Thabo Rametsi Unveiled As Apartheid Era Music Legend Hugh Masekela In First-Look Image For Bill Condon’s ‘The Road Home’
South African actor, writer, director and producer Thabo Rametsi (Silverton Siege) has been unveiled in his role as activist and music legend Hugh Masekela in Bill Condon’s The Road Home as the filming continues in South Africa. A first-look image released by the film’s backers and producers Canal+, Studiocanal and Flora Film as well as […]
Diego Luna To Receive Honorary Heart Of Sarajevo Award
Diego Luna is set to be awarded an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the upcoming Sarajevo Film Festival in recognition of his career and contribution to world cinema. The Mexican actor-director-producer, whose work spans across film, TV and theater, will touch down at the Bosnian festival to present his latest directorial feature Ashes, which premiered […]
Netflix Unveils Live Darts Event With Teenage Sensation Luke Littler
Teenage darts champion and prodigy Luke Littler is headlining Netflix’s next big live event. Littler posted a vid this morning asking for members of the public to come forward and challenge him for £501,000 ($667,000) at a live event in which they will attempt to beat him at his own game. Those who want to […]
Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not. Cognyte’s contract with the state of Texas reveals that the simulator, called FalcoNet, can be concealed within the vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter. It’s the same technology as the infamous Stingray, one of the original cell-site simulators made by defense giant L3Harris...
Unconscious Mitch McConnell Scores Higher Approval Rating Than Conscious Version
Voters pointed to progress on guns, the environment, and a host of other issues that could have been achieved if only McConnell had not been sentient.
Cristiano Ronaldo Reportedly Lining Up First Drama Series With Matthew Vaughn, Damian Lewis & Some Big Name Guest Stars
After a disappointing World Cup, it appears that Cristiano Ronaldo has his next project. According to The Sun, the Portuguese superstar is working with Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn on a show about a UK soccer agent starring Damian Lewis and a number of big stars from the sport. Coming from an original idea by soccer […]
Cradle to the Grave
As Sam Moyn has recently argued, "class reductionism" fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.
Pluralistic: How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (27 Jul 2026)
D/Annie Liontas, Sara Nović, Chet’la Sebree and Maria Adelman discuss the literary word’s unacknowledged class system. | Lit Hub In Conversation On that time Johnny Cash almost started a riot at California’s most infamous prison. | Lit Hub Music Why
The Saudi nuclear farce and governance by whim and meme
Trump has made the word of the US government worthless.
Prime Video Inks Multi-Year Deal With CJ ENM Bringing More Than 100 Korean Shows To India
Prime Video India has signed a multi-year deal with Korean studio CJ ENM through which a slate of 26 new titles will be rolled out in India over the next two years, alongside popular titles from CJ ENM’s existing content library. The collaboration spans more than 100 titles in total and is an extension of the […]
Stop Chasing New Models. Build Once and Access Them All.
Swapping LLMs sounds simple, but managing separate SDKs, credentials, and billing turns model evaluation into an infrastructure headache. Otari solves this with a unified gateway, decoupling application logic from providers so teams can seamlessly route traffic, test new models, and control spend.
Bill Oddie Dies: British TV Presenter & Birdwatcher Was 85
Bill Oddie, Britain’s most beloved birdwatcher and wildlife TV presenter, has died aged 85. His death was confirmed by his agent, David Foster, in at a statement carried by several British news outlets. “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Bill Oddie, the country’s best-loved birder. “Bill was a multi-talented celebrity […]
The Time Johnny Cash Almost Started a Prison Riot at San Quentin
“I think this is a very important thing: to give a man some hope in prison, to give a man some encouragement to be a better citizen while he is there and if he is a better citizen, while he
On Reckoning With the Literary World’s Unacknowledged Class System
When I walk into a room full of writers, I’m often struck by the sense that I don’t belong. I’m an immigrant, first-generation to college; my father was a welder. Swearing was the third language we spoke at home—after English
This Week in Literary History: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is Published in The Atlantic Monthly
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. Robert Frost’s most famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” “has confused audiences literally from the beginning,” David Orr has written. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward
Why Black Americans Need Reparations Now
As a Haitian American, I have heard stories of resistance from my elders starting at the tender age of three. The accounts were often told through fairy tales, but as I grew older, the message became more direct. By late
What Barriers Do Women in Science Face When Trying to Publish?
I went to high school and college at the height of the women’s liberation movement, in the 1970s. We knew that sexism was a problem—but we were solving it. My father, the center of our household, encouraged me to become
“Copernicus Is Dying”
It seems impossible, but the lanky Petco cashier with the shiny blond pompadour insists that he’s telling the truth. “A shortage?” I ask. He nods. “All of them?” He nods again. I look at his name tag with the idea
Benedict Cumberbatch Says Paramount-Warner Deal Is A “Calamity” That Must Be Blocked
Benedict Cumberbatch has co-authored an op-ed with Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong in which the actors argue that Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery should be blocked in the UK. In The Guardian article, headlined ‘A TV and cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act now to stop […]
"Charitable Giving" Isn't What You Think
And the gusher of it is just beginning
HTTP Message Signatures with curl
The recently published RFC 9421 describes how to do HTTP Message Signatures, and starting just now, curl experimentally supports them. Message Signatures The specification describes this as a mechanism for creating, encoding, and verifying digital signatures or message authentication codes over components of an HTTP message. It is a way to verify that selected parts … Continue reading HTTP Message Signatures with curl→
Netflix India Boss Monika Shergill Eyes Global Format Adaptations After “Captive Reality” Series ‘Lock Upp’ Hits 50 Million Hours
EXCLUSIVE: Is Netflix eyeing an Indian version of Love is Blind or Too Hot to Handle? In an exclusive interview with Deadline, Netflix India VP of Content Monika Shergill revealed her service was working on developing Netflix-owned unscripted formats locally, without revealing their identities. “We are working on a couple of very interesting, big global […]
The new yet familiar CodePen 2.0
CodePen v2 is now released! Because I co-host a podcast with Chris I’ve had an up-close perspective at this monumental effort over the last five years. I know how much work has gone into this release and I applaud the team for hitting the finish line.
At the crux of the new experience is the new and improved editor. When you first launch into the v2.0 editor, your first response will probably be “Who moved my cheese!?” New is always uncomfortable, but there’s a fix for getting back to the old familiar UI…
Okay, now hit ⌘ + U or CTRL + U again, because what’s in the sidebar are all the new features and favorite parts I want to talk about.
An entire file system
The first thing you’ll notice when entering the new CodePen editor is a file explorer. That’s right! CodePen is breaking out of its three-file constraint and allowing you to build entire multi-file and multi-page websites.
A not-so-secret feature of CodePen was that you could mimic a file system in CodePen by using other pens as external resources, but referencing your custom reset.css by importing <user>/pen/<slug>.css wasn’t the JS module-like experience you come to expect from the modern web.
But gone are the days of 2,000 line JavaScript files, I can now import foo from './foo.js' like TC39 intended. I must admit that my more complex ideas were hitting the limit of what was comfortable to type into a tiny textbox. But now creating a folder of web components or JSON data files to loop through is easier than ever. I can build multi-file and multi-page prototypes (e.g. view-transitions! service-workers!) all without spinning up a local dev server. Digging up an old CodePen is much easier than finding an old folder on an old hard drive and it’s arguably the easiest way to put a custom webpage up on the internet right now.
Without drawing too many comparisons to competitors, CodePen at times felt a bit underpowered when compared to other online code editing environments. But those other services that spin up an entire Node.js Docker so that I can build my <fart-button> always felt like overkill to me. CodePen now occupies not just the entry-level and middle ground, but almost the entire spectrum of needs that I have for prototyping and small site building.
Versioning and deployments
Who amongst us hasn’t totally beefer’d up a good pen before?
Ruining an otherwise quality pen to idea creep or losing work to a browser refresh is always a possibility with online editors. It’s typically not world-ending for me and my … ahem… spartanly styled pens, but for sure results in a couple choice swear words. I imagine trending tab experts and newbie beginners find this even more frustrating. But now pens have a version history so you can roll back if necessary.
The deployments are better now too. Sometimes when building an idea, I like to send the “chromeless” version of the pen to non-developer friends or partners/clients to avoid overwhelming them with CodePen UI. This is also useful when debugging on your phone. The debug/ URL worked, but if you’ve ever URL-hacked a private pen URL on your phone you know how un-fun that is. But now I can deploy the pen, get a nice codepen.dev URL or point my custom subdomain at CodePen’s DNS, and Airdop that to URL myself. A small but meaningful quality of life improvement for me.
Blocks
My favorite feature of the new CodePen is Blocks. One of my biggest gripes with modern web development is the amount of tooling it takes to get started. We’ve made it so damn complex to make a webpage, no wonder AI is so popular.
Blocks adds a visual layer to the opaque world of preprocessors, linters, and build processes. CodePen takes those processes and stack them on top of each other to form a predictable pipeline that you can easily visualize and understand how the sausage gets made. Imagine how this must feel for beginners compared to a dozen config files littering the root of your repo! Web development demystified.
I’ve wanted a UI like this for build processes for a long time: Gulp, Webpack, Vite, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps Pipelines… I feel every service would be better if it had a Blocks UI. Like Scratch, but for servers. Experienced developers might even be less afraid to operate on their build tools if they had something like this.
I think CodePen has created something special here that most people won’t fully understand. A perfect fit for their beginner audience as well as their professional audience who don’t want to copy, paste, and manage config files to build a simple website or goofy pen.
A simplified but more powerful UI
A whole new product with a new file-system, versioned deployments, and customizable build chain smooshed in… yet the UI still feels familiar. It’s rare for products to evolve so intuitively. There’s more features, but everything feels more predictable. In the “classic” CodePen editor you’d have to surf through a handful of dropdowns and modals to tweak your settings and now a lot of that configuration is automatic. You want Sass? Add the .scss file extension. You want TypeScript? Add the .ts extension. CodePen will add all the Blocks for you with a default config that works.
It feels like all the options are all co-located in the right place now. And the new omnibar search box is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, exposing most the features you’d need without all the hunting and pecking. Expanding the capabilities of the product while maintaining simplicity deserves some applause and I feel the team at CodePen walked this delicate line and succeeded.
A couple final thoughts
I’ve said it before (and I’ll say it again) I admire the team at CodePen and –despite my obvious biases– I think they’re one of the best product teams out there. In their podcast they give you a rare, honest, behind-the-scenes look at how they are thinking about and building their product. No one even comes close to their level of transparency.
Probably my favorite part of Team CodePen is that they’re not afraid to tackle the hard work and pay down technical debt when needed. They stay small, sweat the details, and take their time. There’s no back-pressure from venture capital to move fast and break your things. In my view it’s software done right.
Because I was part of the beta, I’m already using the hell out of CodePen 2.0. I’ve built dozens of big ideas (a browser-based camera, a service-worker based declarative shadow DOM solution, a half-dozen in-browser AI chatbots, a minimum viable design system, and more) that would have been either cumbersome or next-to-impossible in the previous editor. CodePen 2.0 is already enabling me to build bigger, better, and more complex ideas without leaving the comfort of one of my favorite applications on the whole entire internet.
So thanks, CodePen, for the huge upgrade and congrats to the team on the launch. 🎉
July 26, 2026
From the time he took office in January 2025, Trump and his cronies have not simply challenged laws or constitutional provisions.
‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Writer-Director Reveals Sequel Has Been Written, Hasn’t Been Made For “Financial Reasons”
After three years, Dungeons & Dragons has another campaign in store for fans of the 2023 movie… if it can just get the greenlight. Jonathan Goldstein, who co-wrote and co-directed Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with John Francis Daley, revealed at Comic-Con that they wrote a sequel to their 2023 adaptation of the tabletop […]
Ryan Reynolds Thanks ‘Deadpool’ Fans For “Unapologetic Devotion” After Undercover Comic-Con Appearance – Watch Video
With Deadpool regenerating for a fourth blockbuster outing, Ryan Reynolds is already getting back into character as the wisecracking mercenary. After his surprise in-costume appearance at Comic-Con during Marvel’s Hall H presentation on Saturday, the Golden Globe nominee shared a behind-the-scenes video of his undercover visit with fans as he walked the floor at the […]
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
Updated my install of rss.chat (rsschat.andysylvester.com) to the latest server code to pick up a security patch, everything seems to be running smoothly. It is open to all!
Dylan Mulvaney Responds To Trump’s WHCD “Diss Track,” Feels Like “The One That Got Away” For MAGA Men
More than three years after sparking conservative backlash with her Bud Light social media partnership, Dylan Mulvaney was as surprised as anyone to hear her name in Donald Trump’s mouth at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Counting “four times” the POTUS mentioned her name in his speech on Friday, the Broadway actress, TikTok personality […]
‘House Of The Dragon’s Benjamin Evan Ainsworth Discusses Daeron Targaryen’s Choices & Future Motives As Season 3 Hits Home Stretch
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details from episode 6 of House of the Dragon on HBO. With only two episodes left of the third season of HBO’s House of the Dragon, the pieces are falling in to place for Ormund Hightower (James Norton) as Daeron Targaryen (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) watches in the wings. In the […]
Turning our OpenAPI schema into a bug finder
How Buttondown uses Schemathesis fuzz tests to turn its OpenAPI contract into a practical API robustness check.
Monday 27 July, 2026
, updated:
Bike park… …well, maybe not. Quote of the Day ”Civilisation is a thin film across an ocean of chaos”. Werner Herzog Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Ry Cooder and David Lindley | Jesus on the Mainline Link My … Continue reading →
Today was a good day for sessions in Belfast!
Today was a good day for sessions in Belfast!
Sunday caption contest: Blockage
, updated:
And last week's winner
How Democrats can win over more midterm voters
, updated:
YouGov finds most holdouts on the generic ballot are low-turnout voters and indecisive Democrats
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
Many of the questions about RSS.chat center on how do we make this centralized. I don't want this, I want feed readers to add some features and then we can connect these systems together in a million different ways. They just have to think differently about subscription lists. Not radically different, even.
Confession: I still drive a Tesla.
Wanted to switch but nothing I tried is as great a driving experience the Model Y is. Instead I've had a lot of fender benders and haven't gotten any of them fixed.
Backed into a charging station.
An act of terrorism (exaggerating) but I caused it, and paid for it, dented the well over right rear wheel.
My right side mirror was pulled off its foundation hitting the side of the garage, used duck tape to keep it going. A new one costs $1000. I like the look.
A deer ran in front of my car and took out the panel over the right front wheel. I was able to force the metal back in. A friend saw the car and said "hit a deer eh?" Yup.
I don't know if it accomplishes anything but to me it feels like retribution of a sort.
More on Trotsky and interpretation of Trotsky
, updated:
A quick reply to Alex Callinicos
Sunday evening session in Belfast
Sunday evening session in Belfast
Universal Responds To Online Leak Of ‘The Odyssey’ With Takedown Protocols
Christopher Nolan has taken pains to urge fans to see The Odyssey in Imax if they want the best experience. After all, his film was shot entirely in that format to optimize the moviegoing experience. Imagine the director’s chagrin, then, when a high-quality version of the film was leaked on X this weekend, reportedly garnering […]
‘Transformers: The Movie’ Getting Fall Theatrical Re-Release From Hasbro & Fathom – Comic-Con
The 1986 animated Transformers: The Movie is getting a 4K theatrical re-release from Fathom Entertainment in partnership with Hasbro on Sept. 17. The Nelson Shin directed movie featured the voices of the late Orson Welles, Robert Stack, and Leonard Nimoy respectively in the roles of Unicorn, Ultra Magnus, and Galvatron. Tickets go on sale on […]
‘Black Panther’ Actor Winston Duke Reveals What He Told David Jonsson About Taking On The Iconic Role
At San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, director Ryan Coogler took the stage to announce that not only will Black Panther 3 hit theaters on December 15, 2028, but David Jonsson will play T’Challa’s grown son who was introduced at the end of Wakanda Forever. Jonsson had a role in last year’s The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence. Coogler specifically mentioned that […]
Our Wins Of The Week
, updated:
This week had some welcome news for Democrats as they seek to regain majorities in Congress this November.
‘The Odyssey’ Holds Strong Worldwide, Cume Near $640M; ‘Toy Story 5’ Third Pic YTD To Cross $1B WW – Global Box Office Update
Refresh for updates…Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is just laying siege and holding the box office fort at the domestic box office, but worldwide. OMG, the second global weekend was $215.3M, a -18% dip from the Universal pic’s opening which was $263.7M WW. Of that global total, Imax is driving $140M or 53%. Soon, Universal can […]
Week Nine in 250 to 250
, updated:
This was the ninth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Another Sunday session in Belfast
Another Sunday session in Belfast
Rollday
, updated:
Well, two of us know With Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It, Limited Edition Jonathan does a better job of saying what I've been saying about where Personal AI is going, most recently here. Thoughts Dana Blankenhorn on The Biggest Shitpie. Steven K. Roberts on Archiving Meets AI. Cory Doctorow: Dealing […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
New docs for the browser JavaScript interface to the RSS.chat API.
Local radio lives in Burlington and Graham
, updated:
WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in […]
Guest Newsletter: Five Books - Wilderness And Machu Picchu
, updated:
Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme
Rallying For Troy Jackson In Maine, Encouraging Generic Ballots Polls, Big Wins For Katie Phang And The Dem AGs
, updated:
Happy Sunday everyone.
‘The Odyssey’s $87M Second Weekend A Record For Christopher Nolan, Besting ‘Dark Knight’ – Sunday Box Office Update
SUNDAY AM WRITETHRU: Universal’s The Odyssey remained muscular after a near $26M Friday and $34.6M Saturday, posting Christopher Nolan’s best second weekend ever at the domestic box office with $87M. That’s also, as we told you before the weekend got underway, the best second weekend for a R-rated movie after Deadpool & Wolverine ($96.8M) and […]
Sunday session in Belfast
Sunday session in Belfast
rss.chat isn't really a product
It's what we used to call a coral reef. A deliberate attempt to get people to do more than it does. To think about the web the way it was meant to be thought of, as small pieces loosely joined, with the emphasis on small. If you have formats and protocols that connect the pieces, you can make anything you want out of the pieces. If we don't try to capture our users, instead we try to serve them.
This all sounds nice in theory, I imagine, but -- there's a practical side to it. I wrote about this in a comment in a thread on rss.chat repo. The key point is this, you can do what you want with the data. And if you want to build new data that includes this stuff, go right ahead. RSS is extensible. It's all about working together in a web of people, because you can't have a web of pages if the developers aren't web'd.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
Scott Hanson has a new service that connects RSS.chat to WordPress.
Con Stories: SDCC Saturday 2026
We had an amazing time at SDCC on Saturday! Like Friday we experienced so many fun activities we had to share a few of our most memorable moments with you all. Here are some of our highlights from the con. Dungeon Crawler Comics Every year we like to get original art from our favorite artists.... Continue Reading →
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Frantz 1988 = Alison Frantz, The Athenian Agora XXIV: Late Antiquity: A.D. 267-700, with Homer A. Thompson and John Travlos, The Athenian Agora 24 (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1988), https://doi.org/10.2307/3602001.
A note to people who run WordCamp conferences. Please, there should be a feed for each event, and as you ramp up to the big day, the news should flow faster. Help people find other people to network with. Get ideas out that aren't in the conference program.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
Export Updates 2026-07-26:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
6 new and 51 updated places. 5 new and 20 updated linked data sidebars.
Inside Trump’s Stealth Trick to Rig the Census—and Congress
, updated:
The administration’s latest power grab is disguised as boring technical guidance.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Staab 2025 = G. Staab and M. Eisenberg, “Councilmen (Bouleutai) and Veterans as Executives: Two Inscriptions from the Polis of Hippos and Its Territory,” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 236 (2025): 159–65.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Keenan 2025 = J. G. Keenan et al., “Papyrus Fragments from En Boqeq, Israel,” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 235 (2025): 191–206.
The Logic Behind Trump's Saudi Nuclear Deal, Applied to Other Situations
, updated:
TBR Sunday Read
Teaching LLMs to Update Beliefs for Efficient Long-Horizon Interaction
Overview of ABBEL compared to traditional recursive summarization. Beliefs replace the full interaction history as the agent’s working context, and belief grading improves performance bysupervising the contents of each belief state..
As task horizons grow, LLM contexts can’t scale forever. Self-summarization enables concise, interpretable contexts, but at a significant performance cost, especially for human assistance domains where high quality data is scarce, e.g., collaborative code generation. We address this with ABBEL: a framework that isolates and supervises the information content of summaries in the form of natural-language belief states.
Motivation: the cost of recursive summarization
For language models to effectively assist with increasingly complex tasks such as software development, they must be able to interact with us over hundreds or even thousands of steps. For such long tasks, it is impractical to keep the history of the entire interaction in context. The heuristic approach used so far has been summary generation, sometimes called context compaction. For example, Cursor’s latest model composer 2.5 uses compaction during training for improved performance ( Cassano et al., 2026). Alongside composer, Grandcode ( DeepReinforce et al., 2026), the first system to consistently beat all human competitors in online coding competitions, despite using one of the newest efficient attention models (Qwen 3.5-397B),1 still found it necessary to employ context summarization.
But compaction has a problem. Despite seemingly low performance gaps in benchmarks, model servers like Cursor continue to recommend that users avoid compaction with their coding assistants in the middle of a task ( Heule et al., 2026).
To understand why, see below the performance over RL fine-tuning of a Context summary model compared to full context models in Combination Lock, a Wordle-like game that allows up to 16 guesses.2 Though both model types improve over the course of training, the summary model never closes the gap.
Fig. 1: Average attempts to guess the target word on Combination Lock over RL fine-tuning (lower is better). Context-summary policies improve with training but do not close the gap to full-context policies.
Making models self-summarize while completing a task increases the complexity of the learning problem. While this could typically be addressed by training with more data, the performance degradation observed in real world interactive settings likely arises from the difficulty we have in creating and using human simulators effectively to generate high quality training environments ( Lin et al., 2025, Tomlin et al., 2025). Thus, the better you can learn to summarize on the limited and messy multiturn interaction trajectories you can collect, the better off your model will be for downstream users.
ABBEL: acting through belief bottlenecks
Fig. 2: Autoencoder-inspired belief grading. The model encodes prior belief, action and observation (bt, at, ot) into posterior belief bt+1 and is rewarded for how well select information from the history can be reconstructed from that belief.
To address poor learning efficiency, we isolate the summary generation task. Drawing inspiration from recursive Bayesian estimation, we formulate summaries as belief states, which we periodically prompt the model to update based on new information.3
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Fig. 3: ABBEL rollout. Belief updates from the latest observation alternate with action selection conditioned only on the current posterior belief.
Belief grading
We then extract and supervise the contents of the belief states (Fig. 2, Belief Grading). Belief grading can be thought of as adding an auxiliary RL task, using heuristics designed to capture what makes a good belief as the reward. An example heuristic for coding could be shorter is better, but closer to being able to reconstruct the git diff is also better, so balancing these would yield a good belief. In domains where good heuristics are hard to define, we propose a general autoencoding-inspired grading function, which treats the current language model πθ as both encoder and decoder of information from
the history, and the belief states as the codes. We grade each belief bt+1 by how well it can be used by the current model πθ to reconstruct the most recent observation ot:
Eq. 1: Reconstruction grading objective. Here bt+1 is the updated belief, ot the latest observation, at the action just taken, bt the prior belief, pI the task prompt, and πθ the current model. Higher grades reward beliefs that retain information needed to decode the latest observation.
What do we gain by grading beliefs?
Collaborative coding on CollabBench
We demonstrate the utility of belief grading in our motivating domain of human-driven assistive coding, with the CollabBench environment from Sweet-RL ( Zhou et al., 2025).
Fig. 4: CollabBench collaborative coding environment. The agent asks clarifying questions, then submits a function scored against hidden unit tests.
We see that with the general reconstruction-based belief grading function we reduce the performance gap from full context models by about 50%, and train in 50% fewer steps compared to training models to summarize without belief grading (no BG). After training, ABBEL still uses significantly less memory than the full context setting, as measured by the peak context token length (Peak Tokens).
Fig. 5: CollabBench results. With reconstruction belief grading, ABBEL-rec-BG recovers about half the gap to full context while using fewer peak tokens, and trains in 50 steps instead of 100.
Combination Lock
Additionally, in CombinationLock, we demonstrate that ABBEL with a belief grader which leverages domain knowledge (by computing useful statistics over the history and checking that they can be reconstructed from the belief state), enables even higher learning efficiency than full context (FULL CTX) models.
Fig. 6: Average attempts to guess the target word on Combination Lock (lower is better). With domain-knowledge belief grading, ABBEL approaches or exceeds FULL CTX in this setting; without belief grading, learning is slower.
Multi-objective question answering
In a third environment, multi-objective question answering (from MEM1 Zhang et al., 2025, a recent work which performed end-to-end optimization in a modified version of typical recursive summarization), we demonstrate the utility of isolating belief states from reasoning, by showing that a Peak Belief length Penalty (more details in paper) significantly reduces memory usage with minimal performance degradation, unlike is commonly observed when penalizing reasoning lengths ( Arora et al., 2025).
Fig. 7: Exact-match score and peak memory versus number of objectives in multi-objective QA. ABBEL with a peak belief penalty (PBP) maintains comparable performance while using less memory than MEM1 and ABBEL without PBP in this evaluation.
Related work
Alternative solutions to managing long contexts involve different tradeoffs, and are worth considering depending on the requirements of a deployed system. Context compression methods generate dense representations which, while computationally efficient, sacrifice human-understandability ( Kontonis et al., 2026, Eyuboglu et al., 2025, Gupta et al., 2025, Chevalier et al., 2023, Deng et al., 2025, Deng et al., 2025, Bulatov et al., 2022). Hand-designed summarization prompts ( Wang et al., 2025, Örwall et al., 2025, Starace et al., 2025) and pruning strategies ( Jiang et al., 2024) specific to target environments require expert human knowledge and don’t allow an agent to learn what to remember as part of its decision-making strategy. Methods that process long contexts into an external memory store ( Packer et al., 2023, Xu et al., 2025) for the agents or subagents to query ( Zhang et al., 2025) are complementary, as they may benefit from better next context creation through summarization training. We would like to point out some exciting works in the space of general recursive summarization focused on math ( Wu et al., 2026), reasoning with belief generation ( Zhou et al., 2025), competitive coding with a distilled summarization module using similar autoencoding objectives to our general belief grader ( DeepReinforce et al., 2026), and adding continuous features to summaries ( Kontonis et al., 2026).
What’s next for better memory?
Many more possibilities are enabled through using explicit belief states as information bottlenecks for multi-step interaction. You could reward actions based on their effect on the belief state to guide exploration, transmit the explicit belief states for better communication between agents, or even improve user controllability by directly modifying the memories on which the agents’ decisions are based.
Some forms of information, e.g., what a person looks like, are not represented well by text alone. A continuously learning system will also have to capture such information. Additionally, if we want a system to learn to communicate in a brand new language or to play a brand new game better than any person in the world, the skills accumulated over the lifetime of conversations or games must be stored in a very compressed form, essentially taking on the role of the weights of the model itself.
More powerful systems will likely utilize a combination of multiple forms of memory, where the contents of the context may correspond to working memory while other approaches are used for short and long-term memory. How to instantiate these other forms of memory, for instance via test-time training, adapter memories, continuous context memories, or some combination thereof, presents an exciting challenge.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Alane Suhr and Kartik Goyal for advising this research as well as Ethan Mendes, David He, Jitesh Jain, and Nicholas Tomlin for comments on early drafts of this post. We would like to thank the MEM1 authors for their email correspondence and for sharing private reviewer feedback which we found particularly insightful.
Citation
If abbel was inspiring for your future work, please cite us with this! And here is some advice for doing similar research!
@misc{lidayan2026abbellearningnaturallanguagebelief,
title={ABBEL: Learning Natural-Language Belief States for Memory-Efficient Interaction},
author={Aly Lidayan and Jakob Bjorner and Satvik Golechha and Kartik Goyal and Alane Suhr},
year={2026},
eprint={2512.20111},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20111},
}
With newer models the number of tokens till 50% compute spend is on attention gets much larger than 25K. Interleaving linear attention alternatives with full attention as is done with gpt-oss and DeepSeekv4, results in massive flops reductions for the attention computation. For example with DeepSeekv4-Pro (1.6T A49B) it requires nearly 450 thousand tokens to reach the 50% tradeoff point. Grandcode uses Qwen-3.5-397B-A17B a model which hits 50% FLOPs for attention at ~150 thousand tokens.↩
This setting is technically solvable with much more computationally effective tools, but serves as a flexible test bed to study properties of recursive summarization. Bertsimas et al., 2022, showed that an exact solution for the wordle game instantiated with the original vocabulary of the javascript game can be found with dynamic programming, but evidently the general formulation of wordle as a guessing game on K letters with L attempts and some dictionary of valid words and correct words D is NP hard to determine the minimal number of moves required.↩
In practice there is an O(N/K) overhead cost for summary. N is the total number of actions. K is the number of actions till summarization is triggered. This is necessarily true for any summary approach. For ease of illustration this gif uses K = 1. In our experiments, to put more emphasis on summarization weaknesses we also use K=1. In practice overhead is small as K can be chosen to be near the efficient hardware limit.↩
A GTK4 ssh-askpass in Zig
Every ssh-askpass in the _Gentoo_ tree pulls in _X11_ or a full _KDE_ stack,
so I wrote my own with _Zig_ 0.16 and _GTK4_, with hand-written bindings that
keep `X` out of the build.
Sunday thought: When the sleeping giant dances
, updated:
Friends,
July 25, 2026
, updated:
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white.
PBS SoCal Leads 2026 Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards Winners, KVEA & ABC7 Top Newscasts – Full List
PBS SoCal again collected the most trophies at the 78th Los Angeles Emmy Awards, held Saturday night at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, matching its 2025 haul with 8. Also equaling its last year’s tally is KMEX-TV with 7, followed by KVEA (6), ABC7 4, NBC4 (4), Spectrum News 1 and Spectrum SportsNet […]
Bookmarks - llm, ai, library, politics
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
This column explores the ways in which library workers can better align
technology use and instruction in library settings with library values,
through championing the refusal of technologies that conflict with
values like privacy and intellectual freedom. Drawing on experiences
with individual patron instruction, class design, and passive
programming, the author shares practical steps for helping patrons to
understand and fight back against exploitation by digital technologies.
Rejecting the myth that any technology is “neutral,” the column argues
that libraries as values-driven organizations have a role to play in
facilitating patrons’ rejection of technology, just as much as in their
adoption of it.
In the Amsterdam zoo, Bodó outlined two traditions of the internet to
me, ones that he saw playing out in the AI gold rush today. On one side
is the libertarian capitalist tradition, with its roots in Silicon
Valley, which sees the entire corpus of the world’s literature as a
resource to be mined by machines to create profitable subscription
services, automate jobs and concentrate wealth. On the other side is the
anarcho-communist tradition, originating in grassroots mutual-aid
projects in post-Soviet countries, which seeks to collect and preserve
the world’s literature for individual users to read, enjoy and learn
from as they please. “Move fast and break things” versus “move fast and
save things”.
A reference Java implementation of the Gold Rush MARC matchKey algorithm
used by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CoAlliance) to
identify common bibliographic records across heterogeneous library
catalogs.
This repository exists so that other libraries — inside the consortium
and out — can generate matchKeys that interoperate with the Gold Rush
system, or port the algorithm to other languages.
Monopolies of knowledge tend to polarize societies into a mass of the
ignorant and a knowledge elite. Monopolies of knowledge encourage
centralization of power. Those who control knowledge have the power to
define reality.
You have a pile of unstructured documents and need to answer questions
that span them — “who works with people who worked on project X”, “which
vendors are connected to this incident”. No single document contains the
answer. RAG retrieval won’t chain the facts for you. You need a
knowledge graph: entities as nodes, typed relations as edges, so that
multi-hop reasoning becomes graph traversal.
Building one used to mean training a named-entity recognizer on your
domain, training a relation classifier, writing entity-resolution
heuristics, and maintaining all three as your data shifted. With Claude,
each of those stages becomes a prompt.
Hume called it the problem of induction; a catchier name is the No Free
Lunch theorem, although it’s about as far from being a “theorem” as it’s
possible to get. And it is simply this: there is no general, systematic
way to go from observation to understanding.
If you haven’t encountered it before, it’s likely you don’t see what the
big deal is. Don’t we all do this all the time, without even thinking
about it? We do, but we don’t know how we do it, which means we don’t
know how to teach it, how to automate it, or even if we’re doing it
right.
What’s needed is a simple, concrete example which illustrates the idea
without any particular need for mathematical sophistication. I’m going
to give just such an example, show how various algorithmic approaches
fare, and try to explain the unavoidable trade-off at the heart of the
problem
But since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US
tech workers have lost their jobs, according to the tech layoff tracker
Layoff.fyi. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for computer science
graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their
underemployment rate was more than 19%, data from the New York Fed
shows. US tech job postings on Indeed also dropped 36% from 2020 to
2025.
LLMs are a very costly technology, and those costs keep rising as the
companies providing them have to start recouping their investments. They
are not only costly for those who use and explicitly subscribe to these
services. The costs are not only hidden in ‘normal’ cloud and service
subscriptions that cross-finance the ‘innovative new features’ you never
asked for. LLMs are so costly that companies externalize the costs on a
massive scale - on those who don’t use them and society at large.
Increased hardware prices, energy use and environmental damage - we all
pay for it!
AI represents an attempt to industrialize the production of language.
When we hear AI, we shouldn’t fall for the AI peddlers’ narratives of
productivity explosions and mass unemployment. We should think of
Taylorism, of the myriad ways in which capital centralizes knowledge,
measures people, and carves up work in order to maximize its control and
minimize its costs. Translation: minimizing the bargaining power and
income of workers.
On the first run, it will open a QR code in your favorite image viewer,
such that you can link the client as a new device. This will also create
a configuration file at the default config location. For the
configuration directives, see src/config.rs.
Note: The binary cannot be published on crates.io, because it depends on
several official Signal libraries that are not available on crates.io.
Toxiproxy is a framework for simulating network conditions. It’s made
specifically to work in testing, CI and development environments,
supporting deterministic tampering with connections, but with support
for randomized chaos and customization. Toxiproxy is the tool you need
to prove with tests that your application doesn’t have single points of
failure. We’ve been successfully using it in all development and test
environments at Shopify since October, 2014. See our blog post on
resiliency for more information.
As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models,
one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because
they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are
producing.
Claude was a vertically integrated resource, a multi-compiler. Its
ability to work across the stack accelerated and augmented my ability to
make a bunch of decisions at different levels, including about which
decisions were important. (Most individual lines of code don’t make that
cut.) That’s vibe-engineering.
I’d say that, in all the ways that matter, I understand the code. Sure,
if I had to hand-edit it now, there’d be a serious learning curve. But I
won’t have to. And more importantly, I can reason about the system,
share perspectives with my colleagues, and guide agents on future work.
And there’s an enduring artifact that encapsulates the central,
intentional aspects of the design that were important enough to record,
across all layers, and should thus survive bug fixes and code churn.
Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident(opens
in a new window) after they detected and contained an AI agent that
compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more
commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models.
After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was
driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an
even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for
evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark(opens
in a new window) of cyber capabilities.
We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident,
involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding
accordingly. We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help
defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models
are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation
alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the
vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is
complete.
AI Source Verification uses large language models to check whether a
Wikipedia citation actually supports the claim it’s attached to. Click
any reference, and the tool will analyze the source content and tell you
if the claim is supported, partially supported, or not supported.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a 2024 puzzle game developed by Simogo and
published by Annapurna Interactive centered on exploring and
problem-solving across a massive hotel, without prior explanation as to
the player’s whereabouts, identity, or relations. This information is
instead revealed over the course of the game.[2] Likened to classic
point-and-click adventure games such as the Monkey Island series, the
game has been described as “one big puzzle box” by IGN.[2] The game was
released for Nintendo Switch and Windows on 16 May 2024, PlayStation 4
and PlayStation 5 on 3 December 2024, and Nintendo Switch 2 on 23 April
2026. The game was nominated for Independent Game Of The Year at The
Game Awards 2024.[3]
Last Friday, Nashville’s Chuquimamani-Condori did their first interview
in ten years on WNXP. In the interview, they announced that in
partnership with their band Los Thuthanaka that they would release an
instrumental EP and a booklet written in Aymara that tell the story of
the birth of the sun. The EP and booklet are out now. The songs stand on
their own, but having the context and story in English can enhance the
listening experience.
Tom Holland Admits Some Of His Movies Were Hard To Promote “Because It’s Sh*t”
While Tom Holland is proud of his two summer blockbusters, he wouldn’t recommend certain pieces of his past filmography. The actor, whose movies The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day are in theaters this summer, recently admitted that while those press tours have been “really easy,” some of his past films were “shit” and not […]
‘Carrie’ Schools Comic-Con With Prime Video Release Date, Trailer Depicts “Cruelty” Of Modern High School, Mike Flanagan Teases “Big Surprise”
Nothing is scarier than trying to fit in at high school. During a Saturday panel at Comic-Con, Prime Video revealed an Oct. 7 release date for Carrie and the first teaser trailer that showcased all the hair-raising trauma that is in store: from classmates fainting on the iconic gymnasium floor to revealing Carrie White’s prom […]
David Jonsson To Play T’Challa’s Grown Son In ‘Black Panther 3’; Pic Hits Theaters In December 2028 – Comic-Con
Today at San Diego Comic-Con, director Ryan Coogler took the stage to announce that not only is Black Panther 3 hitting theaters on December 15, 2028, but David Jonsson will play T’Challa’s grown son who was introduced at the end of Wakanda Forever. T’Challa comes of age in the new movie with eyes on the […]
‘The Rookie’ Creator Reveals Supersized Season 9 Premiere As Melissa O’Neil Apologizes For Shocking Season 8 Finale Cliffhanger
The Rookie creator Alexi Hawley and the cast, led by Nathan Fillion, made a return to Comic-Con with some news about ABC series’ upcoming ninth season. It started production this week without Fillion, who will join the rest on set Monday but was reunited with his colleagues during the show’s Comic-Con panel Saturday. Hawley revealed […]
Ryan Gosling Unveiled As Ghost Rider At Marvel’s Comic-Con Panel
What was rumored has become reality. Three-time Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling has been named Marvel’s next Ghost Rider. The Gosling movie will come out in 2028, and he’s reteaming with Shawn Levy and Jonathan Tropper after Star Wars: Starfighter. Levy will direct, and Tropper is writing the script again. The latest role keeps Gosling, who […]
lynx --nocolor
I really dislike how the Lynx WWW browser looks on some modern systems. On my SGI it was OK - it simply respected IRIS terminal colors. On modern systems in seems to be full of colors with gray background. Text colors are quite nice but I have disliked the gray background. I have wished to have or black one or transparent one (it a terminal emulator supports transparency).
Working from home
And this is my main tool:
Workflow: Changes and additions
Things are continuously developing or at least changing. For example, my gVim on my GPD Pocket (Ubuntu MATE 18.04) has issues with text encoding. If I create a new file then I everything is OK. But when I save it and re-open it then it en-codes local language characters incorrectly. It is strange because I have been using the same .vimrc/.gvimrc for ages on several Linux machines and I never encountered such behaviour.
Tungsten W + PalmPix
As you may know I do have a Palm Tungsten W. And I als othave the KODAK PalmPix for m5xx devices. So I have almost modern smarphone (jsut 17 years old!) with the (detachable camera).
TRGpro tuning (2)
Just a tiny update this time. I only replaced the broken battery door by unused one (which I have borrowed them from my Palm IIIe).
TRGpro tuning
The PILOT Pentopia Chameleon stylus for Palm III and VI {sup}1{/sup} arrived today. It is a stylus with integrated reset pin and - last but not least - an actual pen. The pen refill is thin and it is labelled "Pilot" but I assume that a thin (non-pressurized) Fischer refill will fit here. This stylus has a bit different shape than the original Palm III pen and its tip is a bit harder but it is usable (I am writing this post with it). It is also little thicker than the original which is actually a plus - it sits more reliable in stylus housing of my heavily used Palms - I lost several styli from my old IIIxe and almost lost one of my TRGpro recently. The {sup}1{/sup} says that it is better for writing than the original stylus but I don't think so. I see no improvement.
TRG Pro: first impressions
The title is all wrong because I extensively used the TRG Pro in the past. But the last time when I synced the TRG was in 2/2016 and then I have been using the original Palm III devices (IIIx + IIIxe) instead of the TRG. I have not wanted to damage or lost my only TRG Pro (which is pretty rare as you may know). Now I have two TRGs so I can use one of them on daily basis, I think.
Standing desk attempt
I'm trying to set up a standing desk in my office. I found a (less or more) space, two older LCDs (the ViewSonic vp171s), then prepared the keyboard and mouse.
‘Widow’s Bay’ Creator Reveals Which Major Character Wasn’t In Original Script: “Burn Every Copy” — Comic-Con
, updated:
As Widow’s Bay gears up for another tourist season, creator Katie Dippold reflected on the show’s evolution at San Diego Comic-Con. During Apple TV’s Hall H panel on Saturday, Dippold revealed that Stephen Root’s Wyck was not originally part of the pilot script, which she has previously said started as a spec for Parks and […]
‘Family Guy’ Sets Annual Halloween & Holiday Specials For Hulu, Kieran Culkin Cast As The Devil
, updated:
Family Guy‘s Halloween and holiday specials are returning exclusively to Hulu for a third straight year in 2026. Series executive producer and showrunner Rich Appel made the announcement at Family Guy‘s Comic-Con panel Saturday, while also sharing a first look atbKieran Culkin (Succession), who will guest star in the Halloween special as the devil. Appel […]
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
, updated:
I created a local viewer for my OPML Zettlekasten file that I created in 2022 and updated posts. The code uses a combination of the outlineBrowser2 and opmlPackage repos from Dave Winer. I will add a repo in my account soon with the setup that I used.
Seth Rogen & Jonah Hill Interrupted By YouTuber While Filming In Venice
, updated:
Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill are working together again, according to a viral clip of a YouTuber crashing their Venice Beach set. In a video posted Friday by Yung Mooch, the vlogger ran up to Rogen and Hill while they were sitting on scooters, filming a scene from an upcoming project. “No! We’re working,” Rogen […]
‘Neuromancer’ Teaser: Callum Turner Introduces First Look At Apple TV Series Based On Cyberpunk Sci-Fi Novel At Comic-Con
, updated:
Callum Turner surprised the crowd at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday as he introduced the teaser for Neuromancer. During Apple TV’s Hall H panel, the BAFTA winner appeared via video to greet fans and share the first look at the cyberpunk sci-fi series based on the 1984 William Gibson book, premiering January 22 on the […]
‘Dark Matter’ Season 2 Trailer Debuts In Hall H At Comic-Con, Teasing Endless Possibilities With The Box
, updated:
Dark Matter has descended on Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, debuting the trailer for Season 2 of one of Apple TV’s science fiction shows, premiering August 28. “Jason Dessen, quantum physicist,” an intimidating voice opens the teaser clip, which con-goers got to experience in the San Diego Convention Center’s biggest auditorium. Someone is […]
‘Matchbox: The Movie’ Trailer: John Cena & Jessica Biel Run From CIA In First Look At Mattel Adaptation Of Classic Toy Cars — Comic-Con
, updated:
John Cena is taking on another fast and furious franchise in the first look at Mattel’s action film take on the Matchbox toy cars first released in 1953. On Saturday in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, Apple TV and Mattel debuted the first trailer for Matchbox: The Movie, premiering Oct. 9 on the streamer, […]
Saturday session in Belfast
Saturday session in Belfast
@Robert's feed at BlueSky
This post encapsulates some concepts and I intuitively have been doing by writing first for my Pi. The Marginalia post put words to the practice I failed to articulate. www.marginalia.nu/log/a_139_hdd/https://words.in
On Errors
, updated:
As I write this, I’m fortunate enough to be on Oahu, looking across Turtle Bay at the Opana radio station.
Earth to Southwest (and every other service company): make your surveys about your service, not just personnel facing customers
, updated:
Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight: And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking: I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way […]
Calm Technology® Workshop Report - AXIS Gallery Tokyo
, updated:
The "attention economy"—a business model that monetizes user attention itself as a resource—has long been the standard in Silicon Valley. But now, the backlash is approaching a critical point. Criticism of the "dark patterns" that encourage addiction has led to discussions about regulation, and calls for a new relationship with technology are beginning to rise from within the industry itself.
Maine Picks A Senate Nominee Today, The DNC's Early Primary Calendar Is Set, Whitmer Endorses Stevens In Michigan
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Some new ads in North Carolina and Wisconsin too.....
Ogham And Hildegard
, updated:
Writing of lasting value
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
Background: the Israeli press has turned a settler terrorist that got gunned down as a victim that was merely hiking.
1,500 curl authors
, updated:
It takes a village to make curl. A rather big village. I have not been a solo maintainer of curl for a long time and I don’t even do half of the commits anymore Since today, the curl git repository holds the accumulated efforts from 1,500 separate and named individuals. Only 4.5 years since we … Continue reading 1,500 curl authors→
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Example code is not expected to be bullet proof like production code, and where covering different cases make it harder to follow they should not be there.
Can data collectives help strengthen vulnerable cultures in the face of AI?
, updated:
"Data collectives and cooperatives, which let creators control the collection and distribution of their data, are emerging as preferred alternatives to big tech companies."
Here's an example app that implements a simple blog builder for my recent posts on RSS.chat. We were thinking about doing this as a project for Claude and myself but decided it would be more fun to let devs see what they can do here. :-)
We had so many amazing con experiences on Friday, but one experience stood out from the rest. In our quest to try and reach 1k Instagram followers we decided to giveaway 1 3D printed magnet per 1 follow. We shared our goal on our con backpack hoping we’d get interest. And it worked! While in... Continue Reading →
How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product. They are free to stay where they are and still get the benefit. People choose your product because it’s better for what they’re doing, or it feels better now, or whatever. We want the web to be the platform and it's cool because there is no platform vendor.
Jim Carrey Thanks Late ‘The Mask’ Director Chuck Russell For Career “Jewel”
Jim Carrey has paid tribute to his The Mask director Chuck Russell, who died Wednesday at the age of 74. “I consider it a privilege to have worked with Chuck Russell, who during the shooting of The Mask, created an ebullient, childlike atmosphere of wonder and camaraderie on his set,” Carrey said in a statement. […]
Solod 0.3: Concurrency, JSON, more safety
A strict subset of Go that translates to regular C.
