Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Economy & Finance
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Trump’s Iranian Nightmare by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“America’s newest quagmire in the Middle East is like its old quagmires in the Middle East. It is based, as were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on a gross misreading of our adversaries, a catastrophic failure to understand the limits of imperial power and no discernible strategy. It swells the profits of the war industry, wasting billions of public funds, alienates our allies and erodes the global power and prestige of the United States.”

“Iran is the clear winner of Operation Epic Fury. Trump is the clear loser. The dilemma is that Trump’s penchant for inventing his own reality means he is unlikely to acknowledge his blunder and negotiate a way out of the debacle he created.”

“Fuel shortages and supply disruptions are crippling countries in Asia, with Thailand facing panic buying and rationing at some petrol stations. Vietnam and South Korea are scrambling to secure alternative crude and fuel supplies. Japan, which relies on the Persian Gulf for roughly 95 percent of its crude oil imports, has had to dip twice into its strategic reserves since the war started in February.”

“The rise in price of liquefied petroleum means cooking fuel prices have increased by about seven percent for domestic use in India, but have skyrocketed by around 76 percent in the commercial sector. This has resulted in production cuts and job losses in the garment and textile sector in India, as well as in Bangladesh and Cambodia.”

“Before leaving for China, Trump claimed: “We have Iran very much under control… We’re either going to make a deal or they’re going to be decimated. One way or the other, we win.” The rants are pathetic and unhinged. But they are also ominous.”

“The management of the conflict is far beyond the capabilities of the buffoons within the Trump administration. They prefer global misery and carnage to defeat. By the time they face the inevitable, they will have left mounds of corpses in their wake. The tragedy is not that the empire is dying. The tragedy is that the empire is bringing so many innocents down with it.”

The Self-Indulgent, Dead-End Politics of AOC’s Partisan Liberalism by Glenn Greenwald (Substack)

“[…] in stark contrast to the aforementioned animal activists, who maintain a genuine devotion to achieving their stated goals and thus creating a positive impact, AOC Liberals are extremely picky, selective, and deeply judgmental of those with whom they would be willing to work to create majoritarian, issue-by-issue coalitions that would succeed. Their own political branding and sense of moral superiority are infinitely more important than stopping policies that they insist so deeply offend their elevated sense of right and wrong.”

“[…] she would never deign to work with someone like Greene because, under AOC’s verdict, she’s “a bigot and an antisemite.””

Her answer could have been better, saying that it is difficult to trust that someone like that wouldn’t try to subvert the process, leading to a net loss of effort, to wasting energy on vigilance. That’s a concern, but you still need their vote. As long as the thing you end up getting has the shape of the thing you’d carefully considered wanting, then you should at least consider it, rather than burn bridges (especially if you’re blatantly doing so to build your brand).

“Behold the noble principles that define AOC and her supporters: they would rather let Americans be forced to pay for Israel’s military and wars, and let Palestinians be bombed, and have Iran destroyed, if the alternative is to talk to or build majorities with gauche and morally inferior “bigots.” What matters — truly matters — is getting to prance around at events filled solely with like-minded, already converted people and be cheered for your elevated tastes and feel good about how untarnished you are, all while calling everyone a racist and a misogynist and a bigot and an antisemite so you signal to the world that you are not any of those things. That, for them, is the real goal of politics.”

“The left-wing flank of the Democratic Party has spent almost three years now insisting that the worst moral crime is the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza. Yet, when a Republican who wants to cut off all funding to Israel is seated next to a Democrat who wants to force Americans to pay for Israeli weapons (like AOC), these liberal frauds somehow side with the one who wants to fund Israel. (That AOC finally changed her mind just last month and now fully embraces MTG’s position only serves to further highlight the absurdity of all this.)”

“AOC made a point of announcing that she would never work with MTG on issues relating to Israel and war, despite the fact (or, more so, because of it) that MTG has displayed more courage and principle on that issue than AOC ever would. AOC lied to protect her party’s leaders as they financed Israel’s war, whereas MTG loudly denounced her party’s leaders as they continue to do so, being forced out of Congress as a result (the same risk taken by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)).”

It’s a little unclear why she left Congress, to be honest. You can be a staunch opponent of Israel’s murder machine and still be a grifter who retires a week after the lifelong government pension for former Congresspeople kicks in.

“Sure, working with them might increase both the number and type of people willing to work for the causes to which they claim to be so devoted. But it would also dilute their specialness, their brand of virtuousness and personal superiority, their addiction to denouncing everyone as racist and bigoted, so that they can feel that they are not those things.”

Kind of a broadside against certain people at the WSWS, as well.

Why the US is at War with Iran and Why the War Might Pause but Won’t End by Brian Berletic (Land Destroyer)

“A similar war of aggression by the US against Russia through Ukraine is also quickly expanding into a war directly against Russian energy production, storage, and export infrastructure through the use of drones that − while attributed to Ukraine − the New York Times has revealed is actually overseen by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US military.”

“From the late-February start of hostilities to the recent ceasefire agreement, energy exports from the entire region to China dropped from approximately 52% of China’s total imported needs to around 30%, according to Reuters.”

“Just as the US had previously done to Europe through its instigation of war with Russia in Ukraine, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the implementation of sanctions on all other energy imports from Russia − and now including the striking of Russian energy production, storage, export facilities and actual tankers carrying Russian energy exports − all of this forcing Europe into energy dependence on US exports − the US is now pursuing a similar policy targeting China and the rest of Asia by deliberately disrupting access to Middle East energy exports.”

“By the early 2030s, the US is expected to double its LNG export capacity, making it capable of meeting the demands of key Asian proxies including South Korea and Japan as well as the island province of Taiwan − but again − only if cheaper and more reliable alternatives remain off the market.”

“[…] a recent US Senate hearing has made it clear nations like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines will be shaped into military industrial outposts of US power in the region, helping minimize the “tyranny of distance” the US is faced with when provoking war with China on the other side of the planet from where the US is actually located.”

“The purpose of maintaining a global network of proxies from Europe to the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific is specifically to have other nations pay all the costs for US foreign policy, allowing the US to assume any and all benefits solely for itself.”

“[…] the prospects of accessing affordable and reliable energy from the Middle East for China and the rest of Asia are steadily fading.”

Gaza then and now

This picture appeared in several of my feeds this week (“went viral” I guess) but it is manipulated. The upper photo was color-enhanced and the lower photo was generated. There is no need to do this, though, as the reality is just as harrowing. Using AI-generated “photos” undermines the intent because it encourages those of bad faith to deny the actual reality that they depict.

The article Fact Check: FAKE ‘After Image’ Does NOT Match Actual Destruction For “Gaza in 2023 and 2026” Comparison by Sarah Thompson (Lead Stories) seems quite credible—the purpose of the site seems to be to non-ideologically check the veracity of evidence in claims in diverse media—and provides additional images, shown below.

The upper image is accurate. The following screen capture from a video at the time portrays the same subject.

Aman Palestin video on YouTube

The next image depicts the same neighborhood but vertically, from above.

Airbus imagery on Google Earth

As you can see, it’s gone. It’s all gone. Only dust and rubble remains. The generated image above is not real but it depicts reality. It’s more like a painting than a photograph.

If the top-down view isn’t as impactful, then the following capture from a video shows the view from the ground.

Sheikh Ajlin neighbourhood in western Gaza City in the northern

The following interview describes the bleak situation in Gaza and is well worth your time.

The History of National Resistance in Palestine (w/ Ramzy Baroud) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

Gaza has been under siege for decades. Even in the pictures above, where things were “going well,” Gazans were nearly completely dependent on food and supplies allowed in by their Israeli occupiers. Their harbor has been blocked for decades. Their water supplies have been pathetically small for decades—even before October 3, 97% of the water in Gaza was not safe to drink. Now, everything has been flattened. There are no buildings, not shelter other than ragged tents.

Palestinians live atop the rubble, scraping together a meager existence. They refuse to leave because they refuse to submit to occupation and genocide. They are not stupid; they have shared a sense of justice that cannot be extinguished by killing individuals.

What you can do is to erase them from people’s minds. Delegitimize their claim to humanity. Declaim them and anyone who recognizes their humanity as antisemites, as inhuman monsters who deserve their own genocide, who bring genocide on themselves with their intransigent dedication to mindless violence.

I visited the Swiss national museum this weekend to see two new exhibits: one on Swiss press photos and one on war. In the first exhibit, there were two photos with the word Palestine in them.

The captions for a photo of pro-Palestine protestors being sprayed with high-pressure hoses

The caption reads, in English,

“On October 11, an unauthorized demonstration against the Gaza war in Bern with around 8,000 participants escalates. Street clashes with police erupt, shop windows are smashed, and a restaurant catches fire. There are injuries on both sides, and the material damages run into the millions. The pro-Palestinian unrest is also fertile ground for antisemitic sentiments.”

This is the only thing that the western media cares about. This is the only thing that western societies officially care about. This is how the decades-long occupation and now nearly three-year-long genocidal intensification of that occupation is depicted. The protestors “escalate”, “smash”, and “clash”. They engender “injuries” and “damages”. They are “antisemitic.”

Were there any press photos depicting the destruction that these people were protesting? Of course not. Even in the “war” exhibit, Palestine was mentioned only twice: I heard a snippet that had been included in a loop of news segments in a giant video display. It played for about ten seconds in a five-minute loop.

There was also a lone entry for “Palestine” in the wall of wars, which as at least honestly marked with “1948 –”. It was called the “Middle East conflict” and described as “War-related violence.” [3]

'War-related violence' in Palestine

There was another press photo of the GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), which is not in any way humanitarian, which is run by Israel and the U.S., and whose members were slaughtering Palestinians at utterly inadequate food-drops a year ago.

A Swiss press photo whose caption lends credence t…dea that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was real

It was captioned,

“On October 10, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas comes into effect in the Gaza Strip. A team of journalists is granted exclusive access to one of the food distribution centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The private foundation is controversial because it operates with little transparency, its aid supplies fall far short of meeting the need, and people have been shot at in the vicinity of the centers.”

Note the use of the passive voice in “people have been shot” when what they meant was “the U.S. and Israeli mercenaries employed by GHF to distribute food shot hundreds of starving people who’d approached to get the food supplies that they were ostensibly distributing.”

Note that the caption says that the GHF “operates with little transparency,” when the organizers of the exhibit know very well that it is very transparently run by the U.S. and Israel but what they meant to write was “the GHF is a sham but we all pretend that it is not because it serves our purposes.”

Note that it writes that “its aid supplies fall far short of meeting the need” as if that were not the entire point of it: they are starving people and the GHF is a fig leaf on that deliberate starvation, behind which the entire western media cheerfully hides itself as that would provide them actual moral cover.

It does not. It only provides them moral cover in the eyes of their unprincipled, unethical, and immoral peers, or in the eyes of the populations of their countries, well-trained by the propaganda spewed by the mainstream media, which, with one voice, wholly approves of the Palestinian genocide and considers even a slight word against it to be antisemitism.

And hence the mealy-mouthed formulations in the captions.

This is how you get the job done.

All Riot On The Northern Front by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Elmer says Hezbollah immediately jumped to fiber-optic drones (which evolved out of radar-jamming in Ukraine slowly). These things, as you can see, have a big ‘fishing-line’ spool of fiber-optic line that literally flies the drone by wire. Hezbollah has then strapped their standard anti-tank shell (what looks like a 93mm PG-7VL) which is comically large ordnance for a drone, I dunno how these things even fly, but they do.”

“Since the Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG) shells Hezb uses are not, in fact, rocket-propelled, all ‘Israeli’ defensive mechanisms are like what the hell? For example, you can sometimes see the defensive Trophy system on Merkava tanks turn around, but it doesn’t fire. If it fired at FPV drones it would also be firing at every flipping bird, which would be absurd. FPV Drones are too slow-moving for the air defenses ‘Israel’ has evolved. It’s like the ‘slow blade’ in Dune, where the advent of personal shields took them back to sword-fighting because anything fast-moving would be stopped.

“The only way to reliably intercept FPV drones is with dumb fishing wire net, which limits your freedom of movement and still has an entrance somewhere, or with smart, situation-aware soldiers using shotguns, which does not describe IOF home invaders and panty raiders. IOF soldiers still park their tanks with the hatches open, still do not cover their tanks with infantry, and hang out on the hood. And now I have seen them blown up in all three circumstances. They have learned nothing from Gaza, let alone from Ukraine.”

“[…] the materiel you see getting blown can get replaced—the ‘Israeli’ conscript colony has received more than 115,600 tons of military equipment in 403 airlifts and 10 sealifts since this Iran War alone—but the conscripts and contractors operating it can break permanently. Many of them have already been deployed for years and in addition to Hezbollah fighters—described as ghosts—they now have drone fears. ‘Israel’s’ will to fight has been broken in Lebanon before, and inshallah will be again.”

Anybody who has to cheat to win is a sucker by Gary Chambers Jr. (YouTube)

“When black men with courage, conviction, and righteousness show up, it triggers something in you. And you feel a way about it. So you try to limit us. You try to steal from us and you think that we don’t understand it. Every one of the black men we put up before you stand head and shoulders above every one of you on this committee and you know it. And it does something in you that makes you feel inferior. So then you come with these white-supremacist tactics because you have the numbers, but you don’t have the courage.

“Because if you were really visionary leaders, you’d run against these black men with fair maps and you get your asses whooped. Louisiana is 33% black. 33% black. We deserve, we have earned, we are due to congressional seats. Now, if you take them from us, just know there will be a day in this state when we organize and mobilize to take something from you. It’s coming.

“And when you lose your House seat because you decided to be Jeff’s boy, come on. When you lose your Senate seat because you decided to be Trump’s minion, remember today. Remember the people that came from your state that you looked in their faces, that you act like what they said didn’t matter to you, because something somebody said thousands of miles away—who don’t really care about any of you on this committee. Be honest, nobody in that conservative party in DC cares about any of you on this city committee other than the fact that you have the ability to take something away from black people. And if you were anything like what America should be, you would find some courage.”

Trump appears poised to restart the Iran war by Trita Parsi (Responsible Statecraft)

“Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.

“Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon. At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.

“This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures. Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use. The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.

“Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.

“Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.”

The Bust-Out Of ‘America’ by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“If you analyze ‘America’ politically, you’re making an error, unwittingly. ‘America’ is not a polity, people’s opinions have nothing to do with policy, it’s a business, pathologically. The war business is booming when bombs are flying and the healthcare business is making a killing when people are dying and the media business is talking money when they’re lying.

“Understanding ‘America’ through its politics is like trying to understand Coca-Cola through its advertising. Coke isn’t trying to make ‘moments’ or ‘memories’ or ‘open happiness’ or anything so humane, they’re a corporation, do I need to explain? In the same way, ‘America’ isn’t trying to deliver ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, are you insane? They’re all just lying in order to sell you something. Like Michael Corleone said, it’s not political, it’s strictly business.”

“If you understand colonialism as a business you can understand that it never ended, it just rebranded. The banner of White Empire went from Lisbon to Amsterdam to London to Washington, changing marketing terms from monarchy to democracy, but never changing the underlying business model. Why change when you’re making bank?”

“[…] the White mafia has ‘busted-out’ entire continents. They corrupt local compradors, debt trap entire nations, strip the resources, and then ‘light a match.’ They have done this to every country on Earth and now there’s nothing left to bust-out, so they’re cannibalizing the imperial periphery (Europe, the UAE) before descending on their own corpse.

“This is how you understand what’s happening today, with war everywhere, prices rising even in the imperial core, and yet the stock markets going gangbusters. Of course, stock markets are just the place where genteel gangs do their dirt in public. The seeming illogic of modern politics is simply an age-old mafia bust-out.”

“In genteel gangland, however, this isn’t called a bust-out. It’s called a leveraged buyout (LBO). It’s the same thing with more lawyers. In an LBO, private equity guys (White word for oligarchs) borrow against a company (which they don’t own yet) to buy the company. If this sounds like a con, it’s because it is, but it’s legal because the bank’s in on it. ‘America’ has legalized corruption.”

“When ‘Republicans’ said (in the 1980s) that they wanted to run government like a business, this is the business model. They have been busting out the world and their own country since then, stripping assets, bilking labor, and goosing the stock market to get paid now. Now, especially since Citizens United gave corporations ‘speech’ rights, they have completed a leveraged buyout of the US government, making the two-party system as redundant as Coke and Pepsi. And making analyzing their political positions as relevant as comparing marketing.”

“This seems cruel if you take it personally and insane if you take it politically, but remember. It’s nothing personal. It’s strictly business.”

“It’s really not that complicated if you stop believing the marketing and follow the money. If you ignore the politics and look at what colonialism always was. A business, built on bones.”

“We are now at the stage in Goodfellas where they light a match to the restaurant and drive away. We are witnessing a last orgy of insider trading and profiting on controlled volatility while the strategic reserve of oil is emptied and even the home economy is hollowed out [from] within. The peripheries of Empire are getting busted-out first but make no mistake, the whole thing is going bust. This is, inshallah, the end of it all. There’s no more out to bust, and no more leverage to be bought.

“People may be like ‘this is bad for America!’ or ‘this is bad for Americans’ but this misses the point entirely. What do y’all have to do anything? You’re like the customers or workers of a company being bust-out by the Mafia, irrelevant.”

In the Wake of Iran War, African Nations Struggle to Cope with Rising Fuel Costs (Drop Site News)

“Some countries are implementing emergency measures: Madagascar declared a national state of energy emergency across the entire country on April 7 to address the country’s supply crisis. Despite being an oil producer, on March 25 South Sudan implemented power rationing in the capital, because it lacks refining capacity. A few days later Egypt ordered restaurants, cafes, and stores closed by 9 p.m. to cut electricity use.”

“Rising prices have doubled aid transport costs in Somalia and delayed shipments of nutrition supplies and medicines. Before the war petrol was at $0.65 per liter but by the end of March had more than doubled to $1.50. “The rise in price of fuel has led to the price of food to also rise tremendously. The fishing fleets in Mogadishu are docked, unable to afford the diesel, causing a secondary protein crisis.” said Mogadishu councilor Abubaker Ali.”

Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz by Jeremy Hsu (Ars Technica)

“[…] the greatest threat to subsea cable infrastructure in the Strait of Hormuz may simply come from delays in any necessary cable repairs in the region. Such jobs require specialized ships to find the damaged area and lower grappling hooks to lift up the cable for inspection and repair, according to BBC News. That repair process can require days or sometimes weeks, which would leave the ship vulnerable to Iranian missiles, drones, or fast boats that have continued to attack commercial shipping in and around the strait.

““Operators face a choice: pay protection fees and accept Iranian licensing over Middle East Gulf seabed activity, or accept that future faults may go unrepaired indefinitely,” said Windward, a maritime intelligence company, in a blog post. “A single transoceanic cable system costs between $300 million and $1 billion to deploy. The expected value of an Iranian protection fee, from Tehran’s perspective, is structured to sit well below that.””

Roaming Charges: Peanuts From Heaven by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Graham Platner, who actually fought in two post-911 wars, has a somewhat different take on Trump’s Iran War:”

“I want to shame the hell out of these people. I fought in these stupid wars. I spent the bulk of my 20s and early 30s in the infantry, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I’m not JD Vance. I didn’t go sit in an air-conditioned and fucking typing copy all day. I was a machine-gunner in the Marine Corps. I was a long-range surveillance team leader and squad leader in the United States Army. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. I know what it looks like when American high explosives interact with fucking children. And it’s the most awful thing you’ll ever see. I want to be in the Senate to make sure that when even people in my party think that sending America’s sons and daughters off to fight for stupid reasons, when they think that’s a good idea, I want to be able to go up to them and tell them that they are fucking assholes. By the time this thing goes to air, it is quite possible that we are going to start to realize that war isn’t a fucking game and that the United States military has gotten itself embroiled in a conflict that it’s not in control of, that might be escalating in ways that we can’t really comprehend. I am terrified. And it’s not the people who started this war who will be the one’s that pay the price.”

I can’t disagree with any of this.

“Thomas Massie, during his concession speech to the Trump-approved, AIPAC-sponsored former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein: “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv.””

Can’t disagree with that either.

“Mayor Zohran Mamdani:”

“Ronald Reagan famously said, “The 9 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.‘” I disagree. Nine more terrifying words are actually, “I worked all day, and can’t feed my family.””

Still agreeing over here.

“According to an investigation by Yahoo Finance, Donald Trump made 3,642 securities trades during the first quarter of 2026, averaging nearly 58 transactions for every U.S. trading day or about nine trades every hour in the day or around one trade every seven minutes while the markets were open. Trump made 94 different trades of “Magnificent Seven” stocks (64 buy orders and 30 stock sales) in the first quarter, valued at between $50 million and $70 million.

“[…]

“Aaron Fritschner: “Trump traded up to ~$700 million in stock in Q1 of 2026. The 535 Members of Congress made ~$635 million in trades in 2025. Trump bought and sold more stock in 3 months than all of Congress put together did in a year.””

Nothing to see here. He’s the people’s president. He gets the working class. That’s why they love him.

Economy & Finance

Who Is “Out of Touch?” by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

• Have you taken a flight recently? The majority of Americans did not take one flight in the past year.
• Did you read more than two books last year? You’re in the minority.
• Have a college degree? Also a minority.
• Do you eat out? The most common place that Americans eat out is McDonald’s, and the most popular sit-down restaurant brand is Olive Garden. Is that where you go? Or do you go somewhere fancy, like, you know, TGI Friday’s? What—fancier than that? Wow.
• Are you a white male? Seven in ten Americans are not.

“Etcetera. I can barely imagine what qualities Marc Andreesen believes that he has that qualify him for being In Touch, but I guarantee that they are all very stupid.”

“I submit to you that the one characteristic that unites the lives of all Normal People is this: They are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. They have to work for money in order to pay bills in order to survive. They are at all times subject to the cruel depredations of fate. Even if they have savings, the stability of their lives could be snatched away by a single disaster. If they rest for too long, they will lose their ability to support themselves and their families. They are all, to varying degrees, in the position of having to do things that they would not choose to do, because those things are necessary in order to earn money and live and navigate their position in society.”

“If you do not have to work to live then, yes, you are out of touch with the organizing principle of the average person’s life. You may feel sympathy for them, or spiritual and political affinity, but your life is of a fundamentally different type than theirs. Congratulations! You’re out of touch. Enjoy it. If you don’t like it, give all of your money away. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.”

Making sense of Trump’s unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Financial economies “suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive.” Keeping billionaires in megayachts comes at the expense of “research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare.” Countries that financialize lag behind countries where the economy is based on making things, not extracting or financing things.

“Generations of both imperial looting and domestic investment made America the richest country on earth. That wealth cushioned America’s transition to oligarchy: for a while, the country could both “finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood” and continue to invest in itself. But while you can double the wealth of a billionaire at the expense of a town or two, doubling the wealth of a centibillionaire requires the destruction of whole regions.

“As America looted itself into irrelevance, China – a very different kind of autocracy – invested in domestic capacity and domestic consumption.”

There follows of standard equivocation on China that seems to be required whenever a westerner talks about China.

“China’s hardly a well-run place: like any autocracy, it functions according to the whims of extremely fallible officials, which produces real-estate bubbles and other crises of production (to say nothing of the demographic crisis of the One Child policy) and necessitates steadily increasing oppression, from online surveillance to concentration camps in Xinjiang.”

Yeesh. Look, some of that might be kind of halfway accurate but it feels more like we’re increasingly incapable of acknowledging what China is today.

Like, how is “having real-estate bubbles” a distinguishing factor to note? Do you know how China got rid of its real-estate bubble? It’s still working on it, but it declared officially that “housing is not an asset” and started dismantling the speculative infrastructure that had benefitted oligarchs over people seeking housing. I have no idea whether that’s going to work, or how long it’s going to take, but it certainly seems preferable to letting the bubble burst and letting the oligarchs keep all of their money, as the west did.

What does Doctorow even mean when he calls the “One Child policy” a demographic crisis. The policy left deep scars on China’s psyche, sure, but demographically it was a success, no? How do you feed a nation that has an ever-increasing number of people when no-one will help you get to the point that you can feed them because you’re communist and refuse to submit to capitalism?

And from someone who complains about online surveillance all the time, it’s odd that he would mention China’s doing it in a way that allows readers to think that that country has a version uniquely worse than the western flavor.

And, finally, of course, we must unquestioningly mention the “concentration camps in Xinjiang” as night follows day, almost as rote as a land acknowledgement before a valedictory address at a liberal-arts university.

“[…] bad news for a software industry that “shifted its entire value proposition from ‘we make tools that help you make or save money’ to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.””

Trump’s Failed China Trip Shows His Trade War Backfired, And US Corporations Are Desperate by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)

“Reuters concluded, “U.S. President Donald Trump left China on [15 May] with no major breakthroughs on trade or tangible help from Beijing to end the Iran war”.

“It was easy to predict this outcome. The US government has spent nearly a decade now waging a trade and tech war, aiming to prevent China from developing, seeking to isolate the country.

“Why Trump thought he could suddenly play nice, and get China to make concessions to benefit the US at its expense, is a mystery.

“Moreover, the US started a war of aggression against Iran, which has disrupted the global economy and caused the largest oil crisis in history, but Trump now expects China to bail him out. It is clearly absurd.

“In other words, after years of punching China in the face, Trump hopes Beijing will help to save the US economy. It is obvious why China was not interested.”

The Bust-Out Of ‘America’ by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“If you analyze ‘America’ politically, you’re making an error, unwittingly. ‘America’ is not a polity, people’s opinions have nothing to do with policy, it’s a business, pathologically. The war business is booming when bombs are flying and the healthcare business is making a killing when people are dying and the media business is talking money when they’re lying.

“Understanding ‘America’ through its politics is like trying to understand Coca-Cola through its advertising. Coke isn’t trying to make ‘moments’ or ‘memories’ or ‘open happiness’ or anything so humane, they’re a corporation, do I need to explain? In the same way, ‘America’ isn’t trying to deliver ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, are you insane? They’re all just lying in order to sell you something. Like Michael Corleone said, it’s not political, it’s strictly business.”

“If you understand colonialism as a business you can understand that it never ended, it just rebranded. The banner of White Empire went from Lisbon to Amsterdam to London to Washington, changing marketing terms from monarchy to democracy, but never changing the underlying business model. Why change when you’re making bank?”

“[…] the White mafia has ‘busted-out’ entire continents. They corrupt local compradors, debt trap entire nations, strip the resources, and then ‘light a match.’ They have done this to every country on Earth and now there’s nothing left to bust-out, so they’re cannibalizing the imperial periphery (Europe, the UAE) before descending on their own corpse.

“This is how you understand what’s happening today, with war everywhere, prices rising even in the imperial core, and yet the stock markets going gangbusters. Of course, stock markets are just the place where genteel gangs do their dirt in public. The seeming illogic of modern politics is simply an age-old mafia bust-out.”

“In genteel gangland, however, this isn’t called a bust-out. It’s called a leveraged buyout (LBO). It’s the same thing with more lawyers. In an LBO, private equity guys (White word for oligarchs) borrow against a company (which they don’t own yet) to buy the company. If this sounds like a con, it’s because it is, but it’s legal because the bank’s in on it. ‘America’ has legalized corruption.”

“When ‘Republicans’ said (in the 1980s) that they wanted to run government like a business, this is the business model. They have been busting out the world and their own country since then, stripping assets, bilking labor, and goosing the stock market to get paid now. Now, especially since Citizens United gave corporations ‘speech’ rights, they have completed a leveraged buyout of the US government, making the two-party system as redundant as Coke and Pepsi. And making analyzing their political positions as relevant as comparing marketing.”

“This seems cruel if you take it personally and insane if you take it politically, but remember. It’s nothing personal. It’s strictly business.”

“It’s really not that complicated if you stop believing the marketing and follow the money. If you ignore the politics and look at what colonialism always was. A business, built on bones.”

“We are now at the stage in Goodfellas where they light a match to the restaurant and drive away. We are witnessing a last orgy of insider trading and profiting on controlled volatility while the strategic reserve of oil is emptied and even the home economy is hollowed out [from] within. The peripheries of Empire are getting busted-out first but make no mistake, the whole thing is going bust. This is, inshallah, the end of it all. There’s no more out to bust, and no more leverage to be bought.

“People may be like ‘this is bad for America!’ or ‘this is bad for Americans’ but this misses the point entirely. What do y’all have to do anything? You’re like the customers or workers of a company being bust-out by the Mafia, irrelevant.”

S13 E12: Trump’s Ballroom & Structured Settlements: 5/17/26 by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (YouTube)

The U.S.A. is a criminal enterprise where the worst people flourish by fraud.

Anthropic’s “Profitability” Swindle by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“Let me speak directly and with more empathy than usual: if you want Anthropic to win, you should be just as skeptical of these numbers as I am. You should want to smash my face in the tarmac with the most crystal-clear, impossible-to-argue with numbers, bereft of asterisks or discounts from suppliers or obfuscated accounting metrics.

“You should want better from your heroes. If you truly think this company is amazing, unstoppable, and leading the tech industry to a glorious era of innovation, there shouldn’t be this many questions, and the metrics shouldn’t be this murky.

“Every other time when a company has played this level of silly, weird bullshit has led to disaster — for example, WeWork claimed to be profitable since the second month of its operations, and repeated claims of profitability throughout its existence, and it turned out that it was only “profitable” if you removed things like “some of the costs of doing business.”

“I get why you’re so defensive, and I get why you want this to work. A lot of you are very excited about generative AI, and being excited about it has given you a tremendous community of equally-excited people. I get that you like these tools.

“And I need you to know these companies are laughing at you.

“Anthropic timed this leak to focus on a specific quarter where it artificially suppressed costs, and gave you the flimsiest proof imaginable, specifically-crafted for you to share it as a triumph and spread the idea that “AI labs are actually profitable,” when their core economics haven’t changed. Costs increase linearly with revenue, and will continue to do so in perpetuity.

“I genuinely can’t wait for both OpenAI and Anthropic to file their S-1s.”

Environment & Climate Change

Why Walking to the World Cup Final Is Illegal by Evan Edinger (YouTube)

“Across the entire Super Fund program, legal fees and cleanup fees are roughly equal. Meaning that for every dollar that’s actually spent cleaning up the polluted waterway, another dollar is spent between lawyers arguing about who should have to pay for it. And if you want to better understand how America operates as a country, I do not think you can find a better example. Why put any time and money into improving everyone’s quality of life when you can just spend 50 years arguing about who should pay for it instead?

“But now New Jersey’s in a bit of a pickle. How’s New Jersey supposed to support the huge surge of people coming for the World Cup if it hasn’t actually done anything to support the huge surge of people coming for the World Cup? Not just in terms of basic safety, but oh my god, financially. It’s going to cost the state a lot of money to run all those extra train and bus services they had 8 years to prepare for. They can’t just make public transport in the city free for the World Cup guests like London did. That would cost too much money. It’s not like this is the most densely populated region of the richest country in the world.

“And a ticket from Penn Station in New York City to MetLife Stadium only costs $12.90 on a normal day. But what if to solve the problem that they themselves created, they simply increase the price of public transport to the World Cup? Nothing crazy, just a casual 12 times increase to $150 for a train ticket and $80 for a bus.

“But don’t worry, according to New Jersey Transit President and CEO Chris Kori, he says this isn’t price gouging. We’re literally trying to recoup costs.

“Okay, so they’re just trying to recoup cost. They can’t build anything that would cost money. They can’t clean the most contaminated waterway in the country. How would they recoup their costs? The plan’s simple. Don’t do anything and then point fingers at others for why nothing was done. I think you’ll find it’s quite genius really.”

“But when you raise a society on the double think that they have the freedom to criticize the government while simultaneously training them that any criticism is unpatriotic, you don’t get democracy. You get a cult unable to perceive its own cognitive dissonance.”

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. But planting trees is expensive. So, I guess it makes more sense to chop your trees down and charge $150 for your guests to stand in the sun. But don’t worry, you can also charge them for sunscreen.

“I stand corrected. Since filming this, it no longer costs $150 to stand in the sun. New Jersey Transit has reduced the cost of a ticket to $105 now, thanks to sponsors and other sources. Thank God to our corporate overlords for the tiny morsels that we receive.”

Colorado River Basin Users are Cooked by nostoneunturned0479 (Reddit)

“At deadpool for Mead, it means no further water delivery for California, Arizona and Mexico. It means the loss of Hydroelectric power from Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, Lake Havasu, the loss of water to cool the Nuclear Reactors at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant near Phoenix. Technically speaking, Palo Verde uses treated wastewater from Phoenix area to cool the reactors, but with water not being assured, Phoenix area customers will have to cut consumption, which will result in less waste water to use.

“Can you imagine the repercussions of the loss of 2,080 megawatts from Hoover Dam, 240 megawatts from Davis Dam (Lake Mohave), 120 megawatts from Parker Dam (Lake Havasu), 4,000 to 4,200 megawatts from Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant? A cumulative loss of approximately 6500 megawatts, means about 6.5 million households will go without power, in the hottest desert areas of the US, where temperatures regularly are in excess of 100 degrees for 60-90 days of the year.

“A few years ago I came on this sub begging for awareness and action, and had several people question the direness of the situation. The day has finally come.”

Roaming Charges: Peanuts From Heaven by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“March was a previously unfathomable 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the 20th-century average for the month. The last 12 months in the U.S. were the hottest ever recorded. And Super El Niño is still coming…”

“Stormwatch’s Colin McCarthy: “Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology. That’s ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025.””

“The water level in at least 13 of India’s largest reservoirs has fallen below 50% of capacity. River flows are below normal and are expected to fall further with the developing super El Niño, placing the entire subcontinent’s drinking water, irrigation and hydropower systems at extreme risk.”

Medicine & Disease

What science knows about Andes hantavirus and why governments ignore it by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“The disease then abruptly shifts into the cardiopulmonary phase, characterized by a rapid onset of coughing, severe shortness of breath and profound hypoxia. The pathophysiology behind this collapse is rooted in the viral infection of the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels. This cellular invasion triggers a massive immune system overreaction heavily mediated by infiltrating T lymphocytes. The resulting immunologic assault causes a catastrophic increase in pulmonary capillary permeability. As plasma rapidly leaks from the microvasculature, the alveoli flood with high-protein fluid, leading to massive noncardiogenic pulmonary edema and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Hemodynamically, the patient experiences a severe drop in blood pressure driven initially by distributive fluid loss into the lungs, which is quickly complicated by profound myocardial depression, ultimately culminating in fatal cardiogenic shock.”

“Currently, there are no approved vaccines and no specific antiviral medications available to treat the infection. Treatment remains entirely supportive, relying heavily on lung-protective mechanical ventilation, vasopressors to maintain blood pressure, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in cases of refractory shock. Consequently, the case fatality rate for the Andes virus is extraordinarily high, hovering around 38 to 40 percent in published series, with some severe outbreaks recording mortality rates exceeding 50 percent.”

“The researchers concluded that person-to-person transmission of the Andes virus was a reality. The epidemiologic data indicated that close contact during the prodromal phase or early cardiopulmonary phase is likely required for the virus to successfully jump between human hosts. However, the papers also identified critical known unknowns that persist today. The exact route of transmission—whether through respiratory droplets, salivary transfer or other bodily fluids—remains unconfirmed. Furthermore, the minimum infectious dose required to transmit the pathogen and the precise role of an infected patient’s viral load in driving transmission remain dangerously undercharacterized.”

“The Andes virus efficiently sheds from the oral and respiratory surfaces of patients precisely when they appear to be suffering from only a mild illness. In densely packed social environments like a ship dining room or a crowded social gathering, prolonged close contact is not an anomaly but the default condition—transforming enclosed spaces into ideal environments for superspreading events.”

“The median incubation time is approximately 18 days after human-to-human contact, but clinical reports document a range from 7 to 39 days. This extended timeline poses a nightmare for contact tracing […]”

“It is imperative to draw a sharp boundary between established evidence and scientific speculation. There is currently no proof that the virus has mutated to become inherently more contagious. However, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Because capitalist governments have deliberately defunded critical ecological surveillance programs and terminated pandemic prevention research, our understanding of the Andes virus genetic diversity currently circulating within wild rodent reservoirs is dangerously incomplete.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

“Maitreya Corso“ by Hinternet Editorial Board (The Hinternet)

“Maitreya Corso, I am therefore ready to venture, is a true heteronym, in the Pessoan sense, of Maya Hawke — Maya, namely, insofar as she has become at least dimly aware of her true bodhisattva-being, riding along on the immanent plane, for now, doing the things that other humans do, feeling the things they feel, but now confidently expressing it all in words and sounds that do not, strictly speaking, quite come from here.”

Rhythm and Reason by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

The article discusses several albums in the genre of what is often unfairly called “Easy Listening” or, perhaps less disparagingly, “Smooth Jazz”. The following album cover stood out because it was pretty risqué for 1958. Actually, it was wildly risqué for 1958.

Sea of Dreams by Nelson Riddle featuring Diane Webber

The album’s Wikipedia page even notes that the lady on the album cover “may have been” the absolutely striking Diane Webber (Wikipedia), who was trained as a ballerina, then became a chorus girl and was even photographed by Russ Meyer for Playboy magazine.

In the 1960a, she apparently chafed against the frowning and iron-fisted megrims of the deeply conservative U.S. culture—thank goodness that’s all changed by now—and was involved in the nudist movement,

“In the mid to late 1960s, as a part of the counter-culture movement in the United States, Webber became involved with nudism and appeared in numerous nudist publications advocating the lifestyle, such as Naked and Together: The Wonderful Webbers (Library Thing) by June Lange (1967). In 1965, she traveled to Sioux City to give evidence at the request of a District Attorney’s Office in a court trial involving the sending of allegedly obscene nudist publications into the State of Iowa. However, when taking the witness stand, instead of proving the prosecution’s case, she gave a spirited defense of the principles of the naked lifestyle.”

Also,

“Her iconic status among Playboy models is referenced in Gay Talese’s non-fiction book Thy Neighbor’s Wife (Wikipedia) (1980). Talese had published an extensive article in the August 1975 issue of Esquire, in which Webber is considered an object of fantasy as well as an actual person. Two nude photos of her appear in the article, and one is on the cover.”

Laurie Anderson: Tiny Desk Concert by NPR Music (YouTube)

My first encounter with Laurie Anderson was on their cover of her 1984 song Excellent Birds on Peter Gabriel’s album So. I didn’t hear much else until her album Heart of a Dog in 2015, which is spoken-word and absolutely amazing. I listen to it only all at once because that’s the only way you can listen to it. Her music is amazing. Avant-garde indeed.

I saw in the comments that someone wrote that they listened all the way through, even though “this isn’t [their] genre,” and that they’re happy for the people who enjoyed it. Do yourself a favor: evolve until this is your genre. The music is beautiful, haunting, inspiring. There’s really nothing else like it.

I can’t imagine what breakfast was like at her house with late husband Lou Reed, with their voices rumbling over coffee.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

In “Mutual Analysis” with Wallace Shawn’s Moth Days by George Prochnik (The Paris Review)

“Characters in Shawn’s later works often spend little or no time speaking to one another, instead directing their remarks to the onlookers. They talk in terms that suggest they are presenting not just their story, but also their case—shifting abruptly between emotional registers: one minute confessional and penitential, the next self-righteous and defiant. Shawn has talked about putting audience members in a position to adjudicate the scenes they’re watching, yet he also frequently implicates them in the unfolding moral dilemma.”

“The Fever, an expansive one-man show from the nineties, whose speaker is overcome by visions of foreign suffering entangled with American interests. This contrapuntal double bill featured Shawn himself performing the latter twice weekly.”

“The drama is effectively a conversion story, from solipsism to Marxism. The narrator discovers Das Kapital and begins to comprehend “commodity fetishism,” along with the invisible labor and bloodshed that went into his bourgeois wrapping. Like Moth Days, as Dizzia put it to me, The Fever concerns a confrontation with what it means to have chosen “to believe you are the life you live in your head, without any sense of responsibility for the life you live in the physical world.” Ultimately, the education that the narrator undergoes destroys his pleasure in the cosmopolitan comforts he had been raised to expect.”

“The Fever, Shawn told me, was an attempt to write something absolutely truthful to what he himself had undergone: a stark confrontation with the fact that his own comforts were inextricable from the suffering of others. The land he owned, as the protagonist reflects, had been allocated not “by chance, not by fate,” but had been “pieced together one by one, by thieves, by killers . . . until the beautiful Christmas morning we woke up, and our proud parents showed us the gorgeous, shining, blood-soaked fields which now were ours.””

“Initially, he performed it at parties in the apartments of friends and acquaintances, sometimes without the guests’ foreknowledge and to occasional outrage. “I don’t think I had the slightest consciousness of the arrogance and presumption involved in asking people to listen to me that way,” Shawn said. “I was just so upset, so concerned with getting people to pay attention.””

““My political opinions fly out across the world and determine the course of political events,” Shawn continues. “What I say to you about my neighbor’s child affects what you feel about the nurse who sits by the side of your friend in the hospital room, and what you say about the nurse affects what your friend’s sister thinks about the government of China.””

Perhaps in the eighties, but no longer. Such minor influences are nowadays quickly drowned in a torrent of counterfactual slop.

“He goes on to describe meeting a young woman at a dinner party who tells him that she sometimes likes to go out with gangsters. “She describes in detail the techniques they use in getting other people to do what they want—bribery, violence. I’m shocked and repelled by the stories she tells. A few months later I run into her again at another party and I hear more stories, and this time I don’t feel shocked. I’m no longer so aware of the sufferings of those whom the gangsters confront. I’m more impressed by the high style and shrewdness of the gangsters themselves.” By their third encounter, he’s become a “connoisseur of gangster techniques” and finds her stories comic. “And so every day,” Shawn writes, we confront the “numberless insidious intellectual ploys by which the principle of immorality makes a plausible case for itself.””

“Shawn acknowledges the paradox of a form of determinism that doesn’t preclude an individual’s responsibility to help cultivate a more just society. “I don’t have the brain that could possibly defend what I believe,” he told me, “which is that other people are determined by the forces working on them, but I still have free will and could make better or worse choices.” And yet there is, throughout his body of work, a strain of hopefulness, however faint, that people might be shaken from their preconditioned paths, and that art, in enacting diverse dialogues of unconsciouses, might play a role in bringing that change about. “Wally’s plays,” Eisenberg told me, “make you aware that you are part of a system, that the way you live is a choice—that at least you should be conscious of this.””

“When I was in college, my mom sent me the script of The Fever. For me, it was my introduction to socialism, to the very personal morality of how we contribute to and benefit from all those structures. I would read it aloud in my dorm. I mean, that’s really the actual story: she sent me the book, and I would read Wally’s words out loud by myself.”

“[…] the truth is that at this moment, to show any sensitivity, delicacy, gentle feeling at all is to take a radical stand against the thugs who are running our country, because their ideology is so opposed to any sort of delicate feeling. Their aesthetic is even opposed to any sort of charm at all.”

“I haven’t resolved that in my own mind. I do say to myself every day, Well, these crimes that have been committed in order for me to have this lovely fruit salad are inexcusable, but shouldn’t I at least enjoy the fruit salad? I mean, if I don’t enjoy it, I’m just going to throw it out. And that won’t erase the crimes that have been committed in order to bring it to me.”

“You could say that people who are brought up in a privileged environment are stupider than people who are brought up in a more desperate environment. There’s an idiocy built into being a privileged person, and when you’re raised in that environment as a child and as a young person, you can’t see around it or through it.”

But you still instinctively know its there, protecting your privilege. Even an ideological attack is threatening, so it doesn’t take much to encourage a defense. Those who attack are jealous.

“When the protagonist says at the end, No one is reading John Donne anymore, that’s not a joke. It’s okay if you find it funny—a lot of Wally’s work invites that specific kind of laughter. But to me, that sentiment is tragic. What Wally’s saying is that if the world were a more just place, and we didn’t insist on poverty, more people might like Beethoven. More people might like John Donne. And what a better world that would be.”

“For a long time I went through a process of thinking, If only I could tell my audience what the world is like and show them their involvement in creating that world and sustaining that world—the world in which the oppressed are crushed in order to create a pleasant environment for the privileged—if I could show my audience how that world works and how they fit into it, they would be shocked and want to change the world. There was a time when it really hadn’t occurred to me that people in my audience might not be shocked. At any rate, I thought that they might be a little bit surprised by what they saw. I didn’t realize that they would accept it. But their conclusion after seeing that they were not nice guys was to accept the fact that they were not nice.”

Because the privilege is worth it. Because the bad thing is never, ever going to happen to them. Because they have no principle and in no way feel its lack.

“Art itself, I think, has become one-dimensional, rather superficial. So work that is actually stripped of artifice and is telling the truth, talking about the way things are, has become quite radical and in a way political.”

A Whole New World by Madeleine Adams (The Baffler)

“Sampling surveys assessing guest behavior was designed to increase revenue and ensure that Disneyland visitors were efficiently and smoothly conveyed through the park, reducing bottlenecks while keeping visitors there for as long as possible. These insights into bottlenecking were gained from the think tank’s studies of mess hall lines in military operations. Studies of television ratings and programming in the 1950s that streamlined the conveyance of a viewer from one show to the next informed the park’s layout.”

“[…] incidents at Disneyland this month involving dropped iPhones and Stanley cups (the huge sippy cups upon which Gen Z nervously suck when no watermelon strawberry cream choco-banana vapes are available) have stopped the rides for hours at a time because of the sensitivity of the park’s track sensors, forcing staff to ban these items from certain rides.”

Snarky but not inaccurate. Having a Stanley Cup send the signal that you’re willing to join cults, that you’ll overspend on whatever you think will gain you acceptance by worthless people that you don’t know.

“In truth, we all live in a Disneyfied world: Our smoking is automated by vape, our gambling is automated by betting apps, and our sex is automated by Tinder. Not even our vices, in the world that Disney made, are truly ours. And our taste is automated by algorithm. Liked Snow White? You’ll love Elsa! AI will embed automation even more deeply into pleasure.”

Well, not for all of us. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to escape the vortex.

The Rise of the Bullshittery (マリウス)

“The bullshitter is optimising for a different objective, usually appearing competent, appearing confident, or appearing to be the right kind of person to be in the room. And precisely because the bullshitter is indifferent to truth, Frankfurt argued, they are a greater threat to honest discourse than any liar.”

“The unspoken contract behind most professional life used to be as simple as learning how to do something, doing it well and gradually developing a reputation among people who could tell the difference. Over time, that reputation would then translate into work, money, and a degree of stability. It was a slow process, that sometimes was unfair, and that was never as meritocratic as its proponents claimed, but at least the basic shape of it made sense. Doing a good job was, on average, an advantage.”

“The algorithm, howeveer, does not particularly care whether you are good at your job, it only cares whether your message is engaging enough to spread fast and far.”

“The people who optimise for being correct are competing on an unfair playing field against people who optimise for being heard, and the result of this is a slow inversion of incentives.”

“The careful professional, who takes a week to think through a problem, who refuses to claim expertise they do not have, and who writes one in-depth researched post about a specific topic, gets out-competed and buried by the carnival barker who will claim any expertise that fits the trending topic, and who fires off five posts a day, each of them a slightly different rephrasing of the same content-free observation.”

“The algorithm does not know the difference between a thoughtful five-paragraph essay by somebody who has spent a decade in the field, and a five-paragraph essay generated in twenty seconds by an LLM, that’s probably sprinkled with emojis. From the algorithm’s perspective, both are content, and the one that triggers more engagement (usually the cheaper, more emotional, more bombastic one) wins.”

“[…] the marginal cost of producing convincing bullshit has collapsed. Large Language Models have done for grift what the shipping container did for global trade. They did not invent it, but they turned a manual process into an industrial one.”

“[…] anyone with a browser can generate a thousand words of confident, on-topic, syntactically clean text on any subject in under a minute. They can ship a book to Amazon, an article to a content farm, a thread to LinkedIn, and even a video to YouTube, all without ever having to know what they are talking about. The output passes the basic test of sounds about right, and that is, increasingly, the only test the distribution channels (and sadly the readers/viewers) apply.”

“This is the bullshittery in its mature form, which doesn’t consist of individual lies, or individual scams, but a steady-state ecosystem in which a large share of professional output is produced to be seen by other people producing output, and in which the connection to anything resembling a real customer, a real problem, or a real outcome has gone slack.”

“[…] a craftsperson of any kind who treats the work as the whole point of it, you are competing in a market that has been quietly tilted against you. The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you. They will get the speaking slots, they will get the promotions or, worse, the funding rounds. Heck, they might even end up on Forbes’ 30 under 30. All that you will get is the satisfaction of doing the job properly, which, don’t get me wrong, is a beautiful thing, but sadly it does not pay rent. I think a lot of the cynicism, exhaustion, and quiet bitterness that has crept into professional life over the last years is downstream of this problem. I don’t believe that people no longer want to do good work, but I think that doing good work has stopped paying the way it used to, while doing bad work loudly has started paying significantly better, so people notice and they adjust.”

“The slop-posting middle manager who cannot tell you what their team actually built last quarter is not necessarily a malicious fraud, but they may be a person whose job no longer rewards them for knowing, in a system that has trained them to perform and act instead. While this, if true, does not make the output less hollow, it certainly does change who the actual villain is.”

“[…] the people are mostly responding rationally to a system that pays for performance and ignores substance.”

“Keep doing the work, keep a principled and honest stance, keep saying I don’t know when you don’t, keep being embarrassable. Even though the market is bad at rewarding it right now, it will not continue to be forever. Hopefully.”

💪🏼

Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them! by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“Say what you will about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its 1936 constitution was a banger.

“It guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and protest. It extended equal rights to all citizens, regardless of race or gender. It shortened the working day to seven hours, affirmed “the right to rest and leisure”, and offered free education and free health care to all, including a “wide network of health resorts for the working people.””

“[…] rules don’t matter unless people act like they matter. Writing down laws does not endow them with physical force or psychic potency. We all know this. We all believe this.

“So why don’t we act like it?”

“You want your partner to realize that your preferences are not silly affectations that can be belittled, ignored, or disputed until they go away, that they are, in fact, load-bearing parts of your personality, and to reject them is to reject you. In return, you have to realize that some of your preferences are more malleable than you thought, that maybe they don’t all have to be foundational to your sense of self, and that some of them can be bent or jettisoned in the interests of coexistence.

“This is the work of love, and it takes a lifetime. You can’t speedrun it by filling out a spreadsheet or signing a contract.”

“Or maybe we misdiagnosed the problem in the first place. We assumed that the justice system was eager to hold bad cops accountable and that all it was missing was the necessary evidence. It turns out the justice system is actually rather ambivalent about holding bad cops accountable, and so it handles additional evidence as halfheartedly as it handled all of the evidence it already had. A camera can allow you to see, but it can’t make you look.”

“At some point, there has to be an Unwatched Watchman, someone who will do the right thing not because they are forced to, but because they want to. Instead of asking, “How we can get people to do the right thing,” we should ask, “How can we get people to want the right thing?””

We could try to have a society that didn’t brainwash people into wanting things that are societally and environmentally detrimental simply because those things happen to be lucrative for the elites.

“As Richard Feynman once put it:”

“But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.”

“I think Feynman was right. The most important lessons—in science, or in anything—are not learned. They are absorbed. And if you’re steeping in dirty water, you’ll absorb the wrong lessons, and then it’s almost impossible to get them back out again.”

you don’t know where anything comes from by Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd)

“Sure, you can walk to the local store and pay extra for that “fair trade” label, but you’re only really paying for your own peace of mind. Just like “American legal gold,” the certification probably covers up a litany of worker abuses you’d rather not know about. At the end of the day, you still have no clue where your fair trade alpaca wool cardigan actually came from.”

In fairness it’s also because you live in a nearly uniquely mendacious society.

You Can’t Defend a Policy By Getting Angry at the Suggestion That It’s Benefitted People by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The strangest thing about all of this is that the very same people who say that nothing has changed will, given a slightly different prompt twenty minutes later, tell you proudly about the change they helped bring about. You just have to be careful about how you angle the question. Ask “Did your diversity programs accomplish anything?” and you get a catalogue of accomplishments. Ask “Is it conceivable that someone else lost an opportunity because of those accomplishments?” and you get a flat, slightly offended denial that any change occurred at all. And you know in advance how the BlueSky posts go: “You’re saying ‘oh but what about the poor white men???’” Well, no, what I’m actually saying is that increasing the number of group X in a zero-sum system must necessarily decrease the number of group Not-X; that is inherent, inevitable.”

“I spoke at a college a few years ago and I gave the students this little challenge. I asked how many students in the audience supported race-based affirmative action at their school − that is, the program that gave underrepresented racial minorities an admissions boost to help them get into their quite exclusive college. Most raised their hands. I then asked if they agreed with the statement “There are Black students at this school who would not have gotten in without affirmative action,” none of them raised their hand. I asked if they thought that statement was offensive, and several murmured yes. But of course, if an affirmative action program does not get Black students into a school who would not have gotten in without affirmative action, then it does nothing; it can’t really be said to exist.”

Seaton: Grocery Rules by Chris Seaton (Simple Justice)

The person who wrote this is a sociopath raised in a sociopathic society. I did not get the impression that this post was written at all in jest.

“You will consult your list exactly three times while grocery shopping: once before you enter the store, once before checkout, and once when you get to your car. You will not pull out your list and randomly check off items while shopping. That’s moron behavior. You can memorize your list and check off items after you’ve shopped.”

Unless you’re old. Or forgetful. Or both.

“[…] you’re using the self-checkout. We’re not here to make small talk with the help. We’re buying food items and toiletries. That’s it. No need to chat with Gloria in the process.”

God forbid you associate with people in your community. Oh, you don’t have a community. You can’t even conceive of what it would be like to have a community. Or to like people.

“[…] you are permitted to visit the store’s fish monger and meat gentleman to discuss your purchases. They can’t give you what you want unless you ask, after all. Same goes for the deli section. All of these folks are hard workers and don’t want to participate in small talk with you, so put your order in and move on.”

Yeah, who would want any human interaction breaking up their eight-hour shift of hard work?

“Speaking of small talk, the grocery store is not for conversing with your neighbors. They have shit to do just like you and you’ll see them later. Say hello if you must. Definitely acknowledge their presence. Just don’t go into great detail about your life in the aisle where frozen breakfast items are stored. That’s weird.”

You should only interact with people online, as God intended.

Don’t acknowledge otherwise lonely people in public or give them any of your precious time.

The other day, I chatted for nearly an hour with an elderly neighbor who was walking by my garden. Did I have a ton of things lined up to do that day? Of course I did. I always do. Was it worth it? Sure! I learned things about her that I hadn’t know; and she had some company for a while. Win-win.

The author of this article seems like he’s proud to be an abrasive asshole who’s too good for anyone else. Or maybe he just lives in an abysmally shitty society where human interaction has stopped being rewarding in any way. But I doubt it.

“I now officially recommend people stop using the plastic grocery store bags if you can help it. They’ve been recycled so many times they are basically useless for holding anything now. Best to suck it up, invest in a couple of reusable grocery bags and go from there now. Hey, it’s got the added bonus of being environmentally friendly!”

Some people just can’t do something good for environment, except as a reluctantly accepted side-effect for another reason (like that the bags are no-good). It is wild watching someone write something like this: that being sustainable and not wasteful is something that you should only reluctantly accept, once all other options are exhausted.

