(Punch, 1845)
[some are paywalled, e.g. Medium, New Yorker, etc.]
[some are paywalled, e.g. Medium, New Yorker, etc.]
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How to Live in a World That's Officially Broken Umair Haque
...You know and I know what's coming now. I don't write about it endlessly because if we're smart, we all know. Financial crashes. Stagnating economies, lurching into depression. Political meltdowns, as democracy goes on decaying, one great leap at a time. Social fractures. The breakdown of norms and values, as people lose their bearings and their marbles and everything they have. We're talking about developing a mindset to weather all that....We're all going to lose something. We're all going to get burned now. Our societies have made disastrous choices, and we're all going to pay a price, whether it's our savings, incomes, assets, possibilities, tomorrows. The question is how much. That's risk mitigation.
Trump's Disgrace David Remnick at The New Yorker
It was one thing to anticipate this prolonged political moment; it has been, these past weeks, quite another to live it. Each day is its own fresh hell, bringing ever more outrageous news from an autocrat who revels in his contempt for the government he leads, for the foreign allies who deserve our support, and for the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Since beginning his second term, six weeks ago, Donald Trump has commandeered public attention to such an extent that it is hard to recall that there was ever a time when an American President went about his first weeks in office in a frenzy of activity characterized not by threat, chaos, and corruption but by discipline, competence, and compassion.
What Shape Is the Universe? John Etnyre at gizmodo
The options become even more complicated if you consider time as a dimension.
The West has Long Demanded of Palestinians what Trump Demanded of Ukraine — and More Juan Cole
...Trump is demanding that Volodymyr Zelenskiyy, the president of Ukraine, "make peace" with Russia, accusing him of risking plunging the planet into WW III with his stand against the Russian invasion. Trump told Zelenskiyy, "you're either going to make a deal or we're out." He meant by "deal" acquiescing in the Russian annexation of the Donbass and neighboring regions of Ukraine.I would like to take the moment to point out that Trump's demands of Ukraine are no different than the US and Western Europe's demands of the Palestinians back in the 1990s, and that nowadays the West appears to expect the Palestinians simply to commit mass suicide...
Another elephant in the room Mark Liberman at Language Log
The lost 'Arab': Gaza and the evolving Language of the Palestinian Struggle Ramzy Baroud at Informed Comment >
Language matters. Aside from its immediate impact on our perception of great political events, including war, language also defines our understanding of these events throughout history, thereby shaping our relationship with the past, the present and the future.
The Souls of Animals Marginalian
Beyond Mesopotamia Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite LRB
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, grasped something of this fact. Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all seeking connection with a lost past, or the power to make obscure symbols speak....Elam, like Sumeria, is an exochoronym, never used in the region itself. As the first documented polity in what we now call Iran, it remains a lesser-known contemporary of the great Mesopotamian states. Elam is recorded dozens of times in the Bible, where it features as a bellicose but impressive kingdom to the east... The Babylonian records were full of wars with the Elamites.
...Desset argues that one thing the Linear Elamite texts reveal is that the concept of 'Elam' was a Mesopotamian construct, similar to the European notion of 'the Orient'. The ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau may have thought of themselves as belonging to an Elamite-speaking (or, as they would have had it, Hatamtite-speaking) cultural world, but not to a country called Elam.
...The Mayanist Michael Coe used to say that three things are necessary to decipher ancient writing. You need lots of examples of the script. You need a good understanding of the cultural context of the writing system. And, most important, you need a bilingual, or better a trilingual, inscription of a known writing system — a Rosetta stone, Ganjnameh or Behistun inscription carved on the orders of a helpful long dead monarch.
...if Desset is correct, Linear Elamite is a phonographic writing system, consisting entirely of signs representing phonemes. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs started out as logogrammatic writing systems, in which the signs record words rather than sounds. Over time they acquired syllabic signs, but they retained logograms and determinatives, which help indicate the semantic class (gods, buildings, professions) to which polyvalent signs belong.
...The word 'decipherment' is in a sense a misnomer. Ancient scripts are not ciphers. They were not designed to be unintelligible to outsiders or intentionally deceive. Ancient inscriptions were written by people following rules that may appear complex, but are no more so than the conventions of our own writing system.
Anchoring Your Thoughts Against the Blizzard of Trumpist Lies Is Very Important for You! Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality
a checklist from Martin Mycielski (2017...): The Authoritarian Régime Survival Guide:
"Transforming into a parent is messy and primal: I drew it all" Becky Barnicoat on turning motherhood into cartoons Guardian, and illustrations
smartphone life illustrated at Other sides of a Nobody
Pronouncing DOGE Mark Liberman at Language Log
The Department Of Government Efficiency is clearly a backronym of the Doge meme, which references a Shiba Inu dog.
Kadiköy: Asian Istanvul Dumneazu
...Kadiköy is on the Asian side of the Bosporus straits, and visitors usually reach it by ferry from Eminönu station across the water. With the newly opened Marmaray train service you can now get there directly by taking a modern subway underneath the Bosporus - a feat of engineering that counts as one of the modern world's technological marvels at least until the next big earthquake hits the Aegean fault, which runs directly beneath it.
Total News Doc Searls
To be clear, Total News is not about how we produce news now, but how we prepare for news in the future, and how we keep archives that inform future news.
How Trump's Tariffs Could Affect American Companies The New York Times
The Secret Menu at Rao's Lucy Sante
...And so it is with editors: If you are ever given the choice (you seldom will be, alas), go with the oldest editor. In addition to all the credentials of the oldest barber, the oldest editor will also know that every serious writer has a personality that comes through in the work, and that the editor's job is to preserve and improve that voice. Younger editors—most of them, now that older editors have been put out to pasture—often have a burning desire to carve their initials in the work of others.Sometimes it's not their fault, really. Increasing corporate oversight may be to blame. Even if algorithms aren't being chased, every outlet with pretensions to stature will attempt to create a house style, and that will entail editing their stable of writers so that they all sound alike. Younger editors, who for one thing want to keep their jobs, will become enforcers. And it's much easier to edit to a formula—to edit from the outside—than to get all the way inside the work and edit from there. Mechanical editing smoothes the surface, trimming digressions, expunging authorial tics, neutering interesting anomalies, turning novel phrases into the clichés they were constructed to avoid. It is as if everything were destined for the tired-businessman market, the people for whom AI summaries are intended. It represents an invisible form of dumbing-down. Anyway, some of these practices have been common among certain breeds of young editor going back to when magazines lived on advertising and were owned by hands-off millionaires who merely wanted to burnish their biographies. It's just easier for the editor whose mind is on a thousand other matters.
Waves of Conspicuousness Andy Ilachinski
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Ian Frazier on George W. S. Trow's "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse" The New Yorker
Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse George WS Trow 1978
Trump — America's "first crypto president" — to host summit on the currency Axios
President Trump will speak at the first-ever White House Crypto Summit next Friday.Trump has promised to be America's "first crypto president," and said Feb. 19 that he's "committed to making America the crypto capital."
The Trump family launched the Official Trump (TRUMP) and Melania Meme (MELANIA) coins Jan. 17 and Jan. 18, making them tens of billions of dollars in crypto wealth (on paper).
The White House says summit attendees will include prominent crypto founders, CEOs and investors.
The summit will be chaired by White House A.I. & Crypto Czar David Sacks, and run by Bo Hines, executive director of the President's Working Group on Digital Assets.
The announcement comes amid a global sell-off in cryptocurrencies, which has some investors fearing the market's "Trump bump" may be over.
Bitcoin is off 22% from the all-time high it set the day Trump was inaugurated.
The global market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies combined is down 13% in just the last week.
World Reordered Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick Trend Rep;ort at Substack
It's not often that the center of the universe shifts with your noticing and, yet, somehow the creeping feeling of this fact was very clearly witnessed.
Trump's Defense Secretary Hegseth Orders Cyber Command to 'Stand Down' on All Russia Operations
Scot-Free Trevor Jackson at NYRB
The market acolytes who reconfigured social life in this fashion over the past forty years promised to reduce bureaucracy but instead they multiplied it. The most hectic labyrinth in the imagination of a Soviet Gosplan apparatchik would seem transparent compared to customer service at Comcast. The insurance company that Franz Kafka worked for in Prague was a model of sanity compared to UnitedHealthcare. Even the much-maligned public bureaucracies that remain have been heavily privatized behind the scenes; their regular functioning depends on Microsoft Teams, Amazon Web Services, and Cisco.The market has become a central site of encounters with arbitrary despotism. Your insurance won't cover the care you need; your company dropped your insurance with your doctor and switched to a different one; your plan "is no longer supported." Private equity bought your child's daycare and quadrupled the prices. Your bosses closed your office and used the revenue to buy back shares for themselves. You depend on the market for your basic needs, and therefore you are subject to its whims.
...The sociologist Melinda Cooper, in her recent book Counterrevolution, tracks the emergence of a new class of oligarchs, who owe their power less to stewarding corporations than to accumulating personal and familial wealth—they are dynastic rather than managerial capitalists.This is not an inevitable outcome of the gears of capitalist inequality churning but the result of a set of identifiable policies. As Cooper shows, the rise of billionaire despots can be traced precisely to the progress of tax cuts and financial deregulation that began in the early 1980s. The 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act (known as the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut) reduced the highest income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and the 1986 Tax Reform Act brought that down further to 28 percent. Together these two Reagan tax cuts incentivized businesses to reorganize as private partnerships or unincorporated structures, generating pass-through income that would be taxed at the lower individual rate than the corporate rate.
Even publicly traded companies like Meta or Apple now pay their executives in stock options: in 2022 stock-related pay was 81.3 percent of CEO compensation. Since the 1980s those options have often been taxed at the capital gains rate, which for stocks held longer than one year is even lower than the personal income rate. The effect was immediate: between 1980 and 1994 the mean value of stock options paid to CEOs increased by 683 percent, while real wages remained largely stagnant. The consequences since 2020 have been almost incalculable.
No, They Don't Need Us As Consumers Chad C. Mulligan at Hipcrime Vocab
Eastern Promises In a Tokyo of tourists, the citizens have become strangers Dylan Levi King at The Baffler
Due Process Lewis Lapham
...the lessons of history. They are more hopeful than those available to the best of my own knowledge and recollection, which tend to recognize the rule of law as the politically correct term of art for the divine right of money.Trump won the [2016] election because he didn't pretend otherwise. He staked his claim to the White House on the proposition that he was "really rich," unbought and unbossed and therefore free to say and do whatever it took to Make America Great Again. A deus ex machina descending by escalator into the atrium of his eponymous tower on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in June 2015, Trump was there to say, and say it plainly, that money is power, and power, ladies and gentlemen, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. Never was, never will be. Law unto itself, name of the game; nature of the beast.
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Shock discovery tears up the rules of time and space inside a computer New Scientist
Mapping Myths Across the World Maps Mania
Trump threatens personal liberty and free markets Matthew Yglesias
Real Christianity vs. White "Christian" Nationalist Trump on the Treatment of the Poor Liz Theoharis at Informed Comment
The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway Informed Comment
The Musk-Trump War on Federal Employees Doesn't Add Up John Cassidy at The New Yorker
Trump trashes Europe as land of "rape gangs" and "murderers" Carla Sinclair at boing boing
Elon Musk Calls Social Security a Ponzi Scheme as He Destroys the U.S. Government Matt Novak at gizmodo
Ex-Amazon VP explains why rich a-holes with helicopters and personal assistants don't get why you hate your commute Ellsworth Toohey at boing boing
Ideas Lying Around Cory Doctorow
I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.
What Am I Afraid Of? Sasha Debevec-McKenney at The New Yorker
Crypto Soars Then Plunges Following Trump's Post About a Strategic Reserve gizmodo
Power Cut Edward Zitron
...To explain here, TD Cowen is effectively saying that Microsoft is responding to a "major demand signal" and said "major demand signal" is saying "you do not need more data centers." Said demand signal that Microsoft was responding to, in TD Cowen's words, is its "appetite for capacity" to provide servers to OpenAI, and it seems that said appetite is waning, and Microsoft no longer wants to build out data centers for OpenAI.The reason I'm writing in such blunt-force terms is that I want to make it clear that Microsoft is effectively cutting its data center expansion by over a gigawatt of capacity, if not more, and it's impossible to reconcile these cuts with the expectation that generative AI will be a massive, transformative technological phenomenon.
I believe the reason Microsoft is cutting back is that it does not have the appetite to provide further data center expansion for OpenAI, and it's having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole. If Microsoft believed there was a massive opportunity in supporting OpenAI's further growth, or that it had "massive demand" for generative AI services, there would be no reason to cancel capacity, let alone cancel such a significant amount.
...In plain English, Microsoft, which arguably has more data than anybody else about the health of the generative AI industry and its potential for growth, has decided that it needs to dramatically slow down its expansion. Expansion which, to hammer the point home, is absolutely necessary for generative AI to continue evolving and expanding.
