Links and Notes for January 3rd, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

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

Public Policy & Politics

“Who Gives a Shit?” by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Imagine living like this: You have four children, all younger than 10. Your husband was killed three months ago in an airstrike. You’ve moved five times in the last year, taking only what you could carry, which wasn’t much because you had to hold an infant in a sling. You don’t know what became of your house, your belongings, your family photos, your extended family.

“Now, you live in a tent in a schoolyard where children are no longer taught. The tent is not really a tent. It’s something you’ve stitched together from scraps of plastic and strips of cloth. It keeps the sun out. But now it’s winter, and there’s not much sun. It’s cold, and the wind blows right through. The five of you sleep together under old rugs, trying to stay warm. Trying not to freeze, at least. It’s been raining for three days. The rain pelts through the tarp.

“The schoolyard floods in the downpours, water streams through your cramped living space. The water is filled with refuse and shit because there’s only one latrine for the more than 1000 people living here. You try to keep the rugs and clothes clean and dry, but it’s impossible.

“You haven’t had a hot meal in weeks. There’s no fuel to cook with or keep you warm. You can’t remember the last time you had meat, fruit, or vegetables. You eat bread and cereal, usually only once a day. Sometimes, you go without, so your kids don’t. You’re no longer producing milk to breastfeed.

“Three of your kids have chronic diarrhea, and another has a cough that won’t go away. The clinic is two miles away and has been closed for weeks now.

“Last night, there was an airstrike. Some of the tents caught fire. People burned alive while they slept. The children cried all night.”

What It’s Truly Like to Sleep in a Damp, Frigid Tent: A Report From Gaza by Abubaker Abed (Drop Site News)

“Dwellings need to be more secure. The humanitarian safe zone is neither humanitarian nor safe since most of the casualties we’ve been receiving are from there. If we want to end this, we need an immediate ceasefire and allow aid and decent containers and building materials in.”

What is remarkable is how people speak so reasonably from positions of drastically reduced expectations. I’ve noticed this a lot, that people discuss the Israeli assault as if it were a weather phenomenon and not a deliberate act of wiping out the people. Everything that makes life miserable there is deliberate, or a fortuitous happenstance that will certainly not be reversed. The agent behind this misery plans to end the misery not by letting up by removing the target of misery.

“Our knees and bones hurt because of the freezing temperatures. But we can’t even purchase some medicine for our pain. We need a rainfly, suitable housing, and good nutrition. My children lack everything. This is our life drenched in extreme pain and horror. I just hope the war ends and we can return to what’s left of our houses.”

Big guy in GazaMy heart breaks at how utterly delusional this poor woman is. Also, I don’t want to be “that guy” but I’m wondering how her husband remains this size despite only having gotten one meal per day for months. It’s the kind of picture you wouldn’t publish if you were interested in massaging you message but it’s a true, honest picture. Some people just lose weight much more slowly.

“‘Acrobats of the American Century.’” by Patrick Lawrence (The Floutist)

“[…] as Arundhati Roy said,”

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

Our World of Wars, Our War of Worlds by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The two world wars were waged in defense of democracy and ended with negotiations after decisive victories on battlefields.”

Wait what? WWI was a war of empires, no? It dismantled the Ottoman empire and carved up the Middle East for Europe.

“Here is de Tocqueville, in the first volume of Democracy in America, which he brought out in 1835:”

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time…. Each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.”

“A dozen years later Sainte–Beuve, the historian and critic, made a more daring case:”

“There are now but two great nations — the first is Russia, still barbarian but large, and worthy of respect…. The other nation is America, an intoxicated, immature democracy that knows no obstacles. The future of the world lies between these two great nations. One day they will collide, and then we will see struggles the like of which no one has dreamed of.”

Nailed it, boys.

Is US Democracy A Sham? Biden Gave Us The Answer. Were You Listening? by Jonathan Cook (Z Network)

“The WSJ reports that even back in 2021 Biden had what his officials described as “bad days” when his mind worked so poorly he had to be kept away from senior Congresspeople and his own cabinet colleagues. So insulated was he that he rarely met even with key figures directing White House policy, such as the Secretaries of State, Defense and the Treasury.”

“The truth about Biden hasn’t suddenly leaked out from his officials. Senior politicians on both sides of the aisle knew. White House correspondents knew. Editors knew. And they all lied to protect the system of power to which they belong, the system that keeps them gainfully employed, the system that maintains their status. No one was going to rock the boat.”

“If a large chunk of the public can be persuaded that a man who is incapable of finding the door through which he’s supposed to leave is “sharp as a tack”, then why would they not also believe that the United States is promoting democracy as it has laid waste to the Middle East over the past two decades to control the region’s oil?”

“Does the US run by itself? Does it need a president? Or is the president nothing more than a figurehead for a permanent bureaucracy that expects to wield power from the shadows, unobserved by voters and unaccountable to them? Is the US a democracy, or is the democracy just a facade behind which a wealth elite maintains its power? Biden has given us the answer. Were you listening?”

Don’t Deify Jimmy Carter by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways.”

“He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.”

“He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.”

“Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.”

Stand For Something by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“When Joe Biden thinks back on his time as president, he should see nothing but an image of a mother crying over a dead child with its limbs blown off by an American bomb. That is the most morally significant thing that Joe Biden accomplished in the White House. No bit of positive domestic policy or sense of personal empathy is more important than the reasoned decision to supply the tools used to conduct tens of thousands of murders. That is what Joe Biden’s half century political career adds up to.”

“The Democrats wholly and completely own every child amputee, every dead baby, every shattered civilian body, every destroyed family home, every death by starvation and disease, every life ruined by Israel’s inhuman bombardment of Gaza, which would not and could not have happened without the blessing of the Biden White House.”

“If I shot your child in the head, would you forgive me because I had good green energy policy? If I blew up your entire family as they slept, would you write it off because I was pro-union? If I assassinated your brother with a missile because he was a journalist, would you feel that was okay, as long as I supported slightly higher marginal tax rates than my political opponents?”

“If you murder someone and then tell the judge, “I know another person who would have done this murder even worse,” the judge will not let you go.”

“What use is this party? If I were for oppression, and violence, and the granting of carte blanche to stronger groups to use force to obliterate weaker groups, I would be a Republican. They have traditionally supported those things in a more straightforward way. The Biden administration’s decision to support those things as well does not mean that I will become a Republican. It does, however, mean that I and millions of people like me have been effectively robbed of a political home. Even more so than before.”

You’re pretty late to the party but welcome nonetheless. And it’s a very well-written mic-drop exit.

“The first and most basic step forward for the Democratic Party is to stand for something. Before the internal debate on the party’s values must come the decision to have values. Today, the party can claim nothing. No ethics, no moral red lines, no ability to assert its superiority to the poisonous (but transparent) fascism on the other side.”

“The Democrats have tried being spectacular hypocrites who perpetrated a great atrocity. They didn’t win. Time to try the alternative.”

