The idea here is to catch things of interest as they stream by.
Some are Outrages of the Day, some are nuggets and threads
to be woven into one's own macramé.
Mapping in time (mental stratigraphy of encounter)
and Space (the geography of tempting rabbit holes...)
and healthy doses of YCMTSU and KFTF
...and it's partly keeping a record of unprecedented times.
1ii25
Millions Flee War, Floods, and Persecution Maps Mania
Karine Polwart's amazing song about Trump and his Scottish roots, "I Burn But I Am Not Consumed" Hobbledehoy
Where Do We Go? Here? There? Everywhere! Alan Levine
Download everything and keep it safe in a clay jar Bruce Sterling
"I Didn't Hear my Other Children Screaming:" A Family's Horrific Losses in Gaza Belkis Wille at Informed Comment
The growing Influence of Israel's Ultranationalist Settler Movement Informed Comment
Checklist for federal data backups Flowing Data and MIT Libraries
Nature Through Microscope and Camera (1909) The Public Domain Review
Patterns, Facts, and AI Stephen Downes
The Most Important Time in History Is Now Tomas Pueyo at Medium
Keywords at pitt.edu
Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World Marginalian
The dispensable nation John Quiggen at Crooked Timber
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California Fires Expose a $1 Trillion Hole in US Home Insurance Bloomberg
Cut-up technique Wikipedia
A Human Among Humans The photographer Larry Fink never saw social events as a disposable theme. For him, they were life itself. Lucy Sante at NYRB
There is an exit Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber
Captain Clock Lewis H Lapham
How To Install And Use DeepSeek R-1 In Your Local PC Jim Clyde Monge ast Medium
DeepSeek Is Chinese But Its AI Models Are From Another Planet OpenAI and the US are in deep trouble Alberto Romero at Medium
Discovery of a unique drainage and irrigation system that gave way to the 'Neolithic Revolution' in the Amazon ScienceDaily
3ii25
Synchronized Street View Tours via Maps Mania
Tribble Trouble at A Way With Words (mp3)
'fraudbot' at Cambridge Dictionary's About Words
Adam's Heart Surgery Tesam Hannah Forsyth at Crooked Timber ... and see The M in PMC for more
Mapped: The Top Import Partner of Every U.S. State
Are we All Hungarians now, or Palestinians? Trump's Onslaught on the Rule of Law and Civil Liberties H Scott Prosterman at Informed Comment
Nifty Simple Web Archive Tool Alan Levine
"The Lion has Fallen:" The End of Syria's Brutal Regime and the Fate of the Refugees Tomdispatch at Informed Comment
About 8,000 U.S. government pages taken down Flowing Data
How Donald Trump Is Transforming Executive Power New Yorker
Defining Life with Aristotle Small Things Considered
Why This Mysterious Painting Still Has Experts Debating After 500 Years Christopher P Jones at Medium
Unelected Billionaire Elon Musk Is Shutting Down the Government Agency USAID gizmodo
President Trump "agrees" with shutting down the USAID agency boing boing
Sincerity Victor Mair at Language Log
colleagues ...asked me if Chinese had a different understanding of sincerity that permitted / encouraged them to do so. "Sincerity" is so front and center in Chinese negotiations with other nations that one soon comes to realize, if you want smooth relations with the PRC, you must needs demonstrate to the Chinese representatives that you are utterly sincere, i.e., that you are willing to do exactly what they want you to do. Anything less opens you to the charge of being insincere.
Stunning Subjectivity: Obsessive Typographic Maps by Paula Scher The Marginalian
A Day's Delay in Government Funding Can Scramble Lifesaving Medical Research gizmodo
Move fast and break things: Acting deliberately to destroy the nation The Hobbledehoy
Health and climate data purge Flowing Data
Pestka at Conscientious Photography Magazine
...In those photographs, I noticed a lot of seeing, a lot of different ways in which this young woman dealt with seeing and being seen. The innocence of looking (by which I mean a child's not knowing that in social contexts, you can never just innocently look at something or someone) is slowly replaced by an awareness of the power of looking.
A Mother and Daughter's Joint Becoming
Magdalena Wywrot's moody series "Pestka captures eleven years in the life that she made with her only child, Barbara.
Massive alien face spotted in Antarctica snow Allan Rose Hill at boing boing
The 60-Year History of Digital Image Sensors As Told By Those Involved Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel
Historic Landslide Complex Near L.A. Is Moving Faster and Growing gizmodo
The Palos Verdes Peninsula is sliding by much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) per week, putting hundreds of buildings at risk....The landslide complex has been active for at least the past 60 years, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The expansion of the complex's footprint follows record-breaking rains in the area in 2023 and early 2024. Those same rains counterintuitively contributed to the ongoing devastating Los Angeles wildfires, which fed on the voluminous foliage that flourished in the rains and was parched by subsequent droughts.
What Game Are We Playing? danah boyd
Jenga Politics.Think about the wooden puzzle known as Jenga, where a tower is made out of criss-crossed wooden blocks. Players are asked to take out pieces of the wooden puzzle from the structure and then place their piece on top, increasing the pressure of gravity on the structure. The goal of the game is get your opponent to take the blame for making the entire system fall.For years now, this has been my description of the administrative state as we've known it. Conservatives primarily take pieces out of the tower while liberals primarily add new blocks to the top. But all have a habit of removing blocks and adding pressures in certain circumstances. Meanwhile, both well-intended advocates and malfeasant ones mess with the blocks along the way.
The role of the civil servants play in the game of Jenga Politics has been to run around with duct tape in an exhausting effort to try to repair the tower before it all topples over...
...My only hope at this point is that the blocks still exist when we get to the other side of this so that a new tower can be built. In reality, I'm concerned that we're about to watch as kindling is brought in to ensure that the existing blocks are turned into ash.
...The tech industry loves hockey sticks. Late stage capitalism is not simply about linear growth, but exponential growth. Faster, faster, faster. After all, financialized instruments depend on return-on-investment, not just profit. And so we've seen countless businesses drive towards sharper and sharper hockey sticks in pursuit of their unicorn dreams...
...The end can also be elongated through what we might call corruption. Twitter had been experiencing a long, slow decline for years before Elon Musk took over the company. His actions sped up the collapse, as though he was aiming for failure. As users and advertisers rushed out of the platform, Musk took to blaming everyone but himself. And then he started suing anyone he could think of. Now it appears that he's gone one step further by making his platform the only place to ask questions and learn about certain kinds of government updates...
...Trump is all about spectacle. But all around him are gamers. And not just any gamers — gamers who are happy to destroy their opponents at any costs, regardless of the societal consequences. Gamers who see such destruction as a source of their power, rooted in their visions of masculinity. Gaming has long been entangled with masculinity, even before there were video games. Sports, gambling, and the stock market are all gaming practices known for expressions of masculinity. Gaming in the context of computing offered an alternative form of masculinity, one that was deeply empowering to so many geeks... But these guys aren't just any gamers. They're trolls who sharpened their claws during #GamerGate. Their version of gaming took on a toxic and abusive form long ago, one seeped in aggression and hate...
...War, politics, and financial markets are often viewed as games that attract all sorts of problematic behavior. The very idea of a society is to create rules and guardrails, checks and balances. But gaming logic has always been about pushing those edges, exploiting the gaps, and finding the secret passageways. For decades, we've struggled to contain war mongers, corrupt politicians, and fraudulent scammers, although we've had mixed success. But this crew of gamers is playing a different game. And so we are going to need a whole new strategy for containing their destructive tendencies.
...To make matters more complicated, there's not just one game at play right now. Different actors in this melange are playing at different games. There are divergent ideas of what the "win" state is. And this has led people to be very confused about what's happening. Is this about financial gain? Is this about power? Is this about a particular vision of the future? Or is this just downright fuckery because you can.
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Corruption, Tariffs, and US Renewal Eric Schliesser at Crooked Timber
This week-end's abrupt attempt, through pre-emptive tariff changes, to reshape the global environment to new political reality is the beginning of the test to what degree the US can ignore the reactions of the rest of the world (and stack the deck toward a certain kind of new, Mercantile regime) as its struggles internally over its future. Your guess is as good as mine in these matters, but I strongly suspect that none of the rules of thumb and maxims about how the world really works that policymakers, commentators, global businesses, NGOs, and academics have relied upon for, say, the last thirty to sixty years, are going to be very robust.
Crystalline Multiverse Andy Ilachinski
The Great Indian Head Shake Sandeep Sreedharan at Medium
OnlyFans, Sophie Rain and the media's parasociality vortex Nick Hilton at Medium
The perseverance of a 'harmless drudge Trinity Hall Cambridge
..."Dull, adjective: Not exhilarating; not delightful: as, to make dictionaries is dull work". The book, Johnson sums up self-pityingly at the end of his preface, 'was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amid inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow ... I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.'
The Power of Naming Victor Mair at Language Log *****
...information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: "Shannon's information theory." In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data-communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as "information theory." The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century...As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.
Ramekin via Sesquiotica
Radar Trends to Watch: February 2025 O'Reilly
37 years of Life photos from time.com
The game theory of Trump's tariff threats Nate Silver
...I find President Trump's bullying of Canada and Mexico with tariff policy unseemly....The game theory says that because the US economy has so much more leverage, he should be able to extract some minor concessions from Canada and Mexico by threatening a trade war. He doesn't necessarily want a trade war, but he's betting his bluff won't be called — and he'll usually be right. And that's basically what happened in Round 1. We threatened tariffs, and because Trump's threats are fairly credible for reasons ranging from his ideological commitments to his reputation as a rogue actor, Canada and Mexico capitulated.
But this will likely build up a lot of resentment — nothing creates resentment like capitulating to bullies — and a lot more Leeroy Jenkins energy from our neighbors in the future. If Trump expects to extract some new form of tribute from Canada and Mexico every month in exchange for delaying tariffs, their leaders are eventually going to say fuck you — or their populace is going to elect new leaders. Wall Street might have been pleased by how the situation played out. But it should probably have sold off more when Trump pledged to implement the tariffs in the first place. This was a highly escalatory move with the potential to go badly next time we play the game.
High-yield rice breed emits up to 70% less methane ScienceDaily
Cosmohedron: A cosmic shape could explain the fundamental nature of the universe New Scientist
...The researchers have been exploring similar shapes that fit into a kind of family tree of fundamental mathematical objects. For example, shapes called associahedra encode the way particles may collide with, or scatter off, each other — without having to use equations that involve space and time....The transformation from an associahedron into a cosmohedron is both surprisingly simple and incredibly powerful. It involves shaving each of the shape's edges to create new surfaces, adding extra parameters into the formulas that correspond to associahedra and endowing them with more meaning. Specifically, by turning a given associahedron into a cosmohedron and then studying the this more complex shape, the researchers could reconstruct a quantum mechanical wavefunction — the formula that summarises all properties and possible behaviours of a quantum object.
Trump's Trade War Is Only Getting Going John Cassidy at New Yorker
...since his Inauguration, Trump has made clear that he plans to upend the international trade system and assert U.S. economic power in ways that are fundamentally antithetical to how the world economy has been organized since after the Second World War......Canada is not a major source of the fentanyl killing Americans, and the real reason for Trump's animus toward the country appears to be that it runs a trade surplus with the United States and that its leader hasn't been sufficiently deferential to him.
Over the weekend, Trump claimed on his Truth Social account, "We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason." And on Monday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he repeated his assertion that Canada should become the fifty-first state. Of course, the United States doesn't spend a dollar to subsidize Canada...
...Over the weekend, Irving Energy, a Canadian company that supplies propane to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, warned that it would pass the levies on to its customers. That's what happens in trade wars.
...As many big U.S. firms, including Apple, Intel, and Tesla, remain heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains, the government in Beijing has the capacity to inflict a great deal more hurt on the U.S. economy, but its measured response signalled it is open to negotiations, and some of Trump's business allies may well be advising him to exercise caution. In the meantime, he is busy bullying the vulnerable and figuring out how far he can take things without creating a financial crash.
Swear at Google Until It Hides AI Search Results Lifehacker
Are you tired of the annoying "AI overview" at the top of your search results? Turns out you can get rid of it by starting your search with the word "fuck." The trick spread thanks to a now-viral thread on Tumblr and it works wonders. I've been trying it out all morning: the AI disappears but the results are otherwise more-or-less the same.
The 'Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly' of the United States Government Elon Musk's bureaucratic coup is under way. Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic
Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup......This is called "flooding the zone." Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk's political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world's richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies...
...Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates.
...As the political scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, "The fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution."
...The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk's personal political weapon.
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation and An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them The Marginalian
The End of Programming as We Know It Tim O'Reilly
Dolní Věstonice Portrait Head: The oldest known human portrait in the world Live Science
5ii25
...after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. "will take over the Gaza Strip," and suggested sending troops to make that happen. "We'll own it," he said. "We're going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of." It could become "the Riviera of the Middle East," he said.Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan "deranged" and "nuts." Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was "speechless," adding: "That's insane." While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, "Let's turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago," Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were "a few kinks in that slinky," a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.
Ethnic Cleansing for "Gaza's Riviera"? A Secret Israeli Memo and Trump's Plan to Displace 2.3 million Palestinians Dan Steinbock at Informed Comment
Bonobos can tell when they know something you don't New Scientist
Bonobos are quick to help a person who doesn't know what they know, a sign that they can think about what others are thinking. Being able to deduce the mental states of others, known as the theory of mind, is an essential skill that allows humans — and perhaps these primates — to navigate their social worlds.
USPS will no longer accept packages from China and Hong Kong Boing Boing
The Greenland Ice Sheet is falling Apart at Informed Comment
The Mass Deportation Handoff, Biden to Trump: And the Booming Border-Industrial Complex TomDispatch at Informed Comment
It didn't take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump's reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. "We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement," explained the GEO Group's executive chair, George Zoley, "and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals." In other words, the "largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history" was going to be a moneymaker.
Geographic boundary data and microdata from Census Bureau is offline Flowing Data
Download CDC data through Internet Archive Flowing Data
Before Etsy Fell Victim to the Algorithm, There Was Community Abby Paradis at Medium
...Tech platforms foster weird, fragile communities early on — until they grow big enough that they develop hyperpersonalized algorithms and community erodes as a result.
The Ridiculous Saviours of Our Culture Yeah, we're screwed Matthew at Medium
...So sadly, there are no saviours, because the voices that rise to the top of this world we have made are not the reflections of the values that matter to us but the scum that floats to the top of the cooking vat of the attention economy. If salvation is to be found, it must lie in a reshaping of the entire way we relate to one another.
Political Lessons from an Underwhelming Stone National myths & my visit to Plymouth Rock M. Cole Grady at Medium
...Nearly every word in that story has been spun into a convenient tale for the American national project; it's a story that echoes a single message: America has always been a haven for those escaping religious or social persecution, a home for anyone who wants to live up to their convictions. It's elegant, a clean line drawn from our past to our present and a justification for America's unwavering moral supremacy....A country of tolerance and love and inclusion: it's a wonderful idea. In our collective memory, one birthed through symbols like Plymouth Rock, it's easy to get lost in these ideals, that somehow this country has a soul and somehow that soul contains the very essence of liberty and tolerance and acceptance for all —that we cannot lose it.