...Again, Microsoft is cancelling plans to massively expand its data center capacity right at a time when OpenAI just released its most computationally-demanding model ever. How do you reconcile those two things without concluding either that Microsoft expects GPT-4.5 to be a flop, or that it's simply unwilling to continue bankrolling OpenAI's continued growth, or that it's having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole?
...The entirety of the tech industry — and the AI bubble — has been built on the assumption that generative AI was the next big growth vehicle for the tech industry, and if Microsoft, the largest purchaser of NVIDIA GPUs and the most aggressive builder of AI infrastructure, is reducing capacity, it heavily suggests that the growth is not there.
...Wake the fuck up, everybody! Things are on fire. ...If I'm right, techs only growth story is dead.
Our Chamberlain? Donald Trump's abandonment of Ukraine has been even more inept and inexplicable than the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. Aryeh Neier at NYRB
...News of his call with Putin on February 12—Putin's first direct conversation with a US president since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine began three years ago—came as an unnerving surprise. It was, Trump insisted on social media, a "highly productive" ninety minutes: "We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together." Above all they discussed Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, on which Trump promised to "start negotiations immediately." He does not seem to have called Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in advance, only informing him of the conversation after the fact. To make matters worse, earlier that day Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had asserted publicly that it was "unrealistic" for Ukraine to seek restoration of its pre-conflict borders, that the United States would rule out Ukraine's accession to NATO, and that the US would hardly come to Ukraine's military aid—in effect conceding these crucial negotiating points in advance....Trump, for his part, seems concerned less with the resulting danger to international security than with disparaging Zelensky. "I don't think he's very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you," Trump told Fox News Radio on February 21. "He makes it very hard to make deals."
Americas Cultural Revolution What Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center really means Stephen Marche at Thew Atlantic
...The American culture industry has overwhelmed politics: Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.The Trump administration has been consistent in its veneration of show business, if in nothing else. The president has put a WWE executive in charge of education, made a Fox News talking head his secretary of defense, installed a celebrity conspiracy theorist to lead the National Institutes of Health, handed control of Medicare to a TV doctor, and appointed a right-wing podcaster as deputy director of the FBI. Elon Musk is running government reform because he can live-post it. Dr. Phil accompanies ICE on raids. Trump's Cabinet picks resemble the cast of a reality-television show by design: Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved.
In his farewell address, President Joe Biden described the incoming administration as an oligarchy. He was mistaken. It is rule by performers: a "histriocracy." Anyone who wants to understand what is happening in American politics needs to understand it on those terms.
...As the grand soap opera of this American presidency unfolds, displays of rage and wonder fill every moment: get-rich-quick schemes, rigged games, vengeful punishments. The audience is hurried from one hustle to another. The distinction between a con and a joke has blurred. The great circus showman P. T. Barnum prophesied the rise of Trump when he declared: "Let me furnish the amusements of a nation and there will be need of very few laws."
...If you think it's a joke to have RFK Jr. in office, that's the point. Jokes gather attention. Attention creates exposure. Exposure drives power. The greatest asset for any politician today is a bottomless narcissism that requires unremitting attention to satisfy.
DEI Metadata Handbook A Guide to Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Description
Written primarily for professionals in library and information science but with applicability to archives and other information management industries, this handbook provides an overview of metadata work that focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI metadata work has several goals: enhancing diverse representation in descriptive metadata; improving discovery of diverse resources; and mitigating negative effects of inaccurate, outdated, or offensive terminology.
Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory Ian Milligan 2024
Halifax Art and Artists An Illustrated History Ray Cronin (pdf)
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Cutting health care "waste" is hard Matthew Yglesias
Ancient ancestor of the plague discovered in Bronze Age sheep New Scientist
Ponzi scheme Wikipedia
The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on Earth Hoover Institution
Madoff - A 21st Century Ponzi Scheme NASAA.org
Bro mentality
The Toxicity of the Frat Bro Mentality: How Trump's Machismo Will Be His Demise Libby Winkler at Medium (Dec 2024)The 'Finance Bro' Mentality at MPSH Permeates Deeper Than The Finance Club The Panther (Miami Palmetto Senior High School)
..."The 'finance bro' mentality is kind of this prioritization of getting money over anything else. No passion in building anything or doing anything, just doing things for money's sake," Miami Palmetto Senior High junior Rodrigo Duran said. "Doing whatever you need to do to get it."...As Generation Z grows into young adults, they are more drawn to the idea of fast wealth. The 'Finance Bro' mentality can cause these young individuals to lose not only their work ethic but their sight of what matters. For high schoolers, it is pivotal to stay educated about the financial world because going into it with little prior knowledge can lead to detrimental decisions. Apart from the required sophomore Personal Finance class, the Finance Club at MPSH is a place for students to do so.
"You don't want to become degenerate and lose money. Learning the importance of winning and losing is good because in investing, you have to learn how to take a loss just as much as taking a win or having a gain," senior and Finance Club President Jack Diemar said.
On Power and "Bro Culture" in Academic Science Sarah Boon at Watershed Moments: Thoughts from the Hydrosphere (2017)
Uber and the problem of Silicon Valley's bro culture Vox (2017)
...In the early days of Silicon Valley, you had a very Mad Men–like culture: people having affairs with admins and secretaries, chasing women around desks. And then there was the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg era, where it was these nerdy guys who just were intimidated by women and didn't naturally hang out with or include them.And then there's what I'd call the "bro wave." It's very much a junior-high-age male culture, a hypermasculine, hypersexualized culture. And the hypermasculinity of men usually goes hand in hand with the hypersexualization of women.
"...the bro mentality, which is really the scourge of this generation of Silicon Valley companies, is just so deeply woven into everything Uber is."
...The Valley apologists say, look, a little assholery is just the price we pay for letting creative, rebellious geniuses start great companies. These people are out-of-the-box rule breakers who can't be expected to conform to societal norms.
sup-bro mentality Urban Dictionary
Bro Culture feministing.com (2009)
My Biggest Gripe About the Tech Bro Mentality Gareth Ceidiog Hughes at Medium
The Tao of Bro Alexander Cortes (2021)
The 4 Noble Bro TruthsBrotopia Summary and Review Emily Chang(Basically buddhism, except way better because you're jacked)
Am I being satirical or serious right now? Probably both.
- Growth requires Suffering: There will be no gains without suffering. Everything that we desire requires work, effort, and patience. Even when training is going well, there is always the possibility of injury, illness, or some fucked up personal shit happening. The acceptance of pain as growth is the first step in overcoming the impatient ego, and learning to STFU and do what is required.
- Nothing is real unless proven by proof of outcome: The fundamental ignorance of this fact causes much pain and suffering in the world. These delusions are painful and misleading, but they will work to maintain themselves all the same.
The cause of lack of gains is the mind enthralled by its own fanciful delusions. Basically you don't know shit because you're all talk, no action. To know anything of what is real, it must be proven by physical demonstration.
Fuck what you read on the internet. Fuck your studies. Fuck your rules. The Bro understands that so long as something can be gained through physical and mental effort, it is possible, and the extent of possibility is far greater than the narrow confines of mind that worships rules and restrictions and authorities.
- There is no end to anything: The path of gains has no end point, the only limitations that exist are the ones we choose. No matter how big or strong you get, there are always bigger bros, and heavier weights. Victories are permanent only memory. Everything changes and nothing stays the same, and the ending of one path is the beginning of another.
When we are enlightened to the impermanence of obstacles and accepting of our own mortality, in every moment we are free to live as we choose, and experience immense gratitude in the process that is life.
- A Good life requires consistency: In order to experience GAINS, we must train, eat, and sleep diligently. The most BRO of Bros understand the power of compounding action. You will never become Jacked on accident. You will never have success in ANYTHING by accident. All things worth having must be worked for
...The first stereotype that came from the tech industry was the nerd, and since then, many others followed. The rising popularity of the tech industry gave rise to the term "brogrammer", which is a rather complimentary term — a combination of "bro" and "programmer." This concept combined with the "work hard, play hard" philosophy made women feel extremely unwelcome at the workplace. A great example of bro culture is that a lot of business meetings and deals happen in places that are uninviting and uncomfortable for women.
There Were Always Enshittifiers Cory Doctorow
...a history of personal computing and networked communications that traces the earliest days of the battle for computers as tools of liberation and computers as tools for surveillance, control and extraction
California Gnarl Rudy Rucker
A new voice morphing application Mark Liberman at Language Log
Pro-Crypto Palantir Co-Founder Weirdly Angry About Trump's Crypto Plan Lucas Ropek at gizmodo
...From Lonsdale's perspective, the government shouldn't "buy in" to crypto. However, Lonsdale's concern may be somewhat premature, as nobody currently seems to know how Trump will fund and/or orchestrate the crypto strategic reserve. It's not clear who is going to hold the bag for the new reserve, or whether it'll even happen....in Lonsdale's view, the best thing the federal government can do is take money from the creepy defense contractors he creates (with, it should be noted, money from the CIA) and, also, apparently, get sued into submission for punishing out of control crypto companies. If Lonsdale's views are indicative of the broader ideological sympathies endemic to his economic milieu, it's no surprise that America is in deep shit.
AI Agentic Evaluation Tools Help Devs Fight Hallucinations The New Stack
What's Yours is Mine: Is Your Business Ready for Cryptojacking Attacks? bleepingcomputer.com
...Instead of locking you out of your systems, cryptojacking silently hijacks your computing power—whether it's on your servers or in the cloud—and mines cryptocurrency without you even knowing....With more businesses shifting to cloud environments and containerized infrastructures, cryptojackers are finding new ways to exploit these systems.
...Cryptojacking involves the unauthorized use of your computing resources—whether it's your CPU, GPU, or cloud infrastructure—to mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Monero. The goal isn't to steal your data, but your processing power. And attackers have developed several methods to get cryptomining code into your systems.
DOGE Prepares to Cancel Lease for Vital Weather Forecasting Center gizmodo
The Unpredicted Kevin Kelly
It is odd that science fiction did not predict the internet. There are no vintage science fiction movies about the world wide web, nor movies that showed the online web as part of the future. We expected picture phones, and online encyclopedias, but not the internet. As a society we missed it. Given how pervasive the internet later became this omission is odd.On the other hand, there have been hundreds of science fiction stories and movies predicting artificial intelligence. And in nearly every single one of them, AI is a disaster. They are all cautionary tales. Either the robots take over, or they cause the end of the world, or their super intelligence overwhelms our humanity, and we are toast.
Products affected by tariffs in the U.S. Flowing Data
Teslas vandalized nationally as angry protest grows Jason Weisberger at boing boing
Social justice Wikipedia
Imports that could be taxed Flowing Data
Computer with 800,000 human neurons launches for $35,000 boing boing
Clarivate Unveils Transformative Subscription-Based Access Strategy for Academia Stephen Downes
The Oscar-Winning Film "No Other Land" is about Palestinians who have no Place else to Go H Scott Prosterman at Informed Comment
Melting Antarctic Ice will slow the World's strongest Ocean Current and the global Consequences are Profound Informed Comment
Congress Freaks Out Over Trump Administration's Decision to Halt Cyber Operations Against Russia gizmodo
The (Parlous) State of the Union Contrarian
We feed gut microbes sugar, they make a compound we need ScienceDaily
Two from NYRB archive:
John Kenneth Galbraith: Hitler: Hard to ResistIn recent times an offensively imaginative revisionism has come to suggest that Hitler was a political and military genius who, in his lofty and statesmanlike way, was only marginally aware of the butchery of the Jews and the Poles. Much of this book consists of the case which German civilians and generals [in the Claus von Stauffenberg conspiracy] made to each other for deleting Hitler. They were not in the slightest doubt as to what his brainless military megalomania was doing to Germany or what he personally was doing to the Eastern peoples and the Jews. Indeed, Professor Hoffmann's book accumulates into one of the most horrifying pictures of Hitler yet. One shudders as always that such a mad criminal could get loose with such a pack in a civilized country in this century.
—September 15, 1977Christopher R. Browning: Giving In to Hitler
But there was another decisive quality in Chamberlain's personality: he stubbornly subordinated the assessment of evidence to the preservation of his own prior convictions. When confronted with an analysis of Hitler's own writings and statements that made his goal of war perfectly clear, Chamberlain retreated into complete denial: "If I accepted the author's conclusions I should despair, but I don't and won't."
—September 26, 2019
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: The Creator of 'Brain Rot' lifehacker
The brutal and the stupid Christopher Hobson at substack
...Frames fail, concepts betray, left with a simplified Schmittian world of friends and enemies, the distinction is imposed and policed. Spaces for open thought, time for reflection, this all disappears in a wash of digital stupidity.(quoting Mike Davis) ...Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds.
...There is a line attributed to Bertolt Brecht: 'The palace of culture is built with dog shit.' Much the same could be said of the tech values underpinning the digital infrastructure that condition our conditions.
(quotes Henry Farrell) ... The problems of the Silicon Valley canon, and increasingly of Silicon Valley itself, reflect the problems of a monoculture, in which people have converged on a particular definition of greatness built around engineering prowess and large-scale social disruption...
The engineer's focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform. Without that, it is liable to result in disaster.