Dr. CALLS OUT CNN’s Role in Gaza Genocide on CNN by Useful Idiots (Substack)

Dr. CALLS OUT CNN’s Role in Gaza Genocide on CNN by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

“But to Dr. Haj-Hassan, remaining silent isn’t an option. “Being silent in the face of the intentional decimation of an entire healthcare system, the intentional killing and targeting of healthcare workers, the intentional detention and torture of healthcare workers for no other crime other than providing healthcare is complicity.””

We cannot just accept that this is the way that civilized people behave. I continue to believe that the language against this should be even harsher. They are killing medical personnel and journalists indiscriminately. That is, they are directly killing civilians dozens of thousands of civilians. They are eliminating the ability to survive for hundreds of thousands more. They are deliberately destroying medical infrastructure. They are targeting and eliminating medical personnel, so no-one is saved and no-one’s suffering is ameliorated. They are targeting and eliminating journalists, so that no-one learns about what is being done.

This is not the biggest slaughter of people ever. It’s probably not even the biggest slaughter happening right now. It is the by far the most flagrant. It is being perpetrated with the active support and encouragement of the west. Even in the most horrific wars in Africa, where millions are killed, there is more respect for medical personnel and journalists. The Russians are conducting a war of attrition on Ukraine but they’ve killed a vanishingly small number of civilians, medical personnel, and journalists.

This is not the first time that this is happening. The U.S. has always conducted war like this, since the beginning of the so-called American Century. Look to the conduct of the Korean, Vietnam, Cambodian, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars, in which the U.S. was directly involved. The numbers were horrifying. The conduct was horrifying. The propaganda and statements of the time were horrifying. It has largely been forgotten.

That doesn’t excuse what Israel and the U.S. are doing now. It puts it in context. What Israel is doing now is perhaps the most flagrant conduct recently.

If the U.S. didn’t lose its reputation for upstanding morality during Vietnam or Iraq, then why should it lose it now? All of its friends are just as much in the tank for this war. There is no-one to judge. No-one whose opinion actually matters or can exert an influence on their behavior.

Best of 2024: Louisiana Is a Testbed for a Fascist State Apparatus by Gabrielle Perry (This is Hell!)

This is a good interview with a very knowledgable and honorable person. She’s great. However, she and Chuck are both silo-ed in some of their knowledge and statements. They should have a bit more contact with people who don’t already think like they think so that they could stop making incorrect statements that undermine their arguments. Like, the core of their statement is correct but the words they use are not, which leaves them open to people not supporting their arguments. Which is a shame. Because they are on the right side of justice.

What, pray tell, might I mean? Well, at one point, Chuck asks her whether Toxic Masculinity is to blame for the mistreatment of women, especially as relates to domestic violence and the stigmatization of victims. She responds that it absolutely is to blame. Why are they using this blanket term that doesn’t actually mean what they think it means? Why don’t they just say “misogyny” instead, or, if they want to make that point, “societally inculcated and condoned misogyny”, although it is a bit of a mouthful. Toxic Masculinity (Wikipedia) usually applies to how toxic it is for men to be taught to be misogynistic or homophobic (just as a few examples). That is, we already have terms to describe the moral crimes against women and homosexuals—we don’t need to co-opt the term that describes how damaging these behaviors are to the perpetrators themselves. Unfortunately, people like to use terms, even when they’re not appropriate, just because they think it sounds better or buzzword-y. I, too, sometimes, like to colubricate words into a sentence just to sound smart. It’s a shame, though, because then people forget that the harm that men cause themselves by buying into the patriarchy no longer has a word to describe it.

Another example comes from the quote on the page linked above, where Gabrielle says, “All our trigger bans went into effect when abortion was banned federally.” Chuck just let that one blow right on by as well—God forbid Chuck should ever correct or, heaven forfend, disagree with a guest—but it’s not correct. There is no federal ban on abortion. There is no longer a ban on banning abortion at the state level. It’s an important difference. What she meant to say was that Louisiana was free to ban abortion as soon as it was allowed to do so. Even her sentence didn’t make any sense, if you read it closely. Why would Louisiana need to ban abortion again if it had already been banned on the federal level?

Still, overall a good interview. Just be careful to parse everything you hear—even pleasant people with whom you agree.

Best of 2024: New Apostolic Reformation Wages Spiritual Warfare on Demon-crats by Matthew Taylor (This is Hell!)

“Many of the charismatic Christian leaders who showed up on January 6th believed that God was going to intervene, that it was a day of prophesied destiny and that God would miraculously put Donald Trump back in office, in answer to their prayers and their spiritual warfare. They believed that that would inaugurate a great revival in America, a great Christian revival and maybe even trigger a global revival because of the evidently miraculous hand of God intervening in American politics.”

This one was also informative but Matthew Taylor is siloed, far worse than Chuck, and far worse than Gabrielle. He can’t stop framing everything as Republicans vs. Democrats, even when it doesn’t lend anything to his argument.

He talks about how Republicans have deified Trump and literally demonized their opponents but utterly fails to note that Democrats are also hewing to this line, by demonizing Trump. He is perhaps an example of people who are utterly unaware that they are doing the thing that they accuse others of doing. The demonization of Trump has led pretty clearly to his deification, but neither Matthew nor Chuck thought it interesting to pursue—or even acknowledge—that angle.

Matthew makes a nice plea near the end, but neither he nor Chuck ever considers that anything they’ve said is demonizing. They consider their arguments to just be facts.

Matthew, like much of his cohort, is stuck in a dialectic, constantly talking about everything in an “us vs. them” framing. He’s largely accepted the framing of the Republicans. That is their apocalyptic frame, not one that anyone interested in solutions should accept. Even when he’s sympathetic—as when he says that the leaders are beyond reach, but not their followers—he says that we could “win them to our side.” If he means “our side” to be the Democrats—which I’m almost certain he does—then he continues to be deluded in an utterly unproductive manner.

Best of 2024: Ideologies of Climate Change by Tad DeLay (This is Hell!)

“Denial comes out of this this sense of not having meaningful agency under the regime of power in which you’re suffering…It’s very common to find people kind of organizing their entire lives around ideas that they’ve never really stopped to interrogate before. This goes back to Marx’s observation that it’s not your consciousness that shapes your social reality, it’s your social reality that shapes your consciousness.”

While Tad also accepts and employs the framing of two silos corresponding to right/left, red/blue, he at least mentions that both sides are deluding themselves. You’ll note, however, that he contrasts a deluded “right-winger” with a deluded “well-meaning liberal”, so he doesn’t quite escape the framing for good vs. evil. It’s not easy, to say the least.

