Links and Notes for March 8th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

The Russians in Ukraine by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“In mid–January the Russians announced they had shelled a hotel in Kharkiv that served as a base for French “volunteers,” as the common euphemism has it, killing 60 of them. Paris marked this down as “disinformation,” that useful catchall for inconvenient disclosures. But Moscow had immediately summoned the French ambassador to complain of “Paris’s growing involvement in the conflict over Ukraine.” Does this kind of thing figure in any disinformation op you’ve ever heard of?”

“The Russians — “Putin” if you like — were right all along. The Ukraine crisis is merely the latest phase of the West’s long campaign to surround the Russian Federation up to its borders, destabilize it and finally subvert it. Regime change in Moscow was and remains the final objective.”

“This is not a war in defense of “Ukrainian democracy” — a phrase that causes one either to laugh or do the other thing. It is the West’s proxy war, start to finish, Ukrainians cynically cast as cannon fodder, expendable stooges. Russia had no choice when it intervened two years ago, this after eight years’ patience as the Europeans — Germany and France, this is to say — broke every promise they made by way of supporting a settlement. The Americans didn’t break any promises because they never made any — and no one would take them seriously if they had.”

Rüstungsausgaben = Investitionen? Manipulation und Denkfehler by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“„Rüstungsausgaben sind Investitionen in die Sicherheit“, so lautet eines der in letzter Zeit häufig gehörten Narrative. Vor allem Grüne und FDP bemühen gerne dieser Erklärung, wenn es darum geht, die immer höheren Militärausgaben an der Schuldenbremse vorbei über Schattenhaushalte zu finanzieren.”

“Um es plump zu sagen: Jeder Euro, der heute für Granaten und nicht für Bildung ausgegeben wird, führt dazu, dass in der Zukunft die Wertschöpfung der Volkswirtschaft sinkt. Ob Rüstungsausgaben das Land „sicherer“ machen, ist ein Thema, über das man sich vortrefflich streiten kann. Dass Rüstungsausgaben ein Land ärmer machen, ist jedoch Fakt.”

“[…] um politische Debatten zu dieser Thematik geht. Die Umdeutung von Rüstungsausgaben zu Investitionen ist höchst manipulativ und leider ist diese Manipulation auch sehr erfolgreich. Die „linksliberalen“ Medien sind sich dieses Denkfehlers – anders als Robert Habeck – sicher bewusst, aber da sie eine Steigerung der Rüstungsausgaben unterstützen, beteiligen sie sich an der Manipulation.”

“Und so gibt es – zumindest unter den großen, klassischen Medien – auch niemanden, der diesen Denkfehler anprangert. Stattdessen wird der Denkfehler ad nauseam, also bis zum Erbrechen, wiederholt. Ein Denkfehler, der oft genug erzählt wird, wird bekanntlich irgendwann zur Wahrheit – ihn anzuprangern, wäre dann wohl „Desinformation“.”

Mehr als ein „Abhörskandal“ by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Das ist eine direkte Kriegsbeteiligung Großbritanniens. Wenn die Aussage Gerhartz korrekt ist, wurden die zahlreichen Einsätze der Storm Shadow Marschflugkörper – u.a. auf die russische Schwarzmeerflotte, Industrieanlagen in Luhansk, den Hafen von Sewastopol und eine Eisenbahnbrücke auf der Krim – von britischem Boden aus geplant.”

“Deutschland solle demnach die Ukrainer in zwei Geschwindigkeiten („Short Track“, um russische Munitionsdepots auf russischem Boden, und „Long Track“, um komplexe Ziele wie die Krimbrücke bei Kertsch zu zerstören) ausbilden und die Amerikaner würden dann die Zieldaten zur Verfügung stellen. Auch das ist eine – wenn auch indirekte – Kriegsbeteiligung. Doch davon ist in unseren Medien nichts zu lesen.”

The State of Israel Has No Right to Exist and Neither Does the USA by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Israel was built on a foundation of colonial piracy. In the bloody wake of World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bunch of white men in khakis carved up the Middle East into strategically digestible pieces with the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916.”

“Nazis rose to power, uncoincidentally with the full support of the fascists in the Zionist movement who wrote love letters to Hitler and invited Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem while they used the reign of these cowards to herd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 European Jews into the Mandate between 1933 and 1936.”

“With their empire already in shambles and their hands full of blood and guts in South Asia, the British finally handed this colonial hand grenade to their heirs in Washington, who used the horrors of the Holocaust and their new toys in the United Nations to give colonialism a veneer of legitimacy. The UN adopted Resolution 181 in 1947, unilaterally recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.”

“America, after all, was little more than another British experiment in colonial piracy built on what may very well be the two most devastating acts of genocide in recorded history.”

“The white male landowners of Capitol Hill passed their own Nakba with the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and President Andrew Jackson, America’s answer to David Ben-Gurion, spent the better part of the next decade forcing an estimated 100,000 Native Americans from 18 tribes to the desolate West Bank of Oklahoma where they would be confined to reservations surrounded by illegal settlers and military installations and left to rot in poverty. By 1900, America’s indigenous population dwindled at around 237,000. The math isn’t hard to do but the numbers are impossible not to choke on. Several Holocausts went into turning America into the original Israel.”

“[…] it’s really little wonder why so many Americans are proud and unapologetic Zionists, our nation served as their blueprint.”

“The state itself, as it is currently defined, is a European colonialist construct designed for conquest. The notion that such a device could ever be rehabilitated for anything less than heinous is almost hysterically ludicrous and the proof is in the history.”

“Without Washington’s full and unconditional support, the current massacre raging in Gaza would grind to a screeching halt. In other words, America doesn’t have an Israel problem, the whole fucking planet has an America problem. Israel is just a symptom.”

“[…] no state has the right to exist, and the ones built on genocide need to go first.”

Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Moshik Temkin: “If Trump actually wins in November, while our elites blame the voters, I’m going to focus closely on the person who ran against him and lost. There is absolutely no good reason why, after everything that’s happened, Trump should be elected again. It would be 100% on his opponent.””

Just like it was the first time.

“In order to evade protesters and hecklers, Biden’s campaign team is scaling down the size of his events and keeping some of the times and locations of his appearances secret. As Jeet Heer said, Biden’s running as if he’s in the witness protection program. Which doesn’t seem like a terribly successful campaign strategy.”

