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Links and Notes for September 28th, 2024

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/22/a-nuclear-war-in-ukraine-is-a-distinct-possibility/" source="Scheer Post" author="C.J. Polychroniou">A Nuclear War in Ukraine Is a Distinct Possibility</a> <bq>It is correct that the war has not gone as Moscow expected. Russia thought it could impose a peace but was taken by surprise when the U.S. and U.K. preferred war. When Russia sent in its military, the small size and conduct of the invading forces indicated that the purpose was merely to pressure Ukraine to accept a peace agreement on Russian terms. Ukraine and Russia were close to an agreement in Istanbul, although it was sabotaged by the U.S. and U.K. as they saw an opportunity to fight Russia with Ukrainians.</bq> <bq>After 2.5 years of war, this has become a territorial conflict that makes it impossible to resolve in a manner that would be acceptable to all sides. As NATO refuses to accept losing its decade-long proxy war in Ukraine, it must continue to escalate and thus get more directly involved in the war. We are now at the brink of a direct NATO-Russia War.</bq> <bq>By failing to admit NATO’s central role in provoking this war, we also prevent ourselves from recognizing possible political solutions.</bq> <bq>The Ukrainian negotiators and the Israeli and Turkish mediators all confirmed that Russia was willing to pull back its troops and compromise on almost everything if Ukraine would restore its neutrality to end NATO expansionism. The mediators also confirmed that the US and UK saw an opportunity to bleed Russia and thus weaken a strategic rival by fighting with Ukrainians. The US and UK told Ukraine they would not support a peace agreement based on neutrality, but NATO would supply all the weapons Ukraine would need if Ukraine pulled out of the negotiations and chose war instead. Interviews with American and British leaders made it clear that the only acceptable outcome for the war was regime change in Moscow, while other political leaders began to speak about breaking up Russia into many smaller countries.</bq> <bq>It is worth remarking that few Western political leaders have clearly defined what “victory” over the world’s largest nuclear power would look like. Russia considers this war to be an existential threat to its survival, and I am therefore convinced that Russia would launch a nuclear attack long before NATO troops get to march through Crimea.</bq> <bq>NATO expansion that cancelled inclusive pan-European security agreements with Russia was the main manifestation of America’s hegemonic ambitions after the Cold War, thus the entire world order will be greatly influenced by the outcome of this war. This also explains why NATO will be prepared to attack Russia with long-range precision missiles and risk a nuclear exchange.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/28/block-busting-beirut/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Block-Busting Beirut</a> <bq>Let’s give Ralph Nader the last word this week on Middle East mystifications of Thomas Friedman and the NYT: “The New York Times’s Tom Friedman wildly exaggerates the Iranian military and that of its proxies. The military superiority of the Israeli/American opposition is massively greater than whatever Iran can generate from an economy smaller than the GDP of Massachusetts. Remember, Iran—a poor country— has been invaded by U.S. proxies/Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It’s been surrounded by the U.S. military and repeatedly sabotaged by Israeli military penetration. Limitless deployed aggressive militarism and expansionism by a nuclear-equipped Israel, backed by Biden’s bombs and diplomatic/political cover, needs an inflated enemy. Keep proportionality and history in mind.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-isnt-attacking-because-it" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Israel Isn't Attacking Because It Was Attacked, It's Attacking Because It Got An Excuse</a> <bq>[...] this “vote Democrat so fewer people get hurt” line of thinking is not based on facts or evidence, and only makes sense within a western supremacist worldview which does not consider non-western lives to have equal value to western lives. If you don’t have such a worldview it’s immediately clear that there’s no evidence-based reason to believe voting Democrat leads to a reduction of harm throughout the world. There’s not actually any way to know which presidential candidate would do more harm if elected, because they’re both so obscenely awful and murderous and there’s no way to predict how their awful murderousness will manifest in policy during their time in office. All you can do is draw an imaginary line between “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” and compartmentalize the two away from each other, and then say “well this candidate makes my feelings feel nicer on domestic policy so they are therefore better” while ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of the abusiveness of US presidents happens outside the borders of the United States.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/27/pmue-s27.html" author="Brigitte Fehlau" source="WSWS">Berlin-Tegel refugee camp: Inhuman conditions, a climate of fear—and huge profits for the operators</a> <bq>The conditions in the large tents are unbearably cramped, with 380 people crammed into each. In the sleeping areas, 14 people have to huddle together—randomly assembled. Single women, mothers with children and babies, the elderly and the sick—including people with mental illnesses—and single men live here together without blankets or doors, without privacy or space for personal belongings. The corridors between the bunk beds are so narrow that two people can hardly pass each other. Sleep is almost unthinkable under such conditions, because someone always has to get out of bed or is coughing, a child cries or a phone rings. In addition, there is dirt, along with mice and vermin, in the tents, which are a breeding ground for infections. There have already been outbreaks of highly contagious diseases such as chickenpox and measles, and, of course, COVID can also spread unhindered here. Dirty showers, clogged toilets smeared with fecal matter, a large proportion of which are usually out of order, are part of everyday life. Like so many other things, the residents are not allowed to clean the facilities themselves. There is no possibility to do their own cooking or even just to warm something up, and so the residents have to survive on cheap mass-produced food handed out in a dining tent. Many complain about inedible meals. Plates and cutlery are made of plastic and the tables and benches are dirty. Of course, no consideration is given to dietary plans for medical reasons, such as diabetes.</bq> The answer, as usual, will be "they should be happy that they're getting anything." It's cruel and it's stupid but people will not see the need for empathy unless they, or people they know, are directly affected. Their consciences are clean. Out of sight and out of mind. Those aren't real people anyway. <bq>Although the conditions for the people living here are miserable, the operation of the camp devours almost half a billion euros of taxpayers’ money every year–about €250 a day for each of the 5,000 refugees!</bq> But here's the kicker: The companies providing these miserable conditions are doing so for €250 per day! That money is obviously lining some already-very-stuffed German pockets. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/good-westerners-dont-start-off-hating" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Good Westerners Don't Start Off Hating Israel, But Truth Eventually Leads Them There</a> Same thing happens with the U.S. You don't hate the people but you do hate the government. <bq>We come to understand that Israel is in fact profoundly evil, not because it is full of Jews but because it’s a western settler-colonialist project that’s inflicting the same kinds of genocide, ethnic cleansing, theft and abuse on the indigenous population of the land that other western settler-colonialist projects like Australia, the US and Canada inflicted in earlier centuries. And we learn that this evil doesn’t just pervade the Israeli government but all of Israeli society — not because of Judaism or Jewishness, but for the same reason hatred and racism pervaded the societies of the Jim Crow south and apartheid South Africa. Israelis are indoctrinated from birth to view the non-Jewish indigenous populations of the region as less than human, because otherwise it would make no moral sense for there to be a state where one ethnic group receives preferential treatment over the others, or for that state to have been dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of the people who live there. This indoctrination is the glue that holds the whole settler-colonialist project together.</bq> It never ends, either. The U.S. is the heart of the empire and its people are among the most heavily propagandized people in the world. They stand no chance. <bq>This is just what it looks like when an entire society is indoctrinated from birth into viewing their neighbors as mindless savages.</bq> Hating the U.S. or Israel isn't enough, though. Hate only "works" if the thing being hated cares that you hate it and wants not to be hated. Your hate is utterly ineffective if you hold no leverage or power over the object of your hatred. Right now, the U.S. and Israel don't have to care at all what anyone thinks. They can just do what they want. Let's see how long that lasts. In the meantime, we gather our facts, hone our arguments, and try to retain a shred of empathy from which we can generate diplomacy in future efforts at entente. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/01/believe-me-its-been-going-downhill-for-awhile/" author="Ron Jacobs" source="CounterPunch">Believe Me, It’s Been Going Downhill for Awhile</a> <bq>I still wonder how many of the people I used to get high with in my youth later voted for Ronald Reagan, who once called for a bloodbath of young people on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and sent in lots of cops to facilitate it. Likewise, I wonder how many, if any, regret those votes. After all, the Reagan years are a big reason why the two current mainstream candidates include a raving fascist and a Ronald Reagan in Democrat drag. Speaking of which, I wonder how many of those who I used to drink and get high with voted for Trump. Or think Ralph Nader lost the 2000 election for Al Gore and Jill Stein could ruin it for Kamala Harris.</bq> All of them. Literally all of them. They all hate you. They all feel 100% justified for hating you. <bq>We’re told electoral politics matter in the United States, but the results of each election I live through make me wonder as to the veracity of that truism. I guess they matter for certain classes and sectors of the US population. For me, a worker now mostly retired, the only way they matter is how much and in what ways I will be getting shit upon after the polls are closed. That and how they’ll affect women and children, especially those who don’t have white skin or money. Some things never seem to change.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/where-to-watch-the-debateand-a-dispatch" author="Ed Augustin" source="Drop Site">Biden’s Cuba Policy Leaves the Island in Wreckage</a> <bq>Biden has one-upped Trump by going further than the previous administration in attacking Cuba’s tourism industry – the main engine of the island’s economy. Two years ago, the Biden State Department barred foreigners who visit Cuba from visa-free travel to the U.S. That meant that people from the United Kingdom, France, Spain and 37 other countries found out that a mere holiday in Cuba could forfeit their visa waiver, and many decided not to risk a visit to the island. Unlike the rest of the Caribbean, tourism in Cuba has not rebounded since the pandemic. European travel to the island is only half what it was before the pandemic. The terror designation, together with more than 200 sanctions enacted against the island since Obama left office, has pulped the Cuban economy by cutting revenue to the struggling Cuban state. Economists calculate that the loss in tourism revenue resulting from the terror designation costs the state hundreds of millions dollars a year. The combined annual cost of the Trump-Biden sanctions, they say, amounts to billions of dollars a year.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/10/02/opinion-we-need-more-consequences-for-reckless-driving-but-that-doesnt-mean-more-punishment" author="Kea Wilson" source="Streets Blog">Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. But That Doesn’t Mean More Punishment</a> <bq>Someday soon, I hope drivers will know that if they get behind the wheel drunk, stoned, or so tired they can't keep their eyes open, their cars will simply not start and they will have to take the bus. [...] I don't want these things, though, because I want bad drivers to suffer, or even for them to feel afraid. I don't want anyone to suffer; that's why I'm a street safety advocate in the first place. And that's why I just can't support many of the punishment-based approaches that have become America's front-line default.</bq> The author doesn't see that having cars that refuse to start because they've "detected" that a person is not ready to drive is a non-starter. Her faith in technology extends to the boundaries of where it affects her. People that are affected will miss a day of work. There are no buses, you dingbat. There is no alternative. You brought a meal to a relative out in the countryside, had a beer with him because he asked you to, and he's dying of cancer, and now you can't drive home. But some 30-something dingbat managed to get your car---that you paid dozens of thousands of dollars for---to not do its job when you need it to, so you're stuck. Maybe you can get a taxi, right? Sure you can. An Uber? Sure you can. Looks like you'll miss your job tomorrow. Or maybe you get home, get a couple of hours of sleep and get on the line, maybe you make a mistake, maybe you lose a few fingers. As long as the author is comforted in her belief that what she advocated was just "discomfort" and not a punishment. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/03/adyq-o03.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Biden escalates toward disastrous war against Iran</a> <bq>Using Iran’s attack on Israeli military infrastructure Tuesday as a pretext, the White House has effectively given Israel carte blanche to carry out an illegal attack against the most populous country in the region. “We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do, but all seven of us [referring to the G7 nations] agree that they have a right to respond,” Biden said Wednesday. Reuters commented in a news report, “[T]he US is not pressing Israel to refrain from retaliation.”</bq> Like it would matter. This is all just so tiresome, at this point. It's all lies and deceit. It's quite obvious that Iran is the end-goal. To have the Israelis take advantage of Iran's reluctance to go to total war, just as the U.S. has Ukraine doing the same to Russia. <bq>One year after the start of the Gaza genocide, it has become clear that Israel seized upon the events of October 7 to implement long-held plans to ethnically cleanse and annex all Palestinian territories. This is part of a regional war throughout the Middle East to conquer what the Zionist state claims to be its biblical borders. For the United States, it has been a means to cement imperialist control over the oil-rich Middle East region and to establish the Middle East and Central Asia as a firm base for US military operations in order to press ahead with its confrontation with Russia and China.