It is indeed a tantalising myth that, whatever may come of our future, we can rest sound in our ethical fulcrum. As our past and our present show us, the national justification global and domestic cruelties, the now undeniable political success of neo-fascism, that is indeed not the case.
MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing Cory Doctorow
...Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"...pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements: Know Your Enemy: The Entrepreneurial Ethic
MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").
The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).
...MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate — it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.
In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.
...The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.
The List of Trump's Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF Matt Novak at gizmodo
here's the list
Nevermind the flood zone, focus on the coup The Hobbledehoy
Kape: the language rope that binds the people of a remote Indonesian island Victor Mair at Language Log
AGI Is Already Here—It's Just Not Evenly Distributed Or: why you should learn to prompt AI models Alberto Romero
Elon Musk Wants What He Can't Have: Wikipedia The Atlantic
Trump's Gaza Takeover Makes No Sense The Atlantic
Why do plants transport energy so efficiently and quickly? ScienceDaily
Enigmatic people who took over Europe millennia ago came from Ukraine New Scientist
Indoor cannabis farms in US use more energy than all other agriculture New Scientist
What the new field of women's neuroscience reveals about female brains New Scientist
Trump, an American Stalin? Massive Population Transfers were a Feature of Communist Dictatorship Juan Cole
A Hostile Corporate Takeover of our Democracy Informed Comment
Elon Musk is serving as a 'special government employee,' White House says CNN Politics
The SAVE Act Will Prevent One-Third of Women From Voting Carlyn Beccia at Medium
Meta Promises to Launch 'Half a Dozen' AI Wearables in 2025 gizmodo
Google Maps celebrates 20 years with 20 favorite features
Interesting how few have any relevance to me
Statista research department and content philosophy
Gen Z Has A Manchild Problem, And It's Scaring Everyone Ossiana Tepfenhart at Medium
While Elon Musk was showing off the competition pushed him out Billy Jones at Medium, on Tesla long-haul trucks
Landmark studies track source of Indo-European languages Harvard Gazette
Elon Musk Says DOGE Will Make 'Rapid Safety Upgrades' on Air Traffic Control gizmodo
Eggs lower heart disease death risk by 27%, new research shows boing boing
New Indo-European genetic evidence Mark Liberman at Language Log
What Makes an AI personal? Doc Searls
Cybertruck meets the "Cybercock test"
Chaos Monkey github
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Antonio Garcia Martinez 2016
Academia: What They Are About To Take From You? Timothy Burke
Musk Shows Us What Actual Government Censorship On Social Media Looks Like Techdirt
Yes: This Is Worth Signing: Economists Who Are Neither Bought Nor Crazy Oppose Broad-Based Tariffs Brad DeLong
...The primary argument for the implementation of broad-based tariffs is that they will reverse the hollowing out of American manufacturing and reduce the trade deficit, which is causing a "hemorrhaging of America's lifeblood." Contrary to the repeated claim, there has been no hollowing out of American manufacturing. Industrial production in the U.S. is at an all-time high. The U.S. is producing 2.5 times as much real industrial output as it did when we last ran a trade surplus in 1975. We are producing that record output with the smallest percentage of the labor force involved in manufacturing since America became fully industrialized. The percentage of the civilian nonfarm labor force employed in manufacturing peaked during World War II and has been in secular decline ever since. This has been a great success for productivity and not a failure of trade, as today's full employment attests.
Google Lifts Self-Imposed Ban on Using AI for Weapons and Surveillance gizmodo
Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy Economics from the Top Down
As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders Ars Technica
You Cant Post Your Way Out of Fascism
Elon Musk's DOGE Is Running Highly Sensitive Government Data Through AI gizmodo
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The perfect boiled egg takes more than half an hour to cook New Scientist
Facing the Rise of Fascism Like Fools for Freedom Rebecca Gordon at Informed Comment
Flooding the Zone
The list of Trump's post-election actions is its own kind of litany — not of benediction, of course, but of horror. Like the Great Litany, it, too, leaps from topic to topic. To name just a few:Any one of those actions would have been sufficient to fuel a whole news cycle on its own. But that's now inconceivable because before we, or the media, can focus on one Trump absurdity, another takes its place in the battle for our attention. To wit: in the last 15 minutes (while I was writing this), the Washington Post reported that Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ordered a freeze on all federal grants, "including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal." And now, in a head-snapping twist, the OMB seems to have rescinded the order — for the moment.
- The nominations to positions of power of the manifestly unfit (remember Matt Gaetz, the ethically-challenged), or the frankly vicious (Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer), or indeed of candidates combining both qualities (Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabard).
- A spate of executive comments, orders, or presidential decrees displaying an imperial greed for territory that would have seemed like so many jokes just a few weeks ago. (Watch out, Panama, Canada, and Greenland!)
- The fulfillment of the Israeli fascist right-wing's dearest desire: a proposal to cleanse Gaza of its more than two million Palestinian inhabitants, in order to make way for the development of what Trump has labeled "a phenomenal location," where "some beautiful things can be done."
- First steps in keeping his vow to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States, including a Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operation, which included an "embedded" Dr. Phil — further proof, should we need it, that the strategy is to enforce the authority of any decree, no matter how bizarre.
- Elon Musk's seizure of access to the records of all federal employees and control of the Treasury Department's disbursement process
These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury Other Sides of a Nobody
Archiving effort to preserve Data.gov Flowing Data
Spiritual Nature Andy Ilachinski (quotes Emerson)
Controversial Philip Guston Mural Unveiled in Mexico After Major Restoration Other Sides of a Nobody
Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification We've got the wrong kind of middlemen. Cory Doctorow
The Internet Has Failed Us Culturally Instead of democratising culture, the internet has destroyed it. Where did it all go so wrong? Matthew at Medium
How did this happen? How did the internet, the place that promised us broad sunlit uplands of a culture freed from gatekeepers and so democratic and free, engender a culture stiflingly banal and entirely empty of novelty? How is it instead of music and cinema flourishing in a lively mainstream full of novelty and variety, the musical world has been listlessly dominated by the Eras tour and Sabrina Carpenter, the television world by mediocre boxsets ripping off classics for money and yet more Superman movies?Culture has always functioned like a filter. In the same way that humans themselves filter the necessary information out of the white noise of reality outside, culture is a processes of selection and elision, the end result of which is the literature, music, poetry and art that reflects back to us something like what we are. Culture is and has always been about identity, and its pleasures are in part pleasures of identification. I am this.
On Undermining the Administrative State Eric Schliesser at Crooked Timber
The last two weeks have seen a number of highly irregular practices develop Stateside since the creation of The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as controlled by Elon Musk, apparently the world's richest person. DOGE's own status within the government is highly unorthodox, and its practices thus far, too. There seems to be little regard for conflicts of interests (and a whole range of other concerns one might have).But DOGE's actions have immediately impacted the second and third of the functions I have mentioned above. When it comes to the three roles established above, a non-trivial number of websites have gone dark, government agencies appear to be closed down, and research halted, and even ended. In addition, some of the public provision of goods and witnessing of truth is being privatized for profit.
So, the second Trump administration is embarking on some dramatic actions that will destabilize existing conventions in and the known workings of the machinery of government and the state's witnessing of truth. Quite a few of DOGE's immediate targets are central to both functions (CDC, NSF, NOAA, etc.). To the best of my knowledge no group with such evident oligarchic tendencies has ever embarked on this road with such reckless abandon before. And whatever their motives, I am pretty confident that they have no idea what kind of intermediate effects they will generate.
Eoin Higgins' "Owned" is a harrowing history of the right-wing billionaire tech takeover
How Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics Quanta Magazine
Palantir's Billionaire CEO Just Can't Stop Talking About Killing People gizmodo
The Private Equity Hatchet Man Leading the Lost Boys of DOGE The American Prospect
The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk's merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets Cory Doctorow
...This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class — like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod...
...These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.
This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson — that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them — of course.
But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient...
We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government — of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does
Public and Private Life of Animals (1877) The Public Domain Review
Elon Musk's Enemy, USAID, Was Investigating Starlink's Contracts in Ukraine gizmodo
Musk Rats Hobbledehoy
An Accurate Organizational Chart of Your University McSweeney's Internet Tendency
DOGE Staffer Previously Fired From Cybersecurity Company for Leaking Secrets Matt Novak at gizmodo
Bullying as a mode of power Adam Tooze
Bullying involves the use of power to humiliate as well as to intimidate, hurt or coerce.Bullying is transgressive and excessive. It goes beyond conventional police, punishment or compellence and yet it is also less. It is less purposeful and instrumental than other forms of power. In the end, enacting repeated moments of humiliation may be an end in itself.
In a world of warlordism, bullying may be the normal modus operandi.
In a world of order, bullying can not persist unless it is tolerated, or it is authorized by other more stable and legitimate modes of power.
...The question in the case of the Trump Presidency is how much is instrumental and how much of the bullying is nothing more than that, an end in itself.
Elon Musk's Revolutionary Terror Susan Glasser at New Yorker
The evisceration of U.S.A.I.D. isn't a policy fight&mdash'it's an execution designed to strike fear in our own government......In its short existence, Musk's small occupying force has gained access to the entire U.S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world. Upcoming targets reportedly include everything from the Department of Education to the government weather-forecasting service and the U.S. aviation system. Federal employees were given a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept Musk's offer of a government-wide deferred-resignation "buyout."
..."Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World," he observed, and "that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that."
...The point is not a policy fight; it's an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others.
The Government's Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified The Atlantic
Elon Musk's unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control......Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk's campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running.
..."This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country's history—at least that's publicly known," one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. "You can't un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want."
...The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo.
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The Slow Suicide of the State of Israel Informed Comment
Gaza: We Analyzed a Year of Satellite Images to Map the Scale of Agricultural Destruction Informed Comment
The art of the Steal: Lawless sheriff Trump goes Rogue in Gaza
Shamash! The Transformation Informed Comment
Your coverage of this event has been completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience Other Sides of a Nobody
My Life with Left-Handed Women The New Yorker
Why Trump Is Targeting Foreign Aid, with Atul Gawande The New Yorker (podcast)
Elon Musk and Donald Trump Are Not Fixing U.S. Foreign Aid but Destroying It John Cassady at The New Yorker
iRabbit call centers Victor Mair at Language Log
Emergency Update Umair Haque at Medium
Oh, Tesla Is Doing So Much Worse Than I Thought Will Lockett at Medium
9 Bizarrely Awkward American Questions That Baffle the Rest of the World David Peluchette at Medium
Dinkscrump Linkdump Cory Doctorow
Fast Culture, Slow Change: The Paradox of Digital Society Giles Crouch at Medium
Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government Lawfare
Some species of baleen whales avoid attracting killer whales by singing too low to be heard ScienceDaily
Multinational research project shows how life on Earth can be measured from space ScienceDaily
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How to Achieve Immortality Ted Gioia
So it's ironic that the people who promote this vapidity are seeking immortality for themselves. I doubt they will find it. But they do have good reason to fear transience and oblivion&mdashbecause that's what they've staked their whole careers on.
Pacing and spacing Christopher Hobson at Substack
...the US and the internet / world is jumping 'right to ludicrous speed', increasingly lost in an ever-widening attention vortex. Our digital existence disintermediates and disorientates, trapping us in immediacy and reactivity.
...we are again in times in which there is a demand for difficult and deep thought, and yet our digitally mediated world largely works to impede and impair this from occurring. There is much to suggest that we are in conditions of genuine flux and transition, with the scope for agency being extremely unevenly distributed
The Sensation of the Mystical Andy Ilachinski quotes Einstein
Efficiency — or Empire? How Elon Musk's hostile Takeover could end Government as we know it Allison Stanger at Informed Comment
In his new role, Musk can oversee — and potentially dismantle — the government agencies that have traditionally constrained his businesses. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has repeatedly investigated Tesla's Autopilot system; the Securities and Exchange Commission has penalized Musk for market-moving tweets; environmental regulations have constrained SpaceX.
...But the most catastrophic aspect of Musk's leadership at DOGE is its unprecedented access to government data. DOGE employees reportedly have digital permission to see data in the U.S. government's payment system, which includes bank account information, Social Security numbers and income tax documents. Reportedly, they have also seized the ability to alter the system's software, data, transactions and records.
Multiple media reports indicate that Musk's staff have already made changes to the programs that process payments for Social Security beneficiaries and government contractors to make it easier to block payments and hide records of payments blocked, made or altered.
...funneling the data into Grok, Musk's xAI-created artificial intelligence system, which is already connected with the Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter, would create an unparalleled capability for predicting economic shifts, identifying government vulnerabilities and modeling voter behavior.
...Like Trump himself and many of his closest advisers, Musk is also deeply involved in cryptocurrency. The parallel emergence of Trump's own cryptocurrency and DOGE's apparent alignment with the cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin suggests more than coincidence. I believe it points to a coordinated strategy for control of America's money and economic policy, effectively placing the United States in entirely private hands.
...Who can effectively investigate a group designed to dismantle oversight itself? The administration's illegal firing of at least a dozen inspectors general before the Musk operation began suggests a deliberate strategy to eliminate government accountability. The Republican-led Congress, closely aligned with Trump, may not want to step in; but even if it did, Musk is moving far faster than Congress ever does.
The Empire Self-Destructs The Hobbledehoy
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire's diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
..."Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and 'Christian values' form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all," I noted in my book. "Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and 'homeland' security."
...Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don't do not.
When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba's admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds "democracy promotion" and "judicial reform" that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
Fire and Rain Doc Searls, quoting John McPhee
Insidious and Invidious Victor Mair at Language Log
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Cambridge Dictionary blog, "Commenting on developments in the English language"
A UK Skills Taxonomy Stephen Downes
Demonic Duo Trump and Musk Detonate a Blast Wave at US Foreign Aid, Harming Millions Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
Palestinians have long resisted Resettlement: Trump's Plan to 'Clean Out' Gaza won't Change that
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises: The Secret War within the Pentagon Michael T Klare at Informed Comment
Silicon Valley's DOGE project: The plan to replace democracy Ellsworth Toohey at boing boing
Roz Chast on George Booth's Cartoons New Yorker
A Centenary Cartoon Collection New Yorker
ChatGPT isn't hallucinating — it's bullshitting Mark Frauenfelder at boing boing
Symmetries Andy Fraser at Medium
Will AI Become a Cultural Mediator? Giles Crouch at Medium
A Teaching on Consciousness, or Your Life in an Age of Collapse Umair Haque at Medium
The Scientific Reformation is OverWhat now? Matthew at Medium
It is not the printing press, but social media that has played a significant role in the undermining of the authority of science in the public world. The missteps and over-claims of public scientists during the pandemic fed into the ability of everyone with an alternative narrative to curate an audience in the online sphere, and allowed significant counter beliefs to spread like wildfire, even as governments and social media authorities such as the then owners of Twitter and, as they have now admitted, Facebook, tried to silence them.