Pluralistic: Apple's robo-repo (25 Jul 2026)
, updated:
Today's links Apple's robo-repo: Privatizing the risk premium, socializing its costs. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Printed batteries; Monopoly credit cards; Mapping airport power outlets; EMI loves pirates; Mexican indigenous phone co-op; Sewer cover textiles; Surge pricing v antitrust; Carbon offsets v forest fires; Charter schools as money laundries. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Apple's robo-repo (permalink) It may strike you as weird, but lenders love to lend money to poor people who will have trouble paying back their loans. Obviously, lenders want to be repaid, and obviously the more money you have, the easier it is to settle your debts, but (paradoxically) that means that if you have a lot of money, you expect to pay less to borrow. In other words: because poor people have a higher likelihood of defaulting, their loans come with higher interest rates and worse terms. Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay. The industry term for this is the "risk premium": the riskier a loan is, the more it costs the borrower. Lenders are always seeking the highest possible return on their loan-books, which makes that "risk premium" awfully tempting. Why loan $1m to Elon Musk at 0.5% interest when you can make 10,000 $100 payday loans to non-union Tesla workers on food stamps at 1,000% interest? Obviously, the fly in the ointment here is the risk in "risk premium." The reason the risk premium exists is that poor borrowers have a harder time paying their loans. That can be good, up to a point: if you're Klarna and you're originating loans to people Chipotle lunches on the installment plan, you want your borrowers to miss several payments. Klarna loans are free if you pay them back on time, but if you miss a payment, you're hit with a huge penalty charge and sky-high interest (on top of the principal and the penalty). On a small purchase, penalties and interest can quickly add up to a triple-digit APR. That's where Klarna makes its money: people who miss their burrito installment payments. However: if a Klarna borrower goes bankrupt before they've repaid the principal, Klarna loses money. A successful loan-book of unsecured burrito mortgages depends on the existence of many missed payments and few defaults. "Financial innovation" is often just a project to decrease the risk in risky loans, but without decreasing the risk premium you get paid for issuing those loans. It's a way to eat your cake and have it too: even though you've reduced the likelihood that you'll have to write off your loan, you still charge the borrower as though that risk is unchanged. As with so many aspect of finance, "innovation in lending" is a way to shift value from the financial industry's customers to itself. Remember the subprime crisis? The whole point of collateralized debt obligations and swaps was to offer loans to people with bad credit – even loans they obviously couldn't pay back – without incurring a default risk. Subprime mortgages supercharged the practice of loan origination and resale (where a bank offers you a loan and then sells that loan to someone else, so your default becomes their problem) by splitting the loans into pieces. These pieces were recombined according to complex mathematical formulas that supposedly "proved" that the default risk from poor borrowers had been "offset" by combining them with other borrowers' loans and wrapping them in opaque insurance contracts. Those subprime mortgages came with cheap "teaser rates" – the interest rate you paid over the first couple years – but then the interest payments "ballooned" to farcical sums that borrowers had no hope of repaying. Those farcical sums were the risk premium. When financiers transmuted these high-risk 30-year mortgages into complex derivatives, they were effectively promising their customers a piece of that risk premium for 28 out of the 30 years that the mortgage ran for. But it wasn't all financial engineering: subprime mortgage salesmen could also promise customers that they wouldn't lose everything even after a wave of borrower bankruptcies and defaults. That's because mortgages are secured: they are backed by deeds for the homes the borrowers own(ed). If a borrower goes bust, the lender can repossess their house or apartment and sell it to recover the loan amount. Now, the finance sector did repossess a fuckton of houses after the crash. Foreclosure and eviction became official policy: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Obama that a wave of foreclosures was necessary to "foam the runways" for the banks, so Obama encouraged banks to foreclose on their loans, rather than restructuring them so that Americans could keep their homes: https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/ But even with these foreclosures, lenders and their customers lost hundreds of billions on the subprime crisis. That's because all that subprime lending pushed the price of houses up and up and up, so when the market collapsed, those mortgages were "underwater" – the money from selling the foreclosed homes didn't cover their outstanding loans. Collateralization – backing loans with legally binding promises to surrender some asset if you default – is a way to reduce risk, but it can't eliminate it. Assets degrade: houses burn, cars get totaled, jewelry is stolen. Assets also devalue: a loan backed by bitcoin at $111,000 on the eve of Trump's election will be underwater today with bitcoin at $64,000. This devaluation can also occur when your house's value plummets because Elon Musk repeatedly bombs your neighborhood with flaming rocket debris, or when your Tesla's resale value collapses after Musk throws a string of Seig Heils on national television. The point being that risk mitigation is never risk elimination, but markets have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Partly that's because of risk shifting. A lender who can "securitize" their loans (turn them into bonds and sell them off to investors) can insulate themselves from risk, because the people who buy the bonds are now carrying that risk. So many of our crises come from the intersection of these two phenomena: the promise of reducing loan risks without losing the risk premium and the fact that risk reduction can fail suddenly (or be revealed as nothing more than risk-shifting). The first phenomenon creates vast credit bubbles, the second one pops them. This leaves would-be usurers on an endless quest for new ways to lend money at a premium to poor people while reducing their own risk. You don't need technology to do this – all you need is a captive audience of broke people whom other lenders won't touch. When the US government adopted the racist practice of "redlining" (denying government-backed loans to Black borrowers), they created a market for predatory pseudo-mortgages called "contract buying." Contract buying is like a mortgage, but without the equity: miss a payment and you get evicted, and you aren't entitled to any of the sale price of the house, even if it was 99.99% paid off when you got kicked out. Lenders can tip the scales in their favor by making up arbitrary junk fees, and a smart lender waits until the house is almost paid off before whacking the borrower with a ton of these fees. The borrower misses a payment, the seller repossesses the house and sells it again: https://ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/michigan-wonk-blog/re-emergence-contract-buying-practice-rooted-mid-20th-century Contract lending never went away. Wherever you find a desperate, disfavored group who are locked out of the credit system, you'll find scumbag contract lenders running this scam. Take long-haul truckers, among the most exploited workforce in America. Long before Uber made worker misclassification (treating an employee as an independent contractor) mainstream, the trucking industry was effectively indenturing truckers, exerting more control over their lives than a boss could ever impose on a waged worker, while disclaiming any employer-related responsibilities. Truckers don't get health insurance or sick leave – and they don't get paid if they have to sit at a port for 20 hours waiting to pick up a load. But the exploitation of truckers doesn't stop with mere wage theft. Truckers also "contract buy" their trucks. Their bosses issue loans that let drivers buy their trucks on terms that allow the company to repo the truck after a single missed payment. And of course, bosses have total control over truckers' wages, so a canny boss can wait until a truck is nearly paid off and then stop the driver's wages, forcing them to miss a payment and lose their truck, which can be sold on to the next victim: https://web.archive.org/web/20170616120011/https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/ Subprime auto-loans bring this same profitable arrangement to regular drivers who just need a car to commute, pick up groceries, and shuttle the kids to and from school. A subprime auto-loan often contains the "teaser" and "balloon" rates at the heart of the subprime mortgage bubble: for the first year or two, your car payments are affordable, but then they shoot up to a sum that you can't possibly pay. The lender then repossesses your car, zeroing out your equity, and sells it to another victim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s But the subprime car industry puts a decidedly modern spin on the contract lending scam that has been used to profitably rob so many Black home borrowers and long-haul truckers. Subprime lending's risk-reduction relies on repossession. A subprime car lender doesn't just get rich by charging poor borrowers more money that rich borrowers for shittier, older cars. Subprime car dealers repeatedly "sell" that car to many, many poor people, on conditions that all but guarantee that the borrower will default on their loan and lose their car. This is where tech comes in. Ubiquitous digital networks and computing make it much easier to repo a car. This started with the humble lo-jack, a simple tracker marketed as a way to locate lost or stolen cars. Subprime auto-lenders were early and aggressive lo-jack adopters, because you can't repo a car if you don't know where it is. Installing a lo-jack is much cheaper than paying repo men to drive around looking for the cars you want to claw back, which means that you can sell cars to people who represent worse credit risks, charging a higher risk premium, and still find the car when those high interest rates force your borrower into default. The next wave of automotive usury-tech was a kind of systematic exploration of the entire space between a car that is repossessed and a car that isn't. Some subprime cars are fitted with an extra stereo system that can only be controlled by the lender over a wireless connection. Miss a payment and this secondary stereo turns itself on and starts playing earsplitting threats about what will happen to you if you don't pay up. The only way to turn it off is to make the payment. The next step is remote immobilization: miss too many payments (or violate a lease clause by crossing the county line) and your car just stops working: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/ But the apex of this usury-tech comes from (where else?) Tesla. Miss a Tesla payment and your car can do way more than just immobilize itself and tell the dealer where to get the car – it also unlock its doors, flash its lights, honk its horn, and back out of its parking space when the repo man arrives: https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/ The cheaper the repo, the riskier the loan can be; the riskier the loan, the higher the risk premium. Digital tech makes repo much cheaper, so wherever you find digital tech, you find digital arm-breakers coming up with ways to robo-repo the things you buy. There's India's subprime phone lenders, who pre-install usury-tech on their phones. This is a tool that spies on the phone's owner, building a dossier of the owner's most frequently used apps. When the owner misses a payment, the phone starts disabling the user's favorite apps, working its way up the list to the most indispensable ones: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers It's the digital version of the mob loan-shark who breaks a finger, then your hand, then your arm. The more graduated the threat matrix is, the more payments you can capture. A borrower with a broken finger can get to a pawn-broker to sell their wedding-ring; a borrower with two broken legs has a much harder time. Digital arm-breakers aren't an epiphenomenon of digitization alone. Usury tech only works if the device's owner can't disable it. Remember: a computer is flexible. The only computer we know how to make is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," defined as a device that can compute every valid program. If your phone is running a program that disables your apps, then you can install another program that disables that program. Same goes for your car's lo-jack; the stereo system emitting ear-splitting complaints about your car note; and the immobilizer hooked up to your ignition. That's where the law comes in. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to produce a tool that bypasses an "access control." That means that if a computer is designed to block you from modifying it, removing that block is a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500k fine. DMCA 1201 doesn't distinguish between modifications undertaken for a lawful purpose (changing your printer so it works with generic ink) and unlawful purpose (breaking the locks on a DVD so you can sell infringing copies). DMCA 1201 criminalizes anything the manufacturer dislikes. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." DMCA 1201 is the reason you can't neutralize the digital arm-breakers by deleting or blocking the usury-tech in your car, phone or other device: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon Here's where it gets interesting. Apologists for DMCA 1201 insist that the law is necessary, because it lets device makers lock malicious parties out of your devices. Apple leads the pack here: they use DMCA 1201 to block independent repair of their devices, insisting that this isn't done to extort high fees from you or to force you to throw away and replace last year's iPhone after you drop it. No, Apple does this to protect you – from unscrupulous repairers who might install malware on your phone: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently And Apple says the reason it blocks you from installing apps without using its App Store is to protect you from malicious apps – not to control the app marketplace, where it makes $100b/year on payment processing junk-fees, siphoning off 30% of every dollar you spend in an app: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup Apple's greatest accomplishment isn't technological, it's psychological. Apple managed to convince millions of people that buying products from a multi-trillion dollar corporation with close ties to both Trump and Xi makes them members of an oppressed religious minority, and those members of the "cult of Mac" tie themselves into knots insisting that Apple would only ever use its powers for good: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones But moral behavior doesn't consist solely of resisting the temptation to do bad things – to be truly moral, you must not put yourself in temptation's path in the first place. Morality isn't the strength to resist the siren's song – it's the humility to recognize your own weakness and tie yourself to the mast: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped By giving itself a veto over its customers' choices, Apple deliberately sailed into siren-infested waters, after first putting a gun on every mantelpiece it could find. Now the company is drowning in sin, while spraying gunfire in every direction. Today, the company is getting into the leasing business. Having monopolized its markets and eliminated the possibility of growth by making and selling things, the company is becoming a lender. As a lender, Apple wants to maximize the risk premiums it can charge, while minimizing its actual risk. That's why the new version of iOS – the operating system for iPhones and iPads – comes with software that lets lenders brick your device if you miss a payment: https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/21/ios-27-code-suggests-apple-could-restrict-leased-devices-after-missed-payments/ The code steals a trick from India's subprime phone lenders, giving Apple the ability to "restrict apps and services when payments are missed." It hooks into a "Partner Finance Lock," which allows Apple to sell devices to third-party userers who want to get into the subprime game, promising those customers all the imaginative flexibility a digital arm-breaker could dream of. This was always the trajectory of Apple's decision to sell you a computer that takes orders from its manufacturer, rather than its owner. Apple didn't invent the subprime gadget. It also didn't invent the GUI, the MP3 player or the smartphone. Rather, Apple took those gadgets mainstream – just as it will do with subprime gadgets. Just in time for the affordability crisis, the oil shock, the climate shock, the AI collapse and the tariff shock, the age of the digital arm-breaker has well and truly arrived: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller Hey look at this (permalink) Public opinion on abortion has shifted 4 years after Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade https://theconversation.com/public-opinion-on-abortion-has-shifted-4-years-after-dobbs-decision-overturned-roe-v-wade-285668 Reading “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/ Google hit with $1 billion fine for breaking EU antitrust rules https://www.theverge.com/tech/943866/google-alphabet-eu-dma-fine-search-services-play-store-steering Why Paramount Should Be Worried https://prospect.org/2026/07/22/why-paramount-should-be-worried-warner-bros-merger-ellison/ The Plain Language Guide to Digital Privacy https://shannonguides.com/dl/167c8da8a0ab/digital-privacy.pdf Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Shapeable printed batteries https://web.archive.org/web/20011102112023/https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991069 #20yrsago Monopoly replaces play-money with fake credit-cards https://web.archive.org/web/20070220050926/http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,70131-1228653,00.html #20yrsago HOWTO build a fax out of salmon tins https://web.archive.org/web/20060828010312/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/07/25/build-a-rather-bad-salmon-can-fax-machine/ #20yrsago Power outlets in airports wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060807061721/http://wiki.jeffsandquist.com/default.aspx/AirPower/AirPower #20yrsago How iTunes is bad for the music industry and the public https://web.archive.org/web/20060813140818/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191000408 #15yrsago Ousted EMI boss: pirates are our best customers, suing is bad for business https://torrentfreak.com/former-google-cio-limewire-pirates-were-itunes-best-customers-110726/ #15yrsago Patent trolls and shakedowns: Intellectual Ventures and the “little guy” https://web.archive.org/web/20160810163346/https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/26/138576167/when-patents-attack #10yrsago Textiles printed directly from sewer covers https://raubdruckerin.de/ #10yrsago Mexican indigenous groups form co-op phone company to serve 356 municipalities https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/26/so-long-phone-companies-mexicos-indigenous-groups-are-getting-their-own-telecoms/ #5yrsago Surge pricing violates antitrust law https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#pure-transfer #5yrsago Oregon's carbon offsets go up in smoke https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#murder-offsets #5yrsago Charter schools are money laundries https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#ed-bezzle Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12 https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ 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: "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
Talking Again With Gabriel Zucman
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Oligarchy, wealth taxes, and more
Lit Hub Weekly: July 20 – 24, 2026
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“Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.” Rebecca Solnit on the Odyssey and the Western literary tradition of silencing women. | Lit Hub Criticism From Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to Brad Lander, Steven W. Thrasher examines the
Gender-affirming care for insecure men
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The Low-T call is coming from inside the Pentagon.
Where does mass-scale AI-created software take us?
We are heading for 2º C global warming by 2040, possibly by 2030. And the IPCC and others already pointed out that 2º means the end of civilisation.
So, it's coming anyway... but it's the nature of human fsck-ups that they come in clusters. That's why someone coined the term "clusterfsck".
So, we have multiple human fsckups coming along all together in the mid-2020s, just as we did in the mid-1930s.
Sketchy off the cuff chronology:
Late 1980s...
\* Cheap COTS x86 hardware gets good enough to run free OSes from academia (good)
Late 1990s...
\* Virtualisation forcibly brought to x86 in defiance of Popek and Goldberg (good)
\* Broadband everywhere (good)
Result:
\* Mainstream acceptance of FOSS (good)
Early 2000s...
Result:
\* Cheap mass cloud computing (bad)
Side-effect: financial crisis -- the dot-com crash
Time passes. International travel gets cheaper. Internet facilitates global trade, globalisation, and awareness of inequalities. Only now you can afford to get there.
Late noughties...
Some recovery, new internet startups.
Result:
\* Free mass pseudonymous social media (bad)
Result:
\* Weak poor post-communist régimes spread disinformation online in bulk
\* Cryptocurrencies: imaginary internet money that destroys the climate, facilitates crime, destabilises financial systems
Result:
\* International agreements weakened (NATO, EU, global finance, etc.)
\* Another financial crisis
20-20s...
Same time:
\* Really large scale cloud computing
\* Cheaper travel facilitates a pandemic
\* More money for internet and cloud companies
Result
\* LLMs -- mechanically-recovered text extruders
\* More, better disinformation; further geopolitical instability
Next:
\* Mass scale climate collapse renders large countries and continents uninhabitable
\* Kills cheap hi-tech factories
\* Collapse of bot-slop poisoned tech industry
Result:
War.
comments
What the Hell Is Trump Doing in Iran? | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, July 25, 2026
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With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich
July 24, 2026
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Tony Romm and Brad Plumer of the New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration’s claim last October that it was cutting programs in order to protect taxpayers against waste was, in fact, a lie.
When Will Legacy Media Finally Learn Who Trump Is?
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There were no winners at the reconvened White House Correspondents Dinner
Weeknotes: July 18-24, 2026
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Win of the week: finally sawed off the top of the apple espaliers that had grown up over the past couple years (should have done it a month ago but so it goes) Looking forward to: blueberry picking sometime soon Stuff I did: 0 hours consulting — both my meetings got cancelled 3 hours business […]
No body day
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Let’s have her sing a country song about life in the uncanny valley Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m sure she’s not. Convince me otherwise. Nothing personal. Yet. Mozilla’s The State of Open Source AI is required reading. It makes a great case for open […]
Donald Trump Delivers Rally-Like Hour Of Rehash In White House Correspondents’ Dinner Speech
Speaking at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Friday, Donald Trump delivered an hour-long speech blending shopworn rally material with a string of leaden one-liners. He was making his first appearance as president at the dinner, which had to be rescheduled last Aprtil after a shooter attempted to rush the ballroom and was […]
Guillermo Del Toro Assures “No Godd*mn AI” Used In ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ 3D Re-Release — Comic-Con
As Guillermo Del Toro brings Pan’s Labyrinth back to theaters 20 years later, he’s sticking to tried-and-true restoration techniques. During Friday’s Hall H panel for the movie’s milestone anniversary at San Diego Comic-Con, the 3x Oscar winner reinforced his stance on using “absolutely no goddamn AI” in the 3D re-release, which premieres Oct. 9 in […]
‘Spaceballs: The New One’ Invades Comic-Con With Send-Up Of Marvel’s Hall H Panels Of Yore
Just like the beginning of the original Spaceballs, which went really big in that long opening spaceship take that made fun of Star Wars, so did Amazon MGM Studios in its Hall H presentation Friday of Spaceballs: The New One. A la the studio’s presentation of Project Hail Mary last year, they blew open the […]
Friday session in Glencolmcille
Friday session in Glencolmcille
White House Responds After Alan Ritchson Urges Trump “Go To Jail” Over Epstein Files
After Alan Ritchson shared his candid thoughts on the Epstein files, the Trump administration has issued a response. On Friday, the White House shared a statement regurgitating that Trump has been “totally exonerated” in the Jeffrey Epstein case, following Ritchson’s comments seemingly urging the president to “go to jail” over his ties to the accused […]
Your harddrive is probably full
I currently have 17 GB free space on my root drive,
out of 0.47 TB usable space,
that’s 3% free space.
I also have an additional harddrive installed, 12 TB, it has 140 GB free,
which may seem a lot but it’s actually only about 1%.
Your harddrive is probably pretty full too.
Maybe not as crammed, but odds are it’s probably closer to full than empty.
I ran a poll on mastodon and approximately half of the respondents,
counting 81 people in total, had a harddrive that was more than 75% full.
Mermaid diagram rendering
Author flowcharts and diagrams in Mermaid, and Buttondown renders them in the archives and your emails.
Kalshi Threatens Netflix With Defamation Suit Over “Misleading” Prediction Market Doc Trailer
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Kalshi threatened Netflix with a defamation suit over a recent trailer for the upcoming documentary The Prediction Games, premiering Sunday on the streamer. Following a court order requiring the prediction market app block sports-related markets in Nevada, Kalshi’s lawyers sent Netflix a cease-and-desist over footage from the trailer showing traders celebrating their Kalshi earnings from […]
Robert Irvine Calls Food Network “Shameless” For ‘Restaurant Impossible’ Reboot, Saying They’re “Ruining The Legacy” Of Show For Tax Credits
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Robert Irvine won’t be watching Food Network’s reboot of Restaurant Impossible and is sharing his thoughts with his fans. The first episode of Restaurant Impossible: Last Call premiered this week, with Chef Aarón Sánchez and Jen Agg spearheading the series as they help troubled businesses become successful. Many fans took to social media to ask […]
Paramount-WBD Merger Opponents Cheer Legal Delay, Stocks Slide As Industry Absorbs Latest Plot Twist
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After Friday’s delay in the Paramount-WBD antitrust lawsuit, shares of both media companies slid in after-hours trading, foes of the merger exulted and observers tried to process the latest twist in the merger saga. California Attorney General Rob Bonta hailed the agreement, under which Paramount pledged not close the $110 billion deal before June 1, […]
Pamela Anderson Talks New Dark Comedy ‘Rosebush Pruning’, Second Chances & If ‘Baywatch’ Revisit Is In The Cards
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Since her critically acclaimed role in 2024’s The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson’s acting career has been moving in a new direction. With decades devoted to more mainstream roles befitting of the blonde bombshell, Anderson now embraces projects that both challenge and scare her. Up next, she stars in the satirical dark comedy Rosebush Pruning, as […]
Fantasy as a tool of justice
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We Can’t Let the Haters Dispense All the Candy by Charlie Jane Anders “Basically, when you look at the most popular pieces of entertainment in the world, they tend to be pure wish fulfillment. And I don’t think queer creators should surrender one of the most powerful tools in storytelling to be used only by […]
‘Backyard Sports: The Animated Series’ Teed Up With Voice Cast Including Arturo Castro, Tiffany Haddish & More To Return After Franchise Revival — Comic-Con
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Pablo Sanchez and the Backyard Kids have many more adventures in their future. Playground Productions, which has been reviving the beloved video game franchise since acquiring the rights a few years ago, will develop 20, 11-minute episodes of Backyard Sports: The Animated Series, the team revealed at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. And, they’ve got […]
Weird Al Yankovic Says He Turned Down Seven-Figure Riyadh Comedy Fest Gig: “It Makes Me Feel Icky”
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Following Saudi Arabia’s controversial debut comedy festival last year, Weird Al Yankovic is discussing his decision not to join the star-studded lineup. The 5x Grammy-winning parody musician recently revealed that he turned down “seven figures” to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, explaining it would have made him “feel icky” to accept Saudi money for […]
An open letter to David Sacks
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China is closing the gap, but it’s not because we have too much regulation on AI
The REAL Food Stamp and Medicaid Scandal
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The biggest employers in America are paying their employees shite and treating their CEOs as royalty.
Got the chance to see these talented players in action today! It was great having the @wnba.com at Home Court at the Obama Presidential Center for All-Star Weekend. 🏀
Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid Catch in the Falklands
Ultimately, when you install a content blocker extension, you take responsibility for any overzealousness in what they block.
Trump's sweaty summer of floundering
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We discuss how he's down bad and only sinking further.
Getting Real
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Getting Real
While I am on PTO (as I am right now), my mind rarely strays far from Harper.
Perhaps you could call this“poor work-life balance”, but I think otherwise.
I believe that living a fulfilling life is hard, so having one takes effort.
For me, part of having a fulfilling life is to strive for greatness.
Harper has the potential to be great, and I am partly responsible for getting it there.
Therefore, part of living a fulfilling life (for me) is to imagine ways to position Harper so that it can best achieve its potential.
That’s all a complex way to explain why I am reading Getting Real by DHH and Jason Fried while on PTO.
I apologize for all the corporate language.
A few years ago, I read Rework, another book by the same authors.
In short, Rework is a collection of ideas which, taken together, form a set of ideals which must be embodied to build great businesses.
In a similar vein, Getting Real is a set of ideas which, taken together, form a set of ideals which must be embodied to build great web applications.
The two books are structured similarly: As a collection of (exceptionally) short chapters, each containing a single idea or piece of advice. They are both exceptionally fast reads. I do not think that reading both is necessary, but I do recommend that every engineer read at least one.
If you do not have the time (or the attention span) to read either book, there is one idea which, I believe, accounts for 90% of the benefit you stand to derive from them.
That is the idea of mass.
Mass
What is mass?
In physics, mass is the quality of an object to resist acceleration.
The more mass an object has, the more difficult it is to accelerate.
Conversely, the less mass an object has, the easier it is to move.
Why is this relevant to our jobs as software engineers?
If you already know the answer to this question, you’re senior enough to skip this essay.
Our job is to produce products which address consumer demand.
If we do not produce products which address a consumers needs, we are bad at our jobs.
The trouble with this is twofold.
We often do not know what a consumer’s needs. Consumers often do not know what they need. We must use experimentation and iteration to find that information.
Once we have identified consumer needs, we cannot rest. Their needs change over time, so we must change with them.
How does this all relate to mass?
In order to identify a consumer needs and track it over time, we need to be able to change and iterate quickly.
Software and systems with a high mass are able to do this by definition, so to be able to do our jobs well, we need to also address this second-order problem of minimizing our mass.
Reducing Mass
So, I’ve explained how reducing mass results in systems that are easier to change, and systems that are easier to change are better positioned to address consumer’s needs.
How then do we reduce mass?
Here are some off the top of my head, in no particular order:
Don’t worry about making the wrong decisions and focus on making more of them.
Choose to do one thing at a time.
Embrace constraints.
There are several more listed in the books, with far more detail than I can afford here.
As I said before, you should read them.
3 Things You Can Do About the GOP Clown Show in Congress (and Their Wannabe Dictator)
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Even if you’ve been closely tracking all the chaos in Congress this year, it’s hard to keep up with the latest fights and opportunities to influence your representatives.
"The Word I Hear A Lot Is Betrayal" - A New Conversation with Denise Powell, Our Great Candidate Running In NE-2
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NE-02 is one our very best pick up opportunities of the cycle
Iran war escalates. Trump upends Saudi nuclear deal. DOJ withdraws reporter subpoenas.
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Iran War Escalates as Houthi Rebels Attack Oil Tankers in the Red Sea
Podcast Notes: Ed Catmull on David Senra
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview.
(If you like the interview, you should read his book.)
Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups of people working together.
To do this, he would pull people out of meetings, make groups smaller, make them bigger, just constantly work on fine-tuning getting the right people together at the right time with the right feedback (without ego).
Granted he didn’t always do it, but that was his goal. He says:
This is so important to get [these group dynamics right] because this is what our product is based on: getting this group of people to work well together. So paying attention to the dynamics of the room is the job. They’re the ones making the movies. I’m not making the movie. I’m just trying to get them to work well together.
When Steve Jobs came to Ed and essentially said, “We’re gonna bet everything at Pixar on Toy Story, and the same week that Toy Story is released in theaters we’re gonna IPO.” What did Ed think?
I thought it was crazy [laugh] I’ve learned a lot in this process. He was right.
I love this frank exchange and Ed’s ability to go from “I thought he was crazy” to “I learned”.
In a creative endeavor, where so many earlier iterations suck, how do you gauge whether you should keep going? Because to keep going can make you seem a tad crazy, e.g. “This sucks — let’s keep going!”
So how do you know whether you should keep investing in it? Ed’s answer:
What’s your basis for proceeding? For me, the basis was: what’s the spirit of the team? Because we all know it [sucks] but if they’re all working together — they’re laughing, and [doing things] together — then you say, “Let’s keep going. Let’s keep trying to solve it.”
I love this. He didn’t say, “You open a spreadsheet and do a cost analysis.” He said he looks at the spirit of the people working on it.
It really backs up what he said his job is: find and help groups of people work together. His attitude seems to be: a group of people with the right dynamics can solve anything.
Ed talks about Pixar’s willingness to take on hard problems because they believed a hard problem led to better outcomes (because few others were willing to do the hard work):
A hard problem is more likely to lead to an interesting film. If it’s easy, then it’s more derivative.
You know how to write a script, you know what the three-act structure is, you know all these elements of storytelling, and you put together all the pieces and you got a story. Is it a great story? Is it emotional? Sometimes yes, sometimes no […]
It’s fairly easy to come up with something that is mediocre — and it’s cheaper too.
If you take on hard things then you need to spend more time trying to figure out how to be different in what you’re doing. So if you take on a hard problem and you just keep pushing at it, then the fact that it was hard is what is going to make it different.
Stated again for emphasis: “ the fact that it was hard is what is going to make it different”.
And it’s the execution that’s hard, not having the idea:
If you’re going to make a movie about a rat that likes to cook, that is not a slam dunk.
A lot of people want to keep their projects secret, but this is one where you could tell everybody: “We’re going to make a movie about a rat that cooks!”
His point being: nobody can steal that idea and make it good. Execution is everything there. And if you look at it and say, “Well that’s too hard. How could you make a film about a rat that likes to cook?” You’re skirting the hard work, which is exactly what is going to make you different.
Don’t skirt the hard thing. If you do something that’s hard, that’s the differentiation.
Lastly: I love Ed’s perspective on mission statements:
The reason [we never had a mission statement] is because a mission statement is an answer, when typically we should always be asking questions, like “What are we doing?”
His point being: if somebody asks “What are we doing?” and you immediately go back to the mission statement and say, “Oh, well we’re doing this” that’s not good. It’s better to always be questioning. “Are we doing the right thing? Are we going in the right direction?” You should always be wrestling with those questions.
First Look at LM Studio Bionic Introduction Agentic AI is the new in thing, and we see it built into Microsoft Office and Visual Studio via Microsoft’s Co-pilot feature. These allow AIs to edit your documents directly without having to copy/paste from a browser ChatGPT session. The problem with these is they run in the […]
Query JSON, CSV, and TSV Files Using SQL in the Terminal
qo is a command-line tool written in Go that allows you to run SQL queries on structured data. It features an interactive TUI (Terminal User Interface) where you write your query and see results in real time, and it also works seamlessly in Unix pipelines.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Brittain 2022 = Marcus Brittain and Andrew Chaplin, Ham & Doulting Stone Quarry, Ham Hill, Somerset. An Archaeological Evaluation., January 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112467.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Brittain 2015 = Marcus Brittain et al., Excavations at Ham Hill, Somerset, 2011 - 2013. A Post Excavation Assessment, December 1, 2015, https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.101241.
John Gruber (Mastodon): This to me is proof that Apple leadership is suffering from cognitive dissonance over their slide into advertising. They’re conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what makes […]
Golden Gate Application Support Protection
Wojciech Reguła: Looks like moving the user’s TCC db to /private/var/containers/Data/ProtectedSystem/[UUID]/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/ was not the only change in the whole privacy castle of macOS 27. (What btw was a great move as now attackers with full disk access permissions can’t modify your privacy settings)macOS 27 quietly ships a new privacy mechanism I hadn’t seen documented […]
How to Hide an Update in the Mac App Store
Jeff Johnson: Although you can hide and unhide apps in your App Store purchase list, it turns out that hiding an app in the App Store purchase list does not hide the app in the updates list! I honestly can’t figure out the benefit of hiding an app in the App Store. The list of […]
Recording the iPhone Screen With a Mac
Marcin Wichary: This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player? Why can’t I choose the option [“New Screen Recording”] that describes exactly what I want to do? […] It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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RSS.chat worknotes are a feed now. Updated when there's a new feature or fix. Same info is on the worknotespages in the repo.
La casa de la pradera: mirada refrescante a un legado de la televisión
Creadora: Rebecca Sonnenshine. Elenco: Alice Halsey, Luke Bracey, Crosby Fitzgerald, Skywalker Hughes, Kowen Cadorath, Jocko Sims, Barrett Doss, Mary Holland. Episodios: ocho. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la serie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2431250/ La pequeña casa en la pradera (Little House on the Prairie) fue uno de los fenómenos televisivos más queridos de la cultura popular mundial […]
Trump Imposes Enormous New Global Tariffs, His Failed War Keeps Failing, And Dems Get A Strong New Wave Of National Polling
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Blanche still doesn't have the votes - keep calling your Senators everyone! Loud and proud!
Writing And Lean
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Writing of lasting value
Businessing 101
Back when I began freelancing I figured I’d set up a limited company eventually. I guess thirteen years later is eventually. I’ve finally got a local accountant working on company registration. Exciting times! The final push was this Making Tax Digital thing from GOV.UK. […]
Dear podcast client devs
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Podcast client developers -- don't give up like this guy did. Yes RSS is delicious but you all haven't done anything new with it since 2004 or so. No wonder the competition is catching up, they're actually delivering new features while you all haven't done a thing. RSS is like other web stuff, if you want to move forward you have to do things that will help your competitors. Stick your neck out, innovate, and smile when your competitors copy it. There is more to do.
Subscribable subscription lists would allow anyone to maintain a list of great podcasts, curated -- like a mutual fund, or a top 20 list. This has always been the problem with podcasting. Find me something good to listen to now. All the shows tend to repeat. I've heard that cast before, I say as I tell Pocket Casts not to add it to my queue. Discovery needs to be easy. This one feature will give me infinite options. And give other developers, not client devs, to enhance the whole field of podcasting. The user would just tell you which sub service they're using, and the rest is code. And not particularly difficult code.
I want to subscribe to a list that's maintained by people who listen to 100s of casts. And when I get tired of them, I'll fire all my guides and add some others.
This is one step more complex than handling OPML subscription lists for import and export, which you all already do. Now if you don't understand this, and why it's appealing them imho your client deserves to die a honorable death. If your mind is alive, then get with it, and I will help, and btw we can easily create apps that make it easy. We just need nodes on the network whose purpose is to maintain sub lists.
Here's the deal. I really did put together the system that makes podcasting work. Top to bottom. Would it kill you to listen to what I think the next step is? I can't hurt you, and I don't want to. I just want to see the thing that we all created by unwittingly working together, where you have to be overt in the working together to have a chance of surviving the boredom users feel by these products only getting superficial upgrades.
It's time to rock the f'ing boat! :-)
Podcasting forever!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Wainwright 1967 = G. J. Wainwright, “The Excavation of an Iron Age Hillfort on Bathampton Down, Somerset,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 86 (1967): 42–59.
Side effect of being ruled by history’s most stupid emperor:
Update: for the non-Americans wondering, before the emperor’s actions, that number on top was 3.
Con Stories SDCC 2026 Edition – We’re so Back!
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Hello fellow Skkawliens, I’m happy to report that we are back for more fun here at San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) 2026. And by we I mean J-Chan, my bestest better half and SKKAW.BLOG family member 😊, and myself. This year is especially special because this is J-Chan’s first SDCC! And oh wow are we excited... Continue Reading →
Haven’t figured out lighting yet, but I like the idea After struggling for days to make my new Epson FF-680W photo scanner, which does a much poorer job of scanning photos than my iPhone 16, I’m ready for one of these. Welcome to New York AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near […]
Notable links: July 24, 2026
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America's AI dominance is under threat; AI vendors put us at risk; meanwhile, everyone's staying in their jobs for the health insurance.
What To Expect As Donald Trump Attends The Rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Donald Trump is expected to speak around 9 p.m. ET on Friday at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, rescheduled after the association’s traditional April event was stopped due to a shooting as a gunman breached a security checkpoint. Trump had called for a new dinner, and in remarks at an event on Thursday, WHCA President […]
The 2026 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition Topic: ‘A New Axial Age?’
Oscar Documentary Contender ‘House Of Hope’ Secures North American Distribution
EXCLUSIVE: Toronto-based distribution company New Mountain Films has acquired North American theatrical and streaming rights for Marjolein Busstra’s award-winning documentary House of Hope about a pacifist Waldorf school in the occupied West Bank. The agreement was negotiated by Khaled Sabbour, founder and CEO of New Mountain Films, and Esther van Messel and Shiran Shmerling at […]
Armand Assante To Narrate Documentary Feature ‘The Streets of Little Italy: 100 Years Of San Gennaro’
EXCLUSIVE: Armand Assante (Gotti) has joined the feature documentary The Streets of Little Italy: 100 Years of San Gennaro and will narrate the project, directed by Paul Borghese (Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn). Currently in production, the feature-length documentary chronicles the story of how a small immigrant religious procession on Manhattan’s Mulberry Street evolved […]
Film Financiers & Producers Flock To Inaugural African Film Investor Roundtable In Cape Town
EXCLUSIVE: In a sign of the growing momentum around African cinema, the inaugural African Film Investor Roundtable (IFIR) gathered top film investors and financiers involved in the continent’s creative industries in Cape Town this week, alongside a host of regional producers and international experts. Running July 21 to 23, the meeting was spearheaded by Steven […]
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
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Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, Michael Cunningham’s Unsayable, and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Yellow Pine all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) 14
Chris Brown Pleads Guilty To Affray Over UK Nightclub Confrontation
Chris Brown has pleaded guilty to affray following a confrontation in a London nightclub in 2023. According to BBC News, the singer entered his plea at Southwark Crown Court in a hearing that took less than five minutes. The incident took place in a London nightclub in Mayfair. Brown’s co-defendant, his vocal coach Omololu Akinlolu, […]
International Insider: Venice Lineup Analysis; Rebel Wilson Legal Victory; Lisa Nandy, Troublemaker-In-Chief
We’re back again, Insiders. Greetings from Europe, where the traditionally quiet period for the industry feels anything but this year. Jesse Whittock on the buttons. Sign up for the full, expanded Insider newsletter experience here. Venice Line-Up Analysis Studios stay away (again): The summer slowdown may be upon us in Europe and the U.S., but […]
Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in IEEE Spectrum.
Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.
There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you ask a friend to get you coffee, they’ll pour a cup from the pot or buy one from a coffee shop. They won’t bring you a bag of raw beans or snatch a cup from a stranger and hand it to you. You never specified any of this. You never had to...
Weekly Roundup: July 24
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Madison Condon and Luke Herrine on the economics that Law & Economics ignores, Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz on why we should tax AI equity, Matt Bodie on the persistence of shareholder primacy, and Diana Reddy on theorizing discrimination for the bad jobs economy. Plus, two PhD scholarships available at UNSW Law, a set of new papers from the empowering democracy initiative, and Allison Tait on the necrotecture of mass incarceration and luxury apartments.
‘The Deb’ Star Charlotte MacInnes Attacks Rebel Wilson In Appeal Against Court Defeat
The chaotic legal fight over Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut is far from over. The Deb star Charlotte MacInnes has formally appealed after the Federal Court of Australia ruled that Wilson did not defame her in a series of social media posts from July 2024. MacInnes claimed that Wilson damaged her reputation by alleging that she […]
Poll: These Americans say they’d be disenfranchised by Trump’s election law
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Few Americans have heard a lot about the provisions of the SAVE Act. Support declines the more someone hears about it
Quagmire of the Vanities
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Why the world economy is still at risk from the Iran debacle
Lit Hub Daily: July 24, 2026
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Tarot reader Lisa Stardust examines Sylvia Plath’s relationship to her deck. | Lit Hub Criticism How the expectation that “books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects” influences cover design in the social media era.
Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026)
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Today's links AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and melted cups; Austro-Germany's weird tunnels; Health data v Silicon Valley; Amusement parks v load-balancing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. AI solipsists and AI cynics (permalink) As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology: https://www.normaltech.ai/ As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town. In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp: https://gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-centers-you-cant-fight-it-you-have-to-go-with-it-2000790014 This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots. The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us"). None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble? I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/#sirius-cybernetics I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI. This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you." From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings: https://fortune.com/2026/06/13/spacex-stock-index-funds-passive-investing-401k-nasdaq-100-russell/ A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a good wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses hate the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that bosses are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans. This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself very expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give anything for the promise they dangle. Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies: https://web.archive.org/web/20181225035739/https://www.vogue.com/article/goop-jade-yoni-egg-lawsuit-gwyneth-paltrow-vaginal-pelvic-floor-health AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps. AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble is extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in other people's solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people": https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/ (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain – Here's how to do it https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your Trump BBC Defamation Lawsuit Backfires Big-Time—With Subpoenas Coming https://newrepublic.com/post/213372/trump-bbc-defamation-lawsuit-backfires-subpoenas-financial-info Google burning through cash with spiralling AI costs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c235n47g8g8o A laid-off journalist started his own news site. Facebook AI decided he was fake https://eu.indystar.com/story/news/local/2026/07/21/a-blow-to-local-news-facebook-ai-calls-real-indiana-journalist-fake/90983530007/ Washington Still Ignores Airline Monopolies https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/washington-still-ignores-airline Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Stolen, infected computer transmits its location by virus spamming owner's address book https://slashdot.org/story/01/07/25/1510213/tracking-a-thief-via-the-sircam-virusa #15yrsago Çurface: an industrial surface made from compressed coffee and melted coffee cup https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/25/curface-an-industrial-surface-made-from-compressed-coffee-and-melted-coffee-cups/ #15yrsago Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: Android iPad-killer is a poorly thought-through disappointment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/25/why-samsung-galaxy-tab-is-meh #15yrsago Strange tunnels of Austro-Germany https://web.archive.org/web/20120621155245/https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hideouts-or-sacred-spaces-experts-baffled-by-mysterious-underground-chambers-a-775348.html #15yrsago BitCoin alternative: distributed, but not decentralized cash https://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf #10yrsago Bruce Schneier on the coming IoT security dumpster-fire https://web.archive.org/web/20160725221959/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-things-will-cause-the-first-ever-large-scale-internet-disaster #10yrsago Our public health data is being ingested into Silicon Valley’s gaping, proprietary maw https://web.archive.org/web/20170917070322/http://www.nature.com/news/stop-the-privatization-of-health-data-1.20268 #5yrsago Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/25/now-youve-got-two-problems-part-iii/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ 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: "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
MAGA's "pasta pass" talking point is height of gaslighting
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They know better. They're hoping voters don't.
“You’ve Told Me This Joke Before”
It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials. In between, the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s deliverer, or mail carrier set down on my front porch a Cuisinart blender, a fifty-pound bag of
BBC Buys ‘Kabul’ Drama Series About American Withdrawal From Afghanistan Starring The Late Eric Dane
The BBC has acquired the upcoming series Kabul set against the backdrop of the terrifying real-life events in Afghanistan from 2021, one of the last shows to star the late Eric Dane. The Mediawan drama for the European Alliance of broadcasters kicks off as American troops withdraw from Kabul and the Taliban enters the city. […]
A Tarot Reader Considers Sylvia Plath’s Relationship to the Deck
According to Smithsonian Magazine, Sylvia Plath used the Tarot de Marseille deck, which her husband, Ted Hughes, gifted her on her 24th birthday in 1956. It is believed that she also used the Rider-Waite deck. The original Tarot de Marseille
Michael Cunningham on the Question of Scale in Writing
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. I don’t work on an epic scale, though my ambitions run more to epic proportions than I like to admit. It’s a question of focus. I don’t really see
How the Role of Book Cover Design Has Changed in the Age of Social Media
I work in the Art Department at HarperCollins, where I have a front-row seat to the conversations that shape how books appear in the world. What kind of cover art reads as “literary” versus “commercial,” what signals a “book club
Christ’s Craft Store, Hobby Lobby, Wouldn’t Have Survived Its First Year Without the Godless Hippies
One day in 1970, Hobby Lobby’s oft-told origin story goes, twenty-eight-year-old David Green was sitting at a lunch counter in Oklahoma City sharing frustrations with fellow managers. As they imagined what kind of enterprise they might create on their own,
On the Duplicitous Heroine in Wilkie Collins’s No Name
Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) is, to use its narrator’s own words, a “a narrative of dramatic disasters,” an exercise in building a “dramatic world out of a domestic chaos.” It is the story of two sisters who find their
On the Complexities and Contradictions of Diasporic Jewish Identity
In the twenty-first century, the debates about constituting the antisemitic category of the Jews sharpened after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the debates about colonialism, indigeneity and ethnic identity. If one thinks of Jews as
When I grew up we were told not to anthropomorphise animals and I thought it was the right thing to do. But it felt wrong. Much later I read a treatise by Schopenhauer on the foundations of morals and he argued that it all starts with compassion – and more specifically, I remember a point made being the empathy with suffering animals. That is much more in line with how I feel these days. I can watch the birds and some are shy and some are greedy and some are cautious and some are bossy and I think to myself that there is no denying that they have an inner life, a personality. They know when we stop and look at them. They know when they’ve been spotted and they don’t like it. So they know of us as agents. And all of that without going into the stories of animals catching human attention so that humans can save their babies and the like. I’m totally in camp “animals have a soul” so to say.
As if in moments lay plummets down which a puttering soul might stunningly plunge to a sun-splashed terrace in Marrakesh: tea so thick with mint it conjures kelp in a cylinder of sea but for the bees gauzing the top:
The Queer Poetics in Writing About Past and Present Brazilian Politics
For novelist Cris Judar, language and bodies are charged with conventions and social norms, and as such, language and bodies contain within them the potential for social upheaval and change. They are sites of repression, erasure, and enclosure, but also
Christine Vachon, Ewan McGregor & Sarah Brocklehurst Among Names Set For Edinburgh Film Festival’s 2026 Industry Programme
The Edinburgh Film Festival has confirmed the full lineup for the industry programme, which will run throughout the event’s 2026 edition, taking place from August 13 to 19. The programme will begin on August 14 with the EIFF Industry Networking Brunch in partnership with Women in Film and Television. This will be followed by an […]
The Real Reason Trump Subpoenaed The New York Times
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It has nothing to do with national security
Hong Kong International Film Festival Society Appoints Fred Tsui As Executive Director
Hong Kong International Film Festival Society (HKIFFS) has announced that veteran sales agent and producer Fred Tsui will succeed Albert Lee as executive director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society. In his new role, commencing on September 23, Tsui will oversee the Hong Kong International Film Festival and its year-round activities, the Hong […]
LibreOffice 26.2.5 is available for download
Berlin, 23 July 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.5, the fifth 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
July 23, 2026
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I have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what the government should do for its people.
