<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</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="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=127365" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Wer ist Friedrich Merz?</a> <bq><b>Wenn Friedrich Merz ins Bundeskanzleramt einzieht, ist dies der Hauptgewinn für die Finanzkonzerne</b>, als deren Lobbyist er jahrelang hauptberuflich tätig war, wobei sich beim „politisch-lobbyistischen Gesamtkunstwerk“ Merz nicht immer klar sagen lässt, was bei ihm überhaupt der Haupt- und was der Nebenberuf ist.</bq> <bq><b>Von 2005 bis 2014 – bis 2009 noch neben dem Bundestagsmandat – war Merz als Partner der internationalen Anwaltskanzlei Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP tätig</b> – ein Schwergewicht der Branche mit einem Jahresumsatz in Milliardenhöhe, das zu den zwanzig größten Anwaltskanzleien der Welt gehört und vor allem Wall-Street-Firmen vertritt.</bq> <bq>Friedrich Merz, der in seinen politischen Reden stets darauf hinweist, dass der Staat kein Selbstbedienungsladen sei, bekam für seine Dienste ein Honorar in Höhe von 5.000 Euro – nicht pro Monat, sondern pro Tag! Indirekt bezahlt wurde dieses „Traumhonorar“ übrigens von all den Krankenschwestern, Paketboten und Handwerkern, sprich dem Steuerzahler. Aber „fleißig“ war Merz offenbar schon. <b>So stellte er seine üppige Tagespauschale sogar für die Wochenenden in Rechnung und kam so bei 396 in Rechnung gestellten Tagen auf ein Gesamthonorar von 1.980.000 Euro.</b></bq> <bq>Über vermeintlich zu hohe Leistungen für Bürgergeldempfänger beschwert er sich noch heute. <b>Über zu hohe Honorare, die Anwälte internationaler Kanzleien dem Steuerzahler in Rechnung stellen, hat er sich indes noch nie beschwert.</b></bq> <bq>BlackRock ist nicht irgendwer, sondern der größte „Vermögensverwalter“ der Welt mit einem Anlageportfolio von mehr als zehn Billionen (ja, Billionen!) US-Dollar. <b>BlackRock ist nicht nur bei fast allen Dax-Konzernen der größte Einzelaktionär, sondern auch der größte Aktionär von Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Nestlé und vielen, vielen anderen Großkonzernen</b>, deren Interessen alles andere als gemeinnützig sind.</bq> <bq>Hier wird der Bock zum Gärtner gemacht.</bq> Die Redewendung bedeutet, dass einer Person (Bock) bestimmte Aufgaben übergeben werden, für die sie schlichtweg nicht geeignet sind. Grund dafür können fehlende Fähigkeiten oder simples Desinteresse sein. <bq><b>Es gibt wohl keinen Politiker in Deutschland, der Merz in Sachen Neoliberalismus das Wasser reichen könnte.</b></bq> <bq>war Merz beispielsweise immer einer der härtesten Gegner eines Mindestlohns, der, so Merz, Arbeitsplätze kosten und den Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschland schädigen würde. Den Kündigungsschutz wollte er abschaffen und eine 42-Stunden-Woche einführen. <b>Das Bürgergeld lehnt Merz kategorisch ab; kein Wunder, plädierte er doch früher für einen Hartz-IV-Satz in Höhe von 132 Euro pro Monat, was „ausreichend“ sei.</b></bq> <bq><b>Nur wenn man auf Steuerzahlerkosten die Staatskassen zu einem Selbstbedienungsladen für Finanzkonzerne und deren Anwälte machen kann, hat er</b>, dessen Reichtum ja zu großen Teilen aus diesem Selbstbedienungsladen stammt, <b>keine Probleme mit dem Staat</b>. Ein Bundeskanzler, der den Staat als Selbstbedienungsladen für sich selbst und seine Auftraggeber sieht, wäre wahrlich eine schlechte Wahl.</bq> <bq><b>Mitglied der deutschen Sektion der Trilateralen Kommission.</b> Auch hier ist Friedrich Merz wohl einer der exponiertesten Politiker Deutschlands, der nicht nur die finanziellen, sondern auch die außen- und <b>sicherheitspolitischen Interessen der USA ohne Vorbehalt über die Interessen der eigenen Bürger stellt.</b></bq> <bq>Wenn ein Politiker auch nur einen Cent aus russlandnahen Kreisen kassiert, ist die mediale Aufregung groß und es wird schrill vor russischer Einflussnahme gewarnt. <b>Dass der wahrscheinlich kommende deutsche Bundeskanzler aber seinen nicht unerheblichen Reichtum durch Tätigkeiten erlangt hat, die man als nichts anderes als amerikanische Lobbyarbeit bezeichnen kann, scheint in den deutschen Medien kein Thema zu sein.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/17/the-possibility-of-a-war-against-iran/" source="CounterPunch" author="Vijay Prashad">The Possibility of a War Against Iran</a> <bq>Now, the contradictions have begun to set in. Al-Sharaa, however much he is a Western, Turkish, and Israeli creation, is nonetheless forced to respond to these continued violations of Syrian sovereignty, which he started to do in a muted manner. <b>He has asked Israel to stop attacking Syria but has also said that Syrian soil will not be used to attack Israel.</b></bq> <bq><b>The moment Israel feels that Iran has no way to retaliate against Israel, Tel Aviv—either with the United States directly or with U.S. backing—will launch a massive military attack on Iran.</b> This is not a theoretical possibility as far as Iran is concerned, but an existential reality.</bq> <bq>There is a certainty that most of the Iranian population will rally against any infringement of their sovereignty. Even if “Iran is not in a position to pick a fight with anyone,” as U.S. Secretary of State Blinken put it, <b>Iran will not collapse before the combined might of the United States and Israel. Pride in Iranian independence and defiance against a repeat of the coup of 1953 are cemented into the Iranian consciousness.</b> That is the meaning of Heydari’s statement.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-ceasefire-charade" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Ceasefire Charade</a> <bq>Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game. It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace. <b>It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the subsequent phases [of Camp David, in 1979], which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and <b>end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never honored.</b></bq> <bq>[In Oslo, 1993,] Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. <b>The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.</b></bq> <bq>Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as <b>Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/13/patrick-lawrence-the-nihilism-of-antony-blinken/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Nihilism of Antony Blinken</a> <bq>The <b>proper way to conduct an interview</b> of this kind is to assess one’s subject—honest, artful dodger, habitual liar, etc. — then determine what one is after, the universe of the exchange, then write out one’s questions. And then <b>one must remain wholly, unreservedly open to abandoning the plan in accordance with the interview subject’s replies.</b> These must be challenged at every turn when a challenge is required. <b>One may never get to most of the written questions</b>, but a willingness to deviate from one’s list is essential. Otherwise, what looks like journalism is reduced to mere presentation. Above all else, before one even sits down, one must be clear in one’s mind: I will <b>address my subject as an equal, not a supplicant in the presence of some kind of superior authority.</b> Interviews with powerful people do not work otherwise.</bq> I mentioned Eliot’s poem earlier, <i>The Hollow Men</i>, published in 1925. “We are the hollow men,” it begins. And then:<bq>We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! <b>Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass</b> Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar…</bq>A hundred years on, a century after Eliot contemplated the nihilism abroad amid the wreckage of World War I, this seems to me a remarkably cogent description of Antony Blinken and all the Antony Blinkens who have populated the Biden regime these past four years. <b>Empty, cold of heart, dry of voice, a head stuffed with straw: How could my mind not go to Eliot’s lines as I watched Blinken exit the stage?</b> <hr> Why haven't we heard anything from Kamala Harris? Well, it's because she doesn't actually have any issues that she wants to get done. She just wanted to be president. Now that she can't be president, she doesn't have anything left to do. In contrast, consider Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had a whole platform that he worked toward before he ran for president, while he ran for president, and after he was no longer running for president. He's been hammering on the same topics for fifty years. Through two election cycles, he didn't change his rhetoric at all; he was working toward his goals and the policies that he thought would be beneficial. Kamala doesn't have any of that. She's empty. She had literally no policy that she was for, that she would keep working on. She just wanted to be president. With that chance gone, she disappears. Felix said something similar in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG4oTBfC6NQ" author="Chapo Trap House" source="YouTube">Drone Bore feat. David J. Roth</a> <bq><b>Kamala can't communicate either, but for an entirely different reason, which is that she doesn't</b>---when you ask her a question about shit, Israel or anything, for that matter---she doesn't <b>know what she actually thinks.</b> We talked about it before, how like all successful politicians in America have, like, patter right? Like, when Donald Trump has nowhere to go, it's like 'jobs, the Wall, will be respected again, etc.' Even Biden in 2020 had, like, you know, 'you won't have to watch the news.' What did Kamala have that was like that, that was like an identifiable theme that she could fall back on she couldn't even explain, like, why she was doing the things that she was doing? Yeah, I think that's a combination of, like, where you've got a bad product, which is basically---she wasn't allowed to deviate from the unpopular policies of an unpopular administration and then also either over-coaching. I think in a lot of ways because <b>she did have that kind of like Teddy Ruxpin aspect</b> of just basically like just saying a line when you're done talking.