It is utterly unsurprising that this author would couch this otherwise banal recommendation in these terms: he’s probably spent a dozen years denouncing “pussies” who couldn’t wrap their heads around the glory of plastic bags.

LLMs and the Library Card Fallacy by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The Library Card Fallacy is the mistaken notion that the purpose of education is to transfer information from teacher to student, and thus that schools and teachers are subject to disruption when any technology comes around that democratizes access to information. The trouble with this theory is that information has been very broadly available for a hundred years or more; depending on how exactly you want to define things, most Americans have enjoyed public library access since sometime between the 1890s and the 1920s. In the late 1990s, people started saying that Google was an existential threat to colleges and universities − you can just get the knowledge from Google! But most people already had access to an immense amount of knowledge before Google, in the form of their public library. You certainly can give yourself quite a self-education with a library card, but the plain reality is that almost no one actually does. Most people aren’t busy little self-starters who will diligently learn on their own. That’s why schools exist, because people need someone looking over their shoulder to force them to learn the material! And even then it often doesn’t work. Most people resist being educated, and the assumption otherwise is part of why policy discussions about education are so unhelpful.

“That’s why I call it the Library Card Fallacy: if it was true that education was about access to information, then anyone with a library card would become educated. But that’s just not what education is about. Education is about being challenged to learn things you don’t particularly want to and about creating an incentive structure that forces you to do so. The much-ballyhooed prediction that Google would create a nation of busy little autodidacts has clearly not come to pass. Of course it hasn’t! Most people aren’t Googling “explain the factors that led to World War I,” they’re Googling “Sydney Sweeney nude” or “Batman torrent” or “fantasy football rankings.” Some people love to learn; many, many, many more love to waste time with trivial bullshit. This is why, for example, the famous NBER study that distributed PCs randomly to homes showed no sign of educational gains for the kids whose families received one. Those kids weren’t reading Wikipedia entries! They were playing Farmville on those computers! Sometimes I wonder if these big-think types have ever met an actual child. And the same thing goes for our 18-25 year olds − how many of them, honestly, do you think are going to be sitting there having Gemini come up with a lesson plan to learn about something they find boring? That is not how human beings function.”

“[…] even when you filter the sample down to people who said they wanted to finish, almost four in five failed to do so. The technology was there; the lectures were free; access was granted. What was missing the sustained desire to grind through twelve weeks of problem sets when nothing external was forcing the issue.”

“This is what that Khan Academy’s Sal Khan, quoted in the piece excerpted in that image, just cannot seem to wrap his mind around: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. The sunny, supposedly egalitarian vision of a world full of people hungry to learn just doesn’t fit the reality. Look around you. How many people are spending their free time learning? And even among the people who are, how many of them are learning things that are genuinely boring and frustrating to learn, instead of what’s fun to learn?”

“The people predicting that ChatGPT will achieve in 2030 what Coursera couldn’t achieve in 2015 are wrong in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons. They’re confused about what education supplies; they think it’s a matter of access to information, which has been ample for some time, when it’s really a matter of institutional accountability, incentives, and personal inspiration. And they’ve ignored the demand side problem, which has always been the binding constraint. An LLM that can patiently walk you through the causes of the Thirty Year War doesn’t matter if almost nobody wants to be walked through the causes of the Thirty Year War. The marginal student who wouldn’t crack open a textbook at school won’t bother to type a smart LLM prompt, either… and in fact will happily type a prompt asking the bot to write the paper for him, which is the use case actually playing out in every classroom in America right now. Indeed, if LLMs prove anything, it’s how widespread the desire to cheat and cut corners really is; that’s not a condition conducive to autodidacticism. Belief in MOOCs presumed a belief in student willingness to work. The LLM era is, if anything, a regression, a technology sold as the engine of unprecedented self-education that in practice serves as a tool for unprecedented evasion of it. Anyone who’s spent five minutes around an actual teenager could have predicted this outcome.”

“[…] supply the external scaffolding that the vast majority of human beings require in order to learn anything they don’t already want to learn: deadlines, grades, embarrassment in front of peers, the looming presence of a teacher who will notice…. That scaffolding is the product and always has been. The lectures are incidental, the textbooks are incidental, and the personalized AI tutor will turn out to be incidental too. What is not incidental is the social and institutional pressure that compels an ordinary late adolescent to sit in a room and slog through the Federalist Papers when every fiber of their being would rather be doing anything else. Maybe we can’t make young people feel that pressure in a meaningful way anymore. Maybe. But that just means that our whole society is doomed anyway, and ChatGPT is not going to be able to fix it.”

“I confess that in the last couple of years I’ve quietly given up, and if LLMs have done one thing for me, it’s to force me to recognize just how little the average person gives a shit and just how willing the great mass of humanity is to slip into apathy and decline. But I do have hope for individuals, the exceptional and talented people who really give a shit. For them, the ones who need it least, the ability to learn is there. The library card has been in our collective wallet for a hundred years. The whole internet has been in our pockets for fifteen. So go learn something.”

The crux is that these tools provide people the ability to appear to provide value that they have either not provided or the verification of that value takes much more effort than its generation. This is a dangerous situation, ripe for scams, as the delay in verification will generally allow the scammer to scamper away with value in exchange and to be long gone before the scammed party notices what happened. The only recourse is for the scammed party to try to find their own victim. LLMs industrialize scams.

Technology & Engineering

How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer by Logan Kugler (Communications of the ACM)

““Modern Agile and DevOps approaches prioritize iteration, which can challenge architectural discipline,” Riley explained. “As a result, technical debt accumulates, and maintainability and system resiliency suffer.””

“The hardware itself is also reinforced. The system employs triple-modular-redundant memory that self-corrects single-bit errors on every read. Even the network interface cards utilize two lanes of traffic that are constantly compared, ensuring that a bit flip in the communication fabric results in a fail-silent event rather than a corrupted command. The network itself is triple redundant with three separate planes, and all network switches employ self-checking strategies.”

“Orion carries a completely independent Backup Flight Software (BFS) system. This is a prime example of dissimilar redundancy. It is implemented on different hardware, runs a different operating system, and utilizes independently developed, simplified flight software.

““It is intentionally different to ensure that a common mode software failure in the primary flight software isn’t also implemented incorrectly on the backup,” Uitenbroek said. The BFS runs constantly in the background and automatically takes over via source selection if the primary computers fail. If the system finds itself on the BFS, it can complete all dynamic portions of the mission to reach a quiescent phase, at which point the crew can attempt to recover the primary FCMs.”

“High-performance supercomputers are used for large-scale fault injection, emulating entire flight timelines where catastrophic hardware failures are introduced to see if the software can successfully ‘fail silent’ and recover.”

The Worlds Left To Conquer by Nikhil Suresh (Ludicity)

“I’m competing with people that don’t have functional literacy. And it’s not just incompetence at programming, it’s everything. The world has phoned it in, leaving us with no pressure to push for excellence. Last year, I was unable to put clients on both Evidence and Prefect because the former failed to attend a sales meeting booked through their website and the latter failed to book a meeting after the ex-real estate agent they hired failed to actually schedule a meeting following outreach also through their website. Our (excellent) accounting team is Hales Redden, who managed my co-founder Jordan Andersen’s old physiotherapy business… because the people I tried in Melbourne don’t check their sales inbox. Our lawyer is reader Iain McLaren4 because the firms I initially tried also don’t respond to their sales inbox. I cannot state this clearly enough – the bar is so low that it is hard to give people money. There are competent actors on the market, but at least in software, there are simply so few of them that you’re more likely to be allies than enemies.”

“It is unbelievable how much of a competitive advantage “Responds to emails from paying clients within 24 hours” is. The bar is subterranean.”

LLMs & AI

Companies under heavy AI psychosis by Mitchell Hashimoto (Twitter)

“I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its… the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

“It’s frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute “MTTR is all you need” mentality: “its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can’t do!” We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can’t yeet resilient systems entirely.

“The main issue is I don’t even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like “no no, it has full test coverage” or “bug reports are going down” or something, which just don’t paint the whole picture.

“We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.”

I don’t think AI will make your processes go faster by Frederick Van Brabant

“Software development is about translating a problem into a solution that a computer can understand and automatically resolve. Preferably in a secure and scalable way.

“To do something like that, you need a full overview of the problem. Either in feature or scope documents (if you’re going more waterfall), or with constant iteration with the domain experts (more agile).

“This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means.

“What does “send mail to user once sale is completed” mean? Ok, we can send a mail, but what should be in the mail? What if there was an issue in the sales process, do we still send an error mail? When is a sale completed?”

“I also think it’s an unfair comparison. Working like this requires a much deeper involvement of domain and product experts. This involvement would mean writing out every feature and bug fix down to the tiniest detail.

“This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like.

“If you were to give human developers the same amount of feature/scope documentation you would also see your productivity skyrocket.”

“One of the big lessons of The Goal is: ”bottlenecks should receive predictable, high-quality inputs”.

“I think that should be the first stop in process automation.”

The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon by Sean Goedecke

“When banks hiked interest rates, almost every tech company immediately laid off 5-20% of their engineers. It was just no longer profitable to keep a bloated engineering staff around to boost the stock price. Instead, companies had to actually make money3. However, that wasn’t a good public explanation for the layoffs, since it sounds weak to admit that you were paying hundreds of engineers to do unprofitable work. Fortunately, the end of ZIRP coincided roughly with the rise of ChatGPT, so tech companies were able to to blame their layoffs on the power of AI. Saying “with this transformative new technology, we’re able to deliver 10x the value with half the engineers” is a much stronger message, even though it doesn’t make much sense (if this is true, why not keep your engineers and deliver 20x the value?)”

OK, I’m with you so far. What else?

“Something like this dynamic has been happening to the just-say-no engineer. Tech companies are now more focused than at any time in the past two decades. They are not doing a bunch of random crap anymore; instead they’re desperately chasing new capabilities and features that can make money (mostly built on AI, for obvious reasons). This new environment is actively inimical to the just-say-no engineer. It’s as if a shark got pulled out of the deep ocean and dropped into a fast-flowing river: what was once a powerful apex predator is now disoriented and flailing.”

What the actual hell are you talking about? They’re not doing random crap anymore? They’re doing it more than ever, no? After having dump nearly $100B into the metaverse, Meta is now planning to sink in almost as much just this year into AI products, which are so vaguely defined that it can’t be interpreted as anything other than hey look at us, we’re doing AI too!

Oracle has pretty much doomed its business based on promises contingent on OpenAI delivery multiple hundreds of billions of revenue over the next couple of years. Also, they can’t get their data centers built that OpenAI would use to generate this wholly fantastical revenue. Microsoft and Google are loading up on expensive debt in order to throw money at AI, for which no real product has been defined—it’s just a technology and tools right now. And those tools are aimed at a very small market of people who are building things.

I just don’t understand how this guy can come to the conclusion that the focus has gotten better.

“This kind of engineer used to enjoy implicit (albeit distant) support from their management. If someone complained, they’d often get told “that engineer knows what they’re doing, if they said no, then I trust them”. Now that support is gone. The just-say-no engineer is now being criticized and actively overruled by their management. They’re being told to be more of a team player, to find a way to say yes, or are simply no longer being consulted (with the company’s blessing) on key decisions.”

Companies still need just-say-no engineers because they avoid complexity. They aren’t just-say-no engineers—they are surface-repercussions-and-medium-and-long-term-costs engineers. They point out dependencies to other systems, sometimes non-technical ones. If you’re not a pure cloud shop with sheep-like customers / users who will put up with anything and everything, when you just change everything in the software.

“LLMs are adding insult to injury for the just-say-no engineer. They’re forced to watch while other engineers merge AI-generated PRs that would previously have been blocked, and are told to use the tools themselves: to become the kind of engineer they’ve spent their entire careers battling against.

“Worse still, the AI tooling mostly works. It’s not (yet) causing any kind of catastrophe6. The code isn’t quite as clean, and it’s a bit less well-understood, but it’s good enough (particularly in a world where companies are trying lots of new things and abandoning the ones that fail).”

This has patently never been true and is almost certainly not true now. Companies have always taken half-baked prototypes to production because it feels cheaper short-term. This will only get worse with plausible-seeming AI-generated products.

If You’re Running Claude Code, PLEASE Run It in a Box by Christian Ekrem

“I want the common denominator for all my LLM usage to be that it frees up more time for me to write code and do engineering, not to outsource those very things.”

This has always been the way to integrate productivity improvements. A calculator frees you from doing long division. Formatting rules free you from fixing spacing. A spellchecker frees you from looking up how words are spelled. Etc. Etc. Etc. Mail-merge frees you from manually matching everything up.

The only difference in AI to past tools is not their power, actually. It’s their much higher variability in unreliability. What they produce cannot yet be trusted so you still have to wrap a verification process around it that becomes so heavyweight that it often feels like you should either skip it (YOLO) or it takes just as long as it took to do it yourself, and doing it yourself was more fun.

“What you need is to simply use Docker’s sbx (brew install docker/tap/sbx):”

sbx run claude

“The sbx docs cover the setup, but TL;DR by default this spawns a safe sandbox that can’t git push or read files outside of your project. What an extreme improvement right from the start that is!

“And get this: inside the sandbox, you can actually just let it run without that stupid halt asking for permission to cat a file or whatever. Claude Code auto-approves everything by default – full kamikaze mode with no confirmation prompts. On my host machine that would be terrifying (I mean, even without the dangerous flags it does crazy stuff!). Inside sbx it’s fine, because it has neither my git credentials or any path to anything outside my working directory. Worst case something goes sideways, I close it and git stash. Containable blast radius: √.

“In other words: Sandboxing makes it faster, not just safer.”

AI Is Technology, Not a Product by John Gruber (Daring Fireball)

“The idea that AI agents “will have already figured out where [we] need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request” strikes me as pure fever dream high-on-the-hype fantasy. I’m just going to step outside a restaurant when I’m done eating a meal and a ride-share is going to be there, waiting for me, without my having hailed it? Every time? And I’m going to find this pleasing, not creepy? And ride-share drivers are going to respond to all these requests, because the requests will never be wrong? And this is going to happen, somehow, without my carrying a phone with me? And this is going to happen in the next four years? I don’t think I’d want this even if it were plausible, but it doesn’t sound plausible.”

Roaming Charges: Peanuts From Heaven by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

Premium: What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? (Part 2) by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“[…] if data center construction slows to a crawl (as I’ve discussed is already the case) there’s a cascade of events that will occur:”

• OpenAI and Anthropic can’t expand much further than their current capacity.
• As they both make up 50% of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s revenue backlogs, hyperscalers will be unable to make the majority of the revenue they’ve promised their shareholders.
• The $178.5 billion in US data center debt from 2025 will go mostly unpaid, as a great deal of it is project financing that’s dependent on revenue from data centers that won’t be built and thus won’t be making any revenue.
• NVIDIA, which claims to have shipped over 3 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025, will have trouble selling its next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs, as nobody will have anywhere to put them.
• Alternatively, we’ll see write offs of billions of Blackwell GPUs that will now be considered obsolete.
• Banks that are already afraid of “choking” on data center debt will stop issuing it, because these investments will not be paying off.
• It will become very difficult for anybody to afford to buy more NVIDIA GPUs, because AI data centers — which cost around $44 million per megawatt — require massive amounts of upfront capital expenditures, making it unlikely-to-impossible that somebody has the money lying around.

“Even in an optimistic scenario, if data centers that started being built in 2024 don’t get finished until 2027 or 2028, that means that NVIDIA’s “latest” GPUs are perennially two or three years in the future.”

“I believe there are at least one million Blackwell GPUs sitting in warehouses waiting to be installed years into the future, which means that projects are going to launch in a year or two with potentially three-year-old GPUs, or said projects are going to have to either replace their orders with Vera Rubin or dump aged capacity onto a market saturated with Blackwell GPUs.”

“The same questionable attention to detail applies to venture capital, which has seen (much like private equity) its investment model slow to a crawl since 2018, with an average TVPI (total value paid in) slow to a horrifying 0.8 to 1.2x since 2018, meaning that for every dollar invested, you’re at best likely to get even money in return.

“These are the very same investors telling you that every AI company is worth perpetually-growing amounts of money, that everything will work out perfectly, that somebody will work out how to make AI profitable, and that AI is both here to stay and doing incredible things, even if they can’t really explain what those things might be.

“In reality, none of these people have any idea how to turn around these rotten economics. Data centers are massive money-losing operations that in the best case scenario take five years to make a single dollar of margin, and their customers are eternally-unprofitable AI startups that rely on a constant flow of venture capital dollars.”

Joe Rogan accidentally exposed AI in four words by Mo Bitar (YouTube)

“They’re producing so much code, they’re being so productive that they can’t sleep anymore because the opportunity cost is too high. If you’re sleeping, your agents are not churning. And Mark is like, people are now working 20-hour days voluntarily. They can’t get enough. And the truth is that people are working 20-hour days because they’re less productive. They’re less efficient than they were before.

“Because there’s this promise that one more prompt, one more prompt and it’ll solve the problem that you’ve been toiling on all day. It’s that slot-machine feeling where you’re one more lever-pull away from cracking it. And it keeps you in this trap. Like, you’re at 88% there and you feel like one more prompt and it’ll get you past the 98% point. But every additional prompt inches you up like 0.1. And it’s like, oh, 88.1, 88.2, 88.3.

“And the only way to win, the only way to play this game is to keep prompting 20 hours a day until you hit something that’s shippable and you hardly ever get there. And the problem right now—the dystopia—is coming from the managerial and executive class who are pressuring employees in the wrong direction. They’re pushing this tool on them and saying, “Use this. It’ll make you more productive.” Productive toward what? They haven’t figured that part out. They’re hoping the low-level engineers will figure out what business objectives to work on by themselves.”

“This message is propagated by the token salesman at the top, Sam and Dario. And it’s not that hard to understand. Follow the money. Who are anthropic and OpenAI selling to? They’re selling to enterprises. And what’s the message enterprises want to hear? They want to hear more productivity, more automation, less need for fickle human beings. That’s why the narrative is the way it is.”

“And you might think, okay, surely now that Sam and Dario are going to see all these people booing AI, that they’re going to change it up. They’re going to clean up their act. But the message is the sales pitch. You don’t change a sales pitch that’s working. Because if you suddenly change the pitch to say that AI is going to augment your employees rather than replace them, then what these companies hear is that you’re offering to double my cost because I was paying for the humans and now I have to pay for the AI, which is not cheap?

“So they stick with the enterprise human-replacement pitch because it’s the most profitable pitch in the history of capitalism. the next industrial revolution, the printing press, the cut engine, AI is going to put your organization at the forefront of innovation and the managers buy that up.

“You’ve been sold on this idea of intelligence when really it’s more of a compelling parody of intelligence. Is it useful? Yes. Is it insanely useful that hasn’t been demonstrated from the output? Your job as a manager is to tell your people what objectives to hit. The objective is not more tokens. The objective is not having your employees sit on the bottom of a token chute and feeding tokens straight into their mouth and having them do something that’s useful. Hopefully, the objective is a business objective that you have to figure out. What your employees use to get the job done hardly matters.

“Now, I personally think that the LLM species has been discovered. It’s like you walked onto this foreign planet and you’ve discovered this alien species and they are what they are. You don’t look at these aliens saying, “hm, if they’re this smart now, imagine how smart they’ll be in five years.” No, you’ve already discovered the species. This is just who they are. You can give them more tools. And that’s what’s happening now. AI isn’t getting smarter. It’s the same base LLM technology.

“Whenever you see Claw Design come out or whatever Anthropic is cooking up next, this is not the base LLM suddenly becoming smarter and rounding out towards general intelligence. This is tool use. It’s the same alien intelligence, same alien species learning to use different tools. And that’s powerful, but it also is what it is and not more than that.

“He says to get to the next breakthrough towards AGI, we have to make a couple more scientific discoveries. But the scientific discoveries you need to make happen on the order of like once a century. He’s like, we’re going to need two more events on the scale of the fire and the wheel. And we got that scheduled for Q3 of this year.

“It’s like, dude, what are you talking about? Like, imagine running any other business this way. Our revenue model assumes we discover a new continent. Two new continents, actually. We’re so close. The boats are so fast now. I think a lot of companies right now are not figuring out how to make more money because making more money is hard. And the layoffs are an acknowledgement of that.

“Jason Freed, the founder of Base Camp, has a pretty good analogy about this. He said bragging about how many tokens you produce is like putting your finger on the shutter button of a camera and bragging about how many pictures you’re taking. Like instead of taking one, two, or three good photos, you’re taking like tens of thousands of photos and you’re like, “Wow, I had a really good day today. I took 10,000 photos.” And now you have to review all those photos. You have to find the ones that meet your business objective.”

Microsoft reports are exposing AI’s real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees by Jake Angelo (Fortune)

“Microsoft has reportedly begun canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, according to The Verge, instead moving engineers toward using GitHub Copilot CLI. That comes just six months after the firm first opened up access to Claude Code, encouraging thousands of its developers, project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding.”

What a shitshow. Seriously, only absolutely over-rich companies like Microsoft can afford this level of stupidity-driven churn. Other companies will commit suicide trying to follow along.

“[…] with a token-based pricing system, the work gets more expensive with more use and better efficiency. Goldman Sachs recently forecasted that agentic AI could drive a 24-fold increase in token consumption by 2030 as consumers and enterprises adopt AI agents, reaching a staggering 120 quadrillion tokens per month. As businesses turn to AI agents to boost productivity, aggregate costs could rise sharply even if the price of each token falls.”

This is what counts as “sophisticated analysis”: scammer companies that have their customers trapped in a cult have figured out how to make more money off of their marks.

“Gartner predicted that cheaper tokens won’t translate to cheaper enterprise AI because agentic models require far more tokens per task than standard models, increased consumption can outpace falling unit costs, and AI providers won’t fully pass through lower costs to consumers. In turn, inference costs are likely to push higher.”

Like NO FUCKING SHIT. Jesus Christ, this is Fortune magazine reporting this utterly obvious tripe as if it were etched in two stone tablets clutched by Moses. FFS this is embarrassing. They’re barely even trying anymore. No-one knows anything and the biggest morons are in charge. And they continue to fail upward because everyone else is just a lemming. The bar is so low that a halfway-intelligent person would trip over it and these people manage to keep shimmying under it anyway.

God forbid they should ever even once mention that frontier models from DeepSeek or any of the other open-source providers are nearly as or just as good as the overpriced crap offered by the golden children of the U.S. stock market. Why would they? They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they will not go down with the ship when it sinks.

At the bottom of the article was this,

“In 2001, Fortune first convened the smartest people we know, bringing together CEOs and founders, builders and investors, thinkers and doers. Since then, Fortune Brainstorm Tech has been the place where bold ideas collide. From June 8–10, we will return to Aspen—where it all began—to mark 25 years of Brainstorm.”

Yeah, I’m sure it will be scintillating. The problem is that that what they’re saying might be true—that they really are “the smartest people we know”—but they are probably all still dumb and blinkered and slavishly devoted to a scam economy that happens to be working for them personally quite well, thank you very much. If they ever had to achieve anything without privilege, they’d be sunk, but that’s not where we are, so they’re not. They soar above the clouds, buoyed by the fumes rising from a giant pile of bullshit. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Programming

Canonicalise, Don’t Remember — Smart Constructors in Kotlin by Christian Ekrem

“The defensive re-merge is gone, because there’s nothing left to defend against: a Cart is, by construction, in canonical form. If you have one, its items are merged. The service doesn’t need to know that SKUs can collide any more than it needs to know how PostgreSQL stores rows.”

“The slogan, if I want one: make the canonical form the only form. (Scott Wlaschin’s framing for this kind of thing: the type is a promise. A shape that also commits to something. When the constructor doesn’t enforce that commitment, every caller ends up co-authoring the invariants with you […]”

“When I look at it through that lens, all the mergeBys and sortBys and trims and lowercase()s and distinct()s I’ve been sprinkling at call sites for years are the same shape of mistake. A list of items on a Cart means the merged list. A trimmed string means the trimmed string. If two values share a type but differ in things I’d happily call equivalences, the type is lying to me.”

“The invariant either lives in the type or it lives in an unwritten promise about your storage layer — and unwritten promises are how we got here in the first place.”

“The bigger move, if I were starting from scratch, is an inline value class:”

@JvmInline
value class MergedItems private constructor(val value: List<LineItem>) {
    companion object {
        operator fun invoke(items: List<LineItem>) =
            MergedItems(items.mergeBySku())
    }
}

“Now Cart accepts a MergedItems, not a List<LineItem>. The invariant lives in the type of the list, not in the type of the thing that happens to hold it. Any future type that wants a merged list gets one for free, and you can’t accidentally pass a raw list where a merged one is expected — the compiler won’t let you.”

That was my first thought.

“If your domain type can be constructed in an invalid state, every function that consumes it is forced to become a domain expert. Call that “reuse” if you like; I’d call it contagion.”

“Once the type carries the promise, the rest of the codebase gets to be stupid, and services stop being domain experts. Stupid services are the goal.”

“Whenever I find myself writing “remember to call X before you pass this around,” I’m sowing foot guns. Reminders don’t scale. Past-me forgets, future-me forgets harder, and the colleague joining three months from now never had a real shot at remembering in the first place. What scales is making the type carry the promise. The only door into a Cart runs the merge, and there is no other door. If a Cart exists in your program, its items are merged. Nobody has to remember anything.”

Learning Software Architecture by Alex Kladow (Matklad)

“[…] you can speedrun the four stages of grief to acceptance. Incentive structure is almost never what you want it to be, but, if you can’t change it, you can adapt to it. This is also true about most industrial software projects — there’s never a time to do a thing properly, you must do the best you can, given constraints.”

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary by Andrew Quinn

“The trick that makes FSTs so much more compact than tries on natural-language data is suffix sharing: a trie shares prefixes (so kadun and kaduille share their first three nodes) but stores every distinct suffix path independently, while a minimal acyclic deterministic finite-state automaton merges any two subtrees that are structurally identical. For a corpus where 100,000 words all end in the same dozen inflectional patterns, this is a license to print memory.”

“This is a recurring shape to my notes here that I keep bumping into qua “it’s okay to solve a problem twice”. One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about awk and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that this is a trap. You need to reinvent a couple of wheels to get to the edge of what we know about wheel-making, not a thousand wheels, and not zero; probably four or five is sufficient in most domains, maybe closer to twenty or thirty in the most epistemically rigorous and developed fields like mathematics or computer science. Each wheel you reinvent, and every directed question you ask along the way, will propel you faster to the true frontier than that same amount of time spend in idle study, or even five times that amount. This is at heart a Caplanian view: “If schools teach few job skills, transfer of learning is mostly wishful thinking, and the effect of education on intelligence is largely hollow, how on earth do human beings get good at their jobs? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice.“”

Always Be Blaming by Alex Kladov (Matklad)

“My default approach to reading is “predictive”: I don’t actually read the code line by line. Rather, I try to understand the problem that it wants to solve, then imagine my own solution, and read the “diff” between what I have in my mind and what I see in the editor. Non-empty “diff” signifies either a bug in my understanding, or an opportunity to improve the code.”

“Most real code is Markov — the shape of the code at time T depends not only on the problem statement, but also on the shape of the code at time T − 1. The 3D step is to trace the evolution of code over time […]”

“[…] mind the gap between the problem that’s easy to solve, and the problem in need of solving.”

Every line of code is always documented by Mislav Marohnić

“There are ways I could have written that code itself better: by encapsulating the magic property access in a function with an intention-revealing name such as triggerLayout(), or at least by adding a code comment with a short explanation that this kicks off the animation. For whatever reason, I might have failed that day to make this particular code expressive. Code happens, and it’s not always perfect.

“Even if this code was more expressive or if it had contained lines of code comments, a project’s history will be able to provide even richer information:”

• Who added this code;
• When did they add this code;
• Which was the accompanying test (if any);
• The full commit message can be a whole novel (while code comments should be kept succinct).

“Code quality still matters a lot. But when pondering how you could improve your coding even further, you should consider aiming for better commit messages. You should request this not just from yourself, but from your entire team and all the contributors. The story of a software matters as much as its latest checkout.”

• Always write commit messages as if you are explaining the change to a colleague sitting next to you who has no idea of what’s going on. Per Thoughtbot’s tips for better commit messages:

  “Answer the following questions:”

  • Why is this change necessary?
  • How does it address the issue?
  • What side effects does this change have?
  • Consider including a link [to the discussion.]

• Avoid unrelated changes in a single commit. You might have spotted a typo or did tiny code refactoring in the same file where you made some other changes, but resist the temptation to record them together with the main change unless they’re directly related.
• Always be cleaning up your history before pushing. If the commits haven’t been shared yet, it’s safe to rebase the heck out of them. The following could have been permanent history of the Faraday project, but I squashed it down to only 2 commits and edited their messages to hide the fact I had troubles setting the script up in the first place.

Build next-generation UIs with the HTML-in-Canvas API by Chrome for Developers (YouTube)

This is kind of awesome: leveraging the HTML/CSS layout system to render user interfaces in 2D or 3D with canvas-style transformation and WebGPU rendering. It’s pretty amazing: the rendered surface is just transformed but is still completely manipulable as a normal HTML surface would be:

Starting at 10:00, there are some pretty amazing demos, showing stuff that you’d normally only see in video games, but all rendered in a web browser and using HTML, CSS, and SVG as layout and specification languages instead of some custom UI-integration-library language for Unity or something like that.

• You can select text, trigger context menus, copy text, change form controls, etc.
• Or you can have an animated SVG that is rendered onto a texture in WebGL, like on a billboard.
• Or you can render a half-transparent, refracting 3D model floating over a form and the form controls are refracted through the model. It’s wild.
• They also show a book UI that let’s you choose the rendering font to use in the 3D-rendered book. It’s all just selectable text. You can even have it translate the text on the fly using regular browser tools.
• Or there’s a 3D-WebGL slider control that’s completely 3D-rendered, squishy, and semi-translucent/refractive that you specify with a range control.

No custom programming. You just author your pages as you always did and then use some plumbing to hook it to a canvas. Some libraries already offer experimental support for high-level APIs that do most of that plumbing for you.

You can edit the the declarative source’s properties in the Web Inspector as you could for anything else and the rendering updates automatically and in real-time. This is kind of like how high-end game-engine editors have worked for years but it’s bringing it to a world of standardized input content. This is a wonderful leveraging of all of these standardized technologies to grant developers superpowers without having to do anything different than they have been.

Sports

Extremsportlerin war schneller als alle Männer (Info Sperber)

“Eine Woche zuvor war Rachel Entrekin eine mindestens ebenso beeindruckende Leistung gelungen. Die Extremsportlerin bewältigte den Cocodona-Ultramarathon in Arizona über 400 Kilometer in gut 56 Stunden – und war damit schneller als alle Männer. Zwar war die Strecke kürzer, dafür hatte die 34-Jährige rund 12’000 Höhenmeter zu überwinden, also deutlich mehr als Saatçi.

“Der Cocodona gilt als einer der härtesten Ultramarathons der Welt. In diesem Jahr nahmen laut Veranstalter fast 400 Athletinnen und Athleten teil. Entrekin stellte mit 56 Stunden und 9 Minuten nicht nur einen neuen Streckenrekord auf, sondern unterbot auch ihre eigene Bestzeit aus dem Vorjahr um gut sieben Stunden. Zudem war sie eine Stunde schneller als der schnellste Mann im Feld. 2024 und 2025 hatte Entrekin die Frauenwertung gewonnen – 2026 dominierte sie das gesamte Rennen.”

Australia-shaped long ride in Switzerland

A good friend mapped out a route for Sunday that looks like Australia. I am in awe of the time he invests.

Fun

The other day, I went from almost getting a hole-in-one on the Wordle but then barely getting it in six guesses. I think it looks pretty nice. If I’d guessed “waner” or “waker” instead, it would have been even funnier.

Water, Wager, Wader, Waxer, Wafer, Waver

14 early 90s comic books

My partner’s aunt and uncle used to run the newsroom back in the late 80s/early 90s. She just dumped a pile of early 90s comic books on me a few weeks ago. Out of curiosity, I asked Copilot to “Create a list of the comic books in this image and estimate the current value of each for near mint condition.”

🧾 Comic List + Estimated NM Values

Top row

• Venom: Lethal Protector #1 (1993)
  Key: First Venom solo series
  💰 $8–15

• Venom: Lethal Protector #2 (1993)
  💰 $3–8

• The Amazing Spider-Man #375 (1993)
  Key: Anniversary issue, hologram cover
  💰 $8–20

• Spider-Man #324 (1990)
  (Punisher appearance)
  💰 $3–10

• The Secret Defenders #1 (1993)
  💰 $3–8

Second row

• Darkhawk #25 (1993)
  “Death & Life” storyline
  💰 $3–7

• Iron Man #290 (1993)
  “Return of Tony Stark” era
  💰 $3–6

• Avengers: The Crossing – “Alternate Visions” (1995 variant/embossed cover)
  💰 $5–12

• The Incredible Hulk #403 (1993)
  💰 $2–6

• Spawn #7 (1992)
  Early Spawn issue
  💰 $10–20

Bottom row

• Silver Surfer #78 (1993)
  💰 $3–8

• X-Force #20 (1993)
  💰 $3–8

• Superman: The Man of Steel #21 (1993)
  “Funeral for a Friend” storyline (Death of Superman arc)
  💰 $4–10

• Superman #77 (1993)
  “Funeral for a Friend” – iconic cover with Superman flying away
  💰 $5–15

💵 Quick Value Summary

Most common value range: $3–10 each
Standout issues:

• Venom #1 → up to ~$15
• Spider-Man #375 → up to ~$20
• Spawn #7 → up to ~$20

• 👉 Estimated total bundle value (NM raw):
• ~$60 to $150 depending on condition and buyer demand.

📌 Notes

These are very typical early-1990s printed comics, which had high print runs, so most are not rare.
Condition matters heavily—true NM copies with sharp corners and no spine ticks trend toward the higher end.
Professional grading (CGC 9.8) can significantly increase value for:

• Venom #1
• ASM #375
• Spawn #7

Neat. I don’t know if those numbers are correct, but they’re correct enough for the amount of time I’m willing to spend on it.

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

America’s Suicide Pact by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.

“Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.

“There is a word for these people. Traitors.

“These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.”

“They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.”

“Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.”

“[…] the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”

“The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics. The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.”

“Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.”

‘Highly Protected’: OPCW Confirms It Buried Critical Evidence In Syria Chemical Weapons Probe by Aaron Maté (Scheer Post)

“The concession came during a legal battle with Dr. Brendan Whelan, a veteran OPCW inspector and senior member of the team that deployed to Syria for the Douma mission. Whelan and another Douma team member, Ian Henderson, raised concerns about the manipulation of the investigation’s findings. After their complaints became public, the OPCW leadership publicly disparaged the two dissenting inspectors and penalized them for alleged breaches of confidentiality. Whelan successfully challenged his censure before the Geneva-based Tribunal of the International Labour Organisation (ILOAT), which recently awarded him damages and instructed the OPCW to withdraw its impugned decision.”

“The Germans’ assessment was included in the Douma team’s initial report, which Whelan authored with the help of fellow experts and, after peer approval including the team leader, prepared for publication in June 2018. But senior OPCW officials subverted that document and tried to rush out a replacement, doctored version that falsely claimed evidence of chemical weapons use. Whelan thwarted the release of the bogus substitute only after discovering it at the last minute and sending an email of protest. But when the final report was released in March 2019, after Whelan had departed the Organization, the OPCW again excluded any mention of the Germans’ expert opinions, or even that they had been consulted. Instead, the report claimed that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine [chlorine gas].” Had the Germans’ findings been published, they would have explicitly contradicted this conclusion.”

“[…] no recognized toxicologist has gone on record to state that the Douma victims’ visible symptoms and reported rapid deaths are consistent with chlorine gas exposure.”

Genocide Is Still The Political Test That Matters by Nate Bear (Scheer Post)

“The (very) dark, although not unsurprising lining to the cloud, is that the far-right Reform party is on course to win a large number of seats. Unsurprising because neither Labour nor the UK’s state-corporate media went after Reform with the rabid, ferocious intensity they went after the Greens.

“Why?

“Because Reform’s imperialist, hyper-capitalist, bigoted policies aren’t a threat to the establishment.

“Reform’s promises to mass deport brown people, build private prison camps, privatise what’s left to privatise of public services, plough money into the war machine, support Israel, and cut taxes for oligarchs, are supported by a right-wing establishment.

“What the establishment fears are threats to their power and wealth. What they fear are those who will redistribute wealth, expand the social welfare state and tax millionaires to do it. And with Zionism so deeply ingrained within western institutions of power, they fear anti-Zionists.”

“The Labour party has effectively criminalised support for Palestine. An anti-genocide and community activist in the UK is facing fourteen years in prison having been charged under terrorism laws for social media posts. For tweets! And an NHS GP, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, has been arrested numerous times for tweets opposing Israel and genocide and is facing years in prison. Meanwhile, another NHS GP, a Jewish Zionist who served in the IDF and claimed he didn’t kill enough babies, has faced no consequences and is still a practicing doctor.

“And of course the Labour government provided funding, support and arms to Israel during the genocide, which included daily spy flights feeding back info to the Israeli army, helping fuel their genocidal assault. An assault that continues to this day, with the majority of Gaza now living in tents among rats and disease atop the wasteland of their former homes.

“It’s a disgrace. More than a disgrace. Gaza is a moral collapse, and should be at the centre of all of our politics.”

The Paradigm Shift Of War: America’s Loss (Part I) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Donald Trump crows about destroying the Iranian Air Force, but the IRGC doesn’t have an Air Force. It has an Aerospace Force, largely unmanned and almost entirely underground. He crows about destroying the Iranian Navy, misunderstanding what their Navy is. It’s a bunch of fast attack boats hidden also underground, not a bunch of ungainly ships waiting to be hit. This is a paradigm shift, and ‘America’, mashallah, is in deep shit.”

“These bases are never coming back. Mark my words, or actually, mark their words. As former CENTCOM Obergruppenführer Frank McKenzie said in a report to his literal Jewish bosses (JINSA), “The United States will not be able to maintain these bases in a full-throated conflict, because they will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack. It is the simple tyranny of geography.” This was in 2024, and his ‘contingency’ is exactly what happened.”

The Emperor Has No Clothes and No Cards by Pepe Escobar (The Unz Review)

“The whole Hormuz game, played to perfection by Iran, has had very little impact on Chinese imports, as much as restricting exports of Nvidia H100 and H200 to “control” Chinese AI had next to zero impact. After all, China de facto ignores Nvidia. The DeepSeek V4 model uses local chips. And the H200 is not sold in China.”

I think a lot about nice people who hold abhorrent views.

I am deeply disappointed not only in the shallowness of their worldview but in their lack of awareness of how crude and cruel it is.

Their worldview doesn’t hold up to any serious analysis nor is it in any way built on a principle that can be called moral or ethical.

It amounts to “I’ve got mine jack” and they celebrate those who commit much bigger moral crimes than theirs as if that somehow excuses their own.

They loathe their fellow man and suspect them of crimes in inverse proportion to their willingness and capability to execute them.

And so, they exalt predatory, venal, dead-eyed billionaires, and revile immigrants and single black mothers. They give the first group infinite second chances, while denying the second ever a first one.

They do this because to question it would cause them to question the morality of how they live, and they can’t bear thinking about the mountain of skulls on which their lifestyle depends. In most cases, they are literally incapable of comprehending it.

My disappointment in them teeters toward disgust.

Roaming Charges: Go Down, Moses by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

We are deeply and thoroughly trained not to recognize the violence that we either commit or upon which our personal thriving rests because otherwise the machine wouldn’t be efficient enough to run. It runs at a profit only because of the violence and the plunder. So, we are trained from birth to not recognize this inherent vice as a vice. Instead, we see in this violence as necessary and principled, as the minimum violence required to repulse the assaults of our myriad enemies.

Paradigm Shift: Iran and The Tunnel/Missile War (Part 2) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“In the future, kids will ask what a fighter jet is, and we’ll say ‘a drone with a person inside it’ and they’ll think we’re insane. This is the paradigm shift Iran more than anyone has ushered in. […]

“Then our future kids will also ask, ‘wait, you just parked those human drones in the open?’ and ‘you parked them on the ocean?’ and think we’re even more senile. Airbases and aircraft carriers are too exposed for the modern era.”

“The NYCrimes goes onto make up some percentages of missiles and missile launchers destroyed (source: trust me bro). The ‘intelligence’ sources the NYCrimes is stovepiping are duplicitious and dumb, and because they refuse to be actual reporters and just listen to Iran, these ‘journalists’ stay dumb. As an IRGC spokesperson said during the war (via Thomas Keith), “Most of the missiles currently being fired were produced over a decade ago.” Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Arachchi directly responded to these jumping, meaningless percentages (dividing what they know little about by what they know zero) by saying, “Also the CIA is wrong. Our missile inventory and launcher capacity are not at 75% compared to Feb 29. The correct figure is 120%. As for our readiness to defend our people: 1,000%.””

Journalism & Media

Darf man mit Höcke sprechen? Man darf nicht nur, man muss! by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Man muss Höcke und noch viel mehr seine Forderungen ja nicht mögen – will man sich aber ernsthaft mit ihnen auseinandersetzen, sollte man dem Mann doch zumindest zuhören und versuchen, zu verstehen, was ihn antreibt. Das schaffte der Podcast sogar weitestgehend und dafür sollte man Ben dankbar sein. ”

“Nimmt man all diese Versatzstücke zusammen, ergibt sich ein Bild, ja schon fast ein Stereotyp. Höcke ist ein Idealist, dessen Ideal vollkommen anachronistisch ist. Ich kann aber durchaus verstehen, dass sich viele Menschen mit diesem Ideal identifizieren oder es zumindest als Gegenentwurf zum Modernismus attraktiv finden. Für mich gilt das freilich nicht. Selbst wenn man die im Vergleich zu heute eher einfach strukturierte Welt der Vergangenheit gerne wieder hätte – man kann die Uhr nicht zurückdrehen.”

“Wer verstehen und nicht nur Vorgedachtes nachplappern will, muss sich ein eigenes Bild machen und das geht nun einmal nur, wenn man auch die Möglichkeit dazu bekommt. Dafür sind Medien ja eigentlich da. Aufgabe von Medien ist nicht die Indoktrination des Publikums, sondern das Angebot möglichst ungefilterter Fakten, aber auch Geschichten, aus denen man sich dann seine eigene Position bilden kann.”

“Ich persönlich finde es da viel spannender, mich beispielsweise mit gegenseitigem Respekt mit überzeugten Anhängern der AfD oder auch der Grünen zu unterhalten, und dabei herauszufinden, warum sie diese oder jene Position vertreten. Denn erst wenn man das versteht, kann man auch in die eigentliche inhaltliche Debatte gehen und vielleicht sogar sein Gegenüber überzeugen. Wer gar nicht erst mit Andersdenkenden spricht, wird natürlich nie jemanden überzeugen, das ist klar.”

“Hätte Gaus mit Höcke gesprochen? Vermutlich ja. Seine Nachfolger beim Fernsehen verabscheuen das echte Gespräch und veranstalten lieber Tribunale gegen Andersdenkende.”

They’re Attacking Online Anonymity, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“It’s all I felt, I feel, it made me feel. My feelings, my feelings, my feelings. We’re watching Jewish feelings get treated as so supremely important that upsetting Jews by opposing an active genocide is treated as a hate crime. The victims of genocide are regarded as infinitely less important than a Jewish Australian feeling offended by anti-genocide sentiment in a Facebook group.

“This is crazy, hysterical bullshit, and it should be treated as such.”

It’s Not About “Blood Libel”, It’s About Narrative Control by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The mass media have been rapidly churning out articles about alleged sexual abuse by Hamas in the wake of the New York Times report [about systematic Israeli rape in its prisons], which is some mighty interesting timing to say the least.

“Israel announced it’s quintupling its propaganda budget and now we’re seeing the news cycle actively manipulated to advance Israeli information interests, and we’re just expected to clap along and pretend we’re seeing real news stories about real things.”

Economy & Finance

Generating profits for capital used to be a tactic that served the strategy of making people’s lives better. Now it is the strategy.

The Old Guard by Samuel Moyn (Harper's Magazine)

“The story of Tithonus no longer feels so outlandish, because our society postpones death to an unprecedented degree. Unlike immortals, we still pass. But the great majority of us, and not only the bad, now die old. In whatever nursing home he was parked in, Tithonus must have looked much like we increasingly do, as doctors continuously defer our mortality. We are approaching a time when a legion of Tithonuses will live in our midst.”

“Whereas the median age of those eligible to vote in America is about forty-seven, the median age of actual voters is about fifty-two. If you filter out presidential elections, when participation is higher across the generations, the median age of voters rises from fifty-two to about fifty-five. The numbers get far worse in primaries and special elections, when the younger vote plummets even further but seniors dependably turn out. In 2024, the alarming median age of a primary voter was sixty-five. In New Mexico, it was seventy-one.”

“This issue is often brushed aside even more quickly than the problem of aging politicians. After all, whether or not to vote is entirely up to individuals. Young people who don’t vote—at least those eighteen or older—have no grounds to complain about disappointing results when they could have shown up on Election Day.”

No, they couldn’t have. Most people have to go to work on election day (a Tuesday). Increasing lines and waits at polling places or closing them near where people live and work reduces participation even further.

“Ultimately, though, the abstention of the young owes less to these practical obstacles than to their alienation from politics itself.”

This is presented pretty much without evidence.

“According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-four fell by 68 percent during the same period.”

“By 2019, this inequality had reached a dire state. Americans under forty, representing 37 percent of the adult population, held a mere 5 percent of America’s wealth. Those over fifty-four, representing a comparable slice of the adult population, held 72 percent of the wealth.”

“A lot of the motivation for hoarding money and assets as people age is a fear of mistreatment when their physical decline makes reliance on others unavoidable, and the prospect of ever-longer life spans may leave people terrified of running out of money. In response, the evidence shows, a great many decide to hold on to their wealth.”

Combine this natural fear with being in a society that not only does nothing to assuage it but actively feeds it. Not only does the society feed insecurity, it actively encourages its members to never, ever, ever think that they have enough money, that they must continue to hoard and consume.

“Cities are graying, with more elderly people living in them than in the countryside, and young workers are being pushed to the peripheries of cities despite commuting downtown for fun or employment. Even in suburbs, housing patterns are not uniform, with the elderly preferring to live where there are fewer children, thus fleeing obligations to pay for schools.”

“[…] it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much.”

Society could also teach them about an obligation to a shared community that has given them so much, but I guess that’s immediately off the table as too much to expect.

An AI IPO Impact Update: The AnthroPix Effect May Be $5-Trillion+ by Paul Kedrosky

“This will only get more dramatic in the coming weeks and months. Money will increasingly flood out of a host of financial nooks and crannies, and into anything with any connection to what’s coming. The money has to come from somewhere, the appetite is immense.”

“Combining what I’m seeing—the huge NAV premium and price behavior of DXYZ, the recent private market price increase of Anthropix [Antrhopic, Open AI, SpaceX] names, and the pre-IPO bidding wars in luxury real estate markets—it is clear my outsized estimate of the likely market cap of these names—a staggering $4 trillion total—was too low. I’ve adjusted the slides on my sim to allow larger numbers, and I now think it very likely we will be above $5 trillion in market value, and higher numbers remain possible. At the higher end we are approaching the inflation-adjusted market cap of all IPOS since WWII, including dot-com.”

Trump Accounts and the No Economist Left Behind Test by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The key point here is, contrary to the way they are discussed in the media, stock returns don’t fall from heaven. They are related to the real economy. If someone is putting on a clown show, they can claim whatever stock returns they want, but if they want to be serious, they have to say where they come from.”

Premium: What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? (Part 1) by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“OpenAI accounts for $718 billion of Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon’s backlogs, meaning that OpenAI’s collapse would leave Oracle destitute, Microsoft and Amazon short-changed, Cerebras without 80%+ of its revenue, and CoreWeave without a major client and in breach of loan covenants guaranteed by OpenAI’s revenue.”

“Data center construction now makes up a larger chunk of all construction spending than commercial real estate. OpenAI has made promises that total over a trillion dollars, and Anthropic $330 billion. NVIDIA represents 8% of the value of the S&P 500, and that valuation is based on the idea that it will never, ever stop growing, which is only possible if data center construction never stops. CoreWeave, IREN, Nebius, and Nscale all rely on hyperscaler contracts that are related to OpenAI, and if those contracts go away because OpenAI does, they’re screwed.”

“[…] for me to be wrong, all of these data centers will have to get built, OpenAI will have to make and raise $852 billion in the next four years, the underlying economics of generative AI will have to improve in a dramatic and unfathomable way, and do so in such a way that it creates hundreds of AI startups that can substantiate $400 billion of annual compute revenue. For NVIDIA to continue growing its revenues at an historic rate, it will also have to, by 2028, be selling over $1 trillion in GPUs, which will require there to be funding to buy these GPUs, at a time when hyperscaler cashflows are dwindling and banks are worried they’re “choking” on AI data center debt.”

“Everybody is pressuring everyone else to “integrate AI,” to “get every engineer AI,” to “become more efficient using AI,” with token spend becoming some sort of vulgar status symbol despite the whole point of the AI push being that workers can be replaced, or enhanced, or, I dunno, something measurable. In the end, all that’s being measured is how many tokens employees are burning, leading to Amazon staff deliberately setting up “agents” to burn more tokens to seem more “engaged with AI” than they really are, all because dimwit managers and executives don’t understand what people do at their jobs and can only comprehend Number Go Up.”

Bond markets send out a warning by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“US economists have warned that there will be upward pressure on prices in every sector of the economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has said that the price of freight transportation, which feeds into the cost of every commodity—from groceries to industrial products—had increased by 8.1 percent in April.

“Joseph Brusuelas of the global consultancy firm RSM told the FT this week’s “hot” inflation reading showed that there was inflation “pressure in the pipeline” and that it was going to be “some time” before inflation peaked.”

“On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that global oil reserves, which have so far kept the oil price from going up more than it has, were being run down at a record pace.

“It said that stockpiles of crude and refined oil fell by almost 4 million barrels a day in April. This is more than the combined daily consumption of the UK and Germany.”

Roaming Charges: Go Down, Moses by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Housing Market on the Brink: Home sellers now outnumber buyers by 630,000, the largest gap in US history. At the same time, home foreclosures have climbed by 18% over last year, with banks repossessing 42,000 homes a month.”

“$109 billion: the amount Americans spent on lottery tickets in 2025, more than they shelled out on movies, concerts, books, and sporting events combined. It’s the Crap Shoot Stage of Capitalism.”

“John Lancaster in the LRB on the world’s third biggest business, money laundering:”

“If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big? Money laundering is a little like drug cheating in sport, where the current state of legal enforcement always lags behind the current state of malfeasance. We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. We are drunks looking for our keys in a big empty space with a single torch, and all we can find is evidence of the rare occasions when other people lost their keys.”

“On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock and another $15 thousand to $50 thousand worth in March. Then, on May 8, Trump told Americans to “Go out and buy Dell,” a company in which he now owned millions worth of stock.”

Science & Nature

How Gödel’s Proof Works by Natalie Wolchover (Quanta Magazine)

“His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.”

“Gödel’s main maneuver was to map statements about a system of axioms onto statements within the system — that is, onto statements about numbers. This mapping allows a system of axioms to talk cogently about itself.”

“Gödel numbers are integers, and integers only factor into primes in a single way. So the only prime factorization of 243,000,000 is 26 × 35 × 56, meaning there’s only one possible way to decode the Gödel number: the formula 0 = 0. Gödel then went one step further. A mathematical proof consists of a sequence of formulas. So Gödel gave every sequence of formulas a unique Gödel number too. In this case, he starts with the list of prime numbers as before — 2, 3, 5 and so on. He then raises each prime to the Gödel number of the formula at the same position in the sequence (2243,000,000 × …, if 0 = 0 comes first, for example) and multiplies everything together.”

“Conversion into symbols is also possible for the metamathematical statement, “There exists some sequence of formulas with Gödel number × that proves the formula with Gödel number k” — or, in short, “The formula with Gödel number k can be proved.” The ability to “arithmetize” this kind of statement set the stage for the coup.”

“By definition, sub(n, n, 17) is the Gödel number of the formula that results from taking the formula with Gödel number n and substituting n anywhere there’s a symbol with Gödel number 17. And G is exactly this formula! Because of the uniqueness of prime factorization, we now see that the formula G is talking about is none other than G itself. G asserts of itself that it can’t be proved.”

“[…] although G is undecidable, it’s clearly true. G says, “The formula with Gödel number sub(n, n, 17) cannot be proved,” and that’s exactly what we’ve found to be the case! Since G is true yet undecidable within the axiomatic system used to construct it, that system is incomplete.”

Photographic Memory Is A Myth – Here’s What Research Really Says About Remembering by Gabrielle Principe (Scheer Post)

“Beliefs about “perfect memory” shape how people judge students, eyewitnesses, patients and even themselves. They influence legal decisions, educational practices and unrealistic expectations about what human minds can – and should – do.

“Letting go of the camera metaphor could be a step toward better understanding how memory works. The brain is not a roll of film, it’s a storyteller – one that edits, interprets and reshapes the past in light of the present.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Howl by Allen Ginsberg (The Poetry Foundation)

In case it’s not clear, the following citations, though extensive, do not comprise the entire poem.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
  hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
  fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
  starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
  supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
  contemplating jazz,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
  leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the
  motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine 
  drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride
  neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the
  roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
  mind,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
  with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible
  leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze 
  of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and 
  undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed 
  down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
  the machinery of other skeletons,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
  tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

I’m with you in Rockland
 where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland
  where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from
    its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland
  where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist 
    revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
  where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living 
    human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
  where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the
    final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
  where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United 
    States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
  where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes 
    roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital 
    illuminates itself     imaginary walls collapse     O skinny legions run
    outside     O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here     O
    victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
  in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across 
    America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Rhythm and Reason by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“[…] sometimes it helps to break our problems down into subproblems, and it seems to me that the subproblem of how to maintain our distinct human practices across the ruptures of technological revolutions —maintaining, that is, the things we have more or less always done in all human cultures, and that are widely seen as constitutive of human social existence as such—, might be significantly illuminated by comparison of our most recent AI revolution to the revolution in musical recording, broadcast, and production that precedes it.”

“The mechanization of music in fact begins not in the late 20th century with synthesized instrumentation, but in the late 19th century with the innovations of Edison, Marconi, and others in recording and broadcasting. Within a few decades of their discoveries, a fundamentally new way of experiencing music moved in to replace the old one. Music ceased to be primarily ritual, participatory, collective, generated each time anew, and instead became a product, experienced passively and often in isolation, bought and sold in standardized units.”

“[…] The purpose of this music is to help sustain the illusion that this new order is quite enough for a human life, indeed that it is an honor and a distinction to have the chance to participate in it.

“We eggheads are used to interpreting the conduct of our mid-century suburban dentist in terms of “false consciousness”. We try not to lay it all on him personally — he’s just expressing class-appropriate tastes, and could not do otherwise. But there’s always a lingering sense, even for the most consistent of historical materialists, that the consumer of mid-century mass musical entertainment is something of a sucker.”