</bq> It has always been about the oil. U.S. actions in Venezuela, Russia, and now Iran are not coincidentally in the oil-rich areas of the world that have historically never come under the control of the U.S. Empire. The Saudis will learn their lesson and will learn to curtail their mouthiness. It will not work out this way, because it never does for the U.S. Military capability, goodwill, and good standing will continue to be burned for the benefit of a handful of elite winners at the helm of the U.S. war machine. <bq>It is high time to put an end to the myth that Israel is an actor independent of the United States. Israel’s primary function is as an attack dog and instrument of the interests of American imperialism throughout the entire region.</bq> What did the potential Vice Presidents have to say? <bq>Walz said, “We will protect our forces and our allied forces, and there will be consequences.” Vance added, “Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe. And we should support our allies wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys.”</bq> Oh. Ok. So, just as simpering and stupid as the people at the top of their respective tickets. <bq>[...] no one bothered to note, first, that such an attack would be completely illegal, and second, that it would have monumental and historic consequences for the entire world.</bq> Neither of those things are of particular interest to those people. They live in a propaganda bubble so impenetrable that they couldn't even begin to process the idea that anything the U.S. or Israel might want to do is "illegal". The notion doesn't even compute. How can a nation that never does anything wrong do something illegal? It's inconceivable. Nor can they imagine that anything the U.S. does would lead to anything but positive consequences for the world, as long as the U.S. extends its governance and grip on the world. How could that be a bad thing? The U.S. is an unprecedented force for good in humanity's long history. <bq>The US media is presenting a looming Israeli attack on Iran as a response to the strikes launched by Iran on Israeli military bases on Tuesday. In fact, Iran’s attack was a response to a series of US-Israeli bombings, murders and terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of people throughout the Middle East.</bq> I really don't think that it's going to suffice to term the U.S. media "useful idiots" anymore. They are complicit. They know exactly what they are doing. The are well-compensated propagandists for Empire, no different than Goebbels and his crew were. Or, as <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/these-are-us-wars-these-are-bidens" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">These Are US Wars. These Are Biden's Wars.</a> puts it: <iq>No matter how much you might despise the mainstream press, it’s not enough.</iq> <bq>The Iranian regime has repeatedly adopted an attitude of restraint to these US and Israeli provocations. There was no significant response to the murder of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, and Iran’s regime has tolerated repeated assassinations of scientists, and most recently, an Israeli bombing in Tehran itself. The president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking for the Iranian ruling class, has repeatedly adopted the most conciliatory attitude toward the imperialist powers. These efforts at conciliation have now failed, and the Iranian regime is coming under increasing pressure to resist and retaliate.</bq> Give 'em an inch and they take a mile. Lesson learned. <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012353766" author="Norman Solomon" source="Antiwar.com">'Escalation Dominance' and the Prospect of More Than 1,000 Holocausts</a> <bq>In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.</bq> <bq>On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”</bq> Why should they negotiate? They plan to attack. They will bomb all of Iran’s nuclear reactors and claim self-defense. The western media and governmenets will nod sagely and crawl further up their own ass, praising their attack dog Israel’s military acumen. <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=122403" author="Tobias Riegel" source="NachDenkSeiten">Baerbock – Das Sicherheitsrisiko</a> <bq>Da Baerbock schon selber von „platten Parolen“ spricht: Platter als die mittlerweile nur noch ermüdende Generalentschuldigung „der Russe war’s“ kann es kaum werden. Das hindert grünes Personal aber nicht daran, selbst noch den eigenen Absturz in der Wählergunst teilweise Russland in die Schuhe schieben zu wollen. An der eigenen Politik kann es schließlich nicht liegen, die muss ja einfach nur „besser erklärt“ werden.</bq> <bq>Auch Baerbocks nicht minder plattes Bild von „Putins Soldaten“, die bald an der polnischen Grenze stehen könnten, sollte mittlerweile ausgereizt sein, zumindest außerhalb der grünen Blase. Baerbocks Satz, „wenn Putin aufhört anzugreifen, dann ist der Krieg zu Ende“, ist eine unseriöse Simplifizierung und sie ignoriert sowohl die Vorgeschichte als auch den Verlauf des Ukrainekriegs – auch diese Aussage ist darum als irreführende Plattitüde einzuordnen. </bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-western-media-helped-create-these" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Western Media Helped Create These Horrors In The Middle East</a> <bq>The IDF continues to slaughter civilians in Lebanon with US-backed airstrikes as news surfaces that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire with Israel shortly before Israel assassinated him. The US reportedly knew about the deal.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/03/bmpj-o03.html" author="John Malvar" source="WSWS">Washington pressures Vietnam against cable deal with China</a> <bq>Washington is engaged in a global campaign, of which the pressure on Vietnam is a part, to prevent HMN and other Chinese firms from laying long-distance data cables anywhere in the world, because they argue that Chinese control of data cables would allow easier access for Chinese government surveillance and possible disruption of communications. What Washington protests as a Chinese threat, is what the United States is already doing. Edward Snowden revealed a decade ago that United States intelligence was engaged in the wholesale collection and surveillance of all internet data passing through the cables of US telecommunications companies, through a program, among others, called Prism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2024/10/04/the-strategic-voting-fallacy" author="Ted Rall" source="">The Strategic Voting Fallacy</a> <bq>For the 61% of Americans who oppose sending more weapons to Israel, this condition has been met. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Both have promised to send more bombs, more missiles, more money and more intelligence to the Israelis. A vote for Harris is a vote for more genocide. So is a vote for Trump. If you vote for either the Democrat or the Republican, the blood of every Palestinian who dies or gets maimed after January 20th will be on you. I am not saying this to make you feel guilty. I am merely stating a fact.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/were-the-fucking-terrorists" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">We're The Fucking Terrorists</a> <bq>Hezbollah is killing Israeli soldiers who are invading their country while Israeli soldiers are deliberately killing women and children and medical staff and journalists. Guess which side the west calls terrorists.</bq> <bq>Every nation on the top ten proven oil reserves list is either a target of US warmongering, has already been ruined by US warmongering, or is part of the US-centralized power structure.<ol>Venezuela Saudi Arabia Canada Iran Iraq Kuwait United Arab Emirates Russia Libya Nigeria</ol></bq> <bq>Nobody honestly still believes Israel kills all these women, children, journalists, medical staff and humanitarian aid workers by accident. You either know they do it on purpose and you say so, or you know they do it on purpose but you never admit it in order to protect a political agenda.