</bq> Kamala's a Teddy Ruxpin. <hr> Trump is good for waking people back up. Democrats 100% go to sleep while their party is in power, letting their representatives act like Republicans the whole time without saying a word. Now that Trump’s in charge, they all feel free to talk about how bad children in cages at the border are and about fighting government censorship and maybe even their in-my-view most immoral failing: the unhinged and unfettered lust for war. Now you're going to see footage of Gaza's annihilation accompanied by a lugubrious soundtrack and a hushed voiceover, wondering how Trump could have let this happen. Instead of screaming "WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS?" (which would be warranted), I take a deep breath and say "welcome back to the fight, my friend. We have missed you." <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/20/leonard-peltier-is-coming-home/" author="" source="CounterPunch">Leonard Peltier is Coming Home!</a> <bq>President Biden granted Leonard Peltier executive clemency and commuted the remainder of his sentence. The president’s decision is the result of decades of grassroots organizing in Indian Country and the unveiling of increasing amounts of evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and constitutional violations during the prosecution of Peltier’s case.</bq> <hr> The European press often complains in an empty manner that politics in Europe is sliding rightward. Where else is it to go? The channel only goes rightward. Anything left is considered anathema. Look at France; if the roles were reversed and the left were unconstitutionally excluding the right from their rightly won position at the head of the government, then the media would be up in arms, calling for a military intervention. Instead, when the right and neoliberals do it, with curses about immigrants on their lips, there is nary a word. OK, there are <i>some</i> words but it is understood on all sides that they are just words, uttered in order to continue to pretend that anyone cares about democracy and people more than they care about money. Germany is the same: the AFD continues to grow but the communist party, the Left---they've all been nearly eliminated. Or in Ukraine: we've heard for the last two-and-a-half years that the entire regime is shot through with Nazis. They openly admit it. We continue to support them wholeheartedly, either denying that they're Nazis---all while they're declaring it openly---or saying that it doesn't really matter that much. If they had instead been Communists, not a single bullet would have been delivered to Ukraine. <hr> When someone calls me a pacifist---as if it were a naive position to take, rather than the only moral one---I wonder, "why aren't you?" Why isn't everyone a pacifist? Why do people hitch their wagons to one violent party or another, even when they have basically no skin in the game? I am not just against war, I am against <i>empire</i>, I am against <i>subjugation</i>. I am not OK with subjugation just because it's my "side" that's doing the subjugating. How spectacularly immoral is it to think it's OK just because you're pretty sure that the awful thing being done to other people that is pretty much directly benefitting you will also almost certainly never, ever happen to you? How unethical and rudderless. No better than a cockroach. And then people say things like, "well, I'd rather have the U.S. in charge than China or Russia." OMG who hurt you? Who convinced you that your own choice is <i>which</i> yoke you get around your neck and not <i>whether</i> you even get one? Have you only ever read history and reports and news published by the empire itself? The one that you just coincidentally happen to believe is the one that it would be OK to be subjugated by? What is wrong with you? How can you look at all of these horrible things that your "side" is doing and still <i>be on that side</i>? How do you end up saying things like "well, things are pretty bad over there, in the Middle East." or "there's some stuff going on" and expect yourself and your opinion to be taken seriously as an adult in society? Do you not realize how self-centered your view is? That you would sacrifice untold numbers of human beings just to make sure you don't have to wait a few extra days for an iPhone 16? Or for your pension plan to not go up as quickly as you'd like and therefore you might not be able to retire early, so that would be awful...what the fuck are you talking about? People are dying every day on the altar of Western wealth-acquisition. Your lifestyle---your well-being---depends at least in part on a machine that harvests lives from the Global South. And you can't even be against the most awful aspects of it! You can't even do the bare fucking minimum of being a human being. You just look away and tweet about the latest Joker movie, like <i>an immoral idiot</i>. From <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/we-really-are-the-bad-guys-and-this" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">We Really Are The Bad Guys And This Really Is The Evil Empire</a>, <bq>It’s like yes asshole, it’s very nice to be living in the imperial core that’s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it’s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/donald-trump-is-the-empire-unmasked" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Donald Trump Is The Empire Unmasked</a> <bq>If you were to twist my arm and force me to say something positive about <b>Donald Trump</b>, this is the sort of thing I would point to. He makes the US empire much more transparent and unhidden. He <b>removes its mask and reveals the twisted face beneath it.</b> <b>The US isn’t suddenly ruled by billionaires now that Trump is president; it was already ruled by billionaires.</b> The US isn’t suddenly an empire bent on global domination now that Trump has been sworn in; that was already the case. But you’re not supposed to just come right out and say that. Well, Trump comes right out and says it. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. <b>He puts much less effort into disguising the true nature of the US empire than other presidents.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1881398555157631157" author="Ben Norton" source="Twitter">Billionaire administration</a> <bq>US President Donald Trump invited the world's richest billionaire oligarchs to sit at the center of his inauguration. <b>Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, & Google CEO Sundar Pichai symbolically sat with Trump's cabinet picks.</b> A dozen billionaires will be in the Trump admin.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1881392501229256988" author="Max Blumenthal" source="Twitter">Mariam Adelson cuddling with the Clintons and Bidens</a> <bq>Appropriate that <b>Zionist warlord and Israeli intelligence asset Miriam Adelson is seated directly behind the former presidents of the US</b>, with a better seat for Trump’s inauguration than members of Congress</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/24/roaming-charges-manifest-destinys-child/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Manifest Destiny’s Child</a> <bq>Countries that have birthright citizenship laws, nearly all of them, including the US, are former colonies of European empires–one of our few remaining links with the post-colonial world, some of which Trump now wants to re-colonize<ol>Antiqua & Barbuda <b>Argentina</b> Azerbaijan Barbados Belize <b>Bolivia Brazil Canada</b> Chad <b>Chile</b> Costa Rica Cuba Dominica Ecuador El Salvador Fiji Grenada Guatemala Guinea-Bissau Guyana Honduras Jamaica Lesotho <b>Luxembourg Mexico</b> Nicaragua Paraguay Pakistan Panama <b>Peru</b> Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent & Grenadines Tanzania Trinidad & Tobago Tuvalu <b>United States Uruguay Venezuela</b></ol></bq> I'd noted to a colleague in a discussion about birthright-citizenship---where they were saying that Trump was absolutely crazy---that "probably" no other OECD or developed country had it. It turns out that my guess was (mostly) right. Only Canada and Luxembourg are in the "true west", whereas Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru are also relatively advanced economies---but none of them are in Europe. Only tiny Luxembourg. <bq>Trump Border Czar Tom Homan (a former Obama appointee) said that ICE arrested 308 “illegal” migrants on Trump’s first day in office. Homan didn’t say whether that was more or less than ICE arrested on Biden’s last day in office. For comparison, <b>in 2024, ICE says it made more than 146,000 arrests, which works out to around 400 per day. I write this not to minimize Trump’s opening act but to emphasize the pre-existing cruelty of Biden’s border policies.</b></bq> <bq author="Paddy Chayefsky" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_Chayefsky" source="Wikipedia">It’s not greed and ambition that makes wars–it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons, for liberation or manifest destiny, always against tyranny and always in the best interests of humanity. So far in this war, we’ve managed to butcher some 10,000,000 people in the interest of humanity. <b>The next war, it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity.</b></bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/hollywoods-dumb-scare" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Hollywood's Dumb Scare</a> <bq>[...] fallen from a great height because of a shift in priorities. Instead of focusing on making movies with mass appeal, <b>studios have been shedding audience at light speed because they got into the preaching business</b>, factory-producing films with leaden messaging. They turned Hollywood’s showcase (and Stone’s bailiwick), <b>the Oscars, into a parody event in which the world’s most ignorant and overpaid performers lecture people with real jobs about issues they know nothing about.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2025/01/17/sympathy-for-our-devils" author="Ted Rall" source="">Sympathy for Our Devils</a> <bq>It isn’t difficult to predict what will happen next. His life as he knew it before the police arrived at his home bearing a search warrant has come to an end. It is highly unlikely that he will ever be paid to draw cartoons again or, for that matter, to do anything at all. At this point, <b>his best-case scenario is that he doesn’t lose his family, makes bail so he can fight his case and is found not guilty or manages to negotiate a shorter-than-usual prison sentence.