Your Fake Online Friends Have a 2,000-Year-Old History TNL.net
Where The Link Goes Therefore I Go (beyond) Alan Levine
Campus closures, mergers, cuts, and crises at the start of 2025 Bryan Alexander
Gary, Indiana, and the Long Shadow of U.S. Steel The New Yorker
Company gearing up to sell sunlight at night using orbiting mirrors boing boing
'In a real sense, US democracy has died' Guardian 7ii25
Elon Musk Offered to Buy OpenAI For an Absurd Amount of Money lifehacker
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Win
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Access previous versions of government websites with GovWayback flowing Data
Gretchen McCulloch — Internet Linguist
Acadia Archives Digital Collections
Make foreign aid great Matt Yglesias
...Much of what's been going on reminds me of the line from The Great Gatsby, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." Musk strikes me as the kind of person who is so focused on his amazing dreams for the long-term future that he simply cannot spare any consideration for actual human beings. We have food shipments stuck on American docks because no thought or planning went into any of this. There's no excuse for behaving this way.
The Second Trump Administration Takes Aim at the Climate Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker
Who is helping Elon Musk gut the US government? Guardian 8ii25
Multinational research project shows how life on Earth can be measured from space ScienceDaily
Jared Kushner Bets on a Trump Hotel with Emerati Billionaire in Belgrade... Bloomberg
'Rip their skin off': Montenegro's Pivot Alexander Clapp at LRB
Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit Cory Doctorow
The Unhinged Presidency David Cole at The New York Review of Books
I Regret to Inform You That a 19-Year-Old DOGE Stooge Named 'Big Balls' Is Now Advising the State Department Lucas Ropek at gizmodo
Why Blog If Nobody Reads It? via DStephen Downes
Outskirting Istanbul Part 1: Bakirköy Dumneazu
JD Vance Tells World to Shove It, US Won't Join International Treaty on AI
AJ Dellinger at gizmodo
Vance, seemingly defiantly, insisted that not only will America reject this international agreement, but it'll "ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American designed and manufactured chips." And while he said that America won't go at it alone, he also made clear that if the rest of the world wants to come along on that journey, the Trump administration will allow it—but only if they drop this whole "inclusive and sustainable" stuff.
Linguist Llama Mark Liberman at Language Log, and see also Know Your Meme and linguist llama language changes faster because internet at Sentence first, and review of
Internet Meme Database knowyourmeme.com
Know Your Meme Wikipedia
Category: Internet memes Wikipedia
The Meaning and History of Memes NYTimes
An Extremely Detailed Article on the Evolution of Internet Memes & Trends The Charger Account
Internet Memes and Desensitization Barbara Sanchez
The evolution of political memes: Detecting and characterizing internet memes with multi-modal deep learning ScienceDirect
Defining and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz (pdf)
Theorising the memescape: The spatial politics of Internet memes Review of International Studies at Cambridge Core
10 classic memes that owned the Internet CNN
What is 'Doge'? Explaining the meme after Trump appoints Elon Musk usatoday
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The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism The Guardian
The paradox of Trump's first weeks Matthew Yglesias
The DOGE hyper-focus on things like foreign aid and the Department of Education is kind of clever politics, but the cleverness lies precisely in its ability to provide cover for diminished aspirations in the face of these failures. Trump is many things, but he is most of all a showman, who's doing a good job of performing mastery rather than letting attention fall on the razor-thin GOP majority and their somewhat incoherent policy agenda.
The fact is, Republicans don't have a politically or economically viable path to creating the level of taxation that they want. Rather than try to reconcile themselves to that reality and come up with a more realistic fiscal agenda, they are lashing out at the pillars of the political system itself.
Dumpster fire Wikipedia
Urban Dictionary Wikipedia
Marco Rubio miserably sighs while Trump insists on "owning" Gaza Carla Sinclair at boing boing
Elon Musk's A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker
The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.
...Musk, with his position as a close Presidential adviser, and with office space in the White House complex, is uniquely and unprecedentedly poised to fuse the agendas of government and Silicon Valley.
A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk's program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk's special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology... the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself. Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.
...Ultimately, though, Musk's push for A.I. in government may be best understood as a marketing tactic for a technology that Silicon Valley sees as an investment too big to fail. A.I. is meant to be powerful enough to rule the world, so rule the world it must. In a recent blog post, Altman heralded artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical A.I. model that meets or exceeds human cognitive abilities, as "just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together."
The News: Apocalypse Now Timothy Burke at Substack
Those people are still with him today. To that assemblage he has now added a few more representatives of other extremist lineages, most notably Steve Bannon's "populists" and some advocates of Christian nationalist theocracy. And a new assemblage has added itself to Trumpism—or perhaps believes that it has added Trumpism to itself, namely the Big Tech billionaires club defined by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and associates. That this new assemblage is unstable and volatile is already very much on display—it is hard to believe that it can survive four years without a night of the long knives within the coalition—but at least for the moment it also is fueling the destruction of a long-standing constitutional republic's basic administrative and procedural infrastructure.
...the base of political support for this group wants to see that existing infrastructure blown six ways to Sunday, that at least some of them represent a millenarian yearning for the old world to fall so that some new world, whose nature is as yet unknown, might rise from its ashes. I now think that this might also accurately describe most or all of the people who hold power in Washington right now, that they also are millenarians, though not all of the same kind as their supporters.
...The desire to hasten the Second Coming, to see the last days of life in a fallen, post-Edenic world and to rise again in the world to come, is a long-standing part of American evangelical belief.
...There may be a second eschatology lurking inside of the current version of Trumpism within the White House, which is a belief in the Singularity, a technological end-of-the-world where our machines outdo us and subsume us, where human beings become something so different than what they have been that everything that has come before is irrelevant. I never know whether to take people from the Big Tech world seriously when they indulge in Singularity talk. A fair amount of the time, it seems more like a typically cynical move meant to hype up some shitty app or justify pointless "disruption" in the name of some future cyborg inevitability. Or in the case of the truly swollen egos at the top of the food chain, it's a way to buttress their belief that they are already the cyborg overlords and the only problem left for them is to figure out how to live forever.
...the extreme financialization of the global economy and the associated rise in dramatic wealth inequality. To put it simply, financialization means that a smaller and smaller number of people are making truly extraordinary amounts of money from having money, that investments no longer correspond to any materially real economic activity.
...Look at Elon Musk, who seems on paper to have lost $30 billion buying Twitter, and who is technically in charge of multiple companies in a way that is plainly impossible in terms of exerting actual leadership within them. Doesn't matter: he had assets to spare to the point that he could and did buy a position of almost unlimited power over the entire government and the nation. He might eventually be a loser in the dangerous game of power, but he almost can't lose in the economy that he both represents and has helped to create.
...I keep reading people saying, "They're stupid, they don't understand what they're destroying, they don't understand that they're just hurting themselves." That's the point. They're not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now.
...Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It's the end times. Or it's that this moment is the only thing that matters. Screw our kids and our families, who cares about them. (I suspect this is one of the few things that Musk and Trump really share as an outlook.)
There may be one group of long-term thinkers in the White House, but they're no more reassuring. Those are the people who recognize that the Rubicon has been crossed and the die is cast. They either win forever or end up in jail. That is a mindset that can easily reconcile itself to millenarian thinking or to living like there's no tomorrow: it all points in the same direction as a first step, which is to destroy everything that already is.
early Sarawak Museum Journal and more recent SMJ articles from Anthropological Index Online
Make Art, not War William D. Hartung at Informed Comment
'Woke' is Dying Matthew at Medium
...The complete failure of the Harris/Waltz campaign seems to have finalised a realisation that wokeness in the political sphere was less a movement of radical conscience than it was an attempt to bandwagon certain ideological movements that have long since lost their impetus. Trump's slogan "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" struck a chord that has resonated beyond merely his own supporters. More than just the Republicans it seems are awaking from wokeness.
It is not easy to chart Polanyi's intellectual trajectory across the 1920s. He was sympathetic to the collectivist policies of Vienna's ruling socialist party, while being drawn to the guild socialism of G.D.H. Cole (his early Anglophilia persisted). Beyond current politics, his energies seem to have been more and more focused on challenging the pretension of free-market economic theories at a conceptual level, especially as those theories were articulated by the Austrian school led by Ludwig von Mises. But by the early 1930s the political tide in Austria was running irresistibly towards fascism. Polanyi's position as an editor on a liberal economic journal — and as 'racially' a Jew in fascist reckoning — became untenable so he emigrated once more, arriving in London in January 1934. He was 47 years old, without a job, money or obvious prospects. Drawing on previous contacts made in Vienna, he became associated with several of the leading figures on the Christian left in the mid-1930s as well as with notable Labour Party intellectuals. (When later he was unsuccessfully applying for academic posts in Britain his referees were Tawney, Lindsay, Cole and Mannheim, a battery that might seem capable of reducing any appointments committee to rubble.) He was particularly impressed by Lindsay's Christianity and Economics (1933), which attacked the dominance of economic calculation in contemporary society; he even read a good deal of T.H. Green. No less crucial was his employment from 1936 as a tutor for the Workers' Educational Association, conducting classes in South-East England. In the early decades of the WEA there was a marked demand for courses in British social and economic history, its adult students eager to understand the origins of what were experienced as the harsh and unjust conditions of modern Britain as an industrial society. (Such classes formed the matrix from which the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.) Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for his classes. His wife later spoke of how his years in Britain in the mid and late 1930s nourished 'that abysmal hatred of the market system, the passion behind The Great Transformation', the book he eventually published in 1944. In the acknowledgments Polanyi declared that, even though the book was largely written in the US, 'it was begun and finished in England' and 'its main thesis was developed during the academic year 1939-40' in connection with his WEA courses. This report is supported by the thorough researches of Gareth Dale (who also contributes a helpful introduction to this new edition): 'It was as drafts of economic history lectures [for his classes] that the principal theses of the book that was to make his name were first jotted down.' Tellingly, one of the possible titles for the book that Polanyi favoured (before he was talked out of it by his American publisher) was 'Freedom from Economics', an odd phrase that nonetheless captured the essence of what was, arguably, to be his lifelong quest ('The Liberal Utopia' was another rejected candidate).
Source: Stefan Collini on The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi at LRB
The true power of AI deepfakes is not what you think
Alberto Romero ...So it seems people might be better off abandoning their brittle defenses against the deepfake deception threat. They'll be cheaper over time, they're not a conspiracy, they're accessible and don't take much time to make, and, to repeat a tired maxim, "this is the worst quality they will ever be." Worry seems justified. Misinformation will catch you off-guard.
...The reason is that the real power of the deepfake doesn't lie in how well it can deceive, but in how well it can express... a deepfake is more like satire than propaganda. A powerful new means of expression. Being worried about it is justified—only for a completely different reason.
...A deepfake tells a story, fictional or not, that directly alludes to our emotions. It doesn't intend to change our minds—because it can't. Deepfakes don't change our minds. We worry about how they could deceive en masse those poor gullible others (not us, of course), but it just doesn't happen. We aren't that credulous, what we are is stubborn. And we love to rejoice in our stubbornness, especially when some external element validates it further.
...The more finely attuned a fake is to our preconceptions of the world—or what we believe it ought to be—the greater its power. That's the right frame to look at the issue: we're mostly moved by things we want to believe and things we want to be real; any expressive vector pushing us in that direction—be it deepfake or art or satire—is effective...
...Deceitful information is sterile on its own, but stories that reinforce what we've already convinced ourselves of spread far and wide. In a way, deepfakes—especially sociocultural and political ones—do best what they were invented to do: manifesting our preferred counterfactuals (things that could have happened in this universe but never did).
...At first, they didn't realize it was AI. They shared it because it advanced their political agenda and when the stakes are that high, anything goes.
But then they were told it was AI slop, they simply changed the story along the lines of "it's a good illustration of what could have been." AI or not, deepfake or not, they didn't care at first. They wanted to believe it was real and once they realized it wasn't—they didn't care either.
The deepfake, as a counterfactual, did the job just fine. It is the expression of what could be, not the deception of what wasn't that makes it powerful.At first, they didn't realize it was AI. They shared it because it advanced their political agenda and when the stakes are that high, anything goes.
But then they were told it was AI slop, they simply changed the story along the lines of “it's a good illustration of what could have been.” AI or not, deepfake or not, they didn't care at first. They wanted to believe it was real and once they realized it wasn't—they didn't care either.
The deepfake, as a counterfactual, did the job just fine. It is the expression of what could be, not the deception of what wasn't that makes it powerful.
...Deepfakes, as expressive vectors, are great at reinforcing preexisting beliefs, not at changing our minds with inconsistent truths. A deceived brain is, by definition, a brain that failed to make the word consistent. It doesn't like that so it tricks itself out of that dead end. Most times, it succeeds.
...Now imagine you know nothing about deepfake technology. What changes? What is so different if you never realize you're looking at a fake? That's right, your reaction is the same—truthfulness is effectively a non-factor.
...Deepfakes are the greatest threat not against the easily gullible but the terminally stubborn. They're the finest weapon not in the hands of the compulsive liar or the corrupt politician but the charismatic leader.
The longer we fail to recognize and accept this, the more destructive they will become.
The Infernal Machine
On escaping the doomscroll Molly Crabapple at Substack
The Trump Supporters Who Didn't Take Him at His Word
Truly autonomous AI is on the horizon Science Daily
The Soy Right may be in charge, but who will clean up its mess?
Rob Beschizza at boing boing
...Here's my guess on how it goes: the Silicon Valley faction, the Muskite wing, will fail for basic competency reasons after moving quickly and breaking everything. It will solve no real problems but will create complicated and expensive new ones. In the context of a Trump administration suddenly needing to reconstitute the administrative state, he will blame the Muskite faction and turn to the third faction of his coalition, currently all but dormant: conservative Christianity. It can promise the three things he needs: ruthless order, mass organization and executive permanence. If Elon Musk succeeds, we get cybernormal dystopia. When he fails, we get Gilead.
Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans "Should Just Die Other Sides of a Nobody
this is going to sound very juvenile and shallow but i am actually 100% serious when i say this re: MAGA portraits
So far, Musk's DOGE gang has outmaneuvered the Democrats and produced a governmental soap opera ravenkings, via Other Sides of a Nobody
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A whole new world of tiny beings challenges fundamental ideas of life New Scientist
A Self-correcting System Andy Ilachinski quoting George Carlin
Diversity, Diversidad, Diversität Small Things Considered
"Diversity" Joachim Frank at albany.edu
A Hero for Cro-MAGA Times Sigrid Nunez at NYRB
Bridging the AI Learning Gap Andrew Stellman at O'Reilly
Oracle Billionaire Encourages World Leaders to Funnel All of Their Data to AI (and Maybe His Data Centers) gizmodo
Wicked High-Definition Image of the Cosmic Web Shows the Universe's Dark Matter Scaffolding gizmodo
"Red, White, and Blueland" Mark Liberman at Language Log
Rich people paying $136K per pound for sex mushrooms grown from dead moths cordyceps ftw
What the Assault on Public Education Means for Kids with Disabilities Jessica Winter at New Yorker
There's a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing How regime change happens in America
Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic
No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as "Liberation Day," a moment when, in his words, "vermin" and "radical left lunatics" would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people." Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the "deconstruction of the administrative state," but that amounts to the same thing.
...Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda...
What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk's companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers' rights, and consumer protection...