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> From a comment on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690616" author="caseyy" source="Hacker News">America is becoming less "woke"</a> <bq>There is a lot of distracting, dividing, and just trash-tier content in social media that society is only worse off for taking seriously. Politically divisive articles such as ones encouraging identity politics tend to fall in that category. And it doesn’t matter much if many other people engage in it, it is likely healthier for you and society not to. Now, I agree that maybe “irrelevant” should be grounded in context — it is irrelevant to a discerning reader. It is relevant in society, unfortunately.</bq> <bq>[...] being permissive of nonsense is what caused the US to arrive at where it is today.</bq> It sounds pithy but it ain't so. Running an empire to funnel money upwards while pretending to be the shining city on the hill is what caused the US to arrive at where it is today. The nonsense is the distraction that greases the cogs. <bq>This is one particularly abusive part of "woke" that has been used to attack and disadvantage women by putting their needs far below the unreasonable and narcissistic demands of males who desire to be women. Glad to hear that support for this nonsense is dropping like a stone.</bq> I'm sure there's more to it than this but this is definitely part of the conversation, if you're honest. This is what it boils down to, in the end. The needs of half of the population take a back seat to the other half for a many centuries, then, when they've regained a modicum of equality, they get loopholed. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-employer-based-social-safety" author="Hamilton Nolan" source="How Things Work">The Employer-Based Social Safety Is a Disaster. We Can End It.</a> <bq>Classic defined benefit pensions are the single most costly benefit that employers traditionally provided, when you add up their total cost over the lifetime of workers. So, for more than 40 years, unionized companies have been absolutely cutthroat at the bargaining table in their determination to shift their workers into 401(k)s. Over the decades, in the private sector, pension after pension has fallen, each a lost battle in an economic war. Even the man who invented the 401(k) now acknowledges that this process has been a financial catastrophe for workers.</bq> <bq>[...] companies are greedy, but that is because they are in essence machines programmed to maximize profits, so cursing them for being greedy is like yelling at a beaver for making a dam. That is what they do. Thinking about the widespread loss of pensions and how it has made life for the majority of working Americans inarguably worse is a good entry point to think more broadly about the insane, rickety, piecemeal, and counterproductive way that we have built our shitty, threadbare social safety net in this country.</bq> <bq>In a mature and serious country, “workplace benefits” would be things like, you know, “a variety of free bagels.” Not stuff like “your health insurance” or “your ability to avoid poverty in your old age.” Remarkably stupid system. Really idiotic.</bq> <bq>If you open an ice cream shop, you want to sell ice cream. Do you want to be a health insurance provider? No. Do you want to be a life insurance provider? No. Do you want to be a retirement investment account provider? No. You want to be an ice cream provider. The absurd burden of making businesses into benefit providers weighs most heavily on small businesses, which are forced to pay to outsource this stuff to large firms. The system is predatory and confusing for employers and employees alike. Unfortunately, the logic of capitalism is simply for employers to try to escape their obligations to provide benefits, which leaves employees with nothing.</bq> <bq>[...] in the long run, employers need a stable society that creates healthy working people who can survive and are not so desperate that they steal from their employer and also chop up the CEO and throw him in a river.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">What the fuck is a PBM?</a> <bq>As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world. But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!</bq> <bq>VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.</bq> <bq>Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.</bq> <bq>[...] the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.</bq> <bq>That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.</bq> <bq>The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.</bq> <bq>[...] the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/climate-change-risk-insurance-premiums/" source="Jacobin" author="Lois Parshley">The Insurance Apocalypse Is Upon Us</a> <bq>Insured losses from natural disasters in the United States now routinely approach $100 billion a year, compared to $4.6 billion in 2000. As a result, the average homeowner has seen their premiums spike 21 percent since 2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the states most likely to have disasters — like Texas and Florida — have some of the most expensive insurance rates . That means ever more people are forgoing coverage, leaving them vulnerable and driving prices even higher as the number of people paying premiums and sharing risk shrinks.</bq> <bq>Costs have catapulted too: since 1970, losses from disasters increased an average of 5 percent a year, particularly in the United States. That’s because damage also depends on vulnerability and exposure — where people live, and how prepared they are. Tragically, the fastest-growing counties also face some of the highest risks.</bq> That's tragic only because of the breathtakingly poor planning. <bq>[...] new report by the US Treasury Department, released at the end of June, found major gaps in the supervision and regulation of insurers. The report advised much closer attention to “the risks the insurance industry may pose to the overall financial sector.”</bq> The risks to the financial sector are, of course, of paramount concern. <bq>Not only is that bad for the families whose losses aren’t protected, it deepens existing inequities. Right now, the insurance market is unintentionally protecting wealthy property owners while socializing their risk through highly subsidized premiums.</bq> "Unintentionally." Sure, ok. <bq>“People don’t understand a basic economic law — there’s no free lunch. There’s a risk,” she said. “Somebody’s paying for it. It’s just a question of who.”</bq> People don't have to know who's paying for it. They just have to know that it's not them. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/09/supreme-court-criminalizing-homelessness-families/" source="Jacobin" author="Richard Schweid">The Costs of Criminalizing the Homeless</a> <bq>I thought of them following the Trump Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision empowering municipalities to make sleeping outdoors, including in encampments, illegal. It provides a taste of what a Trump era’s social policy toward the unhoused would look like. Over the past fifty years, the number of families without stable housing on any given night has skyrocketed.</bq> Trump was president for only four of those fifty years. These people are all currently homeless under Biden's watch. They will continue to be homeless under Biden or Harris. Neither one of them has expressed a single kernel of empathy for the homeless nor will they table any policies that will benefit the homeless---perhaps making them no longer homeless. <bq>City officials in many places, desperate to cleanse their streets of people experiencing homelessness in plain sight, made it illegal to bring them food. A multitude of cities and towns have “vehicle dwelling bans,” on their books, which make it illegal to live in your car. These laws are usually enforced in municipalities with limited shelter space for those experiencing homelessness, leaving people to fend for themselves, even those with families.