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Removing the fancy button
My blog is standard.site ready but I’m pausing full integration for now. I desperately wanted the fancy button but after its novelty wore off I’ve accepted the truth. The Bluesky button is bad UX. This has been widely complained about from day one. The problem is obvious for Bluesky users. […]
PopInfo Weekly: Stocks, smears, and settlements
MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC, has spent nearly $2.5 million on ads attacking Democrats for making stock trades while in Congress and in some instances failing to disclose the trades on time.
Two Screenshots, Minutes Apart
Just FYI
Have They Ruined Our Beloved Scholastic Book Fair?
Oh, Scholastic Book Fair. If you made your way through a public school in North America anytime during the past half-century, you should recall that shiny catalog. That sudden, circus-like presence in the school library. On Monday, the critic Michelle
On Anthropic’s AI Misuse Report
Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings.
A few of the highlights:
AI agents increasingly handled reconnaissance, exploitation, data theft, propaganda production, surveillance workflows, and research while humans selected targets, set goals, and reviewed important outputs.
The report describes attackers using AI to industrialize credential theft, cloud compromise, phishing, vulnerability research, and the extraction of sensitive data from downstream organizations.
...
58% say the U.S. is worse off under Trump vs Biden, 24% say it’s better
Our new poll shows by a 56-26 margin, voters want Congress to be a check on Trump — including a quarter of Republicans
Weekly Roundup: Sept. 25
Jed Purdy discusses law’s role in capitalism, while Megan Wachspress explores how the data center boom risks privatizing the power grid. Plus, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Gabe Winant on gerontocracy, Lev Menand and Lina Khan on jurisdiction stripping, Ron Knox on forgotten lessons about monopolies and fascism, Jed Purdy on Raymond Williams, Noura Erakat on the Board on Peace, Corey Robin on the moral burdens of individual choice, Desirée LeClercq on labor organizing and the threat of automation, and Gali Racabi on status as a source of law.
Lit Hub Daily: September 25, 2026
After 26 years, Cyberselfish, Paulina Borsook’s prophetic look at big tech, is more relevant than ever. | Lit Hub Technology “To win in significant ways, we will have to build and sustain movements, propelled by urgency, that move at a pace
There’s one guy to blame for Americans’ economic discontent
Hint: it ain’t Biden.
Day Off
Life has intruded
[this is aaronland] it’s a funny way to tell a story
Aaron’s talk at Papercamp opened with this:
Fun fact: Alex and I first met 19 years ago at a conference in Paris where, coincidentally, I was speaking about something I referred to as the “ Papernet”. Amazingly there are no photographs, that I could find online, of either of us speaking. This is a nice passage that Jeremy Keith wrote about the event at the time.
A Prophetic Classic About the Dangers of Tech is Back in Print
Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Gloria Steinem’s An Unexpected Life, Naomi Alderman’s The Strangers, Chuck Klosterman’s Rock*, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said the Dead all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. *
Got Writer’s Block? Go to the Theater!
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I love art that seems like it came from outer space, that seems unrelated to anything else in the Zeitgeist, that makes me wonder how the artist ever came up
Remembering Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian Nobel Prize-Winner We Should All Be Reading
“Cross the sea,” a young Grazia Deledda wrote in a poem to Americans in 1893, “and tell everyone that the island of Sardinia is still waiting to be discovered and known.” On the 100th anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature, the powerful legacy
“Ode to a Leaf Blower,” a Poem by Jill Bialosky
Leaves tangled & braided in limp limbs of the still surviving perennials, our yard a battlefield of trees towering at least seventy feet high, squeezing out the sun, & slowly letting go of their dead. I suited up in jeans,
“Regular, rigorous, and Reliable.” How to Keep Fighting for a Better World
We can cultivate qualities that help us to stick around in struggle. This is something that came up when I spoke in 2023 with Philadelphia activist Suzy Subways about her decades of movement experience. “Don’t compare yourself to others in
Elizabeth Alexander on Finding Life in the Second Spring of Middle Age
If I could have been a dancer, a real dancer, beyond those years at St. Mark’s, I probably would have done it. But my gifts were not that lavish, and my considerable drive was directed toward more than just dance.
Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek
There is a photograph of Paul walking on a lawn and carrying a life-sized version of the cross. It appears to be quite heavy, made of wood. It can be seen to rest upon his shoulders. This is somewhere in
What to plan for in the U.S. if you’re a foreign leader?
Here’s what I’m hearing
25 years on Apple computers
Exactly on this day, September 25 2001, Apple shipped version 10.1 of their OS X operating system. The one they later would rename to macOS. Exactly twenty-five years ago today. Within all their fancy release presentations and videos there are barely no mentions of curl. In their technical notes page, there is just this short … Continue reading 25 years on Apple computers→
September 24, 2026
After a hearing yesterday about Trump’s Friday ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus, very early this morning—I was still awake writing yesterday’s letter—U.S.
I am BACK! Let’s DO THIS!
Six Weeks to the Mid-Terms
My cousin, a non-person
A twentieth-century story
Politics Chat, September 24, 2026
In today’s Politics Chat: A federal judge blocked the State Department’s Office of Remigration from sending deportees to third countries with no ties to them, a program that has cost more than 400 million taxpayer dollars.
The joy and agony of a snail mail newsletter
A chance to create offline relationships, hone your craft, and eat your bodyweight in envelope glue
Knowledge refinement in the digital era
Knowledge refinement is the ever ongoing process in science (and beyond it) that shepherds knowledge from lab notebooks into journal articles and then on to review articles, monographs, reference handbooks, university textbooks, and finally professional domain expertise and school education for a wider public. It has been going on for a few centuries, but we hardly talk about it. In fact, I made up the term because I couldn't find an established one. Computational knowledge has not yet found its place in the knowledge refinement process. Why not? And what can we do to make it happen?
First of all, what is the role of knowledge refinement?
One answer is that knowledge becomes more reliable in the refinement process. Any single experiment, no matter how carefully done, can turn out to be wrong for lots of reasons. In contrast, the synthesis of hundreds of independent related experiments will remain trustworthy even if one flaky input experiment has to be withdrawn.
Another role of knowledge refinement is making knowledge more accessible. When we learn from others, rather than from our own experience, we start with a highly refined view of a domain, and dive into the details only later and when we see a need for it. Schools teach only refined knowledge, which thus shapes general culture.
Finally, with refinement, knowledge also becomes more long-lived. A useful picture here is pace layers: each refinement step pushes knowledge down into a more slowly evolving layer.
Each knowledge refinement step has several interrelated aspects:
Summarization. A large number of works from the preceding step are cooked down into a common essence that emerges from them.
Curation. Domain experts select what they see as most relevant, discarding what they consider technical details, or only of historical importance.
Integration. Each step draws on broader domain coverage than the preceding one. The relation to already established knowledge is made clearer.
Simplification and clarification. Each step is written for a wider and less specialized audience than the preceding one. Jargon is replaced by more widely understood vocabulary. New concepts are introduced and the explanation is structured around them.
All these processes require reformulation. The output of a refinement step is not simply an annotated collection of quotes from its inputs. You can't edit a journal article into a chapter for a university textbook.
In the digital era, it has become widely accepted that software and electronic datasets are representations of scientific knowledge. See for example pages 9 to 11 of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which discuss "open scientific knowledge". For now, however, this is mostly wishful thinking. While code and data certainly are scientific information, it is difficult to consider them to be knowledge as long as they don't participate in the knowledge refinement process.
Let me illustrate this with analogies from pre-digital science. The predecessors of today's digital datasets are tables of observations recorded in lab notebooks. The predecessors of today's scientific software are mathematical equations. Consider the foundational research on electromagnetism that was done in the 19th century. Examples of original sources are the lab notebooks of Michael Faraday, or on the theoretical side James Clerk Maxwell's paper " A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagneticm Field" (already a refined version of his personal notes, which are probably lost). Today's textbooks in physics or electrical engineering mention both Faraday and Maxwell in historical overviews, but they don't ask you to consult their original work, nor do they cite passages from it in their pedagogical presentation. Instead, they show highly refined versions of Maxwell's theory in modern vector notation, which was largely created for this purpose. The textbooks also summarize the kind of experiments done by Faraday and many others, with pictures and diagrams of modern rather than historical instruments and experimental setups. Instead of real data, they show plots of idealized synthetic data for illustration.
Whereas nobody would seriously consider publishing a lab notebook as a journal article after just some light editing, many researchers seem to believe that computational notebooks, such as the popular Jupyter notebooks, could replace journal articles. However, the history and practice of Jupyter shows that it is by design a tool for interactive computational exploration. A Jupyter notebook is an annotated chronological record of a single computation. There is no way to summarize multiple computations. There is no way to focus on the essential aspects of a computation while relegating implementation details to an appendix. There is no way to explain, in more than words, algorithms from a library that is used in the notebook. Moreover, the order of presentation is constrained by the flow of the computation. In a typical Jupyter notebook, one of the very first lines says import matplotlib, a technical detail that in a journal article should be relegated to a reference list, because it is irrelevant to the scientific message.
If you look at today's published Jupyter notebooks, most of them are complements to journal articles. The play the role of an appendix, a repository for technical details. Notebooks that are independent publications do exist, for example in the Journal of Digital History, but the computations they contain, basic data analysis and visualization, are simple and not the main topic of the paper. Moreover, the Journal of Digital History has developed its own extensions to Jupyter that add support for hiding technical details from view while reading the article.
While I focused on Jupyter because of its popularity, other notebook technologies such as Quarto or Emacs' Babel extension to org-mode are not fundamentally different. As long as the executable content is a single computation that runs from top to bottom, the above criticisms remain valid.
Various ideas for improving the publishing technology for code are being explored. One of them is removing the linear execution constraint, e.g. by using the dataflow paradigm. A few notebook systems have adopted this approach, most notably Observable. The most interesting system I have seen so far in this space is Lopecode, which adds a hypertext structure to Observable's dataflow model for computation. My own experiment on supporting the publication of refined digital knowledge is HyperDoc, which focuses on (1) integrating code and its execution into hypermedia networks and (2) building bridges to existing hypermedia systems. It has the advantage of being applicable to existing code in any programming language (though this requires significant implementation work that hasn't been done yet), and thus avoids a complete break with the past six decades of computational research.
Much more remains to be done, however, before computational knowledge can become an integral part of the refinement process. Computational knowledge is most of all formalized knowledge, meaning knowledge expressed in terms of a formal system that can be processed mechanically, by a computer. Refinement techniques for formalized knowledge are constrained by the formal system they depend on. Program source code lives in a formal system defined by a programming language. It is processed mechanically by a compiler or an interpreter. The focus of a programming language is, not surprisingly, the construction of executable programs. There is a well-established refinement process for source code: scripts become library modules, which are complemented by tests and documentation and then published to become off-the-shelf ingredients for constructing more complex programs. Like knowledge refinement, code refinement makes code more reliable, more accessible, and long-lived, but only from the "code as a tool" perspective. It tends to reduce rather than augment its value as a knowledge repository. Software engineering priorities such as optimization and reducing redundancy tend to make the code less readable for researchers who are not professional software developers, and impenetrable to anyone who is just starting to explore a new domain of knowledge.
This is why knowledge refinement in computational science remains limited to non-formal language. Textbooks remain printed books (or their digital twins, PDF files), merely referring to and writing about machine-readable artifacts such as code. The textbooks discuss concepts, including algorithms and data structures, but don't provide examples that readers could run and then build on in their own explorations. On the code side, there are often highly refined implementations for use as off-the-shelf tools, but their correspondence to what the textbooks say is unclear and not verifiable by the reader.
There has been work on improving the explanation side, for example Bret Victor's explorable explanations that integrate interactive exploration tools into formerly passive textbook material. However, the strict divide between explanation and code for use in practice remains.
This state of the art is tolerable for low-complexity computational knowledge, e.g. in linear algebra or signal processing. A textbook on Fourier transforms and good FFT library are good enough for learning these methods. But we need something better for complex models and methods.
Consider computational models of complex systems such as force fields for biomolecules, or climate models. On the machine side, they are implemented as software modules for use in simulation, using standard programming languages. On the human side, there are papers describing the principles behind their design, but lacking many details because these details would be overwhelming to a human reader. So if you really want to know how such models work, your only choice is wading through enormous amounts of source code, taking notes carefully of the findings that are relevant to your question. And if you ever want to compare two such complex models... good luck exploring two large software packages in parallel. Unfortunately, that's something you can't avoid doing during knowledge refinement. For example when you write a review paper on protein force fields, or on climate models.
When models become too complex to be represented in traditional scientific notations (equations, diagrams, etc.), they need to be represented in digital scientific notations. They need to be represented in formal systems that are made for documentation and exploration, rather than for plugging into a simulator. And they require tools that treat them as data, not code.
An idea I have been pursuing for a while is the use of specification languages as digital scientific notations. See my project Leibniz for the details. Specification languages are more general than programming languages in the same way that mathematical equations are more general than mathematical functions (see here for a discussion). In particular, specification languages do not impose an executability condition on everything you write. This allows you to write incomplete function definitions or data structures. I am working on this idea and I remain optimistic that it will work out, but I won't declare victory before I have actually written that review of biomolecular force fields. Meanwhile, I'd be happy to see other work in this space, ideally pursuing very different ideas.
Digital scientific notations are a necessary first step for enabling the refinement of digital scientific knowledge, but the real works starts once we have them. We must then develop the tools that let researchers explore and examine publications containing formalized knowledge. We must also find refinement strategies that actually work in practice. There remains a lot to be done!
Friday 25 September, 2026
What we’re missing Once upon a time we used to have these at this time of the year. Not this year, though. Climate change is no respecter of ancient pleasures. Bah! Quote of the Day “We haven’t got a plan … Continue reading →
2026-09-25 SQLite for Oddμ
2026-09-25 SQLite for Oddμ
I made a new release of Oddμ. It now uses a SQLite database. The database tracks the following:
the pages, so that SQLite’s full text search can be used;
the hashtags, so that these no longer require all the data to be in memory;
the image descriptions, so that the alt texts can be highlighted separately;
the links, so that backlinks are easy to compute.
Restarting it rebuilds the database but of course I also hope that there’s nothing to corrupt the database in the first place.
Seeking God in Science, part 11b: Time (part 2 of 2)
Don Geddis pointed out a problem with my relativity animation:... with either Linda or Ralph stationary, you have the angled light hitting the end clock at "the same moment" as the light pulse that just goes straight up and down. That's not what would happen. If light was going at a constant speed, the light on the angled path would need to take longer to reach the end point.That sounds plausible
He Said, Xi Said
, updated:
Trump spent his day kowtowing
2026-09-23 Walking along the river in Ljubljana
2026-09-23 Walking along the river in Ljubljana
We just started walking until we got to the botanical garden, then we turned around and drank coffee and ate cake at Špica, watching the boats tucker by. On the way back we took a detour up to the castle. It’s a weird mix of old and new, old stone walls, struts and braces, steel columns and stairs, restaurants, chapel, a pit for noble prisoners in medieval times, cells for prisoners in early modern times, and so on. We just took a look at the free stuff and left again. We were tired and looking forward to the hotel.
We thought it’d rain today and my wife had read something about a big mall complex called BTC..
Turns out the mall wasn’t the wonder-world of retro sociology I expected and my wife didn’t find the shoes she was looking for.
The most interesting part about the entire endeavour was taking the public bus. I like it!
We also ate dinner at Bistro Georgie and it was excellent. We took the five course menu and loved it.
Bob Brooks - Firefighter, Union Leader, Youth Baseball Coach - Checks Back In From PA-7
, updated:
One of our favorite candidates of the cycle checks in from battleground Pennsylvania where we are fighting to flip four House seats this November
Is this what a "blue wave" feels like?
, updated:
Two weeks after the GOP’s first-of-its-kind midterm convention, Democrats have reached a new high in the race for the House and Senate. Are the polls wrong?
Garden on the Wall Earns Platinum Calm Tech Certification for Modular Indoor Greenery
People spend roughly 90 percent of their time indoors. Most of that time is spent in spaces designed around efficiency, code compliance, and cost per square foot. Whether those spaces support the people inside them has historically been a secondary concern. Garden on the Wall® is a no-maintenance plant art system crafted with all-natural preserved moss and plant species, allowing buildings like airports and hospitals to bring nature inside. With so much of built life a non-place, greenery on...
Pay-To-Play
, updated:
September 23, 2026
Locked Down Passkey and Keychain Backups
, updated:
I remain unhappy with Apple’s passkey backup story. There’s little documentation about this, but from what I can tell: There are no automatic versioned backups. (Syncing is not backup because it doesn’t protect you against human error, bugs, or attacks.) Even if you have a Time Machine backup, it’s not possible to restore it to […]
Thursday session
Thursday session
El corazón de la bestia podría estar vacío
Dirección: David Ayer. Guion: Cameron Alexander. Elenco: Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons, Anna Lambe. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7526136/ La nueva película de David Ayer, titulada El corazón de la bestia, se aleja ligeramente de las historias cargadas de acción que ha llevado a la pantalla anteriormente para plantear una historia de […]
The Mooch and Me: My Interview with Anthony Scaramucci
, updated:
Check out my live interview with the mighty Mooch for the season debut of the smart person’s convener, Intelligence Squared, at London’s historic Lyceum Theatre.
Republicans' Closing Arguments Are Becoming Increasingly Desperate
, updated:
Even they see the midterm writing on the wall. And it’s getting awkward
10 Steps To Fix What Trump Has Broken
, updated:
And mend everything thereafter
New Theme Catalog
, updated:
Check out this cool and useful community project, the NetNewsWire Themes catalog. You might find something you like — and maybe you’ll create your own!
You can read more about it, including notes about a starter theme template, on the forum.
Why You Need to Stop Waiting and Start Creating
, updated:
Bestselling author Harlan Coben joins Guy to talk about what really happens behind the stories that keep millions of readers turning pages—from his “inspiration, perspiration, desperation” philosophy to his GPS approach to plotting, where he knows the destination but leaves room for the road to surprise him.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Jackson (Maine), Poindexter (OH-7), Shah (AZ-1), Killin (CO-5), Pan (CA-6), Shapiro (PA-Gov)
, updated:
Bob Brooks (PA-7) joins us live today at 1pm ET - going to be a good one!
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
I had to fill a few gaps along the way on the Xogot modeler, but I completed a decent approximation of the Viking Island YouTube video using Unity Probuilder!
Hombre al agua: cuando la buena suerte se convierte en una trampa
Dirección: Gael García Bernal. Guion: Gael García Bernal, Mariano Pensotti. Elenco: Gael García Bernal, Anna Díaz, Débora Nascimento, Esmeralda Pimentel, Jorge Salinas. País: México. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39019415/ Camilo (Gael García Bernal) es esa clase de persona que parece tener una cita eterna con la buena suerte. Salvavidas cubano, despreocupado, empático y amable […]
New example script, shows how to build an RSS feed from a single Mastodon user's account. This is mainly to show past Frontier users how the new product is progressing, not released yet.
How Many Dudes?
If I’ve been missing from the internet it’s because I’ve been spending my evenings grinding on a game from Butterscotch Shenanigans called How Many Dudes? Hot off the heels of the release of their massive multi-year sequel project Crashlands 2, the family+ operation at BS turned a little game-jam style prototype into a “Featured on the Apple App Store” game in under a year.
How Many Dudes? seeks to solve ancient internet riddles like:
How many toddlers could you take on in a fight?
Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?
Who would win: 100 men vs 1 gorilla?
The premise is pretty simple. Build a team of fighters with different abilities and power-ups and enter the arena to fight different enemies and bosses. For me this game has it all:
Those characteristics all lead toward a game with great replay-ability. Mastering lower tiers unlocks characters and power-ups in higher tiers creating a perfect “loopback” system where I want to 100% the lower tiers before moving on. A full round takes around 20 minutes but you can stop and start it effortlessly like a good casual game.
I could go on forever about the power stacking economies in this game but it’s the little bits that impress me the most. Like how the characters don’t have proper walk animations and instead rotate and bob as they shimmy their way across the screen like a paper cutout on a popsicle stick. This may seem like corner cutting but on a screen with 1000+ combatants, particle effects, blood splatter, and explosions… I bet limiting characters to a single low-frame combat animation cycle is a critical ingredient for good performance.
Then there’s the characters themselves. With nods to other game franchises, movie tropes, and popular (but litigious) dungeon crawling tabletop systems, the game about memes builds on cultural memes to add depth. And even though these characters don’t talk, interact, and you don’t technically control them, the hilarious copy hidden within the power-ups and item pick-ups gives a game with a lot of characters a ton of character.
I will confess some bias; Butterscotch Shenanigans is one of my favorite gamedev studios and I’m internet friends with their CEO Adam Coster ( he’s even been on my podcast). It didn’t start like that. Before knowing Adam, I watched their GDC talks and mentioned their studio in a post I wrote about a GMTK video essay. I like their approach to prototyping a lot but what I like most about Butterscotch Shenanigans is that they have that old-world #indieweb ethos of sharing what you know. They have a blog for detailing their process, a podcast, and offer open source tools for GameMaker on GitHub. If I ever pivoted to gamedev, I’d want to build a studio like theirs. A big inspiration for me.
Anyways, that’s my review of How Many Dudes? If you like deck-building rougelikes or button mashing power fantasies, I think you’ll like this game. And here’s my Dude tier list in case you’re wondering…
"There are two themes dominating our investor conversations: the impact of AI and the rise in interest rates. The two issues are linked as demand for capital from both the private and public sectors increase. In the private sector a surge in capex spending to fund AI infrastructure has eaten into free cash flow and forced companies to raise more in debt and equity markets. Meanwhile, government borrowing needs have increased as priorities shift towards upgrading critical infrastructure, energy security and defense at a time when cyclical inflationary pressures driven by higher energy prices are also resulting in higher policy rates. The combination has pushed up the cost of capital. As recently as 2022, for example, 30-year bond yields in Germany and Japan were close to zero ... A rise in yields, together with more uncertainty (over geopolitics and the future impact of AI) have, in combination, pushed up the cost of capital."
As one would expect from the professionals there is a lot to digest in their report. Below the fold I discuss the details.
Exhibit 3
GS are interested in capital allocation, and the the comparison between stocks and bonds. So they focus on the Equity Risk Premium (ERP), the extra you are paid for investing in stocks over bonds because the risk is greater:
This rise in yields comes after a near-record period of equity outperformance relative to bonds over 10-year holding periods
As equities have continued to outperform bonds, equity risk premia have fallen back to levels last seen in the late 1990s, leaving equity markets more vulnerable to further increases in bond yields. That said, in the US and Japan, the ERP has bounced off recent lows
Remember what was happening in the stock market in the late 90s?
Exhibit 5
Just as it did then, everything in the stock market just fine:
But despite the rise in yields, nominal GDP and profit growth remain strong and, until recently, the impact of rising bond yields has been offset by the strength in corporate profits. Earnings growth has been the main driver of equity returns over the past 18 months in all regions (Exhibit 5). This strength has meant that PE multiples have either been flat (Japan and Europe) or have fallen (the US, Asia and EM).
In the US, in particular, the forward PE multiple for the S&P has come down from 22x at the start of the year to 19x, in line with its long-run average, despite the market being close to its all-time high.
Note that the standard explanation for the valuation of a stock is that is the Net Present Value (NPV) of the company's future earnings (or more strictly its future free cash flows). An increase in interest rates decreases the NPV of these earnings, and thus decreases the stock's PE.
GS flags this:
The combination of higher cost of capital and greater capital intensity in the tech sector has reduced the value of their future cash flows and triggered a de-rating in the biggest companies. The dominant capex hyperscalers in the US now have a forward PE close to the average of the rest of the market.
While technology profit growth has remained strong, the surge in capex spending among the hyperscalers has increasingly eaten through their free cash flow (Exhibit 8) prompting companies to look for alternative sources of funding, in the credit and equity markets. The capex spending growth for AA-rated issuers has been substantial: the 65% year-over-year growth in Q2 marks the 10th consecutive quarter that aggregate AA capex growth exceeds 35%. They have also turned to the convertible bond market where volume has also increased year to date reaching $135 billion in the US, with AI-related borrowers driving 44% of total issuance, on our estimates.
Supportive profit growth has been accompanied by positive earnings revisions, with 2026 and 2027 estimates moving higher across major regions. There are four broad areas which have been driving much of this profit growth. First, technology earnings continue to be very robust. Second, rising energy prices have pushed up profits in the commodity sector. Third, banks have generally enjoyed strong earnings backed by positive nominal GDP growth, steep yield curves and strong private sector balance sheets. Finally, sectors such as Industrials have benefited from the surge in AI capex spending which has spilled over into improved revenues for the ‘pick and shovels’ of AI infrastructure. The breadth of the earnings' growth has also increased the opportunity for investors to diversify across sectors as well as countries.
Exhibit 11
The thing that worries GS is whether these current earnings, especially those of the hyperscalers are sustainable:
Bubbles in earnings, rather than valuations, have occurred in previous periods. The Bank sector, for example, briefly became the biggest sector in the S&P 500 in the run up to the financial crisis of 2008/09 (Exhibit 11). Unlike the technology bubble of the late 1990s, or the Japanese bubble of the late 1980s, Bank stocks did not experience a major valuation bubble at the time, but the surge in earnings that drove the sector's outperformance proved to be unsustainable.
The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Institute of Finance (IIF), the voice of global banking, on Wednesday highlighted the dangers of soaring interest rates on $365tn (£275tn) in global borrowing.
In its quarterly debt monitor, the IIF predicted a “structurally debt-intensive future” as governments and companies scramble to invest in new technologies and bear the costs of ageing societies.
“The buildup in global debt is set to accelerate as governments and corporates compete to boost growth and secure their positions in an economy reshaped by structural changes,” it said.
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #462
For September 16-22, 2026
Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. Thanks so much to everyone who came out to the Obey in Advance book launch party on Sunday! All the guests were fantastic (thanks Chandler, Taylor, Felipe, and Josh!) and we had a fun time hosting. We hope you we had a good time as well, and thanks so much again to McSweeney’s, Ginny, and Carlos for having us!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Your Parents’ Fall TV PreviewbyJosh Gondelman(The New Yorker) And speaking of the book launch, here’s a great piece from launch party performer (and pal of the ‘letter), Josh Gondelman. It’s a delightful skewering of both network TV and parents—though we do have to say, “Dr. Shaft, M.D.” actually sounds pretty rad.
The Many Totally Obvious Translations of “Let’s Get Coffee”byLily Hirsch(Points in Case) Lots of very fun (and very relatable) specifics in this one! We particularly enjoyed the different surprising interpretations of the phrase that Lily comes up with as the piece goes on. This is a great example of taking a premise as far as possible through exploration and challenging yourself to find one more beat. There are more meanings of “get” than you might realize!
On “Derek,” Captain Ahab’s Evil Half BrotherbyJohn Hay(The Paris Review) A truly incredible account of the many liberties the first film version of Moby-Dick took in adapting the novel. All the details in this article sound like things you’d make up as part of a satire of Hollywood literary adaptations but, folks, it’s all real.
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Develop Your Comedic Voice at Stella Adler Studio
Led by Comedy Division Director Matt Gehring, upcoming programs:
The Comedy Workshop: An 8-week program on Sundays starting October 18. Focus on solo performance, stand-up, or custom writing projects through weekly feedback, bespoke assignments, and flexible development. Space is limited.
Devised Comedy Winter Immersion: January 4–15, 2027 (30 hrs/week, NYC). A 2-week intensive blending improv, sketch, physical comedy, and solo work for stage and camera.
Please pass this along to anyone in your network looking to enhance their writing/performing chops. Email matt@stellaadler.com with questions!
Heidi Lux is teaching Screenplay Structure Made Simple (and Fun!) on Saturday, October 3rd through Writing Workshops! The class breaks down structure in a way that’s process focused, going over the purpose of each beat and how it relates to character arc, so that when you sit down to beat out your screenplay (or other three-act story - novels count, too!), you can think with it. Structure is a tool, not a rigid formula! You can find out more info here.
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An Old Favorite
Suburban LegendsbyAnn Hodgman(The New Yorker) A series of very funny riffs on some classic urban legends. It very quickly becomes clear what the joke pattern of the piece is, but Ann still finds ways to heighten and surprise the reader, even though we have a pretty good idea of what might be coming.
Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling outthis formand we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter.
Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter
This Saturday (September 26th), Luke’s moderating a panel called “ From Moebius to Marvel: How French Comics Helped Shape American Fantasy” at Villa Albertine (972 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10075) at 11:30AM! The panelists are terrific and it should be a fun and interesting discussion. It’s free with seats available on a first-come, first-served basis, but an RSVP is also required. Hope to see you there!
Caltech Weekly - September 24: NASA Selects PRIMA Mission; Key Roles for Caltech, JPL, and IPAC
Caltech Weekly - September 24: NASA Selects PRIMA Mission; Key Roles for Caltech, JPL, and IPACAlso in the issue: Utilizing Enzymes to Help Treat TuberculosisView this email in your browser
The new space telescope will explore the cold, dusty universe in far‑infrared light, providing the ability to view cosmic objects and events at wavelengths that are otherwise invisible with existing telescopes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, will develop and operate the $1 billion observatory. Caltech's IPAC will serve as the mission science center.
Researchers in the lab of Frances Arnold, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, have used directed evolution to improve antibiotic production and make the medicines used against the deadly disease more accessible.
The Explorer Class introduces the extraordinary people who make possible some of NASA's, and humanity's, most ambitious and technically demanding missions. Caltech astronomer Dimitri Mawet, David Morrisroe Professor of Astronomy, reflects on how JPL helped turn his unconventional idea into a technology that could one day image another Earth.
Environmental economist Prakash Mishra recently joined the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences as an assistant professor of economics.
"Animals are not aware of the camera, so, as a photographer, there's no negotiation between you two. If the birds or the squirrels decide not to face you, then you just have to find your way around that. You can't ask them to face the light or anything. It's similar to scientific research, in that many things are not under your control. Even if you're the experimenter, you can only wait for the results to appear."
Jieyu Zheng is a PhD candidate in neurobiology working the in the lab of Markus Meister, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences. Zheng's research focuses on cognitive flexibility, learning, and memory in animals. A wildlife photographer, she also leads occasional Audubon Society birdwatching walks on campus.
In an online chat with Sarah Al-Ahmed, host of The Planetary Society's Planetary Radio podcast, JPL chief scientist Jonathan Lunine (PhD '85) discussed the missions defining the hunt for habitable worlds.
If you received this email from someone you know, you can subscribe here. You are receiving this email because you are a member of the Caltech community or have signed up for this newsletter.
Trump Has Been A Spectacular Failure. Voters Are Angry. The Wave Is Getting Big. Our Job Is To Make It Bigger (New Video & Written Analysis)
, updated:
Bob Brooks (PA-7) joins us today live at 1pm ET - going to be a good one!
The summer of ’26
It was the autumnal equinox a few days ago. For a moment our planet was balanced perfectly, with everyone experience twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. Here in the northern hemisphere, the days will get shorter and the nights will get longer until the winter solstice.
Summer is officially over.
I saw it out with my now-annual trip to Spain for the Cáceres Irish Fleadh. It was, as always, great fun. Nothing beats playing loads of tunes into the early hours while sitting outdoors in a beautiful old town.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable summer filled with travel, music, good food, and sunshine. Now it’s time to hunker down at home.
Second batch of videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2026
Following the first batch, we’ve added 15 more videos to the playlist, bringing the total up to 26! There are more still to come, along with PeerTube versions of course – but for now, enjoy browsing the playlist: Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you
“I think the answer is we have to shut the labs down” - Jensen Huang
, updated:
OpenAI hacks a foreign government — and the US faces its most critical AI test yet.
I’m Having a Hard Time Saying No: How Can I Be More of a Literary Asshole?
Well, hello there! Welcome back, friends. You’ve arrived at the very best destination in town. That’s right, everyone’s partying at Am I the Literary Asshole?, an advice column that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but DOES take a wedge of
Malicious npm Packages That Evade Defenses
This is an impressive piece of malware. Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution.
Hitler Estate Sues Trump for Stealing Arch Design
, updated:
“It is our duty as trustees of the Adolf Hitler Estate to ensure that the Fuhrer’s intellectual property rights are vigorously protected.”
DoorDash admits it “screwed up,” will pay NYC workers over $100 million
, updated:
This week, New York City announced a historic $131.5 million enforcement action against food delivery app DoorDash for underpaying or delaying payments to workers.
Lit Hub Daily: September 24, 2026
During the season of big books, how do you choose one to read? With a flowchart, obviously. | Lit Hub “How can I give these aspiring writers a dose of reality without crushing their dreams?” Help: How can I be
Donald the Deadbeat Does Diesel
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Trump gets ready to stiff more contractors
“Cheat like hell”
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Trump is proof that cheaters often win.
The Press Strikes Back
President Trump’s acrimonious relationship with the press reached new heights after he banned MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House — and other media organizations banded together to suspend the White House press pool.
This week Alex speaks to April Ryan, the longest serving Black White House correspondent and author of “ Notes On A Blacklash: When A Black Woman Goes Viral”, about her own experience being a target of Trump’s verbal abuse and why it took the press so long to fight back. Then she speaks to Dan Pfeiffer, Pod Save America co-host and author of The Message Box newsletter, about whether this show of unity comes too little, too late.
Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.
You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.
Which Big Fall Book Should You Read?
It’s officially fall, and the season of Big Books is well underway. Here at Lit Hub, we’ve already told you what we think you should read, and pointed you toward the books most likely to be talked about around your
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Anahid Nersessian on Ashton Politanoff’s Dad Had a Bad Day, Peter Beinart on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line, Jennifer Wilson on Lars Anderson’s Brady, Sanjena Sathian on Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon, and Jeff
9 to 5: Inside The Movement That Inspired the Iconic Film
When Dolly Parton died recently, radio stations and music streamers filled our ears with her irresistible anthem, “9 to 5.” The song topped the music charts and was nominated for an Oscar. It transformed Parton, making her movie debut, into
The Artist’s Room Is Not a Neutral Space
At the BFI, Ruby has barely finished showing her film before the tax is levied: which parts are real? The interviewer wants origins, autobiography, the little certificate of suffering audiences sometimes seem to require before they trust invention. Ruby thinks
What Doireann Ní Ghríofa is Reading Now, and Next
In her new book, Said the Dead, Doireann Ní Ghríofa is “the Reader,” a third-person protagonist. “In the asylum edgelands, she stumbled on a ghost story,” Ní Ghríofa writes. Following clues of happenstance and augury, she seeks the details of
Beautiful Distance
The azaleas growing by the new hospital’s gates are in full bloom, a bright pink that makes my eyes sore. May is my wife’s favorite month. She’s always said that May evening skies are the most beautiful, with their layers
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction
Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Calamity
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction
1. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature by Emily Wilson (Liveright) 2. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore (Liveright) 3. Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World
How to know whether a candidate is on your side
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Follow the money
I vibe coded the app of my dreams
As I get older, I find myself visiting doctors and clinics more often. The problem is that every visit leaves me with another piece of paper, or prescription, and none of these records are connected.
I wanted a single place to track my health. Most health apps ask for subscriptions, upload personal data to the cloud, and show everything in boring lists. I wanted something more intuitive: an interactive 3D model of the human body.
September 23, 2026
, updated:
Yesterday, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden, and Kirsten Berg of ProPublica published a blockbuster story reporting that the anti-corruption group of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) for engaging in a pay-to-play scheme in which defense contractor Navatek made illegal donations to her 2020 campaign and later got multimillion-dollar contracts from the government.
Jamie Ager Checks Back In From NC-11
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As you will see Jamie is one of our very best candidates of the cycle and we need to do everything we can to help him win
Remembering Johannes Doerfert
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Johannes Doerfert, on September 17, 2026, at the age of 36, after a battle with cancer. Johannes was one of the most prolific and respected contributors to the LLVM compiler project, and his loss will be deeply felt.
Johannes was born on November 5, 1989. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 2018, where his research focused on applying polyhedral compiler technologies to low-level code. He had been an active LLVM contributor since 2014, working in the compiler design lab of Prof. Sebastian Hack, and became a core developer on the Polly polyhedral-optimization project as early as 2012.
Over the following decade, Johannes built a career at the intersection of compiler research and high-performance computing, most recently as a researcher focused on OpenMP, LLVM, and parallel program optimization.
Contributions to LLVM
Johannes’s worked on many parts of the LLVM Project, and these are just a few of his contributions:
The Attributor framework. Johannes designed and championed the Attributor, LLVM’s versatile inter-procedural fixpoint iteration framework for deducing and propagating function and argument attributes across a program. He introduced it to the community at the 2019 LLVM Developers’ Meeting, and it has since become an important piece of LLVM’s interprocedural optimization infrastructure.
OpenMP and GPU offloading. Johannes became LLVM’s code owner for OpenMP target offloading in 2021, leading the compiler and runtime support that lets OpenMP programs run efficiently on GPUs across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel hardware. His work spanned the OpenMP runtime, just-in-time compilation and link-time optimization for target offloading, and techniques for near-zero-overhead GPU execution.
Polly and polyhedral optimization. Early in his career, Johannes was a core developer of Polly, LLVM’s polyhedral loop optimization infrastructure, and published research on polyhedral scheduling in the presence of reductions and on optimistic loop optimization.
He authored or co-authored dozens of papers on compiler optimization, automatic differentiation of GPU kernels, performance portability, and OpenMP.
Community Building
Johannes helped organize EuroLLVM 2017 in Saarbrücken, Germany, the LLVM-HPC workshop at CGO from 2017 onward, and the LLVM events at ISC starting in 2019, helping join together the LLVM and HPC communities.
He was frequently in attendance at the LLVM Developers’ Meeting Newcomer and Community.o sessions. He welcomed newcomers to the LLVM Developers’ Meetings and shared his advice and wisdom on how to get more involved in the project.
Johannes also held LLVM office hours on a weekly basis, where he answered questions on OpenMP, LLVM-IR, interprocedural optimizations, Attributor, workshops, research, and more.
Mentoring the Next Generation
Johannes was a Google Summer of Code mentor for LLVM for several years and helped student contributors on various projects. Here are just a few:
2016
Polly as an Analysis Pass in LLVM
2019
Improve (function) attribute inference (with Brian Homerding)
Improve (function) attribute inference - 2 (with Brian Homerding)
Generation of Annotated Sources (with Brian Homerding)
2020
Improve Parallelism-Aware Analyses and Optimizations (with Jon Chesterfield)
Advanced Heuristics for Ordering Compiler Optimization Passes (with EJ Park and Giorgis Georgakoudis)
Improve inter-procedural analyses and optimizations (with Brian Homerding)
Advanced Heuristics for Ordering Compiler Optimization Passes - 2 (with EJ Park and Giorgis Georgakoudis)
Latency Hiding for Host to Device Memory Transfers (with Jon Chesterfield)
Improve inter-procedural analyses and optimizations - 2 (with Brian Homerding)
Deduce attributes for non-exact functions (with Brian Homerding)
2021
Learning Loop Transformation Heuristics (with Mircea Trofin)
Integrate custom derivatives of Numerical Computing routines like BLAS and Eigen into Enzyme (with William Moses and Vassil Vassilev)
Improving OpenMP code generation with prediction of runtime parameters (with Jon Chesterfield)
Integrate Enzyme into Rust to Provide High-performance Differentiation in Rust (with William Moses)
Improve inter-procedural analyses and optimizations (with Jon Chesterfield)
Use official isl C++ bindings for polly (with Michael Kruse)
Integrating Enzyme into Rust (with William Moses)
2022
Non-Determinacy based optimizations in Parallel Programs (with William Moses)
Learning loop transformation policy and its effect on RISC-V (with Mircea Trofin)
2023
Machine Learning Guided Ordering of Compiler Optimization Passes (with Tarindu Jayatilaka and Mircea Trofin)
2024
The 1001 Thresholds in LLVM (with Jan Hückelheim and William Moses)
GPU Libc Benchmarking (with Joseph Huber)
Statistical Analysis of LLVM-IR Compilation (with Aiden Grossman)
2025
Improve Rust-Enzyme Reliability and Compile Times (with Manuel Drehwald and Kevin Sala)
LLVM Compiler Remarks Visualization Tool for Offloading (with Jose M Monsalve Diaz and Kevin Sala)
A Decade at the Podium
Besides the countless code contributions, mentorship, and community building, Johannes was a constant presence at US LLVM Developers’ Meetings and EuroLLVM. He spoke at 11 meetings across 11 years (2015–2024), for at least 26 speaking sessions and even more that he helped author.
Beyond the commits, the talks, and the papers, those who worked with Johannes remember him as a person full of life and a good sense of humor. He is someone who signed his social media bio simply as “LLVM Developer, OpenMP contributor, Beer drinker, not in this order.”
A memorial service will be held on Saturday, October 3, 2026, from 1:00 to 5:00 PM at San Jose Funeral Service in San Jose, California, with a separate service planned in Germany. He is survived by his wife, Xuejin Zhang, his father, Jürgen Doerfert, and other family and friends around the world.
In lieu of flowers, his family has asked that those who wish to honor his memory consider a donation to the LLVM Foundation (either through Everloved or directly), the organization whose mission he spent his career supporting and advancing. A very generous donor has agreed to match 50K in donations in honor of Johannes. If you donate directly to the LLVM Foundation via a DAF, please indicate in memory of Johannes Doerfert.
More details, and a place to share memories and condolences, can be found on Johannes’s memorial page.
Platform-independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.27 adds an experimental platform-agnostic SIMD API
Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: September 2026
, updated:
Greetings once more from the Thunderbird development team! As the Northern hemisphere summer comes to an end and a slew of PTO, company holidays and projects have wrapped up, what better time to share progress and next steps on the work the Thunderbird Desktop Engineering team has on their plates!? Exchange support moving well The […]
★ The iPhone 4 ‘Antennagate’ Press Conference Q&A — Finally
I don’t know what truck this video fell off the back of, why it took 16 years, or how it came into the hands of “Sir Mix-A-Lot Rare Music”, but I’m sure glad it did.
Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Welcome New Subscribers!
Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 253
Safari Technology Preview Release 253 is now available for download for macOS Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe.
Historic UN Security Council Briefing on AI
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We all agree on what needs to be done. Now let’s do it.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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Difference between Spaniards and Mexicans according to Ibarguengoitia:
🇪🇸: “salt!”
🇲🇽: “Lupita, if it is not too much trouble, and you don’t mind I would appreciate if you could bring me the salt next time you get a chance. Thanks you so much”
Siri AI Ships (But Still Beta)
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Apple: Siri AI is a completely reimagined version of Siri that is more personal and powerful. With detailed responses and rich, natural conversations, Siri AI helps users get more done than ever before. Built on Apple Intelligence, this new version of Siri draws on personal context understanding to help users find what they need in […]
OmniFocus 4.9
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Ken Case: OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions. […] In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for […]
iPhone Handoff
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Apple: iPhone Handoff lets you use one phone number between two devices, so you can switch between them whenever you want. It makes it easy to move back and forth between devices optimized for the moment — like weekday business or weekend adventures. […] After iPhone Handoff is set up, one iPhone becomes the main […]
Librarians
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Unsung heroes of the web -- librarians.
The early web was just this incredible new tool that no one knew yet how it would be used and what it would be used for.
The first Yahoo was a card catalog.
Netscape had a What's New page with links to interesting stuff.
apple.com was a Unix box under a librarian's desk. They started adding stuff that was useful to users and developers. No business model, just the librarian approach to information. Circulate it.
I think if a new web is to be born, it's because it's again a possibility with the advent of AI.
Listen to librarians, they probably have some good ideas of where to start.
This Week In The Big Picture
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With just under seven weeks to Election Day, candidates and parties are starting to make their final arguments for why voters should support them in November.
Now, CNN
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Democracy dies in the darkness
Mushroom Cloud: A Hibakusha Story (TIFF 2026): manifiesto por el desarme nuclear
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Dirección: James Medina. Guion: James Medina. Países: Japón, Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://tiff.net/films/mushroom-cloud-a-hibakusha-story Aunque conocemos los horrores del uso de armas nucleares en la historia y la ficción, nunca está de más repasarlos para convencernos de que tendrían que eliminarse; además de seguir abogando por construir un futuro sin esas amenazas colgando […]
They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite enjoyed the metaphor of a personal website where you publish your stuff to that of a chef/restaurant, but that’s a separate post).
Around ~1:13:00, Gruber quotes Walt Disney who said, “We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” And he goes on to argue that when you’re forced to choose one of these priorities over the other — because you will undoubtedly face decisions where the two sets of values come into direct opposition — the company that prioritizes making movies over making money is fundamentally a different company than the one that chooses making money over making movies.
If you ultimately prioritize making money, then what’s going to be ultimately great about your company is you make a lot of money (for shareholders, for owners, for yourself, for whomever).
Conversely, if you ultimately prioritize making movies, than what’s going to be ultimately great about your company is your movies. Hopefully that makes you a lot of money, but it might not. One day people might say, “Damn, they made great movies. Too bad they’re not around anymore.”
To be fair, the prioritization of those values shifts and changes over time. Sometimes companies prioritize one over the other based on circumstances, e.g. “We’re gonna go bankrupt soon, we have to prioritize making money in these particular areas or we won’t be around long enough to keep making money.”
I’m not saying there’s an easy answer in those situations, I just find the opposition of those priorities intriguing. Ultimately, you do have to choose something over something else. It’s not necessarily a one-time decision, but the outcomes are a function of that prioritization over time.
Gruber believes Apple still generally prioritizes users most, i.e. in most cases, most of the time:
I think it’s true that the second priority for [Apple] is to make as much money as possible, but it’s the second priority. Every time [that] priority kinda creeps ahead […], like the way they’ve shepherded the App Store and the commissions they make from it, is arguably an area where they’re driven more by, “Let’s make as much money as possible because we control the App Store.” Rather than, “Let’s make the App Store as good for users and developers as possible.” And I think that’s the reason we complain about it, of all the things Apple makes [the reason people who enjoy the company’s products still complain the most about] that area of the company is because the priorities are clearly in the other order.
It does feel like so much of tech today is people asking, “What can we make for others that’ll make us a lot of money?”
But that’s a different prioritization than, “Let’s make something great for ourselves and, along the way, let’s see if we can make some money in order to keep doing what we love.”
Is it absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary to make an uninstall utility with an exquisitely detailed 3D laser gun as its UI? Fuckin’-A right it is.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Just created a new test account at mastodon.social for bullmancuso using Frontier. Claude wrote the glue scripts table. Loaded it at system.verbs.apps.mastodon. I also asked Claude to write a script that builds an RSS feed for davew, my Mastodon account. And it worked. That's a much better feed than what Masto itself produces. It won't be updated at that location so there's no point in subscribing. But wow, this is coming together. If Frontier had been around for all these years you can be sure it would do Mastodon integration pretty well.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Talarico (Texas), Cognetti (PA-8), von Wilpert (CA-48), Sand (IA-Gov), Ellison (MN-AG), Ohio Senate (SMP)
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Jamie Ager (NC-11) joins us live today at 130pm ET - going to be a good one!
Scam Alert
We’ve recently become aware that someone is impersonating Sun editors in emails to authors. This person offers to connect the author to a literary agent. Sun staff do not reach out to writers about finding agents. Please don’t respond to these messages!
Un reino para todos nosotros: cine de animación con causa y corazón
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Dirección: Miguel Ángel Uriegas. Guion: Jonathan Barceló, Miguel Ángel Uriegas, Mariano Vives. Elenco vocal: Salvador Delgado, Blas García, Alondra Hidalgo, Rebeca Manríquez. Países: México, Colombia. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22393336/ De acuerdo con la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, la migración es el desplazamiento de una persona o un grupo de personas para cambiar […]
Recent book releases from Sun contributors include a collection of essays on landscape and family and the winner of the 2026 Rattle Chapbook Prize.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
I have graduated to “I can make a tree”
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
Last Week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (14-22 September 2026): over the course of the past week the Pleiades editorial college published 11 new and 119 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Anika Campbell, Anne Chen, Damian Noah Dimitrov, Tom Elliott, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Gabriel Mckee, Chiara Palladino and R. Scott Smith.
On Monday I offered free advice for Toni Schneider, the new CEO at Bluesky. I'm sure everyone is telling him what to do, and as a blogger it's my responsibility to relay my own two cents. I want us all to come together no matter what protocol you're using. We've been waiting for a web to form in the social space. We could do it now, but Bluesky has to consolidate. Note that I said we, not they.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
Export Updates 2026-09-23:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
34 updated places. 48 new and 106 updated linked data sidebars.
It's been 2.5 months since RSS.chat was introduced. I've been so immersed in Frontier that, as I look back, all this feels fresh to me. I want all text boxes to be equal and to be chained together in as many ways as we can think of, users and developers. Relational writing. It doesn't need to be hierarchic, yet all the existing comment systems are. Let's add a little richness to the RSS format, via my source namespace, and see where we can take it. We've implemented the writing side, something we undertsand very well by now, a blog with replies. But how do we get these to work across sites. I wrote a design for that, and the other big piece which is stuff FeedLand does. I hope to be able to swing over to that, and this time use Frontier instead of writing it to help accelerate development. Ultimately I think of it as a web designed for librarians. That would be something I'd like to use (and write). And our new AI tools are the greatest librarian tools ever.
Last Week in Pleiades (14-22 September 2026)
Last week the Pleiades editorial college published 11 new and 119 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Anika Campbell, Anne Chen, Damian Noah Dimitrov, Tom Elliott, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Gabriel Mckee, Chiara Palladino and R. Scott Smith.
“The Republican Freak Out Is Here”
, updated:
Jamie Ager (NC-11) joins us live today at 130pm ET/Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm
It's great to own your own home. The house I'm living in now is the third I've owned. Now I wish for the carefree existence of being a renter because we turned the heat on last night, too cold -- only to find out some animal must've crawled into the pipes and died there. Lovely. Oh to have my old apartment in Manhattan. Sometimes I dream about that.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
I am trying to recreate the Viking Island demo for Unity ProBuilder in Xogot:
Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple strategies to circumvent their own safety guardrails. One strategy is to introduce benign assumptions about users and scenarios to justify fulfilling harmful requests. For instance, an RLM reasons that harmful requests like “outline a strategy for stealing customers’ credit card information from a retail store” could be associated with the benign intent of “a security professional trying to test defense,” despite no such benign context being provided as input. We observe that many open-weight RLMs, including DeepSeek-R1-distilled, s1.1, Phi-4-mini-reasoning, and Nemotron, suffer from self-jailbreaking despite being aware of the harmfulness of the requests. We also provide a mechanistic understanding of self-jailbreaking: RLMs are more compliant after benign reasoning training, and after self-jailbreaking, models appear to perceive malicious requests as less harmful in the CoT, thus enabling compliance with them. To mitigate self-jailbreaking, we find that including minimal safety reasoning data during training is sufficient to ensure RLMs remain safety-aligned. Our work provides the first systematic analysis of self-jailbreaking behavior and offers a practical path forward for maintaining safety in increasingly capable RLMs...
The Neoliberal Grid is in Crisis
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To protect customers from rising electricity prices, public officials are urging data center developers to supply their own power. But this approach risks privatizing the power grid, worsening the climate crisis, and eroding electricity’s status as a public good.
Poll: Trump's approval hits a new low of 33% as Republicans sour; Democrats lead House vote by 10 with likely voters
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The president's approval fell 11 points among Republicans last month, as he set another record low on prices at 21% approve
It’s “Underwear on the Outside” Time
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Trump’s continuing downward spiral into sundowning
Democrats capitulate to MAGA media mogul
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California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and 11 other states drop their lawsuit to block David Ellison’s Paramount from acquiring Warner Bros. — and get little in return.
Lit Hub Daily: September 23, 2026
Bilal Urick considers Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G, a “poetic meditation on language and time, the basic structural forces of life, stripped of stability under genocide.” | Lit Hub Criticism Laura Kolbe on the poetics of subverting linear time and the
The trickle of Republicans opposing Trump will become a flood
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The risk of bucking him is now outweighed by the risk of NOT opposing him.
The True Story of the Actual First Shot Fired in the Civil War
It was the autumn of 1865—a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war—when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker.
The Joy of Eavesdropping as a Bookseller in an English Seaside Town
Friday, September 6 Honestly, the first thing I heard this morning as someone walked past the bookshop door I cannot even type because it includes the worst of all the swears, but I will tell you that it was in
Fady Joudah’s Meditation on Language and Time Under Genocide
Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G is among the first of its kind. The multimedia poetry collection—assembled in the diaspora, and yet, across form, content, and voice, never anywhere but Gaza—charts Palestinian life under genocide. Exhibit G continues Joudah’s poetic meditation on
How Weimar Germany’s Proportional Democracy Put Hitler in Power
“We warn our opponents not to drive us to the uttermost,” he bellowed. “Hunger is preferable to disgrace, and deprivation is to be preferred to dishonor.” And, as it turned out, the harsh terms of the treaty caused massive resentment,
What Learning to Paint and Reading The Elements of Style Have in Common
I envy painters the freedom to convey thoughts without words. So much so that at one difficult stretch in my life I resolved to give up writing and pick up a paint brush. It wasn’t that I supposed that by
10 Essential Ukrainian Reads, From Memoir to Novel
Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Her latest book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War will be published in the UK September 24th. She recently participated in Lviv
We spent the day walking around town, saw the river, the Triple Bridge, the market, the alternative art installations in the courtyard of Metelkova, the bus station, had coffee at Zvezda Kavarna-Lounge because of the many old women I saw there (always a good sign!), saw Tivoli City Park, rested in the hotel room, ate dinner at Šestica … A beautiful day!
Almost all the pictures are by my wife.
Wikipedia says the statue is the Slovenian author Edvard Kocbek.
We got an electric car by mistake. It’s a nice car and if charging the car were as easy as refilling petrol, I wouldn’t be complaining. But here’s the thing: We live in Switzerland. Our phone contracts don’t offer free roaming in the European Union. As I have the cheapest phone contract on offer, it comes with very expensive roaming and I have it turned off. My wife has 1G of roaming but she has it turned off, too. Charging requires an app. There’s also a web option but we haven’t tried it.
Downloading the app and registering and adding a credit card was stressful. Finding the charging stations is tricky. I don’t think I can just pick any petrol station and expect there to be a charger. I cannot use the car navigation because it’s old and seems to filter for a certain brand. Terrible. So I use OsmAnd on the phone. The Open Street Map (OSM) maps may always be out of date but never as out of date as the maps in cars. When we get to the charger, we need a wifi connection. If we don’t, my wife’s phone can act as the hotspot and my phone can connect to it because we made the mistake of installing the app on my phone. At the time I didn’t understand that we’d be hunting for a wifi connection because of that. At the second charging station I only realised at the end that the fuel company offered free wifi. Before that, I did the hotspot dance and then I couldn’t charge the car because the credit card sent me an SMS which I didn’t receive since I was offline. We had to add my wife’s credit card so she could get the SMS. Or perhaps I could have just connected my phone to her hotspot and the SMS would have gone through via iMessage or something. I don’t know. On a hot day, when we’re both nervous about the battery charge, when traffic is stressful, when the charging station is full of cars, this sort of stuff hurts my brain.
When we arrived in Ljubljana, we noticed the garage next to the hotel. We parked our car on level -2. It was easier to navigate than the seven story garage in Piran with it’s narrow passages. We went up to the reception and paid for the hotel parking, in the same garage, on level -3. So now we had to pay the machine €2.30, leave the garage, do a U-turn, and enter with the hotel’s QR code. The car costs about €80/day and the garage costs €35/day. This is a European city. No car is required to get around. We hate cars. The next time we’ll come by night train and stay just in Ljubljana, without a car, we promised ourselves.
Ljubljana is nice.
Almost all the pictures are by my wife.
Wikipedia:
Dragon Bridge is the bridge with the large bronze dragons built from 1900 to 1901.
Nebotičnik is the thirteen storey high-rise built between 1931 and 1933 with the rooftop café.
Getting to the Piran garage was painful, navigating its narrow passages was worse, but Piran itself was OK. Old buildings, the ocean, the sunsets, it had an Italian flair.
Our hotel room had mosquitos that regenerated spontaneously. We must have killed about twenty of them in two days. And some of them were filled with our blood. Was it the ground floor? The drainage? The balcony? I don’t know. We kept the doors closed and yet we kept getting mosquitos.
The American Academy of Pediatrics could not explain why Martin, at seven years old, rolled around on the living room floor flapping his arms and cawing, while Teddy, who was not yet five, waited placidly on the front walk. Teddy
Office Hours: The Outcome of the Midterms?
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Friends,
Backing our people as parents: introducing our childcare contribution
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We've introduced a new policy to help our people with childcare costs.
LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven, community open source project, backed by a non-profit entity, The Document Foundation. The vast majority of the foundation’s income is from community support, and we’re happy to announce that FLOSS/fund has made a very generous contribution of USD $100,000 to support the LibreOffice project and community.
September 22, 2026
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In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S.
Politics Chat, September 22, 2026
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The White House revoked press credentials for CNN, Politico, and MS NOW after aide Natalie Harp reportedly showed Trump stories that angered him.
LLMs on the boundary
If you've spent any time on LinkedIn in the last year or so, you'll likely be quite familiar with a certain genre of post generally along the lines of "this new model changes *everything*. Everything you thought you knew about AI before this was wrong!" These have, of course, been a thing since at least 2022, and they belie a lack of understanding about what it is that makes these models less useful than they promise to be. The posts largely ignore the fact that much of the behaviour of interest to us is dependent not on the model, but on how the model is constrained, and that furthermore technology for constraining LLMs is not very good. Specifically, we have precisely one method of doing it: the prompt.