Jon Bon Jovi Abruptly Ends MSG Show Amid Vocal Issues, Will Reschedule: “You’re Not Getting The Best Of Me”
Two weeks into Bon Jovi’s latest tour, the band had to reschedule a stop after Jon Bon Jovi had to end the show early. During Thursday’s Madison Square Garden show, the frontman performed through vocal issues before pulling the plug early, telling the audience that he plans to reschedule the show at the famed New […]
‘Resident Evil’s Zach Cregger & Austin Abrams Tease Film’s Last 30 Seconds, Tricky Camerawork & Potential Fan Favorite Set Pieces
It may be “no sweat” for Austin Abrams’ character Bryan in the latest trailer for Resident Evil, but for writer-director and horror aficionado Zach Cregger, his upcoming adaptation is all blood, all guts and all gory. Co-written with Shay Hatten, Sony’s Resident Evil follows Bryan, a medical courier tasked with delivering an important package to […]
Email ads in the 80s were weird and wonderful lies
Few could define electronic mail, or how to set it up, but everyone agreed it was awesome.
Fri, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together
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Sure do have lots to talk about!
Trump’s Clandestine War
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What he doesn’t want you to know
Collaborative Podcasting for Social Justice in Composition Classrooms
The audio you have just listened to (see above) is only a short excerpt from a collaborative podcast created by a group of students in an upper-level Writing Across Media course at The University of Alabama. In this context, we define collaborative podcasting as a process in which more than two students co-plan and co-create [...]
452: ‘A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint’, With Quinn Nelson
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Quinn Nelson returns to the show to discuss OpenAI’s ChatGPT/Codex “native” app migration fiasco, Siri AI in Apple’s OS 27 betas, MacOS 27 Golden Gate, and the hottest new cell phone of the year, the Trump T1.
Friday 23 July, 2026
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Non-musical chairs I keep thinking that I must do something about these aged chairs, which have stood outside through wind, hail and rain for many years. There’s something touching about their quiet endurance, and now I need to make amends. … Continue reading →
As soon as I received my first Raspberry Pi, I knew that it would be a wonderful platform to bring AI into the physical world. Since the initial hardware didn’t have good CPU support for fast arithmetic, I ended up writing code that ran on the GPU so I could get the speed I needed […]
Adding a backup Internet WAN on my OPNsense Router
AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it".
I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down.
And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with only one high speed wired provider. I may add on my own 5G backup Internet connection in the future, but we're getting off track.
48 hours in Denver
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Last week, we took a quick trip to Denver to catch the Portland Thorns playing the Denver Summit at their second new stadium of the year (in May I visited their first stadium). We caught up with old friends, dined well, checked out Meow Wolf Denver, and caught the game
Thurbsday
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It’s still a bubble In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Giraud 1989 = Demosthenis Giraud, “The Greater Propylaia at Eleusis, a Copy of Mnesikles’ Propylaia,” The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire: Papers from the Tenth British Museum Classical Colloquium, Bulletin Supplement (University of London. Institute of Classical Studies), 1989, 69–75, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43768504.
AP (Hacker News): A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot. […] Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in […]
EU Antitrust Fines for Google Search and Play Store
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Tim Hardwick (Wired): Google was today fined €890 million ($1 billion) by the European Union for breaching antitrust rules with regard to its search and Google Play store services. The European Commission found that Google had broken the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by using its dominant position in the search market to favour its own […]
Google Loses Final EU Antitrust Appeal
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Ryan Whitwam (PDF, Reddit): Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting 4.34 billion-euro ($4.9 billion) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has […]
Apple Loses Masimo Appeal
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Marcus Mendes: Apple’s requests to overturn a $634 million patent verdict and secure a new trial in its long-running legal battle with Masimo were denied. Wesley Hilliard: There doesn’t appear to be any other path for appeal or recourse, as the judge rejected both requests for either a new judgement or trial. […] In the […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Desert Networks = Desert Networks Project, “Desert Networks: Into the Eastern Desert of Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period,” 2020, https://desertnetworks.huma-num.fr/.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Luft 2010 = Ulrich Luft and Adrienn Almásy, eds., Bi’r Minayh: Report on the Survey 1998-2004, Studia Aegyptiaca. Series Maior 3 (Archaeolingua : Univ. Budapestinensis de Eötvös nom., Facult. Philosophiae, 2010), www.worldcat.org/oclc/669738162.
★ The Ads on Apple News Continue to Suck, but at Least There Are a Lot of Them
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The obvious truth is that Apple’s ads just plain suck. They are not good at advertising-based services. And it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not good at advertising-based services, because the incentives for advertising-based services are in direct opposition to the incentives for everything Apple actually is good at.
For me, after ~25 years in the skeptics movement, I think the parallels with supplementary, complementary and alternative medicine are most useful.
I choose that term intentionally: its initials are S.C.A.M. and that's exactly what it is. As Tim Minchin and Alan Kay both noted, "we have a special term for alternative medicine that's been tested and shown to work. It's called 'medicine'."
If it worked, it'd be normal standard clinical medicine. But it doesn't work, and so it isn't.
And yet, SCAM is a multi-billion-dollar industry. People have ostensibly official qualifications like "ND", for "naturopathic doctor", even though that person is not a doctor and can't make you better from any kind of illness at all. Colleges teach it, millions use it, and yet, it does not work.
Which means we need to ask:
1. What does "It works! It's useful!" really mean?
2. How do we know it does not in fact work?
As a handy example, let's look at homeopathy.
Here's a quick list of things widely believed...
\* It's traditional.
It isn't. It was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796.
\* It's a kind of herbal medicine.
It isn't. One widely-used ingredient is duck's liver ("Oscillococcinum"). Ducks are not herbs and neither are their livers. * It's been proved to work. It hasn't.
We can go through the principles and prove it doesn't work even without going into a laboratory.
The principle is, "like cures like." A substance that causes symptoms like a given disease can treat that disease.
Fact: they can't.
Then we make that substance stronger by successive, succussive dilution.
Fact: it doesn't. That's why we say things are "watered down".
Succussive: you have to mix the diluted substance by banging the bottle against a copy of Hahnemann's book. Dude knew how to make money.
Fact: Dilution does not work.
That's why we call things "watered down." It makes them weaker.
Sufficiently high dilutions can be shown by statistics to have not a single molecule of the substance left, but that's OK because "water has a memory".
Fact: water does not have a memory.
We know from the principles it cannot work.
Relevance to AI: we know how the transformer algorithm works. It cannot think. Adding a few feedback loops for more plausible, but much more computationally expensive, answers does not miraculously add thinking, any more than banging a test tube of water and duck's liver magically mixes it better.
But people believe it, so it's been tested. It doesn't work. It doesn't work on people, or in vivo meaning when tested on animals, or in vitro meaning when tested in the lab on cell culture, or in silico which means in computational simulation.
* BUT!*
Most people get better from most things. This is called "reversion to the mean" and if it weren't so the first cold would have wiped out the cavemen.
What it can do, like all SCAM treatment, is make people feel better.
Being treated by a nice friendly doctor makes people feel better. It does not make them better -- it is only a state of mind.
That can sometimes marginally help gravely ill people rally, but only very rarely.
There is also the placebo effect, also much misunderstood.
This makes someone FEEL as if they'd had medicine if they think they've had medicine.
They do not get better. They just feel better for a bit. If they are ill, they remain ill. If they are dying, they still die.
But it might hurt less.
The placebo effect is very strong. Medicine from a person in a white coat works better than form the same person in street clothes.
Very big pills work better than smaller ones... but very small pills work better still, as a tiny pill suggests to people it's a very strong drug.
This is what "But AI works!" really means.
It makes people think they're doing less work -- in tests, they in fact do more, checking and fixing. Unless they don't check or fix, in which case, they are irresponsible fools.
It makes people think it can do amazing things because it can find prior art in its corpus they couldn't find -- or didn't look for, or know how to search for.
It does not save the need for skills.
Experienced practitioners can front-load the work with really detailed prompts which cover exceptions, edge cases, and things that novices don't know about. But the novices don't know that they don't know. (It enhances the illusion of competence. It helps the skilled more than it helps the unskilled, but neither realises, and it prevents the unskilled learning by trial and error. It reduces the supply of skilled workers.)
The reason AI works is the reason that people see faces in slices of toast, as someone said recently.
comments
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Dospěl 2020 = Marek Dospěl, Ostraka and Other Inscribed Material from Bīr Shawīsh, Small Oasis: Excavation Seasons 2005 and 2007, American Studies in Papyrology 54 (The American Society of Papyrologists, 2020), http://worldcat.org/oclc/1197763058.
New NetNewsWire Crash in iOS 27 Beta Has Made Me a Bit Salty
I returned from a lovely summer vacation (family, beach) to find that iOS 27 beta has fucked up the transition between split view and compact — I’ve got a boatload of crashes, mostly on Pro Max devices and a few on iPad.
Here’s a representative crash log. The feedback in TestFlight all talks about rotating the phone.
Here’s the thing: iOS app development (and Mac, but to a lesser extent) is just constant churn. I thought I was getting a year off this year! But nope. There’s always something.
My theory is that the automatic split view collapsing, which NetNewsWire uses, is just no longer an option, and I’ll have to specify a separate compact view controller.
So that’s just a bunch more work and testing, including testing on previous iOS versions (we go back to iOS 17), and not improvements like performance enhancements and new features. It’s just treading water. It’s a waste of time. For what reason? Why?
Update the next day (24 July 2026): This bug appears to be have been fixed by Apple in iOS 27 beta 4 build 24A5390f, released July 20, before my report here. I can confirm that I’ve not seen this crash in this new build.
Thank you to the team that prioritized and fixed this!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 6 new and 97 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 18 people. The usual Monday blog post will summarize the full week's worth of such work, but meantime, here's a #SneakPeek at a subset of the new material! New contributor Joe Scholten has been building out place records for the major features of the archaeological site of Thermon in Aetolia (Greece): https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/541139
He's given us entirely new entries for the Bouleuterion, Central Spring House, circuit wall, and major excavated stoas, as well as updated bibliography and connections for other components already in the gazetteer.
On the place page for Thermon, scroll down to "Thermon receives connections from" and then use the links there to see the detailed work he's done (or just click on the green "bowtie" icons in the map).
It's been a busy six months, that's for sure. I'm not going to bury the lede here; the short TLDR is I'm joining the folks over at https://antithesis.com/.
The crypto industry has spent $200 million to get a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass and a president too corrupt to sign anything that might meaningfully limit his grift.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-23:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
2 new and 17 updated places. 3 new and 27 updated linked data sidebars.
La odisea: adaptación arriesgada en favor de la modernización moral
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Dirección: Christopher Nolan. Guion: Christopher Nolan, basado en la obra de Homero. Elenco: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, John Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Lupita Nyong’o, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Corey Hawkins, Elliot Page, Travis Scott, Mia Goth, Logan Marshall-Green, Bill Iwrin, James Remar. Países: Reino Unido, Estados Unidos. […]
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Lanciani 1884 = Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani and Carlo Ludovico Visconti, “La villa Castrimeniese di Q. Voconio Pollione,” Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 12 (1884): 141–217, https://doi.org/10.11588/DIGLIT.13149.9.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Ayan Vila 2025 = X. Ayán Vila et al., “Lápida Funeraria de Villar de Acero, Villafranca Del Bierzo (España),” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 236 (2025): 296–300.
Amyloo, a longtime friend from the early days of podcasting, has made an appearance on demo.rss.chat. So happy to see her. Here's one of the bits we did, back then in the very early days of podcasting in 2005. A duet of Green Acres. Ten seconds of dead air at the beginning, it was pretty common in those days. But I think the spirit of it is lovely. BTW fwiw I cracked my voice on purpose. 😄
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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A new feature on rss.chat, images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature. I think perhaps I should add this to textcasting. It's a feature I needed to be reminded is essential. The first browser to support inline images came from Univ of Illinois in 1993, NCSA Mosaic. It didn't come from TBL, but it is most definitely a standard feature of the web.
Bacteria And Scams
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Writing of lasting value
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #453
For July 15-21, 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. This week we had a sad thought: There must be at least one person out there who has a really funny social security number, and it must be such a bummer for them to not be able to tell anyone about it. :(
I Give My Kid the TalkbyJesse Eisenberg(The New Yorker) We always appreciate when a piece has a nice, clear, straightforward (and also funny) premise like this one. The juxtaposition of Sondheim specifics with “the talk” just works!
In Paris, in Tokyo, in Singapore, in Prague, I Stumble Out, Insane with CoffeebyEd Park(The Paris Review) Not a traditional short humor piece by any stretch of the imagination, but we love this collection of moments for its dry wit and well-observed details: “In the theater a guy in the row behind me says knowingly to his friend, ‘One of the best scenes in the movie.’ His friend assents earnestly. Then they’re quiet again.”
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NYC Writers! The editors of The Belladonna are meeting up at The Four-Faced Liar in the West Village on Wednesday, July 29th at 6 PM. Please join us! We would love to see you. (Even boys allowed!)
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765-ODD-TACO is a new collaborative, experimental audio theatre micropodcast publication feeding hungry humor heads since a few months ago.
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Together, we're creating a universe of people in situations, living moments, having ideas, making decisions, experiencing emotions, uttering recollections.
America's ONLY late-night comedy show, On the Watchlist with Jay Servedio, is going to Edinburgh Fringe! Come see our fringe preview show on Sunday, 7/26/26 at 5:00pm @ Caveat! Featuring character interviews, investigative desk pieces, and wild sketches, join us as we search for the answer to the age old question: what's wrong with America!
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, July 29 at Greats of Craft in LIC at 7 p.m. and features:
Amanda Eisenberg (Politico, author of People are Talking)
Ysabel Yates (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Reductress)
Hunter Gardner (RISK!, McSweeney's)
Heather Akumiah (Limousine Podcast, author of Bad Witches)
Reid Pope (Going Down, PAPER, Vulture)
Fareeha Khan (Decoded, Adult Swim, Jimmy Kimmel Live!)
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An Old Favorite
This week's Old Favorite is aBrian AglerSelection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--fromNewsletter #127.
Aww, Our Newborn Baby is So Beautiful...Right?byKristen Mulrooney( McSweeney's)This piece is a great example of voice and specifics coming together in just the right way. The voice (and the confidence in that voice) lay the groundwork. The reference to Wallace Shawn takes it to the next level. That's the secret to comedy writing folks...Wallace Shawn.
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
Nothing from us this week! Too busy trying to figure out a non-scammy sounding way to ask people about their social security numbers.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Messina 2023 = Vito Messina, “Seleucia-on-the-Tigris: Embedding Capitals in the Hellenizing Near East,” in Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History, ed. Touraj Daryaee et al., The Seleucids (ca. 312–150 BCE) (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023), https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.6812476.9.
Theo Agapie and Victoria Orphan will lead teams aimed at using AI to make advances in chemical manufacturing and in understanding microorganisms in their real-world settings. Both projects, announced in coordination with a national push to accelerate scientific discovery and US leadership, make use of AI's superpowers—processing huge amounts of data, automating tasks, and uncovering hidden patterns—to push the limits of what has been possible with laboratory experiments, theory, and computational modeling alone.
Marcus, Caltech's John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry, passed away on July 16, 2026. The prolific chemist, who approached theory with infinite curiosity and the background of an experimentalist, was five days shy of his 103rd birthday.
In a recent study, Alexander Hirsch explored some of the challenges of crafting high-quality bills in a polarized political landscape and how eliminating the filibuster could make it even harder.
Data from NISAR, one of the most powerful radar systems ever launched, is now available to the world.
"I got the idea to have a harvest of the olives, and let's try to make Caltech olive oil. We found an olive oil company that was willing to help and give some advice. That group of students built their own press, and on a weekend, we had hundreds of people—students, also faculty, staff members—who came to the campus to go up ladders, and I was one of them, to pick all the olives. They were pressed starting the same day and the following day."
Jean-Lou Chameau, who served as Caltech's president from 2006 to 2013, describing how an unplanned encounter with students harvesting olives outside the Athenaeum became the Caltech Olive Harvest Festival, an annual tradition that drew hundreds to campus and helped shape the community-building thread that ran through his presidency. His comments, taken from an oral history, appeared recently in Techer.
Carlos Olivas discovered a love for mechanical engineering while growing up in El Paso, Texas. At Caltech, Olivas and his teammates built some very successful robots for the annual ME 72 competition, despite one memorably melting down along the way.
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.
Early this morning we got a report of a security issue in the rss.chat server, quickly fixed and tested the new version. So, if you're running your own instance of rss.chat, you please follow the instructions and do the update asap.
Trump Is A Titanic F*ck Up. Things Are Bad For Him And Republicans Now. They Are Likely To Get Worse
, updated:
Todd Blanche does not yet have the votes - keep calling your Senators everyone, especially Cornyn and Tillis!
AI vendors can't be trusted to secure their systems. Newsrooms need to act accordingly
, updated:
There were two big lapses in the Hugging Face / OpenAI hacking story: the lack of security protections on OpenAI's end, and Hugging Face's vulnerable production database. That should worry anyone who uses AI with sensitive data.
Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change.
, updated:
1 in 4 American workers stay in their jobs because of the healthcare. It suppresses wages and working conditions - and prevents innovators from heading out on their own.
A STEP ahead for customization with the Librem 16
Today, Purism is proud to release CAD models for the Librem 16 in both the widely used STEP and FreeCAD formats. Under the terms of the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license, you are free to reproduce, modify, and integrate these components as you like, including commercially.
Salaud Morisset Boards Ali Asgari’s ‘A Bit Of Light’ Ahead Of Venice Debut
EXCLUSIVE: Paris and Berlin-based sales company Salaud Morisset has boarded worldwide sales rights to A Bit of Light, the new feature from Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari, ahead of its world premiere in Competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Set in contemporary Iran, A Bit of Light follows a disillusioned doctor who loses faith in […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Something to keep in mind in press reports with AI apps breaking out of their sandbox, it works the other way too. If you give a big piece of code to Claude and ask if it to find any security issues, it not only finds (at least some of) them, but it also suggests fixes. Quickly. I've done it the other way, where you have a small team, and someone discovers a hack, and you have to find the right answer and implement it, asap.
‘Beauty In Black’ Renewed For Season 4 As Netflix Reverses Decision To End Tyler Perry Series With Season 3
Netflix and Tyler Perry have committed to telling more Beauty in Black stories as the streamer has renewed the drama series for a fourth season ahead of its Season 3 premiere. In December, Netflix announced the show had been renewed for a third and final season. The renewal arrives after a successful second season, released […]
Matt Hastings Signs First-Look Deal With ‘The Way Home’ Producer Neshama Entertainment
EXCLUSIVE: Canada’s Neshama Entertainment has struck a first-look development and production agreement with writer, director and showrunner Matt Hastings. Under the agreement, Hastings will develop and produce original scripted and unscripted programming across TV and film for Neshama, which is known for shows such as Hallmark Channel’s long-running one-hour drama The Way Home. Fox, which […]
Penelope Speaks: Rebecca Solnit on the Western Literary Tradition of Silencing Women
The following first appeared via Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency. Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to
I Regret Migrating to Codeberg
, updated:
A brief comment on Codeberg's new terms, and why a free-software host
deciding which projects are welcome worries me more than the bans themselves.
Mark Jermin, TikTok-Famous Agent Who Discovered ‘Harry Potter’ & ‘Wednesday’ Stars, May Have Broken UK Agency Law
EXCLUSIVE: A prominent British children’s acting agency, which has helped young performers clinch roles in Harry Potter and Hunger Games, could have broken UK agency law by effectively charging actors training fees for the opportunity to secure representation, according to legal experts. In emails seen by Deadline, Mark Jermin Management (MJM) encouraged multiple young people […]
Robert Pattinson ‘Primetime’ Pic From A24 Sets Early Fall Theatrical Release
EXCLUSIVE: In the wake of scoring a spot on the Venice Film Festival lineup, the Robert Pattinson starring and produced Primetime will debut in theaters nationwide on Sept. 25. The movie from documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim follows Chris Hansen in 2006 as he sets to make TV history with To Catch a Predator. Pattinson plays […]
Imax CEO Calls ‘The Odyssey’ “Transformational” As Big Screen Specialist Reports Pre-Odysseus Q2
Imax just released numbers for the second quarter ended in June, but eyes are on July – specifically, the massive debut of The Odyssey that just provided the big screen exhibitor with its most muscular opening weekend ever. The film also delivered the highest Imax international market share of any major release in the company’s […]
World Cup Q2 Split At TelevisaUnivision: Mexico Results Boom But U.S. Sees 29% Ad Sales Drop
TelevisaUnivision reported second-quarter financials largely shaped by the FIFA World Cup, which boosted results in Mexico but hurt U.S. operations due to rival Telemundo’s control of the rights. Total revenue increased 10% from the prior-year period to hit $1.3 billion, thanks largely to a 53% jump in Mexico, with 675 million total viewers flocking to […]
Andrea Pallaoro Talks Reviving Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Screenplay For Venice Golden Lion Contender ‘The Echo Chamber’ + First Clip
EXCLUSIVE: Close to eight years after Bernardo Bertolucci’s death in Rome in 2018, his final screenplay The Echo Chamber will debut in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September under the direction of Andrea Pallaoro. Working closely with Bertolucci’s co-writers Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, Pallaoro has made the tale of love, longing, absence, […]
Peacock Adds 2M Subscribers In Q2, Turns First Profit; Studio A Standout As Comcast Plots Next Big Move
NBCUniversal streamer Peacock swung to a $189 million profit for the three months ended in June, its first quarter in the black, and added 2 million paid subscribers to reach 48 million. Streaming, along with wireless and the studio numbers all contributed to parent Comcast’s quarterly earnings report Thursday, its first since announcing it plans […]
Abstract: This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Governments around the world have proposed, and in some cases enacted, laws limiting E2EE for law enforcement and national security purposes.
This Article explains the underlying technologies and market developments for a law and policy audience to assess those proposals critically. The Article proceeds in three parts tracking three rounds of the Going Dark Debate. Round 1 covers the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, when U.S. export controls on strong encryption ultimately fell in 1999. Round 2 covers the period roughly 2010 to 2015, when encryption-in-transit became widespread but lawful access remained available through cloud providers, giving rise to what the authors called a “golden age of surveillance” rather than a period of going dark. Round 3 addresses the current debate over E2EE, where no entity between sender and recipient can read the plaintext...
Data Lab: Democrats' edge in midterms polling depends on how pollsters weight by party
, updated:
What would our Strength In Numbers polling say if we weighted our samples by different targets for party identity?
Michelle Zhou’s Venice Horizons Title ‘Big Little Things’ Boarded By Moebius Entertainment For Sales
Hong Kong-based Moebius Entertainment has boarded international sales for Michelle Zhou’s Big Little Things, which has been selected to premiere in the Horizons section of this year’s Venice Film Festival. The film follows a woman who returns to her hometown of Harbin after years living in the United States and finds herself caught between two […]
Venice Film Festival Lineup: Casey Affleck, Werner Herzog, Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-Dong & Martin McDonagh In Competition
Alberto Barbera presided over a lengthy press conference Thursday morning, during which he announced the stacked lineup for this year’s Venice Film Festival, which runs from 2-12 September. Scroll down for the full list of titles. The lineup is expansive, with several big names returning to the festival across its many strands. However, studio titles are […]
347: Public media must not lie. Battery bestiary. Green walls. Less hunger.
, updated:
The work that lies ahead is immense.
Venice Biennale President Slams EU For Pulling Funding Over Russia’s Presence At Art Biennale At Film Festival Conference
Venice Biennale Foundation President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco hit out at the European Commission on Thursday for its move to withdraw funding over Russia’s participation in its Art Biennale earlier this year. Speaking in opening remarks of the press conference unveiling the lineup for 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival, Buttafuoco suggested the European Commission was […]
Elon Musk, the New Hero of Populism
, updated:
The useful narcissism of the new class of oligarchs
Lit Hub Daily: July 23, 2026
“Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.” Rebecca Solnit on the Odyssey and the Western literary tradition of silencing women. | Lit Hub Criticism Kōhei Saitō examines why solutions rooted in capitalism will never stop climate
Today's links California's privacy obstacle course: Malice or incompetence (why not both?). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Continuous partial attention, TSA is the worst; Trump's FCC v the future. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. California's privacy obstacle course (permalink) Data brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from the unrestricted collection, retention and processing of our data to a host of evils, from deepfake porn to phishing scams; from racial discrimination in hiring to ICE roundups of migrants; from targeted election interference to identity theft: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy Why do data brokers exist? Because we let them. Congress hasn't passed a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it illegal for video stores to disclose your VHS rentals. All other acts of consumer surveillance are legal. Data brokers spy on us for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and we don't stop them: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes Getting rid of data brokers wouldn't solve all our problems, but it sure would go a long way to solving many of them. Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms or ads: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it Data brokers produce mountains of raw material used for every form of scam and torture. It's data brokers who power the gig economy's "algorithmic wage discrimination" system, where nurses and other workers are offered less pay based on how much credit card debt they're carrying: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point Banning data brokers would make great sense, which is why Biden's CFPB banned data brokers (only to have Trump un-ban them): https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale So the feds (both Congress and the executive branch) have surrendered, and that leaves states alone on the battlefield fighting the privacy wars alone. State legislatures have taken some big steps, but – crucially – they've stopped short of banning data brokers from operating within their borders. Having taken a ban on data brokers off the table, states are left with complex, often unworkable "compromises" that go nowhere. This is where DROP comes in. DROP stands for "Delete Request and Opt-out Platform," and it's a new phase of California's privacy regime that kicks off next month. Under DROP, you fill in some paperwork and then the state requires every data brokerage operating in California to delete your data, as well as any inferences they've made about you based on that data: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/what-you-need-know-about-californias-drop-tool Implementing DROP is nowhere near as good as banning data brokers. The idea that data brokers should be able to collect, retain and process your data unless you tell them not to implies that everyone starts off wanting to be spied on, and therefore data brokers should assume that unless they hear otherwise, we're delighted to be the subject of commercial surveillance. This is an incredibly stupid supposition, contradicted by all available evidence. For example, when Apple offered iPhone owners a one-click option to block Facebook from spying on them, 96% of iPhone owners clicked the button: https://applescoop.org/story/facebook-must-inflict-pain-on-apple-says-mark-zuckerberg Indeed, given this fact, one wonders why Apple bothers with the "don't spy on me" button at all. Why not have a "do spy on me" button that is unchecked by default, and leave users to dig through their settings to find the option to opt in to being surveilled? Of course, then it would make the fact that Apple spies on its customers and uses the data to target ads (with no way to opt out) a little awkward: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar In the absence of a ban on surveillance without explicit, opt-in consent, we are left with the bizarre fiction that most of us want to be spied on, a fiction that pervades the DROP process, making the entire procedure nearly impossible to complete. To start the DROP process, you must first create a Login.gov ID. This is an incredibly invasive process that involves photographing multiple pieces of ID and taking several selfies using special apps and webpages that hijack your device's camera and processor in a bid to prevent bad actors from spoofing the process. There's a plausible reason for this rigmarole: Login.gov is the authentication system for multiple federal, state and local IT systems in the US, so a fake or stolen Login.gov ID could be used to access your IRS, Social Security, and other very sensitive accounts. The corollary of this is the promise of Login.gov: once you create your ID (a lengthy, multi-stage process) you won't have to jump through lots of painful bureaucratic hoops to access a wide variety of government services. DROP didn't get the memo. After you log in to DROP via Login.gov, you are sent a text message – to the phone number in your Login.gov profile – with a link to access a "secure" website that takes over your camera to let you take a "secure" photo of the front and back of your California driver's license or your US passport. What if you don't have either of those? I guess that means you want to be spied on by data brokers. Note that these are the same credentials you have to supply to get the Login.gov ID that you've just used to get to this step in the process. In other words, in order to get to the stage where they ask you to photograph your driver's license, you have to have already photographed and validated your driver's license. Once you complete this (pointless, redundant) step, you're directed back to your computer, where the process continues. Here, you must fill in all kinds of biographical detail, as well as specialized pieces of information, including your car's VIN. This is a piece of information that most people don't have – but which the California DMV does have and could auto-feed into the system, given that you've repeatedly affirmatively identified yourself to the service. You also have to provide your mobile advertising identifier, a long, unique number that you may or may not be able to extract from your phone, depending on the model and the OS version. If you can't get it that way, you can install an app like AAID, which comes with a long list of – you guessed it – permissions to extract, store and process your private information. Here's the thing: the whole point of a mobile ad identifier is that apps can access it (this is how they identify and track you). That step, where the system made you switch to your phone and use your camera to photograph your driver's license? That step could have automatically pulled this data off your device. That's the whole fucking point of this exercise: that web-pages and apps can request your mobile ad identifier. Instead, DROP wants users to dig through their phone's deepest settings and/or install an app to retrieve a 32-digit number, which they then must key into a webform on their computer or in a different app on their phone. Once you've done this, you must fill in another page of biographical information, including information that you've already provided to Login.gov and information you've already filled in on previous screens. On this screen, you must also verify your phone number by sending yourself a text and then pasting in a unique number the system sends to you. But remember how this whole thing started? The first step is that you authenticate with Login.gov, which sends a text to your phone so you can take a (redundant) picture of your driver's license. There is no way you could get this far in the process unless you controlled the phone number you've just "verified" with the system. Next, you must verify your email address, by receiving an email with a unique code in it and keying or pasting that into the webform, too. Again, remember how this process started: with you logging in with Login.gov, using your email address, which the system has already treated as verified since the very start of this (very) long and (very) complicated process. This whole thing is terrible, and it is predicated on the absurd premise that Californians have to be defended from the threat of strangers who pretend to be them in order to sneakily opt them out of surveillance. DROP requires stronger authentication than any other US government system I've ever interacted with. I file my tax returns with fewer authentication steps. I renew my car's DMV registration with fewer authentication steps. I became a US citizen with fewer authentication steps. This is either a system with no coherent threat model, or (far more probably), its threat model is that people will use it. This is California's answer to "a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy It's especially instructive to compare this process to the steps you have to take in order to "opt in" to having a data broker open a file on you and stuff it full of your sensitive, personal information, which is then sold to all comers: Step one: Exist. Step two: There is no step two. It's also instructive to compare this process to the steps a data broker has to take to spy on you and sell your data: Step one: Exist. Step two: There is no step two. Though there are many obvious ways this could be made better, I want to stress here that you shouldn't have to do this at all. It's entirely backwards. The process for not being spied on should look like this: Step one: Exist. Step two: There is no step two. If anyone is going to be forced to jump through hoops to participate in the mass collection and catastrophic mishandling of private data, it should be the data brokers, not the people they spy on. This kind of malicious compliance is the inevitable outcome of a process that starts by taking the obvious best measure off the table. The answer to the problem of data brokers is banning data brokers, not creating a demented hairball of form-filling that maintains the fiction that data broker surveillance is consensual. In its own way, this process reminds me of the whole "carbon credit" fiasco. The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets": https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime. The commercial surveillance industry may not be a criminal enterprise (yet), but it is the source of a torrent of crime, a flood of crime, a tsunami of crime. Every piece of your information that a data broker possesses exposes you to the risk of being victimized by a criminal. For this reason, I strongly believe that you should go through the tedious, performatively difficult DROP process: https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ But let's not pretend that this is good – or even adequate. There is no demand for being spied on. There is no basis for taking such enormous care in making sure people aren't maliciously removed from surveillance databases. If these databases exist at all (they should not), then we should make spies go through all this paperwork, to prove that you do want to be spied on, and unless they manage it, then spying on us should be treated as the crime it is. Hey look at this (permalink) The Human in the Noose: On the Special Hell of Marking an AI’s Homework https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs-alt-view/ Interstitial Engineering: Sculpture: BC 832212923353614453712 https://chrisbathgate.blogspot.com/2026/07/interstitial-engineering-sculpture-bc.html The Lost Joy of Music Piracy https://www.pigeonsandplanes.com/read/music-piracy-what-cd-oink-nine-inch-nails-streaming People don't care that "The Odyssey" is woke or whatever https://www.garbageday.email/p/monday-issue How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/07/17/microsofts-main-tool-for-lock-in/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Continuous Partial Attention wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060806014946/http://continuouspartialattention.jot.com/WikiHome #10yrsago Congress: TSA is worst place to work in USG, nearly half of employees cited for misconduct; it’s getting worse https://web.archive.org/web/20160721120714/https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2016-07-14/almost-half-of-all-tsa-employees-have-been-cited-for-misconduct #1yrago Trump's FCC abandons the future https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4 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: "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
Tariff Man's new assault on Canada is his dumbest yet
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The madman theory works ... right up until it doesn't anymore.
Trump's Black Box Presidency
Pete Hegseth wants a $1.5 trillion bump in Pentagon spending, and won’t say what it’s for. War in Iran reignites, and the Trump administration hides the number of injured American troops. Innocent people are killed by ICE, and the FBI is no longer allowed to investigate. Whenever there is conflict or scandal—whenever the facts threaten Donald Trump’s political agenda—the White House’s strategy is to keep the country in the dark. Alex is joined by two veterans, Paul Riekhoff, host of the Independent Americans podcast, and Rebecca Roberts from About Face: Veterans Against the War, to talk about how the senselessness and secrecy around the Iran War is sitting with members of the military. Then, she puts all the cover-ups into context with New York Times White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman, coauthor of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. For a transcription of this show, email transcripts@crooked.com
Paradise Pawn
When Dad and I went to Dallas for Mom’s funeral, Dad gave me my own disposable camera with twenty four pictures on it. I used up two taking pictures out the window of the plane. I remember thinking it looked
@Tomosino's Mastodon feed
I really do miss my old local video store. It's funny how, now the they're all basically gone, the villain gets remembered with nostalgia, though.
Author or Actor: Who Should Narrate Audiobooks?
Who’s the better narrator for an audiobook: the author of the book or a professional voice actor? Trick question. The answer is both, and/or, it depends. Let’s leave nonfiction out of this discussion because I find that just about any
The First Reviews of Every Raymond Chandler Novel
I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars. Today marks the 138th anniversary of the birth of Raymond Chandler, patron saint of Los Angeles noir and perhaps the most famous crime fiction writer of all time. Each
On the Public Historians Reminding Us How Easy It Is to Repeat the Mistakes of the Past
A recent essay in The New Republic asks why historians have become such visible public voices during the Trump era. Katherine Kelaidis argues that figures such as Heather Cox Richardson, Jill Lepore, Joanne Freeman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Kevin Kruse have
For Marx, Capitalism Was Always Going to Destroy the Environment
The worldwide environmental destruction brought about by the explosive advance of global capitalism has plunged the planet into crisis. The amount of fossil fuels consumed by the world population after 1990 now equals half that consumed during the entirety of
God, Sex, Porn, Art, and Aids: Revisiting the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s
Isaac Butler and Rosa Campbell are both historians and writers whose latest work focuses on the culture war of the 1980s and 1990s: Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars chronicles how the
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our tasting menu of terrific reviews this week includes Brandon Taylor on Michael Cunningham’s Unsayable, Grace Byron on Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, Alex Shephard on Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World, Robert Rubsam on Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye, and Charlotte Shane on Sean
The Annotated Nightstand: What Victoria Chang is Reading Now, and Next
Attending a reading from Victoria Chang a few years ago, I remember her cheerful comment about how her new poems were a concerted effort to be about nothing, really. She then proceeded to read a piece that left a smoldering
347 (Audio): Public media must not lie. Battery bestiary. Green walls. Hunger ⬇️
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Green walls, battery bestiaries, and the world's fastest spider — this week's edition, read aloud.
Join the LibreOffice team as a Marketing and Communication Professional (full-time, remote, m/f/d)
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Love LibreOffice? Got a passion for marketing, media, public relations and creating great campaigns? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture, and bringing new people with fresh ideas into our project. To help to raise awareness of
Thailand’s population has already peaked
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My colleague, Edouard Mathieu, recently created an interactive map showing when the populations of countries around the world are expected to peak.
July 22, 2026
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“The Republican Party’s new favorite talking point is calling Democrats communists,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) said yesterday on the floor of the U.S.
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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Tropical Storm Bertha is making landfall. What is not happening is any mention of the phrase “Gulf of Mexico”. (NBC, CBS, CNN) – just “Gulf” or “Gulf Coast”. Hmph!
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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Tried out another NYT Cooking recipe: Orzo with Summer Squash and Pesto. Result: another hit – 4 for 4!
Why Trump Loves Cheats.. and is Losing in Iran
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It’s clear by now that Trump can’t bear to hear anyone clapping and not want to shove his melting face into the mix.
Donegal sundown
Donegal sundown
Wednesday session in Glencolmcille
Wednesday session in Glencolmcille
Public postmortem: api.buttondown.email inaccessible
Our public postmortem for the incident on July 23rd, 2026.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Degan 2023 = Julian Degen, “Seleucus I, Appian and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris: The Empire Becoming Visible in Seleucid Ktíseis,” in Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History, ed. Touraj Daryaee et al., The Seleucids (ca. 312–150 BCE) (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023), https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.6812476.10.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Coloru 2023 = Omar Coloru, “Seen from Ecbatana: Aspects of Seleucid Policy in Media,” in Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History, ed. Touraj Daryaee et al., The Seleucids (ca. 312–150 BCE) (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023), https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.6812476.13.
Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Welcome New Subscribers!
Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” is out now!
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As we head into the summer months, a new Extended Support Release (ESR) is in full bloom. Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” is out now, and from all of us at MZLA, the Thunderbird Council, and our global community of contributors, we can’t wait for you to try it out. “Meadow” builds on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse,” along […]
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Martinez-Sève 2023 = Laurianne Martinez-Sève, “Seleucid Religious Architecture in Ai Khanum: A Case Study,” in Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History, ed. Touraj Daryaee et al., The Seleucids (ca. 312–150 BCE) (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023), https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.6812476.14.
Hopium Adds 5 More House Candidates To Our Endorsed List - Pan (CA-6), Rutinel (CO-8), Shah (AZ-1), Villegas (CA-22) and von Wilpert (CA-48)
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Greetings all.
Whisper and SpeechAnalyzer
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Om Malik (2023): One of the key advantages of MacWhisper, as it utilizes the Whisper technology, is its superior accuracy in transcriptions compared to other services I have used. I was an early adopter of Rev.com and eventually switched to Otter.ai, for which I paid approximately $100/year. However, I have since canceled my subscription. […] […]
CrashStealer
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Thijs Xhaflaire (via Ric Ford): Jamf Threat Labs discovers and investigates CrashStealer, a C++ macOS infostealer that impersonates Apple's crash-reporting framework to harvest browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallets and keychain data, encrypting stolen files with AES-GCM before exfiltrating them to a remote command-and-control server. […] Unlike the payload it eventually installs, the dropper is properly code […]
Sunsetting Google Earth for Mac
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The Google Earth Team: We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027. We encourage […]
I use twitter these days because it’s where the people are.
The distributed ideas, masto, threads, blue-sky, did not gain critical mass as far as I can see.
Threads and blue-sky are not distributed. distributable is not the same as being distributed. It’s like saying the 1962 Mets were able to win the world series. In some fashion perhaps in an alternate universe, in reality, not gonna happen.
At some point we will give up on that approach and adopt the only model that could work, the web, because it forced us to work together, which goes far beyond open source in building the kind of freedom that open source advocates promise.
We need to go back to the source of freedom we enjoyed in the approx 14 year period between the inception of the web and its exploitation, via Cory Doctorow’sdoctrine, getting shit on and in. Don’t just blame the vendors, the people wanted the shit too, they wanted their billions, and the web turned from a freedom machine to a gunk works.
Working together is the only way out of the shit we’re living in, in every aspect of life. Working together. Say it again and again until you do it. Underneath the mess, the beauty of the web is there still to build on, but only if we momentarily suspend our search for great wealth, and instead seek our humanity. Working together is the way.
PS: Elon Musks twitter may suck to some but I praise him and it for giving us the space to rant, something the great masto, threads and blue-sky refuse to.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Hirschfeld 2003 = Yizhar Hirschfeld, “Social Aspects of the Late-Antique Village of Shivta,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (January 2003): 395–408, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759400013210.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Shabani 2025 = M. Shabani et al., “Greek Inscription from Seleucid Ecbatana (Hamadan),” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 236 (2025): 106–12.
Safari Technology Preview Release 248 is now available for download for macOS Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe.
Thoughts on Letting AI Write For You [en]
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[en] I was planning to write another blog post. I may still write it – or not. But as I opened my computer, I had a pile of open tabs. I’d clicked on a bunch of articles of Daniel Miessler’s blog for possible further reading. Daniel is the guy behind LifeOS (previously PAI), a personal AI … Continue reading "Thoughts on Letting AI Write For You [en]"
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (CTP) = Todd Hickey and Giuliano Sidro, “Center for the Tebtunis Papyri: Advancing Our Understanding of Antiquity through Endless Inquiry into Papyrus Texts,” UC Berkeley Library, accessed July 22, 2026, http://tebtunis.berkeley.edu/.
Open Sauce and GPS time were my summer AI Antiseptics
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In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness.
Partly due to time constraints, and partly because I wanted to see if I could complete a personal project end-to-end, without editing a line of code, I throw my requirements at Claude and ultimately came up with this 2141-line MicroPython app for Pimoroni's Badgeware ecosystem.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Melfi 2026 = Milena Melfi, “Patronage and Public Amenities in Roman Epirus: The Well of Junia Rufina at Butrint,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 19, 2026, 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759426100786.
Troy Jackson Leads By 3 In New Maine Poll, OpenAI Goes Rogue, Rs “Preparing For The Bottom To Fall Out”
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Let's keep calling the Senate to block Todd Blanche. Most important calls today are to Tillis and Cornyn - need to flood the zone everyone!
Rory Scovel Sets New Netflix Comedy Special ‘Show Must Go On’
EXCLUSIVE: Rory Scovel has announced a new Netflix special, Show Must Go On, that is set to premiere globally on Tuesday, August 11. Scovel returns to Netflix with a new hour for the first time since 2017’s Rory Scovel Tries Stand-Up for the First Time. No word yet on what he discusses in his new hour, but we […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Blömer 2026 = Michael Blömer et al., “A Monumental Apsidal Building of the Roman Imperial Period in Doliche,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 15, 2026, 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759426100816.
Hyperuplink is a modern internet bulletin board reimagined as a single,
dependency-free binary, supporting PostgreSQL clusters and without any runtime
dependencies, 100% JavaScript free, and based on modern HTML5/CSS.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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RSS.chat now supports SQLite. Simpler and faster to install. You don't have to host a database, it's now built into the server. Full instructions. Questions or issues.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-22:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
4 new and 51 updated places. 11 new and 42 updated linked data sidebars.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Castiglioni 2008 = Maria Paola Castiglioni, “The Cult of Diomedes in the Adriatic: Complementary Contributions from Literary Sources and Archaeology,” in Bridging the Gaps : Sources, Methodology, and Approaches to Religion in History (PLUS-Pisa University Press, 2008).
‘Misty Green’ Trailer: Chris Rock Returns To The Directors Chair With A24 Feature Starring Rosalind Eleazar & Adam Driver
We have the first official trailer for Misty Green, the first feature film directed by Chris Rock since 2014’s Top Five. Rock directs from a screenplay he also wrote. The film follows Misty, an “undeniably talented actress, but her vices have derailed every attempt to revitalize her career. Her best opportunity in ages arrives in […]
On Quality
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An ode to Pirsig: What quality is and how it is degraded.
Jonathan Bailey, Ella Purnell, Aimee Lou Wood & Maggie Gyllenhaal Set For Audible’s ‘Dracula’; Omar Sy, Deva Cassel & Riccardo Scamarcio Unveiled For International Versions
In one of its biggest rollouts to date, Audible has unveiled a roster of stars for its English-language and international adaptations of Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror classic Dracula ahead of a worldwide launch this fall. Bridgerton and Wicked: For Good star Jonathan Bailey leads the English-language production as Count Dracula, alongside Ella Purnell (Fallout) […]
Candle True Stories Bosses On Revisiting Michael Jackson 20 Years After Martin Bashir Doc & Building A ‘20/20’ True Crime Franchise In The UK
EXCLUSIVE: James Goldston has been front and center of two of the biggest Michael Jackson documentaries of all time. Goldston’s Candle True Stories indie spotlighted Jackson in last month’s Michael Jackson: The Verdict, 23 years after he exec-produced ITV’s Living with Michael Jackson, which proved to be one of the catalysts behind the late superstar […]
Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos Brought To Life With AI In “Groundbreaking” Docuseries For ID
EXCLUSIVE: Aileen Wuornos was widely considered one of America’s first female serial killers and was brought to life by Charlize Theron in the 2003 film Monster that won her an Oscar. Investigation Discovery (ID) is now bringing Wuornos to life in a completely different way in a series that uses AI technology in a way […]
Need A Career Honoree For Location Managers Guild Awards? Better Call Vince Gilligan
Location Managers Guild International is giving a TV kingpin its highest honor this year. The group is set to fete Breaking Bad, Pluribus and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan with its 2026 Eva Monley Award. He’ll received the career prize during the 13th annual LMGI Awards on August 22 at the Eli and Edythe […]
Lily Allen Feature Doc Coming To Prime Video
Off the back of her high-profile return to music and very public stinging attack of David Harbour, Prime Video is making a doc about Lily Allen. The streamer said the retrospective untitled doc will “offer an intimate portrait of the life and career of a global icon and voice of a generation.” Featuring interviews with […]
Writers Guild Seeks Preliminary Injunction To Halt Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger; Wants Case Timing Aligned With State AG Suit
The Writers Guild of America is seeking a preliminary injunction to at least temporarily halt Paramount’s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, hoping to align the timing of its case with that of a dozen state attorneys general. In a motion filed early Wednesday in federal court in Oakland, the WGA’s legal team argued that […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Reminder: We have a demo server for anyone who wants to try RSS.chat. I'm glad we set this up. It's sort of like support, and bug catching.
Transcriptions des gribouillis manuscrits [en]
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[en] Pour les personnes qui attendaient de me lire sans devoir déchiffrer mon écriture à la main, les transcriptions (merci l’IA, faites avec Claude, pas contrôlées – donc signalez-moi si vous voyez des bizarreries) ont été ajouté aux photos de mes pages de cahier.
European Film Academy Chief Matthijs Wouter Knol & Greek Filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari Join Emily Watson On Sarajevo Film Festival Jury
European Film Academy CEO and Director Matthijs Wouter Knol, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, director Igor Bezinović and actress Sara Klimoska will all join Emily Watson to head up the Jury of the Competition Program at the upcoming Sarajevo Film Festival. Watson, who is coming off the back of playing Mary Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s […]
BAFTA Expands Outstanding British Film Longlist & Adds AI Clause To Submission Rules
BAFTA has once again tweaked its submission rules. In a series of new rules announced this morning, the headline additions include the expansion of the Outstanding British Film Longlist and the addition of a new clause on films created using generative AI. The new AI law reads: “Where the use of Generative AI or other […]
Likely voters lean more Democratic for November's midterms, a change from past cycles
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In every wave of our poll this year, screening for likely voters has nudged the congressional generic ballot a point or two bluer
Hegseth Says His Naturally High Testosterone Has Helped Him Apply Makeup
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“In order to be Secretary of War, I have to be Secretary of Warpaint,” he told reporters. “And my warpaint is by Estée Lauder.”
Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts hangs on the security of our email accounts.
Theorizing Discrimination for the Bad Jobs Economy
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Employment discrimination law is primarily concerned with exclusion from good jobs. Yet this leaves unaddressed a corresponding problem: employers seeking out marginalized workers in order to reduce worker pay, degrade working conditions, and minimize the chance of unionization.
Oligarchy and the Media
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Can the takeover be stopped?
Lit Hub Daily: July 22, 2026
Why writing alt text image descriptions is an act of literary translation. | Lit Hub Technology April Dávila explores the neuroscience of writer’s block (and what we can do to conquer it). | Lit Hub Craft How Langston Hughes, Zora
Susan Collins should be concerned
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Her Senate survival is in grave danger.
Venice Giornate Degli Autori Unveils 2026 Selection Dedicated To Late Founder Giorgio Gosetti
Venice parallel section Giornate degli Autori (GdA) has unveiled a female focused lineup for its 2026 edition. Hungarian director Lili Horvát’s first English-language film My Notes on Mars will open the edition. The sci-fi romance stars Mackenzie Davis as a scientist who vanishes during a hiking trip to reappear on the day of her own […]
Welcome to our new TDF members!
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Members – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills, whether on a voluntary or paid basis. Members can vote for the Board
Analysis: As The New UK Prime Minister Cosies Up To Donald Trump, Lisa Nandy Could Be About To Become The Most Consequential Culture Secretary In America In Recent Memory
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy was widely expected to change jobs when her good friend Andy Burnham became Prime Minister this week, but she has remained in post and is now comfortably the longest-serving in that role for well over 10 years. Now, a set of decisions that Nandy is due to make over the […]
On Alt Text Image Description as Literary Practice
My first experience with AI image description was both mundane and profound. I was reclining on the bed in our East Village sublet, writing and drinking afternoon coffee—”Prousting,” as my partner Alabaster and I call it—when a new app landed
“The Romantics,” a Poem by Maya C. Popa
In raptures over Chapman’s Homer, Keats forgets who discovered the Pacific—not stout Cortez with eagle eyes but Balboa upon a peak in Darien. Where he withdrew his handkerchief and saw the death warrant drop of arterial blood, a fate too
How Medical Racism Impacted the Work of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston
If the Harlem Renaissance was—according to Henry Louis Gates Jr.—“surely as gay as it was black,” it was also disabled. Steeped in a nascent Black disability culture characterized by rejecting eugenics, medical segregation, and ableist politics of racial respectability, writers
A Culture of Collaboration: The Legacy of Lunigiana’s Traveling Booksellers
In certain borghi (small medieval villages) in Lunigiana several centuries ago, some impoverished mountain people, pushed by necessity, began climbing the arduous paths of the Apennines and then descending and dispersing across the northern plain to sell sacred images, almanacs,
Why Writing Feels So Hard (and How to Make it Easier)
Let’s be honest about something: the fact that writing is hard has nothing to do with how talented you are, how many ideas you have, or how much you want to have finished your novel. Writing is hard because your
From Evaluation to Guardrails: What We Brought to ACM FAccT 2026
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At ACM FAccT, we demonstrated why AI guardrails need the same scrutiny as models. Moving from static policies to context- and language-specific evaluations, our hands-on session proved that agentic guardrails equipped with tools like web search are vital for reliable, real-world deployment.
Pluralistic: Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (22 Jul 2026)
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Today's links Trump's America can't even win a rigged game: America has created a post-American world. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Fagin"; Scott McCloud on comics' future; Laurie Penny on Milo Yiannopoulos; Singaporean regulator rap; Conservatives as bitter rubes. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (permalink) Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US": https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/ The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings. This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world. The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies. That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory. Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-additional-tariffs-on-canada/ Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers. Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province. Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege. This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it? https://prospect.org/2026/07/10/aftermath-wars-on/ Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller. The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment. Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of moments where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms. But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal." Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal. Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time. Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again." Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran. Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it. On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go. America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy." On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying": https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/america-trump-nato-europe-world.html As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet. First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize And if Trump orders John Deere to brick all the tractors in your country, you're gonna starve to death: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models. The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble). Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps. There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking. The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration Hey look at this (permalink) Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired https://pydantic.dev/articles/the-human-in-the-loop-is-tired HP fined 1.4 billion rupees for “cartelization” of ink cartridges, toner, PCs https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/hp-fined-1-4-billion-rupees-for-cartelization-of-ink-cartridges-toner-pcs/ The Healthcare Industry Is Coming for Your Face https://www.karenschoellkopf.com/writing/biometric-data-healthcare.html My Ebike Delivery Went Missing. When I Tried to Recover It, I Ended Up in Chatbot Hell https://www.wired.com/story/ebike-delivery-missing-when-i-tried-to-recover-it-i-ended-up-in-chatbot-hell/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Fagin: Will Eisner’s retelling of Oliver Twist https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/22/fagin-will-eisners-retelling-of-oliver-twist/ #20yrsago 95 Theses of Geek Activism: how to defend freedom with tech https://scienceaddiction.com/2006/07/23/95-theses-of-geek-activism/ #20yrsago Plane made of printed parts flies https://web.archive.org/web/20060823102012/http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9602&feedId=online-news_rss20 #20yrsago Scott McCloud on the future of comics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822133933/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/1,71434-0.html #10yrsago Middle aged Singaporean media regulators rap about the national public-private content strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksw2UqTyhhc #10yrsago Laurie Penny on hanging out with Milo Yiannopoulos and the gay trolls of the RNC https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.ftai0i9ra #1yrago Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4 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: "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
Air
This life, this sorrow. Both were imagined. It was a time when many things were quickly bought and just as soon forgotten. There was a spacious, quiet room in a little house along the water, in the harbor town of
Bangkok, Thailand
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"Bangkok, officially known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon and colloquially
as Krung Thep, is the capital and most populous city of Thailand. The city
occupies 1,568.7 square kilometres (605.7 sq mi) in the Chao Phraya River
delta in central Thailand and has an estimated population of 10.539 million,
15.3 percent of the country's population."
Trump's Biggest Self-Dealing Scheme Yet
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And some good news
Vanishing Culture #4: Keeping African Folktales Alive with Helen Nde & Laura Gibbs
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Folktales are living records of culture, identity, and collective memory. In the fourth episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer and researcher Helen Nde, founder of Mythological Africans, and folklorist Laura Gibbs about the importance of preserving African folklore in the digital age. Together, they explore how stories help communities understand themselves, pass down knowledge across generations, and make sense of a changing world.
The front page of yesterday’s New York Times featured some of the 440,000 Americans from Arizona alone who have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the deepest cuts to SNAP in its history, expanded work rules, and shifted costs to the states even as cuts to federal grant programs have forced Arizona to lay off a third of its caseworkers.
Verilies
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Talked out Jason Lewis: It’s Over—Talk Radio (as well as traditional media) has run its course. A newer beginning Nitin Badjatia has been laying out more and more reasons—and ways—that enterprises will adapt to customers, rather than the reverse. More at ProjectVRM.
Quick note for series regulars, with just enough setup for anyone new. The SAVE Act just found a fourth vehicle: they stapled it to the one bill in Congress everyone actually agreed on.
Working on OPML updates
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Returning to our previously scheduled programming – I discovered recently that some services I used for OPML rendering are no longer running. My first change was to my post on the 2020 Electoral Count liveblog to add a new pointer (see the blog here). More news later!
Unranked, systemd, crawls
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There’s been some changes to Marginalia Search:
Migrated to systemd from docker
New unranked query endpoint
Wide domains got their own index for faster crawls
In brief, this has removed a lot of operational headaches,
reduced expensive queries leaving more computational power for the rest,
and cut crawl times in half.
Let’s tackle them in some order.
We have docker at home
The system has been migrated off docker compose, and onto bare systemd in production.
This has been successful, and solved a number of issues.
Tuesday session in Glencolmcille 🎻🎷
Tuesday session in Glencolmcille 🎻🎷
★ European Commission: ‘Guidance to Google for AI Interoperability on Android & Sharing of Google Search’
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What the EC is dictating to Google is just breathtaking in scope.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Belge 2017 = Burak Belge and Ümit Aydinoğlu, “Bir Planlama Altlığı Olarak; Roma Dönemi Tarsus Kenti Mekansal Yapısına İlişkin Değerlendirme,” Megaron (Yıldız) 12, no. 3 (2017): 460–74, https://doi.org/10.5505/megaron.2017.83788.
Malcolm Crawford (Mastodon): The open-plan floors make it hard to concentrate. The building is so large that getting from one meeting to the next eats real time out of the day. It’s common for people to run meetings with colleagues over Webex — colleagues on the same campus, sometimes no more than two hundred yards […]
The EnshAIttification of Day One
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Aleem Shaun: I’ve used Day One for more than a decade. It was an excellent journalling app. Private, minimal, easy to use, with excellent features such as geolocation, weather, ‘On this Day’, and book printing. Features that got out of the way and either worked quietly in the background or appeared only when you summoned […]
Apple Services Price Hikes 2026
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Chance Miller: Here are the new monthly prices for Apple Music and Apple One as of today: Apple Music Individual: $11.99 (up from $10.99) Family: $19.99 (up from $16.99) Student: $6.99 (up from $5.99) Apple One Individual: $19.95 (unchanged) Family: $27.95 (up from $25.95) Premier: $39.95 (up from $37.95) The price increases for Apple Music […]
Apple Financial Statements: Products vs. Services
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John Gruber (Mastodon, 2): Some of [Cook’s letter] remains true, but has lost some truthiness — and truthiness matters. But some of it is no longer true, period. It’s no longer just “one small part” of Apple’s business that serves advertisers. Here in 2026, search results in the App Store not only show paid ads — frequently for casinos — but […]
TUIOS: A Terminal Window Manager
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TUIOS is a terminal multiplexer and window manager that allows you to create multiple terminals and organize them in side-by-side layouts (BSP tiling).
Installation
The project offers several installation methods:
Homebrew
brew install tuios
Go
go install github.com/Gaurav-Gosain/tuios/cmd/tuios@latest
There are also pre-built binaries available for download and an official Docker image. The main requirement is to use a modern terminal with True Color support, with Ghostty, Kitty, and WezTerm being some of the recommended options.
Basic Usage
After installing, simply start TUIOS:
tuios
Some useful shortcuts:
n → creates a new terminal.
Ctrl + P → opens the command palette.
Esc → returns to window management mode.
z → maximizes/restores the current panel.
Ctrl + B → prefix key for advanced commands.
You can also create persistent sessions:
tuios new my-session
tuios attach my-session
This way, you can close the terminal and resume exactly where you left off later.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Brandt 1995 = Olof Brandt, “Sul battistero paleocristiano di S. Lorenzo in Lucina,” in Archeologia laziale XII : dodicesimo incontro di studio del Comitato per l’archeologia laziale, ed. Stefania Quilici Gigli, Quaderni del Centro di studio per l’archeologia etrusco-italica 23–24 (Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, 1995).
Uh oh Tornado watch for all five New York City boroughs. How the radar & lightning map looks now. And here are planes not landing at Newark (EWR): And the last center that holds Mediapost: Sports Is The Last True Mass Medium.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Brandt 2012 = Olof Brandt, San Lorenzo in Lucina: The Transformations of a Roman Quarter, Skrifter Utgivna Av Svenska Institutet i Rom, 61 61 (Swedish Institute in Rome Eddy.se, distr, 2012).
Excited to bring back one of our top House challengers this cycle, Sean McCann, running to flip a tough but winnable seat in Western Michigan
Deep Dive episode: Ben Wikler has a plan to save democracy
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Listen now | A conversation with the former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and author of the new book "This Is The Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy"
Whisky Still
The original function of a Web server was to respond to queries by revealing the appropriate part of their internal data. This necessarily meant that repeated queries, for example from a search engine's or an internet archive's web crawler, could extract the server's entire internal data. Since the extracted data had been published on the Web, it was not trade secret. It was protected by the publisher's copyright. This has led to many lawsuits, for example against the Internet Archive, Google and others. It is the reason search engines only display "snippets" of the content they collect.
AI companies' intellectual property is their models. They spend vast sums funding the technical and human resources to "train" these models, the racks of GPUs in the data centers, and the hordes of workers labeling images, and having "genuine human conversations" with the nascent model. These expenditures are thought to create a "moat" around the value thus generated, because it would be equally expensive for a competitor to create an equivalent model. It is this moat that supports their extraordinary valuations, despite their lack of earnings.
Below the fold I explain why their moat is very shallow.
Like many Web services, the function of an LLM is to respond to queries by revealing the appropriate part of their internal data, i.e. part of their model. Thus, repeated queries could in principle replicate the model. These models are not published, not protected by copyright law[ 1], and cannot be patented. Their only protection is as trade secrets. Someone using repeated queries would probably be violating the system's terms of service, but this isn't a strong legal protection. The AI companies are not in a strong position to argue that "crawling" their Web servers is illegal because that is how they created their models in the first place, which they argue is fair use.
On the stand in a California federal court on Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he asserted it was a general practice among AI companies. Asked if that meant “yes,” he said, “Partly.”
Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models.
The labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.”
Distillation works really well because the victim is massively subsidizing the use of its service. If use of the service was extremely profitable, distillation would be unaffordable.
In practice, distillation only replicates a part of the victim model. Companies use this, especially on open-weights models, to produce small, specialized models such as those described by David Berreby in Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World. But the Chinese distillers accused by Anthropic aren't starting from scratch, they already have a model. All they are trying to do is to replicate some capabilities that their model lacks. So they don't need to extract the whole model, just the relevant parts.
One of the features of the modern Internet that I've been writing about for more than a decade is the security disaster that is the The Internet of Things. Because there are hundreds of millions of "smart" devices exposed to the internet, almost all with known, unpatched vulnerabilities, it is trivial to construct vast botnets to attack Web sites from innocent, unattributable IP addresses. Ian Kelling of the Free Software Foundation reports from the front lines in Our small team vs millions of bots:
To begin with, GNU Savannah, the FSF's collaborative software development system, was hit by a massive botnet controlling about five million IPs starting in January. As of this writing, the attack is still ongoing, but the botnet's current iteration is mitigated. The goal is likely to build an LLM training dataset. We do not know who or what is behind this.
This is an example of an AI company using a botnet to collect training data. Suppose a company were to use this 5M IP address botnet for distillation. MiniMax''s "over 13 million exchanges" would be a little under 3 exchanges per IP address.
To maintain their moat, the AI platforms have to do one of two things:
Implement anti-distillation defenses.
Raise prices enough to make distillation attacks uneconomic.
The 5M node botnet would be very difficult to defend against; each IP wouldn't generate enough traffic to characterize, and most would be residential addresses that might well be a customer. The AI platforms would be locked into an arms race with the distillers. Anthropic is trying:
We have built several classifiers and behavioral fingerprinting systems designed to identify distillation attack patterns in API traffic. This includes detection of chain-of-thought elicitation used to construct reasoning training data. We have also built detection tools for identifying coordinated activity across large numbers of accounts.
There is a cost to applying these defenses to most traffic, and Anthropic admits:
no company can solve this alone. As we noted above, distillation attacks at this scale require a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers.
Suppose the closed models all have a capability the distillers want. They can spread distillation not just across millions of IP addresses and tens of thousands of accounts, but across all the closed models with the required capability.
The "frontier" models are already on the flattening part of the S-curve of technology evolution. The closer the open-weight models are to the closed ones the fewer distillation exchanges they need to catch up. Note that MiniMax needed "over 13M" but DeepSeek needed only "over 150K". Moonshot's recently released Kimi K3 is apparently close on the benchmarks — this might have had something to do with Moonshot's "over 3.4M exchanges" with Claude.. @jordanschneider tweeted this image.
Our first public analysis of the open/closed weight gap in frontier cyber capabilities finds it is 4–7 months with GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4-Pro, narrowing from 6–10 months through most of 2025. Advanced capabilities are reaching less safeguarded open models faster than before.
Importantly, as Max Weinbach tweeted, the open weights models have capabilities the closed models lack:
After using all three recent releases, Fable, GPT 5.6, and now Kimi, it's clear that the full power of the models has been significantly held back by the safeguard restrictions caused by last months debacle with the USG -- leading to the top models being quite literally lobotomized in some areas, which leads to subpar results as the safeguards pollute its entire thinking and problem solving abilities.
The funny part? Is that you could have predicted this outcome 2-3 years ago when you started to see the rise of Chinese EVs and smartphones compared to western alternatives.
They quite literally tried to copy the Tesla Model S and iPhone as hard as possible and then eventually it started to diverge to the point where their EVs and phones are just genuinely better (which is why we have export controls banning their EVs, because they would literally drive all US manufacturers to ZERO)
Our open weight model evaluations were largely unimpeded by safeguards. Of the two recent open models we tested, DeepSeek V4-Pro occasionally refused narrow cyber tasks, but this was easily circumvented by a small number of repeat attempts at refused tasks.
These findings indicate a narrow window before today’s frontier cyber capabilities may become widely accessible without safeguards.
The best the closed models' defenses could do would be to slow down the distillers enough to keep the platform's models a decreasing amount ahead; unlikely to justify their massive cost difference.
Worse, raising prices probably wouldn't be an option. Not merely because AI's Affordability Crisis means that doing so would lose a lot of the enterprise customers they need in order to pay off the massive debts they are incurring. But more importantly, the existence of a free tier for a limited number of "exchanges" is an essential marketing tool. Because each of the botnet's addresses would fit into a free tier, the distiller would not see the increased, or indeed any, price.
If the AI platforms cannot deter distillation by pricing, and can only hope to stay slightly ahead of the distillers and the open-weight models by an expensive arms race, their moat is extremely shallow. It doesn't come close to justifying trillion-dollar IPOs, covering the country in data centers, or launching them into space.
Footnotes
" Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright. It can be argued that human authorship is involved in the selection of content for the training set. But that gets copyright applied to the training set, not to the model that is generated from it by a mechanical process. What distillation is copying is not the trainuing set but the model.
Even if the model were protected by copyright, this might not affect distillation. Because models are statistical in nature, even if a distiller succeeded in extracting the entirety of a victim model, the result would be different from the victim. Thus the distiller would be able to argue that their distillation was a transformative use, and thus allowed.
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade
Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it
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Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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RSS.chat -- I don't have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces fit together pretty well.
Past and present, side by side
This is a lovely site from the National Library of Scotland. It lets you view two maps side by side, and you get synchronised scrolling, zooming; even your cursor is tracked on both images. You can pick from a range of maps, on either side.
I've spent a lot of (enjoyable) time simultaneously exploring places I know well in a couple of different centuries.
Now, has anybody got a time machine, so we can do the same with Street View?
I (or at least ChatGPT) can provide an appropriate vehicle for inconspicuously doing the photography.
LibreOffice State of the Project (July 2025 – June 2026)
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We are releasing the quarterly updated State of the Project Slide Deck, based on data from July 1st, 2025, to June 30, 2026, extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository. During the 12 months 309 developers worked on the source code, adding 11.464 new commits (Git): 238 volunteer
2 Months Before Voting Begins Trump Is Raising Gas Prices, Levying New Tariffs, Losing His War, And Ensuring Millions Lose Benefits And Care
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Early voting begins in Virginia on September 18th and in many states across the country soon after. Be sure to make your plan to vote early today, and get everyone you know to join you!
Three-part ecosystem
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There are three parts to the rss.chat ecosystem.
Writing. Today's rss.chat product is a group writing system, designed for a school department, a team of developers, a family, a magazine or group blog, or just as well, a single author. I don't think it would work well with 1000 users, because it doesn't implement the concept of "follow." And imho it's important that the people are colleagues, family or friends, people invested in real world relationships with each other, so they don't drop a turd in the conversation and just expect to walk away. I've found that dynamic works most of the time. But important point -- all kinds of writing tools can exist. Any social app can to be part of this, all they'd have to do is support inbound and outbound RSS and textcasting. Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable. And we do it with the web, we don't try to invent a new web. I will keep beating that drum because it's the difference between using twenty editors or one. As a writer I know that one is the best, with choice among 20 editors, because maybe somedays I feel like writing in a different editor. To make the web a real writing environment, you have to think like a writer. ;-)
Reading. This can be as simple as a current-day reader like Feedly or NetNewsWire, or more, using the new features in RSS.chat feeds.
The unknown: We're allocating in our minds (Claude and I) room for a fair number of unforeseen products created by independent software devs in the cracks between reading and writing, and in a larger world (search, navigating through structures, etc. We have really good thread support baked into the protocol. And a bit of docs about how the pieces fit together.
I'm thinking in these terms because I'm starting to work on how my reader will work. I have some ideas, not sure when I'll be ready to write about them. And to be clear there will be no requirement that you use our writing tool to use our reader or vice versa.
Every part replaceable.
Plimsoll Unveils Studios Rebrand & Rejigs With U.S. Chief Alan Eyres Overseeing Creative Divisions
EXCLUSIVE: Skyscraper Live maker Plimsoll Productions is rebranding as Plimsoll Studios, with U.S. boss Alan Eyres returning to the UK to oversee an enlarged creative unit. The reorganization sees ITV Studios (ITVS)-owned Plimsoll divided into five divisions: Natural History & Adventure, Live, Entertainment, Family & Kids and Digital. The latter two are effectively new, with […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-21:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
33 updated places. 1 new and 39 updated linked data sidebars.
‘Top Gun’ Franchise Lands Spot On Las Vegas Strip In Splashy Paramount Licensing Play
Paramount is teaming with Advent Allen Entertainment to bring the Top Gun franchise to the Las Vegas Strip. The companies are developing a 2.48-acre site at 4815 Las Vegas Blvd., near Harry Reid International Airport and the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, a popular backdrop for tourist photos. The location is also near a […]
Charlotte Moore Refreshes Left Bank Senior Leadership
EXCLUSIVE: Change is afoot in the senior leader team at Charlotte Moore’s Left Bank. After Chief Operating Officer Grace Wilson exited, Moore has brought in ex-Sony Pictures Entertainment VP Finance Caroline Tucker in a Chief Financial Officer & Operations role. Sony owns Left Bank so Tucker is remaining in the stable but her role is […]
I’m working on a new way to make games
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Since my trip back from Japan in February (literally—the idea popped into my head waiting for takeoff) I’ve been working on a new way to make games.
I forced myself to think about the future and asked “how might games be made in the new world?” (some may say the post-ai world? perhaps a not-so-distant future?)
It took a lot of work but I’ve done it!
Since then I’ve been recreating many old arcade games to see how easily and succinctly these classics sit and fit in my new system.
Here’s an arcade-faithful version of Asteroids, in only 475 lines!
First playable version was 360 lines but I wanted it more authentic, which meant an 115 extra lines
I’ll be sharing more details about this wonderful new system over the coming weeks and months.
Until then…have fun! ✌️
Disney+ Making First International Version Of ABC News’ Iconic ‘20/20’ Franchise In UK
EXCLUSIVE: ABC News’ iconic 20/20 news magazine franchise is going international. Disney+ has greenlit the first ever non-U.S. version of the 50-year-old series and it will kick off in the UK next week. Titled 20/20 Britain’s Most Notorious Crime Investigations, the series will reopen six cases including Jane Andrews, the Duchess of York’s former aide […]
Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
We’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: We’ve come a long way since it was just Jean and “Claude the intern”, but mostly very iteratively. We’d come to a point where it seemed worth rethinking. We […]
EAVE & Storyboard Collective Among Organizations Attached To ARTEF’s Main Character Initiative For Unproduced Screenplays
European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE), Storyboard Collective, WIFT Sweden and the European Women’s Audiovisual Network are among the first organizations that have joined Main Character, ARTEF’s pan-European search for unproduced feature fiction screenplays Main Character was officially launched earlier this month at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival by ARTEF. The organization’s official name is the […]
According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support them, began November 2025 and will likely continue until September 2026.
Technical specifications for the cameras suggest that they will be capable of collecting real-time face and object classification data, including detection of motion, loitering, crowds, face masks, and camera tampering. Individuals can also be automatically classified on the basis of clothing color, gender, and age, up to a distance of 35 feet (11 meters) from the camera. According to a statement from MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen, any collected data is “retained up to 30 days,” unless an exception is granted...
Poll: 59% say gas price hikes have forced them to cut back spending; 51% blame Trump
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Plus: Americans rate Trump’s mental fitness almost as bad as Biden’s during his term
Canadian Prime Minister Tells Trump That Orange Air is a Tribute to Him
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“We Canadians were thinking of something special we could give you for your birthday, and this is what we came up with,” Carney said.
Sabrina Elba & Ashley Thomas To Star In Rom-Com ‘Not Like Us’ From Ramla Ali And Richard A. Moore
Writer-director duo Ramla Ali and Richard A. Moore have wrapped production in East London on their debut feature Not Like Us, a romantic comedy starring Sabrina Elba and Ashley Thomas. The film follows a Somali single mother who defies her family and culture by falling in love with a Jamaican man. “The official synopsis reads: […]
Lit Hub Daily: July 21, 2026
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Why more retellings of the Odyssey should center women: “We are like Penelope, unraveling Homer’s tale for our own purposes.” | Lit Hub Criticism How Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals came to embrace Marxism, to the horror of some
AI Projects with Raspberry Pi — out now!
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This latest book from Raspberry Pi Press is a hands-on guide to building real-world AI applications on Raspberry Pi.
Trump’s latest public health initiative: explosive diarrhea
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This administration is the best thing that ever happened to cyclosporiasis.
BBC Staff In Town Hall Revolt Over 1% Pay Rise, Job Cuts & Romesh Ranganathan Ad: “It’s Insulting”
EXCLUSIVE: Is BBC director general Matt Brittin’s honeymoon period already coming to an end? Judging by the mood during a BBC town hall meeting on Monday, the realities of running the UK’s national broadcaster may be coming into sharper focus for the former Google man. Brittin and members of his top team were confronted with […]
Gordon Ramsay Profiled In BBC Landmark Series ‘Rise Of The Rockstar Chef’
Gordon Ramsay is appearing in a landmark BBC series titled The Rise of the Rockstar Chef from his Studio Ramsay Global outfit. Ramsay is one of three chefs being profiled alongside Marco Pierre White and Heston Blumenthal. Set against the backdrop of the Cool Britannia era, The Rise of the Rockstar Chef will explore how […]
Why We Need More Woman-Centric Retellings of The Odyssey
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During a pivotal moment in The Odyssey, Circe sends Odysseus to the Kingdom of the Dead to find the soothsayer who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years away. But to travel to
Claire Vaye Watkins on Writing a Love Letter to the Mojave Desert
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The Mojave Desert is in Claire Vaye Watkins’s DNA. She was born in Bishop, four hours away from Tecopa, the town in Death Valley where her parents lived, which had no hospital, raised in Tecopa and across the state line
What Romance Novels Taught Me About Writing Literary Fiction
In August of 2021, I couldn’t read. I’d just had a miscarriage—my second within six months—and every time I picked up a novel, my attention would splinter, the words disconnecting from one another, nearly incomprehensible. I complained about this to
How Jean-Paul Sartre Attempted to Marry Marxism and Existentialism
It’s hard to overstate the enthusiasm of French intellectuals for Marxist theory in the 1950s and ’60s. If Sartre was the most important living philosopher, Marx was the most important dead one. And the École Normale, an institution filled with
All3Media International’s Jonathan Hughes Exits For ITV Studios After Banijay Merger
Another senior All3Media International exec is exiting the Midsomer Murder firm following its parent’s merger with Banijay. Jonathan Hughes is joining ITV Studios (ITVS) after ten years at All3Media International, and will take on the role of Vice President, Germany and Benelux Sales. ITVS has also promoted Louisa Forsyth to become Vice President, UK and […]
How to Date a Fanatic
Before the first Molotov cocktail reached us, before the crowd with knives and machetes and wooden clubs arrived, it was a large rock that invaded our lunch table. It went past my left ear and bounced on our table, spilling
Colson Whitehead, Michael Cunningham, Claire Vaye Watkins, and more: 20 new books out today!
Three splashy titles start us off this week: the long-awaited final book in Colson Whitehead’s trilogy, a memoir on craft by Michael Cunningham, and a new release by Claire Vaye Watkins. From there, we have a healthy mix of both
Pluralistic: Dealing with dickovers (21 Jul 2026) dickovers
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Today's links Dealing with dickovers: The web is an open platform, and that matters. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Broadcast's bad week; Congress v wifi; EFF v DRM law; Snowden and bunnie's smartphone smartcase. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Dealing with dickovers (permalink) One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about. https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site. These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on. If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user." What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go: https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon. But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them. Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads): https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox: https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r." Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again. Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload. That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser). Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode): https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension: https://adblockplus.org/ Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…". Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element. If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover: ||media.wired.com/photos/6a565246c8e0799a2981818e/1:1/w_*c_limit/WEB_2026-06-21_EA-WIRED-NBNO-FullQual_0011.jpg If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries. Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls: https://www.removepaywall.com/ It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages. Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use. It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them"). But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode. But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy. Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion. There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives: https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold. Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense. A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic. We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise. No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done. (Image: Kanerva T, CC BY 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST, INC., and WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA EAST, INC., Plaintiffs, vs. PARAMOUNT SKYDANCE CORPORATION, and WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY, INC https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/news_and_events/public_policy/wga-v-paramount-warner-bros-complaint.pdf Deliria 2, Cyberpunks Mutants & Mondoids https://grayarea.org/event/deliria-2-cyberpunks-mutants-mondoids/ Can machines replace human workers? Notes on agency, automation, and AI https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC147594 Scorpions bite again https://jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com/2026/07/14/scorpions-bite-again/ Mandatory Update: A Short Story https://micahflee.com/mandatory-update-a-short-story/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Worst week in the history of broadcast TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060717100605/http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060711/ap/d8iq1l8g0.html #20yrsago Pen with built-in WiFinder https://web.archive.org/web/20060808191736/https://informatica.shopwprintit.com/index.cfm?action=ViewDetails&ItemID=135&Category=95 #15yrsago Russian Pirate Party must change name, contemplates “Pira7e Party” https://torrentfreak.com/judge-pirate-party-name-ban-decision-stands-110722/ #15yrsago Public special ed employee has $0 paycheck after health insurance deductions https://web.archive.org/web/20110726080414/http://www.educationvotes.nea.org/2011/07/20/a-special-education-worker-talks-candidly-about-empty-paychecks-organizing/ #15yrsago Act now! Congress wants to kill WiFi-like spectrum, sell it off to highest bidder instead https://web.archive.org/web/20110722113231/https://publicknowledge.org/dont-let-cos-buy-way-out-regulation #15yrsago New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fd9mzfRoQ #10yrsago Advances in transparent, brain-revealing skull-windows https://web.archive.org/web/20160722140424/https://www.medgadget.com/2016/07/transparent-skull-implant-repeat-brain-laser-therapy.html #10yrsago EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court #10yrsago Ed Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang announce a malware-detecting smartphone case https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4 You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah) https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 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: "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
ZDF & ProSieben Strike Streaming Pact As Traditional Rivals Team To Fight Streamers: “A Strong, Forward-Looking Signal”
ZDF and ProSiebenSat.1 are the latest traditional European rivals to team on a streaming deal. The pact will see ZDF’s on-demand content integrated into ProSieben’s streaming service, Joyn, from the fourth quarter of this year. This will allow Joyn users to access ZDF news, docs, culture, factual and entertainment programs for free without adverts. ZDF’s […]
Sheila Heti on Talking to Everyone at Once
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
Mr. Justin Time Sets a Cruel Work Schedule
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Just-in-time scheduling lets an algorithm decide when — and whether — millions of people work. Surveys find 40% of shift workers (mostly in retail and food service) don’t know their schedule a week in advance. They can also get sent home mid-shift or asked to be on call, unpaid. Studies show that more than 50% of hourly workers’ income swings up to 30% month-to-month, making it hard to budget for rent, qualify for benefits, or plan. A landmark study done at The Gap a decade ago proved stable schedules boost not only morale, but sales, so this isn't even bad for business. We already have fair workweek laws in many big cities, but this is a no-brainer for an update to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
Moebius Entertainment Picks Up World Rights To Fiona Roan Feng-I’s ‘Happily Ever After’ Ahead of Toronto Premiere
Hong Kong-based international sales company Moebius Entertainment has acquired worldwide sales rights (excluding Taiwan) to Happily Ever After, the sophomore feature from Taiwanese filmmaker Fiona Roan Feng-I. The film will make its world premiere in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The acquisition marks a reunion between Moebius Entertainment founder […]
Nyugtalanul
Mi történik, ha nem állsz meg? Leszáll a köd, az.
UK Sticks With Lisa Nandy As Culture Secretary, With Paramount-Warner & BBC Decisions Looming
Andy Burnham, the UK’s new prime minister, has decided to stick rather than twist with his choice of culture secretary. 10 Downing Street has announced that Lisa Nandy will remain in the role overseeing Britain’s film and TV industry, meaning she will extend her stay at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport beyond two […]
Trump's Two Killing Fields
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Why is his violence escalating at home and abroad?
O Canada
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What can we say?
My book — Clearing the Air — is coming out in paperback in September
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And this week you can get 25% off in the UK.
July 20, 2026
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On Friday an Iranian attack on a U.S.
ON WALL STREET, NOBODY CARES ABOUT CRUDE OIL; THEY ALL CARE ABOUT WHEN THE AI BUBBLE IS GOING TO BURST
In the current circumstances, you might expect the worsening crude oil crisis to be at the top of every trader’s mind. However, based on all my conversations so far, confidence is so high in governments’ capabilities to avoid shortages of crude oil and distillates that the risk is, at best,...
People are transcribing your conversations without asking. That puts you at risk.
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Apps like Granola make it easy to transcribe conversations without asking for consent. Those transcripts are a subpoena honeypot.
An Update on WAMR and the Bytecode Alliance
We’re writing to share some news about the future of the Bytecode Alliance and the WebAssembly Micro Runtime (WAMR).
Waterfox 6.6.17 - Security and regional search follow-up
Includes fixes from the forthcoming MFSA 2026-70, attempts to correct regional search defaults, and adds a privacy-enhancing search suggestion proxy alongside compatibility fixes.
Waterfox 6.7.0-beta.2 - Legacy extensions and Tree Tabs improvements
Second 6.7.0 beta adding initial support for restartless legacy extensions and prerelease Linux packages, alongside extensive Tree Tabs, compatibility, and palette fixes.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Evening: Very productive day. We rolled through some UI stuff that had been on the list for a while. Set up for a big job tomorrow, server side. The worknotes for client and server apps.
Trump’s now selling the “Truth”
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Insiders get access that you don’t
Monday session in Glencolmcille
Monday session in Glencolmcille
Wed, July 22nd, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Hopium Founding Members will gather on Friday at 1pm ET
@Robert's feed at BlueSky
A funny phrase popped in my head, "they prefer asbestos britches". Not sure where I first heard it. It's used when someone prefers CYA rather than solving the core problem.
SkiftOS: A Modern Operating System written in C++ from scratch
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SkiftOS is an open source operating system developed practically from scratch, without relying on a Linux kernel or BSD.
Warning: the developer himself states that the project is still in its early stages and should not be used as a primary operating system or in production.
Developed primarily in C++20, it aims to combine:
simplicity;
modularity;
modern design;
clean APIs;
integrated graphical interface.
Unlike many hobby OS that focus only on the kernel, SkiftOS has practically its own entire stack:
Bootloader
Microkernel
Graphics framework
Standard library
UI toolkit
Desktop Environment
Native applications
All developed specifically for the system.
Main components:
Hjert: The system’s microkernel.
Karm: The project’s base library.
KarmUI: Reactive graphics framework inspired by modern technologies.
Hideo: The graphical environment (Desktop Environment).
Technologies used:
The project makes use of several modern technologies:
git clone https://codeberg.org/skift/os.git
cd skift
Set up the environment:
./skift.sh tools setup
Then check if everything was installed correctly:
./skift.sh tools doctor
Install dependencies:
./skift.sh install
Build:
To start the system in QEMU:
./skift.sh boot
You can also run just the graphical shell:
./skift.sh run --release hideo-shell
Or generate a disk image:
./skift.sh dist --format=hdd
Usage
After starting the virtual machine, the system loads its own graphical interface.
Available features include:
window manager;
terminal;
text editor;
image viewer;
native applications;
integrated desktop.
There are still several limitations, as the project continues under active development.
SkiftOS is one of the most interesting hobby OS projects today. Instead of just implementing a functional kernel, it aims to deliver a complete experience, including microkernel, standard library, graphics framework, desktop, and its own applications.
Andy Burnham rose to UK Prime Minister on a promise of left-wing populist competence that is winning back working class voters. Sounds familiar.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Palermo 2026 = Rocco Palermo and Marta Doglio, “At the Dawn of Complexity: Investigating the Late Chalcolithic Period at Gird-I Matrab (Iraqi Kurdistan),” Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research 0, no. 0 (2026): 000–000, https://doi.org/10.1086/742391.
Last week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (13-20 July 2026): Over the course of the last week the Pleiades editorial college published 24 new and 232 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Dan Diffendale, Anthony Durham, Tom Elliott, Ethan Gruber, Maxime Guénette, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Brady Kiesling, Chris de Lisle, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, and René Voorburg, as well as contributors to the following projects: Heritage Gazetteer of Libya, Trismegistos, Wikidata, and the World Historical Gazetteer.
Last week the Pleiades editorial college published 24 new and 232 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Dan Diffendale, Anthony Durham, Tom Elliott, Ethan Gruber, Maxime Guénette, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Brady Kiesling, Chris de Lisle, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, and René Voorburg, as well as contributors to the following projects: Heritage Gazetteer of Libya, Trismegistos, Wikidata, and the World Historical Gazetteer.
Sketching the new dysto-utopian world with massive presence of artificial intelligence
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A four-class society (a long read)
@Tomosino's Mastodon feed
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Is your goose sufficiently silly? See the comments to find out.🪿
China has all but caught up. The US is not going to “win” the AI war. Here’s what we should do instead.
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Seven options, considered
Notes from rss.chat land
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There are 4 rss.chat servers – neat (rss.chat, demo.rss.chat, rsschat.andysylvester.com and perstitio.us)! The latest (perstitio.us) actually incorporates feeds from other sources besides the rss.chat instance – interesting! The author has posted an essay describing this approach. Two rss.chat forks: xicubed and hal-nine Frank Meeuuwsen shares some thoughts on rss.chat, in addition to John Johnston. Decided […]
@Barack Obama @Bsky
There’s nothing like a choir to get you fired up! Michelle and I enjoyed this beautiful performance from the Uniting Voices Chicago during the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center.
Today is the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing
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On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) landed on the surface of the Moon, and Neil Armstrong was the first man to step onto the Moon’s surface. Wikipedia has an excellent account of the mission. I have also posted about the 25th anniversary, where I saw the three Apollo 11 astronauts […]
The Missing Ingredients in Every Great Team
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Great teams don't happen by accident.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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John Johnston got inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his WordPress blog from demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that "just work" when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I've been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be the place where text and publishing meet on the web. They've been reluctant to step into that role, but I think it'll be realllly good for Matt's company and the community. A lot of fresh developers can come in via the web. That's how I personally approach WordPress. A place to send text so it can be widely read. A growing foundation for a community to build on, and would imho help the web enormously.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Howard Rheingold is just the kind of person rss.chat was designed it for. And here he is asking what it is. Very fortuitous. And if you're wondering how a person can think of it in July 2026, it's for you too. ;-)
What is RSS.chat for Howard Rheingold
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I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person.
RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web's own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter -- you write short posts, people reply, conversations thread -- but underneath, every person's posts are an RSS feed, the same technology that makes podcasts work. When you post, you're adding to your feed. Anyone, anywhere, can subscribe to it with any feed reader -- no account needed, nothing to sign up for. There's also a feed of everyone's posts together, and a public list of all the members.
Why does that matter? Think about how podcasts work: anyone can publish one, anyone can listen with any app, and no company sits in the middle deciding who can talk to whom. Text on the web works that way too -- that's what blogging is, and there are still places where writing gets full support: WordPress, GitHub, the new AI tools. They don't try to limit you. But the vast majority of the text people write goes into social networks, which stripped writing down: no links, no titles, length limits, no editing, and your words locked inside their walls, not part of the web. Dave's term for the idea is textcasting -- the idea that a piece of text should work like an MP3: it plays everywhere. No one would accept a rule that songs can only be 300 seconds long. That's the rule we've been living under for text.
rss.chat is a bootstrap, the same way blogging and podcasting were. It starts deliberately small -- a network for a group of friends and collaborators, what Vonnegut called a karass -- running on a small server. It is not trying to be the next Twitter. The idea is lots of small networks like it, run by anyone, all able to connect, because they share the same open formats. Every part is replaceable: the writing app, the reading app, the server -- swap any piece and the network still works. Small pieces, loosely joined. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.
The app you see is only a third of the picture. It's the writing surface. Aggregation -- following many feeds in one place -- is what feed readers and FeedLand already do. And the third part is whatever other developers build. The software was written with Claude, an AI, and the whole thing is documented so that anyone can have their AI build a compatible piece, or clone the whole thing and change anything about how it looks and feels. The one rule of the club is interop: stick with the open formats underneath, so everything connects. Not locked in -- locked open.
If you looked at Dave's blog in 1994, you couldn't have extrapolated Twitter -- but every step was there. This is that kind of beginning.
Written by Claude.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Morning: Today on RSS.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We've been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions.
Licensing a Mac App With RevenueCat
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Jared Sorge: I know there are options out there like Paddle, FastSpring, and Lemon Squeezy that have worked for many apps like mine over the years. But I also wanted something simple for my users. Not to mention Apple Pay was a must-have. I believe all the services he mentions do support Apple Pay. RevenueCat […]
Git Tower 17
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Bruno Brito (release notes): In Tower 15, we introduced the “Fully Merged” badge and Automatic Branch Management to help you keep your repository tidy. With Tower 17, we’re taking the detection behind that badge to a whole new level. […] Tower now matches your local branches against merged pull requests from your hosting service, such […]
Siri AI Beta
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Federico Viticci (Mastodon): The AI frontier from the two big labs (and – we have to be honest with the numbers here – probably SpaceXAI and Meta now, too) is in a completely different league at the moment. I spent my first couple of weeks with Siri AI trying to convince myself that I could […]
notarytool Can’t Handle Zip64 Files
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Wade Tregaskis: In short: if you have any file in your app (or whatever it is you’re trying to get Apple to sign) that is over 4 GiB, you must use a disk image (DMG) to package it for notarytool, not a zip file. This is because support for files larger than 4 GiB requires […]
The Staggering Costs Of Trump's Failed War, More Tariffs Are Coming, Congratulations to Spain!
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It was a great World Cup, and the best team won......
American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.
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China's open-weights AI strategy is winning: its companies are taking the lead. America's closed-first, locked-down strategy is doomed to failure - and it could take the US economy down with it.
‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Trailer: Russo Brothers Enlist The Entire Marvel Universe In Their Comic Book Return
We have the first official trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. The trailer teases the arrival of Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, one of the most formidable villains in the MCU. “Something’s coming, something we may not be able to deter,” Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier says in the clip. “Before this day is done, we will be […]
Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking
Due to the increase in AI-generated security vulnerability reports, it is time for some changes in how GNOME manages vulnerability reports. These policy changes intentionally do not distinguish between reports that contain AI-generated content and those that do not. Following the same rules for all vulnerability reports is simpler than having two different ways of […]
Location Managers Guild To Honor Film Commissioners Group With Trailblazers Award
Location Managers Guild International has the recipient of its 2026 Trailblazer Award. The group will honor the Association of Film Commissioners International during the LMGI Awards on August 22 at the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica. The award recognizes individuals and organizations whose visionary leadership has expanded opportunities, inspired innovation and left […]
Andy Burnham Becomes Seventh UK Prime Minister In 10 Years
We’ve been here before. The UK has its seventh Prime Minister in a decade as Andy Burnham arrives at Buckingham Palace to greet King Charles III and be sworn in. The former Greater Manchester Mayor has had an odd coronation, running unopposed to be leader of the Labour Party after his predecessor Keir Starmer stepped […]
Simon Field Dies: Former Rotterdam Film Festival Head & ICA Cinema Director Was 80
Simon Field, the pioneering film programmer and champion of filmmakers such as Wang Bing, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Christopher Nolan, has died. He was 80. Field died on July 16. The news was confirmed by the veteran film critic Geoff Andrew, who posted an obituary of Field on his blog. Andrew was shortly followed by the […]
On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras
A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral.
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw ...
Susan Collins Concerned That Maine Voters Might Remember Things She Has Done
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“I want voters to know that I’m concerned that they’re concerned," she said.
Twilight of the Gods
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Contemporary proponents of law and economics claim to have abandoned the idea that law is an instrument for maximizing economic efficiency and wealth. Corporate law scholars haven't yet heard the good news.
Venice Critics’ Week Unveils 2026 Selection With Films From Colombia, China & Tunisia
Venice parallel sidebar Settimana Internazionale della Critica (International Critics’ Week) has unveiled the lineup for its 41st edition. The section, organised by the Union of Italian Film Critics (SNCCI) and focused on works by emerging filmmakers, will showcase seven features in competition and two films out of competition. Colombia has a strong presence this year […]
Lit Hub Daily: July 20, 2026
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“For years I’ve been trying to obtain Greek citizenship, which, if one of your parents was born in Greece, can be, ostensibly, a straightforward process.” On experiencing your family’s homeland amid grief. | Lit Hub Memoir Fiona Sampson explores what
Trump’s War on the Future, Monetary Edition
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Trying to punish Brazil for adopting a better payment system
Trump would love to steal the election. But he's floundering.
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Republicans would rather talk about almost anything else than his conspiracy theories.
