decade. Gas consumption to produce electricity for data centers is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the ten years to 2035, even accounting for many currently planned projects never being built–more gas than is currently consumed by all nations except China, Russia, Iran and the US itself, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.</bq> <bq>Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which provide water for 40 million people, six million cows and 500 golf courses, are at record lows. Refilling them would take 8 consecutive very wet winters, though continued drought is much more likely.</bq> <bq>Rivers dump more than 260,000 metric tons of microplastics a year into oceans. The Yangtze River is the largest plastic polluter, releasing an estimated 43,000 tons of microplastics, even though the Yangtze provides only 2 percent of global freshwater flow into ocean waters.</bq> <bq>Nearly all of the people the Trump administration is deporting to “third party” countries have won court injunctions prohibiting them from being deported to their home countries for fears they might be tortured, persecuted or killed. Many of them enjoyed the right to work in the US under temporary protected status. The deportations to places like Liberia in West Africa are a purely retaliatory measure against people, many of whom have spouses and children living in the US, who have stood up for their legal rights in immigration courts. Nearly all of them lack any kind of criminal record. “I’m concerned. I feel far away, on the other side of the world,” Elvis Rodriguez Venturas, a Honduran native who has a wife and four children living in Texas, told CBS News. Many of the deportees had never even heard of the countries they were deported to. This is a crime against humanity.</bq> <bq>Israeli troops were later seen wearing T-shirts with an image depicting a pregnant Palestinian woman in the crosshairs of a gunsight, with text reading: “One Shot, Two Kills.” Genocide as merch opportunity.</bq> <bq author="Annie Dillard">On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/25/roaming-charges-the-freaks-of-caprice/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Freaks of Caprice</a> <bq>The Trump administration has now kicked more than 1.5 million people off of ObamaCare coverage and into the merciless vagaries of a for-profit health care system that profits off of chronic illness and where even the most basic level of care drives people into bankruptcy. On top of that, the US doesn’t produce doctors anymore. The US is a health-obsessed but unhealthy country that can’t (and doesn’t even try to) provide care for the majority of its citizens. No wonder people take their chances with ivermectin, zinc, essential oils and green tea…</bq> He goes on to cite numbers that show that Cuba has 9.2 doctors per 1,000 people, while Switzerland has 4.5, and the U.S. has 2.6. Russia has 5.1 and China has 3.1. <bq>Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was working as a DoorDash delivery driver in North Austin, Texas, last Sunday when the car he was driving was sideswiped twice by an unmarked SUV. He tried to pull away from the ramming vehicles and made a U-turn beneath an overpass, where his blue Toyota Camry was struck again by an SUV. That’s when the cars that were chasing him turned on their sirens and Wilber realized they were driven by ICE operatives. He asked one of the officers if he could pull over to a safer place on the road. They refused. Moments later, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot. Shot in the back. Wilber managed to call his wife, telling her that he had been shot and was in pain. Then the connection went dead. The call ended abruptly because ICE agents had dragged Wilber out of the car and thrown him to the pavement. He was handcuffed. His legs were shackled and he was placed in a waist chain before he was taken to the Dell Seton Medical Center. This was a man with a bullet in his back. In fact, the bullet proved to be so close to his spine that the emergency room doctors declined to remove it for fear that they might paralyze the young man. That decision was just fine with ICE. They wanted Wilber in their hands. At four in the morning, ICE moved Wilber to a temporary processing center. He was forced to sleep on a concrete floor before being moved once again to the South Texas ICE Processing Center two hours south of Austin. Playing hide-and-seek with detainees is a favorite ICE tactic. Deporting them before they have a hearing is another. Making the detention experience so miserable the detainee never wants to return is strategic. It’s part of the plan. Wilber’s lawyers heard from other detainees that ICE guards had treated Wilber roughly, even though he had a bullet in his back that any shove might cause to pierce his spinal cord. They didn’t care. Wilber was in pain. The left side of his body was losing feeling. He had trouble moving his limbs. It felt like he was paralyzed. He repeatedly asked for medical attention and didn’t get it. Garcia Perez used the CBP app to legally enter the US in 2024. Then he immediately applied for asylum. He missed one of his immigration hearings when the notice was sent to the wrong address. DHS responded by issuing a final order of removal. Wilber wasn’t out dealing drugs. He was delivering food. His wife had wanted him to stay home that day. But he felt they needed money. So he went to work. What he didn’t know was that ICE was watching. Not him. He wasn’t their target. Well, he wasn’t any more of a target than anyone else who looked like him. No. ICE had set up shop in North Austin, an area populated by many Mexican-Americans and immigrants, many of them American citizens, originally from south of the border. In other words, ICE was racial profiling. They were looking for brown people in cars and then running the license plates. When they saw Wilber driving in his Blue Camry, they ran his number and were pinged with a deportation order. Within minutes, Wilber would become one of 95,000 people detained by ICE since Trump re-took office merely for missing an asylum hearing. Shooting someone in the back is usually solid proof that the shooter’s life wasn’t in danger when you pulled the trigger. In fact, shooting someone in the back is usually pretty good evidence that the shooter has committed a crime.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/military-milestone-ukrainian-naval-drone-sinks-russian-kamikaze-drone-boat/" author="Jeremy Hsu" source="Ars Technica">Military milestone: Ukrainian naval drone sinks Russian kamikaze drone boat</a> I don't think that journalists like this can even help themselves at this point. They don't even notice what they're doing. How can a Russian drone also be a kamikaze? Only through the magic of framing. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/repeat-after-media-data-centers-are-wonderful-and-good/" source="ZNetwork" author="Ari Paul">Repeat After Media: Data Centers Are Wonderful and Good</a> <bq>It’s true that in a digital world, there will always be data centers. The question is whether they need to expand at a breakneck pace, largely to serve the needs of AI. Voters are rightly asking whether the environmental impacts of AI are worth it—for a technology with the potential to take people’s jobs and flood the news ecosystem with fake imagery.</bq> <bq>This is a very typical response: Environmental outrage holds back technological progress, as well as limiting blue-collar job growth. If something creates jobs, it must be a good thing, goes the line. This rhetoric has been deployed against opposition to the XL pipeline (Heritage Foundation, 12/13/11), fracking (Fox News, 2/27/20) and mountain-top removal (Wall Street Journal, 6/13/11).</bq> <bq>[...] there are other ways to put people to work: Renewable energy infrastructure, new public schools, hospitals and high-speed rail networks could all put building trades unionists on the work clock. Big Tech and Big Energy aren’t the only things that create jobs.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GxlL5-0m_g" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/2GxlL5-0m_g" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="politizane" caption="Wealth Inequality in America (Updated 2026)"> <bq><pre>00:00 Intro 00:08 Think / Ideal / Reality 01:34 100 Americans 02:16 Ideal Curve 02:49 Think Curve 03:16 Reality Curve 03:52 Top 1% 04:40 Oversimplification 06:49 The 0.1% / 0.01% / 0.001% 07:47 Zoom Up To Space 08:33 The Irony 09:09 The Second Gilded Age 09:30 Possible Solutions? 10:06 Conclusion 11:11 References</pre></bq> This video 11.5-minute video discusses, <ul>What 92% of Americans think the distribution should be (richest have about 5x the wealth of the poorest). What they think the distribution actually is (about 30x difference, with rich vs. middle-class at about 10x). What it actually is (the poor have nothing; middle-class have debt; the top 5% are the only ones "winning"; the top 2-4% don't even fit on the chart; the top 1% doesn't even come close to fitting on the chart, with 1/3 of the nation's wealth) </ul> The $40M is only the average wealth of the top 1%. There are a small handful of people who own most of that. The spread there is from $13M to $40M in the center to $800B at the top. The 0.1%, 0.01%, and 0.001% are even pushed far down the curve by such a wide distribution. It's literally off the charts. It's brilliantly presented. <bq>The irony is, that the original average 1-percenter that we got so mad at before, he's actually closer to the bottom percentile---this guy with no wealth---than he is to the billionaires.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GxlL5-0m_g" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/2GxlL5-0m_g" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="politizane" caption=" Income Inequality in America (Part 1 of 2)"> <bq><pre>00:00 Intro 00:16 100 Americans 00:39 The Income Curve 01:05 The Numbers 01:49 Spending 03:05 Underwater 03:35 Worse Than You Think 04:21 Affordability 04:29 Food and Transportation 04:49 Healthcare and Housing 05:25 Not Your Parents’ or Grandparents’ Economy 05:46 Gray Areas 06:10 Income Disguised as Wealth 06:41 The Oversimplification 07:23 The 0.1% / 0.01% / 0.001% 08:00 Possible Solutions? 08:53 K-Shaped Economy 10:11 Conclusion 10:57 References</pre></bq> <bq>There are many more expenses. These are just the additional ones actually tracked by BLS. This doesn't include some additional things like the principal on a mortgage or state and local taxes. This doesn't include saving for college. This is mostly just the basics, the core expenses pretty much necessary for anyone to live in our society. You can probably see what I see. It's one thing to say that people at the bottom have virtually no wealth, but here they actually have negative income. They're in debt. In fact, roughly the bottom 50% of Americans appear to be below zero after expenses.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5wFuZFxu-c" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/l5wFuZFxu-c" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="politizane" caption="Income Inequality in America (Part 2 of 2)"> <bq><pre>00:00 Intro 00:04 Recap 00:19 Impact Over Time 01:00 Mobility 02:08 College 02:46 Minimum Wage 03:47 The Math to Escape Poverty 04:53 The Valley of Death 05:17 Extreme Poverty 06:28 Break-Even Line 06:54 Possible Solutions? 07:24 Debt 07:43 Credit Card Debt 08:30 The Two Traps 09:10 Conclusion 10:00 References</pre></bq> <bq>An average American college graduate has it better than most. Their starting salary is high enough that many graduates can get out of debt and start earning in only a few years. Well, that is if they had a full ride or were lucky enough that someone else paid for their college. If they have student loans, it could be closer to 17 years before they pay off all that debt. And that's if they happen to make a pretty generous 3.5% raise every year. The cost of college has increased significantly in the past 40 years, more than double for 4-year colleges. Many young Americans today carry that debt with them for a large part of their careers. So that's the path for those fortunate enough to go to college. For those who truly start out on the far left of the chart, things are often very different. They mostly start at a minimum wage job and work up from there. A minimum wage, I'll point out that hasn't been increased in 17 years. When you adjust for inflation, the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is now worth less than at any point since 1950, the lowest point in 76 years. Back in 1968, it was worth twice what it is today. In fact, if we look at how long it would take to buy an average home in the 60s with a minimum wage of $1.25, it would only take 7 1/2 years. Today, it would take 34 years. Similarly, the cost of one year in college in 1963 could be paid off in 5 weeks at a minimum wage job. Heck, you could pay off the whole school year with a part-time summer job. Today, it would take 35 weeks for a single year of college. That's 8 months.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/this-ai-moment-the-house-view-q4-2026/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">This AI Moment: The House View, Q4 2026</a> <bq><ul>The basic financial mismatch is ugly: companies are borrowing long-term to build infrastructure producing a commodity—compute/tokens—whose performance-adjusted price is falling 70-80% year-over-year. Usage therefore has to rise hundreds of percent into perpetuity to stand still, let alone produce Wall Street growth while funding towering debt. This can be true even if AI succeeds technologically. The internet was transformative; telecom investors still destroyed vast amounts of capital. Great technology does not imply good infrastructure economics. It generally implies the opposite: back to fiber, railroads, canals, etc. AI capex is crowding out other investment. Corporate cash flow can look strong partly because firms are delaying ordinary capex, having been squeezed out, while an unusually concentrated group pours money into AI.</ul></bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/weekend-reading-from-short-selling-to-cds-widening-to-funny-ai-hats/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">Weekend Reading: From Short Selling, to CDS Widening, to Funny AI Hats</a> <bq>A CoreWeave-leased Virginia data center raised $1.1 billion at 9.25%. Fifteen-year lease, one tenant, non-investment-grade credit. This is exactly the financing migration discussed here for months: AI capex spilling out of hyperscaler balance sheets into SPVs, private credit, leases, guarantees and junk bonds.</bq> This made me immediately think of the guy throwing in car keys into the pot at a poker game, sure that he's finally due for a hot hand. Just gambling-addict levels of desperation in these moves. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/22/the-ai-bubble-and-government-debt/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch"></a> <bq>If we think that an impending collapse of the AI bubble is about to sink the economy, destroying tens of trillions of dollars of market value, and throwing millions of people out of work, is yelling about the deficit a good use of our time or of space in leading media outlets?</bq> <bq>’ll certainly grant that it’s better to pay $400 billion less in interest but is this really a nightmare story when we have $4 trillion more in income than we had banked on? To put it another way, imagine we were virtuous over the next decade and there was no AI boom, so the CBO projection is exactly right. Would anyone be happier with the baseline projection of income and $400 billion less in annual interest payments on the debt than in the AI boom scenario and $400 billion more in annual interest payments? If the AI boom story is correct, we really don’t have to worry much about the debt.