</bq> <bq>Blame is bipartisan. Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996 helped swell the rolls of the extremely poor. The 2008 recession generated a record number of families experiencing homelessness, but even in the Clinton and George W. Bush years of prosperity that preceded it, and the Barack Obama years of recovery that followed, the numbers of homeless families kept rising across the country. It is safe to posit that in a second Trump mandate, many children would live in extreme poverty and experience homelessness. These children will be affected physically and mentally in ways that may hamper them for their entire lives.</bq> Barack Obama's "Years of recovery" were for wealthy finance, not for the hoi polloi. Of course, it's Trump who's to blame for all of this and the suffering of children from poverty and insufficient nutrition (or whatever the hell they're calling it) that's currently going on will be ignored in favor or shuddering with horror about what would happen under Trump, were he to cause the exact same conditions to occur as now exist under Biden. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/23/xasm-s23.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">Some revealing comments on the state of the global economy</a> <bq>Lagarde indicated that today the world economy was facing rifts comparable to those that led to the 1930s Great Depression and a collapse in world trade. “We have faced the worst pandemic since the 1920s, the worst conflict in Europe since the 1940s and the worst energy shock since the 1970s,” she said. These developments had changed the structure of the economy and posed a challenge for monetary policy under conditions of an environment characterised by “more frequent global supply shocks” and a “fragmenting geopolitical landscape.”</bq> Who's going to invest in mills in Asia under these conditions? Why do you think business is down for everyone? Yet, Europe continues to cheer on every war that the U.S. can imagine. War against Russia? Absolutely. Goddamn were they happy to start that one up again---after decades of useless coldness, finally a hot one! War against Iran? Of course! They have all of the oil! Europe needs oil. The U.S. will sell it to them from Iran, but at a significant markup. Europe is nothing if not naive. War with China? Why certainly! The U.S. has told Europe to stop trading with China because it's a threat to everyone. Europe swallows it like a baby bird. <bq>The concerns arose because of the slow growth in the world economy and the ending of large-scale purchases of government debt by central banks (so-called quantitative easing, QE) which drove yields (interest rates) on government bonds to record lows.</bq> <bq>[...] close to potential, such as in the US and most of Europe, there had to be a start on the path of “gradual fiscal consolidation.” Under conditions where growth is at low levels and military spending is on a rapid rise, this can only mean major cuts in spending on social services.</bq> Et voila! Money for the aristocrats' wars and no-one who's anyone need feel the pinch! It's a win-win for those that matter. And who cares about those who don't matter? It's definitional. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1fsvc0t/just_found_on_imgur/" author="ally" source="Reddit">Where's it all going?</a> <img src="{att_link}where_s_it_all_going_.webp" href="{att_link}where_s_it_all_going_.webp" align="none" caption="Where's it all going?" scale="75%"> <bq>i don't understand this economy when nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt our grandparents but nursing home aides need to use food banks. daycare is so expensive it eats up one parent's entire paycheck and yet daycare providers only make $10/hr and need second jobs. college costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts students into debt for life and yet we have thousands of professors living in their cars. everything we need is astronomically expensive and yet almost none of the money we pay is going towards the people actually doing the work and providing the services.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/04/wealth-income-poverty-homelessness-and-hunger-bidens-record/" author="Rick Baum" source="CounterPunch">Wealth, Income, Poverty, Homelessness, and Hunger: Biden’s Record</a> <bq>At the end of the second quarter in 2024, the average wealth of a person in the poorest 50%, with many having negative wealth–owing more than all their assets are worth–came to a bit over $23,000 while the average holdings of a member of the .1% was $63 million, more than 2,700 times as much.</bq> <bq>[...] as of 2023, none of those in the five quintiles, including those in the top 5%, have average household incomes in 2023 dollars adjusted for inflation exceeding the levels of 2019. For example, the average income of those in the lowest 20% stood at $17,650 in 2023, up compared to the previous two years of Biden’s presidency. However, in 2019, it was $520 higher at $18,070.</bq> <bq>A U.S. Department of Agriculture report (pgs. 11 and iii) indicated that the number of food insecure people increased from 33.8 million in 2021 to 44.2 million in 2022, and to 47.4 million in 2023.</bq> <bq>“Children were food insecure at times during 2023 in 8.9 percent of U.S. households with children (3.2 million households), statistically similar to the 8.8 percent (3.3 million households) in 2022, but up from both 6.2 percent (2.3 million households) in 2021 and 7.6 percent (2.9 million households) in 2020. These households with food insecurity among children were unable at times to provide adequate, nutritious food for their children.”</bq> The economy is going great. Do not believe the cries of hungry children. They are lying to you, to try to get Trump elected. Love, Dean Baker and Paul Krugman. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14144" source="Not Even Wrong" author="woit">Is Spacetime Unraveling?</a> <bq>Our currently fundamental classical notion of spacetime is based on Riemannian geometry, which mathematicians first discovered decades before physicists found out the significance for physics of this geometry. If the new idea is that the concept of a “space” needs to be replaced by something deeper, mathematicians have by now a long history of investigating more and more sophisticated ways of thinking about what a “space” is. That theorists are on the road to a better replacement for “space” would be more plausible if they were going down one of the directions mathematicians have found fruitful, but I don’t see that happening at all.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329" source="" author="Scott Aaronson">Quantum Computing: Between Hope and Hype</a> <bq>I’m now more optimistic than I’ve ever been that, if things continue at the current rate, either there are useful fault-tolerant QCs in the next decade, or else something surprising happens to stop that.</bq> Like climate or nuclear catastrophe. Those things won't be very surprising, though. <bq>[...] the only hope of getting a speedup from a QC is to exploit the way that QM works differently from classical probability theory — in particular, that it involves these numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive, negative, or even complex. With every quantum algorithm, what you’re trying to do is choreograph a pattern of interference where for each wrong answer, the contributions to its amplitude cancel each other out, whereas the contributions to the amplitude of the right answer reinforce each other. The trouble is, it’s only for a few practical problems that we know how to do that in a way that vastly outperforms the best known classical algorithms.