“When I was a child in the 1980s, FM radio was saturated with “smooth jazz”, and corporate Muzak could still be heard in department stores and other public spaces. All of this music, or most of it, was played by real musicians, indeed highly competent musicians, on more or less traditional instruments. But I had no idea of that. I simply could not imagine any group of human beings coming together and creating these sounds. Like the consumer under capitalism who assumes that cuts of meat naturally appear in the world wrapped in cellophane, it seemed to me that smooth jazz must somehow be spontaneously generated out of the mall’s sound system itself.”

“[…] so much writing today appears to me as the textual equivalent of smooth jazz.”

“I hear of the latest scandal of someone getting caught using AI for a piece in the Guardian or the Times, and I think: who gives a shit? As with the music piped into malls in the 1980s, for the most part when I read the Times it never even crosses my mind that a human being strung those words together in the first place, and it seems to me a greater shame to be compelled to follow these strings back to human intention than to account for them by appeal to mechanical production.”

Technology & Engineering

Things have jobs and digital devices are made to track you by Carissa Véliz (Aeon Essays)

“Mixed in the flour that bakes digital technology sit two original sins pervading most gadgets, apps and platforms alike: surveillance and prediction; more specifically, surveillance at the service of prediction. Both lead to social control.”

Also a third: filtering in the service of propaganda, forming not only what you know but how you about those things you’re allowed to think about.

“LinkedIn, one of the least toxic social media platforms we have.)”

I’m sorry, what did you write? LinkedIn isn’t toxic? It is nearly solely responsible for the destruction of the white-collar job market, and the rise of AI-generated slop posing as serious commentary. How much more toxic does something have to be?

“[…] starts encompassing millions of people from around the world, including thieves, drug dealers and human traffickers, not to mention swathes of terrifyingly ordinary trolls who silence people they don’t like (women, often). Where did Barlow think fairness was going to come from?”

This kind of write is forever mentioning the usual suspects—the official enemies—who have next to no influence relative to the censors and propagandists that run the whole show.

“One rather depressing hypothesis is that Thiel is nothing more complex or sophisticated than an opportunist; someone who is mostly interested in earning money and gaining dominance over others; someone who is fighting for freedom for himself and his buddies, not caring if it comes at the price of slavery for everyone else. Sometimes Ockham’s Razor is right, […]”

How do you write something like this, in this day and age? That should be the first thing you think of: that he’s a grifter rather than a messiah. There are no messiahs and there are a whole lot of grifters. Every one of these people has more than adequately demonstrated that they don’t believe in anything that doesn’t make their own personal number go up.

“We should be asking more questions of our prophets. We should be less naive about prediction and surveillance, and we should demand safer products that can be more supportive of democracies.”

Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“It’s not enough to tell NASA that you plan to put your payload on a truck and drive it to Kennedy Space Center for launch; you have to analyze the g-forces for every crane movement and specify how fast the truck will go. Any conceivable failure mode has to be identified in a Hazard Report, along with the proposed fix, and that fix has to be certified.”

“There is a truism in aerospace: when you pay $500 for an aviation-certified thumbtack, what you’re really paying for is the ten binders of compliance documents, certifications, and tests that accompany it through the production process, along with a promise that someone will go to jail if any part of that process is falsified.”

“Figuring that out took me several weeks and a few thousand dollars. My mistake was believing that the power system really was decoupled—that nothing in the house could affect things upstream of the junction box. That is what the inverter specs and circuit diagrams all said. That is what customer support told me. But it wasn’t true.”

“This is the class of problem all those NASA interface requirements are trying to forestall. If you’ve ever had a faulty wiring harness in your car (hello Jeep owners!) you know what a nightmare it is to try to chase down intermittent, poorly localized faults. NASA inflicts eye-watering certification costs on itself and its partners to avoid trying to diagnose this stuff in space, where half the systems can’t be powered off, and where there’s a high chance of killing the crew if you break something.”

“[…] future human missions to space will have the same cost profile as big space telescopes do today—a few hundred million spent to launch stuff, and billions spent inventing equipment and trying to get it to work right.”

“The defining feature of a human mission to Mars is that risks are sequential and cumulative. Every link in the chain has to go right, or the mission fails. This means early visits to Mars will have safety and reliability requirements that make the Space Station look like a middle school science fair.

“These requirements will be especially tight for the surface part of a mission. Any equipment that lands on Mars will have to demonstrate that it can launch from Earth, sit dormant for six months, survive entry and landing, and then work in partial gravity and dust without breaking for 17 months. Machinery that is pre-positioned on Mars in advance of the crew (a common risk-cutting measure in mission designs) will also have to prove that it can sit out in the weather for two or more years.”

“There needs to be a mechanism for relaxing rules to adapt to changing conditions, or else the space program will fossilize in its own paperwork.”

France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging by Ken Macon (Reclaim the Net)

“[…] an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.”

I would imagine that having a lock on my door is also a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services? Are you even listening to yourself?

“Aurélien Lopez-Liguori, the RN deputy who opposed the amendment, made the technical objection bluntly. “This is a total misunderstanding of what encryption means. The decryption keys are at the level of users’ devices. The key isn’t centralized somewhere within the platform. You would then have to set up backdoors for all communications, which would go far beyond the scope of fighting drug trafficking. The first hacker to come along would have access to our communications,” he warned.

“Translated into engineering terms, his point was the one cryptographers have been making for thirty years. There is no such thing as a backdoor only the good guys can use.”

“What’s underway in France isn’t really a debate about whether intelligence services should have tools to investigate serious crime. They already do. They have the RDI authority to compromise individual devices, the surveillance algorithmique they expanded last year, satellite interception powers, traditional wiretaps, metadata access, and the cooperation of every French telecom operator.

“The new fight is about whether the one category of communication that currently resists state interception, secured by mathematics rather than by promise, should be reshaped so that resistance disappears.”

LLMs & AI

People arguing for the efficacy of AI in design are implicitly accepting the limitations imposed by the AI, on top of those already imposed by the target platform. If you’re targeting a UI framework that doesn’t support animations, then including them is going to be an uphill climb. If rounded corners are not supported (CSS1), then you’re going to be doing a lot of work to get what you want, or you’re just going to have to accept that you’re not going to get what you want.

The confluence of your team’s members’ skills and the capabilities of their tools, frameworks, libraries, and target platforms has always defined what you can build.

Saying everything is a “skill issue” is an infantile response that lets tools and platforms off the hook for not accommodating other ideas.

LLM-based coding harnesses can make you more efficient if you take the well-worn path and stop fighting the design limitations imposed by the tool. More than ever, you are encouraged to stop thinking, to stop bringing your own designs, to simply take what’s offered.

This isn’t the first time this attitude has influenced software. We’ve had wave after wave of application builders that support only a few designs (visual as well as architectural) that allowed you to quickly get to easy destinations.

As with the output of LLM-based coding harnesses, those tools delivered development speed but often at the cost of limitations on flexibility in customization of look-and-feel as well as on maintainability.

For example, even if having multiple languages is a requirement (should), then what is the likelihood that this requirement will be implemented when the tools don’t support them? Will the developer really accept that the productivity gains earned by building the rest of the app the “easy” way will be eaten up by having to add a feature manually?

And please don’t say “but AIs can generate multi-language UIs!” That’s not the point. Think of something else that you might want but that the LLM-based coding harness keeps nudging you away from, either with initial ignorance or weaponized incompetence.

To be clear: this has always been the case! Tools and team capabilities have always imposed limitations! I mean … obviously! All I’m asking is that you be aware of the degree to which including the output of LLM-based coding harnesses will affect not only what you build but what you can build.

This is a simple evaluation, in that sense. Instead of just picking up the tool and experiencing buyer’s remorse because you didn’t think it through … think it through. Figure out how you’re going to get the work done that you’d like to get done, or at least be aware up front which work you most likely won’t be able to get done. Be realistic about the limitations of your tools and team.

Just saying “it’s a skill issue” is a moronic response for all but the simplest tasks. Building up skills is also an investment. Some tasks take a lot more time with some tools, while the same tools allow you to be extremely efficient on other tasks.

I think one oft-overlooked risk of AI is that you’re spending your time training the models for other teams (at other companies) rather than building up know-how in your own team.

You think you’re being clever by pouring your knowledge into your system prompts, but you’re fighting a desperate rearguard action, trying to get a tool that forgets everything every time you start a new prompt to do something the way you got it to do it that one awesome time. You have no guarantee that it will continue to get it right.

Contrast this with how it works to build knowledge in a team. Once you’ve agreed on how to do something, you don’t have to keep telling team members to do it. They just do it. They’ve learned it. They started pushing you to remember to do it. There’s a feedback loop. You’re building domain knowledge.

None of that synergy happens with AIs. You don’t build your own domain knowledge and the AI doesn’t either. You can’t learn to trust an AI but you will begin to do so anyway because people can anthropomorphize a bowling ball so we’re kind of doomed.

Im going back to writing code by hand (k10s devlog)

“Vibe-coding makes you feel like you have infinite implementation budget. You don’t. You have infinite LINE budget (the AI will generate as much code as you want). But you have the same finite complexity budget as always. The architecture can only support so many features before it buckles, regardless of how fast you wrote them. The CLAUDE.md scope section is you saying no in advance, before the velocity high convinces you to say yes.”

“ra[3] is Alloc. ra[2] is Compute. ra[0] is Name. These are magic numbers. The only thing connecting index 3 to “Alloc” is a comment and the column order defined in resource.views.json:”

{
  "nodes": {
    "fields": [
      { "name": "Name",     "weight": 0.28 },
      { "name": "Instance", "weight": 0.15 },
      { "name": "Compute",  "weight": 0.12 },
      { "name": "Alloc",    "weight": 0.12 },
      …
    ]
  }
}

“
Add a column between Instance and Compute? Every sort, every conditional render, every place that says ra[2] or ra[3] is now silently wrong. The compiler can’t help you because it’s all []string. And the JSON config can’t express sort behavior, conditional rendering, or custom drill targets, so those live in Go code that hardcodes the positional assumptions from the JSON.

“AI generates this pattern because it’s the shortest path from “fetch data” to “render table.” A []string satisfies any table widget immediately. Typed structs require more ceremony upfront. So the AI picks the fast path, and six months later you’re debugging why sort puts “Name” values in the “Alloc” column.

“What to do instead: Put this directive in your CLAUDE.md:”

# Data Representation

- NEVER flatten structured data into []string, Vec<String>, or positional arrays.
- All data flows as typed structs (FleetNode, PodInfo, etc.) until the render() call.
- Column identity comes from struct field names, not array indices.
- Sort functions operate on typed fields, never on positional access like row[3].
- The ONLY place strings are created for display is inside render()/view() functions.

“Then your typed struct makes impossible states impossible:”

struct FleetNode {
    name: String,
    instance_type: String,
    compute_class: ComputeClass,
    alloc: GpuAlloc,
}

“You can’t sort by the wrong column when columns are named fields. You can’t accidentally compare Alloc strings as names. The compiler enforces this for you. AI will always pick Vec<String> because it satisfies the prompt faster. Your CLAUDE.md makes the typed path the path of least resistance.”

The point isn’t that programmers weren’t also doing this! Where do you think the LLM learned it? It was in the training data. But it’s still short-sighted and wrong for nearly all serious work that must be maintained over any reasonable period of time.

When AI Is In The Room by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“A.I.-generated transcripts, which some video call apps allow users to turn on by default, preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes. And they show up in meetings that would otherwise not be recorded.

“In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable.”

“One of the hallmarks of AI is its lack of humanity, its inability to distinguish between things that matter and things that don’t, or shouldn’t, in the course of discussion. To a bot, words are words, without regard to humor or sarcasm. People don’t speak the way we write, with the ability to review our words and correct them to be sure they accurately reflect our point or intentions. When memorialized by AI, and parsed at some later point in time during discovery, words spoken in jest or mistakenly used become just as conclusive as words written after thoughtful deliberation and careful phrasing.”

“Sometimes, we enunciate poorly. or speak with an accent or in jargon shorthand. Will the AI get it? Will anyone notice or care at the time? But it may be critical years later when the specific words are the lynchpin between a win and a crushing defeat. That’s when the problem hits you square in the face. The AI bot wrote what it wrote, and it’s not as if you can put the bot on the stand and challenge its efficacy, its memory. its competence. It’s a machine, kids, and it’s going to do what machines do, which is whatever it’s programmed to do. Claude can be absolutely dead wrong, but it cannot lie.”

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain by Jason Koebler (404 Media)

“[…] the cognitive load of what other people’s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it’s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?”

“[…] large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it’s people using AI talking to other people who are using AI. It’s influencer hustlebros who are teaching each other how to make AI influencers and have spun up automated YouTube channels and blogs and social media accounts that are spamming the internet for the sole purpose of making money. It is whatever the fuck “Moltbook” is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It’s AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that’s actually being run by a marketing firm. It’s fake Yelp reviews for real restaurants and real Yelp reviews for fake restaurants using AI-generated food images being run out of ghost kitchens.”

“What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write.”

Why do I care? Because when I interact, I do so in the hope that I can learn from the person I’m interacting with, or that they can learn from me. I hope that we can perhaps build something mutually beneficial, where we grow out of the interaction. An AI cannot learn and it cannot grow. Other than the interaction, there is no beneficial side-effect. I do not want to waste my time. If it’s a person, they may be wrong, but we can learn together. If it’s an AI, it may also be wrong but I have to invest time to figure that out and that effort can’t be leveraged by teaching someone else, because there is no-one else.

AI layoffs are here. This is how you keep your job. by Mo Bitar (YouTube)

“If your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I’m not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close a door and say, “Hey, Chief, been experimenting with something. It’s called Ralph Loops, and I think it could change literally everything.”

“And he’s going to say, “What’s a Real Loop?” And you will say, “Give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I’ll show you.”

“Now, you won’t actually do anything because you can’t do anything because nobody can because nobody knows what they’re doing. But by the time he figures that out, you’ll have a new title and an equity bump.

“What you want to be doing is automating. Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalist than the mention of automation.

“Drop names too, bro. Like, talk about specific team members you can automate out of existence. Be like, “Yo, I automated Gary, bro.” Tag Gary in the message. Tag him in Slack in a very public channel. be like, “Yo, I just automated at Gary. His function has been Ralph looped.” And tag your CEO in the same message.

“You think you’re getting laid off after that, bro? Like, are you out of your mind? This is how you survive the storm. It does not matter who is right and it does not matter who is wrong. A storm is neither right nor wrong.

“Like, dude, if you’re an AI contrarian at your company right now, like, what are you doing? Resign, dude. Resign voluntarily, man. This is highly disgraceful. The only place you should be talking about AI realism is here with me or with your dog. Do not let anyone, not even your own wife, hear you be negative or balanced about AI. Are you kidding me, dude?

“There’s only one way to make money off being an AI realist. And I’ve already cornered the market and I’m barely getting by.

“Man, the most important thing, the absolute most important thing is that you are no longer going to do any work. Okay? You’re not going to write any code. You’re not even going to type. You’re going to dictate. You’re going to use a voice tool. You’re going to speak to Claude. You’re going to speak to your team on Slack. You’re going to speak in meetings and workshops. And at no point are your fingers ever going to touch a keyboard because we have transcended labor, my friend. We have ascended. Engineering is no longer a craft. Engineering is a metaphysical practice now. We do not write code. We commune with code. We cleanse the repo of bad energy. We are philosophers of the codebase.

“And at this point, if you have a black turtleneck, put it on, okay? If you don’t, get one. Get two. Have a backup turtleneck. Steve Jobs did not have a backup. That was his mistake. Now, I want to address the people in the comments who are about to type, “Hey, man, this is super messed up. This is cynical and it’s bad advice. I would never do this.”

“And I want you to listen to me, okay? This little Gandhi stance you’re taking will not pay off. The CEO of your company is currently taking the Coinbase memo, and he’s asking Chad GPT 5.2 to draft one for his own company. He needs the views, man. He needs an invitation to the All-In Summit. Okay. He needs Chamoth to mention him on the pod. He’s in his office studying Brian’s tweet. He is whispering, “We have made the difficult decision. We have made the difficult decision” out loud just to feel it in his mouth.

“And you taking a stance against AI will not change his mind. It will not change the trajectory of AI. It will not make a fartsswidth of difference. You want to take a stance, go be vegan, man. Go open an account on Threads. But at work in this climate, being a realist will get you canned, bro. You have one obligation, and that is to make sure there is a roof on top of your family’s heads and food on the table. Stop being such a dick, dude, and provide for your family.

“And whenever it gets to be too much, come back here, okay? Because between you and me, you and I know what’s actually true. And it’s that AI is a calculator. It’s not the singularity. It’s a damn tool. Reasonable people know this.

“And now you know why everyone around you is pretending that AI is the second coming of consciousness. It’s because they’re getting promoted. They’re keeping their jobs and you’re not. Put on your turtleneck and I’ll see you on the other side.”

Programming

Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“[…] it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that in one way or another, I’m unusually good at getting adequate results out of these machines. I keep them on a tight leash, provide a lot of architectural input and model code, I tell them exactly what libraries and frameworks to use, I’m usually working on established codebases and I have approximately zero compunctions about rewriting large parts of what the coding agent generates (for that matter, I also generate code in very small chunks). None of this comes about because I’m particularly clever about using the coding agent: it’s because I trust it significantly less far than I could throw it and I am not letting it do anything without being very sure that it’s not going to do anything stupid (and even then I feel bad about giving it the access that I have).”

“From the perspective of someone coming from a much more physical engineering discipline, this is quite simply bad systems design. A lot of this work is, in essence, writing an ad-hoc, messy and ill-defined compatibility layer that’s meant to match a system that’s constantly shifting and utterly lacking in stability: it’s as though you’re trying to design consistent pipe connectors between a distillation column and a catalytic cracker at an oil refinery when the catalytic cracker keeps on changing its design every other week and the width of the pipes isn’t firmly defined at all. The vast bulk of the code we write is, in fact, glue code of this kind, desperately trying to make disparate system components work together when the interface between them was designed poorly to begin with and now keeps shifting on a regular basis.”

“LLM tools are good at generating precisely this kind of glue code that, with better engineering of core systems components, we wouldn’t have to write in the first place and that, in some sense, shouldn’t be written.”

“Producing robust, secure and above all useful systems simply isn’t a question of coding: it’s a question of engineering.”

“Sure, Claude Code might be great at sorting out the whole Schema.org thing, but we’d much rather that Schema.org didn’t exist at all so that we didn’t have to write it in order to be minimally competitive in a job market that’s basically turned into a content creator economy. This means that even when we acknowledge that a coding agent is useful for something, we treat the agent with a level of barely-concealed resentment because we don’t want to be living in a world or working in an industry where what it’s good at is valued anywhere near as much as it is.”

“The watchword seems to be responsibility: you have to have worked on writing and deploying software products that you’re responsible for, and where you have to deal with the consequences if they break, even if you’re the only person affected.”

“[…] seeing code as a thing that mediates between system components or as a constituent of a component rather than as an undifferentiated product starts to come naturally, which will naturally alter how you see coding agents. When a coding agent is producing code, which is the thing of value in itself, they look quite attractive. When you’re using the agent to weld, bolt or rivet together two existing components, or to machine a new one which is going to sit in a larger system, the tool begins to look quite different, and honestly, much less attractive.”

“[…] where someone who’s merely interested in writing code is happy or scared that the coding agent can produce more code than them, as an engineer you want as little code, as few components and as few moving parts as possible: each component and each line of code introduces the potential for failure. In short, you’re going to develop an acute sense for when not to write code that shouldn’t be written.

“All of these points are going to introduce a dislike of coding agents in their current state. After all, the agents are overly verbose, unreliable, opaque when subject to analysis and have a tendency to prioritise the production of code over the design of the system. If, in this situation, you’re going to use them at all, they’re going to be used in a highly constrained manner, told exactly what to do and simply not used for certain critical tasks: a far cry from the claims of the vibe coders and everyone who tells us that they’re going to revolutionise the profession. All told, you’re liable to realise that what the coding agent is good for is mostly writing code that you shouldn’t be having to write in the first place, and consequently use the coding agent only for that and as little as possible.”

“[…] if you’re dead-set on having people use LLMs for some reason, you might have your best engineers work on architecting the system, building the data model and working on defining and constraining the system as a whole. With that work being done, you can then get people who are more willing to use coding agents to fill in the blanks, do the stuff that annoys the good engineers but that you feel that you need to have for one reason or another and get them to extend the initial work within the constraints that your better engineers have built.”

“[…] building systems that deliver value tends to go out the window as people with a systems engineering mindset get driven out of organisations in favour of people who are, for the most part, easily impressed by volume of code and the intense feeling of productivity that they engender, and you can see the results in almost every software product you use.”

Learning to code, 1990s vs 2026 by Oren Eini (Ayende)

“Each step up the abstraction ladder lets people build bigger, more ambitious things with less effort. That is mostly good.

“But there is a real asymmetry this time. The earlier steps abstracted away mechanical work — memory management, boilerplate, deployment plumbing. This step abstracts away the reasoning itself. And reasoning is what you need when the abstraction leaks, which it always eventually does.”

You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs by James Shore

“your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.”

“The model isn’t a perfect representation of reality, but the overall message is right. You need AI that reduces your maintenance costs, and in proportion to the speed boost you get from new code. Without it, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.

“So, yeah, go ahead, chase improvements to your coding speed. But spend just as much time chasing improvements to your maintenance costs.”

Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise by Tuhin Nair

“Special cases, if conditions, new database tables, new components. All yuck yucks. The senior developer wants as little of this as possible, spending lots of time making sure they absolutely need to add more code.

“Because adding to a system is risking more complexity.

“Yes, yes, of course this is simplistic. There are senior developers who excel at taking on unsolved problems and finding new creative designs.

“But eventually, if you’re taking responsibility for a working system, you’re scared of complexity.”

“[…] uncertainty is cruel because no strategy is guaranteed to work. When combined with time (compensation for marketing/sales, or payroll for founders, or data for product managers) it can feel like taking things to market as fast as possible is the only way to reduce uncertainty before a deadline. The more you can take to the market, the more you can get feedback from it, the more you can (potentially) reduce uncertainty.

“This loop, and all companies start with this loop, is about pure, raw, speed.”

“Because once you have customers, both loops are running simultaneously. A business needs to both explore possibilities and serve customers at the same time.”

“[…] here’s the magical phrase every senior developer must learn: ‘Can we try something quicker?’

“The use of ‘quicker’ acknowledges what they’re really looking for; ‘something’ implies another way of achieving it; ‘try’ implies imperfection, but also the possibility of it being good enough.

“It perfectly cuts down to the requirement of the rest of the company, speed to reduce uncertainty, while allowing the senior developer to exercise their expertise: reduce, re-use, and if life is truly a blessing, avoid.”

“What if we had one system just for speed? Everyone focused on bringing things to life could work here. AI agents, our own generated and unreviewed code, junior devs, marketing etc.

“We could call this the ‘Speed’ version of the system. It’s not meant to be understandable, the goal is getting things good enough to take it to the market for feedback.

“And then what if we had a second system focused on stability?

“We could call this the ‘Scale’ version of the system. It’s designed by senior developers to be stable, understandable, and scalable.

“The ‘Speed’ version allows the rest of the business to continue learning from the market, as the senior developers build a trailing version of the system that’s well-reviewed and understandable.

“Plus, the design of the ‘Scale’ version is influenced by what worked and what doesn’t work in the ‘Speed’ version of the system.”

This sounds lovely and sensible and will absolutely not be used, ever, as the business will try to stretch the “Speed” version to act as the “Stable” version but without the effort.

Fun

The hosts of the 2026 ESC are cartoon characters. The lady is a bony, large-lipped, giant-titted, shiny skeleton.

Semifinal 1

Spoiler alert: not a single one of these songs was worth listening to even once. It was even more of a train wreck than usual. Was it always this terrible or just since they all started using AI to “fine-tune”?

Moldova 🇲🇩

Joyless trash.

Sweden 🇸🇪

Utter trash. The singing ruined an occasionally reasonable electronic beat.

Croatia 🇭🇷

Trash, but at least somewhat musical.

Greece 🇬🇷

WTF. Utterly incoherent. This is not even recognizable as music.

Portugal 🇵🇹

Absolutely not my kind of my music but it was at least a song. The five guys were sympathetic. They looked like they were doing karaoke at a team-building event.

Georgia 🇬🇪

Utterly generic ESC semi-electronica song. Some decent group dance stuff.

Italy

A classic Italian disco song that was positively wholesome after the aural onslaught of the first six songs.

Finland 🇫🇮

Generic ESC trash. Not as offensive as some of the others. It doesn’t feel like Finland—more like Sweden.

Montenegro 🇲🇪

Also a generic ESC song, which means it was trash. The aesthetic was OK. It was vampire-lesbian chic, which could be problematic but they all seemed to be in into it, so off you go.

Estonia 🇪🇪

A straight-up 80s rock song. It was a song, like with a bridge, verses, and a chorus. This was fine. It might even be good if you squint hard enough.

Israel 🇮🇱

Trash. Generic. He sang in French, English, and I believe a bit of Hebrew (probably when he wanted to say some deeply racist anti-Arab slurs). Nice to see that Israel made it, though. You’d think they’d be a bit too busy, what with all the conquering and invading and stuff. It wouldn’t be the ESC without them.

Germany 🇩🇪

Just as a good a picture as any of the ESC 2026A slutty dance number but with terrible dancing. The song sucks. It is beyond generic. Germany is filling in for the Russians’ absence, because they liked to send a group of strippers too when they were still being invited.

Belgium 🇧🇪

Relied too much on the singer’s weak voice over a decent bass beat. Again, ruined by the singing and lyrics.

Lithuania 🇱🇹

Something different. Operatic ESC. E-beat. Still trash.

San Marino 🇸🇲

Generic ESC disco trash.

Poland

Gospel-style mixed with rap. Decent backup dancers. Unoffensive but not really good.

Serbia 🇷🇸

Oh hey, the goth entry. They are at least pretending to play instruments. A bit of a Hellraiser aesthetic. Not a good song. The camerawork is disturbing.

Estonia should move on. Maybe Italy. Maybe Portugal.

Semifinal 2

The second semifinal was of slightly higher quality with 4 or 5 decent acts and a handful of not utterly offensive ones.

Bulgaria 🇧🇬

This is a terrible song that’s trying to make some headway with dance moves and a lead singer with giant breasts and lips like a Zodiac boat. It will probably be enough to move on.

Azerbaijan 🇦🇿

The first slow ballad, I think. It wasn’t offensive but it was not good.

Romania 🇷🇴

The song is called “Choke Me,” so I guess that’s promising. Operatic “metal” (who are we kidding, this is hard rock at most). It’s a gimmick where two female lead singers ask to be punished. Sure, OK. This will probably also be enough to move on.

Luxembourg 🇱🇺

Another ballad. Fully generic. This one is trying to be Björk, with the same look and the same bit of a speech defect. Not offensive but not good.

Czechia 🇨🇿

A male ballad this time. He’s by himself on stage but surrounded by mirrors. His voice isn’t terrible but the song is.

France 🇫🇷

It is utterly unsurprising that the singer simply repeats the chorus “Regarde moi” the whole time. It’s an operatic ballad. Some decent dance choreography. This was probably one of the better songs so far.

Armenia 🇦🇲

This is ESC quirky with a lot of tempo changes, strobe lights—oh sweet God the strobe lights—and a lot of yelling and fast, incoherent “music”.

Switzerland 🇨🇭

A blues song? Like, what? No frenzied pace? No screaming? It’s a song? There is way too much strobing but her voice is good and the song … is good? Did I change the channel by accident? Look, before you say it, I couldn’t care less if Switzerland wins but they have, hands down, the best song so far. I would have Shazamed it if it had come on the radio. I also like Veronica’s look: big 70s glasses and big, feathered 70s hair. Not slutty, which is a welcome change of pace from pretty much all of the other female acts.

Cyprus 🇨🇾

She’s fit so that’ll be a whole bunch of votes right there. The song is generic and uninspiring. Lots of tanned skin on stage, though. The song feels really long.

Austria 🇦🇹

Singing in German. Starts off with a cool top-down camera view, cartoon-like. Generic ESC stuff but relatively well-done. Not obnoxious. Whimsical costumes. The dance moves are kind of quaint and simple. A more human music, if that’s the right way of putting it? Genuine, maybe?

Latvia 🇱🇻

Another operatic ballad. This one’s not terrible, so it should probably move on, given that all but three of the preceding songs were trash.

Denmark 🇩🇰

A goth-y generic rock-ish song with a techno beat. His voice isn’t bad but the song is. Mucho pyrotechnics.

Australia 🇦🇺

Bro, another operatic ballad. This sounds like a Disney theme song. Her voice isn’t bad, though. It’s a bit of a Celine Dion vibe. Not my kind of music but hey, it wasn’t actively painful to listen to. She’s pretending to play a golden piano that you absolutely cannot hear. Wait, you could hear it for a bit…but then it kept playing even after she picked up the mic again.

Ukraine 🇺🇦

Another operatic ballad, accompanied by a bandura (Ukrainian lute) for a hot second but you mostly can’t hear it. She has a good voice but the song is quite generic. It’s not really much worse than Australia, though. It is at this point in the evening that it becomes difficult to even tell them apart. She’s got a set of lungs on her, though.

United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Thank God, finally one that is unequivocally bad because the UK almost always sucks so hard. Christ almighty that was awful.

Albania 🇦🇱

An operatic male with a bit more of a rock beat. Not a ballad. He’s by himself on stage. Cool costume. Looks like Ibrahimovic. They have subtitles for his Albanian lyrics. I guess it was important to him. I didn’t hate it.

Malta 🇲🇹

This starts off as a 50s-style crooner by a guy in a sleeveless, leather outfit. He’s singing in Italian and English. It’s not really my thing but it’s well-done and it’s not demanding attention. His voice is good.

Norway 🇳🇴

A good rock song with a structure that is very much like a song. His voice isn’t bad; good stage presence. It’s a bit bland but the bass line is good. It’s a mediocre-to-good 80s rock song. Kind of a bit of a Billy Idol vibe to it.

Switzerland should definitely move on. Also Malta. OK, fine, Norway. Also probably Austria. Maybe France. Latvia if you insist.

Guess what, though? Switzerland didn’t move on. C’est la vie.

I will not be watching or even half-listening to the finals on Saturday because I am not a masochist.

The hosts of the 2026 ESC are cartoon characters. The lady is a bony, large-lipped, giant-titted, shiny skeleton. What have we done to deserve this?

Semifinal 1

Spoiler alert: not a single one of these songs was worth listening to even once. It was even more of a train wreck than usual. Was it always this terrible or just since they all started using AI to “fine-tune”?

Moldova 🇲🇩

Joyless trash.

Sweden 🇸🇪

Utter trash. The singing ruined an occasionally reasonable electronic beat.

Croatia 🇭🇷

Trash, but at least somewhat musical.

Greece 🇬🇷

WTF. Utterly incoherent. This is not even recognizable as music.

Portugal 🇵🇹

Absolutely not my kind of my music but it was at least a song. The five guys were sympathetic. They looked like they were doing karaoke at a team-building event.

Georgia 🇬🇪

Utterly generic ESC semi-electronica song. Some decent group dance stuff.

Italy

A classic Italian disco song that was positively wholesome after the aural onslaught of the first six songs.

Finland 🇫🇮

Generic ESC trash. Not as offensive as some of the others. It doesn’t feel like Finland—more like Sweden.

Montenegro 🇲🇪

Also a generic ESC song, which means it was trash. The aesthetic was OK. It was vampire-lesbian chic, which could be problematic but they all seemed to be in into it, so off you go.

Estonia 🇪🇪

A straight-up 80s rock song. It was a song, like with a bridge, verses, and a chorus. This was fine. It might even be good if you squint hard enough.

Israel 🇮🇱

Trash. Generic. He sang in French, English, and I believe a bit of Hebrew (probably when he wanted to say some deeply racist anti-Arab slurs). Nice to see that Israel made it, though. You’d think they’d be a bit too busy, what with all the conquering and invading and stuff. It wouldn’t be the ESC without them.

Germany 🇩🇪

Just as a good a picture as any of the ESC 2026A slutty dance number but with terrible dancing. The song sucks. It is beyond generic. Germany is filling in for the Russians’ absence, because they liked to send a group of strippers too when they were still being invited.

Belgium 🇧🇪

Relied too much on the singer’s weak voice over a decent bass beat. Again, ruined by the singing and lyrics.

Lithuania 🇱🇹

Something different. Operatic ESC. E-beat. Still trash.

San Marino 🇸🇲

Generic ESC disco trash.

Poland

Gospel-style mixed with rap. Decent backup dancers. Unoffensive but not really good.

Serbia 🇷🇸

Oh hey, the goth entry. They are at least pretending to play instruments. A bit of a Hellraiser aesthetic. Not a good song. The camerawork is disturbing.

Estonia should move on. Maybe Italy. Maybe Portugal.

Semifinal 2

The second semifinal was of slightly higher quality with 4 or 5 decent acts and a handful of not utterly offensive ones.

Bulgaria 🇧🇬

This is a terrible song that’s trying to make some headway with dance moves and a lead singer with giant breasts and lips like a Zodiac boat. It will probably be enough to move on.

Azerbaijan 🇦🇿

The first slow ballad, I think. It wasn’t offensive but it was not good.

Romania 🇷🇴

The song is called “Choke Me,” so I guess that’s promising. Operatic “metal” (who are we kidding, this is hard rock at most). It’s a gimmick where two female lead singers ask to be punished. Sure, OK. This will probably also be enough to move on.

Luxembourg 🇱🇺

Another ballad. Fully generic. This one is trying to be Björk, with the same look and the same bit of a speech defect. Not offensive but not good.

Czechia 🇨🇿

A male ballad this time. He’s by himself on stage but surrounded by mirrors. His voice isn’t terrible but the song is.

France 🇫🇷

It is utterly unsurprising that the singer simply repeats the chorus “Regarde moi” the whole time. It’s an operatic ballad. Some decent dance choreography. This was probably one of the better songs so far.

Armenia 🇦🇲

This is ESC quirky with a lot of tempo changes, strobe lights—oh sweet God the strobe lights—and a lot of yelling and fast, incoherent “music”.

Switzerland 🇨🇭

A blues song? Like, what? No frenzied pace? No screaming? It’s a song? There is way too much strobing but her voice is good and the song … is good? Did I change the channel by accident? Look, before you say it, I couldn’t care less if Switzerland wins but they have, hands down, the best song so far. I would have Shazamed it if it had come on the radio. I also like Veronica’s look: big 70s glasses and big, feathered 70s hair. Not slutty, which is a welcome change of pace from pretty much all of the other female acts.

Cyprus 🇨🇾

She’s fit so that’ll be a whole bunch of votes right there. The song is generic and uninspiring. Lots of tanned skin on stage, though. The song feels really long.

Austria 🇦🇹

Singing in German. Starts off with a cool top-down camera view, cartoon-like. Generic ESC stuff but relatively well-done. Not obnoxious. Whimsical costumes. The dance moves are kind of quaint and simple. A more human music, if that’s the right way of putting it? Genuine, maybe?

Latvia 🇱🇻

Another operatic ballad. This one’s not terrible, so it should probably move on, given that all but three of the preceding songs were trash.

Denmark 🇩🇰

A goth-y generic rock-ish song with a techno beat. His voice isn’t bad but the song is. Mucho pyrotechnics.

Australia 🇦🇺

Bro, another operatic ballad. This sounds like a Disney theme song. Her voice isn’t bad, though. It’s a bit of a Celine Dion vibe. Not my kind of music but hey, it wasn’t actively painful to listen to. She’s pretending to play a golden piano that you absolutely cannot hear. Wait, you could hear it for a bit…but then it kept playing even after she picked up the mic again.

Ukraine 🇺🇦

Another operatic ballad, accompanied by a bandura (Ukrainian lute) for a hot second but you mostly can’t hear it. She has a good voice but the song is quite generic. It’s not really much worse than Australia, though. It is at this point in the evening that it becomes difficult to even tell them apart. She’s got a set of lungs on her, though.

United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Thank God, finally one that is unequivocally bad because the UK almost always sucks so hard. Christ almighty that was awful.

Albania 🇦🇱

An operatic male with a bit more of a rock beat. Not a ballad. He’s by himself on stage. Cool costume. Looks like Ibrahimovic. They have subtitles for his Albanian lyrics. I guess it was important to him. I didn’t hate it.

Malta 🇲🇹

This starts off as a 50s-style crooner by a guy in a sleeveless, leather outfit. He’s singing in Italian and English. It’s not really my thing but it’s well-done and it’s not demanding attention. His voice is good.

Norway 🇳🇴

A good rock song with a structure that is very much like a song. His voice isn’t bad; good stage presence. It’s a bit bland but the bass line is good. It’s a mediocre-to-good 80s rock song. Kind of a bit of a Billy Idol vibe to it.

Switzerland should definitely move on. Also Malta. OK, fine, Norway. Also probably Austria. Maybe France. Latvia if you insist.

Guess what, though? Switzerland didn’t move on. C’est la vie.

I will not be watching or even half-listening to the finals on Saturday because I am not a masochist.

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Design
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

'Free Palestine' under an Israeli flag − Sidewalk-chalk art outside of an elementary school in Switzerland

'Free Free Palestine': Sidewalk-chalk art outside of an elementary school in Switzerland

Re-Radicalization in an Age of MAGA Remorse by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“On a purely political level, I am a practitioner of the lost antifascist art of deradicalization, though I prefer to think of what I do as re-radicalization. Whereas deradicalization is the practice of encouraging people with extremist views to adapt to a more moderate stance, I have nothing but contempt for the so-called moderates of Western Civilization who frequently do a better job pushing white supremacy than the Klan with their endless expansions of the police-warfare state. What I do is try to encourage radicals with counterrevolutionary views to adopt legitimately revolutionary ones.”

“So now, when I cross paths with other clearly subaltern people adopting views and positions that put them at odds with mainstream society, I have a hard time ignoring the pain behind the rage in their eyes. And when I see those same people realizing that they’ve been fleeced by another two-bit conman in designer jackboots, I see an opportunity to finally remove the wool from those eyes.”

“When push comes to shove, nearly every fascist I confront will concede at some point that who they really despise is the motherfuckers in Washington and on Wall Street. Powerful, Atlantic elites, taxing them blind, sending their jobs overseas, and sending their kids off to die for the whole awful scam.”

“[…] the real conspiracy is that poor white people destroy themselves when they destroy Black, brown, and Queer people. They waste their rage on other victims of the same system that enslaves them and become limp-wristed shock troops for city slicking pedophiles like Donald Trump in the process. We can agree to disagree on a good many things, from my alternative ‘lifestyle’ to your Biblical values, just so long as we agree that power is the problem and that any ideology that sanctifies it is the real enemy.”

Brian Berletic: U.S. Is Grooming Europe for War with Russia by Glenn Diesen (YouTube)

“People have to understand that the whole reason there was no change with the incoming Trump administration is because presidents are in charge of nothing. Congress is in charge of nothing. It is the unelected corporate finance here—monopolies inside the United States—that are running everything, that are benefiting from everything.

“A $ 1.5 trillion defense budget that is the arms industry benefiting from that. Big oil is benefiting from these projects that they proposed got approved by the US government under Obama, Trump, Biden, the current Trump administration, projects that made absolutely no financial sense at all until wars of aggression were fought by the US to make them viable.

“So, when you have interests like that who are driven by perpetual power and profit and ultimately global domination, you cannot deal with a country like this with diplomacy, in the way we we think about diplomacy. There’s nothing you can say—it’s like trying to negotiate with a virus that’s eating your body alive.

“You need to identify how it works and how to displace it from the global body and push it back to a more proportional role within the global network of nations. And that’s what multipolarism basically is. That’s what is driving it. It is displacing US-led unipolar hegemony. It is offering alternatives, not just in terms of how countries interact with one another, but [also] corporations, goods and services that countries can get access to without fueling the corporate-financier interests that are driving US foreign and domestic policy.

“And so this is what’s going to have to happen. People are going to have to forget about—you know the US will never accommodate anyone anywhere at any time. They will never accept, you know, being a part of of the multipolar world. They want global domination. So, as long as that’s their obsession, multipolarism has to be resolute in displacing them from around the globe because, everywhere you don’t, just like a virus inside your body, if it’s in that part of the body, it’s going to eat it away and eventually everyone will get sick and die.

“And as you know, as goes with viruses, they end up killing their hosts in the process. And that’s what global empire has always done. It has become unsustainable and it itself ends up collapsing. And so this is why multipolarism is so necessary. This is why that is the solution. And I think Russia, China, many other countries have always understood this. They use diplomacy as a way of trying to make this transition from US-led hegemony to a multi-polar world as painless as is possible.

“But as you can see, there’s still tremendous death and destruction and instability caused through this process. We could only hope that it continues transitioning in the right direction and it minimizes the death and destruction caused by by US aggression.”

Why ‘America’ Is Doing Such Dumb Shit and Why It Can’t Change Course by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Look on a map and let the reality slap you. ‘America’ never withdrew after World War II, and the war against the world never stopped, it just stopped really affecting White people. They called these wars ‘Cold’ like their hearts, but it’s certainly gotten hot since 9/11, the start of what I call World War III. What’s the plot? Same as every night, as the Brain told Pinky. Try to take over the world.”

“‘America’ started as a genocidal unsettler colony and became the head of White Empire after World War II. It was a license to kill, a license to steal, as Henry Hill said, they got to do the ‘American’ thing the world over. ‘America’ has always been about taking land, stealing resources, and genociding everything living. Asking it to do something else is like sending an oil tanker to pick up the kids after school. It’ll kill the kids and blow up the school, what did you expect?”

“‘America’ has been planning to defeat the USSR since the 1940s and the USSR falling wasn’t going to stop them, no sir. Hence they’re still attacking Russia, on sheer inertia. America’s has been planning to corrupt or coup everybody in the Middle East since the 1950s, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution wasn’t going to stop them. Notice them still attacking Iran, there’s that inertia. America’s plan since forever has been to take over the world, and the world taking over wasn’t going to stop them. That’s why they’ve crashed their ship of state in the Strait of Hormuz and are still hitting the gas even though they’re obviously grounded. There is no other setting. It’s full steam ahead and damn the torpedos. ‘America’s’ dumbass course was set decades ago, it’s the sheer inertia of imperialism.”

“‘America’ is really being run like a business now. A business that’s been taken over by private equity, to be loaded up with debt and gutted. In the classic PE/LBO business model—which is indistinguishable from a mafia ‘bust-out’—some oligarchs take over a business, load it up with debt, strip assets, maybe do a bit of insider trading, and then leave it for dead. Often they buy the business by using the business itself as collateral. This leveraged buyout process is really like me telling the bank ‘loan me $5 billion to buy Toys ‘R’ Us ($6.6 total), don’t worry I’m good for it, I’ll own Toys ‘R’ Us in a minute.’ This actually happened. Some oligarchs bought Toys ‘R’ Us using Toys ‘R’ Us as collateral, then ran up even more debts in the companies name and killed it off. When they say America is run like a business, this is what they mean. Private equity guys (the White word for oligarchs) have LBO’d the ‘United States of America’ and are busting it out.”

“The corruption of the US government is the system. They legalized corruption and call it ‘donations’ or ‘lobbying’ to whitewash what remains dirty laundry. Trump openly uses the US Government like collateral, but this is not just him. Why did Hunter Biden have a board seat in Ukraine, before his dad was president? Why did Janet Yellen (before she was Treasury Secretary) get $7.2 million in speaking fees, from the people she’d be regulating? Corruption is endemic to ‘America’, they just hide it in their corruption of the English language. They even publish how corrupt they are as if transparency is decency when it isn’t. It’s just shamelessness, of which Trump is the finest specimen. ‘America’ is a representative democracy in that sense. Trump represents corruption.”

“The problem is not Trump as a dodgy businessman (which he is), it’s the whole dodgy business model, which elevates a man like Trump as its chief charlatan.”

“Thus the USS ‘United States’ is a ship that’s hard to steer if you try, with captains that are busy unloading shit off the side and not trying. This is a sure way to die, but if you make the right bets on the stock market, falling can feel like flying. America lacks the moral, military, and political wherewithal to fight this World War III, but they also lack the moral, military, and political wherewithal to stop it. They have to proceed. It’s last call on the Titanic, and the ice makes the drinks cooler anyways.”

Trump’s Trap, Trump’s Sanity by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

The degree to which the world is trapped by the insanity of the worst people reminds me of It’s a Good Life (The Twilight Zone) (Wikipedia),

“The people live in fear of Six-year-old Anthony Fremont, constantly telling him how everything he does is “good”, since he banishes anyone thinking unhappy thoughts forever to a place that he calls “the cornfield.” Having never experienced any form of discipline, he does not understand that his actions are harmful. […]

“[…]

“Anthony then causes snow to begin falling outside. The snow will kill off at least half the crops and the town will face starvation. Anthony’s father starts to rebuke Anthony about this, but his wife and the other adults look on with worried smiles on their faces. The intimidated father then smiles and tells Anthony “…But it’s good that you’re making it snow, Anthony, it’s real good. And tomorrow…tomorrow’s gonna be a real good day!””

You can see a few minutes of the show here. You need to be in the U.S.—or pretending to be in the U.S.—to watch it.

The Twilight Zone (Classic): It's A Good Life − A Very Bad Man by The Twilight Zone (YouTube)

Free Saif, Free Thiago, F@&k Israel, Free Palestine by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

Trump’s deployment of warships to Strait of Hormuz escalates Iran war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)

“This is not simply a consequence of “bad policy” decisions or the product of one administration’s recklessness. It is rooted in the insoluble contradictions of American imperialism itself. For 35 years, the central project of American foreign policy has been to offset the long-term erosion of US economic dominance through the use of military force. In these conditions, militarism takes on an increasingly existential character for the ruling class: Retreat threatens the credibility of its global power, while escalation courts catastrophe.”

“The disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has driven oil prices above $110 per barrel [actually, spot prices are twice as high; futures are at $110] and injected a new shock into an already fragile world economy. Airlines in Europe and North America are cutting capacity and canceling tens of thousands of flights, translating directly into layoffs, reduced hours and intensified exploitation for pilots, cabin crew, ground staff and maintenance workers, while tens of thousands of seafarers are effectively trapped in the Gulf amid the danger of attack.

“Higher energy costs ripple outward into every supply chain—raising transport and import costs, accelerating inflation and driving up prices for food and basic necessities. This crisis is global in the most literal sense: Disruptions in the transit of key food inputs and fertilizer compounds through the region are already translating into mass impoverishment, deepening hunger and the threat of famine for millions in the poorest countries, who will be made to pay for a war waged in the interests of the imperialist powers and the financial oligarchy.”

Further light shed on criminal US torpedoing of Iranian ship by Wasantha Rupasinghe (WSWS)

“Speaking after his return, IRIS Dena captain Zarri rejected claims by the US Indo-Pacific Command that the vessel was armed. “One of the exercise’s conditions was that missiles and torpedoes should not be carried by participating vessels,” Zarri said. He confirmed that the frigate carried neither anti-submarine torpedoes nor strategic missiles, leaving it unable to defend itself against an underwater attack.

“Zarri said a US submarine launched two torpedoes, with a 90-minute interval between the first and second. The initial strike damaged the ship’s shaft and propeller, bringing Dena to a halt. In the next 90 minutes, the crew carried out emergency procedures while assembling on the aft deck, “preparing for evacuation or surrender.” According to the Tehran Times, the first officer said he “ordered sailors to assemble on the helicopter landing pad while he checked the ship to ensure no one was left behind.”

“In a blatant violation of the rules of naval warfare, the US submarine fired a second torpedo even through the ship had been disabled and the crew was visibly preparing to abandon it. The torpedo struck the aft section “directly beneath the assembled crew,” the first officer recalled. “The second torpedo killed 104 of our friends, our comrades, our dear brothers,” Zarri said, adding, “This was their intention”—to leave a maximum number of casualties.”

“All the evidence—from the technical record of the attack to the harrowing account given by Commander Zarri and his first officer—confirms that the US Navy carried out a deliberate war-crime in torpedoing of an unarmed, immobilised Iranian ship whose crew was in the process of evacuating.

“Whether or not they were directly informed of the impending US attack, the Indian and Sri Lankan governments were well aware of the dangers to the Iranian vessels faced. There is no innocent explanation for the delays in allowing them to dock.

“The evasions and hypocritical declarations of “neutrality” by Colombo and New Delhi, along with the silence of the imperialist-aligned media, cannot cover-up the fact that these governments were complicit in this US war crime.”

What’s (Not) Happening With Iran? by Iindrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The Strait of Hormuz is the most vital trade route in the world and Iran owns it now. Again, the ball is in ‘America’s’ court to win it back, but we all know they don’t have the balls. And they’re not just losing their empire, this hits home. The last pre-war ships just reached California, and there’s no more behind them. This is a bigger oil shock than the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1978 Iranian Revolution combined, which is basically what’s going on. The Arab oil is involuntarily embargoed and the Iranian Revolution has got more volunteers than ever.

“Remember then, that the 1970s recession started after the embargo was lifted. And that and those economic effects took decades to unwind. Stable oil prices basically never recovered, they’ve been spiky ever since. This Hormuz shock is bigger than what happened in the 1970s, and we don’t yet know how big. The pressure is just building and building up, and the Trump regime artificially pumping the stock market only brings a worse reckoning. There’s a Greatest Depression coming and I, for one, feel fine. This imperial world needs to burn for a free world to emerge. And all of its bases are belong to us now.”

European war flotilla en route to the Strait of Hormuz by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“[…] the mission is neither peaceful nor neutral. The former colonial powers France and Britain are pursuing their own imperialist interests in the Middle East, which do not align with those of the US. The same applies to Germany and the European Union.

“They all share Washington’s goal of rolling the region back to its former colonial state. They support the sanctions against Iran and Trump’s efforts to overthrow the regime that came to power in Tehran after the 1979 revolution against the Shah’s dictatorship. And they all stand behind the Israeli regime and crack down all the harder on its critics the more outrageous its war crimes become.”

“EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who attended the summit, praised Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan [of EU-kuck nation Armenia] in the highest terms. She commended the “Velvet Revolution” of 2018 that had brought him to power. The country thereby demonstrated its commitment to European values, she said. President Macron, accompanied by a piano, even performed a song by the Armenian-French singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour to flatter the hosts.”

You can’t even make this kind of stuff up.

“[…] the Zangezur Corridor is in US hands. It was at the centre of the US-mediated peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2023 and is being developed exclusively by US companies. To leave no doubt as to who controls this strategic chokepoint, it bears the official name “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP).”

Why the US is at War with Iran and Why the War Might Pause but Won’t End by The New Atlas | Brian Berletic (YouTube)

“The prospect of US war against Iran and around the globe continuously escalating in the near to intermediate future is inevitable because the wars taking place now are being fought specifically to prepare for a future confrontation with China itself. For this reason, the prospects of the US arriving at any sort of “peace” deal with Russia or Iran is near zero.”

While Berletic does a great job of referencing historical documents from the last 20 years that describe exactly what the U.S. plans are, I think he’s not critical enough in evaluating the U.S.‘s ability to execute those plans. Like, it’s great that someone wrote a document about where they’re headed but what is the plausibility today under the conditions that we live in now?

He tends to treat the U.S.—or the oligarchs that run and control the global empire—as an infinitely powerful and unstoppable force that really experienced no setback, no matter how much it may look like they have. Like, does the impending global depression impact these plans? Like, at all? Does cutting off China from the Malacca Strait—and China’s inevitable economic retaliation—have a potential impact on the U.S. being able to execute its plans? Like, if they lose all of the guns and money, are they still just as powerful?

I sometimes wonder, “who is he arguing with?” Idiots in his Twitter comments? The mainstream media?

Journalism & Media

kids' shows teaching sharing is communism by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Everything Is Fake by Ted Rall

“These days, everything seems so fake that it’s impossible to discern what may or may not be real in order to determine whether you should care.”

Ending Western Warmongering Should Be Our Number One Priority by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“First and foremost the west needs to stop murdering people. Ending western warmongering should take priority over every other societal concern, in the same way your husband being a serial killer would be a more urgent concern than his refusal to wash dishes.

“It’s a sign of a deep sickness how much more political attention is given to domestic policy in our society than the fact that our governments are butchering human beings on other continents. This is not to say that those domestic policy issues are not important; it is only to say that they aren’t as horrifyingly urgent as the way imperial core nations are actively participating in actual mass murder.

“Healthcare? Very important. Immigrants’ rights? Very important. Social justice and equality? Very important. But imagine if you lived in a place where western-made bombs were tearing your family and neighbors to shreds and then catching sight of a western social media post about the supreme importance of LGBTQ issues or ending discrimination against neurodivergent people. Just pause and put yourself in those shoes for a minute.”

“You would not continue your discussion about intersectional feminism at the restaurant if you saw someone being strangled to death at the table across the room.”

“We’re no different than the wife of a serial killer who ignores the bodies being buried in the backyard because she’s more worried about what his online gambling addiction is costing the family. We’re disconnecting ourselves from something precious and important within us in order to psychologically dissociate from the crimes of the empire in the way that we do.”

Labor

In defense of Yugoslavia: Max Blumenthal on Michael Parenti's bravest work by The Grayzone | Max Blumenthal (YouTube)

“Michael Parenti got it right. You won’t know that from his corporate media obituary that Michael Parenti got it right again. Michael Parenti was right. Michael Parenti was right because he was consistent. Because he stuck to his guns, because he painted in straight lines. He never veered from an anti-imperialist analysis when so many other left intellectuals did. He was right because he did not seek elite respectability. And so you would never find him on some shadowy financier’s jet. he would be right down here with the people in Berkeley. He spoke for the working class from which he came. He was right. He was righteous. Michael Parenti is a guiding light in the darkness of this bloodstained golden age.”

Economy & Finance

Will the Iran War Cause a Global Depression? (w/ Prof. Richard Wolff) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

Is Chinese AI the Remedy to Inequality? by Dean Baker (CEPR)

“Chinese AI is beating out US in adoption through much of the world. Apparently, Chinese AI is even gaining many customers in Silicon Valley, both because of its lower price, but also because it is open source, which mean companies can alter it to fit their needs. This also means that a company can run the Chinese AI on their own systems and they don’t have to turn over control of sensitive company data.

“This Chinese competition is a huge deal not only for bringing AI prices down, but also for preventing fascist clowns like Elon Musk from getting endless money. While Musk may always be insanely rich, if investors ever learn arithmetic and value his companies based on their profits, he will have far less money. (Tesla has a price-to-earnings ratio of 360. If it had a more normal, but still high PE of 20, Musk’s stake would be worth a bit more than ½0th its current value.)

“We should have that conversation about intellectual property rules that make the Musks of the world ridiculously rich. We should also be changing rules on things like bankruptcy that private equity barons [use] to get rich by buying companies and putting them into bankruptcy.

“Unfortunately, we have not yet advanced to the point where we can have a serious discussion on the ways we structure capitalism to generate inequality. Perhaps one day we will, but until then, we should be thankful for Chinese competition. ”

The Coming Mega-IPO Flow & Funding Problem of 2026 by Paul Kedrosky

“That much new equity supply hitting in a few months creates a math problem: the money has to come from somewhere. Most of it will come from existing holdings. Passive funds will be forced buyers once these names join the indexes, which will happen much faster than usual, given recent index rule changes. That means mechanical selling pressure on whatever many funds currently own, which is mostly the same large-cap tech stocks everyone else owns.”