At around 20:30 or so,

“I think people enjoy creating a reality which they can respond to. For a right-winger, that might be dreaming an antifa arsonist as an explanation for something that’s clearly climate change, but for a well-meaning liberal, it might mean recycling or voting for a candidate that pledges to end climate change or, at least, fight climate change by reducing the amount of water in a military toilet. It might mean buying carbon offsets […]”

At around 22:00 or so,

“Some people will feel that anxious idea coming to the surface and deny its reality. Others will accept the reality of that idea that they don’t want to know about themselves, but they will find a way to morally distance themselves from it.[…] So, we have a simple schema here: reality-denial and guilt-denial. […] Whether you are on the right or the liberal-center, you kind of conveniently have a major political party for whichever form of climate denial you would like to engage in.”

At around 23:00 or so,

“Denial comes out of this sense of not having meaningful agency under the regime in which you’re suffering.”

At around 37:20 or so, they discuss the different tracks in the IPCC climate scenario.

“We are track […] shared socio-economic pathway II. The worst-case scenario from a climate standpoint is shared socio-economic pathway V. […] There are options to keep warming to 1.5ºC or 2ºC. And this is shared socio-economic pathway I. […] Any time a reader has heard about the scientific community modeling a pathway where we could stay below 1.5ºC or 2ºC, what they are reading is a model run on shared socio-economic pathway I, which is, more or less, a description of a world where we transition to worldwide Scandinavian-style social democracy in, maybe the decade or so.

“I don’t think that comes across to people. Even then, you also have to tack on trillions and trillions of dollars of carbon-capture to make it work. I don’t think that that political-economy claim is being conveyed to people, right? I don’t think that most people understand that, when we talk about meeting the Paris limits, we’re talking about a global outbreak of Scandinavian-style social democracy.

“That is not the path that we are on. And it is difficult to imagine that becoming the path.”

At around 43:45 or so,

“You’re increasingly seeing companies like H&M and Nestlé and so forth claiming to meet science-based targets, by the U.N., the U.N. global compact. […] I mentioned carbon credit before.

“Delta Airlines is a great example of this. Delta Airlines, starting in 2020, claimed to be carbon-neutral. They set some ambitious targets in January through March of that year—which they probably would have met any target that they set in that year because of the decline in air traffic that year—but they claimed in 2020, going forward, if you ride Delta, you can res assured that your flight is carbon-neutral. What they did was, not invest in—and you can see this if you read their ESG report—they did not invest in carbon capture, which would have been true mitigation—paying carbon-capture to offset the company’s emission would have bankrupted the company, so there’s just no way—they didn’t even plant new trees. What their ESG report suggested they did is essentially just buy up existing forests, privatized them, and called it even.

“And this is increasingly what’s happening when you purchase a carbon offset or go with a supposedly carbon-neutral company. It’s not that you’re emitting any less, on the aggregate, through your economic activity through that company, it’s that that company has simply bought up land that is cheap in the developing world, perhaps by buying up indigenous land.

“I even talk about one company in the U.S. that had a deal with the state government to not cut down a certain section of land and then, in addition, they pulled additional revenue by selling that same land, which was already slated to not be cut down, as carbon offsets [for other companies]. Right? So, we’re increasingly getting this sort of three-card-monte with the biosphere. Where, on paper, companies are emitting less but, actually, they’re the same.”

Carbon offsets were never ever going to be anything but a scam.

Best of 2024: Against Resilience by Ajay Singh Chaudhary (This is Hell!)

Excellent and fun interview about the dividing line between accepting that which you cannot change and getting furious about having to accept it. He points out that people stoically accepting newly egregious incursions on their ability to live with dignity works in the favor of those profiting from those incursions.

“It’s like you’re going to the doctor and you’re like, “Dude, I got a lot of problems.” And he’s like, “here you go.” And the prescription, instead of being meds, the prescription is, “Feel better about the world.” Do some training where you understand that in fact, there are no problems. You just need to like have a different world view. You just need to have a positive outlook…It’s so that you don’t think. It’s so that you don’t imagine, so that you don’t believe that something else might be possible.”

He cited a couple of people:

Best of 2024: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow (This is Hell!)

“What actually gives rise to enshittification is that the companies that we buy things from not fearing that they will be punished if they do the things that they wanted to do all along. The way that we make those companies treat us better is by making them afraid of us again, not by rewarding them for good behavior, but by effectively punishing them for bad behavior.”

I’d already listened to and noted this interview in April of 2024 but it was worth a second hearing. He’s very eloquent and, even when he’s occasionally hyperbolic and factually incorrect, his heart is absolutely in the right place and enshittification is real and it absolutely is encroaching on more and more parts of life.

Best of 2024: Ketamine by Dan Piepenbring (This is Hell!)

“You have really open minded medical professionals, psychiatrists, doctors, who absolutely want to use [ketamine] to help people and are studying the best ways to do that. They’re doing that in the more conventional ways, writing peer reviewed papers in the literature and in less conventional ways, just thinking how can we step outside of the medical industrial complex and use these substances to help people heal, and maybe even redefine what healing is so that it’s not this symptom-based thing.”

Dan and Chuck discuss Dan’s book, which contains a few chapters on Benjamin Paul Blood (Wikipedia), who “was born in Amsterdam, New York […] in 1832 and lived for eighty-six years.”

I had to stop hiking and note this quote down, because it hit right home, especially in explaining the paradoxical utility of a liberal-arts education. It doesn’t make me want to do ketamine, but I can totally empathize with those who would want to, perhaps to escape a world that alienates them, if only for a brief moment. They can perhaps and hopefully find solace in carrying that moment back with them like a guttering but valiant candle into the harsh world.

At around 44:00 or so,

“In a way, so little has changed since the 1860s. That sense of being unable to convey the state is still there. And I think it makes people quick to dismiss it. I mean, if you’re looking at someone giggling in the back of a van, saying ‘I am the unanswered question,’ I don’t think you’re going to say to yourself, well, ‘this guy’s got it all figured out,‘ but, in his mind, at that moment, he may, and that may, in some kind of untranslatable way, carry forth into his sober life.

“I guess, maybe, one metaphor for it is, like, a liberal-arts education, you know? Distinctly lacking in utility but certainly equipping you, in some bizarre way, to face the world. And, I think when Blood says he is the unanswered question, he just, he’s speaking of the totalizing way that this drug enters your body and makes you feel like your place in the world is both the mystery and the answer to the mystery, That, I guess, you’re comfortable with the contradiction in that moment in a way that you can’t be in the rest of your life.”

Best of 2024: Taking Down Fat Phobia by Kate Manne (This is Hell!)

Neither Kate nor Chuck discusses why people are fat-phobic. She briefly mentions that semaglutides are useful for combatting diabetes but she doesn’t address the fact that diabetes is strongly linked to obesity. There are a lot of diseases linked to obesity.

She does a good job of explaining how the upswing of obesity can be at least partially explained by the change in the definition of the word (by lowering the BMI at which one was considered obese). And she off-handedly comments that, yes, of course, people are getting fatter, too. But why is excessive adipose tissue detrimental? Because it’s not only not physically healthy, it can also affect your psychological health. How’s that? Well, if you’re a bigger person, you’re necessarily limited in the activity that you can do. Everything seems like an effort. You won’t walk anywhere. You won’t do any activities that require too much walking. You will probably get outside less. You miss a lot of endorphin opportunities. If too many people are fat, then no-one does healthy, outdoor, psychologically engaging, environmentally friendly activities. At a certain point, society ends up being constructed in a way that you no longer even consider that being fat would limit you in any way. You’ll only notice it in an airplane, where the exigency of gravity will demand that seats be smaller.