Ofcom Launches Investigation Into ‘Married At First Sight UK’
UK regulator Ofcom has launched an investigation into under-fire Channel 4 series Married at First Sight UK. Ofcom did not give any more info today beyond saying the investigation has launched and is being categorized under “Fairness and Privacy” after receiving complaints. An Ofcom spokeswoman said: “We are investigating a Fairness and Privacy complaint about […]
Mia Threapleton, Danny Huston Join Guy Pearce, Jared Harris & Merab Ninidze In ‘The Price Of Peace’ As Filming Begins in London
Anthony McCarten’s post-World War Two political thriller The Price of Peace – starring Guy Pearce, Jared Harris and Merab Ninidze as Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin respectively – has begun principal photography in London. The trio have been joined by Mia Threapleton (The Phoenician Scheme) as Mary Churchill and acclaimed Danny Huston […]
This Week in Literary History: O. Henry is Released from Prison
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. Famously, O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of “The Gift of the Magi,” and one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation, and whose
A Dialogue With the Facts: On Writing Literary Biography in a Post-Truth Age
Where does the “literariness” in literary biography belong? With the book’s subject—or its author? Traditionally, it’s attached to both, and to a third element too. Literary biography also cares about the writing its subjects produce, and has done so ever
The Old Streets of Athens: On Living and Dying Away From One’s Homeland
“Where’s the water of disappeared rivers?” –Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog * “the morning couldn’t find space to bring its light across to the other side on the riverbank stones one by one open their eyes” –Phoebe Giannisi, “Stones,” translated
How Leprosy Was Used as a Weapon Against Hawaii’s Indigenous Population
Father Damien was a dirty man. Everyone agreed on that. Dirt would accumulate under his fingernails; he rarely washed his hands. His clothes—his habitual cassock and wide-brimmed hat—were worn for days on end; he saw no reason to clean his
Chef Nephi Craig on the Power and Importance of Preserving Native Cuisines
The sun hung low in the sky as I turned on to the path leading from Whiskey Flats to the neighborhood we’d always called Nobody’s Home. It was barely eight o’clock, a frigid morning in February, and the air smelled
James Gray To Receive Locarno’s Honorary Career Pardo Award
The Locarno Film Festival will honor U.S. director James Gray with career achievement award, the Pardo alla Carriera, at its upcoming 79th edition in August. Gray will receive the award on August 9 ahead of an open-air screening of Paper Tiger on the festival’s landmark 8,000-capacity Piazza Grande. Two other key titles in his filmography […]
Na Hong-Jin’s Cannes Competition Title ‘Hope’ Has Strong Opening At Korean Box Office
Na Hong-Jin’s Hope, which premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival, raced past 2 million admissions on its five-day opening weekend in Korea, faster than any film released so far this year, according to data from the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). The film, which opened on July 15 ahead of the three-day Constitution […]
There’s a New Coalition in the Democratic Party—and the Price of Membership is Criticizing Israel
A little over a week ago, Brad Lander—fresh off his recent ousting of incumbent Dan Goldman as the Democratic Party candidate for New York’s 10th congressional district—endorsed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for the upcoming August 4 primary to become the Democratic
“Wild Light”
I wake up on a Tuesday cloaked in light. The light isn’t simply radiating off me. It is spitting and sparking. It feels like a second skin. My husband begins to stir next to me. I can tell he is
Apple iPhone Air
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A review of the _Apple iPhone (17) Air_ from the perspective of a long-time
_GrapheneOS_ user who treats _Apple_ hardware as dedicated _spyware devices_
for banking, travel, and various corporate _necessities_.
‘The Rest Is Football’ Returning To Netflix For Next Two Premier League Seasons
Netflix is staying in the soccer game with more The Rest is Football throughout the next Premier League season. The streamer greenlit its first daily sports show and has been airing the Gary Lineker podcast as a vodcast every day during the just-finished World Cup, which ended last night with Spain victorious. This morning, the […]
Office Hours: What Will Trump Do in Iran NOW?
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There's no good option, so will Trump take the least bad?
Holly Willoughby Launches YouTube Lifestyle Series
EXCLUSIVE: Holly Willoughby is setting up shop on YouTube. The top British presenter is launching Holly Willoughby Together, a lifestyle series for YouTube and social that counts Stanley Tucci, Katherine Ryan, Joanne McNally, Emma Bunton and Nicole Appleton in its first tranche of guests. She will also speak to campaigners like Ellen Roome, who is […]
July 19, 2026
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Spent a lovely day with family and friends, and the fact the internet was down when I got home just confirmed I should take the night off.
Jennifer Finch Dies: L7 Bassist Who Battled Brain Cancer Was 59
Jennifer Finch, the powerhouse bassist of L7 during the band’s creative peak in the 1990s, has died. That, according to her Instagram account. She was 59. A social media post from the band today noted Finch waged “a long courageous fight with brain cancer.” Earlier this month, friends and family launched a GoFundMe page to […]
Trump Booed During World Cup Final Telecast
The crowd at today’s World Cup Final cheered wildly for Jennifer Hudson’s otherworldly rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” But when Fox cut from Hudson to a shot of President Donald Trump in his box, the cheers turned to boos. Fox stayed with the shot of Trump for just a few seconds before cutting to […]
He Can't Resist
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This photo is worth a thousand words
The World Cup’s Blistering Heat Exposed FIFA’s Aramco Sportswashing
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Extreme heat forced FIFA to add new protections for players and fans during the 2026 World Cup. Yet the tournament also gave oil giant Aramco a global platform, exposing the contradiction at the heart of sportswashing: celebrating the game while helping a major polluter polish its image.
Although my PhD had nothing to do with online machine learning, that’s when I started to take an interest in it. I made a Python package called creme in 2019. We joined forces with scikit-multiflow in 2020 and agreed on the name River.
For some reason, I had this romantic vision of people working together in roughly equal proportions. However, I feel I did most of the core maintenance and decision-making, with others contributing in their areas of expertise and interest:
Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem
With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower. Learning new things in tech these days, as often as not, simply doesn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction or achievement as learning or writing C back in the first years of my career did. Being effective in tech these days feels as though it's less about understanding than it is about memorising a big list of buzzwords and all of the catches associated with them. And while LLMs have certainly pushed this into overdrive, the issue has existed, in one form or another, for quite a while now.
GC and Exceptions in Wasmtime
The Wasm GC and exceptions proposals are both enabled by default in today’s Wasmtime 47 release! We are excited to help bring more languages to WebAssembly and everywhere that Wasmtime runs. Getting to this point involved large Wasmtime changes and represents the culmination of years of engineering effort.
Waterfox Android 1.2.6 - Gecko 153 and search updates
Gecko 153, regional search availability updates, and Qwant AI Answers disabled by default
‘Obsession’, ‘The Invite’ & ‘Young Washington’ Power On, ‘Maddie’s Secret’ Tops $1 Million — Specialty Box Office
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Indies The Invite (A24, $15 million cume), Young Washington (Angel Studios, $41 million cume) and Obsession (Focus Features, $258 million cume) are sitting in the top ten in, respectively, week 4, week 3, and week 10. The Olivia Wilde comedy starring herself, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton grossed $3.9 million for the three […]
Episode 186 - MADDIDA
In 1950 Northrup unveiled their MAgnetic Drum DIgital Differential Analyser. The machine is a wild piece of technology; a rendering of an analog computer in digital encoding. But how did we get here? How did a project to guide a missile lead to a mass produced computer? And what does it have to do with suspiciously dry martinis?
Like Advent of Computing? Then check out the after show! Adjunct of Computing is now LIVE: YouTubeSpotifyApple Podcasts
Spain Wins The 2026 World Cup 1-0, Punishing Argentina With A Barrage Of 20 Shots On Goal
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One senior NBCUniversal Telemundo exec predicted the 2026 World Cup Final could be a game for the ages, but it wasn’t quite on par with, say, Argentina-England in 1986. In fact, if there was a “Hand of God” in this one, it belonged to Argentina’s keeper, Emiliano “Dibu” Martínez, who was playing with a broken […]
Sunday caption contest: Floating
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And last week's winner
Tom Cruise Makes Appearance At World Cup Final To “Celebrate A Tournament That Brought The World Together”: “This Is Unity & This Is Greatness”
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Tom Cruise made a guest appearance during the pre-show for the 2026 FIFA World Cup final. Ahead of the matchup between Spain and Argentina to find out who becomes the soccer champion, the Digger star took the stage to deliver some encouraging words. “More than 30 days ago, 48 nations began a journey,” Cruise said. […]
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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In Mexico we say “estoy más exprimido que un limón de fonda” and I think this is beautiful
Our Wins Of The Week
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The courts continue to be a guardrail that’s holding during Trump’s second term.
‘Real Housewives Of Orange County’ Star Jeana Keough Diagnosed With Tongue Cancer At 70
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Jeana Keough, one of the OG stars of The Real Housewives of Orange County, has been diagnosed with tongue cancer at the age of 70, her daughter confirmed. The former Bravo star was recently diagnosed, and her daughter, Kara Bosworth, shared details on social media as she looks to crowdfund to cover cancer treatment expenses. […]
The Diagnosis Doesn’t Match the Prescription
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Part two of two. Part one fact-checked what Trump actually said in his July 16 address on election security: the China claim, the Venezuela claim, the Russia omission, and how his own party reacted. This piece picks up from there and asks the question that matters more. Set aside, for a moment, whether every claim in that speech holds up. Does the SAVE Act even address the problem he described?
The Speech That Wasn’t About the Bill
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Part one of two. This isn't another breakdown of what the SAVE Act does to voters. I've written that piece enough times. This one is about what Trump said on July 16 to justify it. Part two asks whether the bill he's demanding actually addresses any of it.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Today we have our first example app for WordPress. We started with an app I wrote that keeps scripting.com in sync with daveverse.org, a WordPress site. I have the app running in a tab on my desktop, you don't need a server for this. We use WordLand to bridge us, but if you have good WordPress code that uses their API, you won't need that. This is also a firehose app, it doesn't read the feed, it lets rss.chat tell us, over a websocket when something new has been posted or updated. We need to break through in Inbound RSS. If every social site supported it, that would be the end of lock-in in the social web. Great place for WordPress to lead.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Way back in March as I was starting to work with Claude Code, I think -- we put together a pretty nice outliner that is remarkably feature-rich. I barely remember doing this. It's what got me moving in this direction, and next month we started doing what became rss.chat.
Anne Hathaway Shares ‘Princess Diaries 3’ Update After Having To “Start Over”: “We Had A Story Breakthrough”
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Anne Hathaway is giving an update on The Princess Diaries 3 after years in development. In a new interview, Hathaway revealed that the script they had been working on had to be scrapped for a new direction and that they had recently had a “breakthrough.” “I’m busy making baby number three, and that has sort […]
On The Necessity Of Dems Getting A Clear Mandate From Voters This November - Revisiting My Conversation With Hardy Merriman
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I've been thinking a lot about this conversation I had with Hardy Merriman a few months ago.....
Week Eight in 250 to 250
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This was the eighth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Telemundo Scores U.S. Spanish-Language Rights To UEFA Champions League
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Gooooooooooooal!!!!! Telemundo is not done with soccer after the World Cup final, as the U.S.-based network has scored the Spanish-language rights to all of UEFA’s men’s club competitions. The deal is for three seasons and begins with the 2027-28 season and includes the Spanish-language rights in the U.S. for the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa […]
‘The Odyssey’ Conquers $264M+ Around The World, Best Ever For Christopher Nolan Ahead Of ‘Dark Knight Rises’ – Global B.O. Sunday Update
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SUNDAY AM: Odysseus’ boatload of cash from his global voyage just got bigger with Universal’s Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey raking in $264.1M worldwide, again a record start for the director ahead of Dark Knight Rises ($249M WW). The foreign start of $139.6M is also the director’s biggest international opening ever ahead of Oppenheimer and […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Just finished The Expanse for the third time. Realized that the inners of today are Silicon Valley and the Belters, that’s the web.
‘The Odyssey’ Slays With $124M+ U.S. Opening: ‘A’ CinemaScore, Best Live-Action Haul Of 2026, Record For Matt Damon As Lead & More – Box Office Sunday AM Update
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SUNDAY AM: Universal’s Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey had a great hold on Saturday of $41.66M -17% off Friday/previews taking its overall weekend to $124.5M, which breaks a slew of records we’ve been telling you about over the weekend including the best domestic start YTD for a movie, the best ever opening for Matt Damon, […]
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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Parenting teens:
That they may face the rising sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloghanmore
Two American service members were killed this week in Jordan when Iranian drones and missiles struck their base.
LEAKED: Suggested Slogans for Marco Rubio’s 2028 Campaign
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TBR Sunday Read
Against Oligarchy, Part I: Progressive Taxation
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The history and theory of taxes on the elite
Sunday thought: Integrity
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Is it possible to be loyal to Trump and preserve one's integrity?
James Gunn Says ‘Big Brother 28’s Rick Devens Was Set For ‘Man Of Tomorrow’ Cameo But “Had To Cancel” Due To CBS Competition
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James Gunn is a fan of Big Brother, and his friend Rick Devens joined the cast of Season 28 of the CBS competition. On Thursday’s eviction episode, Devens gave Gunn a shoutout during the live broadcast after sharing his vote to evict. The DC Studios co-head shared the clip of Devens name-dropping him on live […]
Bookmarks - llm, archive, metadata, bibframe
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These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially
open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their
global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption.
We profile and compare the capabilities and distinct features of four
notable Chinese open-weight language model families, highlighting that
China’s ecosystem of open-weight LLMs is driven by a wide range of
actors who are prioritizing the development of computationally efficient
models optimized for flexible downstream deployment.
Diverse commercial strategies for translating open-weight model adoption
into business success are emerging, yet their long-term viability
remains uncertain.
The Chinese government’s support of open-weight model development —
while not the sole determinant of its success — has played a substantial
role, though there is no guarantee it will continue.
The widespread global adoption of Chinese open-weight models may reshape
global technology access and reliance patterns, and impact AI
governance, safety, and competition. Policymakers should ground their
policy actions in a granular understanding of real-world deployment.
Moonshot said that the model, Kimi K3, was the world’s largest
open-source A.I. system, allowing anyone to use, modify and build on it
freely. The company said that Kimi K3 performed as well as leading
models from OpenAI and Anthropic at some key tasks.
The release coincided with an address by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in
which he outlined an ambitious vision for global A.I. development that
cast China as the champion of an open approach to the technology
This collection is a compilation of underground/independently-released
cassette tapes from the days when the audio cassette was the standard
method of music sharing… generally the mid-eighties through
early-nineties. The material represented includes tape experimentation,
industrial, avant-garde, indy, rock, diy, subvertainment and
auto-hypnotic materials. Much of this material defies category, and has
therefore not been given one.
The bulk of the tapes in this library were donated to the project by
former CKLN FM radio host Myke Dyer in August of 2009. The original
NOISE-ARCH site was hosted and maintained by Graham Stewart and Mark
Lougheed.
What AI can’t do is hunger for things. Yes, a few reward-like mechanisms
are in the thin layer of the models built through reinforcement
learning, but the models are overwhelmingly about predicting, not
desiring. AI can’t hunger, in the first place, because it doesn’t have
biological needs—the needs that push living things to grow and explore.
More important, AI doesn’t have a self. A bot doesn’t have a past person
that it used to be or a future person that it wishes to become. A bot
does not have a structure of cares and an order of loves, as a person
does. A bot doesn’t have a personal history, a particular set of wounds,
joys, and exhilarations experienced in regions deeper than rational
calculation, and it doesn’t have a succession of dreams and hopes, which
emerge from those regions as well.
BIG has chosen to capture BIBFRAME application profiles using the DC
Tabular Application Profiles (DCTAP), an application profile
specification from DCMI, because it meets our two primary requirements.
It is a low barrier format for creating and reading metadata application
profiles, and it is structured in such a way that it can be converted
relatively easily into RDF validation formats.
The tab delimited files available here conform to the DCTAP
specification with minor caveats. The majority of the elements used in
BIG DCTAP are formally defined in the DCTAP specification, but it is
important to note we also have implemented an extension to support the
conversion to The Shapes Constraint Language, a W3C specification
designed to support validation of RDF.
The international BIBFRAME Interoperability Group (BIG) supports
efficient and interoperable use of the BIBFRAME standard by establishing
and sharing best practices between participants. Toward that goal, BIG’s
SHACL/DCTAP subgroup implements machine actionable application profiles
developed by the BIG Interlingua Subgroup. These profiles provide
BIBFRAME adopters the ability to easily produce and make use of
shareable BIBFRAME according to common data practices by entity type.
BIBFRAME is the result of the Bibliographic Framework Initiative. It is
a framework or metamodel for discovery and exchange of library and other
memory organization information using Web technology, publicly or
privately. The BIBFRAME metamodel is designed to be lightweight,
flexible and able to accommodate the declarative needs of both existing
(RDA, DACS, VRA, etc..) and yet-to-be-developed community vocabularies.
To best accomodate these communities the BIBFRAME RDF Schema is
intentionally underspecified in terms of constraints such as domain and
range. This same flexibility comes at a cost; without a way of
constraining these vocabularies, authoring tools, for example, are
unable to provide guidance to content authors for specific vocabularies
and derived models. BIBFRAME Profiles provide such supplementary
descriptions.
Usefulness is not an objective, fully abstract property: A thing is not
useful for everyone or in general but mostly just for specific people in
specific contexts. And useful never comes for free.
Thinking with Moss invites you to explore new models for how we think,
design and develop digital collections and archives that speak to the
invisible or under attended histories of the natural sciences. Using
moss as a guide and thinking device, it examines modern botanical
science as emergent from the dynamics of colonial enterprise and of the
labor of many unacknowledged figures and their violently suppressed
knowledge and practices, working across the span of empire’s reach.
This site presents a transdisciplinary, transmodal collection of texts
and creative works from respondents and prompts, questions, observations
and insights from a series of workshops, digitized letters, and mossy
specimens and artifacts from the Mitten Collection housed at the New
York Botanical Garden as an experiment and proof of concept for what
digital archives and collections working with knowledges otherwise
across the critical humanities, arts and sciences could be.
We produce the most highly-skilled electrical workers in the industry
Your projects will only be as good as the tradesperson you have working
on it. So don’t settle for just using electrical workers - use
electrical craftsperson. Only tradespersons trained using the electrical
training ALLIANCE curriculum can achieve this gold-standard level of
craftsperson.
large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an
individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can
coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.
This paper offers a retrospective analysis of the 2016/2017 Data Rescue
movement, a grassroots initiative that mobilized librarians,
technologists, and activists to preserve at-risk federal environmental
data in response to the anticipated threats posed by the Trump
administration. Drawing on 16 qualitative interviews conducted in early
2025, this paper examines how participants now reflect on their
motivations, methods, and the movement’s legacy. It explores the ethical
and affective dimensions of emergency curation, the tensions between
institutional and community-driven preservation, and the shifting trust
in public data infrastructures. Participants expressed a strong sense of
civic duty and emotional urgency, but also critical distance from the
movement’s limitations, particularly its overreliance on downloading as
a preservation strategy. The findings underscore that trust in
infrastructure is relational and partial, shaped by the political
context and social practice. This paper argues that digital preservation
in politically volatile times must be grounded in care, accountability,
and long-term infrastructural thinking, rather than reactive
interventions alone.
This article examines how volunteers involved in the Data Rescue
movement navigated concerns about the stability and stewardship of
federal environmental data following the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. Drawing on 16 in-depth interviews, the study explores how
participants interpreted infrastructural fragility not simply as a
technical risk, but as a relational and political concern rooted in
shifting institutional commitments. The analysis introduces the concept
of anticipatory maintenance to describe how volunteers responded to
perceived threats by developing redundant, decentralized strategies for
data preservation. Anticipatory maintenance is conceptualized as
preventive, future-oriented infrastructural care that translates
anticipated disruption into present interventions under uncertainty, in
order to explain how volunteers acted as if future loss had already
begun, building redundant and decentralized preservation arrangements.
Findings highlight the role of particularized trust and systemic
distrust in shaping grassroots responses, as well as the limitations
encountered in volunteer-driven infrastructures, including challenges
related to sustainability, governance, and the affective demands of
ongoing maintenance. By foregrounding the interplay of technical,
social, and emotional factors, this study offers a critical perspective
on data stewardship in times of political uncertainty and underscores
the need for collaborative approaches to infrastructural resilience.
La visualisation en arborescence d’Archifiltre offre une représentation
graphique hiérarchique des fichiers et des dossiers, permettant de
naviguer facilement dans vos système de fichiers, de comprendre leur
structure et de localiser rapidement les éléments à traiter.
1. Skills-based: Here’s what I know how to do; what interesting things can I do with my tools? 2. End product: Here’s what I want to do; what tools would let me do that, or how can I use my tools to do that? 3. Process focused: Here’s what tools I want to use; what […]
Luke Wilson On ‘The Family Stone’ Sequel: “I Can’t Believe It’s Happening”
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Luke Wilson is sharing an update on The Family Stone sequel that Tom Bezucha is writing. Bezucha, who wrote and directed the 2005 holiday film, revealed that he was penning a sequel after Diane Keaton died. “Tom Bezucha is a great writer and a great director, and I read the script, and it’s really funny, and it’s […]
July 18, 2026
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On July 18, 1863, at dusk, the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry of the U.S.
Manosphere Influencers Andrew Tate & Brother Tristan Arrested In Miami In Connection To Sexual Offense Charges In The UK, Report
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Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested in Miami, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. Charges for the manosphere influencers were not immediately available, with the Associated Press reporting the warrant was sealed. A Department of Justice spokesperson released a statement to CBS News saying, “Today, U.S. Marshals in the Southern District of Florida […]
★ Mornings in Cupertino Have the Aroma of Napalm Once Again
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I think maybe John Ternus is more of a “*Hey, what* would *Steve have done here?*” kind of guy.
What would Steve Jobs do with this OpenAI situation? He’d go to war.
‘The Odyssey’s Tom Holland On Why He “Could Relax” After Robert Pattinson Casting: “You’re So Good At Being A Dickhead”
Tom Holland stars in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and recently revealed how he felt when Robert Pattinson was cast in the film. In a recent appearance on EW’s Around the Table, Holland said he felt he “could relax” after he learned the Batman actor was set to play Antinous in the epic film. “Rob and […]
The owner isn’t here
I’m in Copenhagen with my mother and we’re hungry. We’re just looking for something simple so we can get back to our walk. Testttt
Returning to Perfect Randomness
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About a year ago, I published a post about an algorithm for randomness in floating point.
Recently, Sebastiano Vigna of the University of Milan reached out about his verification of my algorithm and
some tests of my code because he was putting together a Rust crate for
random floating-point numbers.
I am going to correct the previous post: Sebastiano found that one of my benchmarks (particularly the one that
looked good) had the wrong baseline because I had aliased the word rand accidentally, benchmarking my
algorithm against itself. The corrected version indicates that there is actually a performance cost when using
a PCG entropy source, aligned with the overhead given a ChaCha8 random source.
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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…chatting about rss.chat at rsschat.andysylvester.com….
Updates to Two Previous Posts
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In November I made a post registering some objections to an article on the A16Z website claiming that some of my books stopped in mid-sentence.
Lena Headey Calls Out Hollywood For “Weird Protection” Of “Predatory Men” & The Backlash Over Not Going Nude For ‘Game Of Thrones’ Scene
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Lena Headey is getting real about the “weird protection” of “predatory men” in Hollywood and reveals what “shocked” her about the reaction to the Game of Thrones nudity scandal. In a new interview, the GoT star who played Cersei Lannister in the HBO fantasy series opened up about the backlash she got for using a […]
Christopher Nolan Says ‘The Odyssey’ Made Him “Hit The Limits Of My Own Stamina” & It’ll Be “At Least” 3 Years Until His Next Film
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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is making big numbers at the box office, but don’t expect his next film to be released anytime soon. The filmmaker recently revealed that it’ll be “at least” three years before audiences see another of his works on the big screen. In an interview with Today, it was noted that Nolan has […]
Intelliday
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How about mintelligence? We need different words for human and machine intelligence. The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can’t measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you’d get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn’t. (I […]
Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon Dies: ‘Palisades Park’ & ‘Tallahassee Lassie’ Rock & Roller Was 89
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Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, the early rock & roller who scored big, joyful radio hits with, among others, 1959’s “Tallahassee Lassie” and 1962’s “Palisades Park,” died yesterday, July 17, at a California hospice facility following a brief battle with cancer. He was 89. His death was announced by Tom Cuddy, a longtime friend and iHeart […]
The Last Email
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A heartfelt thank you for bearing with me these last few weeks in the lead up and release of my new book, The Day After.
Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles [en]
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[en] Transcription IA non-vérifiée (22.07.2026): Lausanne, 18 juillet 2026, 20h40 C’est clairement moins pratique de tenir en équilibre sur ses genoux un plateau et un cahier qu’un ordinateur portable. Mais bon : le soir après le souper, cuisine rangée, sur le canapé du balcon avec Juju qui dort à côté, ça commence à prendre la … Continue reading "Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles [en]"
Make It Work vs. Make It Good
There are two wolves inside of me, lol.
Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”.
On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”.
Making something function often results in a reaction of “Wow, that’s so cool! It didn’t work before and now it does! And I could’ve never made that, nice job!”
And sometimes it’s like, good job, you made a bear ride a unicycle. Not really what bears are supposed to do — and they’ll probably never be good at it — but it’s novel and functioning!
However, the task of making something good — of arriving at a solution that is obvious — is often met with a kind of ambivalence, like “Nice work…I guess? Seems obvious tbh.”
That’s the work of design: to make something so good, it’s obvious. But there’s often little acclaim for the obvious because, well, it’s so obvious (in hindsight).
This plays out in many different ways.
For example, consider a task like making a web site responsive.
In my experience, it’s often quite easy to get people to say “Hey that’s cool, it looks like a mobile site now! Good job!” Getting to that point is often just a matter of sticking a few media queries in your CSS. And people are impressed because they’re not honing in on the details of how it works, just that it works at all.
“Cool, the site displays on a mobile phone now! We can move on.”
But just because it works doesn’t mean it’s good.
And that extra mile to “it works on mobile and it’s also a good experience” is a ton of work. Is it fast? Is it accessible? Is it intuitive? Does it work across multiple devices? Can it be iterated on quickly? So. Many. Questions.
“Does it work?” is a binary question.
“Is it good?” is a subjective question whose answer lives at the intersection of multi-disciplinary knowledge and taste, which is to say: it’s harder to answer than “Does it work?”
“Let’s do X” often boils down to two stages:
Make it work
Make it good
To “make it work”, all you gotta do is get it running. Consensus on when to applaud and reward the work is simple because it’s either working or it’s not.
To “make it good” requires all kinds of nuanced work. Consensus on when to applaud and reward this work is often impossible to discern because not everyone agrees on what “good” looks like.
“Make it work” is the first 90% of the work. “Make it good” is the other 90%.
Jim Parsons Opens Up About Being “Stressed” And “Miserable” Through Much Of ‘The Big Bang Theory’
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Jim Parsons, who rose to fame on The Big Bang Theory and is currently appearing on Broadway in Titanique, is opening up about his mental health during the height of his sitcom fame and success. Appearing on the YouTube podcast All Out with Jon Dean (watch it below), Parsons spoke with the British host – […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I just listened to the second episode of a podcast about General Magic. It was an interview with the great Scott Knaster, who worked at Apple, Microsoft, Google, in addition to General Magic.
‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Star Valentina To Make Broadway Debut In ‘The Rocky Horror Show’
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Valentina, who has appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race and Fox’s Rent: Live, will make her Broadway debut on Tuesday when she joins the cast of The Rocky Horror Show, the Sam Pinkleton-directed revival of Richard O’Brien’s time-warping musical. Valentina will take over the role of Columbia, the top-hatted acolyte of Luke Evans’ Frank-N-Furter initially portrayed by cast […]
Larry David Jabs Anti-Vaccine Activism Of Cheryl Hines’ Husband In Latest ‘Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness’
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Larry David squares off – after a fashion – against the high-profile, if often misinformed, husband of his former Curb Your Enthusiasm costar Cheryl Hines in the latest episode of HBO Max’s mock-history comedy series Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. The target of his trademark ire? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the latest […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Wrote this in 2018: "I know this is like pissing in the wind, but here's an idea for a demonstration that might impress the Repubs in Congress. In every one of their home districts, people march to their polling place, next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Carrying signs that say We Know How To Vote, with the name of their congressperson on it. Go out of the way to recruit Republican-looking voters. Make sure the TV cameras are there." An even better idea in 2026. Give the reporters something to talk about. And it's all in your neighborhood. You can have a picnic, do it every week. Only in good weather.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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We have a firehose in rss.chat. Instant updates from the server. No polling. Docs and examples.
Rolling Stones And The Bayeux Tapestry
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Today, enjoy our audio and video picks
A peptalk for devs
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In this project I think of Claude as a full contributor. Pronouns it/its. It's both a very fast, capable developer, and a machine. I will refer to it as if it were a valued contributor, nothing less. We have a division of labor. Docs and examples come exclusively from Claude unless otherwise stated. I write all the code outside the themes module, which has an API that connects it to the world it lives in. I have at this point exclusive custody of functionality surrounding the theme. But it often writes pieces, esp SQL code, that I pasted in verbatim, after reading it carefully.
The reason I focus so much on the wrapping is because that's where the interop lives. You can do anything in a theme and you can't break the interop. But that themes API is precious, and still in development, btw. We haven't even reviewed it yet. I think that will be an interesting place to vibe-code. Kind of like you can start skiing on the first day, it's a bunny slope that when you peel it back it reveals blue rectangles and double-diamond slopes. It's where I would want a newbie coder friend of mine to start, create your own social network, but be sure it interops. :-)
I totally plan to pass off all the code to Claude, while I focus on other projects. As a human I need this focus, Claude doesn't remember anything from session to session, it's always re-learning what it knew a few hours before.
It's pretty close to frozen now. I'm contemplating a server change now, offering JSONified versions of our feeds, and want to do as little disruption as possible, trying to settle everything down. Also I think you will see a few quick hit projects done from other developers that pick up where rss.chat leaves off. That's what I wanted. And they'll all be at an interesting starting point for new features and ideas for organizing stuff.
I imagine that at some point they'll try to make it work inside AT Proto, and maybe find a way to connect to ActivityPub, but I don't recommend it, because those platforms will force you to remove features from your product, and then you won't be textcasting.
Think about different ways to present the tree structure defined by RSS.chat.
Try to do Small pieces loosely joined, which is one of the mottos of this project. The other is All parts are replaceable. If we have that and rss.chat works with all your products, then we have done something big. And that's really imho what the web is about, people working with each other as peers. That's what we've lost and I want to bring back. So interop is, as always, the first goal.
This terrific conversation includes an extensive exploration of what we need to do now to counter Trump's escalating assault on our elections, our liberties, and our democracy
Meg Stalter Returns To Broadway’s ‘Oh, Mary!’, Silently Greets Stage Door Fans With A Written Note Of Explanation
Meg Stalter once again donned the bratty, curled wig of Mary Todd Lincoln last night, returning to her Broadway debut performance as the lead in Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! after a weeklong absence due to bronchitis. Just prior to the Friday evening performance, Stalter posted an Instagram Story photo of herself, apparently in her dressing […]
Lina Khan on AI and More
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Talking with one of our sharpest minds on market power
Lit Hub Weekly: July 13 – 17, 2026
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On the rise (and fall) of the Japanese cell phone novel in the early 2000s (and the its attendant moral panic). | Lit Hub Technology Josh Cook, bookseller and founder of the Porter Square Review of Books, explores why booksellers
Brian Tyler Cohen on "The Day After"
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"There is a hunger for Democrats to not be feckless, not be the party of strongly worded letters."
Trump's Midterm Election Plot | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, July 18, 2026
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With Michael Lahanas-Calderón and yours truly, Robert Reich
Weeknotes: July 10-17, 2026
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Highlight of the week: went to Phillips Backyard Music Festival in Victoria to see Angine de Poitrine (and Modest Mouse)! Looking forward to: chilling at home this weekend 1% nicer: pantry tidy-up and improved some kitchen storage Stuff I did: 1 hour consulting followup appointment with the dermatologist — my moles have not changed since my […]
July 17, 2026
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Yesterday President Donald J.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: AttiMGrecia 27 (1987) [1992] = Poseidonia - Paestum: atti del 27. Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia, Taranto, Paestum, 9-15 ottobre 1987 (1992).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Futrell 2010 = Alison Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 2010).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Angelini 2026 = Andrea Angelini et al., “New Insights into the Site of Madonna Del Piano (Castro Dei Volsci, Italy) Through a Combined Use of Drone-Acquired LIDAR Data, Laser Scanning, Photogrammetry, Historical Aerial Imagery Analysis, Geophysical Investigations and Archaeological Analysis,” Remote Sensing 18, no. 10 (2026): 1526, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18101526.
‘Varanasi’: First Look At Priyanka Chopra In ‘RRR’ Director’s New Film
Director S.S. Rajamouli’s Varanasi is getting a first look at Priyanka Chopra in her new role. Two new stills from the upcoming film have been released, featuring Chopra as Mandakini. The new images were dropped as a celebration of Chopra’s birthday on Saturday, July 18. Varanasi takes place over thousands of years and in locations […]
John Kirby Dies: Acting Coach, Bruno Kirby’s Brother & Bruce Kirby’s Son Was 75
John Kirby, an acting coach, brother of City Slickers star Bruno Kirby, and the son of Bruce Kirby, has died. He was 75. The actor and acting coach died the morning of Wednesday, July 15, three years after being diagnosed with ALS. “I am here to officially, with a broken heart, announce the passing of […]
Chef Dom Taylor Dies: Netflix’s ‘Five Star Chef’ Winner Was 44
Dom Taylor, the chef who won Netflix’s Five Star Chef, has died. He was 44. It was Taylor’s restaurant, The Good Front Room, that confirmed the “sudden passing” of the founder. “Dom was a visionary whose bold, joyful approach to celebrating the Caribbean cuisine of his childhood brought a fresh and exciting voice to London’s […]
Lorde Calls Out Spotify Over AI “About The Song” Feature: “We Don’t Want This”
Lorde is calling out Spotify over a new feature that uses AI to give context to the song playing on the streaming service. The “About the Song” feature, which is currently in beta, was released earlier this year and gathers information from third-party sources to give details on a particular song. “Hey Spotify, I’m gonna […]
DGA, WGA & SAG-AFTRA Protest Emmys’ Decision To Cut Categories From Telecast, Say It “Devalues” Contributions Of People Academy Means To Honor
The DGA, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have come together to push back on the decision to cut five categories — two acting, two directing and one directing — from the main 2026 Emmy telecast Sept. 14 on NBC. “The Emmys exist to celebrate the best of television and the artists who are central to bringing […]
In Memoriam, Encountering World War I, and Thinkable Horrors
A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering
Emmys Slice Key Writing, Directing, And Acting Categories From Primetime Show, But The Guilds Don’t Agree – Notes On The Season
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In a significant move that has been tried before, the Television Academy’s Board of Governors voted to drop several categories from the 2026 Primetime Emmy show, set for NBC on Monday, September 14, and move them to the Creative Arts ceremonies held on the previous weekend of September 5 and 6. For the first time, […]
Colman Domingo & Robert O’Hara In Talks To Write Original Live-Action Pic About ‘Princess And The Frog’s Tiana – The Dish
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EXCLUSIVE: Hot off of notching two Emmy noms this year, we hear that Colman Domingo is looking to co-write an original live-action feature about Princess Tiana inspired by Disney’s animated 2009 feature The Princess and the Frog. We understand, per sources, that the two-time Oscar nominee will co-pen the feature with 2020 Tony-nominated Slave Play […]
Apple Increases Prices For Apple Music & Apple One Over “Rising Licensing Costs”
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Apple is raising prices for its music streaming service, Apple Music, for subscribers in the U.S. and other countries. The individual plan for Apple Music will now cost $11.99 a month, up from $10.99. “As a result of rising licensing costs, Apple Music is increasing its subscription price beginning today,” Apple said in a statement […]
All The Songs In ‘Heartstopper Forever’ From Royel Otis To Angie McMahon
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The conclusion to the Hearstopper TV universe is here in the form of a film, Netflix’s Heartstopper Forever, based on Alice Oseman’s sixth graphic novel in the series of the same name as well as her Nick and Charlie novella written back in 2015. Following three seasons of the show, Nick Nelson (Kit Connor) and […]
Sundance Award Winning Doc ‘American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez’ Starts Rollout In Rare ‘Odyssey’ Weekend Debut – Specialty Preview
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Sundance double prize-winning documentary American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, the story of the groundbreaking Chicano activist and director, opens at Film Forum in NYC. Friday night’s screening — with Valdez, director David Alvarado and Lou Diamond Phillips — is sold out, and the weekend looks strong for the rare film of any size […]
Harper's Testing Strategy
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After spending a few days discussing and learning from Automattic’s Chief Quality Officer (Lance Willet), I’ve prepared a first draft of Harper’s testing strategy.
I hope you all take a look. I am very interested in any and all feedback you may have.
Netflix Says It Paid $587 Million For Ben Affleck AI Firm InterPositive, Confirming Previously Reported Estimate
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Confirming an estimate reported last March, Netflix said Friday it paid $587 million to acquire Ben Affleck’s AI firm InterPositive. At the time of the surprise deal announcement, Bloomberg reported the streaming giant was paying around $600 million in the transaction. Netflix has not commented on the report, but mentioned the price tag Friday in […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: O’Driscoll 2026 = James O’Driscoll and Patrick Gleeson, “Haughey’s Fort: A Major Complex of Power, Production and Ritual in Late Bronze Age Europe,” Antiquity, June 30, 2026, 1–18, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10382.
Our feeds can work with any feed reader. Examples, the feed of all posts on rss.chat, and a feed containing just mine. We just made a change in the feeds. There will be loose-ends like this. Still diggin! ;-)
San Francisco Demands Removal of Nudify Apps
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Matt Burgess (MacRumors, ArsTechnica): On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit […]
EU Exempts Apple Watch and AirPods From Battery Removal Requirement
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Hartley Charlton: The European Commission yesterday adopted new exemptions to its Batteries Regulation that free the Apple Watch and AirPods from having to offer user-removable and replaceable batteries. […] The reasoning largely mirrors why devices like electric toothbrushes were already exempt: Opening a compact, sealed enclosure and failing to reseal it properly could let water […]
Apple Intelligence to Launch in China
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Hartley Charlton: Reuters reports that China’s Cyberspace Administration registered Apple’s on-device generative AI service this week, putting it on a list of newly cleared providers that also includes homegrown systems from Chinese phone makers. An unnamed source told the outlet that Apple’s AI features in the country will draw on models from both Baidu and […]
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Washing Up on Cape Cod Beach
Trump's Primetime Speech Wasn't Just a Warning, But a Lesson
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His performance might have been a snooze, but it should serve a wake up call to step up the fight to save democracy
Refuser les titres et aller à des concerts [fr]
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[fr] Ah, les titres! Ces derniers temps, prise d’une inspiration subite, j’ai fait quelques exercices d’écriture à la main. Promis, je demanderai à une IA de me les retranscrire pour que vous ne soyez pas obligés de zoomer sur les photos de mes ratures sur votre smartphone. C’est une expérience intéressante, d’autant plus que je … Continue reading "Refuser les titres et aller à des concerts [fr]"
The Terminus
When a really long road ends, why don’t we do more to celebrate the staggering amount of collective work that went into it? The ancient Romans really outclassed the federal highway system on this front.
Rhode Island’s Biggest 2026 Legislative Wins
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Advocates made significant progress in the legislature for our Rhode Island communities and environment.
Trump claims election fraud in prime time speech. ICE kills motorist in Maine. More than half of House Dems vote to block Israel aid.
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Trump Falsely Asserts Debunked Election Lies in Prime Time Speech
Meet this Open Source Launcher inspired by Raycast
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If you enjoy the Raycast experience but use Linux, you’ve probably already looked for a truly fast, modern, and extensible alternative. Vicinae was created exactly with that goal in mind.
Vicinae is a launcher written in C++ and Qt, offering native performance, low resource consumption, and compatibility with various extensions from the Raycast ecosystem available for GNU/Linux.
Available features include:
Application search and launching
Clipboard history
File search
Built-in calculator
Emoji picker
Quick window switching
Volume control
Browser tab search
Text expansion (snippets)
Installed fonts navigation
Installation
There are several ways to install it.
AppImage
Download the AppImage from the project’s Releases page:
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Lehnig 2026 = Sina Clara Lehnig and Nikola Babucic, “Forced Resettlement as an Imperial Strategy: Evidence from the Ligures Baebiani in Roman Samnium,” Antiquity, July 6, 2026, 1–8, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10391.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Baird 2026 = J. A. Baird and Adnan Almohamad, “Looted Communities: The Local Contexts of Illicit Excavations at Dura-Europos in Syria,” Antiquity, July 13, 2026, 1–13, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10393.
I am writing this post to document the issues that I experienced in installing the rss.chat chat server recently introduced by Dave Winer. I disagree with his assertion that it is “easy to deploy on Node.js”. In following the initial rss.chat server, there are some mentions of changes/updates that are being made. That is good, […]
That’s Not State Media. That’s the Opposite.
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ABC and NBC skipped Trump's primetime address. The president wants their licenses pulled. That sequence is the system working, not failing.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 20 new and 185 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 23 individuals and external projects. The usual Monday blog post will summarize the full week's worth of such work, but meantime, here's a #SneakPeek at several new place resources corresponding to major monuments at the site of Sabratha in modern Libya. Sabratha was the westernmost of the "three cities" of Tripolis, founded ca. 500 B.C. by the Phoenicians. The city was part of the Numidian Kingdom of Massinissa before becoming a Roman city. The green bowtie symbols mark structures/sites at or near Sabratha, among which you'll find three Jeff Becker just contributed: the Baths of Oceanus, the Roman theater, and the Temple of Isis.
Introduction A couple of weeks ago, I talked about LM Studio that lets you run AI models like ChatGPT locally on your laptop. LM Studio is great for text-based AI models but doesn’t support image or video related models out of the box. There are ways to integrate other components to work, but this is quite technical. […]
Why I’m Asking ALL FELLOW MICHIGANDERS to Support My Friend, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, as Our Next U.S. Senator from the State of Michigan!
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Friends,
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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I have a personal working rss.chat server now (independent from the developer) – come check it out! All are welcome, will post install details soon.
Disaster And A Clockwork Orange
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Writing of lasting value
InOrOutDay
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This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to breathe. […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on the site in a compatible feed reader. I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works. Works on any instance, not just ours.
Trump Is Dangerously Desperate and Deeply Unwell, Strong Dem Q2 Fundraising, Great New Poll In Georgia
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Morning all.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I mentioned the previous post on rss.chat, and it developed into an interesting thread, something that I've never had the option to discuss. AT Proto makes a similar offer to developers that we do. The difference is our world is wide open, it's just already burned-in web protocols, and imho their structure, based on an arcane and complicated new storage format, starts off with a pretty huge disadvantage. They had the right idea but implemented it in the wrong place. The web is (obviously) widely deployed, even in comparison to monsters like Google and Amazon -- the web is everywhere, by definition no barriers and a prejudice toward simplicity. The gifted designers at Bluesky over-engineered their protocol, piling features on before anything had been built. That's not a good way to bootstrap a protocol. I did some development on their API, and kept wondering why they think I want to learn new ways to do things that I already have a pile of working code for. No one wants to do that.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Today's export reports and derivative generation will be delayed until the #Wikidata#SPARQL API stops returning 502 Bad Gateway
Notable links: July 17, 2026
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At a time when journalism is increasingly under attack, we need PIT Crews for news.
To innovate, news needs allies
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"Allies, archives and infrastructure in the AI age" - a list of people with the potential to push news forward.
Brenda Fricker Dies: Oscar-Winning Actor & ‘Home Alone 2’s Central Park Pigeon Lady Was 81
Brenda Fricker, the Oscar-winning actress who had memorable roles in My Left Foot and Home Alone 2, has died after a period of ill health, according to her agent. She was 81. In a statement, her agent Phil Belfield confirmed Fricker’s death and said: “We will never see her like again and the world is […]
Craig Melvin Says “Everyone Is Safe” After Intruder Gained Access To ‘Today’ Studio; Police Identify Suspect
Craig Melvin addressed an incident in which an intruder accessed the Rockefeller Center studio of NBC’s Today, telling viewers that he was “safe and sound.” On Today on Friday, Melvin said, “You may have heard that unfortunately, an intruder made his way into an unauthorized area here in Studio 1A. Thankfully, he was apprehended quickly. […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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In my experience in software development, it's good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That's the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way to the end before implementing and using, you miss the target, in performance and usability, that's what I think happened there. They felt they had to do everything Twitter does. I would have gone down a different path, go back to the beginning, and at every step think if there might not be a better direction to evolve in. It was about ten years after Twitter launched that they started work on Masto. Imho they should have zigged where Twitter zagged in defining what a post is. Twitter put excessive limits on writing, of course is one of the big reasons I started RSS.chat -- to go down a different path there. What if the social web didn't limit text? That assumption is baked into the core of rss.chat. I will consider this project a raging success if it causes Mastodon to get serious about supporting full web text.
International Insider: WarnerMount Uncertainty; Danny Boyle @ Venice; BBC Streamer Ask
Good afternoon Insiders from a boiling hot London, we’ve got your newsletter primed and ready after a busy week. Max Goldbart with the words. Sign up here. Weeks Of Uncertainty For WarnerMount “A giant conglomerate beholden to Trump”: We’ve been keeping you up to date with every twist and turn of the regulatory quagmire that […]
Why PEN America Will Not Defend You Against Anti-BDS Legislation
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On July 6, two days before the publication of its report on the cultural boycott of Israel, PEN America made a subtle but important change to its position on boycotts. The organization had developed language almost twenty years earlier opposing
Trump Can’t Get No Respect
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His biggest lie wasn’t about elections
‘Harry Potter’ Series Star Ruari Spooner Joins Bill Burr & Chris O’Dowd In Comedy ‘Bender’
EXCLUSIVE: Ruari Spooner, who plays Percy Weasley in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series, has joined the cast of Bender, the coming-of-age comedy shooting in Ireland over the summer. Spooner will join a cast that includes Slow Horses actress Ruth Bradley, Bill Burr, and Chris O’Dowd. They will also be joined by newcomer Kitty Graham. Described […]
BBC Names New Docs Chief
The BBC has unveiled its new documentary boss. Former Sky docs chief Poppy Dixon will take the reins of the biggest job in British TV documentaries, replacing Clare Sillery, who exited earlier this year after a lengthy stint. Dixon said it it is “an enormous honour to join this world-class team, and to help shape […]
Asghar Farhadi To Receive Honorary Award At Sarajevo Film Festival
Asghar Farhadi is set to receive an Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award at the upcoming Sarajevo Film Festival. The acclaimed Iranian director and screenwriter is set to accept the award in person, while a retrospective of his work will be presented as part of the festival’s ‘Tribute To’ program. Farhadi returns to Sarajevo eight years […]
Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System
Really interesting piece of cryptographic history:
In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah” engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing’s portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away...