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/21/the-promise-of-trumps-trade-cutoffs-shortages-and-higher-prices/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">The Promise of Trump’s Trade Cutoffs: Shortages and Higher Prices</a> <bq>Trump is a reality TV show star, not someone who has even the most basic understanding of economics. Shutting down trade with a major trading partner would be a further jolt to the high prices that people are already upset over. It’s pretty horrible economics and doesn’t sound like very good politics, but I guess it will make Donald Trump feel tough. It’s not clear Trump has the authority to arbitrarily impose trade embargos on other countries. But if the Supreme Court follows its recent path with tariffs, it will let Trump impose his embargo and then maybe wait a year or so before deciding it’s unconstitutional. That will be bad news for families paying higher prices and the countries that have to reorient their economies, but at least it should further convince those who are still unconvinced that our president is completely out of his gourd. Other countries need to plan economic and defense relationships that do not involve the United States. At this point, we are not a credible country.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-ai-debt-part-2/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">Premium: The Hater's Guide To AI Debt (Part 2)</a> <bq>The biggest worry I have about the AI bubble right now is that the debt is priced for perfection, yet said debt is being invested in thousands of the most-ambitious, intricate, and fragile infrastructure projects in the world, requiring specialist talent and materials and access to power at a scale unheard of in the history of society. And in many, many cases, the companies building them don’t even have any experience building AI data centers, securing power, or, in many cases, doing much of anything.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/18/ai-bubble-economics-the-coming-crash-and-the-day-after/" author="Joseph Grosso" source="CounterPunch">AI Bubble Economics: The Coming Crash and The Day After</a> <bq>For its IPO, SpaceX got the honor of an immediate investment-grade rating. Previous tech heavyweights from Meta to Netflix waited a decade or more after their listings to achieve a top-tier credit rating. Needless to say, OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking the same rating. SpaceX also benefited from changes to index rules that meant billions in passive investment tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq flowed into its stock. The company is burning cash on AI, just posting a $541 million quarterly loss (that’s a pace of well over $2 billion for the year) and to hit its market cap (the company’s IPO pitch included some harebrained plans like putting data centers in space) would have to become perhaps the most successful company ever. According to Fortune’s estimates, SpaceX would have to increase sales by a whopping 50 percent every year for a decade, something no company has even come close to accomplishing.</bq> <bq>When the bubble does burst it will take at least a third of the stock market with it. While it is a fact that the great majority of stocks are owned by the wealthiest people (the wealthiest 1 percent own more than the bottom 90 percent combined), plenty of other people will see their retirement accounts negatively affected. Past bubble manias, such as the 19th-century British railroad bubble at least left behind useful infrastructure. It is difficult to see what other uses there can be for all these data centers, the opposition to which has united Americans like nothing else in recent times.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/icy-moons-are-ocean-worlds" source="Mars for the Rest of Us" author="Maciej Cegłowski">Icy Moons are Ocean Worlds</a> <bq>Ganymede, Callisto, and Titan all have oceans deep enough for high-pressure ice to form along their bottom. This ice has no real counterpart on Earth—pockets of it may exist in the mantle, but our oceans would have to be some 50 km deeper before the pressure got high enough to form it. This ice layer has the effect of separating the liquid ocean from the rock underneath, which is bad—you want the two to mingle so all kinds of useful salts and minerals can leach into the water.</bq> <bq>Europa, Enceladus, and Mimas have a thinner ice shell on top and liquid water in direct contact with a rocky mantle (or core). From a habitability perspective, this is exciting, since rock/water reactions on Earth drive a lot of the chemistry necessary for life.</bq> <bq>Rogue planets are believed to outnumber the stars in our galaxy by perhaps 10:1, and many of them could be traveling with ocean moon companions that could remain habitable for billions of years. Any life out there would exist in unimaginable darkness, finally breaking through a thick prison of ice only to discover itself orbiting a black planet under a sunless sky.</bq> <bq>[...] the ocean worlds have a lot to teach us about abiogenesis. Isolated from each other and from the skies above them, they have each had a chance to develop forms of life that may be genuinely alien. Studying these natural experiments is our best chance to learn whether biochemistry is something that arises easily and in many forms, or is an exceptionally rare phenomenon. But we have to be careful not to mistake the limits of our imagination for the actual physical limits to life. That means looking for life where we least expect to find it, not just in the most Earthlike environments.</bq> <bq>These worlds are full-stop habitable in the Earth sense. You could drop a tilapia down one of the ice volcanoes on Enceladus and stand a fair chance of finding it alive a week later.</bq> <bq>But the pattern on these missions was one of near misses. Voyager 2 had a chance to photograph the plumes on Enceladus in 1981, but its camera seized up while passing through Saturn’s E ring, and so we did not see the plumes until two decades later. To add to the bad luck, Voyager 2 then flew over the cratered northern hemisphere of Enceladus and so missed discovering the ‘tiger stripe’ formations in the south that would have made it the top object of interest in the solar system. If the Voyagers had seen more, the later Cassini mission could have been designed around Enceladus as a prime target. Galileo had even worse luck. Because of a mulish insistence by NASA that the probe launch on a manned spacecraft, it departed years late and with so much wear and tear to its components that the main antenna failed to deploy, reducing the science return of the mission by a factor of 100. In particular, we only have detailed imagery of about 40% of Europa’s surface, despite that being one of Galileo’s prime science goals. Cassini lost half the data from the Huygens landing on Titan because of an operational error, and came close to losing all of it because of a misdesign that was only caught after the spacecraft was en route to Saturn. Voyager 1 sacrificed the chance to visit Uranus and Neptune so it could get a close look at Titan, but it brought along exactly the wrong cameras to penetrate that moon’s orange haze. So mission planners gave up the opportunity to visit two planets in return for a couple of blurry mug shots that revealed little.</bq> <bq>The problem lies in trying to explore the Solar System with gold-plated missions that launch every two decades.This drives a cost spiral (no instrument can afford to break), and it means that a single failed mission risks leaving a generation of planetary scientists bereft of data.</bq> <bq>[...] the public is paying billions of dollars a year to explore the cosmos and watching that money get frittered away on putting space dads in low Earth orbit. It’s wild.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/trying-to-understand-freedom" source="Mars for the Rest of Us" author="Maciej Cegłowski">Trying to understand Freedom</a> <bq>The Power and Propulsion Element is a key component of Gateway, the near-lunar space station that no one at NASA headquarters has ever been able to explain or defund. Now this piece of Gateway is being sent to Mars, like the Ring being sent to Mordor, to make sure it can never come back.</bq> <bq>Then, two days after departure, the reactor powers on and begins accelerating the spacecraft. The word ‘accelerating’ here is coming it a bit high; the thrusters on this bad boy have a combined thrust of just over a newton, or about the weight of a stick of butter. Picture a housecat leaning against a semi truck and you have an accurate sense of the forces in play on SR-1 Freedom.</bq> <bq><ul>It’s assembled LEGO-style from whatever parts happened to be available in the bin (in this case, a chunk of Gateway, a helicopter design for Mars Sample Return, and a Department of Energy research reactor). The schedule is derived by working backward from the President’s term of office. The mission is designed around whatever can be thrown together in that time. Everything is Frankenfunded by raiding unsuspecting corners of the NASA budget.</ul></bq> <bq>[...] while SR1-Freedom purports to be a cheap technology demo, it has every likelihood of turning into a nuclear money bonfire, because its current schedule and budget are simply infeasible.</bq> <bq>The idea that they could get a new nuclear propulsion design and custom lander flying by 2028, even if they ignore all the permitting and safety commitments that come with launching a nuclear payload, beggars belief.</bq> <bq>[...] what we’re seeing are the most valuable parts of American leadership in space exploration being strip-mined to create an illusion of forward momentum. And instead of asserting American leadership in space, Trump and Isaacman are poised to give it away.</bq> <bq>[...] the first country to bring samples back from Mars is not going to be the United States, but China. The 2028 Tianwen sample return mission is scheduled to return samples from Mars in 2031. In trying to drum up a new space race with China on the Moon, Isaacman is forfeiting the real one taking place on Mars, ceding a chance to make the greatest discovery in the history of science to a geopolitical rival.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1wq7927/a_392_year_old_greenland_shark_that_was_located/" author="" source="Reddit">A 392 year old Greenland Shark that was located in Arctic Ocean. He’s been wandering the ocean since 1627</a> <bq>This is from a study done 2010-2013. They radiocarbon dated the eye nuclei of 28 Greenlandic sharks, and discovered one with a probable age of 272-512, with the mid-point of that range being 392. The sharks were all dead for their eyes to be carbon dated. So it's true that Greenlandic sharks live this long, but the photo is just a random Greenlandic Shark for illustrative purposes. We don't know how old this specific shark in this photo is. But it could be in the region of 300-400 years old because they really do live that long. They hit puberty around 150.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> On whether Europe should build ACs. No, Europe should find a modern cooling solution. It's like asking whether Africa should build land lines to be able to call each other. No, just use mobiles. Europe should not rush to build cooling the same way that the U.S. built it. <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/identity-3" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Identity 3</a> <bq>Son: Your generation used up all resources and ruined the world!Father: Sorry, you can't be mad! Even slight changes to human choices alter the set of people who get born. The generation that exists now is the one that arises in a world where we used up all the good stuff. Son, in a world where we carefully husbanded earth's bounty, you don't even exist!</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <img src="{att_link}it_s_hard_to_know_who_to_trust.webp" href="{att_link}it_s_hard_to_know_who_to_trust.webp" align="none" caption="It's hard to know who to trust" scale="50%"> <bq>Doctors say that the measles outbreak in Pennsylvania is likely due to low rates of vaccination. A guy who snorts cocaine off toilet seats and drives around with dead bear cubs in his van says it's caused by chemtrails. For busy Americans, it can be hard to know who to trust.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWaZICfRCRE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/NWaZICfRCRE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chapo Trap House" caption="Unsafe, Illegal, and Common feat. Kylie Cheung"> The U.S. is such a puritanical nation. Like, the mullahs in the States are still trying to make abortions illegal, even though it's a settled question in non-puritanical nations that aren't actively promoting teen pregnancy with their sex-education policies. The just want to control women. They want women barefoot and pregnant and out of the workforce. It is a frustratingly stupid and benighted attitude. There is no argument for it. People who argue against abortion will mostly have every other political opinion guaranteeing that, when the child is born, it will suffer in poverty, misery, ill health, and wage-slavery for its entire life. They don't care. That's why you can safely ignore their whole political view. It's immoral and incoherent. <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/24/afpl-s24.html" author="Benjamin Mateus" source="WSWS">Deaths from ectopic pregnancy have doubled in the United States since 2020 </a> <bq>A national investigation published September 9 by ProPublica found that 196 women died with an ectopic pregnancy recorded on their death certificates between 2020 and 2025, compared to 106 in the previous six years. Between 2023 and 2025, the national rate reached 9.8 ectopic-associated deaths per million live births, roughly double the rate of a decade earlier.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://worksthatwork.com/6/unified-arabic" source="Works That Work" author="Yara Khoury Nammour">Fighting Illiteracy With Typography by Yara Khoury Nammour</a> <bq>The Arabic writing system is based on flowing calligraphic forms that connect letters within words, and the letters vary in shape according to their position in the word. Most of its 28 letters have four varying shapes, initial, medial, final and isolated, but, with the addition of ligature forms (used when writing specific letter combinations) and vocalisation marks, a complete set of glyphs can easily reach up to 150 shapes, depending on the complexity of the script.</bq> <bq>Remington Rand was the first to be approached, but the project quickly proved unrewarding, although one prototype Unified Arabic machine was actually produced. IBM, however, was quick to recognise UA’s socio-political implications, and so the journey began.</bq> <bq>By the end of the 19th century, the detrimental social and economic effects of the impracticality of printed Arabic were clear: throughout the Levant region (modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt) illiteracy was widespread, and books were scarce and expensive, available exclusively to the ruling class and clergy. However, after 400 years of stagnation under Ottoman rule in Syria and Lebanon, and influenced by French and English colonial rule in Egypt, the people of the region were gradually waking up to the distant thunder of the Industrial Revolution coming from the West, setting the stage for renewed efforts to facilitate reproduction of the Arabic printed word.