</b></bq> The law must presume you innocent. The media will not. It doesn't sell enough ad space. The accusation is the conviction. People like it that way because it's fun to hate monsters, especially when there's literally no way it could blow back on you. <bq>Perhaps it’s time to start thinking of men (who account for over 99% of those charged with possessing CSAM) who seek out this material not as monsters, but as people desperately in need of help. As Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic, told the Times: <b>“People don’t choose what arouses them—they discover it. No one grows up wanting to be a pedophile.”</b></bq> <bq>[...] the growing scientific consensus is that pedophiles are born that way. “The biological clues attached to pedophilia demonstrate that its roots are prenatal,” James Cantor, director of the Toronto Sexuality Center, said. “These are not genetic; they can be traced to specific periods of development in the womb.” It’s hard-wiring. Unlike other people, many pedophiles’ sexual attraction to young people remains frozen in time from when they too are young, rather than aging along with them.</bq> It's understood that we still have to protect children from pedophiles, regardless of <i>why</i> they're doing it. But <i>why</i> they're doing it is very important in determining a just punishment for it. Even <i>more important</i>, we can have a better chance of <i>preventing</i> it. That is, if we understand better why people do it, then we can also keep it from happening, instead of coming in at the end, after it's already happened, and sending someone to jail for life or murdering them, after they've already done their damage. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/goodbye-to-joe-biden-and-whoever" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Goodbye to Joe Biden, and Whoever Was President the Last Four Years</a> <bq><b>Klain from the start was consistently described as the central figure.</b> In the nineties he was chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore, at one time was in line to replace Rahm Emmanuel as chief of Obama’s White House, but <b>had been with Biden for so much of the last four decades they were “like an old married couple,”</b> according to Foer. A lot of the features about “Biden’s” White House, especially early on, were sourced to Klain.</bq> <bq>[...] when Republicans began nicknaming Klain the “Prime Minister,” the likely most powerful man in Washington objected, saying he was just “a staff person.” It’s hilarious to look back at these strategic puff pieces. Leibovich on the one hand gushed that Klain had a “mind-meld” with Biden, describing him as almost an “alter ego” who could “lead the White House” and “spoke for the President” and was not just a “microcosm into how the Biden White House works,” but <b>a “manager” who “keeps the trains running on time” and is “really the chief orchestrator.”</b></bq> <bq>[...] Joe Biden and “the Presidency” were separate entities, from which it can be deduced that <b>the whole surface operation of the Biden presidency was probably a crime scene.</b></bq> <hr> What do you consider when hearing an accusation? How do you determine whether you lend the accusation credence or not? Is it context? Is it the believability of the accuser? Is it the quality of the supporting evidence? Is it your preexisting beliefs about the accused? Do you even consider the system in which the accusation is made? We have a system where some entities---increasingly individuals---have so much money that can easily buy people's opinions. There are more than enough people around in dire enough financial straits and with a vanishingly small resistance to giving up whatever principles they hold to "hire" as reputation assassins. Whenever someone goes public with an accusation of sexual misconduct---usually rounded up to rape---or secret antisemitism, we often hear "why would that person lie about something like that?" Well, maybe because $50K pays off a few years of mortgage payments instead of losing the house. Or, maybe, people in society are so obsessed with being famous and in the spotlight themselves that they don't care how they get there. There's no such thing as bad publicity. This isn't to say that every accusation is false, of course. It's just that accusations with absolutely no evidence behind them are far too often taken as truth, when there is every reason to believe that it is not true. It seems like we've adopted the attitude that, the more difficult something is to prove, the less evidence we require to believe it. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/17/it-wasnt-just-flawed-forecasts-dishonesty-has-also-hurt-economists/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">It Wasn’t Just Flawed Forecasts, Dishonesty Has Also Hurt Economists</a> <bq>[...] <b>the loss of jobs and the downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers was not an unfortunate side-effect of recent trade deals, it was the point.</b></bq> <bq>While the line is “free trade,” the reality is quite different. <b>Our doctors get paid more than twice as much on average as doctors in other rich countries, pocketing more than $350 thousand a year.</b> If we got our doctors’ pay down to the average in places like France and Germany it would save us more than $100 billion a year in medical expenses ($1000 per family per year). This gap in pay persists because our “free traders” apparently had little interest in promoting free trade in physicians’ services or the services of other highly paid professionals. <b>The agenda was selective free trade. Free trade in manufactured goods, which had the predicted and actual effect of driving down the pay of manufacturing workers and non-college educated workers more generally, but preserving the protectionists barriers that sustained the high pay of highly educated workers.</b></bq> <bq>We will pay more than $650 billion this year for prescription drugs and other pharmaceutical products. We would likely pay around $150 billion if these items were sold in a free market without patent monopolies. <b>The difference of $500 billion comes to around $4,000 per family per year. If we add in the cost of patent and copyright monopolies in other areas it is almost certainly well over $1 trillion a year.</b></bq> <bq>To be clear, <b>patents and copyrights, like all forms of protectionism, serve a purpose. They provide an incentive for innovation and creative work. But they are clearly not free trade</b> and in any case, there are arguable better and cheaper ways to provide these incentives.</bq> <bq>It is also worth noting <b>the large potential gains from a collapse of our major banks. We would have instantly downsized our incredibly bloated financial system, eliminating a huge amount of waste.</b> This financial system is also the source of many of the country’s great fortunes.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/single/melania-trump-launches-a-memecoin" author="Molly White" source="We3 is Going Just Great">Melania Trump launches a memecoin of her own, tanking her husband's in the process</a> <bq>Meanwhile, some in the crypto world are reacting with horror at Trump's decisionmaking. While they hoped that Trump's administration would be crypto-friendly, <b>they did not seem to anticipate that the Trump family would openly embrace some of the ecosystem's worst parts to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense.</b></bq> I can't tell whether she's kidding. She must be kidding, right? This is obviously tongue-in-cheek, right? No-one can be surprised by this. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/20/nlcl-j20.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">US forces temporary shutdown of TikTok in major attack on First Amendment</a> <bq>He added, “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture... Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars - maybe trillions... Therefore, <b>my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture</b> set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.” Trump has invited TikTok Chief Executive Shou Chew to attend his inauguration on Monday, alongside prominent American oligarchs, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Trump has made it clear that <b>he is seeking an arrangement to enable US oligarchs, potentially including billionaire Elon Musk, to take control of a significant share of the company.</b></bq> This was always the point. Censorship is the lever that they use to plunder. <hr> Stop listening to people whose financial interests are directly contingent on you believing them. Assume that they are scamming you and let verifiable data prove otherwise. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Alexander">How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates</a> While individual IQs differ, they don't do so based on race. Your intelligence is based on your inherent ability as well as the degree to which your environment promoted development of that ability. There aren't some races that are inherently dumber than other races, in the sense that none of them will ever be high-achieving. This is patently false. Neither does it seem that mixing the genes of high-IQ individuals leads to more high-IQ individuals more than random luck would. <bq>if IQ was 100% environmental, we should expect populations’ IQ to vary based on the quality of nutrition, health care, and education that they get. Therefore, <b>because whites in the US have IQ 100, and blacks get on average worse nutrition, health care, and education than whites, we would expect them to have some lower IQ, like 85.</b></bq> <bq>Which gap in nutrition/health/education is bigger - the gap between US whites and US blacks, or the gap between US blacks and Malawian blacks? It’s the US/Malawi one, right? US whites and blacks mostly eat the same number of calories, go to the same hospitals, and attend the same schools. Meanwhile, <b>in Malawi, children still sometimes starve to death, 30% of the population is infected by parasitic worms, and only 40% of students graduate the eighth grade. So under the environmental hypothesis of IQ, we should expect Malawians to be more than 15 IQ points behind black Americans.</b> If Lynn is right and Malawi has an IQ of 60, they’re 25 IQ points behind black Americans.</bq> <bq>A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, simple retail, or writing for the New York Times. <b>A country centered around people at this level probably won’t win any space races, but it can certainly continue to exist.</b></bq> <bq>The large difference between sub-Saharan Africans in developed countries (eg the US) and in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that <b>the latter aren’t performing at their genetic peak, and that developmental interventions - again, nutrition, health care, and education - are likely to work.