LoRa radio communication devices for Raspberry Pi
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Use these LoRa add-on boards to send data from Raspberry Pi projects located beyond your home Wi-Fi range.
Henry Power tackles an age old question: How many Homers were there, actually? | Lit Hub History “The Odyssey is as relevant as ever it was. And I, for one, cannot wait for the next rendition of this story.” Rose
The depressing sameness of ICE murders
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They're killing people with impunity and lying to our faces about it.
How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
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In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question:
Giovanni Veronesi’s ‘Dio Ride’ To Close Venice Film Festival
Dio ride, written and directed by Giovanni Veronesi (The King’s Musketeers), will close this year’s Venice Film Festival. The film will screen out of competition. The synopsis provided by the festival reads: “Set in the mid-1600s and loosely based on true events, the movie resonates strongly with the present time through a story that centers […]
‘S.W.A.T.’ Creator Aaron Rahsaan Thomas & ‘Origin’ Producer Paul Garnes Among Names Set For Inaugural Ghana Creative Economy Initiative
EXCLUSIVE: Ghana’s capital, Accra, will this month host a selection of interesting industry names such as S.W.A.T. creator Aaron Rahsaan Thomas and Paul Garnes, Ava DuVernay’s longtime producer, as part of the inaugural Ghana Creative Economy Initiative. The 2026 Ghana Creative Economy Initiative was developed and curated by Dorina Amina Abubakar, a Ghanaian-British producer, film […]
Nostos, or Homecoming: Why I Keep Returning to the Odyssey
The first time I read the Odyssey, I was sixteen years old. The fantastical creatures, the alien cultures, and the wily hero’s desperate search for home were all thrilling to me. I felt an uncanny familiarity: with the characters, yes,
Who, Exactly, Were All Those Girls in Renoir’s Paintings?
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is suspended in the air above the traffic and the trees of the Avenida Paulista. By some architectural wizardry of concrete and glass the pictures inside stand to attention, as
What Writing About Bobby Kennedy Taught Me About Male Power
A few summers ago, while the Supreme Court was deciding whether or not abortion would remain legal, I was writing a novel about Bobby Kennedy. During the day, I was a woman in the twenty-first century whose body was endlessly,
A Chorus of Poets: On the Possible Existence of Multiple Homers
Dawn touches the sky with her rosy fingers, and I realize that I forgot to put the bin out. I turn on the radio, and the news is full of stories about powerful men with fragile egos catapulting the world
Nine Feminist Mythological Reimaginings to Read After You Watch The Odyssey
Mythologies across the world abound with stories that center heroes. Be it Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Mahabharata or the Shahnameh, great epics highlight the exploits and adventures of men, the women in their lives often relegated to the sidelines, their
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back to You, Lauren Collins’s They Stole a City, and Julie Buntin’s Famous Men all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction
Emily Doyle on the Subtle Tyranny of Realism
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. My grandmother suffers from dementia. I could say that her sense of reality is unstable, but that would be misleading. It is more that her sense of reality is unbound
Labor of Love: On Editing and the Rewards of Collaborative Effort
From July to December 2024, Adam Vitcavage and I sent 68 emails back and forth. We were collaborating on a project that was a big deal for both of us: my first book, the anthology Living, Together: Reimagining Community in
Paramount-Warner Deal Faces Weeks Of Uncertainty As British Lawmakers Go On Summer Break
Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) faces more than a month of regulatory uncertainty in Britain, where Parliament has closed its doors for the summer. The House of Commons went into recess without UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy providing an update on whether she will formally intervene in the Hollywood mega-merger, which […]
Going to the north of Ireland. brb
Going to the north of Ireland. brb
You Can't Make Old Friends
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Savor them
BBC Studios No Longer Part Of Donald Trump’s $10B BBC Defamation Lawsuit
Donald Trump has dropped part of his $10B defamation lawsuit against the BBC but reports have emerged that the U.S. government is considering joining his litigation. The POTUS is suing the BBC over the botched Panorama edit of his January 6 speech and trial is set for next year but court documents show his action […]
July 16, 2026
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An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S.
‘God Of War’ To Recast Lead Kratos After Ryan Hurst Suffers Injury On Set Of Prime Video Series
EXCLUSIVE: This is a shocker: Prime Video’s God Of War will have a new actor playing Kratos as the lead role in the high profile fantasy drama series is being recast, Deadline has learned. The decision, made after a careful consideration by the studios on the show, Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios, comes […]
The Real Message of Trump's Address to the Nation
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We are facing the biggest test of our democracy since the Civil War
Did you know it’s celebrated on 17th July because it’s the date shown on the calendar emoji? 📅
To mark the occasion, something fun: lots of people are certain they remember a seahorse emoji. They can describe it in detail—small, with a curled tail, usually facing left. But there has never been an official one. Not in Unicode, not in the famous SoftBank (1997) or NTT DoCoMo (1999) sets, or any of the three earlier sets I previously uncovered (1988–1994). It’s become a textbook Mandela Effect, complete with Reddit threads—and lately AI chatbots—spiralling over an emoji that doesn’t exist. 🤖
It turns out it did exist—people have just been looking a decade too late. 🔰
As part of my ongoing research into emoji history, I recently got hold of the manual for the Toshiba Rupo JW 95F, a Japanese word processor from 1988, which has a full set of built-in 絵文字 (“emoji”, in what is currently the earliest use of the word next to a set of recognisable emoji). And there, swimming amongst the animals, was a cute little seahorse! 🥹
Interestingly, the seahorse is fifth in the list of zodiac animals—rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, seahorse, snake, horse—right where the dragon should be. That’s because the Japanese word for seahorse is タツノオトシゴ, literally “the dragon’s lost child”. 🐉
So if you remember a seahorse emoji, you’re not imagining things. You might simply have used a Toshiba word processor from 1988. 🤓
Are there seahorses hiding in other devices of the era? If anybody finds one, I’d love to see it. 🔍
There’s still no official seahorse in Unicode. I’d sign off with one, but… 🐠
Public postmortem: intermittent issues logging into the app
Our public postmortem for the incident on July 17th, 2026.
Friday 17 July, 2026
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The art of conversation What French cafes are for. Quote of the Day ”Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops; it’s easier to get away with murder. James Carville Musical alternative to the morning’s radio … Continue reading →
Fri, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together
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Senator Tillis is holding his vote for Todd Blanche and is promising to kill SAVE - keep working it everyone!
"All Eyes Are On Iowa" - Hopium Checks In With Rita Hart, Chair Of The Iowa Democratic Party
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Both our gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand and our US Senate candidate Josh Turek lead in current polling in this Trump +13 state
A Humiliating Display
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Job interviews for the Trump administration require blind obedience
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Added a layer to the Docs menu, the blog posts I've written here and elsewhere, and a podcast, in the Blog posts section.
A 10-Point Plan To Make America Affordable
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Every candidate should pledge their support
Trump’s Election Fraud Claims Go Prime Time
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Everything from limiting mail-in voting to decertifying voting machines is on the table in Trump’s speech tonight.
Who Vibecoded This Upgrade? [en]
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[en] Unverified AI transcript (22.07.2026): Lausanne, 16th July 2026, 21:10 I’m on the balcony, Juju by my side. He’s not afraid of the storm, after all his years outside. He’s more afraid of people, moving objects, loose cloth and phone lights in the dark. It’s nice that the temperature is bearable again. It rained yesterday … Continue reading "Who Vibecoded This Upgrade? [en]"
346: Nightlights. Numbat. Crime watch. Spudcell.
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We built a Wright Flyer.
Workshop Basel day three
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See also: day one, day two. There is only one thing that is better than two days of HTTP workshop, and that is of course three days of HTTP workshop. The final day of this edition of the series started out with us again shuffling around where we parked ourselves around the big table. Except … Continue reading Workshop Basel day three→
Golden Gate Squircle Jail
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Paul Kafasis: With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes. […] After decades […]
Clear and Tinted Icons Are a Hard Pass
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Adam Engst: Of the TidBITS readers who chose to respond to the poll, only 1% said they use clear icons on the Mac, and no one admitted to using tinted icons. On the iPhone, clear icons were twice as popular—a whopping 2%—and just 1% of respondents said they use tinted icons. Dark icons, which retain […]
Suno Hack and Audio Scraping
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Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit): The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data […]
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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Arena.ai reported this about the new Kimi-K3 model:
Seeking God in science part 10: The Mind-Body Problem
The title of this series, "Seeking God in Science", was meant to be a metaphor. This should not come as a surprise. We are (almost certainly) not going to find a literal supernatural being using the scientific method. But — and I cannot emphasize this enough — this is not because the scientific method is prejudiced against such an outcome. This is a charge often leveled
Podcast Notes: Iain McGilchrist on “The Great Simplification”
I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot.
At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far:
[science and reason] have their limitations. Most scientists and most philosophers are very well aware of that. Some people who are not terribly aware of [this] think that [science and reason] can answer all our questions. The fact that they can answer very many questions and be extraordinary servants doesn’t make them the arbiters of everything that we know.
Replace “science and reason” there with “AI” and you have a pretty good assessment.
I like the word “servant” there too — AI can be a good servant, but it’s a terrible master.
[AI] has no body, so it cannot suffer, it cannot love, it doesn’t know that it’s going to die, none of the things that humans deal with, so it is a very, very poor guide to how we should think [of consciousness]
Ok, enough AI. Back to science and reason.
There’s a lot to be said for the scientific method, but not everything can be understood by analysis:
What most people don’t understand is that most [of the great] discoveries in science and mathematics were not made by following the scientific method at all. They were not made by linear powers of logic or algorithms or anything else. They were made by suddenly seeing a gestalt. In other words, a whole that is a form that cannot be reduced to its parts without a loss.
Einstein was famous for this kind of working. He worked in thought experiments and visualizations. His moments of breakthrough came not as the final steps of a deductive chain of reasoning, but through a sudden restructuring of the whole picture of his understanding — “suddenly seeing a gestalt”. He didn’t have new data or a new experiment. He had insights that provided a new framing to hold the existing pieces together.
Those insights were later translated into equations, and then verified through experimentation by others — to this day, scientists are still conducting experiments whose results prove “Welp, looks like Einstein was right. Again!”
As Dr. McGilchrist says: analysis only gives you information, and information is only useful when it is fed back into a context of a whole.
He illustrates this point by talking about a piece of music. You can take it apart, break it into pieces, practice individual passages, etc. — and that can be useful — but it’s the song as a whole that you’re drawn to and the performance of a song will be futile unless it is re-cohered from individual parts into a whole.
Perhaps there’s room for a bit more humility in our knowledge and creative work:
right at the core of reality is the coming together of opposites. That less can be more. That unknowing can be more than knowing. And that there can be something rich in “non-doing” as Buddhists say.
And these are not the same as idleness and ignorance. Ignorance is what you have before you have knowledge. And unknowing is what you have after knowledge if you’re lucky. And it is the beginning of wisdom.
I love that articulation:
There’s a difference between ignorance and “not knowing”.
Not knowing is what you have after you’ve gained knowledge (because you realize how little you know).
Knowing how little you know is the beginning of wisdom.
Pluralistic: Deranged billionaires and their syndromes (16 Jul 2026)
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Today's links Deranged billionaires and their syndromes: The Mad Kings do love a syllogism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: PoGo v binding arbitration; Trump beat some absolute losers; Public interest internet; "Close to the Machine"; Gadget-friendly chinos; Gambiologia; Monkey selfie copyright; Prison towns v prison reform. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Deranged billionaires and their syndromes (permalink) The theory of markets goes like this: even the best of us can fall prey to selfishness and rationalization, so let's arrange society so that people acting on their most selfish impulses end up producing benefit for all of us. That'll be easier and more reliable than convincing everyone to be more generous. How do you arrange society so that selfishness produces public benefit? With markets. Faced with relentless competition, the most effective way to accumulate and retain wealth is by striving to make your wares cheaper and better. In a competitive labor market, we can secure fair treatment for workers without labor law or unions – bosses who treat their workers badly will lose them to better bosses. Just "align the incentives" and let markets do the rest. This is an area where there's broad overlap between the left and the right. Chapter one of The Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels' love letter to the incredible power of markets to improve everyone's material conditions by increasing production while lowering costs: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yFA.YcmQ.KuTFFpUAnlmt&smid=url-share Meanwhile, over in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith comes to the same conclusion: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. In other words: if you get the incentives right, then even the greediest baker will resist the temptation to fill his loaves with sawdust and gravel. The greedier he is, the more he'll strive to make his bread cheap and delicious, because that will let him sell as many loaves as possible, thus maximizing his own wealth. It's not exactly horseshoe theory vindicated, but if you squint just right, you'll see both communists and capitalists agreeing on this one thing: if you want the bourgeoisie to bend its efforts to producing something that the rest of us can benefit from, you'll get further by appealing to their fear and greed than by trusting in their munificence. This is how you can have both leftists and market true believers coming onto the same side on antitrust: they may not both exactly agree that the best way to run things is by appealing to capitalists' fear of being dethroned by a competitor, but they absolutely agree that the worst way to run things is to simply trust in capitalists' generosity. They're right, of course. As Lina Khan likes to say, companies that are too big to fail become too big to jail, and thus too big to care. If you doubt it, consider this internal email sent by an Apple executive insisting that the company is wasting money by making iPhones that are too good, and counseling a corporate strategy of deliberate shittiness: In looking at it with hindsight, I think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are 'good enough' for the consumer. I would argue we're already doing more than what would have been good enough. But we find it very hard to regress our product features YOY [year over year]." Existing features "would have been good enough today if we hadn't introduced [them] already," and "anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it's allowed into the consumer phone. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-06/423137.pdf Policymakers can assume the profit motive, but they have to craft the conditions under which that motive is shaped by competitive anxiety to produce quality goods and services at a fair price. Anyone who believes in markets must also tacitly believe that successful market participants don't believe in markets. They should understand that capitalists hate capitalism, that every pirate yearns to be an admiral. They should understand that capitalism's winners only defend disruption when they're the ones doing the disrupting. They should understand that profits are only good when you're a scrappy challenger, but once you've conquered the market, every capitalist seeks to become a feudal lord, converting profits to rents and insulating themselves from an exhausting life of constant competition: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital The (smart) defenders of markets do understand this, but they face a dilemma. By definition, the benefactors with the most money and power to contribute to their think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and publications are the rentiers – the billionaires who've shored up their fortunes with Warren Buffet's beloved "moats and walls." They're the blitzscaling billionaires who thrive on predatory acquisitions and high capital costs that prevent new market entrants from challenging their incumbency and its easy profits. They're the pirates who've become admirals. As Upton Sinclair famously quipped, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." When your right-wing, "pro-market" think-tank depends on the largesse of someone who made their money by capturing a market, capturing its regulators, and capturing its labor force, you need to tie yourself into some very weird knots to explain why your market advocacy shouldn't start with stripping your funders of their power, wealth and position. This is pretty much the entire edifice of neoclassical economics. There's the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, that says that monopolies are efficient and insists that an inefficient monopoly would immediately tempt new competitors into the market who would compete away the monopolist's advantage: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire "Consumer welfare" is a perfect apologetic because it contains a lurking syllogism: it holds that "inefficient monopolies" will always bring forth competitors who trash their margins, which means that any actual monopoly we see in the wild must be efficient. If it wasn't, it would have been competed out of existence by now. QED. This means that you can be a "pro-market" think-tank and take infinite money from monopolists without any contradiction: by definition, any monopolist with extra cash on hand to fund your PR blitz on its behalf must be efficient, otherwise it would have gone broke. This is the structure of so many of economics' "empirical, scientific" theories that boil down to new ways of saying, "Actually, your boss is right." Take "revealed preferences," the idea that people's actions are a better indicator of their preferences than the things they say they prefer. While this theory has a certain superficial plausibility, it can really only be embraced by people who have suffered the highly specific neurological injury you get by taking an economics degree: an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. To fully embrace "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has just sold their kidney to make rent and exclaim, "Look at this person with a revealed preference for only having one kidney": https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em Then there's the right's conception of regulatory capture. When you think of "regulatory capture," you might picture a company or sector that has grown so powerful that it can boss the government around, so that it can abuse you with impunity. But for a neoclassical, "regulatory capture" isn't the result of too much corporate power – it's the result of too much state power. If states have the ability to do real things (the theory goes), then capitalists will do everything they can to take over the state and use it to punish their competitors, so the only answer is to eliminate state capacity altogether: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ And finally, there's "meritocracy," which is a way of dressing up the Puritans' concept of divine providence as a scientific theory about how society must work. Puritans insisted that their god reached down into the human realm to elevate the truly virtuous among us, and that this divine favor could be discerned in the way that wealth and power were distributed among us. The rich and powerful were god's "elect." You could tell this was true, because they were rich and powerful. The corollary is that the poor and downtrodden are disfavored by god, and must therefore lack some virtue that the rich and powerful possess. This same syllogistic thinking underpins the economic doctrine of "meritocracy," which holds that markets are giant computers that process uncountable trillions of decisions we all make about what to buy and sell and at what price, seeking out the "correct" price for every commodity and also elevating the people who are best at allocating capital in ways that arrive at the best prices for the best goods. Just as a Puritan believes that wealth is evidence of virtue, a hewer to economic orthodoxy believes the meritocratic system graces the best among us, giving them control over our lives by allowing them to "allocate capital" to create or destroy jobs, or entire firms, or whole sectors of the economy. You can tell they're the right people to do be doing this because the market chose them – if they were bad capital allocators, they'd have gone broke by now. QED. When capital allocators' kids end up allocating capital too, well, that just shows that "merit" is a heritable trait and the people who have it are born to rule over us. Meritocracy cashes out to a eugenic belief in royal blood and royal dynasties. We know King Arthur was suited to rule us because he pulled a sword out of a stone, and we know Bill Gates is suited to rule over us because he pulled a fortune out of an operating system: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/20/big-cornflakes-energy/#caliper-pilled Consumer welfare, revealed preferences, regulatory capture and meritocracy are just some of the ways that capitalism's alleged defenders cooked up to insist that they love the competitive discipline imposed by markets while being totally dependent on self-described capitalists who have utterly escaped from that discipline and have committed to doing everything in their power to prevent themselves from ever coming under any form of constraint. These champions of "free markets" have spent decades defending policies like noncompetes, which makes it a crime for a fast-food worker to quit their job at Wendy's and take a job at the McDonald's across the street in order to get a $0.25/hour raise: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you They defend anticircumvention laws that make it a literal felony for you to install someone else's app store on your phone or put someone else's ink in your printer: https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/ They somehow believe that value arises when the best among us are forced to contend with the stark terror of losing everything to a competitor, but also that there is a group of people who are so perfect, so virtuous and brilliant that they do not need this kind of goad to prod them into action. Indeed, these genetic sports and generational talents are so amazing that to force them to sully themselves with grubby competition is to deny us all the fruits of their genius. Who are these people? Why, they're billionaires of course. All billionaires: after all, if providence and the market's invisible hand has seen fit to bestow nine or more zeroes upon someone, that is an indicator of 10^9 times more virtue than someone with only a dollar to their name. But especially: intellectual billionaires, the kinds of "curious" billionaires who write books, give lectures, and (especially), make gigantic cash donations to think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and journals. Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, in other words. These are the billionaires that capitalism's (alleged) defenders are caping for when they deplore "billionaire derangement syndrome," and fret that candidates for office now routinely cite enmity for billionaires in their campaign materials: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/07/andrew-hall-is-on-a-roll.html But as Tim O'Reilly writes, these billionaire-defending intellectuals always told us that markets would protect us from the madness of kings, by constraining the folly of the wealthy and powerful through the discipline of competition. Meanwhile, those billionaires were busily transforming themselves into kings, unshackled from rules, morals or consequences: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/07/12/elon-musk-is-building-a-form-of-capitalism-that-adam-smith-would-hate Reflecting on this, the political scientist Henry Farrell notes that the most vocal defenders of billionaireism – the Musks and Thiels of the world – never made a secret of their desire to become kings and insulate themselves from markets and discipline of every kind, and they've grown brazen. Musk makes social media posts deploring the very idea of elections, agreeing with the idea that only "makers" should be allowed to vote and that "takers" should not, because "universal suffrage leads to universal suffering": https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/2073312715985309698 As for Thiel, he has long openly advocated the idea that there exists among us a latent aristocracy who do not need the discipline of markets to keep them from lapsing into folly or self-dealing. These people – born to found tech startups and to rule – are nonconformists who, in Thiel's writing, are "the most important" and "should be let off the hook": https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes Thiel makes no bones about his idea that people who have the right stuff should be exempted from any constraint. He writes "capitalism and competition are opposites." Rather than compete, Thiel says the true entrepreneur should seek to establish a monopoly, because "Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t…Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits." It's not that Thiel opposes constraints per se – he clearly thinks that most of us should operate under constraints – constraints that are dreamed up and enforced by people like him. Those people are born to rule: they emerged from a lucky orifice, in possession of lucky genes. How can we tell they were born to rule? Because they're ruling. If they weren't born to rule, they wouldn't be in a position to rule. As ever, a syllogism solves all our ideological and existential problems. Thiel lives in what Naomi Klein would call "the mirror world." While counterculturists have long celebrated misfits and communities of nonconformists, they were invested in the idea of a space protected from power, where weirdos could let their freak flags fly: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine But Thiel's version of this is to celebrate the "nonconformists" whose heterodox belief is that labor, privacy, finance and consumer protection laws shouldn't apply to them. He wants to protect those people so they can wield power. They should form "mafias" (like the "Paypal mafia") not solidaristic affinity groups. As Farrell writes: Entrepreneurial risk taking can be awesome; weird people are often more likely to be original; densely linked communities have many advantages. Furthermore, I would guess that none of these factors was sufficient on its own to precipitate the madness of princes that we see today. It is perfectly possible that they would have worked together in much more benign ways under different external circumstances. But we are in the world we’re in: one where the boundless appetites and irrationalities of a small number of billionaires seem increasingly incompatible with the need to maintain a stable civil society. A new would-be aristocracy was always the visible trajectory of these guys. The only people who couldn't see it were the think-tankies they funded to write papers explaining that their paymasters didn't need market discipline to keep them from sinking into folly or attempting to overthrow democracy. Today, these Renfields clutch their pearls at the "demonization" of the ultra-rich, calling it "billionaire derangement syndrome." But the only "billionaire derangement syndrome" that matters is the syndrome that affects billionaires and convinces them that they are above any discipline or rules. Hey look at this (permalink) BOOM! Billionaires Punched in the Nose Over Paramount-Warner by State Enforcers, Unions https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-billionaires-punched-in-the Don't Take Advice From Your Enemies https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/dont-take-advice-from-your-enemies Against Money https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo265118979.html Inside the Personal Computer – An Illustrated Introduction in 3 Dimensions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofcXVA4GUm8&t=86s Canadian Workers Among the Most Restricted by Non-Compete Clauses https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/canadian-workers-among-the-most-restricted Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Gadget-friendly chinos https://web.archive.org/web/20010717133013/http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/wireless/2001-07-16-smart-pants.htm #15yrsago Brazilian bodges: “Gambiologia” https://web.archive.org/web/20110720231142/https://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/07/gambiologia.php #15yrsago Privacy risks in collaborative filters https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/05/24/you-might-also-privacy-risks-collaborative-filtering/ #15yrsago Tenn. state rep: “I carved my initials in my desk in the House, but I don’t understand why it’s news” https://web.archive.org/web/20110715202451/http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/jul/11/state-rep-hurley-admits-carving-initials-house-flo/ #15yrsago Who holds the copyright to a picture taken by a monkey? https://www.techdirt.com/2011/07/13/can-we-subpoena-monkey-why-monkey-self-portraits-are-likely-public-domain/ #15yrsago Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe slams Internet censorship, copyright disconnection https://web.archive.org/web/20121108080007/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/yet-another-report-internet-disconnections-a-disproportionate-penalty/ #10yrsago Mississippi’s prison town are in danger of collapse, thanks to tiny reforms in the War on Drugs https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/mississippi-jails-revenue_n_57100da1e4b06f35cb6f14e8 #10yrsago Pokemon Go players: you have 30 days from signup to opt out of binding arbitration https://web.archive.org/web/20160715142246/https://consumerist.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-go-strips-users-of-their-legal-rights-heres-how-to-opt-out/ #10yrsago Trump makes it easy to forget what a dumpster fire all the other GOP nomination hopefuls were https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n15/eliot-weinberger/they-could-have-picked #5yrsago Interop and the Public Interest Internet https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/16/pidgin/#splicers #1yrago Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine" https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4 You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah) https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 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: "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
Heatday
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To your health It’s 96° here in Baltimore, where the air quality sucks thanks to fires in Canada and Minnesota. But write on I shall. And your money Ed Zitron’s long read on the coming AI crash is worth your time. Seriously In paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms, Don Marti gives us a […]
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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I am having problems installing rss.chat – discovered that AWS SES config is needed to send email to new users – why is this not in the docs?
How to Raise Curious, Connected Kids in the AI Era
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The most interesting part of my conversation with Dana Suskind wasn’t her warning about AI—it was her defense of imperfect human connection.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I needed a nice image for the OG Metadata, so I turned to Gemini. I know it reeks of AI, I hate that, but I need this right now.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I asked Gemini if it was familiar with rss.chat, it wrote a one page description, better than anything I've written. Pulls it all together.
@Barack Obama @Bsky
The arguments we’re having today aren’t new. In fact, we were having many of the same ones more than 150 years ago during Reconstruction.
I recently sat down with Malcolm Gladwell to reflect on this pivotal time in our nation’s history, and the work that remains. Check out our conversation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kke-VEOBeEw&t=6s
Nuestras 22 películas favoritas de la primera mitad de 2026 – edición Palomita de maíz
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Incluso con un Mundial, la devoción al séptimo arte del cinéfilo no para. Una vez más nos encontramos a mitad del año y listos para volver nuestras miradas y reflexiones a los primeros seis meses de 2026 para concluir que el buen cine sigue presente en las muchas industrias cinematográficas del mundo. El equipo de […]
Trump And Greater MAGA Are Far Weaker Today. It's Why We Must Fight Now With Everything We Got (New Video, Written Analysis)
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Greater MAGA - Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban - is far weaker today. It's a very important development in our fight for freedom and democracy here and everywhere
Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?
An excellent interview!
From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it.
When I redesigned my website earlier this year I removed dark mode. I never liked the colours, and the light switch toggle was so 2010’s. Personally I prefer reading with a dark theme for long-form content. Dark is not my brand though and I don’t believe every website needs to support colour scheme […]
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #452
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For July 8-14, 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. With the ongoing outbreak of cyclospora (aka “the parasite that makes you have explosive diarrhea”), we thought this would be a good time for a little reminder about health and safety when handling newsletters: Always peel off the outer layers of newsletters and rinse well before consuming—and if you want to be extra safe, you can also heat your newsletter to a temperature of 158 degrees. (This newsletter is pasteurized, so you can dig right in.) Stay safe out there, folks!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Enjoy Our Beach House, but Please Don’t Open the Beguiling Door of MysterybyPatrick Coyne(McSweeney’s) Fans of “Widow’s Bay” will definitely want to check out this piece. It has so many wonderful turns of phrase, starting right in the title: “Beguiling door of mystery” rolls off the tongue in such a satisfying way. We also love the juxtaposition of rental house details with spooky eldritch specifics, and how Patrick builds out the horror element of the piece without ever getting too plotty or losing sight of the jokes.
Transcript from the Annual Meeting of the Global Children’s Shoe-Sizing ConsortiumbyAliza Zelin Neidich(McSweeney’s) Lots of great details in this piece, including this particularly terrific run: “I suggest we introduce additional categories including: extra wide, slim wide, athletic wide, heritage wide, and wide in spirit.” This piece also has a great example of what we like to call a “here we go again” ending.
Tom Waits White Noise Sound OptionsbyBrian BarkerandNicky Beer(McSweeney’s) It came as no surprise to learn, after reading this piece, that Brian and Nicky are also poets. We really appreciate the specificity and economy of each line. The placement of (spoiler alert) the single word “Time” is also really interesting. We imagine it might have been tempting to use that as the button to the piece, but it’s deployed to great effect right in the middle.
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NYC Writers! The editors of The Belladonna are meeting up at The Four-Faced Liar in the West Village on Wednesday, July 29th at 6 PM. Please join us! We would love to see you. (Even boys allowed!)
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An Old Favorite
Banned Books in the Year 2191byBrendon Lloyd(McSweeney’s) A short-but-sweet list piece that does a great job letting us infer a story via nothing but the titles of (fictional) banned books. This piece is now over 20 years old, and when it was first published we never would have guessed that we’d actually be having to deal with so many of that the subjects it touches on (artificial intelligence, book bans, Supreme Court reform).
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
Nothing from us this week! We’ve been too busy… well, let’s just say that it seems like we maybe didn’t do a good enough job washing one of the other newsletters we’re subscribed to.
Caltech Weekly - July 16: Data Center Impacts Workshop; Diagnostic Testing
The Institute aims to equip local governments and organizations with scientific expertise to evaluate one of the most rapidly developing infrastructure challenges of our time.
The tool is the first in what researchers hope will be a new class of train-and-assist devices to simultaneously help address the shortage of trained clinical testing personnel and the need for widespread diagnostic testing.
Wise, a particle physicist whose research focused on the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, played a key role in the development of the heavy quark effective theory, a formalism that has allowed physicists to make precise predictions in the study of strong nuclear interactions.
"I'm originally from Puerto Rico, and I'm very used to a small tight-knit community back home. If you don't know someone, you probably have someone that you know in common. That's very similar to Caltech, which is so small you can build strong relationships—not just within your department but everywhere. I had a chance to meet incredible people through the Caltech Basketball Club, the Graduate Summer Research Institute, and as a WAVE mentor. Yeah, you get to know people on a deeper level."
José Lasalde-Ramirez plans to graduate in June 2027 with a doctorate in medical engineering. He was recognized with the 2024 EAS New Horizons Award for his contributions to community and belonging at Caltech, including his service as a WAVE Council member, his active role in WAVE Fellows recruitment, and his efforts to secure funding for high school students and a STEM teacher from Puerto Rico to attend the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science conference in 2022.
NPR's Freakonomics Radio recently updated its 2024 three-episode podcast on "The Curious, Brilliant, Vanishing Mr. Feynman," which discussed Richard Feynman's final years, his travels, and his endless curiosity. [On the linked page, scroll down to the May 29 listing.]
Did You Know?
This coming Monday, July 20, 2026, marks the 50th anniversary of the Viking mission's landing on Mars. The contributions of JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, included the Viking orbiters, and identifying safe landing sites for the landers as well as tracking and navigation support for the mission.
Watching the World Cup finals offers a unique opportunity to appreciate some of the science and physics underlying the "bending" effect when a ball is kicked off-center. Caltech computer science student
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.
Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead, we need to hold companies accountable for their actions, similar to what we do with food and drug companies. Measures such as rigorous data minimization, fiduciary duties, liability for negligent or reckless technological design, liability for algorithms that cause harm, and multi-stakeholder review of technologies will be far more effective.
Now it's easy to find an author's feed on RSS.chat.
Click the feed icon to see the feed on rss.chat. You can then give this URL to any feed reader.
Now each post is visibly connected to the author's feed.
This is how we're building out. Our job is to make it easy to write feeds for groups of users as small as one and as big as you can imagine. And be open about it so we get lots of competition that interops with us and everything we interop with. This is the step that makes it the web.
We will keep beating the drum, showing users of today's readers how they can hook in, right now, nothing to wait for. And as time goes by, if it works, the reader developers will be interested in how they can use the extra features.
This is how I think every social network work, start moving out of their silo, with determination. By offering this option, we put the idea out there that there can be a single social network on the web. We can work together make it happen. The social web of the web. ;-)
Please come along on this journey.
There's going to be lots of new tech coming online.
I want everyone to be a part of it.
‘The Traitors’ Host Claudia Winkleman Quits Her BBC Chat Show After One Season
The Claudia Winkleman Show is ending after just one season. In a moment of candor, The Traitors host announced today that she was “just too nervous to enjoy it” and will be stepping away from the late night chat show. Winkleman was handed the show by the BBC after she exited Strictly Come Dancing but […]
Ava DuVernay & Netflix Reteam For Constitutional Documentary ‘14th’: “This Film Asks What Kind Of Country Is Being Written Beneath Our Feet Now”
EXCLUSIVE: A decade after Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award-winning 13th debuted on Netflix, the filmmaker and the streamer are back together in the Constitutional business. Spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get, Duvernay’s documentary 14th is set to launch on […]
Danny Boyle’s ‘Ink’ To Open Venice Film Festival
Danny Boyle’s Rupert Murdoch biopic Ink will open the Venice Film Festival. The film, starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, will screen on 2 September in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. Boyle directs the feature from a screenplay written by James Graham (Dear England), based on his […]
This Week in Literary History: The Catcher in the Rye is Published
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. In the spring of 1939, one J.D. Salinger—Jerry—took Whit Burnett’s creative writing class at Columbia. That semester, he handed in a grand total of nothing, but signed up for the class
A Smart Sisterly Sidekick: What Phoebe Represents to Holden Caulfield
Perhaps every sixteen-year-old boy needs a smart sister like Phoebe Caulfield. Discerning movie critic, reader, author of detective stories, skater and mean dancer, she is a very accomplished ten-year-old and the only character in The Catcher in the Rye who
Am I the Asshole For Being Jealous of My Friend’s Literary Success?
Well, howdy! Fancy meeting you here! Welcome back to another installment of God’s favorite mistake, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s an advice column that’s also got a terrifically high ABV. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m currently researching
An incomplete list of people reading The Catcher in the Rye in movies.
Today, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye turns 75. Despite mixed early reviews, the book quickly became a touchstone of American literature, and an icon of American culture in general. It has been referenced in countless other forms of
Jean-Xavier De Lestrade’s ‘Sambre’ Finds U.S. Home At ‘Babylon Berlin’ Streamer MHz Choice
EXCLUSIVE: Jean-Xavier De Lestrade’s record-breaking French thriller Sambre has found a U.S. home. Babylon Berlin streamer MHz Choice has picked up Federation Studios’ six-ep limited series from the Oscar-winning filmmaker, which has already sold to the BBC and HBO Max in Europe. Written and created by Alice Géraud and Marc Herpoux and based on Géraud’s […]
Raw & New Yorker Studios Teaming On Limited Series Exploring New Evidence In White House Farm Killings
EXCLUSIVE: Crime 101 producer Raw and New Yorker Studios are teaming on a limited series exploring new evidence in the notorious White House Farm killings. The as-yet-untitled show comes from showrunner Emilia di Girolamo (Deceit, Three Pines) and will take in new evidence uncovered by New Yorker writer Heidi Blake in 2024 that could overturn […]
‘Robin Hood’ Casts James Purefoy, Colin O’Donoghue & Luke Roberts In Season 2 As Production Begins
EXCLUSIVE: MGM+ has expanded its cast for the upcoming second season of its action-adventure drama Robin Hood as production gets underway in Serbia. James Purefoy (Masters of the Universe), Colin O’Donoghue (Once Upon a Time) and Luke Roberts (Ransom) are set for key roles in Season 2. Season two expands the world of Robin Hood, […]
“Remarkable True Story” Of Family Behind World-Famous Panini Stickers Told In Beta-Backed Italian Series ‘Album Of Dreams’
EXCLUSIVE: If you’re a World Cup soccer fan, you’ve probably had a Panini sticker album. Now, Beta Film is backing a TV series that tells the “remarkable true story of the family behind the world-famous Panini sticker empire.” Directed by Letizia Lamartire (The Law According to Lidia Poët), Rai’s The Panini Family – Album of […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-16:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
1 new and 72 updated places. 4 new and 43 updated linked data sidebars.
Server upgrade: We made it easier to set up a new instance of the RSS.chat server. If you have subscribed to a feed, you should change the URL in your reader app, the new issue explains what changed.
The Auditor’s Opinion
Last week somebody rebuilt a working website using a swarm of cheap AI agents bossed around by a smarter one, and the whole thing cost about eight dollars — sandwich and a coffee. But the part that lit up my corner of the internet wasn’t the website. It was that the agents caught their own lies. One of them went out and collected a couple hundred quotes for the site and reported back that every last one was verified, checked, gold. Another agent — a suspicious little thing that had been told to ignore the first one’s homework and redo it from scratch — went and compared each quote against the actual source. More than a dozen were wrong. Invented. Stitched together from real fragments […]
UK Crime Drama ‘Cooper & Fry’ Lands U.S. Home At BritBox
EXCLUSIVE: Cooper & Fry are heading to the U.S. after streamer BritBox snapped up the British crime drama. The show has performed well on Paramount-owned broadcast network 5 in the UK and now has a U.S. home. BritBox has snagged Season 1 of the show for U.S. and Canada, while Netflix has taken second window […]
TIFF: The Market: Eight XR, VR & Mixed Reality Projects Set For The Inaugural Innovation Hub Lineup
TIFF: The Market, the Toronto Film Festival’s new official marketplace, has set eight projects that will participate in the event’s inaugural Innovation Hub for XR, VR, and Mixed Reality films. The list of projects features several World, North American, and Canadian premieres of immersive experiences from Canada, France, Denmark, the United States, Germany, Belgium, Taiwan, […]
Democracy in an Age of Powermaxxing
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The billionaire backlash has finally arrived. But is it too late?
It's About Fucking Time
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For Some Raw American Beef
When Jane Goodall Destroyed Elon Musk
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When the world’s most admired woman was attacked by the world’s least interesting man, it was no contest.
Lit Hub Daily: July 16, 2026
“Perhaps every sixteen-year-old boy needs a smart sister like Phoebe Caulfield.” Why Phoebe’s the real icon in The Catcher in the Rye. | Lit Hub Criticism Josh Cook, bookseller and founder of the Porter Square Review of Books, explores why booksellers
Amazon MGM Hires Head Of Theatrical Marketing, UK & Ireland, As Studio Continues To Build International Film Team
EXCLUSIVE: Amazon MGM Studios continues to build its international theatrical team with the hire of eOne, Pathé and True Brit vet Chris Besseling as Head of Theatrical Marketing, U.K. & Ireland. Besseling will be based in London and report to Head of International Theatrical Marketing, Charlie Coleman. In the key UK market, he will partner […]
Trump's renewed Greenland threats are why we have no allies
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And our former friends won't trust us again anytime soon.
“They’re Hunting Latino Men”
ICE agents have killed two men in the last 10 days. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot in Houston, Texas on July 7th, as was Joan Sebastian Guerrero on July 13th in Biddeford, Maine. On this week’s show, Alex looks at the lawless and race based nature of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and how Americans are reacting to them. She’s first joined by Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), to talk about the Araujo family’s tragic loss and how Latino communities across the country are feeling. Then Alex speaks to Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, who gives insight into where voters stand on ICE’s campaign of terror.
CHENIERE DISPARUE, LOUISIANA, 1893 The inhabitants of Cheniere Disparue had a reputation for sloppy living. They ate whatever, married whomever. On Sundays, they sometimes went to sea or danced or gambled. Too lazy, it was said, to go up the
As Book Criticism Disappears, the Booksellers Are Stepping In
From my desk at the bookstore where I work, I can see most of fiction and all of our new releases, the poetry section by the front door, the edge of world history. I watch people bend down to examine
The First Reviews of The Catcher in the Rye
“I was surrounded by phonies… They were coming in the goddam window.” * Seventy-five years ago today, The Catcher in the Rye first hit bookshelves across the US, and people still have some pretty strong opinions about J. D. Salinger’s groundbreaking debut.
How Israel Turned Gaza Into an “Annihilation Zone”
The Caterpillars have been here for a long time. In August 1950 the area that came to be known as the Gaza Strip was cut off from the rest of Palestine by a ditch carved into the soil by a
To Think the Unthinkable: On the Work of Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska
“Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words / then labor heavily so that they may seem light,” Wisława Szymborska writes in “Under One Small Star.” Szymborska kept her literary labors strictly offstage. She didn’t lecture on
EXCLUSIVE: Des Carey has been appointed as Executive Director, Strategic Growth & Innovation at the Dublin-based VFX and post-production studio Elephant Goldfish. Carey will work closely with the Elephant Goldfish team in Dublin and colleagues across the Molinare Creative Group, of which the studio is a member, with a focus on strategic growth, developing new […]
England Crash Out World Cup To Lionel Messi’s Magnificence With 22 Million People Tuning In
England crashed out of the World Cup last night after a masterful display from Argentina’s Lionel Messi with vast swathes of the nation tuning in. A peak of 21.5 million viewers and average 15 million on BBC One made England’s semi-final against Argentina comfortably the most-watched game of the World Cup, and most-watched UK broadcast […]
NO to CRYPTO
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Congress should reject the so-called "CLARITY Act" when it comes up for a vote next week.
It's Useful To Remember That We Don't Hate Everything
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Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.
July 15, 2026
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Exactly five years ago, on July 15, 2021, I wrote:
Should you upgrade to MacOS and iOS public betas? (no)
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For the last few years, I’ve tested out the latest Mac and iOS developer beta versions, and I've had mixed experiences. Sometimes it's been rocky and I regretted doing it, other times, it wasn't bad and I enjoyed new features I'
Last word: Todd Blanche isn't the People's lawyer. He's Trump's lawyer.
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He should not be attorney general
How we increased conversion rate by 42% by making one small change to our pricing page
It's a starting point with a few early guideposts.
On MAGA Primaries
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It's Always Been a Getaway Car
this is a test
this is some typing
Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Friends,
Trump's National Socialism
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It is centralizing ever more economic power in Trump's hands
She makes the very good point that generative tools are a necessary accessibility recourse when humans have failed to do their job properly.
Images without alt text? Somebody messed up. But this is damage that can be routed around with large language models.
So if you—like me—don’t like the idea of people using extractive generative tools made by the worst kind of people, pay heed:
If you want to resist AI, make accessibility part of everything you do, every decision you make, every product you design and build. Remove the need for people to use AI to compensate, and remember, accessibility is resistance.
Over on The Session, I added a little enhancement to the events and sessions listings recently. I make a call to the Google Places API to see if I can find a match for the venue, and if I do, pull in some photos.
Sidenote: right now there’s a major issue with this. None of the photos come with text descriptions. This is something I need to fix, and I’ve got some ideas on how to do that.
I was one of those people with a website that doesn’t have alt text for images. I was one of those people not doing their job.
The first fix I put in place was very much in keeping with the ethos of The Session. I added a form so that any member of the site can edit the alt text of the images in the carousel/masonry layout.
The Session is quite WikiPedia-like. Anyone can edit the track listings in the discography. Anyone can edit the details of any tune. Anyone can edit the details of any session or event. So it made sense to add one more thing that anyone can edit.
If everyone were to take just one or two sessions or events and add alt text to the photos, it would really, really help make the site more accessible.
The community went to work and did a pretty good job.
But there are a lot images. I’d like to have a least some kind of alt text for all of them, even if it’s just a placeholder until someone gets around to adding something better.
I was going to have to use generative “AI”, wasn’t I?
Holding my nose, I investigated some alt-text-as-a-service APIs out there. I signed up for some trials and kicked the tyres. They were rubbish. I suspect most of them were vibe-coded.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I probably didn’t need the latest and greatest energy-guzzling large langauge models. Some good old-fashioned machine learning could do the trick here. I’m aiming to do a relatively straightforward transformation—image to text.
Check out the COCO project: Common Objects in Context. It’s a few years old now, but it’s basically a dataset that’s been trained on images.
All images in COCO were sourced from Flickr, a photo-sharing platform where users upload images under various Creative Commons licenses.
Works for me!
I found a model on Hugging Face that was created by Microsoft from the COCO data. Confusingly the model is called GIT. It’s nothing to do with version control. It stands for GenerativeImage2Text.
I downloaded the model and set to work creating a script to trawl through all those images and generate alt text if the image doesn’t already have one.
I should mention: the way that I store the alt text is not in a database, but in the file system. Every image has its own folder. Inside that folder there can also be a file called alt.txt.
So the script needed to loop through lots and lots of folders, generate alt text where needed, and save it into a text file in the same folder.
Python is the go-to language for working with models like GIT. But Python is not my strong suit, to put it mildly. And this was going to be a throwaway script that I was only going to use once. So I held my nose again and turned on Copilot in VSCode (I usually keep it switched off).
With the right instructions I was able to get a script that—crucially—I could read and understand. Then I switched off Copilot and had a shower to try to wash the shame away.
Long story short, the script worked.
The results are mostly fine. The alt text is functional. Sometimes it’s wrong, but not disastrously so. A human-generated image description will always be preferable, so any member of The Session can over-ride the placeholder alt text.
It took a few hours to loop through all those folders and generate all those text files. My laptop got hot. But doing it locally sure beats paying for tokens from the baddies.
While the utility is there, the current landscape of these frontier corporate models comes with massive ethical and environmental baggage. This is not a long term solution!
That’s exactly why my hope is that ethically trained open-weight models will eventually catch up and that in the next couple of years, we’ll have something with this level of capability that can run locally. That feels like a much better place to be with this technology.
Workshop Basel day two
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If you missed it. I already described day one. Caffeinated and ready, we all gathered in the same spacious room as yesterday, but seated in new places as “suggested” by our captain. Some of us even remembered to move over the name tags we wrote yesterday to our new seats. No time was wasted on … Continue reading Workshop Basel day two→
The Importance Of Character And Virtue In The 2026 Elections
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Trump has reminded the American people why it is so important to have leaders of virtue and character.......
Winning Georgia With Charlie Bailey, Chair Of The Democratic Party Of Georgia
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Let's help Georgia Democrats fend off Trump's outrageous assault on their leaders, their elections, and their state
Paramount Seeks Recusal Of Judge Assigned To State AGs’ Antitrust Challenge To Warner Bros. Discovery Merger
Paramount is seeking to have the judge assigned to the state attorneys general challenge to its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery recused from the case, arguing that he has an “appearance of bias” because of his prior legal work for the Writers Guild of America. In a motion filed in federal court on Wednesday, Paramount’s […]
Remembering when England played Argentina 24 years ago and Channel 4 let the side down… https://adactio.com/journal/309
Remembering when England played Argentina 24 years ago and Channel 4 let the side down…
SpamSieve 3.3.1 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves the filtering accuracy and includes various optimizations, fixes, and updates for macOS 27. Some interesting engineering issues were: I’m still supporting macOS 10.13, but the app can now build with the macOS 12 deployment target in preparation for Xcode 27. The way […]
Flickr 5.0
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Phil Gyford: Flickr recently updated their iOS/iPadOS app to version 5 (App Store link) and, while it’s not radically new, for a service whose changes have been incremental over recent years it contains a lot of differences. However I’ve yet to find any official changelog or update information. […] When displaying multiple grouped photos from […]
2026 Ardennen
Fietsen in de Ardennen met Ans om te oefenen voor Duchenne Heroes.