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_constant" author="" source="Wikipedia">Boltzmann constant</a> <bq>The Boltzmann constant (kB or k) is the proportionality factor that relates the average relative thermal energy of particles in a gas with the thermodynamic temperature of the gas.[2] It occurs in the definitions of the kelvin (K) and the gas constant, in Planck's law of black-body radiation and Boltzmann's entropy formula, and is used in calculating thermal noise in resistors. The Boltzmann constant has dimensions of energy divided by temperature, the same as entropy and heat capacity. It is named after the Austrian scientist Ludwig Boltzmann.</bq> Every once in a while, I go down a rabbit hole and am confronted with how high-level, abstract, or superficial my knowledge of science is. I think I'm worlds ahead of most people but I'm world behind the true experts. Wikipedia will cheerily tell you that this isn't the same thing as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan–Boltzmann_law" author="" source="">Stefan–Boltzmann constant</a>, which is also known as the Stefan–Boltzmann law. I started off reading about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain" author="" source="Wikipedia">Boltzmann brain</a> thought experiment. <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <bq>Fascist Republican ex-president Donald Trump visited Valdosta, Georgia, Monday, to take in the distribution of relief supplies by a fundamentalist church. He managed to avoid the degrading scenes that accompanied his visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, where he was seen tossing rolls of paper towels to angry survivors of that storm. Democrat Kamala Harris rushed back to Washington for a photo op visit to the headquarters of FEMA, cutting short a fundraising trip to California expected to raise more than $60 million for her campaign, mainly from Silicon Valley moguls and San Francisco financiers. The White House announced that President Biden will visit North Carolina on Wednesday, although it will apparently be limited to a visit with the governor in Raleigh, the state capital, followed by a helicopter overflight of the devastated Asheville region.</bq> So, the fascist was actually in the disaster area a couple of days afterwards, where he apparently acted normally, so the WSWS must mention a time, seven years ago, when he didn't act normally. Harris, on the other hand, is in Washington. So is Biden. Biden will go tomorrow, but to the capital, not anywhere near any dirty, suffering people. <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/10/04/seaton-helene-about-last-week/" author="Jane Wise" source="WSWS">As the death toll from Hurricane Helene climbs past 200, Trump, Harris and Biden campaign among the ruins</a> <bq>On Thursday, as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris posed this week in Georgia for the cameras amid the devastation, the White House published a press release boasting, “Biden-Harris Administration Provides More Than $20 Million to Hurricane Helene Survivors.” It does not require close reading of the document to realize the Biden administration did not cough up another $20 million dollars, a paltry sum given the magnitude of the devastation, for the survivors of Helene. The $20 million is from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the “flexible, upfront funding” boasted about in the first paragraph of the release indicates it is money coming from FEMA’s budget, specifically from its Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) which was reformed in March 2024 to provide “flexible funding” directly to survivors during a crisis. The fact is, Congress cut FEMA’s request for supplemental funding when it passed a stop-gap budget bill before it left for a six-week break on Wednesday, September 26. According to a report from Politico, FEMA’s disaster relief fund is facing a $2 billion deficit by the end of September.</bq> They got $8B+ to each of Ukraine and Israel, though. I'm sure North Carolinans are delighted to hear that those wars will continue smoothly and that Israelis will get their state health care. <bq>Currently, TVA is spilling water from eight of nine dams on the Tennessee River until further notice. Water levels in some reservoirs reached their highest historic levels during Helene. Cities along the river, like Knoxville, Tennessee, were under a flood warning until Tuesday due to the amount of water moving through the system, causing high water on lakes and rivers downstream.</bq> <bq>Interstate 26 and Interstate 40 are critical routes for shipping, both west to east and north to south, Donald Maier, an associate professor of practice at the University of Tennessee’s supply chain program, told WBIR in Knoxville. Maier anticipates that the road closures will affect inventory levels at grocery stores and bulk shipments, such as lumber, as truckers would have to cover longer distances to transport goods between eastern and western areas. He also warned that the prices on consumer goods might increase by as much as 20 percent in the short term due to longer truck routes, and perhaps up to 40 percent as the effects of the dockworkers strike begins to be felt.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/10/04/seaton-helene-about-last-week/" author="Chris Seaton" source="Simple Justice">Helene, About Last Week</a> <bq>Someone referred to Helene as East Tennessee and Western North Carolina’s Katrina. I would say that’s a fair assessment. We were about as prepared for Helene as folks were for Katrina and it smacked us good and hard as a result. To be fair though, when you’re about 700 miles from the place where this fucker hit land, you’re sort of expecting it to get tuckered out before it reaches your front door. As bad as we got hit, Asheville was hit even worse. That community effectively became an island after the flooding. No power, no internet, no roads [...]</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/20/max-jones-words-you-cant-ignore/" source="Scheer Post" author="Max Jones">Words You Can’t Ignore</a> <bq>One patient, when asked by Maté, “What does the heroin do for you?” told him: “Doc, I don’t know how to tell you this exactly. It’s like when you’re three years old, sick, shivering with fever, and your mother puts you on her lap, wraps you in a warm blanket, and gives you warm chicken soup — that’s what heroin feels like.” Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal (212)</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/benetsv-thirteen02-bloodofthemartyrs/benetsv-thirteen02-bloodofthemartyrs-00-h-dir/benetsv-thirteen02-bloodofthemartyrs-00-h.html" source="Gutenberg" author="Stephen Vincent Benét">The Blood of the Martyrs</a> <bq>The truth, of course, was the truth. One taught it or one did not teach it. If one did not teach it, it hardly mattered what one did.</bq> <bq>Most people were fools, and one government was as good as another for them [...]</bq> <bq>[...] they were fools and childish—playing the childish games of conspiracy that people like Bonnard enjoyed. Could they even make a better world than the present? He doubted it extremely. And yet, he could not betray them; they had come to him, looking over their shoulders, with darkness in their eyes.</bq> <bq>The Dictator looked sharply at the General. "I thought this had been explained to Professor Malzius," he said. "Why, yes," said Professor Malzius. "I will sign any papers. I assure you I am not interested in politics—a man like myself, imagine! One state is as good as another. And I miss my tobacco—I have not smoked in five months. But, you see, one cannot be a scientist and tell lies." He looked at the two men. "What happens if I do not?" he said, in a low voice. But, looking at the Dictator, he had his answer. It was a fanatic face.