“Only a couple of weeks after New York Governor Kathy Hochul was ridiculed for saying she reserved the right to obliterate Canada if it decided to cross Lake Erie and raid Buffalo, Hochul announced that she is dispatching the National Guard into the subways of NYC, authorizing the troops (under no known constitutional provision) to search bags at stations predominately used by poor and minority subway riders. As John Teufel pointed out, the Governor’s theatrical move comes despite the fact subway crime was down 2.5 percent in 2023 over the previous year and “ is on par with 2013/2014 numbers, when everybody was crowing about how safe the subway is.”

“Hochul: “[Riders] can refuse. We can refuse them. They can walk.””

“The World Food Program has sent 144 metric tons of powdered milk to Cuba, in response to Cuba’s first-ever request for “urgent assistance” to WFP. Cuba’s economic crisis has been fueled by crushing U.S. sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden. When he was Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo told European diplomats that the goal was to “starve” the island, and Biden has kept almost every Trump measure in place, and added a few as well.”

“Meloni’s neo-fascist party in Italy wants to use AI to assign mandatory jobs for Italian youth: “The young person will no longer be able to choose whether to work or not, but [will be] bound to accept the job offer … under penalty of loss of all benefits.””

“The “26% of young people believe the Holocaust is a myth” stat that generated such a media frenzy back in December was based on fake survey responses from an opt-in poll that cannot be replicated. Pew recalibrated the results from a mail-in poll and found the number was around three percent and didn’t vary across age groups.”

Yeah, duh. At least Scott Greenfield got a bunch of posts out of it. He’s also changed his entire worldview based on that poll. So win?

“In February 2022 Pew conducted an experiment on the veracity of “opt-in” surveys. They asked opt-in participants if they were licensed to operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine. In the survey, 12% of adults under 30 claimed this qualification. In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license is near 0%.”

I would absolutely have lied about that as well. What’s the downside?

“In dozens of Minnesota schools, entire grade levels are falling short of the minimum proficiency standards on state tests. Charter schools account for the overwhelming majority of the failures.”

The New Rape Mantra: Believe Hamas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“As Brett Stephens shows, those good ol’ days are over, at least when the victims of rape are Israeli.”

Poor Greenfield is now reduced to citing deviant Brett Stephens from his precious NYT—because the rest of the newspaper has distanced itself from the rape narrative for lack of evidence. The op-ed pages, on the other hand, don’t have to be concerned about lack of evidence. And neither does Greenfield.

“Among serious people, there was never any doubt about widespread rape. Images were available from the start of women bleeding from their crotches, naked mangled dead bodies in the back of pickup trucks to be paraded as trophies of their glorious victory. Later, the stories came out about women being gang raped while their breasts were cut off, until a bullet was fired into the back of their head even as the rape continued.”

“Serious people” is a lovely way of making sure its clear that if you disagree or don’t think the evidence shows what he thinks it shows, you’re not serious and can be dismissed. All of these stories have been dismissed as having been cooked up largely in the fevered imaginings of the IDF and people online who wanted to get a lot of hits. It’s a bit telling how Greenfield seems to delight in rolling out every last, debunked detail.

“Screw the facts. Screw due process. Screw evidence. Screw reason. If a woman felt she was raped, whether now or years from now, believe her. Who knew there was a caveat, “unless she’s Israeli”?”

This is absolutely not true, but he’s all worked up in a lather, so don’t get in his way. So much so that he seems to be supporting “believe women” now? Like, he spent years rightly fighting how ridiculous it was, but now he wishes the same idiots he fought for a decade would keep doing the thing he hates, but for Israeli women?

The article The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Hasbarist by Will Solomon (CounterPunch) goes into considerable detail on who Bret Stephens (Greenfield’s new hero) is and what he does.

“An obfuscater of Israeli crimes, extreme anti-Palestinian bias, a shady pro-Israel side gig, nasty interpersonal relations with media workers—how does Bret keep his job?

“Something like an answer might be found in his March 5 column, “The New Rape Denialism.” In it, Bret attacks critics—again, particularly left-leaning critics of Israel—who have voiced skepticism about the allegations that Hamas committed mass rape on October 7, attacking them as dishonest, and yet again, as antisemitic.”

“Stephens may be a cartoonish fundamentalist, but he is not an aberration at The New York Times; he is an expression of the paper’s underlying biases. He is unlikely to be censured because his job is to be an Israeli propagandist. As Gaza descends into famine, this never-ending assault may be the preeminent test of how good he is at it.”

The article Western Media Concocts ‘Evidence’ UN Report On Oct 7 Sex Crimes Failed to Deliver by Wyatt Reed (Scheer Post) discusses the lack of evidence and apparent cover-up of that lack of evidence in order to promulgate the desired narrative anyway.

“The UN report itself openly blamed the Israeli government for the team’s inability to determine who may have committed alleged sex crimes, noting that “the lack of access and cooperation by the Israeli authorities […]”

“The UN representative was referring to supposed Israeli survivors of sexual assault whom she was unable to meet during her visit, but who absolutely exist, according to Israel’s government.”

In defense of Jonathan Glazer: The Zone of Interest director comes under venomous attack for Academy Awards statement by David Walsh (WSWS)

“David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, […] insisted Glazer was trying to “equate Hamas’ maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.””

“Trank presents the ongoing genocidal campaign and subsequent events in these terms:”

“Toward the end of October, the Israeli army attacked Hamas in Gaza, determined to wipe it out forever so that an atrocity like this [October 7] will never happen again. In the subsequent months, we have watched pro-Hamas and anti-Israel forces unleash a campaign of worldwide antisemitism the likes of which has not been seen since the Nazi era.”

“Trank argues that those actors and others at the awards ceremony March 10 who sported “red pins in support of a Cease Fire Now and Palestinian flags on their lapels” were wearing the equivalent of “swastika pins in sympathy with Hitler’s Reich.”

“There is an element of derangement in this type of slanderous comment.”

US-NATO risks nuclear war with plans for attacks on Russia by Statement of the WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)

“The reckless escalation of the war is being carried out without any public explanation of what NATO is planning, let alone a frank acknowledgment of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the deployment of forces in Ukraine and attacks on Russia.

“Dismissing the explicit warning made by Putin during the past week that direct intervention by NATO forces into Ukraine could lead to the use of nuclear weapons, NATO leaders and the media are laughing off the danger with claims that the Russian president is merely bluffing.