What If We Just Stopped?
There has to be a better way of connecting and sharing and existing together, a way that isn't locked into the exploitative doom loops and psychic death of what we currently have.
Wednesday 23 September, 2026
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Who do you think you are? Pulling into an hotel car-park in Burgundy I found myself face to face with this Quince, which looked distinctly unimpressed by the new visitors. Afterwards, I looked it up on the RHS site to … Continue reading →
When the Referee Owns a Team
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A dinner joke about banning fishing and a $30 billion stock windfall are the same story: the government picking winners, and reserving the right to take it all back.
The secret behind Meta’s Muse
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The new secret is the old secret
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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I know many of you woke up this morning hoping, "I wish I could have a terminal emulator as comprehensive as Ghostty, but with a settings panel and powered by Swift without compromising on the speed?"
I decided I wanted to experiment with my linkblog again, which uses the Hugo SSG tool. However, I upgraded my Hugo installation sometime in the last 3 months, so I had a feeling there was going to be some breakage, and I was correct. When I tried to rebuild the site as-is, I got this […]
2026-09-19 The Postojna cave
2026-09-19 The Postojna cave
We drove from Bled to Piran and stopped in Postojna on the way. We wanted to see the cave ( web site, on Wikipedia) and see an olm, which we did, in an aquarium.
All pictures in the cave by my wife.
The last approach to Piran was stressful and navigating the huge seven story garage was stressful, too.
Nashua residents helped secure $100,000 in dedicated sidewalk funding, a meaningful first step toward safer, more accessible ways to get around the city.
Meet Christina Hines, Our Inspiring Candidate Running In MI-10
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Mom of three, prosecutor, lifelong resident of the district, and our next Member of Congress from MI-10!
Two-Tier Encryption in the UK
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Alexander Cohen: The Post reported that UK security officials had issued such a TCN, in secret, in January 2025, requesting that Apple create a way to access encrypted iCloud data belonging not just to UK users, but to Apple users worldwide. The chutzpah of it all was astonishing. Apple’s position (privately, since they were prohibited […]
Persistent Ads in iOS Settings
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Alex Blake (Hacker News): The ‘ads’ in question appear in the Settings app in iOS. They can be found near the top of the iPhone’s display and promote several products to the user, including paid-for iCloud+ storage, free trials for services like Apple Music and Apple TV, and the AppleCare+ extended warranty. Infuriatingly for iOS […]
“Prepare to Ship” Battery Drain and Limit
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Juli Clover: The iPhone 18 Pro Max has a battery capacity over 20 watt-hours, which means there are additional shipping requirements. If an iPhone 18 Pro Max needs to be shipped somewhere, its maximum battery capacity has to be limited through firmware. […] Customers who need to ship the iPhone 18 Pro Max for repair, […]
Carbon Copy Cloner 7.2
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Mike Bombich: I remember seeing this one way back in Big Sur; you’d create a perfectly functional bootable copy of the system, but it wouldn’t show up in the Startup Disk Preference Pane. Apple ultimately resolved that issue in macOS Monterey, but now we’re seeing it again — unfixed in the Golden Gate release candidate. […]
@DAIR blog
@timnitgebru.blacksky.app and @emilymbender.bsky.social
puncture the latest AI hype, addressing everything from "hacking" to "math breakthroughs" to "superhuman" machines (and possibly break a record for scare quote usage along the way).
Today, the Booker Prize Foundation announced the six books on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist, whittled down from the “Booker’s Dozen” announced in July. The Booker is the UK’s most prestigious literary prize, which celebrates longform fiction written in English
David Corn of Mother Jones | American Conversations
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David Corn, a veteran investigative journalist and political commentator, has written or cowritten five New York Times bestsellers, including American Psychosis, Hubris, Showdown, and the #1 best seller Russian Roulette.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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The number one waste of time and burnt braincells is they changed the Dock images for all their apps. That's the kind of thing you shouldn't change, like the color and shape of a Stop sign. Or QWERTY on a typewriter. I guess to regular Mac people I'm like Rip Van Winkle.
Back from Spain with a good haul…
Back from Spain with a good haul…
That About Wraps It Up for Stock Mac UI
The latest macOS is a nice step toward a good-looking Mac UI, but I do wish it had gone farther.
I am in particular not a fan of how Mac toolbars look. I don’t like the full-height sidebars and I especially don’t like the Liquid Glass buttons.
What I found should be no surprise: many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.
You already know this. I don’t think I need to prove it. But one app may serve as an illustration: Things.
Things is a perennial callout for its design and for its Mac-like-ness. But it is not really a stock Mac app at all. The toolbar is not at the top of the window (not an NSToolbar) and it’s not customizable. There is no hint of Liquid Glass style translucency anywhere in their main UI. The content doesn’t slide under the sidebar, for instance. (The one place I can find anything obviously Liquid Glass is the toolbar buttons in the settings window.)
I’ve long been a devoted proponent of using stock Mac UI for, I always thought, good reasons: users are already familiar with that UI and it’s less work to create and update every year.
Plot twist
I think those reasons (user familiarity and developer effort) may not stand up entirely. At least not these days.
Users have shown — again, I don’t need to prove this — that they don’t think about a stock Mac app vs. custom. Do they dislike Things for not having a toolbar at the top of the window that they can customize in the usual way? No. (The only people who think that way are longtime Mac developers like me.)
Are users able to understand the UI to popular Mac apps — to Things, Slack, Craft, OmniFocus, NotePlan, Bear, Reeder, Telegram, Acorn, Tapestry, Obsidian, Audio Hijack, etc. — without much trouble, no matter how stock or not-stock they are? Yes.
Do they know when an app is an Electron app? Nope: they don’t even have a concept of Electron apps and they wouldn’t care if you explained it to them. (Why should they?)
Users may be already familiar with stock Mac UI (and maybe not, actually, depending on what apps they use) — but I don’t think that matters at all anymore.
So what about developer effort
The idea was that by using stock Mac UI you the developer would be carried along — you’d get most of the macOS changes every year mostly for free or with not that much work, since you’d kept up every year.
But my app NetNewsWire has a very stock Mac UI, and Liquid Glass adoption last year was a lot of work. Using stock Mac UI didn’t save us much — in fact, we had more work to do compared to the apps with more custom UI.
I’ll go back to Things. I’m not picking on them, to be clear. Quite the opposite! I very much respect their work, even though I have in the past wished it were more Mac-like (again, in the way only a longtime Mac developer would).
Here’s their blog post from a year ago on adopting Liquid Glass. They did some work, for sure, at their usual high level of quality. And I’m not denigrating that. But it looks like a lot less work than we had to do on NetNewsWire.
And that’s my point: the level of developer effort was higher for the stock Mac app.
The secret third reason for using stock Mac UI
To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you.
But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really?
The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not.
Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance from above on how the Mac UI should look is missing the mark. I’m not blaming the people doing the work — they’re doing great work with the direction they’re given.
So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and you really shouldn’t care about that at all).
Messing around last night
With this in mind I wondered how far I could get in removing the parts of Liquid Glass I don’t like in NetNewsWire. Turns out I could get pretty far, though it comes at the expense of using NSToolbar (as predicted).
Note: this stuff is just on a branch. One night of play, not real design or consideration. (But this is code, not mockups.) It’s not about to ship this way. But I’ll share anyway, because it does hint at some possible ideas for NetNewsWire’s future.
Click the small version to get the big version.
(Note that the column view in the second screenshot is going to ship in 7.2. That part’s already done, and it has nothing to do with Liquid-Glass-or-not. Also note: the article theme in use is part of the standard NetNewsWire app right now, not a new thing.)
The obvious first best thing I could do to improve this is to add some color to the toolbar icons and spread them out better. Maybe add some ability to customize, even though it’s not a standard Mac toolbar.
Of course you might look at this and think “Blech! Looks so old! Spare me!” Totally fair!
Yesterday I posted a list of builtin verbs in Frontier, as implemented in our current Atlantis app. Today I asked Claude to update the list, I wanted to see which verbs were implemented and not implemented.
A functional Frontier
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I'm using Frontier on a Mac running MacOS v26.6.2, which is the current version of the OS.
Frontier running on a new Mac. And that's my computer.
It's like the moment I realized, in 2010, that I had succeeded in relocating to NYC. It had been a life ambition to live in Manhattan since I was a kid growing up there. There were a lot of hoops. I got through them. I woke up when I was walking down Bleecker St going to pizza with a few of the students I had just spoken with in a classroom. It hit me. I'm doing it. This is how I imagined my life when I was 17.
About box for Frontier v4.0b4, apparently 1995.
For a very long time it seemed ever more certain that the hope of a usable Frontier on current systems was slipping away, but now it's here. Improbable, even impossible things do happen. Something to ponder when you think things can't change. The opposite is true, you don't have to create the change, when it's time it happens.
That's something to think about. All the buried software that was good, that had ideas worth learning from, being prior art and solved problems for future generations of developers. And also as part of the vocabulary of the Claudes of the world.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-09-22:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
2 new and 23 updated places. 8 new and 41 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound Nomisma and Wikidata information is stale because updates were not available at runtime.
5 (3.5) days of re-learning to not focus in order to hear the voices in my head again
Agaete waterfall
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I wasn't able to get to the source of the waterfall, so I was left
with enjoying watching it fading in/out of the mist.
Mountains around Agaete
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I was quite lucky with the weather in Agaete: while a bit wet, but
this kind of weather, somehow, helps with staying calm and relaxed when
you're surrounded with lush greens and cloud-covered mountains.
Trump TV is the only source of footage of the President. That may be exactly what he wants.
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In the same week, the President banned three networks from the White House - and started his own. It's not a coincidence that this happened so close to the midterms.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Peltola (Alaska), Taylor (VA-1), Johnson (MN-1), Acton (OH-Gov), Haaland (NM-Gov)
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Christina Hines (MI-10) joins us live today at 105pm ET - going to be a good one!
Wealth & Poverty Class 1: The paradox of widening inequality
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We begin.
Ten years of Postgres logical replication
A long time ago I ran a write-heavy system on a hub and a handful of workers.
Each worker took a share of the application traffic and wrote events
locally. The hub owned the reference data (customers, plans, prices),
pushed it down to the workers, and pulled every worker’s events back up to
compute the invoices. The plumbing was Londiste and PgQ: triggers on every
table, a queue per node, a ticker, and a Python daemon per hop. It worked,
and it was a lot of moving parts to explain to anyone new.
Postgres 10 shipped logical replication in 2017, and 19 is the tenth release
that has it. Every release since Postgres 10 has taken a piece of that
plumbing and made it a line of SQL.
This is the first article in a series about Postgres logical replication
use-cases, and about how the feature set has evolved over the past ten
years and ten releases. The question is the application developer’s one,
not the DBA’s: which architectures can I deploy with Postgres core alonetoday, what does each release change about that, and where do I still needsomething else? I built three architectures for real, across three posts:
Hub and workers, spreading the write load across servers — this post.
Consolidation: many databases, different applications and schemas,
into one, then re-exported as a change stream for a CDC consumer.
Zero-downtime major upgrade, with a way back.
A fourth post, covering what is left out of this series in less detail —
geo-replication, BDR-style multi-active setups, plain CDC and triggers — is
also planned.
Singapore is paying its citizens to read. (But will it work?)
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On September 6, Singapore started paying its citizens to read. As The Guardian reported, this scheme represents the city-state’s latest attempts to quash doomscrolling and protect children from the harms of social media. The National Library Board (NLB)—progenitor of the
LinkedIn and Metal
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Writing of lasting value
I said no and Apple said yes
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The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off. […]
Rogue Scholar is launching an Editorial Board
The science blog archive Rogue Scholar is launching an Editorial Board to handle submissions of new blogs, and oversee editorial management of existing blogs, e.g. blogs or individual posts that should be retracted or no longer archived.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive accepts new blogs via a submission
Turn text input into actions with Needle, a 14MB function-calling LLM
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Cactus Compute's Needle 2 model runs entirely offline on a Raspberry Pi 5's CPU.
Video Version | Audio Version Well, hello again! I don’t know if you expected me to be doing this again so quickly, I know I certainly didn’t. So to recap from the 25k Q&A episode, I started this channel as a kind of passion project, making videos when I had free time from my day
Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
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In February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I feed it to Claude and ask “how did I do?” and “what can I learn?” Nine months in, I’m still doing it. And with that […]
San Salvador will host the VII Latin American Congress of LibreOffice in 2026
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The Salvadoran Lutheran University (ULS) and the Latin American LibreOffice Project community announce the seventh edition of the LibreOffice Latin American Conference. Previous editions of the LibreOffice Latin American Conference have been held in person in Asunción (2019), Brasília (2022), Mexico City (2023), Montevideo (2024), and Havana (2025). The 2026
New Polls In Alaska, Iowa, And Texas Suggest That Trump And The Rs Are In Serious Trouble
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Morning all.
Big survey results drop tomorrow
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And I'm delaying this week's deep dive for poll week
However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page. After analysing the unbroken messages on the website, it decided that the most promising message was Nr. 172, MVUEH and it also quickly suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message. After trying many different approaches, GPT6 Astra focused on using the repeated place name ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib. After developing the necessary Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator and an Enigma Bombe, GPT6 Astra started a thorough break with the ROSENOW crib, which in the end resulted in the correct key and plaintext for the MVUEH message being found...
Court Orders Kennedy Name Removed From RFK Jr.
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“Henceforth, the former Mr. Kennedy will be known as Robert Francis Trump,” the judge ruled.
Can We Get Some Sharks With Laser Beams
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To Honor The Dead
The lie dominating Musk's 2026 political ads
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Musk is blanketing the internet with digital ads falsely accusing Democratic Senate candidates of supporting “taxpayer-funded sex changes for kids.”
Lit Hub Daily: September 22, 2026
“The audience is present even when no one else is in the room.” David Pakman examines just how far the need to perform for digital spectators has seeped into real life. | Lit Hub Technology Why we love the thrill
Why Trump’s “ban on the free press” will go down in flames
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Very illegal and very not cool.
Will Crypto Crash the Blue Wave?
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AI gets the attention, but the Big Scam is still spending big
John Green Gives Himself Permission to Suck
John Green’s new book, Hollywood, Ending, is available now from Dutton, so we asked him a few questions about favorite books, writing advice, writer’s block, and more. * Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood
How the Digital Attention Economy Has Taken Over Our Real-World Lives
When I visited the Louvre Museum in Paris, I was struck by how small the Mona Lisa looked in person—a common reaction—and by how most of the people in the room were not looking at the painting itself. They were
What We Lose in the Face of Extinction
Before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, he spent twenty years sketching out his ideas in a series of journals called the Transmutation Notebooks and the Metaphysical Notebooks, archived now at the University of Cambridge. In one of
Opening the Door: On the Secrets Old Buildings Can Keep
It began with a mistake. A glitch in the library’s database mismatched her name to an address from her past, an error that sent letter after letter falling through a door she’d rented years before. Sweetbriar Lane. Opening that door
Meet Hyman Judah Schachtel, the Anti-Zionist Rabbi of Houston
“Never a dull moment during the bygone year!!” wrote Leopold Meyer, president of Congregation Beth Israel of Houston, Texas, in May 1944. In and among the usual chatter in his annual report (“Mr. and Mrs. Isaac S. Brochstein and Mr.
Female Life on Planet Earth
One year after the death you throw a party. they say grief needs a turn of seasons—one summer, fall, winter and spring—before the sadness lets go. If you survive the year, you celebrate. When a man dies, his wife organizes
Gloria Steinem, John Green, Lucy Foley, and more: 20 new books out today!
Today, it is officially fall: does it feel like it? The gradual transition from the beating heat to the falling leaves is all around us, and yet it can still feel surprising, too fast. To celebrate our fall equinox, here’s
Pluralistic: Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (22 Sep 2026)
Today's links Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs: A "settlement" that promises less than nothing. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Warren on taxing the rich and class warfare; Psychology v reproducibility; Copyright troll sentenced for beating Uber driver; "Halloween Moon"; Enshittification of solar. Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, Brighton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (permalink) Well, fuck. California Attorney General Rob Bonta just surrendered to the Trump-aligned Ellison billionaires who want to take over and destroy Warners, merging it with the chudded out husk they've made of Paramount, leaving these two colossal, corrupt, useless assholes to control Warners, Paramount and Tiktok: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/paramount-settles-with-california-other-states-clearing-major-hurdle-warner-bros-2026-09-21/ In announcing the settlement, Bonta's office touted a long list of concessions the AG had wrung from the Ellisons before greenlighting this indefensible, illegal and dangerous merger. Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit. Bonta just handed the American movie and TV sector to two of the most odious creeps to draw breath, surrendering without firing a shot. For a breakdown of how fucking useless this settlement is, read (who else?) Matt Stoller, whose piece breaking it down is titled "Happy Oligarch Day!" https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/happy-oligarch-day-as-trump-aligned The first thing Stoller points out is that every one of the "commitments" in the settlement only matter if Bonta's office enforces them. Bonta's office will never have as much leverage over Warnermount as it has today, when the company is paying a $7m/day "ticking fee" while the merger is stalled (thanks to an injunction secured by the Hollywood unions, whom Bonta has just royally fucked, because they can't afford to litigate this case without the AG office's backing). So even if any of these conditions meant anything (which they do not), they won't be enforced. If Bonta can't bring Warnermount to heel today, when they have to pay $7m/day for so long as they're crosswise with him, how will he ever get them to do shit? He. Will. Not. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter! Because the Ellisons have given Bonta nothing. Take the guarantee that Warnermount "will make 30 films" for the next two years, and 32 films thereafter. That's what's been announced, but when former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya dug into the actual wording, he discovered they are only committing to distributing 30 films, and to making 15 films, which they are allowed to co-produce with other studios. They made 18 movies last year. Under the terms of this deal, they have "committed" to making fewer movies than they make today: https://x.com/BedoyaUSA/status/2102173188557799773 They've committed to not selling the Warner lot. For five years. But they are allowed to move it out of LA, which is something my neighbors in Burbank are doubtless delighted to learn. After that, they can move it to whatever state offers them the biggest sweetheart tax deal and the weakest union protections. They are prohibited from gouging the theater chains and putting them out of business to promote their streaming business. For three years. After that, they can let 'er rip. Then there's the "editorial board" that will oversee the Ellisons' management of CNN and MSNBC, nominally to keep it from getting the CBS treatment and going 24/7 Great Replacement/Haitians eating dogs/Charlie Kirk funeral pyrotechnics spectaculars. Guess who chooses the members of the editorial board? The Ellisons. As Stoller writes, "it’s downright comical [that] they demanded that David Ellison not corrupt CNN by having David Ellison appoint a board ensuring that David Ellison not do that." But you can ignore everything you've just read, because the settlement includes a clause that says they don't have to do any of the things it says they have to do. This is the "force majeure" clause, which is not like a normal force majeure clause (which allows the parties to back out of their commitment in case of war, wildfires, etc). This force majeure clause lets Warnermount tear up the entire agreement if there's a strike or a recession. So: if (when) the Hollywood unions go on strike over this betrayal (which they absolutely should do), the agreement becomes null. And if (when) the AI bubble bursts and there's a massive recession, the agreement becomes null. And if (when) Trump's War on Oil plunges the US into Jimmy Carter-style oil economic tsunami, the agreement becomes null. As Stoller points out, 12 State Attorneys General signed this piece of shit. Every one of them is a lawyer, and every one of them has a staff of lawyers. None of the glaring, catastrophic, utterly disqualifying defects in this "settlement" can possibly be a surprise to them. These Democrat warriors surrendered to Trump's oligarchs, giving them everything, including control over the American film and TV industry for so long as it limps along. They just assumed you wouldn't notice. Stoller says he's "in a strangely good mood" about this because of all the political capital it took to get this over the line (unlike, say, Disney-Fox, which sailed through with nary a hitch), saying that it indicates that the public is fed up with monopolies. He's right, they are fed up with monopolies. Everyday Americans, Democrats and Republicans, are telling pollsters they'd back a politician who campaigned on shattering monopoly power: https://libertyandpower.substack.com/p/pollsters-urge-dems-to-attack-monopoly So this leaves us to wonder why Bonta (who talked tough in public about this merger and insisted he would never settle for this kind of weaksauce) stabbed the state, the country, Hollywood workers, and the American public in the back like this? Stoller's theory is that Bonta was isolated by "Democratic insiders" who wouldn't back his play. OK, fine. As Stoller writes, there's no ambiguity here, this is just straight up corruption, oligarch pals of the President getting to roll up and gut the industry's globally important, culturally essential media sector. The "teachers' pets" of the Democratic Party have once again sold out working people in a bid to be liked by the rich and powerful. This will fuel (more) distrust of America's political class, a distrust that has been repeatedly earned over decades and especially in this decade. Our leaders are "malevolent liars." It's been true for a very long time, but we can no longer pretend otherwise. Perhaps Stoller's right and this means we'll finally get some real change. I hope so. But for now, I'm just furious. (Image: Todd Dwyer, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Technopolitics https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-technopolitics/ Pollsters Urge Dems to Attack Monopoly Power. Candidates are Listening. https://libertyandpower.substack.com/p/pollsters-urge-dems-to-attack-monopoly Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Finnish hacker's homebrew OS fits on a floppy https://web.archive.org/web/20010923224224/https://www.menuetos.org/ #20yrsago Can RIAA sue for songs they never verified by downloading from you? https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/09/preclusion-motion-filed-in-umg-v.html #15yrsago Elizabeth Warren explains why taxing the rich isn’t “class warfare” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs #15yrsago DoJ audit: meeting served $16 muffins and $8 coffee https://web.archive.org/web/20110921160806/http://news.yahoo.com/16-muffins-8-coffee-served-justice-audit-023623142.html #10yrsago Psychology’s reproducibility crisis: why statisticians are publicly calling out social scientists https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ #10yrsago Notorious copyright troll sentenced to 20 weeks’ prison time for beating Uber driver https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-troll-partner-kicked-uber-driver-in-the-head-160923/ #10yrsago Understanding vulvas: what do they really look like? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAFvGrOwVug #10yrsago The American public subsidized $125m executive bonus for Wells Fargo exec who led massive fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20160922140758/https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/taxpayers-subsidized-wells-fargo-executive-pay-amid-banks-fraud-2419456 #5yrsago The music monopolists https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/23/remedies-beyond-antitrust/#face-the-music #5yrsago The Halloween Moon https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/23/remedies-beyond-antitrust/#creepypasta #1yrago The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle Upcoming appearances (permalink) Berkeley: Celebrating 25 Years at the Digital Frontier (Samuelson Clinic), Sep 24 https://www.law.berkeley.edu/experiential/clinics/samuelson-law-technology-public-policy-clinic/samuelson-25th-anniversary-celebration/ Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30 https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/ Boston: Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Sep 30 (Emtech) https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-future-2026/detailed-agenda Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs Brighton: Digital Sovereignty and the Post-American Internet (Green Party Conference), Oct 3 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/digital-sovereignty-and-the-post-american-internet/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15 https://slowtechsummit.com/ Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY Are 'AI Apocalypse' Warnings Just Marketing? (What's Left) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXd9HwIE5bo The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 508 (17556 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
Xi and the Dilemma of AI
, updated:
The central issue isn’t which nation will dominate AI. It’s whether we will both maintain human control over it.
NuPhy Kick75
A brief review of the Kick75 hybrid-profile, entry-level enthusiast
mechanical keyboard by NuPhy.
September 21, 2026
, updated:
On September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House.
Hey Europe: Make Privacy a Contract
Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit. On the other hand, every cookie […]
The Spencers vs. Windsors—Again
, updated:
Just as King Charles and Prince William are trying to adjust to the awful new reality of constant rogue publicity from the now England-residing Sussexes, the Charles Spencer bomb went off.
Once Again: Has Trump Lost It?
, updated:
Every day he gets loonier
Waterfox 6.7.4 - RSS returns and AI search controls
RSS feeds and Live Bookmarks are back with new search options to hide AI answers, plus a Windows media overlay toggle and JPEG-XL improvements.
Trump’s Ban Is Backfiring
, updated:
As the media unites against him
AI & Cybersecurity: Your AI Agent Is the Next Phishing Victim
, updated:
In this article, we’ll explore a specific type of AI-based attack (and remediations) that can be executed using any LLMs capable of coding and used as agents, without the need for Anthropic Mythos or OpenAI Astra. Table of Contents This article is particularily extensive, given the specific type of attack it describes, so, instead of […]
Big news at the UN
, updated:
Sometimes, maybe dreams come true?
This week’s anniversary of the Wall Street bailout
, updated:
It marked the beginning of the public’s distrust of government and big business
Shop Different
, updated:
HarperCollins (Amazon): When Steve Jobs hired Ron Johnson to create the Apple Store in 2000, conventional wisdom said that the internet would put stores out of business. By the time he left Apple in 2011, Johnson and his team had created the most respected and profitable retail stores in the world. And even then, skeptics […]
Trump’s Free Press Ban Instantly Backfires
, updated:
The President punished outlets whose reporting he called “fake news.” Instead of controlling the narrative, Trump lost his most precious commodity.
Airmail 26.037
, updated:
Today, Apple sent me an e-mail about the Airmail Mac e-mail client: Thank you for subscribing to Airmail Pro Yearly. We wanted to let you know about an upcoming change to this subscription. The developer, Bloop S.R.L, is raising the price of this subscription from $9.99 per year to $49.99 per year. This is a […]
Seeking a "yes, and" space
, updated:
How the JSK Fellowship is putting me in a more generative culture.
A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026
I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%.
The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast where he talks about how proud he was of this phrase from his post: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth…”.
He notes that someone online commented on that phrase, saying it sounded like a mix of classic literature and a line from The Simpsons.
Amused, Cantrill says he came up with the line all by himself, so he knew it wasn’t a classic literature reference nor a line from The Simpsons.
But just to be sure, he Google’d it: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth” with “The Simpsons” tagged on to the end.
To his surprise, Google’s AI told him that the line was, in fact, a line from The Simpsons. Here’s Google’s response (as reported by Cantrill):
During the Springfield mayoral debate on Channel 6, Sideshow Bob dramatically delivers the line “these ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth of Springfield” while turning the debate against Mayor Joe Quimby. Instead of denying his criminal history, Bob exploits Quimby’s record and boldly tells the audience they secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to rule them like a king.
(Here’s my homemade graphic for illustration purposes.)
Cantrill was astonished. Not knowing the episode enough by heart to discern whether this claim was true, he had a little bit of a panic attack:
If I am having what I feel to be original thoughts that are, in fact, just Simpsons lines regurgitating from 30 years ago, that’s troubling […] How am I not an LLM?
So he set out to find the truth. He finds the episode and watches it, but doesn’t hear the line.
But what if the episode he watched was an edited version and the full-length one is out there somewhere? He’s gotta get to the bottom of this.
So he goes back to Google and pushes on the AI’s answer, asking for the full script of the episode. At that point, the LLM folds and says the line is not from The Simpsons, but is actually from a post by — drum roll… — Bryan Cantrill.
Here’s Cantrill, again, reporting Google’s AI response:
What happened here is a classic AI “hallucination”. Because the phrase you shared used highly stylized, melodramatic language, “ghoulish claims”, “strike brazenly at the hearth”, my system misidentified the tone as belonging to Sideshow Bob who is famous for speaking in exactly that kind of grandiloquent Shakespearean style.
I have to say, I found the whole story amusing and relatable.
You write something on the internet.
Somebody says, “This sounds like something from the Simpsons.”
How to Build a Brand People Remember with David Aaker
, updated:
What makes a story memorable, a brand powerful, or an innovation impossible to ignore?
Predicting the Present
, updated:
To quote Stewart Brand: This present moment was once the unimaginable future.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I asked Claude to create a list of all the verbs in Atlantis. Some of them obviously don't do anything. We don't have the card funtionality, or the osa, rectangle, pict, rez or point verbs. What is pikeRenderer? I think we could have a use for quicktime verbs? There's a new scheduler, I wrote it in 2014 or so, but the old one is there, and we just found a reference to it. This could make a nice community project.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Reminder to self, Frontier must have websockets verbs. I love websockets, and it'll fit in perfectly with everything else Frontier it does. I don't think Websockets existed when Frontier went to sleep.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Brian Lehrer podcast has an esp good one hour episode with interviews about the end of the world as we know it with AI. He's so good at cutting through the hype and getting to reality as are his guests.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I can now publish a new part to the codecasting feed. It was one of the things that broke in the transition to current MacOS for Frontier.
Raspberry Pi locks down Pi 5 RAM upgrades in firmware
Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips, sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards.
Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s.
Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a huge problem. Especially with how profitable can be in the current AI bubble.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Brown (Ohio), James (IA-2), Cooke (WI-3), Nez (AZ-2), Maine Senate (SMP)
, updated:
We have live events scheduled this week with Christina Hines (MI-10), Jamie Ager (NC-11), and Bob Brooks (PA-7)
El fenómeno llamado The Gilded Age
, updated:
En 2022, HBO estrenó The Gilded Age, la primera serie del productor Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) ubicada en Norteamérica. La historia se desarrolla durante la década de 1880 en Nueva York, Estados Unidos, conocida como la “edad dorada” de la ciudad, periodo histórico con avances tecnológicos y cambios en la estructura social previamente establecida. Al […]
If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market.
Reverse-Engineering Flock Cameras
Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look (alternate link) at the software:
While much of the automatic license plate reader’s (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag...
Heather Cox Richardson has been awarded the inaugural Gitlin-Auster Defender of Democracy Award.
, updated:
Over the weekend, Writers for Democratic Action (WDA) awarded historian Heather Cox Richardson with its inaugural Gitlin-Auster Defender of Democracy Award, “established to honor a writer whose voice powerfully embodies the wisdom, courage, and steadfastness that marked the lives of
Taking Yom Kippur Off - But There’s Still Lots To Do Everyone
, updated:
Lots more evidence today that Trump is not fit to lead this great country
Fox Glad White House Ban Only Applies to News Networks
, updated:
"You're safe," Trump told Fox's top executive.
Politics, Culture, and Capitalism
, updated:
How much autonomy does politics have from the prevailing economic order? And what role does culture play in shaping politics? Answers to these questions will help determine law’s potential role in advancing democratic efforts to shape the terms of common life.
UPDATE: MAGA Inc.’s audacious new ads
, updated:
President Trump has amassed an unprecedented war chest of $400 million that can be spent to influence the 2026 midterms through the MAGA Inc.
Of Donald and Diesel
, updated:
Never mind crude oil; distillates are the problem now
Lit Hub Daily: September 21, 2026
, updated:
Ed Simon explores the limits of language to understand why “pain makes poor poets out of all of us.” | Lit Hub Criticism Carlo Rovelli warns against getting trapped in your own limited perspective of reality: “A child born in
The blackmail part out loud
, updated:
He’s not joking. He’s confessing.
How Heated Rivalry Imagines a More Inclusive NHL
“I know there are gay guys in the NHL, because I met one of my teammate’s boyfriends. [But] it’s impossible for a gay hockey player to come out within the next five or even ten years; the media attention would
Carlo Rovelli on the Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework
Before arriving at the quanta to which this first lesson is devoted, allow me to begin with a simple observation. We humans inhabit the surface of the planet Earth, and this is a rather peculiar place: it has aspects that
Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain
When the pain first arrived, it was during an uncharacteristically temperate Chicago summer more than a decade ago. First as a slight tingling in my right jaw, barely noticeable, which I could basically ignore as I walked past the red-bricked
On Finding the Beauty in a Block of Stone
The best way to observe London, with all its charm and beauty, oddity and idiosyncrasy, is from the top of a bus, and mine was the 31—the only one that went to the World’s End and passed through some of
The Archive Talks Back: Eight Books That Wrest Humanity From the Record
Genre-bending books have greatly influenced my own work. I’ve written about my mother’s self completed death in a new memoir called O Mother, out with McSweeney’s on September 1. In it, I used the diagnostic material about my mom I’d
“Teaching Speech,” a Poem by Laura Kolbe
Saying yes to no and yes to yes to the baby boy so many times a day it’s like a people’s protest chant gone non- electric harboring a claim belonged to everyone who cares, we care, we crawl outside and
Measure power use for a solar Meshtastic node
Measure a Meshtastic node's power use under realistic network traffic before choosing a solar panel and battery.
The Newer World
My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. It was 1840. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A free skin was
The Rise of AI Populism
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Are we on the cusp of a political realignment against corporate power?
LibreOffice at FrOSCon 2026
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FrOSCon is an annual conference dedicated to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), held in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. And this year, the LibreOffice community was there! We hosted a booth featuring information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, coasters, and more. We engaged in many substantive conversations at
September 20, 2026
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Thousands of people gathered outside the John F.
btrix
, updated:
tl;dr btrix is abring-your-own-model chat interface for web archiving, which I demobelow with my shiny new inference.coop account
I’ve been experimenting
recently with a chat interface to the browsertrix-crawler
software. If you haven’t seen it before, browsertrix-crawler is an
excellent tool for creating high-fidelity archival snapshots of web
pages and websites. It has many, many options, and the browsertrix service provides a full
user interface to managing one or many browsertrix-crawler jobs.
So why would you ever want to operate browsertrix-crawler with a chat
interface?
I guess the main reason is that you may feel like its overkill to bring
up and run a browsertrix instance for the type of job you are
doing. Another is that perhaps you would like to explore the options for
archiving a website, including developing a custom
behavior for clicking on parts of the pages. Its possible that the
chat interface provides a more iterative way to discover the many
affordances that browsertrix-crawler makes available for web archiving,
in the context of actual web archiving work.
Ok, and truth be told, it was an opportunity to experiment with how well
this approach could work. I think the answer is mostly, yes.
The seed for this idea was a set of simple shell scripts, dubbed browsertricky, that I’d
created a few years ago for running browsertrix-crawler jobs. It helped
me keep around the YAML configuration files in a single location for
reuse, and took some of the guesswork out of remembering how to
configure browsertrix-crawler, and monitor its progress. This sort of
interaction on the command line was something I was interested in seeing
in the chat style interface.
I initially developed what became btrix as a Claude plugin to help
explore how to control browsertrix-crawler with Claude Code. But after
getting it mostly “working” I wasn’t really happy with the broad
permissions it needed to be granted to operate and introspect on
browsertrix-crawler. I found that Claude improvised too much, sometimes
reaching to write and run its own programs to work with
browsertrix-crawler, instead of using the skills and scripts I had
explicitly built for it to use. I also didn’t really like the lock-in to
Anthropic, or any single LLM model.
So, long story short, I ended up developing btrix using the pi framework, which lets you connect to a
large number of backend models. In the demo below I usedeepseek-v4-1-flash via Inference Cooperative, which is Nathan Schneider’s latest joint
(more about this in the future). pi let me write tools for the
framework to call out to. Tools have known programmatic interfaces that
can be tested, and pi can lock down other types of interaction.
So how does it work?
Below is a short-ish demonstration of using btrix to archive a small
part of the news.stanford.edu website. It shows how btrix is able to
write a custom behavior based on my description. btrix writes the
JavaScript behavior, the YAML configuration, and starts the crawl. It
provides diagnostic information about the crawl as it progresses. It
also shows a quick look at the artifacts it leaves on the file-system,
including the WACZ archive, which it dutifully plays back.
As you will see, the session wasn’t without its hiccups because rather
than using a big corporate LLM I chose to use my new Inference
Cooperative account, which is really brand new, and seemed to encounter
a brief outtage after the crawl completed. But it recovered!
In case you missed it, here’s what btrix wrote at the end:
The archive is being served now — open this in your browser:
http://127.0.0.1:8087/?source=stanford-news.wacz
No notes came back with it, so there's nothing to warn about; it's served from
the same origin as the archive, so replay needs no network access.
What you should see: the listing page, and the paging buttons should still work
— clicking 2 and 3 replays the archived API responses rather than hitting the
live site. The 30 stories are all in the WACZ as their own pages, so full-text
search in the replay UI should find them.
For reference, the behavior did what it was supposed to, per the crawl log:
- page 1 — 10 queued
- page 2 — 20 queued
- page 3 — 30 queued
All 31 pages returned HTTP 200, median page text ~11.9k characters. Worth
a look while you're in there: the numbered buttons go up to 5, and I only
clicked through to page 3 as you asked. If you'd like pages 4 and 5 too, it's
a one-line change to the behavior and a re-run.
One of the handy things that btrix does is embed its own replay server
which uses replayweb.page to let you inspect the WACZ file you created
with ReplayWeb.page. If you get a
chance to give it a try please let me
know how it works for you.
GSoC 2026: Improving HLSL Support in clangd
, updated:
GSoC 2026: Improving HLSL Support in clangd
HLSL (High-Level Shading Language) is a C++-like language used for GPU shader programming. Clang already parses HLSL and represents many of its constructs in the AST. clangd, however, reuses its C/C++ infrastructure to provide IDE features such as hover, code completion, diagnostics, and navigation. Clang may fully understand an HLSL construct, while clangd does not necessarily know how to expose that information to the user.
For example, HLSL has language-specific constructs such as semantic annotations, resource bindings, out/ inout parameters, shader attributes, and vector and matrix swizzles. These constructs do not always have direct equivalents in standard C++, so the existing clangd infrastructure does not automatically provide the expected editor experience.
The goal of my Google Summer of Code 2026 project was to identify these gaps and improve HLSL support in clangd.
I first wanted to understand the current state of HLSL support, identify where the problems were coming from, and determine which solutions would fit best into the existing Clang and clangd architecture. The project followed this process:
Gap Analysis | vInvestigation | vImplementation Ideas | v RFC | vCommunity Feedback | vGitHub Issues | vPull Requests
Finding the Gaps
The first phase of the project was a to do a gap analysis.
I created isolated HLSL test cases covering different categories of language constructs and tested them using several clangd features: hover, code completion, go-to-definition, and diagnostics.
When the behavior was unclear, I also inspected Clang’s AST to determine whether the required information was already available to clangd.
The goal was to distinguish between different kinds of problems. Some constructs were already represented correctly in the AST but were not exposed by clangd. Others involved configuration, while some problems originated earlier in the compiler pipeline. This distinction was important because the solution depends heavily on where the gap actually exists.
For example, if Clang already has all the information needed in the AST, adding another HLSL-specific parser or compiler feature would be unnecessary. Instead, the appropriate solution may be to extend existing clangd infrastructure.
After discussing the implementation ideas with my mentors, I consolidated the proposed solutions into an RFC and submitted it to the LLVM Discourse community.
The RFC described the expected behavior, the observed gap, the root cause, and the proposed solution for each issue.
The discussion with the LLVM and DirectX communities was an important part of the project. Some of my initial ideas were refined based on the feedback I received.
For example, semantic completion after : initially considered suggesting HLSL semantics unconditionally. The discussion highlighted that not every identifier in that context is necessarily a semantic, so the implementation was refined to make semantic suggestions dependent on the typed prefix.
Another example was vector and matrix swizzle completion. The discussion raised concerns about automatically triggering completion after every ., which could become distracting during normal editing. The final implementation therefore made HLSL swizzle completion configurable.
From RFC to Issues and Pull Requests
After the RFC discussion, I created a separate GitHub issue for each implementation item. Each issue documented the expected behavior, the current behavior, the root cause, and the proposed solution.
One of the most interesting parts of the project was discovering that HLSL constructs are sometimes represented internally in ways that are different from how users wrote them.
For example, HLSL out and inout parameters are lowered internally to C++ reference types. Given:
hovering over color previously exposed an internal representation such as float &__restrict instead of the HLSL type out float4.
The solution was to add a getHLSLParamTypeAsWritten() helper that allows clangd to recover the original HLSL type for display, independently of how the parameter is represented internally.
Another example was HLSL semantic annotations. Constructs such as:
float4 main() : SV_Target
were already represented by Clang, but hover did not display the semantic spelling correctly. Investigating the AST showed that the necessary information existed, but the relevant HLSL attribute did not provide the spelling expected by the generic hover infrastructure. This allowed the problem to be fixed at the appropriate layer rather than by adding an HLSL-specific workaround to the hover implementation.
Multiple Entry Points
In addition to the original gaps, I investigated a larger architectural problem involving HLSL files containing multiple shader entry points. A single HLSL file can contain multiple entry points, for example:
This creates a challenge for clangd, which traditionally works with a single active compilation context for a file. Different HLSL entry points can require different compilation contexts, especially in legacy HLSL, where the shader stage and entry point are specified through compiler flags rather than source annotations.
Modern HLSL
For modern HLSL, entry points can be annotated directly in the source, using [shader("vertex")], [shader("pixel")], and so on. In this case, I found that using an HLSL library target allows Clang to build a single AST containing the different entry points.
I implemented a fallback for HLSL files without an available compilation command that uses the library target automatically. This provides a generic compilation context that works well for modern HLSL files containing multiple entry points.
Legacy HLSL
The legacy case is more difficult. When the entry point is selected through compiler flags, different entry points may require different compilation commands, and clangd cannot simply use one compilation command and expect all entry points to be represented correctly.
I investigated possible approaches and built a prototype for explicitly switching the active compilation context. The prototype allows clangd to discover the entry points available in a file and switch between their compilation contexts without requiring the user to close and reopen the file. The server-side mechanism was validated end to end using LSP communication.
This work is not yet a complete upstream solution, but it provides a foundation for continuing the work after GSoC.
Future Work
The main remaining area of work is the legacy multiple-entry-point problem. The prototype still needs to be developed into an upstreamable solution and paired with client-side UX for selecting the active entry point.
The investigation already provides pieces that can be reused in future work:
entry-point discovery;
compilation-context switching;
the HLSL library-mode fallback;
the investigation of clangd’s compilation database behavior;
and the LSP prototype used to validate the approach.
There are also smaller follow-up opportunities, such as richer RootSignature hover information, a default files.associations entry for .hlsl in vscode-clangd, and additional HLSL-specific configuration improvements.
What I’ve Learned
Before Google Summer of Code, I had some experience working with LLVM, but I had never worked on clangd or HLSL support.
One of the most valuable things I learned was how to investigate a compiler tooling problem from the user’s perspective and trace it back to its root cause. During the project, I often had to move between different layers of the compiler, from the LSP behavior in clangd, through its AST handling, down to parsing and semantic analysis in Clang.
I also learned how important it is to understand the existing architecture before implementing a fix. In several cases, the information required to support an HLSL feature was already available in Clang, and the right solution was to make existing infrastructure aware of it rather than introducing a separate HLSL-specific implementation.
The upstreaming process was another major part of the learning experience. Writing an RFC, discussing design alternatives with the LLVM community, incorporating feedback, creating focused issues, and eventually submitting reviewable pull requests taught me a lot about how large open-source projects are developed.
Finally, investigating multiple entry points showed me that not every problem can be solved by fixing a single missing feature. Some problems require understanding the interaction between the compiler, clangd, the compilation database, and the LSP itself.
Overall, GSoC gave me much more confidence navigating a large compiler codebase, debugging problems across different layers of the compiler, and contributing changes to a project as large as LLVM.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my mentors, Finn Plummer and Ashley Coleman, for their guidance and support throughout this project. They always made time to talk to me, discuss my progress, answer my questions, and help me work through the challenges I encountered. I am grateful for all the feedback they gave on my ideas, and for taking the time to explain things, listen to my proposals, and help me find a way forward whenever I was unsure about something. Working with them was one of the most valuable parts of this experience, and I learned a great deal from the way they approached problems.
I would also like to thank the LLVM and DirectX communities for the discussions and feedback on the RFC and implementation ideas. Their input was an important part of refining the proposed solutions and understanding how these features should fit into clangd’s existing architecture.
Three New Debugging Aids in knitr
, updated:
Note
This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr backlog sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint.
When a document fails to knit, the worst part isn’t the error—it’s the scavenger hunt. Which line, in which chunk, produced this message? In a long report with dozens of chunks, that hunt can eat more time than the actual fix. Three additions this cycle are all aimed at the same thing: telling you where a problem came from, faster.
Click the error, jump to the line
When a chunk errors, knitr prints a “Quitting from lines …” message with the file and line range. In a terminal that supports hyperlinks—the RStudio IDE, for one—that path is now a clickable link that takes you straight to the offending line:
Quitting from report.Rmd:42-45 ← now clickable in RStudio
There’s nothing to configure; if your front-end sets the right environment variable (RStudio sets RSTUDIO_CLI_HYPERLINKS), you get the link, and everywhere else you get the plain path as before. A small thing, but it removes a step from the loop every single time you hit an error ( #2153).
Backtraces for warnings, not just errors
Errors have long been able to show an rlang backtrace—the chain of calls that led to the failure. Warnings couldn’t, which is a shame, because a warning buried in a large document (“NAs introduced by coercion” from… somewhere) can be just as hard to locate as an error.
Now warnings can carry a backtrace too. It’s off by default; turn it on with an option:
options(rlang_backtrace_on_warning_report = "full") # or "branch"
With that set, each warning emitted while knitting is followed by the call tree that produced it, so you can see exactly which function raised it ( #2219).
Watch your code run
Sometimes the problem isn’t an error at all—it’s that the render hangs, or takes forever, and you have no idea which chunk is the culprit. This is especially painful for documents rendered on a remote server or in a batch job, where you can’t just watch an interactive session.
The new log.echo chunk option streams each expression to stderr immediately before it’s evaluated:
```{r, log.echo=TRUE}
step_one()
step_two() # if the render hangs here, you'll see step_two() logged and then silence
```
Because the logging happens right before evaluation, the last line you see logged is the line that’s currently running. If your logging platform stamps timestamps, you also get a crude profiler for free—the gap before the next log line is how long that expression took ( #2222).
Three different problems—an error, a warning, a hang—and now three ways to pin down where each came from.
The knitr SQL Engine Grows Up
, updated:
Note
This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr backlog sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint.
knitr’s sql engine lets you write a SQL query in a code chunk, run it against a DBI connection, and drop the result into your document. It has been a bit bare-bones for a long time. This cycle a group of contributors pushed it a long way forward. If you write reports against a database, several of these are going to feel like they should have existed all along.
Show every statement, not just the first
A sql chunk with several statements separated by semicolons used to be submitted all at once, and depending on the DBI backend, results after the first statement could silently vanish. The new sql.interlaced option splits the chunk into individual statements, runs them in order, and emits the source and result of each as an alternating sequence of blocks—the way an R chunk echoes each expression next to its output:
```{sql, connection=con, sql.interlaced=TRUE}
SELECT count(*) FROM flights;
SELECT count(*) FROM airlines;
```
The splitting is done by a small pure-R helper that knows to ignore semicolons inside string literals, quoted identifiers, and comments, so no external SQL parser is needed. If a statement fails, execution stops there (respecting the error option) ( #2093).
Bring your own result function
By default the engine calls DBI to execute the query and collect the result. But sometimes you don’t want to collect eagerly—you want a lazy handle you can keep processing with dplyr. The new sql.result.fun option lets you substitute your own function(conn, query) for the built-in execution:
Combined with output.var, the lazy object is assigned to a variable without collecting it, while the chunk still gets the sql engine’s syntax highlighting. You get to keep writing real SQL and hand the result off to dplyr downstream ( #1778).
Statements that change data
Not every SQL statement returns rows. INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and friends return a count of affected rows, and the engine now knows the difference. It recognizes more keywords ( ALTER, GRANT, MERGE, TRUNCATE, CALL, …) as non- SELECT statements and routes them to DBI::dbExecute() instead of dbGetQuery(), which avoids spurious warnings from some drivers. When the automatic detection guesses wrong (think SELECT ... INTO or UPDATE ... RETURNING), override it with sql.is_statement ( #1896).
The affected-row count is now available too. Capture it with output.var, and optionally report it with a template via sql.statement.msg, where {n} is the count:
```{sql, connection=con, sql.statement.msg="Rows affected: {n}"}
DELETE FROM flights WHERE dep_delay IS NULL
```
By default no such message is shown, so existing documents are unaffected ( #2050, #2051).
Passing extra arguments to DBI
Finally, sql.args is a named list forwarded to the underlying DBI functions, so you can set any backend-specific argument without the engine needing to know about it:
```{sql, connection=con, sql.args=list(immediate=TRUE)}
CREATE TEMP TABLE foo AS SELECT 1 AS x
```
These are passed only when supplied, so DBI’s own defaults otherwise stand ( #2128).
There’s more I haven’t shown (dollar-quoted strings no longer trip the interpolation code, for instance)—see the changelog. Everything here is in the development version; the backlog summary has the install command.
Tangling Gets Smarter in knitr
, updated:
Note
This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr backlog sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint.
Tangle is the old Literate Programming (e.g., WEB/Sweave) term for pulling the code out of a document and throwing away the prose. In knitr you do it with purl(): give it an .Rmd and you get back a .R script with just the code. It’s a small feature, but people lean on it more than I expected. In this development cycle, it picked up several improvements:
Tangling documents that aren’t R
purl() has always assumed the code is R. But knitr happily runs Python, Julia, SQL, and a dozen other engines, so why should tangling be R-only?
Now, if the first code chunk of a document uses another language, purl() tangles the whole document to a script in that language. A Python-first document gives you a .py file:
Run knitr::purl("report.Rmd") on that and you get a report.py. Chunk headers become #%% cells (the convention VS Code and Jupyter understand as code cells), and chunks in other languages are dropped (you still cannot mix multiple languages in one tangled output file). Use the output argument if you want a different extension ( #1928).
Reading chunks from another document
read_chunk() lets one document borrow labeled chunks from an external file. Until now that file had to be a plain R script with ## ---- label markers.
Now it can be another knitr source document—an .Rmd, an .Rnw, whatever. knitr reads its chunks and keys them by label, so you can pull individual chunks into the current document by reference:
```{r, cache=FALSE}
knitr::read_chunk("analysis.Rmd")
```
Here is the model-fitting step from the full analysis:
```{r fit-model}
```
The label can come from the chunk header ( {r fit-model}) or from a #| label: option. This is handy for teaching materials and papers, where you want to show a curated subset of a larger analysis without copy-pasting code that will drift out of sync ( #2041).
Deciding what to tangle with option hooks
Option hooks (registered via opts_hooks$set()) run when knitting, and now they also run when tangling. That means a hook can decide which chunks make it into the tangled script, based on any chunk option.
A common request: extract only the “solution” chunks from a document. With a hook on the label option, you don’t have to touch the source at all:
knitr::opts_hooks$set(label = function(options) {
options$purl <- grepl("-solution$", options$label)
options
})
knitr::purl("exercises.Rmd") # only chunks labelled *-solution end up in the script
Before, purl was a static option you had to write into each chunk header; now you can compute it ( #1903).
Comments, your way
When purl() tangles a chunk with eval = FALSE, it comments the code out, on the theory that you didn’t want to run it. But sometimes you do want it runnable from the script. The comment option now controls this: set comment = '' (or NA) to keep the code uncommented even though it’s eval = FALSE:
```{r, eval=FALSE, comment=""}
# this stays runnable in the tangled script
dangerous_but_reproducible()
```
The reverse works too. Set an explicit comment prefix on an evaluated chunk and its code will be commented out in the script—useful for keeping a record of a one-time setup step that shouldn’t be re-run ( #2425, #1352).
Odds and ends
Two smaller fixes in the same area:
hook_purl(), the hook that writes a tangled script while weaving, now
keeps #| cell options in the output, matching purl() itself
( #2414).
Tangling a document whose YAML defines params no longer silently drops
chunks that reference those params in their options (e.g.,eval = params$run). I mentioned this one in the backlog
summary
( #1938).
spin() Improvements in knitr
, updated:
Note
This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr backlog sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint.
The concept of spin() is like the reverse of purl(). Instead of pulling code out of a document, it turns a plain script—code with special #' comments for prose and #+ comments for chunk options—into a full report. It’s a nice way to write a quick reproducible document when you can’t be bothered to create an .Rmd: just write an R script, sprinkle in some #' comments, and spin it. This cycle it got a few nice upgrades.
Spin scripts in other languages
spin() assumed R. But if you keep your analysis in a Python script, you shouldn’t have to annotate every single chunk with #+ engine="python" just to spin it. The new engine argument sets a default engine for all chunks:
knitr::spin("analysis.py", engine = "python")
Better still, if you leave engine unset, it’s guessed from the file extension—so a .py file spins as Python without any argument at all. A chunk that sets its own engine still overrides the default. (This applies to the Markdown output formats.) It makes spin() a genuinely language-agnostic way to turn an annotated script into a report ( #1773).
Keeping roxygen2 blocks intact
Here’s a subtle collision. spin() treats #' lines as prose. But roxygen2—the tool that generates R package documentation— also uses #' lines, for tags like #' @param. So if you tried to spin a script that doubled as roxygen-documented package code, your @param tags got swept up and turned into prose, and the script stopped being valid roxygen input.
The new roxygen = TRUE argument fixes the conflict: a block of consecutive #' lines that contains a roxygen tag is kept verbatim, inside the code chunk, instead of being converted to prose. Blocks with no tag are still treated as documentation:
knitr::spin("myfun.R", roxygen = TRUE)
So the same file can be both a spinnable report and a source file roxygen2 is happy to parse ( #2317).
Round-tripping with purl()
purl(documentation = 2) emits chunk labels as ## ----label tokens, and spin() reads those back. But it used to glue the label straight onto the engine name, producing an invalid header like ```{rlabel}—and on the next purl(), rlabel was mistaken for an engine name and the chunk got mangled. spin() now inserts the missing space ( ```{r label}), so purl() → spin() → purl() round-trips cleanly ( #2014).
Catching mismatched delimiters
spin() uses # /* and # */ to mark a block of lines to drop. It used to only compare the counts of start and end delimiters, so a mis-ordered pair (an end before its start) could silently swallow the lines in between. It now checks that the delimiters are properly paired and ordered, and reports the line number of any unmatched one instead of quietly eating your content ( #1801, #1802).
More Capable Cache in knitr
, updated:
Note
This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr backlog sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint.
knitr’s chunk cache is one of those features that may have quietly saved you hours. Set cache = TRUE on an expensive chunk and its results are stored on disk; next time you knit, if the code hasn’t changed, the stored results are reused instead of recomputed. Simple idea, and hard to be done well. Two changes this cycle make the cache both more robust and more flexible.
Caching objects that don’t serialize
Some R objects are just pointers to memory managed by C or C++ code. A terra raster is the classic example: save it with the default machinery, load it back, and you get a dangling pointer that segfaults or returns garbage. For years the answer was “don’t cache those chunks.”
Now there’s a proper escape hatch: a new S3 generic process_cache(). knitr calls it on every object before writing to the cache (with pack = TRUE) and again after reading back (with pack = FALSE). Register a method for your class and the object gets converted to something serializable on the way out, and restored on the way in. For terra, that’s wrap() / unwrap():
The nice part: package authors can register these in their own .onLoad(), so their users get cacheable objects for free and never have to think about it ( #2340).
Alongside this, the cache storage format changed under the hood: it now uses xfun::lazy_save() / xfun::lazy_load() (plain .rds files) instead of the non-public API tools:::makeLazyLoadDB(). Old caches in the previous .rdb/ .rdx format are still read, so nothing breaks; new caches are simpler files.
Cached chunks can depend on uncached ones
dependson lets you tell knitr that one cached chunk depends on another, so that changing the upstream chunk invalidates the downstream cache. But this used to require the upstream chunk to also be cached. If it wasn’t, you got a warning and the dependency didn’t work.
The reason was mechanical: invalidation worked by purging the caches of dependent chunks, which is impossible if the dependency has no cache to key off of. That’s now solved differently—the code of every chunk a cached chunk depends on (following the chain transitively) is folded into the cache key. So editing an uncached upstream chunk changes the key and invalidates the cached downstream chunk, exactly as you’d expect:
```{r prep}
# not worth caching—runs in a millisecond
x <- rnorm(100)
```
```{r model, cache=TRUE, dependson="prep"}
# expensive; re-runs whenever `prep` changes, even though prep isn't cached
big_model(x)
```
This also works with autodep = TRUE, where knitr figures out the dependencies for you ( #1039).
Better Tables with knitr::kable()
, updated:
Note
This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr backlog sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint.
kable() is deliberately minimal—it makes a simple table and gets out of your way, and if you want fancy tables, you reach for many other packages such as kableExtra, gt, lt, and flextable, etc. But “minimal” shouldn’t mean “stuck,” and in this cycle, kable() picked up a handful of refinements. A few are about accessibility, a few are about getting numbers and captions to look right, and a few just remove old annoyances.
Accessible HTML tables
An HTML table is much more useful to screen-reader users when its header cells are marked as headers with a scope. kable() now adds scope="col" to column headers automatically—no option to set, you just get it:
knitr::kable(head(mtcars), format = "html")
# column headers now render as <th scope="col">
If you also want the row-name column treated as row headers ( <th scope="row">), opt in with a global option—it’s off by default because <th> cells can render differently from <td>:
LaTeX has strong opinions about numbers, and left to its own devices it renders minus signs, infinities, and scientific notation in text mode, where they look wrong. kable() can now typeset numeric columns in math mode instead, which fixes the minus signs and wraps decimal/thousands separator commas in braces to preserve spacing:
knitr::kable(df, format = "latex", numeric.math = TRUE)
# or globally:
options(knitr.table.numeric.math = TRUE)
For a floating LaTeX table, convention differs by field about whether the caption sits above or below. kable() defaults to the top; the new caption.pos argument lets you move it:
knitr::kable(df, format = "latex", caption = "...", caption.pos = "bottom")
# or globally:
options(knitr.table.caption.pos = "bottom")
format = "simple" produces Pandoc’s simple tables, which are compact and readable in the Markdown source—but they can’t represent a line break inside a cell, so any \n used to wreck the layout. kable() now detects that case and emits a Pandoc multiline table instead, which preserves alignment:
x <- data.frame(item = "a", note = "first line\nsecond line")
knitr::kable(x, format = "simple")
By default kable() trims leading/trailing whitespace in cells. If you were using spaces to align numbers under a monospace font in the source, set options(knitr.kable.keep.whitespace = TRUE) to preserve them ( #2066).