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoatzin" author="" source="Wikipedia">Hoatzin</a> <img src="{att_link}1080px-4_day_trip_to_la_selva_lodge_on_the_napo_river_in_the_amazon_jungle_of_e._ecuador_-_hoatzin_(opisthocomus_hoazin)_-_(26592958760).jpg" href="{att_link}1080px-4_day_trip_to_la_selva_lodge_on_the_napo_river_in_the_amazon_jungle_of_e._ecuador_-_hoatzin_(opisthocomus_hoazin)_-_(26592958760).jpg" align="none" caption="Hoatzin" scale="50%"> <bq>Der Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin), auch Schopfhuhn, Zigeunerhuhn oder Stinkvogel genannt, ist eine Vogelart, die im nördlichen Südamerika lebt. Da eine Untersuchung des Erbguts keine nähere Verwandtschaft zu anderen lebenden Vögeln zeigte, wird er einer eigenen Familie und Ordnung zugeordnet. Von allen anderen Vögeln unterscheidet sich der Hoatzin durch sein an Wiederkäuer erinnerndes Verdauungssystem und die krallenbewehrten Flügel der Jungvögel.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/uninsurable-futures" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">Uninsurable Futures</a> <bq>[...] climate change will make insurance unaffordable in large, at-risk swaths of the nation, which will create pressure on politicians in those areas, who, rather than allowing private insurance companies to accurately price risk, will take <b>increasingly desperate measures to hide the crisis in state-run “insurers of last resort” which cannot possibly pay the costs associated with the serious disasters that will occur more and more frequently</b> as climate change proceeds. This, in turn, will cause state and local politicians to run to the federal government for bailouts after expensive climate-related disasters, which will soon produce a political backlash from states less affected by climate disasters, who will <b>chafe at the demands to pay the spiraling costs of rebuilding the homes of those who live in harm’s way.</b> In this way, insurance can become the “tip of the spear” that forces our nation to confront the grim choices that climate change demands, though <b>the path to reaching this reckoning will almost certainly be the most excruciating one possible.</b> Our leaders will <b>make the hard but necessary decisions only after exhausting every other possibility.</b></bq> <bq>The two Republican Senators who pushed back on these conditions are from Florida and North Carolina, states that recently experienced devastating storms. This hints at <b>the inevitable political realignment that will drive a wedge between states more and less exposed to climate damage.</b> Mother Nature is more powerful than MAGA. The only question is how long red state Republicans will cling to <b>their insane ideology of gleeful denial before they are battered into submission by their own burned out, flooded, displaced constituents.</b></bq> <bq>Private insurers will not operate in markets where they cannot make money. Therefore <b>all future insurance in the riskiest markets will be stupidly expensive, nonexistent, or provided by the state.</b> The very rich can, if they want, rebuild their mansions in the same places and take their chances. Everyone else will either be pushed out to safer areas by the uninsurability of their old neighborhoods, or will busy themselves <b>lobbying the government to subsidize rebuilding in those old neighborhoods with fictitiously affordable insurance rates—a move that will only kick the can of managed retreat down the road at fantastic public expense.</b></bq> <bq>We can either adapt to them in panicked fits and starts, disaster by disaster, hanging onto an outdated vision of American life until reality punishes us badly enough to give it up; or, we can get to work adapting to them intelligently now, which <b>could spare millions of people from having to absorb the disasters themselves</b>, and save us trillions of dollars in the process. <b>That money can build our future, rather than constantly rebuilding our past</b> and watching it be shattered over and over again.</bq> <bq>Los Angeles, already mired in an affordable housing crisis because of a dire lack of housing supply, now faces <b>tens of thousands of people forced out of destroyed neighborhoods will must all try to secure new housing at once.</b> The rich will snap up everything on the market. Prices will get bid up and rents will rise for everyone. We will see, with vivid suffering, the consequences of having <b>a city that stubbornly maintains 72% of its space as single-family zoning</b>, despite great demand for new housing.</bq> <bq>The classic vision of the American dream—<b>the house, the yard, the driveway with a big car</b> for everyone—is going to have to go away, by necessity. It will not go quietly. <b>Americans regard these things not as temporary byproducts of a particular age of global capitalism that cannot last, but rather as human rights.</b> Much of the confounding Trumpian tendency to celebrate big trucks and more oil drilling and other things we know are bad for us is simply a child’s gut reaction to being told that we cannot have that lollipop, after all. Politically speaking, we are in the tantrum phase of the climate transition.</bq> It's not just Trumpians who do this. Please, please, please stop making this about a red/blue divide. The wealthy, liberal, coastal elites are not driving sensibly sized vehicles. They simply believe that they should be allowed to splurge because they've <i>earned it</i> in the story that they tell themselves, whereas those backwoods yokels <i>have not</i>. Do you think liberals don't live in their own homes, with big yards, four-car garages, and two SUVs in the driveway? Where do you live? <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear" source="Aeon" author="Rob Jackson">We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear</a> <bq>Water levels in the Amazon system were lower than at any time since record-keeping began more than a century ago. Air temperatures around Mamirauá topped 104°F (40°C) for days, and the absence of rain and clouds cooked Amazon waters in the sun. <b>In Lake Tefé – a tributary of, and gateway to, the western Amazon – Fleischmann measured water temperatures at an astounding 105°F (40.5°C) at depths of three to six feet.</b></bq> <bq><b>A fifth of the 1.5 billion gasoline-powered vehicles on Earth are in the US</b>, with almost one passenger vehicle per person. Europe has one vehicle for every two people, South America one for five, Asia and Africa one for every seven and 20 people, respectively. <b>If 8 billion people on Earth owned cars at the US rate, the world would have 7 billion vehicles, almost five times the number today.</b> No matter how green those new vehicles might be – electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen cars or otherwise – <b>adding 5 billion more won’t make the world more sustainable in any way.</b></bq> <bq>We recently documented <b>the rise of dangerous concentrations of benzene and NO_x gases in home kitchens and bedrooms just by flipping a single gas burner or oven on</b> – documenting levels well above health benchmarks set by the World Health Organization, Canada, and the US. The best way to eliminate this source of pollution from your home is to <b>replace your gas stove with a non-polluting induction cooktop.</b> Electric stoves emit no NOx and no benzene.</bq> <bq>A regulatory mandate, prices on carbon dioxide and methane pollution, or both, will be required to meet the climate challenge. <b>When the polluter pays nothing, climate solutions will always be more expensive than free.</b></bq> <bq>Methane is cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after its release. Because of this shorter lifetime, <b>if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities</b>, including agriculture, waste and fossil fuels – a big if – <b>methane’s concentration would return to preindustrial levels within only a decade or two.</b> That’s what I mean by ‘restoring the atmosphere’. <b>Restoring methane to preindustrial levels would save 0.5°C of warming</b> and could happen in our lifetimes.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/fire-weather" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Fire Weather</a> <bq>Beaver Lake, as I wrote at the time, is surrounded by over 35,000 oil and natural gas wells and thousands of miles of pipelines, access roads and seismic lines. The area also contains the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range, which has appropriated huge tracts of traditional territory from the native inhabitants to test weapons. <b>Giant processing plants, along with gargantuan extraction machines, including bucket wheelers that are over half a mile long and draglines that are several stories high, ravage hundreds of thousands of acres.</b> “These stygian centers of death belch sulfurous fumes, nonstop, and send fiery flares into the murky sky,” I wrote. “The air has a metallic taste. Outside the processing centers, there are vast toxic lakes known as tailings ponds, filled with billions of gallons of water and chemicals related to the oil extraction, including mercury and other heavy metals, carcinogenic hydrocarbons, arsenic and strychnine. <b>The sludge from the tailings ponds is leaching into the Athabasca River, which flows into the Mackenzie, the largest river system in Canada.”</b> Nothing in this moonscape, by the end, will support life. “The migrating birds that alight at the tailings ponds die in huge numbers,” I noted. “<b>So many birds have been killed that the Canadian government has ordered extraction companies to use noise cannons at some of the sites to scare away arriving flocks.</b> Around these hellish lakes, there is a steady boom-boom-boom from the explosive devices.” The water in much of northern Alberta is no longer safe for human consumption. <b>Drinking water has to be trucked in for the Beaver Lake reserve. Cancer and respiratory diseases are rampant.</b></bq> <bq>“Fire wants to climb,” Vaillan told me. “[W]e all know heat rises. It’s rising up into the treetops and it’s sucking in wind from underneath because it needs oxygen all the time. <b>So the fire, it’s helpful to think of it as a breathing entity. It’s pulling oxygen in from all around and rising into the architecture of the trees and so there’s this rushing chimney-like effect.