Anatomy of an AI Coup TechPolicy.Press
Muskology Radio Open Source
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Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
Proem: The Trauma of Gaza Scholasticide Hugh J Curran at Informed Comment
What was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and Why does it still affect the Middle East Today? Informed Comment
Maga Wikipedia
The Trump Dictionary: Re-Education of the American Nation
What does 'woke' mean and why are some conservatives using it? ABC News
The Woke Movement and Backlash The First Amendment Encyclopedia
Disrupting the Anti-'Woke' Discourse FrameWorks Institute
What 'Woke' means to Liberals & Conservatives AllSides Red Blue Translator
How Woke Went From "Black" to "Bad": The Meaning of "Woke" NAACP
Reclaiming the Word "Woke" as Part of African American Culture NAACP
Refuse to Say Just What You Mean: Anti- "Woke" Rhetoric As an Exercise in Destructive Abstraction Political Communication: Vol 41 , No 5
Scottsboro Boys lyrics (pdf)
The blues guitarist who invented the phrase "woke" farout magazine
Here's where 'woke' comes from The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
'White supremacists in suits and ties': the rightwing Afrikaner group in Trump's ear Guardian
Age of the panzootic: scientists warn of more devastating diseases jumping between species Guardian
Lonely Charts Personals Adam Tooze [lexicon...]
The Essential Joan Didion Alissa Wilkinson at NY Times
Yair Mark Liberman at Language Log
White House amps up its attacks on the Judicial branch boing boing
How to Use the WordPress Tag Cloud Block
Lawsuit to Stop Elon Musk From Decimating Government Gets a Tough Judge gizmodo
H.H. Munro ("Saki") Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers in the Great War
AP Banned Indefinitely From White House Because It Won't Write 'Gulf of America' PetaPixel
The Erasing of American Science How far can the Trump administration bend U.S. research before it breaks?
Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic
The Public Humiliation of Eric Adams Blink twice if you need help, Mr. Mayor.
David A. Graham at The Atlantic
"If he doesn't come through, I'll be back in New York City, and we won't be sitting on the couch—I'll be in his office, up his butt, saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to?' Homan warned. Federal officials have Adams, a Democrat, where they want him: They've ordered that the federal criminal charges against him be suspended, and now he has no choice but to do exactly what the White House wants. Humiliating as shameless a figure as Adams is no mean feat, but Donald Trump seems to have managed it.
On Monday, the Justice Department dropped charges against the mayor, who was indicted in September for a series of alleged bribery and campaign-finance offenses so elaborate that you'd have to go all the way across the Hudson River to New Jersey to find anything remotely comparable. (Adams pleaded not guilty to all charges.) As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote, this was one of a series of Trump-administration actions that suggest that bribery is now effectively legal.
Because it's turtles all the way down, the federal prosecutor overseeing the Southern District of New York now alleges that the suspension of charges was itself effectively a bribe. Danielle Sassoon, who led the prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried, is no liberal softy: She's a Federalist Society member and a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia. The Trump administration elevated her to lead the office until a permanent U.S. attorney is confirmed, but she resigned yesterday in protest of the Adams case being dismissed.
Meta Building Big-Ass Undersea Internet Cable
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Moonbases and Solar Arrays: Will China win the Space Race as Musk's DOGE cripples NASA? Juan Cole
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials expect their agency to be gutted just as other key government departments have been. Trump is appointing a Space-X executive to run NASA.
Musk has attacked NASA for its plans to return to the moon, arguing for going to Mars instead.
The Gaza Genocide and the Unravelling of US Hegemony Informed Comment
"We've Been Essentially Muzzled"
: Department of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump Informed Comment
The Music Business is Healthy Again? Really?
I express deep skepticism
Ted Gioia
Speed Up the Breakdown The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins. Quinn Slobodian at NYRB
…we are witnessing something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street-Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti-New Deal conservative think tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how well they can collaborate to reinforce one another. The future condition of the government&mdashand by extension the country&mdashdepends on how far the dynamo spins.
Mafalda Wikipedia
Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón (Quino)
Mafalda
A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic Duke University Press
On Marianne Faithfull Lavinia Greenlaw at LRB
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Frozen Homage Andy Ilachinski
A History of the Future, 2030-2040 part 3
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David J.V. Jones' Rebecca's Children (1989) was the first exploration of events that acknowledged them as 'larger than we thought and less respectable'. Meanwhile, in broader histories dealing with the early Victorian age and its transition to industrial capitalism, Rebeccaism tends to remain a footnote or curio, dismissed as a confused or reactionary 'peasant rebellion' ... Rebeccaism deserves a more significant place in British radical history — partly because of, not despite, its messier and more militant dimensions. The study of movements like Rebeccaism, with all their oddities and contradictions, can be useful in the context of post-industrial politics and protest. Many recent struggles — from Occupy to the gilets jaunes — seem to be turning towards autonomous, localised, and self-sustaining coalitions in which the traditional conduits of parliamentary democracy are, at best, incidental. Could attention to pre-modern forms of protest offer a guide to the present and future as well as a deeper understanding of the past?
The one type of "creativity" only humans can do Harris Sockel at Medium Newsletter
...Any AI's most important capability? Creativity, or generating an output based on inputs. Hassabis breaks this down into three categories:
Maybe AI will get there eventually, but for now this is where humans excel: envisioning systems that are beautiful, complex, yet somehow elegant and simply understood. Some oook texts rediscovered:
oook's Word of the Year for 2024 Curate (found while searching for instances of KFTF)
A bunch of texts re: Greek Music, created and collected by oook
Classification and Metadata oook 2003 ACS Workshop
What's Happening? /Conviv 2021
Scientists Confirm that Language is Not Required for Thinking Katrina Paulson at Medium
Evelena Fedorenko:
...Beyond transmitting knowledge, language elevates our relationships by allowing us to share our thoughts, emotions, feelings, ideas, dreams, fears, wants, needs, hopes, and more with each other in detail. Similarly, language helps facilitate cooperative activities, especially as populations grow.
How Many Aboriginal Nations Once Lived in Victoria, Australia? Sara Relli at Medium
Richard Dawson's hyperrealism Hobbledehoy
The Flea-Scope is a $25 USB oscilloscope
DOGE wants access to IRS taxpayer data Flowing Data
Pie charts and bar graphs Mark Liberman at Language Log
Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces Cory Doctorow
...AI turns out to be a great tool for creating plausible statistical correlates of imaginary phenomena. Remember the guy who claimed to have invented Machine Learning Gaydar by analyzing the faces of gay people and comparing them to straight people? Same dude later claimed to have invented an AI that could guess, from your face, whether you were a Republican or a Democrat
This is just AI Phrenology, a continuation of the "scientific racism" movement that was invented to provide a justification for colonialism, slavery, genocide and eugenics. It imagines that there are invisible genetic traits that determine things like your ability to be a good boss, or whether you will cheat on your partner, or whether you are destined to be rich. It's a kind of cod-scientific astrology, where you get to declare yourself to have been born with "good blood" that destined you to rule over others.
Amazingly, this "scientific" philosophy has somehow managed to thrive after the rise of computational genomics, the science that analyzes population-scale genetic surveys to identify whether there is any genetic basis for the idea of "races" (and other cherished distinctions of the "human diversity" movement) have been shown to have no discernible basis in, you know, genetics
...It's easy to see why AI is so tempting to people who want to incinerate any qualitative factors in a complex societal problem, transforming them into dubious quantitative residue that an algorithm can do math on.
Move Fast and Break People Part 1: How the Internet Gave Us the World —Then Took It Away
The Internet was the greatest trick humanity ever pulled on itself
Catherynne M. Valente at Substack.
Dot density map of the US 2024 Election Other sides of a Nobody
On Elite Education and the Rise of Maga Edward Zitron
The Generative AI Con Edward Zitron
...I must be clear that anecdotal examples of some people using some software that they kind-of like is not evidence that generative AI is a sustainable or real industry at the trillion-dollar scale that many claim it is.
...There isn't a single god damn startup in the history of anything — other than perhaps Facebook — that has had this level of coverage at such an early stage. Facebook also grew at a time when social media didn't really exist (at least, as a mainstream thing that virtually every demographic used) and thus the ability for something to "go viral" was a relatively new idea. By comparison, ChatGPT had the benefit of there being more media outlets, and Altman himself having spent a decade gladhanding the media through his startup investments and crafting a real public persona.
...This isn't the early days of shit. The Attention Is All You Need paper that started the whole transformer-based architecture movement was published in June 2017. We're over two years in, hyperscalers have sunk over 200 billion dollars in capital expenditures into generative AI, AI startups took up a third of all venture capital investment in 2024, and almost every single talented artificial intelligence expert is laser-focused on Large Language Models. And even then, we still don't have a killer app! There is no product that everybody loves, and there is no iPhone moment!
...So, what exactly has generative AI actually done? Where are the products? No, really, where are they? What's the product you use every day, or week, that uses generative AI, that truly changes your life? If generative AI disappeared tomorrow — assuming you are not somebody who actively builds using it — would your life materially change?
The answer is "not that much." Putting aside the hype, bluster and ungodly amounts of money, I can find no evidence that any of these apps are making anyone any real money.
...So there you have it folks. OpenAI's next big thing is the ability to generate a report that you would likely not be able to use in any meaningful way anywhere, because while it can browse the web and find things and write a report, it sources things based on what it thinks can confirm its arguments rather than making sure the source material is valid or respectable. This system may have worked if the internet wasn't entirely poisoned by companies trying to get the highest ranking in Google, and if Google had any interest in making sure its results were high quality, which it does not.
...The tech industry — and part of our economy — is accelerating at speed into a brick wall, driven by people like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Marc Benioff, and Larry Ellison, all men that are incentivized to have you value their companies based on something other than what their businesses actually sell.
We are in the midst of a group delusion — a consequence of an economy ruled by people that do not participate in labor of any kind outside of sending and receiving emails and going to lunches that last several hours √ where the people with the money do not understand or care about human beings.
...Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it's fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people.
...The truth is that generative AI is as mediocre as it is destructive, and those pushing it as "the future" that "will change everything" are showing how much contempt they have for the average person. They believe that they can shovel shit into our mouths and tell us it's prime rib, that these half-assed products will change the world and that as a result they need billions of dollars and to damage our power grid.
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Lifehacker Archive redef.com
Tintin and Haddock "What a week, huh?" meme updated every day, week, month and year
Home of the Brave. Really? Hobbledehoy
America and "national capitalism" Cory Doctorow
But here's the kicker: after Bill Gates quit Microsoft, he became a professional investor. He stopped doing a job and started investing in companies where other people were working. Over the next 13 years, Bill Gates (investor) made more money than Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) made in his 25 years of doing a job. He also made more than Liliane Bettencourt.
That's what r > g means: that even the most successful worker in human history can't make as much as a person who merely has a lot of money, and the more money you have, the more money you make.
If you think about this for a second, you can see how it'll play out: in economies both good and bad, the people who emerge from lucky orifices will get wealthier than anyone else, wealthier than the people who do things that grow the economy. And because they're getting wealthier faster than the economy grows, they come to command ever-larger shares of the economy, so that even when the pie gets bigger, their slices gets bigger still, and the remainder that we all share isn't just proportionally smaller — it's actually smaller. We don't just have less relative to the rich — we have less relative to our parents.
...Monopolies consume the American economy. GDP goes up, because the corporate sector is super consolidated and it's jacking up prices and slashing wages, leaving more for profits and dividends.
Society grows progressively less stable. Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else — ignoring the climate emergency, slashing the safety net, starving infrastructure, etc — dominate. Inequality worsens. No one can afford a house, health care, or university. Your life's savings are stolen by a subprime mortgage, or a pension-fund raid, or bitcoin grift. Instability worsens. Policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else — endless imperialist wars, noncompete agreements, private equity rollups – multiply. Wages stagnate. Inequality increases. The rich get richer. One political party is captured by finance ghouls. The other one is also captured by finance ghouls, but welds them into a coalition that includes virulent, apocalyptic racists.
Which brings us to today, and Trump, and imminent collapse, and Elon Musk and his child soldiers, and JD Vance, and the whole fucking thing.
Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM because its holiday list wasn't 'sustainable'
You may not view these new names as facts. However, in the eyes of map software, they are. In its blogpost explaining the change, Google cited the US Geographic Names Information System, which officially updated "Gulf of Mexico" to "Gulf of America" after an executive order from Trump. Google Maps pulls its geographic information from online government documents, which have changed to reflect Trump's whims.
Other erasures: Google Calendar removed Black History Month, Pride and other cultural events. They won't appear by default on users' calendars any more. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut online resources for contraception, gender-affirming care, STIs and HIV. Some flickered in and out of existence; some vanished completely.
Though we may remember our lives as a single continuous, factual narrative, our collective history comprises many. Modify the official sources that make up the record, and the past changes with them. It is a basic but destabilizing realization. We may say that the Stonewall monument in New York City is dedicated in part to the trans community. That becomes a matter of discussion, dispute and controversy rather than one of agreed-upon fact if the National Parks Service preserves none of its own record of the transgender Americans who fought for their rights there. The incontrovertible proof we might cite in an argument, the Wayback Machine archive of previous versions of websites, is itself fragile and incomplete. A historian's record is good evidence, but it is the recollection of a researcher who relies on primary sources much like the National Parks Service's own record, which is now different. We are faced with the brittleness of the truth
Former Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter talks about dismissal Hobbledehoy
RFK Jr. Touts 'Spirituality' as Fix for America's Health Problems gizmodo
The Journal of African History: 1961
Tuesday's Child Is Full of Grace
Timothy Burke
AI says America going full dystopia, suggests starting Hunger Games training now Boing Boing
The Mafia State Chris Hedges Hobbledehoy
The Making of Emergencies
Caroline Elkins at NYRB
...It is Trump who routinely divides the world into friends and enemies, and who since 2022 has threatened to punish or prosecute his personal enemies more than a hundred times. It is Trump who has come to threaten civil rights and constitutionality itself. And it is Trump who seems poised to treat liberalism's legal doctrine of emergency as a mechanism not for saving the republic from existential danger—the kind of temporary state of exception our founding fathers imagined—but for exercising pure power. Indeed, as I was finishing this essay, Trump took to social media channeling Schmitt's vision. He who saves his Country," he posted, "does not violate any Law."
All bets are off Cory Doctorow
The "fiduciary duty" lie is another instance of politics masquerading as economics: even if bosses bargain for as big a slice of the pie as they can get, the size of that slice is determined by the relative power of bosses, customers and workers.
This is why bosses hate unions. It's why the scab presidency of Donald Trump has waged all-out war on unions. Trump just effectively shuttered the National Labor Relations Board, unilaterally halting its enforcement actions and investigations. He also illegally fired one of the Democratic NLRB board members, leaving the agency with too few board members to take any new actions, meaning that no unions can be recognized — indeed, the NLRB can't do anything — for the foreseeable future.
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America stopped caring how poor kids do in school Matthew Yglesias
YouTube Wikipedia
YouTube Simple English Wikipedia
Short-Form Video Content: Capturing Attention In The Digital Age Forbes
short-form video tutorials
History unearthed: What if Trump succeeded in ethnically Cleansing Gaza? Informed Comment
The Heart (or Graphite) of Greed: Why Donald Trump's Obsession with Greenland Is All About China Informed Comment
Acronyms, Initialisms & Abbreviations Dictionary: A Guide to Acronyms, Abbreviations, Contractions, Alphabetic Symbols, and Similar Condensed Appellations
Texting Dictionary - terms used by children online
Medical Abbreviations Taber's Medical Dictionary
Abbreviations Oxford Classical Dictionary
The House Just Set the Stage for the Biggest Regulatory Heist in History Carlyn Beccia at Medium
...The Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996 already allows Congress to undo the prior President's regulations, but only one at a time. Under the CRA, Congress can disapprove a regulation within 60 legislative days of its finalization through a joint resolution, which the President must then sign.