...Robert Louis Stevenson supposedly said: 'sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences'. Get a napkin ready, this is going to be a long meal.
Senate Democrats slam Social Security job cuts, attack Musk calling it 'Ponzi scheme' ABC News
Will Harvard Bend or Break? Nathan Heller at New Yorker
..."an endlessly metastatic sense of crisis over the course of the whole year."...what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has grown into a fear that internal conflict, amplified by outside pressures, can run it and the whole fleet of American universities aground.
...Last fiscal year, two-thirds of Harvard's sponsored research funding—nearly seven hundred million dollars, or more than the growth in the university's unrestricted endowment assets&mdashcame from the federal government, which supports everything from cancer studies to art instruction in museums. The figure isn't unusual: federal funding also supports three-quarters of Stanford's research projects and half of all research at both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.C. Berkeley.
Is OpenAI hitting a wall with huge and expensive GPT-4.5 model? New Scientist
...at a launch event yesterday, OpenAI instead offered an incrementally updated version of GPT-4. A company blog post called GPT-4.5 its "largest and best model for chat yet", but Altman said a lack of computing capacity meant it could only offer the product to a small number of customers. "It is a giant, expensive model," said Altman. "We've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs [processors that provide the computing power for AI]."...The constant scaling-up that has delivered rapid progress in AI cannot go on forever, says Sasha Luccioni at AI company Hugging Face. "The current way of training and deploying LLMs [large language models] is grossly inefficient — it's essentially brute-forcing intelligence. Of course that's bound to hit a wall," she says.
While Altman's claimed that GPT-4.5 has "a magic to it I haven't felt before", Luccioni is unconvinced. "Using terms like 'magic' and 'AGI' [artificial general intelligence] makes the people making these models seem all-powerful," says Luccioni. "But I would argue more that Altman is the Wizard of Oz, distracting us so that we don't look behind the curtain."
US scientists rebuild climate risk map deleted from government site New Scientist
Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover ScienceDaily
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Wiki Explore Maps Mania
...overlays Wikipedia articles onto an interactive map, allowing users to discover information about the world around them. Each point on the map represents a location with an associated Wikipedia article, providing users with quick access into insights about their surroundings.
A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems Quanta Magazine
The biological world is awash in chemical signals. Ants lead their nest mates to food with winding trails of pheromones, plants exude aerosols to warn their neighbors of herbivores, and everything you experience as "smell" is a molecule latching onto your nose. Some molecular messages find their targets; most linger unread in the environment. But sometimes, other species — chemical eavesdroppers, bystanders or visitors — can pick up and interpret the signals in their own way. If the message is powerful enough, the impact can ripple out across an ecosystem.In 2007, biologists named these potent molecules after a popular concept in ecology. "Keystone species," such as starfish in Pacific Northwest tidepools, aren't abundant, but they have outsize effects on the food web — making those species as crucial to their ecosystems as a load-bearing keystone in an archway. If they're removed, the idea goes, the entire ecosystem could collapse into a different form. "Keystone molecules," then, are rare chemicals that can structure, shape and alter connections between species across entire ecosystems.
...Ecology has historically overlooked chemical interactions in food webs. "That could be a big oversight," Krug said. "If chemicals diffusing out from one organism into the environment create many interactions that we are currently missing, it adds a layer of complexity."
...A keystone molecule, they wrote, is introduced into a community by one or very few species, usually as a defense mechanism or communication signal. It then takes on other meanings — mating, safety, danger, food — for other community members. The shrapnel of metabolic processes and species interactions generates a cascade of impacts.
...The work reveals how much ecology is actually chemistry, and how a chemical web might be just as influential as a food web. Given that researchers are just starting to study them, these potent chemical cues are probably more common than we realize. "I think there are tons of organisms that are dripping chemistry all around them, and everything else has to cope with it or get out of Dodge," Krug said.
This Tool Turns Any Wikipedia Topic Into an Interactive Timeline lifehacker
...a free website that uses a large language model to turn any Wikipedia article into a visual timeline you can use to see major events in a sequence.
Brother printers joins the Evil Empire, blocks third-party ink with stealth updates
Brother makes a demon-haunted printer The internet is a portal to hell. Cory Doctorow
Printers are the worst and HP is the worst of the worst. For years, HP has been abusing its market dominance — and its customers' wallets — by inflating the price of ink and rolling out countermeasures to prevent you from refilling your old cartridges or buying third-party ink. Worse, HP have mastered the Darth Vader MBA, bushing updates to its printers that sneakily downgrade them after you've bought them and taken them home.Here's a sneaky trick HP came up with: they send a "security update" to your printer. After you click "OK," a little progress bar zips across the screen and the printer reboots itself, and then…nothing. The printer declares itself to be "up to date" and works exactly like it did before you installed the update. But inside the printer, a countdown timer has kicked off, and then, months later, the "security update" activates itself, like a software Manchurian Candidate.
Because that "security update" protects the security of HP, against HP customers. It is designed to detect and reject the very latest third-party ink cartridges, which means that if you've just bought a year's worth of ink at Costco, you might wake up the next day and discover that your printer will no longer accept them — because of an update you ran six months before.
...HP has done this — and worse — over and over, and every time I write about it, people pop up to recommend their Brother printers as the enshittification-free alternative. I own a Brother, an HL3170-CDW laser printer that's basically indestructible, cheerfully accepts third-party toner, and costs almost nothing to run.
But I still don't connect it to my wifi. The idea that Brother is a better company than HP — that is possesses some intrinsic antienshittificatory virtue — has always struck me as a foolish belief. Brother has means, motive and opportunity to push over-the-air downgrades to block third-party ink as HP.
Which is exactly what they've done.
...Filling our devices with computers that run programs that can be changed in secret, that we're not allowed to inspect or alter? It's a recipe for a demon-haunted world, where the devices we entrust with our livelihood, our privacy and our wellbeing are possessed by hellions who escape from the digital Tartarus and are unleashed upon humanity.
The World Was Flat. Now It's Flattened The state of the culture, 2025 Ted Gioia
...The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.The platforms aggravate this problem further by making it difficult to leave. Links are censored. Intelligence is punished by the dictatorship of the algorithms. Every exit is blocked, and all paths lead to the endless scroll.
...In all fairness, let me say that the corporations didn't intend to make the culture stagnant and boring. They didn't intend to cause teen depression, suicidal impulses, anxiety, self-harm, and all the rest.
All they really wanted was to impose standardization and predictability. That's what businesses always want—because it's more profitable.
But corporate standardization always brings negative unintended effects
...The early web empowered the user. And the very name "web" was revealing—each us could create a unique network of relationships and connections all over the globe.
It was our web.
But the standardization and bunkerization of web platforms has put power in the hands of the digital overseers. We are now caught in their web—and they are the spiders.
In this kind of culture, we shouldn't be surprised to learn that the richest man in the world controls two-thirds of all the satellites surrounding the Earth. Our information network is actually his information network.
He really does own his own web. And it surrounds every one of us.
You couldn't find a more suitable metaphor for a flattened world. But this isn't a metaphor—it's just a plain fact.
...Just put together a list of the people who run the largest web platforms, entertainment companies, and media empires. You will come up with a list of 20 or 30 names—and they have their quite visible hands and fingerprints on everything.
They push the content. They build the devices. They own the satellites. They run the platforms. They swallow up the cash flow.
It's their heavy weight that is flattening the rest of us.
Elon Musk now controls two thirds of all active satellites The Independent
...SpaceX plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites to complete the Starlink constellation, capable of delivering high-speed internet and phone connectivity to any corner of the globe.
Giant clone of seaweed in the Baltic Sea ScienceDaily
Sentient Soul Andy Ilachinski
Three Sunsets and Other Poems from Project Gutenberg Lewis Carroll
Feeding the Mind from Project Gutenberg Lewis Carroll
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Bacterium Linked to Depression
By using a bioassay-guided fractionation approach, the researchers found that an environmental micropollutant, diethanolamine, was incorporated into metabolites produced by the bacterium, forming chimeric cardiolipins that induced pro-inflammatory immune responses in the host. Chronic inflammation is critical because it has been implicated in the development of several diseases and is linked to depression.
Urban Growth in Motion Maps Mania
Dumb and Dumber: Trump's Tariffs will cost each U.S. family $1072, wipe out Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs Peter G. Prontzos at Informed Comment
The Easiest Way to Free Up Disk Space on Your Mac
Vocabulary Mark Liberman at Language Log
$38b of government money that funded Musk companies flowing data
How LLMs work, put simply boing boing
Understanding LLMs: A Simple Guide to Large Language Models oedemis.io
Worst New Trend of 2024: Techno-Colonialism and the Network State Movement gizmodo
Senate Votes to Strip CFPB of Ability to Regulate Platforms Like X gizmodo
Notes on a Meme: The Grotesque Pleasure of Bloated JD Vance Pictures gizmodo
Trump Family's DeFi Project Stocked Up on Crypto Assets Ahead of White House Crypto Summit
Trump moves towards deporting Ukrainian refugees boing boing
Digital Archives and Collections>/a> Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage Katja Müller
The pupil as a window into the sleeping brain ScienceDaily
Canada, the Northern Outpost of Sanity The New Yorker
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How Moore's law led us to a flawed vision of the future New Scientist
Scientists warn of urgent need for H5N1 bird flu pandemic preparations Ellsworth Toohey at boing boing
The Dot Map of America Maps Mania (see censusdots.com)
Cyberpunk Nation: How Donald Trump's America Is Being Hacked by White Nationalism Juan Cole
...The tech-bro oligarchy's rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America's political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the Internet and large language models (misnamed "artificial intelligence"). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that "while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9 percent, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3 percent driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services."
...instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a White settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the "PayPal Mafia" of "libertarian billionaires" that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).
...Joshua Haldeman, Elon's maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its Apartheid racial segregation and ruling White nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany's neo-Nazi party the AfD.
Donald Trump's AI Propaganda Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
...Avital sent the finished video to Vromen. The two passed it around among friends and family, then Vromen, who is an established filmmaker for outlets including Netflix, put it on his Instagram, where he has more than a hundred thousand followers. But Avital urged him to take it down quickly, worrying that they might attract trouble for mocking Trump. Trump, who is not known to shy away from gold, or an effigy, seems instead to have found the video inspiring.
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"I Can't Go On, I Must Go On" Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, interviewed by Will Simpson
...it just became clear that for this to function as a snapshot of what I really think about all this stuff, it was better for me to do it with my mouse mask on. Obviously, over the decades, I'
've done many things that feature scruffy caricatures of myself. But here, that persona was what I had to put forward to make sure that people understood that the mouse was not to be used as a way to ratify what's been happening in Gaza over the last year and a half. And I do find that over the years, the mouse mask has become very expressive. I found a way to use these masks and still make the expressions and the body language do the job. And the expressions are subtle, but they're there.
(Joe Sacco)...So, yes, I can imagine an Israel existing as it does now, by force of arms, beating, corralling, or cowing its neighbors into submission, creating more and more facts on the ground. If the ultimate aim of Israel was to create a space where Jews could feel safe, I think that's the wrong way to go about it. How long can Israel hold the sword? How reliable is US and Western patronage, and how long will it last? What are the alliances with regional strongmen worth? If we still want to hang on to our humanity, then neither Jews nor Palestinians should be removed or driven out. If they could somehow coexist, as Jews and Arabs once did before the Zionist era, then the name of the state or the number of states or their configuration would be of secondary importance. The question is: Have events left these fine notions behind?
Capturing The Soul in Wax and Dye
In conversation with a master Indonesian batik painter M Cole Grady at Medium
Like Diamonds, Teflon is Forever
How a kitchen convenience was a harbinger of chemical pollution... John Knight at Medium
The Grotesquerie of J.D. Vance Memes Rebecca Jennings at New York Vulture
...McNamee says that as of Tuesday, someone made a memecoin out of one of his Vance edits that soon became worth $20 million. "I cannot tell you how disgusted and weird the whole thing has made me feel," he says. What's more, he's noticed that now even the MAGA folks are getting in on the joke. "The right can take ownership over it as an epic internet win for them," he says. In this administration, all attention is good attention, even if thousands of people are calling you a big ugly baby.
What a spalage!
John Gallagher at LRB
...English is a global lingua franca. Comfort with the language's power and prestige has allowed commentators on English to frame its patchwork quality as its great strength. For all that English embraced new vocabulary, it didn't junk the rest of its lexicon, becoming an ideal example of what Renaissance scholars called copia, or copiousness, capturing the sheer variety of words available to speakers. From Johnson onwards, an analogy began to take shape between the open, welcoming character of the English language and the liberal institutions of the English nation. As French linguistic prescriptivism reflected France's tyrannical government, England's lexical laissez-faire proclaimed a commitment to freedom and fair dealing ...Shame and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English lexicon was replaced with triumphalism and self-congratulation: so it remains today.
....the gleeful lexical burglary of 16th and 17th-century writers and printers, nor in the 'gallomania' which saw à-la-mode speakers of 18th-century English cramming their discourse with every scrap of French they could.