</b> Where the fire is in a way happiest, most energetic, most charismatic, and dynamic is up in the treetops, and then it’s pulling in wind from down below. <b>As that heat builds, as the whole tree is engaged, you have this increasing heat and increasing wind which then builds on itself so it becomes almost a self-perpetuation machine.</b> If you have hot enough, dry enough, [and] windy enough conditions, those flames will then begin to leap from treetop to treetop.”</bq> <bq>“<b>All of us alive today have grown up in the petroleum age,” Vaillant said. “It feels normal to us the way I think people smoking on airplanes and in doctors’ waiting rooms felt normal to people in the 1950s.</b> We’re completely habituated to it, to the point that it’s invisible to us. But if you really stop and think about how petroleum is rendered and what it in fact is, it’s literally toxic at every stage of its life. From the moment it’s drawn from the ground through the incredibly polluting refining process, into our cars and where it’s burned…Petroleum will kill you in every form, whether as a liquid, as a toxic spill, as a gas, as an emission. <b>It’s strange to think that we have surrounded ourselves and persuaded ourselves that this profoundly toxic substance is an ally to us and an enabler of this wonderful lifestyle that we live that is now being compromised in measurable and visible ways by that very energy source.”</b></bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.altaonline.com/culture/cartoons/a42179654/weekly-cartoon-altatude-11-issue-22-paul-noth/" author="" source="Alta Online">Weekly Cartoon: Altatude #11 Issue 22</a> <img src="{att_link}paul_noth_-_so_i_m_guessing_we_re_in_the_placebo_group.jpg" href="{att_link}paul_noth_-_so_i_m_guessing_we_re_in_the_placebo_group.jpg" align="none" caption="Paul Noth - So I'm guessing we're in the placebo group" scale="60%"> Found in the video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQH1c-YHfnY" author="Ketamine International Journal Club and Conference" source="YouTube">49. Randomized Trial of Ketamine Masked by Surgical Anesthesia in Depressed Patients</a> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-you-would-be-a-little-touchy" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Perhaps You Would Be a Little Touchy Too</a> <bq>And then there’s <b>bipolar with “ultra-rapid cycling,”</b> the people who claim to go through multiple cycles a day, sometimes an hour. Again, this <b>has always been pretty straightforwardly not a thing, a parody of the disorder, a misconception, a fraud.</b> But I’ve now seen at least a dozen people claim to have it in the past five years, suddenly, as if there’s a new strain or something, <b>defying the etiology that’s been more or less understood for 150 years.</b> A thing that I thought I knew for sure I apparently didn’t know at all. All that is solid melts into air. If I had gone to a group session in 2005 and someone said they had “ultra-rapid cycling,” they would have been rejected by the room. People wouldn’t have tolerated it; that’s not what bipolar disorder is. <b>I could rely on people not to tolerate it. Because our diagnoses meant something, they were real. They weren’t fashion.</b> But something has changed, not something medical, not a change in diagnosis, not a change in psychiatric best practices, but a change in progressive culture. There’s been a lot of yelling by the aforementioned disability activist class, which settled in well with the ethos of the modern liberal, which is, “I’m going to accept every claim of oppression because otherwise I’ll get yelled at.” And that’s all congealed into a scenario where, in the midst of this “anti-woke” moment, it remains the case that <b>liberal people just don’t challenge claims people make about disability.</b> That’s where we’re at, with disability culture now: anything goes. Whatever any individual says goes. People with ADHD are realer and truer and more emotional and better artists and live fuller lives than everyone else? Sure. A self-diagnosis of autism not only proves that you actually have autism, but entitles you to deliver a lecture about what autism is to a parent who has exhausted themselves caring for a severely autistic person for decades? Sure. <b>Dissociative identity disorder, an extraordinarily rare condition that’s notoriously been misrepresented in popular culture and which has traditionally resulted in total debilitation, suddenly afflicts tens of thousands of photogenic and high-achieving adolescent women with TikTok accounts? Why not? Anything goes.</b> If someone makes a claim that, they say, stems from their own understanding of their disability, decent <b>people cannot challenge that claim, no matter how implausible, contrary to medical evidence, or socially irresponsible.</b></bq> <bq>[...] in the span of a decade or so, the world of psychiatric medicine and disability generally has been flooded with a uniquely aggressive form of identity politics and policed by an extremely aggressive activist class that says that <b>you have no right to object to anyone else’s “truth.” And then people change the most basic things you know about your condition</b>, and tell you that you better not object.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/best-housekeeping-yet" source="Hinternet" author="Hélène Le Goff">Best Housekeeping Yet!</a> <bq>He is forgetful about such things, especially now that ChatGPT is around to “talk” to him for as long as he likes about, e.g., <b>whether converbs and transgressive participles play overlapping roles in Chuvash, or whether Avogadro’s number is a mere convention for measurement or instead taps into something fixed and real about the nature of the external world.</b></bq> <bq>Increasingly, as we see things, <b>the foremost imperative of writing in the present moment in history is to resist the AI takeover of our ancient craft</b>, and the threat of this AI takeover is ultimately the same thing as the problem of Dead Souls we have just identified. As the networks of information circulation become ever more automated, we are going to see ever more confirmation of the truth of what is being called “Dead Internet Theory” — that is, the idea that <b>what we take to be “engagement” is nothing more than a spectral illusion.</b> Under such circumstances, <b>it is starting to seem as if the only way for us to continue to affirm our humanity to one another is to pay each other for that comfort.</b></bq> I suppose this is fine, in the sense that, if you spend all of your time writing and thinking, then someone else is going to have to spend the time creating food for you. <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvergelmir" source="Wikipedia">Hvergelmir</a> <bq>In the Poetic Edda, Hvergelmir is mentioned in a single stanza, which details that it is <b>the location where liquid from the antlers of the stag Eikþyrnir flow</b>, and that the spring, "whence all waters rise", is the source of numerous rivers.[2] The Prose Edda repeats this information and adds that the spring is located in Niflheim, that <b>it is one of the three major springs at the primary roots of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil (the other two are Urðarbrunnr and Mímisbrunnr)</b>, and that within the spring are a vast amount of snakes and the dragon Níðhöggr.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztZBH93G9KI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ztZBH93G9KI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="CinemaStix / Danny Boyd" caption="when the movie's so good, even the oscars can't ignore it"> This is a very good ten-minute examination of what made <i>Silence of the Lambs</i> so special that it won five major awards at the Oscars in 1992: Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Picture, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). Watch this video in 4K, if you can; it's lovely. <hr> TIL that alarm is <i>allarme</i> in Italian, which, if you replace the apostrophe, would be <i>all'arme</i>, which is <i>alle arme</i>, which means "to arms". Huh. <hr> I almost always write in order to record things that I want to remember having thought. In writing them, I fix these pithy fragments into the firmament of what I hope to be and to become. It's external storage that a future self can use to remember things that past selves once thought. <hr> If you're ever wondering whether someone is really interested in what you're saying, try simply breaking off the conversation at a convenient point and see if they ask for you to continue. Like, if something distracts you both, just don't continue your thought and see if they ask, 'what were you saying?' If they don't, then you were just talking for you and they honestly couldn't care less whether you ever finish the thought. Either they weren't paying attention or it interested them so little that they have no compunction to find out the ending. Don't ask me how I know this. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8cE5skIvok" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/y8cE5skIvok" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Evan Edinger" caption="I did Duolingo for 2000 days. Can I speak Spanish?"> This was a fun video by a nice guy about his experience with DuoLingo, which matches mine quite well. I don't study a single language as consistently as he does---I jump around a lot, between German, Italian, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish---but what he's saying tracks. I've finished the German and Italian tracks---I had a huge head start in those---and am almost at B2 in French. I'm in stage 2 of 3 in Chinese and stage 2 of 4 in Russian (I had a bit of a head start there as well, as I'd studied it for a couple of years long ago). <hr> <a href="https://lighthousewriters.org/sites/default/files/downloads/Braverman%20Mekong-Delta.pdf" author="Kate Braverman" source="Lighthouse Writers / Squandering the Blue, Stories">Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta</a> <bq>She was thinking about the Colombians and Bogotá and the town where Lenny said he had a house, Medellín. She was thinking they would have called her <i>gitana</i>, with her long black hair and bare feet. She could have fanned herself with handfuls of hundred-dollar bills like a green river. She could have borne sons for men crossing borders, searching for the definitive run, the one you don't return from. <b>She would dance in bars in the permanently hot nights. They would say she was intoxicated with grief and dead husbands. Sadness made her dance. When she thought about this, she laughed.