But this bill? It bundles them all together into a single, glorious kill switch. No need for careful deliberation or debate. Just one quick vote and poof… past regulatory safeguards vanish like a magician's rabbit, except instead of applause, you get corporations gleefully lighting fat cigars.
Republicans have been trying to pass this nonsense since 2017, but now they are dangerously close to succeeding. If this bill gets through the Senate, it could lead to one of the most sweeping regulatory rollbacks in U.S. history.
...The Republican argument goes like this: We don't have time to undo every last Biden regulation. There's too much red tape, "deep state" waste, and bureaucratic overreach. Plus, there are golf balls to hit and babies to kiss. Ain't no one got time to legislate. So we will just bundle it all together and napalm bomb every policy passed in the last months of Biden's presidency. And besides, we package government funding together in omnibus bills, so why not do the same for regulations?
tom-the-dancing-bug-star-wars-welcome-to-the-resistance-2025.html
Gorton: a ubiquitous typeface you may never have heard of Boing Boing
Former Social Security head warns that checks could get interrupted by DOGE's "19-year-old nitwits" Boing Boing
A single protein may have helped shape the emergence of spoken language ScienceDaily
The Palantir Guide to Saving America's Soul Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker
Today Yarvin, whom J. D. Vance has cited as an influence, is practically a household name. Yarvin, in his modesty, only ever called for one king. Now we appear to have two. Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to share the aim of personal enrichment. Their avowed priorities do not otherwise cohere, at least at first glance. Trump is a nationalist who looks to the past and promises its restoration. He would like to take Greenland. Musk is a free marketeer who looks to the future and promises its realization. He would like to take Mars. Liberals might take solace in their partnership's apparent fundamental instability. This may be a coping mechanism.
...In 2003, Thiel started Palantir and soon after, recruited Karp to run it.
Palantir, which was named for the "seeing stones" in "The Lord of the Rings," had twin inspirations. One was the dot-com collapse, which flattened the bubbly frivolity of early e-commerce. The other was September 11th. Thiel believed that a maturing tech industry needed to put away its eToys.com and devote itself to the serious business of national defense. Palantir's data-integration platform pledged to discern obscure patterns that might otherwise elude human analysts. The company's overarching ambition, Karp has said, was "to support the West"—in the local dialect, they were "saving the Shire" from the eye of Sauron. The Thiel-Karp team guaranteed a reasonable calibration of "total information awareness" and the protection of civil liberties.
Selling infrastructure to the panopticon was not a safe play, and investors were skittish. Employees considered their public reputation unfair and inaccurate, but their communications team recognized that a sinister aura was great marketing. A small raft of contracts, along with support from the C.I.A.'s venture arm, kept them afloat until the world readied itself for their relevance. Today their market capitalization is two hundred and eighty billion dollars.
...Many of Karp's colleagues blame the government for regulating away their ability to do interesting things.
In the spring of 2018, Google employees protested against the company's participation in Project Maven, a Department of Defense initiative to better analyze reconnaissance imagery. Their misgivings, Karp and Zamiska write, did not reflect "a principled commitment to pacifism or non-violence," but "a more fundamental abandonment of belief in anything" other than their own bourgeois comfort. Palantir stepped into the breach and picked up that contract. The company has not only accepted their grave obligations to national defense; it has fought for the right to serve the country. The Defense Department's byzantine procurement policies had ruled out the use of Palantir's commercially available software. In 2016, Palantir sued the government and won. Two years later, it was awarded an enormous Army contract.
...This is true in a banal financial way: compared with its average price during the Biden Administration, Palantir's stock has appreciated nearly six hundred per cent. It is more interestingly true on the plane of ideas.
Musk's response to a coddled rank and file has been a purge. When he took over Twitter, he sent a company-wide e-mail that presented a "fork in the road," as he put it: serve at his pleasure or find another job. The point was not to improve Twitter's performance. It was to remind his employees of their fungibility. One of his first acts under the auspices of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency was a government-wide e-mail with a buyout offer. The subject line, lest there be any doubt as to its authorship, was "Fork in the Road." Karp has a different attitude. Silicon Valley is not proof of concept for monarchy. It is proof of concept for war.
...The corporate laborers of the industrial age were drudges, and might have needed the scaffolding of managerial hierarchies to make widgets in bulk. The scientists and engineers of the electronic age, in contrast, did not respond well to top-down instruction. They responded well to meaningful challenges. They could be thrown into a room, or into the desert, with only two parameters: a hard problem to solve and a good reason to solve it.
The Tech Barons have a blueprint drawn in crayon. They have not thought any of this through.
A review of Balaji Srinivasan's book, The Network State.
Dave Karpf at substack
====
The Second Trump Administration's New Forms of Distraction Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
...how the social-media ecosystem has palpably decayed since the late twenty-tens, and not just because the politics of the platforms have shifted toward Trump. A.I. is rampant, algorithmic feeds such as Instagram's have been known to favor posts from businesses and aggregators over individuals, and Meta's social networks have suppressed political content by default. Online discussion is increasingly driven by independent “creators,” who publish podcasts, videos, or newsletters. The experience of using social media lately is less about interactive socializing than passively consuming broadcast content, which may intensify feelings of powerlessness
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When did life begin on Earth? New evidence reveals a shocking story New Scientist
How Starbucks intends to "reclaim the 'third place'" Harris Sockel at Medium Newsletter
"Bespoke up front, scale in the back," he concludes. "This sounds obvious, but the key to making this work is in the details"—which, depending on how you execute them, can feel either welcoming or inauthentic.
Lives of the Rationalist Saints Scott Alexander at astral codex 10
Ubiquity of the Gorton font Flowing Data
Making America Sick Again: How Trump's Drastic Layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control cripple our Response to Norovirus, Measles Outbreaks Informed Comment
47 US continental states with only natural borders Other Sides of a NobodY
The Difficult Truths of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands' The Cultural Gutter
Texas ICE prosecutor: "America is a White nation", "I am a fascist" boing boing
Musk's DOGE squad has "God Mode" access to federal systems, reports The Atlantic boing boing
Elon Musk'' A.I.-Driven Government Coup The New Yorker
Montaigne's Tower
visiting Montaigne's Tower wordscene
rediscovering Montaigne oook.info/blog
A few charts on where AI adoption is going
Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat Cory Doctorow
The Trump Administration Trashes Europe and NATO Dexter Filkins at New Yorker
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from Idle Words, after a long dry spell
Analyzing DOGE actions one month into Trump's second administration Harvard Kennedy School
Women Are Avoiding AI. Will Their Careers Suffer? Working Knowledge at HBS
Honoring Water: A Traditional Ceremony in Wendit, Indonesia
Favian Rafif at
Full Frame via Medium
Everything Is Made of History
What I learned from reading over 100 books on world history in a year
Pierz Newton-John at Medium
Elon Musk Rants Incoherently in Sunglasses While X Shadowbans His Pleading Baby Mama gizmodo
Generate maps of Europe showing translations of English words boing boing
Musk's latest bright idea: paralyze government with $1 credit card limit boing boing via Wired
CDC axes its flu vaccination campaign
Jennifer Sandlin at boing boing
The Democraacy Index The Contrarian
MAGA is also threatening federal judges with retribution if Trump doesn't like their decisions. After Trump and Musk attacked judges ruling against the Trump Administration, including Musk's call for them to be impeached, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (WI) filed articles of impeachment on Thursday against the federal judge who blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury information. Other Republican congressmen have threatened to do the same.
We'd Never Had a King Until This Week
Donald Trump tries to overturn the most basic meme of American history.
Bill McKibben at New Yorker
Academia: In A Republic Far Far Away
...Star Wars, the sprawling property, means something even to people who have never seen any of it—there's a paratextual knowledge of the metatext that's widely distributed. Almost everybody knows what a lightsaber is, that Darth Vader is a bad guy (who is Luke Skywalker's father), that there are spaceships, even if they can't name those things. If the "Imperial March" comes on the audio in a shop, everybody sort of knows what it is. There are people for whom Star Wars means not the text but the people who like it, who disdain Star Wars because of its fans or because it represents the destruction of a more serious kind of cinema or because it's capitalist greed or because it's Disney's monopoly. There are people for whom Star Wars is a joke, a point of reference, a non-memorable cultural property, and no more important than that.
At the other end of things, there are people whose cultural life is very nearly built around Star Wars as a centrally constitutive metatext, who use it as a constant point of reference both in their internal psychological life and their sociality. But even in that world, Star Wars does not have stable meanings. It means something different to a devotee who is 18 and one who is 60, it means something different to the fan who cosplays and goes to conventions and one who writes fanfic and posts to Reddit. Where devoted interpreters congregate, they do not agree on the meaning of the metatext. There is a religious schism between people who embrace The Last Jedi and those who view it as heresy. There are those who say midichlorians were just Qui-Gon Jinn's delusion and those who insist on their canonicity. There are people who like the Empire, not the Rebels. And people who did like the Empire until they watched the first season of Andor.
The people creating and selling Star Wars are not outside these publics—they are shaped by them, they are of them, they disdain them. They make up legends about what Star Wars means and how it came to be that seem untrue on further investigation. They have shallow and deep histories of reference shooting through the text. They turn to scholars who have stepped forward to authenticate Star Wars as having mythological and philosophical depth.
So it's all very complicated, and this is a text which ostensibly is just entertainment that at its origins was presented as an upgraded form of a somewhat misremembered set of older cinematic and textual entertainments. It's not as complex as a constitution or a religious scripture (or at least it wasn't at first).
While the West Hesitates China Marches Forward Alberto Romero
Imagine if learning to use ChatGPT was mandatory for government staff in the West. Imagine how quickly we'd sort out where it's useful and where it isn't. Imagine if policymakers, the people with the power to change things, gained firsthand experience with LLMs—not for abstract policy concerns or to draft new regulations but as tools in their daily work. Imagine if they gathered the know-how result of a continued, consistent practice. Just imagine. Our world would look radically different today.
'Constitutional Crisis' Is an Understatement It's the hottest, and most useless, buzz phrase of the moment David A. Graham at The Atlantic
That's a mistake—not because what's happening is not serious, but because it is so serious. This week, the Trump administration came the closest it has thus far to outright refusing to follow a judge's order, after days of comments from Vice President J. D. Vance, Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk, and others questioning whether a president must follow court rulings. That's a threat to the very basic question of whether a president is subject to the law or not—especially when so many things that Trump has done appear plainly illegal.
The Governor Who Stood up to Trump The president sees himself as national king, and every other American—including Maine Governor Janet Mills—as one of his quavering subjects.
Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic
That conflation was on display once again today at a meeting of governors at the White House. As Trump lectured the audience on his executive order banning transgender girls and women from participating in girls' and women's sports, he paused to single out Maine Governor Janet Mills.
"Are you not going to comply with it?" he demanded of her. "I'm complying with state and federal laws," she replied. To this, Trump shot back, "We are the federal law."
168 employees fired at National Science Foundation
Mysterious QR codes added to 1,000 graves in Munich
Rob Beschizza at boing boing
Classical Music Got Invented with a Hard Kick from a Peasant's Foot Ted Gioia
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ChatGPT does ASMR in Chinese Victor Mair at Language Log
What the US can learn from South Koreans who stopped an Authoritarian Power-Grab Informed Comment
Trump Order Shifts the Financial Burden of Climate Change Onto Individuals Informed Consent
Getting rid of the measure, called the "social cost of carbon," would upend energy and environmental regulations meant to address climate change and could have the long-term effect of shifting costs from polluting industries directly onto Americans as the expenses of climate change rise.
...The executive order disbanded the working group, which included the treasury secretary, energy secretary and director of national economic policy, that set the social cost of carbon and advised how it should be implemented. It revoked that group's previous decisions. And it directed the Environmental Protection Agency, which calculates the figure and bases regulatory proposals on it, to reconsider using the social cost of carbon altogether with the goal of eradicating "abuse" that stands in the way of affordable energy production.
...If carried out, the shift away from using the social cost of carbon measure would not only make it exceedingly difficult to enact new rules slowing climate change and its growing costs in the future, but it would send the signal that the Trump administration doesn't believe that climate change carries economic consequences.
The move shows "that we're abandoning any idea that climate change is a problem," said Marshall Burke, a climate economics researcher at Stanford University.
Suzhou rap sounds like it has a French accen Victor Mair at Language Log
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Dispensing with the US-centric financial system John Quiggen at Crooked Timber
(i) That's absurd. Either it's April Fools Day or someone has hacked the website
(ii) That's unlikely. Surely [1] Wall Street will be able to kill this crazy idea
(iii) That will be tricky. Which cryptocurrencies will be included and what will be the exchange rates?
If your answer was (i) you can stop reading here (and don't bother commenting to justify your position). This answer assumes that, despite Trump's bluster, nothing has fundamentally changed. You're still in the denial stage, with six more to come..
If your answer is (ii) or (iii) you are paying at least some attention. I'll point to some evidence suggesting (iii) is a plausible answer, and look at what that implies for the global financial system.
1/4 to 1/2 of Glaciers will Melt by 2100 Juan Cole
From the Tigris and Euphrates to the Nile: The Middle East's unresolved Water Disputes Informed Comment
Paying the Piper Lewis H L:apham
Grandfather's Bible
Langdon Hammer ast NYRB
The CIA Is De-Woke-ifying Itself gizmodo
Researchers Uncover the Secret Glowing World of Biofluorescent Birds-of-Paradise
PetaPixel
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Scientific insights into how humans access deep spiritual states Science Daily
RATE OF RETURN EQUALS COST OF CAPITAL A Simple, Fair Formula to Stop Investor-Owned Utilities From Overcharging the Public (pdf)
The Secret Society Raising Your Electricity Bills A breakthrough report details how utility companies use bogus models to earn excess profits. David Dayen at American Prospect
OK, so this obscure clique has a name. They're called the Society of Utility and Regulatory Financial Analysts, or SURFA. And they are a large part of the reason why you're paying way too much for electricity.
The West's Ethnic Cleansing under Humanitarian Pretexts Ramona Wadi at Informed Comment
...The open calls for forced transfer are not being called out as incitement to war crimes because the international community prefers to deal with the humanitarian issue of refugees. And when speaking of refugees without context, or within a diluted context, war crimes are dismissed in diplomacy. The forcibly displaced become a mere mass of humans lacking basic needs, but what they have truly lacked for decades is the right to their own land.
...The international community spent decades preparing for a moment when forced displacement can be euphemised through real estate prime property investment.
AI: Too Cheap to Control Stephen Downes
Pluralistic is Five Stephen Downes
Former Intelligence Officer Claims KGB Recruited Trump Hobbledehoy
Slack
'Cut someone some slack' Cambridge English Dictionary
Etymology of "cut someone some slack" at English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
Slacker and
Slascktivism Wikipedia
There Is No AI Revolution Edward Zitron
The answer is simple: I do not believe it exists. Generative AI lacks the basic unit economics, product-market fit, or market penetration associated with any meaningful software boom, and outside of OpenAI, the industry may be pathetically, hopelessly small, all while providing few meaningful business returns and constantly losing money.