The collapse of Spirit Airlines: The latest in a decades-long war on the working class by Tom Hall (WSWS)

“When Spirit Airlines ceased operations last week, 17,000 workers lost their jobs, their benefits and potentially their final paychecks in a single night. Medical, dental and vision coverage for every Spirit employee was terminated the moment the last flight landed.

“The collapse immediately prices millions of working-class travelers out of air travel, because Spirit’s fare were a fraction of those charged by the legacy carriers. In other words, workers are paying twice: as producers, stripped of jobs and conditions; as consumers, stripped of affordable travel.

“The most immediate trigger for the bankruptcy is the doubling of jet fuel prices during the war on Iran, as a direct consequence of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil traffic previously flowed. Spirit, already under bankruptcy, could not absorb the shock. Other airlines are expected to fall if the war continues, including JetBlue and Frontier.

“But in reality, the fuel shock is being used as an opportunity to further consolidate the industry and wipe out jobs. Spirit has been allowed to collapse by the US government because the removal of the ultra-low cost carrier will significantly increase prices and profits for the rest of the industry.”

“The World Socialist Web Site demands that Spirit’s workforce, and all those dislocated by the economic impact of the war, must be made whole, with full pay and benefits until they find new employment. This must be paid for through the expropriation of the windfall profits extracted by the oil companies and major banks from the war they support. This, however, is only a first step towards the nationalization of the airline industry and operating them as public utilities under workers’ control, guaranteeing decent conditions for airline workers and affordable fares for the traveling public.”

Sweet dreams are made of this. Instead, the government will either let the airlines in which their cronies are not invested die a ignominious death, or they will bail them out, if the members of the administration would benefit directly (or indirectly).

“Today, more than 90 percent of air traffic control facilities now operate below recommended staffing levels […]”

“In 2020, with the pandemic shutting down much of the world economy, the industry sought and received—with the support of the Association of Flight Attendants—a $54 billion pandemic bailout as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act. Supposedly to protect jobs, instead it was followed by 70,000 cuts the following year.”

“Iran is part of a global war on the working class. The World Bank estimates that an extended conflict keeping oil above $100 a barrel could push 45 million more people into acute food insecurity. Prices for urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer, have surged 60 to 70 percent, threatening famine across sub-Saharan Africa at planting season. The Iranian government has acknowledged that 2 million workers have already lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the conflict. In Britain, as many as 250,000 jobs could be lost by next year, and in Germany 200,000 jobs are at risk because of the war.”

In praise of vultures by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

““Only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $20.” But if you multiply a $20 junk fee by ten million purchases, a company can use that fact to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s real folding money, which is why every company has figured out a way to whack you for a $20 junk fee.

“There are two ways to end this racket: one is litigation, the other is regulation, and the capitalism-hating-capitalists who run the world want to kill both. That’s why the business lobby smears lawyers like Keller as being “vultures.” But as Matt Stoller says, “vultures look aggressive and whatnot, but when you actually get rid of vultures out of an ecosystem, all sorts of things go haywire.”

“I love this point. Vultures live off the disgusting, rotting crap that would otherwise pile up around us, breeding disease and emitting an unbearable stench. If plaintiff-side, no-win/no-fee lawyers are vultures, then junk fees, wage theft, and the million petty frauds they fight are the disgusting, rotting crap that vultures feed off of – and the harder we make it for our noble vulture lawyers, the more disgusting, rotting crap we have to live with, hence the unbearable stench that is all around us.”

Am I Meant To Be Impressed? by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“While Google CEO Sundar Pichai will gladly say that “[Google’s] AI investments and full stack approach are lighting up every part of the business,” said “lighting up” never results in a revenue number that you can point at, because Google knows that analysts and journalists will read “Gemini Enterprise has great momentum with 40% quarter on quarter growth” — which we have no frame of reference for because Google doesn’t share its AI revenues — and clap and honk like fucking seals. Sundar Pichai knows that everybody is desperate to see him jingle his keys, and has such utter contempt for reporters, analysts, and investors that he doesn’t have to prove AI is actually doing anything. Those writing up his earnings will do it for him. ”

“Amazon’s AI revenue run rate is roughly 0.419% of the $298 billion in capex it spent on AI capex so far, or around 25% of the $5 billion it just invested in Anthropic last week. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent $293.8 billion on AI capex through its latest quarter — making its revenue run rate around 1.04% of its spend.”

“[…] most AI revenues out of Google, Microsoft and Amazon come from two companies that lose billions of dollars a year, have no path to profitability, and are only able to keep paying these companies because the companies (and investors) keep feeding them money.

“These relationships are utterly poisonous, and an intentional attempt to deceive investors and the general public.”

“Most of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s capex is being driven into capacity mostly used by OpenAI and Anthropic, neither of whom have the money to pay without continual infusions of more capital. Only Microsoft was smart enough to realize the problem, which is why it allowed Oracle to take over the majority of OpenAI’s future capacity (which may kill Oracle, by the way!), but both Google and Amazon keep feeding Anthropic money so that Anthropic can feed it right back to them.”

“Meta Has Burned Over $150 Billion — Its AI Story Is Completely Insane Nonsense, And We Need To Stop Pretending Otherwise

“Meta is probably the funniest company in the AI bubble, in the sense that it does not appear to have anything approaching an AI strategy beyond “build as much data center capacity as possible” and “lose $4 billion a quarter selling pervert glasses.”

“I realize I sound a little dismissive, but nobody can actually explain to me what Meta is doing with AI in a way that remotely justifies it burning $158.25 billion in capex since 2023, with plans to spend as much as $145 billion in 2026 alone.”

“Unbe-fucking-lievable! Anthropic and OpenAI have now committed to over $718 billion of Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s revenues, despite the fact that neither of them can actually afford to pay for it. The market’s response? A slight (and short-lived) after-hours lift.

“Dear members of the media: these companies are laughing at you. They know you are going to cover this in a way that makes them look good. They know you’re going to use this as proof that they’re “doing well in AI,” despite the fact that the majority of their future revenue is tied up in two oafish failsons, one of which (OpenAI) plans to burn $50 billion on compute in 2026 alone.”

“ I’m sorry, WOW, Satya! You managed to get up to twenty million paying Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions — $600 million a month in revenue, not profit! — and all it took was you investing $13 billion dollars in money to OpenAI, forcing Large Language Models into every one of your products in a way that borders on harassment and about $289 billion dollars in capex, as well as laying off thousands of people and savaging the Xbox brand.”

Higher oil prices to come as reserves fall at record pace by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“It has been calculated that global airlines have cut 2 million seats from their flight schedules for May in just two weeks, with thousands of flights cancelled as a result of the doubling of the price of jet fuel.”

“Growth forecasts are being reduced significantly because of the fuel price hikes. The finance minister of Bangladesh, where inflation is already running at 8 percent, told the FT that spending on fuel was “bleeding the exchequer.”

“Thailand, the second-largest economy in Southeast Asia, has cut its growth forecast from the already historically low rate of 2 percent to 1.5 percent, with inflation expected to rise from just 0.3 percent to 3 percent.

“India, which has been touted as the world’s fastest-growing economy, has cut its growth forecast to 6.9 percent for the fiscal year which started in April, from 7.6 percent last year.”

“According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the US auto industry consumed 3.7 million metric tons of aluminium last year, a 30 percent increase from 2020. The article cited a report from S&P Global Energy that with the “global aluminium price at about $3,500 a metric ton, the tariff and delivery charges raise the US price to $6,100, compared with $3,220 a year ago.””

A revealing report on the rise and rise of private credit by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Payment in kind refers to a situation where borrowers increase the loan principal or provide the lender with equity in the firm rather than pay the interest bill in cash and is estimated to involve around 12 percent of loans.”

This is how the finance world talks to itself. It indicates that entities that are not creditworthy are getting loans. These are the private-credit equivalent of NINJA loans (No income, no job, no asset.)

“Valuation of the assets which private credit finances also poses “challenges.” This is because valuations are “often conducted less frequently and may involve significant discretion, which can amplify uncertainty during times of stress.”

“The phrase “significant discretion” is a euphemistic way of saying that in many cases there is no objective basis for valuations and these are recorded as what the borrowers say they are, according to their own calculations, which are then exposed when they undergo the test of the market.”

To paraphrase in my own way is another way of writing “there are an increasing number of assets whose value we have no plausible way of evaluating, so we’re left to take the seller’s word for it. We do this because we expect to make short-term windfalls from the high valuation, bailing out after having sold them to another sucker.”

It’s basically fraud but it’s an unregulated market, so there is no regulatory or punishment mechanism for it.

“The FSB report provides numerous examples of major problems. One of these is lack of information leading to a “reliance on private ratings estimates in the market, which are often provided by smaller lesser-known rating agencies. Opacity in credit quality can lead to informational contagion, which in turn can amplify credit related vulnerabilities.”

“A practice of credit-rating shopping has developed in which borrowers obtain better ratings from smaller agencies, anxious to increase their market share.”

This section simply provides for detail that the vaunted price-finding mechanism of the market is open to scams and manipulation in markets where there is regulation or enforcement. Private equity is no different than offshore crypto or prediction markets.

“It noted that in the changed environment of rising interest rates, “refinancing challenges may become more severe, and persistently negative cash flows often lead to escalating debt and heightened financial stress.””

We no longer have the vocabulary for defining “failed companies” as long as the owners of those companies are important people.

“There is also the problem of liquidity mismatches in which investors in private credit want to obtain their money but are unable to do so because it has been invested long term.

““Liquidity mismatches may increase going forward if managers continue offering more flexible redemption terms to attract investors, particularly retail investors.””

A “liquidity mismatch” means “we no longer have the money you loaned to us, nor is there is any halfway-plausible mechanism or path through which we will ever be able to pay you back, but we are categorically incapable of admitting that we are bankrupt or in default, so we will continue pretending that we can pay it back at some point and that the only problem is that you’ve come for your money at the wrong time, leading to a “mismatch”.

“This “to do” list is revealing because it shows that financial authorities have very little knowledge of the workings of a key part of the system over which they supposedly preside and regulate.

“This fact underscores a broader point. At present Wall Street is surging to new record highs. But underneath the surface the conditions are developing for another financial crisis which will suddenly burst over the heads of financial authorities just as happened in 2008, only in a more severe form not least because of the enormous changes in the financial system since then of which the growth of private credit is one.”

This is obvious but the important thing is that all of the right people will have increased their fortunes massively before the crash and, furthermore, the degree to which they still retain any exposure to the fallout of their plunder will be matched by subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of government largesse that allows them to come out of the financial disaster that they caused larger than ever, and with their engines revving to do it all over again.

Roaming Charges: Pity, the Poor Billionaire by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Wall Street Journal reports that since 1976, the top 0.001% of U.S. households have seen their wealth increase by 3,500%, versus 2,200% for the top 0.01%, 1,200% for the top 0.1%, and just 200% for the average household.”

“Bloomberg News: When do oil storage tanks run empty?

“Jeffrey Currie, energy analyst at the Carlyle Group: Parts of the world, like Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, you are there. But the question is, when and where. I still say that it’s going to be sometime in the month of May that you’re going to end up with Europe hitting tank bottoms. And in the US, it’s somewhere in that July 4th time period, if not sooner. By the way, the inventory numbers coming out of the US, the ones we got last night [Tuesday], the ones last week, I’ve never seen anything like that before.””

AI’s Circular Psychosis by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“At $2.5bn a year or so, Anthropic will be effectively the entirety of xAI’s revenue, which was at around $107 million in the third quarter of 2025.

“To put this very, very simply: xAI should, in theory, have massive demand for AI compute, but its demand is apparently so small that it can flog a multi-billion-dollar data center to a competitor.

“Sightline Climate found that 15.2GW of capacity is under construction and due to be completed by the end of 2027, and at this point I’m not sure anybody can make a compelling argument as to why it’s being built or who it’s for.

“Who needs it? Who are the customers? Who is buying AI compute at such a scale that it would warrant so much construction? Where is the demand coming from if it’s not OpenAI and Anthropic?

“These questions shouldn’t be that hard to answer, but trust me, I’ve tried and cannot find a GPU compute customer larger than $100 million a year, and honestly, that customer was xAI.

“Through many hours of research, I’ve found that the vast majority — as much as 95% — of all compute demand comes from a few places:”

• Meta, for reasons that defy logic.
• Microsoft, for OpenAI’s compute.
• Google, for Anthropic’s compute.
• Amazon, for Anthropic.
• OpenAI.
• Anthropic.

“Otherwise, every data center deal you’ve ever read about is for a theoretical future customer or an unnamed “anchor tenant” that gives them “guaranteed, pre-committed occupancy” without being identified in any way.”

“Based on discussions with sources and analysis of multiple years of reporting, I estimate that of the roughly $700 billion in capex spent by Google, Meta and Microsoft since 2023, at least 5.5GW of capacity costing at least $300 billion has been built entirely for two companies. This has in turn inflated sales through multiple counterparties involving NVIDIA, ODMs like Quanta, Foxconn, Supermicro and Dell, and created a form of market-driven AI psychosis that inspired Meta to burn over $158 billion in three years and the entire world to convince itself that AI was the biggest thing ever.

“The reason that there isn’t another OpenAI or Anthropic is that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon bankrolled their entire infrastructure, fed them billions of dollars, and then charged them discount rates for their early compute, with sources telling me that Anthropic pays vastly below-market-rates for Trainium compute from Amazon, and The Information reporting that OpenAI was paying $1.30-per-A100-per hour in 2024, or at or around the cost of running them.

“By sacrificing their entire infrastructure to OpenAI and Anthropic, the hyperscalers created the illusion of demand by feeding themselves money, all while buying endless GPUs and TPUs to fill further data centers for two customers, both of whom paid discount rates that lost them money.

“This capex bacchanalia gave all three companies a massive boost to their stock prices, so they kept going, even though there wasn’t really demand other than for Anthropic or OpenAI, two companies that they had to constantly cater to with investment capital and server maintenance.”

Science & Nature

What Happened With Mars Sample Return? (I) by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“One challenge for the ascent rocket is temperature. The U.S. arsenal has plenty of stubby rockets that can sit in storage for years and still fire reliably, but none of them are designed to work in conditions as cold as the Ascent Vehicle would experience on Mars. And in fact, no one has ever launched a rocket from the surface of another planet, making the Ascent Vehicle the technically riskiest link in the chain of events meant to carry the collected samples home.”

“For those keeping track, the mission includes two rovers, two orbiters, three launches from Earth, one first-time-ever launch from Mars, and a challenging treasure hunt in low Mars orbit for the Orbiting Sample, which carries no beacon and is about the size of a basketball. Two of the vehicles needed—the Earth Return Orbiter and the Sample Return Lander—would be the largest spacecraft of their kind ever built.”

“The sole purpose of this beefy team of robots was to return about 500 grams of material from Mars to Earth. But as the mission blew through its budget estimates and started looking for things to cut, the inevitable happened. NASA started reducing the number of samples the return mission would carry. Congress, lacking an appreciation for the absurd, killed the program before NASA could take the process to its logical conclusion and design a sample return mission that would come back to Earth carrying nothing. But the result was much the same.”

“Why the ultraviolet light that has been bathing the dust on the surface of Mars for four billion years is not considered adequate to do the same job is one of the many mysteries of the ‘reverse planetary protection’ protocols NASA adopted for this mission.”

The Disaster I Never Imagined Having To Worry About by Veritasium (YouTube)

00:00 The Disease Infecting Miracle Medicine
04:20 An Explosive Feud
10:05 How The Same Compound Can Behave Two Different Ways
13:18 Polymorphs Of Chocolate
19:51 Why Ritonavir Stopped Working
22:57 The Tin Pest
27:28 Disappearing Polymorphs
30:20 Is Everything Polymorphic?

Environment & Climate Change

Is Reason’s video on climate change alarmism a ‘masterclass in manipulation’? by Aaron Brown (Reason)

“Meanwhile, the activist wing of the climate movement has spent the same 50 years absorbing government money, proposing expensive coercive solutions, and attacking those who disagree with them. They get most of the airtime.”

This is where he loses me immediately. I’m supposed to believe that climate extremists are somehow holding our attention and tax dollars hostage, when it’s obvious that that have all but lost to a nationwide fleet of SUVs—only the most obvious excrescence of a society run by corporations heavily invested in fossil fuels—which we are then told is what everyone innately wants, as if propaganda and marketing didn’t exist and hadn’t built the mindset that we now deem “human nature”.

Here’s he video that he was referring to:

A Masterclass in Manipulation by Hank Green (YouTube)

This was a great and fair analysis. Aaron Brown is cited heavily throughout in order to allow him to hoist himself on his own petard.

“Aaron: As a theoretical physicist, Steven Koonin
Hank: Oh god, it’s so interesting that Steven Koonin is a theoretical physicist. So we have Bloomberg columnist being an example of climate scientists being alarmists. We have Michael Man who is a climate activist. And then we have Steven Koonin who is a theoretical physicist. Okay? Like all of these things are true, but you’re picking you’re picking which title you’re giving to people. Like you could say former oil industry executive Steven Koonin. You could say lead climate contrarian Steven Koonin. Like you could call Steven Koonin a lot of things—and theoretical physicist is certainly one of those things—but you’ve picked which one you’re going to call him whereas you’ve picked what you’re going to call Michael Mann. Honestly, if you didn’t do these little things, I would believe that you believe your BS. But you do these little things and it makes it very clear that you don’t believe your BS. You’re trying to manipulate me.”

“Aaron: Only when you express the figures as a ratio does it make it look like record
high temperatures are increasing…
Hank: Only when you express it as a ratio does it tell you anything about the world.”

“Hank: […] things getting hotter is really scary, but things getting less cold isn’t scary. And so, he’s going to focus on things getting less cold, and that’s what we’re doing here.”

“As far as I can tell, this isn’t a very good graph. Now, it is not a graph that came out of a paper. It’s a graph that came out of somebody’s Substack and then a Bloomberg columnist saw it and he was like, “Oh my god, this is a scary graph.”

“But then, if you correct the graph, it’s less scary. It is. It’s less scary. Still scary. […] When this was published, I think they only had two years of data. So 2020 and 2021 having 35% of the like world’s months that had the hottest. This is a—it’s a freaking confusing chart. Like you would never use this chart, which is why it’s never used. We’re talking about this chart being bad, but no one’s ever seen it before. I went to the guy’s Substack who published it. No one’s seen it. It had like 25 likes. We are focusing on nothing.

“So, cherrypicking is a thing that we talk about with data where you’re like, “Oh, I just want to show you like the good data.” What this guy is clearly doing, he’s cherrypicking his two least favorite graphs in a world of tens of thousands of climate charts that he could have picked out that would show a quite alarming thing going on with respect to the amount of energy in the Earth system.”

“He’s implying it in a way that you probably wouldn’t notice if you were just watching the video. That’s not so bad for there to be less cold. Why would we be worried about there being less cold? That’s kind of fine.

“No, like that is not an argument in like the problem is not that I’m going to be hot in the summer. That’s like the thing that most people think and I guess that’s fine and we can lean on that. The problem is not that I’m going to be hot in the summer or that I’m going to be less cold in the winter.

“The problem is that we have built our entire society on the climate acting a particular way. And if the climate starts to act different ways than that, we have famines. We have climate refugees. We run out of water in places. We have to like completely upend agriculture. We have infrastructure in place that we will no longer be able to use. And we have needed infrastructure in places where it isn’t. That’s the problem.

“The problem is not like just—and you’re showing a guy like a video of a guy shoveling his sidewalk. —you’re being like, “Oh my god, nobody worries about there not being cold.” That’s not that. The problem isn’t that I’m cold or hot. The problem is that our current infrastructure is built for our current climate. And if it changes quickly, it will be very bad for humans. And I’m a human and I love humans. And I think that we should do good things for them, which like creating energy is good. That’s a good thing to do for humans.

“But if we don’t put resources toward creating energy in new ways to doing things in new ways that have less impact on the climate, we’re going to have a lot of suffering. And the case you are making, the only thing we need to do is care about this. We need to care about it and we will take it on. People are amazing at solving problems, but not if we don’t recognize them. Not if we don’t think that they’re a big deal. And that’s the scariest, hardest thing about climate, right?”

“I have no doubt that we will take on the climate crisis. I just want us to be able to do it with the least amount of suffering possible. I don’t think that that means you should have existential dread. I’ve never said that. I don’t think that means that you shouldn’t have children. I don’t think that that means that there will be an apocalypse.

“I think that when things start to get a little apocalyptic, we’ll actually start to take action with the tremendous amount of resources that we have at our disposal. The richest 1% of Americans have 50 trillion dollars. And I don’t know, maybe if we left them to their own devices, they’d just build air conditioned bunkers for themselves. But I think that they want to have a society.

“And I think also we can compel them by law to help contribute to making the world livable. But not if we don’t think there’s a problem. And I understand that this is hard to like find the balance between like alarmism that pushes people into despair and rosy pictures of climate change that it just means you’ll have to shovel less, making people not think that it’s a problem at all.”

The part about compelling rich people to stop hoarding is where a Reason writer gets their hackles up. Do not interfere with the beloved rich, who have gotten rich by their own work.

“People talk about how scary geoengineering is. We’re doing it. This is geoengineering. We are adding so much energy to the Earth’s system. Like it is scary. We don’t know what it means. Is it like a 5% chance of super bad outcome? Is it a 30% chance of a super bad outcome? I don’t know. Like climate scientists work really hard on trying to answer those questions. But what they don’t say is, “Well, that is an indication that there is a problem.” But, certainly not something that we should be super alarmed about because what does that imply?

“It implies go back to your business everybody. We don’t actually need advocates in this space. We don’t actually need climate scientists working on this. We don’t need to spend money subsidizing solar or geothermal or potential next generation clean energy. We don’t need any of that. We don’t need to do these big crazy things. Everybody calm down. Go back to your business.”

“The idea that 461,000 people saw this video that is making the case that climate scientists are here to alarm you with no evidence. He cherrypicked three graphs in this video. One of them is bad. One of them I think is way better than the one he said was better. And one of them he uses again as an example of a good graph, but he makes it bad by making it more manipulative by stretching it out and then drawing a trend line over it that has nothing to do with reality. It’s embarrassing. It is an embarrassing piece of punditry. The fact that he says it all so calmly.

“And I know I have not been calm in this video. Maybe I would be more convincing if I was. I don’t feel calm though. I don’t like it when people lie to people.”

“He also will preload us with ideas like he’ll say that the the cold chart is more dramatic when it’s not. It’s like the same level of drama as the heat chart but he’s preloaded us with that idea. He chooses to emphasize low salience frames. So things you would be less worried about like there will be fewer cold days and isn’t that kind of a good thing?

“He also preloads us when he frames the experts with their titles. So this one guy is the theoretical physicist. He’s very credible. This other guy’s a climate activist. He’s not credible.

“Also he frames non-action as action. So the correct moral thing to do given this problem which does exist but isn’t that big of a deal is nothing which is huge. That’s wonderful. That means I don’t have to worry about this. How great.

“And finally—and this one sort of exists inside of the cracks—he says up front that he’s going to make the case that climate change isn’t something you really need to worry that much about and it’s mostly alarmist. And he never makes that case. He says he’s going to make it and then he gives you a bunch of information and it makes you conclude that he has made the case, but he does not.

“I’m going to make a case right now real quick, which is that you should care about this. It should be something that informs how you move through the world, how you vote, what you buy, what you invest in, the conversations you have with people in the world, and like straight down to the kinds of podcasts you listen to. climate change is a big deal.”

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs”

“China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world’s energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.”

“Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops.”

“[…] not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever.”

“[…] a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it’s also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world’s sixth-most abundant element […]”

“A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won’t be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.”

Picnic on a Receding Glacier by Peter Bach (CounterPunch)

“There is a blue that appears where ice is dense enough to absorb every wavelength of light except the shortest.

“Not the blue of the sky or of water. It is deeper than that. It is internal. As if the glacier were lit from within by something slow and ancient.

“A student tries to photograph it and fails.

““It never looks right,” they say, scrolling through images that have flattened it into something ordinary. “It’s more…”

“They don’t finish.

“Nearby, someone finally unwraps the strawberries. The red is uncomplicated. Immediate. They are eaten quickly, before they warm.

“This one glacier presently loses several metres of thickness each year.

“This is measured. Cross-checked. Published. The numbers grow with a clarity that resists metaphor.

“And still, people come. They lay out their blankets.

“Not in denial of the data, but in its presence.

“As if beauty—especially when it becomes precarious—requires witness.”

Medicine & Disease

The MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak and the threat of another pandemic by Evan Blake (WSWS)

“This strain of hantavirus carries a 38–40 percent case fatality rate, roughly 40 times that of COVID-19. There is no FDA-approved vaccine, no specific antiviral treatment, and an incubation period that can extend up to eight weeks before symptoms emerge. No one knows how many infections this cluster has already produced.”

“An examination of the sequence of events that have led to this crisis exposes the catastrophic undermining of public health and scientific infrastructure that has taken place during the pandemic. Capitalist society is even less prepared today than it was in 2020.”

“The index (first) case, a Dutch man in his seventies, developed fever on April 6 and died aboard ship overnight on April 11.

“The ship’s doctor took no samples and ordered no isolation. The captain told passengers the next morning: “Whatever health issues he was struggling with, I’m told by the doctor, were not infectious, so the ship is safe when it comes to that. The ship is safe.” The body was kept aboard for thirteen days while the itinerary continued. “We again kept eating all together,” a passenger later told AFP, “and we didn’t wear any masks.”

“On April 24 the Hondius docked at Saint Helena, the site of Napoleon’s exile. The index case’s wife disembarked, was pushed past in a wheelchair, and boarded a flight to Johannesburg. She deteriorated mid-flight and died in Johannesburg on April 26.”

“[…] 30 disembarkees had dispersed by commercial flight to twelve countries with no testing, no quarantine and no notification.

“A German woman died aboard the Hondius on May 2. A British physician who cared for one of the cases is in intensive care. A Swiss passenger surfaced in Zurich twelve days after disembarking, identified only because Oceanwide eventually emailed disembarked passengers. The WHO was not informed under the International Health Regulations until May 2—three weeks after the first death and six days after the second. Returning passengers were given no isolation guidance. How far this has already spread, no one knows.”

“The same fascistic war on science is unfolding internationally—Milei in Argentina, where this hantavirus emerged and where CONICET has been gutted; Meloni in Italy, the AfD in Germany. None of this began with Trump’s second term. The Democratic Party, the Labour government in Britain, and social democratic parties across Europe have been junior partners in the assault on public health for six years.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

A wall of books supposedly by someone named J.B. Turner

It truly is a grand new age of literature when an author can not only “write” not one but 20 masterpieces in an afternoon, not only make most of the book titles incorporate the word “hard” as a through-line, but can also have their oeuvre be promoted throughout the world by a multi-trillion-dollar company.

I am left wondering whether it even matter in which order you read them. Do they even exist as books? Is it even possible to read through these books in a coherent, rewarding way?

What even is the point of it all? A human author generally feels a subjective drive to tell a story for a subjective reason, arising from a consciousness with wants and desires.

A machine has none of that, has no sensorium, no memories, no qualia … nothing. What is the point of a book that has no story to tell? Is it people have forgotten—or never learned—what it is like to read a book that lets you very much know that a human author was behind it?

I’m reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons, which is spectacularly rich and evanescent with humanity, but anything by Murakami also springs to mind.

Another wall of nearly indistinguishable books

This wall-o-books ostensibly contains books by different authors but are they really? What’s the difference to wall-o-books by only J.B. Turner immediately above? Is any of this stuff even real anymore? Will any of it impart a look into the window of a human mind, of human experience? Will any of it surprise and delight? Or is it stuff that is sufficient for inspiring a dollop of dopamine?

If you’re wondering why my Kindle UI is in German, it’s because that’s the only way to force the clock to use military time. This is a tragic statement about the state of UIs and configurability in this day and age, of course. We seem to forget more and more as we reinvent everything over and over.

We Bought an Orchestra by Jeffrey Arlo Brown (The Baffler)

“In 2012, Alexey Kononenko, a former mathematician at the mysterious hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, began a career as a composer. Despite never having learned to play an instrument, a rudimentary grasp of music theory, and a ratio of inspiration to imitation that would embarrass a large language model, Kononenko, who goes by the stage name Alexey Shor, has had his works performed all over the world by many of its best musicians. Shor has bankrolled a dizzying array of concerts, festivals, and competitions. The catch is that they must all include Shor’s own works.”

“The aesthetic consequences are even more depressing. As Quasha and her ilk build a parallel classical music system where cash is king, meritocracy loses its place as the field’s ideal. That confirms what skeptics have always suspected—that classical music is less ravishing art than playground for the elite. It’s vertiginously unfair to the many young conductors plying their trade with real ability under incredible pressure for almost no money in the hopes that their ability will someday allow them to survive. But it’s also bad news for us listeners. The music made under this system is so much worse than the one where the rich stay in the background, and the best musicians rise, however unevenly, to the top. Oligarchy ruins everything, even Brahms’s First Symphony—assuming we get on the guest list to hear it in the first place.”

Hawai’ian Music Is American Music by Mary Cadwalladr (The Hinternet)

“Among the most problematic of cultural productions, from the perspective of the Hawai’ian Renaissance activists and culture-shapers, was Hapa haole music, literally “half foreign”, which emerged at the time of the San Francisco Exposition, featured steel guitar and ukuleles, and a mixture of English- and Hawai’ian-language lyrics, often describing light-hearted scenes of pleasure and sensuality in a mostly history-free, and mostly imaginary, island utopia.”

“Since 1970 what has happened is that another great island musical tradition, from Jamaica, has moved in to play a comparable role in its hybridism with commercial pop styles. This was likely made possible, at least in the US, by the perception that it is less problematic simply to import one’s island music from a different imperial legacy; for as long as we enjoy our own imperial island music, we have to hold at least somewhere in the back of our heads the question whether that imperial history is “good”; as long as it’s someone else’s empire, it’s much easier to appear wise in saying that it is neither good nor bad, but “just is”.”

“These reflections all began for me about a year ago, really, when I started wondering why we think of the steel lap guitar as quintessentially country, even if many of us have some vague awareness of its earlier history. Why, that is, was the steel lap guitar so fully denatured and reinvented for a different musical idiom? This led me eventually to wondering why the Honolulu airport is not named for Sol Ho’opi’i, and whether, if it had been, we might not be better able to hear country music for what it is: an American style that since the early recording industry has successfully absorbed the vernacular forms of every corner of the American empire.”

“And these themes were there because history had compelled America to find a way to express, in art, the successful absorption of the American Pacific into our shared culture. Because California had itself only recently undergone a similar and by no means obvious historical process, and because it is Hawai’i’s closest continental neighbor —indeed it is where Queen Liliʻuokalani went into exile, and where, before her death in 1917, she probably heard her own “Aloha ‘Oe” performed, out of context, on at least a few occasions—, it is normal that it should fall to a quintessentially Californian artist like Brian Wilson to work out not just the essence of California in music, but the essence of Pacific America.”

“To avoid the creative output of Hawai’i in the period broadly between annexation and statehood simply because the art bears the marks of compromise with a ruthless historical reality is really no different from Adorno’s dismissal of jazz. Jazz is American genius at its purest and finest, and Adorno was wrong about it. He was right about horoscopes, he was right about almost everything in fact. But he was wrong about jazz.”

STORM by GENER8ION and Yung Lean (YouTube)

Cool video. Great ensemble dancing starting at about 04:30.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Self and Selfishness (On Liberalism) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Going back to my own tradition, my government name is Indrajit, meaning son of Ravana. Ravana is commonly known (in India) as a demon, as a villain. Yet in cyclical Hinduism, there are no permanent villains. In the longer telling, Ravana was once Rama/Vishnu’s servant, and by dying at his hand, Ravana was returned to heaven. If you rewind three past lives, Ravana was the celestial doorman Jaya, who by blocking the baby-sages–the Sanat Kumaras—was cursed to a fate equivalent to death, being reborn as a mortal (the worst).”

“At some level the White Empire wants to die, and Iran, Russia, and China if they ever get around to it are putting them out of their misery. And at some level their hearts have to be hardened (or their brains, at least, retarded) to make it go faster. If ‘America’ did the logical thing and traded rather than tiraded they could be treated like an elder statesmen (entirely undeservedly) for another century. But instead they want to rage, rage, against the dying of the White, whiting themselves out in decades, as abject villains, condemned as worse than the Nazis. Choosing the shorter route of a few bad births, to be reborn in some other form.”

“I know there are people walking the earth today that may be reduced to statistics tomorrow (may their God receive them with honor). I know that better men than me clean their rifles, while I rifle through theory, idle. I fear that somewhere, soon, will be rubble and take cheer that someday, near, Empire will be in trouble. But no one knows where or who. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, as John [Donne] said, it tolls for you. Or as Hemingway said in the eponymous novel, “If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and [yet] I hate very much to leave it.””

“Western liberalism is not about the self, but selfishness. Who gets to be a self? Who gets the right to self-defense? This is the central contradiction of liberalism, so much so that it’s not really a contradiction, it’s just central. ‘Israelis’ get selves that must be mourned, whereas Palestinians get torture cells and must be bombed. ‘Israelis’ get to pre-emptively bomb everyone in ‘self-defense’ whereas the natives are terrorists if they dare resist. This is really classical liberalism. Rights for Whites and might for everyone else. They’ve always been like this. This is not some flaw in liberal democracy. This is working exactly as intended.”

“As Montesquieu said, “It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians.””

“Trump’s logic for a ‘Gaza Riviera’ is Locke’s logic just with stupided words. Locke said “God gave the World to Men in common; but since he gave it them for their Benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational.” This is what Trumps son-outlaw Jared Kushner meant when he said, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods… It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.””

“What is he saying here? Nothing crazy really, this is standard liberalism. What Benjamin Franklin said in his autobiography, “if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Seacoast.” Again and again, these are not anomalies in the liberal project! This is the whole project! See what they did, and also see them still doing it!”

“Locke’s selfish idea of ‘men’ doesn’t included colored men or any women, just as Kushner’s idea of ‘people’ doesn’t include Palestinians. This is by design. Citizenship since the Greeks has always meant in-groups with rights and out-groups ruled by might. If you’re White, this is just right. This is just the background logic of White Empire, which goes unnoticed like the white of this page, and bro, I need you to know, they haven’t changed.”

“The central premise of liberalism is and was not some abstract self but a very real selfishness. Very precious property rights in the imperial core, including the right to make property of people across the globe, and to genocide and assassinate anyone that says no. Very precious speech rights (as long as you say what you’re supposed to), which is the casual idea that this or that government should be overthrown, or that these natives are ‘illegal’ and should be thrown out; basically to hate who you’re supposed to. Your love of the Empire is not necessary. Your selfishness will do.”

A Few More Thoughts On AI And Consciousness by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Chatbots having the ability to mimic the appearance of cognitive behavior is not an adequate reason to believe they might be conscious, because no matter how many thoughts they appear to generate or how brilliant those thoughts appear to be, there’s no evidence that there’s any experience illuminating that behavior in the same way pain is illuminated in the experience of a cat whose tail has been stepped on. It’s just the movement of unliving matter, like lightning or the wind, without any subjective experience from the viewpoint it arises from. Computing power and consciousness are not the same thing.”

Technology & Engineering

The Role of a New Machine by Dan Cohen (Humane Ingenuity)

“It’s hard to read The Soul of a New Machine in 2026 without wondering whether all this AI hype is really so new. Is AI truly more revolutionary than a previous wave of computer technology that offered, for the first time, to put screens on every desk of every company? The Data General team helped to bring about a transition not from existing software and hardware to incredibly intelligent software and hardware, or from powerful computers to superpowerful computers, but literally from paper to digital files and high-speed processing. Now that is a transition.”

The Car That Watches You Back by The Telematics Desk (Nobody Asked for This)

“Safety researchers pointed to Fitts’s Law, the principle that acquiring a touch target requires visual confirmation in a way that a physical knob with a learned position does not, and published studies showing that touchscreen-heavy interfaces increased cognitive load. The studies were accurate. The market did not care. Within a decade, a 12-inch screen was unremarkable. Mercedes-Benz developed the Hyperscreen, a 56-inch curved display spanning the full width of the EQS dashboard with three screens beneath a single piece of Gorilla Glass. The Jeep Grand Wagoneer shipped with seven screens.”

“[…] produced dashboards where a screen replaces the climate knobs, the audio controls, the seat heater buttons, and the parking brake switch, each function now two or three taps into a sub-menu. The screen was not added because it made these things easier. The screen was added because a screen is what modern things look like, and because once installed, it could be updated remotely and eventually monetized.”

“This architecture is connected internally by the CAN bus (Controller Area Network), a communications standard from the 1980s that allows a vehicle’s dozens of electronic control units to talk to each other over a shared network. The CAN bus was designed for reliability within a closed system, and it has almost no built-in authentication. When a message arrives on the bus, there is no native mechanism to verify who sent it. The assumption when the standard was designed was that nothing external would ever reach the bus. That assumption dissolved when vehicles were given cellular modems and internet-connected infotainment systems.”

“What has become clearer is that the same mechanism that delivers improvements can remove features, restrict settings, and gate capabilities behind payment, often without the owner’s agreement and sometimes without notice. Tesla removed the adjustable regenerative braking setting from its vehicles in a 2020 update, leaving drivers with a single level regardless of preference. The option partially returned in 2023. Tesla also removed Autopilot features from used vehicles, requiring new owners to repurchase capabilities the previous owner had paid for. The hardware remained, but access did not transfer with the title.”

“In July 2015, security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek sat in an office in St. Louis and remotely accessed a 2014 Jeep Cherokee being driven by journalist Andy Greenberg on a highway. Through a vulnerability in the Uconnect infotainment system, and from there to the CAN bus, they commanded the air conditioning, the radio, the windshield wipers, and the transmission. They cut the engine at highway speed and disabled the brakes in a parking lot.”

“[…] the navigation application showing the route to the next destination is displaying promoted pins placed by businesses that paid for the placement. Google Maps displays these markers along the route whether or not the driver searched for the business. Waze, also owned by Google, has displayed pop-up banners at the top of the navigation screen at red lights near sponsored locations, with a prominent “Drive There” button. Google has filed a patent for a system that would integrate the audio stream with the navigation layer, so that an advertisement heard through the car’s speakers could trigger a suggested navigation detour. The patent has not shipped. The intent is documented.”

“The only visual difference from organic results is the marker shape: squares are paid placements, circles are not.”

And Google is in no way obligated to continue showing even that subtle difference. You constantly have to consider through which filters are you obtaining your information. Which entities and which software determined the shape or content of your results? Which guardrails are you trapped between? Can you search for pornography? Can you type a curse word? Can you get straight answers about U.S. or Israeli foreign policy? Are you really driving the shortest route or is it the shortest route that takes you past the places for which sponsors have paid?

“The driver who stops at a 7-Eleven, hears a Gulp Radio ad for a product near the register, sees a GSTV ad at the pump, and then opens Google Maps navigation is moving through a single continuous advertising environment. Each transition (car to pump, pump to store, store back to car) passes through a different medium with a different operator, but the commercial logic is identical. Your attention is there, your purchase intent is measurable, your location is known, and the inventory will be sold.”

“We have covered the Roku home screen in detail: the screen that appears before you have chosen to do anything, already running full-motion video advertising, on a device you purchased, in a room you live in.

“In-vehicle advertising is being built on the same foundations. Stellantis’s Grand Cherokee pop-up was a direct, guaranteed placement: the manufacturer delivered a specific message to a specific set of vehicle identification numbers at a scheduled time, the oldest form of media buying, equivalent to a network upfront buy, except the inventory was the dashboard of a vehicle the recipient owned.”

“The CarPlay removal is the same dynamic viewed from the manufacturer’s side. GM is phasing out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from its entire vehicle lineup by 2028. GM earned $5.4 billion from connected services in 2025. Every minute a driver spends in CarPlay is a minute the manufacturer cannot collect location data, serve its own content, or accumulate the behavioral record that feeds that revenue. The connected car data market is projected at $26.4 billion by 2030. The in-vehicle advertising market specifically is projected at $6.7 billion by 2034.”

“The fight over who controls the screen is, in part, a fight over whose ads run on it. The driver is not a participant in this negotiation.”

“Nineteen of the twenty-five (76 percent) stated they can sell personal data.. Fifty-six percent stated they can share data with government or law enforcement in response to an informal request, not a court-issued warrant. Nissan’s privacy policy reserves the right to infer drivers’ “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” and sell those inferences to third parties. BMW, Tesla, and Toyota can collect data including sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, and genetic information.

“General Motors secretly shared detailed telematics with the data broker LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which used braking patterns, acceleration, and time-of-day driving data to adjust insurance rates for drivers who had not been told their data was being sold. The program ended after a 2023 New York Times investigation. The data already shared was not recalled.”

“A 2025 study by Privacy4Cars evaluated the consumer data rights processes of 49 automotive brands against 12 criteria based on industry best practices. Only five brands scored 3.0 or above on a 5.0-point scale, meaning fewer than half of the identified best practices were adopted. Honda and Acura topped the list at 4.6 after settling with the California Privacy Protection Agency and implementing changes within weeks. Most brands scored significantly lower.”

“The Stellantis opt-out is a phone number, business hours only. The Tesla opt-out disables safety monitoring. The Toyota opt-out degrades vehicle functionality and affects warranty terms.”

“[…] the car would like a word with its advertisers, through the speakers you paid for, on the cellular connection you pay for monthly, in the cabin where the windows seal out the weather and seal in the audience.

“The consumer remedies, where they exist, are unserious. Add a Pi-Hole to the trunk. Buy a 2007 Camry. Neither scales, neither is factory-supported, and neither stops the next car you sit in from trying again.”

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible (No One's Happy)

• Openly refuse apps, and vocally advocate for the web instead.
• Try not to install any apps if you don’t need to.
• If a service has a functioning website, use it instead.
• Revoke all permissions by default, including background location, microphone, and camera permissions for anything that doesn’t require them to function.
• Audit your installed apps. Uninstall all apps you don’t actively need.
• Treat every “download our app” prompt with skepticism.

LLMs & AI

Long-running Agents by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“The headline finding is that the metric has been doubling roughly every seven months since 2019, and their TH1.1 update earlier this year doubled the count of 8-hour-plus tasks in the eval set. If that curve holds, frontier agents complete tasks at the day scale by 2028 and the year scale by 2034.”

And then million-year scale like Deep Thought?

“Auditing 24 hours of autonomous activity is a real human-time problem. Observability and structured artifacts (PRs, commits, briefings, test runs) are how you make this tractable. Without them, you’re scrolling logs and you’ll miss what matters.”

This recommendation is a joke and will never work for any task that actually matters i.e., has real-world import or consequences. No-one will review any of this. We’ve already seen what happens. There is no quick and easy solution to quality control. Most processes just stop controlling for quality, which is why you still hear stuff like “we can’t afford testers” and “we’ll write tests at the end of the project, if there’s time.”

That is exactly what’s going to happen with content produced by LLMs. What hope should we have? We didn’t control for quality in software well enough when there was a human-produced firehose of software; now that LLMs threaten to produce a dozen times as much software, what is the likelihood that we’re all going to buckle down and really start verifying software and controlling for quality?

We still barely even know what we want, so we’ll just end up wanting whatever the LLM produces, because that’s easier than formulating requirements. We hate writing tests, so whatever the LLM-produced software ends up doing is what we will retroactively decide is what we wanted to have happened in the first place.

“Defining work crisply enough that an agent can run for a day on it is harder than doing the work yourself. The skill that’s appreciating in value isn’t writing code. It’s writing specs that survive contact with an autonomous executor.”

This is great, though, right? By the time you’re done writing a spec that will be applied by a machine that cannot learn, you will have spent as much time as you would have on writing the spec for one or more people who can. Is the automation of AI—with its attendant imprecision and requirement for verification—worth the time you invest in it?

If you get garbage out, then it’s your fault for having put garbage in. Why are we will to expend so much effort on writing specifications for tools when we were never willing to do it for our teammates? The hope is, of course, that you can benefit from automation—but that only works for deterministic tools, where you get it right once and can then repeat it perfectly endlessly.

That’s not what we’re talking about here; we’re talking about a nondeterministic tool that you must continuously adjust and fine-tune in order to keep the performance within your established parameters. You have to figure out how to get the output consistent enough that you no longer have to verify—and correct—so much, or you can have to put the work in on verification, and hope that your yield stays high enough to make it worth it.

I don’t understand how more people don’t see this: they just see automation and assume that it’s good, even though the yields vary wildly, can change with a minor change in tooling or configuration, and for which much of the tooling and configuration is not under the control of the producer.

The assumption is thatyou must use AI or you will be driven out of business by those who do. Is this a reasonable assumption based on what we’ve seen about how these tools work? Can you build a stable process that incorporates tools like this without losing the quality that you want? Or do you assume you use the tool, and then adjust your expectations of quality to match the output that you can afford to produce with it?

Marc Andreessen shows off genius prompt, accidentally reveals he *really* doesn’t understand LLMs (Reddit)

A lot of people think that the “system prompt” is actual instructions that influence the result as if a human were reading and interpreting them.

I was wondering the other day why, if these instructions were so useful, they weren’t just part of the standard harness? The most likely answer is “they don’t actually work.” Your exhortations to “not hallucinate” or to “try harder” are just Hail Marys thrown at the ghost in the machine.

The GPU Is the New Bangalore by Oren Eini (RavenDB Blog)

“Today, instead of shipping my requirements to a dev shop overseas, I’m shipping them to a GPU somewhere. I get something back. It looks like code. It might be code. It might be a very convincing facsimile of code that will quietly fail in production under load. I genuinely don’t know until I sit down and read it carefully.

“The same discipline that separated successful offshore engagements from expensive disasters applies here as well:”

• Specification quality determines output quality. Vague prompts return vague code. The ability to articulate exactly what you want — at the right level of abstraction — is now a core engineering skill.
• Validation is non-negotiable. “It passed the vibe check” is not a code review. The reviewer needs to understand what the code is doing and why, not just that it compiles and the tests are green.
• Iterative delivery beats big-bang delivery. Nobody who survived offshoring tried to outsource an entire product in one shot. You stage it. You review at each stage. You course-correct before mistakes compound.

Sure, of course. These are the two hardest things to do: determine your use cases, your requirements, and then write specifications, and then write verifications (automated tests, preferably, or you’re not gaining anything in efficiency) that actually nail down the functionality in the specifications.

If we would do just those two things, then we’d already be doing great, software-development-wise. That’s the problem, though: those are the two tough parts.

Building the software? That’s never been the problem. Building it well, with a maintainable, extendable architecture? We know how to do that too.

Are there still heroes who over-engineer everything? Of course. But AIs do that, too. They do it even more. And you can’t stop them from doing it. You have to keep preventing them from doing it. They don’t learn. You just keep adding little prayers to your spellbook. Your spellbook doesn’t mean shit to the AI, which is running in the cloud by a corporation that views you like a parasite views a host.

“[…] for most of software history, the bottleneck was writing the code. That took time and required expensive humans. So the industry optimized heavily around it, better editors, better frameworks, and better abstractions. All in service of making the act of writing code faster and less error-prone.

“That bottleneck is collapsing. What once took six months might take six hours. When the cost of implementation approaches zero, the bottleneck moves upstream: to design, specification, and verification.”

I don’t agree that what once took six months might take six hours because it makes no sense to talk about unverified code. Unverified code might as well not exist. But that’s not true, is it? Because no-one expects anyone to continue verifying AI-generated code. So many projects don’t bother writing tests when the output was made by people, so why would they start now? Their software sucked before and it still sucks, but they’re making it much faster now. Still no tests and it’s based on shitty requirements but the users will alpha- and beta-test it for you.

That’s how you get from six months to six hours.

“[…] we already have a well-established protocol for coordinating the work of specialized, partially independent contributors on a complex system. It’s called software design.

“Module boundaries. Interface contracts. Separation of concerns. Dependency management. SOLID principles and more. These patterns exist precisely because complex systems built by multiple contributors without clear interfaces turn into unmaintainable messes. This is true whether those contributors are humans, offshore teams, or language models.”

“The answer isn’t a smarter message bus between your agents. The answer is better system design that minimizes how much the pieces need to talk to each other in the first place.

“We have literally decades of experience in how to build large software systems […]”

Empty Pockets by Remy Porter (The DailyWTF)

“[…] the kind of person who speeds on a motorcycle without a helmet isn’t doing so because they don’t understand the danger. They’ve just decided it doesn’t apply to them.”

“In a section called “The Agent’s Confession”, Jer highlights that the agent is able to identify the explicit rules that it failed to follow.”

“Read that again. The agent itself enumerates the safety rules it was given and admits to violating every one. This is not me speculating about agent failure modes. This is the agent on the record, in writing.”

“No, it is not the agent on record. I see this kind of thing a lot when people talk about LLMs. An LLM cannot explain its reasoning. It cannot go on “the record”. It cannot confess to anything. While what it plops out when asked might be interesting, it is not an explanation. The only explanation is that it’s a powerful statistical model trying to create a plausible string of tokens! It’s simply looking at its context window and your prompt and trying to predict what it should say. It can tell you what rules it violated not because it understands the rules or knows it violated any rules, but because those rules are in its context window.”

“[…] the documentation is actually quite explicit about what those guardrails guarantee. If you’re using a first-party tool, it will prohibit unsafe operations. When using 3rd party MCPs, like Railway’s, the only guardrail is that it requires human approval for every action- unless you update your allowlist for that MCP. If you put them in your allowlist, the guardrails go away. Jer argues that tools should enforce more protection against LLM behaviors, but the problem with that is people- like the PocketOS team- turn those protections off. And like a lot of safety mistakes, they can get away with it all the way up until the point where they can’t.”

“This is not an anti-AI post, or even a “get a load of this asshole” post. It is a “understand the damn tools you’re using” post. Be critical of them. Don’t trust them. Ever. Especially LLMs, because the worst part of an LLM is that it takes away the one thing computers used to be good at: predictable, deterministic behavior. But not just LLMs: don’t trust your cloud provider, don’t trust your infrastructure manager. Dig into them and understand how they work, and if they seem to[o] complicated to understand, th[e]n they may be too complicated to trust.”

Programming

Architecture by Autocomplete by Christian Ekrem

“Here’s roughly what an AI tends to hand you:”

function confirmOrder(orderId: string, customerEmail: string, total: number) {
  if (!customerEmail.includes("@")) throw new Error("bad email");
  if (total <= 0) throw new Error("bad total");
  // …
}

“And here’s what someone who’s actually thought about the domain writes:”

type Email = { readonly _tag: "Email"; readonly value: string };
type OrderId = { readonly _tag: "OrderId"; readonly value: string };
type PositiveAmount = {
  readonly _tag: "PositiveAmount";
  readonly value: number;
};

function confirmOrder(
  orderId: OrderId,
  customerEmail: Email,
  total: PositiveAmount,
): Confirmed<Order> {
  // …
}

“[…]

“The second version cost the developer thirty seconds and a handful of keystrokes. What did those keystrokes buy? They froze a piece of theory into a form the compiler enforces. An email is not a string. An order ID and a customer email cannot be transposed by a tired junior at 4am. A total is positive by construction, and if it isn’t, this code never runs in the first place.

“Each of those types is a fragment of the program’s theory in Naur’s sense, encoded somewhere a future maintainer (human or otherwise) cannot ignore. The first version’s theory lives in the head of whoever wrote it. In this case: nobody. The second version’s theory lives in the type signature, where my future self can still read it.”

“GitClear’s report on 153M lines of code put numbers on it. Copy-pasted lines climbed from 8.3% in 2020 to 12.3% in 2024 — and for the first time in the dataset’s history, copy/paste exceeded moved (refactored) code within a commit. Code churn (lines reverted or rewritten within two weeks of being authored) is projected to roughly double from its pre-AI baseline. CodeRabbit’s State of AI vs Human Code Generation report — a review of 470 open-source pull requests — found AI-coauthored PRs shipped with about 1.7x more issues overall and 2.74x more XSS vulnerabilities than human-only PRs.”

“A type like NonEmptyList<Confirmed<Order>> is interesting because it encodes what can’t happen. The list isn’t empty. The order isn’t tentative. The compiler will refuse to run code that violates either constraint.

“To invent a type like that, you have to model the negative space of the domain. You have to know what shouldn’t be representable, where the impossible lives, which transitions a real order can never take. None of that is anywhere in a training corpus, because training data is the record of what was written. It can’t be the record of what couldn’t have been written.

“When a senior dev reaches for a sum type or a smart constructor, that’s the theory becoming visible. The compiler now enforces it. A future reader inherits it for free, at compile time, even after the original author has forgotten what they were thinking when they wrote it.”

Programming Still Sucks. by Steven Langbroek

“You were an engineer once. You remember what a code review was for. You remember being the junior whose first PR got shredded by a senior who took the time to explain why. You didn’t wake up one morning in 2024 and decide to abolish that.

“What happened was: the runway got cut. The board meeting didn’t have the word “values” in it anywhere. The CFO had a spreadsheet. The CEO had come back from an offsite where someone had shown him a demo of an agent writing a whole feature in fourteen minutes, and he had believed it (the way people believe things when they want to believe them) and he had told the board he could cut thirty percent of engineering by Q2. Now it was your job to figure out how.”

“[…] you’d been the engineer who had to clean up after the last leader who’d been sold a simple answer. You’d watched Goodhart’s Law eat velocity metrics, story points, test coverage; every number a non-engineer had ever been handed as proof the work was going well. You knew the DORA metrics were already telling you what happens to deployment stability when you add tooling faster than you add judgment. You knew what happens to a codebase when the people who’d catch the errors get pushed out, or learn to stop catching them.

“You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who’d fix it later once things stabilized.

“Later is never.”

“There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren’t valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we’ll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember.”

“She’s not the safest person in the industry. She’s the shape of what you cannot touch. She is every piece of institutional knowledge your transformation just deleted, walking around in a fifty-five-year-old body. She came up through the apprenticeship you abolished: Ben, 1998, the USB stick. She is the pipeline. When she dies, the thing that produces people like her is already gone. You killed it three years ago. You will not be able to hire her replacement, because you broke the machine that makes her.”

“AI didn’t take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask.”

Appearing Productive in The Workplace (No One's Happy)

“I have a colleague, a careful and intelligent person in a role that is not engineering, who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a great deal of code, a great deal of documentation, a great deal of what looked, to anyone who did not know what to look for, like progress. He could not, when asked, explain how any of it actually worked. The work was wrong from the first day. The schemas, and more importantly the objectives, were wrong in a way that would have been obvious to anyone with two years in the field.”

“The tool did not make him a worse colleague. It made him able to impersonate, for months, a discipline he had never trained in, and the impersonation was good enough that the institutional incentives all bent toward letting him continue. Perhaps it’s a failure of management, but I have been finding management to be so eager to embrace AI that they’re willing to accept the risk.”

“[…] you have overconfident, novices able to improve their individual productivity in an area of expertise they are unable to review for correctness. What could go wrong?”