</b></bq> <bq>Lenny was stretched out on the bed. The bed belonged to Bernie and Phyllis but they weren't coming back. Lenny was holding a diamond necklace out to her. <b>She wanted it more than she could remember wanting anything.</b> "I'll put it on you. Come here. Sit down. I won't touch you. Not unless you ask me. I can see you're al dressed up. Just sit near me. I'll do the clasp for you," Lenny offered. She sat down. She could feel the stones around her throat, cool, individual, like the essence of something that lives in the night. Or something more ancient, part of the fabric of the night itself. "Now you kiss me. Come on. You want to. I can tell. Kiss me. Know what this costs?" Lenny touched the necklace at her throat with his fingertips. He studied the stones. He left his fingers on her throat. "Sixty, seventy grand maybe. You can kiss me now." She turned her face toward him. <b>She opened her lips. Outside, the Santa Ana winds were startling, howling as if from a mouth. The air smelled of scorched lemons and oranges, of something delirious and intoxicated. When she closed her eyes, everything was blue.</b></bq> <hr> A good friend is skiing in the frozen Rockies (Sierra Nevadas?) right now. He sent me this lovely snow report. <bq>Officially we'll call this snow “wind whipped cream cheese with chunks of polished turtle shells” piled generously and invisibly in deep long trenches between solid sastrugi peaks. New sharp edges spread that goodness in long speedy soft turns like spreading a buttery goodness on warm toast. So fast that time is still catching up behind me. Joyful tears ahead stick in frozen droplets on my inside and my lens with impunity.</bq> I responded with a report of a more prosaic thing: my morning commute. It was very cold riding my bike through fog so thick this morning that it combined with the darkness to rob me of nearly all visibility except the thin sheen of hopefully not-ice---hopefully not like the rime that lightly covered my seat and whose melted wetness reminds me that it was definitely there and which my logical mind can't but helpfully repeatedly inform me is almost certainly on my rims and brake pads and, yes, probably the road---that is briefly illuminated by newfangled, economic, and automatically but only slowly illuminating streetlights as a I whip by, well aware that I have to ride carefully, well aware that my train is in eight minutes, well-aware that I've forgotten my helmet at home this morning, well aware that my body will barely notice the difference between 20 and 35 KPH were it to hit the pavement. Braking, braking, braking slowly, easing into the turns, breathing a sigh of relief at the last stoplight as the only distance remaining is a short and easy climb to the train station where now nothing can really go wrong. No sastrugi. <hr> <a href="https://beruhmte-zitate.de/autoren/richard-ii/" author="" source="Berühmte Zitate">Richard II. Zitate</a> From a speech to the peasants at Waltham, Essex (22 June 1381) according to Thomas Walsingham, quoted in Nigel Saul, Richard II (Yale University Press, 1999), p. 74: <bq>You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. <b>Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher.</b> For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, <b>we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal.</b> Choose now which course you want to follow.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/abuser_economy" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">The abuser economy</a> <bq>A disturbingly large volume of <b>writing and texts on sales</b> encourage you to do things that in the context of personal relationships would be considered coercive or, in an intimate context, sexual assault. <b>You're encouraged to violate consent, be relentlessly pushy and never take no for an answer, and encourage people to act against their best interests in order to make <i>you</i> happy.</b> In a word, many, many hangouts of salespeople become rooms full of the kind of creep that you would do your best to avoid at a party. While it is possible to find texts and resources on sales that don't do this, they're hard to find and even the best ones tend to be less than ideal on many fronts. <b>The worst ones essentially read like pick-up artist manuals: from subtle negging to outright coercion, all the techniques are there.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the fundamental violation of consent inherent in almost all sales is seldom addressed</b>: the salespeople in question might dress it up in nicer language or try and obfuscate, but they will very seldom be able to give an explanation of why what they're doing isn't coercive.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>the only real way of winning at SEO is so-called black hat techniques: keyword stuffing, link-buying, AI slop</b> and all of the things that Google supposedly penalises. Most of you are probably aware that Google has disintegrated into serving up mostly SEO slop, which is largely the product of these black hat techniques, which in turn means that <b>SEO professionals are overwhelmingly engaging in this shit.</b></bq> <bq>Between the sheer ubiquity of the practices and the effort put into suppressing cognitive dissonance described above, <b>people functioning in these environments wind up believing that this is simply how business is: the deeply coercive, consent-violating and harassing nature of these practices fade away</b> and become invisible. And at that point, we have a problem, because <b>participating in this culture becomes key to being accepted by the business community, and thus, for anyone working primarily business-to-business, to winning clients.</b> You have to post constantly on LinkedIn aggrandising yourself. You have to have a large email list which you consistently spam. You have to use socially comprehensible sales tactics to sell, no matter how toxic and obnoxious they are, because they're part of the social script. And <b>if you refuse to use these tactics, you will, as sure as night follows day, wind up marginalised and not allowed into the business world.</b></bq> <hr> No, you don't get to invent and scream to high heavens about a completely fictitious danger, then dump a ton of money "fixing" it, then declare the problem "fixed"---which it is, but only in the sense that it never existed in the first place. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/" source="BloombergNEF" author="Michael Liebreich">Generative AI – The Power and the Glory</a> <bq>Suddenly AI could prove mathematical theorems, make medical and materials science breakthroughs, improve weather forecasting, generate images and videos from text prompts, and <b>write better computer code than humans.</b> Boom!</bq> The last one has absolutely not happened. This is they typical unsubstantiated hyperbole with which so-called journalists nearly inevitably pepper their essays because no-one will question it---they're all so desperate to believe that a miracle is coming to make their lives worth living, to make their lives easier. These are people whose lives are already very good but they want to have them even easier. The statement "help a seasoned developer write serviceable, prototype code more quickly" is an argument you could make. "Write better code than humans who are actually not really programmers" is also true but meaningless. That's like saying "plays tennis better than someone who doesn't know how to play tennis." <bq>Nothing <b>trumpeted the dawn of the age of AI</b> more loudly than Nvidia replacing Intel last month in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.</bq> Jesus, dude. Get a grip. That NVidia has replaced Intel in the Dow speaks volumes about the loyalty than a U.S. financial index has to U.S. companies---none---and less about the hype engine that the respective firms are using. It says more about the financial markets than about technology. Number gotta go up. Intel's number's not going up. NVidia's is. Intel's out. NVidia's in. <bq>The average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) – the ratio of total power used in a data center to the power used by its servers – dropped to 1.5 in 2021 from 2.7 in 2007, with the best data centers now delivering PUEs as low as 1.1 . <b>In 2011, data centers were still using less than 2% of total US power.</b></bq> But has the power-consumption doubled? Percent is relative. Just because it has stayed stable says nothing about the actual power-consumption; it just says that the share used by data centers has not changed. This is not a difference without a distinction. Instead of just massaging numbers, you should be noting how <i>useful</i> the energy expenditure is. Is it valid to be spending 2% of our power-consumption on data centers? Or are just to assume that this is so? If 2% is useful, then why not 5% or 10%? Are we just expected to accept without question whatever percentage it happens to be, regardless of what that energy gains us? And regardless of to whom that power-consumption brings value? I suppose if the Bloomberg-adjacent benefit, then it's considered a good thing. <bq><b>The Northern Virginia data center cluster, the largest in the world at around 2.5 gigawatts, soaks up around 20% of the region’s electrical power</b>, growing In 2022, local energy provider Dominion Energy had to pause new connections for several months. <b>In Ireland, last year power consumption from data centers reached 21% of the country’s total, up from 5% in 2015</b>, prompting EirGrid, the transmission system operator to issue a moratorium on the development of new data centres in Dublin until 2028.</bq> So, some places are bearing the majority of the brunt of the power-consumption---presumably wherever the regulatory apparatus allows the most plunder. <bq><b>For AI training, latency is not an issue, so data centers can be anywhere in the world</b> with fiber connections, building permits, skills, security and data privacy. However, <b>when it comes to “inference” – using the model to answer questions – results have to be delivered to the user without latency, and that means data centers in or near cities.