...OpenAI — as with all generative AI model developers — loses money on every single prompt and output. Its products do not scale like traditional software, in that the more users it gets, the more expensive its services are to run because its models are so compute-intensive.
...Generative AI isn't that useful. If Generative AI was genuinely this game-changing technology that makes it possible to simplify your life and your work, you'd surely fork over the $20 monthly fee for unlimited access to OpenAI's more powerful models. I imagine many of those users are, at best, infrequent, opening up ChatGPT out of curiosity or to do basic things, and don't have anywhere near the same levels of engagement as with any other SaaS app.
...OpenAI, as a company, is piss-poor at product. It's been two years and ChatGPT mostly does the same thing as it used to, still costs more to run than it makes, and ultimately does the same thing as every other LLM chatbot from every other generative AI company.
...The fact of the matter is that if Google and Microsoft can't make generative AI apps with meaningful consumer penetration, this entire industry is screwed.
...One of the arguments people make is that 'AI is everywhere," but it's important to remember that the prevalence of AI is not proof of its adoption, but the intent of companies shoving it into everything, and the same goes for "business integrating AI" that are really just mandating people dick around with Copilot or ChatGPT... there's a lot of demand to put AI in stuff and some demand to buy stuff with AI on it by enterprises buying software, but little evidence to suggest significant user adoption or usage, I'd argue because Large Language Models do not lend themselves to features that provide meaningful business returns.
People really do use them for coding, for searching defined libraries of documents, for generating draft materials, for brainstorming, and for summarizing and searching documents. These are useful, but they are not magical.
These are also — and I do not believe there are any use cases that justify this &mdash not a counterbalance for the ruinous financial and environmental costs of generative AI. It is the leaded gasoline of tech, where the boost to engine performance didn't outweigh the horrific health impacts it inflicted.
...Generative AI is probabilistic, and Large Language Models do not "know" anything, because they are guessing what the next part of a particular output would be based on an input. They are not "making decisions." They are probability machines, which in turn makes them only as reliable as probability can be, and as conscious — no matter how intricate a system may be or how much infrastructure is built — as a pair of dice.
We do not understand how human intelligence works, and as a result it's laughable to imagine we'd be able to simulate it. Large Language Models do not create "artificial intelligence" — they are the most powerful parrots in the world, trained to respond to stimulus with what they guess is the correct answer.
...Put aside whatever fantastical beliefs you may have about the future and tell me, right now, what business use case exists that justifies burning hundreds of billions of dollars, damaging our power grid, hurting our planet, and stealing from millions of people?
...I have said that generative AI is a group delusion in the past, and I repeat that claim today. What you are seeing in the news is not the "success" of the artificial intelligence industry, but a runaway narrative created by and sustained by Sam Altman and OpenAI.
What you are watching is not a revolution, but a repetitious public relations campaign for one company that accidentally timed the launch of ChatGPT with a period of deep desperation in big tech, one so profound that it will likely drag half a trillion dollars' worth of capital expenditures along with it.
...OpenAI and Anthropic are not real companies — they are free-riders, living on venture-backed welfare for an indeterminate amount of time because the entire tech industry has agreed to rally around the world's most unprofitable software. And like any free rider that doesn't actually produce anything, when the money goes away, they're fucked... ChatGPT is sustained entirely on deranged, specious hype drummed up by a media industry that thinks it's more remarkable to write down the last lie that Sam Altman told than say that OpenAI has lost $9 billion dollars in the last year and intends to more than double that number in 2025 for absolutely no reason.
...Something about generative AI has caused the hyperscalers to truly lose it, and the intrusion of generative AI into both Microsoft Office and Google Docs has turned just about everybody I know in the business world against it.
The resentment boiling against this software is profound because the tech industry has become desperate and violative, showing such contempt for their customers that even Apple will force an inferior experience upon them to please the will of the Rot Economy and the growth-at-all-cost mindset of the markets.
Let's be frank: nobody really needs anything generative AI does. Large Language Models hallucinate too much to be truly reliable, a problem that will require entire new branches of mathematics to solve, and their most common consumer-facing functions like summarizing an article, "practicing for a job interview," or "write me a business plan" are not really things people need or massively benefit from, even if these things weren't ruinously expensive or damaging to the environment.
...I want you to remember the names Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Sundar Pichai, because they are the reason that this farce began and they must be the ones who are blamed for how it ends.
Algorithm
Explainer: What Is an Algorithm? Stanford Graduate School of Business
Everything You Need to Know About Social Media Algorithms Sprout Social
Experts on the Pros and Cons of Algorithms Pew Research 2017
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms: a complete overview Tableau.com
What is an "algorithm"? It depends whom you ask MIT Technology Review 2021
Ketamine's neurotoxicity suddenly in the spotlight boing boing
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Dispensing with the tech bros John Quiggen at Crooked Timber
Beyond Doomscrolling Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic Jan 25
...As I read these dispatches and watch helplessly from afar, the phrase time on site bangs around in my head. This is the metric that social-media companies optimize for, and it means what it sounds like: the amount of time that people spend on these apps. In recent years, there has been much handwringing over how much time users are spending on site; Tech-industry veterans such as Tristan Harris have made lucrative second careers warning of the addictive, exploitative nature of tech platforms and their algorithms.
...Many people suspect that time on site can't be good for us, yet time on site also is how many of us learn about the world, form communities, and entertain ourselves. The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.
...The toxic incentives and environments of our other apps are as visible as ever, and the men behind these services—Musk and Zuckerberg especially—seem intent on making the experience of using them worse than ever. It's all in service of engagement, of more time on site. Musk, who has transformed X into a superfund site of conspiracy theorizing, crypto ads, hateful posts, and low-rent memes, has been vehement that he wants his users to come to the platform and never leave.
Doomscrolling is not healthy Hanna Brooks Olsen at Medium
Desperate & Semi-Despairing Night Thoughts About Ukraine Brad DeLong
...Trump is such a liar that what he says is worth reporting only for whatever clues it might give to his fantasy state of mind, rather than to any form of reality ground truth out there in the world.
The true face of Trump derangement syndrome Steve QJ at Medium
Perceptron algorithm from the 1950s and its ties to LLMs Flowing Data
Authoritarian Blitz Joseph O'Neill, interviewed by Daniel Drake at NYRB
Laser 'license plates' help satellites dodge orbital collisions
Gail Sherman at boing boing
Origin and diversity of Hun Empire populations
Far-reaching genetic ties between the Mongolian steppe and Central Europe under Hun rule Science Daily
...there was not a large Asian- or steppe-descended community living in the Carpathian Basin after the Huns' arrival. However, they identified a small but distinct set of individuals -- often belonging to the "eastern-type" burials — who did carry significant East Asian genetic signatures
...DNA and archaeological evidence reveal a patchwork of ancestries, pointing to a complex process of mobility and interaction rather than a mass migration
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Robert Reich on Musk Other Sides of a Nobody
Center for Digital Thriving Stephen Downes
Teaching Digital Well-being (pdf)
Surviving Hard Times: The Last Generation of Black Americans under Jim Crow and the Culture of Racism in America Douglas White via Informed Comment
North Korea just yoinked $1.5 billion from crypto bros to fund more missiles boing boing
Days After DOGE Lands at the Agency, the FAA Says It's Testing Starlink Equipment in Its Systems gizmodo
Elon Musk, and How Techno-Fascism Has Come to America Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker
Projects of transition
Andrew Barry and Evelina Gambino at Economy & Society 2024
AI Overview jokes Mark Liberman at Language Log
With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It Cory Doctorow
Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder's Twelve Proverbs (1558) Public Domain Review
The President Shares AI Video of 'Trump Gaza' Complete With Giant Gold Statue PetaPixel
Trump's Putinization of America Susan Glasser at New Yorker
The Social Life of Photographs Flickr Foundation
Elon Musk Suggests He Alone Decides What Gets Funded in the Government gizmodo
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I Do Not Understand Quantum Computers or the Apparent Breakthroughs From Google and Microsoft Stephen Downes
A Quick Primer on "Rewilding Your Attention" Clive Thompson at Medium
...A well-researched non-fiction book is the single most info-dense piece of culture in existence, full stop... I prefer to find nonfiction books that are ... out of left field. I want them to introduce me to a realm sufficiently foreign to my usual interests that I wouldn't normally expect I'd even want to read it. This requires, like RSS, a lot of panning for gold.
...Whenever I hear about a new subject, I do a google search for "[SUBJECT TK] forum" and boom, there it is. Invariably engrossing as hell, and mind-broadening.
...I love weird old books so much that I created a special search engine &mdash the Weird Old Book Finder. Type in a query, and it finds one randomly-chosen public-domain book that fits your interest and presents it for instant reading. (And here's my essay explaining why I created it!)
DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and the global fight for technological supremacy Harvard Law Today
The surprising intelligence of brainless organisms
Ellsworth Toohey at boing boing
Whether in neural networks or bacterial colonies, intelligence seems to emerge from relationships between parts working as a whole. Humans aren't separate from nature but deeply embedded within it. "Cognition is a relational property between the organism and its environment," says researcher Paco Calvo from the Minimal Intelligence Lab in Spain,. "It's not something sitting in your head."
OpEd: This is Not A Drill, it's an accelerating constitutional crisis Colin Woodard
"Which leads us to the biggest question of all, the one every American should be focused on: Will an administration that has so brazenly flouted the law do as the courts order? And what if it doesn't?" Woodard added. With the U.S. Marshalls Service controlled by the president — who could order them not to enforce judge's arrest warrants for contempt of court — we could very quickly be in a post-constitutional environment, where the executive is no longer bound by law.
Trump's AI Gaza Video Is the Tip of a Horrifying 'Gaz-A-Lago' Iceberg gizmodo
Musk and Trump's Fort Knox Trip Is About Bitcoin gizmodo
FAA Might Drop Verizon for Starlink as Elon Musk Controls U.S. Government
We're Already in the Aftermath Sarah Kendzior at Hobbledehoy
Despite a surfeit of documentation, most pundits and politicians have been reluctant to pursue Trump's Kremlin ties seriously because: 1) they do not want to follow the money trail, which leads to donors to both parties 2) Trump's network includes US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia 3) and ties to cases like Epstein/Maxwell that highlight lost US sovereignty and decades-long sadistic plots 4) and exposes many US officials, especially in the FBI, as corrupt accomplices. As a result, the focus has been on trivialities, like bot farms, or on rumors like this one. As I wrote in Hiding in Plain Sight, "No one could see the forest for the treason."
Trump's E.P.A. Seeks to Deny Science That Americans Discovered Bill McKibben at The New Yorker
Keeling, who worked with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, set up his instrument in the U.S. Weather Bureau's newly built observatory, on the north flank of the Mauna Loa volcano, on the island of Hawaii. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he sampled the air, and what he found was that the oceans were not, as long-standing scientific wisdom had held, soaking up all the excess CO2 produced by humankind's combustion of coal and gas and oil; instead, carbon dioxide was accumulating in the atmosphere. By 1960, he had the beginnings of what we now call the Keeling Curve, which shows the relentless (and accelerating) pace of that accumulation, the graphic depiction of our fate. That monitoring station is, for the moment, still operating, under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Under DOGE, America's VA Finds New Government 'Waste' Target: Chemotherapy for Vets gizmodo
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The Battering School Kids Map Maps Mania
Microsoft pulls the plug on Skype boing boing
COVID-19 Pandemic and Vaccination Skepticism PMC
Did You Realise How New Your Rights Are? Kay Elúvian at Medium
I Wasted 6 Months Writing Aimlessly. One Simple Shift Changed Everything Derek Hughes at Medium
To Increase Government Efficiency, Every Federal Employee Must Write an Email No One Will Read Matt Moskovciak. at McSweeney's
An Updated Guide to Generations Rachel Reyes at McSweeney's
The Democracy Index Joyce Vance at The Contrarian
That's what we saw in broad daylight, in front of the cameras.
Behind the scenes is where the corrupt dealings take place, where self-dealing and conflicts of interest have become standard operating procedure. In a jaw-dropping indication of grift, Trump's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reportedly plans to cancel a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to purportedly upgrade air traffic control communications systems by handing that lucrative contract over to Musk's Starlink (a SpaceX technology). Executives at Musk's X are also reportedly pressuring an advertising agency, Interpublic Group, to have its clients purchase more advertising on the social media platform; Interpublic took these comments as threats to their pending $13 billion merger with another ad agency. Not to be outdone, Trump used the Oval Office this week to broker negotiations between rival golf leagues, the PGA and LIV Golf (which he called "much more complicated" than the Russia-Ukraine peace talks). Trump's golf courses will benefit from any deal he secures.
In real time, we are watching as Trump and Musk turn the U.S. government into a piggy bank for billionaires, with the GOP Congress' tacit consent. Less obvious, however, is their affinity for lining up what appear to be protection rackets. All of which undermine the rule of law.
Trump and Vance berate Zelensky, kick him out of White House The Contrarian
As the New York Times reported, "President Trump and Vice President JD Vance loudly berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday in an explosive televised shouting match unlike any seen in the Oval Office between an American president and foreign leader in modern times." In a scene as jaw-dropping as it was disgraceful, Trump and Vance "castigated Mr. Zelensky for not being grateful enough for U.S. support in its war with Russia and sought to strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictate."
At the onset, it appeared that Vance had provoked Zelensky, drawing on old grievances from the campaign and for failing to express gratitude.
The sight of an American president so out of control, so lacking in either grace or gravitas, and so dismissive of our own security needs marked a low point in the annals of U.S. foreign policy.
West Virginia lawmakers want to declare Bible "inerrant" and "accurate historical record"
Subsea fibre optic cable deliberately cut for the 2nd time between N.S. and N.L. CBC News
The Five Best Video Call Apps to Replace Skype
Splinternet: Nation-States and the End of the Global Web? Giles Crouch
Götterdämmerung and Ragnarök Wikipedia
It Was an Ambush Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic
...Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn — or apply — the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move — it would be a self-inflicted wound.
...What these platforms deliver is the exact opposite of immortality. The empires of TikTok and Instagram and hundreds of other apps are built on the flimsiest of foundations—a few seconds of streaming data.
...Contemporary academia, ceaselessly warped and worsened by the collision of petty politics and neoliberal nastiness, constantly demands more and more. As researchers, we are expected to produce research™: commodified, packaged, ready to be sold back to universities. The type of scholarship and thinking encouraged by such conditions is not only increasingly incremental and irrelevant, it tends to be narrow and banal.
...Viewing Musk's moves as a power grab becomes clearer when examining his corporate empire. He controls multiple companies that have federal contracts and are subject to government regulations. SpaceX and Tesla, as well as tunneling firm The Boring Company, the brain science company Neuralink, and artificial intelligence firm xAI all operate in markets where government oversight can make or break fortunes.
We share the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.
...What seems to have happened, and what the pandemic accelerated, was something akin to the beginning of the protestant reformation. Part of the reason Luther was able to so powerfully undermine the Catholic powers of the time was his proximity to the novel technology of the printing press, and the sheer volume of pamphlets that he was able to turn out and distribute. Authority rests on trust, and the more its assumption can be directly questioned the more it begins to become shaky, especially if that questioning comes at a time when the foundations really are shaky.