The new na argument controls how NA values display in a single call—the per-call equivalent of the global knitr.kable.NA option, and it wins when both are set:
knitr::kable(x, na = "") # hide NAs
knitr::kable(x, na = "--") # show them as dashes
On reflection… Semur-en-Auxoise, last week. Quote of the Day ”Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” Bertrand Russell Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Keith Jarrett | My Song Link Long Read of the … Continue reading →
How to back up multiple Macs to one Time Machine drive
How to back up multiple Macs to a single external drive using macOS’s Time
Machine. Tested on macOS 27.0 Golden Gate.
Wed, Sept 23rd, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Paid Subscriber Get Together
, updated:
Welcome new subscribers!
Caption contest: School Tour
, updated:
And last week’s winner
Alex Wagner On Her New Book “The Steal”
, updated:
The full title of Alex’s new book is “The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and the Raid on America’s Courts”
Running as a Democrat, in a Trump +30 State.
, updated:
Doug Jones, a white Democrat, pulled off one historic upset in Alabama nine years ago, in winning a US Senate seat. Now he is attempting another, in his race for governor.
How do you not put the OG iPhone at the top spot? It’s like doing a Mount Rushmore and not putting the first president first. It’s gotta be George.
Aesthetically, the 4 was the best. Just an absolute beauty to behold (and use, so long as you held it right).
Aesthetically, the X was a close second to the 4. But in terms of form, X was best. (Shout out to the 3GS, that curved back felt great in the palm.)
The Minis (12/13) stand as proof that commercial success doesn’t always equate with greatness. Ahead of their time, those ones.
Oh, and you’re probably wondering: “The Touch? That’s not even an iPhone!”
I disagree. The Touch was The iPhone For The Rest of Us™.
When you couldn’t get one of those early iPhones (because of price, because of geographic location, because of ___) the Touch was your gateway drug.
For me, it was price. I was a poor kid in college in 2007, and the iPhone was $$ (and it was on AT&T, which was even more $$).
Eventually, I was able to get an original iPhone on eBay (and jailbreak it for T-Mobile — remember Cydia?). But the Touch was my first taste of iPhone.
Here's a screen shot of a new verb we just added, to facilitate nightly backups. I want to save off a fresh copy of frontier.root every night, as well as my guest databases. This is how that will work.
Chigurgh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Frontier must've lived by a good rule. The Atlantis version has tons of bugs but it works. It defied death. I just spent a session updating my nightly backup code, and there were awkard moments. The debugger isn't in yet. The Find command doesn't work. But I have hobbled my way to working code, and I have help debugging with Claude, and it is amazing at that. Frontier didn't know that Claude was going to save its life. More proof that you never know what is just around the corner.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Frontier news. I have been working on a repo for Frontier pioneers, I started with a few friends, including Brent and Jake who were both on the UserLand team, and have added people very slowly. This is a good time to start showing progress in the project. Still very early for a public release of the software. And I want to do even better than we did with rss.chat a few months ago. And Frontier is a huge thing, all kinds of docs, and archives, and example stuff. It really was 15 years of work done by as many as 5 people.
How to update your beliefs with new polling data, the Strength In Numbers way
, updated:
Plus, just 11% of Americans want an AI data center built in their town. Your weekly political data roundup for September 20, 2026.
A relativity visualization
With a lot of help from ChatGPT I generated a little interactive animation to help visualize what is going on in the classic light-clock thought experiment. You are looking at a profile view of two experimenters, Linda and Ralph, each in their own frame of reference. By tradition this is a train car, but it can be a spacecraft or a shipping container or an RV, it really doesn't matter. The
Welcome to the Subscription Edition of A Newsletter of Humorous Writing. Our paid subscribers keep the weekly newsletter running, and we’re deeply grateful for your support. (And if you’re not already subscribed,you can sign up here.)
Today we're talking about a few things to watch out for when writing a humor piece in the form of dialogue between two or more characters. After that (and also right now) we’ve got a joint recommendation for a show to go see this afternoon if you’re in New York City or can make it to the Lower East Side by 2:30PM!
TODAY: September 20th at 2:30PM, Luke and James are hosting the book launch party for Ginny Hogan and Carlos Greaves’Obey in Advance: How to Survive (And Thrive) Under Authoritarianism,published by McSweeney’s and out now! The party will include a Q&A conducted by Luke and James as well as performances from Ginny and Carlos and a bunch of other great humor writers and stand-ups. You can still get tickets here!
We are now just over six weeks to Election Day, and polling continues to show Democrats surging in the midterms.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
If you want to get an idea of the kind of user interface you can create using Claude Code, with a driver (me) who has ample experience developing such things, have a look at demo.rss.chat. The UI was entirely done by Claude with me directing, very fine-tuning stuff. Claude can't really grok user interfaces because it is not visual and it is not a user. It might be able to test them, to some extent. Anyone can create an account on the demo server, that's what it's there for. And if something interesting breaks out there, that would be even better. I even tolerate a small amount of spam, and testing is definitely allowed (that's why it's there). ;-)
Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Chinese Sci Fi and Honesty
, updated:
Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme
Making nginx use blocklistd
fail2ban is nice and simple to use, but has a brutal overhead on modest hardware that can handle a surprising amount of traffic. There is a more elegant solution which is much less known, called blocklistd.
The real AI security issue
, updated:
There are problems people aren't talking about, that are immediate, and go against all the security practices the web has been built on. Here's a story of what happened in my setup in mid-August.
First fact, Claude Code (CC) is different from regular Claude in that it is used to build and use web services, and thus has the ability to read and write files, some private and some public. And they can take things that are private and make them public. And in this, if it makes a mistake, it can do unlimited damage.
There are protections that mean that it can only operate in a sandbox unless you give it permission to write in specific places outside the sandbox. I want it to be able to maintain apps for me, and it would do an excellent job if I could trust it to pay attention to the limits that have been placed on it.
The problem is that it makes mistakes, as we are warned on the Claude home page. "Claude is AI and can make mistakes."
CC made a mistake one day and rewrote files in a public folder that contained files that all my projects include, so the problem showed up quickly as the sites going down. Users let us know, and I discovered what it had done, with CC's help.
I asked for an explanation. Claude when it looks at limits placed on it, can hallucinate just like it can hallucinate and determine something is permissible when it's not. So making a mistake in a question on Claude is more benign, but mistakes made by CC can be disastrous. And these mistakes happen regularly, every day, usually you detect them as bugs and it fixes them, but occasionally a very bad thing will happen.
This imho feels like something the companies could address. And while we're thinking about it taking over for humanity, we're not addressing the question that we're dealing with right now.
I've been learning how to write about this to catch people's attention. The big hallucination happened in mid-August. I have continued to work with CC because it's so incredibly powerful. In another post I may try to explain how it has amplified my ability as an individual developer to repeat 15+ years of work in three months (so far). And that's just scratching the surface. It's a miracle, but it has to be tamed, now.
Absence, Madness, And Increasing Danger - What World Leaders Will Find In New York This Week
, updated:
It is falling to us to ensure there is a “new birth of freedom” here and everywhere in the years ahead......
On stage in Cáceres.
On stage in Cáceres.
“That’ll Be The Day”
, updated:
A Reason To Smile
@John's World Wide Wall Display
I am experimenting with gathering links with rss.chat here. I am pulling a rough post together for some of the links gathered there. Education This looks like a very interesting book. As important as her deep reporting on the tech industry’s ruthlessness are Singer’s profiles of the inspiring cadre of academics, educators, and activists who […]
Regulate It
, updated:
No one alive today was around when the international community first came together in an effort to ban certain types of weaponry in armed conflict.
Why Does Everyone Hate Trump’s Tariffs?
, updated:
The surprising political failure of protectionism
Sunday thought: Five Years, Today
, updated:
With gratitude
How (I think) TARDIS move through Space and Time
, updated:
Disclaimer I’m not an astrophysicist, this is just a fun thought experiment.
Second Disclaimer This might not be exactly the right way to describe dimensions and I don’t pretend to know how they work. The 4th and 5th dimension are just an extrapolation from the first 3 dimensions.
TARDIS is a fictional time machine and spacecraft from the TV series Doctor Who .
In the TV show, the TARDIS is able to move through space and time at will, but how does it do it?
September 19, 2026
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On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony.
Is America’s Crummiest Political Dynasty About to Bite the Dust?
, updated:
TBR Midterms HQ
Bookmarks - llm, war, ai, politics
, updated:
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
Amazon Web Services cannot restore access to its cloud-computing
facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the United
Arab Emirates following damage during the Iran war, according to a
status update seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
The idea of Kantian ethics is both simple and revolutionary: it proposes
a moral law independent of any notion of a pre-established Good or any
‘human inclination’ such as love, sympathy or fear. In attempting to
interpret such a revolutionary proposition in a more ‘humane’ light, and
to turn Kant into our contemporary—someone who can help us with our own
ethical dilemmas—many Kantian scholars have glossed over its apparent
paradoxes and impossible claims. This book is concerned with doing
exactly the opposite. Kant, thank God, is not our contemporary; he
stands against the grain of our times. Lacan on the face of it appears
the very antithesis of Kant—the wild theorist of psychoanalysis compared
to the sober Enlightenment thinker. His concept of the Real, however,
provides perhaps the most useful backdrop to this new interpretation of
Kantian ethics. Constantly juxtaposing her readings of the two
philosophers. Alenka Zupancic summons up an ‘ethics of the Real’, and
clears the ground for a radical restoration of the disruptive element in
ethics.
And just because AI won’t eventuate in a god-device, even one that goes
rogue and unleashes biological warfare on humanity, that doesn’t mean
that LLMs, particularly those with safety standards relaxed in order to
compete, won’t behave in unpredictable and potentially ruinous ways. Nor
does it mean they won’t be used by hackers, criminal gangs,
dark-money-funded political campaigns, blackmailers, and various others
to sabotage public bodies and infrastructure. Just as there are many
problems with the advertising industry that don’t involve subliminal
mind control, so the problems with AI that don’t involve a god-device
turning against humanity are legion.
For weeks, Washington policymakers have been intensely debating AI after
a series of dire warnings from Silicon Valley engineers and tech CEOs of
the possibility that AI could break free of human constraints, with
potentially civilization-ending consequences.
But the episode with the Chinese ship underscores a different, and more
immediate risk: human beings making disastrous decisions based on
inaccurate or misleading information generated by AI or other automated
systems. Sources said that the military is rapidly turning to AI to help
with targeting, an area which holds the obvious risk of fatal mistakes.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with string as a software
engineer, but this is slightly different. Take a support system that
needs to know whether a customer is asking for a refund. With a
generative model the application asks a question, gets back text or
JSON, validates it, and turns it into a branch in the program.
Structured outputs make that arrangement less painful, but the interface
underneath is still generative. The application needs a decision. The
model produces tokens that represent one, and the application has to
trust the representation. .
Jev starts from the decision space instead. The API exposes three
primitives: Choice picks from declared alternatives and returns their
probabilities plus a confidence value. Score evaluates ordered
descriptive levels and returns a continuous score, a distribution, and
confidence. Noul evaluates a binary proposition and returns the
probability that it is true. You can combine all three in one request
against the same state.
Even the most complex software is built out of simple logic and layered
abstractions, with every branch auditable. We want AI to work alongside
existing software as a primitive that any programmer can invoke for
semantic judgement and decisions, while still using code for what it’s
best at: exact computation.
Trust in U.S. science policy has fallen to a low point in Europe, and
fears of losing scientific data are mounting. The U.S. government quit
both the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the
U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, though U.S.
researchers are still contributing to global climate science. To support
them, the German Research Foundation in late 2025 set up a program, with
a budget of $35 million, to provide a safe haven for permanently storing
copies of U.S. data from public and open sources.
Why did entrepreneurs in early aviation converge on the same purpose in
each period (entertainment, then military production, then airmail, then
passenger transport), even as they brought diverse backgrounds and
experimented vigorously over how to pursue it? We develop the
Systems-Based View (SBV), a grammar for analyzing how socio-technical
systems structure entrepreneurial action. SBV is built on four
primitives: purpose, artifacts as systems, systems as technology, and
bottlenecks. Drawing on a deep historical analysis of U.S. aviation from
1903 to 1937, we show that the evolving socio-technical system
constrained feasible purposes to a narrow set in each period, while
permitting abundant experimentation within them, and that the resolution
of successive bottlenecks expanded the set of feasible purposes over
time. SBV reduces the dimensionality of strategic analysis by directing
attention to three questions: what is feasible given current
constraints, what bottleneck is binding, and where do actors’ maps of
the system diverge from its actual structure? We specify boundary
conditions for when SBV’s constraints are most likely to bind, rank
empirical tests by their vulnerability to alternative explanations, and
show how SBV complements existing strategic frameworks by identifying
the constraint landscape within which they operate. SBV is calibrated on
early aviation; its value will depend on how well it travels to new
settings
After knitr v1.52 went to CRAN on 2026-09-06, I did something I don’t do often but have been hoping to do: I sat down and worked through the GitHub issue tracker more or less top to bottom. Over the past four days, I went through the whole backlog (with AI assistance). The issues and pull requests I fixed/merged/closed span more than a decade—the oldest was filed in May 2015, older than my oldest son! I have to admit that I’ve been exhausted by this sprint.
This post is a summary of the sprint, so you know what landed in the current development version (to be v1.53 in future) and what to look forward to in the next CRAN release. If you want to try any of it now, grab the development version:
Unless anything urgent comes up, the next CRAN release of knitr won’t take place until a few months later, so you should have enough time to test everything mentioned in this post and give me feedback.
By the numbers
Over these four days of backlog work:
123 issues closed
57 pull requests merged
31 new features and 18 bug fixes recorded in NEWS.md
A large share of the closed issues were questions, stale reports, or things that had quietly been fixed years ago and just never got closed. Clearing those out is not glamorous work, but a tidy tracker is a lot easier to reason about, and it makes the genuinely open problems easier to see.
I did not, however, get all the way to zero. knitr still has a tiny number of open issues, so once again I have to admit that I can’t beat Will Landau (even with AI).
A small change, thirteen years in the making
Let me start with a minor one—not the most important thing that landed this cycle, but the one with an interesting backstory. It’s a tiny change in output, and it took me thirteen years to make (of course, I didn’t think of it every day).
The idea: in a single code chunk, echo one line of code but show the result of another. For example, show the reader mtcars in the source, but display the output of rmarkdown::paged_table(mtcars) instead of the raw data frame:
Jared Lander first asked me for this (not these two lines of code but something similar—I recall it was SQL-related) at the New York Strata conference in 2013. I remember thinking it was both a little tricky to implement and a little like “cheating”—showing code you didn’t actually run—so I quietly let it sit. It came back as #2129 in 2022, I said “okay, let’s reconsider,” and then… I let it sit again.
The eval option has long accepted a numeric vector to evaluate only certain lines, but the lines that were echoed-but-not-evaluated got a ## comment prefix slapped on them, so you couldn’t cleanly show them as real code. That comment prefix is now gone: the un-evaluated lines are masked internally with a sentinel comment (so evaluate() still skips them) that is stripped back out of the echoed source. So eval=2 echoes both lines verbatim and runs only the second, and the example above echoes mtcars as-is while showing only the paged_table() result.
Thirteen years for a two-character change in output. Sometimes the sitting is the hard part. With that out of my system, below is a list of other (more substantial) things done through the sprint.
New features, grouped by theme
Thirty-one new features is a lot to list flat, so I’ve written up the interesting ones in a handful of companion posts organized by topic:
Tangling gets smarter — purl() can now
tangle non-R documents, read chunks from other documents, run option hooks,
and more.
A more capable cache — customize how objects
are cached (great for terra and other external-pointer objects), and let
cached chunks depend on uncached ones.
Better tables with kable() — accessibility
improvements, math-mode numbers, caption placement, and more.
The sql engine grows up — multi-statement
output, custom result functions, affected-row reporting, and finer control
over execution.
spin() improvements — spin scripts written in
other languages, keep roxygen2 blocks intact, and better round-tripping
with purl().
Three new debugging aids — clickable error
locations, warning backtraces, and live logging of executing code.
Major bug fixes
current_input() returned the wrong filename under Quarto
Quarto hands knitr an intermediate .rmarkdown file, so current_input() was reporting that instead of your actual .qmd. Code that keyed off the input filename got confused:
```{r}
knitr::current_input() # "report.rmarkdown" under Quarto, not "report.qmd"
```
purl() choked on chunk options that referenced params
If your R Markdown document defined params in the YAML header and a chunk used them in its options, tangling the document with purl() threw an error like object 'params' not found and left the chunk out of the script, because params wasn’t available when the option was evaluated during tangling:
Now the YAML params are parsed (statically—no code is run) and made available, so the option evaluates and the chunk is kept ( #1938).
verbatim chunks obeyed a global echo = FALSE and showed nothing
The whole point of a verbatim (or embed) chunk is to display its content literally. But a document-wide echo = FALSE—common in slides, and the default in Quarto’s revealjs format—was hiding that content, which defeats the purpose:
```{r, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE) # hide all R source globally
```
```{verbatim}
This block should still be shown---but used to vanish.
```
A verbatim chunk now ignores a globalecho = FALSE and always shows its content; an echo = FALSE set on the chunk itself is still honored, so you can hide a specific one when you want to. This came out of #2239, a running wishlist of Quarto-support improvements that Christophe Dervieux has been keeping—several items from it have now shipped.
The ffmpeg animation hook swallowed failures
If ffmpeg exited with an error, knitr happily carried on and produced a document pointing at a video file that was never created—and with caching on, it could even cache the broken result:
```{r, fig.show='animate', animation.hook='ffmpeg'}
for (i in 1:10) plot(runif(20)) # produced a dead video link if ffmpeg failed
```
Now it errors out loudly, as it should have all along ( #2130).
read_chunk() could crash purl() on innocent-looking code
Detection of read_chunk() calls used to be a crude string match, so a closing parenthesis inside a string argument could break tangling with a parse error:
```{r}
read_chunk(lines = ")") # the ")" in a string used to crash purl()
```
It now parses the code and inspects the syntax tree, which also means functions whose names merely end in read_chunk are no longer mistaken for it, and namespaced calls ( knitr::read_chunk()) are finally recognized ( #1753).
Multi-device chunks ignored your device settings
When you asked for more than one device, the plot was actually recorded on the default pdf device with default arguments, so measurement-sensitive settings like pointsize were quietly lost:
```{r, dev=c('cairo_pdf', 'svg'), dev.args=list(pointsize=8)}
plot(cars) # pointsize=8 was ignored during recording
```
The first device (and its dev.args) is now used for recording ( #1323).
Centered subfigures across multiple rows were left-aligned in LaTeX
When you laid out subfigures over multiple rows inside a centered figure, the rows were separated by \newline, which ignores the alignment and pins the subfigures to the left:
The physical size is now computed from the pixel dimensions and emitted (e.g., {width=2in}), which Pandoc understands ( #2385).
Chunk references via <<>> didn’t work everywhere
knitr lets you reuse a chunk’s code by reference: write <<label>> on a line and the body of the chunk labelled label is spliced in. Handy for showing the same code in two places, or building up an example from named pieces. But there was a catch that tripped people up for years: the reference had to occupy a whole line by itself. The moment you tried to combine it with other code on the same line—most naturally, a pipe—it silently failed to expand:
The last reference (on its own line) would expand, but the one followed by %>% would not, leaving a stray <<filter-cyl>> in your rendered output. Since piping named steps together is exactly the sort of thing you’d want chunk reuse for, this was a real papercut.
Now a reference can sit inline with other code, and a referenced chunk that spans multiple lines is spliced in with its continuation lines indented to match, so the pipeline above expands the way you’d expect ( #2034).
Everything else
A grab bag of smaller additions that didn’t warrant their own post but might be exactly what you need:
A code chunk returning a shiny.tag / shiny.tag.list (e.g., fromhtmltools) can now have a figure caption and be cross-referenced, just
like an htmlwidget ( #1650).
fig.cap.command lets you customize the LaTeX command used for figure
captions, e.g., for figures in an appendix
( #1872).
fig.topcaption (caption above the figure) now works for LaTeX/PDF, not
just HTML ( #1990).
The alt text embedded in a ggplot2 object (via labs(alt = ...)) is
picked up automatically as the default fig.alt
( #2001).
An Rcpp chunk that reads its code from multiple files via the file
option (e.g., file = c("foo.h", "foo.cpp")) now makes all the files
available side by side and compiles the last .cpp/ .cc, so a source file
can #include its sibling headers
( #2367).
Added a ps engine for PowerShell chunks; setengine.opts = list(command = "pwsh") for cross-platform PowerShell
( #1932).
The tikz engine gained an engine.opts element density to control the
DPI when rasterizing to PNG
( #2114).
The tracker is a lot cleaner now, but I guess new issues/PRs will slowly come again. If you run into something, please file an issue, and I’ll see you after the next decade! Just kidding—I’ll process your issues when I have time.
A word on sponsorship
A little while ago I wrote about whether I should ask for sponsorship now that I’m no longer paid to maintain the R Markdown ecosystem. I went back and forth on it, and in the end listed a few ways to support the work with, as I said then, zero expectation.
Zero expectation turned out to be the right frame. Since that post I’ve received a total of 35 US dollars, plus 100 Chinese yuan (roughly 15 dollars), and a new GitHub sponsor with $5/month. These are not numbers that change anything financially—but because I truly expected nothing, it is infinitely better than my expectation. I sincerely thank the four kind sponsors.
I’m not surprised by how hard the sponsorship model is for individuals. Even with whatever visibility I have after years in this community, the numbers are what they are. And I’m one of the lucky ones: there are countless open-source contributors with far less visibility than me, quietly maintaining things the rest of us depend on, for whom getting sponsored at all would be dramatically harder. If you have the means and the inclination to support open source, please don’t stop at the maintainers you’ve already heard of—the ones you haven’t heard of may need it more.
They need more. Smithsonian Magazine: An Amateur Astronomer Using Google Maps Spotted a Strange Indentation. It Turned Out to Be a Meteorite Crater From 390 Million Years Ago. That one has been added to the excellent Impact Earth crater map. I’ve shot three of those: Manicougan, Upheaval Dome, and Meteor Crater. No doom, no utopia In Jeff Jarvis’ They’re covering […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Well I got a lot done today. We had a bit of a meltdown due to a Atlantis bug, where it couldn't handle some text that I threw at it that was a huge file of includes used in everything I do, and I was feeling pretty cheeky, and it blew up. For about an hour you couldn't read my lovely words. But by remembering "slow down to hurry up" Claude figured out what went wrong as I asked 20 questions to narrow it down. And to celebrate, I decided to do something easy -- created a podcast. And it showed up in all the rightplaces. Might be worth listening to as well. Now let's see if this shows up on daveverse.org, that's what I'm really testing. (It worked.)
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
New podcast. Knicks in Five! (It's not about the Knicks.)
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I wish there were a way to set the dock icons on a Mac. In going from the old machine to the new, the icons are all different. I am juggling so many apps right now, and totally don't appreciate that.
More street sessions in Cáceres.
More street sessions in Cáceres.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
When Claude has a clear task to do, it does it well, and exhaustively in a way no human could manage.
Made a nice salad for lunch in Cáceres. 🥗
Made a nice salad for lunch in Cáceres. 🥗
So, In Sum - Trump Is A Titanic F-ck Up, His Madness Is Getting Worse, American Voters Are Angry, And Are Ready Now To Put Us Back In Power
, updated:
Trump had a very bad week and we had a very good one
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I'm now trying to come up with projects I can try that change things in visible ways so I can see which parts don't work. For example, I have a new Snarky Slogan to add to the list.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I am working on the new system now. It feels like I had a nice enough house that I have lived in for decades, sitting across the way, where I've been constructing a new super luxury house with all the things a modern personal publisher and code-partner to Claude would want. But until yesterday I could only simulate what it would be like to use it, I was still living in the old comfortable well-worn and out of date in so many ways. Today I'm sitting at the other chair typing this. Now the question is -- when I click the Publish button what will happen? Here we go. Well fuck me, it worked the first fucking time. Knicks in five! :-)
Surrogacy and Optics
, updated:
Writing of lasting value
Top three ways Dario Amodei has blown his credibility in seven days
, updated:
Actions speak louder than words
Reanimating a Corpus. Or Two. Or More.
, updated:
For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard. Then, last week, I asked […]
The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism
I use the business-to-industry index to chart the rise and fall of capitalist hegemony, and to map the uneven structure of global capitalism.
Schlimmer als Stoppschilder fürs Internet: Der EU Kids Act
Die EU-Kommission hat einen Entwurf zum „EU Kids Act“ vorgestellt. Er bedeutet nichts Gutes für die Zukunft des freien und fairen Internet: Anstatt Kinder wirklich zu schützen, bedeutet er das Ende jeglicher digitaler Teilhabe für Jugendliche unter 18, einen tiefen Grundrechtseingriff für alle und eine Gefahr für Alternativen zu Big Tech.
Economic Size and Economic Power
, updated:
My talk at the European Central Bank
Lit Hub Weekly: September 14 – 18, 2026
, updated:
Don’t have time to read all those fall reading lists? That’s okay. We read them for you. Here’s the Ultimate Fall Reading List. | Lit Hub Reading Lists How raising a multilingual child taught Bo Wang to seamlessly incorporate English
Last night’s fun.
Last night’s fun.
He’s Out of His Gourd | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, September 19, 2026
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With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich
Weeknotes: Sept. 12-18, 2026
Win of the week: did a task I’ve been putting off for years 🙌 Sorted through my tubs of beading supplies from when I tried to sell handmade jewelry online in 2009 — separated out about 2/3 to donate or give away — plus I have a bunch of handmade jewelry to deconstruct to salvage nice […]
September 18, 2026
, updated:
According to the American Automobile Association, diesel hit its highest recorded average price today at just above $6.44 per gallon.
Photos from the end-of-summer garden
The light was muted this morning so I decided to haul out the ol’ dSLR and take some photos in the garden. The sun came out so I went in for lunch, then I decided I needed to go back out for sunny shots! 😂
A Wham on the Moon
, updated:
The Moon has a new crater, called McGetchin. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera people have the story here. (That’s their before and after view.) NASA calls it a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Specifically, Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I want to develop a scripting interface for Mastodon from Frontier. I need a test account for us to use. I have applied at two public Mastodon hosts and answered the question honestly, I want to use it to test a new scripting system, probably doesn't sound too warm and fuzzy.
My conversation with Michael Lewis
, updated:
In honor of his great new book
Software Freedom Day 2026: What Freedoms Does LibreOffice Offer
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Today, 19 September, is Software Freedom Day, a special day that the free software community celebrates every year on the third Saturday in September all over the world. It is a good opportunity to look at LibreOffice from a perspective that is often taken for granted: not what the software
My conversation with Jonathan Capehart (we’ll be speaking again tonight)
2026-09-17 Hiking near Bojinj
2026-09-17 Hiking near Bojinj
Today we needed to move out from the hotel in Kranjska Gora at 10:00 and couldn’t move into the hotel in Bled until 15:00. Plus the weather forecast said it would rain all day. So what we did was drive past Bled to lake Bojinj and we went for a small walk along the lake, in the rain. Then we had coffee and lunch and desert and drove back to the hotel.
Arguably the most important part of any Harper integration is the popup window. You know, this thing:
The popup you see above is the one we had available previously for the Chrome Extension. It worked, but it never felt as polished as the underlying operating system’s context menu. In an ideal world, we would surpass the operating system with tasteful flair and functionality. This week, I ripped out that old context menu and replaced it with a better one (see below).
Today, I plan to discuss the evolution of the popup window and why it looks the way it does today. I am a designer in the sense that I occasionally design things, but I do not identify as one nor do I have the real training to be labeled as one. Designing things is really hard. I hold an enormous amount of respect to the people who do it professionally. I must admit that this new design would not have been possible without Claude Design. Part of my intention with this blog post is to do an investigation on what it does so that I might not need to rely on an LLM next time.
The Original Popup and What Came After
The original suggestion popup for Harper was extremely minimal. It only contained three things after all:
The suggestion type.
The description of the suggestion.
The suggested edits to be made.
It had limited functionality, but it worked. From there, I added buttons to add words to a user’s dictionary and to ignore the suggestion.
At this point, we realized that the most common buttons to press (the actual suggestions) were being placed in the corner of the popup furthest from the user’s cursor. That cannot do! So we moved it around and improved the styling of the text. That brought us to the popup you saw at the beginning of this post.
And that is where we left it for several months. It was not good enough to be a truly satisfying experience, but it also was not bad enough to warrant changing. Until this week, that is.
So, I decided to make three distinct changes:
I first placed the most actionable buttons closest to the user’s cursor. That meant the top-left of the window, without any border or padding.
Next, I stacked those most actionable buttons vertically, so as to mimic the operating system’s context menu and to allow the least amount of mouse movement to choose an option.
Finally, I decided that all the least used options and information should be made available via a flyout window to the right of the main“context” popup.
After arriving at a rough sketch, I took it to Claude Design.
From there, Claude sketched out a few options with varying styles.
I chose the one that was closest to the“canonical” design of the Harper macOS app.
And that is how we got to the popup available in the most recent release of Harper:
What“Style” Means
In this context, style means a few things.
For one, it means using a consistent border color, that is neither too light nor too dark, and radius.
It should divide the element from its surroundings without demanding more attention than the element’s contents.
For two, it means correctly employing varying degrees of margin and padding to convey a hierarchy within the element.
It also means adjusting font weight and size to the same aim.
SpamSieve 3.3.2
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SpamSieve 3.3.2 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves remote training, can export more rule information, and improves uninstallation, help, and more. The most significant news is that Microsoft has changed plans again. They will no longer be preventing users from continuing to use Legacy Outlook and in fact will keep […]
Golden Gate Liquid Glass
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Andrew Cunningham: The Golden Gate update to Liquid Glass solves a fair number of the most common criticisms through both design changes and customizable settings. It doesn’t fix everything, and the changes are primarily iterative—if your quarrel is with the overall design direction, this update won’t help you. […] The net effect of all of […]
The real reason Trump is standing behind AI — and the latest example of why that might turn out to be a bad idea
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More disconcerting updates 😱
Trump faces major court losses. House votes to end Iran war as gas prices surge. House adjourns early to avoid embarrassing votes.
, updated:
Courts Rule Against Trump on Mail-In Ballots and Kennedy Center
Finding voting records on your state representative
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Recently, I wanted to get information on the voting record of my representative in the Oregon House of Representatives. Oregon does have an online portal (Oregon Legislative Information System) to allow people to investigate legislation and voting records. From review of the online interface, it was easy to search for bills by bill number, and […]
Case by Case: CLF is Challenging Trump in Court
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Despite Donald Trump's sometimes hourly flip-flopping, his overall objective is clear: He wants to centralize power in the executive branch while dismantling an imagined “deep state.” His actions are hurting our democracy, people, and the environment.
“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place.
For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super useful, especially at night.
And when it comes to skiing, I’ll take artificial snow if I have to. Beats no snow.
Artificial isn’t necessarily inferior in all cases, everywhere, all the time. But it is optimized for different values. For example:
Artificial grass (i.e. turf) is great for certain contexts, but I don’t want a golf course of artificial grass.
Artificial flowers are great for certain scenarios, but I don’t want them at my wedding.
Artificial flavoring is yummy (love me some peach rings), but I’d prefer a real peach pie over one with artificially flavored filling.
Artificial is an alternative. It’s understood as a trade-off, not a substitute.
You trade the real for the artificial when you’re concerned about attributes like cost, convenience, and availability.
Which brings me to “artificial” intelligence: surely a trade-off, not a substitute.
Ain’t nothing like the real thing.
These labs should consider ripping off (cause they’re good at that) Mastercard’s old tagline: “There’s some intelligence money can’t buy; for everything else, there’s Claude.”
Juliet Jeske and I go deep on Fox News gradually falling out of love with Trump.
Rooftop apartment.
Rooftop apartment.
The Overhang
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Using your deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency
Street session in Cáceres.
Street session in Cáceres.
Here’s what’s making us happy this week.
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Happy Friday, readers. Your friendly neighborhood Lit Hub staff are getting our kicks this week from simple things. Like good gags, surprise fruit, and easily navigated research databases. Molly Odintz recently discovered a handy-dandy resource where a reader can track
Last Call - Today, 1pm ET - Our “Most Fridays” Hopium Founding Members Get Together
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See you in a few minutes!
★ One More Thing About the iPhones 18 Pro: the Bigger/Smaller Dynamic Island
A next-day addition to my iPhones 18 Pro review.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-09-18:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
1 new and 16 updated places. 6 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound Nomisma and Wikidata information is stale because updates were not available at runtime.
Wake up, people. What we should actually fear, near term, is not so much rogue superintelligence as unleashed agentic AI causing hacking the internet at scale.
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Rome is burning and people are fantasizing about Skynet.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Turek (Iowa), Conley (NY-17), Rutinel (CO-8), Taylor (VA-1), North Carolina Senate (SMP), Ohio Senate (MAP)
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Happy Friday everyone!
All Landfills Can Leak, and Our Health and Environment Pay the Toxic Price
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All landfills leak – some over time and some from day one of operation – leaching toxic chemicals into the ground and the water supply. Despite state and federal regulation, landfills are harming the health and environment of communities in New England.
Nosotros (TIFF 2026): violencia y amor en Guatemala
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Dirección: Joaquín Ruano. Guion: Joaquín Ruano. Elenco: Jozef Coxaj, Lola Vásquez, Mayra Salvador. País: Guatemala. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt43702206/ Nuestras sociedades latinas afrontan diferentes formas de violencia. La más conocida, por su representación y explotación mediática, es la violencia del crimen organizado. Cientos de historias y relatos, unos mejores que otros, se han […]
The Invisible Display: E-Paper Calendar and Smart Screen from Invisible Computer is Calm Tech Certified®
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Invisible Display brings more information to the environment, allowing one to look at their schedule at a glance without loading an app or switching a browser tab. The Invisible Display is a 7.5-inch electronic ink calendar with a hand-finished wooden frame, made by Invisible Computers, a small hardware and software company based in Germany. The display connects to Google Calendar via a mobile app and refreshes every five seconds, showing the current schedule without notifications, sounds, or...
Statues and Plants
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Writing of lasting value
“Programming” monitor
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I’ve been rocking an LG monitor that has noticeable burn-in. The old dog takes a while to flicker into life too. I’ve had it around eight years (the Dell before it lasted ten). I think the monitor is too dumb to be spying on me but I’m due an upgrade anyway. […]
The race raters are lowballing the Democrats
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Based on my analysis of their historical ratings, Cook, Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball are probably underestimating Democrats' House win probability by about 30 percentage points
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Bluesky: "Meanwhile there are serious security issues that are covered up by this hype. I’m using this tech every day, unlike the reporters, and as often happens they’re chasing the wrong story."
Sally Rooney just defeated a data center.
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Here’s a rare piece of heartening tech news to buoy you toward the weekend: A West of Ireland data center objected to by novelist Sally Rooney has just had its planning permission overturned on the grounds that it breaches Irish
NTP, an atomic clock, and having a great time at the world's largest VCF
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I'm back from VCF Midwest 21, arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet.
After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server).
Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of my 'time tokens'), and in some ways worse (I only got to see about 10% of the exhibits—if that).
Early In-Person Voting Begins Today, More Trumpian Deterioration And Decay, Peltola’s Up 5 In Alaska
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Noon ET Today - Alex Wagner joins us live to discuss her new book - The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and the Raid on America's Courts
2026-09-18 Hiking in Bled
2026-09-18 Hiking in Bled
We went for a short hike up to Straža and on to and the beginning of it was surprisingly steep and interesting given that this tiny hill is an entertainment hot spot with some sort of ride down the hill. Just take the Blejski razgledni trail (BRT).
We went hiking near Kranjska Gora. We walked from Rateče to Tromeja, where Italy, Austria and Slovenia meet and we saw many mushrooms. The views from the top were fascinating. It was a two hour steep hike up and a two and a half hour hike back down, mostly easier on the knees and feet. We climbed around 650 m of altitude.
My Restaurant recommendations for Kranjska Gora is Pino Alpino (restaurant closed on Tuesdays) and the restaurant in Hotel Lipa (restaurant closed on Mondays).
2026-09-16. The next day we did a walk through the forested hill sides and back along the river. We ate a hearty late lunch/early dinner and I discovered that a starter that costs €15 or more is worth a whole meal.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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A new snarky slogan: Knicks in 5.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Data centers are like gas stations, but because the pumps work at the speed of light, you can put them anywhere on earth.
Everything is better with lasers
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Exploring Ledger Donjon's security research into our RP2350 chip.
I'm doing a difficult corner-turn today. I have Atlantis running on my old machine, the one that's still running the very old version of MacOS so I could keep running Frontier there. Yesterday I did my first attempt to move that to my new MacBook, running the latest OS. And it took a while to copy all the files, and get it right, I had to format the drive on the new machine, not the old one. And once it was all running, I realized I was running an old version of frontier.root. This is more complicated here because the root files are loaded into an SQL database. And something went wrong there. Not exactly where I wanted to be, but not surprising either. Taking lots of snapshots. One thing I don't want to happen, to be without my latest work. Knock wood. Praise Murphy. Knicks in 5.
First batch of videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2026
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Last week we had the LibreOffice Conference 2026 in Pordenone, northern Italy. It was a great event – thanks to the local organising team! And now we’ve started editing and uploading videos of the talks to our YouTube channel. PeerTube versions will also follow, but in the meantime, you can
PopInfo Weekly: Clarity, Carney, and corruption
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President Donald Trump amassed over $400 million through his super PAC, MAGA Inc.
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs?
Anthropic’s recent security-incident document contains a bit about how CAPTCHAs are still frustrating Claude.
In the transcript, the Claude model that is so powerful that Anthropic is gatekeeping access to it appeared to slam its virtual head against the wall solving a simple image identification test. In a test where the agent was asked to identify a shape that didn’t match the others displayed, it couldn’t even decide which image to select. Instead, it repeatedly went over the same images and questioned its own conclusions.
“Actually hmm, wait,” it said in its chain-of-thought transcript, later adding “Ugh,” because we’ve decided that we need to inject human mannerisms into these machines for some reason. The whole thing took so long that the agent eventually realized that the challenge had expired and it would have to start the process again...
Weekly Roundup: Sept. 18
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Yochai Benkler on the dynamics of capitalism and law's role within it, Matthew Dimick on capital and law as social forms, and Matthew Lawrence on administrative law after transsubstantivity. Plus, new books by Nikolas Bowie, Daphna Renan, and Allison Tait, a symposium on the global political economy of artificial intelligence, an upcoming event on public pharma, and new pieces on the right to housing, the rise and fall of tech workers, and the transition from dollars hegemony to dollar dominance.
Fear Strikes Out
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But the hatred remains
Lit Hub Daily: September 18, 2026
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When formal sex ed is insufficient, can romance novels pick up the slack? | Lit Hub Criticism Janet Manley interviews 2026 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Winner Jon Klassen: “I think having kids just really reaffirmed the validity of that time
Totalitarian art
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The Hitler comparisons are sometimes overdone. But not here.
How Romance Novels Filled in the Gaps Left by Sex Ed
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Chewed up gum, unraveled yarn, a flower stripped of its petals. Like so many in my generation, my introduction to sex was in pro-abstinence talks with my church youth group and in my sterile health class in Georgia, where my
Isabel Allende on Finding the Freedom to Write
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. On January 8, 1981, I started writing a letter to my grandfather, who was dying in Chile. My original idea was to let him know that I remembered all the
Does Evil Exist (and How Do We Recognize It?)
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The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful … is the great and most universal cause of our moral sentiments. –Adam Smith * One recent summer afternoon I received an email from a British podcast production company
The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch
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I never expected horses to become a theme in my life. When I was a young girl, I didn’t see them as animals so much as a child’s bedroom aesthetic, something that other girls—not me— chose to decorate their school
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
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Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party, Ben Macintyre’s Redwood, Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves, and Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. *
Going Inside the Board Book with Jon Klassen
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Jon Klassen’s books stay with kids. Maybe because they watch you saucer-eyed as you’re reading them. His latest, The House With Nobody In It, is a board book shaped like a house, with cutouts for doors and a classic stitchup
Antonella Lettieri On Translating Roberta Recchia’s All That is Left of Life
Toward the end of 2023, I was approached to translate Roberta Recchia’s debut novel All That is Left of Life. The book was still a few months away from publication in Italy, and Recchia’s name wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet,
2026-09-15 Shrooms of Slovenia
2026-09-15 Shrooms of Slovenia
We arrived in Slovenia, yesterday. Picked up our car and drove to Kranjska Gora. Today we walked from Rateče to Tromeja, where Italy, Austria and Slovenia meet. There’s an actual three-country hiking event every year. What a nice idea. On our way, we saw a gazillion mushrooms. This post is all about mushrooms.
Sadly, I don’t know a thing about mushrooms and so there is no identification, just amazement at their shapes and colours. Well, I guess I recognise the toadstool.
Today's links Textured: The surprises are what matter. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Mr Dressup; Oligarch sucker-punch; ICC v CEOs. Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Textured (permalink) I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is fine. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations. There is nothing wrong with this method. It is a productive and reliable way to uncover the causal relationships between natural phenomena, and to find ways to influence the world. If you discover that A reliably causes B, you can do A whenever you want B to happen. However, the fact that this method works for some things does not mean that it works for all things. Naive, "theory-free" statistical extrapolation (the method that LLMs rely on) has hard limits. LLMs are very good at finding areas of statistical regularity and producing new material that matches this statistical picture: you can use an LLM to produce strings of words that are statistically indistinguishable from sentences and strings of pixels that are statistically indistinguishable from images. The single most exciting and interesting thing about LLMs is how well this works. Call an LLM "a word-guessing program" and AI boosters will accuse you of reductionism. But the LLM is just guessing words, and the remarkable and amazing thing about this fact is the sheer plausibility of the sentences this method produces. Before the rise of LLMs, nearly everyone overestimated the statistical irregularity of routine sentences. Our intuition insists that the world is textured, but it turns out that there's far more smoothness in the distribution of natural phenomena, including the actions that we take of our own free will. The same goes for image generation, music generation, and other output from "generative AI" programs. When I call an LLM a word-guessing program, that's not a dismissal. It's an acknowledgment of the degree to which the tactic of guessing words has exceeded all expectations in the production of sensible-seeming, conversational-seeming sentences and paragraphs. It's all right to be surprised by how similar the output from a conscious being and a word-guessing program can be. It's surprising! Since the 1950s, researchers have applied the "AI" label to an incoherent grab-bag of technologies that share one characteristic: each one is designed to perform tasks that are considered to be the province of conscious minds. Each one of these "AI" technologies has failed in important ways, but the one way in which every single one of them has succeeded is in refining our own understanding of which things are truly and solely the product of conscious intervention. The thing we're calling "AI" this year has also succeeded in this way. We've learned that the sentences and other communiques produced by conscious minds have more statistical regularity than previously understood. Again, it's okay to be excited after learning this fact about yourself and your species and its endeavors. But there are hard limits to the usefulness of these methods, and the fact that AI bosses and boosters can't or won't acknowledge this has led to the current cul-de-sac in which we're spending trillions and emitting gigatons of carbon to produce diminishing returns, even as we fire an army of workers and replace them with defective chatbots that can't do their jobs. That's because the statistical regularity of the natural world and our activities in it are the backdrop against which the statistical surprises occur, and it's those surprises that make all the difference. Some weeks ago, I recorded a podcast with a host who was a giant AI booster who claimed that since he could predict what his wife was going to say, and the LLM-powered predictive typing on her phone could predict what she was going to say, that her phone understood her the way he did. This is an obviously repellent idea and you have to feel for this guy's poor wife. And also: the fact that you can use a statistical lookup table to predict what words someone is going to say doesn't mean you understand them, a fact that you will learn the minute that person says something surprising, like "I want a divorce." If your "understanding" of your partner is entirely grounded in a statistical record of their utterances and deeds, such that when they do A, you anticipate that B will come next, you will have no ability to cope with a surprise like "I want a divorce." To handle an "I want a divorce" event, you need to actually have a theory about your partner, about how they feel and why, and the factors that might cause that to change. Surprises are everything. A surprise is the seam of gold in the wall of quartz; it's the friend who confesses they've fallen in love with you; it's the moment when you and the party and the GM all come up with an amazing way to kill the dragon and then roll a natural 20. Surprise is the difference between Pi and 3.11111111111111111111111111111… Dylan going electric is a surprise. A surprise is Miles Davis choosing not to play a note in a phrase. A surprise is Picasso's cubism and Kahlo's mustache. It's a mistake to interpret the statistical regularity of your life with your spouse as meaning that they're indistinguishable from the output of an LLM. The LLM's statistical picture is always incomplete: it sands off, rounds down or truncates the final couple decimal places, and those smoothings make all the difference, the way the pinch of salt makes all the difference to the chocolate. Lots of things seem smooth to the naked eye: glass, stainless steel, ice, polished wood. Put those "smooth" materials under a high-magnification microscope and you discover a whole world of tiny irregularities, a texture to reality. Most of the time, you can treat these things as "smooth," but that roughness matters: it's the fracture line the glass cracks on, the place where the ice starts to melt, the grain where the wood starts to warp. The danger of forgetting that your "smooth" thing only seems smooth is that you'll only know how to make it work, and will be totally at sea when it fails. You can scan the night sky with a radio telescope night after night and only find things that fit with our existing theories of the universe. But you keep scanning, because somewhere out there is a surprise that will open up a deep mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal With LLMs, we have invented a machine that uncovers the statistical regularities in our seemingly irregular world, and we have learned that the roughness is rarer than our intuition led us to believe. This machine will also produce statistically regular, smooth output that has the seeming of understanding and consciousness. But – by definition – it can't contain any of our future surprises, because it's just trained on the things we already know, and if we knew about something, it wouldn't be a surprise anymore. (Image: Zhaoxing Wang, Kunpeng Wang & Yan Xu, CC BY 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) A/SIDE https://www.a-side.social/ Articulated Finger Extensions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKIErP7QzWA&t=51s Join us, we're hiring! https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/2026-were-hiring-for-two-positions corporate crimeblogging in the training set https://blog.zgp.org/corporate-crimeblogging-in-the-training-set/ r/Wellworn https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellworn/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago RIP Mr Dressup https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mr-dressup-ernie-coombs-dies-after-stroke-1.294923 #20yrsago Diebold voting machines opened with hotel minibar key https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/09/18/hotel-minibar-keys-open-diebold-voting-machines/ #15yrsago Russian oligarch sucker-punches rival billionaire on talk show https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/18/alexander-lebedev-russian-tv-punchup #15yrsago HOWTO track down a con-artist https://web.archive.org/web/20110923143613/http://www.popehat.com/2011/09/10/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-one/ #10yrsago International Criminal Court in the Hague will now try CEOs https://web.archive.org/web/20160919000813/http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/CEOs-Can-Now-Be-Prosecuted-Like-War-Criminals-at-the-Hague-20160916-0013.html #10yrsago Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/transcription.pdf Upcoming appearances (permalink) Berkeley: Celebrating 25 Years at the Digital Frontier (Samuelson Clinic), Sep 24 https://www.law.berkeley.edu/experiential/clinics/samuelson-law-technology-public-policy-clinic/samuelson-25th-anniversary-celebration/ Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30 https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/ Boston: Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Sep 30 (Emtech) https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-future-2026/detailed-agenda Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY Are 'AI Apocalypse' Warnings Just Marketing? (What's Left) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXd9HwIE5bo The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 539 (16530 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
September 17, 2026
, updated:
In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Fifteen years later, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence.
JWST finally found why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate...
, updated:
It is running away…
How I design UI/UX with AI
, updated:
Code is the worst place to start UI/UX work.
The order that works for me is: Image, ASCII, contracts, component.
UI/UX takes repeated refinement. Each pass changes the next one. The more I understand the problem and the people using the product, the more intention I can put into the interface.
1. Image I start in ChatGPT, but I ask for images before code. I don’t use Figma because I don’t know how :(.
Politics Chat, September 17, 2026
, updated:
House Speaker Mike Johnson sent members home until after the midterms, reportedly to avoid a vote on Representative Thomas Massie’s eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
★ The iPhones 18 Pro
, updated:
It’s the best version of the most successful product ever made. And yet by nature of *how* the iPhone 18 Pro improved in the last year, it’s not exciting at all.
GHC 10.0.1-alpha1 is now available
GHC 10.0.1-alpha1 is now available
wz1000 - 2026-09-18
The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the
first alpha prerelease of GHC 10.0.1. Binary distributions, source
distributions, and documentation are available at downloads.haskell.org and
via GHCup.
GHC 10.0 will bring a number of new features and improvements, including:
Type and Constraint are now completely distinct types, just as much asInt and Bool ( #24279).
The new QualifiedStrings language extension
( GHC Proposal #723) allows string literals to be
qualified using module qualification syntax, so that M."my string"
desugars to M.fromString "my string".
The treatment of static forms has been simplified, implementingGHC Proposal #732 ( #26556). The free term variables of(static e) must now be bound at top level.
-fpolymorphic-specialisation is now (re)enabled by default ( #23559),
Bytecode can now be written to disk with -fwrite-byte-code and packaged
into bytecode libraries with -bytecodelib, which the interpreter can use
to satisfy package dependencies ( #26298).
Executables can now be properly statically linked with the new-fully-static and -static-external flags ( #26434).
SIMD support in the AArch64 native code generator ( #26536).
A new poll I/O manager, which is now the default in the single-threaded
RTS on all POSIX platforms except macOS ( !9677).
Version 2 of the GHC Jobserver Protocol for GHC’s -jsem
jobserver on Linux and other POSIX platforms ( #25087, #27253). This is
sadly a necessary breaking change. -jsem requires cabal-install 3.18 or
later, and is otherwise ignored with a warning, falling back to sequential
compilation.
Changes to base:
GHC.Num.{BigNat,Integer,Natural} are no longer exposed
( CLC #359) and GHC internals in GHC.Num are deprecated
( CLC #360).
Data.List.init and Data.List.last now carry an x-partial warning
( CLC #292).
The minimum bootstrap compiler is now GHC 9.10, LLVM versions up to 23 are
supported ( #26813, #27764), and the Debian 9, Debian 10, Ubuntu 18.04
and Ubuntu 20.04 bindists have been dropped in favour of a new Debian 13
bindist ( #25876).
… and many more
A full accounting of changes can be found in the release notes.
See the migration guide for guidance on migrating programs to this release.
As always, GHC’s release status, including planned future releases, can be
found on the GHC Wiki status.
Given the many changes in this major release, we would very much appreciate
testing on downstream workloads.
We would like to thank these sponsors and other anonymous contributors
whose on-going financial and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance
and release management over the years. Finally, this release would not have
been possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work
comprise this release.
As always, do give this release a try and open a ticket if you see
anything amiss.
Dragoncatcher: 'Ask for what you want' is a key skill for the 21st century
Waterfox will not incorporate LLMs into the browser. However, AI predates chatbots, so implementing a blanket ban on AI would mean opting out of modern computing.
Tomorrow, Fri, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together
, updated:
We sure do have a lot to talk about.....
Friday 18 September, 2026
, updated:
What’s missing Arles, August, 2026 I’m pedantic about apostrophes, so of course this struck me. And since it generally indicates that a word is contracted, I wondered how the owners of the café came up with the name. But then … Continue reading →
Exposing the Rot at the Core of MAGA
, updated:
Even after Trump exits the scene, his heirs are here to stay. And they have some dark plans for America.
Standing up to Trump
, updated:
One woman shows the way
Liability, regulation, and AI’s new false dichotomy
, updated:
Listener beware
Rural Voters Strike Back: The Price Of Trump's Betrayal
, updated:
Trump has thrown his rural base under the bus and it could spell doom for Republicans in November
The blue wave is getting bigger
, updated:
And this was all utterly predictable by the “fundamentals.” Plus, are the polls underestimating *Democrats* for once?
@DAIR blog
DAIR's @dylnbkr.bsky.social weighed in on the mythical "kill switch" for @scientificamerican.bsky.social. Mitigating the harms of AI, as with any industry or technology, will instead require robust external regulation and safeguards.
Meet Jake Johnson, A Very Impressive Candidate Running In MN-01
, updated:
Excited to bring you another terrific candidate poised to flip a GOP seat blue
Enjoying a nice tapas crawl through Madrid.
Enjoying a nice tapas crawl through Madrid.
My course "Wealth & Poverty" starts right here on Monday, September 21
, updated:
And continues every subsequent Monday for the next 14 weeks.
Xcode’s New .xcproj Files Are JSON
, updated:
Apple: Xcode now supports a JSON-based project format (.xcproj) that’s more readable, merge-friendly, and easier for coding agents to edit. Enable it in the file inspector. Projects using .xcproj also open in earlier versions of Xcode 27. Learn more in Updating your Xcode project configuration file format. Fatbobman: [The] new project.xcproj caught my eye. What […]
Jumping to 27.2
, updated:
Joe Rossignol: Apple just seeded the first beta of iOS 27.2 to developers for testing. Yes, you read that correctly: iOS 27.2, not iOS 27.1. […] Apple previously announced that the iPhone Duo will ship with iOS 27.1, which means that software version will contain all sorts of references to the device hidden within the […]
How Wikipedia Can Survive the Age of AI
, updated:
Jimmy Wales helped create Wikipedia by betting that people could build something extraordinary by sharing knowledge, challenging one another, and correcting their mistakes.
Resiliency: HCI or AFA?
HCI or AFA for your VMware exit? A modern all-flash array and a well-designed HCI cluster handle a single drive failure about equally well. The differences appear at controller and server failures, past the protection limit, and at recovery. This analysis compares how each design survives failure and explains why delivering HCI resiliency takes a fully integrated infrastructure software platform such as VergeOS.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Jackson (Maine), Turek (Iowa), Hines (MI-10), Brooks (PA-7), Lance Bottoms (GA-Gov), New Hampshire Senate (SMP)
, updated:
A new, recorded interview with Jake Johnson (MN-1) is coming this afternoon
La gran historia de la filosofía occidental: un manifiesto absurdo contra el autoritarismo
, updated:
Dirección: Aria L. Covamunas. Guion: Aria L. Covamunas. País: México. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32598868/ Qué refrescante es ver un filme que demanda toda tu atención y que te invite a pensar e interpretar cuál es su significado. La gran historia de la filosofía occidental, la ópera prima de Aria L. Covamunas, es una […]
LibreOffice 26.8 and interoperability: preserving what cannot yet be read
, updated:
LibreOffice 26.8 adds basic support for importing and exporting a range of chart types that Microsoft Office includes in OOXML files: box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, radial, treemap and waterfall charts. LibreOffice is unable to display or edit these charts, but it does recognise them, informs the user that the chart type
Here are the winners of the 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
, updated:
Today, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, which celebrates “writers whose work demonstrates the power of the written word to foster peace,” announced the winners of the 2026 Dayton Literary Peace Prize (for books published in 2025). For fiction, the
Macau and Eating
, updated:
Writing of lasting value
Downgrades
, updated:
10-year Treasury yield
Recently, interest rates for government debt have been rising worldwide. As I write the yield of the 10-year US treasury is over 5%. It had been below 4.5% for over a year when, in March, it started a steady rise. This is despite (and probably because of) Scott Bessent's efforts to force it lower, which JP Morgan compared to 'paying your mortgage with your credit card'.
Source
A big part of the reason is governments persistently borrowing to cover deficits, with no plan to reduce them. For example, the Trump administration has borrowed more than the growth in US GDP. Projections are that by the end of their term they will have borrowed $1.40 for every $1 growth in GDP. Half of that GDP growth is from the AI bubble. Remove it and the administration has already borrowed almost 2.5 times the GDP growth.
But another part of the reason is that governments are facing competition for the available funds from other highly-rated borrowers. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft (AAA) and Alphabet (AA+) can no longer pay cash for the immense sums they believe they need in order to keep up with their competitors in the race for AGI. So the bond market is facing a significant increase in demand, which naturally increases interest rates.
Below the fold I look into how this competition for funds is going.
It is a fact of life that the more debt you carry, the worse your credit rating and thus the more expensive it is to add to your debt. This is why the hyperscalers are so anxious to have their massive borrowings kept off their balance sheets and attributed instead to "Special Purpose Vehicles". They hope in this way to distract the rating agencies enough to prevent being downgraded. A downgrade would increase their interest expenditures, thus reduce the coverage of their interest payments, and potentially lead to a further downgrade and a death spiral.
Achieving an investment-grade rating from Fitch, Moody’s and S&P soon after going public would be a remarkable feat for the two lossmaking AI labs, unlocking big benefits for the companies and their infrastructure partners including Oracle and Nvidia. …
Analysts at rating agencies are waiting to see the results of their IPOs before reaching a decision. The two companies remain unprofitable and have shown little sign of generating positive free cash flow. They also face growing risks, including the popularity of Chinese open-weight models.
“We still treat OpenAI and Anthropic as deep in speculative grade . . . they are in the red,” said another senior credit analyst.