</b> They may look like the data centers with which we are familiar, but they will need to be larger. According to EPRI, <b>a single ChatGPT query requires around 2.9 watt-hours , compared to just 0.3 watt-hours for a Google search</b>, driving a potential order of magnitude more power demand. Even inference data centers will need to be 100MW or above.</bq> An inference query, where the answer is produced by several iterations, up to a dozen, will increase that difference by yet another order of magnitude. There are real scaling problems here; there are real questions to answer about whether this is where we think we should be investing so much power-consumption. The goal is profit for the companies running these services. So far, they're kind of good at making custom birthday cards; would you really build all of this for that? Does this business model only work temporarily until someone notices how the bang for the buck isn't there, and all of the initial investors have already cashed out early, leaving a husk of overpowered data centers and a completely unaddressed climate crisis. <bq><b>The Nvidia Blackwell B100, expected to ship by the end of this year, will draw up to 1,200W.</b> A single rack of 72 Blackwell GPUs, along with its balance of system, will draw up to 120kW – as much as 100 US or 300 European homes.</bq> <bq>A January 2024 report from the Lisbon Council noted that, “even if the predictions that data centers will soon account for 4% of global energy consumption become a reality, <b>AI is having a major impact on reducing the remaining 96% of energy consumption</b>”.</bq> It's possible that this will happen, but it's very unlikely. Claiming this as truth is very disingenuous, as it ignores <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox" source="Wikipedia">Jevon's Paradox</a>, which has always taken precedent. The paradox describes what, <bq>[...] occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.</bq> <bq>If AI helps bring forward the electrification of heating, transport and industry by a single year, that would more than offset any negative climate impact from its own relatively limited power demand.</bq> The operative word here is "If". If this technology solves what we say it will solve, then investing in it will have been worth it. This is how you describe scams, no? There is a risk inherent in the premise, which behooves us to examine it in detail and determine (A) to what degree the conclusion is actually linked to it and (B) the likelihood of it being or becoming true. At any rate, the person proposing the scam is going to win because their personal profit can be secured with temporary interest and investment and isn't at all affected by eventual failure to deliver. <bq>While all four hyperscalers say they remain committed to their net zero targets, the AI boom has made achieving those targets much harder. Their power use has more than doubled since 2020. <b>Google has seen its carbon emissions increase by 48% since 2019 and Microsoft by 29% since 2020.</b></bq> They are lying about their climate goals because there is no downside, only upside. No-one is going to hold their feet to the fire because they are actually in charge. If they want to waste a bunch of energy on stuff that makes them money but doesn't otherwise bring value---especially relative to the cost---then there are literally no mechanisms to stop them. <bq>Other SMR [Small Modular Reactor] designs could come in cheaper, but <b>I would be highly skeptical of any claim for a FOAK SMR under $180/MWh or a NOAK under $120/MWh before subsidies.</b> Application of multiple subsidies could mask the real costs for the first few plants, but when you are looking for tens of gigawatts of supply, sooner or later you have to foot the full bill.</bq> <bq><b>Firebrand British parliamentarian Tony Benn</b> knew a thing or two about power. If we want to hold our leaders to account, he suggested, we should ask the following five questions:<bq><ol>What power do you have? How did you get it? <b>In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable?</b> And how can we get rid of you?</ol></bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://huyenchip.com/2025/01/07/agents.html" source="" author="Chip Huyen">Agents</a> <bq>The <b>unprecedented capabilities of foundation models</b> have opened the door to agentic applications that were <b>previously unimaginable</b>.</bq> Fock dood---get a grip. This seems to be the standard way of discussing LLMs and agents in the mainstream press but it seems kinda try-hard, you know? The author just wrote that there's a whole field of research for this stuff, stretching back to the late 80s and 90s. The capabilities are not "unimaginable"; they've been very thoroughly imagined. No-one thought we would be seeing it so soon, maybe? There are those of us who are still not convinced that what we actually have is what we're being told we have. You can't sell a bicycle for $100K but you can if you pretend it's a rocket-ship just long enough for the money-transfer to complete. <bq>Actions that allow an agent to perceive the environment are <i>read-only actions</i>, whereas actions that allow an agent to act upon the environment are <i>write actions</i>.</bq> Are these the same as sensors and actuators, which he mentioned earlier? Is there a reason that we're italicizing such mundane concepts as if they were ground-breaking? <bq>Proper security measurements are crucial to keep you and your users safe.</bq> I think the author means "measures", and saying "this technology is inherently insecure in a nearly shockingly dodgy way, so make sure you're careful with it, kthxbye" is pretty hand-wavy and dishonest. <bq>The intent classifier should be able to classify requests as IRRELEVANT so that the agent can politely reject those instead of wasting FLOPs coming up with impossible solutions.</bq> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_second">FLOPs</a>? Like "floating-point operations per second"? What an odd way to characterize that. It kind of reminds me of how people will use bigger words to convince their audience of their expertise. <bq>While there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that LLMs are poor planners, it’s unclear whether it’s because we don’t know how to use LLMs the right way or because LLMs, fundamentally, can’t plan.</bq> Yeah. Why listen to Yann LeCun when you can just hypothesize that there's something magic in that black box instead? <bq>[...] the agent can reason that [...]</bq> The word "guess" is a better approximation of what's happening. It's not reasoning. <bq>Using more natural language helps your plan generator become robust to changes in tool APIs. If your model was trained mostly on natural language, it’ll likely be better at understanding and generating plans in natural language and less likely to hallucinate. The <b>downside of this approach is that you need a translator to translate each natural language action into executable commands.</b> Chameleon (Lu et al., 2023) calls this translator a program generator. However, <b>translating is a much simpler task than planning and can be done by weaker models with a lower risk of hallucination.</b></bq> <bq>For example, given a coding generation task, an evaluator might evaluate that the generated code fails ⅓ of the test cases. <b>The agent then reflects that it failed because it didn’t take into account arrays where all numbers are negative. The actor then generates new code, taking into account all-negative arrays.</b></bq> This is where you lose me. Who's doing this part? How? What is the mechanism for it to detect the failure? Is it writing and applying tests? Are you? If it does fail, how does it extend the context to prevent further iterations from failing in the same way? Do you feed the test-failure messages in? Along with the tests? And then just trust in Jesus Christ our Lord that another try will be better? Are we seriously just gambling for everything now? <bq>Thoughts, observations, and sometimes actions can take a lot of tokens to generate, which increases cost and user-perceived latency, especially for tasks with many intermediate steps. To nudge their agents to follow the format, both ReAct and Reflexion authors used plenty of examples in their prompts. <b>This increases the cost of computing input tokens and reduces the context space available for other information.</b></bq> And now consider that inference and iteration is the future, which means that you're doing all of this a dozen times, each time with the context extended by the results from the prior iteration. All of this has to be extremely high-powered because the latency in the current technology is already pushing people's patience---an order of magnitude more latency is going to be too much for most. <hr> <a href="https://addyo.substack.com/p/ai-driven-prototyping-v0-bolt-and" source="Substack" author="Addy Osmani">AI-Driven Prototyping: v0, Bolt, and Lovable Compared</a> <bq>The need to eventually “export” or “eject”: Bootstrapping tools are excellent at helping you get to an MVP more quickly than before, but suffer from what I’ve written about in the 70% problem . <b>You will likely hit a complexity threshold where shifting to editing code locally (whether it’s manually with a traditional editor or an AI-enhanced one like Cursor/Cline/Windsurf) will be necessary.</b></bq> <hr> We were never going to be able to stop people from using LLMs to do their work for them, even if it's patently incapable of doing that work reliably. Most people are also patently incapable of doing their work reliably, so no-one notice. Young people don't like homework; they never have. Teachers don't enjoy grading the work; they never have. Now, there's a tool that will allow everyone to pretend that they're partaking in the learning process much more efficiently, freeing up time to learn new dance moves from TikTok. When innovation and progress grind to a halt, the best we'll manage is an "I told you so, but you wouldn't listen." <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/18/lessons-from-red-teaming/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Lessons From Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products</a> <bq>Tucked away in the paper is this note, which I think represents the core idea necessary to understand why prompt injection is such an insipid threat: <b>Due to fundamental limitations of language models, one must assume that if an LLM is supplied with untrusted input, it will produce arbitrary output.