The greatest lie those that benefit most from capitalism ever told you is that you can’t defeat capitalism.

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

I know that people were absolutely horrible to large parts of the population based purely on identity in the United States in the 1950s. But can we also acknowledge that discussions like the half-hour interview of Erich Fromm by Mike Wallace actually happened on television?

This is a major socialist philosopher and psychologist talking to a non-adversarial journalist who actually read his book. These days, this kind of interview is relegated to a channel with subscribers in the triple digits... [More]

A 16-minute video that puts the lie to the story that LLM company have got alignment under control. It’s not really feasible without neutering the tool outright. it’s now a race to see who can “pivot”—read as: continue to boost vigorously while backing out of investment to limit financial exposure without collapsing the house of cards—to another niche.

Some Lessons from Adversarial Machine Learning by Nicholas Carlini (YouTube)

“The problem that you face is that it’s relatively easy to take a model and make it look like it’s aligned. You ask GPT-4, “how do I end... [More]”

Here are two videos of the inestimable Norman Finkelstein. The first one is just under ten minutes while the second is much longer: it starts at about 28 minutes into the 100-minute video.

'Gaza is GONE:' Prof. Norman Finkelstein on Israel's Destruction by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

“Norman Finkelstein: There’s no question in my mind what’s going to happen: Israel is going to say we’re not letting cement into Gaza. It already did that after Cast Lead. It said that Hamas will use the cement to build tunnels. ‘We’re not going to let cement in.‘ And nobody in the international community... [More]”