(on the translation account: from Will I, Won't I? Daniel Soar at LRB
...Take the infelicitous narrator: I'm guessing that some translators feel uncomfortable trying to match his not particularly great phrasing — what if the reader thinks it's the translator being sloppy? But his language says something about the book, a novel in which characters speak in opposing ways, with their verbal tics reflecting their education or lack of it and their position on the social scale, where some people are moralists and others are libertines, and where some are both. In this little town everyone knows everyone else, and gossip and rumour zip between them. People absorb what they hear, and their speech echoes the speech of those they've heard it from, so that even the university-educated types who habitually adhere to certain standards of talk often come out with a bit of homespun swearing. The narrator — sometimes seen, sometimes not — is part of this network, and he inflects the language of the whole text, the text which, after all, we're told he has written. If you don't give an indication of his presence behind it all, then you're losing a large part of what distinguishes the novel from the unruffled and elevated works of other late 19th-century writers.
...At first sight, each of the three brothers is an exemplar of one particular way of thinking, and of living, and they are totally at odds. Dmitry is the emotional one, impetuous, louche, out to please himself. Ivan is the thinker, sceptical, scrupulous, tormented. Alyosha: well, he's compassion itself, totally free of self-regard.
...whatever Dostoevsky thought, his novel doesn't think the same: it's full of voices — contradictory, incompatible, all clamouring to be heard. It was Dostoevsky who led Mikhail Bakhtin — Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics; The Dialogic Imagination –— to introduce the concept of polyphony to literary theory, as the only way of explaining a novel that says so many things at once.
High-res lidar exposes large, high-elevation cities along Asia's Silk Roads phys.org
Study raises the possibility of a country without butterflies ScienceDaily
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What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly Fintan O'Toole at New Yorker (review of
Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine Padraic X. Scanlan)
Deep Interlock Andy Ilachinski
Tesla Is So Screwed Will Lockett at Medium
Let's start with those sales figures because, oh boy, are they juicy!
Tesla sold just 9,945 vehicles in Europe this January, which is a massive 45% decline compared to its sales in January 2024. However, the EV market in Europe has grown by 37% since then. That means Tesla sales in Europe have effectively fallen more than 60% below where they should be. In fact, Tesla sold so few cars in the UK that its main Chinese competitor, BYD, actually outsold them! I believe this is the first time a Chinese EV brand has outsold Tesla in the West, marking a pivotal shift that will likely haunt Western automakers for years to come...
...Honestly, the only way Tesla can continue like this is if Musk manipulates one of the largest and most powerful governments in the world to pour money into the company, removes all of the safety regulations protecting the public from their driverless death machines, ruins the media that would make the public aware of such dangers, and then cripples the judicial system that would hold Tesla accountable...
Trumpcession Jennifer Rubin at substack ...It is not too late to avoid the worst pain. Trump could permanently rule out tariffs. Congress could significantly scale back the tax cut and produce a more responsible budget. Acting president Elon Musk could cease mindless cuts and wholesale layoffs of federal employees. And the administration could drastically scale back mass deportation.
But all of that would require Trump and his MAGA troops' recognition that they are propelling us toward economic catastrophe. The likelihood that this bunch will engage in some humility or self-reflection, revise course, rely on economic expertise, and reject inane conspiracy theories (e.g., "globalists" are sinking the stock market) is close to zero.
Electing an ignorant, narcissist president and spineless supplicants to control Congress has real consequences. Tragically, the ones most affected will be the most vulnerable Americans.
The language of organs: how faulty communication leads to disease via Stephen Downes
The Republic of Climate Change Deniers Maps Mania
This purge of climate-related information means that many of FEMA's most useful tools have been censored by the Trump administration and can no longer be accessed by the public.
Sarah Kendzior: The Black Place
...Georgia O'Keeffe died in 1986. It doesn't seem possible that my life and hers overlapped, that she was there for the Reagan era that propelled the nightmare world I inhabit. But her world was one of nightmares too: two world wars, a pandemic, and the destruction of much of the US by industrialization.
Through it all, she painted rocks. No matter what happens, rocks stay the same. Rocks don't let you down like people. Rocks, bones, flowers — those old reliables. Flowers won't disappoint you if you don't expect them to last. When they do, it is a pleasant surprise.
...No one should resign themselves to this government's malicious plans. But to keep our country, you must abandon old delusions. You must see The Black Place — and protect it, because there is beauty in truth. Even the darkest truths, the truths most difficult to reach and hardest to convey.
Diary: At CPAC Antonia Hitchens at LRB
Some will try to find a third option to put on the table; they may or may not succeed, but they will still be sitting at the same table.
The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate of its surface with options others have not dared imagine. These are the visionaries — the only people who have ever changed this world.
Eggflation is excuseflation Copry Doctorow
Egg prices are at record highs, and we're told that this is the fault of bird flu. but a closer look demonstrates that eggflation is excuseflation. The egg industry is a vertical stack of monopolies, duopolies, and cartels, controlling everything from the genomes of egg-laying chickens to the raising and processing of chickens, to the distribution and retailing of eggs. These monopolists have conspired in the open to use the excuse of bird flu to restrict production and raise prices, over and over, every time bird flu strikes, posting record profits while poormouthing about their rising costs — costs that don't actually show up on their balance sheets.
Are We on the Cusp of a Major Bird Flu Outbreak? Catherine Caruso at Harvard Magazine
...H5N1 has a long history of transmission through multiple bird and mammal species worldwide, and the virus has undergone massive diversification into multiple genetic subtypes. The jump into dairy cows is new, and we don't really know what the implications are yet. We've been monitoring the spread to humans, and most cases have been mild so far. There's been no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but there has been human-to-cat spread, which suggests that humans can transmit the virus.
...Until recently, H5N1 strains did not show resistance to Tamiflu. However, a study from Canada documents the emergence of a resistant H5N1 strain in poultry. This strain has a rare mutation that has not yet been observed in humans. Still, the potential for resistance is why it's so important to develop antivirals and monoclonal antibodies that could give us new treatments. We also need to continue genomic surveillance of H5N1 to understand the spread of resistance mutations.
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From Techscape:
Throughout last week, US oversight agencies announced they would drop investigations into major crypto companies without penalty — Coinbase, Gemini, OpenSea, Yuga Labs, Robinhood Crypto, Uniswap Labs, Consensys, Kraken — and nixed fraud charges against an entrepreneur who had bought $75m worth of Trump's meme coin, $Trump. Two weeks ago, the new leadership of the US's main financial regulator declared that "meme coins", flash-in-the-pan cryptocurrencies like the one launched by Donald Trump himself, would not face strict oversight.
...The summit was a victory for crypto and a spectacular return on its collective investment in politics. Combined, the attendees had donated $11m to Trump's inauguration, according to the Intercept. During the 2024 campaign, crypto spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, far more than any other sector, though the industry's main political action committee notably did not contribute to the presidential race.
Zuckerberg's New Meta: It's Finally Time to Leave Social Media
Meta's new announcement signals dangerous times ahead
Kat Anderson at Medium (7i25 post)
The History of Hantavirus and Why You're Reading a Lot About It in 2025 René F Najera
In the end, about 5% of those who got sick in Korea died. But it was all a medical mystery, as the testing of the time didn't come back positive for anything known at the time. It wouldn't be until 1976 that Dr. Ho-Wang Lee discovered that some field mice had something in their lung tissue that reacted with serum (the liquid part of blood, which contains all the antibodies) from people who survived hantavirus.
The virus was eventually isolated in 1978. It was named "Hantaan virus, strain 76–118" after the place and time where it was first isolated, near the Hantan River in Korea.
...In 1993, several people in the Four Corners region of the United States came down with a nasty flu-like illness that turned into a pneumonia. These were young people, primarily from the Native American tribes in the region... They discovered the disease was caused by a hantavirus, the first hantavirus seen in the Western Hemisphere. It was not the same as the one from Korea or a "daughter" strain of it. No one had recently brought it over from Asia. The virus had likely come along thousands of years ago with the first humans who arrived in the Americas.
...The main route of exposure is through inhaling aerosolized mouse urine and feces. The mice are reservoirs of the virus, carrying it around without getting sick. They then pass it through their digestive and urinary systems. The feces and urine dry and are turned into an aerosol (fine particles in the air) when disturbed.
This Will Be the Next Big Thing After Smartphones
Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
...Mixed reality smart glasses (MRSG) will replace the smartphone.
...The way I see the use of Mixed Reality in MRSG is that they would superimpose a minimalist overlay on the real-world image, adding value to it, instead of obstructing the outside image.
...practical MRSG are impossible without AI. They don't make practical sense without AI.
The next disruptive device has to be able to bring AI interaction as close to us as possible. It has to provide a natural, frictionless interaction experience. Only this way it would be convenient to use it throughout the day.
Artificial Intelligence as a daylong helping buddy is something we are not yet used to, but I see it as the next frontier. It's not about occasionally launching an AI app, asking it something, and forgetting the AI until the next interaction. The next disruptive device will use AI all day long.
The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil "the first arrest of many to come." John Ganz at Unpopular Front
...The details here are very important: agents of the state without charging a crime or presenting a clear legal basis have detained a legal resident and are threatening him with deportation. (A Federal judge has halted deportation for now.) These agents were apparently unaware of his legal status in the country. He was clearly targeted for his political activity. The revocation of a Green Card typically requires a hearing before an immigration judge where specific wrongdoing must be demonstrated. The rationale provided thus far by the administration—I'm sorry, the regime—is ad hoc.
...DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed in a statement that ICE detained Khalil "in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism." Without providing evidence, McLaughlin claimed Khalil "led activities aligned to Hamas."
...If organs of state security and petty demagogues and mob leaders are acting in concert to crack down on dissent it is clearly and unequivocally fascist.
A Conversation with ChatGPT About Personal AI Doc Searls
'Your Not Even Allowed to Do That,' Trump Cries as Energy War in Canada Heats Up gizmodo, and see Mapping the U.S.-Canada Energy Relationship CSIS Briefs
Big Thought: Trump comes for the universities, students, and the First Amendment ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
"I don't know who I am, I don't know what I am... but I am" Anne Briggs interviewed
This Is How Tesla Will Die Will Lockett at Medium
...However, Musk has also used his Tesla stock as collateral for SpaceX, Twitter, and Tesla loans. Before he bought Twitter, over half of his shares were collateralised; now, that figure is far, far higher. Again, let's be generous and assume only 70% of his 12.8% stake in Tesla is collateralised in this way, with a third of these loans for Tesla. That would mean Musk has $71.68 billion in personal loans, with $23.89 billion for Tesla.
...In other words, Tesla actually has $72.28 billion in debt. That is more than the company is realistically worth!
...In our modern, unreal economy, Musk's collateralised loans might not be called if Tesla lost that much value. Moreover, some investors see Musk as a point of control, not a point of profit, so they are happy to back him even if it loses them huge piles of money. The investors might not want to force a liquidation, as they will only get a fraction of their money back. Heck, Trump might even step in and bail out Musk as his cars and rockets are "vital to America." But, even if these factors managed to prevent the total failure of Tesla, the company would have still died. The hope, optimism, and hype it once thrived on will be gone, and because Musk can't make billions from Tesla speculation, he will lose interest and let the company rot.
Budget—and the credulous mouthpieces laundering Republicans' talking points Jen Rubin at The Contrarian
Just as Democrats successfully drew the line in the sand in 2017 to protect the Affordable Care Act, they now must mobilize the American people to reject this monstrous reallocation of wealth and fiscal insanity. Surely, Democrats can make the case that taking healthcare away from seniors in need of long-term care, children in need of food, and medical patients in need of treatment—all for the sake of feathering billionaires' nests—is unconscionable.
The good news: Americans do not like Musk. They don't like his grotesque cuts in vital services, his tax cuts for the rich, or much of anything about their scheme. The bad news: Musk-Trump do not care…and may go through with it anyway.
Elon Musk and His Doge Pals, in "Auto Graft" Tom the Dancing Bug
Chance, Love, and Logic, Charles S. Peirce at Project Gutenberg
Provocations-Media in Transition mit.edu
Musk Plans to Give Trump Groups $100 Million After Tesla Ad at the White House gizmoodo
Randomness, Creativity, Mystery, Understanding Andy Ilachinski
Tech Execs Are Pushing Trump to Build 'Freedom Cities' Run by Corporations gizmodo
Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn't It Anymore?
Lara Trump as U.S. crashes: You should be "kissing the feet of Elon Musk and Donald Trump!" boing boing
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Signs of Terry Pratchett's dementia may have been hidden in his books New Scientist
deepity wiktionary
deepities and bullshit philosophytalk.org
Trump crows about champagne tariffs while stocks plunge yet again boing boing
World in itself Andy Ilachinski
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Withholding Consent from the Trump Regime Nan Levinson at Informed Comment
Ultimately, the last of these may be Trump's greatest menace, but also his greatest weakness, because what he does give a damn about is his image. It doesn't take an armchair psychologist to recognize why Trump preens and puffs himself up or a master strategist to know how easy it would be to make him lose his cool (which may be the only time the words "Trump" and "cool" appear in the same sentence). And boy, can he not take — or make — a joke!