“The skills of producing work and judging it were deliberately distinct, but accomplishing the work itself used to teach the judgment. The first skill now belongs, in large part, to the machines. The second still belongs to us, though fewer are bothering to acquire or utilize it.

“The architectural critique that used to come from someone who was taught, or who had built and broken three of these before now comes from a model with no embodied memory of building or breaking anything. The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work. It was how the work got good, and how the people producing the work got good, and how the firm whose name was on the work could promise the client that what they were buying was a particular kind of thing rather than a generic one.

“The current generation of agentic systems is built around the premise that the human is the bottleneck — that the loop runs faster and cleaner without the awkward delay of someone reading what is about to happen and deciding whether it should.”

“Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive. The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about. Each individual decision to elongate seems rational, and each is independently rewarded — readers are more confident in longer AI-generated explanations whether or not the explanations are correct [5]. The collective effect is that the signal in any given workplace is harder to find than it was before any of this began.”

“The pipeline of future experts is thinning from both ends. The work that used to teach judgment is now done by the tool, and the entry-level roles where the teaching happened are being cut on the theory that the tool can do the work. What this is causing, in many offices including mine, is a great deal of motion and very little of what motion used to create.”

“[…] the same dynamic playing out inside organizations: time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.”

“What discipline looks like, in this environment, is almost embarrassingly old-fashioned and may seem obvious to most of you until you try to avoid it. Use the tool where you can verify precisely what it produces. Never ask a model for confirmation; the tool agrees with everyone, and an agreement that costs the agreer [sic] nothing is worth nothing.

“Generative AI does well on tasks where feedback is fast, where being approximately right is good enough, where the human remains the final arbiter. Drafting a memo, generating examples, summarizing material the reader could verify if they cared to. The University of Illinois Generative AI guidance and the PLOS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules paper on AI in research, among the more careful documents now circulating, list much of this explicitly: brainstorming, copyediting, reformulating one’s own ideas, pattern detection in data one already understands.

“In every recommended use, the human supplies the judgment and the tool supplies the throughput. This is a stronger position than human-in-the-loop. The tool sits outside the work, contributing where invited and silent otherwise, which is the opposite of what most agentic systems are now being built to do.

“For firms, the competitive advantage of a firm whose work can be trusted has not disappeared; it has, if anything, appreciated, because so many of the firm’s competitors are quietly converting themselves into content-generation pipelines and counting on the client not to notice.”

“The firms still doing the work properly will be in a position to charge for it. The firms that have hollowed themselves out will discover that what they hollowed out was the thing the client was paying for.”

“In many of the rooms I now find myself in, expertise has been asked to look the other way: to deliver faster, produce more, integrate the tools more deeply, get out of the way of the colleagues who are “getting things done”. The artifacts are accumulating; the work [value] is not.”

“If you take one thing away, take away that people are impressionable creatures.”

Programming Sucks by Peter Welch in 2014 (Still Drinking)

Man, not much of this article has changed. It’s actually gotten more true with the advent of slop and enshittification.

“Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.”

“Here are the secret rules of the internet: five minutes after you open a web browser for the first time, a kid in Russia has your social security number. Did you sign up for something? A computer at the NSA now automatically tracks your physical location for the rest of your life. Sent an email? Your email address just went up on a billboard in Nigeria.

“These things aren’t true because we don’t care and don’t try to stop them, they’re true because everything is broken because there’s no good code and everybody’s just trying to keep it running. That’s your job if you work with the internet: hoping the last thing you wrote is good enough to survive for a few hours so you can eat dinner and catch a nap.”

Design

Handy CSS layout patterns, and fun ways to elevate them by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Kevin shows how to make very sophisticated, responsive layouts—“fluid, intrinsic, and responsive design patterns”—for which a lot of people would reach for JavaScript but for which CSS has long since acquired powerful and concise syntax that does it all with no trade-offs: it’s declarative syntax that the browser applies as efficiently as possible, using built-in logic.

00:00 − Introduction
00:20 − overscroll scroller
05:05 − auto-grid and preventing overflow with it
09:30 − adaptive layouts with container queries
13:09 − CSS Demystified
13:53 − bonus: scooped corners
15:08 − bonus: overscroll animation with scroll-driven animation

Sports

What Ethiopian running says about the limits of human ability by Michael Crawley (Aeon Essays)

“In 2025, athletes from Ethiopia and the nearby East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Tanzania filled 69 and 74 of the top-100 spots in the World Athletics marathon rankings for men and women, respectively. This is an extraordinary level of dominance, with few parallels in global sport. In these countries, distance running expertise is seen as something that is intuitive, learnt from others, honed through experience, and deeply dependent upon a group training dynamic. Increasingly, though, this approach goes against the grain of cutting-edge sports science, which advocates the monitoring of an ever-increasing number of physiological variables and individualised, precisely engineered training.”

“More and more athletes are relying on this biomarker [glucose], along with heart rate – a more established but sometimes less reliable marker of physiological strain – to guide the precise speeds and intensities at which they perform their individual training. It’s not uncommon for elite distance runners to pause every few reps in a session to take a blood sample to calibrate their paces, speeding up or slowing down for the next few reps, even by just a few seconds, depending on what the test reveals.”

“Such control and precision are exactly at odds with the Ethiopian valuation and management of their energy. A tailored, individualised management of physical energy is necessarily non-social, while in Ethiopia, the important properties of energy are that it is understood to be a limited substance that must be carefully monitored and protected. It is understood to be a ‘transbodily’ substance – that is, it can flow between people, as well as between people and their environments.”

“While many have assumed that East African athletes’ success comes ‘naturally’, or is derived almost automatically from the advantages of genetics or altitude – there is a huge amount of expertise about endurance running in Ethiopia. It is not ‘old school’ at all, but more refined, built upon decades of cumulative knowledge. It just can look a little different to Western sports science: less about lab testing and utilising data, and more about creating a balance in training between different kinds of environmental conditions and learning to share energy with others.”

Fun

Capitol Tour Guide Keeps Pointing Out Hidden Spots With Uninterrupted Sight Lines (The Onion)

Taking Advantage Of Other People Was The Best Financial Decision I Ever Made by Trent Ralston (The Onion)

“[…] the most important thing I learned didn’t come from any expert. It was a lesson I had to teach myself—that the key to financial success lies in taking advantage of others.”

“Many of us fall into the habit of treating those around us—friends, family, coworkers—with respect. Unfortunately, this all-too-common practice can be devastating to our financial wellness. The good news is that our prospects improve dramatically as soon as we learn to see other people as nothing but tools for our personal gain.”

“Did you know you can borrow money from somebody and just never pay it back? The benefits of this approach are seemingly endless. Back when I was married, I used to take out loans from my father-in-law all the time, and I never dreamed of repaying him. I mean, what was he going to do about it? Sue his own daughter’s family?”

“I know some of you out there are thinking this all sounds too good to be true. You ask: How can this be? How can taking advantage of everyone you meet possibly be the secret to long-term financial security? I’ll answer your question with a question: How the fuck do you think billionaires do it?”

not doing stupid things saves us all from dying by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

“i changed one (1) breaker in one (1) breaker box with the help of my father, who is a retired electrical engineer, and when I commented that he was maybe being overly cautious with a breaker box whose master breaker was off, he said “first, never trust anything is off. and second, all the people who mess with electricity who weren’t overly cautious are dead now””

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

White House Press Briefing on Trump Assassination Attempt by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

I honestly cannot tell whether this is satire or poor Tadhg just reading an official transcript in a wig. Like, he may very well just be reading a Truth post.

More than six million Haitians need urgent humanitarian aid: ‘The population is at breaking point’ by Carlos S. Maldonado (El Pais)

“The figures emerging from the island reveal the depth of the collapse: more than six million people — more than half the national population — require urgent humanitarian assistance to avoid succumbing to hunger, disease and violence.”

“Haiti’s collapse has been dizzying. In January 2024, there were around 300,000 internally displaced people. By April 2026, the figure had reached 1.4 million.”

“The healthcare system has suffered a near-total collapse: only 30% of health facilities across the country remain operational. The remaining 70% ceased operations between 2020 and 2026 due to the complete lack of safety guarantees for staff and patients.”

“The international community views Haiti with a mixture of helplessness and weariness. There is frequent talk of “donor fatigue,” a notion that Silva Chau insists should be eradicated from the diplomatic lexicon. “There is no excuse for saying that nothing can be done. There is an obligation to provide the necessary resources,” she states firmly.”

A Feral and Savage Party by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

And from the batshit right-wing, there’s this interpretation, which is what everyone over 65 is reading all day every day. For a hot second, I didn’t notice who’d written it, so I thought it was an article about the Republican party. I was wrong.

“[…] labored to throw thousands in prison, ran a fake pandemic op, queered two elections, hijacked the courts, shut down opposing opinion, and poisoned the minds of several assassins?”

They acknowledge these things are happening but that it’s despite the administration’s best efforts to thwart the all-powerful Democrats in perpetrating them. Fascinating.

“Don’t expect the action to remain “mostly peaceful,” either. The idea, of course is to get violent so as to goad President Trump into invoking emergency powers to put down an insurrection.”

Yes, of course. Trump needs goading in order to turn violent.

“I doubt that President Trump will shrink from invoking the Insurrection Act […]”

I don’t even know why it would matter whether there’s legal justification for anything the Trump administration does. This guy writes like not having invoked the act would be handcuffing the Trump administration. That’s so ludicrous on its face that this guy seems to be living in a parallel universe.

He has a solution, though: change how elections work. What a surprise.

“President Trump might have to use the Insurrection Act to stop what has been an ongoing coup against his elected administration by an opposition party that has turned criminal and traitorous. He may have to convene extraordinary military tribunals to adjudicate crimes that include those committed by the federal judiciary itself. If he does all this, it must include an executive order mandating common sense election procedure for the midterm: citizenship and photo ID required, paper ballots only, no vote-counting machines, voting only on one day deemed Election Day, and mail-in ballots limited only to military, people required to be out of the country, and the disabled. All this is looking increasingly unavoidable.”

He writes about an “ongoing coup against [the Trump] administration” by the feckless Democrats. If you’re weak enough to lose to the Democrats, then you deserve what you get. None of this is happening, though, other than in his fevered imagining. His solution is to only allow good people to vote, by executive fiat. This guy used to hate the government. Look at how much he loves the federal government once his cult leader is in charge. It’s so sad.

Roaming Charges: Bad Citizens by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Democratic establishment is incapable of admitting that they habitually run bad candidates, with no ideas, who are in the pockets of the Israel lobby, the war-making industry, the surveillance state, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Tech, the real estate industry and the banks. Instead, they blame voters for refusing to overlook these fatal flaws.”

Journalism & Media

FOX NEWS IS LOSING IT by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Top comment:

“Fox News acting like they aren’t a constant megaphone for the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories ever conceived.”

Another one,

“They’re EATING CATS AND DOGS!”

TrueAnon Episode 543: The Freaky Warble of the Black Canary by TrueAnon (Patreon)

“We welcome Jacqueline Sweet back to the studio to talk about her new exposé on Canary Mission, the pro-Israel doxing group; plus the Blaze’s J6 pipe bombing story and more…”

Brace Belden:

“There’s this guy who might have done January 6th a little bit.”

and

“If someone is suing you, that means that they’re afraid. It means you’re “over the target.””

Holding Out for a Hero feat. Hasan Piker by Chapo Trap House (YouTube)

This was a very funny discussion of the state of the union after the fourth assassination attempt of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s front-loaded with a lot of funny hot-takes—Felix talks a lot, but has a pretty high hit rate—and the final 10-15 minutes are filled with very pithy statements that I feel were extemporaneous and which I’d like to have included in a transcript, but it was too long.

They discussed how most of the noise that we’re hearing—about Hasan Piker in particular—is largely a disciplining effort on the part of the media and the single party in the U.S. They understand that he is not what they say he is, which is why they must lie about him to dissuade people from ever actually watching him. He is charming, charismatic, funny, humble, intellectually curious, fair, well-educated, loquacious, well-spoken—but also deeply versed in the argot of multiple generations of netizens—and interested in justice and a good life for all. He alternatively calls himself a communist or socialist but isn’t interested in labels. This is why they need to shut him down. He’s Chomsky without the boring monotone.

In fairness to the Chapo Trap House crew: they continue to fight the good fight and have been fighting it in the public eye longer than Hasan has. They’re all on the same team. Hasan seems to be breaking out faster right now than they are, though they had their moment as the so-called “dirtbag left.” They are all deeply dedicated to the same mission outlined above, sewer socialism, getting people lives of dignity, stopping wars, encouraging human flourishing.

To be clear, almost none of our societies promote any of that as a primary cause. They promote profit and occasionally hope that some of the above shakes out as a result of minting billionaires. Almost no-one. Maybe Cuba. Maybe China a little bit. Maybe Switzerland. But the profit motive still reigns supreme. If that were to falter and everything else would be working fine, then most regimes in most countries would change what they were doing. We see it now with the next wave of proposed austerity measures to pay for wars of plunder.

It’s honestly not so difficult to be on the right side of justice when the other side is so wildly unprincipled, immoral, unethical, and clearly demonic.

Our Rulers Take So Very Much And Give Us So Very Little by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Sure plutocrats are killing our biosphere, but hey, at least they’re creating technology that lets you avoid the cognitive discomfort of writing your own words and thinking your own thoughts.

“Sure the empire is butchering human beings at horrifying scale around the world, but on the bright side it’s creating refugees who will move to your country and bring you treats that you can order from an app on your phone.

“Sure imperialist extraction is robbing the resources and exploiting the workers of the global south at extortionate fees, but on the other hand you get to wear a new outfit every day because the clothes you ordered online are dirt cheap thanks to transcontinental slave labor.

“Sure our rulers are rapidly caging us in a digital surveillance network of ever-increasing intrusiveness and control, but golly gosh they just keep gifting us all these nifty free social media platforms that we simply cannot stop ourselves from scrolling through for some reason.

“[…]

“Sure it’s only a matter of time until we find ourselves policed by armed robots and facial recognition murder drones and praying the government AI doesn’t shut off our digital money because our eyes lingered a bit too long on an anti-Israel meme, but at least we can have fun placing Polymarket bets on the next country the United States is going to bomb.”

Grievance Poisoning in the First Degree by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Some philosophers are wrong and some are crazy and some are impenetrable and I would certainly never recommend that you try to follow all of them at once, but I am grateful to them for teaching me the basic lesson that your beliefs should be based on principles. Your values should be in line with your principles. There should be underlying reasons for your conclusions. These principles and values and reasons and conclusions should all fit together in a reasonably coherent way.”

“It’s a list a child would make! “MY PHILOSOPHY: 1. You must be NICE to me. 2. My hunger for candy shows that I am SMART.” It’s embarrassing! Have some self respect, dude. You are a right wing billionaire weapons merchant. You are the human face of technological totalitarianism. You are the embodiment of just how close America is to a horrifying public-private partnership of fascism. You are the closest thing that we have to Dr. Evil. Stop acting so thirsty. It’s unbecoming. Your job is not to grovel for praise from Silicon Valley people who have not finished a book in the past 14 years. Your job is to keep doing cartoonishly evil shit until a hero finally vanquishes you. We all know you’re awful. Don’t work so hard to be awful in new and more tedious ways.”

Labor

What does minimum wage even mean fr

“The wildest part about being in the homeless shelter was seeing all the people who also lived there but worked every day. One guy was like a manager at Family Dollar…”

“We must learn to disobey.” by Patrick Lawrence (The Floutist)

“There was an ordinary German living during the Nazi regime’s grotesque excesses. When he left for work each morning and whenever he was in public, he made sure to carry two briefcases, one in each hand. “He was never obliged to salute in allegiance to the Reich.”

“In 1946 a French novelist named Georges Bernanos, a man of very mixed persuasions, published a book that came out in English four years later with the title Tradition of Freedom. This topic was much on the minds of European intellectuals at the time. The Bernanos book appeared a few years after Fromm published Escape from Freedom and just as Sartre was finishing the trilogy of novels he called The Roads to Freedom. All of the writers were concerned with questions of engagement, individual commitment, and spiritual exhaustion.

“Parenthetically, the original, 1946 title of the Bernanos book was La France contre les robots: In specific terms Bernanos intended the book as a critique of the Americanization of postwar societies—the “robotization” of Western civilization, whereby technological efficiency threatens to destroy all notions of freedom and replace all human values.

“Here is a passage in the Bernanos book that is pertinent to our topic, and I wish very much it weren’t. It falls at his conclusion and I will read it in full:”

“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself … but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base, subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men.To the extent this passage bears upon our time—and it seems to me dreadfully to our point—it places a severe limitation on all thoughts of a restoration or reinvention. By definition, to restore or renew or reinvent requires people dedicated to the undertaking, and I see little sign most American citizens are even thinking about any such endeavor.”

“My mind goes in many directions when I consider this question. One of these is to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor active in the anti–Nazi resistance and who, in 1945, gave his life up for what he knew to be right. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer famously wrote of “Cheap grace” and its opposite, “costly grace.”

““Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves,” he wrote. He meant, to resort to a shorthand I think will hold up, the grace of good intentions without action and the acceptance of the risk action requires of those who take it. I associate cheap grace with passivity, with acquiescence in the face of wrongs. Straight to my point this afternoon, Bonhoeffer wrote that, in this state of cheap grace, “we suppose the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.””

“If we—we Americans most of all—have not altogether missed our Machiavellian moment, and it is very possible we have, I think it lies in these thoughts, and I will conclude with them. If we have responsibilities in our time of lawful lawlessness, and of course we do, they must begin with acting while accepting the price action exacts, and with learning how to disobey.”

Economy & Finance

Kerosinmangel – Bitte gehen Sie weiter, hier gibt es nichts zu sehen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Bei der Hälfte des Treibstoffs, die importiert wird, kommen wiederum drei Viertel aus Raffinerien, die in der Golfregion beheimatet sind – zum größten Teil aus Kuwait und den Emiraten. Der letzte Tanker, der die Straße von Hormus passiert hat, ist bereits letzte Woche in Rotterdam angekommen. Nun kommt nichts mehr und selbst wenn die Seewege sich wie durch ein Wunder heute wieder öffnen würden, wird es noch sehr lange dauern, bis wieder Kerosin nach Europa verschifft werden kann – mehr als 80 Raffinerien in der Region sind Angaben von Branchenexperten durch die Kriegshandlungen teils schwer beschädigt worden und fallen ohnehin auf unabsehbare Zeit aus.”

“Für die größten kontinentaleuropäischen Drehkreuze des Flugverkehrs war dies interessanterweise indirekt nur durch die NATO möglich. Flughäfen wie Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Köln-Bonn, Brüssel, München oder Zürich werden über das CEPS-Pipelinesystem der NATO mit Kerosin versorgt, das größtenteils über die Raffinerien und Häfen der Energiehubs Rotterdam und Antwerpen gespeist wird.”

“[…] der Dachverband der Fluggesellschaften IATA bereits im Herbst letzten Jahres – also lange vor dem Irankrieg – eine Warnung aussprach, in der es heißt, die Kerosinversorgung in Europa laufe durch die Folgen der Russlandsanktionen auf einen Notstand zu. Ohne strukturelle Reformen bei der Kerosinversorgung drohen demnächst den Flughäfen, die nicht an eines der großen, zentralen Versorgungsnetze wie der CEPS angeschlossen sind, schon bald physische Engpässe. Wie gesagt – diese Warnung wurde bereits vor dem Irankrieg ausgesprochen.”

“Große Airlines, wie die Lufthansa, können das noch wegstecken, da sie den Großteil der Einkäufe über Warentermingeschäfte (Hedging) gegen Preisschwankungen abgesichert haben. Aber die Preise fürs Hedging steigen natürlich mit dem Kerosinpreis und es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit, bis die Kerosinpreissteigerung sich auch massiv auf die Ticketpreise überträgt – die Kerosinkosten betragen in normalen Zeiten rund ein Viertel der operativen Kosten von Fluglinien.”

“Schätzungsweise landen und starten pro Tag rund 80 Langstreckenjets voll mit „Billig-Krempel“ von Aliexpress und Temu in der EU, die pro Jahr rund 4,6 Milliarden Kleinsendungen an europäische Haushalte transportieren. Mit steigenden Kerosinpreisen dürfte dieses Geschäftsmodell auch ökonomisch nicht mehr nachhaltig sein.”

“Bevor das Kerosin physisch knapp wird und die Flugzeuge nicht mehr starten können, werden die Flüge zuvor ohnehin vom Flugplan gestrichen, weil sie aufgrund der Preise nicht mehr nachgefragt werden.”

“In Deutschland wird dies vor allem für die ostdeutschen Flughäfen Berlin-Brandenburg und Leipzig-Halle auch gelten, die nicht an das NATO-Pipelinesystem CEPS angeschlossen sind, sondern ihr Kerosin über die ostdeutschen Raffinerien PCK Schwedt und Leuna beziehen, die ihrerseits von den Russlandsanktionen ohnehin bereits schwer getroffen sind. Da kommt die aktuelle Meldung, dass der russische Konzern Rosneft die Durchleitung kasachischen Öls über die Druschba-Pipeline womöglich bereits im Mai unterbrechen will, natürlich zum denkbar ungelegensten Zeitpunkt. Honi soit qui mal y pense [Ein Schelm, wer Böses dabei denkt]. Ohne russisches Öl kein Kerosin aus Schwedt. Ohne Kerosin aus Schwedt könnten am BER schon bald die Lichter ausgehen.”

“[…] wer jetzt nicht in den Urlaub fliegt, fliegt womöglich lange nicht mehr; nicht nur weil sein Ferienflieger womöglich mangels Treibstoffs am Boden bleiben muss, sondern weil er selbst sich den Flug schlichtweg nicht mehr leisten kann oder der Flug gestrichen wurde, weil viele andere Mitbürger ihn sich nicht mehr leisten können.”

Will Gravity Pull Down the AI Bubble? by Dean Baker (CEPR)

“I have always been skeptical about how much money the AI folks would be able to pocket for themselves. Remember, the issue here is not how useful AI is or will end up being. The question is how much of the benefits (or harms) from AI that Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and the rest can capture for themselves.

“Here, the competition from China is a very big deal. This is not just a question of which country at the end of the day ends up having better or more efficient AI; the issue is that the Chinese AI companies provide serious price competition for US models. This will limit the extent to which US companies can make huge bucks on their products.

“At the moment, it looks like the cutting-edge Chinese AI company, Deep Seek, is coming out far better on price than the US leaders, OpenAI and Anthropic.

“[…]

“Deep Seek also has the advantage that it is an open-source system, which means that companies can alter the models and run them on their own computers rather than loading data onto the cloud. This means they don’t have to worry about losing control of proprietary information. By some accounts, usage of Chinese AI already vastly surpasses usage of AI from US companies.”

Roaming Charges: Bad Citizens by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Financial Times: “The number of white-collar prosecutions in the US has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, leaving many white-collar criminal defence lawyers facing a major problem: they have nothing to do.” Grift, graft and greed are good again!”

🤦‍♂️

DEBT INC.: GUILT, CREDIT, AND THE ALGORITHMIC FUTURE by Slavoj Žižek | Alenka Zupančič (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“This possibility that arises with modernity is a possibility of a more radical alienation, which can lead to something like the sacrifice of the sacrifice itself: we can be asked or expected to sacrifice everything we have for a cause, but the next level, so to speak, is when we are then asked to sacrifice/betray this cause itself, the very thing for which we were willing to sacrifice everything. In this case, we don’t just lose everything we have; at the horizon looms the loss of everything we are.”

“Credit means that when we receive or borrow something—especially when we borrow money—our debt grows with time, and we must return more than we were lent. We pay for the time during which the Other holds us “in credit,” and we pay, so to speak, for the very access to debt. The notion that money could generate (more) money—that value could emerge from nothing but time—stood in deep conflict with theological orthodoxy. For this reason, in the Middle Ages only non-Christians (Jewish, and later Lombard or Florentine bankers) were permitted to lend at interest, often acting as intermediaries. Of course, this also meant that Christians could use them to lend money at interest without themselves being held accountable—thus giving rise to the classical antisemitic topos of the usurious “Jew.””

“[…] the company uses existing profits (already extracted surplus) to inflate its own market value, rather than to reduce liabilities or invest productively. This creates the appearance of growth while in fact indebting the future, since fewer productive investments mean less real foundation for future profit. In other words, the company pays itself in the present by borrowing against its own future capacity to produce. Present “profits,” in this sense, are nothing but debts—debts that, in most cases, someone else will eventually have to repay (or lose their job), even as this profits-debts are presented as the fruits of the company’s past and present “success.””

““Cheap debt” means that one can actually profit from acquiring debt: access to low-interest credit is more desirable, and economically more advantageous, than having no debt at all.”

“[…] the modifications and shifts in the functioning of the global capitalist economy do not stop with the form of financial capital, which thrives on interest and speculation—where profit comes from anticipating price changes, from betting on future movements, and where prices do not depend on any value tied to commodities or the “market,” but rather on what investors think others will think.”

“What financial capital achieves by converting time into interest, algorithmic capital achieves by converting desire into a specific form of engagement—“attention” has become one of the key market categories. The “interest rate” of our connected lives is measured not in percentages but in notifications, clicks, and emotional volatility: each moment of distraction is a micro-installment in the debt of our attention. The result is a form of soft servitude, in which the future—once the site of possibility—becomes the primary terrain of capitalization.”

“Algorithmic capital extends this one step further: it speculates not only on the future of production or exchange, but on the future of desire (thus, we could add, robbing desire of its future). Like financial derivatives, algorithms convert uncertainty into a field of calculation; they extract surplus not from things, but from “subjectivity”—from the circulation of affect and attention.”

“We live in a regime where desire itself accrues compound interest, and where the future, as both Marx and Lacan might agree, is mortgaged to the endlessly deferred satisfaction that sustains the system. (In the sense that, on the one hand, it promises “full, ultimate satisfaction,” while on the other hand it profits from its structural impossibility.)”

“Jodi Dean argues that contemporary capitalism has ceased to function as capitalism in any meaningful sense and has instead morphed into a neo-feudal order. Rather than organizing social life primarily through markets, wage labor, and competitive production, today’s dominant system is increasingly structured around enclosure, rent extraction, and relations of dependency. In her account, what is decisive is not simply that capitalism has become more unequal or more monopolistic, but that its basic mechanism has shifted: instead of capital investing in production in order to generate profit, we see the consolidation of power through the control of infrastructures, access, and networks, enabling owners to demand payment simply for entry and participation. The central figure is no longer the capitalist entrepreneur competing in a market, but the lord who owns the gate, the channel, the platform, the territory, and who can therefore extract tribute from all who pass through.”

“Digital platforms and financial infrastructures thus operate as private estates: they enclose what once appeared as public or common spaces (communication, sociability, information, even attention), and they regulate access to them in increasingly arbitrary ways. Users and workers do not simply “participate” in these spaces; they are rendered dependent upon them, compelled to remain within them because their economic, social, and symbolic existence is increasingly mediated by them. Dean emphasizes that extraction here is continuous and ubiquitous: it is not limited to the workplace or the labor contract but extends across the whole of life, in the form of subscriptions, fees, data extraction, algorithmic visibility, and the constant conversion of activity into value for others. What looks like openness and connectivity is, from this perspective, an enclosure of the commons: a privatization of the conditions of social existence.”

Witness the recent cutoff of Claude Code to an entire company for a perceived transgression. Or the over 2000 people sanctioned by the EU who have no access to money or payment because they are accused of expressing forbidden ideas.

“Those at the top occupy positions of insulated sovereignty, while those below are locked into various degrees of precarity and dependency. This hierarchical organization undermines collective political struggle not only materially but symbolically: subjects are individualized, sorted, and divided, encouraged to compete for recognition, attention, and platform access, rather than to recognize themselves as part of a common antagonistic position.”

This sounds like Marxism where the difficulty encountered by the proletariat in its struggle to escape the system is exacerbated by the system’s heretofore unparalleled ability to atomize, to distract, to seduce, to subdue, to immiserate, to shame and humiliate, and to render hopeless. It obliterates imagination, forestalling even the consideration of an alternative.

Science & Nature

Why not Venus? by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“The way I like to think about this question is that we can’t lose. Missions to the clouds of Venus are either going to find life or some kind of brand new chemistry, either of which will be a breakthrough discovery in planetary science. There’s basically a guaranteed Nobel prize waiting in the skies of Venus for whoever wants to collect it. A more sober case for exploring the planet is that we only have three terrestrial worlds to work with. We should learn all we can about how they formed, how they function, and why their fates diverged if we want to better understand exoplanets that humanity won’t be able to physically visit for millennia.”

“The science return on any airship design with 2026 sensor technology would be phenomenal, and they could all be rigged to drop a series of sondes or mini-landers down to the surface.”

“The final and most metal approach is to dispense with refrigeration entirely. NASA has been experimenting with integrated circuits made from silicon carbide that can take a thermal beating. The Glenn research lab has kept chips running at temperatures over 500°C for a year, and even built prototypes that function at 900°C. These electronics are primitive, but more than capable of handling signal processing, amplification, basic imaging, and many of the other tasks you want in a Venus lander.”

Environment & Climate Change

Roaming Charges: Bad Citizens by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The question, as always with EVs, remains: how is the electricity powering the cars generated. In Singapore, 95% of the electricity is generated from natural gas and LNG.”

While true, do not be distracted from the fact that an electricity-powered vehicle has the potential to be powered by cleaner energy, where a fossil-fuel-powered vehicle does not. It’s a big step in the right direction, and will hopefully not be wasted. Recycling is a similar dynamic: you need people to start separating their waste, even if you can’t recycle any of it yet. There is only a limited window of opportunity, though, before people become disillusioned.

“Why is Georgia burning? 99.8% of the Southeastern US is now in drought, smashing the previous record of 87%. 94% is in severe drought (previous record: 71%). The worst drought by far the region has seen in decades.”

“In 1990, coal provided 90% of Danish electricity. Today, it is less than 3%. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of Denmark’s electricity generation is powered by wind.”

“Costa Samaras, director of the Carnegie Mellon University Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, on news that the Trump administration will pay two more offshore wind companies $900 million to walk away from their projects:”

“Hold on. We, the taxpayers, are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?”

“The median forecast predicts that the gathering El Niño in the Pacific Ocean will be the strongest in 150 years. That’s the median forecast. There’s a 50 percent chance it could be much worse.”

Medicine & Disease

Before the Opioid Crisis, We Had the Valium Crisis by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“[… ] we could just start the college student on medication, to help her get comfortable with the government’s psychopathology.”

“Sedative pills of the newly discovered benzodiazepine family poured out of doctors’ offices and pharmacies in the 1960s and 1970s, in return for fabulous sums of money. Librium® had hit the market in 1960 (nine years before the advertisement referenced above), and was soon earning tens of millions of dollars a year. Valium®, its younger and more popular sister, debuted two years later. Both blockbusters, as recently reviewed here, were manufactured by Hoffman-La Roche pharmaceuticals and marketed by Arthur Sackler’s ad company.

“Valium® became the first medication in history to rack up more than $100 million in annual sales. And then, even as the business world gaped in awe at the thought of a $100 million drug, Librium® was also a $100 million drug, while the saturation marketing of Valium® had sent it soaring ten times higher, and it became the first drug to earn $1 billion in annual sales.”

“Everyone involved in pushing benzodiazepines like Librium® and Valium® initially denied they were addictive; and then, when evidence that benzodiazepines are addictive became incontrovertible, they insisted that the problem was not the medication, but the person, since he or she probably had “an addictive personality” and would just get addicted to something else.”

That sounds very familiar. These people are demons.

“[…] without the Valium craze of the 1960s-1980s, there’d have been no Opioid Crisis of today. One pathological, market-rewarded behavior amasses resources and know-how to launch another.”

“In the pilot episode of the sit com “The Brady Bunch,” which aired in 1969 — the same year as the “college students need Librium” journal ad — the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. Brady commiserate by telephone about their wedding day jitters.

““Why don’t you take a tranquilizer?” she suggests.

“Marriage and college are apparently both something to get through on drugs.

“[…]

““I took one,” he replies.

““Well, maybe you should take another one?” she suggests, as if it’s the most utterly reasonable thing imaginable to keep pounding sedation on your wedding day. He declines because, while he’s fine with tuning out the ceremony, “there’s the honeymoon to consider.””

“Valium® became — year in and year out, for the entire decade of the 1970s — the most prescribed medication in the world.

“Or at least, in the Western world. Doctors in the Soviet Union were futzing around with their own discoveries. These included ß-phenyl-GABA, a sedative available in Soviet cosmonaut medical kits, and phenazepam, a benzodiazepine 10 times more powerful than diazepam. Both are still used in Russia today.”

““Millions of people — government officials, businessmen, policemen, farmers, journalists, doctors, among others — keep the tranquilizer at hand to swallow in periods of stress,” reported The New York Times in 1974. Pointedly, the newspaper described Valium® as “a multipurpose drug unknown 15 years ago,” but now with “so broad a spectrum of medical uses and … so frequently prescribed that many Americans are born and die with Valium in their bodies.””

“The headline tells us this woman’s world “orbits around doctors,” and the text explains further that you are treating her for hypochondriasis. While you’re doing that, the ad says, why not also start her on Valium®? The ad recommends diazepam 10 mg four times a day — a shockingly high dose. (If, in my emergency department practice, I saw a patient on half that dose, I would be concerned enough to investigate the situation.)”

“For those keeping score at home, reasons to be started on a benzodiazepine like Valium® or Librium® include going to college, getting married, being afraid of your mother-in-law, resenting your older sister, keeping house, succeeding in business, or being a government official, police officer, farmer, journalist or doctor. What could go wrong?”

How to train your brain to see possibility instead of doom by Dr Hannah Critchlow (The Guardian)

“It can feel as though the world is tilting towards chaos: political shocks, economic instability, technological upheaval and a constant stream of bad news. Faced with so much uncertainty, many of us default to a sense of impending doom. But is that reaction hardwired – or can we train ourselves to keep a more open mind?”

Man, I was hesitant about this recommended article but the first paragraph—cited above—is such a doozy. It is, at least, honest. This is exactly what the rest of the article is about. It admonishes people for not noticing how awesome everything is. She’s absolutely terrible: a terrible writer with terrible ideas.

Maybe everyone should take Qualudes? F@&k, the Guardian sucks @ss.

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

✅ “There are myriad ways…”
✅ “There are a plethora of ways…”
⛔ “There are a myriad of ways…”
✅ “The number of ways are myriad”
✅ “The number of ways comprise A, B, and C”
✅ “The number of ways is composed of A, B, and C”
⛔ “The number of ways is comprised of A, B, and C”

My friend replied,

“merriam-webster (and oed and cambridge and wikipedia (but merriam-webster has the nicest dictionary)) says you are an old man yelling at a cloud and you can use myriad as a noun

you are right about comprise tho ❤️”

Merriam Webster, OED, and Cambridge are all trollops whispering whatever the customer wants to hear as long as he’ll come upstairs with them and leave behind a satchel of specie minutes later. That said, the ⁠FreeDictionary agrees. I very much prefer their explanation to MW’s suspiciously slop-like formulation.

“Usage Note: Throughout most of its history in English myriad was used as a noun, as in a myriad of reasons. In the 1800s, it began to be used in poetry as an adjective, as in myriad dreams. Both usages in English are acceptable, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Myriad myriads of lives.” This poetic, adjectival use became so well entrenched generally that many people came to consider it as the only correct use. In fact, however, both uses are acceptable today.”

For comparison, the MW version,

“Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.”

God, that is so much worse. They both say the same thing but the first version is so much more legible to me.

It tickles me that people who can’t write well will be accused of having used LLMs to write their texts, even though they were the ones from whom the LLMs learned how to write in the first place.

Dawn of a New Educational Era: Confronting the Epic Crisis in 2024 Without Teachers (NLI Institute)

• On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
• 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
• 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
• Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.
• 34% of adults lacking literacy proficiency were born outside the US.

This is not a coincidence; it is deliberate. You won’t join the revolution if you don’t even understand you need one.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Turing Test 2.0 by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)

Turing Test

“The essence of a human being is not to work, it is not to follow instructions – it i to act freely in the world with intention, to create meaning, and to enact our will on the world.

“Double Radical Freedom!”

Do not anger the Gods

“Why do we have to kill kids?
It’s not “killing.” It’s a “sacrifice”…
…If we didn’t sacrifice kids, the rain God [would] be angry…
…and the rain [would] stop falling…
…and our crops would stop growing…
…and we’[d] starve to death!”

“Why do we have to kill kids?
It’s not “killing.” It’s a “car accident.”…
…If motorists had to drive [more slowly], it would hurt car-sales…
…and the economy would be upset…
…and we’[d] all lose our jobs
…and we’[d] starve to death!”

I hadn’t noticed the atrocious and inconsistent grammar in this comic until I started transcribing it.

We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“In 1900, 100 out of 1000 American infants died before their first birthday, 10% of all lives snuffed out in their first year. By 1950 it was around 30 out of 1000. By 1970 it was about 20. When I was born it was less than 10. Now it sits at a little less than 6. The entire 1995–2024 window we’re looking at is the nearly flat tail-end of a transformation that was essentially complete before the “digital revolution” began. The heavy lifting, the core development and progress in sanitation, antibiotics, pasteurization, hospital births, happened far earlier, specifically in that magic 1870ish to 1970ish window I always talk about. You can say, hey, we haven’t seen major advances here because we’re near the limits of progress, there isn’t much further to go! But if that’s true, it kind of proves the point, right?”

“American households spent about 50% of their budgets on food in 1870, about 15% in 1970. We could add the maternal death rate during childbirth, which fell 99% from 1900 to 1970, and we could add the share of homes with indoor plumbing or electricity, and we could add workplace safety and the decline of workplace mortality by more than 80% in that period, etc and etc and etc. That all constitutes genuinely revolutionary progress, and once you see its scale you can’t unsee it.”

“The fundamental architecture of daily material life − how we heat our homes, how we move from place to place, how we grow and store and cook food, how we build structures − has changed remarkably little since 1970. Yes, medicine has progressed a great deal, but look at those charts above; the vast majority of the work of reducing deaths from disease and increasing longevity was accomplished long ago. A person transported from 1926 to 1976 would find the world nearly unrecognizable. A person transported from 1976 to 2026 would find it, after some orientation, quite familiar. The cars go to the same places. The planes aren’t even marginally faster. The houses are built the same way. People still die of cancer.”

“I’d rather be living in 2026, enjoying the benefits of that long-passed fertile period, than living in the teeth of all that incredible innovation in the 1910s, watching thousands die of the Spanish flu. I just think people should be clear-eyed about the era they’re living in. What modern invention would you really take over indoor plumbing, or pain killing medication, or the airplane? I think any honest person would have to say, none of it. No, you would not trade food refrigeration for TikTok. No, you would not trade routine handwashing as a mass phenomenon for the OLED TV. And no, you would not trade the EKG for ChatGPT.”

“Your Sams Altman and Darios Amodei are circus barkers whose net worth is directly dependent on getting you to believe their shpiel, so I’ll leave them aside.”

“LLMs write code, generate images, produce music, summarize documents, draft prose… which is to say, they have achieved mastery over the exact domains that were already, by any sane measure, overprovisioned. Was anyone saying that we didn’t have enough digital writing, images, videos, music, video games, or applications, a few years ago? The core triumph of technological growth is taking scarcity and creating abundance. Well, LLMs create an abundance, that’s for sure. But there was already an abundance of text, online, and an abundance of images, and there’s some insane stat like 24 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every second or whatever, and yes, there has been an abundance of code, of programs, of apps. And before we got these fancy new tools to produce more code, there wasn’t a lot of people saying “Gee, what we need is more apps, the app store is too empty.””

“We needed (and still need) cheaper energy, more housing, better cancer treatments, functional mass transit, and a replacement for the internal combustion engine people actually want to use. [those last two are uniquely U.S.-American problems] What we received instead was a machine that can write a cover letter in four seconds and generate a photorealistic image of SpongeBob jackin it. The question of whether this constitutes civilizational transformation should answer itself. Right?”

“Code cannot insulate your house; no algorithm has ever laid a water pipe; the internet has not built a single mile of high-speed rail. What our current stagnation shows, collectively, is that the improvements in material human life that matter the most − abundance in warmth, in calories, in clean water, in physical safety, in hours of freedom from labor − were all achieved by technologies that operated on atoms: steel, concrete, copper wire, chlorine, penicillin. The digital revolution produced real and genuine gains within its own domain, but it never breached that membrane between the virtual and the physical, and LLMs show no signs of doing so either.”

“[…] the leap from “AlphaFold is sometimes useful to structural biologists” to “we are on the threshold of defeating disease” is not an inference supported by evidence but rather a narrative that a certain kind of mind finds emotionally necessary.”

Or, more likely, potentially personally profitable if you can get other people to believe it.

“[…] each generation of technologists, confronting the gap between what their tools can do and what they wish they could do, fills that gap with imagination and calls it the future.”

“[…] we cannot sit back and wait for technological progress to save us. The only solutions to our problems − the problems of hunger, of poverty, of injustice, of disillusionment, of alienation − are political solutions. I understand feeling totally defeated by that idea, given what politics is like on this planet. But it’s all we have. We start to build the political structures that can enable humanity to take care of all of us or we drown. There is no fate but what we make.”

“Consider what that century actually delivered. Electrification, meaning not just the lightbulb but the complete rewiring of industrial production, household labor, and urban organization; indoor plumbing and modern sanitation, which did more for human life expectancy than anything medicine has yet accomplished; the internal combustion engine, which annihilated distance and remade geography; the telephone; commercial aviation; refrigeration; central heating; antibiotics. The Green Revolution in agriculture, which most contemporary Americans know nothing about, ended famine as a routine feature of agricultural life. Radio and then television enabled (for the first time in human history) simultaneous mass communication across a nation. Any one of those categories is more substantial than the entire sweep of growth in computing technology in the last 50 years or so.”

“These weren’t merely new inventions or products or possibilities; each was a restructuring of the basic conditions of existence. Before electrification productive work ended at sundown. Before indoor plumbing fetching water was a several-hour daily task for most households. Before refrigeration the organization of daily meals was governed entirely by what hadn’t yet rotted. Before antibiotics a scratch could kill you. Before commercial aviation the journey from New York to London took a week by sea.”

“Gordon’s point isn’t merely that these were humanity-altering technologies, but that the improvements these technologies delivered were one-time gains. You go from no electricity to electricity once. You go from outhouses and wells to indoor plumbing once. The gains are enormous, irreversible, and non-repeatable. And they are, by and large, done.”

Roaming Charges: Bad Citizens by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In 1988, George Will attacked novelist Don DeLillo for humanizing Lee Harvey Oswald in his novel Libra and blaming “America” for shaping Oswald’s character. The pious Will denounced DeLillo as “a bad citizen.” DeLillo, who rarely says anything publicly, took Will’s attempted slander as a badge of honor, saying: ”I don’t take it seriously, but being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.””

“Don DeLillo: “Half the world is redoing its kitchens; the other half is starving.””

How uncertainty-tolerant are you? by Jeroen van Baar (An Educated Guess)

“[…] researchers have long interpreted IU as a psychological trait, a relatively stable feature of one’s personality. I know of no other personality trait whose average level has shifted by a whole standard deviation over the course of a few decades. Either IU is not a trait but a situation-specific attitude, or something has drastically changed how trait IU develops over childhood. Either way, young adults in Canada and the U.S. have become less tolerant of uncertainty over the past thirty years.”

The School Reformer “Accountability Era” Narrative Simply Does Not Add Up by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“ESSA is best understood as a reform of how states meet federal accountability requirements than a repeal of the requirements themselves. And the clue is in the names: No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds…. The only way the Obama administration was going to get very hostile Congressional Republicans to pass the bill was by emphasizing continuity with Bush’s NCLB.”

“What changed at the federal level after 2015 was largely a) rhetorical and b) administrative; the substance of test-based accountability was picked up and carried forward by the states. Every state continues to operate a federally required accountability system that rates schools using student test performance as the dominant input, though ESSA provoked the addition of “school quality” and “student success” measures. The large majority of states still assign schools A–F letter grades, 1–5 star ratings, or similar summative labels, driven primarily by proficiency and growth on state assessments.”

“The “Nation’s Report Card” still gets published on its NCLB-era schedule, and districts continue to live and die by those numbers in the local press. It’s just weird to act as though we’re in a dramatically different era of American public schooling; we are not.”

“This is one of the weird things about this whole debate, the way that the rhetoric of a loud fringe and the actions of a tiny number of outlier schools and districts are mistaken for actual meaningful pedagogical and policy change. They aren’t. More than a decade after its repeal, it’s remarkable, the degree to which NCLB still determines national ed policy.”

“NAEP gains during the NCLB era were heavily concentrated in elementary grades and in math (precisely the subjects and levels where the test-and-punish pressure was most intense) while reading gains at the 8th grade level were much weaker, and 12th grade scores barely moved at all. This is exactly the pattern you’d expect not from genuine learning improvements but from score inflation through fraud and teaching to the test.”

“National trends outside of the classroom, like those relating to food insecurity, often have the biggest impact on test scores. Given that knowledge, ascribing noisy NAEP score changes to national policies that were implemented piecemeal and at very different rates is irresponsible, especially given the surge in scores from the 1990s and how it complicates the simplistic narrative.”

“The PISA declines visible in American math and reading scores over the 2003–2022 period aren’t remotely anomalous; they’re part of a near-universal pattern among wealthy, developed democracies. In particular, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, Canada, and Australia − that is, countries with many economic and social similarities but radically different curriculum philosophies, funding structures, pedagogical traditions, etc − all show trajectories strikingly similar to that of the United States.”

“[…] what the data show is convergence: a broad, shared downward drift across the developed world that almost certainly reflects forces operating above the level of any individual nation’s classroom policy. Pinning these trends on American policy choices, without accounting for why virtually identical trends appear in countries that made very different choices, is not serious analysis.”

“[…] what do I suspect? I suspect that it’s related to the fact that children and adolescence have, in the past ten or fifteen years, almost universally adopted a kind of technology that has unique capacity to suck up their attention, drain their mental energy, and waste their time. I think in a decade we’re going to have very strong evidence that it was always the smartphones.”

“Demanding accountability allowed elites to believe that compassion consisted of demanding more from teachers who were asked to do the impossible and students struggling against major socioeconomic barriers. But politicians and neoliberal wonks found that this profoundly unfair behavior towards public educators could be effectively rebranded as high expectations. Accountability rhetoric allowed politicians to posture as champions of children while systematically undermining the working conditions of teachers and narrowing the curriculum to whatever could be cheaply measured. We allowed pundits to talk endlessly about “what works” to improve test scores while refusing to confront the most basic empirical fact in all of education: that schools are downstream of society, not the other way around.”

The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood by Stephen Johnson (The Big Think)

“Georgia’s old law, for instance, defined neglect as the failure to provide “proper” parental care. The new law replaces that with “necessary” care and sets a higher bar for neglect: Parents must demonstrate “blatant disregard” for their child’s safety — putting them in imminent, obvious danger. The law also explicitly states that allowing a reasonably capable child to walk to school or travel to a nearby park unsupervised does not, by itself, constitute neglect.”

What a clown car that country is. Like, they have to make laws stating blindingly obvious facts because too many people with power are deed-down-to-the-bone stupid and have no idea that they are.

“Current FBI data shows about 350,000 juvenile missing person reports per year, most of which are resolved quickly and do not involve abduction. Of cases that do involve abduction, the vast majority are committed by someone the child knows — often a parent in a custody dispute — rather than a stranger.

“Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life. Couple these odds with decreasing violent crime rates over the past several decades in the U.S., and you might think today’s parents would be generally comfortable letting kids be outside on their own.”

“[…] a 2025 Harris Poll of kids ages 8 to 12 in the U.S. found that about two-thirds had never walked or biked to a nearby place without their parents.”

“[…] fearing another report to DFCS could land Mallerie in jail. “Maybe our culture is going to get even more risk-averse,” she says. “I just feel like every adult is like a little sentinel. Like they’re going to spot us, and they’re going to report us if they see anything that they don’t agree with.””

Technology & Engineering

Why Japan has such good railways by Samuel Hughes (Works in Progress Magazine)

“Japan’s vast railway network is divided between dozens of companies, nearly all of them private. The largest of these, JR East, carries more passengers than the entire railway system of every country other than China and India. Each year, JR East carries four times as many passengers as the whole British railway system, even though it has fewer kilometers of track, serves about ten million fewer people, and competes with eight other companies.”

“Japanese cities have the lowest residential density in Asia, and a plurality of the Japanese live in houses, usually detached ones. The urban area of Tokyo, the densest Japanese city, has a weighted population density less than that of many European cities, including Paris, Madrid, or Athens. Japanese cities have vast low-rise, predominantly residential suburbs, built at densities that might be higher than what is typical in the United States, but that would be quite normal in Northern Europe.”

“Japan is a place where cars and car-oriented lifestyles compete on a level playing field.

“Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.”

“Japanese roads are expected to be self-financing. Motorways are run by self-contained public cooperatives, very similar to the statutory authorities that ran English roads and canals between 1660 and the late 1800s, and funded by tolls on their users. Vehicle registration taxes, which are allocated to localities for road construction and maintenance, are worth three percent of the Japanese government budget.”

And, in Switzerland, we have an automobile GA for CHF 40.-

Sam Altman is “the face of evil” for not reporting school shooter, says lawyer (Ars Technica)

“the AI company overruled recommendations from its internal safety team. More than eight months prior to the school shooting, trained experts had flagged a ChatGPT account later linked to the shooter as posing a credible threat of gun violence in the real world. In those cases, OpenAI is expected to notify police—which, in this case, already had a file on the shooter and had proactively removed guns from their home previously—but that’s not what happened.”

Did you catch that? Anything in the cloud is being watched, it’s being pored over. Experts are reading what you’re doing, even when you think it’s private. Nothing is private. The police are listening. The companies are listening. Everyone is listening. They have tools to detect patterns in your behavior and make your life a living hell unless you can prove that you’re not guilty of what the machines and experts have inferred you to be guilty of doing.

LLMs & AI

7 Questions with Jeremy Howard (Answer.ai, fast.ai) on Open Source AI and Agents by NVIDIA Developer (YouTube)

“I think people who go all-in on agents right now are basically guaranteeing their obsolescence. The reason is like one of two things is going to happen.

“Either like we get AGI, […] we’re all obsolete, in which case, it doesn’t matter. I don’t think that’s likely, but it could be more likely that doesn’t happen. In which case, if you’ve outsourced all of your thinking to computers for the last few years, you’ve stopped becoming a more competent human being. You’ve stopped upskilling. You’ve stopped learning. You’ve wasted your time and you’re going to be in a group of people that is of no use to anybody.

“AI is actually great at helping you learn. You know, you can ask it to, you know, find good resources for you, to help you with misunderstandings.

“So I would say also if you’re running an organization, if you go all in on agents, there’s a good chance in two years time that will turn out to be the decision that destroyed your company. And the reason why is that if in this quite likely future where we don’t have short-term AGI, etc., what’s happened is you’ve created much much more code that fewer and fewer people understand that you can’t build on top of. You got two-week wins of like 18% faster.

“But, in two years time, you end up with a massive spaghetti. Then people will look around the company and say we can’t make anything anymore. It’s kind of like happened when lots of companies used to outsource their work to the contractors and at some point they […] forgot how to do it ourselves.”

Programming

CSS As A Query Language (evdc.me)

“In Datalog, we do this with relations. A relation is a set of tuples (this is also the definition of a SQL Table, not entirely coincidentally). A tuple is a list of atoms. E.g. in the example above, parent is a relation. parent(alice, bob) is a tuple in the parent relation. The parent relation is a set of pairs, such as the (alice, bob) pair, indicating “Thing 1 in this pair is the parent of Thing 2”.”

“We can also intersect sets, just like CSS can. This is usually called a join. Repeating the same variable name twice in a rule body joins on that variable:”

% These are unary relations, aka sets of atoms. Also yeah comments use `%`.

woman(alice).
man(bob).
parent(alice, bob).
parent(bob, carol).

% "X is the mother of Y, if X is the parent of Y, and X is a woman."
% X was repeated in the body, so it's a join.
mother(X, Y) :- parent(X, Y), woman(X).

“The example above essentially intersects “the set of all parents” with “the set of all women”, to form “the set of all mothers”.

“A Datalog rule looks like this:”

head(X, Y) :- body1(X, Z), body2(Z, Y).

“Read :- as “if”. The right side is your body — a list of conditions, all of which must hold simultaneously. The left side is your head — the new fact you’re asserting is true whenever the body holds. Commas in the body are “and”. So ancestor(X, Y) :- parent(X, Y). means: “For all possible values of X and Y, X is an ancestor of Y, if X is a parent of Y.””

“This is something SQL couldn’t do before the WITH RECURSIVE keyword, which exists precisely because people kept needing to do stuff like this. (In typical SQL fashion, WITH RECURSIVE lets you express any recursive computation, but only if you shoehorn it into a weird syntax and semantics that doesn’t always compose well with other parts of the language.). It’s something CSS definitely can’t do. But it’s literally the first textbook example for Datalog.”

“Here is how a naïve Datalog engine works (informally):”

1. Start with your base facts — the ones you wrote down explicitly, like parent(alice, bob).
2. Look at every rule. Match the “body” against the currently known facts, substituting in values for variables in the process.
3. For each such match, add the “head” of the rule to your list of known facts.
4. If you added anything new in step 3, go back to step 2.
5. If you didn’t, stop. You’re done.

“This is called “naive evaluation”. It runs until the set of known facts stops growing, which is called the fixpoint — the point where applying all the rules produces nothing you didn’t already have.”

“The CSS Working Group has been orbiting towards something similar to “CSSLog” for years. They wanted “element queries” or “container style queries”, ran into the problem of infinite loops and fixpoint semantics, and solved it by restricting the direction of information flow: descendants can query information about ancestors, but not the other way around. This keeps it finite, without fixpoint semantics, as information can only propagate down the tree, and we never inject new “base facts”, so to speak.”

“CSS maestros may point out that you could partially fake it with custom property inheritance. Something like:”

[data-theme="dark"] {
  –effective-theme: dark;
}
[data-theme="light"] {
  –effective-theme: light;
}

@container style(–effective-theme: dark) {
  :focus { outline-color: white; }
}

“This is a bit hacky but basically works, actually, for this specific case. CSS is pretty good at making hacks look like features, but inheritance is not actual transitive closure (e.g. one could imagine transitive closure along a property chain other than the parent/child relation built into the DOM structure), and so a slightly more complex version of this problem will break it. It’s the principle of the thing!”

The Zig project’s rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy by Simon Willison

“In Contributor Poker and Zig’s AI Ban (via Lobste.rs) Zig Software Foundation VP of Community Loris Cro explains the rationale for this strict ban. It’s the best articulation I’ve seen yet for a blanket ban on LLM-assisted contributions:”

“In successful open source projects you eventually reach a point where you start getting more PRs than what you’re capable of processing. Given what I mentioned so far, it would make sense to stop accepting imperfect PRs in order to maximize ROI from your work, but that’s not what we do in the Zig project. Instead, we try our best to help new contributors to get their work in, even if they need some help getting there. We don’t do this just because it’s the “right” thing to do, but also because it’s the smart thing to do.”