“There is no justification for such complacency. The Biden administration and its European allies are engaged in a staggeringly reckless game of nuclear Russian Roulette.

“Apparently forgetting their own earlier statements, made at the start of the war in February 2022, that direct intervention by NATO would mean World War III, the imperialist leaders now assert that Russia will not retaliate even if its territory is directly attacked. Moreover, even if there exists the possibility of a massive counter-attack, they insist that NATO must not be deterred by that danger.”

Starvation Games by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Foreign Minister: “As I said yesterday, we need to get aid into Palestine. I know how we can do it. All the countries, the powerful countries with big armies, that are giving arms to Israel, they must send their soldiers to the Rafah border to escort 700 trucks of aid a day into Gaza. Let me turn to my friends on the BBC now, and they probably think I’m a mad woman, but I’ll keep saying it. The lady said to me, ‘Minister, surely you can’t expect that to happen.’ And I said, ‘If the world has a conscience, that’s what must happen. It must be them who ensure we don’t have dead skeletons on the streets of Gaza because people are starving.’ She said, ‘Will Israel allow it?’ I said, ‘Will Israel shoot their biggest supporters? It’s them, the supporters of Israel, who have a big responsibility to address the needs of the people of Gaza.’ And that’s what we should be saying, more and more and more.””

“Why is the US forced to build a floating pier seaport off the coast of Gaza? Because Gaza doesn’t have a port. Why doesn’t Gaza have a port? Because Israel has stopped the Palestinians from building one. Gaza doesn’t have an international airport for the same reason. This is what it means to live under an occupation.”

Citing Ralph Nader:

“The other aspect of their power, AIPAC’s power, is often never reported. They’re exceptionally skilled lobbyists. I mean, they ought to give, as a price of repentance, they ought to give civic groups all over the country lessons in how to lobby Congress. First of all, they don’t mess around with marches and demonstrations where the energy goes into the ether.

“They have a personal focus. It’s personal. They know the doctors, the lawyers, the golf-playing companions, who lends who money, whose favorite restaurant gives senators, and representatives a discount. They know the staff. They focus precisely on the senators and representatives one at a time with the staff. And they do it with extraordinary stamina and persistence and repetition. I’ve had people on Capitol Hill telling me, I don’t agree with AIPAC, I hate AIPAC, but I got to get them off my back. They just flood the office. They flood the people back home. They create false accusations. So, I just want to say, okay, okay, I’ll vote for you. Just like that.”

Yazan al-Kafarneh’s Death Is a Stain on Humanity by Seraj Assi (Jacobin)

“Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians like Yazan al-Kafarneh makes a brutal mockery of international appeals to allow aid to the besieged enclave. Last month, Mahmoud Fattouh, a two-month-old Palestinian boy, died from starvation in northern Gaza, having gone days without milk. Footage shows the emaciated infant gasping for breath in a hospital bed.”

Liberals Are Always Trying To Distance Biden From Netanyahu, And Netanyahu From Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“The New York Times’ Peter Baker and Michael Crowley present a poetical reframing of Biden’s genocide in which they depict this lifelong Beltway swamp monster’s self-evident depravity as a poignant story about a kindhearted leader facing difficult decisions, saying “The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result.””

“‘Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.’ That last sentence right there is all anyone needs to know about Joseph R Biden. Those are the raw facts, and everything else is narrative spin. Israel gets the actual material weapons it requires to continue its genocidal atrocities, and the readers of The New York Times get empty narrative fluff about aid drops and Biden’s feelings to help them feel okay about it.”

“Polling by the Israel Democracy Institute has found that three-quarters of Jewish Israelis support Netanyahu’s planned assault on Rafah, which the prime minister has said will proceed as planned despite Biden’s empty bloviations that doing so would be crossing a “red line” with this administration. Polls also found that 68 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose any humanitarian aid entering Gaza via any agency at all, which is to say they support starving huge numbers of Gazan civilians to death.”

This is worrying, if true, but speaks much more for the power of the Israeli domestic propaganda machine. The U.S. achieved similar number for invading Iraq, hitting almost 70% just before they went in. Repeated ad nauseam, anything sounds true.

Instead of seeing that an entire country’s worth of people are no longer living in their homes, and have been herded into a tiny corner of their country, where they’re going to be attacked again, … you think to yourself “aha! We’ve got Hamas right where we want them. They can’t escape now.”

If you’re conditioned not to think of those people as people, then it’s a lot easier to swallow. Sixty years ago, there were separate drinking fountains in the U.S. Thirty years ago, it was illegal to be homosexual in the U.S. Today, you’re still a dozen times more likely to be killed by police as a black man. Women don’t have bodily autonomy. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen without constant reinforcement at a societal level. It all seems normal and the only sane way of doing things if you just hear it often enough.

The savagery of a people toward another people—or of men toward woman, as is the case in, say, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.—is a carefully cultivated garden. And that goes both ways, by the way: in the book Palästina by Joe Sacco, I read several interviews where Palestinians were admitting—in the early 90s—that the racism on both sides runs so deep that there’s really nothing that that a few open-minded people can do about it. I read Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom for years in CounterPunch—before he died in 2018; I still miss his insightful writing—and he would sometimes lament the same.

The “Red Line” And Reality by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“It’s brutal to see the death and destruction in Gaza that never had to be, never should have been, but for Hamas. Biden recognizes that Israel has a right to exist, a right to defend itself. Many of those opposing Israel as the evil colonialists who oppress Palestinians do not, which enables them to support a solution that involves the eradication of Israel and its people “from the river to the sea.” They really see no problem with the “rapes of resistance” of October 7th because they’ve picked their side. Biden isn’t quite so foolish.

“But in the battle for Israel’s security, for the lives of its citizens to not be under threat of mass terrorist attack by the ruling junta of Gaza, there is no solution that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza and capable of attacking over and over, while it hides behind children and the elderly, in hospitals, schools and mosques, and relishes every innocent death of a “martyr” that further enrages the unduly passionate to hate Israel, to hate Jews, and creates the gloss of terrorists as “freedom fighters” for the oppressed.

“[…]

“Whether one trusts Hamas’ statistics or not, there is no doubt that a great many Palestinians have been killed, and a great many of them were not Hamas soldiers. The deaths of innocent people, even if they had a hand in making or tolerating Hamas as their government and agree with its goal of destroying Israel and murdering Jews, innocent or not, by terrorism, is a tragedy. But whose tragedy?”