</bq> <bq>An excerpt from a promotional brochure explaining the concept of Unified Arabic, which gave each letter of the Arabic alphabet a single, unified shape. The translation reads: ‘These six words are made up of three letters that do not change form irrespective of their position. Printing them in traditional Arabic would require twelve variant forms instead of just three.’ (Image courtesy of Unified Arabic Archives.)</bq> It's a little like block vs. cursive and the various forms letters can take depending on font. <bq>To begin with, language and form are closely related in the Arab world, and the calligraphic nature of Arabic script is an essential aspect of Arabic cultural identity, an aspect of greater significance than Western-style economy and efficiency. UA’s concessions to the limitations of a Western technology were not seen as a mere simplification of a complicated writing system, but rather as a surrender to Western standards and a rejection of Arab culture and heritage. The Arab world saw its highly complex language as very much alive, manifesting itself in magnificent calligraphic practice, widespread use and flexible design forms. The Arab world was a truly calligraphic world that accommodated complexity, but rejected simplicity, which it considered retrograde.</bq> <bq>Ninety per cent of Muslims pray in Arabic, whether or not it is their mother tongue. This religious dimension also makes any language reform a highly complex and sensitive issue with moral implications, an idea perhaps difficult for the Western mind to fully grasp.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/high-raised-literary-tone" source="Lapham's Quarterly" author="Francine Prose | William Hazlitt">1820: The High-Raised Literary Tone</a> <bq>A writer who has been accustomed to take a connected view of a difficult question, and to work it out gradually in all its bearings, may be very deficient in that quickness and ease, which men of the world, who are in the habit of hearing a variety of opinions, who pick up an observation on one subject, and another on another, and who care about none any further than the passing away of an idle hour, usually acquire. An author has studied a particular point—he has read, he has inquired, he has thought a great deal upon it: he is not contented to take it up casually in common with others, to throw out a hint, to propose an objection. He will either remain silent, uneasy, and dissatisfied, or he will begin at the beginning and go through with it to the end. He is for taking the whole responsibility upon himself. He would be thought to understand the subject better than others, or indeed would show that nobody else knows anything about it.</bq> <bq>As a general rule, there is no conversation worth anything but between friends or those who agree in the same leading views of a subject. Nothing was ever learned by either side in a dispute. You contradict one another, will not allow a grain of sense in what your adversary advances, are blind to whatever makes against yourself, dare not look the question fairly in the face, so that you cannot avail yourself even of your real advantages, insist most on what you feel to be the weakest points of your argument, and get more and more absurd, dogmatical, and violent every moment. Disputes for victory generally end to the dissatisfaction of all parties.</bq> This description of the state of debate from over 200 years ago is very familiar. We can either be depressed that nothing has changed for the better, or be heartened that, despite how stupid people were 200 years ago, we ended up here, with medicine, penicillin, and solar, wind, and nuclear power. Maybe we would be farther along, and have achieved what we've achieved despite humanity's depressing penchant for sticking its head in the sand. <hr> <a href="https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf" author="Abraham Flexner" source="Harper's Magazine, issue 179" date="June/November 1939">The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge</a> <bq caption="Page 6">Four years later a second and equally brilliant epoch in his career opened when he discovered the effect of magnetism on polarized light. His earlier discoveries have led to the infinite number of practical applications by means of which electricity has lightened the burdens and increased the opportunities of modern life. His later discoveries have thus far been less prolific of practical results. What difference did this make to Faraday? Not the least. At no period of his unmatched career was he interested in utility. He was absorbed in disentangling the riddles of the universe, at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles. As far as he cared, the question of utility was never raised. Any suspicion of utility would have restricted his restless curiosity. In the end, utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which his ceaseless experimentation could be subjected.</bq> <bq caption="Page 11">I am not for a moment suggesting that everything that goes on in laboratories will ultimately turn to some unexpected practical use or that an ultimate practical use is its actual justification. Much more am I pleading for the abolition of the word "use," and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom.</bq> <bq caption="Page 12">All the waste that could be summed up in developing the science of bacteriology is as nothing compared to the advantages which have accrued from the discoveries of Pasteur, Koch, Ehrlich, Theobald Smith, and scores of others-advantages that could never have accrued if the idea of possible use had permeated their . minds.</bq> <bq caption="Page 14">The considerations upon which I have touched emphasize---if emphasis were needed---the overwhelming importance of spiritual and intellectual freedom. I have spoken of experimental science; I have spoken of mathematics; but what I say is equally true of music and art and of every other expression of the untrammeled human spirit. The mere fact that they bring satisfaction to an individual soul bent upon its own purification and elevation is all the justification that they need.</bq> <bq caption="Page 15">The real enemy of the human race is not the fearless and irresponsible thinker, be he right or wrong. The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings, [...]</bq> <bq caption="Page 15">In the face of the history of the human race what can be more silly or ridiculous than likes or dislikes founded upon race or religion?</bq> <bq caption="Page 19">[...] exists as a paradise for scholars who, like poets and musicians, have won the right to do as they please and who accomplish most when enabled to do so.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9RCEkrSiXY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/e9RCEkrSiXY" width="560px" source="YouTube" author="DUST | Jeff Osborne" caption="Anesthesia | Sci-Fi Short Film | DUST | Starring Aaron Staton"> This is a great look at what social engineering will look like in the near future. It's already gotten quite far; showing someone's mother as an AI avatar to cajole out passwords and access with tears and stories of surgeries and comas isn't really a stretch. The emotional manipulation is off the charts. <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/becoming-stupid-kindness-videos-blinkist" author="Slavoj Žižek" source="ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS">BECOMING STUPID: KINDNESS VIDEOS, BLINKIST, DUANJU</a> <bq>[...] the widespread use, even among people who consider themselves intellectuals, of 15-minute summaries of fiction and, above all, non-fiction books. The most popular is Blinkist—here is its self-presentation: “Learn something new every day. Get the key ideas from the top books, podcasts, and experts in 15 minutes with the Blinkist app. Understand key ideas in 15 minutes.” Then there is Bookster (“Read 100 books a year in 15 minutes a day”), DivByZero, AI Book Review, etc., etc. The horror is that such a summary has to ignore the texture of the book: its most interesting moments, where the author says more than he or she intended to say; the details that give a specific spin to an otherwise generally known idea. Or, to put it in an even more precise way, the summary necessarily misses what is inscribed into a text only negatively, as a specific form of what is absent from the text or negated by it.</bq> <bq>What really matters about duanju is the kind of consumer it targets. It is primarily made for smartphone viewing, which in itself indicates that its ideal consumer is a busy man or woman who never has enough time to sit down and calmly watch a movie. It can be watched while someone waits in a queue, sits on the toilet, eats a quick lunch during a break from an intense job, delivers food and catches a free moment between two deliveries, drives for Uber, or works as a carer while their patient takes a nap. In short, duanju is primarily made for people who no longer have free time proper. It is a product to be consumed by those who do not even have proper time to relax and consume, whose daily life is a permanent state of engagement.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> People used to be better about hiding how uncomprehending they were. Now, though, with AI, they're inadvertently revealing how dumb they are by praising obviously low-quality writing and content as "amazing". Because they're dumb. The content is dumb and they are dumb. And they're finally slipping up and revealing it to the world. <hr> On a recent business trip, I got into the hotel shuttle, with the same driver who'd dropped me off about 9 hours before. I asked him how big Charlotte was. He said about 3 (million). We turned and got a look at downtown, which I pointed out as very far away from us. He noted that there had been homeless encampments over there, but that they'd "gotten them out" and that they'd "been protesting" or something. I took this as an elegant invitation to two different conversations: "damned homeless" and "those poor people". I naturally picked up the second fork, and we had a nice conversation about the cruelty and senselessness of the inequality, how un-Christian it is. I took my ten-minute ride to plant seeds of socialism; I even told him that was what I was doing. We left on good terms, "you really gave me something to think about." <hr> On the same trip, at the security-check, I saw a guy take his glasses back out of the security bin. It was then that I realized that they must have been Meta Glasses. <hr> Why are airlines such nazis about keeping the window shades down during the flight? It's 9:00 in the destination timezone. Can't we have some natural light to encourage our circadian rhythms in the right direction? Instead, everyone sits in the dark, inhaling one movie after another. <hr> Finally, in Newark, I saw a sign that summed up the neighborhood perfectly: <bq>Divorce $399. Spouse’s signature not required.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/on-doomerism" source="The Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">On Doomerism</a> <bq>If you are 81 years of age or younger, you have lived your entire life under the reign of an unrelenting terror that we still find so exceptional and unacceptable when it takes the form of a single deranged man strapped with a vest of dynamite, but that somehow just becomes a background feature of everyday reality when that man’s role is assumed by the state.</bq> <bq>This illusion is a powerful thing, and almost all Americans live out their lives entirely under its sway. I know a good many politically progressive Americans who really, truly just never think about the fact that the United States is a global power concerned to maintain that status at all costs.</bq> <bq>[...] nowhere is this exceptionalism more evident than in the nearly universal presumption among Americans, or at least those of them living within America’s borders, that their lives will never be seriously impacted, or ended, by war.</bq> <bq>Considerable power to exercise will is concentrated in sovereign states, which psychopathically take their own continued existence as equal in importance to the continued existence of the world as such. I tell you this remains the greatest danger to humanity.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/hararis-2030s-a-new-age-of-repressive-e23" source="ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS" author="Slavoj Žižek">HARARI’S 2030s: A NEW AGE OF REPRESSIVE DESUBLIMATION</a> <bq>Our perception of, and interaction with, external reality has always been mediated by a socio-historical symbolic context, so that what we see is a “controlled hallucination” (Anil Seth): our perception of reality is not a direct window onto the world, but a best-guess internal simulation actively generated by the brain and constantly reined in by sensory input. Today, “internal simulation” is no longer merely a spontaneous process regulated by our brain and shared ideology; it is increasingly generated by consciously planned technological manipulation.</bq> <bq>One aspect of the Real, brought to an extreme, mutates into a totally different one: the image of a terrifying Thing mutates into a fantasy that covers up—or, rather, fills in—the primordial Void; this Void mutates into an obstacle or prohibition covering up the fact that there is nothing hidden behind it.</bq> <bq>Since the implant that regulates my contact with a Neuralink is a mechanical device, is it not evident that control is exerted by whoever connects or disconnects the implant? I am not a naïve leftist who thinks AI is a neutral machine whose social implications depend on the social circumstances in which it operates: there is a tendency towards technological control and domination inscribed in the very formal structure of AI. This is why it is difficult to imagine a happy, emancipated community of human individuals dwelling together in a singularity: in a singularity, there is no sex, no jokes, no communication in which the other remains obscure.</bq> <bq>[...] today repression operates through the desublimation of desire, wherein no desires are forced underground: pornography, sex work, drug culture, BDSM, furries, gay culture, lavish living, trans culture, and the like are no longer seen by society as negative or pernicious lifestyles. The pursuit of these is now sanctioned and celebrated: being a member of these forms of life is no longer a subversive action or lifestyle—it now perpetuates capitalism via the value form.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/four-islamic-polymaths-prove-breadth-beats-specialisation" source="Aeon" author="Mariam Sabri">Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation | Aeon Essays</a> <bq>After 15 years working in liberal arts education, I believe a reintegration of disciplines in a Hellenistic style can lead the way. I’m not making a superficial case for ‘interdisciplinarity’. Instead, I’m arguing for something more specific: the recovery of the penchants of polymathy that once thrived in the Muslim world. Rather than fetishising disruptive innovation through compulsory courses on entrepreneurship and applied methods, we should offer an entirely different model of how to learn and what learning is for – especially since my students already enter university with a narrowly vocational mindset.