So, one simple way we could resist is by denying him our full attention. Of course, we can't ignore him completely, since willful ignorance is self-defeating and, like an adolescent testing parental limits, he'll just keep upping the ante to see what he can get away with. But it's necessary not to be derailed by every inanity or outrage. I'm choosing to concentrate my attention on two or three areas I know something about, while counting on my fellow outragees to attend to other issues.
Not that I think Trump cares what I do, but if enough of us focus less on what he says and more on his actions that have discernable policy outcomes, we might indeed be able to cover all the bases and have enough energy and attention left over to push back more quickly and effectively.
AI system to revoke student visas Flowing Data
Why it matters: The effort — which includes AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders' social media accounts — marks a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government's policing of foreign nationals' conduct and speech.
The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump's Purge Julian Lucas at New Yorker
Patterns of Arrangement Andy Ilachinski
Why is the Federal government working for Tesla? Jason Weisberger at boing boing
Restaurant offers to compensate 4,000 diners after teenagers caught peeing in the hotpot broth boing boing
'Doomsday Clock' and patterns of mortality and mental health in the United States ScienceDaily
Evolution of plant network: 600 million years of stress ScienceDaily
Are volcanoes behind the oxygen we breathe? ScienceDaily
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The "Cognitive Élite" Seize Washington New Yorker (podcast)
This is how the West's ruling class's worldview becomes the "common sense" point of view in many non-western societies, as per the logic of Antonio Gramsci, who developed the concept of cultural hegemony. In that sense, hegemony is not the imposition of power through direct military or political control, but through cultural dominance
The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities JSTOR
Can the Middle East escape Western Media Hegemony and Thomas Friedman? Ramzy Baroud at Informed Comment
Draft List for New Travel Ban Proposes Trump Target 43 Countries NYTimes
A Crimson Shroud: The Enigmatic Burial of the Red Queen John Knight at Medium
Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading Cory Doctorow
Rachel Maddow looks at a string of peculiar behaviors by Donald Trump MSNBC
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The dark side of poutine: Canada taking credit for Quebec dish amounts to cultural appropriation, academic says National Post
The Kushan Empire and its languages Victor Mair at Language Log
European word translator: an interactive map showing "apple" in over 30 languages
Netflix Codes: find hidden categories on Netflix (full list)
Gag of America Doc Searls
Planet Definitions xkcd
AI is guest-writing my blog today and Claude fact-checks its AI ass Joho the Blog
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AI scientists are sceptical that modern models will lead to AGI New Scientist
Should governments really be using AI to remake the state? New Scientist
Indeed, many AI scientists are increasingly of the view that LLMs aren't a route to the lofty goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of matching or exceeding anything a human can do — a machine that can think, as Turing would have put it. For example, in a recent survey of AI researchers, about 76 per cent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" that current approaches will succeed in achieving AGI.
Instead, perhaps we need to think of these AIs in a new way. Writing in the journal Science this week, a team of AI researchers says they "should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated". The researchers compare LLMs to "such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies" that have transformed the way we access and process information.
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Science
Living 82-year-old Social Security recipient erroneously marked as dead Flowing Data
How an American Radical Reinvented Back-Yard Gardening New Yorker (re: Ruth Stout)
David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" Cory Doctorow
As such, Enrich's writing is extremely cautious, sometimes comically so, but always intentionally, in a way that highlights the absurd chilling effect his subjects are attempting to induce in all of us.
Cosmic Process Andy Ilachinski
A Portuguese Exploration Mystery Jim Fonseca at Medium
What Google and Meta's Leaked Internal Memos Reveal About Power, AI, and Control K.W. Hampton at Medium
We made it! A robot can now write your autobiography boing boing
The evil at your door Hobbledehoy
MAGA's Tesla Embrace Means EV Politics Will Never Be the Same Again gizmodo
Other prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly moved to defend Tesla against vandalism that Trump is labeling "domestic terrorism." Tesla's sudden shift from Democratic status symbol to Republican icon has some thinking the controversy around Musk could lead to a bipartisan embrace of EVs.
CoreWeave Is A Time Bomb
Edward Zitron
You'd assume that such a company would be a thriving, healthy business. And yet, a cursory glance at its financial disclosure documents reveals a business that's precarious at best, and, in my most uncharitable opinion, utterly rancid. If this company was in any other industry, it would be seen as such. Except, it's one of the standard bearers of the generative AI boom, and so, it exists within its own reality distortion field.
...To properly understand CoreWeave, we have to look at its origin story. Founded in 2017, CoreWeave was previously known as Atlantic Crypto, a cryptocurrency mining operation started by three guys that worked at a natural gas fund. When the crypto markets crashed in 2019, they renamed the company and bought up tens of thousands of GPUs, which CoreWeave offered to the (at the time) much smaller group of companies that used them for things like 3D modelling and data analytics. This was a much smaller business, and far less capital-intensive, with CoreWeave making $12m in 2022 with losses of $31m.
When ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 activated the management consultant sleeper cells that decide what the tech industry's next hypergrowth fixation is going to be, Coreweave pivoted again, this time towards providing the computational muscle for generative AI. CoreWeave became what WIRED would call "the Multibillion-dollar Backbone of the AI boom," a comment that would suggest that CoreWeave was far more successful than it really is.
Trump vs higher education: a report from March 17, 2025 Bryan Alexander
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Meta Is Experimenting With AI-Generated Comments, for Some Reason
White House Announces Plan to Use Federal Lands to 'Reduce Housing Costs'
The Trump White House is ready to divvy up public lands for private profits.
Lucas Ropek at gizmodo
Congratulations, You Are Now an AI Company O McCallum at O'Reilly
Plenty of companies have tried. They've stumbled through the dark room that is AI, bumping their shins and stepping on spikes because... I don't know why. Hubris? Ego? A love of pain?
The Price of American Collapse Umair Haque
Open Access, Open Source: OpenTimes an interactive travel-time map of the United States at Maps Mania
AI can't do your job Cory Doctorow
The Visible Invisible Andy Ilachinski
You Can't Fact-Check a Song: Inside Trumpism's Sonic Reality Jeffrey Anthony at Medium
These phonotopes are active, immersive environments that 'resound constantly with their own sound,' filled with the voices, tools, and murmuring of everyday life. Just as a venue's response (its audience, shape, history, and affective resonances) tells a musician what kind of night it's going to be, a phonotope attunes its participants to a particular sense of the world they inhabit. Inside these sonic bubbles, people share not just language but an entire auditory atmosphere that reinforces group identity and belonging.
Through constant sound transmission, the repetition of themes, phrases, and tonal cues, what emerges is a kind of acoustic immune system that filters out anything unfamiliar. This system preserves the group's internal coherence, where communication isn't about exchanging new information but about maintaining a shared world through redundancy.
GIMP 3's New Features Make the Best Free Image Editor Even Better lifehacker
Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink John Battelle
This is why, at present, you don't have an AI agent doing much of anything for you, nor will you anytime soon.
Climate change in Africa realclimate,org
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It's been evident since Trump's inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over
Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana: Mahmoud Khalil Informed Comment
The New Age Militarists - And their Threat to our Common FutureWilliam D Hartung at Informed Comment
Columbia University must Reject Trump Ultimatum and Stand up at long last for the Freedom and Independence of the Academy Informed Coment
Seamus Heaney's Advice on Life The Marginalian
How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons of Creative Work Marginalian
Folk Musicians Nora Brown & Stephanie Coleman Protest Trump's Takeover Hobbledehoy
Words for "library" in Sanskrit: the future of information science Victor Mair at Language Log
She is a humanist who also has a deep interest in the history of medicine, so if anyone would be spending a great deal of time in library, you'd think it would be people like her. Although she is a diligent, productive scholar, the library holds little abiding attraction for this student. Nearly everything she needs to read, she can find online or she can buy it rapidly from an online dealer or have it sent to her doorstep quickly from a depository or archive. Most of the time it arrives instantaneously in digital form.
I think we all realize the reason for this sea change in the storage of information that I was pondering: the electronification and digitization of massive data bases.
State of the Global Climate 2024 Maps Mania
Good art moves culture forward Medium Newsletter
Embodied large language models enable robots to complete complex tasks in unpredictable environments Nature Machine Intelligence
Elon Musk Is Joining Microsoft in $30 Billion Data Center Project gizmodo
Subtle and Evanescent Andy Ilachinski re: wabi-sabi
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Everything Is Made of History. What I learned from reading over 100 books on world history Pierz Newton-John at Medium
Fox host floats "death penalty" for Tesla protestors boing boing
French Researcher Denied Entry to U.S. for Disliking Trump gizmodo
French scientist deported after border agents find anti-Trump messages during device search boing boing
Canada or America? Touring N.S. folk duo questioned by state troopers Hobbledehoy
Musk's allies in the Trump administration can't stop Tesla's stock slide boing boing
It's Over Doc Searls on Voice of America
Dire warning from Canada MP: "I urge people not to travel to the United States"
Carla Sinclair at boing boing
Why "Constitutional Crisis" Fails to Capture Trump's Attack on the Rule of Law The New Yorker
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Earth's Dreaming Andy Ilachinski
Trump's Shock and Awe: Move Fast and Break Things Tom Engelhardt at Informed Comment
Music Pathways si.edu
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Exploring the Amazon Maps Mania
A simple forks or no question Mark Liberman at Language Log
Twinkump Linkdump Cory Doctorow
How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future (2025) Bruce Sterling (The "print" version of an extemporaneous speech given in Austin on March 12 at SXSW 2025)
...a broader creative practice, which might be described as: deliberately turning culturally significant imaginary things into functional real-life things.
We are using modern capabilities to make things work, when it was once merely imagined that these things might somehow someday work.
...This project that I've been talking about, it's a design fiction project. I said fifteen years ago that design fiction is a form of design, and it's not a genre of fiction. Historically, design trends come and go. This time, it might be the fiction that matters more here. This Versificatore device, it's not a manufactured work of industrial design from 1960. It looks like one, but it's a work of fiction from 1960. That's why it matters today and tomorrow.
...I'll offer one last word. That word is "Realization." You should rebuild an imaginary future, not as a clever stunt or a stage-trick, but for the sake of the realization. You have this old imaginary thing which was fantastic, or even sarcastic and satirical. Maybe absurd, surreal and bordering on zany, but then, the technological platforms change. Then it becomes possible to "realize" that dream of some past visionary figure. It becomes a public tribute to him and his lost world.
Also, you and your colleagues realize something by the act of realizing it. You arrange the situation so that the public can realize as well. It becomes more than a mere toy, or a pricey collectible, or an archaic artifact under glass in a museum.
It's a living and persistent insight into how we are, and also what, and where, and why, and who, and when we are. When you have all those things aligned, you don't have mere passing gadgets of circuits and plastic, you have a culture. You have a civilization.
America, the Unhappy: Lonely, Suspicious, Gun-ridden, and Stingy, the US Ranks Low for Well-Being Juan Cole
Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World The Marginalian
Microplastics Hinder Plants' Photosynthesis, threatening Massive Crop and Seafood Losses Informed Comment
The War on Government Statistics Has Quietly Begun Bloomberg
...One of FESAC's official responsibilities was "exploring ways to enhance the agencies' economic indicators to make them timelier, more accurate, and more specific to meeting changing demands and future data needs." In the complex and highly dynamic US economy, this is an ongoing effort — not a one-time task that has been "fulfilled," which was the Commerce Department's stated reason for terminating the committee.
...The National Academies of Sciences, in discussing best practices for statistical agencies, argues that external advisory committees are a good way to engage with users of the data and obtain expert advice. Moreover, external evaluation should be part of regular program reviews to ensure quality, relevance and cost-effectiveness. That's exactly what FESAC did.
The statistical agencies need more, not fewer, resources now to meet their challenges. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly questioned the credibility of US employment statistics. In particular, he claimed that the downward revisions of monthly payrolls showed political interference. Senators Bill Cassidy and Susan Collins asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to explain why large revisions were happening and how to avoid them. FESAC could have been a valuable resource for possible improvements.
Disbanding FESAC does not advance the administration's goal of greater efficiency in the government. ...FESAC is not alone. By executive order, the administration is ending several advisory committees in the federal government, reducing transparency and the technical resources for agencies. It's a short-sighted approach that could undermine essential government services.
Rescuing America's Economy from Trump: First, Stop the Sanewashing Brad DeLong
Thus, the Trumpists want a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" whereby other countries help to weaken the dollar in exchange for tariff relief, military protection, and so forth. Ultimately, countries would fall into one of three buckets: green (friends), red (foes), or yellow (partial alignment). "It's extraordinarily bold," Tett tells us. "You can't lose sight of the fact that there are people who do want to re-engineer the global financial and economic system, and they do have quite a coherent plan."