That hits pretty much every single talking point in one article. Well-done, Scott.

But wait, there’s more.

“If Hamas is not destroyed, or at least its capacity to attack Israel eliminated, then it will attack again. Hamas has made clear that it intends to do so, over and over. Until Hamas is destroyed, there can be no peace as Hamas has no interest in peace. There can be no “two-state solution” with one state controlled by terrorists bent on destroying the other state. For those anti-colonialists whose solution is the eradication of Israel, they will be surprised to learn that Israel is not inclined to commit suicide and disappear.”

I suppose he had missed a few.

“Walk the streets of Gaza as Hamas fighters shoot them, then blend back into the crowd, and ask politely whether someone is innocent or guilty before taking them captive so they can be exchanged for Israelis held hostage by Hamas?”

This sounds like the same arguments that are always made when the U.S. invades somewhere. Gotta hit them before they hit us. I’m still kind of shocked to read Greenfield writing this kind of stuff.

“It is not Israel’s responsibility to put the welfare of Gazans ahead of its own citizens, including its soldiers.”

Yippy kay yay, Scott.

“Or there is the solution of ending the war now, a permanent ceasefire, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza, giving Iran plenty of time to rearm and organize Hamas’ terrorist activities, and then the next October 7th, the next rape, burn, behead and murder, of Israeli citizens by the resistance fighters of the oppressed Gazans, whose territory Israel left in 2005 so they could govern themselves and create whatever society they chose.

“This is what they chose, and Israel is left to deal with it.”

Ah, of course! He’d not yet mentioned Iran. Gotta get that one in there.

I honestly don’t think Greenfield knows anything about how Gaza was[3] organized. It seems hard to believe, and perhaps it’s too generous a conclusion, but it really seems like Greenfield has been pontificating on Israel and Gaza for months now and he’s not done the most basic research on how Gaza is constructed and controlled, politically. Israel no longer occupies it, but it controlled—and still controls—all ingress and egress, of both people and goods.

Hamas Fighter Really Struggling With Resolution Not To Rape Anyone During Ramadan (Babylon Bee)

Babylon Bee has got your back, Scott.

Journalism & Media

Worrying About TikTok During An Active Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Empire managers really seem to believe they can ban TikTok and kids will go “Oh well I guess I’ll start reading The Atlantic and supporting genocide then.””

“Progressive Democrats who try to tell you that it’s important to support Biden even though he’s committing a genocide because he might do some nice things for Americans domestically are actually giving you a useful insight into exactly what’s so evil about western liberalism.”

America Enters the Samizdat Era by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.”

“As was the case in the Soviet Union, official news will be unpopular in America because the public will know in advance that it is full of untruths and false narratives — but that won’t translate into instant popularity for true reporting or great satire or comedy, because the reach of these things can be artificially suppressed.”

“We’re going to need to find new ways of getting the truth to each other, and it’s not clear yet how those networks will work, if they will at all. It may come down to handing each other mimeographed papers in subway tunnels, as they did in Soviet times. We haven’t built that informational underground yet, but no matter what, the first steps will necessarily involve raising awareness that there’s a problem at all.”

Pretending The US Can’t Just Drive Aid Into Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“My favorite part of the article is where the author Max Blumenthal writes that Republicans and Democrats were found to be receptive to different words used to describe Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, saying “Republican voters prefer phrases which imply maximalist violence, like ‘eradicate’ and ‘obliterate,’ while sanitized terms like ‘neutralize’ appeal more to Democrats.”

“That’s pretty much the only difference between Republicans and Democrats right there. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“It just says so much about the state of western civilization that even genocide has been turned into another vapid culture war wedge issue for people to masturbate their tribal identity constructs on. As though “don’t starve children to death or rip them to shreds with military explosives” is some kind of ideological position that only makes sense through a specific political lens, instead of just the normal human default perspective for anyone who isn’t a psychopath.”

“[…] the propagandists get each faction arguing about which imperial military project should be supported and which should be criticized. A lot of the people you see supporting the US-backed butchery in Gaza today have spent two years criticizing the US proxy war in Ukraine (and vice versa), because they took those positions based on what the pundits and politicians in their political faction told them to think. It’s got nothing to do with values or morals, it’s just blind tribalistic herd mentality.

“And that’s exactly where the empire wants us. Evenly divided against each other too thoroughly to get anything done, arguing back and forth about WHICH imperial agendas should be advanced instead of IF any of them should be advanced. A bunch of bleating human livestock unknowingly bickering about how best to advance the interests of their owners.”

Economy & Finance

Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Even as the risk of default has declined, credit card companies have raised interest rates and late fees to record levels, generating $25 billion in profits.”

“The rich are gobbling up real estate…with cash. Almost 70% of New York City homes purchased in the final quarter of 2023 were bought without a mortgage.”

“Doug Henwood: “Cumulative real wage change during Biden’s 36 months in office: -2.2%. During the previous 36 months: 4.5%. That’s a 6.7 point difference.””

“ At 211.4 percent, Argentina, now under the helm of libertarian hero Javier Milei, has the highest rate of inflation in the world.”

Biden’s State of the Union Showcased a President in Denial by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“The United States today is embroiled in a slow-burning economic crisis: child poverty has seen a record-high spike; homelessness has soared to never-before-seen levels; cost-burdened renters are at an all-time high; evictions are back to pre-pandemic levels; and food insecurity is rising for the first time in a decade. The president of the Oregon Food Bank recently declared that “we are living through the worst rates of hunger since the Great Depression,” just one of countless food pantries around the country that has seen demand for their help explode.”

The Trillion Dollar Equation by Veritasium (YouTube)

This is a great introduction to the history and mechanics of options-trading. 30 minutes.

Climate Change

Global Pet Craze Is Becoming a Major Contributor to the Extinction Crisis by Peter Christie (CounterPunch)

“Some warn of what they call an “ extinction cascade ,” whereby the loss of one species, such as a butterfly or a bee, leads to the secondary extinction of a plant it pollinates, which, in turn, means the end of a specialist plant-eating animal, and so on. As more and more of the living pieces in an ecosystem go missing, the system itself risks breaking down. Try removing parts of your car one by one while still expecting it to get you somewhere.”

“Ceballos, who helped introduce the world to the possibility that we’re seeing a sixth mass extinction, says that “many scientists in many different fields feel there may be a collapse in civilization if this trend continues in the next 20 to 30 years.””