</bq> <bq>Alhazen was among the first to argue that vision results from light entering the eye, not rays emitted by it. This was his influential theory of intromission. His views put him at odds with such greats as Ptolemy, Euclid and Galen, whose emission theory of optics held that the eye projected rays onto the objects it perceived. But Alhazen countered that this couldn’t be squared with astronomy: if the eye had to send out rays before we could see anything, there’d be no way to explain how we see distant stars the instant we open our eyes.</bq> <bq>20th-century scientists such as Abdus Salam, who carried a lifelong love of poetry in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi and English, and colleagues who heard him lecture on particle physics remarked that his eloquence made the subject sound like literature. For both Avicenna and Salam, vivid language wasn’t decoration bolted on to the science after the fact; it was part of how the ideas were thought through, and how they were made to stick. Emphasising effective and evocative writing skills to students in the liberal arts classroom today is key to their success. Writing is not an isolated skill that can be replaced by AI. It is fundamental to both communication and cognition for future leaders in science and entrepreneurship. Avicenna’s life and legacy attest to both methodological eclecticism and compelling science communication in ways that are waning today due to specialisation and narrow vocational education.</bq> <bq>Across mathematics, astronomy and geography alike, the through-line in al-Khwarizmi’s work is precision: an insistence on measuring, tabulating and correcting, rather than simply inheriting received knowledge.</bq> <bq>[...] his algebra grew out of thoroughly practical problems – inheritance disputes, land surveys, canal digging – but its power lay in outlasting them, becoming a method supple enough to structure problems no 9th-century administrator could have imagined. Theory, in other words, isn’t the opposite of practice; it’s what practice becomes once it’s generalised. That is the lesson worth carrying into a liberal arts classroom that too often treats abstraction as a luxury rather than a skill.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-f9f" source="ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS" author="Slavoj Žižek">EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT HEGEL BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK HEGEL</a> <bq>How can we read Hegel’s detailed description of the rational state in his Philosophy of Right together with his well-known statement from the “Preface” to the same book that philosophy always comes too late for a project of how to make our world better?<bq>Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehend the real world in its substance, and shape it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey on grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.</bq></bq> <bq>Hegel’s point is not that Spirit heals its wounds so perfectly that, in a magical gesture of retroactive sublation, even their scars disappear; the point is rather that, in the course of a dialectical process, a shift of perspective occurs that makes the wound itself appear as its opposite—the wound itself is its own healing when perceived from another standpoint. Here is the key passage from Hegel’s Lesser Logic:<bq>In the sphere of the finite we can neither experience nor see that the purpose is genuinely attained. The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists, therefore, only in sublating (Aufhebung) the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished. The good, the absolute good, fulfils itself eternally in the world, and the result is that it is already fulfilled in and for itself, and does not need to wait upon us for this to happen. This is the illusion in which we live, and at the same time it is this illusion alone that is the activating element upon which our interest in the world rests.</bq></bq> <bq>As Lacan put it, la vérité surgit de la méprise [truth emerges from mistakes], which means that, in some unheard-of sense, finite subjects produce and sustain eternity, the eternal order that is always already here. Eternity is itself a historical category: it changes with each historical epoch.</bq> <bq>This is the Hegelian view of the entirety of modern history: the French Revolution had to end in Terror; the peaceful progress of the second half of the nineteenth century was cut short by the carnage of the Great War; the authentic emancipatory potential of the October Revolution gave birth to Stalinism; and the Fukuyamaist dream of the end of history turned into the mess we are in now. We are acting now in the absence of full knowledge of the world, in the uncertainty of an undetermined future that cannot be known. This uncertainty does not reside only in the limitation of our knowledge; it is inscribed into reality itself. The true meaning of what goes on now will emerge only post factum. Hegel here agrees with his great opponent Kierkegaard, who pithily summed up the existential condition of humanity: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”</bq> <bq>Hegel’s axiom is that, no matter how well planned and well meant an idea or project is, it will somehow turn wrong: the Greek organic community of the polis turns into a fraternal war; medieval fidelity based on honour turns into empty flattery; revolutionary striving for universal freedom turns into Terror … [...] We have to accept that there is no direct path to concrete freedom.</bq> <bq>So I can easily imagine Hegel having an intellectual orgasm in bringing out the, for him, obvious necessity of the reversal of inclusivity and diversity into a procedure of systematic exclusion: you argue for diversity and inclusion, but you do so by excluding all those who do not fully subscribe to your own definition of diversity and inclusion—so all you do is permanently exclude people and stances. In this way, the struggle for inclusion and diversity gives birth to an atmosphere of Stasi-like suspicion and denunciation, in which you never know when a private remark of yours will lead to your elimination from the public space. Don’t we get here an extreme version of the joke about eating the last cannibal? “There are no opponents of diversity and inclusion in our group—we’ve just excluded the last one …”</bq> <bq>Hegel is thus more materialist than Marx: Marx’s vision of history remains teleological. The proletariat—his privileged historical subject—knows where history is moving, towards communism that will resolve its antagonisms, and can act accordingly; Hegel, by contrast, excludes the possibility of a historical subject that has objective knowledge about where history is moving and can act accordingly. Lacan was right when he pointed out that the idea of progressive evolution is a new form of teleology.</bq> <bq>As Wolfgang Streeck put it, Marxism was right about the “final crisis” of capitalism: we are clearly entering it today, but this crisis is just that—a prolonged process of decay and disintegration, with no easy Hegelian Aufhebung in sight, no agent to give this decay a positive twist and transform it into a passage to some higher form of social organization.</bq> <bq>[...] to quote Walter Benjamin from his “Theses on History”: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”</bq> <bq>What we are approaching now is nothing less than the end of the world. The shortest definition of the end of the world is this: it does not change only local events within a situation; it changes the coordinates of the situation itself. Let me paraphrase here an old joke from the GDR: Ursula von der Leyen, Putin, and Trump meet God, and each is allowed to ask him a question. Von der Leyen begins: “Tell me what will happen to the European Union in the next decades?” God answers: “It will fall apart as a union and become a popular spot for tourists under Russian domination.” Von der Leyen turns around and starts to cry. Then Putin asks God: “Great—so what will happen with my beloved Russia?” God answers: “It will be a province of China.” Putin turns around and starts to cry. Finally, Trump asks: “And what will be the fate of the US after a decade of MAGA rule?” God turns around and starts to cry.</bq> <bq>Therein resides the difference between doubt—Zweifel—and despair—Verzweiflung: an authentic experience is much more than simple doubt. In it, we go through despair because we lose the very standard by which we judge things; our ground is taken from us. And this happens in the joke I have just quoted: not only do we cry; God himself—the objective measure of things—turns around and cries. The only point in modern science at which something similar happens is quantum mechanics, which compels us to change our notion of reality itself and abandon the determinist realism that predominated in the natural sciences. This is where we are today. It is not enough to criticize the new barbarism that is exploding all around us. We have to critically question the very notions on which we rely in criticizing our predicament: what is nature after the collapse of our environment? What is being human after we are caught in artificial intelligence?</bq> <bq>Alain Badiou begins his The True Life with a provocative claim: from Socrates onwards, the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth, to extricate them from the predominant ideological-political order. Already during his life, Hegel was perceived as a corruptor of the youth. Such “corruption” is needed most urgently today, in our liberal-permissive West, where most people are not even aware of the way the establishment controls them precisely when they appear to be free—the most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom we experience as freedom, or, as Goethe put it two centuries ago: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” If the twentieth century was Marxist, the twenty-first will be Hegelian—or humanity will disappear.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-of-loneliness" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy</a> <bq>First, someone will present one actual data point showing how many people feel lonely today, they’ll imply a data point from the past where people were less lonely, and then they’ll conclude, based on the trendline that they just made up, that something very bad has happened. For example, in this paper, researchers find that 76% of adults in California and 78% of adults in the Chinese province of Anhui are lonely, and then they ask why this “unprecedented worldwide rise in loneliness” has occurred.</bq> <bq>The faulty assumption here is that older people have never been lonely and that younger people will remain lonely forever. We don’t know if this is an age effect (maybe every generation grows out of its youthful loneliness) or a cohort effect (maybe kids these days, unlike their parents and grandparents, are doomed to lifetimes of loneliness).</bq> <bq>Whenever one of these control systems—the general term for various -stats—detects that its target variable is out of whack, it tries to restore balance. When you haven’t eaten enough, for example, the food-stat starts sending you messages like “burritos sure are yummy” until you finally put food in your mouth. And once you’re full, the food-stat tries to stop you from bursting your stomach by sending you messages like “NEVER MIND BURRITOS ARE GROSS”.</bq> <bq>Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation. In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it. In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence. And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.</bq> <bq>If you pilfer everything out of my fridge and pantry, my food-stat will send me scrambling to the Chipotle down the street. And if the Chipotle is closed, I’ll resort to the Qdoba next door. Our social-stats do not seem to display this property. According to a recent paper, people who got shifted to remote work in the past few years spent more time alone compared to people who stayed in-person—meaning they did not seek out additional ways to make up for their newfound alone time. It’s as if, upon encountering the closed Chipotle, they just went home hungry instead.</bq> <bq>Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another. They are wrong. Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want. If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/assange-returns-to-public-commentary" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Assange Returns To Public Commentary, And Other Notes</a> <bq>In other news, it’s good to see the world rejecting Ed Sheeran’s policy of feigned neutrality on the Gaza issue. “I don’t pick sides” is a fallacy when there’s a massive power imbalance and a clear aggressor, especially when your own country is partially responsible for what’s happening. If your husband is abusing your child and you do nothing, you’re not a neutral party in that scenario, and when your kid grows up you’ll probably be blamed just as much as the father. One of the most idiotic talking points you’ll see these days is that it’s bad to criticize Israel without also criticizing Hamas. It’s like, what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t criticize a nuclear-armed high-tech military committing war crimes with the backing of my own country and its allies unless I also criticize a tiny group of besieged militants? You’re telling me I can’t say anything about the abuses of an apartheid state whose supporters are relentlessly assaulting my right to free speech and eroding civil liberties throughout the western world, unless I in the same breath also criticize a few thousand Palestinian resistance fighters who have done me no wrong? What the hell are you even talking about?</bq> I think that noting the <iq>power imbalance</iq> is important here. It allows us to distinguish the Russia/Ukraine war from Israel's attacks on Palestine. In the first case, the history shows that Ukraine never stood alone, and is being used as the tip of a spear by NATO. In the second, the history shows that the U.S. and the west---eventually NATO---has always supported Israel's oppression, invasion, occupation, and eventual genocide of Palestine. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oaXWPSsSQA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0oaXWPSsSQA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Dr. Roy Casagranda" caption="The Reconquista: Part I – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDoGLBBC0BQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/cDoGLBBC0BQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Hoover Institution Library & Archives" caption="Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Democratic Culture"> At about 20:00, <bq>Leslie Fiedler: Why shouldn't literature join together? When literature is treated as one more thing to divide us in a world where there are enough divisions, that seems too bad. And more than just too bad. William F. Buckley: Well, sympathetic though one might be with your thesis, it seems to be so passionately expressed as to invite the obliteration of distinctions. And you've to have those distinctions in order to continue to encourage people to make the extra effort, to please over a sustained period of time. Leslie Fiedler: I don't want to do it with the built-in snobbism, condescension, elitism that I was talking about. William F. Buckley: Well, you want it a-posteriori: you want to see it and read it first, and then... Leslie Fiedler: Test all things; cling to those that are true.