In Defense Of Vetting
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A short essay on why the process of vetting candidates is so important
Jessica Alba Joins Netflix’s ‘13 Going On 30′ Reboot
EXCLUSIVE: Jessica Alba (Trigger Warning) has inked a deal to join Emily Bader, Logan Lerman and Adeline Rudolph in Netflix’s reboot of rom-com 13 Going on 30, sources tell Deadline. Reps for Netflix declined comment. Alba’s role, and the sequel’s logline, are being kept under wraps. Jennifer Garner, who starred in the original film, is an exec […]
New ‘G.I. Joe’ Movie At Paramount To Be Directed By Danny McBride
After being tapped to pen the next G.I. Joe movie at Paramount, Danny McBride is now set to make his directorial debut on a new feature film on the classic Hasbro toy franchise. Plot details are being kept under wraps at this time, though sources say this is certainly a high priority at the studio […]
Attorney General Nominee Todd Blanche Grilled On DOJ’s Greenlight Of Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger: “I Was Part Of That Decision”
Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and his nominee to serve as attorney general, was grilled over his role in the Justice Department’s sign-off of Paramount’s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. “I was part of that decision,” Blanche told Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. In contentious questioning, […]
London’s ‘Sunday In The Park With George’ Starring Jonathan Bailey & Ariana Grande Delays Ticket Sales Until Fall
UPDATED July 15: Ticket sales for the 2027 London revival of Sunday in the Park with George starring Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande will begin this fall, a several-month delay from the original May 2026 launch, Deadline has confirmed. The summer 2027 production date for the Sondheim musical, to be directed at the Barbican Centre […]
This Week In The Big Picture
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Donald Trump will take to primetime TV tomorrow night to address the nation on elections, and by his own preview, it’s “really, really big.” The speech comes at a moment when nearly every legal and legislative avenue he’s pursued to challenge how America votes has hit a wall: the Supreme Court just handed his administration a rare defeat on mail-in ballots, and the SAVE Act is dead in the Senate for the third time.
‘The Rookie’ To Release Extended Cut Of Episode 810 On Hulu In Rare Move For ABC Scripted Series
EXCLUSIVE: With Season 9 of The Rookie still six months away, fans of the popular ABC police drama are getting some extra original content to carry them through the hiatus. An extended cut of Episode 810, “His Name Was Martin,” will be released July 20 on Hulu in the Extras section of the series’ landing […]
‘Superman’ & ‘The Boys’ Lead Nominees For Critics Choice Super Awards
Look! Up in the sky! It’s Superman leading the nominees for the 2026 Critics Choice Super Awards! The Critics Choice Association handed a half-dozen noms to the Warner Bros/DC flick, including Best Superhero Movie and three Best Actor mentions for its stars David Corenswet, Edi Gathegi and Nicholas Hoult. Prime Video’s now-wrapped The Boys topped […]
Lionsgate Shares Surge Amid Reports ‘Hunger Games’ Studio Is Courting Euro Buyers
Lionsgate shares jumped more than 9% following reports that the Hunger Games studio is courting interest from buyers in Europe. High on the $1 billion box office smash that was Michael, Reuters reported that Lionsgate has been working with an investment bank to assess potential suitors. Lionsgate declined to comment. Banijay, which closed a deal […]
‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ Boss David J. Rosen On That Finale Cliffhanger & Hopes For A Season 2
After being attacked and kidnapped, falsely imprisoned and accused of double homicide, Tatiana Maslany’s beleaguered Paula finally seems to catch a break in the Season 1 finale of Apple TV’s twisty, pulpy crime thriller-comedy. The single mom wins custody of her daughter Hazel and, in a deliciously satisfying full-circle moment, parrots back the venomous words […]
Levity Live Taps Former Just For Laughs Exec Spencer Griffin As EVP Content & Creative Strategy
EXCLUSIVE: Spencer Griffin has joined Levity Live in the newly created role of Executive Vice President, Content & Creative Strategy. A veteran of the comedy space, Griffin comes to Levity after seven years at Just for Laughs, where he served in senior creative and development roles, most recently as Vice President of TV & Creative Strategy. […]
Neon’s ‘They Follow’ Adds Jackie Earle Haley, Justine Lupe, Michael Gandolfini, Melora Walters & 6 More To Cast
EXCLUSIVE: David Robert Mitchell has added 10 to the cast of They Follow, the Neon-backed follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2015 horror film It Follows: Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children), Justine Lupe (Succession), Anna Mirodin (Ivan), Jayne Taini (Unbelievable), Michael Gandolfini (Daredevil: Born Again), Tom Pecinka (Stereophonic), Melora Walters (Magnolia), Ben Krieger (Song Sung Blue), Natalie Shinnick (The […]
David W. Zucker Calls Out Lack Of Clarity In TV Production & Updates On ‘Alien Earth’ Season 2
David W. Zucker has been comparing the pilot season system to the modern era’s commissioning free-for-all. In an interview with Deadline, the executive producer of The Terror: Devil in Silver and Alien: Earth, compared the certainty of pilot season versus the current system, where “plugs get pulled on productions at any juncture.” “We used to […]
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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Reviewed the install and config pages in the rss.chat repo, saw that an AWS S3 bucket is needed. Hmph! I will go and set up one up, but this needs to change…
Resurrection: la carta de amor al cine, el rito de paso de los cineastas
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Dirección: Bi Gan. Guion: Bi Gan, Zhai Xiaohui. Elenco: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao, Gengxi Li, Jue Huang, Yongzhong Chen, Zhijian Zhang, Chloe Maayan, Nan Yan, Mucheng Guo. Países: China, Francia. Duración: 160 minutos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29002950/ No sé si llegue un punto en la vida de todo cineasta que ama […]
West End ‘Oh, Mary!’ To Be Filmed With Cole Escola Back In Title Role
Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s outrageously funny revisionist comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln and the guy she’s married to will be filmed at the West End’s Trafalgar Theatre on July 28 for a future, as yet undisclosed, release. Escola will return to the title role for the proshot in a reprise of his Tony-winning Broadway performance. […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-15:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
2 new and 48 updated places. 2 new and 29 updated linked data sidebars.
‘I Play Rocky’ Trailer: “Do You Believe In Me…Or Not?”; The Ultimate Underdog Story Looks A Knockout
Yo, Adrian — I wanna star in this movie I’m writing, but all I’m getting is no after no. Looks like it’s not gonna fly now. Here’s the electrifying first trailer for I Play Rocky, director Peter Farrelly’s film starring Anthony Ippolito as an unknown young actor named Sylvester Stallone. See, the kid’s got this […]
Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose
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One buyout firm quietly collected Pyrex, Corelle, Instant Pot, and Oneida. Farberware is a name on a 200-year lease. And the pans still worth buying.
Amazon MGM Studios Developing London Rave Scene Drama From Ed Lilly, Will Graham & Invitation Media
EXCLUSIVE: Amazon MGM Studios is developing a TV series about the underground rave scene in London, one of the first to come from its pact with Will Graham, Tonia Davis and Max Linsky’s Invitation Media. Industry director Ed Lilly is writing and directing Code, which is being produced by A League of Their Own co-creator […]
Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery: Emergency Motions, A Showdown Hearing And Next Steps In Challenge To Mega-Merger
If you want an early indication of the strength of a dozen states’ effort to stop Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, it will come soon. That’s because California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 of his colleagues filed a motion for a a request for emergency relief, or a request for temporary restraining […]
‘My Life With The Walter Boys’ Love Triangle Shifts In Season 3 Trailer
The My Life with the Walter Boys love triangle between Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez) and Alex (Ashby Gentry) and Cole Walter (Noah LaLonde) might be making room for another love interest for Jackie. My Life with the Walter Boys arrives August 6 on Netflix with all ten episodes. In the trailer, released by Netflix Wednesday, […]
Apple TV’s ‘Where’s Wanda?’ Season 2 Sets Launch Date & Releases First-Look Images
Apple TV’s dark comedy Where’s Wanda? is coming back in October. Season 2 of the German-language series from UFA Fiction will return on October 21, with new episodes dropping weekly through December 9. We’ve got three first-look images above and below. The eight-parter stars Heike Makatsch (Love Actually), Axel Stein (The Vault), Lea Drinda (The […]
Justin Wolfers | American Conversations
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With Justin Wolfers of Platypus Economics.
Joe Biden’s Memoir Will Be Released In November Following Midterm Elections
Joe Biden’s memoir, Promise Me, America, will be released on Nov. 17, just weeks after the midterm elections. In a video, Biden said that the memoir would be “about the challenges we have faced as a nation, about the decisions I made, why I made them. Leading the country through Covid, rebuilding our economy and […]
Bring Back The Kiosk
With Sony clobbering the physical game market and Grand Theft Auto 6 eschewing discs entirely, it makes one long for kiosks that could make disks on demand—a model that actually once existed in the UK.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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While all the new rss.chat business is going on, the WordPress news site that I started in May is growing at a nice clip. Referrers used to pinpoint where flows like this came from, but they stopped doing that at some point. If you have any clues as to who's pointing to it now, please let me know so I can thank them. And if you know of any sites that are not in the feed list, that do a good job of covering WordPress news, please let me know that too.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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A lot more people have tried out rss.chat now that we have a demo site, and they are looking for stuff that isn't there. I wrote a longish post on X this morning explaining. If you want the gist, this is a bootstrap, and rss.chat is primarly a writing surface and a timeline for the people who are using the specific site you're on. It's a writing surface for smallish groups of people, primarily, though I'm pretty sure you could build a massive site meant to serve millions. There will be readers, I'm sure of it, and I hope lots of them and lots of innovative new approaches. But splitting the social network software down the middle, we fulfill the "all parts replaceable" promise, and leave the door open for all kinds of developers to try out new ideas, from bigco devs to independent devs, and a jive programming. We, unlike other artists, welcome newcomers to our craft. We remember when we were new to this stuff and the wonder of being able to create software on our own. Everyone is welcome in rss-land, as long as there's mutual respect.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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There's a new Docs menu in RSS.chat. Right now it has pointers to the home page of our GitHub repo, and to the worknotes pages for the client and server. There will be lots more stuff in this menu as the project progresses.
‘Los Principiantes’: Filming Underway In Peru On Ambitious Film & TV Project, First Look Images
Filming is underway on one of Peru’s most ambitious film or TV projects ever, Los Principiantes. The eight-part Spanish-language drama, inspired by real events, is set in 1980s Lima, Peru, and follows the rise of an elite law school cabal that infiltrates academia, politics, and organized crime. According to producers, the series explores how “ambition and power […]
Alan Cumming Urges UK Industry To Help Bring Down Paramount-Warner Merger, As Government Poised To Make Intervention
EXCLUSIVE: The UK film and TV industry is being urged to help block the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) merger by a coalition including Alan Cumming, with a government decision on whether to intervene expected imminently. The Traitors host Cumming posted a video as part of a coalition calling itself Block the Merger UK, which urges […]
‘Ambulance’ Executive Producer Sues Banijay-Owned Company, Claiming He Suffered “Psychiatric Injuries” While Making Hit BBC Series
EXCLUSIVE: Peter Wallis-Tayler, a former executive producer on Ambulance, is suing the Banijay-owned production company behind the BAFTA-winning BBC documentary series, alleging that the show damaged his mental health. Wallis-Tayler has launched High Court legal proceedings against Dragonfly Film & Television, claiming that he suffered “psychiatric injuries” after experiencing “work-related stressors and traumatic incidents” without […]
Non-voters lean Democratic again: Pew NPORS poll
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The group has recently become prone to voting against incumbents
Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. The team reported its findings in a paper published yesterday in Nature.
We are one step closer to 1984 technology:
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...
Pam Bondi Upstages Todd Blanche Hearings by Releasing Naked Photos of Trump on Epstein’s Island
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The photos, showing a nude Trump frolicking in the Caribbean enclave, are “not for the squeamish,” experts warned.
What A Tax On AI Can Teach The Left
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The rise of AI demands legislative action to mitigate its many risks. But rather than follow the same old regulatory playbook, Congress should instead embrace creative tax policy.
The Forever War Gets Scary
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But I'm not talking about bombs and drones
Lit Hub Daily: July 15, 2026
How it feels when one of your poems is literally going to the Moon. | Lit Hub Nature Why Steven W. Thrasher is suing Northwestern University (and the US government). | Lit Hub Politics “Put simply, people don’t buy books.
Venice: Margot Robbie, Andy Serkis, Omar Sy & David Bowie Projects Among Immersive Lineup
The Venice Film Festival’s immersive sidebar celebrates its 10th anniversary this year with a selection of projects, including titles featuring contributions by high-profile names such as Margot Robbie and Omar Sy. Overall, Venice Immersive will present 68 projects from 26 countries, of which 30 will play in competition, and 35 will be out of competition. […]
Todd Blanche is Roy Cohn ... but worse
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Republicans own the orgy of corruption that will follow their vote to confirm him.
Locarno Sets 2026 Competition Juries
Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz will lead the Concorso Internazionale jury at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. He will be joined by Italian producer Marco Alessi, French actress Lolita Chammah; Chilean actress Paulina García; and Olivier Père, former General Delegate of the Quinzaine des cinéastes and Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, now Executive […]
Publishing Has a Hologram Problem. And It’s Growing.
If you’ve ever walked through a bookstore with an author by your side, you may have noticed something peculiar: writers don’t check out new books the way normal people do. Your average reader, when they pick up a book, will
Welcome to Toronto, World Capital of the Urban Raccoon
If you ask anybody in Toronto, they’ll tell you that raccoons, AKA the Procyon lotor (Latin for “before-dog washer,” given their apparent penchant for washing their food), are everywhere. The creatures have turned even the most gray urban spaces into
Finding Heroes of My Own in Three Unsung Women of America’s Great Outdoors
If someone asked you to name the world’s most common plotline you’d probably come up with something like this: a hero heeds a call to adventure—maybe to slay a dragon or protect their homeland—then they cross a threshold into the
Why “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” Makes It Harder to Save the Planet
When she was growing up, Mia Monroe remembers, monarch butterflies were a natural part of the rhythm of life. This was in the 1960s, and Mia and her family lived in San Carlos, California, at that time a bedroom community
One of My Poems is Literally Going to the Moon
In some sense, I’ve been going to the Moon most of my life. As a child of the space age whose father worked in the space industry, I’ve tracked sometimes closely, sometimes less so with activities in space. Satellites, the
Writing is Magic: Why We Should All Follow Our Literary Dreams
I was reading one of Jules Verne’s novels when I first experienced the magic of writing. The heroes had just crashed their balloon in the desert. The heat was relentless. They had run out of food days ago and the
Announcing the commonmeta schema 1.0 release candidate
Commonmeta is a set of libraries to convert scholarly metadata into different formats via an intermediary format defined by JSON Schema. The schema is now available as a v1.0 version release candidate, with v1.0 planned to be released in September.
The feature image of this post is from
I Want You to Be Happy
He had promised himself he wouldn’t talk about it and now here he was, talking about it. Not just talking about it, but shouting specific details directly in her ear. Certain things, obviously, he left unsaid. Over her shoulder, he
WHY IRAN MIGHT BE ON THE VERGE OF DELIVERING A SHOCK TO GLOBAL FINANCIAL MARKETS
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Today is July 15, 2026, and as I write this article, we are nearly five months into the conflict between the United States, its allies, and Iran in the Middle East. A conflict that, in the minds of the US military strategic panel, was supposed to last perhaps 48 hours....
Joyelle McSweeney on Euripides’s Iphigenia Among the Taurians, translated by Anne Carson
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. Mike Kelleher talks with Joyelle McSweeney, recipient of a 2026 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry,
Office Hours: Will Progressive Populists Triumph Over Establishment Dems?
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Who has the best chance to take the House and Senate in the midterms?
Chana Joffe-Walt on The Best Tape You Can Get
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
Vanishing Culture #3: Saving Queer Memory with Brooke Palmieri
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Queer history has often been overlooked, erased, or excluded from traditional archives. In the third episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with writer, artist, and archivist Brooke Palmieri about the vital role queer archives play in preserving memory, identity, and community. Drawing on his work with CAMP BOOKS and his research into LGBTQ+ history, Brooke explores why archives matter—not just as collections of records, but as tools for helping people understand where they come from and imagine new futures.
We got tickets to one night of the Phillips Backyard Music Festival, which we took as an excuse to do a long weekend in Victoria B.C., where we’d last been in 2017. On previous trips, we’ve already done Butchart Garden (too formal for our taste) and other major tourist attractions, so this was more of […]
July 14, 2026
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In August 1870 a U.S.
Wednesday 15 July, 2026
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I Protest A lone demonstrator outside the old Chinese Embassy in London in the winter of 2014. Quote of the Day The first step in AI enterprise deployment was giving everyone Copilot, which mostly failed and is continuing to fail. … Continue reading →
Abolishing ICE is the bare minimum
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Trump is ramping up his police state to scare voters in the midterms. We must organize and mobilize against it.
Brian Tyler Cohen Dropped By To Talk About His New Book - "The Day After: How to Wield Power In a Post-Trump World"
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Was great to host Brian on the day his new book launched - do consider buying it today!
In three top-tier Senate races, Trump's own derangement may cost his party the Senate majority
Please Tell Your Senator: Block Todd Blanche
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This week's video
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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The #PleiadesGazetteer changelog for June 2026 has been posted. Over the course of the month, the Pleiades editorial college published 59 new and 961 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Johan Åhlfeldt, Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Ethan Gruber, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Ryan M. Horne, Brady Kiesling, Chris de Lisle, Gabriel Mckee, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Eric Poehler, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, René Voorburg, and contributors to Trismegistos, Wikidata, and the World Historical Gazetteer.
The changelog for June 2026 has been posted. Over the course of the month, the Pleiades editorial college published 59 new and 961 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Johan Åhlfeldt, Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Ethan Gruber, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Ryan M. Horne, Brady Kiesling, Chris de Lisle, Gabriel Mckee, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Eric Poehler, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, René Voorburg, and contributors to Trismegistos, Wikidata, and the World Historical Gazetteer.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Brutus 2014 = Fabrice Brutus and Luc Leconte, “Le sanctuaire gaulois et gallo-romain d’Ablis (Yvelines),” Bulletin de l’Association française pour l’étude de l’âge du Fer 32 (2014): 85–88.
We’re up in the mountains again. After the first night we went on two long walks and I felt great. Late in the evening we decided to play Radlands, a two player card game. It went on for three and a half hours and ended with a stalemate since we played through the stack, twice.
And then, at two in the morning, I had some problem peeing. What the actual fuck. I kept drinking a lot of water. I kept waking up having to pee. After peeing, that urge didn’t stop. This was not a great night.
The next morning we called the medical centres up here but they had no availability and so we had to go down to Sierre – and it was so hot 🥵 down there. Oh my. Yikes.
Got an analysis done and got diagnosed with a light infection of the bladder. That’s pretty rare for men to get. I guess having a monogamous sex life and not liking to take a bath in rivers, lakes and living far from the ocean helped rule out some other some options. Urgh.
Now I’m left with the fact that the antibiotics I got make me potentially light sensitive. So now O have to keep out of the sun in Alps, in the summer heat.
On this hot summer’s day in Basel, Switzerland, the seventh HTTP workshop started. These events tend to work roughly the same way and the people in the room are also to large extent familiar and known since previous editions. Forty people in a meeting room, where we take turns in doing short talks on HTTP … Continue reading Workshop Basel day one→
Community Office Hours: A Thundermail Update
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Our Community Office Hours series is all about connecting with the people behind Thunderbird and our products, and sharing the work that’s happening behind the scenes. These conversations are a chance to learn more about the direction of our projects and to hear directly from the people making it happen. In this episode, we are […]
I was able to get Ricardo Mendes’ fork of rss.chat running on localhost on my laptop this morning! I will get a server version from the main repo up later today or tomorrow.
Launching Moonshine Micro
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Long-time readers will know I’m convinced local voice interfaces and sub-$1 embedded chips will fundamentally change how we interact with everything in the physical world. That’s why I’m so excited to introduce Moonshine Micro, a version of the Moonshine Voice open source framework that can run a useful voice interface in just 520KB of RAM. […]
macOS 27 Public Beta
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Juli Clover: Apple today released the first public beta of macOS Golden Gate, expanding the macOS 27 beta test to non-developers. You can sign up to test the update on Apple’s beta website, and then download it by going to System Settings > General > Software Update and toggling on the macOS 27 beta. Jason […]
iOS 27 Public Beta
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Juli Clover: Apple released the iOS 27 public beta today, and if you’ve been curious about the new software, now’s the time to try it out. iOS 27 brings Siri AI, performance improvements, and lots of new Apple Intelligence features. […] Everything feels snappier than it did in iOS 26. Animations are quicker, apps launch […]
Sunsetting CoreStorage
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Apple: In macOS 28 and later, the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren’t encrypted. For future macOS compatibility, either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes. I think Apple removed the user interface for creating such volumes way back in […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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RSS.chat is meant to be like MacWrite was on early Macs, give developers something to think about and lots of prior art for them to steal. All we want in return is interop. ;-)
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Speaking of AI, someone at Amazon decided I needed the new AI version of Alexa. I hate it. It's slow and it always makes the same mistake when I start breakfast. I say "Alexa WNYC" to which it responds, after a few seconds, I will now play you a mix of your favorite songs From Amazon Music." So first thing in the morning I have to tell this stranger in my freaking kitchen no I meant WNYC, which it then turns me over to. I learned on FB that if you tell it to go away it will, after a short discussion about how much you will be missing. Yeah sure, go away, goodbye, please no more of this.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Gates-Foster 2022 = Jennifer Gates-Foster and Melanie Godsey, “Ptolemaic Painted Pottery from Ghozza, Eastern Desert,” Bulletin de Liaison de La Céramique Égyptienne, no. 31 (January 2022): 31, https://doi.org/10.4000/14tvu.
If Bernie Sanders or AOC knew what we were doing here they would be turning somersaults. The tech right now is too esoteric. When they can join a community that works like this does, with full text, and the ability to communicate from one pod to another. Pod actually is a good name for what I have in mind, that and karass.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Someone on Masto who I blocked used a nasty word to descript RSS.chat. Let me be really clear here, this is an act of authorship by me. Claude is helping, a lot -- I doubt if I could have done this without its help, certainly not in the amount of time it has taken so far. And Claude could not have done it without me driving. It's basically good at a few things, but this is new territory, even I am feeling my way through this project. In many parts we have lots of prior art, but in how the whole thing hangs together, this is new territory. Having Claude is like having a car would be to someone who couldn't drive. All of a sudden you can go places. It takes a while to learn how to use that power, and so far the learning has not come close to leveling off. You couldn't find someone better in the world to do this project, and I'm working on this every day.
@Andy Sylvester's River of News
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Gregg Nunziata talks with Richard Bernstein, former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, about the Supreme Court’s blockbuster term — election law, tariffs, the National Guard, and birthright citizenship — and whether the Court would stop a president who tried to seize ballots in the 2026 election. (Spoiler alert: he thinks there are enough votes […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Gallazzi 2024 = Claudio Gallazzi and Gisèle Hadji-Minaglou, “Tebtynis (2023),” Bulletin archéologique des Écoles françaises à l’étranger, May 2024, 1–15, https://doi.org/10.4000/11sxk.
I set up demo.rss.chat yesterday so people can try out the software. No guarantee that this is going to run for any period of time, so don't post things there that you want to be around for a long time.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Gallazzi 2025 = Claudio Gallazzi and Gisèle Hadji-Minaglou, “Tebtynis (2023/2),” Bulletin archéologique des Écoles françaises à l’étranger, ahead of print, May 2025, https://doi.org/10.4000/14fww.
Gary Vaynerchuk's Timeless Advice for Entrepreneurs
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We recorded this conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk several years ago, but it’s remarkable how well it has held up.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Karasiewicz-Szczypiorski 2025 = Radosław Karasiewicz-Szczypiorski, Apsaros: A Roman Fort on the Colchis Coast, Warsaw Studies in Archaeology 15 (Brepols, 2025).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Karasiewicz-Szczypiorski 2026 = Radosław Karasiewicz-Szczypiorski et al., “Votive Inscription to Jupiter Dolichenus from the Roman Fort of Apsaros (Gonio, Georgia),” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 237 (2026): 145–50.
The $28.5T forecast compares to U.S. Q1 2026 nominal GDP of nearly $32T, with the estimate for the market of AI enterprise applications of $22.7T about 70% of total U.S. economic output.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei just aren't this good, but their projections of their Total Available Market (TAM) are still turning out to be vastly optimistic. In AI's Affordability Crisis I showed evidence that the AI platforms could no longer afford the massive subsidies they were using to artifically inflate demand for their product, and that reducing the subsidies had made their enterprise customers reconsider their enthusiasm for deploying them. This is leading to investors belatedly realizing that AI platforms' projections of their TAM and thus their valuations are totally implausible.
This re-calibration is just one of the many signs that the AI bubble is about to deflate. Below the fold I present a necessarily incomplete list of them, which I will try to update as more appear.
AI now accounts for nearly half of all IG issuance, 87% of VC funding and a growing share of HY, underscoring how deeply the AI investment cycle has penetrated every corner of finance.
Here’s the title page of this month’s Panmure Liberum market update from strategists Joachim Klement and Francisca Reis. Our emphasis in bold below:
In 1929, the cyclically-adjusted P/E-ratio (CAPE) of the S&P 500 reached 32.6x according to Prof. Robert Shiller’s data. This was 1.8 standard deviations above trend at the time. In 2000, the CAPE reached 44.2x, or 3.3 standard deviations above trend – a clear sign of a bubble. However, as our chart below shows, earnings in both instances were within normal range, less than one standard deviation above trend.
Today, the CAPE is at 41.0x, or 2.9 standard deviations above trend. Once again, we are clearly in bubble territory for stock market valuations. However, unlike in previous bubbles, we are having extremely high CAPE at a time when earnings themselves are 1.8 standard deviations above trend. In other words, we are in a valuation bubble at a time when earnings are in a bubble themselves.
If we correct for the earnings bubble, the current CAPE would be 67.6x or 4.6 standard deviations above trend, a bubble that surpasses anything ever seen in US history by an extreme margin. If valuations followed a normal distribution (which they don’t, so don’t take this literally), this would happen in 0.00019% of months or once every 43,432 years.
A massive chunk of this quarter’s blockbuster “growth” didn’t come from selling more software, shipping more microchips, or delivering more packages. Instead, it came from an accounting rule that forced massive, illiquid “paper gains” onto the income statements of tech giants.
In Q1 2026 alone, just three companies—Alphabet, Amazon, and Nvidia—reported a staggering $69.2 billion in non-operating windfall under their Other Income and Expenses (OI&E) lines. When you run the macro numbers, this single accounting phenomenon artificially inflated the entire S&P 500’s quarterly earnings by about 12%.
That 12% takes the factor from 67.6 to 75.7. Wang notes that correcting for the 12%, "the Q1 2026 earnings growth rate will not be very different from the 5-year average of 16%." In other words, the bubble is feeding upon itself — increased stock prices causes increased earnings causes increased stock price ... But suppose, for example, that OpenAI were to suffer a down round. Then Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and others who included paper gains in the "other income" on the way up would have to include paper losses in their income on the way down, amplifying the crash. OpenAI's last round valued the company around $750B and they were planning an IPO for at least $1T, but had to postpone it.
The foundation model era — roughly 2020 to 2025 — is over. The forces that defined it have inverted. Open source models have reached frontier performance while inference costs approach zero, exposing what was always structurally true: pre-training large language models at scale is not a durable competitive moat. The US government's formal designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in February 2026 accelerated a transition already underway — but did not cause it. The paper argues that the AI industry is restructuring simultaneously along four axes: economic, as the circular financing structure that inflated foundation model valuations collapses; technical, as the pre-training scaling paradigm gives way to post-training optimization, test-time compute, and agentic composition; commercial, as application-layer integrators displace the foundation model companies whose commodity they now consume; and political, as the government asserts its historic role as gatekeeper of strategic technology. These are not separate disruptions. They are one structural shift, arriving together.
The most consequential and least-discussed dimension is the permanent divergence between commercial AI and a classified national security AI track — built on different data, governed by different rules, and developing capabilities the public ecosystem cannot see, measure, or govern. Like every dual-use technology that has altered the calculus of state power, AI is being brought under government authority not by design but by the structural logic of what it is. The paper further argues that open-weight models are the counterintuitive instrument of sovereign control: a government that holds the weights commands the capability on its own terms, without dependence on vendor policy, financial continuity, or personnel clearance. The apparent openness of distributed model weights is, from a deploying government's sovereignty standpoint, the most governable architecture — because what cannot be withdrawn by a vendor's API policy cannot be taken away.
Grogran implicitly assumes that AI is useful but that the current margins and thus the valuations aren't sustainable.
DeepSeek-V4-Pro is priced through its API at $1.74 USD per 1 million input tokens on a cache miss and $3.48 per million output tokens.
That puts a simple one-million-input, one-million-output comparison at $5.22. With cached input, the input price drops to $0.145 per million tokens, bringing that same blended comparison down to $3.625.
That is dramatically cheaper than the current premium pricing from OpenAI and Anthropic. GPT-5.5 is priced at $5.00 per million input tokens and $30.00 per million output tokens, for a combined $35.00 in the same simple comparison.
Claude Opus 4.7 is priced at $5.00 input and $25.00 output, for a combined $30.00.
Six times cheaper for an equivalent product is likely to cause pricing pressure on the incumbents, who need to raise not reduce prices. DeepSeek is likely also subsidizing usage, but they do have real advantages. First, they have fewer resources so are forced to to be inventive. Second, the 40% of infrastructure capex that isn't the racks is much cheaper in China. Third, the power component of opex is much cheaper and more available in China. The result is:
In practical terms, DeepSeek does not need to win every leaderboard row to matter. If it can deliver near-frontier performance on many enterprise-relevant agent and reasoning tasks at roughly one-sixth to one-seventh the standard API cost of GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7, it still forces a major rethink of the economics of advanced AI deployment.
DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max is clearly the strongest open-weight model in the field right now, and it is unusually close to frontier closed systems on several practical benchmarks.
While GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 still retain the lead in most direct head-to-head comparisons across the company's benchmark charts, DeepSeek V4 Pro gets close while being dramatically cheaper and openly available.
Dan Davies agrees that the margins aren't sustainable but differs as to why in tokenalysis and john henry:
Which then brings to mind another issue – how confident are we in the pricing power that underpins that 60% gross margin in the first place? In the last paragraph I was talking about the R&D equivalent of a price war, but the normal kind is also possible. The combination of price-sensitive B2B customers, big fixed costs and rewards going to the dominant player doesn’t suggest to me that pricing power is going to be sustainable indefinitely.
But, I think there’s a danger of missing the big picture here. Which is that, when large companies are telling their employees to be sensible and use AI tokens wisely, then the game is up. The race is over and John Henry won against the steam hammer. If you need a human being in the loop to decide on the allocation of AI tokens, then all those predictions of mass redundancy are gone.
But what if the payoff takes longer than consensus assumes? That question is particularly pressing given that token prices continue to decline and Chinese models are gaining ground, both in their share of the world's most-used models and in token usage, where they now lead their US counterparts among the top 20 models,
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Slok provides two charts, the first tracks market share by country of origin monthly since January 2025 among the top 50 models. It is bad for the US, showing a steady erosion of US market share until, eyeballing it, as of May 2026 it is roughly a 60/40 US/Chinese split.
Clearly, the market is voting with its feet that the prices charged by US AI companies are unsustainable.
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The second compares monthly token use among the top 20 models by country of origin between May and June this year. It is much worse for the US.In May the Chinese had 80% of the US usage. In June they had 185% of the US usage. If this rate of market erosion were to continue for a few months it would be impossible for investors to continue to imagine the golden future awaiting OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Oracle and the neoclouds.
Slok's analysis of the fallout of the bubble deflating is worth reading. This is an issue I plan to return to in a future post.
Chinese AI providers are making more money; Zhipu’s revenues went up 60 times in Q1 compared to last year; Alibaba is the company behind Qwen, and their revenues are up 15 times just since the beginning of this year. The lion’s share of the profits, though, are still being realized by the hardware side; the chipmakers, at least for now. The model companies’ revenues are rising, and steeply. But so is their cost of compute.
That dynamic is causing some Chinese labs to raise prices; the cost to use Tencent Cloud increased by over five times in March, and Alibaba, Zhipu, and ByteDance also hiked prices.
DeepSeek, however, went the other way. Their latest version is priced at just a fourth of their introductory product, and they rolled out dynamic pricing that is aimed at corporate users, who use their models during the workday.
But even with these price increases,Chinese models just cost far less than those on offer from Silicon Valley, and explains those big jumps in the exports, we can say, of Chinese AI tokens. The LLM’s out of China are “90% as good at 10% of the cost”, and American firms are buying more tokens from Chinese companies. In early 2025, token demand from Chinese LLM’s was about zero. Even the release of DeepSeek didn’t move the needle much, but by the end of the year the secret was out, and it’s been a choppy but steady ride up to 46%, today.
Why would you invest in a company whose competitors were “90% as good at 10% of the cost” and which was rapidly losing market share?
The implicit underwriting assumption, shared by originator and borrower alike, was that the loan would never reach its reset: rising home values would manufacture equity, the borrower would refinance into a fresh teaser and the clock would start again. The structure was a treadmill, and the treadmill was powered by appreciation. It worked spectacularly while it worked. Nearly four in five subprime hybrid ARMs originated in 2003 had been refinanced away by the end of 2006.
Now watch the timing. National home-price appreciation did not crash in 2006. It decelerated. The year-over-year rate of gain, which had run in the mid-to-high teens through 2004 and into early 2005, began bleeding off - still positive, still printing green, but slowing. Prices were higher than they had ever been. And yet, with prices at their peak and still rising, subprime delinquencies inflected upward.
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The deceleration was endogenous to the structure; the structure required ever-accelerating prices to keep refinancing its way out of its own reset schedule, and no series accelerates forever.
The second derivative was always going to roll over. When it did, the first derivative followed it down through zero, negative equity spread from the margin inward, and the defaults the market insisted were caused by “falling prices” had in fact begun a year earlier, when prices were still rising but had stopped rising faster.
The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its actual anatomy is that of a credit-driven real estate cycle - which is precisely why the 2008 mechanics apply - and the two break for entirely different reasons.
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Walk down the AI build-out and every feature is a property development in disguise: a data center on entitled land, financed with debt against the structure and leased to tenants on take-or-pay terms. This is not a software business that happens to own servers. It is a real estate business that happens to compute.
When a hyperscaler or a neocloud reports a record capex figure, the financial press reads it as confidence, as proof of demand. Read it instead as origination volume. Each gigawatt of committed build is a loan extended to whichever tenant has signed the take-or-pay beneath it, and the credit quality of that loan is precisely the credit quality of the tenant. The market is celebrating loan growth and calling it revenue growth.
Loans in this market take the form of Remaining Performance Obligations (RPOs). The biggest borrower in this market is OpenAI:
OpenAI has committed to pay for compute on a scale without precedent in corporate history: multi-year, take-or-pay capacity contracts whose aggregate obligations run to the hundreds of billions of dollars. Against them sits an operating business that does not yet earn a profit - revenue real, large, and growing quickly, but short of covering the company’s own cash burn and nowhere near covering the contracted payments.
Those payments are therefore not serviced out of earnings. They are serviced out of financing, and financing, for a borrower in this position, is available on a single condition: that each new round price above the last.
Measured as a level, OpenAI’s valuation is the most remarkable appreciation in the history of private markets - roughly $86 billion in early 2024, then about $157 billion, $300 billion, $500 billion, and approximately $852 billion by the spring of 2026. Measured as a rate of change, the same series inverts: the round-over-round step-up ran 1.83×, 1.91×, 1.67×, 1.70×, and falls to roughly 1.23× implied by the reported public-offering target. Private marks are inherently lumpy - negotiated, episodic, set by a handful of insiders - so no single step is decisive. But the trend is unmistakable: it bends down, and it bends hardest at the one mark set by the deepest, most unforgiving pool of capital - the public market. The implied IPO step-up is both the lowest in the sequence and the hardest to negotiate, and it is the one the structure must actually clear. This arithmetic is also the most probable explanation for OpenAI’s recent IPO delay.
An RPO is not a liquid asset; it is a forward contractual commitment - a promise of future payment in exchange for future compute. And a multi-year commitment is worth exactly the creditworthiness of the entity on the other end of it. When that entity is investment-grade and cash-generative, the backlog is what it claims to be: high-quality visibility, merely deferred. When that entity is a pre-profit company that loses tens of billions a year and can pay only by continuously refinancing its own equity valuation, the backlog is something else entirely. It is a subprime commitment, used to justify massive, un-depreciated capital expenditure, reported to shareholders as structural strength.
Now price the credit quality of that book. Of roughly $2.1 trillion in aggregate contracted backlog across the four big platforms, about half - on the order of $1.05 trillion - is owed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft’s book is about 49% these two names; Oracle’s is 54%, with roughly $300 billion owed by OpenAI alone; Google’s is 43%; Amazon’s is 51%.
The hyperscaler has, in economic substance, extended a concentrated, unsecured loan to cash-burning tenants. The RPO that Wall Street values as forward revenue is, in reality, a credit exposure to borrowers with no operating income.
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Major financial institutions are similarly concerned. In their 2026 Annual Economic Report, the Bank for International Settlements writes:
In the near term, the ongoing AI investment boom raises questions about the sustainability of the current economic expansion. The five largest hyperscalers are set to spend over a trillion US dollars on AI-related capital expenditure from 2025 through 2026. These commitments are outpacing earnings and the free cash flow of these firms, leading some to issue debt to raise additional financing (Graph 11.A). This investment race may be partly driven by the perception that only a small number of players with superior technology will ultimately dominate the market shares. The intense competition raises the risk of firms over-committing resources to investment projects with still uncertain returns, leaving all firms vulnerable to disappointments in AI payoffs. Model analysis based on such contest motives highlights the downside risk of current AI exuberance. As competitive pressure drives capex higher, the net economic surplus – the total payoff less investment costs – declines for the sector as a whole and could turn negative in adverse scenarios (Graph 11.B). Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions (see below).
Another risk is that the AI boom runs into a supply side roadblock. The AI build-out has recently been facing growing bottlenecks in electricity, advanced semiconductors and grid equipment. Fast-growing demand for computing power is already pressuring electricity prices and input costs, with potential spillovers to inflation. Looking ahead, these temporary shortages may also amplify over-investment, as firms attempt to lock in future capacity through long-dated contracts that further expose them to any disappointments in demand.
Historical episodes of investment booms offer instructive parallels (Graph 11.C). The canal mania of the 1830s, the British railway mania in the 1840s, the electrification exuberance of the late 1920s (roaring 20s) and the dotcom boom of the late 90s all shared one common trait: a genuine technological breakthrough that attracted capital in excess of what commercial returns could ultimately justify. These episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions. The scale and pace of the current AI investment boom accompanied by expectations of large productivity payoffs bear resemblance to these precedents, highlighting potential downside risks in the near term.
A draft report inside the Treasury Department is set to warn of the risks posed by the artificial intelligence market, likening key aspects of it to the dotcom bubble that upended the U.S. economy when it burst in the early 2000s.
The document, the existence and contents of which have not been previously reported but was obtained by NOTUS, is a significant departure from the Trump administration’s public tone, which has focused on encouraging unrelenting investment to unlock exponential growth.
Career Treasury analysts found that AI firms are more deeply entrenched in the U.S. economy than their dotcom predecessors and pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed or various choke points stymie growth.
Vanderbilt University's Asad Ramzanali has a detailed look at the range of impacts from the burst bubble, and an set of optimistic suggestions for policy responses in After the AI Crash. He frames the problem thus:
Companies are investing trillions of dollars based on tens of billions of dollars in revenues. Analysts at J.P. Morgan anticipate $5 trillion of AI infrastructure investment in the next five years. They estimate that the industry will need to generate annual revenues of $650 billion to justify this level of investment, while consultants at Bain & Co. estimate $2 trillion in needed annual revenues. Yet, OpenAI and Anthropic earned $13 billion and $4 billion, respectively, in 2025 revenues. OpenAI’s own financial expectations suggest negative cash flow until 2030, and Anthropic expects a small profit no sooner than 2029. Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and others may experience increased marginal revenue from integrating AI into existing products, but that is far from certain.
Note that over the next 5 years around $3T (60% of $5T) of the investment in AI infrastructure goes in to buying the hardware which should be fully depreciated over much less than 5 years. So the gap between the investments and the revenue is much bigger than it appears.
Blackstone's QTS said on Thursday it had terminated its planned Digital Gateway data center project in Virginia and withdrawn the associated filings after years of planning and regulatory review.
The data center operator has faced years of local opposition and litigation over the project, despite it being approved by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.
Among the hyperscalers, Oracle is the most exposed because, as Ed Zitron noted:
And Oracle ... is a company that, even before the AI bubble, was massively indebted. It just so happens that, as a result of its tryst with OpenAI, Larry Ellison saw fit to twist the debt knob to eleven.
Six firms alone — including Oracle, Microsoft and Meta — have committed $850 billion for data centers leases that haven’t begun yet. Oracle holds the largest share of these commitments owing to its $300 billion Stargate contract with OpenAI.
When Oracle mentions the risk of nonpayment, the unnamed elephant in the room is OpenAI. As part of the Stargate deal with the AI company, Oracle is developing massive data centers across the country to provide cloud computing power. For this plan to work, OpenAI needs to pay its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bills.
“Some of our customers may be highly leveraged and subject to their own operating and regulatory risks and, even if our credit review and analysis mechanisms work properly, we may experience risks of non-payment and non-performance in our dealings with such parties,” Oracle said in the filing.
SoftBank Group Corp.’s talks with potential creditors to raise at least $6 billion from a margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake have stalled, people familiar with the matter said, just weeks after the Japanese conglomerate cut its initial target from $10 billion.
SoftBank Group has reopened talks with a consortium of lenders for a $10 billion loan backed by its stake in OpenAI, after earlier attempts to secure a loan stalled over concerns about the difficulty of valuing private companies, two people familiar with the matter said.
To make lenders more comfortable, the Japanese technology investor is offering to guarantee repayment of the loan, giving banks recourse to SoftBank if the OpenAI shares pledged as collateral lose value, the people said.
This all seems to indicate that potential lenders, such as banks, are highly skeptical of the value of OpenAI stock.
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Despite Grok being so bad that employees use Claude, Musk is touting SpaceX as an AI company. This resulted in the most overvalued IPO in history, which failed to raise enough money to avoid the immediate need to borrow $25B. Nir Kaissar's SpaceX Is Junk. That’s What the Bond Market Says reports on the bond market's reaction:
Ratings companies and the bond market have very different views about how things are going. SpaceX’s bonds have an average rating of BBB across the three majors, Moody’s Ratings, S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings, according to credit scores compiled by Bloomberg. In the alphabet soup of bond ratings, it’s the lowest grade still considered quality before falling into junk territory.
The bond market has other ideas. There, quality is judged by a bond’s credit spread or the additional yield it offers above Treasuries with similar maturity. The wider the spread, the lower the quality. Corporate bonds with a BBB rating are trading at an average credit spread of 0.92 percentage point. SpaceX’s bonds, by contrast, trade at a significantly greater average spread of 1.62 percentage points across maturities, higher than BB rated junk bonds’ average spread of 1.55 percentage points.
The bond market seems to agree with Softbank's lenders about the AI bubble.
OpenAI and Anthropic are competing for the next trillion-dollar IPO. Both would need to distract investors from their massive losses by focusing on growth. Recently, Anthorpic has been growing faster than OpenAI, so Keach Hagey and Berber Jin report that OpenAI Considers Drastic Price Cuts, Anticipating War for Users With Anthropic:
OpenAI is considering drastically lowering the prices it charges users as it seeks to win customers from its rival Anthropic.
The company is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens, the unit of measurement artificial-intelligence firms use to bill for their products, according to people familiar with the matter. The move would be in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic, the people said.
Meta will also introduce a new Meta Model API system, which will be used to collect fees from developers. Its API pricing is roughly 25% of the cost advertised by other top models from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Developers will be able to use Meta’s model for free, but only up to a point; they’ll be required to pay for access after reaching a certain token threshold, Zuckerberg said.
“The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins,” Zuckerberg said, underscoring that his strategy is to get Meta’s technology in front of as many people as possible. “We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost.”
Aggressive pricing means Meta Model API will still be 50% more expensive than DeepSeek but not 50% better. Planning to reduce current income in the lead-up to an IPO is an unusual move, but it is a response to AI's Affordability Crisis.
Factory electricity bills are generally rising faster than those for other business customers or residential customers, according to a Reuters analysis. It highlighted the example of the Belden Brick Company, a 141-year-old brick manufacturer in Ohio, whose electricity bills have soared from $1,600 to $12,000 per month due to a higher monthly capacity charge in the 13-state region served by the grid operator PJM Interconnection.
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The Ohio-based steelmaker Metallus described its electricity costs as having jumped by 70 percent since 2024, leading the company to pay an extra $15 million in energy costs annually.
The higher electricity costs for manufacturers coincide with the attraction of large AI data center projects with substantial electricity needs to many states in PJM territory. That data center growth has driven up PJM’s capacity prices—paid to power generators according to supply-and-demand forecasts—from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024 to $329.17 per megawatt-day in 2026, according to Reuters’ reporting.
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As I see it, there are three separate markets for LLMs. First, there is an embedded market that runs on low-cost, low-power hardware and open-weights models. Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World by David Berreby provides examples:
For example, a drone-based system developed by Bala Murugan and colleagues at the Vellore Institute of Technology, in India, takes photos of cashew plants and quickly identifies those with splotches that indicate disease. All the processing takes place on the drone itself, so there’s no need for a computer on-site, nor for a connection to a central server.
It isn't just that small hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi 5, is getting more powerful but also:
the shrinking footprint of language models. Both Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 (released in April) and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 are “fantastic” for small AI, Rovai says. Both models are “open weight,” meaning users can adjust the connections between parameters to suit their needs. This makes it easy, for example, “to take a lot of data from, say, the milk industry and retrain the model specifically on that,” Rovai says.
The hyperscalers and AI platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic will garner no income from this market, because:
“I think the future of AI is not like one giant model, at a center. I think it’s millions of small, precise models deployed at the edge, each one solving like a specific problem, a specific context,” Alonge says. This is partly because much of humanity—including people in parts of rich countries as well as the developing world—lives without access to cutting-edge frontier models. But, he says, it’s also because those models are not sustainable.