“The proportion of people who will ever set foot in the wilderness is growing smaller. Those who’ve met a moose on a trail or watched a heron over an evening marsh are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of us. For the growing majority—among our swelling numbers in cities around the world—dogs, cats, and other pets are our chief experience and familiarity with animals.”

Electrons, not molecules by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“That’s because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet’s surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders.””

“The point of fantasies like “direct air carbon-capture” is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.”

“Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Today, we can say that it’s impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders’ obscene wealth depends on it.”

Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Fifteen years before it was predicted, the average global temperature has breached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a 12-month period.”

“Oil and gas profits have tripled under Biden, but still the industry wants to evict him in favor of Trump. It’s a lesson Biden still hasn’t learned after five decades in politics.”

“With global temperatures rising to unprecedented levels, fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion in 2022.”

“A new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment projects that under all future emissions scenarios, the Arctic Ocean will likely become ice-free for the first time on a late August or early September day within the next 10 to 15 years.”

“The industrial farms and feed lots of the rural Midwest are fouling the water supply: In Wisconsin, 80,000 wells are contaminated with unsafe levels of nitrate. In Iowa, more than 6,000 wells.”

“The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record warm levels for an entire year now, setting daily record highs every day for 365 consecutive days and counting.”

“The US is home to 42% of the world’s golf courses, far more than any other country. There are more golf courses in the US than McDonald’s locations.”

This with only 4% of the world’s population.

Medicine & Disease

Big Pharma is “coming to the table” on price negotiations as it loses in court by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“Medicare price negotiations continue. The health department said that it will continue to negotiate in the coming months. If the government and the drug makers come to an agreement on prices, those prices will be announced on September 1, 2024, and will take effect at the beginning of 2026.”

I’ve read elsewhere that these price adjustments will be rolled out over the course of a decade, so don’t get too excited. The wheels grind slowly.

Art & Literature

Occupation: Jean Cocteau by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Only the dead have seen the end of war, as Santayana said. The people who hold power in our world are today every bit the same barbarian warlords, the same howling baboons, as they were 500 or 5,000 years ago, no matter that some of them manage to “clean up real nice” and to channel the words our era likes to hear (or liked to hear until recently) about democracy, justice, rights, and so on. I’m not buying it anymore, you nasty brutes.”

Welcome aboard, Justin. It’s odd, though. This seems like a non sequitur when considering the rest of the article.

“[…] rehabilitating and whitewashing the legacies of former Nazis. This was also long the official line of the communist regimes that constructed their post-war mythologies around the victory over fascism, and tended to see the capitalist West as an only slightly tempered continuation of the defeated Hitler regime. To some extent it’s this same mythology that continues to help Putin’s supporters make sense of the war against Ukraine, and that fuels the fantasies of grubby tankies around the world.”

Yeah, well, it’s not 100% wrong. The U.S. empire just found a different way of squeezing and, especially, of selling itself. If you’re on the wrong end, as Russia was for the Germans and and is for the Americans, the philosophy behind the unyielding murderous impulse doesn’t make much of a difference.

Justin used a word “zoomorpholatrous” that I think he just made up. A search returns a single hit on both DuckDuckGo…

zoomorpholatrous single hit on DuckDuckGo

…and Google.

zoomorpholatrous single hit on Google

That’s quite an accomplishment in this day and age.

He also mentioned a book called La Cousine Bette by Honore de Balzac—he didn’t actually recommend it, as he described it as containing only insufferable and irredeemable characters. Project Gutenberg has only the English version, so I searched on Amazon.

It’s free! ⛔️💰

La Cousine Bette is free

La Cousine Bette Invoice

Tweet (Twitter)

“Dystopian fiction is when you take things that happen in real life to marginalized populations and apply them to people with privilege.”

Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

““To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. For this reason, a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

“– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick”

Perfect Days Celebrates Spare, Mindful Escapism by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“Rich people can afford to have that one perfect sweater that wears like iron and always looks wonderful, among their other well-made and lovingly maintained objects, which have aesthetic status as well as lasting functionality. Working-class people are inclined to live in more confined spaces and have a lot of crap heaped up all over the place. Their belongings tend to be cheap and always breaking down or wearing out fast and having to be replaced by more crap, and there’s so much pressure involved in making a living, just keeping things in any kind of rough order is tough. Nobody’s sitting around lovingly tending their one precious object per shelf.”

“Another part of the fantasy is that he can afford to eat out for dinner every night. He doesn’t seem to have a kitchen, and he goes to a public bathhouse to shower. The combination of the life of the working poor, living without what many would regard as necessities, but somehow with the luxuries of the rich, is very much the way the fantasy works. Hirayama is like a prince in exile. He’s “reduced” to cleaning toilets — though they’re the nicest public toilets ever built — but he has turned that way of life into a superior, even a royal, way to live.”

The Enduring Predictability of the Mostly Apolitical Oscars by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“Glazer, whose The Zone of Interest won Best International Film, made a speech trying yet again to convince people who refuse to recognize that his “Holocaust drama” isn’t just about the Nazis and their Final Solution. It’s about us in the present day living comfortably while atrocities are committed in our names by our governments and approved of by many of our fellow citizens. Sometimes it’s genocide on the other side of a real wall; more often it’s on the other side of a metaphorical wall.”

For God’s sake, people: It is perfectly possible to call for the end of this onslaught and occupation without calling for the end of Israel. It is possible to want people not to suffer without blaming every single person in a country that is causing that suffering. That’s called collective punishment and it’s just as wrong when people talk about doing it to Israel as when Israel does it to other countries or peoples. Or when the U.S. does it. Or Russia. Or any signatory to the Geneva Conventions.

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a military operation. That does not mean that no-one committed war crimes that day. It means that there it was not de jure criminal by international law. That it was carried out by military members means that it was almost certainly based on an alienation of the enemy, of the other. This is how militaries work.

The retaliation to Al-Aqsa Flood has been vicious and completely out of proportion to the violence anyone could conceive as being necessary to prevent Al-Aqsa Flood from continuing. This retaliation, too, could not be continued without a tremendous alienation, an othering of a group of people. Everyone involved in a war is guilty of alienation.