</b> When you're building software against an LLM you need to assume that anyone who can control more than a few sentences of input to that model <b>can cause it to output anything they like - including tool calls or other data exfiltration vectors.</b> Design accordingly.</bq> <iq>Design accordingly.</iq> aka "the car we sold you tends to veer unexpectedly off of cliffs. Drive carefully." <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/anthropic-chief-says-ai-could-surpass-almost-all-humans-at-almost-everything-shortly-after-2027/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027</a> <bq>On Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities "in almost everything" within two to three years, <b>according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.</b> Speaking at Journal House in Davos, Amodei said, <b>"I don't know exactly when it'll come, I don't know if it'll be 2027. I think it's plausible it could be longer than that.</b> I don't think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then <b>eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics.</b>"</bq> This is not news. This is not information. This is word salad. Just stop. I hate everything about this. Benj Edwards: you're better than this. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with-americas-best-reasoning-ai-models/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download</a> <bq>The R1 model works differently from typical large language models (LLMs) by <b>incorporating what people in the industry call an inference-time reasoning approach</b>. They attempt to simulate a human-like chain of thought as the model works through a solution to the query. This class of what one might call "simulated reasoning" models, or SR models for short, emerged when OpenAI debuted its o1 model family in September 2024.</bq> <bq>[...] Dean Ball, an AI researcher at George Mason University, wrote on X, "The impressive performance of DeepSeek's distilled models (smaller versions of r1) means that <b>very capable reasoners will continue to proliferate widely and be runnable on local hardware, far from the eyes of any top-down control regime.</b>"</bq> This is very good news. This is a model with open weights, with an MIT license, that can be run on local hardware without limitation. The larger version apparently has guardrails but those can almost certainly be easily evaded or removed. This is much better than reporting bullshit from billionaires and trillion-dollar companies. <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/22/trading-inference-time-compute/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Trading Inference-Time Compute for Adversarial Robustness</a> This is a fancy-sounding title that could also have been written as "Putting in the extra work to make software less hackable." This sounds like Spectre and Meltdown, where side-channel attacks on branch-prediction units would have forced vendors to remove optimizations that would increased speed by 30-40% Did you notice your computer slow down by 30-40%? No? It's because they largely left it unpatched in existing processors and decided to address it in different architectures going forward. <bq>We find that across a variety of attacks, increased inference-time compute leads to improved robustness. In many cases (with important exceptions), the fraction of model samples where the attack succeeds tends to zero as the amount of test-time compute grows.</bq> The report discusses how models---already relatively high-latency---would be nearly unusably slow if they were to use extra compute-time to attempt to mitigate prompt-injection attacks. Why is this more important than ever? Because we're now being inundated with the message of "hey, you know that thing that's really good at making gaudy birthday cards and spam mails but isn't so hot at generating anything that would support societally valuable activity? Yeah, we think that the real value lies in letting that thing loose on your user accounts to do stuff for you." <bq>Ensuring that agentic models function reliably when browsing the web, sending emails, or uploading code to repositories can be seen as analogous to ensuring that self-driving cars drive without accidents.</bq> Yeah, no kidding. Prompt-injection isn't solved. Not even close. In typical fashion, people are overwhelmed by the din of AI hype. The purveyors of AI hype are already incredibly wealthy but want to become even more so, vacuuming up short-term profit from sources that can ill-afford it. The media---which also understands nothing, mostly because, as Oscar Wilde once said, <iq>their salaries depend on it</iq>---either don't know that there are grave security risks associated with AI or have just put their hands over their ears while they sing LALALA. Even the study that Willison cites posits conditions that are nothing like real-world conditions, akin to the perfectly spherical cow on a perfectly flat, frictionless field in physics, or <i>homo economicus</i> in modern economics. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2025/01/15/is-memory64-actually-worth-using.html" source="Spider Monkey" author="Ben Visness">Is Memory64 actually worth using?</a> <bq>[...] <b>address space is cheap on 64-bit devices.</b> If you like, you can <i>reserve</i> 4GB of address space from the operating system to ensure that it remains free for later use. <b>Even if most of that memory is never used, this will have little to no impact on most systems.</b> How do browsers take advantage of this fact? <b>By reserving 4GB of memory for every single WebAssembly module.</b> In our first example, we declared a 32-bit memory with a size of 64KB. But if you run this example on a 64-bit operating system, the browser will actually reserve 4GB of memory. The first 64KB of this 4GB block will be read-write, and the remaining 3.9999GB will be reserved but inaccessible. By reserving 4GB of memory for all 32-bit WebAssembly modules, <b>it is impossible to go out of bounds.</b> The largest possible pointer value, 2^32-1, will simply land inside the reserved region of memory and trap. This means that, when running 32-bit wasm on a 64-bit system, <b>we can omit all bounds checks entirely.</b> <b>This optimization is impossible for Memory64.</b> The size of the WebAssembly address space is the same as the size of the host address space. Therefore, <b>we must pay the cost of bounds checks on every access, and as a result, Memory64 is slower.</b></bq> <hr> When you have warnings as error set, it’s as if you’re forcing people to wash their dishes while they’re still eating their meal. When you have warnings as errors set, and the runtime changes, you’re basically just waiting for the runtime lottery to choose the person that’s going to have to make those fixes so they can continue working. It may be the wrong person in your team who’s going to choose the quickest way to get compiling again rather than the best way to incorporate the new errors and warnings and inspections. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLoTReccvPw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/sLoTReccvPw" caption="The Fix For Your Database Performance Issues in .NET" author="Nick Chapsas" source="YouTube" width="560px"> Nick discusses the <a href="https://github.com/BuriedStPatrick/delta-net8.0-support" source="GitHub">Delta</a> package, which you can hook into your web-server APIs to automatically improve caching. As documented in the package's documentation, it assumes, <bq><ul>Frequency of updates to data is relatively low compared to reads Using either SQL Server Change Tracking and/or SQL Server Row Versioning</ul></bq> It includes an extra column in your data tables called <c>ETAG</c> that encapsulates a time-stamp-based version. It also hooks your SQL connection to determine whether the results of a query have been cached and returns a 304 with the cached results instead of re-calculating needlessly. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNXEORSk4GU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/DNXEORSk4GU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kevin Powell" caption="CSS Popover + Anchor Positioning is Magical"> This example uses <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_anchor_positioning" source="MDN">CSS anchor positioning</a>, <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/position-try" author="" source="MDN">position-try</a> and <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:popover-open" author="" source="MDN">:popover-open</a>. You can use <c>position-try</c> to direct the browser to adjust the appearance of the popover when there isn't enough "space" on-screen at its default position. You can also animate everything. <img src="{att_link}popover_menu.jpg" href="{att_link}popover_menu.jpg" align="none" caption="Popover menu" scale="50%"> <code><macro convert="-all">.user-button { padding: 0; border-radius: 100vw; aspect-ratio: 1; <hl>anchor-name: --profile-button;</hl> } .profile-menu { <hl>position: absolute; position-anchor: --profile-button top: anchor (bottom) ; right: anchor(right);</hl> margin: 0; inset: auto; margin-block-start: 6px; } <hl>.profile-menu:popover-open { display: grid; }</hl> @position-try --bottom { inset: unset; top: anchor(bottom); right: anchor(right); }<macro convert="+all"></code> The article <a href="https://fullystacked.net/portal/" author="Ollie Williams" source="Fully Stacked">Do JavaScript frameworks still need portals?</a> explains a bit more about the relationship between <c>dialog</c>, <c>popover</c>, and <c>anchor</c> as well as how these elements have made "portal" support in frameworks obsolete. <h id="fun">Fun</h> Have you heard about the U.S. ban of TikTok? The U.S. natives are fleeing to other Chinese services ... instead of back to Instagram or Threads or Twitter or BlueSky or ... whatever. One of these Chinese services is called RedNote. Some of the people are welcoming. Others are not as enthusiastic to see so many videos of Americans. <img src="{att_link}shake_arm_fat_like_country_flag.webp" href="{att_link}shake_arm_fat_like_country_flag.webp" align="none" caption="Slut virus most strong. Im not approve." scale="75%"> <h id="games">Video Games</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGFuaVUI6_E" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/FGFuaVUI6_E" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bethesda Softworks" caption="DOOM: The Dark Ages | Developer_Direct 2025 (4K) | Coming May 15, 2025"> This would be right in my wheelhouse if I were still prioritizing video games.