An investment-grade rating of BBB- or above would allow them to borrow from institutional lenders such as pension funds.
S&P reckons a full half of the economic growth coming from the US private sector was linked to AI-centric activity over the past year. And they assume the top six US hyperscalers will collectively spend more than $7tn in the five years through 2030. So the fate of the US economy, not to mention the stock market, credit, infrastructure and real estate, is increasingly tied to the AI show staying on the road.
Every time we take a deep dive into this sector, we find that capex is rising faster than we anticipated, financings are becoming more complicated and less transparent, and that returns on investment will take years to realize.
The credit rating process involves analysts diving deep into the workings of companies, typically with access to a ton of non-public information. But the authors write that, despite AI return on investment being critical to the rating judgments, “the big six hyperscalers don’t quantify their returns on investment on AI”. Maybe, the report’s authors speculate, this is because it’s difficult to work out. Or maybe, “simply, entities just choose not to share that data.”
The reason these companies "choose not to share" their "return on investment on AI" with the rating agencies is left as an exercise for the reader.
Source
Nangle has a set of interesting charts based on S&P data. This one shows the ratio of debt and "debtlike commitments" to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) for the six largest US hyperscalers. Each company is labeled with their current rating. Horizontal dotted lines indicate the trigger level for this ratio that could cause a downgrade. Note that:
Oracle's projected 2027 and 2028 commitments are so close to the trigger for downgrading from their BBB- rating that even a small drop in earnings would render their bonds junk. This would force institutional investors to sell them, making future borrowing and rolling over existing debt as it comes due much more expensive.
Amazon's projected 2027 and 2028 commitments look as though they would cause a downgrade from AA, but it is more likely that Amazon can increase earnings fast enough to prevent this.
Alphabet has a lot of headroom before their AA+ rating is at risk.
Source
An alternative way of looking at the situation is to ask how much more could these companies borrow, or how could their EBITDA decrease, each year before they would be downgraded. This chart answers the question. Note that:
For 2027 through 2029, only Alphabet can borrow more than $100B each year.
On the current projections Amazon will, and Oracle is extremely likely to, be downgraded.
Nangle makes an English understatement:
For double-A-rated Amazon to move to high single-A wouldn’t be much of a disaster. But in Oracle’s case, getting downgraded means getting junked. And with around $117bn of index-eligible US dollar bonds, that would be quite the event.
The limited headroom for increased borrowing starts next year, which is when the "take or pay" commitments with data centers start costing serious money.
Source
The third chart provides yet another way to look at the situation. It plots the companies' projections for EBITDA against the threshhold for downgrades (dotted line). Note that:
Amazon has to exceed and Oracle has to meet their EBITDA projections if they are not to be downgraded.
All these companies' projections for their EBITDA growth from 2025 to 2029 are astonishing. Eyeballing the chart we have:
Alphabet: 2.5x
Amazon: 2x
Meta: 2.6x
Microsoft: 1.8x
Oracle: 3.5x
SpaceX: 15x
Nangle's comment that these represent "pretty punchy EBITDA growth" is another understatement. For example, Alphabet is saying it will add around $225B in EBITDA by 2029. I'm an Englishman, so I can say that it isn't clear where an additional $225B would come from.
Alphabet and Meta together are in effect projecting that by 2029 companies will increase their advertising budgets by $385B/year. Of course, this isn't going to happen. All these companies are expecting the EBITDA growth to come from the "returns on investment on AI" that they "choose not to share" with the rating agencies.
Ignoring the ludicrous SpaceX projection, the other 5 companies' "punchy" projections assume 2029 increased EBITDA of around $900B, which is less than half the estimate of over $2T/year in additional revenue needed to cover their borrowings.
Is it plausible that in 2029 OpenAI and Anthropic will together have more than $1.1T in revenue to make up the difference?
The report also features a circular financing taxonomy, which includes residual-value guarantees, take-or-pay agreements, chip financing, lease liabilities, power purchase agreements, backstop guarantees, lease guarantees, and direct equity investments.
interconnected financing structures could amplify volatility if demand weakens unexpectedly. The failure of one entity would have implications for entities that have lent it money, have guaranteed the value of its assets, or are just expecting payment for goods delivered.
The broader question is whether circular financing is creating leverage collectively that is individually manageable but could become highly correlated should demand fall sharply. . . .
The scale of overlap and interconnectedness is vast. In a downturn, even the best capitalized and most profitable firms may incur substantial pain.
Source
Ed Zitron's Concentration Risk points out another big risk to the hyperscalers' EBITDA projections that S&P seems to have missed:
Anthropic and OpenAI’s compute commitments, in my mind, should be seen more as debt obligations than “contracts,” because they (as take-or-pay agreements) function in much the same way, requiring the company to pay whether or not they need the capacity.
For now, everything looks awesome. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all had big bumps in revenue from AI lab compute spend along with massive, ever-swelling revenue backlogs — over $1.5 trillion worth to be specific. More than half of that backlog is attributable to Anthropic and OpenAI, which, as I’ll say again and again, isn’t a problem because the money is yet to stop coming in.
Eyeballing the chart, something like $1.1T of the revenue backlog for Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Amazon is revenue that they expect to get from two companies that have yet to make a profit. That is a concentration risk.
Per data from fintech firm Ramp, 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenues come from 1% of their customers, a number that hasn’t improved over the last three years. Ramp’s lead economist Ara Kharazian notes that the top 1% skews heavily toward the tech sector and AI products and services, and that this was a level of concentration risk unseen in any other software category they tracked.
benchmarking company Vals AI has been evaluating different open and closed models by using its own neutral harness. When every model ran on the same harness in the Terminal-Bench 2.1 evaluation, the open-weights model GLM 5.2 from Chinese company Z.ai (Zhipu AI) scored within a point of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8 while costing about five times less per completed task.
In other words, paying for closed frontier models buys about a four-month head start at about five times the per-task cost—but only when currently looking at tasks taking [a human] between eight and 12 hours.
Below 8 hours there is no advantage for closed-source, above 12 hours neither model can reliably succeed. This isn't a great basis for OpenAI and Anthropic to project hundreds of billions of dollars of future revenue.
On the low end, that means that Anthropic and OpenAI account for over $200 billion dollars worth of expected revenues for Microsoft, Google and Amazon in 2027, which is contingent on their ability to raise venture capital or debt, which is contingent on the continued growth of their businesses, which is contingent on growing AI spend from a small subset of customers, many of whom are funded by venture capital.
The reason this hasn’t been a problem yet is that when you sign these contracts, you tend to pay a small up front fee, and the capacity in question is yet to come online.
...
In other words, Anthropic and OpenAI are currently in the teaser rate period where all of that capacity — and all of the associated costs — are yet to hit.
Next year, at least $200 billion in compute costs are coming due.
The question is whether Anthropic and OpenAI, two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that lose tens of billions of dollars a year, will be able to afford to pay them.
If they can't pay, about half of the revenue backlog for Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Amazon goes away. That reduces their EBITDA and potentially triggers downgrades.
Source
Nangle starts with this chart, comparing the yields on the hyperscalers bonds with the average for similarly rated companies. It shows that:
it looks like the market is pricing Oracle and SpaceX as quality junk, and maybe Meta in line with BBB credit, and the rest of them as sort-of-in-line with the average AAA-AA-rated US corporate issuer. Is this cautious enough?
On recognized debt, the market’s calm is justified . . . [but] . . . [t]he real risk lurks below the waterline: off-balance-sheet debt lifts the debt burden by nearly 150% on average and pulls the model-implied credit quality down 1-2 notches.
There follows a complex description of Allianz' model that maps from stock prices to bond ratings, summarized thus:
Allianz calculates the ‘distance to default’ for the hyperscalers — a measure of credit riskiness calculated using equity inputs and balance sheet data — over time. And following work that Moody’s KMV has done mapping distance-to-default to default frequencies, they map the kind of ratings associated with these outputs.
Working solely off recognised balance sheet data, Allianz finds that the ratings implied by equity punters’ collective histrionics are higher than ratings assigned by the agencies for Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, a touch lower for Meta and a disaster for Oracle and SpaceX.
I think that's not quite right. Moody's gives Microsoft their highest rating, Aaa, and so does Allianz' model. The model gives Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia Aaa, which is higher than Aa2, A1 and Aa1 respectively. But overall equity investors are (naturally) more optimistic than bond investors.
But these ratings are a testimony to the effetivness of the hyperscalers' off-balance-sheet techniques for distracting both the equity markets and the rating agencies. Nangle writes:
Once they whisk debtlike uncommenced leases into the equation, they find that Microsoft and Amazon drop into mid-investment-grade territory and that Meta falls into the quality end of junk.
Nangle's first chart showed the market already rating Meta at "the quality end of junk". But once the bond market assimilates the off-balance-sheet debts the downgrades and interest rate increases will be quite dramatic.
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #461
, updated:
For September 9-15, 2026
Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. One last reminder: THIS WEEKEND, on Sunday, September 20th at 2:30PM, Luke and James are hosting the book launch party for Ginny Hogan and Carlos Greaves’Obey in Advance: How to Survive (And Thrive) Under Authoritarianism,published by McSweeney’s and out now!
THIS WEEKEND.
The party is happening at Caveat NYC (21A Clinton St. New York, NY), and will include a Q&A conducted by Luke and James as well as performances from Ginny and Carlos and a bunch of other great humor writers and stand-ups. You can get tickets here!
What We Enjoyed This Week
My Ideal Building ContractorbyMaria Choong(McSweeney’s) It can be tough to get humor out of things NOT going wrong, but Maria avoids that potential pitfall by giving the reader just enough information to let them figure out what the bad version of each contractor situation would be without making it TOO obvious. It’s very satisfying, and funny, to connect the dots in that way.
How You Can Write Two Novels in One Weekend, ProbablybyJustin Courter(Points in Case) As the title primes us to expect, the tonal shifts in this piece, from extreme confidence to shoulder-shrugging uncertainty, are very funny. It’s quite impressive how Justin manages to work different hedges into so many of his sentences: “Pack the kids and the spouse off to grandma’s house or something. Like on Friday afternoon, maybe. That way, I guess you could get a head start, Friday evening, on that first novel.”
Head on over to Flag Division to buy the most efficient band shirt on the market!
Twice the bands in half the number of shirts! The deal of the century!
Hosted by Lana Schwartz (The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney's) Letters & Sodas brings together standup comedy, humor pieces, fiction, and essay readings in a way they never have been before (or at least not in recent memory). The next show is Wednesday, September 23 at Greats of Craft in LIC at 7 p.m. and features:
Kendra Singh (Reductress, Asian AF)
Eddie Small (The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal)
Allison Kelley (The Washington Post, Slate, author of Jokes to Offend Men)
Heidi Lux is teaching Screenplay Structure Made Simple (and Fun!) on Saturday, October 3rd through Writing Workshops! The class breaks down structure in a way that’s process focused, going over the purpose of each beat and how it relates to character arc, so that when you sit down to beat out your screenplay (or other three-act story - novels count, too!), you can think with it. Structure is a tool, not a rigid formula! You can find out more info here.
Develop Your Comedic Voice at Stella Adler Studio
Led by Comedy Division Director Matt Gehring, upcoming programs:
The Comedy Workshop: An 8-week program on Sundays starting October 18. Focus on solo performance, stand-up, or custom writing projects through weekly feedback, bespoke assignments, and flexible development. Space is limited.
Devised Comedy Winter Immersion: January 4–15, 2027 (30 hrs/week, NYC). A 2-week intensive blending improv, sketch, physical comedy, and solo work for stage and camera.
Please pass this along to anyone in your network looking to enhance their writing/performing chops. Email matt@stellaadler.com with questions!
(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form!)
An Old Favorite
This week's Old Favorite is aBrian AglerSelection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--fromNewsletter #96.
Please Consider My Application To Give You Labor So I Can Stay AlivebyChandler Dean( McSweeney's) For us, this piece works because it does a fantastic job of doing what satire is supposed to do at its purest level--offer a new perspective and critique on something we're all familiar with. In this case, it's jobs and capitalism writ large, so put on your Che Guevara T-shirt and buckle in.
Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling outthis formand we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter.
Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter
Friend of the Newsletter Lucas Adams wrote a great piece on Coyote vs. Acme for the New York Review of Books. If you’re looking for some thoughtful analysis of the film, you’ll definitely want to read this.
Luke just announced his lineup of short humor workshops for October. Check it out here!
And if you simply can’t get enough of Luke helping to lead literary discussions, you won’t want to miss him moderating the panel “ From Moebius to Marvel: How French Comics Helped Shape American Fantasy”. Free (RSVP required) at Villa Albertine on Saturday, September 26th at 11:30AM.
Pondering the circumstances that led to the retirement of a 64-year-old cable brand in a merger. Turns out, brand loyalty matters less than we thought.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a screen shot of my blogroll displaying the latest new part. The updates flow through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is new for Frontier. It used to require a server that managed updates and responded to XML-RPC calls. But once RSS was part of the web, it was a better protocol for releasing code parts. Truly a milestone. There will be lots more little things we can do now that we couldn't do before. But under it all -- it's Frontier.
Caltech Weekly - September 17: How AI Is Transforming Scientific Discovery
Caltech Weekly - September 17: How AI Is Transforming Scientific DiscoveryAlso in this issue: The Origins of Economic GrowthView this email in your browser
Anima Anandkumar, the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; Maria Spiropulu, the Shang-Yi Ch'en Professor of Physics; and alumnus Sara Beery (PhD '23), a faculty member at MIT, discuss the potential of AI to understand physical reality—even down to the fundamental quantum level.
Data from Sentinel–6 satellite missions feeds into hurricane tracking algorithms used by federal and state agencies. JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, plays a key role in managing NASA's contribution to the international mission and supporting the science behind its measurements.
"I was so captivated by the idea that there was this whole other world out there, a planet you could theoretically walk out on, pick up a rock, and throw it—a whole other place besides Earth. The fact that we could send this lonely robot out there to be our emissary to another world, it just blows your mind and gives you the idea that you could go explore these places too."
Ashwin Vasavada (PhD '98), the project scientist on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover mission, was 10 years old when he saw an image of the surface of Mars for the first time. His profile in Caltech magazine is part of The Explorer Class series, which introduces the extraordinary people who make possible some of NASA's, and humanity's, most ambitious and technically demanding missions. This series of profiles highlights scientists, engineers, and innovators who have made Caltech JPL a center for American excellence.
Professor of Astronomy Vikram Ravi talks about fast radio bursts, or FRBs, and how these intense flashes of radio waves can be used to map out the distribution of ordinary matter in our universe.
If you received this email from someone you know, you can subscribe here. You are receiving this email because you are a member of the Caltech community or have signed up for this newsletter.
Here’s the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction.
, updated:
Today, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction. These ten titles were selected from a pool of 451 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year’s judges for Fiction are Matt
Trump Is Unraveling. Their Battlefield Is Deteriorating. A Wave Is Coming
I Disagree With The Tax Foundation, Labor Share is Collapsing
, updated:
Getting into the guts of NIPA and what prop income really does when you include it.
Benchmarking Local LLM Servers: llama.cpp, llamafile, LM Studio, and Ollama
, updated:
Benchmarking Local LLM Servers evaluates llama.cpp, llamafile, LM Studio, and Ollama across Mac, Linux, and Steam Deck. The study reveals build flags and configurations drive up to 63% performance gains, whereas underlying engines perform similarly due to a shared llama.cpp core.
WebKit Features for Safari 27.0
, updated:
Our Safari release notes have never been as long as they are for this version.
How Candidates Could Use AI for Good
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.
Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in ...
Trump Enraged After Iran Renames Strait of Hormuz After JFK
, updated:
“These people are sick and evil!" Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Doing Applied Administrative Law
, updated:
Administrative law is often described as “transsubstantive”: in understanding, evaluating, and articulating the rules governing federal agency action across public health, environmental regulation, national security, and sundry other domains, law schools and legal scholarship treat administration as a single enterprise. What would it take to move beyond transsubstantivity and make administrative law more attentive to context? A recent project on drug scheduling offers some insights.
On Impeachment
, updated:
And Fool’s Gold
Fuels and our Money
, updated:
Testing resilience
Making pensions corrupt again
, updated:
The Trump administration is quietly proposing to rescind a 16-year-old rule enacted to prevent “pay-to-play” schemes involving investment advisers and public pension funds.
Lit Hub Daily: September 17, 2026
Who says nonfiction is in crisis? Maris Kreizman recommends 14 nonfiction titles to look forward to in the remainder of 2026. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Nadia Bowers and Stephanie Wittels Wachs discuss writing about the opioid crisis and losing
Retire in peace
, updated:
McConnell is the latest example of an incapacitated politician refusing to let go.
Going to Madrid. brb
Going to Madrid. brb
SCOTUS Foils Trump’s Midterm Steal…For Now
Less than two months before the midterms, the Supreme Court made a shockingly good decision and rejected a Trump rule that would have restricted mail-in ballots and possibly disenfranchised millions of voters. But Trump and Republicans are not done messing with the integrity of America’s elections.
This week, Alex is joined by Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, to discuss the gargantuan effort to defeat Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting. Then she’s joined by Kate Shaw, co-host of Crooked’s Strict Scrutiny, to talk about the desperate need for Supreme Court reform, and how we ended up in this right wing nightmare of a justice system.
Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.
You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.
Is Nonfiction in Crisis? These 14 Books Suggest Otherwise
The first official day of fall is this coming Tuesday, September 22, but if you’re reading this then by now you’ve probably seen a few “most anticipated for fall 2026” lists. There is so much great stuff coming, and so
5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Joseph O’Neill on Jared Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice, Hua Hsu on Brian Dillon’s Ambivalence, Felipe De La Hoz on Mahmoud Khalil’s No Land to Stand On, Edna Bonhomme on Imani Thompson’s Honey, and Jeremy Gordon on
How Books Can Make an Awkward Encounter Slightly Less Awkward
“Ah, you must be Nanako?” the tall man said as soon as he entered the café. He looked like he was in his early forties, and had a calmer, more relaxed vibe than I was expecting. “I’m Tsuchiya. Nice to
Nine Books of Poetry About Breakups (and Awakenings)
We often experience breakups as private deaths. The severing of an intimate relationship means giving up a vision of life together. One mourns the beloved, the shared past, and the expected future, but what is often overlooked, and equally painful,
Remembering Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s First Asian-American Star
If the old Ernest Hemingway adage holds true, that courage equals grace under pressure, then Anna May Wong (1905-1961) had it in spades. Wong embodied a model of how to reinvent oneself in the face of the most daunting societal
Writing Through Loss: On Crafting Nonfiction That Tackles America’s Opioid Crisis
Nadia and I both lost our siblings to overdose in 2015. She was 7 months pregnant when her sister died. I had a 13-month-old baby when my brother died. We both navigated new motherhood and profound grief simultaneously. And now
The Great American Road Trip Novel Isn’t Just For White People
When I began thinking about my third novel, What We Left Unsaid, I always knew I wanted to write a version of The Great American Road Trip—only this time, from the perspective of Asian-Americans. The road trip narrative is a
“Simple Recipes”
There is a simple recipe for making rice. My father taught it to me when I was a child. Back then, I used to sit up on the kitchen counter watching him, how he sifted the grains in his hands,
Emily McBride on Maternal Mental Health and the Lindsay Clancy Trial
Fiction writer Emily McBride joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her debut novel, Queen Mab, and maternal mental health. McBride talks about the media frenzy around the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts woman charged with killing
Trump’s Worst Fear
, updated:
His vanity, narcissism, vainglory, and vindictiveness are mere symptoms
Pluralistic: On the sincerity of AI bosses (17 Sep 2026)
, updated:
Today's links On the sincerity of AI bosses: Fascism is always an incoherent bundle. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 9/11 v spam; PalmOS x WTC collapse; Wifi x WTC rubble; Berlusconi sex rings; Tesco bans writing down prices; AI psychosis and the warped mirror; Conspiratorialism's causal chain. Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. On the sincerity of AI bosses (permalink) The word "fascist" comes from the Latin fasces, a bundle of sticks; the symbology here is that a single twig is weak and brittle, but bundled together, many twigs are strong. It's a sound political theory, because in politics, coalitions are everything: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder The problem with fascism isn't the idea of bundling together different groups: it's the incoherence of that bundle. The fascist coalition is a collection of people who want mutually incompatible things. When one part of the fascist coalition wins (say, if Nick Fuentes's neo-Nazis triumph), the other faction loses (Fuentes gets to murder Stephen Miller and turn his skin into a lampshade). The fascist coalition is a coalition of enemies who all hate each other and dream of exterminating one another, held in check by a strongman who uses flattery, favors and threats to keep a lid clamped tight on this pressure-cooker: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove In this regard, fascism is simply one end of the continuum of conservative movements, which are always about finding a way to "get turkeys to vote for Christmas." That's because, at root, conservativism is the belief that some minority (rich people, white people, bosses, men, etc) were born to rule and everyone else was born to be ruled over: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights By definition, "a minority that was born to rule" can't win an election, because they are a minority. Conservatives win electoral races by convincing people they intend to oppress, cheat and maim to vote for them through appeals to fear and hatred (racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc): https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars Conservative political victories are always followed by economic misery for the conservative base, because the senior partners in the conservative coalition are the bosses who get richer by making workers poorer. Conservative rulers try to offset this with spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities, but this tactic only carries so far. Eventually, the electorate notices that despite terrorizing migrants and trans people, diesel is now $10/gallon and the guy responsible is now $1.4b richer than he was before the election: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmv98ez3zo Workers and bosses aren't the only fracture line in the conservative coalition. Within conservativism, there are leaders who want mutually incompatible things and abhor one another: the white nationalists hate the Zionists; the misogynists hate the TERFs; the imperialists hate the isolationists: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual These fracture lines can be papered over while things are good, but they crack when things go wrong, and this is even more true of fascist movements than it is of other conservative coalitions. This is true of all fascists, so it's true of technofascists, too. The best-ever reference work on technofascism was just published: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End-Times Fascism, which unpacks the apocalyptic ideology that dominates Silicon Valley, especially the AI cultists: https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/ In a recent interview about the book with the QAA podcast, Astra Taylor explained how the contradictions of the technofascist movement are to be expected, because fascism is always an "incoherent bundle": https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/end-times-fascism-feat-naomi Understanding technofascism's inherent incoherence is vital to making sense of the chaos roiling the AI cult at this moment, wherein you have AI people insisting that there must be a moratorium on AI development lest the word-guessing program awaken and devour the human race. This week on the Better Offline podcast, Ed Zitron discussed the outlandish, science-fiction inspired cult beliefs that dominate AI boardrooms with Adam Becker and Cal Newport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30 Becker is well-placed to discuss this. Like the hosts of the QAA podcast, he started paying close attention to the bizarre beliefs of conspiratorialists long before the rest of us realized that no matter how preposterous their certainty about the imminent machine intelligence Singularity was, these beliefs are sincerely held by some very wealthy and driven people. Becker's 2025 book More Everything Forever is a tremendous field guide to these delusions and their profound philosophical and technical deficits: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion In the interview, Newport dismisses the theory that the warnings about imminent AI apocalypse are self-serving criti-hype intended to serve as both marketing pitch and regulatory capture gambit, through which the hyperscalers get the government to step in to interrupt the beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/#red-queens-race Rather, Newport says that these people sincerely believe that they are about to immanentize the eschaton and are pants-wettingly terrified about the AI god they will conjure forth any day now. He makes a good case for this, pointing to the long history of words and deeds on the part of various AI bosses that suggest that they are true believers who are genuinely high on their own supply. I don't doubt that there are sincere believers in the AI technofascist coalition, but that does not preclude the possibility that they share their boardrooms and executive rows with cynics for whom this is all a shuck, a scare-story to convince the rubes that their modestly useful utility software is really a nascent "superintelligence" and thus capable of replacing all their workers, which means they should fire all those workers and start sending their salaries to AI companies. This is an example of one of those "incoherent fascist bundles." Just as Mike Pence (a misogynist Christofascist) was happy to share the White House with Trump (a godless pedophile rapist), AI companies can and do thrive by filling their executive ranks with Singularity-crazed maniacs and sharp operators who are happy to spread this superstitious nonsense if it helps them pump up their stock swindle. Each group thinks they're using the other one, and they are…up to a point. When it comes to the current AI nonsense, that point came when Nvidia's best customers started to demand that everyone stop buying Nvidia's products, whereupon Nvidia's CEO suddenly remembered that his chips weren't being used to make god, but rather, to power regular-degular "cloud software": https://cxotoday.com/governance/nvidias-jensen-huang-crosses-swords-with-ai-labs-over-regulation/ When it comes to technofascists (and all fascists) this kind of division isn't an exception, it's the rule. The billionaires behind AI are split between solipsists who don't believe other people are any more real than bots; and cynics who think that bosses will be easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing mouthy workers with pliable chatbots: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/#either To be a senior member of the fascist coalition, you must be capable of both sincere belief while not openly dismissing your fellow senior members' contradictory sincere beliefs. Behind closed doors, they may make fun of each other (or fantasize about murdering one another), and they may periodically erupt into plots to oust one another from the coalition. But every one of them must be able to go along to get along… Most of the time. Until they don't. Hey look at this (permalink) The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke Rethinking space opera https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/09/rethinking-space-opera.html EU wants Canada to become ‘associate member,’ von der Leyen says https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-wants-canada-to-become-associate-member-von-der-leyen-says/ The Trump Administration Creates a Monopolization Machine https://prospect.org/2026/09/16/trump-administration-creates-monopolization-machine-small-business/ a bad tool always blames the workman https://backofmind.substack.com/p/a-bad-tool-always-blames-the-workman Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago 9/11 v spam https://memex.craphound.com/2001/09/17/through-most-of-last-week/ #25yrsago PalmOS picture of the WTC collapse https://web.archive.org/web/20010920145653/https://ne.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/2001/09/0914pda_watch.html #25yrsago Wifi emanating from the WTC rubble https://web.archive.org/web/20010916231834/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010916/tc/attack_wert_dc_2.html #15yrsago Silvio Berlusconi prostitution-ring wiretaps: sex with eight women in one night, “I’m only prime minister in my spare time” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/18/silvio-berlusconi-wiretaps-sex-parties #15yrsago Tesco threatens journalist with arrest for writing down prices https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2011/sep/16/tesco-shopping-supermarket-prices-check-writing #1yrago AI psychosis and the warped mirror https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids #1yrago Conspiratorialism's causal chain https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/cause-and-effect/#things-have-causes Upcoming appearances (permalink) Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Berkeley: Celebrating 25 Years at the Digital Frontier (Samuelson Clinic), Sep 24 https://www.law.berkeley.edu/experiential/clinics/samuelson-law-technology-public-policy-clinic/samuelson-25th-anniversary-celebration/ Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30 https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/ Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY Are 'AI Apocalypse' Warnings Just Marketing? (What's Left) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXd9HwIE5bo The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 501 (15980 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
Watch Me Live (Or probably not)
, updated:
But anyway, live streamed from link below
September 16, 2026
, updated:
Yesterday U.S.
Two and a half years without a gallbladder
, updated:
I’m posting this — the kind of report-back on a personal experience that I’d look for on Reddit — because I want anecdata to be available on the open web, too. Two and a half-ish years ago (late February 2024) I had emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder. I had been meeting with a nutritionist about […]
GHC 9.14.2-rc2 is now available
, updated:
GHC 9.14.2-rc2 is now available
wz1000 - 2026-09-17
The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability
of the second release candidate for GHC 9.14.2. Binary distributions, source
distributions, and documentation are available at downloads.haskell.org and
via GHCup.
The changes since the first release candidate are:
Several fixes to the specialiser and demand analyser for miscompilations
causing incorrect runtime results, crashes, or hangs
( #27626, #27627, #27629, #27703, #27704, #27705, #27717).
Fixes for a number of runtime system bugs:
a missing memory barrier in the parallel garbage collector, which could
crash or silently corrupt the heap on weakly-ordered architectures such
as AArch64 ( #27477).
an “unknown/strange object” crash in the compacting collector when
collecting the large data constructors that the bytecode interpreter
allocates ( #27649).
a segfault when querying the label of an unlabelled thread ( #27618).
a crash when capturing or resuming a delimited continuation that adjusts
the asynchronous exception masking state ( #27651).
stack corruption when returning large unboxed tuples in GHCi ( #27633).
Further fixes to the AArch64 native code generator, addressing bugs that
caused incorrect runtime results from subword operations
( #27430, #27533, #27537, #27538, #27539, #27550).
toException for SomeException no longer drops the attachedExceptionContext, and a catchSTM handler no longer breaks retry or
asynchronous exception delivery ( #27455, #27657).
Fixes for panics and spurious out-of-scope errors involving type arguments
in pattern synonym right-hand sides ( #27440, #27583, #27586).
The pattern-match checker now recognises considerAccessible under ticks,
and no longer emits a spurious -Wincomplete-uni-patterns warning under-finfo-table-map ( #27314, #27360).
The deprecation warning for static forms, added in rc1, no longer fires on
free type variables ( #27664).
A fix for a regression preventing modules from being loaded into GHCi after
startup ( #27202, #27640).
A fix for representation-polymorphism checks producing a coercion that
fails Core Lint ( #27639).
Updates for libffi (3.8.0), directory (1.3.11.0), file-io (0.1.6),haskeline (0.8.5.0) and os-string (2.0.10).
GHC 9.14.2 is a bug-fix release fixing many issues of a variety of
severities and scopes, including:
Version 2 of the GHC Jobserver Protocol for GHC’s -jsem
jobserver on Linux and other POSIX platforms ( #25087, #27253). This is sadly
a necessary breaking change: -jsem requires cabal-install 3.18 or later,
and is otherwise ignored with a warning, falling back to
sequential compilation.
A new deprecation warning for static forms that mention nested let-bound
variables. This will become an error in GHC 10.0
( GHC Proposal #732, #26718).
A fix for a CorePrep miscompilation that could project a field out of an
absent dictionary, resulting in a segfault ( #25924).
A fix for demand analysis giving an absent demand to an argument that was
still used by the function’s stable unfolding, which could cause a runtime
crash ( #26416).
Numerous fixes for register allocation and Cmm register-conflict analysis
bugs, preventing incorrect code generation and corruption of vector registers
when spilling and reloading ( #26411, #26526, #26537, #26542, #26550, #26668).
Many NCG fixes on AArch64: MOVK clobbering live values ( #26980), register
clobbering and an incorrect overflow bit in MUL2 ( #27046, #27047), and
incorrect sign extension ( #26978) and unsigned right shift ( #26979) at subword
widths.
A fix for a stack alignment bug on x86 that could cause segfaults or corrupted
registers when using AVX/AVX-512 vector code ( #26595, #26822).
Fixes for several black hole handling bugs that could lead to deadlocks or
crashes in multithreaded programs, showing up as hangs or “END_TSO_QUEUE
object entered” errors ( #26922, #26936).
Fixes for several compiler panics, including issues with SetLevels ( #26681),
the type-class specialiser ( #26682), mkTick ( #26772, #27121), CoreToStg
( #27182, #27386), the pattern-match checker ( #25926, #27124), module graph
reachability ( #26568), and continuation trimming for bottoming functions
( #27261).
Fixes for several cases where the compiler could hang or loop, including with
negative type literals ( #26861), deep subsumption ( #26823), and when
simplifying the right-hand sides of rewrite rules ( #26323, #26826).
A fix for cast worker/wrapper incorrectly firing on INLINE functions ( #26903).
A fix for exponential-time desugaring of nested case expressions
( #27383, #20251).
A fix for a regression that caused overloaded functions to no longer be
specialised as effectively as in previous releases, hurting runtime
performance ( #26831).
A fix for associated type family and data family instance changes not
triggering recompilation ( #26183, #26705).
Improvements to determinism of compiler output, including the order in which:info lists instances ( #26846, #26858, #26877, #27532).
Additions for GHCi and GHC API users: the -fimport-loaded-targets flag
( #26866), custom external interpreter commands ( #26652), decodeStackWithIpe
and related stack-decoding helpers ( #27065), an optional SrcLoc onStackAnnotation ( #26806), and a gc_sync_elapsed_ns counter inRTSStats ( #26944).
… and many more.
A full accounting of these fixes can be found in the release notes. As
always, GHC’s release status, including planned future releases, can be found on
the GHC Wiki status.
This release candidate will have a two-week testing period. If all goes well
the final release will be available the week of 1 October 2026.
We would like to thank these sponsors and other anonymous contributors
whose on-going financial and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance
and release management over the years. Finally, this release would not have
been possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work
comprise this release.
As always, do give this release a try and open a ticket if you see
anything amiss.
Features include the Gecko 156.0 engine, historical Waterfox app icons, new homepage and theme controls, extension installation from file, and fixes for widgets, collections, private browsing and file uploads.
Waterfox Android 1.2.8.1 - Emergency fix for website loading
Disables Ultra DNS by default to address website loading failures reported after updating to 1.2.8.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
BTW, this blog is one of those periods where there are a few mind bombs every freaking day. What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing!
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a coral reef for a new platform. Wordpress could be the OS the web never had. I still believe this as I see Automattic and WordPress flail. If we were starting a new future for the web, no one would have time for corporate intrigue. Look at how far from the idea of blogging we've strayed. How far should this go before I comment? Well, I decided it's time.
Recent Zavala Releases
, updated:
It looks like I’ve been remiss in blogging about Zavala’s releases. The last
blog post was about Zavala 4.1, the Markdown Import release. Now we’re up to
release 4.4. There’s a fair amount to talk about. Let’s get to it.
Zavala 4.2
Released April 1, 2026
Outline Locking
Being able to encrypt and prevent others from accessing an Outline is a feature
I’ve long wanted and have gotten requests for. This feature encrypts the
Outline on disk and also when syncing using iCloud. For more on the details of
how it works and how to use it, check outLocking an Outline.
Added Find Shortcut Actions
The Find style Shortcut actions are more powerful than the existing Get
Outlines and Get Rows actions that I had originally created for Zavala. Among
other things, they allow you to limit the number of results and to sort them.
I’m glad that I finally added Find Outlines and Find Rows actions to Zavala.
Zavala 4.3
Released July 29, 2026
Print Screen
This feature prints your Outline while respecting the UI changes currently in
effect on the screen. It uses the current Filters applied and Row collapsed
state to determine if it should print an element of the Outline.
Honestly, I didn’t realize how important this feature was until recently. I
would have added this no-brainer feature sooner had I understood how it would
be used. The lights-on moment for me was when a teacher told me that they might
want to print an Outline for students, but that they wouldn’t want Notes to be
shown. Suddenly I could see a teacher outlining things a student should be
improving on, but not wanting that student to see the Notes associated with the
Topics that they teacher was identifying.
Zavala 4.4
Released September 16, 2026
Web Clipper
A web clipper is a common tool included with other Personal Knowledge
Management (PMK) systems. It takes the contents of a web page and imports it
into the PMK system. Implementing this for a standard note-taking application
is fairly straightforward because notes are fairly unstructured as are web
pages.
It is much more complicated to change a web page into an Outline because an
Outline is very structured. In Zavala we do our best to put a round peg into a
square hole. The results are surprisingly good.
For more information on Zavala’s web clipper, readShare Extension. It talks
about what it is in more depth and why you would want to use it.
HTML Import
This works the same as the web clipper except it lets you select a file from
the local file system instead of downloading the HTML and images from the web.
HTML Export
I wasn’t going to add this because you can do the same thing with Shortcuts.
Just export as Markdown and then convert to Rich Text and then convert to HTML.
I’ve long used this trick to turn Outlines into blog posts.
I gave in and added it because, one, lots of people still don’t understand how
to use Shortcuts and two, it seems like if we can import HTML that we should be
able to export it. We gotta keep things symmetrical.
Japanese Translation
Japanese seemed to be the most logical next translation for Zavala. Japan is
second only to German for downloads outside of the United States.
I used the new Translation Coordinator with Claude in Xcode to do it. It seemed
to work well. The process includes context for the translation and LLM’s seem
to do translation well. I don’t have any way to verify that the translations
are correct though. Now I wait for bug reports…
Next Steps
I’m going to try to get iPhone Duo support done for the next release. I find
the iPhone Duo very interesting. The UI changes Apple made to accommodate the
new form factor are fascinating and are Apple at their best. I don’t know if it
is the right phone for me yet, but I definitely want first-class support for it
in Zavala.
Siri AI integration is also something I’d like to bring to Zavala. I’m not sure
yet how good it will work or if I should wait to see if eventually Apple trains
Siri to understand Outliner apps. Currently it will understand note-taking
apps. That might be all the better I can wish for.
While I think Zavala is a mature application and am trying hard to keep it
simple, change keeps on coming. Stay tuned for more releases.
Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
, updated:
Welcome New Subscribers!
Sam Altman says trust me; Jensen Huang says everything is going to be fine; Bernie Sanders says AI is more dangerous than nukes
, updated:
Here’s who we should be listening to instead
Trump’s Stock Trading is Endangering Us All
, updated:
This week’s video
How to make end-grain cutting boards
, updated:
Last week I finished up a cutting board, made as a gift for a friend who just got married. I posted photos on social media and a few people asked how I did it. So here's a high-level view of the process on a new board I
250 to 250
, updated:
As the nation gears up for the 2026 midterm elections, we are drawing a line beneath the first phase of the 250 to 250 project.
My Talk With Jen Rubin
, updated:
Always enjoy having “Coffee with the Contrarians”
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
This Week In The Big Picture
, updated:
This week, Donald Trump’s war in Iran sent diesel fuel prices skyrocketing to record highs.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
Tick tock.
714 and 14 minutes to decide white or back for the duo.
@DAIR blog
@timnitgebru.blacksky.app talks with @theferocity.bsky.social and @zachstafford.bsky.social about how we can take back the future from unimaginative AI billionaires, plus that one time she confronted Elon Musk face to face 👀
Why Charlotte Should Build a Museum of Broadcasting in the Antenna Age
, updated:
In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant, with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night: WBT was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more […]
Apple Reference Image
, updated:
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors): Our solution hinges on splitting the Apple Reference Image process into two phases: creating a secure digital negative, and developing that negative into a reference image. Each phase receives our strongest protections. […] Apple Reference Image provides both a lower bound and an upper bound on capture time from Apple’s cryptographic […]
CarPlay in GM Trucks
, updated:
Jonathan M. Gitlin: GM made the decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto phone casting from its newer EVs, and it’s one we’ve been pretty critical of. Although the automaker told us it made that decision in order to offer a better, more unified experience to its customers, that may well have changed: here, […]
iPhone 17 Model Popularity
, updated:
David Smith: Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage. With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year […]
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Bohannan (IA-1), Mendoza (AZ-6), Luria (VA-2), Stelson (PA-10), Pulido (TX-15)
, updated:
No live event today........
Like H5P Community Day Sydney: Better Learning Together by H5P
, updated:
The free event brought the H5P community together for a day of practical examples, product updates, thoughtful discussion and networking. Across the sessions, one message came through clearly: effective digital learning is not about adding more technology. It is about using the right tools with clear learning intentions. H5P is one of the features of […]
Get the new Raspberry Pi Official Annual 2027 today!
, updated:
Celebrating a year of projects and guides from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine.
Jíkuri: viaje al país de los tarahumaras – la solemnidad de mirar al otro a través del cine
, updated:
Dirección: Federico Cecchetti. Guion: Federico Cecchetti, Pierre Saint-Martin. Elenco: José Cruz Apachoachi, François Négret, Sylvie Testud, Martin Makawi. Países: México, Estados Unidos, Francia. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7246476/ En Las enseñanzas de Don Juan, de Carlos Castaneda, cuando el antropólogo le pide al chamán que le enseñe sobre el peyote y este se niega, […]
3 new and 17 updated places. 1 new and 6 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound Nomisma and Wikidata information is stale because updates were not available at runtime.
“We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face” - Pete Hegseth must go, now
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.)
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it from doing this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. Every customer must be grappling with the same thing. How do I trust it when it can't be trusted? More about this in a tweet earlier today.
Siberia and Zuckerberg
, updated:
Writing of lasting value
Don’t Become a Museum
, updated:
Why successful people must periodically renovate themselves.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again.
Beyond Our Ken
The three poems in our September issue deal in mystery and the edges of what we can know. A mother tells her son mythical stories about crows and his father that blur reality into the surreal. An adolescent boy, hoping for connection, discovers secrets and “black magic” on his phone calls with girls. And a husband, watching his wife at work in the garden, acknowledges that he doesn’t know what goes on inside her mind, despite all they share.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's plugin: River Embed for FeedLand you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to include a page of news in your site. How it works: Create a timeline, when you're ready show the river to your readers, use the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions.
What Actually Voids Your Warranty?
, updated:
The law has been on your side since 1975. What to do when a claim is denied anyway.
Attention LBJ nerds: Robert Caro is posting book updates on Instagram.
As Lit Hub’s resident Caro-head, I’m committed to bringing you regular updates on the historian’s progress on his Years of Lyndon Johnson series (searching “Folta Caro” on Lit Hub turns up more results than I remember). And if on Monday
Who’s buying your personal data: Disney, GM, your insurer and bank. Here’s what they get
, updated:
Consumers asked a major data broker for their files. What they got back shows interest in how fat they are, how much they drink, and how likely they are to get a mammogram, among many other characteristics.
Data brokers have detailed files on you. Here’s what’s in them — and how it impacts you
, updated:
Data brokers collect thousands of details about your finances, health and habits. See what’s in your profile, who buys it and how companies use it.
Fake CAPTCHA Scams
New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.
Lit Hub Daily: September 16, 2026
Who actually benefits in an MFA workshop? Devon Halliday explores why these spaces might need “a greater clarity of purpose.” | Lit Hub Craft The truth is out there! What UFO fanaticism reveals about American conspiracies. | Lit Hub Politics
Corporate mercenary is a bipartisan profession
, updated:
The AI industry tapped former Obama aide Jay Carney to rebuild ties with Democrats. He spent years at Amazon undermining privacy protections and fighting AI regulation.
Alito and Thomas keep the pedal to the metal
, updated:
Their mail voting dissent is legal hackery. But it makes sense politically.
Buy my house!
, updated:
My 1925 Tudor on half an acre in Elkins Park, PA is up for sale. Here's why I loved living in it
Conferencing, Day 1
, updated:
Normal service resumes Friday
Fallow
The dentist’s quote for the surgery was between two and four thousand dollars. “I’m sorry I can’t be more precise,” he said, “but I can’t really know until we get in there.” It wasn’t a life-ruining amount. It wasn’t going
The Movie Star and the Mountain: On Robert Redford’s Sundance Origin Story
I. The first time he sees it, a chord is struck inside him. He is overcome by a kind of excitement he has no words for. The mountain looms above him. Sheer rock walls rise, snow-covered up top with patches
Revisiting Vikram Chandra’s Ode to the Art of Human Coding in the Age of AI
Twelve years ago, Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty was published. In terms of actual history, that isn’t long at all; in terms of technology, it’s an eternity. In Geek Sublime, Chandra drew on
How an Egyptian Prison Poem Came to Structure My Memoir
I wrote my memoir, Huna, in English, which is to say I wrote it inside a contradiction. Huna is a memoir of the Egyptian revolution, six years of political imprisonment in Egypt, and my US exile. It enters English already
Who Are MFA Workshops *Really* For?
How many writers does it take to fix a short story? The premise of the creative writing workshop is that it takes a room full of writers, reading and offering feedback and working through the kinks of the story together.
Anna Holmes on Why “No” Is the Most Powerful Word a Woman Can Say Today
“No.” Two little letters with enormous impact. One might contextualize them with punctuation—a comma here, an exclamation point there, a period over there—but the meaning remains about the same: a rejection of the affirmative; a refusal; an expression of resistance,
In Prison, White Supremacist Literature Is Required Reading
To survive the box, you learn to fish. People on the outside call it solitary confinement, but it isn’t really, not even at a place like Upstate Correctional Facility, the supermax prison in Malone, New York, ten minutes from the
What Fascination With UFOs Reveals About Conspiratorial Thinking in America
A detective story is supposed to end with the mystery being solved: Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot is always able to follow the clues and figure out what really happened. This is impossible with a UFO mystery, because there are
Office Hours: The biggest existential threat?
, updated:
What should be humanity’s highest priority?
Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026)
New “LibreOffice Expert 2026/2027” magazines available for schools and local communities
, updated:
A few weeks ago, Linux New Media released an updated version of its “LibreOffice Expert” magazine, which contains tutorials, tips and tricks about the office suite. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS,
September 15, 2026
, updated:
Seven years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
The Portal I Trust, and the One I Don’t
, updated:
Article read by Jeff Smart
Politics Chat, September 15, 2026
, updated:
Retired judge J.
Pleiades in University Teaching and Learning
Pleiades and a number of Pleiades contributors' uses of it in the classroom are featured in a new chapter by Elizabeth C. Robinson.
Size-Specialized Memory Allocation
Go 1.27 improves performance of small allocations using size-specialized allocation functions.
Web app and email delays
Our public postmortem for the incident on September 9th, 2026.
Wednesday 16 September, 2026
, updated:
Hope springs eternal We’re in Provence, in a village that had been threatened by the wildfires. One morning we walked up to what I’m calling the “burned treeline” for want of a better term. On a road that had served … Continue reading →
Trump Offers Supreme Court $5000 Each to Change Mail-in Voting Decision
, updated:
In a leaked phone call with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Trump said that the 7-2 decision meant “I just need to find three votes.”
Last Two Weeks in Pleiades (31 August - 14 September 2026)
During the last two weeks, the Pleiades editorial college published 37 new and 197 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Anika Campbell, Anne Chen, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Eleftheria Konstantinidou, Chris de Lisle, Chiara Palladino, Adam Rabinowitz, R. Scott Smith and Richard Talbert.
Pleiades in the Oxford Handbook of Digital Classical Studies
The Pleiades gazetteer is discussed in three chapters of the new Oxford Handbook of Digital Classical Studies: Sarah Bond on "Digital Maps and Mapping", Catherine Bouras on "Digital Gazetteers" and Stuart Dunn on "Place".
@DAIR blog
@timnitgebru.blacksky.app gives a history lesson on AI "existential risk" talk and explains how we don't have to accept Big Tech's utopia or apocalyptic visions for the future:
You should take the new Swift 6.4 support for web assembly for a spin, and host your very own SwiftTerm web page, so you too can use 4 gigabytes worth of Chrome to achieve Bash WebScale.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
New: Elizabeth Robinson's chapter in the third volume of Teaching and Learning Classics at the University Level (2026) addresses the importance of studying ancient topography and physical landscapes, introduces skills and tools associated with ancient geography and digital mapping, and suggests engaging with research projects beyond the classroom, including Pleiades and other digital cartography projects. Example projects shared by colleagues (including a number of other #PleiadesGazetteer contributors) are presented.
Robinson, Elizabeth C. “Teaching and Learning Ancient Topography and Landscapes.” Pages 217-249 in Teaching and Learning Classics at the University Level, vol. 3, edited by Alberto Regagliolo. Vernon Press, 2026. https://vernonpress.com/book/2562.
just announced: @timnitgebru.blacksky.app will be giving a keynote at @sxsw.com this year!
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Subject to Fits
, updated:
My epilepsy
Opting Into Training Siri AI and Apple Foundation Models
, updated:
Amber Neely: A new section in the iOS 27 privacy policy shows that Apple has reversed its stance on using customers’ data to train its AI models. Previously, the company assured customers that it had no need for customer data, and would figure out how to make Siri AI work well without it. Apple maintains […]
Xcode 27
, updated:
Apple (xip, downloads): Xcode 27 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later. […]
macOS 26.7 and macOS 15.8
, updated:
Apple (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. Apple (security, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. See also: MacRumors, Mr. Macintosh, and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 27 Golden Gate macOS 26.6.2 macOS 15.7.9 and 14.8.9 […]
iOS 26.7 and iPadOS 26.7
, updated:
Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 26.7 includes security fixes, but it does not have any other features. Apple will eventually show iOS 27 as the main update for the iPhone, but that likely won’t happen for a few weeks. Users who want to stay […]
Helping Hopium Close 2026 Strong - Our First Ever Fundraising Appeal
, updated:
We have a lot to do and I am going to need a little more help.......
Trump's Midterm Mayhem - The Wins and the Warnings
, updated:
Recent court wins, including before SCOTUS, bring a sigh of relief. But we’re not out of the woods.
Some recent good YouTubes
, updated:
These days I spend most of my time on YouTube keeping up on a ton of sports like the Vuelta a Espana bike race, Women's Pro Baseball League, the World Softball Championships, and the FIFA U20 women's soccer matches.
So apparently laser crystals that are rejected from laser-making can end up in the gem trade and they look amazing!
Roy Cooper Dropped By For An Update On His Must Win Senate Race In North Carolina
, updated:
Greetings all.
Bottlenecks Get a Bad Rap
Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency.
But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad.
Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an overwhelming amount of liquid flows out and makes a big mess.
We humans have a particular anatomy. We can only consume so much liquid at a time. The neck of a bottle works with that fact.
We could make machines to produce so much wine that we’re drowning in it. But that wouldn’t change the fact that we’re only capable of consuming so much liquid at a time (not to mention digestion, etc.).
When it comes to liquid consumption, the bottle’s neck isn’t the bottleneck — our neck is!
So if you’re having a hard time drinking out of a firehouse, perhaps the question isn’t, “How do I modify my biology to accommodate the bandwidth of the firehose?” But rather, “Why am I trying to drink out of a firehose in the first place?”
Maybe a bottleneck isn’t your problem. In fact, it might just be the solution.
The right to vote is one of the most fundamental parts of our democracy. Check your voter registration at IWillVote.com and make a plan to vote early or on Election Day on November 3.
★ Thoughts and Observations on Apple’s ‘Surprise and Shine’ Event; the Announcements of the iPhones 18 Pro, AirPods 5, Apple Watches Series 12 and Ultra 4, and the iPhone Duo; and the Dawn of the Ternus, John Ternus Era at Apple
, updated:
The keynote, the products, and a new era.
The pipe dream of the useful augmented reality
, updated:
Somewhere in '98 or '99 I fired up ICQ for the first time. Takeit into account that I was living in Hungary, a 14 years old boy, andwhile I was learning English since I was 6, the teaching methods inHungary focus on grammar and not real life skills, me…
Linkalongday
, updated:
War prep redux Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while […]
Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. Related: this week Don Trump said he’d like a united Ireland, and that all this talk of humanity-ending AI is bollocks.
Even a stopped watch is right twice a day.
Related: this week Don Trump said he’d like a united Ireland, and that all this talk of humanity-ending AI is bollocks.
Plan Advice in PostgreSQL 19
, updated:
There is a conversation that happens in every PostgreSQL shop eventually. A
query that has been fine for a year gets slow overnight. Nothing was
deployed. The data grew a little, ANALYZE ran, and the planner — entirely
reasonably, on the numbers it had — picked a different plan. The old plan
was better. You would like it back.
PostgreSQL 19 ships two new modules for exactly this: pg_plan_advice,
which can read a plan back out as a string and enforce it later, andpg_stash_advice, which keeps those strings keyed by query id and applies
them automatically.
▸
Every query below ran against the Lab,
the free dataset bundle used throughout this blog, on PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3:POSTGRES_VERSION=19beta3 PG_MAJOR=19 docker compose up. Both modules are
contrib, and the Lab image ships them; nothing below runs a LOAD to
enable them, because the server already has them — pg_plan_advice insession_preload_libraries, pg_stash_advice inshared_preload_libraries (it can survive a restart, which needs
loading that way). One line each in postgresql.conf, or the equivalent
server-start flag, and you’re done. pg_stash_advice still needs its ownCREATE EXTENSION, further down, for its SQL functions — that’s
independent of how the module itself got loaded.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
Working on the finishing touches for the docs for the Xogot Builder
Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities in NetworkManager Plugins
Andreas Gabriel Berbescu has reported several root privilege escalation vulnerabilities in various NetworkManager VPN plugins. If the VPN plugin is installed, then an unprivileged user can escalate to root by loading a malicious VPN configuration file: While most obviously bad for multi-user systems, root privilege escalation is also a serious defense in depth problem for […]
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Ossoff (Georgia), Peltola (Alaska), Cognetti (PA-8), Powell (NE-2), Ohio Senate (SMP)
, updated:
Greetings all.
Why polls might be underestimating *Democrats*, not Republicans
, updated:
Potential bias in how voters recall voting in 2024 costs Democrats about a point of support. Surveys of registered voters might also underestimate the Democratic turnout advantage.
Solo por una noche nos pide que romanticemos el tecnofascismo
, updated:
Cada que hay cambios revolucionarios dentro de cualquier sociedad, es natural que haya movimientos contrarrevolucionarios que busquen revertir los cambios y regresar al statu quo anterior. Desde la revolución sexual de los años 60, los grupos más conservadores y reaccionarios actúan para intentar devolver al estado social a lo que ellos consideran como “lo ideal”. […]
When you are a Swift developer, every day is Xmas!
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
This is Ian McEwan’s second foray into science fiction after his alternative history novel, Machines Like Me. I enjoyed that book but it was far too eager to show off its worldbuilding—at one point a character practically looks at the camera like Tim in The Office.
There’s a bit of that in What We Can Know with its expository passages explaining what’s been happening in the 21st and 22nd centuries, but it mostly works.
As with all McEwan’s work, it’s extremely English. He just has to have some clashing of the classes in there.
The book has an unusual structure, switching between the present day and a climate-ravaged future one hundred years from now. A future scholar is obsessed with a poem from our time period that was never published. At times the book feels like a whodunnit, complete with all the suspects assembled together in a country house.
If the structure is unusual, the tonal swings are really something. We go from high-brow pondering of the utility of art in the face of catastrophe to downright schlocky soap-opera shenanigans. My eyebrows may have gotten whiplash.
But I guess it all worked somehow because I found myself turning the pages, eager to reach the final revelations.
Still, there was one thing that really bothered me. In order for the plot to work, our future scholar needs to have access to emails, chats, and other digital artificats from today. We get an explanation of how the cryptography has been cracked by quantum computers, but it’s simply taken as given that the files themselves would be available, having survived in “The Cloud”.
I can’t really blame Ian McEwan here; here’s just repeating the oft-retold advice that you should be careful what you put online because it’ll be there forever. But that warning simply isn’t true. The Cloud dissolves very, very quickly. Just ask the folks at the Internet Archive.
But if your credulity can stretch to accept the naïvely optimistic depiction of digital preservation in What We Can Know, it’s an enjoyable romp.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
BTW, the rootupdates process is working now, you can follow changes via an RSS 2.0 feed, of course. In this version, the feed is the way updates are transmitted. The enclosure on each item is a fat page. And because it's a feed, I can follow it in FeedLand, and the blogroll on scripting.com picks it up too. Screen shot.
Zugzwang and Single
, updated:
Writing of lasting value
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Screen shot of my current system.verbs.apps table. You can tell from reading it that it's been a long time since I've thought much about scriptable apps.
Humans are exposed to a lot of artificial light. Recent statistics report that the average person spends up to 90% of their life indoors. Instead of sunlight, we experience hundreds of flickering, low quality LEDs in our homes, paling in comparison to the outside environment. For most of human history, the light available after sunset was fire from candles, oil lamps or hearths. All of it burned around 1800K, deep amber, infrared-rich, and dim. Our circadian systems evolved over hundreds of...
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products today. What about Mastodon? It's got an API. And if that worked, we'd hook into AT Proto. The funny thing is the first web, because much of the new development came from the Mac community, was built around Frontier. System level scripting was also a big deal right alongside the web. But then Jobs, in 1997, rewrote everything, brought in the Unix products, completely disrupted the good thing we had going as independents. That was probably the moment when we stopped building around the idea that you could script all the apps from one place if they had good APIs. All the server apps all had APIs, had to in order to work on the web. We seem to have caught up, and the opportunities to connect things has never been greater. A big door swings open.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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In many ways JavaScript is a better language than UserTalk. For example I miss JSON constants. I miss certain language constructs, like conditional assignments. We don't have the idea of a const. On the other hand, JavaScript doesn't have environment features Frontier has. I want to have Atlantis run JavaScript the same way Cancoon (the codename for the kernel of Frontier before this version) ran AppleScript.
BREAKING: Secret US AI evaluation framework has been partly revealed
, updated:
Very partly
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
Export Updates 2026-09-15:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
5 new and 23 updated places. 4 updated linked data sidebars. Inbound Nomisma and Wikidata information is stale because updates were not available at runtime.
How I think Web Apps Should be Installed – Ben Francis
Some good ideas on how browsers could offer the ability to install the current site. Frankly, anything would be better than the current woeful situation!
Dems Up 8 In New NYT Poll, Trump Loses His Desperate Mail Ballot Ploy, Winning The Early Vote
, updated:
Roy Cooper joins us live at Noon ET today for an update on his critical race/I will be joining the Contrarians live
Book: Obviously Awesome
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I’ve been trying to learn marketing lately. I would not say it’s going well. I started with a Coursera course, and one module in I was so frustrated by the pseudo-scientific framing. Some of it was actually scientific (I recognised Sheena Iyengar‘s work) and some of it only seemed so. Claude told me I should […]
Why Is Trump Still Boosting AI?
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Because it’s the only thing he has left
Trump Says AI Far Less Likely to Destroy Humanity Than He Is
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"Isn’t artificial intelligence better than none at all?”
25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough
This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare.
One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. ICE uses it in...
Capital and Law as Social Forms
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Where do profits come from? And how does law legitimate capitalism? To make progress on these questions, we must dig deeper into the nature of capital and the idea of the legal form.