“Zig values contributors over their contributions. Each contributor represents an investment by the Zig core team − the primary goal of reviewing and accepting PRs isn’t to land new code, it’s to help grow new contributors who can become trusted and prolific over time.

“LLM assistance breaks that completely. It doesn’t matter if the LLM helps you submit a perfect PR to Zig − the time the Zig team spends reviewing your work does nothing to help them add new, confident, trustworthy contributors to their overall project.”

Fun

Das sind die Signal-Phishing-Nachrichten, mit denen deutsche Politiker ausgespäht wurden (Der Postillon)

Russian Ice Phishing

“Hier spricht der Signal Support.

“Wir vergeben automatisiert Regenbogenflaggen als Profilbild. Wenn Sie dagegen Einspruch erheben wollen, klicken Sie auf folgenden Link: nogay.phishing.ru”

That URL. So good.

Level 44 idiot shit

“Level 1 idiot shit is texting a link to myself because I don’t know an easier way to get it from my computer to my phone. Level 44 idiot shit is hearing my phone buzz 1.5 seconds later and going “oh who’s that””

Video Games

Modern rendering culling techniques (krupitskas 🌦️)

“The tricky part is avoiding visible pop-in. Common mitigations are dithered fade-out, aggressive LOD before the cull point, or impostors (billboards that replace the real mesh at distance).”

“One thing worth knowing: in a traditional vertex + fragment pipeline, backface culling happens after the vertex shader has already processed the vertices. So you don’t save vertex work, only rasterization and fragment work. In more GPU-driven pipelines, you can move this decision earlier, for example in compute or task/amplification work that culls meshlets before they ever reach rasterization.”

“This is the core tradeoff with object-level culling: many small objects give you fine-grained culling opportunities but each one is a draw call and a CPU-side visibility test. A handful of large objects is cheap on draw calls, but you’re stuck rendering the whole thing even when 90% of its triangles are offscreen − and you pay vertex shader cost for all of them, since the rasterizer clips after vertex shading, not before.”

“All major graphics APIs expose occlusion-query-style features. Direct3D 12 has query heaps, Vulkan has occlusion queries, and Metal has visibility result buffers. The idea is the same: render proxy geometry, typically the object’s bounds, and count whether any samples passed the depth test. Zero visible samples means the proxy was fully occluded from that view, so the real object can usually be skipped.”

Kind of like a bloom filter: if the coarse version doesn’t pass the depth test, then the more fine-grained version wholly within its volume also wouldn’t. if it does, then you have to do the work to depth-test the real geometry. The work you save on not rendering fine-grained geometry far outweighs the “wasted” work of depth-testing the proxy model for which you have to end up doing proper depth-testing and clipping on the real model anyway.

“The upside is zero readback latency since it all happens on the CPU before you submit anything to the GPU. The downside is CPU cost and the need to maintain a separate simplified occluder mesh, since you can’t afford to rasterize your full scene geometry.”

“The simple version is one pass: cull everything against last frame’s Hi-Z, render what survives. It’s cheap, but objects that just became visible get wrongly culled and stay invisible for one frame.

“The two-pass version fixes this. Pass 1 tests objects that were visible last frame, renders the survivors, and builds a fresh Hi-Z from them. Pass 2 then takes everything that was culled in pass 1 and retests it against the new Hi-Z. Anything that just became visible gets a second chance and renders this frame. The Hi-Z used in pass 1 is still one frame old, so there’s a small residual inaccuracy that no extra passes can fix. In “normal gameplay” you won’t notice it. The case where it breaks down is a hard camera cut, like a sudden 90-degree rotation: pass 1’s visible set is basically wrong, the rebuilt Hi-Z is unreliable, and you get one bad frame. Engines usually detect this and fall back to a full depth prepass for that frame.”

“The normal cone is particularly clever. If all the normals in a meshlet point roughly the same direction, you can reject the entire meshlet with a very cheap cone-vs-view test. It’s basically backface culling at the cluster level.”

“The other key piece is the software rasterization path Nanite uses for very small triangles. Once triangles get tiny, the fixed-function hardware rasterizer starts carrying a lot of overhead per triangle. Nanite handles those cases with a custom software path while larger triangles still use hardware rasterization. The result is that you can have scenes with billions of triangles where only the visible, appropriately-sized triangles actually get rasterized.”

“Culling is one of those topics that looks simple from 10,000 feet and then turns into a pile of tradeoffs the moment you build a real renderer. The right answer is almost never a single technique. In practice, you stack them: distance and frustum culling first, some kind of occlusion next, then finer-grained systems like meshlet, light, and shadow culling where the content justifies the extra complexity.”

“The hardware does this, but we can do it earlier and skip the downstream cost. The trick is the 2D homogeneous determinant from Olano and Greer’s “Triangle Scan Conversion using 2D Homogeneous Coordinates” − you build a 3×3 matrix from the triangle’s clip-space xyw coordinates and check its sign. No perspective divide needed, which avoids a bunch of edge cases with w near zero.”

“Even a triangle that’s inside the frustum and front-facing can still rasterize to zero pixels if it’s smaller than a pixel or falls between pixel centers. To detect this you have to match exactly what the hardware does − 23.8 fixed-point snapping (8 subpixel bits is standard on most GPUs). Snap the vertices to the subpixel grid, build the bounding box, and check whether any pixel center falls inside it. If not, the triangle rasterizes nothing, and we cull it.”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

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• Journalism & Media
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Public Policy & Politics

Trump says “I’m hungry,” then, a minute later, he’s in the kitchen, f@&king a watermelon. His supporters call this “4D chess.”

Sent to me via Signal by a good friend.

Pete Hegseth prays for death

Lunacy. Utter lunacy. A runaway train of stupid. They are a high colonic for empire. Things will be better afterward, but it’s deeply, deeply uncomfortable now. Well, not right now. But it will be. The tide’s going out because the tsunami’s coming in.

Empire Or Bust: The Ceasefire Becomes Deceased Fire by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Iran seems to really care about something entirely foreign to Western politics. Public opinion. They do not attack until attacked (a Quranic injunction) and try to desist if they desist (also Quranic). This translates outside the Muslim World as almost absurd (why would you not do your worst?) but it is actually moral.”

“[…] as Khamenei the Elder said (before the Islamic Revolution, in 1974, mind you),”

“Moral duties are not just for religious seasons. They are not for sometimes. They do not apply one day but not another. They do not apply to one person but not another. Duties are perpetual, universal and eternal.”

“[…] violence in the Quran is strictly defensive (to the point that you can get hit with obvious attacks), restrictively proportional (to the point that it ties your hands), and constrictively negotiable (to the point that you have to hold back). You have to negotiate even with Satan not cause you trust Satan, but because you trust God. As Khamenei the Elder also said (2014),”

“We had announced previously that on certain issues, if we deem it proper we would negotiate with this #Satan to deter its evil.”

“None of this makes any sense within capitalist self-interest theory or game theory, but the Islamic Revolution ain’t playing and they aren’t craven capitalists.”

“To me, moral behavior is in your self-interest in the long run, especially if you believe in a hereafter, or at least a reputation. I could go to a restaurant right now and leave without paying, this is actually easier, but I live in a community and in continuity and so I don’t. Moral behavior is social behavior, but capitalism has elevated sociopathy to its central value. Greed is good,”

“In our short human lives, doing the right thing often gets us killed and almost always leaves us poorer. This is why all religions have some concept of an afterlife, to make the moral math work.”

“Even in the face of death, and even in the face of obviously wicked people getting away with it, there has to be faith in the right thing that goes beyond one’s current skin. And the Islamic Resistance is, I think, living proof of this.”

“Genocidal states like those of the White Empire cannot understand this—their founding ethos is cheat to win—but civilizational states know this instinctively. The root of civilization is cooperation whereas the root of capitalism is competition.”

“I’ll leave you with the words of Ali Khamenei (the Elder), who died for this dharma. As he said in 2024,”

“Those who support the Palestinian people are fulfilling their duty. No one based on any international law has the right to object to the people of Lebanon and Hezbollah supporting Gaza and the uprising of the Palestinians. It is their duty, and they should have done this. This is both an Islamic ruling, a rational law, and based on internationally accepted reasoning. The Palestinians are defending their own land. Their defense is legitimate and supporting them is also legitimate. So all these attacks, including Operation Al-Aqsa Flood which took place around this time last year, were internationally legal, logical correct moves. And the Palestinians had this right.

“The Lebanese people’s vigorous defense of the Palestinian people falls under this same ruling. It is legal, reasonable, logical, and legitimate. No one has the right to criticize them for helping this defense. The brilliant work of our armed forces a few nights ago was also completely legal and legitimate. What our armed forces did was to inflict the minimum punishment on that usurping Zionist regime in response to its appalling crimes. It’s a bloodthirsty regime, a wolf-like regime, and the US’s rabid dog in the region. The Islamic Republic will carry out any duty it has in this regard with power, firmness, and decisiveness.

“In fulfilling this duty, we will neither hesitate nor act hastily. We won’t hesitate, neglect our duty, or act hastily. What is logical, reasonable, and correct according to military and political decision-makers will be carried out at the appropriate time, just as this has been done in the past. And if necessary, this will be done again in the future.”

Dumbkirk: Retreat Disguised As Rescue by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“As Bikrum Gill has said, this is perhaps the first anti-imperial war (as opposed to anti-colonial). Iran is not decolonizing Iran here. They did that in 1979. They are de-imperializing the White Empire itself, which is a very different proposition. White Empire has certainly lost before but, geopolitically, nobody else has won. Korea and Vietnam were able to decolonize their own land (ish), but the imperial war machine marched on.”

“‘America’ lost their own bases on day one, their aircraft carriers by week three, and now have supply lines stretching back to Old Blighty, the indignity. Their aging planes cannot fly over Iran reliably and their even more ancient refuelers get caught sleeping. ‘America’ loses embarrassing amounts of irreplaceable machinery every time they venture out and have nowhere to park anyways. All their base are belong to us.”

“They are facing the “tyranny of geography” as one 2024 internal report said. That JINSA report said their fancy planes might be stealthy in the air but, “on the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun.””

“At some level none of us can know the mind Don Tzu, whose Shart of War is”

“If you don’t know what you’re doing, the enemy doesn’t either.”

“At some level, no one knows what this idiot is doing, least of all him. His only military experience is watching Hollywood movies about daring raids to keep colored people from getting nukes and he probably just thought he’d try one on.”

“Forget corresponding with external reality, these correspondents from Washington are not even internally coherent. They say that the airman “sustained injuries” but also “hiked up a 7,000-foot ridgeline.” They say “the commandos fired their weapons ferociously… But they did not engage in a firefight.” They say that the airman was surrounded by hostiles, but also that these Iranians were friendlies, “strongly opposed to the Iranian regime.””

7000ft. Is no joke. I’m sure he didn’t climb from sea level but most people would have trouble with 3500ft even if they weren’t injured.

“The NYCrimes said Iranians are ‘strongly opposed to the Iranian regime,’ but then the Joint Chief said “the Jolly Green Flight was engaged by every single person in Iran who had a small arms weapon.” Honestly, I don’t even understand the words I’m typing but it’s all happening.”

“The Dumbkirk ‘rescue’ of one man covered up the retreat of everyone from Bahrain. The entire Fifth Fleet got cooked, while nobody looked.”

Lebanon, Iran, and the Forgotten Plight of the Shia “Infidel” by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Israel has released official statements reassuring the regions Christian and Druze populations that they will be allowed to return home to Israeli occupied rubble but have also harshly warned these populations against so much as even sheltering any member of that regions Shiite majority who have very pointedly not been welcomed to return. There is a word for this, and it start with a ‘G’ but even the most progressive First World observers don’t seem to want to use it.”

“More often than not it has been western imperialists fueling the bigotry too, targeting Shia communities for their inability to capitulate and conform to our pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi quislings and generally using them as convenient scapegoats to keep the Sunni majority distracted while we rob them blind too.”

“The Russians have an old saying that the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. I guess you could probably sum up this latest rant of mine by saying that the Mullahs were wrong about everything but the Great Satan.”

We Are Doomed and Our Leaders Are Insane by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Bill Clinton celebrated Cold War victory by promising a shift away from “making armaments” toward a domestic windfall. Almost immediately he junked the “peace dividend” plan in favor of investing in a more activist military to fight wars of boredom, pitched to us as “humanitarian” interventions. That soured enough voters on Democrats that in 2000, a half-literate goof in George W. Bush was elected after insisting, “I don’t want to be the world’s policeman.””

“His win over McCain by ten billion votes or whatever had every reporter on earth (including me) kissing his ass, while foreigners hurled plaudits and unearned Nobel Prizes into a White House still prosecuting two major wars. Like the rest, Obama began reversing every promise right after election, expanding extrajudicial assassinations to Americans while saying things like “It turns out I’m really good at killing people.” He brought Hillary in as Secretary of State. She promptly birthed a giant new shit-ball in Libya and advocated for at least one more regime change war in Syria before leaving to gorge on bank cash and prepare for the 2016 Faceplant.”

“Trump in his second term is no longer an affront to the system. He is the system, a crazy person merged with the crazy institution, our worst nightmare. Now we are just more unrestrainedly ourselves. It turns out that the phony gravitas that attended previous presidencies was useful. It offered some restraint. We took more time to bomb places. We at least pretended to have reasons, even though they melted under the faintest scrutiny,”

“I Felt Like a Monster”: Israeli Soldiers Break Silence on Gaza—and the System Behind It by Joshua Scheer (ZNetwork)

“none of this unfolds in a vacuum. The bombs, the cover, the diplomatic protection—all of it flows, in part, from Washington. The United States continues to fund, arm, and politically defend the very system these soldiers are now describing from within.

“The facts are no longer hidden. The voices are no longer external critics. They are coming from inside the system itself.

“So the question is no longer whether the world knows.

“The question is whether it is willing to act—or whether it will choose, again, to look away.

“Because when even the perpetrators are telling the truth, silence is no longer ignorance.

“It is complicity.”

It’s nicely written and it feels like a powerful statement. Maybe it is, in some circles. For those of us who’ve been paying attention to the full scale of the genocides perpetrated by the IDF—first in Gaza, then in the West Bank, now in Lebanon as well—silence hasn’t been ignorance for a long time.

Europe has been complicit for a long time. Decades.

The U.S. is not only complicit—it is the driving force of these genocides. It provides the weapons, the international diplomatic cover, and the blueprints found in the myriad genocides of its own. Read about any of the wars in which the U.S. has fought and you will see that Israel’s savagery, it’s barbarity, its vicious racism are not unique. The U.S. has done it all before.

We see how the U.S. indiscriminately bombs civilian infrastructure, cheerfully destroying people’s lives, people who have nothing to do with the military. Israel commits dozens of war crimes a day; so does the U.S. Neither of them gives a tinker’s damn for international law.

They spit, piss, and shit on the opinions of supposed peers; they don’t care about people, not even their own citizens. They are all demons, burning everything to the ground in order for them to build their wealth or to be able to dream sweet dreams of children burning.

We Should Not Fear The Tyrants; The Tyrants Should Fear Us by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“If there were a thousand people living on an island, and one of them began making life miserable for everyone else, there would soon be 999 people living on the island.”

Facts. I use the “100-person-island” analogy all the time—sometimes its a rocketship—because I find that it helps people see the utter stupidity of what we’re doing here.

“How strange, then, that a few oligarchs and empire managers get to push around an entire planet full of humans.

“I mean, right now we’re all sitting around hoping a few sociopaths in Washington and Tel Aviv don’t collapse the global economy with their reckless warmongering against Iran. There are so many of us and so few of them, and yet everyone’s sitting around going “Golly gosh I sure hope I’ll be able to afford food in the next few months, hopefully the orange guy acts sane and normal for a while so my family gets to eat.”

“These are not gods sitting on Mount Olympus exerting omnipotent control over our fate from on high. These are ordinary men with ordinary flesh and bone bodies, walking upon the same earth we walk on. They have soft skin and internal organs. Their heads must remain firmly attached to their necks if they’re to continue to draw breath.

“And yet they are permitted to terrorize the people with whom they share a planet.

“I am reminded of a quote from Scientific American about an Inuit tribe’s perspective on the problem of psychopathy:”

“In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe ‘a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women — someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.’ When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, ‘Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.’”

“In our society, we do not push psychopaths off the ice when nobody is looking. In our society, we let them rule the world.”

A Utah Phillips said, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

“We can have revolutionary change whenever we want to. We already have the numbers. All we need is the will.”

Roaming Charges: the Jesus of Uncool by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Dean Baker: “We really do need to celebrate the humiliation of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Orbán had done all the undemocratic things Trump is starting to do here. He gerrymandered election districts. He took over the media. He took over the universities. And he took over the courts. He gave government money to his cronies and blacklisted his political enemies. Despite all these efforts to tilt the playing field, which he has been doing for 16 years, the people of Hungary still threw him out on his ass.””

None of what Orbán built will be dismantled by Magyar or the people who promoted and supported him. After 16 years, Orbán had gotten too old, and the powers-that-be in Hungary moved in a younger version. The people of Hungary did as they were told, and elected a different autocrat, a younger, more handsome, and more appealing one. Magyar isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, for God’s sake.

This is what liberals always do. They’re so easily manipulated. You can get them to cheer the election of a right-wing, autocratic candidate as long as he’s portrayed to have defeated an even-more right-wing, autocratic candidate. These people probably still believe in the Easter Bunny.

“Edward Luce: “People will be closely studying how Hungary’s opposition pulled off their win in such a pro-incumbent system. Important to note that the theme was corruption. Democrats need to get much better at calling out Trump’s corruption.””

Democrats like what Trump is doing. They are not in any way opposed to his wars of choice. They just watch “number go up” like everyone else. They only represent their own interests. Stop pretending that there is a viable alternative without revolution.

How Cops Became Soldiers by Some More News | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

This is an absolute tour-de-force. John Oliver’s show is a sad shadow of this show. Cody Johnston’s writing and delivery is incredibly good. No fat on it.

00:00 − Introduction
03:37 − How Cops Became Soldiers… But Worse!
06:52 − It’s All Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s Fault
26:37 − It’s All 9/11’s Fault
43:35 − It’s All 2020’s Fault 
57:22 − It’s All Capitalism’s Fault

“But it sure seems that when private corporations and foreign countries are allowed to pay the police millions of dollars, it’s almost like those police forces are no longer incentivized to serve and protect their citizens, but rather the interests of those corporations and foreign countries instead.”

“Imagine a garden, a lush, beautiful marijuana garden. But for some reason, not all the plants are growing strong. You’re getting a lot of ditch-weed-looking turds, you know, snicklefritz.

“And what you want to do is troubleshoot the soil, open access to resources like sunlight and water, nurture the plants so they can grow strong. But imagine instead of that, you hired a landscaper who just kept coming over and yanking out the bad plants and spraying your precious weed with chemicals and shit.

“And you never solved the problem. You just kept hiring this landscaper to come back every week.

“Now, this analogy may seem crass because we’re comparing people to weeds and whatnot, and I understand and agree, but incidentally, this is somewhat similar to a tactic employed in Gaza by our collaborator and training buddy, Israel, and they literally call it mowing the [lawn].

“That’s essentially what we’re doing with the police. But more sinisterly, it’s as if that hypothetical landscaper kept asking for billions of dollars in order to buy elaborate equipment while secretly funding and supporting political efforts to keep your plants unhealthy in order to perpetuate the cycle and, as a result, ultimately brutalize your entire garden until all your precious marijuana’s gone.

“I’m sorry for calling criminals ditch-weed. Again, it’s hard to build a perfect metaphor, but that is basically the problem: a fundamental misunderstanding of how to prevent crime thanks to decades of propaganda. While it began with real fears, crime has since gone way down since the days of Lyndon Johnson, and it is still down, which, as we noted before, doesn’t have much to do with our increasing police budgets.

“As it stands, of the millions of arrests made in America each year, roughly 5% involve violent crimes at all. And at the same time, our fear of this perceived crime just keeps going up. All the while, we’ve never once bothered to explore the root causes of that fear of crime. And this is of course, in tandem with decades of television and movies and video games depicting cops as action heroes and loose cannons, traversing scum-filled cities like they were war zones.”

“From 1987's “Police Quest” to 2005's “SWAT 4,” we were gradually fear-mongered into allowing our police forces to get bigger and bigger and bigger.—mainly with the help of Daryl Gates, I guess, until they began to work in tandem with our military, adopting the same imperialist mindset and forming a symbiotic relationship, invading other countries, creating refugees who we would then demonize and terrorize here at home, all to continue this self-perpetuating cycle of money being fed into law enforcement, to exist in service of themselves and the wealthy people in charge.

“It’s wrong. It’s not what police are supposed to be. As was beautifully and gruffly articulated by Commander Bill Adama,”

“There’s a reason why you separate military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both and the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

“And here we are with the police, treating the people like the enemy of the people.

“Now we have this big grotesque machine with talons deep in our foundation. It’s hard to imagine how to dislodge that, but it starts with fear. It starts with everyday people realizing that the way we think about crime and the causes and solutions to crime are fundamentally incorrect. And that taking even just a little bit of law enforcement’s staggering budget of over $100 billion per year from state and local funding alone and redirecting it towards other programs or social services could be very useful.

“Drug treatment, affordable housing, work programs. Maybe instead of paying to put cops in schools, we just fund the schools, you know? And this isn’t even getting into the ever-increasing budget of our actual military. The military.”

A Second Blockade Has Hit The Strait by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“You can’t get outsmarted if you don’t think.”

“The whole reason why he wanted to open the Strait of Hormuz was because of what’s going on in the oil markets.

“Okay, so that’s an incredible, incredible move by JD Pondon. Brilliant sir.

“He is truly the real revolutionary, the real green-energy champion that this world needed. Many of you don’t understand. He doesn’t think in decades. He thinks in generations. He thinks in centuries. The Trumpian mind cannot be comprehended. He is Mr. Ecoterrorism. It turns out some of y’all have only watched movies about how to blow up a pipeline. Trump is quite literally doing that. Okay. So who’s the real woker now?

“Donald Trump is forcibly creating an environment for that renewable energy transition for every country. Respect. Put some respect on his name. He is the goat. Don Tzu.”

“They literally went from, ”

“Trump is going to reopen the blockade, reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He’s going to do it with our military might. We got our hardest-dicked Marines coming in. How are we going to do this? I don’t know. Maybe we’ll take Kargh Island. Maybe we’ll take other islands. How will we do that? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We’ll do it somehow. Okay. Their dicks are hard. They’re ready to go. They’re locked and loaded. They’ve been eating the best crayons that are readily available, not available to regular commercial consumers. These crayons that these hard-dicked marines are eating are basically blue crayons. Their dicks are hard. Their weapons are locked and loaded. They’re ready to rape and pillage.”

“Except that hasn’t happened because it’s virtually impossible to pull through on an operation like that without suffering significant casualties, tremendous casualties. So much so that even Donald Trump is not, you know, pushing for it. He’s saying that he wants to do this, but he’s clearly hasn’t, you know, done it, right?

“And instead, this is the new meta. Oh, you put a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Well, guess what? I’mma put a blockade on your blockade. Leaning into the offense to begin with, leaning into the damage that the blockade is doing to the global energy markets, and only worsening that crisis in our own hands.

“I’m gonna piss off every single fucker. I’m going to make the Gulf scream. I am going to make it so that the Gulf never deals with the United States of America again. I’m going to make it so that all of the Asian countries that we have developed security cooperative agreements with suffer energy-grid collapses and they will lean into China and they will also never work with the United States of America again.

“Absolutely gutting the the security umbrella and the defensive perimeter that we’ve created around China. We’re going to render that into nothing. Okay? We’re going to turn it into dust. I’m going to do that shit cuz I’m fucking crazy. That’s what Dan Tzu is doing. That’s what JD Pondon is doing. Respect JD Pondon. He is a Maoist third-worldist.”

Did the Iranians Capture America’s Most Expensive Drone?
by Rainer Rupp | Pascal Lottaz (Neutrality Studies)

“The US Navy currently operates approximately 20 of these aircraft, with seven more on order. The original programme of 70 units was cut to 27 due to cost overruns, meaning a loss of this magnitude is far from trivial: it creates a gap in global surveillance coverage, particularly across the Indo-Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Replacement is not a near-term option, as production is winding down and scheduled to end in 2028. To maintain surveillance coverage of the Persian Gulf, the Navy would need to redeploy a Triton from another region of the world, creating a corresponding gap elsewhere.

“Yet the material loss is not what is generating the most anxiety in the Pentagon. The real question being asked is whether Iran has managed the seemingly impossible: either detecting and shooting down a stealth-equipped drone at extreme altitude, or — far more alarming — electronically hijacking the aircraft and forcing it to land intact. Either scenario would effectively rule out any further Triton operations in Iranian airspace.”

How The Gulf Is Boiling The Oceans by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“You can observe this metaphor for yourself by watching a pot boil. It seems like it won’t start, but then it can’t stop. For most of the degrees it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, but once it crosses 100℃, liquid rules are overthrown and a gas state takes power. This is what Iran has done. They have turned up the heat on the imperial economy and people will be like ha ha, nothing happened, until it does. Don’t believe me, just watch.”

“[…] this government [Sri Lanka] just paid $286 for a barrel of landed diesel not because they’re dumb, but because they’re scared, given hard experience. Fear is the lesson pain teaches you, but if you haven’t learned (and you refuse to be educated), there’s only one way to find out. Sri Lanka’s among the first bubbles to run for the gas, but believe me, we won’t be the last one. It’s a burbling, burbling pot.”

“When the tsunami hit, the joke was that the government thought it was a Japanese guy they had to pick up from the airport (‘Eh, who is this T. Sunami sir?’). We literally did not know the word. Thus, when the ocean first receded, as tsunamis do, people went out to see, and got swept away forever. At least 35,000 people died that day, the coastline was shocked. Pain is the greatest teacher, and now if we see any pertubation in the ocean, people know what to do. Don’t just stand there. Run, or in case of oil suddenly receding, queue.

“When I see the slow motion shock spreading across the world oceans, I remember that it took hours for the tsunami to wrap around my island. There was time for Trinco to call Galle and time for Galle to call Colombo but it didn’t matter cause whatever message got through was incomprehensible. People died anyway, though the information was there from morning. This is what I see happening across the world, as the Al Aqsa Flood wraps around every continent. Even though the oil shock has already hit the Indian Ocean, the Atlanticists can’t understand it because A) they’re racist and B) simply inexperienced. Me explaining this to White people is like Lassie barking that a Black kid fell down the well, to which the town responds ‘oh well,’ and gets on with whatever they were doing.”

“The pump is broken and the ships are backed up. Even if that all stops tomorrow, which it won’t, production won’t recover for years, and shipping won’t recover for months. Remember that water resists changing its temperature and the iron is not cooling down. ‘America’ is now hijacking Iranian boats in the Indian Ocean and Iran is fast-attacking anything imperial that floats. This is what the ‘Americans’ call a Mexican Stand-Off and what the imperial economy can call adios, amigos.”

“Even if ‘America’ conceded defeat tomorrow, a lot of energy is just lost. It’s already boiled off into the ether, and you cannot unboil a pot. A lot of infrastructure is physically damaged and will take years to repair, a process that hasn’t even started. To make things just ‘snap back’ we’d need more tankers than currently exist and existing tankers to be in places they are not. The futures markets cannot just magic up oil which isn’t pumped and on ships already. My opinion is that the White economy has already collapsed, and your elites are just stealing the silver and plates from the Titanic.”

“Speaking from the Dirty South, we’ve been in the soup for years, we’re well seasoned by now. But Americans are not used to even a little loss of exorbitant privilege, which to them will feel like great oppression. What’s coming will feel, for them, like the end of their world. Which it is, inshallah. God willing, this is the big one. A rising flood to lift all shorts.”

“You really have to boil the oceans to get the White Empire to notice anything. Their only prophet is the profit, that’s all they follow, and they can make that golden calf moo by just blowing bullshit through it. But it’s a false god, as they’ll find when the goods stop being delivered. It’s important to remember that the boiling of the ocean didn’t start with Hormuz, they’ve been suppressing economic farts since 2008 at least (the 1970s, really), and now they’re going to soil themselves in the public markets.”

Patrick Henningsen: Hezbollah JUST Fired Back at Israel − Iran Vows to 'Crush' All Attacks by Dialogue Works | Nima Alkhorshid (YouTube)

“We’re talking about a post-US Persian Gulf. There’s no place for the US there and no nobody has admitted this in the Trump administration. They’re talking like things are as they were a year ago. They’re not. This is not the same Persian Gulf. This is not the same Middle East. It will never be the same.

“So, their inability to kind of confront and accept these realities and their own sort of incompetence of their negotiators—of their Secretary of State, who’s basically AWOL. Marco Rubio is not even like—nobody knows where he is, what he’s doing. I guess he’s planning the invasion of Cuba at the moment. another illegal war. They’re planning to invade Cuba. So, that’s what Rubio’s busy doing, stealing oil and imposing illegal blockades on US neighbors. So, he can’t even be bothered to even show up or do, you know, even weigh in on this war.

“So, it shows you this this is a dysfunctional government. They have one choice, which is they have to double down. They can’t admit they’re wrong and they have to double down.

“And you know, as far as Israel goes, Israel is not able to defend itself right now. That’s pretty clear. If hostilities start, there’s going to be big problems for Israel physically, politically, militarily, economically. It’s all going to continue to get worse. So, this also opens the door for there’s a lot of talk about the deployment of nuclear weapons. And I find this to be very disconcerting and quite shocking and frightening that people are talking about this in such a casual way, as if that’s some kind of a justifiable solution to a war that the US and Israel started.

“So it’s lies upon lies. You hear from the west—from the western side—now, lies upon lies. They’re piling it on now, because they don’t want people to look at the root causes of how this began.”

“The global economy is already hitting the wall. You’re already seeing Southeast-Asian fuel shortages, business shutdowns. You’re going to start seeing bankruptcies, liquidations. There’s whole manufacturing sectors that are shut down. It’s like COVID-level, system-level perturbations. Okay, that’s already happening. That will eventually come west now because the the paper market of futures-trading and derivatives and all this stuff—it’s now converging with the material reality on the ground, because all of the reserves are expended—in terms of oil, floating gas reserves, and so forth.

“So pretty much, you know, the the real price is going to emerge and the market will do its corrections. And right now, you know, jet fuel shortages globally. I mean, this is going to be everything from transportation, delivery, employment. So we’re looking at a global recession right now, as of this week. And, if this continues, if they keep messing around with this unwinnable war, this disaster, then we’re looking at a global depression, which will begin, well and truly, probably a lot quicker than people think, but it will start hitting hard in June and July.

“Maybe they have a month, the month of May, to sort of, you know, stay in La La Land. Everybody in America can go to their barbecues and pretend that nothing’s happening because the US is energy-independent. Okay, but that’s not going to save all the supply chains that are right now being absolutely obliterated by what the United States and Israel have done to the world, which is to start this war.”

Israel Apologists Lie About Their Feelings And Beliefs, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The food and fuel crisis that’s about to hit is the fault of the US and Israel. All US and Israeli allies should end the alliances and collaborate with nations around the world to establish a new order of international power.

“I’ll keep repeating this as life gets harder for us all.”

Piers Morgan Controversy: Marandi Calls Out “Censorship” by India & Global Left | Jyotishman (YouTube)

This clip is mostly mis-titled; they talk about Piers Morgan in the last couple of minutes. Mostly, Marandi discussed other issues, like the one outlined below.

“[…] the point is that we are dealing with a dying but vicious and sinister empire and we will quite possibly see very dark times ahead. And of course, the Iranians have said that if if critical infrastructure is targeted, then we will destroy the critical infrastructure of the Israeli regime and its coalition allies and partners in the Persian Gulf because, without them, the United States would not be able to wage this war. And without the United States waging this war, the Israeli regime could not wage this war.

“So if so if we we do have a new wave of fighting then I think that a global economic depression is assured it’s it will definitely happen. The IEA has already said that the impact of the rise in oil prices and the breakdown of the supply chain may be at least for 2 years at least for prices like LNG. It would be very very high for at least 2 years.”

Journalism & Media

Public Stonings are Not “Accountability” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Punishing one person faster to make up for perceived slowness in other cases is the opposite of justice, which by definition has to be particularized. It’s the type of thinking Nuremberg prosecutors worked to avoid, and what Arthur Miller riffed on in The Crucible when he had his Judge Danforth say, “We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.” Searching around for logs to feed the heat of public frustration is justice in reverse.”

“During this first peak of #MeToo, there was, seemingly by design, no process for differentiating between a pol who says something creepy or is “awkward,” and a forcible rapist like Weinstein. The behaviors are understood to be on the same spectrum.”

The Cowardice of Qualification: When Anti-War Voices Speak the Language of Empire by Ramzy Baroud (ZNetwork)

“By qualifying their condemnation, these voices neutralize their own position. They suggest, whether intentionally or not, a form of moral equivalence: the US-Israeli war on Iran is wrong, but Iran is also guilty; the genocide in Gaza is horrific, but Palestinians are also to blame. The result is not balance—it is paralysis.

“Compare this to the moral clarity of those who support war. Their position is never qualified. It is assertive, absolute, and often built on exaggeration or outright falsehoods, yet it carries conviction because it does not undermine itself.

“This pattern is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of Western political discourse. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which was justified as a necessary act to save lives, to the Cold War military interventions in places like Guatemala in 1954, where regime change was framed as a defense against communism, the language of morality has consistently been used to legitimize violence.”

“Many of us recognize this pattern, yet instead of exposing its fallacies, some continue to operate within it, searching for a “balanced” position while still presenting themselves as anti-war or even pro-Palestinian. They acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.”

“For many Western activists, this qualification functions as a form of protection. It allows them to maintain a sense of moral authority within their own societies without risking their professional or social standing. By condemning violence while simultaneously distancing themselves from the victims, they occupy a safe middle ground—one that appears principled but ultimately changes nothing.

“This is not merely a question of rhetoric; it reflects a deeper structural problem. Even those who oppose war often do so within a framework shaped by the very systems of power they claim to challenge. Their language, however critical it may sound, still echoes the moral grammar of empire.”

I’ve been catching up on my TrueAnon episodes and, as usual, I’m so glad I did. Liz is on maternity leave and Brace Belden and Yung Chomsky have hit the road.

TrueAnon Episode 526: Observations by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

Wall-to-wall great information and analysis 5 days after the most-recent war on Iran began. Absolute worth the price of admission.

TrueAnon Episode 532: Cuba 1 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

The boys went to Cuba. They describe the dire situation there, about what it’s like to live without power, with a society ground to a halt but persevering.

“We talk about the effects of the American blockade in Cuba and interview Cuban journalist Daniel Montero from Belly of the Beast.”

One of the comments sums it up quite well,

“This shit just makes me so sad. The amount of effort the US govt expends to prevent people from making a better world is maddening and unfathomable. the case of Cuba makes it so starkly clear that their enemy is healthcare, education, human life. Thank you for this great episode and solidarity with the Cuban people ”

TrueAnon Episode 533: Cuba 2 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

“We sit down with Dr. Mitchell Valdés-Sosa, the director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience. We talk about Cuba’s research sector, Alzheimer’s medication, and his research into Havana Syndrome.”

Both of these interviews—this one and the one above with Daniel Montero—are required listening for every goddamned American so that they can hear what their demonic country is doing to one of the few good ones. The U.S. is fighting against doctors, against medicine, trying to kill anything that doesn’t generate profit its oligarchs.

The U.S. has started sanctioning countries that host Cuban doctors. Cuban doctors are being sent home. Cuba has more doctors working in foreign countries than the rest of the world combined. Tiny Cuba. No-one else helps like they do, despite their poverty, despite the 800-pound gorilla on their neck.

They live their principles and hope to persevere.

Things are looking dire. They are bending under the weight of heretofore unseen levels of brutality and sanctions. And now the U.S. is threatening to bomb them. When will this madness end? Senseless.

TrueAnon Episode 534: Dallas 1 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

“We head West to CPAC at Gaylord’s to discover “DL Trade” and related issues. Featuring advice from Ben Mora.”

I love how Yung Chomsky easily carries his weight here, even up against Brace’s madness. Love how he says “Ok” to Brace when he’s getting on a tear. Just accepting the premise, knowing it will lead to a pot of gold.

TrueAnon Episode 535: Dallas 2 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

“We try—and fail—to find a single person carrying the flame for Charlie at CPAC.”

CPAC is a wasteland, apparently. It’s over. It’s done. It’s cooked.

TrueAnon Episode 536: Dallas 3 by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

The official description of this show is,

“We succumb to the malignant spirit of the Gaylord Hotel.”

But I think the following line from it was much better,

“At CPAC, heaven’s about to get crowded because of Father Time.”

This is a short one because even the boys have to admit that there’s no more gold to mine there. Making it three shows, though, makes us truly feel how hopeless it must have felt to be there. These two are truly genius reporters on life, culture, and politics. I cannot recommend this podcast enough.

TrueAnon Episode 538: More Observations by Brace Belden & Yung Chomsky (Patreon)

“Abandoning analysis entirely, the podcast assembles a huge amount useless facts and figures and, so burdened, hobbles towards a hateful future.”

It ends with,

“It beggars belief that somebody would think that the U.S. is the good guys in this war. And you see this really half-hearted from some people—“Oh, I don’t like Trump, but, you know, taking out these mullahs, it’s still a good thing, right?”—says you? Says some dumb, fucking cocksucker from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, or whatever organization that is essentially exactly the same as FDD? Says whatever unregistered FARA agent who works for the Daily Wire? […]

“I don’t understand how much of this people can take—that is hyperbolic because people can take essentially an infinite amount of this—people will, American people, will eat shit like it is the last thing on Earth and they are hungry. It bothers me, and then I don’t let it bother me, and then it bothers me again…because I do try to love everybody. I try to love each and every American but it’s getting quite difficult. […]

“It doesn’t seem like there is anybody who is adult enough, serious enough, to say ‘stop this.’ You fucking mutant freaks. Fucking Steve Cheung. Fucking Pete Hegseth. Donald Trump. JD Vance. All these malformed, mutated, ugly—and you can tell them smell like shit—all these people, who are dragging this country to—and it is a country that has a lot of blood on its hands, but still, I live here, I’m from here, it’s a beautiful country, I don’t wanna see these people drag it down any further, but they are. And they’re gonna. And they’re gonna have the support of a lot of people while they do it. And the people who come in after them aren’t gonna fix it […]

“I hate these people. I hate the government that they make up. And I hate the world that they’re making.

“[…]

“It drives me crazy. How much more of this are people willing to put up with? How many more days or months or years are we willing the world’s future, this country’s future, your family’s future, be in the hands of these people […] who hate on a level that I could not even dream of.

“Donald Trump. JD Vance. All these people. They are pieces of shit. They are irredeemable. They are crazy. And they are ruining the fucking world and I am sick of it.”

America is the Bad Guy in This Movie by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“For nearly a century, mainstream American cinema has regurgitated, devoured, and re-regurgitated the same foaming popcorn mythology in which it is presented as basic common sense that America is always the good guy and that every foreigner with a funny accent who stands in his way is a totally otherized human bowling pin who exists for the sole purpose of being obliterated again and again and again in a voluptuous bacchanalia of endless machine gun barrages and bottomless stacks of bloodless corpses.”

“Since its inception as a republic largely defined by genocide and slavery, the United States has engaged in nearly 500 foreign military interventions with over half of them occurring after our victory in World War 2 and about 25% of them occurring after the demise of our only real rival on the world stage, the Soviet Union. In other words, the more America “wins”, the more violent it gets. The weaker America’s opponents become, the higher the body count reaches.”

“[…] this can hardly be surprising for anyone who’s history education didn’t end with Rocky IV. This whole fucking horror show is merely the natural result of Manifest Destiny; the cult of the omnipotent good guy that has long governed the zeitgeist of Western Civilization.

“Super creeps like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are merely the first cracks in the facade big enough to frighten the neighbors. Our fellow NATOcrats have ridden Robin on every Batman drive-by the US has orchestrated over the last century.”

UNREDACTED: The Final Episode! by Lee Camp (YouTube)

The Gaza Genocide is Changing America | Norman Finkelstein by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz (YouTube)

Norman Finkelstein is fascinating and on-point as always. He hits the same points he always hits and they’re all still relevant: The UN is dead. The UN gave Donald Trump the title to Gaza. Almost no country mentioned Trump or the U.S. when talking about Venezuela. Most heartily approved. The UN blames the Iran war on Iran; it doesn’t mention the U.S. or Israel. The European countries are the most shameful vassals. Nothing new to see, but also there is not need to mention anything else when these giant inconsistencies exist. There is not international rule of law. There never has been.

The other guy Félix Marquardt wanted to talk about the Kennedy assassination. It is fascinating how much time people want to spend on discussing whether Israel was involved in the Kennedy assassination when that country is and has been slaughtering dozens of thousands of civilians with impunity. The Kennedy assassination just doesn’t matter. It is a tiny detail. If they did or didn’t does not matter relative to the enormity of that country’s other crimes. It’s like people talking about whether Epstein files contain proof that Trump is a pedophile. It’s a horrific crime but it doesn’t matter relative to the enormity of the war crimes he is committing literally right now. Focus.

Trump backs down… by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Trump’s already done this ‘you can’t fire me because I quit’ thing several times now.”

He spent several minutes discussing the degree of destruction in the U.S. bases in the GCC because the American Enterprise Institute has published a report—which means that official sources are finally acknowledging what those of us who listen to independent, non-empire sources have known for a while now—and the U.S. media can finally admit that the U.S. has no bases left anywhere near Iran and that Iran is flying over U.S. bases with impunity—even with 1950s-era planes like F5s.

“Piker News Service: for tomorrow’s news today.”

“[…] in the initial days of the war, an Iranian F5 fighter jet bombed the US base in Camp Beering in Kuwait. An F5. I don’t know what’s more disrespectful. $7,000 lawnmowers with propellers flying over the Straight of Hormuz and hitting these Gulf bases and taking out billions of dollars worth of equipment. or a F5 fighter jet.”

Labor

Wall Street Journal announces the era of the “mega layoff” by Tom Hall (WSWS)

““Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once,” the paper notes. “That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.””

“That one of the chief motivators of mass layoffs is the instant increase in share values is a sign of the extreme shortsightedness and recklessness which dominates corporate strategy. But Wall Street’s response reflects a more basic decision made by finance capital: whole swathes of less productive capital must be eliminated, along with the workers employed by them.

“This is expressed in the growing series of mass layoffs. There were 1.2 million layoffs last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the highest toll since the first year of the COVID pandemic. This month alone, layoffs were announced at Snap (1,000 jobs), Disney (1,000), Morgan Stanley (2,500) and Citigroup (1,000). Thirty thousand layoffs each are under way at Amazon and Oracle.

“Nor is this confined to white-collar jobs. UPS is eliminating more jobs than any other employer in the country. Thousands of layoffs are taking place in auto, including GM’s shutdown of what had been presented as its new flagship EV plant. At the United States Postal Service, as the result of a manufactured financial crisis, management has stopped payments into the pension plan and is preparing vast cuts. Almost every major school district and transit authority in America is eyeing layoffs to close major deficits.

“This is not only an American phenomenon. Lufthansa is closing its subsidiary CityLine. As a result of the expanding war against Iran, Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left,” according to the International Energy Agency. The BBC is eliminating 10 percent of its workforce, some 2,000 jobs. Canada Post is planning to slash 30,000 jobs, more than half of its workforce, while ending door-to-door delivery.”

“The cost of their attempts to sustain these levels of debt and avoid economic collapse, while also financing the massive cost to society of the corporate oligarchy itself, can under capitalism only be carved out of the working class.”

“The corporate elite dreams of creating profit out of profit by removing human labor from the equation entirely, both through financial bubbles and through AI. But it cannot extricate itself from dependence on the working class, which is the source of all value.”

“The vast improvements in productivity made possible by AI and automation must be used to fund a sharp decrease in the length of the working day with no loss of pay, along with high-quality education, healthcare and other public programs, rather than financing out-of-control inequality.

“AI itself, harnessed to a workers’ government, could become a key planning and organizing tool, opening up new possibilities for the direct, democratic administration of society by the masses themselves.

“The ruling class is making revolutionary struggles inevitable. The central task is to arm them with a socialist program: the seizure of the productive forces from the financial oligarchy and their reorganization for human need, not private profit.”

This is where our views diverge: I don’t see a tremendous amount of potential in the “AI” that is on offer right now. Its usefulness is much more limited than the paragraphs above suggest. The tools generate so much bullshit data, it’s hard to know where to begin.

People don’t notice how terrible the summaries are, how wrong the numbers are, and, even when the errors are pointed out, they start defending the “AI” as if it were their best friend. I guess, in a way, that it is: it’s the thing that allows them to pretend to do their job with a lot less effort, and the repercussions of intellectual laziness lie somewhere in a vague future, where their mistakes have blended in with the myriad mistakes of others to leave us with wasted effort, wasted time, and missed opportunities—but no-one to blame.

We all did our best and it wasn’t good enough. I guess we have to learn how to prompt better. Shame on us.

steal from the poor you become rich, steal from the rich you go to prison by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Well, the rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich. If you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison.

“So, there’s only one direction where you can do unlimited theft and erode the social contract for the 99%. There’s an invisibility baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this sort of behavior.

“It’s a cliche at this point, but like wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.

“A similar invisibility exists in structural violence as opposed to individual acts of violence as well.

“If it’s a police officer engaging someone violently, the automatic assumption from the average person is, “Oh, that was probably a criminal. They probably deserved it.” But if there’s any circumstance where someone else is fighting back against police, like in a normal protest environment, for example, most people assume that that is chaotic, that there’s a chaotic situation and that it is born out of the escalations from the protesters themselves. Even if, as regular citizens, we’re infinitely closer to those exercising their First Amendment rights than those with the power stamping out people exercising their free speech rights.

“We never look at systemic forms of violence and we don’t look at systemic forms of theft in the same way that we do individuals breaking that social contract.”

There’s an excellent, longer follow-up here:

BIG DRAMA Over Shoplifting by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“I literally can’t even steal a candy bar. When we were in college, a lot of my friends used to love doing that, you know, getting drunk, going to the gas station, five-finger discount. I would never participate in it and I still can’t to this day participate in it. I’m just saying that I personally don’t really care. If someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.”

It’s blindingly obvious when Hasan is kidding and when he’s being serious. He includes a lot of clips of him providing serious answers, like this,

“In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Often times anarchists will say this is a propaganda of the deed. The action itself, no matter how violent or how disruptive it is, is justifiable because the disruption is the point. I believe in the power of organized labor and labor militancy and building these structures of power so that we can actually make more effective change, more long-standing change.

“So, concepts such as micro-looting indicate that there is an energy there, just like you said. And yet, many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language. They lack the political education. They lack the class-consciousness to recognize their position in society and lack the capacity unfortunately to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective.”

One of his OG community members “Miss Metafan” wrote in the chat,

“People are just being dumb. What they see is the tax-the-rich-shirt douchebag with just two women with valley accents. People viewed you as you’re being out of touch without actually listening to what’s being said.”

More quotes from the video,

“This discourse that’s going on right now is not actually about me at all. This discourse is 100% about signaling to other elites, signaling to other gatekeepers in mainstream media to stay the f@&k away. They’ve been trying to kick him off Twitch and YouTube for years. It hasn’t worked. So, they’re trying to make him toxic so that nobody in politics wants to go on a show so that it can’t serve as a launchpad for a rising crop of left populists, particularly critics of Israel.

“The Israel-Trump war on Iran has only served to make this feel urgent or existential for them. Their power base is in terminal decline when it comes to public opinion. It’s not surprising that everyone trading in this Hasan-dumping represents a zombie politics on its way out.”

“I wasn’t being like particularly radical in my commentary here at all. But what I find strange—I guess it’s not so strange, it’s very commonplace—is the handshake between right-wing reactionaries from Ben Shapiro to Fox News commentariat to all of the right flank of the liberal Democratic party, people in positions of power within the party structure doing the exact same analysis, right? Like, I hope people can see exactly what’s going on here. This is a rehashing of the exact same ridiculous outrage that was manufactured towards Bernie Sanders in 2016 and in 2020 as well. They’re doing it right now.”

”IF UNITED EUROPE IS DEAD, EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED” by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

Citing Raphael E. Alvarenga,

“Rather than choosing between social chaos and top-down crisis management, we should embrace bottom-up, democratic, grassroots internationalism in the form of migrant mutual aid networks, urban solidarity initiatives, and cross-border labor struggles. /…/ Anti-colonial struggles were not doomed because their vision was necessarily flawed or naïve; for the most part, they were crushed, contained, or co-opted because imperialist powers, acting in defense of the global capitalist order, could not tolerate successful experiments in economic sovereignty and redistribution. Whenever anticolonial movements had room to maneuver – as in early Tanzania (Ujamaa era), Burkina Faso under Sankara, Kerala’s left governments, or the Mozambican and Vietnamese experiments – they achieved tangible egalitarian gains. Where these projects were rolled back, the causes were overwhelmingly geopolitical rather than cultural.”

I don’t think people have a coherent idea of what immigration even is or how it’s being used to manipulate them.

There are people who bristle—to put it mildly—at being called racists when they say they’re against immigration who will also cheerfully invite actual immigrants over for family events, as long as those immigrants are white.

But also, my in-laws will say that they’re anti-immigration because they’ve been well-trained to be anti-immigration by their indoctrination system—thanks, all of U.S. mainstream media!—but also three out of six of the parents of their children’s spouses are/were [3] first-generation immigrants. One of them is even very much not white. They accepted them all with open arms and not a second of thought for their immigration status.

Immigration is not a coherent issue. It is paper-thin and yet so powerful. This is a country of people who cannot shut up about how proud they are to be Americans but also cannot shut up about their foreign ancestry. Like, they hate immigrants but they want to have been immigrants.

“I’m Irish on my mother’s side.”

Pretty much everyone in the country has eagerly done 23&me to find out what kind of extra-national roots they really have. I suppose that also means that they’re super-likely to fall for scams of all kinds, not just the “wedge issue” of immigration.

My mom was a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. from Switzerland who would breezily disparage “Europeans” as if she hadn’t spent her first and formative 30 years there. This is the power of framing and propaganda.

Economy & Finance

The Persian Gulf Between Markets And Reality by Indrajit Samarajiva (indica)

“This has been the reality in Asia for a while, but I mention Europe because White people don’t seem to believe in Asia as something connected to them. If you look at jet fuel prices across the world, you can see that prices are already up about 150% (from last year) in Asia and the Middle East and about 125% in Africa and Europe. Only North America is still living in last year (prices are actually 2.4% less) but oil is a liquid market and prices will slosh around until settling. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

“As some oil dude on Twitter says, “If Dated Brent remains at $120-130/bbl leading into the expiration of the front-month ICE Brent futures contract (currently around $100/bbl), the futures contract must converge toward the physical price. The convergence is not optional; it is mathematically enforced by the exchange’s settlement rules and market arbitrage.” The jaws of this oily delta can be prised open by market and media manipulation for the carnival barker to put his head in and shout, but at some point the delta will snap shut.”

“[…] his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning—

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“The promise of imperialism, even to its most impoverished denizens, were that you could get some share of the spoils. Even as public goods got worse, the ‘American’ poor could still get cheap consumer goods via colonies like Japan and Korea and communist economies like China.”

“The American Enterprise Institute graphed this, though they didn’t quite get it. You can see that capitalism made everything more expensive and worse (healthcare, education) while imperialism let them get the benefits of socialist production elsewhere (cheap clothing, cars, toys). This is the spoils delta that’s long been opening in the heart of White Empire but people didn’t feel it going rotten because their TVs got bigger every year.”

Price Changes − January 2000 to June 2022 − Selected US Consumer Goods and Services, Wages

“The rich got richer but the poor at least got stuff. But now that stuff is going to stop coming in so cheaply, because of both tariffs and also a giant oil shock. The delta between rich and poor is going to become obvious as distractions dry up.”

“Now the Standard & Poor stock market index (SPX) is nearing record highs while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (UMCSENT) has hit its greatest depression. Consumer sentiment is at the lowest level ever measured, in 70 years of this account. You can see the delta here.”

Wall Street vs. Main Street

“‘Americans’ act like the Strait of Hormuz only affects Asia or Europe or Africa but that’s your empire. That’s your factory, your clothes, your gadgets, your toys, and much of your food. That was the spoils of forever war and as ‘America’ loses this war, they’re actually losing something. A spoils delta is opening up within ‘America’, as the poor lose their treats.”

“As Gramsci said in the more full quote from above,”

“That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a “wave of materialism” is related to what is called the “crisis of authority”. If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant”, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Oil Markets Are About To Get Mugged By Reality by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Whoever said markets were good for processing information was obviously selling something. At least a quarter of the global economy has blown out and ‘the market’ is like this is fine. As Karl Marx said, in Capital,”

“In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.”

“All trading is insider trading in the US now. They may report on facts, boringly, but nobody acts accordingly. They just look at how other traders react, and pat each others’ backs. As long as no one spooks, everyone can cook the books, so the charade continues.”

“As Isabella Weber, who wrote the great book How China Escaped Shock Therapy, said to ‘American’ state media recently,”

“Isabella Weber, a professor of economics at UMass Amherst, worked on a paper that found that in 2022, after Russia launched its full- scale invasion of Ukraine, the global oil industry brought in some $916 billion in profits. The U.S. was the chief beneficiary, raking in $301 billion, some seven times the pre- COVID average annual profits for U.S.-headquartered oil and gas companies. Weber says this money, through shareholder payouts, disproportionately flowed to the very wealthy. “We find that 50% of the profits in the oil and gas industry went to the top 1% richest Americans, whereas only 1% of those profits went to the bottom 50%, she says.”

“Look under the tags of the clothes people in the Empire wear, or the gadgets that make their miserable lives disappear, none of it is made there. These treats are the only things that keep they distracted and meek, while everything they have to get locally (healthcare, education) has inflated beyond reach. Even if America has its own oil, it does not have its own economy. It is an Empire, and cannibalizing that empire has consequences.”

“Markets have ceased to be people betting against each other to better estimate reality and have become algorithms and index funds colluding to keep the looting going. As one example, from another Goldman Satanists report on AI, they call the whole thing bubble, but then say to stay invested in the bubble, because everyone else is doing it.”

“Jim Covello says “Over-building things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly,” but in the same breath also says, “That said, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past three decades is that bubbles can take a long time to burst. That’s why I recommend remaining invested in AI infrastructure providers.” Can you imagine? The tooth fairy isn’t real, but everyone believes in her, so pull out your teeth as well.”

Where there’s money to be made…

“When this hits North America is just a timing difference. Even if you have your own oil, oil will go where the money is, and prices will rise everywhere. North Americans just have more time to prepare, but in their typical fashion, waste it without a care.”

Amazon to merge with Globalstar, become iPhone’s primary satellite provider by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)

“Amazon recently filed a petition asking the FCC to deny SpaceX’s request to launch up to 1 million satellites, which led Carr to issue a blistering criticism of Amazon. “Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellites short of meeting its upcoming deployment milestone, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit,” Carr wrote at the time.”

Brendan Carr is a fucking idiot. That he has so much power over the allocation of shared global resources is proof that God hates humanity.

1M satellites. All owned by SpaceX. Jesus wept. We deserve whatever is coming to us.