...With the tech billionaire Elon Musk at his side, Trump has moved with astonishing velocity to fire critics, punish media, reward allies, gut the federal government, exploit presidential immunity and test the limits of his authority. Many of their actions have been unconstitutional and illegal. With Congress impotent, only the federal courts have slowed them down.
...if you want to get away with something that involves an extremely dodgy process, it's smart to start with the most substantively unpopular program you can find. The humanitarian work of USAID seems largely irrelevant to this administration. George W. Bush, for all his flaws, had a genuine interest in global public health that was motivated by a sincere idealism, and that's just not the case for Trump or anyone influential on his team. USAID is a soft target to beat up on while testing the theory that the president can ignore the law and unilaterally kill off duly authorized programs.
...Affinity Partners, the investment firm Kushner founded after leaving the White House, and Emirati billionaire Mohamed Alabbar will develop a luxury hotel and apartment complex in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, on the site of the former Yugoslav defense ministry. Trump considered a similar idea before running for president in 2016.
Vance's primary reason for snubbing the global community, he said, was because the Trump administration believes "excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off." Growing that industry safely and with guide rails would get in the way of profits, you see, and that simply cannot stand.
...It's also true, I think, that Trump has been able to consolidate mainstream Republican support for his unlawful behavior in part because Republicans do not have a viable legislative agenda, despite their trifecta. George W. Bush tried to significantly reduce Social Security spending. Mitt Romney ran on significantly reducing Medicare spending. Trump, in his first term, tried to completely eliminate ACA subsidies, completely eliminate Medicaid expansion, and then cut Medicaid even more to below the pre-ACA level. None of this succeeded.
...he wants not only to reduce the U.S. government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart... The team was aided in this demolition job by a suite of tools from the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an "A.I.-first strategy," which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts. DOGE is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including "climate change" and "gender identity"—and then block the proposals. "Everything that can be machine-automated will be," one government official told the Washington Post. "And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats."
Trump's first administration had him as the unhappy CEO of a cluster of Republican-affiliated leaders with business experience, military experience, administrative experience and experience in electoral politics, a different cluster than the one that had risen through service in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies. He was unhappy because his assemblage wanted to domesticate his wild impulses and careless gestures, to yoke him to something like a coherent strategic vision of governance and some degree of continuity with past Republican policy initiatives. In the end, Trump won out by attrition and began to summon an entirely new assemblage to his side, recruited first and foremost for their servility to his personal authority and impulses and secondly for the extremism of their vision, for advocacy of post-constitutional executive power.
...many companies including Amazon, Pepsi, McDonald's and Walmart have gradually been abandoning many of the DEI policies that have been front and centre over recent years. And the decline in what is mockingly called 'woke' is not just limited to companies or caused solely by fear of the wrath of Trump. Even those once fully sold in seem to be turning their backs on support for a political movement seemingly running out of steam.
Stefan Collini on the new edition of the Great Transformation is a heavy dose of Oxbridge Senior Common Room. Nevertheless, interesting, as one would expect from Collini, on the English intellectual background.
...What they all have in common is that they remind us how unprotected we are from information that appears to be real but is completely false.
...we can't stop the coming tech fascism by spending our lives hypnotized by social media platforms run by billionaires. Even as we try to inform ourselves or raise awareness for one of the ever-increasing barrage of horrors, we are enriching toads like Zuck and Muskrat. As we tear each other apart according to the dysfunctional logics that their platforms incentivize. as scroll through child snuff films bracketed by ads for Adderall substitutes that don't work, we are feeding our lifeblood to their bank accounts. We stare into our LED screens until the physical world seems pallid by comparison. We scroll. Our lives tick by, ever more isolated and disembodied. We have to pry their trap from our hands...
...In a 2015 tweet that remains depressingly relevant a decade later, Adrian Bott joked: " 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party." But I don't want to single out ordinary citizens. Even Republican members of Congress are doing the same dance—cheering on Trump cuts in general but scrambling to protect their own states from losing any federal money. They ran for office with the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, but they never expected the leopards to eat their faces too.
Researchers have developed a new AI algorithm, called Torque Clustering, that is much closer to natural intelligence than current methods. It significantly improves how AI systems learn and uncover patterns in data independently, without human guidance.
In "Soy Right ascendent" Max Read describes the shift in Trumpdom away from the old MAGA tribe of angry dads and obsessed moms toward the "Soy Right" of sexist techbros, whiny contrarians and meme Nazis. This group, he points out, is what evolved out of Gamergate, and its ascendance is happening mostly because one of them is the richest man in the world.
Philip Roth famously worried that good satirical fiction was impossible to write in America because actual America was too absurd and too extreme to effectively parody. In an essay published in Commentary in 1961, he wrote:
The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.
...New York Mayor Eric Adams and the Trump-administration border czar Tom Homan appeared together on the Fox & Friends couch, where hizzoner pledged cooperation with the federal government on immigration and Homan pledged in graphic terms to hold him to that.
Musk himself is a giant contractor for the government and many of his moves may be intended to disadvantage his competitors and spew more billions of our tax dollars into his shitty companies. Although Musk's myrmidons seem to be leaving the Department of Defense — the biggest black hole in the US budget and the most corrupt of US government agencies &mdash alone for the moment, their actions nevertheless have dire implications for US national security.
Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent. The tech critic Cory Doctorow has described these men as "broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts," fighting enemy institutions as a sort of Tesla Jugend. The sociologist Ho-Fung Hung suggested they were Red Guards of a Great Github Cultural Revolution, storming the headquarters and confronting the party in the name of a purer reading of the master's texts. The economist J.W. Mason compared their actions to the dismemberment of the former Soviet state in the 1990s—private looting under foreign supervision. Musk himself referenced a beloved far-right meme when he posted that "not many Spartans are needed to win battles."
...the world is so indigestible that if someone wanted to sell it they wouldn't even find a convincing advertisement. However, even if Mafalda is dissentient and rebellious, she is still a child, this is why she does not abandon the world to its fate, but she speaks with it and nurses it putting even plasters on its wounds if necessary. She invites it to improve, she exhorts it to resist, she makes it promise her that it would be still there when, as an adult, she'll be an interpreter at the UN. It's true, she holds the plate with her globe, which is only a reproduction of the decrepit original one, but what is important are the intentions and those of Mafalda are sincere.
A sustained campaign of attacks blazed across the Welsh counties of Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire, and Pembrokeshire from 1839. Tenant-farmers and labourers, infuriated by increased charges on road travel that made their working lives and finances even more burdensome, took matters into their own hands by destroying tollhouses, gates, and bars in what became known as the Rebecca riots. Perhaps the movement's most recognisable aspect was its enigmatic leader 'Rebecca', purported to be taken from Genesis, in which Rebecca is told: 'Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. She was represented during protests by a participant in costume that combined masculine and feminine signifiers: a gown or petticoat thrown on over work clothes, or an elaborate wig paired with a false beard. As the unrest spread across South Wales, reaching its peak in summer 1843, it grew to encompass workhouses, formerly common land enclosed by private landowners, and the estates of the local gentry. Just as the targets of Rebeccaism went beyond tollgates, so their tactics went beyond rioting. Protesters organised mass demonstrations, stormed workhouses, resisted evictions of tenants and auctions of seized property, wrote threatening letters in Rebecca's name, and collected money for unwed mothers and children. At public meetings, they drew up resolutions to Parliament that echoed the Chartist demand for the secret ballot and the vote for working men. … Authorities at the time, from local magistrates to the young Queen Victoria, took the riots more seriously than many subsequent historians have... Victoria's adviser Lord Melbourne worried that the conflict might spiral into a revolutionary 'general rising against property'. Robert Peel's Tory government, already shaken by the rise of Chartism, Ireland's independence campaign, the general strike of 1842, and, elsewhere in Wales, popular uprisings at Merthyr Tydfil and Newport, sent in thousands of police and soldiers to occupy the area. As resistance continued, the government was forced to take the more conciliatory step of asking the people to air their grievances directly in the 1843 Commission of Inquiry... Far from being — as some radicals sneered at the time — 'an affair of middle-class farmers', the Rebecca movement drew poorer farmhands, domestic servants, artisans, industrial workers, and even the commercial middle classes into its ranks. Its cross-class makeup, initially a strength, led to fractures and divisions ... Rebeccaism's demographics also played a part in its rocky relationship with Chartism, which was entrenched in the Welsh coal and iron towns further east. While some leading Chartists cautioned against the class alliances that shaped Rebeccaism, citing the failure of this strategy in the earlier Reform campaign, others welcomed Rebecca as a potential partner in a radical popular front...
Source: History Today by Rhian E. Jones...From literally the very beginning, Medium was a place for personal storytelling.
rethinking libraries oook in 2003
...Throughout history, many writers and philosophers observed a strong relationship between language and thought. A few examples include Oscar Wilde's statement that language is "the parent, and not the child, of thought", or when Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world," and Bertrand Russell said that the role of language is "to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it."
...What I'm doing right now is sharing some knowledge that I have that you may have only had a partial version of — and once I transmit it to you through language, you can update your knowledge and have that in your mind as well. So it's basically like a shortcut for telepathy. We can't read each other's mind. But we can use this tool called language, which is a flexible way to communicate our inner states, to transmit information to each other.
Theory-free inference is a hell of a drug. For years, Big Data advocates — the larval form of today's AI weirdos — have insisted that if you have enough data, you can infer causal relationships between complex phenomena without ever having to understand how x causes y, and thus, we can slay the dread "correlation is not causation" beast.
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it.
...Now consider Liliane Bettencourt, who, during Bill Gates period as Microsoft CEO, was the richest woman in Europe. Bettencourt was born very, very rich, heiress to the L'Oreal fortune. Unlike Gates, Bettencourt didn't have a job. She just sat around, while financial planners invested her family money. Over the 25 years when Bill Gates was growing Microsoft from zero to the most successful company in planetary history, Bettencourt made more money than Gates. Gates made his money by doing something. Bettencourt made her money by emerging from a very lucky orifice and just hanging around.
Google and Apple changed the name of the body of water between Mexico and Florida to "the Gulf of America" last week. People in Mexico will see the maiden name, people in the US the Maga name. People outside of either nation will see both, which looks a bit like a hyphenated last name.
...The more extreme life becomes, the more extreme ideologies become. Huge segments of the population, unable to absorb the despair and bleakness, severs itself from a reality-based universe. It takes comfort in magical thinking, a bizarre millennialism — one embodied for us in a Christianized fascism — which turns con artists, morons, criminals, charlatans, gangsters and grifters into prophets while branding those who decry the pillage and corruption into traitors. The rush towards self-immolation accelerates intellectual and moral paralysis.
...Thus far, however, Trump is faring badly in the court system. TROs have paused the implementation of myriad orders—from ending birthright citizenship to shuttering USAID—pending further judicial review. The fate of many of those orders ultimately rests with the Supreme Court, to which Trump appointed three of the nine justices, and which recently granted the executive sweeping immunity powers. Even here, an unprecedented showdown is possible: recently J.D. Vance tweeted that "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power," suggesting that it is the executive, not the judiciary, who decides what is and what is not legitimate—or legal—cfor the president to undertake.
...Even if you've been suckered by the lie that bosses have a legal "fiduciary duty" to maximize shareholder returns (this is a myth, by the way — no such law exists), it doesn't follow that customers or workers share that fiduciary duty. As a customer, you are not legally obliged to arrange your affairs to maximize the dividends paid by to investors in your corporate landlord or by the merchants you patronize. As a worker, you are under no legal obligation to consider shareholders' interests when you bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions.
...the flagging performance of American students isnt just about something that's happening in schools; it's about something that's happening in our society at large. He glosses a few different theories, but I think it's pretty obviously a combination of smartphones, social media, and short-form video. If you give people more stuff to do, they read less. Our son loves to read, but he obviously loves playing Fortnite and watching Minecraft streamers on YouTube even more. He reads a lot anyway because he loves it, because he was taught well at school, and because we make books available for him at home. But mostly he reads a lot because there are large swathes of time when gaming and watching videos are simply off-limits.
...this Act allows Congress to lasso and hogtie hundreds of Biden-era federal regulations in one mass repeal. Worker protections, environmental safeguards, product safety rules, and banking regulations — blown up like a stick of dynamite.
(in the mid-teens)...In those days, Silicon Valley was perceived as an apolitical place. People in the industry were associated with a naïve techno-utopianism—the belief that problems of governance might be properly demystified as problems of engineering. They might have made libertarian or even anarcho-capitalist noises from time to time, but their underlying commitments were more or less progressive. Peter Thiel espoused the view that freedom and democracy were incompatible, and he likened the most capable founders to dictators, but these ideas seemed idiosyncratic and vain rather than dangerous. The Google engineer's petition in favor of a Valley-backed coup was taken as a spoof. It wasn't. A "neoreactionary" vanguard had arisen in the Bay Area. Its objective was not to retreat from the citadels of governance but to place them under siege. The Google engineer had been influenced by an obscure programmer-monarchist named Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. America, Yarvin declared, suffered from “chronic kinglessness.” Silicon Valley, where the best companies were run by executive fiat, knew how to make the trains run on time.
...Doomscrolling, as Eiseman referenced—the overindulgence in anxiety-inducing news stories and commentators shouting in text online&mdash'accomplishes even less than it did before, because Internet discourse lacks any coherent direction
...This attempt "bespoke" community-centrism reminds me of M.G. Siegler's analysis of Barnes & Noble, which completed a similar turnaround over the last few years. "Scale is power," Siegler writes, "but you need to obfuscate that from the customer when it comes to retail." If you don't, your product will feel soulless and customers will leave, which is exactly what's happened to Starbucks over the last five years.
...St. Madeline Medianus had many interesting opinions on AI safety, but nobody listened because she was ugly, shy, and a bad speaker. She prayed for help, and one night Gwern appeared to her in a dream and told her a personalized supplement stack that would make her beautiful and charismatic. She took the supplements, got invited to all the cool parties, and her theories became the talk of the town. But she realized that her beauty and charisma were making people take her too seriously compared to others, so she lowered the dose until she was exactly average-looking and people would update on her opinions exactly the right amount.
Montaigne's Tower Wikipedia
Adding new titles in bulk to LibraryThing
...This week, we also got a snapshot of what it means for the Justice Department to be a captive of the presidency; a tool Trump can deploy to both threaten enemies and reward friends. Take the new initiative by Ed Martin, the interim and nominee for U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. Martin, who personally represented Jan. 6 defendants, sent a series of letters to Democratic members of Congress threatening federal prosecution for their criticisms of Trump allies like Elon Musk. We're also following the ongoing drama of DOJ's efforts to dismiss the bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, bringing him to heel so he can help carry out their mass deportation plans. It's nothing short of an intimidation racket.
...In his 2017 response to Barnett, Gienapp digs in hard on a point that most historians understand extremely well, which is that deciding how people made meaning in the past, in understanding what things meant to past people, is an incredibly challenging methodological and epistemological problem. Above all else, you cannot begin to make honest progress towards that work if you just decide that you're the subject you're looking for, and that what makes sense to you must have been how people made sense in the past. That's especially true if you do it in the especially crude sociological way that the current originalists implicitly do—that the reason they can gauge those past publics is that they are also white, literate, educated people of means.