</bq> <bq>He felt a last weakness—a wish that someone might know. They would not, of course; he would have died of typhoid in the castle and there would be regretful notices in the newspapers. And then he would be forgotten, except for his work, and that was as it should be. He had never thought much of martyrs—hysterical people in the main. Though he'd like Bonnard to have known about the ink; it was in the coarse vein of humor that Bonnard could not appreciate. But then, he was a peasant; Bonnard had often told him so.</bq> <bq>He raised his head and looked once more at the gray foggy sky. In a moment there would be no thought, but, while there was thought, one must remember and note. His pulse rate was lower than he would have expected and his breathing oddly even, but those were not the important things. The important thing was beyond, in the gray sky that had no country, in the stones of the earth and the feeble human spirit. The important thing was truth.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/01/utke-o01.html" author="Erik Schreiber" source="WSWS">Rapper Macklemore dropped from festival lineup for “anti-American” opposition to Gaza genocide</a> <bq>I have been in utter disbelief with how our government is showing up at this moment in history. I don’t think I’m alone.” The rapper drew a connection between the US government’s support for genocide in the Middle East and its domestic attacks on the working class. “I am outraged by the fact that we lack money for healthcare, affordable housing and education in America, yet we send billions to Israel to commit internationally recognized war crimes,” he wrote. Macklemore directly criticized the Democratic Party for its hypocrisy and warmongering. “I watch Democrats sign bills to ban semiautomatic assault rifles after another horrific school shooting takes place, then turn around and use the same ink to send those same weapons off to Israel to kill the children of Palestine,” he wrote.</bq> <bq>Macklemore’s positions are rare in his genre. Apart from him and Puerto Rican rapper Residente, few hip-hop artists have denounced the atrocities being perpetrated by Israel, the US and other imperialist powers. Chuck D, for example, the founder of the explicitly political group Public Enemy, which came to prominence in the late 1980s, has remained silent about the genocide. Worse, the rapper agreed during the summer to represent the US State Department as a “global music ambassador.” US Secretary of State, the unspeakable Antony Blinken, up to his neck in blood, is described by the media as Chuck D’s “friend.” In June, that is, eight months into the mass killing in Gaza presided over by Blinken and the White House, the rapper shamefully showed up at an event at the State Department.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/tim-walz-still-doesnt-understand" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Tim Walz Still Doesn't Understand the First Amendment</a> <bq>“‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” not only isn’t law, it’s a symbol of one of the darkest chapters in our history, when we passed the aforementioned Espionage Act of 1917 and the similarly heinous Sedition Act of 1918, punishing utterance of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” This was when Attorney General Mitchell Palmer terrorized Americans with deportations, mass arrests, even torture. “Clear and present danger” cast a shadow over expression for decades. Not until the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio, which established the current standard barring incitement to “imminent lawless action,” was America free of the stain of the case.</bq> <bq>The list of Democratic politicians either claiming ignorance of the First Amendment or openly calling for its curbing it grows by the day. Walz at least he didn’t go to law school. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during the Murthy v. Missouri digital censorship case complained the First Amendment is “hamstringing the government,” even though that’s its express purpose. John Kerry’s comments last week at the World Economic Forum about how “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to “hammering [disinformation] out of existence” was another example. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in media”) and Hillary Clinton (who said people who “engage in propaganda” might need to be “civilly or… criminally charged”) also expressed similar ideas of late.</bq> <bq>Within a year the world knew the vaccine didn’t stop infection or transmission, and that health officials had in fact concealed that the vaccines “don’t work as well as we want them and need them to work.” That exact situation is why we have a free press: to prevent the state, which like anyone else can be wrong, from having an informational monopoly in a crisis. It’s why Madison said we needed a “multiplicity of interests” to prevent the majority from imposing opinion.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/3d-cmos" source="IEEE Spectrum" author="Marko Radosavljevic">3D-Stacked CMOS Takes Moore’s Law to New Heights</a> <bq>Finally, we construct the gate. First, we remove that dummy gate we’d put in place earlier, exposing the silicon nanoribbons. We next etch away only the silicon germanium, releasing a stack of parallel silicon nanoribbons, which will be the channel regions of the transistors. We then coat the nanoribbons on all sides with a vanishingly thin layer of an insulator that has a high dielectric constant. The nanoribbon channels are so small and positioned in such a way that we can’t effectively dope them chemically as we would with a planar transistor. Instead, we use a property of the metal gates called the work function to impart the same effect. We surround the bottom nanoribbons with one metal to make a p -doped channel and the top ones with another to form an n -doped channel. Thus, the gate stacks are finished off and the two transistors are complete.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}dumb_and_mechanical.jpg" href="{att_link}dumb_and_mechanical.jpg" align="none" caption="Dumb and mechanical" scale="50%"> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://time.com/7026050/chatgpt-quit-teaching-ai-essay/" author="Victoria Livingstone" source="Time">I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT</a> <bq>In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. “It makes my writing look fancy,” one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text.</bq> They can't tell the difference. Soon, there will be no-one left who can. Those of us who continue to rage against the dying of the light are simply choosing not to go gently into that good night from which so many have never even emerged. They can't tell the difference between good writing and the pedestrian tripe generated by an LLM. They are offended that you think that you can. Even at the top of the article, they call it a "5 minute read", when they clearly meant a "five-minute read." But what they're saying is that the article is a canapé, note worth spending more than five minutes on. Perhaps. Perhaps I've seen fit already to spend more than that, simply because it made me think. And, in thinking, I wrote some of my own thoughts about what I'd read. I am, in fact. doing so right now. <bq>In a recent article on art and generative AI, author Ted Chiang put it this way: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.” Chiang also notes that the hundreds of small choices we make as writers are just as important as the initial conception. Chiang is a writer of fiction, but the logic applies equally to scholarly writing. Decisions regarding syntax, vocabulary, and other elements of style imbue a text with meaning nearly as much as the underlying research.