At about 47:00, she says

“[…] It is so mired in late-stage capitalism’s profiteering and exploitation [of] understandable fears and worries about fat bodies. I mean, the diet, health & wellness, and fitness industries will have a combined annual revenue of $400 billion by 2030. It’s projected.”

I don’t think that figure is correct. That’s as much money as the U.S. spends on pharmaceuticals. Does she mean worldwide? Or just the U.S.? How much of the healthcare industry is included in that figure? Is she just counting every gym that exists?

At about 57:00, Chucks poses the Question from Hell.

“Chuck: I think that there might be people listening right now, who are like ‘I’m not fat; why should I care about fat-phobia?’ You know? People are pretty self-centered. […] How are people who are not fat plagued by fat-phobia? Isn’t this someone else’s problem and not theirs?
Kate: Bodies change. We age. We sag. We gain weight. We become disabled. If we’re lucky enough to have the privilege of aging, bodies change in unpredictable, all sorts of ways, that means that fat-phobia may very well become someone’s problem, even if they’re currently thin. And I guarantee, too, that they will have friends and loved one and people in their wider communities who are really affected by this. I think, for the sake of themselves, who may very well gain weight, for their friends and family, who may well be or become fat, but also just for the sake of social justice, like stand in solidarity with larger people. Don’t say, well, there’s a weight limit to thinking of someone as deserving, implicitly. Say, I’m going to be in solidarity with every body, no matter its size or shape or race or gender identity or disabilities or neuro-type or being trans vs. cis. I’m going to be in solidarity with everyone. And that demands paying attention to body diversity as a valid axis for human diversity too.”

Meditations On Bono Receiving The Presidential Medal Of Freedom From Joe Biden by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Hague fugitive Joe Biden has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to U2 singer Bono, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in a society where everything is fake and we are led by the least among us. Other recipients of the medal this year include Hillary Rodham Clinton and George Soros.”

“Whenever I’m sad about a musician I like having died before their time, I comfort myself with the thought at least they didn’t live long enough to become another Bono.”

Man, I had to check that Bill Hicks hadn’t written that joke (he hadn’t).

“Our society elevates the worst among us. The artists who are willing to sell their souls to the empire. The scientists who are willing to design killing machines for the military or invent some piece of future landfill manufactured by the toil and resources of the global south. The politicians who are willing to subvert the interests of ordinary people to the interests of plutocrats and power structures. The pundits, reporters and filmmakers who are willing to sell propaganda to deceive us into thinking this is all healthy and normal.”

Urquellization by Chapo Trap House (Felix, Will, Matt) (YouTube)

Felix is a bit of an acquired taste because he interrupts a lot and he sometimes seems to speak in tweets but … man is he funny. My favorite parts are when he can get Matt Christman to just burst out laughing, like, despite himself. Felix is, as we say in German, schlagfertig (quick on his rhetorical feet).

At one point early in the podcast, he’s talking about a hypothetical 2028 election in which Brandon had been reelected at “like, 97 years old”, and then did a bunch of Brandon stuff. I thought it would sound better with Trump when people are surprised at something he’s doing that’s actually 100% predictable,

“You voted for Trump. You went to the Trump store and you bought Trump.”

At about 16;45, Will says,

“[…] he’s referencing the late, late seasons of Family Matters where Steve Urquel invents something that basically rewrites his DNA to get pussy.”

Felix keeps referring to “jug hooters,” which I believe is his way of saying hillbillies, referring to the person who blows across the top of a bottle in a jug band (Wikipedia).

Soon after, at about 22:00, Felix says,

“[…] did you see Patrick Bet-David? This has been an all-star month for every Iranian or Indian MAGA guy to just come out the gate swinging and piss everyone off. Patrick Bet-David, who—I don’t know what he does—he said ‘when I came to America as a Persian immigrant,’ belying the fact that his family were like Savak torturers who came here with priceless gold and and jewels hidden in fucking toothbrush containers that they’d plundered from Zoroaster’s tomb […]”

And then there are the moments when Felix is less a cynical comedian and more of a sympathetic socialist. At 35:00 or so, Will and Felix discuss,

“Will: […] there’s also this rhetoric that’s being employed by Trump now but also like liberal defenders of this, about the best and brightest from the world over, which that sounds good … America, the land of opportunity. Like, why why wouldn’t we want the best and brightest from everywhere?

“But, when that process is sort of draining the best and brightest from the countries that they’re born in, for our benefit, at the expense of those countries, it’s like, wouldn’t the best and brightest of those countries prefer to just be the best and brightest of India or elsewhere, rather than do it here, for our benefit?

“Felix: That is the main thing really, that I I think with all this: the delusion for everyone is that everyone wants to come here because of these innate
intangible qualities that have very little to do with economics about America. That America is so great that everyone would kill themselves to be here, when the fact is I don’t think it’s like a good thing that you should have to leave your fucking home to survive to ensure your family’s economic stability. Ideally, we would live in a world where we fuck with other places less and they don’t experience the economic turbulence and social unrest that comes with that. Just the idea that we’re doing anyone a favor by forcing them to come here is just fucking delusional.”

Another segment at about 40:00 or so, they spend quite a bit of time talking about the Congressional Medal of Freedom honorees in 2024 (Wikipedia).

Bono receives Presidential Medal of Freedom from Biden

It’s pretty incredible; the list included Simone Biles and Steve Jobs, which OK, but also David M. Rubenstein, George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Al Gore, Jens Stoltenberg, Hillary Clinton. And then also Bono. Lionel Messi (WTF?), Michelle Yeoh (WTF?).

Robert F. Kennedy? He’s been dead for 60 years, and was only ever an attorney general and presidential candidate.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a good one, but she would have turned it down. Jane Goodall was also fine.

This whole list is bizarre. How can anyone take this kind of stuff seriously?

At about 57:40, Felix says about people writing about genocide in the mainstream media,

“[…] it’s all preemptively giving yourself permission to not care about something that you already didn’t care about.”

As war chancellor, Green Party leader would triple Germany’s military budget by Johannes Stern (WSWS)

“The Federal Ministry of Finance is forecasting a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of €4,210 billion for this year, 3.5 percent of which would correspond to a military budget of almost €150 billion. This would not be a doubling, but almost a tripling of the regular annual military budget. Without the existing €100 billion “special fund” for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces), this is currently just under €52 billion.

“The sum is gigantic. It almost corresponds to the entire social budget (€175.67 billion in 2024), seven times the education budget (€21.49 billion) or nine times the health budget for 2024 (€16.71 billion), which has already been massively cut in recent years. When Habeck stresses that the loans “will of course have to be repaid,” he is saying nothing other than in the end, there will be nothing left of the remnants of the welfare state.”