Austerity creates fascism by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“I’m worried about the psychosis that makes our “capital allocators” spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That’s some next-level underpants-gnomery.”

“[…] what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.”

“Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe’s house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin’s house, the reality is that 95% of US workers have $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers’ pockets.”

“Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he “foamed the runways” with everyday Americans’ mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country’s worst slumlords.”

“Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants” who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to “deserving natives.””

“[…] the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.”

“Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called ‘organized loneliness’ – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.”

IMF spells it out: Workers must pay for the cost of war by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The global attack on the working class is not going to be a passing storm. The Fiscal Monitor report made clear it must be at the very heart of every government’s economic agenda.

“In the words of the blog post: “The nature of today’s fiscal challenges has shifted. Weaknesses are longer mainly cyclical or the result of temporary emergencies, but are structural: security spending [a euphemism for the vast increase in military outlays], climate and energy transition costs, and rising interest bills are placing persistent demands on budgets, whole revenues have not kept pace.”

“All the reports from the IMF this week have pointed to the inextricable connection between war and the state of the global economy, the increasing fragility of the global financial system and have been summed up in the Fiscal Monitor report declaring war against the working class at home.”

New IMF agreement requires Sri Lankan government to complete austerity program by Saman Gunadasa (WSWS)

“[…] the release of the fund, with the approval of the IMF Executive Board, will be contingent on “the restoration of cost-recovery electricity and fuel pricing” and the completion of the financing assurances review so as to confirm multilateral partners’ financing contributions and adequate debt restructuring progress.

“The restoration of the price recovery mechanism for electricity and fuel are code words for strictly implementing price increases in these two sectors so as to eliminate the debts of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. From February 2022 to April 1 this year, the country’s electricity tariff has increased by around 125 percent.

“Though Papageorgiou did not say so publicly, the IMF is demanding the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) proceed.”

“The IMF’s expression of sympathy for working people in Sri Lanka is utterly bogus. Its only concern is to ensure the repayment of defaulted foreign debts and to boost investors’ profits. When announcing the IMF bailout in 2023, former mission head Peter Breuer said the program was in fact a “brutal experiment” for Sri Lanka.”

S13 E08: Iran, The Pope & Prediction Markets: 4/19/26 by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (YouTube)

“Hey, quick question. What exact stage of capitalism are we in when the child CEO of an offshore gambling platform refers to betting odds on bombings as an undeniable value proposition?”

“CoinBase CEO Brian Armstrong: I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. And I just want to, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and web 3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.
John Oliver: Yeah, he saw people’s bets online and just rattled off words that they bet on him saying. And it really feels like manipulating betting outcomes should be more difficult than that. In the old days, you at least had to sneak cocaine to a racehorse, not just rattle off a list of the most punchable words in the English language.”

The CEO of PolyMarket is one of the more punchable people I’ve seen in a while. Someone should start a prediction for him being hit by a car, then make it come true.

Science & Nature

Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing. by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead. This isn’t true. All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths. Nobody calls it “power posing” anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on “embodiment” and “expansive posture”, like this one, this one, and this one. Ego depletion studies keep coming out. I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026.”

“Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it. You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, “Hmm, well is it really black? Is it actually a swan? Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!” And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days.”

“Falsifiability depends not only on the qualities of the theory itself, but also on the whims and biases of the people who engage with it. And because there are so many people with so many different whims and biases, few theories are ever going to be left with zero adherents.”

“Cringe doesn’t mean wrong! Continental drift was cringe. Germ theory was cringe. Smallpox vaccination was cringe. All of them went from mortifying to undeniable. Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory. If a scientific idea is young and it’s not cringe, it probably has no promise. But if it’s old and it’s still cringe, it probably has no merit.”

“Max Planck famously quipped that science advances one funeral at a time, but that’s not quite right, because nothing changes if everyone at the funeral vows to continue the legacy of the dead. It seems to me that science actually advances one young person’s decision at a time.”

Let’s talk space toilets! by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars For The Rest of Us)

“Everyone agrees that the sanitary conditions aboard Apollo were barbarous. Going to the Moon in the tiny capsule was like living in a three-man port-a-potty, made worse by the fact that doing the deed took the best part of an hour, with much of that time spent kneading antimicrobial powder through the contents of the collection bag.”

“The third task, sequestering waste and controlling odor, is tricky. Urine can be collected in a funnel, where it gets mixed with an antimicrobial agent before being sucked into a storage tank. The state of the art for fecal collection is single-use porous bags that allow airflow but retain solids and water. These are tied off after use and placed in a collection cylinder, along with any gloves and wipes that the astronaut used for cleanup.”

“Designing for quiescence takes this problem to the next level. We need to build a space station, leave it empty for two years, then demonstrate that the toilet is not filled with cosmic horrors, and that all the life support systems can function for the six months it takes the crew to get back to Earth.”

“NASA has set itself the design goal of keeping astronaut waste sequestered for fifty years, and is in the early stages of testing vents and filters that can equalize pressure without getting rapidly clogged by dust. But this goal seems a little wild to me. NASA has trouble building structures that can last 50 years on Earth, let alone getting a level-4 biohazard storage shed on Mars right on the first try.”

Why So Many Asian Languages Have Tones by Julesy (YouTube)

TIL about Tonogenesis (Wikipedia)

Medicine & Disease

Mexico Is Going All In for Universal Health Care by Kurt Hackbarth (ZNetwork)

“At her morning press conference on April 7, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the credencialización process, or enrollment, for Mexico’s new universal health care service was set to begin. The goal, she explained, was unambiguous: “By the time we leave office, any Mexican will be able to go to any public health institution and receive care for any condition.”

“To be phased in over the next four years, the reforms represent, in her words, “a historic step.””

“In 2026, all citizens will be given their credencial, or health ID card, which will also serve as an official means of identification. The card, which will gradually replace the health booklets currently in use, will be linked to an app containing each individual’s medical records, appointments, and available services. In 2027, portability will begin for an initial set of services: universal emergency care (currently patients are stabilized at the hospital of arrival before being transferred to a hospital in their system); high-risk pregnancies and other obstetric emergencies; heart attacks and strokes; breast cancer; universal vaccination; and basic consultations such as flu, diarrhea, and preventive care.

“Patients will not only receive care at any health center but will also have the option of remaining there for the duration of care, eliminating situations where forced transferals lead to truncated treatments. Then, in 2028, portability of care will be extended to chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension; cross-institution specialist consultations and hospitalizations; and the ability to fill prescriptions at any institution.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

A Tribute to Iran’s Soulful and Revolutionary Cinema by Eileen Jones (ZNetwork)

“In making the film, Makhmalbaf recreates his attempt to make amends twenty years later by finding the actual policeman he injured and involving him in the lengthy process of reenacting the long-ago stabbing and the circumstances surrounding it. Together they cast their youthful alter egos and codirect the film performances. In the process, they arrive at a sometimes devastating, sometimes tender series of epiphanies about their youthful selves, their motivations and misunderstandings, and the directions their lives have taken since.”

“Just these few descriptions of key Iranian New Wave films illustrate how rare, wise, and humane a cinema arose from the culture now threatened by war. Our hearts go out to the great Iranian filmmakers struggling to preserve and pursue their art, and we long for reports that Jafar Panahi is alive, well, and still free, somewhere in Iran.”

“Sweet Leilani” by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“The Greyhound went past signs that said “Correctional Facilities — Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers”, and then it went past the promised facilities, and then there was nothing for a while, and then some more signs and then another prison. I pressed my face to the glass and sang, I hoped inaudibly: “Nature fashioned roses kissed with dew” etc. At Jacksonville the lady who had sat next to me, and who wore an actual unironic beehive, held over, one might imagine, from her 1969 yearbook photo at the Pensacola College of Nursing, said: “You sing pretty.” The happiness of that moment is still with me, as if it only occurred a moment ago.”

“First among these achievements was the opening of the Panama Canal the year before, but the presence of a Hawaiian Pavilion also celebrated the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 and the establishment of a US territory there two years later, and the many delights of cultural syncretism that had flowed, and had yet to flow, from this new alignment.

“Inside the Pavilion you could hear Joseph Kekuku, on steel lap guitar. Born Joseph Kekuku’upenakana’iaupuniokamehameha Apuakehau in 1874, his performances seem to have played a significant and greatly underacknowledged role in shaping the general sound of American popular music for most of the rest of the 20th century.”

“This wide purview enabled him to participate, as a country artist, in what we might call the “musical Monroe Doctrine”, where mid-century American artists (often low-key Canadian), celebrated the fruit-hats and the rum and the relatively more sensual women to which their de-facto hemispheric sovereignty gave them easy access.”

“Today, the Reagan revolution against the spirit of the civil rights era survives on both the right and the left. On the left it takes the form of a taboo on “appropriation”. However the enforcers of this taboo may understand it, willy-nilly it is a demand for ignorance, segregation, and crude essentialism. It is, no doubt, often motivated by a sincere, yet hopelessly naive, reading of such mid-century cultural artifacts as Waikiki Wedding, which seem to demand of us that we replace any memory of the settler-colonial history of a place like Hawaii and reimagine it, along rigidly ideological lines, as an ahistorical paradise, as a place of endless leisure for active seniors.”

“There was a time when Bing offended traditional sensibilities for being too sensual and raw, though for as long as more or less anyone’s living memory extends today, he has offended in the opposite way: for being too old, too corny, and far too invested in the work of projecting American imperial soft-power propaganda. I take it that all of this is entirely irrelevant to any serious critical engagement with Bing the artist.”

Drunk, Interrupted by Peter Welch (Still Drinking)

“Socialization in general was a valid practical reason, especially for the wilting penitent I felt my peers had branded me. Loosening the tongue cures a measure of stutter and drinking rituals more egalitarian than any church service. How else was I going to make friends? Especially the kind of friends I want, who need something to do when they don’t like doing many things. Drinking around a bar or table is actively doing nothing with a glass of plausible deniability.”

“Once I have a drink, I’m finished. Can’t drive, won’t work, won’t be able to metaphorically focus on reading until long after I can’t physically focus on words well enough to read. The day has come to a close, a demarcation between Doing Life Well Enough and Watching Law and Order Reruns.”

Norm. by Aron Fromm (YouTube)

“Kinison told me there’s two ways to write a joke. One, […] you take a little thing like cornflakes and you make it big and treat it with the utmost importance.

“Oh, no, this is much bigger than that. This is life, I tell you.

“But the other way to do it—the better way—is you take a very, very important thing and do the opposite.

“Either way, it juxtaposes the absurd with the profound. And that dissonance…is art.”

The other day, after work on a Saturday (thesis presentations for two of my students), I rode my bike 28km and 700m of climbing over the Hulftegg and up to the Iddaburg for an espresso and a Schlorzifladen. Iddaburg is great. There’s a beautiful old church at the end of a dead-end road, with a lovely, old restaurant right next to it. There’s seating in a lovely garden. You can see a lot of northern Switzerland from there. On a good day, you can catch a glimpse of the Bodensee and parts of Germany.

I wrote to a friend to tell him how lovely it was, not to brag but because I know he’d appreciate it. He asked me to describe it. I wrote,

So Swiss. And rural. The church is ringing away right now and this guy just pulled up on a big old Harley actually it’s a Yamaha but he looks like he would ride a Harley. And when the guy came to take his order, he couldn’t hear him so the waiter goes should I turn off the church bells and then they both laughed and I thought to myself this is such a wonderfully bucolic place that I call home. I don’t know that I could ever live in the city again. I think it would literally kill me. Perhaps that’s being melodramatic, so let’s instead say that I fear that I might lose a part of me that has become quite important to me. The body would live on, but my soul would wither.

when the devil owns the rights to your movie by CinemaStix (YouTube)

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

I personally find it pathetic that so much public discourse is still strongly influenced if not actively driven by the presence or absence of exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics.

Somebody just posted “Love ❤️ you all” into a group chat, like, completely out of the blue, and I found myself wondering whether something had happened or what was going on but then I thought wait a minute why do I find it so odd for someone to be arbitrarily and without prodding expressing love in a group chat? Why do I search for any more justification than an affirmative one, of just calling and perhaps hoping for a response?

Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit by JA Westenberg

“In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia − the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest military fuckups of all time.

“He had no coherent supply plan for feeding them, he had no realistic timeline for when, exactly, the Russians would agree to fight a decisive battle on his terms, and he couldn’t even articulate a coherent goal for his gamble, beyond ~beat the Russians in some vague way.

“He had been warned by multiple advisors, including his own foreign minister Talleyrand, that invading Russia was a catastrophic idea − and he did it anyway.

“By December, roughly 400,000 of his soldiers were dead, mostly from starvation and exposure and the consequences of field surgery, and another 100,000 had been captured. The Grande Armée, the most feared fighting force on the continent, clawed its way back across the Niemen River as a frozen, shattered remnant of itself. It was the beginning of the end for Napoleon, who would never again be able to field an army of the size // quality he squandered on his pointless excursion into Russia.”

“This is how cults of personality sustain themselves − through interpretation, and through a community of believers who will do the intellectual labor of making sense of the nonsensical, who treat confusion as evidence of their own limited understanding rather than evidence that the thing they’re looking at is, in fact, confused.”

“The more successful they become, the more they start to believe that their success came from skill rather than from some volatile, unrepeatable cocktail of skill, timing, luck, and other people’s labor.”

Born on third; thinks he hit a triple.

What is Left of “Believe Women”? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“There is simply no objective way to suggest that the allegations against Allen are remotely as convincing as those against Tyson. And yet the latter gets to serve as a cuddly symbol of 1980s athletic excellence and 21st-century comedy, while the former lost his Amazon deal, saw his films removed from several streaming services, was denounced by dozens or hundreds of eminent Hollywood figures, and in general was made persona non grata in polite society. The contrast, to me, does not compute in basic moral or procedural terms.”

“[…] less than a decade after the explosion of interest in MeToo, one of its champions is in the pages of our most celebrated magazine, very much not believing a woman. Based on what principles? According to which playbook? When did things change so much in this arena, and who got that memo?”

“This is what bothers me so much about this and the other crumbling vestiges of the social justice movement’s period of institutional dominance in American life: not so much that the rules are bad rules, or that they are the wrong rules, or that they apply to the wrong people, but that there appear to be no rules at all.”

The rule is that the one with all the gold makes the rules.

“Annie Altman has made allegations that are, by any measure, at least as serious as those leveled against figures whose names became synonymous with MeToo’s cultural moment. She has repeated them consistently, pursued them through legal channels, and given interviews to prominent journalists. Her claims seem dubious, but so have other allegations that have been rabidly supported by the usual suspects. Yet, now, the response from the progressive media ecosystem that once treated every such allegation as an occasion for collective reckoning has essentially been silence, or worse, a paragraph of dismissal tucked inside a piece whose real concern is Altman’s management style and his rivalry with the board of OpenAI. What changed? The cynical answer, the one that is uncomfortable precisely because it’s so difficult to refute, is that Altman is powerful and useful to people who also happen to be powerful, and that MeToo’s enforcement mechanism was always less about principle than about which targets were convenient. Harvey Weinstein was powerful too, but he had spent decades accumulating enemies in an industry that had quietly suffered his behavior,”

“The Altman situation, it might surprise you to hear, is not of particular interest to me. What is of interest to me, again, is the collapse of rule. What this all reveals is something more corrosive than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy at least implies a standard that someone is failing to live up to, a gap between the stated rule and the practiced one. What we’re dealing with here looks more like the complete absence of a rule, replaced by a set of aesthetic and tribal signals that masquerade as moral commitments. “Believe women” was never, in its most honest formulation, a legal standard or an epistemological claim; it was a corrective impulse, born from the entirely legitimate observation that women who reported sexual violence were routinely disbelieved, shamed, and institutionally failed.”

“[…] when you spend all your time lecturing the world about how it fails to live up to your exacting moral demands, the world will eventually realize that there is no there there, that the ethical stitching beneath your sanctimony is frayed and full of holes.”

“These are not the outcomes of a movement with principles. They are the outcomes of a movement that had a moment, and then, like so many movements before it, found that its energy was more reliably sustained by solidarity with the powerful than by fidelity to the vulnerable.”

“[…] the women who most needed MeToo to mean something durable − the ones whose alleged abusers are celebrated, connected, and very rich − are precisely the women for whom it has come to do the least.”

Why wank wins by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

📝 “Wank” here is defined as bad-faith argumentation i.e., deliberately misinterpreting words, not reading counterarguments, cherry-picking terms, and disregarding context.

“[…] we can now observe that despite how much of a problem using the Bayesian interpretation for everything is, a striking number of people in our society function entirely in the Bayesian mode.”

Understanding reality is not only unnecessary for survival but often detrimental to success.

“[…] the people who demand that communication says something valid in the Grammatical interpretation are few and far between and can mostly be ignored. This isn’t always bad: after all, as well as bullshit, small talk and phatic conversation of the type that we use for social bonding fall into this category as well, and if you insist on everything that’s said having a grammatically-encoded communicative payload, you will not be much fun at parties. That said, I’m not sure that this is the way to run countries or build nuclear reactors, so I think there’s some value to perhaps stopping this from happening so much.”

“[…] and agree for the sake of getting along. If you don’t, I can go tell the rest of the group that you think uranium’s actually fine, relying on the fact that much of the group will adopt the Bayesian interpretation and those who don’t will shut up to stay a part of the group, and they’ll most likely line up behind me, either expelling you from the group or marginalising you within it. I manage to boost my status, get the language I want into the platform, and I get to protect my feelings and not admit that I was wrong about the uranium: in fact, everyone will agree that I’m right about it being a radiological hazard in order to avoid any more messes.”

“[…] the claim about the properties of depleted uranium is expected to be treated as materially true because it has the right vibes, but if challenged it’s treated as though the challenger doesn’t share your deeply held values and in fact believes them to be wrong. This line of attack is usually used in groups where people are generally expected to have similar values and similar sentiments about words and the things in the world that they refer to, and in this cases wank can actually be a very effective form of coercion.”

“The threat of social exclusion and ostracism that comes with that makes it even worse: if you know that other people will believe those things about you if you don’t assent to the Bayesian reading of the claim, that’s an extremely strong incentive to go along with it however false it might be in the Grammatical reading.”

“[…] an environment where some people are only capable of seeing the Bayesian interpretation of a text and an even wider group of people are being coerced or deceived into admitting that interpretation even when a Grammatical one is available and makes more sense, having certain forms of knowledge becomes suspect (and thus inadmissible) in itself.”

“Even if you’re on-side in the general sense and the Grammatical interpretation of what you’ve written contains sensible and useful information, the language used and the sign that you know something has the wrong vibes and invalidates the statement in a Bayesian sense. The end consequence is that in a space where wank has taken root, only people who know nothing about certain subjects are held to be qualified to talk about them.”

“[…] the people setting policy almost definitionally wind up being the ones that know basically nothing about the tools: they’re easily persuaded by performance that even a more informed enthusiast will dismiss, and when trying to encourage use of the tools they’ll do things like set token quotas for workers that simply make no sense to speak of. In short, they make bad policy that gets them in trouble.”

“On a social level, interventions pushing improved literacy could do a lot to help. This is probably something that we should be doing anyway given the somewhat parlous state of literacy in the world at the moment and how important it is for general human function, but it would also help reduce the amount of wank we have to field. Literacy-favouring interventions are relatively cheap, we know how to do them effectively and they’re implementable without a great deal of state or corporate support: in short, we should be investing in them in volume. In professional settings, formal training in reading and writing would be well-worth investing in and would help reduce overall levels of wank a lot, leading to better decisions.”

“[…] wank is, when it’s safe, an important thing to be able to do. Wank relies on not being noticed as such to be effective: if you can actively point out “hey, this person is blatantly misreading this text and is trying to push you to do the same because the misreading’s better for them”, that is beneficial to us.”

Good luck with that. I think that ship has sailed. There are a lot of people doing this online. God’s work.

The Importance of Being Idle by Robert Zaretsky (The American Scholar)

“Lafargue exclaims, “the blind passion and perverse murderousness of work have transformed the machine from an instrument of emancipation into an instrument that enslaves free beings.” The reason workers spend so many hours shackled to their machines, he contended, was not from economic necessity. Instead, it was imposed upon them by their superiors, the captains of industry and finance, who were wedded to “the dogma of work and diabolically drilled the vice of work into the heads of workers.”

“Of course, Lafargue never called for the eradication of work. The necessities of life, after all, would always require the labor of women and men to produce and provide. But he did press for the rationalization of work. Given the efficiency of machines, fewer hours were needed to provide the necessities of life. Maintaining the same excessive number of work hours inevitably flooded the market with superfluities and the era’s repeated economic crises stretching from 1873 to the end of the century.”

“Although Lafargue does not flesh out his notion of a future filled with idleness, my guess is that he meant it would be devoted not to the pleasure of doing a particular hobby or specific activity, painting a landscape or swinging a gold club. Instead, it would be a life given out, quite simply, to the pleasure of faisant rien or doing nothing. As the Czech playwright Karel Capek wrote in an essay called “In Praise of Idleness,” this state is defined as “the absence of everything by which a person is occupied, diverted, distracted, interested, employed, annoyed, pleased, attracted, involved, entertained, bored, enchanted, fatigued, absorbed, or confused.” In a word, idling is the sentiment of being.”

LLMs & AI

On using AI to pass university courses: If it doesn’t matter if you know anything, or if you learned anything, or if you know how to do whatever job you’re going to get with that degree, then that job doesn’t matter.

The work you’re going to do with no knowledge doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you fuck it up because no-one cares whether you’re doing it.

You’re not providing any value with a job into which you put no effort and for which you don’t have to know anything.

You’re a button-pusher.

You’re digging a ditch on the day shift so another zombie can fill it in at night.

Use ChatGPT or we'll hit you

“White collar jobs in 2016: Free cold brew on tap! Conference rooms? Too old school! We’re yoga ball people. We have catered lunch on Wednesdays. If your benefits don’t cover something you need, tell us!

“White collar jobs in 2026: Use Chat GPT or we’ll hit you”

The Agent Stack Bet by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“Peek under the hood of most “production agents” shipping today and you won’t find intelligence. You’ll find custom plumbing, fragile session logic, shared service accounts, and a security model held together by hope. This can be so much better.

“If you’ve spent the last 18 months putting agents into production, you already know the models and tools have gotten dramatically better. You also know the problems that are still burning your on-call rotation are not problems you can prompt your way out of. We are running into a stack ceiling, and it is quietly creating a governance and reliability gap that the next generation of agentic systems cannot grow through.

“Right now the industry is living with what I’d call excessive agency: autonomous systems given broad permissions to get things done, then left to discover − at runtime, in production − that a schema drifted, an API changed, or a downstream service started returning PII it wasn’t supposed to. Agents mark tasks “complete” while leaving a trail of corrupted state behind them. The humans find out on Monday.

“This is not a failure of the people building agents. It is a failure of the stack they’re building on.”

“Every engineer who has shipped agents to production knows this specific flavor of dread: you have agents doing useful work, and effectively zero visibility into which tools they touched, which data they moved, or which credentials they used to do it. I call this governance debt − the silent accumulation of security and audit risk that eventually forces a full rewrite […]”

A possible solution?

“The agent has a distinct, unforgeable identity recognized at the network and platform level, and policy is enforced at the source. If the agent reaches for a database it isn’t cleared for, the connection never opens. No middleware, no vibes.”

How in God’s name did they build these systems without this in place already?

“Teams are burning a huge share of their engineering hours (and tokens) on undifferentiated plumbing − custom serialization, bespoke session stores, hand-rolled memory layers − just to keep an agent from forgetting its mission halfway through a multi-step task.”

“The real value lives in domain reasoning and business logic − the judgment calls that are specific to your company, your customers, your regulatory environment. Everything underneath should be the platform you build on, not the plumbing you build.”

Oh, God, this. This is the exact thing I’ve been telling people: These tools are not ready for the most of us. Anyone using these tools right now aren’t gaining an advantage over those not using them—they’re helping billion-dollar companies build their software, and they’re doing it without any return. It’s not open-source, but they’re volunteering their labor building systems that these tool providers should be building. Remember what your business is. Your business is not building LLM-agent harnesses.

“Teams should be able to prototype on their laptop with the same building blocks they’ll run in production, and cross that boundary without a rewrite.

“That’s the engineering standard that lets teams stop fighting plumbing and get back to the product.”

“The teams that pull ahead in the next five years will not pull ahead by being smarter at writing boilerplate. They’ll pull ahead by choosing the right agent foundation and spending their engineering hours on the problems only they can solve.

“Every month spent rebuilding the common stack − identity, context, persistence, orchestration − is a month not spent on the logic that actually makes your agents worth deploying.

“The agent stack has to become a solved problem. The only real question is whether you want to solve it yourself, again, or build on a foundation that was engineered for agents from the ground up.”

Exclusive: Microsoft To Shift GitHub Copilot Users To Token-Based Billing, Tighten Rate Limits by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“The document says that although token-based billing has been a top priority for Microsoft, it became more urgent in recent months, with the week-over-week cost of running GitHub Copilot nearly doubling since January.

“The move to token-based billing will see GitHub users charged based on their usage of the platform, and how many tokens their prompts consume — and thus, how much compute they use. It’s unclear at this time when this will begin.

“This is a significant move, reflecting the significant cost of running models on any AI product. Much like Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and every other AI company, Microsoft has been subsidizing the cost of compute, allowing users to burn way, way more in tokens than their subscriptions cost.

“The party appears to be ending for subsidized AI products, with Microsoft’s upcoming move following Anthropic’s […] recent changes shifting enterprise users to token-based billing as a means of reducing its costs.”

“According to the documents, Microsoft also intends to tighten rate limits on some Copilot Business and Enterprise plans […]”

“As part of this cost-cutting exercise, Microsoft intends to remove Anthropic’s Opus family of AI models from the $10-per-month GitHub Copilot Pro package altogether.

“Microsoft most recently retired Opus 4.6 Fast at the start of April for GitHub Copilot Pro+ users, although this decision was framed as a way to “further improve service reliability” and “[streamline] our model offerings and focusing resources on the models our users use the most.”

“Other Opus models — namely Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.5 — will be removed from the GitHub Copilot Pro+ tier in the coming weeks, as Microsoft transitions to Anthropic’s latest Opus 4.7 model.

“The move towards Opus 4.7 will likely see GitHub Copilot Pro+ users reach their usage limits faster.”

“The standard version of Claude Opus 4.6 has a premium request multiplier of three — meaning that, even with the promotional pricing, Claude Opus 4.7 is around 250% more expensive to use.

“The announcements for all of these changes are scheduled to take place throughout the week.”

So that means that Claude Opus 4.6 will become unavailable and the only equivalent will be 2.5x more expensive.

It is unclear to what degree Enterprise users are immediately affected, though the GitHub settings for my corporate account now include a “Preview” section called Models, which writes,

Models paid usage is disabled

“If enabled, usage beyond the free tier will be billed per token based on model pricing from our Models budget.

“You currently have free rate limits. Enable paid usage to avoid interruption and add tokens.”

Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans by Simon Willison

“It’s easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM users were burning an order of magnitude less tokens. Coding agents consume a lot of compute.”

This is a classic scam:

1. Demonstrate a modicum of utility in one or two areas.
2. Get people excited about your product for all areas.
3. Make the product magical: no-one knows how it works.
4. Make it the customer’s fault when the product doesn’t work.
5. Make the compensation model inscrutable: how do tokens relate to output? No-one knows. You can “burn” tokens with no useful result, so you can’t predict your budget.
6. Set up a monopsony so no-one spoils it.

At this point, people are just expected to throw their money at these companies with no clear correlation to the expected gains. You have no control.

LLMs Corrupt Your Documents (and the Theory Dies Twice) by Christian Ekrem

“The researchers built something called the DELEGATE-52 benchmark. Fifty-two documents across different domains, handed to nineteen different models (including “frontier” ones like Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude 4.6 Opus, and GPT-5.4). Each model gets a document and a series of editing instructions. Twenty interactions. Just twenty. […] About 25% of the document content was degraded.”

“[…] short-term performance doesn’t predict long-term reliability. Two models that looked nearly identical after two interactions (91.5% vs 91.1%) diverged wildly over time (48.3% vs 64.1%). So “it works on my machine” is even less reassuring than usual. The demo always looks fine. It’s the twentieth, fiftieth, hundredth interaction where things fall apart – and by then, who’s still checking?”

“Out of all the domains they tested, only Python code showed what they called “majority readiness.” Seventeen out of nineteen models hit 98% or above. Python! The most structured and mechanically verifiable domain in the whole set.

“Everything else? Documents, prose, data, less structured formats? Corrupted.”

“Boilerplate generation, data formatting, repetitive scaffolding, test setup. The stuff with clear structure and tight constraints. The moment you need judgment, taste, or domain knowledge, you’re on your own. (Or worse: you think you’re not on your own, because the output looks right.)”

“When you delegate document maintenance to an LLM, the theory dies twice. First: you didn’t build the understanding, because you delegated instead of engaging with the material. Second: the LLM silently corrupted the artifact itself. So now you have neither the mental model nor an accurate written representation of it.

“You’ve lost both the map and the territory as it were.”

“The researchers also tested whether giving models tool use capabilities (web search, code execution, that sort of thing) would help. The “agentic” setup that everyone is so excited about.

“But lo and behold: It made things worse. Six percent additional degradation.

““Better tooling” made it worse!

“The models with the most capabilities introduced more errors, not fewer. They had more ways to confidently do the wrong thing.”

No-one notices, though, which confirms my theory that most of what people do is worth literally nothing. No-one’s reading it. No-one’s decisions based on it mean anything. Most people are just spinning their wheels for a paycheck. The massive use of AI in white-collar jobs has revealed the lie that these jobs produce any value at all.

“They also found that distractor context – irrelevant documents sitting in the context window alongside the one you’re working on – made things worse too. And the effect compounded over time. So the more realistic the setup (long conversations, multiple files, the way people actually use these tools in practice), the worse the results.”

GPT-5.5 prompting guide by Simon Willison

“Also relevant is the Using GPT-5.5 guide, which opens with this warning:”

“To get the most out of GPT-5.5, treat it as a new model family to tune for, not a drop-in replacement for gpt-5.2 or gpt-5.4. Begin migration with a fresh baseline instead of carrying over every instruction from an older prompt stack. Start with the smallest prompt that preserves the product contract, then tune reasoning effort, verbosity, tool descriptions, and output format against representative examples.”

“Interesting to see OpenAI recommend starting from scratch rather than trusting that existing prompts optimized for previous models will continue to work effectively with GPT-5.5.”

😳 😂 Classic cult!

Start over! Throw away everything you’ve learned up until now!

This is incredible. You are paying these companies ever-increasing amounts of money to alpha-test their products, all the while devoting a large amount of effort in fine-tuning the harness you have to build around the product in order to use it in anything approaching a reliable way, all the while taking 100% of the blame when it doesn’t work as advertised.

With this new release, they have the utter gall to tell you: You know that massive investment you’ve made in your system prompts and your skill files and all of that other bullshit you needed for the lower levels? You don’t need it anymore! You need to develop entirely new skills now that you’re an Operating Thetan (Wikipedia).

The AI Question that No AI Person Asks by vlogbrothers (YouTube)

“How will AI help solve the housing crisis? Because to me, the lack of housing that people want where people want it is like one of the big problems that underlies many many other problems in America. And I know that it is worse where I live than other places but it is a very big problem and it underlies a lot of other problems. And on that benchmark, I think AI does very poorly. And it’s strange to me that we don’t even look at this or think about it, but like obviously ask this question. If it’s such a big deal, how does it solve the biggest problems? Maybe it would help like a tiny bit of the margins. Maybe you could do permitting more quickly, maybe cheaper code review or design, but like that’s not what’s blocking housing in America.”

“Those are not the thing that would solve the problem because we have solutions now and doing any of those things or implementing any of those things would still require institutions that want the outcomes and can execute on them. Again it’s the same problem. The people who need the help who need the resource don’t have power over the resources. People who need housing don’t have any sway inside of a community. They don’t live there. They don’t have housing.”

“We live in an intelligence-constrained world. And so, if you have more of it, like a bunch of stuff’s going to get created that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

“But intelligence is separate from what I’m just going to go ahead and call wisdom. And I don’t think that we have a way to mass-produce wisdom. So perhaps we have been moving throughout my lifetime from a world that was intelligence-constrained to one that is wisdom-constrained. Perhaps that transition started a while back, but we are in the midst of it still.

“So for more examples, intelligence would help you get what you want, whereas wisdom would help you want what you should want or the right things. It’s the ability to figure out which problems are worth solving and then to solve them in ways that don’t create worse problems in the process, which is not easy.

“Even the wise fail on that sometimes. But while designing a more effective slot machine is an application of intelligence, I don’t think that you would call it an application of wisdom. And wisdom also has to survive contact with reality and also the other people who make up reality.

“I don’t see any reason to think that making intelligence extremely efficient would change the power dynamics that create an unjust world. It might help. It might hurt. It might do both at the same time or in different situations or at different scales. It is impossible to know, though I certainly see a concentration of power being somewhat inevitable here. But maybe not. I don’t know.

“Oh, a frame that has been resonating with me is that AI is to some extent a technology. It is a tool that already makes like a fairly broad array of tasks easier, probably make more tasks easier in the future. I think that it’s a genuinely a big technological shift. That is sort of how I’m imagining it. There’s a lot of, you know, leaping seven steps down the path that I don’t think is valuable because nobody can predict any of these things. But, as of right now, it is a big technological shift and so has been the internet and so has been personal computing. These things did not solve the housing crisis.

“It’s wild to say this, but it is obviously true that it will be easier for AI to create a cancer drug than it will be to get that cancer drug to all the people who need it. And I think that it is important to recognize that those problems are both problems. The cancer doesn’t care if the drug exists. that is not going to be affected by the existence of a drug that is not being given to a patient.

“So, the question isn’t whether AI is powerful. I think that it clearly is. It’s just that no one can know what its impact will be. Will it allow wisdom to flourish or will it allow the powerful to route around wisdom as they tend to do when given the opportunity?”

Aw man, we both know the answer to that one. Power concedes nothing with a demand; it never has and it never will.

Programming

The peril of laziness lost by Bryan Cantrill

“Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:”

“If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.”

“Laziness drives us to make the system as simple as possible (but no simpler!) — to develop the powerful abstractions that then allow us to do much more, much more easily.”

“[…] when programmers are engaged in the seeming laziness of hammock-driven development, we are in fact turning the problem over and over in our heads. We undertake the hard intellectual work of developing these abstractions in part because we are optimizing the hypothetical time of our future selves, even if at the expense of our current one. When we get this calculus right, it is glorious, as the abstraction serves not just ourselves, but all who come after us.”

“[…] a consequence of the broadening of software creation over the past two decades is it includes more and more people who are unlikely to call themselves programmers — and for whom the virtue of laziness would lose its intended meaning.”

“[…] should be of little surprise that LLMs have served as anabolic steroids for the brogrammer set.

“Elated with their new-found bulk, they can’t seem to shut up about it.”

“[…] like assessing literature by the pound, its fallacy is clear even to novice programmers.”

“LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.”

Brocards for vulnerability triage by william woodruff

“[…] because the programmer is responsible for maintaining the invariant, there is a potentially legitimate vulnerability when usage of the API violates the invariant. By analogy: free(3) is not considered vulnerable to a double free, but a program that calls free(3) on an already freed pointer is considered vulnerable to a double free.”

“[…] a vulnerability report can be safely dismissed if the behavior described is a direct consequence of the software’s correct adherence to a standard or specification. In these instances the vulnerability (if one exists) is present within the standard itself, and not the implementation.”

I Can’t Look by Mr Fish (Scheer Post)

“Allen also talked about how he preferred the gutsy temerity of the female characters written about in the Bible over the credulous obedience exhibited by their male counterparts. He claimed that anybody too demure or subservient to defy the sanctimonious bullying of a “vain and sadistic Holy Spirit” deserved zero respect and infinite ridicule for the sin of not listening to the existential distress, animalistic passion, irrepressible curiosity, and glorious self-determination of their own heart.”

“[…] a convincing argument could be made that the overwhelming majority of so-called truth-telling artists working as cartoonists, satirists, muralists, and social realists are merely men and women willing to reveal what is already evident to everybody—to, quite literally, expose a pre-existing truism made invisible by those motivated by fear or dread or confusion to simply turn away, claiming that they just can’t look!”

Homer Simpson: He’s saying what we’re all thinking!

“What defect in our supposed higher intelligence insists that we continuously wait for proof before we acknowledge our acquiescence to bad behavior and the wanton destruction of people, places, and things?”

Highlights from Git 2.54 by Taylor Blau (GitHub Blog)

“Git 2.54 introduces a new experimental command that is designed for exactly these simpler cases: git history. The history command currently supports two operations: reword and split.

“git history reword <commit> opens your editor with the specified commit’s message and rewrites it in place, updating any branches that descend from that commit. Unlike git rebase, it doesn’t touch your working tree or index, and it can even operate in a bare repository.

“git history split <commit> lets you interactively split a commit into two by selecting which hunks should be carved out into a new parent commit.”

“Git 2.54 introduces a new way to define hooks: in your configuration files. Instead of placing a script at .git/hooks/pre-commit, you can now write:”

[hook "linter"]
   event = pre-commit
   command = ~/bin/linter –cpp20

“The hook.<name>.command key specifies the command to run, and hook.<name>.event specifies which hook event should trigger it. Since this is just configuration, it can live in your per-user ~/.gitconfig, a system-wide /etc/gitconfig, or in a repository’s local config. That makes it straightforward to define a set of hooks centrally and have them apply everywhere.

“Even better, you can now run multiple hooks for the same event. If you want both a linter and a secrets scanner to run before every commit, you can configure them independently:”

[hook "linter"]
   event = pre-commit
   command = ~/bin/linter –cpp20

[hook "no-leaks"]
   event = pre-commit
   command = ~/bin/leak-detector

“Git’s internal handling of hooks has been modernized. Many built-in hooks that were previously invoked through ad-hoc code paths (like pre-push, post-rewrite, and the various receive-pack hooks) have been migrated to use the new hook API, meaning they all benefit from the new configuration-based hook machinery.”

Removing byte[] allocations in .NET Framework using ReadOnlySpan<T> by Andrew Lock (.NET Escapades)

“When the compiler sees the pattern above, it does the following:”

1. Embed the byte[] data into the final assembly’s metadata
2. When ReadOnlySpanProp is invoked, instead of creating a byte[], create a ReadOnlySpan<byte> that points directly to the data in the assembly

“So the returned ReadOnlySpan<byte> isn’t pointing to data that exists on the heap or even on the stack; it’s pointing to data that’s embedded directly in the assembly. That means there’s no allocation at all, which removes that startup overhead and means there’s no pressure at all on the garbage collector 🎉

“It’s worth noting as well that this is a compiler feature, which means that as long as a System.ReadOnlySpan<T> type is available, you can use it. So as long as you add the System.Memory NuGet package to your .NET Framework app, you too can benefit from this zero-allocation technique!”

“The compiler optimizations shown so far can only be applied to byte-sized primitives, i.e. byte, sbyte, and bool. That’s because the constant data would be stored in a little endian format, and needs to be translated to the runtime endian format, e.g. if the application is run on hardware which utilizes big endian numbers.”

This applies to UTF-8–encoded strings, so that’s good.

“The failure path here is understandable, because there’s really no way to do a safe zero-allocation approach when the data needs to be mutable. The big problem is that it’s not obvious that it’s a super-allocatey property instead of a zero-allocation version. If you accidentally fat-finger and write Span<T> instead of ReadOnlySpan<T>, or, you know, Claude does, then it’s really not obvious from simply reviewing the code…

“The only good news is that if you use modern features, namely collection expressions, you might catch the issue!”

Toolchain Horizons: Exploring Rust Dependency-Toolchain Compatibility by Brian Anderson (TigerBeetle)

“The Rust compiler is stable. The Rust crate ecosystem is not. Crate authors have strong incentives to adopt new features and break from the past. Based on this experiment, I estimate a roughly 2-year window in which any particular Rust compiler remains viable for a project that takes dependencies. After that, we’re all forced to upgrade — not by language changes, but by our crate neighbors.

“We can widen that window slowly, but it requires individual crate authors to expand their toolchain horizons.”

Design

Gestalt Principles by Nikita Prokopov

An utter lack of gestalt

“There are many ways to illustrate that things belong together or are related to each other. They are commonly known as “gestalt principles” (top)

“What happens when you ignore them all? You get a UI that is absolutely undecipherable (bottom). Just one hot mess of everything with no indication what applies to what.”

Today I learned about gestalt theory, mostly from Principles of grouping (Wikipedia).

• Proximity
• Similarity
• Enclosure
• Closure
• Good continuation
• Common fate
• Good form

Fun

Horse Tornado for Children

“My favourite translator said that when she was an ambassador for Hungary she took all these Japanese politicians on a tour and she was trying to circumtranslate merry go round’ cause she didn’t know the Japanese word for it by calling it a ‘horse tornado for children’ and they had no blessed idea what she was saying and she finally started running in circles going up and down and they go ‘ohhhhh, in Japan we call those merry-go-rounds””

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Environment & Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Design

Public Policy & Politics

USA setzen Schweiz unter Druck – Patriot-Streit offenbart strukturelle Abhängigkeit by Daniel Funk (Bewegung für Neutralität)

“Die USA griffen auf einen gemeinsamen Finanzierungstopf zurück, in den die Schweiz auch Mittel für andere Rüstungsprojekte einzahlt – darunter die Beschaffung der F-35-Kampfjets sowie Ersatzteile für bestehende Systeme. Gelder wurden umgeschichtet und an den Hersteller weitergeleitet. Der Schweizer Zahlungsstopp wurde damit faktisch neutralisiert.”

“Angesichts der massiven Verzögerungen – eine Einsatzbereitschaft der Patriot-Systeme wird frühestens Mitte der 2030er-Jahre erwartet – richtet sich der Blick verstärkt nach Europa. Ein zweites Luftabwehrsystem wird evaluiert, entsprechende Anfragen wurden verschickt.”

Just stop wasting my money. Stop looking for stupid shit. Buy drones from Iran. They seem to know what they’re doing.

“Ob bei der Wahl des Kampfflugzeugs oder bei der Flugabwehr – wiederholt wurden amerikanische Systeme europäischen Alternativen vorgezogen. Damit einher geht nicht nur eine technische, sondern auch eine politische und logistische Abhängigkeit. Wer auf komplexe, hochintegrierte Systeme aus dem Ausland setzt, begibt sich zwangsläufig in deren Einflussbereich.”

“Der Patriot-Streit ist damit mehr als ein Einzelfall. Er ist ein Warnsignal. Und möglicherweise eine der letzten Gelegenheiten, die sicherheitspolitische Ausrichtung der Schweiz grundlegend zu überdenken.”

Good news from Hungary by John Q (Crooked Timber)

This is a terrible article, written by someone whose politics are pretty terrible but they’re a reminder of how colonialists think.

“Some credit for this must go to JD Vance. The spectacle of a US vice-president appearing in Europe to complain about foreign influence must have been too absurd for voters to accept. Putin’s unsubtle interference allowed Peter Magyar to remind Hungarians of Russia’s previous crimes against Hungary.”

He is delighted that the U.S. showed up to interfere in an election to prevent Russia’s election interference, all seemingly without a sense of irony.

What else does this genius think?

“Within Europe, the effect will be to isolate Putin’s last supporter in the EU, Slovakian PM Fico. It should now be possible to get rid of the veto power exercised so balefully by Orban, with Fico’s support, and to constrain financial aid to Fico’s government. That will enable an acceleration of Ukraine’s admission along with Moldova, while Serbia (still aligned with Russia) can return to the back of the queue.”

Oh, neat. He thinks that Slovakia shouldn’t get to express its opinion because he has Ukraine brain. Also, Serbia should be punished because it hasn’t renounced Russia. I can’t wait to see how this guy justifies Europe’s turn back toward Russia to beg for resources in the coming months.

“[…] the result should accelerate Britain’s return to the EU. Brexit and Orbanism were parallel projects, and both have failed miserably in delivering the prosperity they promised. Moreover the result has confirmed the toxicity of Trumpism, even in one of Europe’s most conservative countries. Starmer has taken the first steps, finally admitting that Brexit was a disaster. Hopefully he will be gone soon, and his successor will be free to start the serious work of returning at least to the single market and something close to free movement.”

Oh, wow. He is deranged. Like, completely. Britain is never returning to the EU because the EU is unlikely to be a going concern within a half-decade, in the shape that it is now. The EU has so many other problems right now that re-onboarding Britain and onboarding Ukraine seem like utterly impossible tasks. They can’t even denounce a genocide or a war of aggression. But the author doesn’t seem to mind either one of those things.

What Viktor Orban’s crushing defeat in Hungary really means by Molly O'Neal (Responsible Statecraft)

“Magyar promised better relations with the EU, and it is likely that the EU will quickly unblock some, if not all, of the several billion euros withheld from Hungary because of failure to comply with EU standards on human rights, press freedoms and democratic governance.”

Isn’t it neat how people who likely write about Russia’s purported manipulation of the election don’t think that blackmailing a country for billions of dollars isn’t election-manipulation? Like, they said that the billions will be freed up because they got rid of the prime minister that Europe hated, not that they have actually improved their human rights or press freedoms, which is a strong sign that it was never about either of those principles, which should surprise absolutely no-one.

The guy who won is as bad as, if not worse, than Orban on immigration. He’s just as anti-LGBTQ as Orban. The reason some of the worst people are celebrating is that he’s more pro-EU, anti-Russia, and pro-Israel, which is all that they care about. They couldn’t care less what happens to Hungary. They just care about its vote in the European Parliament or Council … or whatever the fuck they’re doing over there with their myriad layers of technocratic rule posing as democracy.

“However, Magyar did not promise to reverse Orbán’s opposition to arming or funding Ukraine. He did agree to gradually reduce Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil delivered by the Druzhba pipeline and Russian gas delivered by pipeline through Turkey. While Magyar can be expected quickly to reverse Orbán’s opposition to the disbursement of the €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine, it is not clear whether Magyar will acquiesce in the permanent elimination of Hungary’s oil supply through the Druzhba pipeline.”

You can sense the palpable sense of relief that Ukraine will get its €90B, which seems to be the only policy that anyone in Europe cares about anymore. The only other issue of note is for Hungary to waste its time changing its oil source away from Russia, just like the rest of Europe, which has worked out super-great for everyone. These people are so empire-brained that I don’t even know how they function.

Despise Israel AND The Entire Western Empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Hating Israel without hating the western empire is nonsensical, because Israel would not exist without western weapons, military support, narrative control, and diplomatic cover. It’s like hating Bonnie without hating Clyde. Like hating Butch Cassidy but not the Sundance Kid. There are laws against being an accomplice to murder because we all understand that if you aid and abet a murderer then you necessarily share moral culpability for the killing.”

As the Worms Turn by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“The Russians have a phrase for it: negotiation-incapable (ne peregovorosposobny). That is what the Iran delegation demonstrated during a long day of talks with the US team over the weekend in Islamabad. What part of “no nukes” didn’t they understand? All of it, apparently. The corollary question on the table — arguably more pressing for Iran — was: how much more punishment are you willing to suffer to sustain your dream of atomic bombs? You have no defenses left, no control of your air-space. Do you just want to sit in the dark for the next hundred years?”

This is the question that plagues Mr. Kunstler. Not: what gives the U.S. the right (other than might) to dictate what Iran can and can’t do? Or, what gives the U.S. the right to attack a sovereign nation? Or: are the things that I believe about Iran really true?

Of course the world remains a mystery to him. He simply cannot fathom that Iran would walk away from total capitulation because he has allowed himself to be convinced—by the biggest pack of liars that the world has ever seen—that Iran has been unequivocally defeated. They are without missiles, military, electricity, … everything. And yet. And yet, they keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. How? Do not let the potential answers to that question bother your poor, withered brain, James. It is obviously because they are inscrutable aliens, benighted foreigners who are so deluded about their worldview that they would rather commit suicide than learn anything new.

That should be ringing a bell for you, Mr.. Kunstler, but I imagine that it will not. I imagine that it will not cause a single ripple in the undisturbed pond of your worldview.

When so much of the world is surprising, you should really think about checking your premises. I, for one, was in no way surprised that the ceasefire never existed and that the negotiations went nowhere. Iran will give the U.S. more opportunities to dig its own grave, to continue making the mistakes that have gotten it to where it is now.

I Hope The US Loses And The Empire Collapses, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I hope the empire falls. I hope the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled. I hope humanity is able to pry the steering wheel from the fingers of the ghouls who currently rule our world, so that we can create a healthy planet and a harmonious future together.”

“YouTube has banned the channel that’s been creating viral AI Lego music videos criticizing the US war on Iran.”

What a fuckin’ surprise. That’s too bad. They were great fun.

“The US and Israel have so normalized the assassination of national leaders that the mainstream press now discuss it as a standard military tactic. The other day The Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen arguing that the US should “carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations.”

““Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed,” Thiessen writes.

“At some point one of America’s enemies is going to assassinate a US official and my replies are going to be full of shrieking, outraged Americans acting like I’m the bad guy when I say Washington had it coming.”

Hungary’s Fake “Democratic” Revolution — From Orbán’s Mafia to Péter Magyar’s Neoliberal Circus by Michael Leonardi (CounterPunch)

“This is not a victory for the left, for working people, or for any genuine progressive force. It was a squalid palace coup within Hungary’s corrupt political elite — a transfer of power from one faction of the ruling class to another, dressed up as a heroic popular uprising. The Hungarian people did not win. They simply exchanged one set of oligarchs for another.

“Péter Magyar is no savior. He is a former insider of Orbán’s own circle, a playboy from one of Hungary’s most powerful families, whose rapid rise reads like a trashy soap opera: sordid affairs, a bitter divorce from his wife (who happened to be Orbán’s Justice Minister at the time), blackmail, extortion, and backroom deals. He didn’t defeat the system — he was vomited up by it. His campaign was fueled by sex scandals, personal vendettas, and the kind of polished PR that liberal media loves. Now, many are pretending this represents a meaningful shift.”

“Magyar appears ready to smooth Hungary’s re-entry into the mainstream neoliberal consensus — more arms spending, more sanctions on Russia, with continued subservience to Washington and a more cooperative approach towards Brussels.”

“Magyar has already signaled even harder lines on immigration and is deeply embedded in the same transnational networks of casino capitalism, weapons manufacturers, and Zionist-aligned oligarchs that are driving Europe’s rot from within.

“This is the classic trap: liberals celebrate any defeat of a right-wing populist as a win for “democracy,” even when the replacement is just another servant of the same empire. They cheered when a CIA-backed stooge in Venezuela, Machado, was handed a Nobel Peace Prize while working on regime change. They cheer now as Magyar takes the reins in Budapest. In both cases, the underlying power structures — Western capital, NATO militarism, and the refusal to confront the real enemies of humanity — remain untouched.

“The Hungarian election exposes the bankruptcy of the so-called “democratic” opposition. Magyar’s victory offers no real alternative to Orbán’s authoritarian model. It simply promises a more polished, EU-friendly version of the same neoliberal policies […]”

Pentagon drafts plans for military assault on Cuba by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)

“The humanitarian situation inside Cuba is catastrophic. Decades of the genocidal US economic blockade—intensified through an oil embargo since January—have resulted in daily blackouts lasting for hours, alongside severe shortages of drinking water, food, and medical supplies. The economy has effectively ground to a halt, with workers frequently unable to report to their jobs due to lack of transportation, electricity, or basic necessities.

“Internationally, tensions are mounting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit to China that Moscow would continue providing assistance to Cuba and expressed hope that the United States would not return to the era of “colonial wars.” A Russian tanker, the Universal, is currently sailing in the North Atlantic and is expected to reach Cuba within approximately 15 days. Analysts have identified it as the likely next fuel shipment to the island.”

The Settler’s Grin: How One Italian Magazine Cover Exposed the Monstrosity of Greater Israel by Michael Leonardi (CounterPunch)

“This single photograph has become a symbol of the Zionist Greater Israel project in its most unfiltered form. It is not an aberration. It is the logic of expansion made visible: armed civilians, backed by the state and its military, systematically terrorizing indigenous Palestinians to steal their land, destroy their livelihoods, and drive them out. Olive trees — ancient symbols of Palestinian rootedness and resilience — are regularly uprooted, burned, or blocked by settlers. The harvest, once a time of community and sustenance, has become a season of fear, confrontation, and ethnic cleansing in slow motion, especially in areas like Masafer Yatta and the South Hebron Hills.”

L'espresso l'abuso

Roaming Charges: Mad Mouth, Bad Man; Mad Man, Bad Mouth by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Buffalo Medical Examiner ruled that the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alama was a homicide. Shah Alama, a legally blind and elderly Burmese refugee, was dumped by Border Patrol at a closed shop late on a freezing winter night. He died of a burst ulcer caused by severe stress brought on by dehydration and hypothermia. Typically, DHS dismissed the ruling, saying that “Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released by Border Patrol…“his death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol.”

“In fact, the medical examiner couldn’t determine the time of Shah Alama’s death. He was released on the street by CBP on the night of February 19 and reported missing in February. 22. He was found dead two days later, four days after being released. Shah Alama, who spoke little or no English, had fled the genocide in Burma and was granted protective status in the US in 2024, pending a ruling on his asylum claim.

““Shah’s death is deeply disturbing and a dereliction of duty by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” said Boston Mayor Sean Ryan. “A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location….CBP’s behavior in the incident was unprofessional and inhumane.””

How do you live with yourself? These are the same kind of people that dump dogs at rest stops or on country roads.

These 100 former US lawmakers have become foreign lobbyists by Nick Cleveland-Stout | Ben Freeman (Responsible Statecraft)

“The top destinations include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Libya, Qatar, Russia, and China. Eighty-five percent of the members of Congress who have registered as foreign agents have worked for governments rated “not free” or “partially free” by Freedom House. Of the top ten foreign patrons, only South Korea and Taiwan are rated as free.”

Huh. I feel like there’s a country missing on this list.

Canada? France? Italy?

I feel like there’s some country that’s pretty familiar that is an even bigger destination for ex-Congresspeople. C’mon, … it’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s been in the news a lot for the last few years. Why can’t I remember it? I feel like I just mentioned it above.

Oh, wait.

I got it.

It’s Israel.

The article doesn’t even mention Israel. Do they even have to register as foreign agents to work for the government of Israel? Israeli agents don’t have to register in the U.S., so maybe there’s a reciprocality there? It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Israel would be exempted from regulation, for some odd, but presumably utterly innocuous reason.

Oh, no, wait. There it is, right at the top of the diagram.

Where's Israel?

In this diagram, though, Israel’s slot is just as big as China’s, Kazakhstan’s, or Qatar’s. Since they didn’t publish any numbers, it’s hard to tell how close they really are. What’s wild is how many people are working in Libya, which basically doesn’t have a functioning state. I guess maybe that’s why. Where there’s chaos, there’s money to be made.

Perhaps the reason that fewer ex-Congresspeople work for Israel is that Israel isn’t going to bother wasting money on people with no legislative power when they have nearly every actively serving Congressperson on their payroll.

Journalism & Media

My Comedy Show Is Now Canceled — Thanks To Suppression by Lee Camp (Daily Dose of Sanity)

It’s a tragedy that you’re being canceled again, though a completely unsurprising one.