...Canada should already be working to link the resource-rich parts of its economy to China and Europe. That means abandoning any plans for new infrastructure to take resources south, and coming up with a new development strategy for Ontario. For 150 years, the southern swath of the province has been an integral part of America's Midwest manufacturing complex. Both sides have benefited enormously. But divorce is now necessary. It is only a matter of time before Trump, desperate for TV airtime, does something to weaponize the relationship. The fact that doing so will harm Americans more than Canadians does not matter to him.
Could We Store Our Data in DNA? It might allow us to keep everything, forever. Jaron Lanier at New Yorker
Mark Zuckerberg's Human Update is Horrifying
The Secret Developer at Medium
Once upon a time, Silicon Valley's overlords were nerdy, socially awkward engineers who kept their heads down while counting their stock options. In a sense that worked, and we all knew where we stood. Fast forward a couple of decades, and they're aging tech bros who refuse to let go of their youth, desperately rebranding themselves as cool, edgy, and human.
It's not just Zuckerberg. Elon Musk, the once adored tech visionary, completed his own midlife crisis speedrun by rebranding himself as a free speech crusader, aligning with right-wing culture wars, and turning X into the dumpster fire it is now. Once known for sending electric cars into space, he now spends his days arguing with 19-year-olds about how to best lay off government workers.
Then there's Jeff Bezos, the supervillain persona. A shaved head, excessive bicep flexing, and yacht flexing that screams "I just divorced my wife and need you to know I'm fine"'.
Watch a chameleon's tongue catch a bug in slow motion boing boing
'We Just Want to Get Back to Work': NOAA Hurricane Hunter Speaks Out After Trump's Layoffs gizmodo
Social Security Activist on DOGE's Cuts: 'People Will Die gizmodo
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The Graveyard Of The Future Warren Ellis
...one angle on AI is that it's a listening service that shoves your every digitally recorded thought into spreadsheets that are then compiled and sold back to you and everyone else as a product. And everything from social media to the open web is being scraped to fill those spreadsheets, right? We have to choose what to put out there now
Richard Brody on Pauline Kael's "Notes on Heart and Mind" The New Yorker
The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons Yiyun Li at The New Yorker
The Making of the Modern Middle East: Juan Cole on History, Politics, and Todays Turmoil Tamooda Interview at Infprmed Comment
Baguetiquette: The Art and History of French Baguettes Mark Laflamme at Medium
Starlink is Doomed Will Lockett at Medium
Why Gen X and Gen Z See Right Through Zuckerberg's Social Experiment — But Millennials Fell For It Victoria Muggridge at Medium
The Rhetorical Tricks for Normalizing Genocide Ramona Wadi at Informed Comment
"Gather in the Mushrooms" is music of innocence and rare beauty Hobbledehoy
Trump's imperial presidency is a throwback to a greedier, pernicious age Hobbledehoy
More Entries from My Private Journal Ted Gioia
...I listen to lots of self-produced albums on Bandcamp. I sometimes find hidden gems, but even the mediocre music gives me a read on the pulse of the culture.
But I've learned the warning signs. It's best to avoid
Trump restricts access to border-straddling library
Jason Weisberger at Boing Boing
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The Russian Sabotage Map Maps Mania
Way With Words Love Bites
Trump rages to snuff out Democracy's Candle: Will we Rage against the Dying of its Light? Rebecca Gordon at Informed Comment
People will die and, as was true of the cruelty of Trump's first term, their deaths are, in a sense, the point. They will die because he has undoubtedly realized that, no matter how long he remains president, one day he himself will die. His administration is, as he has told us, driven by a thirst for retribution. He is seeking revenge for his own mortality against everything that lives.
Cowardice and Capitulation Stain the Legacy of Once-Esteemed Mega Law Firm Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian
Meta's AI Will Suggest Comments for Users to Post About Your Photos Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel
The Lines We Draw Jörg M Colberg at Conscientious Photographer
Therein lies the rub: often, community is a lot less well defined than those within it would like to imagine. Families have their black sheep, chess clubs tend to erupt in rather pointless infighting over the proper rules of engagement as a club, some North Germans are stoic and don't talk very much while others will chew your ear of.
ommunity, in other words, tends to come with bad blood, and bad blood has the potential to create open conflicts, even (or maybe especially) when the underlying reasons have long been forgotten or were so minor that in retrospect the whole conflict seems positively ridiculous.
But we stick to communities because they're not only the sources of conflict. They're also the sources of deep meaning, regardless of whether that meaning is derived from abstract principles or from something very real.
White House turns Easter Egg Roll into ad space for corporations Boing Boing
Product Market Fit Collapse: Why Your Company Could Be Next Styephen Downes
Trump Loves Big Tech Cory Doctorow
...It's pretty clear at this point that the anti-Big Tech wing of the Trump Party has lost. Trump's saber-rattling is funneling billions into Big Tech's pockets and consolidating their power.
...Trump is in the tank for American Big Tech. He may have courted the anti-Big Tech wing of his movement by trash-talking US tech giants, but all it took was a few million in bribes and he changed his tune. US Big Tech is now an ascendant faction in the Trump Party coalition, which makes them fair game for the trade war.
A Conversation With Jeffrey Goldberg About His Extraordinary Scoop David A Graham at The Atlantic
Jeffrey: No, nothing like this. This was like an intravenous drip of information that no one in the government thinks journalists should have. Until almost the very last minute, I could not believe that this was actually happening, that there could be a Mack-truck-size breach, that somehow, the editor in chief of The Atlantic was invited into a conversation with the intelligence agencies, secretaries, the national security adviser. Like most reporters, I've been a recipient of leaks. A leak is a totally different thing. That's a whistleblower trying to make complaints. This is just reckless.
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The Suplex Bird crookedtimber.org (on shrikes)
Counteract #AI Cynicism with Philosophy-Inspired CARES Model via Stephen Downes
Trouble at Tesla and Protests against Trump's Tariffs suggest consumer Boycotts are starting to Bite Informed Comment
Emergency National Statement to University and College Presidents from Faculty Informed Comment
pernickety, persnickety sesquiotic
The Netherlands for beginners Other Sides of a Nobodfy
One Wonders
Fergus McIntosh, interviewed by Merve Emr at NYRB
The Hypocrisy of Pete Hegseth (If Hypocrisy Were Still a Thing)
But her emails. Matt Novak at gizmodo
Getting Their Stories Straight Los Angeles Review of Books (Ralph Mazza's daiughter re: Chadwick School)
Time-resolved tracking of cellulose biosynthesis and assembly during cell wall regeneration in live Arabidopsis protoplasts Hyun Huh et al. at ScienceAdvances
Since conventional lab microscopes only provide a blurry look at the cell wall-building process, the authors of a new Science Advances study turned to a technique known as total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. This minimally-invasive method illuminates just the underside surface of living plant cells, and let the researchers capture images over 24 hours without causing any damage to the cells. The team also found a way to strip cell walls from individual cells belonging to the flowering plant Arabidopsis , a cousin of cabbage, leaving behind "naked" protoplasts. As study co-author Eric Lam explains in a statement, this process provided the researchers with a "blank slate,”"
The live video images reveal Arabidopsis protoplasts sprouting messy filaments of cellulose fibers; they tangle and fuse with one another as they grow progressively longer and move about on the cell surface. Over time, these unstable early networks dynamically evolve to become denser and more intricate, ultimately producing a strong, stable wall. "I was very surprised by the emergence of ordered structures out of the chaotic dance of molecules," says study co-author Sang-Hyuk Lee. "I thought plant cellulose would be made in a lot more of an organized fashion, as depicted in classical biology textbooks."
The Hollow Men It takes a special talent to betray an entire worldview without missing a beat. George Packer at The Atlantic
Trump's Kids Launching Stablecoin After Trump Backs Regulations for Them gizmodo
Why I don't like AI art Cory Doctorow
How the brain links related memories formed close in time ScienceDaily
Feline therapy: Study suggests cats could fill an assistive niche ScienceDaily
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Resisting Trump 2.0 with Brain-Rot Memes Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
The Trump Assassination Attempt Meets the Internet's Brain-Rot Era Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
Make Your Own Scrambled Maps Maps Mania
Turn map locations to slide puzzles Flowing Data
Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of Australian Artist Shane Drinkwater The Marginalian
Middle East Studies Assn, AAUP, and Knight Inst. file Lawsuit over Trump Arrests and Deportation for lawful Speech Informed Comment
bozos Bruce Sterling
The "War on Terror" Comes Home in the Trump Era Karen J Greenberg at Informed Comment
Coming Up: More History Doc Searls
The N-word is back! Tom the Dancing Bug
Incompetent or Evil: A False Dichotomy Trump's people can be and are both Paul Krugman at substack
And he shares these traits with Donald Trump, which makes them allies, although I keep wondering when their egos will collide explosively.
...Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls "the dumbest motherfuckers alive"? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?
The answer is "yes." These people are both incompetent and evil.
What does 'that' mean in 'Did you see that?' ScienceDaily
Bernie Sanders delivers fiery speech on the floor of the Senate
Trump has illegally and unconstitutionally withheld funds that Congress has appropriated. You can't do that. Congress has the power of the purse. We make a decision. We argue about it here. Big debates, vote-aras, the whole thing. Make that decision. That money goes out. The president does not have the right to withhold funds that Congress has appropriated.
Trump has illegally and unconstitutionally decimated agencies that can only be changed or reformed by Congress. You don't like the Department of Education, you don't like USAID, fine. Come to the Congress. Tell us what reforms you want to see. You do not have the right to unilaterally do away with these agencies.
Trump has fired members of independent agencies and inspectors general that he does not have the authority to do.
...Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than there has ever been in the history of America. Now, I know we don't discuss it. You don't see it much on TV. You don't hear it talked about here at all. But the American people do not believe that it is appropriate that three people—one, two, three—Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, and Mr. Zuckerberg, three Americans, own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. 170 million people. Really? Three people own more wealth than 170 million people? Anybody here think that is vaguely appropriate?
And by the way, those very same three people—the three richest people in America—were right there at Trump's inaugural, standing right behind the president. So, you want to know what oligarchy is? I know there's some confusion out there. What is oligarchy? Well, it starts off when you have the three wealthiest people in the country standing right behind the president when he gets inaugurated.
The Mysterious Flow of Fluid in the Brain Quanta Magazine
For this unsung philosopher, metaphors make life an adventure Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley at Psyche, via Stephen Downes
Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
ChatGPT Just Got a Huge Image-Generation Upgrade lifehacker
Four stages of tariff progressions flowing Data
Google (And all of Tech) to News: Shove It. John Battelle
...The news business has had a tortured relationship to the tech industry for decades — first as it attempted to adapt to the Internet, then as it realized in doing so, it had been disintermediated, first by Google, and later by social media (and Apple's iOS). The reasons for the news industry's decline are too numerous to review here, but the results are clear: Overall, the sector is losing outlets, practitioners, revenue, and audience.
My Octopus Teacher director returns, this time with a pangolin
Inbox
boing boing
Here Are the Attack Plans That Trumps Advisers Shared on Signal
"...The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and it's now collapsed."
Vance responded a minute later: "Excellent." Thirty-five minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, "A good start," which Waltz followed with a text containing a fist emoji, an American-flag emoji, and a fire emoji. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.
The Art Works in Flannery O'Connor's Attic The New Yorker
A Journey to Antarctica in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Sur" New Yorker
The Greater Scandal of Signalgate David Remnick at New Yorker
White House officials' Signal group chat leak now includes passwords, phone data Boing Boing
Memristor Wikipedia
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Trump's war on science Matthew Yglesias
We may have found the edge of quantum theory — what's beyond it? New Scientist
Signals and Symbols in Linguistic Variation and Change Mark Liberman at Language Log
How Deep was That Earthquake? Maps Mania
Tariff tracker and economic effects flowing data
Syria after Assad: Why many Syrian Refugees aren't returning Home Informed Comment
Doublethink and the Struggle for Survival in the Gaza Genocide Ramzy Baroud at Informed Comment
...The number of Palestinians killed — now more than 50,000 — is reported widely by mainstream media outlets, yet rarely do they mention that this is not a war in the traditional sense, but a genocide, carried out, financed and defended by Israel and Western powers for domestic political reasons. Palestinians continue to resist because it is their only legitimate option in the face of utter destruction and extermination.
AI and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions Mike Loukides at O'Reilly
...Wolf's argument is similar to the argument about AI's potential for creativity in music and other arts. The great composers aren't just recombining what came before; they're upending traditions, doing something new that incorporates pieces of what came before in ways that could never have been predicted. The same is true of poets, novelists, and painters: It's necessary to break with the past, to write something that could not have been written before, to "make it new."
...The same is true for the arts: There may be only one Beethoven or Mozart or Monk, but there are thousands of musicians who created music that people listened to and enjoyed, and who have since been forgotten because they didn't do anything revolutionary. Listening to truly revolutionary music 24-7 would be unbearable. At some point, you want something safe; something that isn't challenging.
We need AI that can do both "normal science and the science that creates new paradigms. We already have the former, or at least, we're close. But what might that other kind of AI look like? That's where it gets challenging—not just because we don't know how to build it but because that AI might require its own new paradigm. It would behave differently from anything we have now.