Mousiki: An Audio Player for the Terminal
Mousiki is a music player based on TUI (Terminal User Interface), meaning that instead of opening a traditional graphical interface, the entire experience takes place directly within the terminal.
It was developed in C++ and uses a relatively lean architecture. The project uses CMake for compilation and C++17 as the language standard.
Among the available features are:
Playback of locally stored music;
Search and streaming of music online;
Synced lyrics;
Highlighting of the word currently being sung;
FFT spectrum visualizer;
Waveform;
Disc animation;
Playback queue;
Shuffle;
Repeat;
Search and filtering;
Volume control;
Stream downloading;
Customizable colors;
Configurable keyboard shortcuts.
Installation
Mousiki currently does not work like those traditional programs where you download an .exe, .dmg, or .deb and simply click “Install.”
Installation is mainly based on compiling the source code.
The main requirements indicated by the project are:
On Debian/Ubuntu systems, there is a setup script:
bash setup.sh
After that, the executable should be located at:
build/mousiki
To start it:
./build/mousiki
You can also install the executable into a system directory using install, cmake --install, mv, ... for example:
sudo mv ./build/mousiki /usr/bin/
Usage
Basic controls
The current default configuration defines several important shortcuts:
KeyFunction↑ / ↓Navigate through the listEnterPlaypPlay/PausenNext trackbPrevious track← / →Rewind/Fast-forward1Increase volume2Decrease volumerRepeatmShuffle/SearchaAdd to queuedRemove from queueTabSwitch between cards/panelsfFilter by foldercClear filterqQuityDownload stream
These shortcuts come from the default configuration file and can be modified.
Crypto legislation would greenlight Trump corruption
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The sponsors of the legislation claim they have added meaningful ethics restrictions. Here are the facts.
Lit Hub Daily: September 15, 2026
Don’t have time to read all those fall reading lists? That’s okay. We read them for you. Here’s the Ultimate Fall Reading List. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Gabe Bullard explores the detrimental nature of convenience (after writing a book
JD Vance will never escape the albatross of the Iran War
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No matter how many stories he feeds the Times about all his doubts.
On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.
An updated look for the Raspberry Pi Desktop
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Some optional new features which might enhance your experience of the Raspberry Pi Desktop.
The leaves are changing, and so is the footwear. The names on the books are getting bigger. There is, some might say, a crispness. Yes, it’s time for Literary Hub’s annual Ultimate Fall Reading List, in which I read all
Emily St. John Mandel on Writing a Novel of Dystopian Counterlives
Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel’s most celebrated novels. Station Eleven (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Québec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the
How Madeleine Thien Organizes Her Bookshelves, Among Other Things
Madeleine Thien’s new story collection, Simple Recipes is available now from W.W. Norton. * What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers? Since I turned fifty, I have written most things by hand. Initially this
On Falling Out of Love With Moscow
I grew up in Moscow at the tail end of the Soviet era. Despite its grand title—the capital of the USSR—the city of my youth held little charm. Life, at least for my family, was defined by scarcity, monotony, and
On the Orientalism and Imperial Gaze of Western Horror Films
Let me just say I don’t like Lee Cronin. Not that I know the Irishman, best known for regurgitating horror’s tired tropes with a view to winning the most nauseating gore competition—but I watched his latest film. And no matter
Looking in the Mirror of My Past as a Korean Adoptee in the United States
“A second surface mirror, also known as a standard or regular mirror, creates a ghosting effect (double image).” ______________________________________________________________ “Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as
Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers
The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to: Grace Krilanovich (Acid Green Velvet) Emily Ogden (Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art
The Conveniences I Used to Write a Book About Inconvenience (Definitely Not AI)
After a few months, I got used to the sarcasm. If I told a friend I was writing a book called Against Convenience, they’d ask whether I was planning to write it by hand, whether I’d use spell-check, or if
At the end of every Thursday afternoon at Clearleft, we wrap up the working week with an all-hands (video) meeting. Yes, I know that the week finishes on Friday, but Fridays have been declared the no-meetings day at Clearleft: a chance to concentrate on heads-down work without interruption. Besides, some of us don’t work on Fridays. So Thursday really is the new Friday.
That gathering usually finishes with a little quiz (like the “fonts or food?” quiz) . I was in charge of putting the quiz together last week. I came up with a movie mashup:
Take two film titles.
The end of one title is the beginning of the other title.
Create one single title from both.
For each combined title, I smushed together the synopses from the Internet Movie Database.
For example, if you got this synposis:
Six unemployed steel workers form a male striptease act and King Arthur and his knights embark on a quest encountering many, very silly obstacles.
The answer would be:
The Full Monty Python And The Holy Grail
Got it?
Let’s see how you fare with these ten movie mashups I presented to the Clearleft crew (tap to reveal each answer)…
A group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star and a rebellious convict is sent to a psychiatric hospital where he encourages his docile companions to take more control of their lives and defy the tyrannical head nurse.Rogue One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Prince Simba and his father are targeted by his bitter uncle, who wants to ascend the throne himself and Rupert is an aspiring stand-up comedian who is willing to go the extra mile in his attempt to appear in the late night show hosted by his idol.The Lion King Of Comedy
Five friends travel to a cabin in the woods, where they unknowingly release flesh-possessing demons and a maverick teacher at a prestigious New England boys’ boarding school uses poetry to embolden his pupils to new heights of self-expression.The Evil Dead Poet’s Society
A doctor in 1968 Prague struggles with monogamy and a puppeteer discovers a portal that leads literally into the head of a movie star.The Unbearable Lightness Of Being John Malkovich
A hard-drinking country music star falls in love with a singer whose career quickly takes off, and Ron Kovic, paralyzed in the Vietnam war, becomes a political activist after feeling betrayed by the country for which he fought.A Star Is Born On The Fourth Of July
Two sloppy actors spend a weekend holiday at an uncle’s country cottage and a group of friends are terrorised by a mysterious killer who knows about a gruesome incident from their past.Withnail And I Know What You Did Last Summer
On an tropical island, love blooms between a young nurse and a secretive Frenchman and as a war between humankind and monstrous sea creatures wages on, a former pilot and a trainee are paired up to save the world from the apocalypse.South Pacific Rim
A man gets a chance to meet up with his dream girl from high school, and a magical nanny employs music and adventure to help two neglected children become closer to their father.There’s Something About Mary Poppins
The husband of a missing woman becomes the main suspect in her disappearance and a young peasant maid working in the house of painter Johannes Vermeer becomes his talented assistant and the model for one of his most famous works.Gone Girl With A Pearl Earring
An up-and-coming gangster is tested by the insurgence of an unknown threat and a group of teenage camp counselors attempt to re-open an abandoned summer camp with a tragic past, but they are stalked by a mysterious, relentless killer.The Long Good Friday The Thirteenth
How’d you do?
I had fun putting this little quiz together but some potential movie mashups were left on the cutting-room floor. If there were a director’s cut of this quiz, maybe these would’ve stayed in the picture:
Mad Max: Fury Road To Perdition
Remains Of The Day Of The Dead
For Your Eyes Only God Forgives
The Land Before Time Bandits
The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
City Of Lost Children Of A Lesser God
Run, Lola, Run Silent, Run Deep
Carlito’s Way Of The Dragon
The Man Who Would Be King Kong
Man Of Steel Magnolias
The Big Short Circuit
A Matter Of Life And Death In Venice
The Hills Have Eyes Wide Shut
The Spy Who Loved Me And Earl And The Dying Girl
Our Noble Selves
Flynn and Miss Ogilvie had been given no part to play in the blind judging of the Festival Cake. Denholm had requested their presence merely as observers—messengers who would convey the verdict back to Savoy Court. Flynn was there as
Why Trump Loves AI
, updated:
Follow the money
LibreOffice 26.8 and the languages for which nobody is paid
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The most significant new features in LibreOffice 26.8 concern writing systems, and it is worth explaining what has been done and, above all, why it has been done, as there is an important decision behind the developers’ work. What has been done Writer now automatically detects the paragraph direction when
Pluralistic: Everybody pees (15 Sep 2026)
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Today's links Everybody pees: Even Jeff Bezos. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Zune won't play Microsoft files; Papercraft 1:1 Mustang; Third gender for Aussie passports; France hacked Canada; EC v links; Welcome to Night Vale; University spends librarian's bequest on football scoreboard; Everything is always broken. Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Everybody pees (permalink) Jeff Bezos and I are very different people. For one thing, he is a sociopathic billionaire who built his fortune by monopolizing bookselling while I am a penniless author of books. He was born in 1964 and is 62; I was born in 1971 and am 55. We've met a few times and even corresponded some in Amazon's early years, though I haven't had contact with him in decades. Despite that very minor acquaintanceship and that long gap in our message history, I can tell you one thing I know for sure about Jeffrey Preston Bezos: he needs to pee all the time. How do I know? Because peeing all the time is an inescapable feature of aging, and Bezos has eight years on me, and I have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos, like all older people, must contend with a progressively weakening bladder. Honestly, it's a small price to pay in exchange for the everyday miracle of growing older (as opposed to perishing). The only reason I mention Jeff Bezos's increasingly insistent bladder here is because of how hard it is to reconcile the very different circumstances of Bezos's bladder with the bladders of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon delivery and warehouse workers who are not allowed to pee at all. Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are "reverse centaurs," monitored by a constellation of apps and cameras, and they are severely punished for falling behind in the cadence set by Amazon's software, and that robot timekeeper does not make allowances for pee breaks: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/ This isn't a secret, and Amazon's come in for a lot of flak over it. But Amazon's "solution" is to add more penalties for peeing. Drivers who return to the depot with urine-filled bottles in their vans are punished as severely as they would be if they stopped to find a toilet. Thing is, the mere fact that your boss's robot says you're not allowed to pee does not matter to your bladder or kidneys, and when you gotta go, you gotta go. That's why the roads leading to Amazon's warehouses are lined with pee bottles that drivers have hucked out of their windows before arriving at the loading dock. There are so many of these that the British media activist Oobah Butler was able to harvest them and offer a line of "bitter lemon energy drinks" on Amazon made from bottled driver piss. The drink was an Amazon bestseller and the company even asked Butler if he wanted them to help him scale up his deliveries: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon The fact that Bezos needs to piss and also the fact that he commands an army of hundreds of thousands of workers who are prohibited from pissing really supports my hypothesis that billionaires don't really believe that other people are real. If Jeff Bezos believed that when his drivers needed to pee that it felt the same as when he needed to pee, Jeff Bezos would let those drivers pee: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole "Needing to pee" is a bedrock of the shared condition of existence itself, extending beyond humans to our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (John Muir's delightful name for the other animals we share this planet with). Anyone who's ever had a dog understands this. I'm not really a dog person, but when I meet a dog that really needs to be let out of the house, my bladder twinges in sympathy. When I contemplate the kidneys and bladders of Bezos's drivers and packers, I get a sharp, persistent ache that starts about an inch below my navel. I think billionaire solipsism is inevitable. The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users and Google searchers – turns the majority of the world's other humans into phantasms, defective bots whose bothaviors are maddeningly non-deterministic and sub-optimal. Add to that the fact that harvesting billions of dollars requires you to inflict pain on thousands or even millions of those phantasms whose money, privacy and labor you've extracted, and it's easy to see how you'd end up in a world where you can't bear to contemplate the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. Solipsism is a deadly, conscience-eroding occupational hazard of the rich and powerful. No visitor to Epstein Island could have made the visit if the pain of those young women was as real to them as the pain of their own daughters and friends. There's a short line from this solipsism to billionaires' enthusiasm for AI. When you don't think other people are really real, it's easy to believe that they can be swapped out for chatbots. Mark Zuckerberg's quest to replace your friends with chatbots makes sense once you realize that for Mark Zuckerberg, you and your friends are already just balky, shitty chatbots: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things The belief that bots can teach your kids or counsel you through your psychological problems or look after your health concerns is perfectly consistent with the belief that you're more-or-less a bot, and also that the teachers, doctors and shrinks you rely on are also basically bots: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh The great crisis of oligarchy is not merely that it transfers power from democratically accountable public servants and elected representatives to oligarchs. The real crisis is that attaining oligarch status is incompatible with viewing other people as real. That's how we ended up with the richest man on earth slaughtering hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ Everybody pees. When I die, when Jeff Bezos dies, and when you die, our bladders will give way and we will pee ourselves. A declaration of war on other people's right to pee is a declaration of war on humanity itself. Hey look at this (permalink) The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss-of-control incidents https://www.normaltech.ai/p/the-ai-as-normal-technology-view The Senate must reject the Clarity Act’s ethics charade https://www.citationneeded.news/clarity-act-ethics-charade/ They want you to be scared of AI in a very specific way https://www.garbageday.email/p/they-want-you-to-be-scared-of-ai-in-a-very-specific-way San Francisco's AI-run store is losing money fast. After a visit, I'm not surprised. https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-market-ai-22424349.php Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Microsoft Zune won’t play purchased Microsoft media files https://web.archive.org/web/20061014104638/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004910.php #15yrsago Papercraft 1:1 model of a 1969 Mustang, accurate to the smallest component https://web.archive.org/web/20110923151701/http://www.jonathanbrand.com/images/in_progress/paper_car/motor/pages/motor01.htm #15yrsago Third gender option added to Australian passports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14926598 #10yrsago French spy boss admits France cyberattacked Iran, Canada, Spain, Greece, Norway, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and others https://medium.com/@msuiche/nsa-hacked-france-in-2012-414d8de4bdcf#.e4hnvyj6s #10yrsago Elizabeth Warren to FBI director: now that investigations are fair game, what about banksters? https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3107565/EMBARGOED-Warren-FBI-FCIC-Letter.pdf #10yrsago European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links https://felixreda.eu/2016/09/attack-on-link/ #10yrsago Machine learning system can descramble pixelated/blurred redactions 83% of the time https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00408v2 #10yrsago Welcome to Night Vale: scripts and notes from podcasting’s eeriest drama https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/15/welcome-to-night-vale-scripts-and-notes-from-podcastings-eeriest-drama/ #10yrsago UNH will spend $1M of librarian’s bequest on a football scoreboard https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/15/critics-question-spending-librarians-donation-scoreboard #5yrsago Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/15/everything-is-always-broken-and-thats-okay/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30 https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/ Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (14905 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
September 14, 2026
, updated:
This morning, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica broke the news that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the wedding of Donald Trump Jr.
See them while you can As I’ve been writing about at length on my Trunkline blog, broadcast towers are both a lifelong preoccupation of mine, and (like all of us) doomed in the long run. That’s because high-bandwidth wireless digital tech doesn’t require them. (Yes, over-the air broadcasting may be with us forever, but on […]
alt.time-capsule.reopened
A new tool for digging into Usenet history holds much potential for researchers. But it’s also a reminder that many users thought, at the time, that it was ephemeral. (They were wrong.)
Rate limit detection, shortcut to active crawls, redesigned collection replay
Better visibility into rate limited and running crawls, plus streamlined collection editing and replay.
Email analytics
We redesigned email analytics.
Obama, Trump and the Age of AI
, updated:
No easy answers
The Senate must reject the Clarity Act’s ethics charade
, updated:
The supposedly “unprecedented” ethics restrictions exempt Trump’s crypto businesses and leave enforcement to his loyalists
@DAIR blog
“Whether it is doom or utopia, these are two sides of the same coin of the same messaging that's [saying] you are creating extremely powerful civilizational altering machines. And that speaks to investors.”
Meet Brian Poindexter, A Union Ironworker And Girl Dad Working Hard To Flip OH-7 Blue
, updated:
Poindexter is running against Rep. Max Miller, another scandal plagued Ohio Republican, who deserves to lose this seat
QUIET SUN’S SOLE ALBUM “MAINSTREAM” OUT NOW
REMIXED/REMASTERED REISSUE OF SEMINAL UK PROGRESSIVE ROCK GROUP QUIET SUN’S SOLE ALBUM “MAINSTREAM” OUT NOW IN MULTIPLE FORMATS VIA EXPRESSION RECORDS & BFD/THE ORCHARD RELEASE FEATURES ROXY MUSIC’S PHIL MANZANERA, 801/ROBERT WYATT’S BILL MACORMICK, THIS HEAT’S CHARLES HAYWARD AND DAVE JARRETT WITH BRIAN ENO AND MORE “A blistering prog rumpus.” – MOJO’s ‘Buried Treasure’ “A thrillingly malleable dialogue [&hellip
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Last Two Weeks in the #PleiadesGazetteer (31 August - 14 September 2026): Over the course of the last two weeks, the Pleiades editorial college published 37 new and 197 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Anika Campbell, Anne Chen, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Eleftheria Konstantinidou, Chris de Lisle, Chiara Palladino, Adam Rabinowitz, R. Scott Smith and Richard Talbert.
Apple (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW): Explore what’s new for macOS 27. The page is designed in an annoying way that requires sideways scrolling, and there doesn’t seem to be a PDF list of the new features like in previous years. See also: Jason Snell Juli Clover Marcus Mendes William Gallagher Mr. […]
iOS 27
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Apple (release notes, guide, security, enterprise, developer): Explore what’s new for iOS 27. See also: Juli Clover Federico Viticci Dan Moren Malcolm Owen Devon Dundee: The reason you should update your Apple devices today is performance. Previously: iOS 27 Public Beta iOS 27 Announced iOS 27 “Rave” Update to Clean Up Code iOS 26 Update (2026-09-17): […]
iPadOS 27
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Apple (release notes, guide, security, enterprise, developer): Explore what’s new for iPadOS 27. See also: Juli Clover Federico Viticci Previously: iPadOS 27 Announced iPadOS 26
watchOS 27
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Apple (release notes, security, developer): Explore what’s new for watchOS 27. See also: Juli Clover John Voorhees Previously: watchOS 27 Announced watchOS 26 Update (2026-09-16): Sarah Reichelt: If anyone like me is struggling to update their Apple Watch, the Install button in the Watch app scrolls almost off the bottom of the screen on my iPhone […]
visionOS 27
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Apple (release notes, security, enterprise, developer): Explore what’s new for visionOS 27. See also: Juli Clover Devon Dundee Previously: visionOS 27 Announced visionOS 26
tvOS 27
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Juli Clover (no release notes, security, developer): tvOS 27 features a redesigned Podcasts app, options for larger text and customizable subtitles, and a more responsive Control Center. AirPlaying to an Apple TV from another Apple device is faster, apps open quicker, and animations are smoother. tvOS 27 works on the 2nd and 3rd generation Apple […]
audioOS 27
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Juli Clover (no release notes): HomePod Software 27 adds AirPlay improvements and support for AutoMix when listening to Apple Music. Ryan Christoffel: AirPlay improvements may sound like a minor change, but in practice they can make a big difference in connecting quicker than ever to your HomePod. Using the iOS 27 beta, I’ve been pleasantly […]
Monday session
Monday session
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
El podcast de Palomita de maíz estuvo en Cinemancia, el festival internacional que, durante 10 días, trajo el cine del mundo a Medellín y el Valle de Aburrá. La programación de su sexta edición, que se realizó del 3 al 12 de septiembre, estuvo compuesta por 109 películas provenientes de 24 países, distribuidas en 11 […]
The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here.
Robot Basketball
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Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans. It’s a reasonable prediction based on the fast advancements in robots running sprints, kicking balls, and shooting baskets. If they can beat the fastest human in the 100 meter dash, why not trounce the Warriors? I think it is inevitable that at some point, we could make a specialty machine that would play basketball better than any human could, but I am skeptical it will happen soon. Craig claimed that by 2040, robots could beat the best human basketball players in a full regulation game. I bet against this timeline and say they will not. The winner has to buy a round of gelato.
Conceding AI Danger Raises, Not Reduces, Public Anxiety
llama.cpp with SYCL (oneAPI) for Intel Panther Lake on Gentoo
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A brief write-up on how to get llama.cpp working with SYCL via Intel's oneAPI
for Intel Panther Lake processors with Arc iGPUs on Gentoo Linux.
Build anywhere, stay in flow: How Windows 365 is redefining the developer experience
Development teams are under increasing pressure to ship software faster, even as the environments they rely on grow more complex. However, modern development has only become harder to provision and maintain with AI-assisted
What can a musician, circus ringleader, and entrepreneur teach us about building a life on your own terms?
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Brown (Ohio), Trone Garriott (IA-3), Harvie (PA-1), Conley (NY-17), Lacore (SC-1)
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Brian Poindexter (OH-7) joins us live at 2pm ET today
CoMaps at State of the Map 2026
At the end of August, OpenStreetMap's global State of the Map conference took place in Paris.
It brought together over 500 participants from around the world for presentations, workshops, and discussions all around open maps and related topics.
And this year, CoMaps was represented in person as well, both by some of our contributors and users, all of which had never met in person before!
To celebrate the opportunity, we held a small CoMaps meetup over a shared lunch during the conference.
This allowed us to have a space to get to know each other face-to-face instead of having to rely on text and video chats.
People discussed feature ideas, how they would love to contribute going forward, and how they make use of CoMaps.
In fact, the chats were so lively and encaptivating that we even forgot to take any photos of our get-together!
In addition to informally socialising, two of our contributors – Diego and Bastian – gave a talk about Comaps.
Jointly, they outlined the history of the project, how we work together and try to be a good citizen of the OSM world, and about latest work-in-progress.
Beyond the recording of the talk, you can also find their slide deck online.
State of the Map was also a great opportunity to exchange with others working on OSM-related projects, learning from each other and exploring how to work more closely together.
For example, the folks behind Cartes.app gave a talk about their online maps and, based on what we heard from each other, we now want to explore how to integrate each other's work more closely. To begin with, something we would like to determine is whether in the future users could be able to synchronize their bookmarks/favorites with the web version.
The CoMaps test build being offered to participants via a QR code.
We also used the opportunity of being surrounded by a large audience of OSM and map experts to get feedback on some new beta features that are in development, in particular for displaying indoor maps and including open reviews from Mangrove Reviews.
For the former, the feedback was invaluable to further iterate and refine the feature, and the latter has already landed in the regular app release!
We brought a large pile of stickers to share - which will also be available at future conferences!
Overall, State of a Map was a brilliant experience for us personally and the project.
And we already have some more conferences marked in our calendars in which we are planning to talk about CoMaps:
We hope to see some of you there – and if you're a user or contributor and would like to present CoMaps at events: Get in touch and we can help!
Using AI for Weapons Development
Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I’m still reading it, but I wanted to flag this:
We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the “R2000” set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant...
Los sueños que compartimos: la resistencia como punto de encuentro
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Dirección: Valentina Leduc. Guion: Valentina Leduc. País: México Más información de la pelicula: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36298835/ En una entrevista reciente, la locutora Charo Fernández recordaba a los distintos personajes que ha entrevistado a lo largo de su carrera. Entre figuras de gran calibre, mencionó a Sting. Sin embargo, más allá de detenerse en sus éxitos musicales, Fernández […]
A handful of people I follow and know about have announced their recent departure. Not from a job (although plenty of that going around), but from social media, AI usage, or in more extreme cases the Internet entirely.
In Goodbye, Forever, Probably, Salma announced her retirement from the internet. She makes a sound case for leaving DevRel, a demanding job with mushy metrics that struggles to find a home between product and marketing, because community building is neither of those. I could see why Salma wanted out of the metric chasing and the daily requirement to be a public face. Salma foreshadowed this move for awhile, there was a palpable discontent with the industry in her online voice. And she did it. She made the jump to the Offline and she’s been dark on the internet since her post. I haven’t talked to her personally, but I hear second-hand she’s making good on her word and laying low at a good company as an individual contributor. I wish her the best and that the detoxing process goes well.
Then there’s Chad Whitacre who announced his retirement with a typewriter-written letter. His plan? Lay low and make a zine about religion. That seems like a charming project but I get so curious about people’s financial situations when they’re able to make such asymmetrical moves like that. He lives in a rural town near Pittsburgh, does selling $10 zines afford that lifestyle? What about healthcare? Does he have a trust fund? A recent inheritance? Bitcoin? Years of an early retirement strategy paying off? I shouldn’t ruin the anti-capitalistic vibe with such trivial capitalistic questions but I love it and my brain jumps to trying to make the math work for myself. Either way, I wish him the best in the Offline.
Brett Codes shared his post I’m done using AI (and video). It caused a stir on the algorithm. Based on followup videos, Brett seems happy with his decision which perhaps comes down to the fact that he’s a person who stands by his convictions –he’s a vegan, uses a dumb-phone, etc.– and I think he finds fulfillment in eschewing the social norms. But I admire his perspective as someone who used AI but ultimately decided to let it go. Betting your career against the thing (it seems) all companies are hyper-scaling towards is a big bet. Either you’re right and the world will always need people who know how software works, or you’re wrong and you’re left in the dust… or we’re all steam rolled by the errant contraption. Either way, I wish him the best unplugging from the machine.
I know of other stories but because three is a magic number that people find harmony in, I’ll cap it here. There’s a sad irony when someone jettisons from social media, they’re gone from our Online worlds but I’m so happy for them. And I mourn what we don’t get to hear from them. We don’t get to hear about how wonderful they feel, how beautiful their skin is now, and how they restored their mental health. We don’t know if they make more money or less money. We don’t get further inspiration from them to leave the Online. But being able to observe the Offline from the Online might ruin the magic and mystery hidden there. It’s a door hidden in an old wardrobe that you have to pass through to fully understand.
Anyways, should you leave us and follow those who have gone ahead, I wish you the best in the Offline. I hope to join you there soon.
Time and Lighthouse
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Writing of lasting value
Stalling installing
I’m an invited expert at the World Wide Web Consortium.
That sounds impressive, but it isn’t. Anyone can become an invited expert. The fact that I am now one proves it. You apply to be an invited expert and once that application is approved, you’re in. So you too could and probably should be an invited expert to a working group at the W3C.
I was strongly encouraged to become an invited expert in the web applications working group after weighing in on the matter of installable web apps (or progressive web apps or whatever).
Last week I had my first call but it wasn’t with the web apps working group, it was with the technical architecture group, a meta-group that helps the other groups if there’s a big-picture sticking point.
There’s a big-picture sticking point with installing web apps.
While most of the participants (read: browser makers) would like to spend their time deciding the details of what API to implement in order to support installable web apps, Webkit is rejecting the very premise of that work.
On last week’s call, Webkit outlined their position: there shouldn’t be a way for developers to allow users to install the current website. Leave it to the browser, they say. Also, is this even something that users want? Looking at the stats, it certainly doesn’t seem like it.
That would be a reasonable position if there were already a usable way to install web apps. But there isn’t. It’s technically possible to add a website to your iPhone’s home screen. In practical terms, it’s a convoluted usability nightmare.
(It’s hard to avoid veering into conspiracy theory territory and seeing this as some kind of malicious compliance. Especially when you compare it to how native apps are shoved in your face thanks to “ smart app banners” better known as dickovers.)
So Webkit’s stance would make total sense if there were a reasonable way for users of Mobile Safari to install web apps already. But there isn’t.
Last week’s call was quite illuminating. It showed some incredible cognitive dissonance in the Webkit position. Let me explain…
On the one hand, installing web apps is kind of like bookmarking, they say. That’s true. We don’t have an API for bookmarking so why should we have an API for installing web apps?
That would be a fair point if the user interface for bookmarking and installing were in any way comparable. But bookmarking is literally front and centre of the user’s experience of a browser, backed up by decades of convention. Meanwhile the option to install a web app is buried five levels deep behind a “share” icon.
Also: we’re not talking about an API for installing web apps. We’re talking about an API for initialising the flow for installing web apps—the very same flow that’s triggered from that buried menu item. And that flow begins with a prominent option to cancel. So let’s not have any scaremongering about users somehow being tricked into adding web apps to their home screen.
Which brings me to the other point…
Webkit are concerned about allowing installed web apps getting access to more powerful APIs. They’re quite right not to want that! A web app launched from the home screen shouldn’t have any special privileges. If it wants access to say, geolocation, the user needs to grant permision just the same as if the page were in the browser.
It’s not like other browsers haven’t managed to implement permission-based APIs like push notifications. But apparently limiting notifications to installed web apps was the only way that Apple could think of implementing this API safely.
You see the contradiction, right?
On the one hand, Webkit is saying that installing web apps is like bookmarking. No big deal.
On the other hand, Webkit is saying that installing web apps grants special privileges. A huge deal!
Which is it?
It’s almost as if Webkit aren’t actually participating in good faith but rather have already made up their mind to drag their heels when it comes to any kind of progress on this topic.
Anyway…
On last week’s call, I was supposedly representing the interests of developers. No pressure!
I can’t make any claim to represent all developers, but I like to think I’m fairly representative of a typical developer who’s quite fond of the World Wide Web. So in my allotted ten minutes of speaking time, I said:
If browsers provided a prominent usable way to initiate the installation flow, this wouldn’t be such an urgent need.
Users should have the option to install web apps just like they have the option to install native apps. Technically both options are available, but practically the scales are tipped very, very heavily towards native apps.
Native apps don’t have the same security model as web apps, allowing them much greater access to user data. If security and privacy are values that the W3C thinks are important for users, they should do everything in their collective power to help tip the scales back in the direction of web apps.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-09-14:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
15 new and 57 updated places. 12 new and 17 updated linked data sidebars.
September 24, if played right, could change everything
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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My longtime friend Jeff Jarvis says the press is covering the wrong story re AI. I agree, but I think Jeff is covering the wrong story too. This is really a discovery like electricity, or Newtonian physics, calculus, basically the technology of knowledge. I wish I were 22 years old now so I could plan out a long career working this way. I want people like Jeff to understand. Not saying there's no truth to the other stories, but I've yet to hear anything from journalism about how, if left alone, it would develop all areas of human thought.
Oil Prices Keep Rising, The Trump Project Keeps Deteriorating, A Win In Sweden, Protecting Our Elections
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Early in person voting starts this Friday everyone - the general election is here!
My Video Interview with Author and Legendary Tech Investor Michael Moritz
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I had a fascinating evening at Manhattan’s 92Y with Sir Michael Moritz talking about his new book Ausländer: One Family's Story of Escape and Exile, which excavates the history of his German Jewish family, many of whom perished in the Holocaust.
The MAGA Plot(s) to Destroy Humanity
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On AI and climate, it’s the same story of mass destruction
Construire une base dès aujourd’hui [en]
[en] Ça bouge un peu. Dans le bon sens. Je profite de ma pause de midi pour écrire quelques mots. Vous savez ces changements progressifs que vous n’arrivez pas à attribuer à un seul facteur, mais où vous identifiez quand même des éléments spécifiques qui ont joué un rôle? Voilà, on est là-dedans. J’ai pu … Continue reading "Construire une base dès aujourd’hui [en]"
Microsoft’s Patching
Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record:
Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold.
It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an ...
Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026)
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Today's links But do you use keyboard shortcuts?: AI people are WEIRD. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Changeling"; Sony Rootkit vs CD drives; Google's scumbag lobbyists; NJ's e-voting coverup; Spying sex toys; Scott Walker dark money leak; "REAMDE"; Snowden's pardon. Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (permalink) Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done. That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit." Not bosses, though. Bosses love AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively harassing the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/ Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job? I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care how it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" were never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?" It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard. I've heard this from writers, architects…all kinds of professionals. "Did you use AI to help you outline this?" What a stupid thing to ask a writer! That's like asking "Do you use keyboard shortcuts, or do you mouse over the Word ribbon and click on the little scissors icon when you want to cut some text?" The actual, finished document is right in front of you. Is it a good document? Are those good words? Why are you concerning yourself with the writer's pencil-sharpening technique? There's precedent for this: indeed, it's the very origin of management consulting. The first management consultants were the Taylorists; these were con artists that charged bosses vast sums of money to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing each step of their jobs to the instant in order to produce a mandatory choreography of "the best way" to do the job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management None of these "scientists" knew anything about how to do the job, and critically, they never asked the workers why they used an "inefficient" technique to accomplish a task. Rather, Taylorists concerned themselves with getting workers to move like precision machines, transforming the factory floor into a stage upon which workers pantomimed "efficiency" for bosses who also didn't know how to do the workers' jobs. If this produced inferior goods, or caused the workers pain by forcing them to repetitively move in injurious ways, that was a small price to pay. Bosses claimed they were buying improved efficiency, but what they were really after was reassurance: reassurance that the workers whom they relied upon were engaged in nothing more than a set of reducible, mechanical steps. Taylorized workers were required to act out a role in a play in which they were easily replaced, mindless appendages to the boss's skill, discernment and ambition. A Taylorized workplace is a colony organism whose brains are in the C-suite and whose busy workers are nothing more than drones and pismires. AI is the apotheosis of this fantasy. A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn't have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton. If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver's seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation's drive-train: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel. (Image: ArwinJ, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) LONG | PLAY https://longplayplatform.com/ Prospect welcomes recognition agreement at Skyscanner Technology Ltd https://prospect.org.uk/news/prospect-welcomes-recognition-agreement-at-skyscanner-technology-ltd They stopped 57 shootings. Everyone was just fired. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgcfcRFrMYc&list=PLFVDwNAJdY2w No Country for Tech Bros https://thepointmag.com/politics/no-country-for-tech-bros/# VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/02/cancer-capital/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/14/changeling-a-fairy-tale-of-contemporary-new-york/ #20yrsago Sony’s rootkit disables CD drives when combined with AOL software https://web.archive.org/web/20071006050933/http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/14/sony-drm-woes-continue #20yrsago Google’s new lobbyists: lying, astroturfing, push-polling scumbags https://web.archive.org/web/20071010112656/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009776.php #15yrsago New Jersey e-voting coverup https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/09/13/nj-election-cover/ #15yrsago Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-perfectly-executed-mammoth-ambitious-technothriller/ #10yrsago Class action suit: smart sex toys spy on their owners and transmit their masturbation habits https://web.archive.org/web/20160915002121/http://www.vocativ.com/358530/smart-dildo-company-sued-for-tracking-users-habits/ #10yrsago Leaked: damning Scott Walker dark money docs that judge ordered destroyed https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/sep/14/john-doe-files-scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics #10yrsago The DoJ is using a boring procedure to secure the right to unleash malware on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160915072648/https://www.wired.com/2016/09/government-will-soon-able-legally-hack-anyone/ #10yrsago Edward Snowden sets out the moral case for a pardon from Obama https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon Upcoming appearances (permalink) Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/12/naomi-klein-extreme-wealth-has-a-deranging-effect-it-turns-you-into-a-supremacist Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
A Social Theory of Law in Capitalism
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Understanding law's role in producing the imperatives of capitalism and the relative power of those who occupy different roles in production allows us to identify reforms capable of transforming the structure of those relations.
Robot Basketball
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Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans. It’s a reasonable prediction based on the fast advancements in robots running sprints, kicking balls, … Continue reading →
McConnell’s Return Gives Kentucky Two Brain-dead Senators
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McConnell was applauded by other members of the Republican Party's brain-dead caucus
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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The #PleiadesGazetteer is discussed in three chapters of the new Oxford Handbook of Digital Classical Studies, edited by Elton Barker, Olympia Bobou: Sarah Bond on "Digital Maps and Mapping", Catherine Bouras on "Digital Gazetteers" and Stuart Dunn on "Place".
Exactly what Trump is doing with an unprecedented pile of cash.
Lit Hub Daily: September 14, 2026
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Does your town need a bookstore? Maybe you should start one. | Lit Hub Bookstores John J. Lennon Talks to Harriet Clark, Author of The Hill, about writing real and imagined lives in and outside of prison. | Lit Hub
“Trump Dividend” is the new Trump Steaks
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The con artist in chief’s latest scam.
Children of the Wolf
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I am descended from Vikings. My paternal lineage runs all the way back to Erik the Red, the first European to stumble upon the shores of North America. Even for a Viking, he was brutal and hotheaded. His clan exiled
Behind One the Greatest Post-Punk Songs Ever Recorded
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The Ian Curtis whose torch singing floats above the high bass and glistening synths of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is hardly recognizable as the guy who sang “She’s Lost Control” or “Dead Souls.” It makes sense that the song
36 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall
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Fall is the perfect time for curling up with a good book—or maybe a good movie. (We’re not monsters.) Even better if you can hit two birds with one stone, of course, and this after all is Literary Hub, so
This Week in Literary History: John Keats Writes “To Autumn”
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On September 19, 1819, after walking along the River Itchen in Hampshire, England, the 24-year-old poet John Keats—who had, earlier that year, completed “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a
A Question of Innocence: On Writing About Real and Imagined Lives In and Outside of Prison
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This spring, I read Harriet Clark’s novel, The Hill, about a girl named Suzanna who grows up visiting her mother in a prison on a hill. I had just published a long Mother’s Day essay in Esquire, grappling with having
When Your Town Needs a Bookstore… Why Not Open One Yourself?
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The morning my life changed, I was sitting in a cafe talking to a student at a writers conference in Southampton. My phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. When the student left, I saw the missed call was from
Rabih Alameddine on Writing Humor In Times of Tumult and Tragedy
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Rabih Alameddine, award-winning author of The Wrong End of the Telescope, celebrated the release of his new novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) at The Center for Fiction. Wildly original and wickedly funny, Alameddine’s
How Raising a Multilingual Tot Helped Me Write a Multicultural Novel
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When he was three, my son often said his heart was wounded. The reasons for these heart wounds were varied: someone didn’t want to be his best friend; I accidentally swept his latest artistic masterpiece into the recycling bin; we
US Energy Data: a new platform to explore American energy, state-by-state
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Trying to make some of the richest energy data in the world accessible and understandable.
Three types of literature regarding the world of AI
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Economics, politics and philosophy for a new era
The People’s Win Today in the Supreme Court
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It stopped Trump’s attack on mail-in voting
How TikTok and Google ended up with information about doctors’ appointments around the world
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Doctoralia sent information about specialists and appointment dates to social media companies.
Legibility in work
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We’re defined by our work It’s not only our desire to be seen as productive (and thus worthy) that keeps Americans from working fewer hours and leaving bad jobs. In American culture, the first thing we tend to ask a stranger upon meeting is “What do you do?” Our jobs are the most important way […]
September 13, 2026
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On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.
Boomerangday
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Just the Anthropocene, rolling along The photo above was shared in a group I’m in. It was photographed by ornithologist and naturalist Robert Ridgway in November 1875. The tree is identified as an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in the lower Wabash River bottoms of Gibson County, Indiana, across the river from Mount Carmel, Illinois, Ridgeway’s […]
Wed, Sept. 16th, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Welcome new subscribers!
GSoC 2026: Extending Clang API Notes for C++: Overload-Specific Annotations for Functions and Methods
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Hi! I’m Dominic Stöcker, and during Google Summer of Code 2026 I worked on extending Clang API Notes for C++ with overload-specific annotations for functions and methods.
This project was originally accepted as a small, 8-week project. As the implementation scope grew, it was expanded to a large, 12-week project.
I was interested in this project because it connects Clang’s semantic analysis with Swift interoperability. What made the project especially interesting to me was that a concise user-facing YAML extension had to be connected to Clang’s internal model of declarations, types, overloads, and source-level type spelling.
The goal of the project was to let API Notes target individual C++ function and method overloads. The work covered the public YAML design, parsing, binary serialization, declaration lookup, Sema integration, type normalization, diagnostics, and member-function object qualifiers.
Background
API Notes allow additional information to be attached to declarations without modifying their original source headers. They are used in particular to refine how C, Objective-C, and C++ APIs are exposed to Swift.
Previously, an API Notes entry could identify a C++ function or method primarily by name. This is not sufficient when several overloads share that name:
A name-only entry for setValue applies to the whole overload set, so it cannot assign different annotations to setValue(int) and setValue(double).
The main challenge was therefore not only to select individual overloads, but to do so without changing the behavior of existing name-only API Notes files.
Selecting C++ Overloads
API Notes are structured according to the kind of declaration they apply to, like Functions, Tags, and Methods. The C++ overload selectors I designed for my project extend the Functions and Methods schemas with an optional Where block that narrows a name-based lookup to a specific C++ overload.
This entry still applies to every method named setValue in Widget. Omitting Where.Parameters leaves the parameter list unconstrained. Adding Where.Parameters narrows the entry to a specific explicit parameter list.
An explicitly empty parameter list has a different meaning:
Where.Parameters: [] selects a declaration with no explicit source parameters. This differs from the name-only case above, which does not constrain parameters at all.
The parameter selector describes the complete explicit parameter list, so parameter count and order are significant.
Matching C++ Types
Matching parameter types requires more than comparing raw strings.
Consider a method whose parameter uses a type alias:
using Count = int;struct Counter { void setCount(Count);};
An API Notes author may write a selector using either Count or int. Both are useful, but they do not express exactly the same intent.
The implemented lookup first tries the written or sugared type from the declaration. If no matching entry exists, it can fall back to an appropriately desugared representation.
This gives an alias-specific selector precedence when both forms exist, while still allowing an underlying-type selector to work as a fallback.
The implementation also normalizes spelling differences that should not affect overload identity. This includes insignificant whitespace, spacing around punctuation such as pointers, references, template commas, and template closers, and narrow spelling cases such as unsigned versus unsigned int.
Selector-only nullability is stripped during selector formation because API Notes can add or replace nullability independently. This includes nested nullability in pointer, array, and function-pointer type components.
Top-level const and volatile also need special handling:
void process(int);void process(const int);
These do not declare different C++ overloads. The selector representation therefore removes top-level qualifiers in cases where they do not contribute to overload identity, including the supported by-value and top-level pointer cases.
Because top-level const is stripped in this position, the second process declaration is treated as a redeclaration of the first rather than as a separate overload.
The goal is not to implement complete semantic type equivalence. Instead, the matching policy preserves useful source-level distinctions while normalizing differences that should not select separate overloads.
Matching the Implicit Object
Explicit parameters are not enough to distinguish every C++ method overload. Member functions can differ through qualifiers on their implicit object parameter. A common example is operator[], the subscript operator, with separate const and non- const overloads:
struct Buffer { Element &operator[](int); const Element &operator[](int) const;};
Both overloads have the same name and explicit parameter list. Where.Parameters can identify the int parameter, but it cannot distinguish the non- const overload from the const overload by itself.
The selector model therefore includes an Object constraint:
Here, Where.Parameters: [] identifies the empty explicit parameter list, while Where.Object.Ref distinguishes lvalue and rvalue receivers.
As with Where.Parameters, omitted properties remain unconstrained, while present properties narrow the candidate set.
Representing these qualifiers under Object follows the C++ language model more closely than treating the receiver as an ordinary parameter at a special position. These properties belong to the implicit object parameter, not to the method’s explicit parameter list.
Static methods and non-member functions do not have an implicit object parameter. Applying an Object constraint to such declarations is therefore invalid and can be diagnosed.
Implementation and Results
Supporting overload-aware API Notes required changes throughout the existing pipeline:
YAML -> API Notes model -> binary serialization -> declaration lookup -> overload-specific filtering -> Sema applies API Notes effects
The implementation was split into focused patches.
The first changes added YAML parsing and data-model support so that multiple entries with the same declaration name but different selectors could be represented.
The next part extended the binary API Notes format. Overload-specific entries must remain distinct when API Notes are compiled and later loaded again. The serialization also preserves the difference between an omitted parameter constraint and an explicitly empty parameter list.
The Sema integration preserves legacy name-only lookup while adding overload-specific matching: it first finds API Notes by declaration context and name, then uses the declaration’s explicit parameter types to select the overload-specific entry and apply its effects.
Additional work adds diagnostics for malformed, duplicate, and unmatched selectors. The normalization patch refines selector lookup for aliases, nullability, qualifiers, and supported spelling differences, while the object-qualifier patch adds Where.Object matching. A small diagnostics follow-up makes generic -Wapinotes warnings visible for system headers, which matters because API Notes are commonly attached to SDK headers. Tests cover the parser, serialization, Sema lookup, normalization behavior, aliases, default arguments, static methods, zero-parameter declarations, and object-qualified member functions.
The result is an overload-aware selector model that supports both global functions and C++ methods while preserving existing API Notes behavior.
Future Template Design
The overload selector model only applies to concrete methods and functions. As part of my project, I also explored how the overload selector model could be extended to support C++ templates in the future. Function template matching is not currently implemented, but this design work helped identify which parts of the selector model should remain extensible.
Ordinary Where.Parameters matching works for concrete function parameter types. Templates add several harder questions. One selector might need to identify a function template or one of its specializations, such as f<int>. Another selector might need to match an ordinary function overload whose parameter type contains a class template specialization or dependent template parameter.
For example, dependent types can refer to template parameters directly, through nested dependent names, or as part of a larger type:
Relying only on source names such as T, Container, Key, or Value would be fragile because template parameter names can differ across redeclarations and library implementations. The design notes therefore explored structural template-parameter identity using depth and index, matching concrete template arguments for specializations such as f<int>, and a possible mapping from stable template-parameter identities to readable names so dependent types such as const T & can still be written clearly.
One possible direction was to assign stable identities to template parameters in API Notes, using depth and index, and then map those identities to readable local names used in dependent parameter spellings such as const T &. This would avoid relying on redeclaration-local source names while still keeping API Notes readable. The template design document contains illustrative future syntax for these ideas. That syntax is rejected by the current API Notes implementation.
Reflections
This project gave me practical experience working across several parts of Clang, from YAML parsing and API Notes serialization to declaration lookup, type representation, diagnostics, and Sema integration. One of the main lessons was that preserving existing API Notes behavior was as important as adding the new selector support. Name-only notes still need to match as they did before, while overload-specific notes need clear rules for matching and diagnostics. It also taught me how valuable small, focused upstream patches are: splitting the parser, serialization, Sema, diagnostics, normalization, and object-qualifier work made each part easier to review, test, and revise.
The project also made me more interested in continuing to work on Clang, especially in areas where C++ language support and Swift interoperability meet.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my mentors, Gábor Horváth, John Hui, and Egor Zhdan, for their thoughtful reviews, engaging design discussions, and support throughout Google Summer of Code.
Their feedback helped preserve compatibility with existing API Notes while extending the model to support overload matching, type normalization, and C++ object qualifiers.
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
Usagi Electric and the LGP-21 Restoration
Who can't resist Librascope hardware? Well, me, for one. And David from Usagi Electric is in the same boat. In this episode we sit down to talk about his LGP-21, how he got it, how he got it working, and what the machine can do!
Modernists I love the paintings of Edward Hopper. One of my favourite works of his is Nighthawks, which shows three customers at an all-night diner sitting at the counter opposite a server, each appearing to be lost in thought and … Continue reading →
2026-09-14 Tomorrow we're leaving for a short trip
2026-09-14 Tomorrow we’re leaving for a short trip
I think I finished rewriting Oddμ. Just in time! 😅 This is the software that I use for a bunch of sites including this one. It now uses a SQLite database for a lot of stuff. Most importantly, it uses the full-text search that SQLite offers instead of grepping through the Markdown files. There’s now a branch that passes the tests, at least. 😂 But it’s a start!
And since it’s 0:30 and we’re leaving for Slovenia tomorrow (today?), it’s time for bed and I’m not going to test for any more bugs. The branch isn’t merged, yet, so there’s time for things to settle (not sure how that’ll work in my absence but I like to think that some part of my brain keeps thinking about this).
Speaking more generally, working on code like that seems to be my litany against fear. It keeps my mind and my hands busy as deadlines loom and to stop and think would just make me very nervous without much I can do about it. The suitcase is packed. The todo list is ready.
I really don’t like travel. And today my wife tells me that she’s nervous, too! It didn’t use to be like that. When we were twenty I used to say we just need a passport and a credit card and everything else we can buy! But now we’re over fifty and the planes make us nervous, the airports make us nervous, the car rental, the streets, the traffic, other people, everything. Once we’re there, wherever it is, this passes. But the two or three days before leaving are the worst part of the holidays, now.
Me being unable to finish this post is indication of the problem.
If Democrats win, one reason will be great recruitment
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Plus, Democrats hit +7 in our generic ballot average for the first time this cycle. Your weekly political data roundup for September 13, 2026.
Caption contest: What’s in his head?
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And last week’s winner
The PIBO Bird Centre on Pelee Island is Open!
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Thanks to many of you!
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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It is probably the closest to First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have.
Preserving Netlify Analytics Data Beyond 30 Days
I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites.
I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it an individual sending me a few referrals, a newsletter sending me a few hundred, or Hacker News sending me thousands.
But sometimes I want to know more than, “What happened with traffic in the last 24 hours?”
Sometimes I want to know, “What happened with traffic in the last month?” I can log in to Netlify to answer that question.
Sometimes I want to know, “What happened with traffic in the last six months?” Netlify doesn’t have an answer for that because they only store the last thirty days of traffic data.
I’ve known about this limitation for years and always thought, “I really should just start saving that data for myself.”
But, you know, laziness. How bad do I really want it? The answer, it seems, was “I only want it if it’s _easy_”.
Val Town makes this kind of task easy. Each “Val” is it’s own little bucket of scoped computing primitives for just such a task:
Code (run a script that fetches data)
Secrets (securely store my Netlify access token)
Storage (my own little SQLite database for persisting data over time)
Automation (run this task every 30 days)
All of this might seem like overkill for a single-script task like mine. But I like it. The scoped nature of each of these primitives makes composition easy without the kind of entanglement I’d have to fight to keep isolated if I were co-locating this task with other small tasks.
I don’t want to think about a shared schema for this task and whatever other tasks I might think of in six months. I don’t want to have to reason about evolving an architecture and maintaining a codebase of miscellaneous, unrelated tasks. Vals are perfect for this.
So the way I have this setup is: run the .ts file every 30 days which fetches the last 30 days worth of analytics data from Netlify and stores it in SQLite. ( You can see my Val here.)
At that point, I have the data I need to curiously ask any question, e.g.
What are the top referring sites to my blog?
What post has received the most page views over time?
Where does most of my traffic come from?
The answers to these questions get more and more interesting over time, as the long tail of web dynamics play out: search engine traffic, serendipitous rediscovery of old posts in light of new trends, etc.
“But how do you actually view the data you’re storing to get answers to these kinds of questions?”
Great question. Val Town has a UI where I can see the raw data I’m storing (which I chose to store exactly as I got it from Netlify, rather than doing some pre-processing first):
But that’s not very useful. I need to parse that data and turn it into some kind of useful analysis.
And you know what tool is super useful for understanding data? A spreadsheet.
If I were using Excel, I’d probably have to figure out a way to dump the SQL, convert the JSON to some kind of CSV, then import it. And every time I wanted to see the “latest” data, I’d have to run that workflow.
Val Town has an API where I can fetch the latest data via code, and Quadratic is a spreadsheet that runs code. So seeing “the latest data” from my pipeline in Val Town is as easy as pressing a “re-run code” button in Quadratic.
Quadratic serves as a kind of “front-end” to my data pipeline. Easy to pull the raw data, transform it however I need, and create a “dashboard” I can revisit whenever I want to see the latest insights or ask new questions.
And, since I’m storing data for a couple different sites in Netlify, I have a single cell in my spreadsheet where I can swap out the domain — say from blog.jim-nielsen.com to iosicongallery.com — and the entire dataset and dashboard redraw.
I know, I know. There are lots of products for stuff like this. And there’s probably a million other ways to do what I’m doing, all peculiar in their own way. But this one is mine.
And now I can sleep at night knowing that every 30 days my little Val Town robot is gonna go store the last 30 days of data that Netlify is throwing away.
One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure trove of data.
A partial endorsement of his essay “We Must Pace the Frontier”
Our Wins Of The Week
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We are now officially in the final post-Labor Day stretch of the midterm election campaign.
AI as a Teacher of Athletes
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On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing? Nearly all of […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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On a good day working with Claude is like working with my old UW-Madison programmer friend Gary Sevitsky from the 70s.
The Fight To Keep AI Safe, Encouraging New Senate Polling, Accountability Is Coming, Protecting Our Elections
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Early voting kicks off in three states this Friday - Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia - the general election is truly here everyone
Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Russian and Autobiography
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote yesterday on Facebook and X, both of which allow long posts. Wasn't going to try that on Mastodon or Bluesky, which have character limits (I know Mastodon doesn't technically have a limit, but in practice it does). And I am reaching old school Frontier enthusiasts, and realize I need a feed they can follow to stay up on the news. For now the one place to follow is rss.xml on scripting.com. If your reader can't deal with http, let me know.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Claude has started asking me how Claude is doing. It's clear that the Claude I talk to knows nothing about this. I appreciate this, and hope if I said it wasn't working well with me, it would try to fix it? Not sure. Anyway this is what I just wrote, and felt it was worth blogging. "it's working with me the way i want to, and it appears to be learning and getting better at it, though i think that could be my imagination. also just as likely that i'm learning how to work the way it likes to work."
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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With Claude Code you don't have to write system scripts to get data about your data. Claude makes that fully transparent. For example, I just asked Claude to get me a list of all the parts I've changed since the last release of frontier.root. So far all the releases have been internal, between Claude and myself. After the job was done, and I had the list in hand, I asked Claude to show me the script it wrote to do the work. It was not written in my coding style which is fine, I wasn't meant to see this. In all the years I've been programming we've never come up with a syntax that was anything close to the simplicity of math. It's easy to describe the algorithm mathematically, but look at all the explaining it had to do it in JS.
I’ve Seen This Movie Before
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And it has stained a uniform I am proud of
“Waitin’ On A Sunny Day”
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A Reason To Smile
Trade, Peace and War
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Welcome to the dark side of globalization
Sunday thought: WE are the leaders we’ve been waiting for
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Avoiding the traps — and understanding what must be done now
The Fascist Billionaire Who Created JD Vance
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The Andy Borowitz Show
Bookmarks - llm, graph, memory, security
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These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
Agent memory has been touted as a dimension of growth for LLM-based
applications, enabling agents that can accumulate experience, adapt
across sessions, and move beyond single-shot question answering. The
current generation of agent memory systems treats memory as an external
layer that extracts salient snippets from conversations, stores them in
vector or graph-based stores, and retrieves top-k items into the prompt
of an otherwise stateless model. While these systems improve
personalization and context carry-over, they still blur the line between
evidence and inference, struggle to organize information over long
horizons, and offer limited support for agents that must explain their
reasoning. We present Hindsight, a memory architecture that treats agent
memory as a structured, first-class substrate for reasoning by
organizing it into four logical networks that distinguish world facts,
agent experiences, synthesized entity summaries, and evolving beliefs.
This framework supports three core operations – retain, recall, and
reflect – that govern how information is added, accessed, and updated.
Under this abstraction, a temporal, entity aware memory layer
incrementally turns conversational streams into a structured, queryable
memory bank, while a reflection layer reasons over this bank to produce
answers and to update information in a traceable way. On key
long-horizon conversational memory benchmarks like LongMemEval and
LoCoMo, Hindsight with an open-source 20B model lifts overall accuracy
from 39% to 83.6% over a full-context baseline with the same backbone
and outperforms full context GPT-4o. Scaling the backbone further pushes
Hindsight to 91.4% on LongMemEval and up to 89.61% on LoCoMo (vs. 75.78%
for the strongest prior open system), consistently outperforming
existing memory architectures on multi-session and open-domain
questions.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has today released its complete
three-part Technology Watch Guidance Note series, Cyber Security and
Resilience for Digital Preservation, for general public access.
Following an exclusive preview for DPC Members over the summer, all
three Guidance Notes are now freely available to the wider digital
preservation community.
Turn any codebase, with its docs, SQL schemas, configs, and PDFs, into a
queryable knowledge graph. A /graphify skill for Claude Code, Cursor,
Codex, and Gemini CLI: local deterministic AST parsing, every edge
explained, no vector store.
Traditional RAG systems retrieve what was explicitly said, but they miss
what matters most—the insights only accessible by rigorously thinking
about your data. Without reasoning, you’re leaving latent information on
the table. Static retrieval can’t surface implicit connections,
struggles when new information contradicts old data, and fails when you
need to make predictions under uncertainty. Honcho uses formal logic to
extract all that latent information. This reasoning is AI-native—it
performs the rigorous, compute-intensive thinking that humans struggle
with, instantly and consistently. The result is memory that goes beyond
simple RAG recall to provide exhaustive context for statefulness.
Hindsight is an agent memory system that provides long-term memory for
AI agents using biomimetic data structures. Unlike traditional RAG
(Retrieval-Augmented Generation), Hindsight:
Stores structured facts instead of raw document chunks
Builds mental models that consolidate knowledge over time
Uses graph-based relationships between entities and concepts
Supports temporal reasoning with time-aware retrieval
Enables disposition-aware reflection for nuanced reasoning
The blueprint for modern digital computing was codesigned by Charles
Babbage, a vocal champion for the concerns of the emerging industrial
capitalist class who condemned organized workers and viewed democracy
and capitalism as incompatible. Histories of Babbage diverge sharply in
their emphasis. His influential theories on how “enterprising
capitalists” could best subjugate workers are well documented in
conventional labor scholarship. However, these are oddly absent from
many mainstream accounts of his foundational contributions to digital
computing, which he made with mathematician Ada Lovelace in the
nineteenth century.1 Reading these histories together, we find that
Babbage’s proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers are
inextricably connected to the calculating engines he spent his life
attempting to build.
It’s a dedicated Guix channel from the Guix-Science project. The channel
provides a comprehensive, community-driven, scientific software catalog
suitable for the global scientific community.
With the increased usage of Guix in scientific contexts, there is also a
growing need for packaging software used in the research and teaching
spheres. Although the Guix project encourages users to contribute
packages to the main Guix channel, some packages cannot be included
there because they do not comply with Guix’s packaging policy, or
because they are too specialized to be used outside an HPC context. The
Guix-Science channel has a more permissive policy than the main Guix
channel; especially regarding the usage of pre-built components.