Does Ukraine face a “Syrian scenario?” by Ukrainian Journalists (WSWS)

“In total, in November 2024, Russian troops captured 4.7 times more territory than in the whole of 2023. In the first four days of 2025, they already took eight villages south of Pokrovsk, and only seven kilometres left to the border of the Dnepropetrovsk region, where there had been no hostilities yet and there are minimal fortifications. Despite such a critical situation, there is no visible patriotic upsurge among the population of Ukraine. Too many working people no longer see any fundamental difference in who will rob them.”

The Biden Administration Declares That A Genocide Is Happening… In Sudan by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] the US is indirectly backing the genocidal atrocities it now denounces in Sudan, while aggressively defending the genocidal atrocities it is directly backing in Gaza.

“This announcement comes as Biden and his handlers push through one last $8 billion weapons shipment to Israel in the last days of his term, a final blood-soaked punctuation mark on an ugly legacy of mass murder throughout Biden’s far-too-long political career.”

“Anytime [sic] genocide rears its ugly head in a way that is convenient for the interests of the empire, the empire at best will look the other way and at worst join right in with the slaughter.

“The empire itself is the problem. When the empire remains murderous even after you get rid of the official elected leaders currently overseeing the murderousness, this tells you that it is the empire itself that’s the problem. The empire is what needs to go.”

2024 was the deadliest year on record for migrants trying to reach Europe by Lena Sokoll (WSWS)

“This massive crime against refugees and migrants will continue in 2025. European governments are individually and collectively responsible for the mass and completely avoidable deaths at sea of those seeking protection and safety, work and a better life in Europe. The most fundamental human right, the right to life, is denied to migrants at the gates of Europe. And if they do set foot on European soil, they face inhumane detention in camps, all kinds of harassment and deportation to war and crisis zones.”

Journalism & Media

On Priesthoods by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex)

“I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true − probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true − in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers.”

I just wanted to note this down so that I can find it whenever people argue with me that whole world isn’t just in the tank for mainstream media, for the most part.

“The lies of priests are so limited and subtle, compared to the lies of non-priests, that it might seem like following priests is still an obviously superior option. I think this is true in every way but one: because the priesthoods move as one and fall victim to ideological fads, the lies of priests are correlated. If you follow every priestly pronouncement, eventually you will end up manipulated into going to some specific place you really didn’t want to be. Meanwhile, if you follow the lies of non-priests, you’ll probably end up trying to cure your liver disease with ground-up hippopotamus eyes, but whatever disasters this causes will push in random directions and cause random chaos, rather than slowly turning your society into a totalitarian hellhole. Even though on every specific point you’ll probably do better trusting the priests, you may find that a blanket policy of always trusting the priests is not in your interests. And unless you’re a priest yourself, you probably can’t distinguish good priestly pronouncements from bad ones.”

I think his whole argument is far too long-winded and, essentially flawed. It’s like he’s arguing with himself. It’s fine. I do this in blog posts, too. I don’t charge people to read what I write, though (this article was free, but the point stands). He might have had something interesting in this argument but I can’t get on board with it, as it stands.

If They Don’t Believe They’re Enemies, Why Should You? by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Trump and Obama were seen happily chatting and laughing together at the funeral for Jimmy Carter. If these guys don’t buy into the story that they are on opposite sides of a ferocious battle of existential importance between two wildly different ideologies, then why should you?”

Obama thinks Trump is funny at Carter's funeral

Don Sr. and Obama at Carter's funeral

“One of the dumbest psyops in history is this idiotic faux populist faction being marketed to rightists which claims that a brave revolutionary movement is being led against the establishment by a plucky band of billionaires, defense contractors, Zionists, and DC swamp monsters.”

“Western critics of Israel tend to fall into two categories: those who believe the western empire supports Israel because the western empire is evil, and those who believe the west is naturally good but has become corrupted by Israel. I find the latter group ridiculous and baby-brained.”

Labor

A revealing strike by ski patrol workers at Park City, Utah resort by Alex Findijs, Shannon Jones (WSWS)

“The workers, who are paid around $21 an hour, cannot afford to live in Park City, one of the most expensive towns in the country. According to rental and home sale site Zillow, the median price for a rental is $3,500 a month, well over the monthly take-home pay for the average ski patroller after taxes. Even in nearby Salt Lake City, median rent is $1,500, which would make a ski patrol worker nearly 50 percent rent-burdened and place extra commuting costs on workers.”

“[…] management has stuck by its insulting offer of a 4 percent raise. The union points out that this includes merit increases earned under the last contract, which management has been withholding. When that is subtracted, management’s net offer is 0.5 percent.”

“The fierce resistance of management to the modest pay demands of these 200 workers highlights the real state of class relations in America. The financial oligarchy fears that any concessions could encourage other workers in the resorts and broader sections of the working class to press ahead with their demands. The incoming Trump administration, made up of mega-billionaires and fascists has no intentions of granting anything to the working class. On the contrary, they want to reinforce the servility of labor to capital.”

The Los Angeles fire disaster and the necessity of socialist planning by Tom Carter (WSWS)

“Firefighters—a third of whom are estimated to be unfree convict laborers making as little as between 16 and 74 cents per hour—continue to risk their health and lives to fight the flames, but their efforts have been handicapped by insufficient numbers and lack of water pressure in the hydrants.”

Economy & Finance

Revising NYT History on Democrats Losing the Working Class by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“While the NYT piece might leave readers with the impression that working-class disaffection with the Democrats is the result of a misunderstanding, in fact the party’s leaders did pursue policies that benefited the elites at the expense of people with less education. They also used their power in the media and other institutions to cover up the class interests in these policies. The working-class has a pretty good case.

“The one point the Democrats can make in their favor is that the Republicans are even worse. They will give even more money to the pharmaceutical industry, the financial industry, and the tech bros. This will presumably become clear over the course of a second Trump administration, but that doesn’t change the fact that the working class had very real grounds for being unhappy with the Democrats.”

…and continues to have very real grounds for being unhappy, despite Chuck Schumer’s smarmy declarations that they didn’t quite get the message across correctly.

Roaming Charges: Hurricane of Fire by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“According to a piece in the Economist, the economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world is widening. By 2030, it’s estimated that Africans will make up more than 80% of the world’s poor.”

Science & Nature

How to Attract a Bird! | Battle of the Sexes in the Animal World | BBC Earth by BBC (YouTube)

I love how focused and fastidious the birds in the first few segments are about stacking and arranging their items.

Environment & Climate Change

The Los Angeles fire disaster and the necessity of socialist planning by Tom Carter (WSWS)

“Firefighters—a third of whom are estimated to be unfree convict laborers making as little as between 16 and 74 cents per hour—continue to risk their health and lives to fight the flames, but their efforts have been handicapped by insufficient numbers and lack of water pressure in the hydrants.”