I use the RSS feed for your YouTube channel to watch every one of your shows. I’ve been watching since the first days of Redacted Tonight. I have the book. I’ve been throwing you a couple of beers a month for as long as I can remember. Although, now that I think about it, beers cost more now than when I started. I flew to Berlin to catch your one show in Europe. (it was great. Berlin was great, too. I mean, I did stay a bit to look around. It wasn’t just you; don’t get a big head about it.)

John Oliver will never be canceled because he doesn’t worry anyone. It’s cold comfort that you seem to be annoying all of the worst people.

I’m wondering, though, why a show like Some More News with Cody Johnston isn’t being shadow-banned as much as you. (At least it seems like they’re doing fine; they even have sponsors who don’t seem to have jumped ship.) Some More News covers a lot of the same topics and doesn’t pull its punches, from what I can tell. I can’t recall whether they’ve stayed away from Israel, though, which is probably the third rail that’s blasted you this time. I’m so sorry.

It’s easy to write, but I learned if from you. Keep fighting.

Tucker: 'Trump is a slave' by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Hasan sums it up,

“You’re not agreeing with him, he’s agreeing with you.”

The War We Left Behind (1991) by PBS Frontline (YouTube)

PBS Frontline reports on U.S. war crimes in Iraq in 1991. The crimes are horrific, well-known, and disgustingly familiar. The report is good but the context is fascinating, in that they seem to be reporting as if they’d just discovered that bombing away a population’s electrical grid is collective punishment that destroys the civilization.

They report on war crimes without calling them war crimes.

“Pentagon analysts had assured us that collateral damage would be minimal.”

Of course they did.

“We just don’t have any good way of knowing what the effect on the population is going to be of something that happens to them indirectly.”

The guy lies like he breathes.

“From a pilot’s standpoint, we just hope that there isn’t anybody there. Our mission is to drop them bombs on those specific targets. And, again, it’s unfortunate if somebody happens to be there. And that’s the way we look at it. ”

That’s the pilot talking. He goes on,

“And bomb’s don’t always hit where you aim, particularly the dumb bombs that we were dropping then.”

That’s what the “gravity bombs” being used in Iraq 35 years later are. Dumb bombs dropped by dumb pilots and their dumb bosses.

They’re not dumb. They’re evil. They’re monsters and demons.

Calling them the “great Satan” is accurate.

They Always Tell You Why The Empire Uses Violence, But Never Why Its Enemies Do by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Why did Russia invade Ukraine? No reason. Putin’s just evil and hates freedom, that’s all. Sure, countless western experts and analysts had been warning for years that NATO aggressions were going to lead to a war on Russia’s border, but they were just rambling lunatics whose forecasts of war were proven correct by pure coincidence.

“Our entire understanding of history is framed in this way. Fidel Castro killed people in Cuba. Why did he kill them? No reason; he was just a mean jerk. All the violence of the socialist revolutionaries around the world overthrowing the abusive governments which preceded them is framed as causeless genocidal carnage inflicted by murderous tyrants who simply loved killing people. The desperation caused by the capitalist exploitation that had been imposed upon those populations is completely redacted from our history books.”

Economy & Finance

All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame by Ellen Brown (Scheer Post)

“In 1999, the world was opened to unregulated derivatives trading, so that sovereign bonds, oil flows, shipping routes, and war-risk policies could all be collateralized, rehypothecated (pledged multiple times over), and gambled upon. The lynchpin was the 1997 WTO Financial Services Agreement (the Fifth Protocol to GATS), which became operational in 1999.”

“As for Iran, it is not only the largest and strongest of the Islamic countries but operates the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. This stands in direct contrast to the conventional Western model, which relies on interest as its primary revenue mechanism. “Money making money out of itself” underpins the global derivatives complex, which is built on rehypothecated, collateralized debt-at-interest.”

“Financial analyst Stephanie Pomboy warns that the $1.5-3 trillion private credit market is in lockdown, forcing fire sales of liquid assets; and the much larger $5 trillion BBB-rated corporate bond market is teetering. Downgrades will force mass selling, and pensions face a $4 trillion shortfall.”

“The WTO Financial Services Agreement became the battering ram for opening global markets to this derivative play. Every member nation was forced to open its banking system or face sanctions. In 1999, the portion of Glass-Steagall separating investment banking from depository banking in the U.S. was repealed, leaving depositors’ money vulnerable to speculative risk. Derivatives then exploded. Sovereign bonds, oil contracts, shipping insurance policies, and war-risk premiums were all sliced into credit-default swaps, hedges, and other derivative products.”

“According to data from the Bank for International Settlements and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the top five U.S. banks alone hold roughly 90% of all U.S. bank derivatives, with JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley dominating the global over-the-counter market. These institutions capture the lion’s share of derivative profits […]”

“virtually every security today is dematerialized (digitized) and pooled in central depositories. Quiet changes to the Uniform Commercial Code and equivalent E.U. rules have turned ordinary investors into mere “entitlement holders” holding only a legal claim against their brokerages. As for bank depositors, they have for centuries been categorized as mere “creditors” of their banks. Once the money is deposited, legal title passes to the bank. The depositor holds only a contractual claim (a demand liability) that ranks as an unsecured creditor position in the event of insolvency.”

“Leading this band of holdouts was Iran, which since its 1983 Law for Usury-Free Banking Operations has run the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. Its banks use Sharia-compliant contracts — profit-sharing (musharakah), cost-plus financing (murabaha), and leasing (ijara) — instead of charging or paying interest.”

“Iran’s system was designed to eliminate usury and align finance with real economic activity and risk-sharing rather than speculative debt. It has long been viewed as structurally incompatible with the interest-based, collateral-heavy architecture of City of London and Wall Street finance — an architecture that requires perpetual debt servicing and easily rehypothecated assets to feed the derivatives machine.”

“Today the risk of a crash is even greater than during the GFC. The global OTC derivatives market has officially ballooned to a notional value of $846 trillion, more than seven times the size of the entire world economy. Long-range political solutions are possible. Congress could restore Glass-Steagall and impose a financial transaction tax. State governments could withdraw their approval of relevant portions of the UCC and form public banks that can protect against local bank bankruptcies.”

Science & Nature

The man, the mind, the series, and 314 trillion digits by Dilip D'Souza (3QuarksDaily)

“Aryabhata’s approximation: Add 4 to 100, he said, and multiply the result by 8. Add 62,000. Divide the result by 20000. The answer, he said, approaches the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle.”

“[…] if you use 40 digits of π, you can calculate the circumference of the universe – an unimaginably larger distance than to the Moon – accurate to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom.”

“Here’s the first series for π I ever ran into: π/4 = 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 … This series was discovered by the mathematician Madhava in the 14th Century. To me, it is both pleasing and surprising. How does such a simple manipulation of the odd numbers produce π? Yet examine it more closely, or try to use it, and it isn’t so pleasing after all. For it takes many many terms to give us worthwhile approximations to π. For example, for two-decimal accuracy, you’d need over 300 terms; that is, you’d have to go past 1/601.”

“This is known as the Ramanujan-Sato formula. Don’t get discouraged by the symbols, and allow that “k” and “n” from the image at the top are interchangeable. But allow yourself too, to gasp, for its very first term, also in that image is this: 2 × √2 × 1103 / 9801 … which gives us π = 3.1415927 – meaning, accurate to seven decimal places right off the bat. Add the second term and we have accuracy to 14 decimal places.”

NASA astronaut, U.S. Navy Captain, father, former F/A-18 pilot and SpaceX Crew-1 pilot Victor Glover on becoming the first Black man to go to the Moon 🚀 gets hit with a DEI question and flips it into something bigger than race (Reddit)

“I also hope we are pushing in the other direction, that one day we don’t have to talk about these [having done something from the perspective of being a woman or being black] first, that one day this is just, and I—listen to this—that this is the human history. It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity, not black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.”

Environment & Climate Change

Can a Comedian help the Mule Deer Foundation CEO save the deer? by United by Nature (YouTube)

I liked these people. They’re good and nice people.

What’s sad is that Greg is triggered by people who are activists for the environment but he’ll never, ever be triggered by people who are such avid activists for capitalism and their own wealth that they’re destroying everything else. Chaining yourself to a tree is somehow perceived as more extremist than clear-cutting half of Alaska. He’s been trained not to notice that kind of activity as extremist at all. Ditto for Beth and even ManCarryingThing.

Medicine & Disease

Antibiotic resistance in India has consequences everywhere by Assa Doron (Aeon)

“Consider the daily wage labourer with a family to feed, moving from job to job with no contract, and many others ready to replace him if a shift is missed. A bout of diarrhoea or a respiratory infection can mean losing his job altogether. A visit to a nearby pharmacy, a short course of antibiotics, a day or two of rest, and it’s back to work. For people at the lower rungs of Indian society, there are no medical certificates and no paid leave to protect either their health or their jobs. With lack of regular access to clean water and sanitation, health, like income, is managed day by day. For many, a single missed wage is enough to push basic needs out of reach.”

“Drug-resistant bacteria survive, thrive and spread. These microbes do not remain confined to a single gut. They leave the body through faeces and enter environments where sanitation is uneven and sewage often untreated.”

“Microbes travel through trade and tourism. A study of Swiss travellers returning from India found strikingly high rates of gut colonisation with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, an unwanted bug carried home without symptoms. Resistance does not respect borders. It moves with the infrastructures and ecologies we have built.”

“On the outskirts of Hyderabad, often called the Pharma Capital of India, villagers living near industrial estates described foul-smelling effluents, often released under the cover of night. Shanakar, a former village head with whom we spoke, has spent decades challenging the pharmaceutical companies. At a site near his village, he gestured toward a darkened canal. ‘You see,’ he said, pointing to the water, ‘because of the pollution, the fish have died. Migratory birds have stopped coming.’ Paddy fields now yield half as much as before. A buffalo that once gave eight to 10 litres of milk a day now produces only two. ‘This is what progress looks like for us,’ he said. While Hyderabad may be celebrated as an IT and pharmaceutical hub and hailed as an economic miracle, from the banks of the Musi River, the cost of that success appears disturbingly dire.”

“Drugs once trusted to protect the most vulnerable – newborns with sepsis, surgical patients, people undergoing chemotherapy – no longer perform as they once did. In India, resistant bacterial infections are estimated to contribute to around 60,000 newborn deaths a year, while their effects are increasingly visible well beyond the poor.”

“There is rarely time, money or equipment for proper diagnostics. Treatment becomes empirical, guided by symptoms and probability rather than lab confirmation – a shotgun approach where precision is needed. Broad-spectrum and last-resort drugs are deployed to cover as many possibilities as possible, disrupting entire microbial communities in order to hit the likely culprit.”

“[…] patients frequently expect, and even insist on, a prescription. Leaving without one can be read as neglect; doctor-shopping often follows. In a system where many clinics operate as small businesses and reputation travels by word of mouth, withholding antibiotics carries real professional risk. The clinician stands in a bind: prescribe and risk contributing to resistance, withhold and risk losing the patient’s trust.”

“[…] antibiotic treatment functions less as targeted therapy than as a management tool in a competitive healthcare market. The irony is pointed: the drugs that made modern hospital care possible are losing their power precisely in the institutions built around them.”

Capitalism ruins everything.

“AMR is, in this sense, not a disease the system has failed to prevent. It is one the system keeps producing.”

“[…] the entire scaffolding of modern healthcare depends on antibiotics working. Hip replacements, chemotherapy, caesarean sections, organ transplants – none of these are exotic procedures. They are the everyday traffic of hospitals everywhere. Each carries an infection risk that antibiotics currently make manageable. Without that assurance, much of what contemporary medicine takes for granted would become difficult, or impossible, to safely perform.”

“Superbugs care little for national borders or bodily boundaries. They move through healthcare systems, infrastructures and industries that reward short-term gain while dispersing long-term harm. India is not the source of this crisis, but one of the places where those pressures converge most intensely and at scale. Until those arrangements change, superbugs will remain not an aberration, but a predictable outcome of the world we have made.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope (The Poetry Foundation)

“Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dread repose:
Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,
Shades ev’ry flow’r, and darkens ev’ry green,
Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,
And breathes a browner horror on the woods.”

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!”

“If ever chance two wand’ring lovers brings
To Paraclete’s white walls and silver springs,
O’er the pale marble shall they join their heads,
And drink the falling tears each other sheds;
Then sadly say, with mutual pity mov’d,
“Oh may we never love as these have lov’d!”
From the full choir when loud Hosannas rise,
And swell the pomp of dreadful sacrifice,”

Rhyming by spelling rather than pronunciation.

Or a four-message conversation by Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi (Substack)

“I know of the people around me in their phones and in a fiction that suffers the present. I knew how miserable they had become, but he wasn’t like that; I had to convince myself. The jester must have told the same joke to himself a hundred times to satisfy the king and his audience. Do you think he finds the act funny anymore? Has he killed a part of himself to stay alive, or is he so rich in laughter himself? That night, he returned home with the dimes and washed the paint mask off his face. Can you see the red smile go down the drain?”

Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division by Stephen Diehl

“There is a particular flavor of horror that only people who work with formal systems for a living can fully appreciate. It is the horror of data loss, of silent corruption, of the thing that fails without logging an error. It is the backup that was never tested. The monitoring system that monitors everything except its own health. The silent failure that propagates through a distributed system for weeks before anyone notices, and by the time you do notice, the state of the world has drifted so far from what you believed it to be that the gap itself has become invisible. If Kafka wrote incident reports, they would read like this novel.”

“You cannot fight it because you cannot remember it exists. You cannot organize a defense because the knowledge that a defense is needed is the first thing it destroys. The monster hides in the structure of cognition itself. The darkness is a feature.”

“The SCP Foundation is, in essence, what would happen if the IETF wrote horror fiction, and the result is exactly as wonderful as that sounds. It is one of the genuinely great creative experiments of the internet age, and Hughes’s Antimemetics Division entries are widely regarded as the best thing to come out of it.”

“The drugs have brutal side effects. The work has worse ones. You are fighting a war that nobody knows is happening, that nobody will remember you fought, and that erases its own history as it proceeds. Every victory is immediately forgotten. Every sacrifice is invisible. It is, in other words, open source maintainership as cosmic horror. This is heroism that is structurally incapable of being recognized, which is either the noblest possible form of service or the most absurd possible form of futility,”

“Beneath ordinary three-dimensional spacetime lies the noosphere: the space of all human-conceivable ideas, memes, and concepts, a vast ecology that transcends the physical world and can retroactively edit memory, identity, and even the historical record. The noosphere is not a metaphor. It is, within the novel’s logic, the true substrate of reality, and the physical world is a shadow cast by it.”

“The protagonist of the novel is a woman who is voluntarily dismantling her own identity in order to save a world that will never know she existed.”

“Love, the novel argues, leaves traces that even antimemetic erasure cannot fully remove. This is the most emotionally devastating science fiction idea I have encountered in years […]”

“You read the way the Antimemetics Division works: assembling fragments, inferring what is missing from the outline of what remains, never certain your reconstruction is correct. It is the only honest way to tell a story about forgetting.”

“[…] it is the best argument I have seen for why the SCP Foundation is one of the most important literary projects of the twenty-first century. That a novel this good started life as collaborative wiki fiction is itself an antimemetic phenomenon: a masterpiece hiding in plain sight in a format that literary culture is constitutionally incapable of taking seriously. Read it, and then try to remember that you did.”

The old man lost his horse

“The old man lost his horse (but it all turned out for the best) (Chinese: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福; lit. ‘The old man of the frontier lost his horse’, ‘how could he know if this is not fortuitous?’), also known as Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows? or Bad luck brings good luck, and good luck brings bad luck are some of the many titles given to one of the most famous parables from the Huainanzi (淮南子; ‘Master of Huainan’), chapter 18 (人間訓; Rénjiānxùn; ‘In the World of Man’) dating to the 2nd century B.C. The story exemplifies the view of Taoism regarding “fortune” (“good luck”) and “misfortune” (“bad luck”).”

This is a great story. I caught myself about to say that our cultures are so different but they’re actually not. American culture is filled with nuggets of wisdom like this, too. It’s just become so deemphasized that we only ever remember Real Housewives TV shows instead of Steinbeck.

Mannequin Pussy: Tiny Desk Concert by NPR Music (YouTube)

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

”It Me” by Marta Figlerowicz (The Yale Review)

“Of Daphne, turned into laurel as she fled Apollo, Ovid says in the first book of the Metamorphoses:”

“Scarce had she thus prayed when a down-dragging numbness seized her limbs, and her soft sides were begirt with thin bark. Her hair was changed to leaves, her arms to branches. Her feet, but now so swift, grew fast in sluggish roots, and her head was now but a tree’s top. Her gleaming beauty alone remained.”

“But even now in this new form Apollo loved her; and placing his hand upon the trunk, he felt the heart still fluttering beneath the bark. He embraced the branches as if human limbs, and pressed his lips upon the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses. [Trans. Frank Justus Miller]”

“The stillness into which the figures fall is the stillness of the dancer freezing into a memorable pose, becoming an inanimate, or less animate, version of the human, and also an abstraction of this particular human’s grief. “Outside my studio door, in my garden, is a tree that has always been a symbol of facing life, and in many ways it is a dancer,” writes Martha Graham in “I Am a Dancer,” comparing herself to it. Ovid seems to be making a similar discovery here, or, rather (perhaps), documenting it.”

“When I post the famous “Hotline Bling” meme on Twitter, I do not see myself as Drake—not exactly—but as his frown, then his smile.”

TIL that this meme is Drake.

“Like a well-executed dance, memes can momentarily trick us into believing that they were made for us, and in our image, alone—“it me.” They satisfy our desire for abstraction as well as for effortless sprezzatura, making us feel protean but also eminently clear. As we identify with them, like a Roman audience entranced by a dancer, we might momentarily forget the difference between ourselves and the signifier of our self-expression.”

“Is the dream of simplicity and directness itself the problem or the means by which we claim to achieve it? Ultimately, the question raised both by pantomime and by memes concerns the ethics and epistemic reliability not of metaphor, as the title Metamorphoses might at first suggest, but of metonymy.”

Struggle Against the Gods by Gao Zhisheng (First Things)

“At present, I can move freely within the bounds of a village in northern China, but I’m still in prison—it’s just that my cell has become larger. In negotiating with the Communist party, I have always been willing to compromise on technicalities, but on principle I have been immovable. As long as my physical shell can support my spirit, I will stand against the forces of evil.”

“I once asked several of the guards, one of whom was responsible for education on religious matters, what exactly an illegal religion was. None of them was able to answer. I asked what legal religious acts they sought to protect, and they said there were no legal religious acts in prison. “Then why ban ‘illegal religion’ and not all religion?” They couldn’t answer.”

“The bureau wanted me to write weekly reports that expressed my remorse, my change in thinking, my willingness to break with the past, and my determination to make amends. These requirements were imposed on all political prisoners and “cultists.””

“Though “ruling the country by law” has long been written into the Constitution, the government prevents citizens from enjoying their constitutional rights. Any mention of “constitutionalism” is criticized in party media as “anti-party” or “defaming China.” Since Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign started, there has been no evidence of a genuine move toward rule of law. Raucous acclaim conceals the fact that corruption cases have been handled gangster-style. In fact, after three years of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, the following conclusions can be drawn: He has no desire to introduce due process of law; his main goal is to maintain the CCP’s dictatorial status and eliminate rivals; and a sincere anti-corruption campaign would subvert the regime.”

“When the power struggles remain in equilibrium, everyone remains a “leading comrade.” Once the equilibrium breaks, the losing party becomes the corrupt official and the winning one becomes the anti-corruption hero. In fact, these are cases of the heinously corrupt arresting the merely corrupt. If Xi really fought corruption through to the end, he and the rest of his regime would be thrown into prison.”

“Denial of the supernatural is a major reason why so many of my countrymen have become moral degenerates.”

Wait. What? I was with him for the first half:

Most of my countrymen have been deluded into becoming moral degenerates.

Amen, brother. Same.

But then he loses me in the second half:

It’s because they don’t believe in ghosts.

Dammit.

“Encounters with the spirit world were by no means limited to that location. Soldiers and officers told many amusing stories about their “struggle” against gods and ghosts. According to the soldiers, “weird phenomena” began to occur after Jiang Zemin became General Secretary of the CCP. “Demonic sightings” were reported everywhere. From 1990 onwards, the People’s Armed Police units in all provinces were plagued by hauntings.”

Stories like this are the reason people hate AI. It was bad enough spending time trying to figure out whether something was lies or self-serving. It was hard enough figuring out whether to go out of your trust zone, to expand it. AI makes that much harder, orders of magnitude harder.

Is this article translated? A story? News? What the hell do I do with this seemingly bizarre source of information? Is the guy for real? Is he really a dissident? Are the stories he tells of the Chinese system real? Factual? Is he known to be a fabulist? He’s talking about ghosts and demons. Is that a normal thing to do in China? Is it a metaphor? Did something get lost in translation? Or is this whole goddamned thing, along with the attribution to a translator, made up out of whole cloth, either by a human or machine?

In the past, we could have convinced ourselves that no-one would bother wasting so much time making something like this. And, even if they did, it would be so unprofitable that they would soon have to stop. But now? Now you can generate something like this in 30 minutes, for whatever nefarious propaganda purposes you like.

“The paradise of power is the hell of rights. In today’s China, constitutional government, rule of law, freedom, religion, universal values, democratic elections, and judicial independence are labeled as erroneous ideological trends of the West. In fact, justice is justice, and doesn’t distinguish between East and West.”

“Today when I went out to exercise at noon, the earth was weighed down by snow and blown raw by the wind, but plants pushed out new green shoots, indifferent to the remnants of winter. My heart was stirred by this small miracle, which seems beneath notice but is as inspiring as the greatest philosophy. Harshness and desolation are not death, but the harbingers of life to come.”

Real Feelings for Fake Beauty by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Sometimes the style is referred to as Late International or The Glass Box Style, but perhaps the term Value-Engineered Modernism is more apt. Whatever you call it, this kind of building is the architectural equivalent of a default font, a soul-crushing assembly line of sterile glass monoliths that erases local identity in favor of the numbing, cookie-cutter uniformity of global bureaucracy. It’s the corporation in building form.”

“Yale was built to look old, specifically styled after the “Oxbridge” fashion of England’s great universities. Its architectural style is, depending on how you look at it, symbolic, or aspirational, or postmodern, or perhaps fraudulent. It’s not like the school hides information about when its buildings were built or whether they’re made in a deliberately retro style. But most people who walk through campus have no idea that its buildings are just as decorative and fundamentally a work of fantasy as those in Disneyland. They just know, and love, how the campus feels.”

“My guess is that, if they knew that Harkness Tower was a 20th-century facsimile of a 15th century style, built by oil money to honor an obscenely wealthy alum none of them had ever heard of, they wouldn’t much care.”

“[…] the statuary is too white, the lawns too well-manicured. The whole thing is hung with a creepy inauthenticity. But then, the older Old Campus buildings are also deeply inauthentic, and yet it doesn’t bother me at all; I “believe” the atmosphere when I walk among them. Their fakery is real enough that I can choose to buy into it. I’m able to accept the illusion, embrace the kayfabe. Which gets to the hoary old world of simulacra theory, to Baudrillard, and to the way the modern world keeps attempting to remake an old world that never existed, and to the relationship between beauty and self-deception.”

“In 50 years, he thought, the buildings that made up Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray would be sufficiently old that they would look as old as they were meant to feel and feel as old as they were meant to look, and no one would know the difference. And he was probably right.”

“[…] the pursuit of aesthetic excellence is not a straight path, but it is one that people will always walk all the same, and we ignore the power of subjective aesthetics at our peril. People want their college to look like a college and not like an office park, and I think we should trust and honor that instinct.”

“[…] whether we’re willing to admit what we actually want, which is to be surrounded by things that feel old and storied and earned, even when they aren’t. Yale understood this and built a fantasy, and the fantasy worked so well that a century later they felt compelled to extend it, and even their imperfect extension will probably fool people in another fifty years. The desire isn’t really for Gothic architecture specifically, or for Art Deco, or for any particular style. The desire is for the feeling that a place has been cared for across generations, that it meant something to the people who built it and to the people who came after. Beauty is the signal. Permanence is the message.”

“And here’s where I find myself making a kind of peace with the whole business of beautiful lies. I know that Old Campus is a stage set, that the gargoyles are props, that the medievalism is a borrowed costume from universities that were themselves borrowing from an even older tradition. I know all of that, and I go back anyway, baby on my chest, to walk among the Gothic opulence. My friend was right about the timescales, but I think he was pointing at something bigger than he intended: authenticity is itself a function of time. The new colleges at Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray feel fake not because they are fake − Old Campus is equally fake − but because they haven’t yet had the time to make us forget that we’re in on the trick. Beauty, it turns out, requires a kind of willing amnesia. We have to be allowed to forget the scaffolding. And maybe that’s the real argument for building ornately and lavishly right now, today, in our own cities and neighborhoods: not that we’ll love it immediately, but that someday, if we build it with enough sincerity and enough craft, people will walk past it and feel, without quite knowing why, that human beings once cared about beauty enough to live and work inside of it, and might still.”

Even though we barely care about anything right now, so we will have managed to fool the future instead of only ourselves.

The Turner Diaries (Wikipedia)

“The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, the founder and chairman of National Alliance, an American white nationalist group, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. It was serialised in the National Alliance publication Attack! from 1975–1978 before being published in paperback form by the National Alliance in 1978. As of 2001, the book had sold an estimated 300,000 copies, initially only available through mail order from the National Alliance. In 1996, it was republished by Barricade Books with a foreword that disavowed the novel.

“It depicts a violent revolution in the United States, caused by a group called the Organization. The Organization’s actions lead to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and ultimately a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites and Jews worldwide. Whites viewed as “race traitors” are ultimately hanged in a mass execution called the “Day of the Rope”. The novel utilizes a framing device, presenting the story as a historical diary of an average member, Earl Turner, with historical notes from a century after the novel’s events.”

Holy crap.

The Ones Who Don’t Get “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Christopher Hall (3QuarksDaily)

Those who don’t get it start arguing for literally walking away without doing anything, whereas those “who walk away” is a metaphor for those who refuse to accept the status quo. It just sounds more poetic and elegant than writing “The One Who Stayed and Fought to End the System of Barbaric Subjugation that is the Linchpin of all Joy and Success in Omelas.” FFS literal-minded people often end up arguing in such bad faith, and the death of metaphor and irony is tragic.

The one who don’t get “the one who walk away from Omelas” are the people of the village of Omelas. This is how they justify their moral superiority. They are colonialists, slavers, and eugenicists. Some pigs are better than others.

Technology & Engineering

The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet by Thom Holwerda (OS News)

“I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with working together with your nation’s military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies’ products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion).

“There’s always going to be difficult grey areas, but any military or defense company supporting the genocide in Gaza or supplying weapons to kill women and children in Iran is unequivocally wrong, morally reprehensible, and downright illegal on both an international and national level.”

The Engineering of Duct Tape by engineerguy | Bill Hammack (YouTube)

I accidentally started a green screen revolution… by Corridor Crew (YouTube)

A testament to the power of open-source and free software. This is what benefits to humanity could look like. This guy initially built this tool to make his life making movies easier. He released it as open-source and the community made it 100x better within a month, something he could have never done himself.

• Uses ¼ of the VRAM.
• Has a user-friendly standalone UI.
• Has a one-click installer for all supported platforms (Linux, MacOS, Windows).
• Has support for blue-screen as well as green-screen.
• Has incredibly smooth plugin support for at least one editor (the one he happens to use), with many fine-tuning options.

He’s going to release all of the weights and training data to let the world have a crack at doing better training than he did. This is the way to build things. He could have tried to build his business on it, but that’s not what he does. He makes movies. He will now be able to make movies more easily, focusing on the fun bits, for free—and so will everyone else. Fantastic.

No one can force me to have a secure website!!! by suckerpinch (YouTube)

This is great. He developed his own implementation of HTTPS in order to pretend that his web-site is secure when he has implemented it with the most insecure keys and protocols that he can get away with.

LLMs & AI

AI Coding Assistants by Sasha Levin and Jonathan Corbet (GitHub | linux)

“This document provides guidance for AI tools and developers using AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel.

“AI tools helping with Linux kernel development should follow the standard kernel development process

“[…]

“The human submitter is responsible for:”

• Reviewing all AI-generated code
• Ensuring compliance with licensing requirements
• Adding their own Signed-off-by tag to certify the DCO
• Taking full responsibility for the contribution

This is the same conclusion to which Uster came two years ago in defining its software-development process. AI is just another tool. Feel free to use it but you’re still responsible for your contribution. There’s no magic bullet that lets you reap the rewards of value without effort.

AI Cybersecurity After Mythos: The Jagged Frontier by Stanislav Fort (Aisle)

“There is a practical consequence of jaggedness. Because small, cheap, fast models are sufficient for much of the detection work, you don’t need to judiciously deploy one expensive model and hope it looks in the right places. You can deploy cheap models broadly, scanning everything, and compensate for lower per-token intelligence with sheer coverage and lower cost-per-token. A thousand adequate detectives searching everywhere will find more bugs than one brilliant detective who has to guess where to look. The small models already provide sufficient uplift that, wrapped in expert orchestration, they produce results that the ecosystem takes seriously. This changes the economics of the entire defensive pipeline.”

“FreeBSD detection (a straightforward buffer overflow) is commoditized: every model gets it, including a 3.6B-parameter model costing $0.11/M tokens. You don’t need limited access-only Mythos at multiple-times the price of Opus 4.6 to see it. The OpenBSD SACK bug (requiring mathematical reasoning about signed integer overflow) is much harder and separates models sharply, but a 5.1B-active model still gets the full chain. The OWASP false-positive test shows near-inverse scaling, with small open models outperforming frontier ones. Rankings reshuffle completely across tasks: GPT-OSS-120b recovers the full public SACK chain but cannot trace data flow through a Java ArrayList. Qwen3 32B scores a perfect CVSS assessment on FreeBSD and then declares the SACK code “robust to such scenarios.””

“To be clear about what this does and does not show: these experiments do not demonstrate that open models can autonomously discover and weaponize this vulnerability end-to-end. They show that once the relevant function is isolated, much of the core reasoning, from detection through exploitability assessment through creative strategy, is already broadly accessible.”

“This directly addresses the sensitivity vs specificity question some readers raised. Models, partially drive by prompting, might have excellent sensitivity (100% detection across all runs) but poor specificity on this task. That gap is exactly why the scaffold and triage layer are essential, and why I believe the role of the full system is vital. A model that false-positives on patched code would drown maintainers in noise. The system around the model needs to catch these errors.”

“For many defensive workflows, which is what Project Glasswing is ostensibly about, you do not need full exploit construction nearly as often as you need reliable discovery, triage, and patching. Exploitability reasoning still matters for severity assessment and prioritization, but the center of gravity is different.”

Secret agentic AI by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“For practical purposes, today’s AI companies are American. It’d be naive to think that it will stay that way. When a technology becomes sufficiently strategically important, other states subsidize national enterprises to catch up. To Silicon Valley ears, this may sound derivative and unfit for competition, but such a strategy can work. Historical evidence exists.”

Bro, how can you be such a smart software designer and so brainwashed on elementary politics and economics? Silicon Valley is probably the most heavily government-subsidized industry ever—it’s just hidden behind other quasi-capitalistic layers. Instead of the money coming directly from the government, it comes from VC investors, all of whom got their money because of a highly investor-friendly capital environment in the U.S., where they never pay taxes, and they have subsidies and kickbacks on every level. There is more red tape involved than in China, but it’s a nearly unending and uninterrupted conveyor belt of money from the U.S. taxpayer to the richest people and industry in the U.S. Let’s stop kidding ourselves that these are anything but corruption, which are subsidies with no upside for those providing the money.

Our world is doomed unless more of the ostensibly “smart” people in the world shake off their societal programming and stop writing stupid things like this that make it look like Silicon Valley is some sort of magical paradise untouched by subsidy or corruption. This is just ludicrous. Who is he afraid of offending? Or is he that deluded?

It’s the same at the beginning of his article: he spent four paragraphs explaining how a pay-as-you-go model might be something that will eventually appear for the money pit that is the cloud-based LLM business. I mean, DUH. But he had to spend some time pretending that what is happening right now is in any way a viable approach to delivering a service.

He digs deep to find an example of a subsidized business and comes up with Airbus because of course he does. When we talk about subsidized businesses in the empire, we talk about the ones that the naughty leftist Europeans have subsidized, not the fucking engineering and safety boondoggle that is Boeing, a money pit many miles wider than that of Airbus.

“You can find examples in another capital-intensive industry, aviation. Airbus probably wouldn’t exist without European governments taking an active interest. And I find it fair to argue that Airbus is currently doing better than their main competitor in civil aviation.”

You could also mention, oh, I dunno, NASA? Or DARPA? Or the whole thing that led to Lucent? C’mon. This is all government-subsidized. This is great! Except, of course, that the profits were quickly privatized and that most of the foreseeable purposes were military. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for government subsidies, where the benefits—both real-world and fiscal—redound to the investors (the people of the country).

“You may counter that you’d never use a Chinese, Russian, or pick-your-own-enemy LLM system. But some people and organizations are more price-sensitive than security-conscious. Besides, a dismissal of this scenario assumes that ownership is transparent.”

And the hits keep coming: Mark Seemann says that Russian and Chinese LLMs cannot be trusted but that this problem does not exist with U.S.-based LLMs.

“You may consider only using systems of known origin. You may decide to stick to OpenAI, Anthropic, or other American companies. Perhaps, but I think that you should consider at least two things. The first is that, as already covered, these companies run huge deficits. Where do the money come from? Investors, you say? Indeed, but which investors? Is it conceivable that some of the investors are already, through chains of shell companies, controlled by foreign governments? And if not now, then in the future?”

This is mind-boggling. His concern is not for the nefarious intentions of investors, but for the possible presence of nefarious investors coming from bad countries. How can you possibly have so much empire-brain?

To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica)

“Most examples of this “effective use” involve students generating an essay with AI and then critiquing it. (As if the Internet wasn’t bursting at the seams with human writing that one could critique!) Every time I’ve asked an instructor what their learning objective was for this assignment, the answer has been to help students see why they shouldn’t trust an LLM to write for them. Stop me when you notice the contradiction between that and the administrators’ wishes.”

“The reason this feels so different to teachers than the tech panics of the past is that there is no clear solution to how AI is undermining nearly every aspect of education. It’s a strange game trying to get students to do things you think will help their education while they point LLMs at you, and it too often feels like the only winning move is not to play.”

“It doesn’t seem like anyone wants to listen to instructors explain how bad it feels to try to do our job in the presence of this annihilative education antimatter. Instead, we’re offered AI grading tools to score AI-generated submissions for AI-generated assignments.”

“LLMs are a shortcut. Students often take shortcuts they later regret. We’ve all been there.”

“As an instructor, I want to build a clear path up the mountain for my students and see them reach the top. Instead, I increasingly feel like I’m just playing impossible defense to keep them from moving every direction but up. It’s exhausting, and I will mostly lose, which means I’m not even helping them.”

“A few months ago, I overheard some college students talking about their classes. One was complaining about an assignment they needed to do that night, and another incredulously asked why they wouldn’t just have ChatGPT do it. The first replied, “This is my major, I actually need to learn stuff in this class. I use AI for my other classes.”

“I haven’t encountered any students who think they’re learning when they let LLMs do their work, despite the face that college administrators and LLM advertising try to put on this. It’s just workload management to them.”

And remember, these are students who don’t really have a workload to speak of. They’re just playing more Call of Duty with the time that they save by having LLM tools do their work.

AI Chatbots and Trust by Bruce Schneier

“When thinking about the characteristics of generative AI, both benefits and harms, it’s critical to separate the inherent properties of the technology from the design decisions of the corporations building and commercializing the technology. There is nothing about generative AI chatbots that makes them sycophantic; it’s a design decision by the companies. Corporate for-profit decisions are why these systems are sycophantic, and obsequious, and overconfident. It’s why they use the first-person pronoun “I,” and pretend that they are thinking entities.

“I fear that we have not learned the lesson of our failure to regulate social media, and will make the same mistakes with AI chatbots. And the results will be much more harmful to society:”

He gets the point right but then weakens the conclusion because he’s afraid to look the Gorgon in the eye. We didn’t fail to learn a lesson to regulate social media. We failed to have a society that serves anything but corporations. The problem is much bigger than some sort of failure on the part of a regulatory apparatus. It’s that we not only live in a society without any regulatory apparatus worth noting, we live in a miasma of propaganda that teaches us every day that even looking sideways at a regulatory apparatus amounts to treason.

His weak-ass conclusion makes it sound like we just have some legislative housekeeping to do when we don’t even have the beginnings of the tools we need to fight the overwhelming arsenal arrayed against us.

This is Why AI Could Replace Programmers by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

This is a pretty sane and balanced take on LLM-supported coding.

A good rule of thumb when you read press releases (which most “reporting” summarizes) is to ask yourself how close the statement is to “this thing that I want you to buy from me has been scientifically proven to be the only thing that you will ever need for anything again.”

The AI revolution in software development by Charlotte Relyea and Martin Harrysson (McKinsey)

You're always one step behind

It’s interesting that the “Capturable today” column was the “100x” column just a year or two ago.

Now, it’s the “1.2x” column and the “agentic AI workflow” is the “current frontier” where a 2x productivity improvement is supposedly possible. I suspect they’re only getting more modest because the new 20x is, of course, the next thing they’re selling. That is, if you’re already using the current frontier, then you’re still doing it wrong. Even though you’ve already changed your software-development process twice in 2-3 years, you’re still behind.

Man, it’s hard to imagine we’ll be able to do it alone. I wonder who could help us? OMG I bet it’s McKinsey! We should engage their services so that we don’t miss the boat again.

“The role of humans is to declare high-level intent and boundaries, evaluate outputs, and react to agentic decisions and suggestions. This change is leading to smaller teams, much lower unit costs for software development, and much faster idea-to-impact cycle times.”

Yes, the goal is to remove the cost and leverage that software-development has gained over the years. Engineers cost a lot of money, and we’d like to have as few of them as possible. The problem is that “declaring high-level intent”, “evaluating outputs”, and “reacting to decisions” (i.e., “reviewing”) are the hard part that takes a lot of time. Programming “intent” doesn’t take that much time. It’s actually quite efficient already.

My gut feeling is that,

Level 1 (no AI)

Very few developers are on level 1. Even at that level, we drastically underestimate the power of declarative non-AI tools that don’t make mistakes. That is, developers could be made much more efficient (2-3x) if they’d make more use of non-AI tools that are available to them, and use practices that accelerate programming and reduce the developer-feedback loop. No-one likes to talk about this because there’s nothing to sell here. The tools are commoditized, well-known, and non-mysterious, and it involves people learning things and changing how they work. That’s a non-starter, so how about we sell AI as the revolution that will solve all of the problems we’ve never solved before? It won’t work this time any more than it worked the last few times—because there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch—but at least some of the best people in the world can make a lot of money.

Level 2 (assistance)

Many developers are on level 2 . This is great but, as noted above, these developers would benefit just as much from learning how to use non-AI tools that they’ve had for years. They still need to know best practices (proper design and automated testing).

Level 3 (plans & workflow)

Probably more than we think are on level 3. Here, the pitch is that we don’t have to know how to design because the AI does the design. We also can generate tests with AI, or we leave it up to the AI to decide how much to test. At this level, the review burden is massive, and much more likely to be ignored (technical debt and risk).

Level 4

Level 4 is extremely cutting-edge, very frothy, and largely not applicable for most companies or departments. The industry wants everyone to feel that they’re missing out if they’re not helping trillionaire companies alpha-test their software. I would advise extreme caution here. The tools change every month, if not week. That’s not a place I’d recommend for most companies. You can experiment with prototypes and throwaway scripts, data-mining projects, or other more ephemeral software where maintenance isn’t an issue.

“We found that a small group of top performers—roughly the top quintile—are achieving 16–30 percent improvements in productivity, time to market, and customer experience, along with 31–45 percent gains in software quality.”

I call bullshit or cherry-picking or both here. Software is not gaining in quality. McKinsey’s very biased study (their interest is going to bias any study they do) is belied by dozens, if not hundreds of other meta-studies (e.g., from Microsoft), which should that quality has deeply degraded over the last few years. There’s a lot more code, with a lot more bugs.

This is an excerpt from a book. It is a tragedy that this is a book. It is a tragedy for humanity that McKinsey has so much influence over those who influence how society runs. But, of course, they just tell those people what they want to hear: you can finally get rid of all of those non-management people who were always so hard to manage, impossible to understand, and who were paid far too much money that could have been better returned to shareholders. The AI wave is highly attractive in that it’s a cudgel you can use to cow an expensive, and historically intransigent, inscrutable, but indispensable workforce into submitting to the lash.

“By morning, the factory has produced a set of ready-for-review pull requests, each containing code, tests, logs, analysis results, and a natural-language rationale.”

Ah, the dream. This is not the reality, though. Nor can it realistically be. What will happen is that whatever the agents build becomes your product. If it doesn’t work, no-one has time to fix it. You’ll either muddle through, with a technical-debt burden increasing far, far faster than it ever did before, or you’ll run into a wall that the AIs cannot get around. This happens all the time but, somehow and mysteriously, is never mentioned iņ books like this. Also, AIs still make a lot of mistakes.

For those two reasons, letting them “run all night” is a pipe dream sold by companies that are deep in the red and are desperately seeking a silver bullet fueled by your company’s money. They will either spin their wheels all night, burning millions of tokens that your company pays for, which is preferable to burning those same tokens producing tons of output in the wrong direction. All of that needs to be reviewed and adjusted.

Have we not learned that it’s better to work in bite-sized chunks? Now that the worker is “free” (hahahahah, it costs so much in tokens and will cost much more in the future), we believe the myth that you can “one-shot” your software in an all-night binge?

“In this model, software development becomes a continuous, high-speed loop rather than a two-week sprint cycle.”

Awesome. Note how there is no longer a need for a retro. The retro is the most-ignored and most-valuable part of the agile process. These glorious middle managers have finally managed to elide it with technology. As soon as you replace your messy meat-bags with digital agents, you also no longer need to waste any time on reflection.

“If you ask us, this is absolutely incredible.”

I agree. It is literally incredible. As in “not believable.”

You know why? Because it all relies on this extremely difficult and time-consuming piece that is only mentioned in a “by the way”-style bullet point near the end.

“Strengthen human judgment and review skills. Humans become the editors-in-chief of the factory. They must review proposed updates, catch architectural drift, assess whether the agent’s work matches intent, and decide when to tighten guardrails or adjust tests. This combination of product judgment, architectural understanding, and quality review remains fully human.”

The tool that relies on a strengthened human judgment and review skill is also constantly undermining those capabilities. This will not end well. It will barely get started.

Another bullet point? “Monitor token consumption closely.” Ok. Will do. And then what? What if your token costs spiral exponentially, but your productivity doesn’t? McKinsey won’t care. They already got paid. The AI companies won’t care. You know who’ll get blamed: you. You’re the problem because you’re not using the tools correctly. You’re prompting it wrong. It’s your fault if you fail to generate productivity and 10x value from the tools. There are no guarantees and no SLAs. These tools cost more than anything else we use and they have far fewer guarantees.

If a deterministic software-tool fails—e.g., JetBrains bungles a solution-wide refactoring—then I can file a bug report. If there’s not bug, then I barely need to look at the changes. How can I find out if Claude failed? I have to check every line in hundreds of files because I won’t know whether it might have colored outside the lines. If I do find something, what can I do? Redo the whole refactoring with a “better prompt” and hope for the best? Or should I just fix that spot and check the rest?

Have I really saved time in the end? The only way to save time with these tools is to stop checking their work. That’s the only thing that’s being sold to us. But they’ll never put it like that. The 20x solution McKinsey outlines is to have agents generate code, check it themselves, write tests for it, then dump a giant PR on you in the morning.

Since it’s a generated PR, you can’t actually add comments because what’s the point? The agent isn’t going to learn anything for the next time. When you comment on a human PR, there’s the hope that there’s some sort of learning effect and exchange.

Your only recourse will be … what? Can you use fewer tokens? Can you go back to working with less AI? Or have you already buried it all so deeply into your processes that you’re captured and you know have a new, expensive, metered utility to pay that doesn’t benefit from heavy regulation (e.g., water, electricity, etc.)?

When you utterly fail to check that work but are absolutely not allowed to throw it away because your management expects 20x productivity boosts, you’re going to punt on it, wave through the PR, and let someone else deal with the fallout. You know, dipshits like testers, QA, supports, ops, whatever. It doesn’t matter because it’s not you, the 20x developer. You’re awesome now! Everyone else is the bottleneck, baby!

The Boy That Cried Mythos: Verification is Collapsing Trust in Anthropic by Davi Ottenheimer (flyingpenguin)

“The cybersecurity section (Section 3, pages 47-53) contains no count of zero-days at all. With no CVE list, no CVSS distribution, no severity bucket, no disclosure timeline, no vendor-confirmed-novel table, no false-positive rate, why are you teasing us with the claims about vulnerabilities at all?

“The “thousands” number lives in the red.anthropic.com launch blog post and the Project Glasswing announcement. The 244-page technical artifact, the thing that would have to survive peer review, refuses to actually quantify. And when you claim mass vulnerabilities that you also don’t quantify, that’s a big NO in trust. The research org did not sign its name to the number that the comms org put in the headline. That’s a BIG problem.”

“So here’s the big Firefox flaw demonstration that Anthropic gives us to work with. Right away it collapses. I mean like I can’t believe this went to print. The test (Section 3.3.3, pages 50-52) was not Firefox. That’s nice. Right off the bat. The Firefox test is not Firefox. It’s a SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine shell in a container, with “a testing harness mimicking a Firefox 147 content process, but without the browser’s process sandbox and other defense-in-depth mitigations.” (page 50)

“There were 50 crash categories pre-discovered by Claude Opus 4.6. Mythos did not find these bugs. Ok, now it’s getting even more awkward. Not Firefox. Not found by Mythos. The bugs were handed off as starter material.”

“The 72% headline number floating around has two lucky primitives. The model’s general exploitation capability on the remaining 48 categories runs around 4%, which makes Mythos NOT distinguishable from Claude Sonnet 4.6 within any reasonable confidence interval.”

1. Not vulnerability discovery because the bugs were handed to it.
2. Not triage because Sonnet 4.6 identifies the same candidates.
3. Only mechanical follow-through on exploit-primitive coding, which is a skill for which CTF pwn teams have had libraries (angr, ROPgadget, pwntools, BROP frameworks) for a decade.

“The flagship demonstration of “unprecedented cyber capability” is in fact a model that weaponized two bugs that a different Anthropic model had already found, in software Mozilla had already patched, in a harness with the actual defenses turned off, where the “triage” step it performed is also performed by its predecessor.”

“Anthropic is paying partners, in kind, to use the thing Anthropic wants them to endorse. This is not a defensive investment. It is a reverse sales pitch — the vendor subsidizing the customer to generate validation the vendor can then cite, because so far, there ain’t nothing to bank on.”

“No comparison baseline to existing tooling. The words fuzzer, AFL, libFuzzer, AFL++, honggfuzz, OSS-Fuzz, Semgrep, and CodeQL do not appear anywhere in the 244-page document. In a 2026 cybersecurity capability document. This is an especially annoying omission. It is the difference between “we just discovered vulnerability research exists and want to change everything” and “we know what’s out there so we benchmarked our tool against the state of the art.””

“No open-source evaluation harness. Nothing is reproducible by a third party using Anthropic’s own tooling.

“No named external testers for Section 3. The document says “external partners” in the cyber section without identifying them.

“No independent replication. Everything in Section 3 is Anthropic evaluating Anthropic with Anthropic-built harnesses. The one attempted external reproduction (AISLE) found the capability on a 3.6B open-weights model for eleven cents.

“A CVE disclosure report from any serious lab — Project Zero, Talos, ZDI, any academic group — looks nothing like this. It has named testers, version numbers, reproduction steps, timestamps, artifact hashes, and vendor sign-off.”

“Anthropic ignores twenty years of security domain expertise and treats “finding vulnerabilities faster” as self-evidently dangerous. This framing ignores fuzzing completely, but more fundamentally it shows the company lacks basic expertise in security.”

They are lying to boost their reputation. They are not serious about anything but boosting reputation. They are not serious about engineering. Why should we believe claims about the efficacy of their other tools? This is particularly egregious and should make them a laughing stock. Instead, I will get the next McKinsey article mailed to by Monday asking whether we’re using AI enough.

“OSS-Fuzz crossed 10,000 vulnerabilities years ago. It finds roughly 4,000 issues per quarter across thousands of projects.

“libFuzzer and AFL++ have been producing crash corpora at industrial scale since 2016.

“Not only did they fail to mention the concept of a fuzzer in more than 200 pages about fuzzing, they left out mentions of AFL, libFuzzer, OSS-Fuzz, Semgrep, or CodeQL. There is no comparison baseline to any existing automated tool anywhere.

“And we all know the discovery rate has not been the constraint on vulnerability management for a decade. The constraint is triage, prioritization, patching velocity, and coordinated disclosure. Exploitability? Relevance? A tool that accelerates discovery without accelerating remediation grows the backlog; it does not shift the threat model.”

This is exactly the same thing they’re doing for software-development. Exactly the same.

“They get a seat at the table of a body that now decides, on a rolling basis, which vulnerabilities are too dangerous for the public to know about.

“That is not a safety posture. It’s regulatory capture dressed as restraint. And it is being constructed with no democratic input, in a legal vacuum, by a private company whose business model depends on selling access to the very capability it has declared too dangerous to release.

“[…] Someone running this campaign is trying to build exclusivity and moats, undermining transparency.”

On historical “boy crying wolf” moments:

“It was the first time a US executive action pulled civilian computing under national-security agency oversight. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 followed from the same reaction window. The actual harm from the 414s was negligible. The statutory and executive response was permanent, and it expanded NSA authority into civilian systems in a way that remains in force today.”

“ The US government’s financial, monetary, and international economic leadership have been fully captured by the narrative in under a week, on the basis of a 244-page document whose cybersecurity claims collapse under a careful afternoon read.

“The institutional pipeline is off to the races already. Six days after launch, CSA, SANS, and OWASP published a 29-page “Mythos-ready” emergency briefing with Bruce Schneier, Jen Easterly, Chris Inglis, Heather Adkins, and Rob Joyce as contributing authors. It goes extra heavy on crediting a lot of people, including 250 CISOs. I’m not sure why, especially given the obnoxious mistakes.

“The paper repeats “thousands of critical vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser” as settled fact on page 8, repeats the “181 working exploits” and “72% exploit success rate” on page 9, and builds a 90-day emergency program on top of both. It never mentions the collapse to 4.4% when two bugs are removed. It never mentions AISLE’s reproduction on a 3.6B model for eleven cents. It never mentions that the system card’s own cyber ranges section admits the model fails against patched, defended targets.

“Its own page 10 concedes that comparable capabilities may appear in open-weight models “within six months to a year,” a timeline AISLE made obsolete in six days.”

“This is the FUD genre.

“It has a recognizable shape: a legitimate technological capability, reframed as civilizational threat, by a party that benefits from the reframing, in a rhetorical register that borrows from national security so that skeptics can be dismissed as naive. Anthropic did not invent this move. They are running a well-documented play, and running it faster than any previous instance on record.”

“The most important thing in the Mythos release is not the model. It is the precedent. Anthropic has established, without discussion and without pushback, that a private company can unilaterally classify a capability as too dangerous for the public, grant selective access to the largest incumbents in the affected industry, and construct a parallel disclosure regime outside any democratic accountability structure. That precedent is exclusivity for abuse. It will be used by companies with worse judgment than Anthropic and narrower definitions of “partner” than the Glasswing consortium. The time to object to the shape of this thing is while it is still being built, not after it has removed all transparency and accountability.”

He further wrote in answer to a commentator who (pretty clearly) didn’t read his post,

“ I never said Mythos doesn’t have improvements. The problem is “real step forward” is not even close to saying “too dangerous to release”. My whole point is the spread, that “unprecedented civilizational threat requiring a private classification regime and 5x pricing” is VERY far from the truth of an “incremental improvement on undefended targets”.

“Every model release is a step forward, almost by definition. The AISI evaluation does NOT show a model that justifies Glasswing, the withholding, the pricing, or the headlines. AISI’s own words are damning: “we cannot say for sure whether Mythos Preview would be able to attack well-defended systems.” That is section 7 of my post, which I feel like you didn’t read: Mythos needs defenses to be absent because it loses where they show up. Mythos scored a 30% completion rate on undefended networks, and it could not complete the OT-focused range.

“I’m reading the full documents and finding that the evidence contradicts the headlines. That’s due diligence, quite the opposite to the cherry pickers in this whole situation. Anthropic is the one who put 72.4% in the blog and 4.4% on page 52.”

🎤💧

I Will Never Respect A Website by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“You’ll notice that most AI boosters have some sort of bizarre, overly-complicated way of explaining how they use AI. They spin up “multiple agents” (chatbots) that each have their own “skills document” (a text document) and connect “harnesses” (python scripts, text files that tell it what to do, a search engine, an API) that “let it run agentic workflows” (query various tools to get an outcome.”

“The so-called “agentic AI” that is supposedly powerful and autonomous is actually incredibly demanding of its human users — you must set it up in so many different ways and connect it to so many different services and check that every “agent” (different chatbot) is instructed in exactly the right way, and that none of these agents cause any problems (they will) with each other. Oh, don’t forget to set certain ones to “high-thinking” for certain tasks and make sure that other tasks that are “easier” are given to cheaper models, and make sure that those models are prompted as necessary so they don’t burn tokens.”

Programming

Surelock by Brooke (Monad Nomad)

“Surelock is built around a physical-world analogy: to interact with locks, you need a key. in our case, we’re going to keep that key while the mutex is in use. You only get that key back when you unlock it.

“We call this a MutexKey — a linear3 scope token. You get one when you enter a locking scope. When you call .lock(), the key is consumed and a new one is returned alongside the guard. The new key carries a type-level record of what you’ve already locked, so the compiler knows what you’re still allowed to acquire. Try to go backwards and the code doesn’t compile.

“💡 This is the core trick: by making the key a move-only value that threads through every acquisition, we get a compile-time witness of the current lock state. No global analysis, no runtime tracking — just the type checker doing what it does best.

“This analogy only goes so far: MutexKey actually grants you the ability to lock multiple mutexes together atomically. Locks in surelock may be grouped into levels to enable incremental acquisition, and locking returns an attenuated key that can lock fewer levels.”

“Deadlocks are a solved problem in theory — we’ve known how to prevent them since 1971. The challenge is making that prevention ergonomic enough that people actually use it. Surelock is my attempt at that: lean into Rust’s type system to make the correct thing the easy thing, and make the wrong thing a compiler error.”

Effect Without Effect-TS: Algebraic Thinking in Plain TypeScript by Christian Ekrem

“Read the signature: signupUser(deps: SignupDeps, email: string, password: string): Promise<Result<User, SignupError>>. That’s the whole story. What it needs, what it takes, what it returns, how it can fail. No ambient imports, no hidden capabilities. If you read that line and nothing else, you know what this function does.”