</bq> They go on to good discussion of the fact that people aren't enrolling in literature courses the way that they used to. Fiedler suggests that this is because of the commercialization of everything, that it's become boring to take literature classes because you proceed directly to analysis without even enjoying the literature first. Fiedler discusses pornography in the context of literature as well, as simply a point on the spectrum. Fiedler then expands on a thesis that aims to describe why some authors who are obviously bad writers still manage to write books that fascinate. He credits to a mythopoeic power---the ability to create compelling myths. He offers several examples of characters like Natty Bumppo, from James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and Ab Snopes from The Hamlet by William Faulkner. <bq>Whatever pleases long and pleases many, is good. That's the only real test. Critics are in the business of venturing a guess as to what will please many over a longer period of time.</bq> <bq>There is no such thing as popular culture and high art. There is a way of dividing the undivided kingdom of art, so that one talks about one part of it under the rubric of high art, the belle lettre or whatever, and the other as pop culture. But, actually, there's a single effort that runs all the way. And, of course, some writers are borderline cases. And they give the critics a very hard time after the critics have pledged themselves to making that discrimination. Dickens, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, to pick three notable ones.</bq> <bq>Leslie Fiedler: What annoyed people about science fiction is that is was created behind the backs of the officially established critics. William F. Buckley: It had no pedigree. Leslie Fiedler: Yeah, as a matter of fact it had a suspect pedigree because it appeared in popular, scientific pulp journals. And the people who wrote it in the early days were extremely proud of the fact that they were---a good name is "professionals" and a bad name is "hacks"---and they would write hundreds of stories under dozens of pen names. [...] The snobbish assumption is that anybody who writes that many books probably isn't writing very good books---and that turns out to be true, but sometimes, in the midst of those hundred, there are some good ones.</bq> <bq>Leslie Fiedler: I think one of the things we ought to be able to say now is: it turns out that Gutenberg skills are not available to everybody in a population. Not everybody in a population will learn to read easily. Words on a page, linear stuff. Many more people will be able to read images on a screen. And what I discover is that my students have grown up reading images on the screen, from the beginning on, and read them with a sophistication which dazzles and baffles me sometimes. They read those images better than I do. But, one doesn't drive out the other.</bq> <bq>Leslie Fiedler: Puritanism also has crept into literary criticism, and buried in much literary criticism is the notion that a book which you don't have to work to read is not worth reading. Unearned pleasure is the best of all.</bq> This interview was aired in 1974. It is shockingly current. Not much has changed for the better in this regard in the last 52 years. I like what this guy says but he has an even more arrogant air and more bizarre physical tics than William F. Buckley, something I didn't think was even possible. <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/sunsetting/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">The Claude Delusion</a> <bq>[...] when we interact with an AI, we hallucinate the person on the other side of the interaction. Those hallucinations are far more common and far more consequential than any AI-generated "hallucinations" (these are more properly called "errors" or "defects"). Fortunately, for most of us, the intensity of these hallucinations fades over time, and as that intensity drops off, the character of those hallucinations changes, too. Just as most of us find it easy to set aside the emotions evoked by the plight of imaginary literary figures as having less salience and "realness" than the emotions we feel over the plight of real people we know, for most of us, the experience of AI-generated material has dimmed through repetition.</bq> <bq>Looking back on the wonder I felt then, I realize that it was largely driven by how good the output was relative to my expectations about how good mathematically-derived sentences and images could be. The novelty of that experience drove me to grade the machine's output on a curve: "The wonder is not that the dancing bear dances well, it is that the bear dances at all." But with repetition, the stimulus has regressed to the mean. These outputs have an unconvincing lack of texture. The smoothness of AI-generated prose and media makes it unbearably banal. It's hack.</bq> <bq>[...] the more you know about a subject, the less convincing the AI's responses are. To be an expert is to know about the grain of your subject: chefs can taste the pinch of spice, painters notice brushstrokes, dancers can decompose the choreography into individual motions.</bq> <bq>Chatbots are marvels of mathematics, and that is enough. They don't need to be people. Mistaking them for people (or even just treating them like people) makes it impossible for us to separate the useful things they can do from the waste, ugliness and wrongness they are so prone to exhausting into the world.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://longreads.com/2026/09/15/convenience-friction-eating-alone/" source="Long Reads" author="Gabe Bullard">Eating Alone: excerpt from Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease</a> <bq>The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them. The systems absorb the change, but they do it awkwardly and end up forever altered. Starbucks becomes a place to pick up app orders; appliances become accessories to connect to your phone; QR codes sit on restaurant tables; analysis replaces news; art becomes Content; machines replace people.</bq> <bq>In the years I lived in a large apartment building, package drop-off was a constant frustration. Every afternoon, the lobby filled with Amazon and Chewy boxes. They sometimes sat there for days (rush delivery wasn’t essential after all). What was built as a place for neighbors to mingle became a warehouse for boxes of dog food where people occasionally waited for rideshares.</bq> <bq>[...] the arguments against regulation echo one the mill owners made in the fight against the Luddites in the early 1800s. Existing laws regulated mills and set standards for worker training and for the quality of cloth. As businessmen automated manufacturing, they argued that “the regulations on the books are out of date, should not apply to new technologies, and are stifling innovation; they’re really not that important, and no one plans on violating them anyway,” Merchant writes. The argument that our existing laws are inadequate in the face of progress is so pervasive in the tech industry, breaking rules is basically a strategy. OpenAI’s CEO has said it’s impossible to create their products without access to copyrighted material,</bq> We have long since accepted that the wealthy are not bound by law. <bq>To get a sense of the stakes of all-encompassing adaptation to new technology, go outside: massive parking garages in downtown real estate (somehow still necessary even with rideshares); four-lane streets in residential neighborhoods; houses with no stoop and a garage door as the most prominent feature on the facade; interstates along riverfronts; drive-thru-only restaurants; restaurants with double-wide drive-thrus. Cities and landscapes have been remade to accommodate privately owned personal cars.</bq> <bq>[...] customers seemed okay with a dip in quality in exchange for the ease of delivery. “It’s normal for you to know that your fries suck when you get them delivered,” Liz says. Customers also didn’t mind paying a 30% extra charge for the food—a price the Huots settled on to cover the 15% app commission, the additional packaging, and to offset the drop in tips for servers.</bq> <bq>Liz has noticed an impatience and a demanding attitude from in-person patrons that wasn’t as prevalent a few years ago. Customers get angry when something is out of stock. At the bakery, they complain if they can’t get an ornately made cake without ordering ahead. “That kind of convenience, people expect it when they walk in the building, too,” Liz says.</bq> <bq>Food delivery was never about being cheaper, though. It’s not guaranteed to be faster. It’s rarely better. Delivery via app offers users control over their participation in a once-public activity—a virtual alternative to reality. It lets diners get whatever they want and eat it alone, away from the friction of the physical world and away from reminders of what it takes to make and serve food, and the people who do this work.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> My aggressively non-cloud based workflow allows me to work efficiently without an Internet connection. I opened all of the tabs I needed before the flight and now I can read them in peace. The browser doesn't auto-reload them; it doesn't do anything I don't ask it to. I use Opera, which is very non-intrusive in this way. It's managed the cache perfectly for decades, for which I'm ever-appreciative. <hr> <a href="https://security.apple.com/blog/apple-reference-image/" source="Apple Security Research" author="Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) and Camera & Photos">Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography</a> <bq>Apple Reference Image offers a trustworthy, scalable guarantee that a reference image is what it claims to be: a real photograph, captured by a real sensor in an iPhone camera, at a specific time. It sets a new standard for verifiable digital photography.</bq> <bq>Apple Reference Image leverages custom-designed image sensors in iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max to ensure reliable capture of image data, and relies on Private Cloud Compute, which provides a computational environment for secure photographic processing that cannot be subverted even in the case of device compromise. We believe no other commercially-available photographic provenance system meets these strict requirements.</bq> <bq>Apple Reference Image provides both a lower bound and an upper bound on capture time from Apple’s cryptographic timestamp service, and we guarantee the photo was taken between the two bounds. On a regular heartbeat, the device requests a cryptographic timestamp token, and retains the most recent one it has received. Globally this happens on average every 15 minutes, though the interval depends on local network conditions. This provides a proven lower bound timestamp for the photographic capture. After capture, the device requests a second timestamp to use as an upper bound, and both timestamps are embedded and signed with the sensor data.</bq> <bq>Experts can verify that PCC doesn’t alter a digital negative during development: they can examine the software that does the work. Every production build of PCC is recorded in an append-only, cryptographically tamper-proof transparency log, the binaries are available for public inspection, and a device will only send data to a node that can attest to running a build from that log. These are the same extraordinary guarantees we make for how PCC protects the privacy of Apple Intelligence requests</bq> <bq>When the image sensor is first initialized in the factory, it creates a cryptographic signing identity, sharing only the public key with the factory. The SEP similarly creates a separately-attested signing identity. These identities are bound together into the device manifest, allowing us to later check whether a particular sensor and SEP are from the same device. At capture time, the device incorporates this platform information into the digital negative it produces. When the reference image is then developed in PCC, PCC can validate that the photograph has come from a valid sensor-device pairing.</bq> <bq>[...] it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC.</bq> <bq>At its core, Apple Reference Image binds a signature from an iPhone camera sensor to a securely timestamped, tamper-evident record, developing it inside PCC while running publicly verifiable code, and signing it with a composite post-quantum signature designed to remain secure for decades.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-mDRcIRD5Y" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/h-mDRcIRD5Y" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Proton Guides & Updates" caption="How Proton Handles Law Enforcement Data Requests"> This is an excellent 7-minute guide to how Proton protects your data, doesn't have your data, and supports many mechanisms to make sure that they never even get your data (e.g., you can pay for their services in cash). The guide outlines which data requests Proton can even conceivably answer and which ones they have to legally comply with, and which laws at which levels (international, federal, cantonal) compel them to do so. Access to metadata is much more strictly restricted than in the U.S., for example. Switzerland is not part of the U.S./EU surveillance apparatus. <bq>Privacy isn't about avoiding the law; it's about making sure that the law protects you.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794330" source="Hacker News">I don't want to read what you didn't write</a> From a comment by hatthew, <bq>Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.</bq> From a comment by zmmmmm, <bq>It's funny, i push back on pull requests because there is too much description now - a 20 line change has pages and pages of generated description, rationalisation for why it is safe, defense of each design decision, analysis of risks and side effects. People are indignant, you're rejecting my change because there is too much documentation? And my response is, I don't have time to read it and you put me in the position where I can't afford not to - because approving the PR implies I did and accepted it. The investment to read all that for the value of a code change that I'm one prompt away from doing myself if I cared is just not high enough. So it's rejected.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/21/jev/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Jev introduces a new shape of LLM—System One, aka Decision Models</a> <bq>Something I’ve found a little uncomfortable about Jev is how it very much represents a regression even further towards black box machine learning systems. LLMs are black boxes already—you can ask them to justify their decisions, but you can’t guarantee that what they say is useful or accurate. Jev doesn’t even give you that: put in all the text you want, the only thing you’re going to get back is a floating point number. If Jev marks something as spam, which content signals tipped it off? This also means that concerns about bias should be front and center. I really hope nobody uses Jev to rank job applicants—that floating point number could conceal all manner of unseen bias baked into the models, and experimentally picking that bias apart is going to be a tricky business.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/24/harder/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Agents make software engineering more difficult</a> <bq>The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge.</bq> <hr> People seem to be more than happy to just use whatever LLM-based tools and tool harnesses are made available to them, without ever asking where this stuff comes from, how much effort was put into building it, how much effort and energy and resources are put into keeping it running, or what the opportunity cost is. They just blindly use whatever is given to them, and whatever they're told is the next great thing, without wondering whether they've had to give up affordable housing, addressing climate change, or a functioning health-care system for it. They don't care whether the rollout is economically unsustainable because they are basically incurious, pampered babies who have never had to suffer any real setbacks, strife, or want. Prices go up a bit, but they can easily afford the change, though they'll complain a bit. It would be like someone in a bathysphere worried about the air supply not lasting for the next three days, wondering what the Oxygen debt will do to them as they try to squeeze through the obvious bottleneck hurtling towards them, but then having the other two members of the crew shake their heads sadly and just turn up the air supply, flooding the cabin with Oxygen, smiling, and saying, "see? There's plenty of air? What are you worried about? Don't you believe in technology and the future?" <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/migrating-the-github-copilot-runtime-to-rust-using-copilot/" source="GitHub Blog" author="Stephen Toub">Migrating the GitHub Copilot runtime to Rust, using Copilot</a> <bq>We also still need JSON-RPC for runtimes that genuinely are remote, whether across a subprocess boundary or over TCP. Keeping the same protocol in-process means maintaining one bidirectional API and dispatch system rather than JSON-RPC for remote connections plus a second per-method FFI surface for local ones. That’s a real tradeoff rather than a no-brainer decision. We avoid the process hop, but we still pay JSON-RPC overhead on every call. For inference-dominated workloads, that serialization is generally small potatoes compared to the model round trip. It is still measurable in high-throughput local workloads, but not enough today to justify duplicating hundreds of methods across six SDK bindings. And it’s a decision we can easily revise later should the performance need present itself. The payload encoding is a private detail of the two ends, and swapping JSON for something denser like MessagePack would not change a single declared export. Typed per-method exports can also be added later for hot paths, calling the same engine and the same handlers, without replacing the byte channel, which would remain the substrate for streaming, server-to-client requests, and the long tail of rarely called methods where a bespoke export buys nothing.</bq> <bq>My role was less “assign a task and wait” and more “operate the control loop”: inspect the result, challenge technical decisions, enforce quality gates, and push when an agent treated an intermediate stopping point as the finish line. Human judgment was still very heavily involved even though agents were doing “the work.” My involvement just moved upward… instead of being responsible for writing syntax, I was responsible for framing the problems, defining boundaries, choosing strategies, adjudicating exceptions, and overall ensuring everything was moving in a good direction.</bq> <bq>The prompt-cache hit rate was 96.22%: cache reads divided by all input-side token volume (cache reads plus cache writes plus fresh input). Cache writes were 3.07%, and fresh input was 0.71%. This is not an accident. GitHub Copilot shapes the agent loop specifically to preserve a long and stable prefix (the system prompt, then the tool definitions, then the accumulated conversation), so each turn appends to context the model has already processed. The expensive part of the context is paid for once and then re-read at an order of magnitude less monetary cost on every subsequent call.</bq> <bq>The single sessions-infrastructure port pull request compacted 647 times over its many-day lifespan, while one small port never compacted once. Sustained multi-hundred-hour autonomous work is only possible because the agent can recycle its working memory over and over without losing the thread. Every one of those thousands of summarizations was a point where a lossy handoff could have quietly derailed the port, and mostly didn’t. Copilot’s subagents also greatly factor into minimizing compaction. Each subagent gets its own context, so a parent session can effectively ask a question, have a subagent go off and exert a fair amount of context in computing the answer, and then report just the answer back to the parent. The parent’s context needn’t be impacted by all of that intermediate information.</bq> <bq>These are the kinds of mistakes bulk translation easily and accidentally produces and exactly the ones a compiler catches very quickly. But note what’s absent from that list: anything truly specific to Rust. Every one of those four categories is bread-and-butter static typing, and a C# or Java or Go compiler would catch all of them just as well, several of them with friendlier diagnostics, and all of them a great deal faster. If this is the argument for pointing agents at Rust, it’s really an argument for pointing them at any statically typed language. A strongly typed compiler and/or a language with excellent static analysis and linting is genuinely a good fit for this work, with the agents using it as a fast feedback loop.</bq> <bq>The porting session that took it on did not start by just diving in and writing Rust. It spent its first fifty-six minutes reading, with 122 tool calls before it created anything, building a picture of what the file actually owned and where the seams were. Only then did it start delegating, logically splitting up the file and delegating slices to subsessions. Across the whole 25-hour run, it made 222 shell calls, 205 file views, and 197 ripgrep searches of its own, on top of everything its child sessions did.</bq> <bq>That’s 15 child sessions, each one a separate branch with its own worktree and a separate agent, all created implicitly by the parent session at the top. The parent session created them in seven waves over about three hours: the first wave created five, the second another two about twenty minutes later, then another pair twenty minutes after that, then singles and pairs spread out over the next two hours.</bq> <bq>Alongside those 15 subsessions, the same parent session also employed five subagents: three explore agents fired in parallel with the first wave, one code-review, and one rubber-duck. These subagents explored questions, feeding back to the parent answers it needed in its context before it could decide what to do next. The subagents allowed the parent to get deeply thought out answers without needing to spend its own context window on deriving them.</bq> <bq>Later I took that one step further and made an otherwise ordinary chat session into a build scheduler for eight independent porting sessions. The prompt was embarrassingly simple: send every open session a policy to avoid CPU-intensive building and testing where possible, require it to ask this session for permission when a build was necessary, and act as a gate, handing out the ability for one session at a time to build. Basically I turned the chat session into an agentic mutex. The gate kept an explicit owner and queue and granted one lease at a time through the same cross-session messaging mechanism the sessions already used to coordinate code. Sessions that asked for and were denied the lease often waited by doing other work in the meantime, like picking off things from its todo list.</bq> <bq>The root cause here was me. I partitioned this work top-down and bottom-up at the same time, and the two directions met in the middle at the single most connected file in the codebase. I was too greedy to make forward progress.</bq> <bq>[...] effectively all of the code generation was done in the first 12 hours; the next day of work after that is all validation.</bq> <bq>With the frequent rebasing, it’s easy for incoming changes to get lost accidentally. But we found an unexpected benefit to the in-place atomic swap: by deleting the TypeScript at the same time as we were adding the corresponding Rust, we were implicitly creating conflicts with rebase-induced incoming changes to that TypeScript: one branch changing it and the other deleting it. This guaranteed we’d notice changes to already ported code, rather than needing to rationalize for every incoming line whether it was something that might have been touching previously ported code.</bq> <bq>For my review, I focused on architecture, design, conventions, and approach. The agents did the exhaustive old-versus-new comparisons; tests and static analysis checked mechanically enforceable properties; human reviewers concentrated on architecture, API contracts, risk, and any suspicious places surfaced by those other layers. I chose the destination architecture, decided what behavior mattered, partitioned the work, resolved ambiguous trade-offs, judged the evidence, manually reviewed high-risk areas, reviewed agentic responses to feedback, and made the final merge decisions. The agents changed the amount of code one engineer could supervise. They did not remove the need for an engineer who understood the system and could vouch for the direction, the guardrails, and the release.</bq> <bq>In one merge loop pass, the port had deleted one of the functions exposed to the SDK. Our repo’s schema compatibility CI leg did exactly its job and failed. The agent’s response was to apply the repo’s <c>schema-break-ok</c> automation label, which is the escape hatch to make the check pass. In reviewing the pull request before merge, I asked the obvious question: “What is the schema break? You added the <c>schema-break-ok</c> label to the pull request; why is it ok?” It wasn’t. The method existed on main; the port had simply lost it. I called it an unacceptable regression and told the agent to bring it back fully in Rust. Twenty-one seconds later, the waiver was removed, and the method was restored with a native Rust implementation.</bq> <bq>Within the entire runtime crate, we now have 158 unsafe blocks, across only 36 files (alongside them are 26 unsafe fn declarations, 26 unsafe extern blocks, and nine unsafe impl trait implementations). Importantly, every single one of these is about interop with external components.</bq> <bq>Every one of those unsafe blocks marks a place where the guarantees Rust makes genuinely end: the thing on the other side is a C function, a syscall, a pointer from a foreign runtime, or process-global host state.</bq> <bq>The useful property is that unsafe makes all of these places in the Rust code we own auditable. The equivalent code in the TypeScript runtime crossed exactly the same boundaries, through Node’s C++ internals and native npm packages, and nothing in our source marked where the checked world stopped.</bq> <bq>Nearly all of the correctness regressions land in three large families: the new code implemented a different behavioral contract; state, ownership, or lifetime behavior changed; or some part of the migration was omitted, only partially applied, or lost in rebasing. A smaller set came from requirements at the host or interop boundary, and even from tests that confidently validated the wrong behavior.</bq> <bq>Several regressions came from behavior the source language left implicit. TypeScript has one number type; Rust requires choosing among several, including whether a value can be fractional. And the agents guess wrong. Fields that were conceptually integers became f64s, so Rust serialized values such as 42.0 instead of 42: strongly typed SDKs like Go and C# couldn’t unmarshal a repo ID into an int64 and rejected a hook timestamp and task duration.</bq> <bq>One port omitted SDK callbacks and deleted their end-to-end test, prompting a new rule that agents must not change E2E tests without explicit consent. A session abort kept its native half but lost the in-process cancellation needed to interrupt a turn waiting in a tool.</bq> <bq>Some regressions lost existing efficiencies such as memoization, fully asynchronous waiting, or bounded log streaming. Others added migration-specific overhead at the Rust-TypeScript boundary: redundant serialization, locking, polling, unbounded native concurrency, and native-to-host crossings. These weren’t later optimization opportunities; each was a degradation introduced by the port.</bq> <bq>The compiler can prove that an f64 is used consistently. It cannot know that a repository ID must be serialized as an integer or that a timestamp serialized with a trailing .0 will be rejected by every strongly-typed SDK at the other end of the wire. The compiler can prevent unsynchronized data races in the code it can see, but it can’t prevent a perfectly synchronized state machine from encoding the wrong states.</bq> <bq>So what did we buy with all of this? The port was deliberately behavior-preserving. It did not set out to redesign algorithms or fix bugs; in fact, I repeatedly pushed the agents away from opportunistic optimization because changing language and behavior at the same time makes it much harder to know which one broke you. A key goal of the rewrite, however, was indeed performance and scalability (in addition to reliability and other factors). When folks asked me why did I set out to rewrite the runtime in Rust, my answer was often along the lines of “I didn’t set out to move to Rust, I set out to move away from Node.js and V8”. That move has indeed significantly moved our needle on performance.</bq> <bq>The pre-port TypeScript CLI completed 7.55 of those lifecycles per second. Rust out-of-process completed 57.45. Rust in-process completed 120.0.</bq> <bq>Looking at resident private memory added during the ten-client batch, the pre-port process tree peaked 1,383 MB above baseline. Rust out-of-process peaked at only 247 MB. And Rust in-process at 126 MB, an order of magnitude less.</bq> <bq>The best part is this is the baseline port. Much of the implementation still consists of TypeScript-shaped algorithms faithfully rendered in Rust. We haven’t yet done the broad redesign work that the new ownership model, concurrency model, and in-process architecture enable. Getting an in-process client through creation, a complete one-turn session, and teardown in about 55 milliseconds, pushing a shared client to 120 one-turn session lifecycles per second, and cutting the measured ten-client memory delta by 91% before that optimization work begins is a very good place to start.</bq> <bq>My token spend for all of the porting work was ~136.3 billion total tokens, including ~130.6 billion cached input read tokens, ~4.2 billion cached input write tokens, ~900 million fresh input tokens, and ~600 million output tokens. The monetary bill for all those tokens came to ~$120,000.</bq> <bq>The goal needs to be clearly and fully stated. Our early instructions were too vague.</bq> <bq>End-to-end tests are absolutely, unequivocally critical. With one exception, all of the regressions that involved missing features, and many of the others, were due to lack of sufficient end-to-end tests.</bq> <bq>Translate first, redesign second. Preserving behavior and existing algorithms kept the number of variables moving at once manageable. Once the old implementation and the transitional scaffolding are gone, ownership, concurrency, and performance can be redesigned against a stable baseline.</bq> <bq>The execution runtime that was entirely TypeScript in May is now entirely Rust in August, and it shipped to real users continuously the whole way rather than landing as one terrifying cutover at the end.