“The entire political establishment is responsible for the catastrophe. The inadequate fire department budgets, the insufficient water supplies, the anarchic and unsafe construction practices—all these are the direct responsibility of the Democratic Party, which has held Los Angeles tightly in its grasp for decades. In Democratic mayor Karen Bass’s latest budget proposal, funding for the fire department was cut by $17.6 million, while the Los Angeles Police Department received a $126 million increase to its budget, now at $2.14 billion.”

“More profoundly, Los Angeles in particular suffers from what can only be described as the opposite of rational urban planning. For decades, the city sprawled haphazardly in whichever direction was dictated by short-term profit interests. This process has produced a massive concrete metropolis that grinds entirely to a halt at rush hour every morning and evening due to inadequate transportation infrastructure.

“Concentrated in areas like the infamous Skid Row and in rows of tents pitched alongside the streets, an unhoused population, so large it can only be estimated in the tens of thousands, looks up every day at hills ringed with mansions shamelessly constructed by the wealthy, many of which sit empty for much of the year. Taxes, as well as the price of housing, health care and basic necessities, are notoriously astronomical.”

“It is noteworthy that the Getty Villa museum was evidently and thankfully spared as the Palisades Fire swept through the area. The measures implemented by the museum include on-site water storage, regular brush clearing efforts, double-walled construction and state-of-the-art insulation techniques. One cannot reproach the museum for going to extraordinary lengths to protect its irreplaceable collection of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts. But one must ask: If such measures are available, why were they not taken for every other home and workplace in the city?

“Indeed, if Los Angeles had put the wealth concentrated in its boundaries to rational use, not a single structure would have burned and not a single person would have died”

He means “humane” use, not “rational” use. The people who allocated resources in Los Angeles did so rationally, by their own inhumane logic. If one of the ten houses that a wealthy person owns burns, it doesn’t matter so much, as they never really viewed it as any sort of home, and the insurance payment is nice, too. A discussion of protecting the homes of the poors is so outlandish and inconceivable that you might as well be speaking Greek.

Instead,

“[…] such “natural” disasters are able to devastate a society which instead funnels all of its resources into limitless military budgets and into the pockets of grotesquely rich oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”

Medicine & Disease

Psychiatry’s Latest Insane Magic-Bullet Treatment for Depression: Why Ketamine? by Bruce E. Levine (CounterPunch)

“In sharp contrast to the many online ketamine anecdotal enthusiasts, to get a sense of what a bona fide research scientist—with no financial conflicts of interest—sounds like, I suggest listening to Theresa Lii’s talk about her study “Randomized Trial of Ketamine Masked by Surgical Anesthesia in Depressed Patients .””

““Treatment-resistant depression,” according to establishment psychiatry , “happens when at least two different antidepressants don’t improve your symptoms.” However, if research has shown SSRIs and other antidepressants to have “no clinically significant benefit over a placebo,” to be “clinically negligible” with respect to depression remission, and less effective in a year’s time than no treatment at all, does it makes sense to diagnose patients with “treatment-resistant depression” because they did not improve after two antidepressants?”

How exercise may be the ‘most potent medical intervention ever known’ by William Brangham & Azhar Merchant (PBS Newshour)

“[…] we were seeing changes in the kidney, in the adrenal gland, in the intestine, in the brain. And I think that begins to get at how exercise is just such a remarkable intervention, essentially helping with, for example, reducing the risk of heart disease by 50 percent, reducing the list of many cancers by 50 percent and more, reducing the risk of back pain.

“People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps.”

Art & Literature

Palm Beach, Tower D by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“[…] why not set up Social-Media in a way that incentivizes working together towards “next-level” breakthroughs, rather than doing everything possible to keep opposed camps stuck in the trenches they have dug for themselves? Of course, some on the Council were quick to point out that it was not Hegel at all, but J. G. Fichte, who in his Wissenschaftslehre of 1795 proposed the triadic thesis-antithesis-synthesis progression from a pair of opposites through their higher-order sublation. A certain number of dissenters began setting their PERDs 2 with the slogan “It’s Fichte, Actually”, and soon it was enough simply to display the acronym “IFA” to let the world know where you stood on the matter.”

“Political conflict was nearly done away with after just the first few months. With everyone rushing to find ways to agree, there was suddenly simply no market for antagonism. The incentive structure was the same as ever —to wit, self-advancement—, but the overall effect was identical to what you might expect even if human beings were a species of natural-born eirenists.”

“From the outside it may look as if nothing has happened at all, while inwardly the poster cannot help but feel that there is no greater change possible, than just to “get it out there” like that. That’s posting.”

Nosferatu Is a Flawed Triumph by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“Eggers also loads up the soundtrack in certain sequences with vague murmurs and chuckles and rustlings that are a brilliant way of portraying the living world beyond humankind. Really, he’s so gifted at Gothic horror, I’ll be grateful if he spends the rest of his career fine-tuning his abilities in atmospheric unease — a sense of the world as fundamentally strange and ungovernable. We’d be more careful with the world, if we took that attitude.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

My Friend Chooses How and When to Die by Jeannette Cooperman (Common Reader)

“Her gamble is with timing, and she is determined to beat fate to the punch, not wait until a stroke or accident renders her incapable of making this decision. Besides, she repeats, she is not doing as well as it might seem. She is blind in one eye, falling frequently, losing control over her body in practical and embarrassing ways. She has painful neuropathy. Leg cramps keep her awake every night. “And I can feel my cognitive bandwidth shrinking.””

“I ask what she thinks of the Immortalists who want tech to keep them alive practically forever. She politely affirms their right to try, then adds, “I think it’s asinine, actually. Everything dies. Animals die, trees die, rivers dry up. It’s a cycle. If you are 102, how much good can you do for anybody?””

“[…] spending more time with her mother, she saw the changes. Ann’s weight was down, and caught off guard, she did look frail. She fell often, sometimes hitting her head or bruising her face. The next fall could cause a brain bleed or break a hip. She could lose her chance to die on her own terms.”

“[…] before I can move, she is on her hands and knees, reaching way back for the toy, then rising, fluid as a dancer, without holding on to anything. When I comment on her agility, she explains that she climbs the terrazzo marble stairs of her apartment building every day, starting in the basement and going up to the eleventh floor. She does this six times.”

72 flights of stairs a day is about 216m. That’s a lot.

“She reads me a quote from Mary Pipher: “I want to die young as late as possible. I don’t want to live beyond my energy level. I don’t want to suffer dementia or lie helpless in a hospital. I want to die while I still believe that others love me and that I am useful.””

“I ask what is she doing, now that she has no fear of consequences. Mischief, indulgence, decadence? Well, she bought herself the expensive honey yogurt she loves, and she may stop climbing all seventy-two flights, just to have more time to wrap things up.”