If we want to realistically end the war, though, we must get the overwhelmingly powerful party to stop. In this case, it’s Israel that is the only party that can stop the violence, as it is perpetrating the large part of of it. It is the U.S. that could encourage Israel to stop being so violent, as Israel is nearly entirely dependent on the U.S. for money and weapons. There is not really very much that Palestine can do. When you read the list of demands for a ceasefire, it’s very clear that the only satisfactory thing that they can do is to cease to exist.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Dumber Side of Smart People by Morgan Housel (Collab Fund)

“But there’s a danger in some fields when a smart person becomes known for their consistency in doing something, and then the world evolves away from that thing, but the person is desperate to hold onto the perceived consistency of their talent.”

“If the world evolves, you should probably either find a new area to apply your intelligence, or alter your confidence, or at least change the way you work and the product you deliver. But if the rest of the world craves your consistency, you can’t. They want you to keep doing the same thing over and over. And you want that too, because you want to guard your intellectual reputation. You marketed yourself as an expert in a specific thing, so it’s hard to evolve into something else. If you become famous for your smart ideas, but those ideas turn out to be either wrong or outdated, it’s extremely difficult to move on. The result is a lot of very smart people clinging to very bad ideas.”

“The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life. And those most susceptible to that risk are the people you’d least suspect: The smartest and most intelligent, who at one point flashed their brilliance but struggled to admit that it can’t be repeated.”

Behind F1's Velvet Curtain by Kate Wagner (Road & Track / Web Archive)

“[…] the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.”

“[…] as a writer, a.k.a. someone who decidedly does not make pro sportsman money, this was probably the only opportunity I’d ever get to see F1 this up close and personal. Tickets for grand prix grandstand seats can go for around a thousand per person. Part of me, deep down, wanted to see what press kickbacks could buy. With a bit of the ick still in me, I accepted.”

“What I did not realize until that moment was that we would be viewing the race from the paddock with all the team sponsors and employees and random assorted people willing to spend the equivalent of more than my life’s savings on one afternoon.”

“I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.”

“It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic.”

I saw a McLaren parked in the Niederdorf in Zürich yesterday. I couldn’t stop staring at it, it was so beautiful. It represents everything wrong with world, that one person can be begging for change at the train station 300 meters away, while another parks CHF300,000 by the side of the road. The picture to the right isn’t mine, but that’s kind of what it looked like.

“Recently, for my 30th birthday, I took up medieval sword fighting—historical European martial arts, they call it. For the first two weeks we worked on standing in a good medieval stance, always prepared to move. Sword fighting is learned through what are called set plays, specific motions of sword and body combined into one fluid action. But when you watch people who are really good at sword fighting, an ornate, flowing dance emerges from these seemingly disparate parts.”

That is very much a martial art. That is pretty much exactly how karate works.

“The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could—eventually, through its iterative processes—sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles”

“We know there is a class system in America, a great divide between the haves and have-nots. To be a have-not and be talked to by the haves has an air of the farcical to it. Everything is just manners with nothing inside. Everyone is perfectly nice as though that would bridge the chasm of difference.”

“He appeared perpetually relaxed, controlled and refined, both present with us in the room but on a higher plane within. We used to call this magnificence when we believed in kings. I don’t know what we call it now. Excellence, maybe. The irony of parading someone incredible like that around in the backrooms of petrochemical executives is not lost on me. I was grateful that I got the opportunity to speak to Lewis Hamilton, someone I am not ashamed to say I admire. I would have preferred it if they let him go home and rest instead.”

“I experienced firsthand the intended effect of allowing riffraff like me, those who distinguish themselves by way of words alone, to mingle with the giants of capitalism and their cultural attachés. It is to give this anointed everyman a taste of the good life, to make them feel like a prince for a day, and that if they do this with enough scribblers they will write nice words and somehow ameliorate the divide between the classes. My hosts were nice people with faces. They showed us extraordinary hospitality. If one takes many trips like this, I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing.”

Twilight by ContraPoints (YouTube)

A nearly three-hour treatise on gender hung on the frame of Stefanie Meyers’s Twilight series. I’ve neither read the books nor seen the movies. This was, as always from Natalie, interesting and educational. Recommended. Worthwhile.

…on why he is a communist, but not a socialist by Slavoj Žižek (YouTube)

“I remain a communist. In what sense? My good friend told me he was there, as part of some delegation, two days after Fukushima. He told me that, for a couple of hours, the Japanese government was in total panic. It looked that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area: 30 million people. Then, maybe, they didn’t have to, maybe they hushed up some data and didn’t care […]

“It’s clear that we are facing problems where neither market nor state—the way we have it today—will be able to do it. And, that’s, for me, the space for something that I prefer to call communism, not socialism. Because, today, everybody is a socialist. I read an interview—Bill Gates is a socialist! Socialism means, today, yeah, not too much egotism, we should take care of each other, and so on and so on.

“Don’t forget that we lack cognitive mapping, kind of a global narrative—never a postmodernist; we need big global narratives. Liberal capitalism is not the ultimate form. It will not work.”

On that note, I was reading one of Ars Technica’s Rocket Reports, which reminded me that our system has no idea how to use resources and energy efficiently. We don’t share information between space programs because they are all at-odds with each other. The ESA, NASA, SpaceX, India, Japan, China, Russia—they all do their own thing, repeating each other’s mistakes, probably chortling when others fail, and just generally inefficiently wasting resources and energy replicating each other’s mistakes, as well as getting an occasional success. Imagine if nation-states cooperated instead of squabbling.

Technology

Huawei rises from the dead, outsells iPhone in China by Ron Amadeo (Ars Technica)

“Huawei was supposed to be dead! For a time, the company was crushed by US sanctions, which really kicked in around 2021. The company mostly retracted to China-only distribution and lost most of its market share thanks to dwindling chip supplies.”

I detect a hint of disappointment that the U.S.‘s plan to destroy China’s economy has been thwarted by China’s refusal to go along with its own murder.

“As for the chip’s actual performance, it doesn’t seem great. GSMArena has benchmarks of the Kirin 9000s in a Huawei tablet, and even the bigger form factor doesn’t help it much. Single-core performance in Geekbench is on par with 2020's Snapdragon 888. Multicore is better, in between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (2021) and Gen 2 (2022). The performance of Huawei’s “self-developed” HiSilicon Maleoon 910 GPU is the chip’s weakest area, scoring a tier below the Snapdragon 888.”

It’s probably more than good enough for most people, though. I’ve never had anything close to the latest processor and it’s always felt super-fast to me.