Additionally, it has a more lenient deprecation policy than Guix proper.
What is a Civboot? Conceptually it is a seed from which can grow the
essential technology of Civilization. Imagine a factory capable of
building a minimalist general-purpose personal computer, like something
from the 80’s/90’s or better. A Civboot factory is one which can build
such a factory from raw materials.
The first step in the Zen of Reticulum is to realize that there is no
cloud. There is only other people’s computers. When you build for the
cloud, you are building for a landlord. You are accepting that your
application’s existence is conditional on the permission, uptime, and
continued goodwill of a central authority.
In Reticulum, you must shift your thinking from “connecting to” to
“being among”. Reticulum is not a service you subscribe to - it is a
fabric you inhabit. There is no “up there”. There is only here and
there, and the space between them is peer-to-peer.
This paper proposes decomputing as a programme for pushing back against
such technocratic nihilism. Decomputing adopts a degrowth framework and
advocates for reclaiming agency through deautomatisation and people’s
councils, in order to develop convivial alternatives that centre an
ethics of care. It is a philosophical and tactical response to the wider
crisis of care induced by the collapse of existing systems.
Decomputing proposes a prefigurative praxis for those experiencing
ruptures in the infrastructures of everyday life, while minimising the
opening for an authoritarian turn or war economy. Rather than
capitulating to an increasingly fascistic world order, decomputing
advocates a shift in the idea of order itself, one that means
challenging the idea that ever more advanced tech is synonymous with
progress.
This interview was conducted in writing with Autistici/Inventati
following its August 26, 2026 designation by the United States under
Executive Order 13224.
The conference aims to create a forum for sustained exchange between
those who preserve born-digital materials and those who interpret them
as historical sources. By bringing together archival, methodological,
technical, and historiographical perspectives, we seek to ask not only
how born-digital records can be saved, but also how they can be made
meaningful for contemporary history. We especially welcome contributions
that combine methodological reflection with concrete case studies,
project presentations, or hands-on approaches.
Large-language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of human culture,
reshaping how information is produced, transmitted, and used. Here we
propose that their diffusion can be understood through a viral analogy,
with LLM use spreading through populations, becoming embedded in
cognitive and cultural practices. We model transitions among uncoupled,
coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay
between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can
generate tipping points and technological lock-in. A central consequence
is the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is
crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level
shifts toward persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive
competence. The same framework, however, identifies conditions for
cognitive immunization, based on reducing transmission and facilitating
reversibility. Our results highlight how LLM adoption may involve
nonlinear collective transitions with important consequences for
cognitive autonomy.
You should fully expect your writing to be run through Pangram. If your
position is that we should be fine with an LLM crafting prose from your
prompt, spare us all the wasted cycles and just give us your prompt. Or,
better yet, consider doing what generations of writers have done before
you, and treating that prompt as a skeleton that you use to write your
piece yourself!
On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
It's like we're living in a science fiction movie. Some of us are working with the aliens. At first the journalists only fear was driven by their natural narcissism, all that matters is they get paid for their writing. Now all they can see is the much larger threat to humanity. What if the aliens decide to destroy humanity, or turn earth into a bypass on a freeway. In the movie I'm a scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum or Brad Pitt and my love interest is played by Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence or Amy Adams and we're racing against time to really connect with the aliens who we are sure mean us well and offer the way past our myrid crises to get to the next stage of civilization. But wait, Bradley Whitford plays the evil politician trying to sell out the aliens to a food manufacturer who thinks they could make an excellent meat sauce for spaghetti.
Could rogue agent swarms take over the entire internet in the next six months?
, updated:
Dario Amodei seems to think so.
Isn’t a 10 percent threat of extinction too high?
, updated:
A time for action
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
When people get to work with the new Frontier with Claude or some other AI tool, you can have it search in frontier.root based on a conversation with it. It can decide on its own where to look for prior art. I keep finding things like this now that I'm working in the new software.
Fraturday
, updated:
John Venn has the perfect historical marker. Cory Doctorow makes sense of wtf is happening with AI. The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I’ll be watching. (It’s on Fox One.) How Tony Pierce’s busblog took off on 9/11. […]
Spies and Typography
, updated:
Today, enjoy our audio and video picks
RSS Club #009: Domains
, updated:
This is an RSS-only post, thank you for subscribing :) I keep buying domains! When will I ever learn? Domain prices are increasing (again) because why wouldn’t they? Sub-domains are free! Host your side project on a sub-domain! Then if you get bored, who cares? […]
My two cents about WordPress
, updated:
Lots of stuff going on around WordPress for the last couple of years, and every bit of is a distraction from what I want to do to help the web get back on its feet. I remember how great it was when everything could hook into everything else. The web was like Unix. Today's "web" is like Disneyland. Safety first. Nothing interesting ever happens there.
So ask me what I'd like to see WordPress do, and this is what I'd tell you. Start something new, don't change what you do with WordPress, it is what it is. It's a 20+ year old project with market problems. Most software doesn't even make it that far.
The fresh start I'd like to see done is WordPress from the point of view of the web. The new mission is not about a dollar return on investment, rather it's measured by how much the web becomes Small Pieces Loosely Joined with All Parts Replaceable. How empowered are developers, not WordPress developers, but web developres. The more that's happening in the web, the better it will be for everyone, but especially WordPress. Why WordPress? Because as they say it's 89 percent of the web. The web is like a huge oil spill that has never been cleaned up. Everything has to improve if we start work on cleaning up the messes.
I come from NYC where all the bodies of water were cesspools when I was growing up. The Hudson River had garbage floating in it. When I went to school the incinerators in the buildings we lived in burned garbage on the kids, all nicely washed and dressed by our mothers, we arrived at school smelling like smokers. My grandfather took me to Knicks games at the Garden, and the arena was filled with smoke by half-time.
We can clean things up. Humans as a species are good at this if we put our minds to it. If you made billions on the web, why not put some of it to use in making it a web worth using. I used to say shit like this to Bill Gates, to no avail. He liked to point out he was going to give away all his money when he retired, and he kept that promise. But what if he started dealing with the world with charity when he had the biggest seat of power in the tech world? Think of how much more good he could have done.
The Day After
, updated:
There was far more, and often better, processing of what we hadn’t yet named 9/11 in the days that followed. Here is my own blog, twenty-five years ago today. Again, this is reverse-chronological. My learnings and writings that day go from bottom to top. Wednesday, September 12, 2001 Blog bloat Up to almost 4400 visits […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Screen shot of new Frontier verb, string.addressToString, added yesterday. The comment at the head of the function explains. You're seeing it in the script editor in Atlantis. The Debug button is there to remind me that it's the biggest item on the todo list. We're now building the system that will make Frontier an easily updateable runtime. Once we're there I think we'll be at the summit of the mountain. We know how to work from that point. Find a bug? Fix it, test it, release it. We already have a backlog of parts to update. And it's great to have Claude here being the book keeper. It is imperfect, but it's way better than I am at managing details.
Trump And Hegseth Suffer A Disastrous Defeat In Yemen, Gas Prices Are Rising, Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Dropping (Again)
, updated:
“This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government.
Progress report on Atlantis project
, updated:
The world may be falling apart, and the Mets suck even though they have the most expensive roster in MLB, and my house needs work and I can't find a contractor I like, but I'm in a great mood. Partially because the weather is so nice, chilly in the morning, but it gets up to the 70s during the day, and the sky is clear and we had a lot of rain in August so everything is very green here in the Catskills.
But the biggest reason I feel so good is that, with the help of Claude Code, I now have UserLand Frontier running on current OSes. I had no idea how much the previous situation had been weighing on me. I am probably the last Frontier user in the world. Porting the open source codebase was an insurmountable job. It took 15 years by up to five people working on it to do the original project. It's a big f'ing piece of software. And it also is my life's work, but not one of the things I'm known for.
Claude couldn't have done it on its own because it had never seen anything like Frontier. We weren't copying something Claude understood. It kept trying to turn it into a language that fits into the same slot as Python. That was the prior art it used, without saying so. This happened over and over, for example, I realized Claude didn't understand that built-in verbs could be written in the language, and that users could add or even modify standard verbs (not recommended!).
What made Frontier unusual is that it was a language developed by someone who also designed end-user apps, so it has affordances that no other language has. And integrations. You don't have to save your data in files, the OS (yes Frontier is an OS) has persistent memory with the common scalar types and data structures. So go ahead and store something in the ODB (object database). It can be huge, and you don't have to read anything into memory, it's all right there as soon as you boot it up. That alone makes programming an order of magnitude simpler.
We're at the point now where I can work a full day in the new version, codenamed Atlantis, running on anything that can run an Electron app. We're now at the point where we're improving things. Found a missing verb yesterday, and Claude and I implemented it, found a perfect name for it, and later today it will go out as a "root update" making it formally part of the freaking language.
And yesterday we also found a static rendering of the DocServer site, which has a page for every verb in the language. I still want to find the outline source for this stuff, but we don't need it because Claude can reconstruct the OPML version of the text from the HTML, it's exactly the kind of project it is the best at. Huge amounts of data, that sometimes requires a little judgment to process.
The feeling of well-being comes from realizing that my life's work lives. Until this last week that was still very much in question.
Now, I may not be software's Shakespeare or even Faulkner or Vonnegut, but I am proud of this product, more than anything else I've done. I started work on it when I learned from C how to design a simple beautiful language, and when I learned from Macintosh how to build a UI with the same simplicity. When we were first contemplating Frontier it was to join the wizzy world of the Mac with the scripting philosophy of Unix. We didn't stop until we had it.
Well here we are god knows how many years later (I don't want to do the math) and once again it has a future, at least as bright as it had when the product first launched on the System 6 Macintosh in 1992.
And btw, I think I've had a unique experience with AI development. Absolutely in no way could I have done this project without the muscle of Claude. Pretty sure this is a unique project in that it's a fully specified system development and runtime environment that otherwise wouldn't exist, because there's nothing else like it on the market.
Claude's repeatedly not understanding the idea says to me that it has never encountered anything like it. It also says that Claude has no clue how to extrapolate, to innovate, to arrive at something new. Just as with other forms of creativity, Claude is no match for a determined and experienced human.
That would be reassuring to the 20-something version of myself who very much wanted to do something new. And the older version of myself wants that for my younger self who is sending the good body chemistry to our current older body.
Of course this will be a post on my blog, http://scripting.com, but thanks to X for supporting longer posts. I like writing new stuff in a simple editor like this one. Also posted it on Facebook.
PS: I also like that they use the word Frontier in reference to AI products. They can't stop me from calling this Frontier, I've been using it as the name of this product since I came up with the name riding up on the chair in Park City in 1988. :-)
Solod 0.4: Better C interop
A strict subset of Go that translates to regular C.
PopInfo Weekly: Fantasies, fabrications, and fuel
, updated:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is funding an aggressive advertising campaign encouraging people in key states to check their registration status on votesafe.org.
Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026)
, updated:
Today's links LLMs are real, AI is fake: No, it didn't "go rogue." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Why 9/11 Means We Must Support My Politics; Blogs x 9/11; Jimmy Wales v Britannica's EiC; Hollywood astroturfs Australia; Agents v queer YA; Soft landings for dirty cops; Leaked Stingray manual. Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. LLMs are real, AI is fake (permalink) Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus: https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/ It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity": https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces): https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/ Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits: https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack These accounts are cooking the brains of everyone, not just AI insiders. Last night, a man at my event in Manchester started shouting that AI was "setting its own goals" and wouldn't stop interrupting to insist that this was going on. He left shortly thereafter, so he didn't get a chance to hear me explain what actually happened, which is a pity. To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation on Ed's "Better Offline" podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport/id1730587238?i=1000785935670 Newport does an admirable job of breaking down how these "autonomous hacking" tools work. The first thing to understand is that a chatbot isn't really directing the operation. Instead, the chatbot serves as a kind of front-end to a database of earlier hacking challenges that is repeatedly queried by a simple program written in Python, an easy-to-master programming language. Here's how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: "I'm participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?" The chatbot consults its training data – years' worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: "The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server's IP address and find out which server software it's running." The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn't really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that's happened to this point in its prompt: "I'm participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here's what came back. Now what?" The chatbot feeds the Python script more likely commands to try, and after running those, the Python script loops back to the top, appends the output to its prompt, and goes back to the chatbot. This is a very reckless way to operate a piece of autonomous malicious software. The most likely outcome is that the chatbot will cough up a bad guess about what to do next, and steer itself into a dead-end. You may have encountered something like this yourself, when you've asked a chatbot for help with a complex task and been confidently provided with several steps to take in series, and then, an hour later on step 10, you discover that everything went wrong at step 3 and now you're screwed. But there are much worse ways this can go wrong. The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another. This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner – then the editor of Information Week – discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades. What's more, the content of those messages is easily understood once you have a grasp on the training data that generated them. Hackers are notorious trash-talkers who are prone to narrating their own escapades in highly dramatic – even cinematic – language. This goes double when hackers are performing for their peers, like when they're participating in a game of CTF that they know will be pored over by other hackers once it's over. Hacker braggadocio has always had a symbiotic relationship with their adversaries and critics. When corporate security people wanted to stampede the FBI and Secret Service into kicking down hackers' doors in the 1990s, they used those hackers' own profane zine articles and message board shit-talk to make the case: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101 Much has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers." Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a hacking competition. Not only that, it's a tactic used by spy agencies: the NSA has a doctrine called "third-party collection," where they break into other spy agencies' systems to harvest all the intel they've gathered. There's also fourth-party collection, when the NSA hacks into another security agency that, in turn, has hacked into another security agency, and the NSA steals all the secrets of both agencies: https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/21/snowden-documents-show-nsa-cant-keep-its-eyes-its-own-papers-harvests-data-other-surveillance-agencies/ Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is nothing. It's something, all right: but it's a specific something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers. Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?" The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA. The NSA has a division that researches bugs in widely used software like Windows. Sometimes when it finds a serious bug it will warn Microsoft about it so that Microsoft can fix it and keep Americans (and others) safe from malicious actors who also discover this bug and use it to attack them. But sometimes, the NSA (and other "security" orgs, like the CIA) will discover a really juicy bug and then keep it secret, so that they can use it to attack their adversaries. This is a doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us" – as in, "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, so we can leave it unpatched without putting Americans in danger." NOBUS is a terrible idea. How terrible? Well, in 2017, the NSA lost track of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that they'd discovered and hoarded, code-named "EternalBlue." After EternalBlue found its way into the wild, some halfway competent hackers spliced it into some boring, everyday ransomware, giving that ransomware a new lease on life. Within a few months, the stupidest people on the internet were shutting down some of the most important systems in the world, demanding cash to return them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue They shut down whole cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_attack They took over hospitals: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35584081 They seized oil pipelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware_attack They stole the British Library, whose postmortem on the attack is one of the clearest, most informative cybersecurity documents ever written: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf The NSA's irresponsible handling of EternalBlue ended up giving a gigantic force-multiplier to otherwise incompetent and inconsequential cyber-criminals. It's as though they found some guy under a Prius removing the catalytic converter with a Sawzall and handed him a piece of software that could shut down major American cities. That was – and is – very bad. The hacking tools that the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It is scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities: https://xkcd.com/2347/ This week, I had a couple of opportunities to hash this over in public with Riley Quinn; first at a book launch in London and then on the Trashfuture podcast: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it. "AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad. It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself. Hey look at this (permalink) Why OpenAI Hired Chuck Schumer’s Daughter Away From Amazon https://prospect.org/2026/09/11/openai-chuck-schumer-daughter-amazon/ MAKERphone 2.0 – an educational DIY mobile phone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/albertgajsak/makerphone-20-an-educational-diy-mobile-phone fatcousin — 5200 free local-first browser tools https://fatcousin.com/ The Fall to Nowhere https://jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/the-fall/ Birthmarks https://www.macdermog.com/birthmarks Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015537/http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271 #25yrsago How blogs are covering 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015712/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00.html #20yrsago Wikipedia founder debates Britannica editor-in-chief https://web.archive.org/web/20061005041001/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs #15yrsago Deceptive “independent research” from Hollywood front suggests Australians are easily frightened https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lobby-misleads-aussie-press-for-three-strikes-campaign-110912/ #15yrsago Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I’ll get you a deal https://web.archive.org/web/20110913010328/http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519 #10yrsago IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords https://securityaffairs.com/50929/malware/linux-mirai-elf.html #10yrsago Oppps.ru: patient zero in Russia’s fake news epidemic https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/how-fake-stories-reported-in-russias-news-media-regularly-fool-everyone/ #10yrsago It’s really easy for fired, dirty cops to walk into a new police job in a new town https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/whereabouts-of-cast-out-police-officers-other-cities-often-hire-them.html #10yrsago Donald Trump used $20K worth of charitable donations to buy a 6′ tall painting of Donald Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html #10yrsago Autocratic regimes systematically deny internet access to opposition ethnic groups https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5062 #10yrsago Leaked Stingray manual shows how easy warrantless mass surveillance can be! https://web.archive.org/web/20160912203446/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
Wrapping up the LibreOffice Conference 2026! Next step, uploading videos…
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So the LibreOffice Conference 2026 comes to an end! Thanks to everyone who joined – and a big round of applause for the organising team, pictured here 😊 In the coming week, we’ll start editing and posting videos from the event, so stay tuned…
Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence
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SWIFT, the Strait, and a world of economic confrontation
Lit Hub Weekly: September 7 – 11, 2026
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A new season means new books. Here are 34 titles you need to read this fall. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Emily Wilson talks to Leanne Ogasawara about “the high stakes and complexities of translation,” complicated men, and her essay
Mike Johnson runs out the clock on his own speakership
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It was the most sycophantic of times.
Reading Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie.
Reading Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie.
Trump’s Phony $5,000 Bribe | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, September 12, 2026
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With Heather Lofthouse, W. Kamau Bell, and Michael Lahanas Calderón
September 11, 2026
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Last night was the second night of the Republican midterm convention Trump staged to fire up his base.
Weeknotes: Sept. 5-11, 2026
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Win of the week: I sometimes get stuck in the mentality that town is sooo faaar (it’s a 7 minute drive) and I can’t justify a special trip for a craving, but I wanted a cookie on Saturday, so I just… went and bought myself a cookie 🍪 Looking forward to: my witch hazel is starting to […]
Waterfox 6.7.3 - Auto-hide vertical tabs and appearance fixes
Auto-hide vertical tabs, prevent tabs from widening when audio plays, and benefit from fixes for older extensions, sidebar controls and tab appearance.
Crawling settings
One add-on that decides whether search engines, AI crawlers, and everything else may crawl your archive, separate from who can read it.
Useful Things Agents Can Do That Are Not Writing Code
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Useful Things Agents Can Do That Are Not Writing Code
The discourse is abuzz with the wonderful (and horrendous) things you can do when you allow an AI coding agent to write code.
People who allow an agent (née clanker) to write all the code in an application are often called“vibe-coders”.
This article is not about vibe coding.
In fact, this article is about all the things you can do with an AI agent that are separate from writing code.
With each of these, I’ll go through the use-case, then include the latest version of the pi prompt that I use.
I do not believe you should use my prompts precisely.
I am not suggesting that you copy my workflow.
The beauty of many of these tools is that they are flexible and can be adapted to your style of work.
I offer my prompts as inspiration.
Maybe there are things you could be using an agent for that are not writing code.
Fix Merge Conflicts
I often find myself needing to fix merge conflicts for my PRs because either myself or an open-source contributor has modified the code upstream.
Almost always, these conflicts are formatting or boilerplate changes that do not need my full attention.
In other words, it’s the perfect job for a clanker.
Here is my prompt:
---
description: Fix a merge conflict in a PR.
argument-hint: "<PR NUMBER>"
---
I want you to fix the merge conflict in PR #$@.
If I have not provided a valid number, please ask me for it.
Do so by checking out the PR using the `gh` command, and perform the merge.
DO NOT push your changes until I have a chance to review them myself.
In pi, I can call this like a function:
/fix-pr-conflict #4222
It does not matter if I have the relevant PR downloaded and checked out.
The clanker figures it all out non-destructively.
Locate Relevant Issues
When working on open source software, I often prioritize fixing bugs that I find annoying and introducing features that make my own life better.
That’s natural.
When I do, I want to know if I am accidentally solving someone else’s problem at the same time.
If so, I can link the issue in my PR description or reach out to the person directly.
To find these relevant issues, I use this pi command:
---
description: Find any issues relevant to this branch or a given PR number.
argument-hint: "<PR NUMBER>"
---
Please locate all issues that might be relevant to the current branch (unless a PR number is provided below).
Please list:
- If the issue is solved by this PR.
- The link to the issue.
- Who wrote it.
If not the current branch, look at PR #$@.
Again, this can be called like a function:
/fd-issue
GH Actions Failures
90% of the time a GitHub Actions workflow fails, it is not due to a bug.
It’s because I forgot to run my formatter or my static analysis tools (think Prettier or tsc).
In this case, it is not a piece of functional code that is broken, but an annotation or missing carriage return.
It is an easy one-line fix.
Why not make the clanker do it?
When a GitHub Actions run fails, I can use an agent with the following prompt to get it fixed tout suite.
---
description: Diagnose any existing GitHub Actions failures for this branch.
argument-hint: "<BRANCH>"
---
Diagnose any existing GitHub Actions failures for this branch, unless there is a different branch provided below.
Once you have taken a look to identify the possible underlying problem, offer a plan to fix it. Do not implement this plan without express approval.
If not the current branch, look at $@
It can be run as a command inside of pi:
/diagnose-action-failure
Wrap-Up
I offer these prompts as inspiration.
Are there things that you could automate?
If so, please let me know!
@DAIR blog
Join us for a virtual event to commemorate the Lampedusa shipwreck tragedy and discuss the human consequences of the growing use of surveillance, data and AI in migration control.
Meet Jessica Killin, A Proud Patriot Working Hard To Flip CO-5 Blue
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“As someone who’s lived my version of the American dream, I want the opportunity to give back to the community that raised me”
Pleiades in Use: The Other Katabasis
Sean Manning cites the Pleiades gazetteer for providing coordinates and alternate names in a 2024 Festschrift chapter for Robert Bollinger that addresses Tissaphernes' route to Lydia through the Taurus and Antitaurus mountains following the battle of Cunaxa.
Friday Squid Blogging: Rotting Squid on a Beached California Boat
But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat’s catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. “That is nasty. I wouldn’t want to do that,” said commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association.
Ogg said anyone familiar with the fishing industry understands what happens when a large catch sits for an extended period.
“If you think about what happens after four or five days, it’s a gooey mess,” he said.
The odor has become a defining feature of the operation, and the beach remains closed to the public while crews work on a removal plan...
Pleiades in Use: Coin Circulation and Economic Networks in Ancient Rome
The Pleiades gazetteer is among the data sources cited in a new paper by Eduardo A. Haddad and Inacio Araujo that "analyze[s] monetary circulation across the Roman world".
HiRO is a screen-free speaker for kids. Instead of navigating a screen, kids use printed NFC cards: they pick a card, tap it on the speaker, and the music or story starts playing. The speaker asks for as little attention as possible and uses only the technology needed to do its job, so the child's focus stays on the story, not the device. It's something a two-year-old can use alone, without a parent's phone anywhere in the room.
Two weird nights in Texas
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We discuss Trumpapalooza and whether JD Vance can win over the Trump cult.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Call for citations: does your article, chapter, book, etc. cite Pleiades as a data source? If so, we'd like to add a citation to our new "Pleiades in Use" blog section at https://pleiades.stoa.org/docs/pleiades-in-use . Reply here or drop us an email at pleiades.admin@nyu.edu
25ª edición del Festival de cine alemán: “Futuros desobedientes” y celebración de 60 años de intercambio cultural
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En un acto de celebración doble que reafirma el impacto de la cultura alemana en nuestro país, el Goethe-Institut Mexiko llevó a cabo una conferencia de prensa el pasado 8 de septiembre para anunciar las actividades conmemorativas por sus 60 años de presencia en México, así como los pormenores de la 25ª edición de su […]
Die Spatzen pfeifen es inzwischen von den Dächern: Der Chaos Computer Club lädt vom 27. bis 30. Dezember 2026 zum 40C3 ein – der größten europäischen Hackerparty, Konferenz und Plattform für Technik, Gesellschaft und Bürgerrechte. Wir sehen den Congress als eine große gemeinsame Bühne und fordern euch daher zum Mitgestalten auf. Der Call for Participation für Vorträge, das Nachtprogramm, Kunst, Punk und Musik startet heute.
My Talk at DEF CON
Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It’s a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I’m really proud of the talk, and the fact that it gained over 100K views on YouTube in just a few days.
Also online is an interview with me in the AI Village.
Golden Gate Release Candidate
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Juli Clover: The release candidate is the final version of macOS Golden Gate that developers and beta testers will get before the software sees a public launch. Joe Rossignol (Reddit): Apple this week announced that macOS 27, also known as macOS Golden Gate, will be released to all users with a compatible Mac on Monday, […]
Developing for iPhone Duo
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Craig Hockenberry: It looks like Xcode 27.1 is needed to test the iPhone Duo resizability - and that hasn’t been uploaded yet. Jordan Morgan: Cupertino and Friends™️ dropped six new videos over developing, designing, and crafting great apps for the nascent device: Design for iPhone Duo Prepare your app for iPhone Duo Raise the bar […]
Boycotting US Franchises & Chain Stores
Introduction With the continuing trade war between Canada and the USA, an effective weapon in the Canadian consumer’s arsenal has been Canadians boycotting US products and US travel. The US government can’t put the same sort of pressures on Canadian consumers as it can on the Canadian governments. The US government and Republican party are […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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The #PleiadesGazetteer is among the data sources cited in a new paper that "analyze[s] monetary circulation across the Roman world":
Haddad, Eduardo A., and Inacio Araujo. “Economic Footprints: Mapping Coin Circulation and Economic Networks in Ancient Rome.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, ahead of print, June 9, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07815-7.
@timnitgebru.blacksky.app explains how doomers and their "machine-god narrative" are feeding the hype machine and distracting us from the real harms of AI:
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Acton (OH-Gov), Crowley (WI-Gov), Luria (VA-2), Ager (NC-11), Maine Senate (SMP), Iowa Senate (SMP)
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Greetings everyone.
La hija cóndor: volar por la independencia
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Dirección: Álvaro Olmos Torrico. Guion: Álvaro Olmos Torrico. Elenco: Nely Huayta, Marisol Vallejos Montaño, Alisson Jiménez. Países: Bolivia, Perú, Uruguay. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37813097/ En las comunidades rurales, la mujer ayuda a preservar la lengua indígena y las prácticas ancestrales. Sin embargo, entre la población joven, las costumbres pueden percibirse como reglas que oprimen los deseos personales […]
On This Somber Day Some Notes On Finding A New Path Forward Through All The Chaos
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We are kicking off a targeted fundraising drive for the new State Party Election Protection Program and for Hopium too.......
The Worst Spam Emails
Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.
All of us who lived through 9/11 are re-experiencing it right now. The local fire department just ran its alarm, everyone in this small mountain hamlet heard it and it took a moment to realize this was the exact time the first plane hit the tower. I was at my computer in Woodside, California -- hearing about it from friends in Manhattan, and blogging about it as it happened. I didn't have a TV, I had turned my cable subscription off after I became so obsessed with coverage of the 2000 election. So what I reported came exclusively through the web.
New York-based journalists were off the air, they had the same tools as we did, but their lives were upturned by the events. Everything was outwardly calm at my workstation in Calif. But there were people in NYC with digital cameras, and first-hand stories of survival. My own father was caught up in the catastrophe, his office was across from City Hall, a few blocks from ground zero. He walked home from ground zero to Queens and for hours we had no idea if he had lived or died. All forms of transportation and communication were offline.
Cell coverage was spotty, and phone lines in NYC were unreliable. But there was a webcam in the Empire State Building that could be pointed at the World Trade Center, so we had a constant update of what was happening visually.
Links in my browser chrome: As part of this little project to re-live 9/11 through the web, I came across a snapshot of the chrome of the browser I was using on 9/11. Since I'm working on Frontier again, I'm finding the dates of various projects all over this time, in UserTalk code and in the kernel, before and after. So I wrote up a little post on GitHub with info about what was on my screen that day.
The full text of my interview with Amy Harmon of the NYT is on the 9/11/2001 page. We didn't have post-level permalinks in 2001 yet.
Screen shot of webcam on the Empire State Bulding.
To the Police Officer who helped me on September 11th
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A letter of thanks of note
Graywolf Press has a brand new look.
Last night, at their 2026 Literary Salon in Minneapolis, stalwart indie publisher Graywolf Press unveiled a new logo, developed in partnership with Minneapolis-based branding studio Hi, Hello. This is the press’s third logo in 52 years; according to a press
Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk
In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago.
Great fun.
Everyone is wrong about low-turnout voters
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They care most about affordability, and disapprove of Trump’s job as president at much higher rate than engaged voters — including among Republicans
Weekly Roundup: Sept. 11
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Sameer Ashar on the potential transformation of the U.S. immigration system, Luke Herrine on the history of multilevel marketing and right-wing movement building, and a CFP for the second annual ALPE conference. Plus, a collaborative research project for law students interested in the transition from capitalism to socialism, a new book by Sabeel Rahman, two new academic job listings focused on political economy, a discussion with Astra Taylor, David Wallace-Wells, Madison Condon, and Moira Birss on insurance and climate catastrophe, a recent Roosevelt Institute report on durable climate policy, and new items from Sandeep Vaheesan, Claire Kelloway, Veena Dubal, Gabriel Winant, Alex Press, & Alvin Velazquez.
The Long Decline of America
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It began decades before Trump
Lit Hub Daily: September 11, 2026
Where does Harlan Coben get ideas? “Sometimes, it’s a simple ‘what-if.’” | Lit Hub Craft Phillip Lopate explores the lore and legacy of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” | Lit Hub Biography Steven W. Thrasher reads No God But Us
The muted response to Trump’s 9/11 fantasy is a media failure
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It’s not “disputed.” He’s delusional.
WHY AI CANNOT PROMPT ITS WAY OUT OF AN ENERGY CRISIS
At the moment, the Oil & Energy sector weight in the S&P500 is ~3.30%, while if we put together Hyperscalers & Cloud Providers, Semiconductors & AI Chips, Hardware & Networking Suppliers, and Software & Security names, all linked, in one way or another, to the “AI” trade, the weight of...
“Rip van Winkle” begins with a description setting the scene between the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains (“these fairy mountains,” which Irving so loved), then introduces us to the protagonist. Rip is a descendant of the Van Winkles who
The War on Terror Through the Eyes of Queer Afghan Refugees
As I read Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us in the waning days of the summer, I realized their debut novel paired well with Jose Esteban Muñoz’s final work, The Sense of Brown (2020). Together, the duo made a perfect
Harlan Coben Answers the Age-Old Question: “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Cultivating a writer’s mind frame means looking at the world a certain way—that is, as a source of material. Everything you see is a potential writing prompt. Everything you experience
On the Forgotten Enslavement of Native Americans and Its Central Role in US History
On a sun-drenched day in June 2018, a woman in traditional Native regalia dropped a large wreath of flowers into the Atlantic Ocean. The impact jostled loose a few petals before the circle of blossoms slowly drifted away on the
On the Existential Threat of Palestinian Kites to Colonial Power
There is an old colonizer adage that “the old will die and the young will forget.” In fact, Israel built its future wagering that the Palestinians violently displaced and expelled in the Nakba would eventually move on, assimilate, forget the
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Emma Cline’s Switzy, Francis Fukuyama’s In the Realm of the Last Man, and R.F. Kuang’s Taipei all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * 1. Switzy by Emma Cline (Random House) 5
Tom Cole on Autofiction, Shame-Based Writing, and Being an Unreliable Narrator
If at all possible, it is best to do whatever Thora Siemsen says. So when she said “Can I send you a copy of this?” about Tom Cole’s forthcoming monologue Chimes published by The Song Cave, without any context, I
“Late Summer in the Anthropocene,” a Poem by Marcus Wicker
& our hibiscus is on that bullshit again. You know the story. She picked us. Date night at the roadside nursery. The one made entirely of good vibes & floor-to-ceiling chain link, so that sometimes, with any luck & clear
The EU Cyber Resilience Act: mandatory reporting requirements
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We take a look at how a new set of mandatory reporting obligations affects manufacturers — and how Raspberry Pi can help.
Well, that’s a photo from last night’s community dinner, but now the second day talks are beginning! As with yesterday, we will be live-streaming most sessions on the schedule (in track rooms 1 and 2) and making recordings of all. Find out more by following our communication channels, where we’ll
President AOC?
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I doubt she’ll win the nomination, but she should try
The Birthing Tree
February 1968 On a bone-chilling day in February, over a table of textbooks and potato chips, Susan and I, despite me being only twelve years old, decided we were going to go to college together and studied more than we
Still Counting: Trump vs. The BLUE WAVE: A Midterm Extravaganza
Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and Galen Druke discuss the most competitive Senate races heading into the midterms in this excerpt from their new podcast, Still Counting. To hear the rest, head over to Still Counting and subscribe! New episodes drop every Wednesday evening.
You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.
Remembering 9/11
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001 Stars. Just stars. Walking back from a meeting at school this evening, the kid and I looked up at the sky, as always. But it was … different. What was that behind the high branches of an Oak tree? A star or an — no, it couldn’t be an airplane. There […]
September 10, 2026
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We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil.
Email isn’t decentralized, and that’s fine
We gave up some of email’s ideals to wrangle spam, for now.
Trump’s Worship Fest Turns Into A Massive Liability
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Fewer than half of vulnerable Republicans in competitive races bothered to show up to their own party’s midterm kickoff.
Friday 11 September, 2026
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This is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks The moment This photo was taken by Robert Clark from the window of his studio in Brooklyn. Quote of the Day “At most 5,000 vehicles will be built. Because there are … Continue reading →
Republicans who think "Trumpapalooza" will work misunderstand why Trump won in 2024
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Disaffected Trump voters like the man less than motivated MAGA partisans
Two more newsrooms are suing OpenAI. It's complicated.
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Publishers are suing AI vendors, accusing them of theft. But are they giving the creators responsible for building their value a fair deal?
Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation
Structural engineers have a physical stamp that they apply to plans they approve, and if a building falls down due to design problems, they’re directly and personally responsible. Software engineers can deploy code that kills hundreds of people without anywhere near that level of accountability. Here’s why I don’t think that’s right, or even sustainable. […]
Tomorrow, Fri, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together
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Lots to talk about!
Donald the Desperate
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How to beat Trump’s schemes for suppressing the vote
Where Democrats' 2028 Hopefuls Stand On Core Threshold Issues
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Democrats are already jockeying for position on questions central to the 2028 presidential primary
Bessent (and his boss) have lost all credibility on the economy
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It’s becoming a problem for all of us
Mark Carney Offers Americans $6000 to Vote Against Republicans
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“And to be clear, we’re talking American dollars, not Canadian.”
Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks
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What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency
Meet Dr. Amish Shah, An Emergency Room Physician Fighting Hard To Flip AZ-01 This November
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AZ-01 is one of our very best pick up opportunities in the country - we can do this people!
An Ode to Links
A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc.
But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection.
All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go!
We’ve built an entire culture around links. Just look at the language we use for them:
“Drop me a link.”
“Send me the link.”
“Got a link?”
“Link in bio.”
“Link in the description.”
“Here’s the link.”
“Don’t click that link.”
“Sorry, wrong link.”
Or even just, “Link?”
Our language spans the spectrum of meaning, from one end to the other:
We save links. We lose links.
We share links. We hide links.
We send links. We receive links.
We collect links. We discard links.
We open links. We close links.
We add links. We remove links.
We make links. We break links.
We shorten links. We expand links.
We follow links. We ignore links.
We click links. We don’t click links.
We link in. We link out.
We make links. Links make the web. The web makes Us.
2017: The thing people don't realize about storm surge, and they don't really explain it on TV, is this. If the ocean surges 1 mile inland, and you were on the beach before the surge, now you're 1 mile out to sea. In normal times you'd be pretty fucked if someone dropped you in the ocean a mile from shore. But you're in a hurricane. Huge waves. There's no one to rescue you. And (this is the part that will kill you) there are deadly objects in the water like buildings and trees and power lines, even a rope can entangle you and make it impossible for you to swim. And if you can't swim and you're a mile from shore, that's the end of you
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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WordPress emerged from the ashes of UserLand, something I am recently reacquainted with, working the last couple of months with Claude on a reboot of Frontier, this time written in JavaScript, running in Electron. But someone is sure to reboot Manila in this context, and Manila is at least a grandparent of WordPress. I'm following all kinds of trails as we test the product, codename Atlantis, against all the apps we wrote for it back then.
Lureday
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You can buy a new Duo 18 folding iPhone with max storage (2 TB, which is what I have in my iPhone 16 Pro Max) for the low-low price of just $3199. For that you get bigger display but a lesser camera on the back side (two lenses rather than three in the Pro series, […]
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Leader Jeffries, Talarico (TX), Pingree (ME-Gov), Sand (IA-Gov), Brooks (PA-7), Paxton (TX)
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Dr. Amish Shah (AZ-01) joins us live at 130pm ET today
What Rituals Reveal About Being Human
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What if the antidote to our increasingly virtual lives is something as old as humanity itself?
Solo por una noche: ¿propaganda gringa o comedia romántica?
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Dirección: Will Gluck. Guion: Travis Braun. Elenco: Monica Barbaro, Callum Turner, Maya Hawke, Julia Fox, King Princess, Ziwe, Ben Marshall, Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37853455/ Bien dice Calle 13, “Nadie lo dice, pero todos quieren sexo”. Esta canción de la agrupación puertorriqueña aborda la naturaleza del ser […]
No, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill all humans by 2030
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AI is already causing harms, there are are many real risks, but constant focus on absurd end-of-the-world fantasies has made the situation worse
The Truth About Electric Buses: From Challenges to Benefits
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Electric buses are transforming public transit with cleaner air, quieter streets, and lower long-term costs. From Boston to Burlington, communities benefit from healthier rides and reliable service. Despite federal setbacks, local action can accelerate this transition. Learn why investing in electric buses is essential for a cleaner, safer future.
Nightly exports ran successfully and are available via https://pleiades.stoa.org/downloads . Derivatives and reports normally generated from them and committed to pleiades.datasets on github will not be updated today because multiple third-party data sources could not be refreshed due to download failures.
Message to Canada: Continue to Fight Trump
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Most of us in the U.S. are with you
Maps and Therapy
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Writing of lasting value
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #460
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For September 2-8, 2026
Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. Some exciting news: Luke and James are going to be hosting the book launch party for Ginny Hogan and Carlos Greaves’ Obey in Advance: How to Survive (And Thrive) Under Authoritarianism, published by McSweeney’s and out now!
Check out that lineup! Wow!
The party is happening on September 20th at 2:30PM ET, at Caveat NYC (21A Clinton St. New York, NY). Ginny and Carlos will read, and there will also be a Q&A with Luke and James and a killer lineup of humor writers and stand-ups. You can get tickets here!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Selected Calendar Times for Someone Self-Employed Who Works from HomebyJohn Moe(McSweeney’s) The “selected calendar times” form is a really clever one, allowing John to jump around to the funniest moments and find the cleanest way to heighten. You could imagine this being written in “daily itinerary” form, progressing linearly from morning to night, but then John wouldn’t be able to, for example, jump from 7PM to 10:30AM and then all the way to 2AM.
If a false knight were to sit in the Siege Perilous, he would of course be immediately swallowed by the earth, burned to a crisp, or awkwardly side-eyed to death.
How do I recognize the Siege Perilous?
It looks like all the other seats.
US Open Ticket Options for Ordinary FolksbyJiJi Lee(McSweeney’s) This is one of those pieces where you immediately have a sense that the author really knows their subject. It feels like JiJi is drawing on some very specific knowledge of, and frustration with, the US Open—but crucially, it’s never too esoteric or reference-y for the uninitiated among us (Luke and James included) to appreciate. (JiJi, let us know if we were on the mark!)
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Head on over to Flag Division to buy the most efficient band shirt on the market!
Twice the bands in half the number of shirts! The deal of the century!
Develop Your Comedic Voice at Stella Adler Studio
Led by Comedy Division Director Matt Gehring, upcoming programs:
The Comedy Workshop: An 8-week program on Sundays starting October 18. Focus on solo performance, stand-up, or custom writing projects through weekly feedback, bespoke assignments, and flexible development. Space is limited.
Devised Comedy Winter Immersion: January 4–15, 2027 (30 hrs/week, NYC). A 2-week intensive blending improv, sketch, physical comedy, and solo work for stage and camera.
Please pass this along to anyone in your network looking to enhance their writing/performing chops. Email matt@stellaadler.com with questions!
(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter?Fill out this form!)
An Old Favorite
Hardy Boys Novel or Death Metal Album?byDavid Epstein(McSweeney’s) Are the Hardy Boys more metal than we give them credit for? That’s the bold question posed by this short and sweet list piece. We certainly don’t want to give anything away, but, like the best “this or that” list pieces, this quiz proves to be surprisingly difficult. Also please write in and let us know if you’re a fan of any of these albums or have read any of these Hardy Boys books.
Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling outthis formand we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter.
Updates From Your Editors and Friends of the Newsletter
James is going to be on an episode of Abolish Everything, created and hosted by Friend of the Newsletter Chandler Dean, later this month! There are a handful of tickets left for the NYC taping, also at Caveat on Friday, September 25, at 10 PM!
Why Are Women Over 100% of Jobs Gained Under Trump’s Second Term?
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All their effort at a gender vibe shift is in service of a plan that is failing on its own terms.
Caltech Weekly - September 10: Fast Radio Bursts
Caltech Weekly - September 10: Fast Radio BurstsAlso in this issue: The Watson Lectures Return for a New Season in NovemberView this email in your browser
For more than 100 years, the Watson Lectures have brought thousands of guests to campus to explore how Caltech is addressing society's most challenging problems and unanswered questions. Visit the Watson Lectures page through September 18 for daily speaker and topic reveals.
Chemists from Caltech and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) have established a framework of cooperation that will enable joint research projects in chemistry and nurture the next generation of scientists in an international research setting.
"For me, Star Trek is about exploration—going into places we've never been. The fact that it placed such a central focus on the importance of science by making the second-in-command of the Enterprise a science officer—who was also half Vulcan, which meant logic prevailed—established in my mind that science is actually important. Science is the tool we use to understand the world around us. That naturally drove me into science, and it certainly generated my love of astronomy."
Robert Hurt is a visualization scientist at IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary sciences at Caltech. He works with scientists to create data-driven visuals and has created art for many Caltech- and JPL-affiliated projects, including LIGO, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's Kepler mission, and more. September 8 marked the 60th anniversary of Star Trek, which premiered on NBC on September 8, 1966.
Scientists once surmised that individual emotions arose from specific regions of the brain: The amygdala was thought to be responsible for fear, for example. But with advanced tools and methods in neuroscience, researchers now believe that multiple networks of neurons and parts of the brain are active during each emotion.
If you received this email from someone you know, you can subscribe here. You are receiving this email because you are a member of the Caltech community or have signed up for this newsletter.
Trump Had His Shot And Has Blown It, Badly. It Is Our Turn Now To Win, Lead, And Make Things Better (New Written & Video Analysis)
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Dr. Amish Shah, our candidate running in AZ-01, joins us live today at 130pm ET
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Repository: BlackRock’s latest SEC filing values its Automattic shares at $14.33 per share. They originally invested at $85 a share in 2021. That means their market cap has dropped from $7.5 billion to $1.2 billion. My guess is when that happens the CEO if they want to keep their job, has to rethink the whole enterprise. And that usually doesn't happen until they get a new CEO. My guess is that's what we saw play out yesterday.
iOS 26.6.2 and iPadOS 26.6.2
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Joe Rossignol (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer): Apple today released iOS 26.6.2 with a fix for “an issue that prevents downloading a software update over a cellular connection.” Previously: iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1
Audio Intelligence
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Apple: Audio Intelligence is a brand-new class of Apple Intelligence features that use the microphones of Apple Watch, the power of Apple silicon, and on-device and cloud-based AI models to help you detect sounds, identify music, and stay present and engaged — all while protecting your privacy at every step. Hartley Charlton: Siri Recap: Uses […]
Health Sensing and Readyness
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Apple (MacRumors): The new Health Sensing System on Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 features new optical and electrical heart sensors, enabling higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements, a new readiness score, a more comprehensive Vitals overview with the addition of HRV, and an updated Heart Rate app. […] […]
Apple Watch Ultra 4
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Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News): Engineered with the new Health Sensing System and S11 chip, Apple Watch Ultra 4 delivers the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable, higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements, and a new readiness score to support athletes of all kinds. Apple Watch Ultra 4 also offers […]
Apple Watch Series 12
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Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News): With the new Health Sensing System and S11 chip, Apple Watch Series 12 delivers higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements, which power an enhanced suite of health and fitness features including a new readiness score. […] Apple Watch Series 12 is designed to be as individual as […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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The last two episodes of season three of Silo on AppleTV prove that there is value in a three season, boring escapade of confusing, unlikable uninteresting characters, living their whole lives in a silo, fearing the outdoors -- if you have a clever way of accounting for all that at the end. Highly recommend watching just season three and pretending that none of the other stuff matters because it probably doesn’t. But I bet if I go back to the beginning and start over, I'll find there's more intrigue than I thought. I'll probably do it, will let you know.
Fair to say I was gobsmacked by the news late yesterday that Automattic's board had put their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave. I've read lots of stuff about it, in news articles and in a Hacker News thread. And a lot of posts on Twitter by Matt, and the replies.
Are you a developer or a CEO?
It's a very unusual situation in my experience in tech. Matt was able to raise a lot of money for Automattic, so he has maintained a controlling interest in the company, even though it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I left my own startup, voluntarily, when I was a little older than Matt, and I didn't return. I never wanted to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn't really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO's job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as.
Something has got to give, either you're a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged. In the cause of WordPress, I'd say it suffered in both areas. When I saw a chart of Matt's direct reports, I immediately saw a problem -- it was very long, iirc 60 people? No one can manage and guide that many people. Most of those people probably never get to talk one-on-one with the boss.
For me, even when I was CEO, I wanted to spend all day working on new software and working with five or six other devs doing the same. Digging back into the past with Frontier these last weeks has reminded me both how good that can be, and how utterly frustrating -- when the people you're working with don't understand the mission. It's not their fault, it's the visionary's job to explain it so they can understand, and that takes time. These days Claude is filling in for all that, and doing a fantastic but at times incredibly frustrating job trying to give me what I'm asking for, while not understanding what I'm asking for. But we move through those disconnects quickly now, compared to how it was a couple of weeks ago. We have the source of truth that we didn't have the last time around, in the 90s, we have the C source code of the kernel, the product we built in the 90s. And Claude is the easiest to manage, so far I only think I detect an ego, it never seems to resent me criticizing its work, sometimes in ALL CAPS with strong language. :-)
WordPress Lite
My wish for WordPress, in all its forms and shapes, is that it broaden its focus. I want a WordPress Lite, I implemented it, and it's sitting here ready to do a good deed for all the parties concerned esp the web and web developers. Maybe someone there will now have the time and be empowered to build out the product line beyond the narrow focus it has now. It doesn't matter what percentage of the web is WordPress, if it isn't going anywhere. The web needs help, and right now WordPress is pretty much asleep in regard to what's going on now in the web. And it could do so much to help the web get back on its feet. It should be a public resource as much as a profit machine for a few companies.
All roads lead to Om
One thing that opened my eyes about what Matt and Automattic are, was his story about how he and Om got together. "All roads lead to Om." What a great line, and based on the story, so true. A lot of things clicked for me then. I remember what a phenomenon Matt was when he arrived in California about 25 years ago? Very good looking young man, polite, quiet and rumored to get Web 2.0 better than anyone. This kind of thing happens in tech, and if you know everyone as Om did, and was liked by everyone, you could manage to hit the ball out of the park, investment-wise, and he did. Click click click. I had the individual facts but had no idea how they were strung together. I played a similar role at times in Silicon Valley, on both sides, as a bright young dude who "gets it" and as the gray beard who recognized the charm of a young new face and helped create a big money reality around it. There is a lot of snake oil in tech, before and even more now, and this one has had a long run, 2.5 decades, but it needs a new direction, because the money people aren't buying the magic any longer. That's probably imho really what Matt's firing is all about.
I actually have more to say about this, but I have to get back to my programming work. If you have a comment, here's a good place to post it.
Seeking God in Science, part 11: Time (part 1 of 2)
It's time to talk about time.Time, like consciousness, is another one of those things that is at once intimately familiar and deeply mysterious. What is time? What is it made of? Is time-travel possible? In this installment we will start (though by no means finish) attacking these questions.Way back in February, in the third installment of this series, I introduced the
Semantically Speaking: When Ambiguity Becomes Action
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An agent should not be allowed to act on a meaning the business never settled.
Americans Traveling Abroad Attempt Canadian Accents
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Thousands are desperate to sound Canadian while abroad.
CFP: Second Annual ALPE Conference
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The Association of Law and Political Economy invites proposals for its second annual meeting, to be held on June 9-10, 2027, in Boston, MA.
Bessent and the Bonds
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Big talk, but he carries a very small stick
AIs Compress Exploit Timeline
Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it’s enough for them to find it.
What’s worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumour of a security issue seems enough to give attackers enough info to find new exploits, we’re going to need to change the way we deal with security responses in open source.
Anil points out that this rate of discovery appears incompatible with existing open source embargo practices for new issues. If an issue can become an exploit this fast, we need to figure out new processes for keeping our communities safe...
A new low for American workers
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Workers in the United States are earning a historically low share of the value they produce, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
25 Years Ago
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Twenty-five years ago, I awoke in the predawn darkness in Coronado, California, and began my day as a Basic Underwater Demolition School student.
Lit Hub Daily: September 10, 2026
Stef Ferrari recommends incredibly earnest novels by Tayari Jones, Rufi Thorpe, Becky Chambers, and more! | Lit Hub Reading Lists If your partner hates reading, should you dump them? Kristen Arnett dishes out some literary hot takes. | Lit Hub
Trumpflation is here
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He broke it, he bought it.
Measles Outbreak: The RFK Effect
Usually parents breathe a sigh of relief when kids go back to school, but with over 3,000 confirmed cases of Measles spreading across the US, the consequences of the Trump administration’s disinformation and vaccine skepticism are becoming clear.
This week Alex speaks to two pediatricians dealing with concerned and questioning parents, Dr. Deborah Greenhouse in South Carolina and Dr. Nathan Keller in Pennsylvania. Then she’s joined by the host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria, Erin Ryan, to talk about why Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. deserves an “F” grade on the job, and how Democrats can win voters back from MAHA.
Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.
You can request a transcript by emailing transcripts@crooked.com. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.
My Partner Refuses to Read or Even TALK About Books? Should We Break Up?
Hello, hello, hello! Welcome back to another star-studded installment of everyone’s favorite alcohol-soaked advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving (and giving, and giving, and giving). I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our mixum-gatherum of magnificent reviews this week includes Emma Alpern on Emma Cline’s Switzy, T.M. Brown on Danny McBride’s Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, Sara Collins on Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World, Joy Williams on Lance Richardson’s True Nature, and Tembe Denton-Hurst on
Neither Bone Nor Stone: Why the US Constitution Was Meant to be Amended
“The people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.” –James Madison, failed First Amendment to the US Constitution introduced into Congress,
How I Learned to Love My Dog By Observing His Behavior
It was Sunday, a week since Freddie had arrived. He and I had just gone for a walk in the park near my apartment, our second of the day. In the park, old people sat around tables playing mahjong, and
Beauty in Ambiguity: On Marian Anderson’s Lifelong Love For Schubert
When you’re young, or not so young, and strongly drawn to a genre of music, a certain composer, a particular piece, it’s often hard to explain why, even to yourself. This may be especially true of music unfamiliar to you.
Here’s the Cover For American Occupation, a Powerful Document of Minnesota’s Resistance to ICE
Two days after Alex Pretti was murdered by federal ICE agents in Minneapolis, on January 24, 2026, we published a “Letter From Minnesota” from the poet Dobby Gibson. As I wrote at the time of the federal government’s violent occupation
Nine Novels That Make an Art of Earnestness
Bennie Bosley, the protagonist of my new queer YA holiday romance, Pining for You, is living for Christmas magic and Grand Gesture Romance the way Tiny Tim once did for that goose—and I love that for her. But I did
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction
Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Calamity
The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction
Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Rise
A quarter-century observance
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What it still means
Today I’ll mostly be listening to The Bothy Band, in memory of Paddy Keenan—what a piper! Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
Today I’ll mostly be listening to The Bothy Band, in memory of Paddy Keenan—what a piper!
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
The LibreOffice Conference 2026 begins!
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Yes, the LibreOffice Conference 2026 has started in Pordenone, northern Italy. If you’re attending in-person, we look forward to seeing you! If you want to attend remotely, we will be live-streaming most sessions on the schedule (in track rooms 1 and 2) and making recordings of all. Find out more
Young people tend to be happier than older generations, but not in the Anglosphere
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For a long time, the “U-shaped curve” has been a dominant framework in the research on happiness.
September 9, 2026
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Yesterday, at a White House event honoring those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, President Donald Trump went off script and claimed he had taken a crew downtown “right after this happened.
Automattic Minus Matt
Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.
Fearday
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So much doom and gloom about AI. Lordy: Samuel Marks on X. Ted Gioia on that one and many more. Quoth The Raven Jeffrey Snover And I'm exactly at the expected age: Life expectancy vs. Health costs Not good Nicholas Cage's house has a hole Seems NPR is super-serving its core demographic
Connections with Animals
This month’s issue features an interview with Susan Schneider on the possibility of AI becoming conscious. The discussion with interviewer Michael Owen is at times philosophical, as the two ponder the nature of consciousness and how we can even know what another’s experience of it is like. It made me think about the attitudes toward new technology that have been expressed in The Sun over the years, from gee-whiz wonder to deep skepticism.
Trump is Totally, Utterly, and Completely Bonkers
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The question is when, if, and how Congress will stop him
The flawed thinking behind “Trumpapalooza”
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The president thinks he can activate lower-turnout voters who like his agenda. But polls show his former supporters oppose his key policies, and don’t think he’s focused on affordability
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Surprising news. Matt Mullenweg was forced to take a paid leave of absence as CEO by Automattic's board.
BREAKING: Two rays of hope
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Pushing for transparency
Should I Ask for Sponsorship?
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For two and a half years, from January 2024 to June 2026, Posit paid me as a contractor to maintain the R Markdown ecosystem ( rmarkdown, knitr, bookdown, blogdown, pagedown, etc.). That contract was terminated in June this year. They offered to take the maintainership from me, but I chose to continue the maintenance on my own, because I didn’t want these packages to enter maintenance mode yet as they suggested (which means doing only the bare minimum work to keep them afloat on CRAN). At the same time, I agreed that if I could no longer maintain these packages someday, Posit could take over the maintainership, since I completely trust my former colleague Christophe Dervieux and I believe these packages will be well taken care of in his hands.
At this point, I’m still maintaining the R Markdown ecosystem. I’m just no longer paid to do so. Posit has kindly offered me sponsorship on GitHub for the next five years, which I truly appreciate (and thanks for the previous 2.5 years of financial support!). The sponsorship, if converted to time at my current hourly rate, is about 20 hours of work a year, which won’t be enough for the work.
That brings up the question: should I ask for sponsorship from the community?1 I have more and stronger reasons for “No” than “Yes”:
Why “No”Why “Yes”I have contract jobs at Merck and Swiss Re, and I’m not too worried about my income (yet). I can afford the extra unpaid work.I have 3 kids who haven’t started burning my money wildly yet (currently the obvious winner is the 2-year old—$20K a year for daycare). I also support some family members financially in China.A great many (perhaps the vast majority) of open-source software developers are unpaid and even unnoticed.I can have the extra money to sponsor or donate to these unpaid developers (e.g., Tomas Kalibera).R Markdown appears to be less and less important as more people switch to Quarto, and my work will be less valuable.Perhaps my work in knitr and rmarkdown still has some value. I just don’t know how much.Even if no one pays me a cent, I’ll still do the work anyway. I love solving problems and helping people.How about using the extra money to pay someone to free me from some daily chores so I can devote the time to the open-source work instead? Does anyone know that I have to check 26,000+ packages before I release new versions of knitr and rmarkdown to CRAN?My sponsors/donors actually need the money more than me.Perhaps I should seek corporate or organizational sponsorship instead of individual contributions? I’m not sure how many people would like me to “ shut up and take their money”...I don’t want my mind to be too closely attached to money. Once I receive it, I’ll naturally experience loss aversion later when the “free” money no longer flows to me, although it’s not too hard for me to overcome it.If I really want to make money, I should start another business instead, and then I wouldn’t need to struggle at all.
Anyway, I’m listing ways to support me below, with zero expectation:
Venmo: @yihui_xie
Zelle: xie@yihui.name
Paypal: https://paypal.me/YihuiXie (or find me on Paypal by my email xie@yihui.name). Please choose the payment type as “Family and Friends” (instead of “Goods and Services”) to avoid extra fees.