“On the ground in front of me, a fuzzy bee lies on its side. Dying, I presume. Staring at its shadow, I see the antennae waver. Should I end this little life quickly, spare the bee its suffering? Or let it have a natural death at any cost? Is wanting to end the suffering selfish on my part, because watching tightens my throat? Or is refusing to intervene a failure of compassion? What does the bee want? Is its brain clever enough to wish for greater agency?”

“If she had stayed instead of dying, she would have felt shackled. And—I force myself to be honest—if I had watched her grow older and more frail, in pain, having less and less fun, would I still have craved her company? Yes, but in a different way, shadowed with sympathy. And she would have sensed and hated that.”

“[…] why is it that no one quibbles at the use of artificial medical technology to prolong life, yet deciding to die is deemed an unacceptable intervention?”

“Over the next decade, though, she saw, in her work, “a lot of bad deaths, deaths that were unnecessarily difficult. And a lot of opportunities to die well that were lost in the process,” because people, too ill or distracted to think it through, had made small decisions along the way that led to situations they never would have chosen.”

“It is easy, on a sunny day, to spout fine words about going on without those capacities. But when the sky turns gray and cold and I wake creaky and dispirited, I try to project twenty years forward. At what point will living become far harder than dying? And should that be a call for courage or a sign to quit?”

Eyesight, mental capacity, physical capacity. I don’t have to keep doing all of the things that I do—hell, maybe I try to keep too many balls in the air—but if you take away too much, then what am I doing here?

Is it Possible to Read Walden When You Own a Smartphone? by Rebecca Baumgartner (3 Quarks Daily)

“[…] is it the content that’s boring, or are we simply less capable of appreciating it? I propose that we’re the boring ones. Or more precisely, our thinking is too small and frantic to follow where Thoreau’s mind goes. It’s the same reason we find meditation so hard and boring. It’s the same reason most of us haven’t stared off into space at all in the past 15 years. It’s why you never see anyone waiting in line without a phone in their hands. Our minds have seemingly lost the ability to sink into an awareness of and interest in our surroundings that Thoreau presupposes his readers will share.

“After all, there’s nothing inherently more boring about the water level of a pond than about the way a random YouTuber has organized their freezer. In fact, if the pond description is well-written, it can even be a thing of beauty, while no amount of freezer organization ever could. And yet, I’d bet money that most of us would have less trouble focusing on a freezer-org video than reading Walden with our undivided attention. Thoreau’s book is a pearl before swine, and we have just enough non-swine in us to feel this to be the case, and it makes us angry.”

“Sometimes you have to wait for the rain to come or the fever to break. You have to wait for the sun to rise, the fish to bite, or the year to end. These things can’t be rushed, and maybe a typical reader from that time period would have felt that to really get a sense of Thoreau’s life in the woods, the description of the pond couldn’t be rushed, either.”

“The world that Thoreau describes, and perhaps Thoreau himself, couldn’t care less about earning your attention. It is there, and you can observe it, and learn something about your world and yourself – or not. It’s up to you. Nothing is relying on your engagement. Nature is not designed for your convenience, nor is it calibrated to your preferences. It is the anti-phone, delivered with flinty Yankee indifference.”

“This is the real explanation of what people mean when they say “I want to read more but I can’t find the time.” Being a reader of any kind in 2025, but particularly a reader of works like Walden, does not mean becoming a person who “has more time”; it means getting used to shifting down to first gear while the culture is racing past you in fifth gear.”

“Whether this was on purpose or was just the way Thoreau’s mind worked, he knew something we need reminding of these days: Doing the right thing slowly and with difficulty will always be better than doing the wrong thing quickly and effortlessly.”

This is a well-written article about how we choose to spend our time. The following single-line post summarizes it nearly perfectly: Unread Lord of the Rings Books Look On As Owner Binges Movies For 25th Time (Babylon Bee).

I am personally delighted to learn that people are watching videos of other people organizing their freezers and I hadn’t even suspected that such a thing existed. I suppose it makes sense. I imagine them watching them with ads.

Expanding on Rebecca’s topic above is the video “Small Data” with the song “Small Bytes”, which has the refrain, “Just live your life in small bytes.”

Small Data by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“We have been data-gatherers since the very beginning. The hunters and gatherers, you know? The data that they had, it didn’t come from a machine or a network or a app it came from their eyes their ears the world around them”

“I do run a small platform for data-veganism, data advocacy, and, specifically, a website dedicated to ending the absolute travesty that is the Java programming language.”

As someone pointed out in the comments, the video is shot in the 4:3 aspect-ratio.

The credits song is a legit banger. You can download EXTRAS: “Small Bytes” Music Video & MP3. The music video’s almost better than the video. It’s so poignant and lovely. It really makes you wish for a simpler, more joyful, and artisanal world.

“It ain’t no use in usin’ up your bytes, babe.
The bytes, small and slow.

“It ain’t no use in usin’ up your bytes, babe.
My dialup won’t download.

“I wish there were something I could … do or say
to free this space up in my memory lane
But … we never had our heads in the cloud anyway.

“Just live your life in small bytes.

“[Harmonica solo]”

Technology

Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap by Son Nguyen Kim (Proton)

“Passkeys could make nearly every account secure against attacks that cause such havoc today. There’s no such thing as a “weak” passkey, so attackers will no longer be able to brute force their way into accounts. And passkeys can’t suffer mass exposure like passwords because apps and websites only store the public key — the private key remains safely stored on your device. If everyone used passkeys, much of the harmful effects of data breaches would disappear.”

Machine translators vs. human translators by Victor Mair (Language Log)

“Whereas “machine translation” translates whole documents, and thus is meant to replace human translation, CAT supports it: the computer makes suggestions on how to translate words and phrases as the user proceeds through the original text. The software can also remind users how they have translated a particular word or phrase in the past, or can be trained in a specific technical language, for instance, by feeding it legal or medical texts. CAT software is currently based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, which are trained through bilingual text data to recognise patterns across different languages.”

“Although NMT full text translations have become much more readable, they are still far from being convincingly written by an expert native speaker. At present DeepL even seems to find it hard to do some fairly basic things like cutting sentences in half or reordering them, something which is always necessary in Italian to English translation. This will no doubt improve over time as it begins to identify more complex unwritten grammatical rules within the patterns of the various languages. But for now, to create a text that sounds like it could have been written by a native speaker, a translator will have to change the vast majority of the machine translation, and so it would often be quicker for them to start from scratch, particularly if they are supported by CAT.”

“For example, the term “il popolo” in Italian would normally be translated as “the people” in English, however, in an article on the workers’ movement the computer translates this Italian sentence “Qual é il motivo per cui il movimento operaio non può avere come soggettività di riferimento il popolo?” as “What is the reason why the workers’ movement cannot have the working class as its reference subjectivity?”. “Il popolo” becomes “the working class” because the computer is smart enough to register that the article is talking about the workers’ movement and the working class is usually around when we’re talking about the workers’ movement. However, this article was specifically about the distinction between “the people” and “the working class”, and so the computer has completely confused the argument. In this case, the problem is precisely the computer’s attempt to take context into account with its “intelligent” non-literal translation. Again, although computers will of course become better at identifying the specificities of a particular context, in order to completely avoid these kinds of mistakes they would have to stop working with probability and instead understand the text they are translating, something which the current technology can only dream of.”