...The Chinese government has taken a clear stance on DeepSeek: Officials must learn to use it—as a means to master AI and large language models (LLMs)—and integrate it into governance. Nationwide deployment. It's being applied across the board to reduce workloads, enhance decision-making, and accelerate tasks wherever it makes sense. Unprecedented appreciation for this technology at the bureaucratic level.
...Grasping the scale of President Donald Trump's assault on American governance is no small matter. The administration is challenging laws, claiming the right to reinterpret the Constitution, questioning judges' powers, and arrogating new powers to itself. Seeking to convey the gravity of the situation, many commentators have labeled what's happening a "constitutional crisis."
...The larger picture is that Donald Trump refuses, or is simply unable, to grasp any distinction between the law and his own whims.
...Prior to the firings, about 1,700 staff worked at NSF, managing their $9 billion federal budget that funds research on everything from astrophysics to civil engineering. Staff were called to an emergency meeting at 10 a.m. ET, held on Zoom and in person, where they were told by Micah Cheatham, NSF's chief management officer, that they'd be terminated by the end of the day, without severance. According to sources who were present, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, who ordered the firings, did not attend the meeting.
...Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), sometimes auto sensory meridian response, is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson...
South Korea is a particularly apt example in this context. After all, something incredible happened there two months ago, and it could be just the kind of inspiration Americans need to turn the tide on the Trump administration's dangerous power-grab.
a sweeping Inauguration Day executive order focused on "Unleashing American Energy." Half way through the lengthy document is a directive that would obliterate an obscure but critically important calculation the government uses to gauge the real-world costs that climate change is imposing on the U.S. economy.
Quick quiz. Suppose you read a headline in the online version of the Wall Street Journal (or NY Times etc) stating that, from now on, US Treasury bonds would be redeemed in crypto. Would your response be
A new multi-author study in Nature finds that the world's 200,000 glaciers are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. If all of them melted, it would raise sea level by over a foot, a disaster for coastal communities around the world.
...The capitalist dynamic is both cause of our prosperous good fortune and means of our probable destruction, the damage in large part the work of Adam Smith's invisible hand, guided by the belief that money buys the future. Nature doesn't take checks. Who then pays the piper—does capitalism survive climate change, or does a changed climate put an end to capitalism?
In the world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep well of inspiration—and Christian beliefs she would always struggle against.
Study finds practices in Buddhism and Christianity share a similar cognitive pathway to profound focus... While one is quiet and deeply focused, and the other emotionally charged and expressive, both appear to harness the same cognitive feedback loop to create profound states of joy and surrender.
The American utility market is based on a social contract. The government sanctions private, for-
profit monopolies to provide approximately 70% of electricity and 95% of natural gas deliveries
in the United States. 1 In return, these private monopolies, called investor-owned utilities (IOUs),
agree to provide universal service and to be subject to cost-of-service regulation (COSR) of their
customer rates, usually by state utility commissions. The other 30% of electricity and 5% of gas
are provided by publicly or mutually owned utilities.
What if I were to tell you about an obscure clique of consultants that concoct dubious economic analysis to convince regulators to side with corporations, enabling a massive rip-off of ordinary Americans? I think your curious, cautious response might be, "You're going to have to be more specific."
Emboldened by the US and the international community's acceptance of its genocide, Israel is not taking long to emerge from the shadows of its own rhetoric. After US President Donald Trump said that there is no right of return for Palestinians under the proposed take-over of Gaza for real estate development, Likud Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi has called for the forced transfer of Palestinians from Gaza.
"When you want to get everyone hooked on a product, you release it for free. Read the AI's description of AI Lock-In Strategy at the end of the post (oh, the irony)." The lock-in strategy is a lovely read, and people should quite rightly take it as a warning. But it isn't AI that's the problem, is it? The same strategy is described by Shapiro and Varian in Information Rules, published in 1999. It's what publishers did with books and then e-books. The product isn't the problem, the companies that control the product are. Educated people should be able to see the difference.
I see the point of focusing your reading on who you follow and not who is recommended by the algorithm. I've never used alerts and notifications, so my attention stays pretty uninterrupted. I use RSS extensively and focus on finding people and topics that are of interest to me. I keep negative and distracting voices out of my head. Would this work for everyone? I can't say; for some people the fear of missing out (FOMO) is strong, and we need those people, so we can find out what's going on.
..."Good morning, everyone! As a reminder, please refrain from using Slack at the moment while our various general counsels figure out the best way to handle the records migration to our new EOP [Executive Office of the President] component"
Slack (software) Wikipedia
...Where is the money that this supposedly revolutionary, world-changing industry is making, and will make?
As Trump leans into AI, automated systems are already ruining lives. A new organization is out to stop it.
Algorithm Wikipedia
...Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: "I am not a survivor or a responder. I'm a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame."
How can one try to negotiate a peace with a lying fantasist chaos monkey in the house—with multiple lying fantasist chaos monkey in the house—anyway?
...They don't care about statistics or probabilities or the fundamental incompatibility of their priorities and those of the billionaires who are kissing Trump's ring. They care about that feeling they get when they feel like someone, especially someone important, is finally speaking their language.
Welch Labs explains how the perceptron, an algorithm developed by Frank Rosenblatt in 1950s, is a foundation for current large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT. You just have to link 100 million or so perceptrons in a single network.
The number of artificial satellites orbiting the Earth has increased exponentially in recent years, from under 1000 in 2010 to over 11,000 today.
...researchers analyzed the DNA of 370 individuals that lived in historical periods spanning around 800 years, from 2nd century BCE to 6th century CE, encompassing sites in the Mongolian steppe, Central Asia, and the Carpathian Basin of Central Europe. In particular, they examined 35 newly sequenced genomes ranging from: a 3rd-4th century site in Kazakhstan and 5th-6th century contexts in the Carpathian Basin
A research and innovation center based at Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Our mission is to create knowledge and research-based resources that help people — especially youth — thrive in a tech-filled world.
...In an essay published in 2000, the anthropologist Anna Tsing placed the idea of the project at the heart of her analysis of modernization, globalization and what she termed, 'the global situation'. 'Modernization, like globalization, was seductive. It was many years before social scientists moved beyond endorsements, refusals and reforms of modernization to describe modernization as a set of projects with cultural and institutional specificities and limitations'(Tsing, 2000, p. 328). Yet, if the dreams of both modernization and globalization have faded, as Tsing observed, the idea of the project, which was so central to her analysis, has had remarkable resilience. Even when the ruins of earlier modernization projects are scattered across the landscape, there is no shortage of new infrastructural projects. Tsing (Citation2000) notes that earlier critical studies highlighted 'the social practice, material infrastructure, cultural negotiations, institutions and power relations through which modernization projects work – and are opposed, contested and reformulated'(p. 329). In this paper we pursue the idea of the project, expanding and reformulating her analysis of the ways in which projects are both assembled and disassembled. Moreover, whereas the 'global situation'for Tsing was marked by the wider projects of modernization and subsequently globalization, we observe that the present period is one in which infrastructural projects have come to be justified as contributions to 'transition'and as responses to climate change (Gutierrez et al., Citation2019). In her book The licit life of capitalism, anthropologist Hannah Appel understands capitalism not as a pre-existing context but rather as a 'project, a constant ongoing experiment, a desire, a haunted hope'(Appel, 2019, p. 26). As such, capitalism has come to include both successful and failed projects, which are themselves thought to be elements of wider projects. What is a project? First, for us, a project (noun) is an assemblage of expertise, labour and resources. Tsing herself defined projects as organized packages of ideas and practices that assume an at least tentative stability through their social enactment, whether as custom, convention, trend, clubbish or professional training, institutional mandate, or government policy. A project is an institutionalized discourse with social and material effects. (Tsing, 2001, p. 4; see also Tsing, 2000) But while this is a good starting point, sustaining projects, as Appel (2019) insists 'requires a tremendous amount of work. From manual, managerial, domestic, and political labour; to material infrastructures and technologies; to legal, ethical, and affective framing processes'(Appel, 2019, p. 3; see also Graan, 2022, p. 743; Nadaï & Cointe, 2020, p. 150). A focus on the 'tremendous amount'of diverse forms of work lies at the heart of our analysis of projects. Moreover, if projects have, as Tsing observes, a 'tentative stability', we stress how they can be destabilized, both through explicitly political forms of action and non-human forces. Yet, at the same time, to project is a verb. To project is to throw forwards or to imagine, visualize or speculate on a possible future (Abram & Weszkalnys, 2016, p. 9; Born, 2006). As Andrew Graan (2022) suggests, projects are both logisitical and visionary (p. 736). A projector is an instrument or person that performs the task of projection; an act that may be considered more or less realistic about the possibility that a project may be actualized in the future. At the same time, it is not possible to understand individual infrastructural projects without mapping the layering of the history of earlier projects, including unrealized and unbuilt projects, on which they rest. Indeed, the 'history of international development is littered with the wreckage of failed projects'(Scott, 1998, quoted in Carse & Kneas, 2019, p. 10). All too frequently, projects fail to materialize, or they are stalled, or remain incomplete or unused. The debris of incomplete projects remains.
...Whether tripe is kosher depends on the religion of the cow...
...On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after his foreign-policy team met in Riyadh with Russian officials to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine, the President had what can only be described as another Helsinki moment. Holding forth at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago about why he had refused to include the Ukrainians in the Saudi meeting, Trump said that there was no reason to have done so, since Russia's invasion, three years ago this week, was actually Ukraine's fault. "You should never have started it," he said, addressing Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky. "You could have made a deal." To hear Trump tell it, Ukraine might as well be bombing its own cities and killing its own citizens. He claimed that the United States had spent three hundred and fifty billion dollars helping Ukraine, and that Zelensky's popularity had plummeted to just four per cent in recent polls—both statements so far divorced from reality that Putin himself might not have been brazen enough to make them.
...When we explore the social life of photographs we find that serendipity can be a large factor in people's re-engagement with the context surrounding a photograph, a way to bring older photographs back to life. We see this regularly on Flickr Commons and even more so since the Commons Explorer's Conversations view lets anyone see what people are saying about the photographs in Flickr Commons
...Whether he knows it or not, Musk was admitting that he was making the decisions about what should get funding in a completely arbitrary way. While it may seem obvious that Ebola prevention should be funded, he hasn't been elected or confirmed to make that decision. His mandate from President Trump as a “special government employee” is ostensibly to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. But everything DOGE has presented publicly to cut is just something Musk didn't like, not something that was an example of waste, fraud, or abuse.
...I've seen enough from my workplace to be able to say that quantum computing is a real thing and will make life interesting for developers and programmers (or their AI tools) for the next few decades. But I want to remind people as the hype wave starts that quantum computing has been in development for a long time in academic and government computer labs. Microsoft isn't creating or inventing quantum computing; it's trying to commercialize it. Take careful note of the difference.
...an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed
(of RSS)...It's like panning for gold! It's work. The vast majority of stuff these sites crank out is middling-to-low interest to me. But when I stumble upon something great, the delight is intense and vertiginous. Many of my favorite essays on Medium were sparked by offbeat posts/essays/stories I found using RSS. And it's always stuff you'd never find going viral on any social network; awesomely weird mushrooms growing on the side of dank trees.
Plants mount strategic defenses against predators, fungi solve complex mathematical problems, and bacteria coordinate group behavior through electrical signals similar to those in human neurons.
..."When the president breaks laws or violates the Constitution in such a manner, our system provides two remedies. The first is that the U.S. House impeaches him or her and the Senate votes to remove them from office; it's clear that the Republican majorities in these chambers today will not do this," Woodard wrote in the essay published Feb. 15, referencing the illegal closure and impoundment of congressionally-allocated funds at USAID and other federal agencies. "The alternative is that the illegal moves are challenged in court and blocked by judges, who order the lawless acts reversed," which is what has been happening in recent weeks.
(best to avert one's eyes...)
Trump's allegiance is to a transnational organized crime network in which the Kremlin is a key node. He has operated in this network for over half a century. His criminal ties are extensively documented in my book Hiding in Plain Sight, which contains hundreds of end notes to others' work. Trump is a Kremlin asset: his activity benefits Russian officials and oligarchs and puts their interests before those of the US. This does not make him a secret agent or a spy. Trump is primarily a mafia associate, and it is through that lens that his rise should be examined.
...The period from July, 1957, to December, 1958, was designated the International Geophysical Year, a global scientific effort to understand the Earth and its environment. Researchers discovered everything from the Van Allen belts (two belts of radiation that surround and shield the Earth) to the undersea mountain ridges that helped us understand plate tectonics. The launch of Sputnik (and America's Vanguard catch-up) was part of the I.G.Y., too. But, in the long run, nothing mattered as much as the deployment of an instrument installed by a young American postdoc named Charles David Keeling, which was used to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
...According to the data, approximately 70,000 children were physically punished during the 2017-18 school year. Mississippi reported the highest number of students hit, with 20,388 pupils beaten. Texas (14,264 students beaten) and Alabama (9,174 students beaten) recorded the second and third highest numbers, respectively.
...The study reveals that trust in the COVID-19 vaccines, institutions, and cultural and religious beliefs determines people's vaccination decisions in a significant manner. The study further highlighted that the quick production and administration of the various COVID-19 vaccines and history of previous epidemics/pandemic's vaccination programs (such as the side effects of the vaccines) could have made people hesitant towards the COVID-19 vaccination. Furthermore, trust in governments, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare institutions informs people whether to participate in the COVID-19 pandemic vaccination project. Last but not the least, religious and cultural beliefs have sown seeds of skepticism in people and, ultimately, their COVID-19 vaccination decisions.
Did you realise, best beloved, that the "weekend" is barely 100 years old? It was established in the 1930s, after a century of workers and unions fighting to be seen as respectable. Churches also fought for an extra day of the week, after Sunday, for parishioners to "improve" themselves through wholesome recreation. A 6-day working week had led to Sunday being a 24 hour period when as much debauchery could be accommodated as possible — leading to the infamous "Saint Monday" work absences — and religious leaders were keen to control this. Starting as half-day Saturday, the recently realised railway network offered discount tickets on Saturday. Saturday also became the traditional day for football matches. Finally, in the 1930s, it became the norm for both all of Saturday and Sunday to be free days for workers.
For 6 months I felt lost. No audience. No growth. My writing was ignored. Then I made one shift. I got crystal clear on what to write about. Within a year I had 16,000 followers and enough income to go part-time.
Think back to your favorite organized crime films. They feature theatrical displays of obedience and sycophancy, along with economic grift.
This week's Cabinet meeting was a textbook example of the former. Ahead of the meeting, the President set the tone, posting on Truth Social, "ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON. The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!" At the meeting, Trump prompted the group to signal their deference to Musk, "Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we'll throw him out of here." With that, the Cabinet began a round of applause. Musk then stood to address the room, towering over the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense, and the other Cabinet officials, who strained their necks to watch the richest man in the world field questions from the press. On Thursday, Trump elevated Musk, a "Special government employee" above the duly appointed-and-confirmed Cabinet officials, for all the world to see.
Never before have we witnessed such a grotesque display of bullying in the Oval Office by a president and vice president of the United States. Berating a democratic ally for the temerity not to sacrifice his own country to Donald Trump's idol, Vladimir Putin.