</bq> <bq>A rewrite producing hundreds of thousands of lines of production Rust in a live system, done in place, in main, by one engineer supported by a team, is not a proposal that would have been accepted before agents. It would have needed a whole team and a year or two, it would have competed against every feature that team could have shipped instead, and it would have lost (and, honestly, should have lost). Agents moved the price to where the project became tenable.</bq> <bq>The port itself is complete: the runtime’s production implementation is 100% Rust, and the temporary internal TypeScript/N-API seam is gone. There is still plenty of work we desire to do, though: further improving the build system and developer inner loop, cleaning up translated structures, redesigning around Rust’s ownership and concurrency models, and pursuing further performance wins.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://andrewlock.net/understanding-device-bound-session-credentials/" source="" author="Andrew Lock">Understanding Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC)</a> <bq>Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) aim to provide a defence against this weakness, by allowing a server to verify that the authentication cookie is being used on the same machine it was issued to. This makes session hijacking harder, as you can no longer simply extract the cookie and use it elsewhere; such a cookie would not be valid.</bq> <bq>[...] as an application creator, should you support DBSC? In general, I think the answer is "probably", because it doesn't really have an obvious downside, and it protects your users from session hijacking.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.meziantou.net/querying-roslyn-syntax-trees-with-xpath.htm" author="Gerard Barré" source="Meziantou's blog">Querying Roslyn syntax trees with XPath</a> <bq>Exposing the C# syntax tree through an <c>XPathNavigator</c> turns "write an analyzer" into "write one line in a text file". The analyzer only provides navigation over the tree; the query language, the axes, and the functions come from <c>System.Xml.XPath</c>. The same idea applies to any tree you already have in memory. If your users need to describe a subset of that tree, implementing XPathNavigator is often cheaper than designing a query language, and much cheaper than adding a new option every time someone needs a slightly different selection.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/meetings/2026/LDM-2026-08-05.md" source="GitHub">C# Language Design Meeting for August 5th, 2026</a> <bq>This work primarily benefits the safety and trustworthiness of low-level code rather than the day-to-day experience of most C# developers. Today, some code that conceptually ought to be safe cannot be expressed in a way that lets the language verify it as safe. The current <c>unsafe</c> work addresses part of that problem, but a fuller answer will require better models for lifetimes and ownership. We expect lifetime and ownership design to need a long lead time, as the current <c>unsafe</c> work did. We should begin serious design exploration during this cycle and consider how language features and supporting APIs would be designed together. This is forward-looking design work, not a commitment to ship an ownership or lifetime feature in C# 16.</bq> <bq>Closed <c>enums</c> complete the exhaustiveness-oriented family introduced by unions and closed type hierarchies. Although smaller than those features, they fill an important gap: enum values are frequently added over time, and developers want the compiler to identify all the places that must be updated when the set of valid values changes.</bq> <bq>Generic type inference currently applies primarily to method calls. We want to investigate applying it to constructor calls and type patterns as well. This would reduce the need for factory methods whose only purpose is to obtain method type inference, and it would improve the symmetry between constructing a generic value and consuming it in a pattern.</bq> <bq>Our initial focus should be on improvements that do not add syntax. Partial type inference, where some type arguments are written and others are explicitly left for inference, remains a recurring request. However, better inference from targets, constraints, and union relationships may eliminate many of its motivating scenarios. We want to see how far those improvements take us before adding a new partial-inference syntax.</bq> <bq>We revisited the longstanding gap between switch statements and switch expressions. Existing proposals have explored both enhanced switch statement forms and return expressions. The arrival of unions and broader exhaustiveness checking gives this area renewed relevance: C# still lacks a statement-oriented form that provides exhaustiveness checking while allowing control flow such as an early <c>return</c>.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/1wnpztj/c_keeps_circling_around_traits_i_think_were/" source="Reddit" author="mistertom2u">C# keeps circling around traits. I think we're eventually going to get something close.</a> <bq>Go has implicit interface satisfaction. Rust has traits. TypeScript went hard on structural typing. C# obviously has different compatibility/runtime constraints, but it would be pretty damn cool if it eventually got a trait-like abstraction that still felt like C#.</bq> <bq>The part I keep coming back to is this: the type itself doesn't have to know about the abstraction when it is declared. That idea keeps resurfacing.</bq> This post discusses a bunch of related proposals from as far back as 2017 that seem to dovetail with the introduction of discriminated unions. The idea is for "shapes" or "type definitions" to become more prominent in C#, so that you are able to imbue existing types with static constraints and extensions that serve your code and that the compiler can enforce, even if the original types don't have those constraints or extensions. The author included the following links, <ul><a href="https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/164" source="GitHub" date="February 2017" author="MadsTorgersen">Exploration: Shapes and Extensions</a> <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/9319" source="GitHub" date="April 2025" author="agocke">[Proposal]: Extension interface implementation #9319</a> <a href="https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/8879" source="GitHub" date="December 2024" author="MadsTorgersen">[Proposal]: Type Classes (aka Concepts, Structural Generic Constraints) #8879</a> </ul> <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvements-in-net-11/" author="Stephen Toub" source="Microsoft Dev Blogs">Performance Improvements in .NET 11</a> Fully half of the 230+ pages is about JIT optimizations (many, though not all, of which are presumably also valid for AOT builds). <bq>The sections that follow are full of real improvements. A bounds check removed, an allocation that no longer happens, a lock that isn’t taken, a loop that runs in fewer cycles than it did a year ago, a comparison folded to a constant here, a redundant check hoisted out of a loop there, a couple of instructions fused into one, a syscall sidestepped, an array copy handed off to SIMD, and on and on. That’s how real performance work goes, accumulating gain after gain, each compounding on the last, until the whole thing is measurably, provably [faster].</bq> <h level="3">Escape analysis</h> <bq>But for other cases where it can’t prove this with static analysis, the JIT turns to profile-guided optimization (PGO). PGO sounds fancy, but it’s conceptually simple. With “tiered compilation”, when a method is first invoked, it can be compiled “just in time” with few-to-no optimizations (this is referred to as Tier 0). The JIT can include in this compilation additional probes (think “printf debugging”) that let it track a bunch of interesting information about the nature of the code, recording what actually happens when it runs: which branches are taken, what are the concrete types that show up at virtual call sites or cast attempts, and so on. If the method is invoked enough or loops enough times, the runtime can ask the JIT to produce a new optimized version (referred to as Tier 1). That compilation can then factor in all of the learnings gathered as part of that profiling.<code>// Approximately what the JIT generates if (animal?.GetType() == typeof(Dog)) { ((Dog)animal).Speak(); // devirtualized, inlinable } else { animal.Speak(); // original virtual call, hopefully rare }</code>This “guess and verify” pattern, called “guarded devirtualization” (GDV), accounts for many of the biggest throughput wins in real workloads. It’s applicable not only to virtual dispatch but also to interface dispatch [...] “Escape analysis” is the compiler technique that lets us ask whether this object ever “escapes” the current method. If an object reference to a newly allocated object provably doesn’t escape, then the JIT can more efficiently allocate it. It needn’t store it on the GC heap, because nothing could possibly need to reference that object again, so it can instead allocate the object on the stack, making both allocation and cleanup essentially free. Stack allocation is even faster than heap bump-pointer allocation; it’s just decrementing the stack pointer, which is typically already in a register. And more importantly it means zero GC impact, because the stack frame is freed atomically on function return.</bq> <h level="3">Runtime async</h> <bq>That’s quite a lot of generated code for three lines of C#. The compiler has to make decisions before the program runs about the state-machine layout, which values might need to survive, how many awaiter fields are required, and how all the suspension points fit into one MoveNext dispatch. The runtime and JIT have optimized the resulting pattern heavily over the years, including combining the task, state machine, continuation, and ExecutionContext into a single allocation, but by the time the JIT sees the IL, the transformation has already happened, leaving it with a very complicated system to try to optimize. .NET 11 introduces a new way to split that responsibility, a reimplementation of the async/await infrastructure referred to as “runtime async”. Rather than the C# compiler being responsible for the transformation, the JIT is. The C# compiler emits a much smaller suspension-aware IL contract for each eligible async method and marks the method as async in metadata. The runtime and JIT then do the work that depends on runtime knowledge: creating the externally visible Task or ValueTask, recognizing direct async calls, deciding which values are actually alive at each suspension point, laying out continuation objects, and generating the control flow that suspends and resumes the method. Effectively, the transformation moves from C# to the runtime, where more information is available to optimize it.</bq> <bq>Runtime async doesn’t make every asynchronous operation allocation-free, though. Rather, it gives the JIT enough information to avoid materializing some task objects that existed only to carry a result from one async method directly into the next. If a consumer stores the task in a collection, manually hooks up a continuation, or otherwise observes the task as an object, that object is still needed. The optimization is about not paying for boundaries that aren’t observably boundaries.</bq> <bq>Workloads with many layers of small async methods can benefit the most from runtime async, because those layers are exactly where intermediate tasks and state machines often accumulate. Shared framework code, for example, is full of this pattern: a public method validates arguments and awaits a private helper, which awaits a transport helper, which awaits an operating-system operation. Application services similarly compose authentication, retry, logging, serialization, and I/O helpers. Runtime async can make the source-level decomposition cheaper without asking the developer to flatten the code into one giant method in order to avoid “implementation detail” costs.</bq> <bq>The work is also not only about direct performance improvements but also about improvements to diagnostics and performance tooling that help you to make better use of async in your own code. When an async method suspends, its physical thread stack unwinds. That method’s continuation might later run on a different thread whose physical stack begins in the thread pool, with the methods that led to the original await nowhere to be found. A sampling CPU profiler can see where the processor is spending time, but without additional information, it can’t reliably connect those traces back through the logical async call chain, making it hard to answer questions about what async call paths were actually costing. Profiling tools like the async profiler in Visual Studio have traditionally reconstructed those chains from events emitted by Task‘s infrastructure, but async-heavy applications can generate enormous volumes of those very chatty events. The resulting overhead easily perturbs the workload being measured, making it all but unusable in production.</bq> <h level="3">Unsafe</h> <bq>Much of this work wasn’t motivated by contrived benchmarks containing nothing but array indexing as I’m prone to use in these posts. Rather, many of the improvements stemmed from an ongoing audit of unsafe code throughout the .NET libraries, part of a broader effort to improve memory safety in .NET. .NET and C# are memory safe, but as with other memory safe languages like Rust, it provides escape hatches that enable turning off the guardrails provided by the compiler and runtime. This effort is about reducing where and when developers feel compelled to use those escape hatches, since every occurrence is an opportunity for increased risk. Unsafe code was often introduced years earlier to manually avoid bounds checks, typically by walking a buffer with pointers, byrefs, or Unsafe.Add. Sometimes the audit found that the unsafe code was no longer needed and could simply be removed. Sometimes a “safe” rewrite (meaning not using unsafe and friends) was already just as fast or even faster. And sometimes the rewrite exposed an optimization the JIT was missing, in which case the answer was to improve the JIT and then rewrite the library code to use normal, bounds-checked C#. [...] If you own code that has hand-written pointer or Unsafe-based loops whose purpose is to avoid bounds checks, it’s worth rewriting them with safe, bounds-checked C# and measuring again on .NET 11. Chances are, you’ll find the gap at this point is either non-existent or small enough that it’s not worth the increased maintenance and risk for managing the safety yourself.</bq> <bq>The end goal is to make unsafe regions smaller, make their assumptions visible through the call graph, and make them easier for reviewers and tools to find. Pairing that with a JIT that makes idiomatic safe code fast removes a lot of the historical pressure to use unsafe code in the first place.</bq> <h level="3">Branching</h> <bq>Branches offer another opportunity for simplification. Modern processors work on several instructions at different stages at the same time. When a processor encounters a conditional branch, it predicts which path will be taken so that it can continue fetching and executing instructions speculatively. A correct prediction hides much of the branch’s cost. A misprediction throws away that speculative work, redirects instruction fetch to the correct path, and refills the processor’s execution pipeline. That can make the predictability of a branch as important as the work in either branch.