This is a fascinating example of how even 99% correct can still be 100% wrong.

As I’ve probably written dozens of times: the less complex, subtle, or important your content, the more likely it is that you can translate it automatically.

If it’s important, you’re going to need expert eyes on it. Those expert eyes are human eyes. For now, I guess, but I’m not seeing that changing anytime soon. The technology arc doesn’t include moving that particular needle.

“[…] humans will be grateful for the assistance of the machines, because the latter will drastically reduce the drudgery and repetitious boredom of the low-level parts of the human translator’s job. A skillful human translator is not needed for the routine, humdrum, monotonous labor that makes up the majority of translation work.”

It’s the same for a some coding work as well. In the case of coding, though, you should ask yourself why your process requires so much boilerplate and busywork.

LLMs & AI

Will We Get AGI In 2025? by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

“Personally, I strongly doubt that OpenAI will make it to AGI any time soon, if ever. It’s because the test results alone don’t tell the full story. O3 is still a specific type of AI called a large language-model that is trained on a lot of data with examples of the problems it is supposed to solve. But most humans can solve the ARC problems without having ever seen anything like it before.”

“[…] in internal documents between Microsoft and OpenAI, they define AGI as “any system that will make more than 100 billion dollars of profit.” If I now tell you that OpenAI also considers putting adverts on its models, it suddenly all makes sense. General Intelligence means spamming your customers with ads. The future will be bright.”

On a side note, I noticed while transcribing a couple of videos that the YouTube transcripts have, finally, gotten quite a bit better, including appropriate punctuation and capitalization.

It still bleeps out what it considers to be curse words.

It’s remarkably easy to inject new medical misinformation into LLMs by John Timmer (Ars Technica)

“A new study by researchers at New York University examines how much medical information can be included in a large language model (LLM) training set before it spits out inaccurate answers. While the study doesn’t identify a lower bound, it does show that by the time misinformation accounts for 0.001 percent of the training data, the resulting LLM is compromised.

“While the paper is focused on the intentional “poisoning” of an LLM during training, it also has implications for the body of misinformation that’s already online and part of the training set for existing LLMs, as well as the persistence of out-of-date information in validated medical databases.”

Yeah. It’s good to have empirical evidence for this. Establishing a lower bound and quantifying it is good. It’s what we all kind of suspected, though.

“Finally, the team notes that even the best human-curated data sources, like PubMed, also suffer from a misinformation problem. The medical research literature is filled with promising-looking ideas that never panned out, and out-of-date treatments and tests that have been replaced by approaches more solidly based on evidence. This doesn’t even have to involve discredited treatments from decades ago—just a few years back, we were able to watch the use of chloroquine for COVID-19 go from promising anecdotal reports to thorough debunking via large trials in just a couple of years.”

Programming

Super quick way to improve your gradients by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

This short (<2min) video explains how to use newer color spaces—like oklab or oklch—to make gradients more vibrant, and you can even choose the direction around the color wheel to take, i.e., go the “longer” way around by interpolating with hue (MDN), as showin in the example below, which uses hsl and goes the long way around the hue spectrum.

.longer {
  background: linear-gradient(90deg in hsl longer hue, red, blue);
}

Sports

Athletics at the 1952 Summer Olympics – Men’s marathon (Wikipedia)

“The event was won by Emil Zátopek of Czechoslovakia, the nation’s first Olympic marathon medal. Zátopek completed a long distance triple that has never been matched: the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres, and marathon golds in a single Games.

“[…]

“Approximately halfway through the race, Zátopek famously pulled alongside pre-race favorite Jim Peters and asked him, “Jim, is this pace too fast?” Peters replied, “No, it isn’t fast enough.” Peters later said he was joking, but Zátopek accelerated into the lead and won by more than two and a half minutes. Peters failed to finish.”

Fun

'Touch Me' − The Poems of Suzanne Somers

I found this book in my mother’s old book collection this past summer.

Suzanne Somers played Chrissy on Three’s Company. Chrissy was a very ditzy bottle-blonde character, written to get away with murder simply because of her heaving, gravity-defying bosom. She was juxtaposed with brunette Janet (Joyce DeWitt), who it was often noted was the “plain” roommate of the pair.

At any rate, Suzanne Somers apparently wrote poetry and named her book of poetry “Touch Me”, seemingly without any sense of irony whatsoever. She published this book in 1973, at 27 years of age, four years before starring in the show for which she would become famous. This was only the first book of many for Somers; everything else was self-help, though, which should come as no surprise to anyone.

NRA Magazine: America's First Freedom

Also this past summer, I caught a glimpse of the September 2024 issue of the NRA’s magazine. I’m a little confused that it’s named America’s 1st Freedom because the freedom to keep and bear arms is famously the second amendment. Maybe they’re angling to promote it above free speech, free religion, free press, right to assemble, and right to redress grievances?

If you look in the upper left-hand corner, you’ll see that they’re hawking silver and gold, naturally.

Firearms Safety and Pistol Permit Class − $300

Again, from this past summer, I went out for dinner with a good friend. We went to a place called Scenic View where there was an advertisement for a pistol-permit class featured very prominently just as you walked in. It’s an 8-cours and would take place right on the premises. Only $300. Good to know, I guess.

This is soap for adults, apparently

The U.S. has been an advertisting-heavy culture for as long as I’ve been alive. I feel like the infantilization of the lower classes has gotten much more extreme. While the upper classes get advertisements in black-and-white with beautiful, thin models of all genders, with excellent attention to lettering, font, and style, leading to advertisements that wouldn’t be out of place in an architectural digest, the lower classes get cartoonish, pun-laced idiocy like this, training them to be as lowbrow as possible, lowering their expectations of themselves. There is no reason that you couldn’t use the exact same stylish appearance for everyone. They will claim that this sells better. Chicken or the egg. Chicken or the egg.

Reminder: American Women Have Until January 20th To Find A Man To Get Them Pregnant Or One Will Be Selected For Them (Babylon Bee)

“At precisely noon, Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. As his first act, he will sign an executive order requiring all women to produce children for the glory of the American theocracy. Any woman without a man will be assigned one through the Supervised Triage of Unique Dads (STUD). Women caught actively not getting pregnant will be sent to the Gestational Camps in Guantanamo Bay.

“A period of one year is allowed between pregnancies while the mother recuperates from her holy work.”

Justin Trudeau is more gay than me by Dave Rubin (YouTube)

See ya later, Justin. Don’t let the door hit ya on the ass on yer way out.

but for real, a round of applause for everyone who buys books, ESPECIALLY my books, but others might be okay too by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

Dinosaur Comics: Bookstore

“I won at bookstore.”