</bq> They don't care. They don't want to be good at writing. They don't want to ever have to read anything again. They want to be highly paid and respected scientists. Just give them the piece of paper that enables that. The world has taught them that producing actual value is secondary to success. It is not intrinsic to it. So, they'll take the success without the work, without the effort, without the stress, without the humiliation of having been wrong, without the discomfort of learning, thanks very much. <bq>I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI. I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students. So I quit.</bq> <bq>With few exceptions, my students were not willing to enter those uncomfortable spaces or remain there long enough to discover the revelatory power of writing.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://blog.washi.dev/posts/binaryshield-vm-crackme/" author="Washi" source="">Solving BinaryShield VM Crackme by ra1n</a> He writes a bunch of stuff like: <bq>The first three instructions read an additional byte from the VM bytecode (the operand of the instruction). The following three instructions first read from the virtual stack pointer, then add to our virtual stack pointer, and finally store the value into some memory indexed by our operand. In other words, this is a pop instruction that pops a value from the virtual stack and puts it in a virtual register defined by the operand of our instruction. The last four instructions read the next RVA for the next opcode, advance the program counter by four bytes (the size of the next opcode RVA), and jump to it, effectively dispatching the VM to the next opcode handler.</bq> Then concludes, <bq>We know enough to start building our disassembler for this Virtual Machine.</bq> Do we know that, though? Or is it just Washi? <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/peloton/comments/1fstcp1/its_obvious_that_he_is_now_above_me_eddy_merckx/lpn410k/" author="RageAgainstTheMatxin" source="Reddit">‘It’s obvious that he is now above me’ – Eddy Merckx hails Tadej Pogačar after Worlds exhibition</a> This is from a comment, noting that Pogačar may be above Mercx but there is one above him: Bernard Hinault. <bq>Hinault won every grand tour. At the first attempt. In his first season riding any GT he did the Vuelta-Tour double. The next year he focused on the Tour which he won by 13 minutes (plus a bunch of classics) Until his crippling knee injury 8 years into his career he had never finished one without winning it. And had only DNFed one, in the lead, due to the same injury. Which years later he aggravated by pushing through the pain to win. He would return after the injury a much diminished rider. Still did the Giro-Tour double. One of his Lombardia wins he made the decisive move with 150k to go. The next year he attacked just to stay warm in a snowstorm at Liege Bastogne Liege and won by ten minutes. Then won the Giro. Later that year he won the worlds by setting tempo on the front for several hours until nobody could hold on. The next year he won Roubaix against some of the greatest classics legends ever - including "Mr. Roubaix" himself - despite weighing as much as Evenepoel. One time he got in on the bunch sprint on the champs elysees for kicks and won it in the yellow jersey. Not even his only win on the champs The day Merckx first made the statement that Hinault was on his own level, he had attacked the Giro field to drop everyone on the Stelvio, caught his teammate from the break, then paced him over the next 80k of flat with essentially no help to finish 4 and a half minutes clear of the chasing GC field. In general, it might be quicker to list races he didn't win. Yeah, he was alright. In general, Merckx was unreletingly consistent because he had to win everything no matter how small. Hinault mostly only cared about big races but in terms of highest level reached at the races he cared about I don't think anyone will ever be that dominant.</bq> This font of knowledge even answered a few follow-up questions: <bq><bq>So how do Hinault and Merckx compare then? Is there an argument for Hinault to be greater than him or is Merckx the undisputed number 1?</bq>The argument depends on what you value. For most people it will be Palmares. For a smaller group it will be the highest level of natural ability and mental strength. No one is ever going to amass the sheer numbers of wins in every major race that Merckx did, so for most he's #1.<bq>Also what do you mean with Merckx needing to everything, because he wanted to?</bq>Say It's October, you've been racing since January on the track and won, say, 40 races including GTs and several major classics plus the world championship. It's the small race where you end your season in some podunk village in a random country. Your teammate is off the front and might get a rare win. You're in a whole peloton working smoothly to catch him. But he might stay away. What do you do? Merckx would be taking the longest pulls of anyone because a win is possible god damn it. Actually, this isn't even a hypothetical, he did this often.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/oct/01/tadej-pogacar-has-delivered-an-alternative-reality-for-the-true-believers" author="Jonathan Liew" source="Guardian">Tadej Pogačar has delivered an alternative reality for the true believers</a> <bq>So first you have the tactical mind games, the theatre, the thespian flourish. But the moment itself: that comes from pure racing instinct. A little shift in the energy, the spidey sense that tells you your rivals are napping a little, and the breakaway group are beginning to cement their advantage, and now is the time, so go, just go. And the legs feel good, and the gap opens a little more easily than you were expecting, so you just keep going. Pogacar called his attack on Sunday “stupid”, but perhaps a better term for it is “mindless”: the state of flow that great athletes occasionally achieve in which their decisions are no longer entirely conscious or deliberate, where their body simply takes over.</bq> <bq>The Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, the rainbow jersey, Liège‑Bastogne‑Liège, Strade Bianche, 23 race wins in total. Beyond the bare statistics, that sense of sheer impregnability, the helplessness he engenders in his rivals, the conviction that he can win whenever he wants, however he wants.</bq> <bq>And so in many ways this is not really about Pogacar himself, a rider who has never failed a doping test, who vigorously denies ever having taken a controlled substance, who has never really come under any credible suspicion of illegality beyond simply being really, really good. Doubtless there will be accusations and aspersions flung at him, as there have been all year, as they were at the last guy, and the next guy.</bq> <bq>[...] to a soup of numbers and chemicals is really the narrowest and most boring way of appreciating him; the most boring way of appreciating sport.</bq> <bq>[...] is there still a beauty beyond corruption, a hope beyond futility, a wonder beyond cynicism, a clean break to win the world championship from 100km out?</bq> That is my kind of win. My hat's off to him. That was exciting as hell and wonderful to watch. I was wandering around Locarno at the time, watching on my phone. Technology is sometimes wonderful. <hr> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/15/tadej-pogacar-describes-stage-win-as-one-of-best-performances-on-climb-ever" author="Jeremy Whittle" source="Guardian">Tadej Pogacar describes stage win as ‘one of best performances on climb ever’</a> <bq>Pogacar suggested the growing rivalry between his team and Vingegaard’s Visma Lease-a-bike squad was fuelling innovation. “Every team is pushing each other, with technology, with nutrition, with training plans, with altitude camps. We push each other to reach new limits.”</bq> <bq>Like others, Pogacar also cited technological advancement as a key reason for higher speeds. “The bikes now are so much faster, especially the tyres. They make the biggest difference from what we had six, 10 years ago. The wheels, the aerodynamics, the frames – it’s just amazing how different the bike is now compared to five years ago.”</bq>