...one characteristic—perhaps the most important characteristic—of human intelligence that our current AI can't emulate is will, volition, the ability to want to do something. AlphaGo can play Go, but it can't want to play Go. Volition is a characteristic of revolutionary thinking—you have to want to go beyond what's already known, beyond simple recombination, and follow a train of thought to its most far-reaching consequences.
People Are Using ChatGPT's New AI Image Generator to Turn Photos into Studio Ghibli Style Images
The Delaware 'Billionaire's Bill' That Just Passed Is Bad News for Everyone Who Isn't a Billionaire gizmodo
A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release Balaji at X
(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT below.
(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.
(4) This may change books. I'd like to see someone take a public domain book from
Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude, and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.
(5) This changes slides. We're now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.
(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any
(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.
(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.
(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.
(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.
A cleaner future for tires: Scientists pioneer chemical process to repurpose rubber waste ScienceDaily
The devastating human impact on biodiversity ScienceDaily
'Where Should the Birds Fly?' Adam Shatz at NYRB, on Anouar Brahem's new record
Top Senate Republican Protests Trump Bid to Withhold Spending NYTimes (Susan Collins)
Smart insoles that could change the game for sports and health ScienceDaily
Economic impact of federal health research cuts Flowing Data
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Undaunted: Tammy Duckworth fights for America Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian
An architect-detective's medieval mystery Harvard Gazette
Envisioning Cluny:Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872-2025 Harvard Graduate School of Design
On Play The Marginalian (re: Homo Ludens)
History of slipping on banana peels Flowing Data
China's BYD has a $16K "Tesla-killer," as IEA finds EVs are an Oil Company-Killer Informed Comment
Making America White Again: The Deafening Silence of Trump's Black Supporters Informed Comment
Iraq's Climate Crisis is a Human Rights Crisis Informed Comment
DOGE Plans to Rewrite Entire Social Security Codebase in Just 'a Few Months': Report Matt Novak at gizmodo
Big Tech and "captive audience venues": The digital equivalent of baseball stadiums and airport concourses Cory Doctorow
The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn't anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn't really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn't have to worry about these things, so he's indulging the impulses that he's had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.
A genetic tree as a movie: Moving beyond the still portrait of ancestry Science Daily
..."Because our pedigrees explode so quickly, they also must collapse in the same sense that you and I must share many, many relatives at many points back in time, and that's true for every person alive on Earth," Bradburd said. "We're all extraordinarily closely related to each other."
...The statistical method, called Gaia (geographic ancestry inference algorithm), starts by making a very simple assumption about how individuals move: that typically they move locally. The method combines that assumption with the location of modern-day individuals and a genetic structure that relates them called the ancestral recombination graph.
(see A genetic tree as a movie: Moving beyond the still portrait of ancestry)
African time travellers: What can we learn from 500 years of written accounts?
Edward Kerby et al Economic History Review (2024)
Via Adam Tooze, and from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:
Hidden Reality Andy Ilachinski
Elon Musk's AI Company xAI Buys Elon Musk's Social Media Platform X
Elon Musk Declares Intention to Bribe Voters (Again) to Attack U.S. Judicial System gizmodo
29iii25
Trump & Musk Aren't Ready For What They Are Unleashing
The US is sliding towards revolution. Will Lockett at Medium
So, Musk, Trump, and DOGE are severing the government's income while increasing its spending, but not on social programmes, on privatising vast swathes of the government. This is why studies found that Trump's economic plan would increase the US deficit by twice that of Harris', and it is the reason why the US government is barreling towards bankruptcy.
That is it. The stage is set for revolution.
"Servants of the Damned" or how Trump has put a bit of stick about with BigLaw Adam Tooze
Who the hell is running the White House Twitter account?
Grant St. Clair at boing boing
Trump: we "have to have" Greenland
Grant St. Clair at boing boing
Global patterns in seed plant distribution over millions of years Science Daily
Politico's $50M Peter Thiel Problem Is Axel Springer CEO's son the 'German JD Vance'? Gil Duran at The Nerd Reich
...Vance initially worked for Thiel's fund, Mithril Capital, and later received seed capital from the multi-billionaire to establish his own fund, Narya. Finally, Thiel also boosted his political career: He reportedly flew to Mar-a-Lago last year specifically to ensure that everything would go smoothly at the first meeting between Vance and Trump.
30iii25
On Discovery Warren Ellis Orbital Operations
How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on the Three Demons of Creative Work Maria Popova The Marginalian
Your Gasoline Car is an Engine of Trump’s Fascism: Resistance requires going Green Juan Cole
AI Experts Say We're on the Wrong Path to Achieving Human-Like AI gizmodo
In Trump’s Dragnet Julia Preston at NYRB
31iii25
Our Built Environment Microbiomes Small Things Considered
The passing of another golden age: global ethics in a time of deglobalisation Christopher Hobson at Journal of Global Ethics
A cleaner future for tires: Scientists pioneer chemical process to repurpose rubber waste ScienceDaily
Digital Hittite Victor Mair at Language Log
Algorithms, Trade Wars & Sovereignty Giles Crouch at Medium
Not Tired of Winning Against Trump Jennifer Rubin at Contrarian
Revolutionary brain-computer interface decoding system ScienceDaily
A lighter, smarter magnetoreceptive electronic skin ScienceDaily
Philosophy: Cultural differences in exploitation of artificial agents ScienceDaily
Revolutionizing touch: Researchers explore the future of wearable multi-sensory haptic technology ScienceDaily
Capitalism's Capital Jackson Lears at LRB (on Robert Moses, 2016)
The University of Peers and Elders John Battelle
Sam Altman's Eyeball-Scanning Crypto Startup Gets a New App Store gizmodo
Map of New England in 1730 by Matthäus Seutter mapsontheweb
Pribvate-sector Trumpism Cory Doctorow
The many names of Eadweard Muybridge (he of the phenomenal galloping horse photographs) Victor Mair at Language Log
Why scientists are worried about weasels ScienceDaily
...As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for "probationary" employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be "probationary" for one month.
...it is the work of two Israeli American filmmakers, Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, who run an A.I.-driven studio in Los Angeles called EyeMix Immersive Visuals. The pair created the clip in early February, in the course of eight hours, as a way to test the capacities of the generative-A.I. software Arcana Labs, which is made by another L.A.-based company. The news of Trump's Gaza statements had just broken and, Avital told me on a recent video call, miming an expression of shock, "I couldn't believe my ears and my eyes."
(Art Spiegelman)...So it was a battle between my superego and my id, like the superego saying, You got to do this! And the id saying, Who needs the grief? What kind of difference can you make? If you look back at the McCarthy era, I'd rather be Dashiell Hammett and ashamed to be Elia Kazan. So I was being forced to do the right thing, but I think the strip took this long, starting from April and ending nine months or so after, because of that wrestling match in my brain forcing me forward. "I can't go on, I must go on, I'll go on" kind of stuff.
...The discovery of Teflon was indeed miraculous, but its discovery also opened the door to a new class of chemicals that we are struggling to deal with. The same carbon-fluorine bond that makes them so special and useful also makes them so persistent. Today, we can find these chemicals in many different environments, and it is highly likely they are in your body as you read this article. These forever chemicals live up to their name! Fortunately, a growing awareness of what they can do to the environment may just allow us to undo the chemical footprint they have left behind.
Welcome to the week of J.D. Vance memes, nearly all of which portray him as either a child in an adult's body (many incorporate rainbow propeller hats and comically oversize lollipops) or a neck-bearded adult. These edits are not new; back in October, Representative Mike Collins's tweet in support of Vance included an attached image that had been altered to make his jawline and chin appear stronger and more pronounced — or, colloquially, more like a Chad. This being an extremely weird thing for a congressman to do, the writer and social-media strategist Dave McNamee started a thread of his own Vance edits, giving him progressively rounder cheeks and smaller eyes. "I posted something about making him chubbier and rounder for every 1,000 likes, and that snowballed into a J.D. Vance body-horror thread that blew up," McNamee tells me over email. After Trump and Vance's meeting with Zelenskyy last week, the edits circulated again, this time with an even more absurdist bent.
Authors and translators borrowed promiscuously from French to expand English's range of expression, prompting Samuel Johnson to warn that too much translation risked shaking the foundations of English. Since no book 'was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom', translators' 'mischievous and comprehensive innovation' in attempting to ape the style of originals — which, in the 18th century, were very often in French — meant that they wrote with an insidiously Gallic inflection. This, for Johnson, was worse than simply borrowing new terms, something which had exercised critics for years. He warned that 'single words may enter by thousands, and the fabrick of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the columns.' If nobody stopped the translators, the English would be left 'to babble a dialect of France'.
...Translators always tell us where they stand on the matter of fidelity — accurate but sometimes awkward, or fluent but sometimes loose? — though those who claim to stick closely to the original usually make more noise about it: no one wants to say their version is far removed from the book you want to read. ... 'Literal' translation is a contradiction in terms. Languages have different syntaxes, with Russian word order quite unlike that of English or French or Spanish, and many words in one language don't have an exact equivalent in the other – the Russian for ‘dark', тёмный, has connotations of the murky, the clouded, the unknowable, the obscure, as well as perhaps the suspicious or dodgy — which makes it impossible to render perfectly in English
...Frachetti and graduate students in his Spatial Analysis, Interpretation, and Exploration (SAIE) Lab compiled the drone-lidar data into 3D models, which were passed to Liu and Ju, who applied computational algorithms to analyze the archaeological surfaces and auto-trace millions of lines to predict likely architectural alignments
While Musk has stayed busy perpetrating a coup under the transparently false guise of "efficiency," Tesla has been having a bit of a rough time. Public backlash to Musk has been, rightfully so, pointed squarely at Tesla, causing sales to dip and its stock to slide. However, no one is talking about the big picture. The sales and stock issue is a far bigger problem than anyone appears to be willing to acknowledge, but there are other, entirely separate company-crushing factors that threaten Tesla's very existence. As such, I don't think you understand just how screwed Tesla is.
...If these trends continue—and there is no sign Trump will magically become stable or economically literate—the economic situation may deteriorate further.
..."Our metabolism is closely linked to inflammation, aging and chronic disease. Metabolites can circulate as signaling molecules between tissues, either promoting healing or exacerbating disease." The discipline is called 'metabolomics', and that's our new word for the day.
The United States is currently undertaking the biggest act of climate change denial in history.
One striking example is what is happening at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Over 200 FEMA employees have been fired by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Those who remain have been ordered to remove all language related to climate change from FEMA websites and publications. Staff have also been instructed to report any colleagues who continue working on climate change-related projects.
(see National Risk Index maps from FEMA, 11iii25)
...In Cortez, I bought a Navajo rug. It has a seam on the border called a ch'ihónít'i, or spirit line. The spirit line protects the weaver from the emotions of the person who bought it. The artist wove herself an exit from her creation
...a painful read...
Maria Popova:
When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations.
...When an industry is heavily concentrated, when it is a cartel that controls key chokepoints that restrict access to key markets, then rising prices don't trigger discounts from rival companies, because rival companies simply can't get any market oxygen. And when a shock — covid, bird flu, etc — strikes, cartels can hike prices way over their higher costs, and point the finger of blame at the shock. This is a special subspecies of greedflation called "excuseflation":
...As influenza spreads from host to host, it gradually accumulates genetic mutations, which is what necessitates an updated flu vaccine each year. Occasionally, an animal is infected with two influenza strains at the same time. When this happens, the viruses swap genes, shuffling their gene segments like a deck of cards to create a new strain. We think this process generates influenza strains like the one that caused the 1918 pandemic.
Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a "strategic reserve" of cryptocurrency for the US, which he called "digital Fort Knox for digital gold to be stored". It's just one of several recent announcements that indicated a new, and friendly posture toward the industry.
During the Korean War, thousands of United Nations troops acquired what was called "Korean hemorrhagic fever." They experienced a flu-like illness with muscle aches, fever, and a general malaise. The disease would then progress to kidney failure, and loss of blood clotting factors. That loss of those factors manifests in bleeding from the mucous membranes, like the eyes and nose. Some even develop a rash.
...other devices that were overtaken by the smartphone:
I believe it's appropriate now to refer to the present government of the United States not as an “administration” but as a “regime,” with all of that word's dark and ugly connotations.
...The only reason Tesla is so stupidly valuable is because it is treated as a speculative meme stock.
...the real question is: Why are Republicans shutting down our government and growing the debt to destroy vital services and increase Musk's and his billionaire buds' staggering wealth? It might be because the oligarchs care not one wit for the American people, lack any understanding of the essential functions that government performs, and look at the federal government as a giant opportunity for one more grift.
...every work of science great enough to be remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic
...an archive of incitements, a gathering of provocative and productive ideas, speculations and attitudes about media and representation.
even profound, but achieves this effect through ambiguity (about 30 minutes in for the anecdote)
Deepity Wikipedia
...Not giving a damn if he's caught in a lie or an error or simply sounds nuts as long as the focus remains on him or, these days, on his stand-in, Elon the Enforcer.
... Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-fueled "Catch and Revoke" effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups, senior State Department officials tell Axios.
Although tech companies frequently describe AGI as their ultimate goal, the very definition of AGI is unsettled. Google DeepMind has described it as a system that can outperform all humans on a set of cognitive tests, while Huawei has suggested reaching this milestone requires a body that lets AI interact with its environment. As for Microsoft and OpenAI, an internal report stated that they will consider AGI achieved only when OpenAI has developed a model that can generate $100 billion in profit.
...As New Scientist has extensively reported, current LLMs aren't intelligent in any meaningful sense and are just as liable to spew convincing-sounding inaccuracies as they are to offer useful advice. What's more, their answers will also reflect the inherent biases of the information they have ingested.
Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to revolve around whether large models are intelligent, autonomous agents. Some AI researchers and commentators speculate that we are on the cusp of creating agents with artificial general intelligence (AGI), a prospect anticipated with both elation and anxiety. There have also been extensive conversations about cultural and social consequences of large models, orbiting around two foci: immediate effects of these systems as they are currently used, and hypothetical futures when these systems turn into AGI agents—perhaps even superintelligent AGI agents. But this discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. Combining ideas from social and behavioral sciences with computer science can help us to understand AI systems more accurately. Large models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated.
In taking on the libel-industrial complex — a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today — Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.
Individuals associated with the federal government have, in defiance of a court order and without a trial or any form of due process, deported hundreds of people from the territory of the United States to El Salvador, where they will be held indefinitely in a concentration camp.
The strong feelings surrounding Musk have already started to scramble the politics around EVs. Trump's exhibition at the White House on Tuesday was a defense of Musk, who he said had been unfairly penalized for "finding all sorts of terrible things that have taken place against our country." Yet the bizarre scene of Trump showcasing a vehicle that runs on electricity instead of gas felt almost like a sketch from Saturday Night Live, and not just because the Trump administration has been trying to reverse Biden-era rules that would have sped up the adoption of low-emissions vehicles. Here were the two biggest characters in MAGA politics promoting a technology that's been largely rejected by their right-wing base.
...this company is worth observing, if not for the fact that it's arguably the first major IPO that we've seen from the current generative AI hype bubble, and undoubtedly the biggest. Moreover, it's a company that deals in the infrastructure aspect of AI, where one would naturally assume is where all the money really is — putting up the servers for hyperscalers to run their hallucination-prone, unprofitable models.
...A similar story is playing out in the AI space. (For brevity, I'll lump all of data science, machine learning, and GenAI under the term "AI.") Like early-day custom software development, today's AI opportunities bear the price tag of new approaches and new discipline. You can't just cram a bunch of data scientists into an office and cross your fingers that everything works out.
...Each human community generates its own sonic environment — a phonotope — that both shapes and is shaped by the people who live within it.
...there's data, data, everywhere, but without connectivity, there's not a drop to drink. Want your nifty new AI agent to book a flight for you? Well, it'll have to work with, let's see ... every major airline's online systems, every major payment system, every major travel platform, every major calendaring system, and ...well, that's enough to confound your average AI developer right there. For every single possibility, a developer would have to code a custom programming interface, not to mention get their business colleagues to negotiate a deal with each company to access the data in the first place. Those kinds of hurdles are near impossible to overcome for most startups.
When I was in college and graduate school, I practically lived in the library. Among the best students I know now, fifty years later, a superlative PhD candidate attended a very good college and is enrolled at one of the world's premier universities, yet she spends almost no time in the library.
...Michael Heine: Art moves culture forward. Heine writes: "AI can calculate, connect, simulate — but where is the escalation? Where is the one sentence that topples an empire, the idea that unsettles an entire generation?" For anything to count as "artistic," it has to generate something fundamentally new, he argues. It can't just "get the vibe of metafiction" right ... it has to create an entirely new vibe.
...It's quite amazing how well Levi understood the future human reactions to a novelty like an AI that can write human language. You can watch that show on YouTube right now, it's quite engaging and funny. Of course it's all in Italian, but who cares? As you watch the show, you can get Google's Artificial Intelligence to translate the TV show from speech to subtitled text in real-time. It turns out, sixty year later, that Primo Levi was quite right about the prospect of machines with an astonishing command of human language. They're very much here, and wreaking predictable havoc.
In a time of great economic uncertainty, President Donald Trump's administration quietly took a step last week that could create even more: Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
..."On the one hand, they want to ensure that the dollar remains supreme as a global reserve currency and that the dollar-based financial system continues to dominate," she explained. "But at the same time, they also think that the dollar is overvalued by virtue of the fact that it is the world's reserve currency, which means that people keep buying dollars and so that pushes up the value."
A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. That's a lot—but, according to one estimate, humanity will produce a hundred and eighty zettabytes of digital data this year. It all adds up: PowerPoints and selfies; video captured by cameras; electronic health records; data retrieved from smart devices or collected by telescopes and particle accelerators; backups, and backups of the backups. Where should it all go, and how much of it should be kept, and for how long?
...Zuckerberg's latest attempt at appearing "relatable" follows a growing trend among tech billionaires desperately seeking public validation. It's as if there was a secret Slack channel titled "How to Convince the Masses That We're Fun", and they've been A/B testing new personalities but still can't iterate their way to "competent adult".
...Maybe that's why I keep so many of these old things. Every one of these old objects is the distillation of a group's beliefs about what the future will look like. They're not junk. They are memorials for an imagined better tomorrow.
...I'm surprised public intellectuals and culture critics don't focus more on music. It's the clearest, most unfiltered expression of the zeitgeist you can find.
On the other hand, I could be out-of-touch. Each of these might be the basis for future Grammy categories.
As Elon Musk recently told podcaster Joe Rogan, "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." And the strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.
if, like me, you're born in the relatively small town of Wilhelmshaven, Germany, then you are a Norddeutscher, someone who not only originates from northern Germany but who, at least that's the idea, displays certain characteristics that people from there either claim to have or are said to have.
...PMF...
Trumpism — like every successful political movement — is a coalition. It's made up of factions who virulently disagree on key issues, and Trump himself is the arbiter of which faction emerges triumphant and which one will have to eat shit and like it
...I lived in the Hudson Valley in the 1980s when the fiddlehead, a Spring-foraged and now cropped fern bracken, became the fashion of New England restaurants. Outside of Maine it had little history as an Anglo Spring green vegetable. And even in Maine its few citations in print in the early 20th century little suggest the rage for fiddleheads that would flare in the 1980s. Where did the produce stands and restaurants in the 1980s snag their fiddleheads—not from foragers in Maine. But from Canada where the vegetable has long been popular and part of foodways. So with the rival claims of Canadian heritage as a background, newspaper writers began devising the broadest sort of regional mythology for its place in Spring wild foods foraging in New England. So New England remains useful as an intellectual construct about food.
...David: You have done a lot of sensitive national-security reporting. Have you ever received any information like this?
although researchers have a fairly good understanding of what plant cell walls look like on a microscopic level, the way they form remains somewhat mysterious.
...Hugh Blackmer
...What becomes of democracy when it seems everybody has been herded into separate and opposed algorithmically assembled and maintained tribes, and when most of tech is run by oligarchs (for a few years while tech oligarchy stays a thing), and every status quo will prove transient in a Digital Age that's maybe a decade or two old and will be with us for decades, centuries, and millennia to come? Whatever the answer, it should now be clear that history is happening, big time. And we hardly know if or how any of the old anchor institutions (libraries, universities, journalism) from which Authority long derived in the past will survive in familiar forms.
...Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework. But he also clearly detests anything that makes life better for non-billionaires.
...But Mr. President, it is not just the media that Trump is going after. He is going after the constitutional responsibilities that this body, the United States Congress, has. And I will say it amazes me, it really does, how easily my Republican colleagues here in the Senate and in the House are willing to surrender their constitutional responsibilities. Give it over to the president.
Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words
Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive – to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.
- from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer
- from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer
...Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here's the money quote: "...news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google."
...Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg's cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi "Target Terrorist," was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.
...When you start firing people willy-willy [sic!], visible consequences arise because most of the people working for the government are, in fact, doing something. But then every time a national park has a disruption in user-facing services as a result of something that Trump has done, the right claims "malicious compliance." They're so sure that the National Park Service is wasteful that when cuts turn out to have visible consequences, that must mean sabotage.
Words are digital symbols transmitted as acoustic signals. The word sequence in an utterance is encoded by a phonological system whose symbol-facing side connects to morpho-syntax, while its signal-facing side controls articulation and perception. This "duality of patterning" (Hockett) or "double articulation" (Martinet) has crucial and little-recognized benefits for accurate transmission, lexical learning, and community convergence.
...While the Israeli army has inflicted suffering on the Palestinian people like no other force has against a civilian population in modern times, the Gaza Genocide endures because the Palestinians refuse to surrender.
...Wolf's argument is that our most advanced language models aren't creating anything new; they're just combining old ideas, old phrases, old words according to probabilistic models. That process isn't capable of making significant new discoveries; Wolf lists Copernicus's heliocentric solar system, Einstein's relativity, and Doudna's CRISPR as examples of discoveries that go far beyond recombination.
A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release.
(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like "Studio Ghibli" or Dr. Seuss or South Park.
tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.
...a much too complete history of slipping on banana peels, dating back to May 28, 1867
...As arable land for farming shrinks and waterways for fishing evaporate, among other economic factors, increasing numbers of Iraqis are moving to cities in search of work. As of March 2024, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) recorded over 140,000 Iraqis who remain displaced in the context of drought and land degradation. If the needs of migrants and internally displaced people are not adequately addressed, this may increase pressure on services, push up food prices, and exacerbate social tensions, leading to protests and even violence.
...Everything from the code that issues Social Security numbers to the payment schedules are written in COBOL, which was created in the 1950s, but the DOGE team seems to believe it can make a snap transition with the help of artificial intelligence, according to Wired. The DOGE team has already been reportedly running highly sensitive government data through AI, as the Washington Post reported last month, so why not use it to cheat-code your way to a more modern programming language? The reason, of course is the risk of cascading failures during any rush-job that might mean missed payments or beneficiary information getting wiped from the system entirely.
Enshittification is what you get when tech companies, run by the common-or-garden mediocre sociopaths who end up at the top of most businesses, are unshackled from any consequence for indulging their worst, greediest impulses.
...A field, forged by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Svante Pääbo, developed the tools to genotype ancient DNA. This allows researchers to trace waves of human populations as they spread throughout the world -- particularly in Eurasia, where most of this type of genetic sequencing has been happening, Bradburd says. This has allowed researchers to see how human groups enter and leave geographic regions through time.
In this paper we study 500 years of African economic history using traveller accounts. We systematically collected 2464 unique documents, of which 855 pass language and rigorous data quality requirements. Our final corpus of texts contains more than 230 000 pages. Analysing such a corpus is an insurmountable task for traditional historians and would probably take a lifetime's work. Applying modern day computational linguistic techniques such as a structural topic model approach (STM) in combination with domain knowledge of African economic history, we analyse how first-hand accounts (topics) evolve across space and time.
..."xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI's advanced AI capability and expertise with X's massive reach," Musk's tweet reads.
...DOGE isn't finding fraud and waste. It is cutting vital government services that hold billionaires like Musk to account and produce huge amounts of income for the government. Take IRS agents; DOGE and Trump want to cut this workforce by 20%, despite the fact that every dollar spent on IRS agents returns between $5 and $12 for the government. That is one hell of an investment, and they are cutting this vital income stream! Not to mention that both DOGE and Trump are pushing for even more privatisation, which often actually increases governmental spending, as privatised governmental bodies can negotiate extortionate deals, given that they are often functional monopolies with shareholders hungry for profit.
"Denmark does a lot of business in the United States, and I think they want to see- I think everybody wants to see that work out. We need Greenland, very importantly, for international security. We have to have Greenland. It's not a question of 'do you think we can do without it', we can't. If you look at Greenland right now, if you look at the waterways, you have Chinese and Russian ships all over the place, and we're not gonna be able to do that- we're not relying on Denmark or anybody else to take care of that situation. And we're not talking about peace for the United States, we're talking about world peace. We're talking about international security."
Mathias Döpfner, CEO and part-owner of Axel Springer — the German media giant that owns Politico — has developed remarkably close ties to tech billionaire Peter Thiel. His son, Moritz Döpfner, previously served as chief of staff at Thiel Capital, the billionaire’s family office. Now, according to German media, the young Döpfner has started a new venture capital fund — with a $50 million investment from Thiel.
...Obrist is in many ways the pronoiac meme-broker of our millennial fictions, batting across the planet like a lunatic, soaking up the next new thing and connecting up all the people that make them.
...Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds "so undone"
...our current fascist moment is driven in part by a merger of the US government with the portfolio of companies owned by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The focus on the "broligarchy" of tech firms infiltrating the government to feather their own nests is something that I wrote about for The Type Media Center's Tomdispatch in my essay "Cyberpunk Nation: How Donald Trump’s America Is Being Hacked by White Nationalism."
(vioa Alberto Romero at Algorithmic Bridge