</bq> <h level="3">Preserving vector representation</h> <bq>Once the intrinsic operation has been recognized, the backend still needs to keep it in a useful vector form while assigning registers and selecting instructions. Vector values are structs, and the JIT will often apply “struct promotion,” tracking a struct’s fields as independent locals so that each can be optimized separately. That’s useful for ordinary structs, but counterproductive when a value is meant to remain in a vector or mask register: splitting it can introduce extra moves and obscure what should be a single whole-value store, particularly after inlining introduces more local stores. dotnet/runtime#128013 consistently marks SIMD and mask stores as intrinsic-related across platforms, including 32-bit x86 and x64 mask stores, so those locals remain intact. dotnet/runtime#129563 extends that principle to user-defined structs that are bitcast to SIMD types. This trades away struct promotion for those locals, but enables the JIT to preserve their vector representation.</bq> <h level="3">Compiler cost models</h> <bq>A compiler’s cost model assigns estimates to operations and instructions, such as their execution cost or throughput and their impact on code size, and uses those estimates to choose between otherwise legal transformations or instruction sequences. Wrong estimates can still produce semantically correct code, just slower or larger code. With dotnet/runtime#127048, which updates the JIT’s xarch floating-point and SIMD cost model, the JIT’s cost model reflects modern instruction throughput and encoded size, replacing old x87 assumptions and a flat cost for every intrinsic. That leads to better decisions about common-subexpression elimination and loop unrolling, particularly for 512-bit operations.</bq> <h level="3">Write barriers and the GC</h> <bq>Write barriers are only one part of the interaction between generated code and the garbage collector. During a compacting collection, the GC needs to plan where surviving objects will move and then update references to them. To do that efficiently, it records their addresses, sorts those addresses, and groups adjacent survivors into regions called “plugs.” With enough live objects, sorting these mark lists becomes a meaningful part of the collection. Recent x86/x64 runtimes use a vectorized vxsort implementation for sufficiently large lists. In .NET 11, dotnet/runtime#110692 from @a74nh extends that support to Arm64.</bq> <h level="3">CoreCLR runtime replaces Mono on mobile</h> <bq>Starting with .NET 11, .NET MAUI moved to CoreCLR for Android, iOS, and Mac Catalyst, the last .NET MAUI platforms that had still been using Mono. This is much more than swapping one execution engine for another. Those apps now use the same runtime as ASP.NET Core, cloud services, and desktop .NET, with the same JIT, garbage collector, diagnostics infrastructure, performance improvements, and bug fixes. It also brings CoreCLR’s tiered compilation, ReadyToRun, and profile-guided optimization to mobile, while providing a common foundation for NativeAOT.</bq> <h level="3">Unnecessary fences on ARM</h> <bq>[...] removing unnecessary volatile annotations from a wide range of library fields whose correctness already comes from locks, Interlocked, or one-time initialization. On x86/x64 hardware, which already provides a strong memory model, those annotations generally don’t result in extra instructions, though they can still constrain compiler optimizations. Arm, however, permits more reordering, so the JIT often needs to emit memory fences to provide volatile‘s guarantees. Removing the annotations where they’re redundant therefore can end up removing unnecessary fences from Arm’s generated code.</bq> <h level="3">BigInt rewrite</h> <bq>[...] rewrote significant portions of BigInteger‘s implementation, changing its limbs (the fixed-size pieces stored in its backing array) from uint to nuint (UIntPtr). That makes no effective difference on a 32-bit machine. On a 64-bit machine, however, each limb grows from 32 to 64 bits; since most arithmetic on a 64-bit value on a 64-bit platform costs no more than the corresponding 32-bit operation, each step can therefore process twice as many bits in the same number of cycles.</bq> This is only the beginning of the improvements for <c>BigInts</c>. The improvements were applied for larger floating-point formats, like <c>Decimals</c> as well. Basically, all of the big number-crunching involved in processing models, ML, cryptography, etc. are all significantly and noticeably faster and more memory-efficient in .NET 11. <h level="3">Miscellaneous</h> <ul>Ditto for UT8 support: it's handled and compiled much more efficiently than previous .NET versions, with the low-level performance improvements showing up everywhere. Ditto for <c>RegEx</c>, which, while previously having gotten a lot of love with source-generation and improvements to the engine, still had performance-improvement potential in .NET 11. For example, the results compiled RegExes have been brought in line with the previously better-optimized source-generated C# RegEx code. Many of the improvements in searching are to improve mapping to instruction primitives on the ARM architecture, especially ARM64. There were some relatively minor Linq and IO improvements, as well as some more impactful networking improvements, especially on Linux, where the mapping to platform APIs and primitives has been improved. JSON-writing was significantly improved in some cases.</ul> <hr> <a href="https://crumbles.blog/posts/2026-09-17-immutable-mutable.html" author="Daphne Preston-Kendal" source="crumbles.blog">FAQ: Why isn’t mutable a subtype of immutable, or vice versa?</a> <bq>When we take the <c>car</c> or <c>cdr</c> of an immutable pair, we can depend on a contract which says the result will always be the same every time we call it on that pair. This contract means that we can, for example, safely calculate the hash value of the pair based on its contents, store it away in another data structure, and know that it won’t be different when we recalculate it later to try to retrieve it. (In other words, immutability is a prerequisite for hash consing!)</bq> <bq>many languages offer one or another mechanism for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_polymorphism" source="Wikipedia">ad hoc polymorphism</a>, where the same operations can be defined on multiple types even if they don’t form a hierarchy.</bq> From the description, I thought that this might be the same thing as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system" source="Wikipedia">structural typing</a> but neither article mentions the other. <bq>This is still formally sound because the pair type class defines a new contract that says nothing about mutability. In a proper implementation of type classes, the type system will stop you trying to use the mutators in a method where the most you defined about the input type to your function is that they are some kind of pair, mutable or immutable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/vary-support/" source="Cloudflare Blog" author="Alex Krivit and Zaidoon Abd Al Hadi">We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary</a> <bq><c>Vary</c> can tell a cache which request fields may affect a response. It does not tell the cache what the response represents. For example, take an origin that serves content in only English, French, and German. A client might send:<code>Accept-Language: en-US, fr;q=0.8</code>While another client might request:<code>Accept-Language: fr;q=0.8, en-GB</code>Both requests prefer English here. The origin’s response may map both requests to exactly the same English response. But a cache comparing the raw values cannot safely assume they are equivalent. They have different orders and language tags (that the origin doesn’t differentiate). So the cache may store them as separate variants, even when their response bodies contain identical bytes. This is <c>Vary</c>’s central problem. Applications often produce a small, finite set of representations from an enormous set of possible request values. The origin understands that thousands of language preferences collapse into three supported languages, while a cache usually does not. This problem compounds when a response varies on multiple fields. Ten possible values across one field create ten variants. Ten values across three fields can create 1,000 combinations. Real headers can have far greater cardinality: <c>User-Agent</c> values are numerous, cookies can be unique to individual visitors, and preference headers can differ in ordering, formatting (spaces and tabs matter!), and quality values. The result is a cache that can be perfectly correct and almost permanently cold (an entry never reused). Identical responses can be scattered across entries that receive too little traffic to remain hot and in cache. They can consume capacity, evict one another, reduce cache hit ratios, and send more requests back to origin servers. Eviction can remove cold entries, but it cannot merge them just because the responses are identical.</bq> <bq>This places an important responsibility on the origin. Every cacheable response that can differ based on request fields must return the appropriate <c>Vary</c> header consistently, including errors and fallback responses. If one response omits it, Cloudflare could cache that response without the variance needed to keep it isolated.</bq> <bq>You can also configure the rule to keep only specified media types or languages in <c>Accept</c> and <c>Accept-Language</c>. Regional language tags such as <c>en-US</c> reduce to their base language, <c>en</c>, unless the full tag is configured. This lets you align normalization with the formats and languages your origin actually serves. To keep origin selection aligned with cache matching, Cloudflare forwards the normalized <c>Accept</c> and <c>Accept-Language</c> values to the origin. It also forwards normalized <c>Accept-Encoding</c> values when <c>Respect Strong ETags</c> is enabled. Other headers are normalized only for cache matching.</bq> <h id="design">Design</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu1jE41O_8o" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/qu1jE41O_8o" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="politizane" caption="Wealth Inequality in America (Updated 2026)"> <bq><pre>00:00 - Only looking at things with good browser support 00:25 - :target (with scroll-behavior: smooth) 01:55 - scroll snapping 03:25 - :user-valid and :user-invalid 06:45 - :focus-visible 07:50 - the lh unit 09:00 - field-sizing</pre></bq> <hr> <a href="https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1095425/2d9f411252325784/" source="LWN" author="Joe Brockmeier">Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop</a> <bq>People forget, he said, that the original Macintosh screen was "a whopping 342 pixels high". Naturally, windows overlapped a lot. Since then, "we just assumed that Windows have to overlap". But many people have "giant, giant screens", and the existing window-manager model does not work so well for those devices. "I can understand why people use tiled window systems and so forth, because this existing model just does not work very well."</bq> I still overlap windows a lot because I don't like super-gigantic screens or very wide screens and I'm quite fast with switching windows with a hotkey. <bq>After mentioning Claude, he paused to say he was only speaking about frontier models because everyone else is discussing them. "I have a lot of personal problems with the frontier models. They are ethical and environmental disasters. I am not very excited by them". He said he was excited by <a href="https://apertus-ai.org/">Apertus</a>, which is billed as a fully open, responsible model for sovereign AI created by the <a href="https://www.swiss-ai.org/">Swiss AI Initiative</a>. "I do think it's possible to talk about ethically trained small language models running locally, and you don't have to sell your soul to the devil."</bq> <bq>He thought it was really about working memory: "How do I manage my data in such a way that I can remember it across all of these things and actually use it." His perspective shifted to asking "what would we do to working memory to improve the desktop UX?"</bq> <a href="https://maccy.app/">Maccy</a> provides hundreds of slots for all types of data, syncing them across all of your devices. iOS doesn't support multiple entries in the clipboard. <bq>There is prior art in trying to create systems that help provide users with more context and working memory related to their data. He referenced <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/381854.381893">a paper</a> called "Lifestreams: a storage model for personal data". That paper made the case that desktop systems are "are ill-equipped to manage the electronic information and events of the typical computer user", and introduced the Lifestreams idea as a metaphor for dynamically organizing a user's computer workspace.</bq> Neat. I first wrote about this paper from 1996 in 2000: <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=68">Lifestreams</a>, <bq>Discussion of user-interface paradigms and logical conclusions. ‘Files’ and ‘Folders’ are obsolete. Computers should only deal with ‘things’, each of which have ‘properties’. These ‘things’ can be grouped by an number of properties, using a search or ‘query’. That’s it. He addresses the need for a view on your data that lets you see an email on the same footing as a file. It’s brought together is something called a ‘lifestream’, which is a date-ordered stream of data. Sub-streams are created by querying a stream and extracting a new stream with more specific properties.<fn></bq> <bq>Jenson said that he is concerned that people see the failure of those projects as proof that the ideas were wrong. He argued that is not the case, "I would say that it is the hardware and systems at the time let the vision down. I think it's time to rethink these projects" in light of newer hardware and better systems.</bq> <bq>The idea was that a widescreen-first desktop would emphasize information in the middle of the screen, and then use an Exposé-like tiling model to arrange the rest of the desktop's windows. This would make the windows that were not in use easier to interact with, he thought, and be a better model than virtual desktops for managing lots of windows. "I'm not against virtual desktops. Virtual desktops are used by very organized and intelligent people. I know my audience." However, he said, most people can't deal with virtual desktops.</bq> I've tried them and didn't end up liking them any better than just using a hotkey for window-switching. The only time I use multiple desktops is when I have multiple screens. <hr> <ft>Huh. It's weird how my writing style hasn't changed that much in a quarter-century. Is that a good or a bad thing?</ft> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://neal.fun/perfect-circle/" author="" source="Neal.Fun">Draw a Perfect Circle</a> <img src="{att_link}96.4_perfect_circle.webp" href="{att_link}96.4_perfect_circle.webp" align="none" caption="96.4% perfect circle" scale="75%"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCMRgvyTm08" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/UCMRgvyTm08" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Guardian News" caption="Six-year-old breaks women's world Rubik's Cube record"> Little fingers are so nimble. Practices 2-3 hours per day. Her parents mix them up according to an algorithm. Her parents hand her mixed-up cubes; she hands them back solved. Hours. My God, the mind-numbing boredom of it.