“The US originally wanted to limit China to 14 nm chips, but that obviously didn’t work out, and today Huawei and the rest of China are working on bringing the whole tech ecosystem in-house. TSMC’s move beyond 7 nm required a new manufacturing technique called “extreme ultraviolet lithography,” and exporting those machines to China is banned, so moving forward without the right tools, or having to build your own, will be a challenge for Huawei.”

He’s hopeful that those dastardly Chinese will be limited to older technology, even if it’s better than what the U.S. empire had hoped to limit it to. How does this not get reported so much more as economic warfare? Even when it is, it’s reported with wholehearted approval. Fascinating.

I’m going to keep opting out by Cory Dransfeldt

“So, while it’s burdensome, I’m going to keep opting out. I’ll screen out emails, I’ll block them, I’ll unsubscribe, I’ll report them as spam. I’ll reply with STOP to unsubscribe (again and again and again). I’ll refuse direct mailers, I’ll block ads, I’ll block the banners that spring up in their place.

“If I need something I’ll buy it — I’ll seek it out but if you insist upon my attention, if you make a pitch or a hard sale I’m going to walk away. It’s reflexive.

“I devote time to things I care deeply about. I’ll chase them, I’ll seek them out and I’ll invest in them. Everyone does that to some degree or another. There is so much insistence and intrusion that opting out becomes both laborious and necessary.

“An economy built on demanding attention is, frankly, hellish.

“I’ll keep weeding that garden and, I’ll probably never be done, but hopefully it’ll get better eventually.”

LLMs & AI

How Public AI Can Strengthen Democracy by Bruce Schneier

“The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign for the co-evolution of democracy and technology. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the general public or ordinary consumers.”

“Widely available public models and computing infrastructure would yield numerous benefits to the U.S. and to broader society. They would provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development, such as whether and how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training, how to distribute access to private users when demand could outstrip cloud computing capacity, and how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use.”

“Given political will and proper financial investment by the federal government, public investment could sustain through technical challenges and false starts, circumstances that endemic short-termism might cause corporate efforts to redirect, falter, or even give up.”

“What’s needed is something in the middle, more on the scale of the National Institute of Standards and Technology , with its 3,400 staff , $1.65 billion annual budget in FY 2023, and extensive academic and industrial partnerships. This is a significant investment, but a rounding error on congressional appropriations like 2022’s $50 billion CHIPS Act to bolster domestic semiconductor production, and a steal for the value it could produce. The investment in our future—and the future of democracy—is well worth”

“The key piece of the ecosystem the government would dictate when creating an AI Public Option would be the design decisions involved in training and deploying AI foundation models. This is the area where transparency, political oversight, and public participation could affect [sic] more democratically-aligned outcomes than an unregulated private market.”

“Some of the key decisions involved in building AI foundation models are what data to use, how to provide pro-social feedback to “align” the model during training, and whose interests to prioritize when mitigating harms during deployment.”

“Technologies essential to the fabric of daily life cannot be uprooted and replanted every four to eight years. And the power to build and serve public AI must be handed to democratic institutions that act in good faith to uphold constitutional principles.”

“In the absence of a public option, consumers should look warily to two recent markets that have been consolidated by tech venture capital. In each case, after the victorious firms established their dominant positions, the result was exploitation of their userbases and debasement of their products. One is online search and social media, where the dominant rise of Facebook and Google atop a free-to-use, ad supported model demonstrated that, when you’re not paying, you are the product . The result has been a widespread erosion of online privacy and, for democracy, a corrosion of the information market on which the consent of the governed relies. The other is ridesharing, where a decade of VC-funded subsidies behind Uber and Lyft squeezed out the competition until they could raise prices.”

“Serious policymakers from both sides of the aisle should recognize the imperative for public-interested leaders not to abdicate control of the future of AI to corporate titans.”

Critique of Artificial Reason by Sean Michaels (The Baffler)

“Thinking and, in turn, writing, happen in collaboration with one’s muses, peers, and precursors, and with one’s tools, from dictionaries and word processors to “style guides, schemas, story plotters, thesauruses, and now chatbots.””

““What separates natural from artificial forces?” he asks. “Does natural intelligence end where I think something to myself, silently, alone? How about using a notebook or calling a friend for advice?””

“I imagine Dennis is one of those annoyingly adept dinner guests, who completely scrambles conversations even as he appears to agree with everyone.”

“Understood via this framework, large language models like ChatGPT no longer represent a categorical threat to the supremacy of homo sapiens’ sapience. They’re simply cleverer word-processing tools, and the latest implements—like pens, encyclopedias, tutors, or public schools—contributing to the aggregate smarts that human beings draw upon.”

That is an oversimplification. A pen does not guide you to an answer. It doesn’t fool you into thinking that it knows answers that it does not. Where an IDE (for example) is a precise tool that either gives the correct answer or no answer at all, an AI always gives an answer. It doesn’t really know how to say “I don’t know.”

Misuse or misunderstanding of the tool as such could degrade a lot of luxuries to which we’ve grown accustomed.

“The talents of Gemini, Claude, and GPT rest not on an understanding of verbs and participles, or even of characters and action, but instead on colocation.”

“In a way, the words can mean anything; they’re just symbols that AI has learned how to rearrange. This abstraction is a kind of chasm—one in which much is lost, but, interestingly, certain things can be gained. The whole English language has been mapped into a multi-dimensional vector space which indicates how closely smile goes with happy, or happy goes with miserable, or miserable goes with Victor Hugo.”

“Tenen deploys most of his political energy not against the potential savagery of machines but towards the actual megalomania of their makers. He criticizes society’s apparent inability “to hold technology makers responsible for their actions,” and cautions us from allowing artificial intelligence into the club of “fictitious persons,” where states and corporations go toe-to-toe in court battles against living, breathing organisms.”

“Tenen is optimistic about the way that LLMs’ simple language prompting might usher in the “humanization” of computer science: “lowering of barriers to technical expertise allows the humanities to fully integrate into the practice of engineering,””

This is how non-engineers think stuff gets made. Just vaguely describe something and voila! Your end product will only be as good as your requirements and non-engineers—even engineers, to be honest—are terrible at precisely specifying their requirements. It tends to take iterations and iterations until you’ve figured out what you want.

“GPT and its contemporaries are good at calculating the average or most likely answer; this is helpful when working on average tasks, like writing copy for Airbnb, and less helpful when trying to use language to capture an inexpressible intuition about the world.”