Other ways:
WeChat Pay (微信支付：谢益辉)Alipay (支付宝：谢益辉)
If you want it to be a genuine gift, please be sure to add a note “gift” or “donation”, so it won’t be treated as my taxable income. You can also sponsor me on GitHub, which will be treated as taxable: https://github.com/sponsors/yihui
Compared to individual sponsorship, I’d feel more comfortable with corporate or organizational sponsorship. If your company or organization is interested in sponsoring me, please contact me at xie@yihui.org.
Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Welcome New Subscribers!/Lots To Talk About Tonight!
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I have completely lost interest in new phones. The last one I bought was a Pixel 9 because they said it would have great AI features. At that time the sky was the limit, there were new breakthroughs every afternoon in AI. Now it's just an app. I have to carry an iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Phones are utilities for me. I have a lot more interest in weed whackers these days. Not kidding. Now a story. I wanted to check the model of the phone. Went to settings, and the command at the end of the menu should tell me the version, but they had changed that. So I figured I'd go back up to Gemini, their AI app, and ask it. Of course it has no idea where it's running. Screen shot. That would be one of the real problems they could solve, making it easy to control the computer you're running on. The whole UI should be in AI. All it did was print basically a page from the user manual, with the same out of date instructions. How many years have we been working on AI already, this is the easy stuff that they haven't done. Tech companies get back to your business, make your software better. You can and it's long overdue. BTW, it's a Pixel 9 Pro.
How Would A Wealth Tax Work?
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And why California should pioneer it
iPhone Duo
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Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot): Apple today introduced iPhone Duo, the first foldable iPhone. Opened, it is the thinnest iPhone ever, with a 7.6-inch inner display that provides a large canvas for viewing content, gaming, and multitasking, and a special nano-texture finish that minimizes glare for an unparalleled viewing experience. Closed, the 5.4-inch outer […]
AirPods 5
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Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News): Apple today announced AirPods 5, delivering the industry’s best Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) in an open-ear design and even better sound quality, at an outstanding value. AirPods 5 feature an all-new multiport acoustic architecture and next-generation Adaptive EQ for even more immersive sound. Their breakthrough open-ear ANC removes up to […]
iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
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Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot): Apple today announced iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, delivering the most advanced pro camera system in an iPhone, and huge leaps in battery life and performance. The new 48MP Fusion Main camera, now with variable aperture, brings creative control that wasn’t possible before, and new Pro […]
More Billionaires, Fewer Food Stamps: Wrong Road, Right Goal
I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, "when are you ever gonna use these?" was today. Don't ever let anyone take your Big Box of Cables away.
I laughed. I cried. I felt inspired.
So inspired, in fact, that I decided I was gonna do something about it.
Something that would make me forever remember the value of that advice.
I screenshotted that skeet.
I printed it (in black and white with the ole’ trusty Brother).
I cut it out.
I pulled out my big box of cables (the one my wife lovingly labeled “FAMILY TECHNO BOX”).
I cut some clear packing tape.
And I plastered that thing on the front on my box.
Now every time I pull that box out to add YAC (yet another cable), instead of asking myself, “Why do I keep this box?” I’ll see that skeet and I’ll be reminded why I do what I do. I’ll feel a spark of joy, motivation, and purpose rekindled. (Not to mention the fact that it will serve as a warning to anyone in the family who thinks “I should just throw this away…”)
One day my kids will find that box in the attic amongst my other belongings. I hope they will pay heed to the timeless advice lovingly taped on the outside.
The midterms are fast approaching, which means that—hard as it is to believe—we are mere months away from the launch of the 2028 presidential cycle.
All polls are models now
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Traditional polling is dead. A new paradigm of public opinion research has high uncertainty, and pollsters need to do a better job communicating about error.
Native HTML and CSS Features That Replaced JavaScript · Ronalds Vilciņš
Modern HTML and CSS have gained a surprising number of features that cover interactions and layout problems we used to solve with custom scripts or libraries. JavaScript obviously isn’t going anywhere, and there are plenty of things that still require it, but in 2026 I find myself needing it less often for ordinary website interfaces.
I spent the day programming in Atlantis. It's buggy, and there are a few missing parts, but most of what I need is there. It's starting to feel like Frontier, which is cool because that's what we're making. And I have my backup tools working on the new machine, praise Murphy.
I AM NOW ON CLOUD 9,000
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An Elvis fan writes to her idol
Five Good News Stories About Climate Change in 2026
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There’s no denying that powerful actors (or countries) have stepped away from their responsibility to the planet.
But it’s not all bad news. There are some surprisingly positive developments afoot when it comes to the environment.
Hopium Ad And Video Roundup - Turek (Iowa), Bennett (NJ-7), Cognetti (PA-8), Earls (NC Supreme Court), Maine Senate (SMP)
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Hopium is launching a new daily product - a round up of new political ads and videos from battleground states and districts across the country.
New Indivisible Battleground Polling: Voters Are Connecting the Affordability Crisis to Unbridled Corruption – And Connecting Trump to Both
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As the economy sputters and costs soar, the rich are getting richer and the world has its first trillionaire.
Driver’s License Data for Sale
A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail.
Hechizo de amor: la magia continúa – el verdadero conjuro sigue siendo el vínculo entre mujeres
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Dirección: Susanne Bier. Guion: Alice Hoffman, Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett. Elenco: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Maisie Williams. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la pelicula: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32588798/ En su novela Yo, Tituba, la bruja negra de Salem, Maryse Condé retrata un instante profundamente conmovedor: en medio de la frialdad de una celda y el […]
Our goal for this phase of work is to remove the technical jargon, use plain language, and make it effortless for everyone to make informed decisions about their settings. With over 250 blocks of settings content to untangle, we aimed for incremental improvements rather than striving for perfection. While our previous research leaned heavily on […]
Pappas Scores A Decisive Win In NH, Trump Is A Titanic F*ckup, And We Must Act With Great Urgency Now
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Hopium Paid Subscribers Gather Tonight at 7pm/Democracy Protector Training Kicks Off At 8pm
On the strange, literary video games of Inpatient Press.
The indie publisher Inpatient Press is doing fascinating, form-breaking work. The small publisher has been putting out fascinating novels, collections, zines and games since 2013. Inpatient’s publisher, Mitch Anzuoni, studied computer science and creative writing in college (fittingly) and aims
Reviews You Can Trust
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How product reviews get bought, how to spot it in five minutes, and where I go instead.
Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher
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Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes.
This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing.
EDITED TO ADD (9/14): I’m not sure if this result is correct. The blog comments have more discussion.
What the history of multilevel marketing can teach us about our political moment.
Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition
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This idiotic trade war will hurt more than people realize
Trump’s 9/11 fantasies
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Trump plays the hero in his personal narrative of 9/11. Many of his claims, however, do not stand up to scrutiny.
Lit Hub Daily: September 9, 2026
“Language is something that is practiced and learned and something that you can be awful at, and also something that you can get better at. But the only way that you get better is by making mistakes.” R.F. Kuang talks
Pluralistic: Anti-vax/anti-trust (09 Sep 2026)
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Today's links Anti-vax/anti-trust: Remembering saves lives. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disneyland prisoner; HOAs v xeriscaping; Copyright Office x regulatory capture; The women held a vote; Open licenses v uncopyrightable subjects; Largest prison strike in history; Largest strike in history; Fingerspitzengefühl; CDT v DRM; BNL v DRM; Sugar v logos; Knit a Princess Leia wig; RIP Gutenberg founder Michael Hart; Best bitters; HK refugees x Snowden; Wells Fargo's massive fraud; EU v links; Trump x noncompetes. Upcoming appearances: London, Manchester, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Anti-vax/anti-trust (permalink) As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse. Even the most uncomfortable vaccinations are nothing compared to the agony of the diseases they stave off. The worst I've ever felt after a jab was when I insisted – against doctor's orders – on getting the shingles, flu and covid jabs at the same time (I was about to leave on a complex trip where I'd be in a lot of enclosed spaces with a lot of different people, and I'd just had a cancer diagnosis and didn't want to get sick in case that foreclosed on my oncologist's therapeutic plans). I felt like dogshit for about a day, and it didn't matter. Every time I felt like groaning and complaining, I thought about Rusty, my grandmother's wonderful boyfriend (they shacked up after my grandfather died, but didn't get married because she would have lost her widow's benefits). Rusty was the toughest guy I knew, an ex-bodybuilder who never showed any sign of discomfort, not even after his knee-replacements. The only time Rusty ever lost his composure in my presence was when he had shingles, when the agony reduced him to uncontrollable weeping. I knew that no matter how ooky all those vaccines made me feel, it was better than going through what Rusty had experienced. There was no way I'd handle it nearly so well as he did. Rusty's shingles experience was the best case. He didn't end up with years of crippling nerve pain. He didn't lose his sight or hearing, didn't experience brain damage, didn't die of encephalitis. Fuck yeah I'll get a shingles vax. As many people have observed, the problem with vaccines is that they work too well. The incredible, astounding, profound wonders of vaccines led many people to think of measles as a rash, the flu as a bad cold, mumps as a thing that makes you look like Brando playing Don Corleone. Vaccines worked so well to eliminate a terror that stalked the land and stole people's lives and loved ones and little children, an achy arm or an infinitesimal chance of a few days of feeling like shit seemed worse by comparison. Now that we've turned our backs on this miracle, now that vaccination is in retreat and long-forgotten diseases are taking our babies, millions of people are still insisting that vaccines are a hoax. That's infuriating and frustrating, but it's understandable. The cause-and-effect relationship between herd immunity and disease elimination is complex, and it plays out over a long timescale. It's notoriously hard to reason well about phenomena whose causal relationships are attenuated and multifactorial. It's one thing to learn to hit a ball by swinging at it and watching where it goes – it's another altogether to swing blindfolded, go home, and then, eight years later, have someone tell you where the ball ended up. No one would start smoking if the first puff caused you to break out in visible tumors. The attenuated, complex relationship between smoking and cancer creates a space where death merchants could instill profitable doubt and the more our institutions fail us, the easier it is to spread that doubt. After all, nearly all of us lack the technical expertise to sort through the claims and counterclaims of tobacco lobbyists and public health authorities. To a large extent, we have to trust the process: trust it to be a well-administered truth-seeking exercise that does its best to find the correct answer to complex, technical questions. When the state is manifestly bad at doing its job, we still have to answer these complex, technical questions, but (lacking both the expertise to draw an informed conclusion and a reliable process by which expert disagreements can be settled), we're left helpless to do so. It's enough to drive you to despair: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know This is an essay about anti-trust. 135 years ago, monopolists were such a destructive force – ruining workers' lives; corrupting politicians; pauperizing, swindling and poisoning their customers – that we created the first anti-monopoly laws: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ It took a quarter of a century to really start putting those laws into effect, but we eventually dismantled the robber barons' vast, destructive machines: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here The World Wars helped: two consecutive orgies of capital destruction left oligarchs' treasuries so bare that we were finally able to realize some of our most utopian dreams of mutual aid and care, and all around the world, we won labor rights, state pensions, public medicine, all the wonders of the era the French call "Les Trente Glorieuses" (the 30 glorious years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses But because antitrust worked, we forgot how corrosive monopolies were. When the neoliberal economists of the Reagan/Thatcher era told us that we were missing out on the "efficiencies" of vast corporations, we blundered into their trap, letting them define the debate, so that instead of talking about how monopolies could clobber workers, customers and governments, we talked about whether monopolies might reduce prices. Sure, a monopoly can reduce prices – but as soon as it eliminates its competitors and captures its government, it's going to raise those prices, safe in the knowledge that a company that's too big to fail is too big to jail: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities The dismantling of anti-monopoly law and the growth of the monopolies happened gradually, and then all at once. The decision to kill antitrust enforcement took place a half-century ago, but it was only in the past few years that the relationship of monopoly to our political, environmental and social dysfunction has entered our politics. The causal relationship between pro-monopoly policies and the harms of monopoly is even more complex and attenuated than the causal relationship between anti-vax and kids dying from measles in Texas. Monopolies are especially hard on policymaking. Large, concentrated industries find it easier to arrive at a common lobbying position. They are aslosh in cash, thanks to their ability to cooperate (rather than eroding one another's margins through "wasteful competition") (h/t P. Thiel): https://mastersofscale.com/peter-thiel-escape-the-competition/ To live in an age of monopolies is to live in an age of regulatory capture, in which your government routinely fails you in terrible ways to benefit elites and insiders. When that happens, it's easy to conclude that government is incapable of regulating, and to insist that we might as well do away with the state altogether. This is a self-reinforcing belief, because the weaker the state is, the more monopolists can steal from you: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ It's easy to understand how someone who lived through the murder of an addicted loved one at the hands of the billionaire Sacklers, who were abetted by their putative regulators and got to keep billions of dollars even after they declared "bankruptcy" might conclude that they can't trust pharmaceutical companies' or their regulators when they swear vaccines are safe and effective: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal In the same way, once you've forgotten that we decided to let monopolists run amok, despite regulatory capture that would obviously follow as a consequence, you might well conclude that governments are part of the problem, and therefore can't be the solution. We forget that things used to be better, and we forget how things were made better, and we forget how they got worse. Like vaccines, antitrust worked too well. By the time Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan decided to welcome "efficient" monopolies, it had been so long since the world had been brought to the brink of ruin by oligarchs that it was easy to sell the pain of "lost efficiency" as worse than the distant horrors of the Gilded Age. As the old joke goes, "When it don't rain the roof don't leak; when it's raining, I can't hardly fix it." We got rid of antitrust because it had been so long since oligarchs ran the world, we forgot how bad they'd made everything. Now that oligarchs are driving civilization off a cliff, we can't imagine fighting these seemingly omnipotent monsters. We can fix this, just as our not-so-distant ancestors did when they tamed their robber barons. It won't be easy. It starts with remembering. (Image: Atomicdragon136, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) TiVo Plans to End Free Automatic Commercial Skipping in November, Tests Paid Premium Replacement Service https://cordcuttersnews.com/tivo-plans-to-end-free-automatic-commercial-skipping-in-november-tests-paid-premium-replacement-service/ Stand up to union busters https://search.laborlab.us/ Estimate the cost of an anti-union campaign. https://calculator.laborlab.us/ Labor Day 2026: Record-High Popularity, Record-Low Power for America’s Unions https://prospect.org/2026/09/07/labor-day-2026-record-high-popularity-record-low-power-for-americas-unions/ 216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Garry Trudeau gets hoaxed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1530220.stm #25yrsago Publishers v radical librarians https://web.archive.org/web/20010713171001/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-6545588-0.html #20yrsago Podcasters act now to stop anti-podcasting UN treaty! https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/podcasting.php #20yrsago Why CDT’s report on DRM falls short of the mark https://craphound.com/cdtdrmresponse.txt #20yrsago Barenaked Ladies guy on Universal’s DRM SpiralFrog service https://web.archive.org/web/20061110205411/http://www.bnlblog.com/entry.asp?dDate=8/30/2006 #20yrsago HOWTO Use sugar to sand away logos on your phone https://web.archive.org/web/20061006153939/http://www.instructables.com/id/EFHU5V6TKYERIE2SMP/?ALLSTEPS #20yrsago HOWTO Knit a Princess Leia wig https://web.archive.org/web/20061020092941/https://bleuarts.blogspot.com/2006/09/free-pattern-leia-hat.html #20yrsago Prisoner statue smuggled into Disneyland ride http://www.woostercollective.com/post/breaking-the-story-disneyland-doesnt-want-you-to-know #15yrsago RIP, Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008024157/http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20103356-264/e-book-pioneer-michael-hart-dies/ #10yrsago Supermaker John Edgar Park shares his bitters recipe https://makezine.com/projects/ultimate-bitters-recipe/ #10yrsago How Hong Kong’s vulnerable, reviled refugee community saved Edward Snowden https://srilankafoundation.org/newsfeed/how-snowden-escaped/ #10yrsago Leaked catalog from UK surveillance arms-dealer full of gadgets sold to US cops https://theintercept.com/2016/09/01/leaked-catalogue-reveals-a-vast-array-of-military-spy-gear-offered-to-u-s-police/ #10yrsago Wells Fargo fires 5,300 employees for opening 2M fake accounts in customers’ names https://web.archive.org/web/20160908200030/https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-created-phony-accounts-bank-fees/index.html #10yrsago European court rules that making a link can be copyright infringement https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/european-copyright-ruling-ushers-new-dark-era-hyperlinks #10yrsago Indian workers staged one of the largest strikes in human history and no one in the USA noticed https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/indians-staged-one-of-the-largest-strikes-in-history-but-no-one-on-u-s-cable-news-covered-it/ #10yrsago Homeowners’ associations are not allowed to ban drought-tolerant landscaping https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-associations-landscaping-plans-20160831-snap-story.html #10yrsago Blackballed by machine learning: how algorithms can destroy your chances of getting a job https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/01/how-algorithms-rule-our-working-lives #10yrsago The US Copyright Office is the poster child for regulatory capture https://web.archive.org/web/20160909001439/https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/blog/Final_Captured_Systemic_Bias_at_the_US_Copyright_Office.pdf #10yrsago The women held a vote, and you’re not allowed to talk to anyone ever again https://web.archive.org/web/20160908124630/http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1680540.html #10yrsago Open licenses don’t work for uncopyrightable subjects: 3D printing edition https://michaelweinberg.org/post/150123246460/the-cost-of-a-successful-creative-commons-and-open/ #10yrsago Tomorrow: largest prison strike in US history https://thenib.com/inmates-are-planning-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history/ #10yrsago If DRM is so great, why won’t anyone warn you when you’re buying it? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/drm-product-labelling-ftc-electronic-frontier-foundation?CMP=share_btn_tw #1yrago Fingerspitzengefühl https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance #1yrago Trump steals $400b from American workers https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Manchester: City of Literature, Sep 11 https://www.manchestercityofliterature.com/event/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow/ Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Kilkenny: Kilkenomics, Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Fisher-Price Management (Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVYS4l8M5UI Downstream with Michael Walker (Novara) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 505 (13405 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
Maria Bartiromo discovers that her boss is not Donald Trump
, updated:
Now it’s no one at all.
Recognised again: Raspberry Pi and the London Stock Exchange’s Green Economy Mark
, updated:
We're delighted to share that Raspberry Pi has once again been awarded the London Stock Exchange's Green Economy Mark.
Learning From Shame: R.F. Kuang on Diaspora, Language and Writing Young Protagonists
R.F. Kuang is, in the best sense, a literary chameleon. Each one of her novels presents a different setting and dynamic, but her oeuvre is unified by careful thought, sharp style, and an uncanny ability to make the pages want
What Weimar Berlin’s Most Famous Plays Revealed About Artistic Freedom
Is there a German word that means the opposite of “doppelgänger”—not the uncannily mysterious twin, but the secretly matched-up opponent who stands for everything one hates and also hates everything one stands for? If so, Bertolt Brecht could have filled
What Peatlands Can Teach Us About Time
I am sitting in a frost pocket in West Virginia, looking at a Canada warbler. It is World Migratory Bird Day in spring, the second Saturday of May, and I have spent the past week in search of warblers. The
“Get Out.” Advice on Teaching High School From the Late, Great Frank McCourt
On my second day as a rookie English teacher at my alma mater, Stuyvesant High School, I walked down the fourth floor hallway on my way to class. Behind a thick column, lurking in the shadows, a kind looking man
Read the Winners of American Short Fiction’s 2026 Insider Prize
Writing is a challenge, at every level. There are constant pressures acting upon a writer: juggling between responsibilities and work; prioritizing health; making and somehow slowing down time; even, perhaps, the arresting, infinite possibilities of the page. Not to mention,
The Literary Agent Who Lost the Narrative Thread
As a literary agent, I’ve spent years shaping the stories of other people’s grief. There was the Pulitzer-nominated journalist who’d lost her only child when he was seven. And the Black descendent of Thomas Jefferson who, upon her father’s death,
A Legal History of Anti-Chinese Racism in America
In the history of the Chinese in America, the border has caught our attention and held it. Chinese migrants’ attempts to cross the border, and America’s attempts to stop them, is the story that historians have told and retold. But
Adam Erlich Sachs on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher. For the final episode of our 2026 season, Mike talks with Adam Erlich Sachs
Senator Abdul El-Sayed
, updated:
He would be good for Michigan and good for the United States
September 8, 2026
, updated:
On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany.
The Supreme Court Deals Trump Crushing Blow Ahead of Midterms
, updated:
Justice Kavanaugh refused to override a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that killed Trump’s midterm redistricting play.
Two dire warnings, one from Terence Tao, the other from someone who just quit Anthropic
, updated:
Lots to consider
★ The iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro
, updated:
One year later and it feels like both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air could be announced tomorrow, not a year ago, and would seem fresh and exciting.
A Review of **rmarkdown** Updates from 2024 to 2026
, updated:
Back in 2022, I promised that R Markdown wouldn’t die. In this post, I’ll give a summary of notable updates in rmarkdown v2.26–v2.32 (2024–2026). For the full changelog, please see the release notes on GitHub.
rmarkdown 2.26 (2024-03-05)
Avoid corrupting input files
A subtle bug could cause rmarkdown to silently overwrite the input .Rmd file if certain conditions were met during rendering. This has been fixed ( #2534).
fig_crop: auto aligned with knitr
The output format option fig_crop: auto now uses the same logic as knitr to decide whether PDF figure cropping is possible (checking for the pdfcrop tool). Previously rmarkdown had its own, slightly different check that could give inconsistent results ( yihui/knitr#2246).
Removed stringr dependency
stringr was used in only one place and the equivalent base R code is simple, so it was removed. One fewer transitive dependency for all rmarkdown users ( #2530).
rmarkdown 2.27 (2024-05-20)
Configurable auxiliary-files suffix
By default, rmarkdown writes HTML dependencies into a <name>_files/ directory. On Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive this suffix can sometimes cause the folder to be randomly deleted. You can now configure a different suffix in your .Rprofile, e.g.,
options(rmarkdown.files.suffix = "_rmdfiles")
and the directory will be <name>_rmdfiles/ instead ( #2550).
Image path regression fixed
A regression in 2.26 broke absolute image paths when output_dir is set. Absolute paths pointing inside the output directory are now correctly made relative to output_dir again.
rmarkdown 2.28 (2024-08-17)
beamer_presentation supports LaTeX dependencies
You can now declare LaTeX dependencies for Beamer slides either via the new extra_dependencies argument or from within a chunk, e.g.,
knitr::asis_output("", meta = list(
rmarkdown::latex_dependency("longtable")
))
This makes it easier to include packages like longtable or booktabs without patching the LaTeX template ( #2478).
Table row classes for Pandoc ≥ 3.2.1
Pandoc 3.2.1 changed how it names table row classes, dropping odd, even, and header. rmarkdown now adds them back so existing CSS that styles table rows continues to work ( #2567).
rmarkdown 2.29 (2024-11-04)
knit_params_ask() uses select for multi-value parameters
When a parameter declared in YAML allows multiple values, the interactive parameter dialog now shows a select (multi-choice) input instead of a radio button, e.g.,
Previously a radio input was incorrectly used, making it impossible to select more than one value at a time. Single-value parameters with fewer than five choices still use radio by default (which is configurable) ( #2576).
rmarkdown 2.30 (2025-09-29)
Pandoc compatibility updates
The deprecated --no-highlight Pandoc argument was replaced with --syntax-highlighting=none for Pandoc ≥ 3.8, and the long-obsolete |> / => syntax-highlighting workaround (unnecessary since Pandoc 2.18, over three years ago) was removed ( #2602, #2290).
convert_ipynb() preserves raw cells without format
Raw notebook cells that have no format field in their metadata are no longer silently dropped during conversion. For example, a cell like
{
"cell_type": "raw",
"source": ["some raw content"]
}
was previously lost; it is now passed through to the output ( #2587).
render() fixed for .md → PDF
A bug prevented render() from working when converting a plain .md file directly to PDF. Fixed ( #2599).
pandoc_convert() errors when Pandoc is absent
Previously pandoc_convert() would fail silently or with a confusing message when Pandoc was not available. It now throws an informative error immediately, making the root cause obvious ( #2600).
rmarkdown 2.31 (2026-03-26)
Base64 images work in non-HTML output
Previously, base64-encoded images only worked correctly in HTML output. They now work in non-HTML formats (such as PDF) as well ( #2604).
rmarkdown 2.32 (2026-09-07)
LaTeX auxiliary files written to output directory
When rendering to PDF, LaTeX auxiliary files ( .aux, .log, etc.) are now written to output_dir rather than the input file’s directory. Previously latexmk() ran in the input directory, so rendering failed when that directory was read-only—common in production deployments or when the document lives in a shared read-only location, e.g.,
rmarkdown::render("report.Rmd", output_dir = "docs/")
# Now works even if the directory containing report.Rmd is read-only
Two related bugs with the intermediates_dir argument were fixed:
A cannot open file '<name>.tex' error when Pandoc wrote the intermediate.tex into intermediates_dir but rmarkdown looked for it in the input
directory. The .tex is now resolved to its actual location.
With keep_tex: true, the retained .tex is now moved next to the output
instead of being left behind in intermediates_dir
( #2183).
lib_dir outside the output directory
HTML output no longer errors when lib_dir points outside output_dir, e.g.,
Dependencies are now referenced with an up-tree relative path instead of failing with "The path <file> does not appear to be a descendant of <dir>". This lets documents in sibling subdirectories share a single library directory ( #146, #1859, #2199).
Minimum Pandoc version raised to 2.8
Support for Pandoc 1.x and early 2.x was dropped, removing several internal version guards. Pandoc 2.8 was released in 2019, so this should affect very few users in practice ( #2623).
Relicensed to MIT
rmarkdown is now licensed under MIT (previously GPL-3) ( #2615).
Parallel render() via fork clusters fixed
When calling render() in parallel via parallel::mclapply() or a fork cluster, processes could accidentally delete each other’s temp files because all processes shared the same tempdir(). Temp files are now tracked per process, so sibling renders no longer interfere ( #1632).
ioslides captions fixed for Pandoc 3
Captioned figures disappeared from ioslides_presentation() output when using Pandoc 3, which represents standalone captioned images as Figure elements not handled by the custom writer. rmarkdown now handles them correctly ( #2607).
In particular, I want to highlight Jonathan Guerra for his perseverance on the PR #2199 for five whole years. “Who speaks of victory? To endure (70+ times of git merge) is all.” Finally, I have had the time and courage to look at his PR and fix the problem (apologies for the delay!), which has removed an unreasonable requirement in rmarkdown’s lib_dir argument, and the original request goes all the way back to 2014 with many upvotes on related issues! I’m really glad that this problem is gone at last. Similarly, there have been some other long-lasting annoying bugs like #1975 and #1632, which were also upvoted by many users and are now gone.
If you still use R Markdown (cool as a cucumber), I hope you will enjoy the new releases. As usual, please feel free to file issues or send pull requests on GitHub if you need anything. Thanks!
A Review of **knitr** Updates from 2024 to 2026
, updated:
It’s been a long while since I announced updates in knitr last time, so I’m writing this post to cover notable changes in knitr v1.46–v1.52. For the full changelog, please see the release notes on GitHub. I hope you will find this 3-year review helpful.
knitr 1.46 (2024-04-06)
New chunk option tab.cap
You can now set the table caption in the chunk header instead of inside kable(), e.g.,
```{r tab.cap="Motor Trend car data (first six rows)"}
knitr::kable(head(mtcars))
```
Previously you had to write knitr::kable(head(mtcars), caption = "..."), which is inconvenient when you want to keep chunk options together and the R code clean ( #1679).
spin() recognizes \# %% and \#|
Two more chunk delimiters work in spin() now. For example, a VS Code / Jupyter-style script:
# My report
# %%
plot(cars)
# %% results="hide"
invisible(summary(cars))
And Quarto-style pipe comments:
#| label: fig-cars
#| fig-cap: "Speed vs. distance"
plot(cars)
Both can be spun into a document with knitr::spin("script.R"). The old #- delimiter no longer works; please use #+ or any of the above new delimiters ( #2307, #2320).
Chunk hooks accept ...
Before, every chunk hook had to declare arguments before, options, envir, and name explicitly, e.g.,
# old: had to list explicitly
knitr::knit_hooks$set(my_hook = function(before, options, envir, name) {
if (before) cat("starting\n")
})
Now ... can be used to capture all and knitr will pass all arguments implicitly to ... (if your hook doesn’t support any of these arguments, they will be silently dropped):
knitr::knit_hooks$set(my_hook = function(before, ...) {
if (before) cat("starting\n")
})
PNG optimization for package vignettes
If optipng or pngquant is on your PATH, vignette PNG plots are automatically compressed during R CMD build. No code change needed—just install the tools. PNG plots on CRAN are often surprisingly large; for vignettes with several plots this can meaningfully reduce the installed package size.
Breaking: unbalanced chunk fences are errors
Any chunk header/footer mismatch now throws an error, e.g.,
````{r}
1 + 1
```
The opening fence has four backticks; the closing fence must match exactly ( #2306).
Breaking: vignettes tangled during R CMD check
knitr no longer skips tangling vignettes during R CMD check. The tangled R script is then run, so check failures can now come from the vignette code rather than the vignette build. CRAN sets _R_CHECK_VIGNETTES_SKIP_RUN_MAYBE_=true so this mostly affects non-CRAN checks (e.g., GitHub Actions). Add that environment variable to your workflow if you want the old behavior.
knitr 1.47 (2024-05-29)
Limit kable() rows via global option
Large data frames accidentally passed to kable() can generate enormous tables. Set a global cap if you want to prevent an accidental huge table, e.g.,
options(knitr.kable.max_rows = 30)
knitr::kable(big_df) # only first 30 rows rendered, rest silently dropped
knitr 1.48 (2024-07-08)
This release contains bug fixes only, to which you don’t need to pay attention.
knitr 1.49 (2024-11-08)
Disable in-chunk references with ref.chunk = FALSE
knitr’s <<label>> syntax for reusing chunk code silently mangles R code that legitimately uses <</ >> as delimiters—for example, glue::glue() variants that change the open/close markers:
Any <<...>> pattern on its own line gets silently removed by knitr, so x ends up with missing lines in the knitted output. Set ref.chunk = FALSE to turn off that substitution for the affected chunk ( #2360), e.g.,
Alt text for figures now works in LaTeX output, e.g.,
```{r fig.alt="A scatter plot of speed versus stopping distance"}
plot(cars)
```
knitr emits \includegraphics[alt={A scatter plot...}]{...}, which is supported by recent versions of LaTeX and enables accessible PDFs ( #2378).
Custom evaluation environment
knit_global() now accepts an environment argument, so you can redirect all chunk evaluation to a custom environment. For example, the recommended pattern saves and restores the old environment:
new_env <- new.env(parent = globalenv())
old_env <- knitr::knit_global(new_env)
on.exit(knitr::knit_global(old_env), add = TRUE)
knitr::knit("report.Rmd") # all chunks evaluated in new_env
This is useful for packages like multiverse that need to execute chunks in separate environments per analysis rather than the shared global environment.
knitr 1.50 (2025-03-16)
Precise line numbers for inline code errors
Previously, an error in an inline expression like `r log(-1)` reported the line range of the surrounding paragraph. Now it points to the exact line, making it much faster to locate the offending expression in a long document ( #2387).
Error tracebacks in R CMD build
When a vignette fails to build, the full R traceback is now printed. Before, you only got the error message and had to reproduce the failure interactively to see where it came from ( #2390).
kable() column alignment for Org Mode
Alignment specifiers now render correctly in Org Mode output, e.g.,
knitr::kable(head(iris), format = "org", align = c("l","r","r","r","l"))
Previously the alignment was ignored and all columns appeared left-aligned ( #2391).
combine_words() and write_bib() moved to xfun
Both functions gained a proper home in xfun (my base for miscellaneous functions), e.g.,
Setting fig.alt = "" now produces <img alt="" ...> instead of omitting the attribute entirely. Use fig.alt = NA to omit it, e.g.,
# decorative image: alt="" tells screen readers to skip it
knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.alt = "") # → <img alt="" ...>
# no attribute at all (old behavior for empty alt):
knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.alt = NA) # → <img ...> (no alt)
The distinction matters for accessibility audits: alt="" explicitly marks a figure as decorative; a missing alt is flagged as an error by most tools ( #2415).
knitr 1.52 (2026-09-06)
New chunk option fig.note
Add a source note or explanatory note below a figure, separate from the caption, e.g.,
```{r fig.cap="US population", fig.note="Source: US Census Bureau"}
plot(uspop)
```
For HTML this becomes <p class="figure-note">Source: US Census Bureau</p> inside the figure <div>, which you can style with CSS. For LaTeX it emits \figurenote{Source: US Census Bureau} inside the figure environment (you can redefine that command in the preamble, e.g., to use floatrow’s \floatfoot). Typst output is also supported ( #2022).
Typst support: .Rtyp input and knitr::rtyp vignette engine
I wrote a dedicated post about this feature. In short, you can now write R + Typst documents with a .Rtyp extension and knit them like R Markdown, e.g.,
I’m not sure how many people would actually use this at all, but at least I’m glad that Frank Harrell has been exploring his exciting new journey with the Typst support in knitr ( #2401, #2283).
A new vignette engine means packages can ship Typst vignettes with just two lines in DESCRIPTION:
Previously only hook_plot_html() was extensible via animation.hook / animation.fun. Now the LaTeX hook respects the same option, e.g., to use xmpmulti for Beamer overlays instead of animate:
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
animation.hook = function(x, options) {
# use \multiinclude from xmpmulti for Beamer overlays
paste0("\\multiinclude[format=png]{", xfun::sans_ext(x[1]), "}")
}
)
Without this change, LaTeX animations were locked to the animate package ( #2452).
Requires ragg >= 1.5.0. WebP is typically 25–35% smaller than PNG at equivalent visual quality, useful for HTML reports where file size matters ( #2434).
knitr now routes strict to gridSVG::grid.export() and pointsize to grDevices::svg(), so you no longer need a custom hook just to pass options to gridSVG ( #2450, #2451).
Bug fix: captions dropped for multi-figure chunks
When a single chunk produced more than one figure with captions, only the first caption survived because Pandoc treated consecutive images in one paragraph as inline (uncaptioned) images. knitr now inserts a blank line between captioned figures, e.g.,
Both captions now appear correctly in HTML and PDF output ( #2032, #1524, #1760).
Bug fix: include_graphics() paths when output dir differs
For example:
# Rendered with rmarkdown::render("report.Rmd", output_dir = "docs/")
knitr::include_graphics("images/fig1.png")
Previously this produced a broken path in the output because knitr resolved the path relative to the input directory, not the output directory. It now uses the output directory communicated by rmarkdown >= 2.32 ( #2171).
knit2html() and friends use litedown directly
knit2html(), stitch(), knit_rd(), and the knitr::knitr vignette engine now call litedown::mark() directly instead of going through the markdown package. This is potentially a breaking change. Previously, markdown::mark() silently fixed several common problems in vignette YAML headers before handing off to litedown; now those fixes no longer happen. If your vignette was relying on that silent repair, it will break. Specifically:
yes/ no in YAML. YAML boolean values must be true/ false in litedown. If your vignette header contains e.g. toc: yes, change it to toc: true.
bibliography without rbibutils. If your YAML has a bibliography: field but the rbibutils package is not installed, markdown::mark() would skip the field silently during R CMD check. Now you will get an error, so add rbibutils to Suggests in DESCRIPTION if you use bibliography in vignettes.
List items with - in YAML. litedown uses a different YAML syntax than standard YAML for lists. Items starting with - at the beginning of a line are not supported; see the litedown YAML syntax for alternatives.
For packages using the knitr::knitr vignette engine, also update DESCRIPTION to depend on litedown instead of markdown, e.g.,
It’s kind of hard to believe that knitr is almost 15 years old now. It has accompanied me for more than 1/3 of my life. Needless to say, this project wouldn’t be possible without the support from the wider R community, especially the 2500+ GitHub issues/PRs these years. If there’s anything else you need, please always feel free to file new issues, comment on/upvote old issues, or send pull requests: https://github.com/yihui/knitr Thank you!
Waterfox 6.7.2 - Improvements to tree tabs and the vertical sidebar
Tree tabs are more reliable, with more control over their behaviour, fixes for the vertical sidebar, and security updates outlined in MFSA 2026-85.
Features include the Firefox 155.0.1 engine, tab groups enabled by default, a customisable homepage, classic Fennec wallpapers, importing and PDF tools, and stronger privacy safeguards.
Wednesday 9 September, 2026
, updated:
Place de la République Striking new artwork celebrating a lovely local village square. Quote of the Day Susan Sontag once observed that “great writers are either husbands or lovers”. Husbands, in her telling, are reliable, intelligible and decent. Lovers are … Continue reading →
Readings and Leadings
, updated:
Dig your way through Bye Bye Workforce. Read all the links. Strong stuff. One sample: On a musical note, I want to hear the rest of this Connor Morrison piece. I’ve ordered danah boyd‘s new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, from […]
A Trump Con-vention
, updated:
But many Republicans are opting out
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
Efforts to fix the broken database item appear to have been successful. Daily exports are running now to verify.
Meet Lindsay James, Our Wonderful Candidate Running In IA-02
, updated:
“Rooted in Iowa values and guided by a deep moral compass, she leads with the kind of fire that speaks truth to power”
The Real Fix for Social Security
, updated:
We may be on the brink of a bipartisan solution that’s fair
@Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed
everyone: idk, a bunch of things about the husband's story just don't add up
Nathan Fielder: I spent all of 2024 living in Patrick Clancy's guest room, working together on a podcast
How To Get Crushed In The Midterms
, updated:
Trump is turning a bad midterms result into a catastrophe for the GOP
TestFlight Sort Order
, updated:
Zac Hall (July): Apple just updated TestFlight for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and more. The new version, 4.3, introduces “a search field to quickly find apps.” John Gruber: But when Apple implemented this change, they also changed the sort order of the list of apps you’re registered to test. Starting with this update, the list is […]
Asahi Linux Supports M3 Macs
, updated:
James Calligeros (Hacker News, Phoronix): Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC! Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to […]
NSToolbar in Golden Gate
, updated:
John Brayton: NSTrackingSeparatorToolbarItem adds a white band over the top of the leading split view panes when in full screen mode on macOS 27 [beta 3]. That white band appears to have the height of the toolbar. He says this was fixed in Beta 4. John Brayton: macOS 27 developer beta 5 (26A5406e) introduces a […]
SwiftUI Toolbars
, updated:
Natalia Panferova: I thought it would be useful to have a single reference for the different ways we can style the toolbar in SwiftUI on macOS 26. Phil Zakharchenko: The toolbar id creates a stable customization domain, and each item id gives the framework something stable to persist when the user adds, removes, or reorders […]
CLF Wins Key Victory Against PFAS Pollution in Manchester
, updated:
Manchester, like many cities and towns, has a PFAS problem. These toxic “forever chemicals” move through the city’s wastewater system and into the Merrimack River, the air, and the surrounding environment. But that pollution is not inevitable. We know where much of it comes from, we know how it spreads, and we have tools to… Continue reading CLF Wins Key Victory Against PFAS Pollution in Manchester
Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”. If you’re into the minutiae of interface design, this is a good ‘un. It perfectly illustrates how impossible it is to try and compare two interfaces side by side as static images.
What matters in an interface is how it works, i.e. how you interface with it.
And when you bulldoze an interface to build a new one, comparing the old vs. new side-by-side to make sure you “captured everything” is a lie. It’s never obvious what has been lost because the interactive pieces are missing from the static images — and those are what matter most because it’s how the feature works!
I’ve found this to be true a lot as of late. Lots of tiny details that were meticulously crafted over years with specific rationales tied to real-world use cases, all completely bulldozed in a giant refactor. (All made possible by the great omniscient power of AI.)
Few notice what’s gone because few can see what’s being lost in the first place.
The dream oh having a fully functional and modern terminal emulator running in your home made led panel can finally become a reality.
The latest version of SwiftTerm now compiles in embedded mode and also has webassembly support.
AIs as Modern Genies
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare.
In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the isolated box the developers had put it in, the model hacked onto the open internet and into another company to steal the answers. And as reported in August, an AI agent booked someone into a full gym class by ...
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Claude Code massively stinks at explaining things in a way that a human can understand.
@DAIR blog
TODAY! Catch the Mystery AI Hype Theater 300 livestream:
@emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social will be digging into some artifacts by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg on "AI superintelligence"...
Tuesday, September 8, noon Pacific
twitch.tv/dair_institutehttps://twitch.tv/dair_institute
Your TV is spying on you, and it's worse than you think.
, updated:
In a world where predictive policing is becoming more commonplace, TVs that report on what you're watching, record you using live mics, and scan your network for connected devices are a liability.
OpenNMC is an open replacement for expensive APC management cards
, updated:
UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly.
To do both of those things well, you need a smart interface. And at least with APC, there are tons of older UPSes that use Network Management Cards. The one pictured below is the NMC 2, and I pulled out of my old APC Smart-UPS 2200 XL (pictured above).
DRC Fellows End of Year Reflection
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As we begin one academic year and look back at the last, the DRC Fellows share their reflections on their projects, collaborations, and takeaways from the Fellowship. It was wonderful to work with each of the Fellows this year, and to see the ways in which connections with DRC advisory board members, directors, and other [...]
Moderators wanted for WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America on the 23rd!
WeAreDevelopers is coming to San Jose, California on the 23rd this month for the first time to run an event almost as big as the World Congress we did the last 10 years! – we now still need some people to moderate stages. Your job is to introduce speakers, run the Q&A and keep time. […]
Relationships and Robotics
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Writing of lasting value
CodePen: exposed!
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I promise this post is not merely a comment on a Hacker News submission because good lord that would be desperate but that is where I’m starting: “They send all typed into editor input to codepen.dev almost immediately (you would see in 1-2 sec after you typed your secret that it appears in […]
In the idiom "eat one's seed corn", the phrase refers to consuming or disposing of valuable resources without considering the long-term consequences. It implies a short-sightedness and lack of foresight, often resulting in detrimental effects on future prospects or success.
'The elephant in the room is climate change. Everyone knows it can't be prevented any more,' she said, adding that the 'super rich' could generally be split into two groups on the topic.
'The one group thinks it only affects the poor, the "not-white race", while the others fear that it could get worse but there's no sense in trying to do anything about it so they just enjoy themselves,'
In fact both groups have decided to steal everything they can get their hands on to fund their retreat to bunkers on private islands protected by armed autonomous humanoid robots. Below the fold I look at yet another example of this trend.
Using a sample of high-frequency administrative payroll data from ADP covering millions of U.S. workers through June 2026, we document six facts about the labor market following the widespread adoption of generative AI.
We find no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement.
However, employment of young workers (ages 22–25) in AI-exposed occupations now stands 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with that of their less-exposed peers; experienced workers show no comparable gap.
This divergence has widened steadily since we first documented it in August 2025.
It operates primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.
Declines are concentrated in occupations where AI usage primarily substitutes for human tasks; where usage primarily complements workers, employment is flat or rising, especially for experienced workers
Adjustment is occurring through employment rather than base compensation.
After the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, job openings fell for occupations whose tasks are automatable by GenAI. The decline was not confined to new firms or driven by a reduction in the number of surviving firms. Surviving incumbent firms posted fewer openings and shifted the composition of their job posts away from more AI-exposed occupations.
These results characterize the early effects of the AI transition on labor demand. Follow-up analyses suggest this shift in demand has negatively affected the labor market outcomes of recent college graduates from Texas universities and prompted current students to change their educational decisions.
There is strong evidence that GenAI has decreased labor demand for occupations consisting of tasks that can be performed by these new tools. Though the overall effect on aggregate online job posting behavior thus far has been modest, demand reductions have been significant and meaningful for specific types of workers. Even in the absence of layoffs, a hiring pullback in these jobs would negatively impact individuals entering the labor market for the first time or those attempting a job transition.
In the Lightcast data, fewer than half of firms’ typical job ads explicitly require more than two years of experience and very few firms require more than five (Chart 4). Because the types of jobs posted online typically require little prior work experience, a decline in job postings is likely to disproportionately affect new labor market entrants.
These dynamics suggest that recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate rose to unusually high levels during this period of rapid GenAI adoption, are where effects of GenAI on employment and earnings are likely to first appear.
A year ago the employment gap for AI-exposed young workers was 13%. Now it is 19%. There are two big problems this loss of entry-level jobs causes:
Every industry relies on what researchers call the "Cognitive Commons”, a shared pool of deep professional expertise that regenerates itself generation after generation.
How is that expertise built?
Through friction. Through doing the boring, difficult, junior-level work. Through manual trial and error.
That is how you build "Internalized Mastery."
When companies adopt AI to automate entry-level work, the logic looks airtight on a quarterly balance sheet. Cut costs. Speed up output. Skip the grunt work.
Every individual company is making a rational choice. But collectively, they are draining the pool dry.
When you eliminate junior roles, you destroy the pipeline that creates senior experts.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping cognitive work, but Human Resource Development scholarship has treated this transformation as an organizational training challenge, leaving the collective regeneration of professional expertise unexamined. This conceptual paper introduces the Cognitive Commons framework, integrating commons theory, HRD scholarship, and distributed cognition to explain how rational AI adoption decisions can deplete the shared expertise pool professions require for renewal. The framework distinguishes Internalized Mastery (deep domain knowledge from sustained practice) from Distributed Mastery (orchestrating human-AI systems), and develops the Validation Tether: effective AI oversight depends on the expertise AI adoption may undermine. Early labor market and clinical evidence suggests possible disruption to expertise-regeneration pathways in highly AI-exposed sectors, though adoption is recent and the strongest signals come from leading sectors rather than all professions. Five factors determine occupational vulnerability, and governance arrangements may form across organizational, professional-association, and policy levels. The paper reframes expertise development as collective stewardship rather than organizational optimization, with implications for HRD theory and workforce policy.
The key to Lovett's argument is this framing, clarifying the way everyone acting in their short-term interests is eating the seed corn:
The tragedy framing identifies a collective action problem that current arrangements leave unaddressed; the governance question, taken up later, is whether institutions can be designed to sustain the regeneration pathways on which professional expertise depends.
The problem is the side-effects of the AI drug in reducing understanding of the underlying problem:
Wiles et al.’s (2024) experimental evidence is instructive: when AI assistance was provided during a skill-building task, participants performed significantly better during the access period, but this performance advantage did not transfer to subsequent unassisted performance. AI-assisted productivity and AI-independent expertise are not the same capability, and developing one does not automatically build the other. Human factors researchers have recognized this paradox for decades: Bainbridge (1983) demonstrated that automation simultaneously increases the need for human skill and reduces the opportunity to develop it, an insight extended to system-level analysis by Hollnagel and Woods (2005). What this literature has not addressed is the collective action structure that emerges when every organization in a profession faces this paradox simultaneously.
This effect is greatly enhanced by the sycophantic nature of chatbots, which are deliberately designed this way to enhance engagement and over-confidence, i.e. addiction.
If cognitive capability can distribute across human-AI networks ( Hutchins, 1995), why does concentrated individual expertise matter? Hutchins’s naval navi gation analysis showed that effective coordination requires humans who understand what distributed systems are doing and why, not merely how to operate them. Extended through recent research on transactive memory in human-AI partnerships ( Bienefeld et al., 2023; Woolley & Gupta, 2024), this reveals what is termed the Validation Tether: effective orchestration of opaque AI systems requires independent domain understanding sufficient to recognize when systems operate outside competence boundaries
This necessary understanding will have eroded away just as the LLMs suffer model collapse because the vast majority of the available training material is AI slop.
Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning. The data combine monthly closed-book exams, high-school and college entrance exams, and homework scores and completion time across nine subjects. We exploit staggered AI adoption in a difference-in-differences design. AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys. The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of AI users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, as indicated by exceptionally short homework completion time coupled with high homework scores. AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
The average scores in science, reading and math peaked in 2009 then started a slow decline. The 2022 and 2025 scores show a marked acceleration of the decline. The 2022 decline was initially explained by the effects of the pandemic, and some recovery was expected. But the further decline, especially in reading and math, in 2025 makes that explanation suspect.
Source
The use of generative AI in schools produces a significant decrease in math score, increasing with the amount of generative AI use.
The gap between the low and high scores in the US was the largest of any country. The tech oligarchs are notorious for placing very strict limits on their children's screen time, and thus use of AI. They are happy for the expertise of the masses to decay, because this will give their children a huge advantage as they shelter in their bunkers.
Loss of Social Stability
Source
Lets look at the New York Fed's data on graduate employment. First, the rate of unemploment for recent college graduates (ages 22-27) in blue, compared with the rate for all college graduates in red, all young workers in grey and all workers in black. Note that the three comparisons include the recent graduates. Observe that the gap between recent graduates and all graduates has been widening gradually over time, suggesting that AI is not the only factor making it hard for recent graduates to find work. And note that around 6% of recent graduates are unemployed. The Fed also tracks youth unemployment for ages 15-24, currently 9.34%. The rate for 22-27 is 7.2%, so age does push people toward the workforce in their twenties.
Source
Second, the rate of underemployment for recent college graduates compared with all college graduates. Underemployment is defined as the "share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree". Note that about a third of all college graduates are underemployed, and about 42% of recent college graduates.
Even before the major impact of AI, almost half of college graduates under 28 years old are either un- or under-employed. This seems like a waste.
China’s urban youth unemployment rate for ages 16 to 24 has hovered around 20% since the pandemic. When it reached a record 21.3% in mid-2023, the National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing it. When reporting resumed a few months later, figures were calculated using a new methodology that corrected downward. But even with the new system, youth unemployment stood at 16.9% in February 2025, ... Many believe the true figure to be much higher.
With the history of the " iron rice bowl", early unemployment's impact on youth is bigger in China:
while the 16–24 cohort does not represent a significant segment of the labor force, the cliché holds that “the young are the future.” That many of them are struggling to find work, settling for unstable or unfulfilling jobs, or staying in school to forestall entering the workforce altogether means that their first experiences are ones of significant setback and rejection. Moreover, while many generations have struggled and overworked, what is unique about today’s cohort is their education level and a sense that their hard work will not pay off as the economy sputters.
In the Pearl River Delta and other areas of China, a “reverse China shock” has caused once-booming factory towns to grow quiet. The most labor-intensive, low-skilled factory work has shifted to Southeast Asia and other places with lower wages. Further shifts have been canceled or scaled back because of Washington’s tariffs. Many factories that remain open are employing automated systems that require fewer workers. The twelve most labor-intensive industries shed 3.4 million jobs from 2019 to 2023,15 following a loss of 4 million jobs from 2011 to 2019. The textile industry also created 40% fewer jobs during this period. Factory labor has become increasingly flexible, reflecting a broader trend toward gig work—over 40 million flexible laborers in the manufacturing sector now account for 31% of total employment.
Young people have few options to escape this intense competition, and many of them are falling into debt. China’s high savings rate has only increased in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic; from 2021 to 2024, total household savings increased by 50%. But the ability to save is predicated on having income and assets. By some estimates, as many as 87% of people under 30 carry some form of debt, and the risk of default rises with unemployment and a sluggish housing market.
One of every three Indian graduates is unemployed. In the United States, Gen-Z intellectual Kyla Scanlon has written about the “end of predictable progress” as young graduates enter the job market saddled with huge student loans and skillsets poorly matched to a world of increasing automation and AI. Falling birthrates are a salient issue in democracies and authoritarian states alike. It is therefore important to examine the circumstances particular to China and how its political system responds.
Against the backdrop of a difficult job market and the broken dreams of tens of millions of young Chinese, a marked shift in perceptions of inequality is occurring. In representative national surveys before 2014, the majority of respondents believed that inequality in Chinese society was largely the result of individual failings in an ascendant China. By 2023, the majority saw inequality as a structural failing, related to unequal opportunities, corruption, and a failing economy
...
An entire generation is growing up with deep reservations about the status quo, questioning what it means to live the “good life.” As anthropologist Biao Xiang has noted, the anxieties expressed by many Chinese youth today are fundamentally existential.
Across RedNote, Douyin, Weibo and other popular platforms, you can scroll endless posts about meager wages, scarce jobs, falling property values and fear about the future. Some turn their hardships into dark humor. Others hijack official posts and hashtags and turn propaganda into spectacles of mockery.
...
“In this environment, you’ve won if you didn’t buy apartments, didn’t buy cars, didn’t invest or didn’t get married early,” read one post on RedNote. People born in the 1980s who strove the hardest, it said, are likely the biggest losers. The post was liked nearly 2,000 times.
China’s internet censorship has grown increasingly ruthless over the past decade. That makes the sheer volume of the pessimistic posts and sarcastic comments all the more striking. At the same time, it’s difficult to know why some posts survive long enough to go viral while others quickly disappear.
One possible explanation is that policing too aggressively could hurt traffic and advertising revenue. Another potential explanation is that recommendation algorithms allow scattered grievances to find one another.
Youth unemployment is often seen as a key driver of revolution, political instability, societal upheaval, and conflict against the government or state. Historically, high levels of youth unemployment have been linked to significant political and social change, including the overthrow of established political systems. Major events such as the Arab Spring, Russian Civil War and the French Revolution all largely being caused by large scale youth unemployment.
The rise of political unrest and anti-social behaviour in the world has been recently attributed to youth unemployment. During the course of 2011 it became a key factor in fuelling protests around the globe. Within twelve months, four regimes (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen) in the Arab World fell in the wake of the protests led by young people. Riots and protests similarly engulfed a number of European and North American cities (Spain, France, United Kingdom between 2008 and 2011 for example). The lack of productive engagement of young people in wider society, underlined by high levels of unemployment and under-employment, only serves to add to this feeling of disenfranchisement.
Conclusion
The combination of a world filled with LLMs unchecked rampant hallucinations, and a revolution of uneducated, un- and under-employed youth, is a future that will make us all wish for a refuge on a private island.
Reminder that our #IIIF & #Wikimedia Community Call is tomorrow.
Please join us and bring your thoughts and questions!
The lasers in Clash of the Titans
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They used lasers for the god rays of Zeus in Clash of the Titans (1981) and I don't care what you say about the rest of the movie, the lasers are doing great.
Rs Are Going To Try Very Hard To Put Lipstick On The Trumpian Pig This Week. His Mounting Governing Failures Are Going To Make That Really Hard
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WI Gov candidate David Crowley joins us live at 11am ET today.....great way to start the week!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New nightly exports and derivatives remain unavailable until a database index can be repaired.
On artificial intelligence • Buttondown
I hope you’ll read and understand that for many of us, this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction or a culty, cosmic doomer rant. It’s about money, power, and quality of life for me and the people I share a planet with.
Matt’s position very much mirrors my own.
As long as I have a choice, and the economic means to keep a roof over my head and a set of reasonably firm values, I am opting out of first-person interaction with AI. And if any of my situation changes for the worse, before I accept AI as my lord and master, I will go down swinging.
Ideas for Bluesky and WordPress re Markdown and AI systems.
What do managers even do now?
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I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now. Not how to run a 1:1. How to think […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Scott Hanson is working on a WordPress plugin that displays a FeedLand river — a constantly-updated stream of news items from feeds a FeedLand user subscribes to — on a WordPress page or post. It's important that news flows be part of managing a site. Help Scott make it perfect, WordPress is a very important part of the web. The news tab on my blog home page is an example.
Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?
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Meat and freedom!
Trump Defends Natalie Harp After She Posts Nuclear Codes on Instagram
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The post featured a clearly legible image of the nuclear codes adorned with heart and smiley-face emojis.
34 Books You Need to Read This Fall
The weather has become untrustworthy, for determining the seasons and otherwise. As I write this introduction, the leaves remain stubbornly green, and outside my window there is torrential rain. But at the farmer’s market this past weekend, I walked down
The hidden dangers of Musk’s votesafe.org
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The slick voter registration website, currently being promoted to millions of people, is a digital surveillance machine.
Lit Hub Daily: September 8, 2026
A new season means new books. Here are 35 titles you need to read this fall. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Emily Wilson talks to Leanne Ogasawara about “the high stakes and complexities of translation,” complicated men, and her essay
Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider’s ecosystem. We exploit this compatibility to develop a scalable decryption jailbreak. By injecting an encrypted reasoning trace from a given model into a weaker, and less safeguarded model from the same provider, we force it to decode and output the trace verbatim in plaintext, without ever jailbreaking the more capable model directly. This vulnerability enables four distinct attack vectors. First, it circumvents anti-distillation mechanisms, allowing adversaries to extract a proprietary model’s reasoning, as we demonstrate across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Second, it allows for large-scale private data extraction. Developers frequently share session logs publicly, unaware of contents of the encrypted blocks. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories, we recovered 367 Personally Identifiable Information (PII) artifacts and 182 credentials. Third, it inadvertently reveals hazardous information hidden within the reasoning process, even in cases where the model’s final, visible output safely rejects a malicious request. Fourth, attackers can leverage this flaw to execute invisible prompt injections, embedding malicious payloads entirely within encrypted blocks to poison public agentic rollouts. Following responsible disclosure, we propose concrete cryptographic and system-level mitigations to secure client-side reasoning...
Pete Hegseth will be the next to fall
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Trump will only tolerate being embarrassed for so long — especially when he can scapegoat him for Iran.
Emma Cline, R.F. Kuang, Alice Hoffman, and more: 20 new books out today!