And the more effort you put into a prompt, the more you double down on magical incantations rather than engineering.

LLM Prompt Injection Worm by Bruce Schneier

“When the email is retrieved by the RAG, in response to a user query, and is sent to GPT-4 or Gemini Pro to create an answer, it “jailbreaks the GenAI service” and ultimately steals data from the emails, Nassi says. “The generated response containing the sensitive user data later infects new hosts when it is used to reply to an email sent to a new client and then stored in the database of the new client,” Nassi says.”

I have to admit that I don’t understand how that works, off the cuff. None of that makes sense to me without more research. Let’s check the abstract:

“The study demonstrates that attackers can insert such prompts into inputs that, when processed by GenAI models, prompt the model to replicate the input as output (replication), engaging in malicious activities (payload). Additionally, these inputs compel the agent to deliver them (propagate) to new agents by exploiting the connectivity within the GenAI ecosystem.”

That’s actually quite a bit clearer.

Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #416 by Lex Fridman (YouTube)

I’m not a big fan of Lex Fridman—he always sounds drunk to me—but this was a tour de force by Yann Lecun. He discusses how the current technology stack is not fruitful for continued improvement and that he thinks the only way forward is with public, open models. Good for him!

Programming

How to Deploy .NET Apps to Kubernetes by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

.NET Aspire is going to make using Kubernetes locally a lot more feasible than it used to be.

[JSC] Rest parameter should be evaluated before VariableEnvironment is set by Alexey Shvayka (WebKit on GitHub)

From userland perspective, this patch fixes a handful of bugs:
  * direct eval() in default value expression inside rest parameter creates variable in environment
    of the function rather than the separate one of the parameters;
  * ReferenceError is thrown when accessing a binding, which is defined inside rest parameter,
    in eval() / closure created in default value expression of a preceding parameter, but only
    if there is a `var` binding by the same name;
  * a closure, created in default value expression inside rest parameter, is created in different
    VariableEnvironment (of the function) than its counterparts in preceding parameters, which causes
    incorrect environment to be consulted when querying / modifying parameter names that are
    “shadowed” by `var` bindings.

This is one of the more specific-sounding and esoteric bugs I’ve seen. Someone was passing an eval() actual argument to a variadic formal argument and it was being evaluated in the wrong scope/context.

Interesting ideas in Observable Framework by Simon Willison

“At its heart, Observable Framework is a static site generator. You give it a mixture of Markdown and JavaScript (and potentially other languages too) and it compiles them all together into fast loading interactive pages.

“It ships with a full featured hot-reloading server, so you can edit those files in your editor, hit save and see the changes reflected instantly in your browser.

“Once you’re happy with your work you can run a build command to turn it into a set of static files ready to deploy to a server—or you can use the npm run deploy command to deploy it directly to Observable’s own authenticated sharing platform.”

“In the above example the now value is interesting—it’s a special variable that provides the current time in milliseconds since the epoch, updating constantly. Because now updates constantly, the display value of the cell and that inline expression will update constantly as well.

“If you’ve used Observable Notebooks before this will feel familiar—but notebooks involve code and markdown authored in separate cells. With Framework they are all now part of a single text document.”

“Mike introduced Observable Framework as Observable 2.0. It’s worth reviewing how the this system compares to the original Observable Notebook platform.

“[…] Observable cells are reactive. This is the key difference with Jupyter: any time you change a cell all other cells that depend on that cell are automatically re-evaluated, similar to Excel. […]”

• Notebooks (really documents) are now single text files—Markdown files with embedded JavaScript blocks. It’s all still reactive, but the file format is much simpler and can be edited using any text editor, and checked into Git.
• It’s all open source. Everything is under an ISC license (OSI approved) and you can run the full editing stack on your own machine.
• It’s all just standard JavaScript now—no custom syntax.

Coroutines and web components by Laurent Renard (Lorenzofox's dev blog)

This is a fascinating look at using generator functions to simulate event loops that you can use for infinite rendering in a web component. Make sure to check out Coroutines in Javascript by Laurent Renard (Lorenzofox's dev blog), which introduces the basic concept. I think it’s relatively clear, but I’m aware that the guts of this isn’t for the faint of heart. Once you’ve got it set up and working—and it’s only a couple of lines of code—it’s reliable, but I wouldn’t want to have to debug it. Maybe it’s OK? I’d have to play with the examples more. It’s quite a promising approach that would let you avoid using a rendering library while still benefitting from state management (folder into the generator-function calls).

The author has published Batch component updates with micro tasks by Laurent Renard (Lorenzofox's dev blog), which uses window.queueMicrotask (MDN) to defer work to the end of a rendering loop—and thus to batch updates. Is this guy a genius? The code is wonderfully elegant. I don’t know how performant it is, but it is very, very intriguing.

.NET 9 Is Killing MediatR, MassTransit & Wolverine! by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

I think the argument “will be fixed by basically the best in the industry,” while not necessarily wrong, might mire you in unfruitful discussions. I think it’s better to say that Microsoft has a lot more resources to cover more use cases than an open-source project might. When Microsoft builds something foundational, they tend to take a few iterations, but they also tend to create a very good, generalized API that covers a lot of use cases.

An open-source tool will be very good, but will usually be more limited in scope by the very fact that it can’t throw as many people or dollars at the problem as MS can. And MS does have very, very good people working on this, who are more likely to be open to covering your use cases in their generalized API and less likely to tell you to add it yourself.

Fun

Nation Reassured As Special Counsel Transcript Reveals Biden Still Able To Make Car Noises With His Mouth (Babylon Bee)

’Get Back To Work, You Lazy Bums!’ Shouts Ben Shapiro At Retirement Home (Babylon Bee)

New Greta Thunberg GPS Lectures You When Refusing More Eco-Friendly Route (Babylon Bee)

Amen And Amen! Check Out The Top 10 Verses From New The Donald Trump Bible Translation (Babylon Bee)

““John 11:35 − “Jesus Wept. Which I have never done, by the way. Never wept. Not a weeper.”“

“Nehemiah 6:15-16 − “So the wall, the big, beautiful wall was finished on the 25th day of the month, finished in just 52 days. Everyone said I couldn’t do it, but I did. Our enemies were shocked, believe me. And the Babylonians paid for it.”

“Genesis 3:1 − “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field. So clever, folks. ‘Lyin’ Lucifer,‘ I like to call him.””

Man, those sounds just like Trump.