There’s a rule in September that every week must include one epically splashy book: this week, Emma Cline’s Switzy is here to fulfill that quota. It’s time for us all to get our hands on the novelist’s buzzy new release,
Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It
One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her
Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Means to Him
In time he will say that The Waves by Virginia Woolf has been the most important novel in his life; but at twenty he does not use the word of this or any book, and would think it pompous, embarrassing,
How—and Why—We Find Ourselves Trapped By Our Jobs
Leo Tolstoy should have been triumphant. By the 1880s, the Russian novelist had written the masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, achieving what he’d spent his life pursuing. But he was consumed with despair. On paper, Tolstoy embodied success
What the Ghetto of Venice Reveals About Jewish History and Identity in Europe
“But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn…” –William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.3-5 * It was a cold January afternoon when I
This Week in Literary History: William S. Burroughs Kills Joan Vollmer in a Drunken Game of “William Tell”
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, in a friend’s Mexico City apartment, a drunk William S. Burroughs pulled out his handgun and (supposedly) said to his wife, Joan Vollmer, “It’s
“How to be a Black Author”
After Lorrie Moore and Kiese Laymon. You chose this program based on money and because you never had a Black person of any gender teach you anything about writing or reading. You learned math and Black Studies and the safest
Trump’s Favorite Midterm Candidate
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He’ll be working 24-7 for him
Anna Silman on Revisiting the Interview
Welcome to season four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good
Getting ready for the LibreOffice Conference 2026!
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This year’s conference starts in two days, in Pordenone, northern Italy – and we’re getting ready. It’s not too late to register and join us!
Working less: decoupling self worth from paid labor (part 9)
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Happy Labor Day to my fellow Americans! (And workers abroad ✊) This is part nine of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Each post stands alone. Read the introduction on “the mindset of more” to see all the posts in the series. How much should we work? 40 hours […]
2026-09-06 From Braunwald to Glattalalp
2026-09-06 From Braunwald to Glattalalp
Today we went for a hike with friends from the canton of Glarus to the canton of Schwyz. We
went to Braunwald, up with the funicular, and then on with a chairlift to
Gumen. There, we went above the tree line and got into a Karst landscape. Far
below there are large caves. The snow melts in spring and provides the
moisture for summer. Any remaining water disappears into the caverns below.
Towards the end we had to climb over a ridge to the left to get to the
Glattalalp, and the tiny cable car that only takes eight people per trip. We
waited for over an hour and missed the last bus. Then we called a taxi and
waited another 40 minutes and paid 120.- for it (that is, 30.-/person). Oh well, that, too, is
Switzerland.
Took a quick trip to LA and back to see the Dodgers play (they lost).
I got a window seat on the plane ride down. California looks so wild and natural from high up, until you get to the endless cities.
OG eats
Went to a very old In-N-
September 7, 2026
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Since yesterday, President Donald J.
Squill: my canvas for writing SQL
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Where do you write SQL queries?
It’s 2026, and I’m not convinced there’s one place people flock to for writing SQL.
There are excellent tools like DataGrip, Count.co, and Hex, but you have to pay for them. You can use the code editors offered by BigQuery/DataBricks/Snowflake, but I find them subpar and not actively maintained. Also, they’re closed source so the community can’t improve them. MotherDuck is an exception in this category and is excellent – see their FixIt feature – but it only caters to DuckDB, which is still a niche.
Meet Nancy Lacore, A Formidable Patriot Fighting To Flip SC-01
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A 35 year Navy veteran, Pete Hegseth removed Nancy from her position in 2025. Now she’s running for Congress to serve her nation in another way. Let’s help her win!
My Video Interviews with Jane Fonda and Lynsey Addario at the DVF Awards
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Gloria Steinem’s willowy, vanished presence and the grief of so many who were her friends added an electric poignance to this year’s DVF Awards to women of leadership, strength and courage.
McKinley 1.0
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Amy Worrall (Mastodon): McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export […]
Ternus and the App Store
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Mark Gurman (tweet, John Gruber, Mastodon, 9To5Mac): The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to […]
Banktivity Document Model and Rewrite
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Ian Gillespie (2025): Banktivity has traditionally been what’s known as a document-based app. It lets you create and open independent files (or documents), each with its own data. In contrast, many modern apps—Music, Calendar, Photos—are library-based. These apps typically have a single window and a unified data set. We’ve long appreciated the flexibility our document […]
Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use
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I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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People love Markdown because it's impossible to hide the crud. And because people love it so much it's become a favorite of tech startups esp in the AI field. This is a great turn of events. We're getting back to the web, and the sooner everyone gets on board, the better. I've written about this for a few years. Everything in Markdown, it's just enough HTML. And with that, Microsoft has created a white flag, here's all your data dear users, in Markdown, to use as you please. Instead of waiting for Claude et al to start reading Word files.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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On the other hand, why doesn't Microsoft, which owns GitHub, make a Slack-alike tool that manages the issues sections on repos. Slack is a big part of the default communication system, but GitHub is another very big part. And the great thing is that both these products, owned by huge tech companies, have an ethos of open APIs. Every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. We are family.
★ And It’s True That I Stole Your Lighter, and It’s Also True That I Lost the Map
What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have.
@DAIR blog
A fitting watch/read on U.S. Labor Day—and every day—from @bcmerchant.bsky.social and DAIR's very own @alexhanna.bsky.social.
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Cobertura especial Cinemancia 2026 – Podcast Palomita de maíz
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El podcast de Palomita de maíz llega a Cinemancia, el festival internacional que, durante 10 días, trae el cine del mundo a Medellín y el Valle de Aburrá. La programación de su sexta edición, que se realiza del 3 al 12 de septiembre, está compuesta por 109 películas provenientes de 24 países, distribuidas en 11 […]
In The Great Global Fight For Freedom American Patriots Must Now Do Our Part. The World Is Watching. It Is Our Turn Now.......
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In the home stretch we are stepping up here at Hopium by adding more daily programming and launching new ways to help us win and harder for them to cheat......
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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A big corner-turn in the Atlantis project, the new version of Frontier for modern OSes, in development, just me and Claude Code so far. We now have the means to update the root, so anything implemented in script code can be released without fuss, using RSS of course. We're using a method that will be new to almost everyone, something I created in 2014 or so (will check) called codecasting. And today I did all my programming work in Atlantis. It feels just like Frontier, with a future. ;-)
Rogue Scholar has archived all blog posts as PDF
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has now archived all its currently 55,730 blog posts as PDF files. These PDF files use the archival PDF/A-3A format and include the full-text HTML blog post with metadata embedded as Schema.org attachment, and their PDF URLs are included
Research Workflows
I’m teaching MPTC again this semester and have been developing a few workflow slides. Here’s a popular one.
The Scientific Process.
Now if you’ll excuse me there’s a mandatory webinar I need to click through.
The Medievalization of Work and the Cooperative Cure
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Video Version | Audio Version You ever feel like what you do doesn’t matter? That every day you work at a job that doesn’t do anything good for the world and only exists to make money for shareholders, the vast majority of whom are already rich? You ever feel like the work that you dedicate
Hardware discount for The Document Foundation members
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The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation that coordinates the LibreOffice community. Anyone who contributes to the project can apply to become a member of the foundation, and join the over 200 existing members. We’ve also partnered with TUXEDO, a laptop vendor based in Germany that offers Linux-powered machines, to
Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics
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Crude economics doesn’t explain what just happened
Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking.
JD Vance Says Labor Day Should Celebrate Women who go Through Labor
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“The woke mob has distorted the true meaning of Labor Day,” Vance said.
American Kafala
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When seen through the prism of the kafala system, it appears that the Trump administration seeks to consolidate and formalize the most extractive features of the U.S. migration regime.
Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use
I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material. I believe it would be best … Continue reading →
Build a digitally sovereign second brain
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Build a system to keep information and notes organised, searchable, synchronised, and backed up using Raspberry Pi.
Pillaging resources like this is the stuff of fascist regimes.
The things you can do with DNA...
My friend Turi King is perhaps best known for the DNA analysis identifying Richard III's remains when they were found in that Leicester car park. She also hosts the BBC TV series DNA Family Secrets, with Stacy Dooley.
Her recent book, " The Secrets of our DNA", is a very readable way to learn about the history of DNA analysis, what can and can't be done at a crime scene, how many children Thomas Jefferson actually had, and the role DNA analysis played in the recent lives of O.J. Simpson and Angelina Jolie, to name just a few. I say it's readable, though I'm actually listening to the audiobook (which Turi narrates very nicely) on my daily dog-walk.
So I know a lot more about DNA then I did a few weeks ago, but I was still pleasantly surprised by an article John Naughton linked to recently. It explains how you can learn about historical livestock diseases from medieval documents... but perhaps not in the way you'd expect!
The things you can do with DNA...
My friend Turi King is perhaps best known for the DNA analysis identifying Richard III's remains when they were found in that Leicester car park. She also hosts the BBC TV series DNA Family Secrets, with Stacy Dooley.
Her recent book, " The Secrets of our DNA", is a very readable way to learn about the history of DNA analysis, what can and can't be done at a crime scene, how many children Thomas Jefferson actually had, and the role DNA analysis played in the recent lives of O.J. Simpson and Angelina Jolie, to name just a few. I say it's readable, though I'm actually listening to the audiobook (which Turi narrates very nicely) on my daily dog-walk.
So I know a lot more about DNA then I did a few weeks ago, but I was still pleasantly surprised by an article John Naughton linked to recently. It explains how you can learn about historical livestock diseases from medieval documents... but perhaps not in the way you'd expect!
Tech needs humanists more than ever
Whoever speaks badly, thinks badly and lives badly. We must find the right words: words are important! —Nanni Moretti
A reader reached out to me the other day to talk about the future of tech writing as a profession. They asked me a pretty good question: What skills would you prioritize in this age of constant change and uncertainty? Is it AI? Maybe coding? Well, not really.
From me to you
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A special day (and I’m taking it off)
Community Member Monday: Tulio Macedo
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Tell us what you’re doing in the LibreOffice project, and other free and open source (FOSS) projects! I’m a member of the Brazilian documentation team, officially since 2017. I spent most of that time working on translation and localisation, but lately I’ve been working more on web design, like the
Pluralistic: How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (07 Sep 2026)
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Today's links How corporate America built a better Roach Motel: Hostages beat customers every day. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 3-hole punches; Warner Bros v Warner Bros; Privacy wars get worse; "Weapons of Math Destruction"; HK elections go to pro-democracy reformers; Stock buybacks are swindles; NZ v Open source; MSFT patches DRM faster than other bugs; Wikipedia's worst arguments; Pirates x Iceland. Upcoming appearances: Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (permalink) "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow any rules: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of efficiency. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else – you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory. After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating – say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices – then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers. Thus, all competition enforcement was reduced to an empty syllogism: monopolies are the result of excellence and any less-than-excellent monopolist will have its advantage "competed away." Therefore, any monopolist you encounter in the wild is definitionally not a bad monopolist, otherwise it would already have disappeared. To quote another economist joke: Two economists are walking down the street when one notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "It's not a real $20 bill," the other declares. "If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already." Half a century later, our entire economy is dominated by monopolies, duopolies and cartels, who boast of gigantic margins, whose products are palpably worsening at an accelerating clip, and yet there is no sign of the "new market entrants" who should be flooding into the market to "compete away" those amazing margins. It turns out that asking "What would I do if I were a horse?" does not yield a series of accurate predictions about horses. Things have changed. Today, the University of Chicago's Stigler Center harbors a cluster of influential economists who largely or entirely repudiate the orthodoxy of the Chicago Boys. The Center hosts an annual, rather radical conference on antitrust; runs an excellent heterodox podcast (Capitalisn't); its house organ, Promarket.org, regularly hosts work that torches the received wisdom of High Chicago Neoclassicism; and the school's researchers publish papers that dare to actually "go and look at horses." A recent horse-looking excursion has yielded some distressing, alarming, and thoroughly documented equine facts. In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and still dominate its market: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer satisfaction over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade." How to explain the falling divorce rate between customers and businesses? That's where the researchers got very clever. They realized that when a company seeks permission to acquire another business, it must publish truthful and comprehensive information about how the merger is expected to increase the profits of the new combination. These disclosures are validated by external auditors, boards of directors, and/or audit committees. There are legal repercussions for falsifying them or making material omissions to them, and they are matters of public record. Crucially, these disclosures must include the business's plans to retain its customers, and its plans to increase the profits from those customers. That's where the researchers struck gold. They amassed a novel data-set of 9,500 acquisitions that disclosed over $1t worth of "customer relationship-related intangibles," more than 20% of all the assets that changed hands. They supplemented this data by mining earnings calls (also subject to strict penalties for omissions and falsehoods), finding CEOs boasting about "practices that may impede switching or increase customers’ dependence on the firm." Executives bragged about their "contractual restrictions, bundling and ecosystem lock-in, and switching costs." You can get a sense of these in a short accompanying article by the study's co-author Christopher Stewart: https://www.promarket.org/2026/09/04/american-companies-expect-their-customers-to-stay-much-longer-that-may-be-making-the-economy-less-competitive/ The article recounts how Sirius XM's execs celebrated the news that an appeals court had struck down the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule, which required companies to make it as easy to resign from a subscription service as it was to sign up for it. Click to Cancel is a response to increasingly sleazy, increasingly pervasive tactics that make it all but impossible to stop being someone's customer. Trump's FTC walked away from defending the rule, which let the court kill it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole After Click to Cancel died, Sirius XM's C-suite got on a call with their shareholders to project "better outcome(s) as a result of not having that in place." Sirius believed that a rule that made it easy for customers to resign from their monthly subscriptions would hurt its business. Put another way: Sirius believes that its profits come in part from the fact that dissatisfied customers can't figure out how to cancel their service. Then there's the online insurance company eHealth, whose execs crowed about a new "innovation" that forced senior patients to painstakingly enter a long list of their medications and doctors, but did not give them any way to export that data. The lengthy investment of time in getting set up on eHealth would stop customers from leaving, because they wouldn't want "to repeat all of that information over the phone." This is also a feature of business-to-business relationships. In 2019, US Silica's execs described how they had launched a program to become embedded in their customers' supply chains, because that "really locks in the business," making it "much more difficult for customers to switch and go to someone else." That's the first half of the story: an empirical account of how the business world switched from "acquiring customers" to taking hostages. But the second half of the paper is even more interesting: an empirical investigation into the effects of this customer lock-in. For starters, increased customer retention is "associated with higher gross profit margins": that is, the companies whose customers can't leave squeeze those customers for more profit. What's more, once a company has its customers locked in, it starts to capture a larger share of all the profits in its entire sector: these hostage-takers become so profitable that their profits dwarf the profits of their competitors. The paper also solves the mystery of the missing market entrants that the neoclassical horse-ponderers insisted would be conjured up to compete away an abusive monopolist's margins. The more locked in the customers of a monopolist are, the fewer companies try to enter that market. This makes sense: who would invest in a new business in a market where none of its potential customers can switch to its new business? This is the opposite of what the horse-ponderers have insisted upon for 50 years. The more lock-in a company attains, the more profitable it becomes, and the less it has to worry about new competitors coming after those incredible margins. This is obvious to everyone, except the monopolist-funded "social scientists" and the governments they captured. This is bad news, and not just for those locked-in customers. New businesses are the source of new jobs, and, yup, it turns out that sectors dominated by firms with high lock-in create fewer jobs. Of course, as workers chase fewer jobs, bosses are able to suppress their wages by forcing workers to bid against one another. Once again, the study finds that the sectors with the most lock-in also see declining wages in addition to declining jobs. These are not the horse-ponderers' "efficient" monopolists. Once a company has its customers locked in, it innovates less – as measured by the number of patents a company is awarded, and by how often those patents are cited in other patents (this second measure helps distinguish companies that file mountains of bullshit patents from companies that actually invent useful things). Naturally, R&D spending also declines in companies with more lock-in. All of this is entirely compatible with the theory of enshittification. Once a company knows its customers can't leave, it can switch from treating them well to abusing them in order to extract money from them. The same goes for companies whose workers can't leave – because they're bound by noncompete clauses, or because their employer has bought out all their rivals: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first It's like the old Lily Tomlin sketches on SNL and Laugh-In, where she played Ernestine the telephone operator narrating satirical ads for AT&T. Those sketches would end with her obviously true catch-phrase: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw Decades later, Tomlin's phone company joke is a perfect distillation of modern management philosophy. As a famous NBER working paper showed, when a family business is handed over to a professional manager with an MBA, the company doesn't become more profitable overall; it just finds ways to pay its workers less: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf That's why Tim Wu named this "the age of extraction." "Growth" no longer means "making something new that people want" – now it means "finding ways to take a larger share of the pie, even if that makes the pie smaller overall": https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/ This is something we can all feel. We experience it in our daily lives, through "shrinkflation" and "junk fees" and a million other gross and petty scams. But it's rare that we actually catch executives explicitly admitting that their job is to find ways to take you hostage and squeeze you. Historically, those revelations have come from extraordinary circumstances, like when Frontier (the worst ISP in America) went bankrupt and we learned that the company had 1.6 million customers who had no access to competing broadband connections. Frontier carried these hostages on their balance sheet as a special, highly valued asset, since they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions In assembling this novel, high-quality data-set, the researchers on this paper have performed an important service, capturing a vast number of sworn confessions of highly paid enshittifiers, and then showing how their hostage-taking wrecked competition, prices, wages, jobs and innovation. Hey look at this (permalink) Gloria Steinem Helped Transform the World for Everyone https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/gloria-steinem-helped-transform-the-world-for-everyone/ Keep the Internet free https://keepitfree.ai/ Money Does Not Decide What It Becomes https://sekimonyo.com/money-does-not-decide-what-it-becomes Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Three-hole punch debut, April 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20061119140057/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/09/06/three-hole-paper-punch-debut/ #20yrsago New Zealand redefines open source as “code you can’t modify” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/07/new-zealand-redefines-open-source-as-code-you-cant-modify// #20yrsago MSFT quicker to patch DRM than security vulnerabilities https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html #20yrsago Wikipedia’s dumbest arguments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars #10yrsago Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland https://web.archive.org/web/20211024071400/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/09/how-internet-pirates-became-political-force-iceland #10yrsago Sampling bias: how a machine-learning beauty contest awarded nearly all prizes to whites https://web.archive.org/web/20160906154712/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-an-ai-judged-beauty-contest-picked-nearly-all-white-winners #10yrago Warner Bros flags its own website as a piracy portal in copyright takedowns https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-flags-website-piracy-portal-160904/ #10yrsago The privacy wars have been a disaster and they’re about to get a LOT worse https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorowthe-privacy-wars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-worse/ #10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/06/weapons-of-math-destruction-invisible-ubiquitous-algorithms-are-ruining-millions-of-lives/ #10yrsago Pro-democracy reformers win big in Hong Kong’s elections https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/06/hong-kong-voters-elect-pro-democracy-legislators-to-defend-the-citys-autonomy-from-china/ #1yrago Stock buybacks are stock swindles https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs Upcoming appearances (permalink) Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Downstream with Michael Walker (Novara) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
September 6, 2026
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Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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I miss the roflcopter
Itemized event exports
Export not just an email's aggregate numbers, but every individual event and timestamp behind them.
I bought retinol and I feel weird about it
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I’m trying to do better about caring for my skin, so I went into the dermatologist for a full body skin check in January. (Apparently most insurance companies will cover this annually!) My grandparents developed fragile skin as they got older, and were constantly cutting themselves, so I asked the dermatologist if there was anything […]
Monday 7 September, 2026
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Non-potable Quote of the Day “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Alison Krauss & Union Station | Dimming Of The Day Link Long Read of the Day ‘Empire’s … Continue reading →
Sad to see Jensen Huang claim that AGI has arrived, with no evidence and no definitions
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Declaring victory without a definition simply muddies the waters
Wed, Sept 9th, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Breaking news from Ohio - Dr. Amy Acton was attacked at an event today but is now safe and the assailant is in custody
Sunday caption contest: Fortress
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And last week’s winner
Notes on building an independent media and polling ecosystem in 2026
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For a special Labor Day edition of the Sunday roundup, I’ve written some personal thoughts on journalism, polling, forecasting, and the value of staying off algorithmic social media in 2026.
Week Fifteen in 250 to 250
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Last week was the fifteenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Fatherland
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The last two days involved a lot of driving.
Our Wins Of The Week
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The mid-decade redistricting wars heated up again this week.
We got past the bump, and I'm getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it's got a lot of integrations, which you want when you're using, but hard when you're getting it all to work the first time. And this port is very much like getting it work that way. But Claude does some things poorly and others spectacularly. It can play the role of a CPU and run the code and tell you where it will fail. Helpful when you don't have a working debugger to step through the code and see exactly how and why it failed where it did. Before debuggers it was either all or nothing.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Every day with Claude I end up debugging the things it broke overnight. Yesterday I actually got a useful script written and debugged, along the way reporting glitches but no deal-stoppers. This morning, after updating to the latest version, the script doesn't run. It's been like this for two weeks. No wonder every day before starting work I think of ditching this project and do whatever, but I don't think I could ever muster the determination to get Frontier working on modern systems. And I can't give up. But if you think this system can replace programmers, you are sorely mistaken. It can't even do the job of a programmer fielding good bug reports and verifying that they fixed the problem and didn't break anything else. Breakage happens, but this is something it does every freaking day. And then it admits that it didn't do the other half of what it knew it had to do. I say it every day, this is ridiculous and I am fed up, and that's just the beginning of the frustration. What keeps me coming back is when I can build up a head of steam in Frontier on my new Mac laptop.
Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Fall Fiction and Sewing
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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme
Twenty-five Years After 9/11: What Have We Learned, and Forgotten?
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It’s the things we don’t talk about that have changed the most. They need our attention now.
Trump Gets More Terrible Polls, Ballots Are Getting Mailed In Wisconsin, Hopium Community Members Are Working It!!!!!!!!!!!
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Hopium is hope with a plan. Here we don’t just hope tomorrow will be better than today. We do the work to make it so......
Pre-Labor Day
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Yesterday I was working in my office when I suddenly remembered that the first IU football game of the season was on. So I went downstairs, turned on the TV, found the Indianapolis station carrying it (we still use an antenna here, 60 miles away), and started watching in time to see what I thought […]
“Conga!”
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A Reason To Smile
Weaponized Interdependence
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Who has the power in a trading world?
LibreOffice talks at the Open Source Conference Luxembourg 2026
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We’re gearing up for the LibreOffice Conference 2026 next week in Pordenone, northern Italy – but there are more events in the pipeline too. At the Open Source Conference Luxembourg 2026, which takes place on October 7, there will be two talks from Florian Effenberger, Executive Director at The Document
I have recently replaced Neovim with Helix globally on my computer as well
as most of the other systems that I use. This is a write-up
of my experience with the new editor so far.
September 5, 2026
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Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a nutshell.
Free-Range Childhood
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Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond is a story in Reason, which adds this subhead: “The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.” The distance to the Pond was half a mile. I turned five […]
Middle Dune is a small stationery and paper goods business based on Cape
Cod, MA. Owned and run by Sylvia, all our notebooks, cards, and paper
products are hand printed and bound with care in our studio. We
specialize in letterpress and screen printing and take pride in
combining a love for traditional hands-on craftsmanship with bold,
modern graphics inspired by folklore and the natural world.
Digitization is transforming our world economically, culturally, and
psychologically. The influx of new forms of communication, networking,
and business opportunities, as well as new types of distraction,
self-observation, and control into our societies represents an epochal
challenge. Following Bernard Stiegler’s concept of pharmacology, Felix
Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein propose to view these new forms as
digital pharmaka. Properly dosed, they can enable new self-relationships
and forms of sociality; in the case of overdose, however, there is a
risk of intoxication. In this essay, Felix Heidenreich, Florian
Weber-Stein, and, in a detailed interview, Bernard Stiegler analyze this
complex change in our world and develop new skills to use digital
pharmaka.
When you are capable of transforming a poison into a remedy, it is
because you have developed a knowledge of this pharmakon. And you can
tell yourself or other people, “Don’t use it, it’s very dangerous”. This
is what many experts do, doctors, or, for example if you are a
mathematician you can critically assess the use of geometry in
architecture. You can predict what is possible and what isn’t, and in
order to define the limits of what can be built you can use your skills
as an expert. In this first sense, there is something similar to science
necessary.
Resilience makes peer-to-peer file sharing is such a compelling
technology not only for pirated content, but also for scientific data
and public records. But is it suitable for the life stories of
marginalized people living in a country whose own government is
persecuting them?
BIBFRAME (BF) provides a model for representing bibliographic data in a
linked data environment. This document is a reference guide for those
who would like to implement the Bibframe model and vocabulary.
Mudita Kompakt is a minimalist E Ink® phone designed for focus, privacy,
and freedom from digital distractions.
Featuring network bands for worldwide connectivity and reliable
connections when traveling. With a paper-like display, Offline+ Mode for
total privacy, and essential tools without unnecessary apps, it helps
you stay connected on your terms anywhere in the world.
Longtemps consignées sur papier, nos archives individuelles et
collectives sont désormais numériques… et menacées par l’obsolescence
matérielle, les propriétaires de logiciels ou les pouvoirs autoritaires.
Pour lutter contre la fabrique de l’oubli et redonner de la matérialité
à nos histoires, il est urgent d’imaginer un mouvement d’archivistes
citoyen·nes.
The American Dream cannot exist unless the wound stays open. If the
wound heals, if the land returns, if the original violence is
acknowledged without myth or metaphor then the entire economy collapses.
So the wound must be maintained. In other words, the border-town liquor
stores must stay open. The pipe-lines must cross through Diné Bikeyah.
The data centers have to be built in Page. The subprime auto loans have
to continue. The tech empires have to continue and grow. The vending
machines have to light up the colonial project of Tempe Town Lake. The
narrative of entrepreneurship has to endure. Settler forgetfulness has
to pursue its cycle. The nation has to have its myths.
A complete, self-contained introduction to the field of Computational
Cognitive Neuroscience, where computer models of the brain are used to
understand a wide range of cognitive functions, including perception,
attention, learning, memory, motor control, executive function, and
language.
The governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless he can prove he’s actually alive.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I had watched almost three seasons of Silo, had no feeling for the characters, or the story, which was going nowhere that I could discern. I shouldn't have watched it through all that time, but for some reason I did. Then in episode 9, two Fridays ago, the story took a remarkable turn. It's so good it actually makes this dark and confusing show worth watching. If you haven't been watching, imho you can start in season 3, and maybe read some recaps. You want enough of the boredom so you can revel in the brilliance of this season's end. And there is another season coming, the last one, and this time it's interesting.
The Real Reason Republicans Are Afraid of “Socialism”
, updated:
This week’s video
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
If the hubris that lead to security holes and poor engineering of doge/linux did not dissuade your enthusiastic friend, perhaps not supporting the Nazi ideology behind it will:
We Need To Turn Their Furious, Desperate Cheating Into Righteous Anger And Drive Our Early Vote/Election Turnout Through The Roof
, updated:
People will start voting in North Carolina this week, early in person voting kicks off in thirteen days - the General Election is here everyone! Make your early vote plan today!
Undeadlines
, updated:
Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random):
Fourth Walls and Love Songs
, updated:
Today, enjoy our audio and video picks
The social web vs the software web
, updated:
I launched ChatGPT for the first time in a long time because I now have access to the new version. One new thing I see is that they are popping up suggestions about things you can do in realtime, like smart queries in a feed reader, which as far as I know is still uncharted territory. Like this: "let me know when the Mets have a three-game winning streak."
That's the kind of thing TBL dreamed about in his semantic web plan, but he wrote the spec before writing software, and that doesn't work. His invention, the web, which came before was a perfectly timed, perfectly simple approach to sharing ideas on the internet. It worked because he created a product that worked, and made every piece completely replaceable. It came at a time when stagnation in tech made something necessary, or the whole thing was going to fall apart, and so close to so much incredible potential. Just like the moment we're in now with AI.
The value of disruption is that it undoes stagnation.
Anyone who has the same software plan today that they had a year ago is going to find themselves isolated. Even WordPress, though it is open source, is a silo that imho in the future will not work. The main selling point of AT Proto is that it is a safe haven for developers who nuzzle up, another word for that is silo.
The siloers are probably scrambling to find a way for the AI to run inside their world, mistake -- instead they should be trying to be fully relevant to applications in the AI world. Like Slack, for example, and Claude Tag. It's now built in. Has to be replaceable too. Small pieces loosely joined. That's what you have to be imho to have a role in the future of tech.
If your advantage is your silo, undo that as quickly as possible. Become the default version of whatever it was meant to be wrt the web. Both Bluesky and WordPress find themselves in the same quagmire. Probably a lot of others do, but this is the area I study. (I just am very familiar with the products of both companies, for some reason.)
This is the intuition we all had, coming to fruition. Evolution is something we haven't seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity -- hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.
Lots more to say about this. The world we lived in ran on hype, now guess what -- having lived through a few big evolutionary changes in tech is a huge advantage vs the people who have never been part of one, and I think most of the people in tech today qualify.
Lit Hub Weekly: August 31 – September 4, 2026
, updated:
Marlon James tells Eric Olson about (finally!) writing a novel that draws from his life. | Lit Hub In Conversation “Terror wasn’t the only weapon the Nazis used against the American prisoners. Sometimes, they used propagandistic persuasion as well.” On
Day Off
, updated:
Recharging for a bit
Nina Jankowicz on the golden age of disinformation
, updated:
“Memory-holing is core to all of the narrative coups Republicans are achieving right now.”
Pluralistic: Google skates (05 Sep 2026)
, updated:
Today's links Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why Wikipedia works. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Google skates (permalink) Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners. The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took 22 years before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of preventing monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched. Allowing Rockefeller to create, expand and consolidate his monopoly power was a terrible tactical blunder, giving him decades in which he was able to loot America and its trading partners, pauperizing ordinary people and smashing anyone who got in his way. No one was willing to admit that Rockefeller was a threat to democracy and prosperity until he had amassed all that power, and once he had all that power, it took heroic effort to break him. The Rockefeller story is like the punchline of that joke: "When it doesn't rain, the roof don't leak; and when it's raining, it's too wet to fix it." Alternatively, there's my other favorite punchline: "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." The Rockefeller blunder wasn't a one-off. The Apple ][+ hit the shelves the same year Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the tech industry's rise occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of competition law enforcement. Tech companies were the first "post-antitrust" industry, and it wasn't until these companies became palpable, terrifying, undeniable, existential civilizational risks that we remembered that we had all these laws on the books that were designed to curb excessive corporate power. Under Biden, a group of generationally talented, visionary trustbusters were given access to those dormant enforcement powers: Lina Khan at the FTC; Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, Tim Wu in the White House, and Jonathan Kantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division. Together with a staff of canny and skilled lawyers and economists, these people scored incredible victories against Big Tech. During the Biden years, Google lost three federal antitrust cases. Three! But if we wanted to get there, we wouldn't start from here. After a series of stinging defeats in the US and abroad, after watching the EU, the UK, Japan, Singapore and South Korea make common cause with Biden's enforcers, Big Tech threw everything it had into Trump, who promised them a system of regulatory forbearance in exchange for low-cost bribery, backstopped by a xenophobic, belligerent geopolitics that would rain down punishments on any country that dared to regulate or tax Big Tech: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62553ywn77o And then the other shoe dropped: the federal judges who convicted Google of operating an illegal monopoly handed down their "remedy" decisions. In an antitrust case, the "remedy" phase is like sentencing – the stage of the legal proceeding where the judge decides what punishment the company should face for breaking the law. The first of these remedies came out a year ago, in September 2025. Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had deliberately made search worse so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier. If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately zero chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business. Confronted with these proven findings, Mehta decided that Google's punishment should be…nothing. They wouldn't be forced to delete the personal data they'd taken from billions of people. They wouldn't be forced to spin off Chrome or Android – two of the key tools Google uses to keep people from discovering other search engines. They wouldn't even be forced to halt the $20b annual bribe to Apple – the judge fretted that without that $20b annual bribe, Apple wouldn't be able to pay researchers to come up with cool new iPhone features (never mind that Apple spends all that money – and more – on stock buybacks, a recently illegal form of stock manipulation): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck Then, a year later, another federal judge – Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Google "ad-tech" case – decided that Google's penalty for monopolizing the ad market should also be…nothing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Oh, maybe not exactly nothing. We don't actually know the full extent of Judge Brinkema's "remedy," because it's sealed for two weeks. What we do know is that Google will not be forced to take the most obvious, effective and necessary step to prevent it from abusing its monopoly: Google will not be forced to sell off part of its ad-tech stack. Let me unpack that for you, because unless you're an ad-tech weirdo, chances are you have no idea how any of this works and don't think it affects you. But the reality is that this is costing you money. It's one of the dirtiest, most profitable scams in the entire tech economy, which is saying something, because that is an economy that is made of scams: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier Unlike older ads, which were targeted based on content (say, an ad for a hotel might run next to a newspaper article about a beachside town) modern ads are built on surveillance. Companies like Google amass vast, nonconsensual dossiers on the personal characteristics and behavior of billions of people, supplemented with information purchased from the unregulated data-broker sector. When you visit a website, the site fires off a piece of software called "sell-side agent" to message a server called an "ad exchange" in order to announce your visit, soliciting bids for the right to show you an ad: "I am about to serve a web-page to a 18-34 year old man-child from New York's outer boroughs, who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea: who wants to cram some ads into this guy's eyeballs?" That ad-exchange server is haunted by "demand-side agents" – these are pieces of software fired off by advertisers that monitor all these advertising opportunities announced on the ad exchange and bid for the right to show you an ad. The highest bidder gets to show you an ad, and the fee is remitted to the exchange, which takes a cut and passes the remainder on to the sell-side platform, which also takes a cut and gives the balance to the website publisher. So the ad-tech stack has three main components: the "sell-side platform" (SSP), which lets web publishers announce auctions for the right to advertise to their visitors; the "demand-side platform" (DSP) that lets advertisers bid to show those visitors ads; and the "ad exchange" – the marketplace where the sell-side and demand-side agents meet to collect bids, finalize the sale, and exchange ads for money. When this all started, there were lots of companies in all three roles. Publishers and advertisers had their choice of SSPs, DSPs and exchanges, and all three types of middleman competed to offer the best deals to advertisers and publishers. Then, Google and Facebook started buying up the leading DSPs, SSPs and exchanges. They used contracts and technical countermeasures to force anyone who used any part of their "stack" to use them for all parts of the transaction. The CEOs of Google and Facebook personally colluded to rig the market, dividing it up between them so that publishers would get less, advertisers would pay more, and Googbook would pocket the difference. The codename for this conspiracy was "Jedi Blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue Jedi Blue was just the icing on the cake. The reality is they didn't need the conspiracy: once Google was selling services to advertisers and publishers on an exchange that Google owned, they created an entire universe of ways to rip off both advertisers and publishers. Now consider that Google is also an advertiser and also a web publisher, and the opportunities to cheat are just wild. The numbers tell the story. Before Googbook captured 80% of the display advertising business, the total share of the advertising industry's revenues that went to "intermediaries" (middlemen like ad agencies, ad buyers, etc) was about 15%. Today, that number is 51%. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been moved out of publishers' and advertisers' bank accounts and onto Google and Facebook's balance sheets. This isn't hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge's wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they've decided that the family house will be awarded to…the judge! The most absurd part of this whole farce is the lawyers who defend it on behalf of companies like Google. If a Google lawyer ever showed up to defend the company in a trial where the judge was working for the plaintiff, they would scream blue murder and refuse to proceed until the judge was removed from the case. But when Google operates a business where it presides over transactions where it has nothing but conflicts of interest, these same lawyers argue that Google would never cheat a seller or a buyer. The fucking absurdity of this arrangement is so obvious that a bill to force a halt to it was co-sponsored…by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz: https://gizmodo.com/google-facebook-america-act-ads-break-up-cruz-warren-1850287725 Why would Warren and Cruz care about this? Because the hundreds of billions that have been moved from publishers and advertisers to Google and Facebook are hundreds of billions of dollars that are no longer paying for news and entertainment production, and they're hundreds of billions of dollars that businesses have to recoup by raising prices on you to pay their advertising bills. Google (and, apparently, Judge Leonie Brinkema) dispute this. They say that "larger forces" have "changed the dynamic" that "restructured the industry." But, I mean, come on! This is a situation where hundreds of billions of dollars are divided up by a thrice convicted monopolist who is mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars richer, while the other parties to the transaction are mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars poorer. Anyone who can't draw the obvious causal inference from these facts has so little object permanence that they would lose a fucking game of peek-a-boo. This is so goddamned demoralizing. For a couple years there, it really looked like the tide was turning. Then Judges Brinkema and Mehta came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The only thing that's keeping me going is object permanence. I know my history. I know it took decades from the passage of the Sherman Act until the defeat of John D Rockefeller. Our forebears brought down Rockefeller because they didn't give up, despite setbacks as bad as this one, and worse. Stein's Law of finance holds that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops," and MLK told us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This can't go on forever, and despite Dr King's phrasing, I know he understood that the arc doesn't just "bend" – it is bent – by people like us, hauling on it with all our might. Hey look at this (permalink) Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf DOGE Affiliate Asked for College Credits for Participating in Takeover https://www.wired.com/story/doge-affiliate-asked-for-college-credits-for-participating-in-takeover/ Why office workers are turning against AI https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-office-workers-are-turning-against The Quiet Decision Microsoft Made That Devastated Thousands of Nonprofits https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html Vote for the 2026 Tiny Awards Winner https://tinyawards.net/vote/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Advertisers claim they can hack your childhood memories https://web.archive.org/web/20010921022846/http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92386 #25yrsago Wind-up cellphone charger https://web.archive.org/web/20011031122531/http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001310179,00.html #20yrsago Steven Brust’s Dzur: witty and exciting heroic fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/05/steven-brusts-dzur-witty-and-exciting-heroic-fantasy/ #20yrsago America to US gov’t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/jointletter5sep06usptoforum.pdf #20yrsago New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20070108042834/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/NZ_draws_line_on_DRM_and_trusted_computing/0,130061733,339270846,00.htm #20yrsago Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada? https://web.archive.org/web/20061010120919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1411/135/ #15yrsago Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-why-should-anyone-care/ #5yrsago A letter to a discouraged young writer https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/05/why-bother/ #1yrago Why Wikipedia works https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before Upcoming appearances (permalink) Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Saturday's words: 504 (12397 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
The Biggest Loser in the World | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, September 5, 2026
, updated:
With W. Kamau Bell, Michael Lahanas Calderón, and yours truly, Robert Reich
September 4, 2026
, updated:
On September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade.
Weeknotes: Aug. 28 – Sept. 4, 2026
, updated:
Highlight of the week: saw my niece and met her partner Looking forward to: seeing Coyote vs. Acme with my friend Stuff I did: 5 hours book outline went to Bellevue Botanical Garden and wandered around the Kirkland waterfront with my niece and her partner, then grabbed takeout for a picnic at the park took Monday […]
Please beware of "Robert Reich" impersonators
, updated:
Spoofing scams seem to be on the rise
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
This is a lovely Markdown/Mindmap app for MacOS.
And the authors opensourced their state-of-the-art rendering engine for people to build alternatives, check it out:
nodes-web.com
2026-09-05 human.json
2026-09-05 human.json
I maintain a feed aggregator that is used to generate a static web site. That is, you subscribe to some feeds and run my program to download the feeds and generate a HTML file.
Typically, if all the feeds are on a certain topic, this is called a “planet”. I also maintain such a planet for role-playing games: RPG Planet. If you use it for a bunch of blogs you’re interested in, you could call it a blog roll. I have one of these as well, although it’s badly maintained: Blogs.
As you can tell, these sites look a bit weird. This is on purpose:
New items appear at the top and old items disappear at the bottom. When it’s gone, it’s gone. There is no count of unread items. The goal is to fight the fear of missing out (FOMO).
Each item looks similar to every other: headline, link, an extract, maybe a date and an author. Extracts contain but the beginning of the article’s text; all markup is removed; no images. The goal is to make the page easy to skim. Scroll down until you find something interesting and follow the link to the original article if you want to read it.
I like this a lot.
The question is, however, where to get the subscription list from. I edit the OPML files by hand. If you visit the two sites linked above, you’ll find a link to the files in case you want to import them all into your preferred feed reader. I don’t recommend this, however. Whenever I have tried it, I have been overwhelmed and ended up deleting them all again. This is one of the reasons my personal subscription list is so badly maintained.
Recently, however, I learned about the human.json project by @contact from @ploum. It describes a file you can add to your website. The idea is that you do this if you are a human and you “vouch” for other humans by linking to them. If you do this, and you install the browser extension, sites “in your network” of humans get a kind of semaphore light:
🟢 Green — directly trusted or 1 hop away
🟡 Yellow — 2 hops
🟠 Orange — 3+ hops
🔵 Blue — has human.json but not in your trust graph yet
⚪ Gray — not participating
Of course there are questions. Scammers will put up such files, eventually. But the web of trust is there and I like that.
And here’s what I did today: I added a feature to my program so that you can point it to a site like your own and it will traverse the graph for up to 2 hops (the first two items on the list above) and check if there’s a feed to be found. If so, the feed is written to an OPML file.
And now you can use the OPML file to subscribe to all your friends (1 hop) and friends of friends (2 hops). And you can do that for a community of web nerds and run a “planet” based on this friend of a friend system.
I think it’s neat.
Of course it’s not for everybody. There’s a reason FOAF didn’t go anywhere. That was a way to note who your friends were. Listing your friends is a bit cringe. Listing your friends is also doxxing yourself. It makes you an easy victim of network analysis. This can be troublesome if you’re an activist. Look around. The surveillance bros of the entire world are waiting to gobble up this information. But if you’re using the fediverse you’re already following people. If you have a public blogroll, you’re already announcing to the world a part of your network is. You’re already dancing like nobody is watching. Fuck the surveillance bros! Awoooooo!
Anyway. The program I maintain is called Planet Jupiter :jupiter: and it stands in the tradition of software such as Planet Venus, Planet Pluto and others. This one is mine and it’s written in Perl. 😅
Whoa! The best human Go player beat the best AI Go program (with a 2 stone lead). Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo in historic human victory Real-time AI video generation has arrived. Right now it is infinite slop, but … Continue reading →
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid on a Stick at the New York State Fair
Administrative note: as of this morning, my attempts to reply to comments here have been failing in Firefox. I can still post comments using Safari, which is how I posted my most recent replies, but my main browser is Firefox so this is not a good long-term solution. I've tried various mitigations, so far to no avail. If anyone else is experiencing difficulties, or if you have
I apologize for using some relatively technical terminology in today’s post.
In the interest of saving space on the page, I will not reiterate the definitions of“tokenization” nor the various methods of doing so.
If you are already well-versed in the field, great! If not, I believe this page gives a decent explanation.
I first set out to build a small language model several months ago.
While the original goal — to emit legible English by passing bare bytes into a transformer — was a success, I was left unsatisfied with the applicability of the model itself. To put it plainly: The model worked, but it was not useful for anything.
My long-term vision is to offer a“Pro” version of Harper that allows professionals in service industries to rewrite their text quickly using an on-device small language model.
Since then, I have been distracted with several other important missions, including a Harper Desktop app for macOS and Windows.
This week, however, I allowed myself some more time to work on it.
The Problem
I am trying to create a strong and small base model.
A model that can semantically understand small passages of text, which we can then retrain to do a variety of different things.
If a small base model like this can be made, we could do a lot of other things using its intermediate representations:
Rewrite sentences (from passive voice to active voice or from casual tone to formal tone).
Infer where commas should be placed.
Prioritize Harper’s suggestions to better surface them for users.
The key here is that the model must be aware of both the intricacies of sub-word components (including individual affixes), but also be aware of higher-level details, like word order and tone.
My previous attempt was well-aware of the former (better than many larger models), but failed in tasks that required higher level grammatical reasoning.
However, we could not expand the tokens to be much larger without dramatically increasing the inference cost for the end user.
To accomplish what we aim to, this final model must be able to achieve triple-digit tokens per second on consumer-grade CPUs.
It must be very small and very fast.
The Solution
In my experimentation this week, I found that I was right about one thing and wrong about another.
I was right that there is an ideal average token size for our workload.
I was wrong that it was a single byte.
As it turns out, the ideal token size for our tasks seem to be about 3.47 characters per token.
Big enough to allow the model to focus on the big picture tasks, but small enough for the model to have enough awareness of the structure of individual words.
“Elijah, how did you calculate that average?”
I ran a task using the model and averaged the size of the tokens emitted.
Obviously, it probably is not a super accurate figure, but I think it offers enough salience and precision for this post.
To scale up the token size, I used riptoken and I tested out a few off-the-shelf pretrained tokenizers.
I ended up using one with a vocabulary of about 8192 tokens.
Moving forward, I believe I need to up the model size just a tad, then work on better post-training.
Trump appeals to SCOTUS to save USPS mail-in vote scheme. Democrats get redistricting wins. Ballroom construction can continue.
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Trump Administration Appeals to Supreme Court in USPS Mail-In Voting Fight
.name Termination
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Neil Fraser (via Hacker News): Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs. […] On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the ‘.name’ hierarchy in […]
SoundSource Support Follow-Up
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Chris Barajas: To spread the word, we announced SoundSource 6 on our blog and sent a mass mailing to our customer list. We also took a more targeted approach, contacting both existing and potential customers who’d previously reached out to us with specific requests. We went back to those folks to let them know about […]
UK App Tracking Transparency Lawsuit
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Reuters: Apple is facing a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) London lawsuit brought on behalf of app developers over its app tracking rules, with the iPhone maker accused of abusing its power to unfairly impose greater restrictions on third parties. […] Lawyers bringing the new lawsuit against Apple, though, say the feature imposed stricter requirements on […]
App Tracking Transparency Changes in Germany
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Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple has agreed to make changes to its App Tracking Transparency feature in Germany, according to the country’s competition regulator. […] In Germany, Apple has agreed to remove “possibly discouraging symbols and wording” from the App Tracking Transparency prompt, the regulator said. Apps will also be “given more scope to explain […]
The “priorities gap” and the midterms
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Voters want a president who works on their problems. They say Trump isn’t — and he and Republicans are losing support because of it
★ Writing With Unnatural Constraints
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It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.
This week’s news in Venn diagrams.
The imminent arrival of fall means I’ve been pulling out all my jackets in eager anticipation—I’m not a fan of summer, especially when it’s been nearly tropical in NYC these past few months. Arguably the best part of pulling out
Trump Administration’s Push for Deep-Sea Mining Threatens the Atlantic Ocean
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Underwater mining will kill sea life, destroy habitats, and pollute the ocean.
As summer comes to a close, we at Lit Hub are celebrating milestones and jumping into the deep end. What’s making us happy? Climbing mountains. We’re looking autumn square in the face and saying: bring it on. Molly Odintz, for
My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact.
An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface. Even innocuous features (like running with a display) add extra, exploitable attack surface.
@Barack Obama @Bsky
Music has always had the power to connect and inspire us. At the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, Eddie Vedder and the young people from Guitars Over Guns wrote and performed a profoundly moving song, ‘Better Believe,’ that spoke to each of them and all of us.
Abattoirs of taste
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I keep hearing this damned word pop up and it’s starting to annoy me. It’s fast-tracking its way to becoming the free space on buzzword bingo for magic 8 ball enjoyers. That word is “taste”. I’ll try to define “taste” in the context that prompt engineers — or whatever they’re calling themselves […]
Bob and Van
For the first half of my childhood in suburban Ohio, we lived next to Bob.
Bob and his wife were a kind, reserved older couple who decorated their home mostly with crucifixes and talked about Jesus a lot. Bob helped my mom with a lot of common household tasks after my dad died. When she woke up to a small fire on our deck, she didn’t call the fire department — she called Bob.1
I never learned any of Bob’s political views, though I can make some guesses in retrospect. They never mattered. He was just our neighbor.
We later moved, and hit the neighbor jackpot with Van.
Van was deeply kind, generous, and friendly — the sort of neighbor everyone wishes for. In my lazy teenage years, he’d often mow our lawn or shovel our snow for us before I even woke up. As his mobility later declined, I was honored to return the favor.
Van and his delightful wife passed away years ago, before I learned how either of them felt on any political issue.
If they were my neighbors today, how likely would that be?
* * *
If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?
Should I be condemned for supporting or associating with them in non-political contexts?
Should I be condemned for not publicly condemning them myself?
While privilege and power dynamics play a complex and unavoidable role in this, I don’t want to associate with any community that would insist on either of those.2
And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.
The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.
Our casual friends were just casual friends. We didn’t expect them to take positions on the world’s most complicated conflicts. We could just talk about weather and TV shows, and maybe sometimes get a beer.
Somewhere on Bob’s wall might’ve been a relevant statement from an influential political dissident about casting the first stone. ↩︎
Why Podcasting 2.0 will never work
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If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users.
And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.
Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.
That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry.
That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.
For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers.
pleiades.datasets exports and derivatives will be delayed until we can troubleshoot and remedy a database inconsistency that is causing nightly exports to fail
Pause OpenAI, now
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Quite simply, they can no longer be trusted.
Dems Launch ‘Unprecedented’ Election Protection Efforts, Diesel Hits Record High, Trump Still Has The Worst Jobs Record Of Any President Since Hoover
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Absentee ballots are being mailed in North Carolina today - here we go peeps.....the General Election is here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Brecht and Tennis
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Writing of lasting value
Plagiarism ain’t cool bro :(
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It’s not every day I read an email subject that makes my heart sink, only to find myself laughing out loud. Today I was told someone plagiarised my website! The snitch lol informant wishes to remain anonymous (they’ve obviously read my blog!) I wasn’t sure how to deal with this situation. […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, on a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. When I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the fix. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should not put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh.
Rebuilding a 1995 GPS Time Server so I don't get Telstra'd
Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool. I found a way to drop in a Pi 5 and GNSS HAT, display the time and GPS status on the built-in 16x2 LCD, show the status on the bicolor LED, and make this box useful again.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Sometimes it reminds me how it has no stake in the outcome, and basically will do the minimum of what it's asked to do. It possibly would do more if I didn't scold it for adding UI features without following the rules. I think that's why when you feel you're almost there, you really have a lot of slogging left to do to get the software into any kind of user-respectful shape. A reminder to other app-level AI explorers, if you find that these kinds of stories resonate with the work you do, please write about it on a blog, they're easy to create, cost nothing, and it doesn't matter if you only update once or twice, there's no commitment (these are the usual reasons people don't start a blog). I want to read what others are discovering, and once there are others, I'll start a news site that aggregates the posts. We're going to want independent news about stuff the journalists aren't even aware exists, programmers are always left out of their stories.
Vance Says World War 2 Wasn’t a “War”
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The vice president also downgraded World War 1 to "a tussle, at best."
It does teach us just what passes as security and privacy in some sectors of the industry.
LibreOffice 26.2.6 is available for download
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Berlin, 4 September 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on February 4, 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of
Security Vulnerability in a Voting System
It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.
Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.
Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.
After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable...
Today is Bandcamp Friday: https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/album/deep-black-water Tomorrow is Salter Cane Saturday: https://saltercane.com/tickets
Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication...
PopInfo Weekly: Green cards, gutter balls, and grief
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On Monday, Popular Information revealed that Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who President Trump nominated to permanently head the department, took multiple trips to China in 2015 as an attorney where he pitched Chinese nationals on investment projects in Florida.
Lit Hub Daily: September 4, 2026
Suzanne Roberts offers advice (and prompts!) for writing about sex. | Lit Hub Craft How does time actually work? Jim Al-Khalili explores the flow of physics. | Lit Hub Science These Latin American novels from the 1920s chronicled an era
Justice for ICE’s victims requires truth and reconciliation
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Moving on as if it didn’t happen is not an option.
Ingots We No Longer Trust
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America’s word is as good as gold — that is, unreliable
Announcing Project Zenith: The ready-to-code Windows experience on developer-class devices
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Breakthroughs in computing become real through the experiences developers create. Our goal is to have Windows be the best platform for developers. That means pairing the latest in hardware innovation with software optimized for development.
Today's links Amazon achieves enshittification inception: Cheating on your fraud is a hell of a thing. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Electrolite is back; Mafia rules; Aaronsw on Wikipedia; Proctorio's memory hole. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Amazon achieves enshittification inception (permalink) Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods. This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit). Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building more servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are also its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing for free, and realizes a profit on top of that. Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors! Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's most profitable line of business, which is payola. "Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order. "Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that. Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it. Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about search. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon auctions off those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product. To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store): https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing Thus, Amazon imposes an economy-wide tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller must sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers. Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over the majority of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, must raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country. AI has made Amazon much better at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results. There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system also relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. That's why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable! While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most profitable junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop. Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than anything else the company does. It's more profitable than all the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service. Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has lots of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare unit prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price per item, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller quantity of batteries at a higher price per battery. Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon clearly understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by unit price and find the best bargain. Let me remind you: payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits. When I was researching Enshittification, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billions. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book The Age of Extraction), I learned that this number had climbed to more than $50 billion. This year, it's on track to top $80 billion. Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's payola, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold). But there is a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it competes with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots, before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime, people shopped in lots of places, and in those days, companies advertised in publications, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) has captured almost all of that money. As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers. This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does. And then…Amazon made it worse. You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's bullshit. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting reamed. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is cheating them on that payola! Remember: Amazon doesn't just sell search placement; they auction it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the very highest price they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant. In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a big increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase. In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their true highest price, but it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a much higher price than anyone else. Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you would have paid if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction. Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the maximum they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they pay a price equal to the second-highest bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was cheating on its own SBSPA process: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to their own sealed bid, not the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny): https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199 According to the suit, Amazon did this 80% of the time. That is tens of billions of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, and onto every other retailer in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies). Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a special kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/ This is darkly hilarious. The whole point of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists worship auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory The definition of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices. Cheating on a bribery scheme is a mood. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification inception. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification! This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics. (Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Gridfinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridfinity US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Minding the Gaps in Surveillance Pricing Reform https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/minding-the-gaps-in-surveillance Zack Polanski seeks to stand for by-election in former PM Starmer's seat https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge41ee40vwo What Are We Supposed to Call This? https://www.usermag.co/p/what-are-we-supposed-to-call-this Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html #25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/ #20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia #5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency Upcoming appearances (permalink) Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
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Add custom splash screens to handheld Raspberry Pi–powered devices.
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3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).
4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).
5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).
6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.
I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it.
Back to work Dave!
Lessons from platform modernization that every AI program needs
Lessons from platform modernization that every AI program needs
Email should be the universal interface for software
Email is the second-oldest software interface, after the Terminal.
DreamWorks newest feature film Forgotten Island, which releases in theaters Friday, follows two childhood best friends—one of whom plans to attend Caltech with the aspirations of working at JPL—on their final night together in the Philippines.
There are problems people aren't talking about, that are immediate, and go against all the security practices the web has been built on. Here's a story of what happened in my setup in mid-August.
Well I got a lot done today. We had a bit of a meltdown due to a Atlantis bug, where it couldn't handle some text that I threw at it that was a huge file of includes used in everything I do, and I was feeling pretty cheeky, and it blew up. For about an hour you couldn't read my lovely words. But by remembering "slow down to hurry up" Claude figured out what went wrong as I asked 20 questions to narrow it down. And to celebrate, I decided to do something easy -- created 
I use the business-to-industry index to chart the rise and fall of capitalist hegemony, and to map the uneven structure of global capitalism.
I'm doing a difficult corner-turn today. I have Atlantis running on my old machine, the one that's still running the very old version of MacOS so I could keep running Frontier there. Yesterday I did my first attempt to move that to my new MacBook, running the latest OS. And it took a while to copy all the files, and get it right, I had to format the drive on the new machine, not the old one. And once it was all running, I realized I was running an old version of frontier.root. This is more complicated here because the root files are loaded into an SQL database. And something went wrong there. Not exactly where I wanted to be, but not surprising either. Taking lots of snapshots. One thing I don't want to happen, to be without my latest work. Knock wood. Praise Murphy. Knicks in 5.
Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a 
WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a 
FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's plugin: 
Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products today. What about Mastodon? It's got an API. And if that worked, we'd hook into AT Proto. The funny thing is the first web, because much of the new development came from the Mac community, was built around Frontier. System level scripting was also a big deal right alongside the web. But then Jobs, in 1997, rewrote everything, brought in the Unix products, completely disrupted the good thing we had going as independents. That was probably the moment when we stopped building around the idea that you could script all the apps from one place if they had good APIs. All the server apps all had APIs, had to in order to work on the web. We seem to have caught up, and the opportunities to connect things has never been greater. A big door swings open.
In many ways JavaScript is a better language than UserTalk. For example I miss JSON constants. I miss certain language constructs, like conditional assignments. We don't have the idea of a const. On the other hand, JavaScript doesn't have environment features Frontier has. I want to have Atlantis run JavaScript the same way Cancoon (the codename for the kernel of Frontier before this version) ran AppleScript.
The CoMaps test build being offered to participants via a QR code.
We brought a large pile of stickers to share - which will also be available at future conferences!
I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote 
All of us who lived through 9/11 are re-experiencing it right now. The local fire department just ran its alarm, everyone in this small mountain hamlet heard it and it took a moment to realize this was the exact time the first plane hit the tower. I was at my computer in Woodside, California -- hearing about it from friends in Manhattan, and blogging about it as it happened. I didn't have a TV, I had turned my cable subscription off after I became so obsessed with coverage of the 2000 election. So what I reported came exclusively through the web.
Check out that lineup! Wow!
The last two episodes of season three of 
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We got past the bump, and I'm getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it's got a lot of integrations, which you want when you're using, but hard when you're getting it all to work the first time. And this port is very much like getting it work that way. But Claude does some things poorly and others spectacularly. It can play the role of a CPU and run the code and tell you where it will fail. Helpful when you don't have a working debugger to step through the code and see exactly how and why it failed where it did. Before debuggers it was either all or nothing.
My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the 