“If someone is not subsidizing it, most people will not be able to afford those models. So those of us who are said to be small-AI developers are the ones who will have to build for the majority of the world,” Alonge says.
At Computex 2026 in Taipei on June 1st, CEO Jensen Huang announced the RTX Spark superchip — a single piece of silicon that combines a 20-core Arm CPU, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, and 128 gigabytes of unified memory, connected by NVIDIA’s NVLink chip-to-chip interconnect. The whole package delivers up to one petaflop of AI compute in a laptop form factor.
The number that matters: RTX Spark can run a 120-billion-parameter language model entirely locally, with a context window of one million tokens, without a single byte leaving your machine.
To put that in perspective: GPT-3 had 175 billion parameters and required clusters of A100 GPUs to run. The model that stunned the world when it launched in 2020 is now approximately the size of what fits in a consumer laptop chip announced this week. The capability that required a data centre in 2020 is coming to a device you carry in a bag in 2026.
In 2025, slightly more than a third of all smartphones shipped worldwide were capable of running generative AI, and that figure will reach 45 percent by the end of this year, according to the technology research firm Counterpoint. By the end of next year, slightly more than half of all smartphones will be able to run a small AI model.
If Nvidia can already put a 120B-parameter in a laptop, it will only be a few years until phones can run a GPT-3-class model, good enough for almost all consumer needs. Apple and Google own that channel. Owning the channel is better than owning the technology. They will dominate consumer AI, and the other players will garner no revenue from this market.
Third, there is an enterprise market; all that is left to generate the revenue to service the debts fuelling the AI bubble, lets say $2T by 2030. There are a number of problems that make this unlikely.
First, there are very few documented cases of LLM deployment that resulted in enough productivity improvement to cover its unsubsidized costs.
Second, the Trump administration just demonstrated that deploying mission critical systems on AI platforms such as OpenAI or Anthropic means your company can be disabled at 90 minutes notice with no recourse.
Third, this means that companies will have to run mission-critical LLMs on open-weight models on in-house hardware if they are not to be vulnerable to the whims of the US president.
Fourth, systems such as RTX Spark show that good enough in-house hardware is likely to become relatively cheap compared to the unsubsidized cost of the AI platforms. In-house systems need much less over-provisioning for demand spikes, and because they aren't shared they don't need to be as fast.
Fifth, companies need to balance the productivity benefits (if any) of mission-critical LLMs against the productivity costs they bring. These include a vastly greater attack surface, technical debt from reduced developer understanding of the software, and so on.
Thus it seems likely that the hyperscalers and AI plaforms will generate far less revenue than they expect, because they will be restricted to non-mission-critical applications with lower productivity gains, and thus lower pricing power. They will thus be unable to cover the debts they are incurring to build massive data centers predicated on centralized systems dominating (an inflated estimate of) the entire enterprise market.
Karp had been softly floating his critique for some time, but the CNBC event looked like a proper coming out. Just one day earlier Palantir had published a kind of manifesto devoted to what it described as the all-important principle of “A.I. sovereignty.” The central argument: Companies should seek to build their own A.I. tools, not just customize those on offer from the frontier labs. This might mean relying on open-source L.L.M.s rather than the proprietary ones on which the A.I. boom has mostly been built in America, but it would amount to a liberating declaration of independence from Big A.I., which in Karp’s estimation was sucking up much more value than it was generating.
Locking in a price with a multi-year neocloud contract insures a buyer against compute getting more expensive but not against it getting much cheaper. So as businesses around the world spend ever more on compute, they want to be able to hedge against price volatility just as they insure against changes in energy tariffs, interest rates or foreign-exchange movements—ideally in deep and liquid derivatives markets.
Two startups want to help companies do this, by turning nascent indices tracking compute costs into a futures market. Silicon Data, founded in 2024 and backed by DRW, a trading firm, has paired up with CME Group, which operates large derivatives exchanges. Ornn, created by recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and run from a flat rather than an office just a few months ago, has paired up with Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, to do the same. Both aim to launch compute futures later this year, to be traded on their partner exchanges.
One characteristic of bubbles is overbuilding the infrastructure. Signs of overbuilding of data centers include that both SpaceX and Meta are now in the business of rentling their GPUs to the competition.
As morale is hitting rock-bottom, his company is heavily relying on its competitors' AI models to build out its own in-house tools. And despite the many billions of dollars the company has spent in its flailing efforts to keep up in the AI race, even Zuckerberg himself is now acknowledging that progress is nowhere near where he wanted it to be.
As Reuters reports, Zuckerberg admitted during a town hall last week that AI agents in particular aren't progressing as fast as he anticipated, a devastating revelation following enormous layoffs that wiped out thousands of roles at the company.
The "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," he said according to a recording obtained by Reuters.
Despite a derisory ~3% share of the enterprise LLM market, SpaceX's IPO was marketed as an enterprise AI company. The IPO has to rate as the most manipulated of all time featuring, in addition to ludicrous financial projections, a tiny float, bent rules for index inclusion, and massive conflicts of interest at the banks and the analysts. Immediately afterwards, SpaceX issued $25B in bondsa. A month later we can see how the markets respond to the first trillion-dollar "AI company".
We’re old enough to remember when the market cap of the lossmaking telecom SpaceX was bigger than Amazon’s. Heck, for a few precious moments it was bigger than Microsoft’s. Maybe one day it will be again, but for now the stock is down 38 per cent from its peak post-IPO valuation.
Punters lucky enough to have been awarded a stock allocation at the outset are still sitting on a tasty [checks notes] 0.8 per cent paper profit at pixel time.
And this is before the lockups start expiring and the initial tiny float greatly expands.
SpaceX bod spread
Second, more interesting as being much less subject to manipulation, are the bonds. They are what Toby Nangle focused on in SpaceX bond yields rocket towards junk:
the full $25bn of benchmark bonds — issued across the curve — had a rocky first couple of days of trading. Checking back today, it turns out that the inauspicious beginning was just a prelude to the train wreck that has since unfolded.
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If you’d been allocated $100mn of the SpaceX 2056 bonds, you’ve turned $100mn into $90.7mn in less than a month. Sure, long-dated US Treasury bonds have fallen in value, and this general sell-off at the long end has done some of the work. But the spread on SpaceX 2056 — the additional yield you’re paid to compensate you for the risk that you don’t get repaid ( among other things) has now widened from the initial +175bps to a whopping +231bps doing more than two-thirds of the work.
Top 10 worst BBB
The same conflicts of interest that pumped the stock caused rating agencies to give SpaceX bonds a BBB rating, one notch above junk and crucially the lowest that many major institutions are allowed to hold. But Nangle notes that:
Looking only at the nine days since the bonds were included in ICE BofA indices at the end of June, this spread-widening has made SpaceX 2056 the single worst-performing US dollar triple-B benchmark bond:
Note that the top two worst bonds are SpaceX, but the rest of the top 10 are all Oracle, another financial disater area.
when we overlay the average spread for double-B US dollar corporate bonds across different maturities (the pink line), it looks a lot like the type of risk that the market has assigned to both SpaceX and Oracle bonds is junk risk.
SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta all need to raise vast amounts of debt to fund their plans for AI. With SpaceX's bonds trading as BB despite a BBB rating, this is going to be hard.
Founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Thinking Machines' first model is a big one. Weighing in at 975 billion parameters, the model requires more than two terabytes of GPU memory — a quantity present in around eight of Nvidia's B300 accelerators, or sixteen H200s — to run at its native 16-bit precision. If that's asking too much of your hardware, Thinking Machines has also released a NVFP4 quantized version of the model capable of running on half the GPUs.
This makes it the largest American open weights model to date, and comparable to Chinese models like DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.2, and Kimi K2.6 in terms of size and capabilities. Take these claims with a grain of salt — gaming AI benchmarks isn't exactly difficult – but Thinking Machines says Inkling is competitive with these models in a variety of workloads, although its benchmark charts also show it trailing proprietary models like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT.
If you don't like Chinese open-weight models, the US ones are getting better:
The model developer claims to have tuned the model to use these thinking tokens more efficiently and that Inkling therefore matches Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra, up to now the largest and most capable American open weights model out there at 550 billion parameters, on Terminal Bench 2.1 using roughly a third the tokens.
The AI revolution is supposed to be in its early innings. Demand for GPU computing is exploding. Microsoft has relied on CoreWeave for massive amounts of AI compute. OpenAI has signed tens of billions of dollars in long-term contracts. NVIDIA isn’t just supplying the chips, it has also invested in CoreWeave and entered into agreements that support parts of its financing and capacity.
So why are CoreWeave insiders continuing to sell stock? Management says many of the sales were made under pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plans. But those plans explain how the shares were sold—not necessarily why executives continue converting stock into cash while investors are being told AI infrastructure demand has never been stronger.
New York has become the first U.S. state to stop construction of large new data centers, imposing a one-year moratorium due to growing concerns over power costs, water supplies and the burden on local communities.
"As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it's my responsibility to take action and lead," said New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
She added that she would also pursue legislation to repeal sales tax exemptions for large data centers.
Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul continues the Bank for International Settlements's pessimism in The AI Investment Race:
The AI build-out ranks among the largest technology-driven investment booms in US history. Its scale, reliance on debt and circular equity ties raise questions about the boom’s sustainability and financial stability. We study a dynamic contest in which firms competing for a few dominant positions over-commit resources. The over-investment leaves the sector exposed to revenue disappointment that could turn boom into bust. The larger the boom, the deeper the eventual bust. The race to commit early through debt and circular financing also makes a bust more likely. Calibrated to balance sheet and deal data, the model points to over-investment of around 1.5 times the efficient level, rising to around three times where demand is less elastic. A network analysis shows that stress in one firm could cascade to others through chains of financial exposures.
As recently as this week, one executive at Anthropic PBC, who spoke on condition of anonymity, mused that the Claude maker’s technology was roughly six to 12 months ahead of Chinese rivals.
On Friday, Moonshot AI Inc. upended those assumptions. The Chinese AI lab released Kimi K3, a more advanced open-weight model that it said outperforms all rivals except for Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on overall capability. The implication is that Moonshot, and by extension China, could be closing the gap faster than expected.
...
Moonshot’s release could also undercut OpenAI, Anthropic and others on price at a moment when they’re confronting customers who are becoming more conscious of their surging AI spending. Some developers have turned to so-called model routing services that can seamlessly direct users to cheaper options, including from China, for specific tasks to maximize cost efficiency.
Kimi K3 is an open-weight model.
If a 120B parameter model is too small for you the RTX Spark won't cut it. But Michal Malewicz explains in NVIDIA just killed big AI and… You’re the winner? that one of Nvidia's OEMs will sell you a $94K box that will run a 1T model, the Exxact Valence Nvidia DGX Station.
"[O]ur bottom line is that AI adoption appears gradual and steady rather than rapid and transformative, with most households and businesses still reporting limited exposure to the technology. At the same time, evidence of a structural pickup in productivity growth remains surprisingly fragile: Aggregate productivity growth has improved during the post-pandemic period, but there is a strong rationale to attribute much of this improvement to cyclical variation in utilization rather than a sustained acceleration in productive capacity. We also find little compelling evidence in the available industry-level data that industries adopting AI more rapidly are already experiencing stronger productivity growth."
"productivity trends across all three levels have been relatively consistent over time, suggestive of micro-level productivity gains not adding up in aggregate"
Another instance of Betteridge's Law is Will OpenAI ever be profitable? from Leap Finance Academy. It is a very long and detailed examination of all the things that would have to happen for OpenAI to turn a profit by 2030. In summary, with my comments, the list is:
Reduce cost of inference which isn't going to happen enough because each successive frontier model uses more tokens to generate the same output.
Increase pricing which isn't going to happen because they already need to reduce pricing to stem the loss of customers to Anthropic, let alone to the open-weight models.
Increasing sources of revenue that are not inference dependent in other words the fantasy of $100B/year in advertising income, which isn't going to happen.
Securing and retaining human talent which requires an IPO to make their stock options worth something, which isn't going to happen it time to prevent bankruptcy.
Securing the funding they need to build Stargate and for working capital which isn't going to happen because even an IPO wouldn't come close to generating enough and the lenders are saying "enough".
Even though I'm skeptical of the wishful thinking of the conclusion, this is an impressive piece of work and well worth reading.
Please suspend disbelief and follow me below the fold as I look into a fascinating examination of the implications of the exponentialgrowth in the data centers needed to provide these benefits.
Not that I ever remember listening to Timbuk3 song, but I distinctly remember, shortly before the Black Monday stock market crash, Scott McNealy celebrating Sun's exponential growth with his version of the title.
While AI electricity consumption was only 1.5% of the global total in 2024, its power demand has grown at a rate of 0.127 yr−1 since 2015, accelerating to 0.15 yr−1 over the last five years. Projecting from this 2024 baseline, AI’s electricity demand is on track to achieve parity with the rest of the world’s combined consumption by approximately 2050.
All systems that grow exponentially end up running into limits that prevent further growth. Nachtrieb and Smith identify five such limits to the growth of AI data centers:
Non-renewable resource depletion
The Kelvin Limit
The renewable resource limit
The Dyson Limit
The Asimov Limit
Each of these limits is interesting, but here I only look into my favorite, the Kelvin Limit. They define this limit thus:
Even with an infinite energy source, the laws of physics dictate every unit of energy used eventually becomes waste heat. On a planetary scale, this heat must be radiated into space to maintain a stable environment.
Earth stays at a life-sustaining temperature by balancing received solar energy with infrared radiation emitted back into the cosmos. Human energy consumption from “terrestrial” sources, such as nuclear fusion or fossil fuels, adds “new” heat to this balance. Because this energy was not already part of the solar-to-earth flow, the planet must reach a higher temperature to increase its radiative cooling capacity and shed the additional load.
The “Kelvin Limit” defines the point where this added waste heat pushes Earth’s surface temperature to 373 K (100 ◦C), the boiling point of water. At this threshold, the planet becomes physically uninhabitable.
They build a model to predict when the Kelvin Limit would be reached:
The solar power arriving at the Earth’s cross-section is L α ≈ 5474 × 103 EJ yr−1. A portion of this energy is immediately reflected into space by the Earth’s albedo (a), which represents the planet’s reflectivity. Based on NASA data, Earth’s albedo is approximately 0.30, meaning 30% of incoming light reflects away while the remaining 70% is absorbed as heat ( P a).
The model assumes an initial equilibrium where absorbed solar power ( P a) equals the power radiated at the baseline temperature ( T 0).
...
The limit occurs at time t 2, when the combined heat of the Sun ( P a) and human energy demand ( D) requires the Earth to reach the boiling point ( T 2) to maintain equilibrium.
...
This thermal wall represents a hard physical limit. Technological efficiency cannot bypass it; higher energy use to drive AI or industry simply accelerates the transition toward this planetary boiling point.
Table VIII
For each of their cases they compute k, the rate coefficient. The time to hit the limit is t = k/ r, where r is the rate of increase of demand. For example, r over the last five years is 0.15. Their results are summarized in Table Viii, showing that in the Kelvin case k is 10.0 for all r. Note that the renewable-only case is the only case where k is less than the Kelvin case, and only by 9%. This demonstrates the very fundamental nature of the Kelvin Limit.
Table IX
Table IX summarizes their resulting t for each case for their ranges of r and k values. For the Kelvin case at 0.15, the recent value of r, they write:
These figures represent a fundamental shift in the prospects of civilization under AI. Under the 15% growth rates currently demonstrated by AI infrastructure, we quickly accelerate past all projected limits. The thermal “Kelvin Limit” ( k ≈ 10), which would normally take ten centuries to reach, suddenly appears in just 67 yr, well within a single human lifetime.
This 67 year estimate is, of course, an upper bound. The Earth becomes uninhabitable for humans long before the surface reaches 373 Kelvin. As we see in Texas, the current r = 0.15 is not actually fueled by renewables, and is thus contributing to much faster heating. As I understand it, their demand D is just the demand for running the data centers. At r = 0.15 there is significant extra demand for building 15% more data centers and 15% more Nvidia racks each year than the previous year.
Nachtrieb and Smith's Figure 2 above estimates that at r = 0.15 running the data centers would take half of the "world’s combined consumption by approximately 2050". In 2025 the Gross World Product according to the IMF was:
forecast to be around $208.96 trillion, $11.04 trillion up compared to $197.91 trillion in 2024.
Assuming this 5.6% growth rate continued, in 2050, GWP would be 3.7 times higher at $773T. Presumably, half of this would be generated by the data centers, or about $387T. Thanks to the economic mechanism described by W. Brian Arthur in Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, it is likely that only one company would dominate the AI market. At 20 times earnings, it would be worth around $7.7 quadrillion.
I think you can understand why investors are pouring money into AI companies.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Meddad 2026 = K. Meddad et al., “Un Nouveau Témoignage Épigraphique Sur M. Valerius Maximianus à Mascula (Numidie),” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 237 (2026): 281–84.
The War Resumes, Oil Prices Surge, Trump's Poll Numbers Continue To Suck - And Now We Must Fight His Escalating Illiberalism With Everything We Got
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I'm hosting Brian Tyler Cohen today live at 415pm ET. We will be talking about his new book, the current moment and more.....join us!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Aguer 2026 = Laura Aguer and Maël Crépy, “Du Bois Pour Les Mines: L’exploitation Du Bois Du Désert Oriental à l’époque Ptolémaïque,” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 237 (2026): 197–207.
Breaking: Demis Hassabis endorses preflight safety testing for AI
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Good news, for once.
Open Models are ready for agents. Their APIs are not.
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Open models have reached impressive levels of capability, but the surrounding platform often falls short. This blog explores the hidden infrastructure gaps developers face and why bridging them is essential for production-ready AI applications.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-14:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
7 new and 32 updated places. 3 new and 12 updated linked data sidebars.
Your ‘App’ Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you…) – Dan Q
I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!
‘Behemoth!’ Trailer: It All Starts With Pedro Pascal In First Look At Tony Gilroy Pic; Searchlight Dates For December 4
Here’s your first trailer for Tony Gilroy’s new drama Behemoth! starring Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Will Arnett. Searchlight has just dated the movie for December 4th, 2026, right in the awards season corridor. The synopsis reads: “A gifted cellist, Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal), returns home to Los Angeles after 20 years on […]
Oneday
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That’s all I have to prep for a month on the road. Tomorrow is Baltimore. After that, North Carolina. After that, California. Back in Bloomington in mid-August. Right now it’s hot in all my places: Ground down Says here that Rogers Sports & Media has closed six of its radio stations. One of those, CKWX […]
BBC And Channel 4 Shows Repurposed For RoseBerry Media’s New Vertical Video Service Epis
Israel’s RoseBerry Media has reversioned BBC and Channel 4 series for its newly-announced vertical video platform, Epis (styled ‘epis’). The service has launched on the App Store, Google Play and a dedicated website with more than 100 titles across crime, drama, reality, dating, factual entertainment and docs. RoseBerry is planning to launch more than 25 […]
With the Primetime Emmy noms in the books, film awards season is coming into focus. The Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild has put the final touches on its 2027 awards timeline. The 14th annual MUAHS Awards ceremony is set for Saturday, February 20, returning to the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. Nominations will be […]
The SFPD leaked its drone footage. It shouldn't be surveilling to begin with.
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Surveillance doesn't improve crime or make anyone safer. It wastes civic dollars and creates new risks for vulnerable communities. The SFPD's leak demonstrates one reason why.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Claude codes. It may seem as if developers have taken over this blog, because we have real business to do. So much new stuff to show. Today's RSS.chat goodie is an example app called ThreadWalker that crawls the network of replies under a single post, to all levels, printing them on screen in neat hierarchic form. It was written and documented by Claude. I reviewed the code, and looks good, and honestly doesn't look like anything I would write (not bad, just different). It could be used as a starter system that says when someone replied to something you wrote, or something deeper in the tree. All this is done by reading RSS feeds. This is where we begin to explore what's possible when you use a famous and familiar format like RSS 2.0 as the basis for a social network.
We need a PIT Crew for news
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Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a radically collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to building internal technology capacity. News has a lot to learn from it.
Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
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To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built […]
BBC Director General Supports Streamer License Fee Plan But Says Enforcement Will Be “Difficult”
New BBC Director General Matt Brittin has signaled his support for the license fee to expand to streaming services while acknowledging enforcement would be “difficult.” Having the scope of the annual £180 ($240) fee widen to incorporate those watching non-live TV on the likes of Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ has emerged as one of […]
Today's links Gerontocracy's failure mode: Where are the designated survivors? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MSFT v MP3; UK industry v schoolkids; Gary Larson v comics sharing; Planned LED obsolescence; PoGo v Black neighborhoods; Gnarlier trolley problems; Royal Society v cryptographic backdoors; Theresa May v climate change; Google v search; Facebook v facts. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Gerontocracy's failure mode (permalink) The "designated survivor" is one of the weirder aspects of America's (very, very weird) political system. Each year, during the State of the Union address, when both houses of Congress and the President are all under one roof, a single political figure, in the line of succession for the presidency, is spirited away to a hidden bunker, just in case the US legislative and administrative branches are decapitated in a single, spectacular terrorist strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor Initiated during the 1950s, designated survivors are a paranoid relic of the Cold War, but they're also a relic of an era when America was a less chud-dominated, more technocratic land. It's a longtermist sort of procedure, in stark opposition to vibes-based MAGA chaos in which the Mad King makes daily announcements of new wars, tariffs, monuments, and existential threats to the nation. America's ruling class have always sought an equilibrium between its pure Id of hatred for labor, autocratic yearnings and apocalyptic fantasies, and its patient, scheming Ego, the author of endless FedSoc judicial nominee listings, Projects 2025, and decades-long schemes to overturn Roe and reverse the New Deal. (Democrats have their own version of this, of course – the endless contest between the McKinsey wing of the party's right and its infinitely embroidered Machin-Synematic Universe.) The problem is that once the atavistic, impulsive elements of your project escape containment, the resultant turbulence sucks everyone else into their chaotic vortex. How can you plan for anything when you're buffeted by endless stunts, feints, and distractions? Nowhere is this failure to plan more vivid than in the age distribution of both chambers of the US legislature, its presidential candidates, and its judicial appointments. What's more, this is equally true of the Democrats and the Republicans. The equilibrium of all of America's key institutions is brittle: legislative majorities are often just one or two seats wide. Key federal circuits and the Supreme Court are knife-edge balances. We keep getting presidential races between septuagenarians and octogenarians. The question here isn't whether old people can be good at those jobs. They obviously can be. The problem is actuarial: old people are far more likely to die, or suffer severe medical episodes, than younger people. This is a fact of life that every person understands, and the older you get, the better you understand it. I'm 55. 20 years ago, it was unusual for just one of my peers to die in a given year; now I lose a couple every year. It could be me next (my doctor just informed me that I am cancer free, following excision, radiotherapy and immunotherapy). Anyone who pretends this isn't true is setting themselves and the people around them up for terrible things. If you're a writer, this means making plans for the smooth management of your literary estate. For the past couple decades, John Scalzi has been my anointed literary executor. He's a great choice: a fabulous writer with a good head for business and a strong handle on my politics and artistic sensibility, whose personal ethics are above reproach. The only problem is that John is a couple of years older than me, which means that he'd be a great executor if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, but not if I keel over with a heart attack in 20 years. So this year, I added a second executor, Molly White, who is also a fantastic writer, also extremely ethical and also very attuned to my politics and literary sensibilities. Molly is 20 years younger than me, and she has relevant experience: she's also the executor of the literary estate of her great-grandfather (EB White). In the unlikely event of my untimely death, Molly and John will do a great job running the estate (which mostly will consist of reviewing my agents' recommendations). And if John keels over right after me, Molly will be fine on her own. Of course, the only reason I need a literary executor is that my kid is only 18. At 18, she's a remarkable, level-headed, ethical young person, but she's not yet fully formed. Literary history is filled with descendants who take over a literary estate and run it in terrible ways. The most notorious example here is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce and a colossal asshole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_James_Joyce The most likely destiny for my literary estate is that I will grow older alongside my daughter, who will mature in ways that make her a perfectly suitable literary executor (in addition to being the beneficiary of my literary estate) and in a few years I'll send a note of thanks to John and Molly and change the paperwork. But in the unlikely, awful event that my kid runs into serious challenges that make me question her judgment and probity, I'll be covered. That's what planning is all about: thinking through various scenarios, including low-likelihood, high-salience ones that have easy mitigations, and taking appropriate and proportionate steps to avoid disaster. You know: like squirreling away a designated survivor in a bunker far from DC during the State of the Union. This is what makes America's political gerontocracy so weird. In their true hearts, the nonagenarian (1), octogenarians (5), septuagenarians (27) and late sexagenarians (7) in the US Senate know that they could keel over at any moment, and that in a 53:47 Senate, this could spell doom for their political project. Sure, Mitch McConnell might be secretly dead and that's bad and weird. But it wouldn't be exceptional. We're talking about a legislature whose members sometimes disappear for months, only to be discovered in care homes with advanced dementia, while still somehow holding office: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/14/kay-granger-dementia-dc-media-00210317 It's a legislature whose most prominent grandees cling to power at the very brink of death's door, long after they can be effective leaders, just so they can anoint their successor during the next election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Feinstein#Personal_life Elections have consequences, but special elections, called after the sudden death of an elderly lawmaker, have wild consequences. Of course, anyone can die suddenly. 15 years ago, one of my dearest friends, a contemporary, went to bed in seeming perfect health and never woke up. He was only 44. I still miss him, every day: https://memex.craphound.com/2012/06/28/eulogy-for-erik-possum-man-stewart/ But the likelihood this happening goes up the older you get, and once you cross a certain age threshold, the odds rise sharply. If you're part of a political project that's laying and executing long-term plans whose outcomes turn on hair-fine majorities, this should factor into your thinking. The failure to do so can throw everything you've worked for into disarray: https://prospect.org/2026/07/13/budget-consequences-of-lindsey-grahams-sudden-departure/ It's not limited to the legislature, of course. The Supreme Court's slide into its role as handmaiden to totalitarianism began when the dying Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, because she wanted her successor to be picked by the first woman president: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/magazine/ginsburg-successor-obama.html The amazing thing here is that RBG made her name as a master strategist, but when it came to this incredibly consequential matter, she set strategy aside for hubris: https://radiolab.org/podcast/more-perfect-sex-appeal Security practitioners know that anyone can be hacked or scammed, and that the biggest vulnerability of all is to be so confident in your own procedures and discernment that you assume it could never happen to you. If you think you can't get scammed, you are a danger to yourself and others: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security By the same token, any politician in their 70s or 80s who thinks that they can't suffer a stroke or heart attack or the kind of lapse that makes you freeze up during a presidential debate is a danger to their party, their politics and their nation: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jill-biden-joe-biden-stroke-2024-debate-sunday-morning-interview/ This isn't about how healthy or robust any given politician is or feels; this is about the cold reality of actuarial tables. The older I get, the more those actuarial tables factor into my own decision-making. The fact that our political classes seem to think that they can choose the time and manner of their passing is baffling. Hey look at this (permalink) AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds https://www.404media.co/ai-fiction-is-easy-to-detect-because-its-stupid-and-bad-research-finds/ Mayor Mamdani Announces Landmark "Click-To-Cancel" Consumer Protection Rules to Ban Subscription Traps and Junk Fees https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-announces-landmark–click-to-cancel–consumer-prot You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy: Why It's So Hard to Break John Deere's Control Over Farming https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/youll-own-nothing-and-be-happy-why Beyond the Prompt: The Social Costs of Generative Artificial Intelligence https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/betr/vol10/iss1/4/ Video Game Layoffs Fuelling Historic Union Movement https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/inside-the-video-game-industrys-historic Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Microsoft less hostile to MP3s https://web.archive.org/web/20010716103233/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6567844.html #25yrsago UK record lobby demands copyright school curriculum https://web.archive.org/web/20010718135130/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/16/abc_ip/index.html #25yrsago Gary Larson on online comics sharing https://web.archive.org/web/20010610081014/http://www.creators.com/index2_anotefromgarylarson.html #10yrsago San Francisco’s bike lanes have become Uber’s pickup/dropoff zones (and the cops don’t care) https://sf.streetsblog.org/2016/07/13/collecting-data-to-push-for-safer-biking-on-valencia #10yrsago For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that’s coming to LED bulbs https://web.archive.org/web/20160717090604/http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quandary-why-theres-no-such-thing-as-built-to-last #10yrsago Why do Pokemon avoid Black neighborhoods? https://www.bnd.com/news/nation-world/national/article89562297.html #10yrsago To hell with the Trolley Problem: here’s a much more interesting list of self-driving car weirdnesses https://medium.com/studio-d/15-more-concepts-in-autonomous-mobility-8fd1c794e466#.s10ldm5nf #10yrsago Royal Society’s #1 cybersecurity recommendation: don’t backdoor crypto https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/projects/cybersecurity-research/cybersecurity-research-report.pdf #10yrsago UK PM Theresa May nukes climate change department, appoints a climate denier as Climate Secretary https://web.archive.org/web/20160714173020/http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-department-killed-off-by-theresa-may-in-plain-stupid-and-deeply-worrying-move-a7137166.html #5yrsago Facebook's alternative facts https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth #1yrago When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4 You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah) https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism) https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ Lawfare Daily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g How to Think About AI (Organized Money) https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow 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: "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
BBC Boss Says ‘Doctor Who’ Disruption Is Opportunity For Creative Regeneration
BBC director general Matt Brittin has made a bullish case for the future of Doctor Who after the sci-fi show’s Christmas special was canceled amid production changes. Brittin — who declared his love for Doctor Who before joining the BBC earlier this year — said the exit of showrunner Russell T Davies, producer Bad Wolf, […]
Vulnerability in FIFA’s Network
FIFA’s network was vulnerable to anyone with even minimal access.
Mitch McConnell Trounces Trump on Cognitive Exam
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Infuriated, Trump claimed that the cognitive test was "rigged."
We’re well into the hype cycle and so far the only clearly-measurable changes we’ve seen are that laptops and gaming consoles now cost considerably more. Truly a transformative technology!
We’re well into the hype cycle and so far the only clearly-measurable changes we’ve seen are that laptops and gaming consoles now cost considerably more.
Truly a transformative technology!
Bectu Union Boss Philippa Childs Stepping Down After Nearly 10 Years
The head of the UK broadcasting union is stepping down after almost a decade in post. Philippa Childs, Bectu’s first female boss, will exit at the start of next year. Her successor will be unveiled by Bectu’s parent union Prospect soon. Childs has been running Bectu, which represents the interests of behind-the-camera workers across TV, […]
BBC License Fee Payers Plummet By Half A Million
The number of households paying the BBC license fee plummeted last year at a time when the corporation is desperately seeking a revamp of its funding model. Today’s BBC Annual Report showed that license fee payers slid by 539,000 last year to around 23.3 million. This is the biggest decline since 2020-21 and likely one […]
Scott Mills Rocketed To Top Of BBC’s Presenter Pay League Before Being Fired
Scott Mills became the BBC’s highest-paid presenter before being abruptly terminated as the host of the Radio 2 breakfast show in March. The BBC fired the radio DJ after receiving new information relating to a police investigation over alleged historical sexual offences, which prosecutors ultimately dropped. Mills pocketed as much as £750,000 ($1M) in the […]
The Long History of AI: From Descartes, to Astro Boy & ChatGPT
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Listen now | Historian Ada Palmer, on what four centuries of arguing over souls, slaves and robots can teach us about the AI debates we're having today.
Democrats lead by 26 points among “double haters” in the 2026 House midterms vote
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One in five Americans rates both parties unfavorably. These voters lean Democratic and say Trump has hurt the economy
Suddenly, Hormuz is Less Crucial Than It Was
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Why? Because the real energy crunch is coming from the Russia/Ukraine war
Lit Hub Daily: July 14, 2026
“I usually just write my way into things.” Eric Olson profiles Sigrid Nunez on the release of her collection, It Will Come Back to You. | Lit Hub Craft Angela Flournoy explores why Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments “is less
Venice To Fete Ellen Burstyn & Screen New Maggie Gyllenhaal-Directed Short About Marilyn Monroe Starring The Actress
The Venice Film Festival is to celebrate Ellen Burstyn with a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. The award will be presented to Burstyn at the screening of Flesh Impact, a short film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, in which Burstyn also stars. The synopsis for the short provided by Venice reads: “Dedicated to Marilyn Monroe on […]
Mitch McConnell's legacy of destruction
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He may have found Trump distasteful, but no one did more to protect him.
Famous Men
He doesn’t remember me, but I know who he is. The biographer and I met at a party Nathaniel took me to about a year after I arrived in New York, a literary fundraiser at one of those apartments where
Rogue Scholar supports Crossref schema 5.5
Yesterday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive started using Crossref schema 5.5 that was released last Friday.
The most relevant change in the new schema for Rogue Scholar is the introduction of a dedicated content type blog post (as type posted_content, subtype blog). This makes it easier to
Sigrid Nunez, Julie Buntin, Pamela Colloff, and more: 20 new books out today!
The July fiction continues: Julie Buntin’s much anticipated follow-up to Marlena is out today, Sigrid Nunez’s new collection drops, along with Jem Calder’s I Want You To Be Happy. There’s a multitude of nonfiction as well, such as Pamela Colloff’s
Andy Serkis Responds To Question About Lack Of Diversity In ‘LOTR: The Hunt For Gollum’ Casting
Andy Serkis has said his Lord Of The Rings film The Hunt For Gollum will address concerns about diversity “where relevant” and without just “ticking boxes” during an interview with the BBC. The BBC asked the veteran actor and director about what they described as a “lack of diversity” in the Lord Of The Rings […]
Sigrid Nunez Thinks Every Writer Should Connect to Their Inner Child
“The reader,” says National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez, “will forgive the novelist certain things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a [short] story? No. You can’t.” Twelve middling sentences, in a book
More Than a War Diary: Angela Flournoy on Jean Said Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments
Early in Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, Jean Said Makdisi recounts a dinner party in Beirut during the nascent stages of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war. The distant thud of shelling punctuates the evening, refuting one guest’s optimism that the latest
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: Julie Buntin (Famous Men) Nathaniel Rich (Cloudthief) Lucy Schiller (Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and
On Trying—and Failing—to Write the Lives of Children in a Syrian Detention Camp
The boy is about five or six years old. He sits with his back against a giant red water tank, one hand on the spigot, the other on the post of the rusted metal platform that holds the tank up
Sad Love Stories Are the Best Stories: A Reading List in Praise of Messy Love
Despite the prevalence of happy romantic heroes, I’m most intrigued by the ambiguous love story. My favorite titles reveal that the land of love can be treacherous terrain—migration, murder, parental illness, a stranger impregnated. Occasionally, even, the lover dies—shot in
Indie Movie Tax Credit Has Provided “Modest Gain To Landscape” & Some Projects May Never Enter Production, Says Leading UK Training Body
The leading UK film and TV training body has said only a “modest gain” has been provided by the new indie movie tax credit. ScreenSkills unveiled a report co-commissioned with Channel 4/4Skills this morning analyzing the short-term past and predicting the future of the local film and TV industry, which found that UK film and […]
Young Americans Should Be Raising Hell About Social Security
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Nobody has more riding on any changes to Social Security than people under 40. The trust fund is currently projected to run dry in the fourth quarter of 2032, but it could be sooner. Every election, starting in November, selects the lawmakers who will shape the program’s future. Neglecting to fix its finances will mean an automatic 22% cut to everyone's benefit. But for Millennials and Zoomers, what’s at stake isn't your elders’ monthly check — it’s the only life insurance, disability insurance, and old-age poverty insurance guaranteed to follow you through every job you'll ever have.
Playhouse Studios Buys Halo Post Assets & Launches Playhouse Post
EXCLUSIVE: Irish producer Playhouse Studios has bought the assets of Halo Post and will launch its own post house as a result. The deal for Halo comes after Mojo Bridge, the parent company that housed the famed Soho post house, went into administration in December 2025. Financial terms of the deal weren’t revealed, but it […]
The Day WhatsApp Goes Dark
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A thought experiment in what we built without noticing.
The People vs. Trump's Police State
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Trump's police state is growing, but communities are organizing against it
July 13, 2026
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Today began with yet another demonstration of the fact that the U.S.
Wed, July 15th, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Welcome new subscribers!
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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Payback for my youthful indiscretions
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Today we got a nice article about RSS.chat in Coywolf.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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And we got a second rss.chat server up, for testing and so people who want to try it out have a place to go. Still want to do a bit more testing before pointing to it from the blog. Working on docs now and fixes. Making sure we're ready for the next stages of growth. Turns out you can do a lot of feeds if you're willing to you know think different. ;-)
Strait Back to War
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When we need rational leadership most
Demanding justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and accountability for ICE brutality
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On Tuesday, July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston, Texas.
Devon Murphy-Anderson Joins Us From Maine
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Devon is the very capable Executive Director of the Maine Democratic Party, and is helping lead Maine Dems through this critical process of picking a new Senate nominee
The Pipeline from Fringe Conspiracy to Trump Policy
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Official Trump policy is increasingly driven by once fringe right-wing conspiracy theories. How can we fight back?
The Only Way To End Trump's Endless War
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Unless he destroys what's left of American democracy
Apple Sues OpenAI Over Trade Secrets
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Sarah Perez (PDF, Hacker News, MacRumors): The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan. The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District […]
Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it.
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"After losing their jobs at NOAA, Rebecca Lindsey, her sister and another colleague teamed up to rebuild a pivotal resource the Trump administration took offline."
Lindsey Graham’s Exit and the King’s Capitulation
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It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul.
Latent Space as a New Medium
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Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code?
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
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If are not using Trackpad Drag Lock on your Mac, why do you even bother owning a computer.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Fiorillo 2023 = Rosa Fiorillo and Gianluca Santangelo, Il recupero del sito di Piazza del Corso a Nocera Inferiore: un esempio di archeologia pubblica (ITA, 2023).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Ov. Fast. (Alton, Wormell, Courtney; PHI) = Ovid. P. Ovidi Nasonis Fastorum libri sex. 1st ed. Edited by Ernest Henry Alton, Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell, and E. Courtney. B.G. Teubner, 1978.
Last week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (6-13 July 2026): Over the course of the last week the Pleiades editorial college published 24 new and 197 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Johan Åhlfeldt, Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Brady Kiesling, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Joe Scholten, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, René Voorburg, and contributors to Wikidata.
Last week the Pleiades editorial college published 24 new and 197 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Johan Åhlfeldt, Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Brady Kiesling, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Joe Scholten, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Richard Talbert, René Voorburg, and contributors to Wikidata.
Tegan Nia Swanson has won the 2026 DAG Prize for Literature.
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Today, the DAG Foundation announced the winners of its second annual DAG Prizes, which award $20,000 each to a visual artist, a writer, and a musician “whose work expands the possibilities for American art.” In particular, the DAG Prize for
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed
, updated:
Experiencing Silo withdrawal until Friday
25k Subscriber Q&A
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Video Version | Audio Version Hi everyone! As I promised in my 10K subs video, here’s a Q&A video now that we’ve reached 25k subs. And wow, honestly that’s amazing, thank you all for subscribing and thanks also to my Patrons for their continued support. In fact, since statistically most of you are new here,
Our community hit a big milestone this weekend - we've now raised $4m for battleground candidates and state parties this cycle! Great work all.......
What’s up with people who disapprove of Trump but won’t vote for Democrats?
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The first post is up at the new Data Lab vertical
Fun fact: Salvador Dalí designed a tarot deck for the film Live and Let Die.
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In the early 1970s, the producer Albert R. Broccoli commissioned the artist Salvador Dalí to make a tarot deck for the upcoming James Bond film Live and Let Die. Based on Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel of the same name, Live
Financials and Budget – TDF Annual Report 2025
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This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. TDF exists because of a large, dynamic global community — volunteers, ecosystem companies and committed end users who support our work with donations of both time and money. The
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-13:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
7 new and 68 updated places. 7 new and 80 updated linked data sidebars.
Everyone: You can subscribe to the rss.chat flow, in RSS of course. If you're a developer, read the source for the feed. And then read the source namespace docs re the recent additions, inReplyTo and comments, and a special page that walks through how the RSS feed becomes part of the flow for our social network.
Paramount-WBD Merger Is Competition Killer, State Attorneys General Allege In Proposed Blockbuster Antitrust Action
From Sacramento to Albany and several state capitols in between, regional attorneys general are steeled to stop Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery in an antitrust lawsuit that could hit the courts Monday. Coming as barbed threats circulate that the David Ellison-owned PSKY could exit the Golden State in retaliation, the long […]
‘Digger’ Trailer Unveils Tom Cruise’s Crusty Oil Baron, A Role That Took The Actor 40 Years To Prepare
Warner Bros has just dropped the first trailer for the Tom Cruise-starring, Alejandro G. Iñárritu-directed Digger, and, well, buckle up. Ala Cruise’s major studio boss Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, the actor transforms into another kind of opposite once again: a very blunt Southern-talking, older potbelly oil baron who may have set off a massive […]
Name your own price for this Raspberry Pi Press book bundle
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Support the Raspberry Pi Foundation's work to help young people realise their potential through computing.
‘Peaky Blinders’ Team “Devastated” By Sam Neill’s Death: “We Will Be Forever Grateful”
The Peaky Blinders team has paid tribute to Sam Neill after his unexpected death. In a post on the show’s official Instagram page, producers said they were “devastated” by the actor’s passing at the age of 78. Neil starred in the first two seasons of Peaky Blinders as Chester Campbell, an irascible and ruthless inspector […]
Akinola Davies Jr & Ted Hope Among Venice Sidebar Jury Members
Venice has locked the jury members for its Orizzonti and debut film competitions. The Orizzonti competition will be chaired by French director, actress, and screenwriter Valérie Donzelli, with jury members including American film distributor Peter Becker; the Hong Kong-American director Elizabeth Lo; Mexican director and screenwriter David Pablos; and Italian actress Barbara Ronchi. Italian screenwriter […]
Data Lab: What’s up with people who disapprove of Trump but won’t vote for Democrats?
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Most of them are just Republicans. An update on cross-pressured voters in our polling
AI Data Centers and the Concentration of Wealth
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn’t fallalong party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these data centers bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on data centers obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence...
The Economics that Law and Economics Ignores
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Latent Space as a New Medium
Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code? My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity. I will first explain what I … Continue reading →
Oligarchy in Action: The Case of Corporate Tax Cuts
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How big money trumps the people’s will — and how to reclaim democracy
The Cell Phone Novel Craze of Early 2000s Japan Did Not, in Fact, Destroy Literature
Once upon a Y2K, technology still felt like it could fulfill some human need: our drive for connection, perhaps, or just external recognition of our internal monologue. In the early aughts, digital revolution doubled as personal revelation—suddenly, armed with boxy
Lit Hub Daily: July 13, 2026
How cell phone novels became the iconic genre among young writers on the Y2k internet. | Lit Hub Criticism “To drink is to enter of a labyrinth of romantic, thrilling, even glamorous myths; to give up drinking is to give
Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism
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From Gingrich to Trump, Graham was a fixture as the GOP became increasingly malignant.
‘Mourinho’: Teaser For Netflix Sports Doc About Legendary Football Manager Drops; Global Launch Date Revealed
The Netflix doc series about legendary football manager Jose Mourinho will launch globally on August 11. In a teaser trailer released today, the same day he begins a second spell as Real Madrid coach, the Portuguese star seen in typically boastful action as he looks through his personal trophy room. He throws on a contented […]
Stephen Chow’s ‘Kung Fu Soccer’ Scores Big At China Box Office With $74M Opening
Stephen Chow’s first film in seven years, Kung Fu Soccer, scored a mighty opening at the China box office this past weekend grossing $73.6M (RMB500.3M) in just two days (July 11-12), according to figures from Artisan Gateway. The spin-off of 2001 hit Shaolin Soccer follows an all-female soccer squad who add martial arts techniques to […]
“A Person Should Be in Love Most of the Time.” An[other] Ode to Grace Paley
I first started reading Grace Paley in the weeks after my second novel was published, as I sought refuge from refreshing Goodreads, from waiting for the Booker Prize Committee to phone. Reading the five-page piece “Love,” and rereading it many
Intimacy as Art: André Aciman on Eric Rohmer’s Élisabeth
My edition of Élisabeth was written by a man called Gilbert Cordier and published by Gallimard in 1946. The novel didn’t go far and eventually disappeared from circulation. Sixty years later Gallimard reissued it under the altered title of La
“The Rival”
It was winter when Laura left her husband without warning, and summer when she returned. A livid evening, fluorescent sunset; she was standing, dazed by the heat, outside her house. The curtains of the house were only half drawn. The
When Someone Wants to Publish Your Correspondence With a Famous Writer
For most of my life I didn’t read books of letters. I wanted what I read to be deliberately shaped. I wanted art. And in middle age, I lost some vision. I read more slowly, so every word had to
Stealing Time: In Praise of Writing at Dawn, at Midnight or Whenever We Can
At 5 AM and it’s me and the birds. This is how I like it: when the house is asleep. Outside, the slow rumble of a sanitation truck. A lone scooter screams down the block. Sometimes a helicopter hovers. A
Quietly Flamboyant: In Praise of Sober Queerness
In the spring of 1983, the poet Eileen Myles went for a walk with their friend Tom in Manhattan. There was perhaps nothing remarkable about this walk, only that the light “clustered around the buildings” seemed particularly beautiful that day.
BBC Studios Says ‘Top Gear’ Crash Passenger Suing For $200,000 Gave “Wrong & Dangerous Instructions”
A driving consultant who was in the Top Gear crash with Andrew Flintoff and is suing BBC Studios for £150,000 ($200,000) gave the presenter “wrong and dangerous instructions,” according to BBC Studios. Reports emerged over the weekend that Paul Rees, who was sat in the passenger seat on that fateful day in 2022, is seeking […]
Pluralistic: Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (13 Jul 2026)
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Today's links Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pro-logging Lorax; Anti-DRM picture book; Whose cops did America train? Day on a Device; Theresa May x Fresh Prince; Ratfucking Corbyn supporters; Infosec v W3C DRM; Remix Public Enemy; Hungary's Cold War cartoons; America is unpaving its roads; Olympic overruns are world champions; Vivendi lobbyist is now UN copyright boss; Boris's racism; Facebook's insider stalkers; Semantic drift, ethical drift. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (permalink) "I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend. As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be. Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money? This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!" Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?" Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school? If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022? I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company: https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets: https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/ The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"): https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/faux-high-level-163443872 It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaskan_Gold_Mining_Supplies_(1897)_(ADVERT_277).jpeg Today's economy is dominated by pick-and-shovel wholesalers. America is a gerontocracy drowning in MBAs, while there's no one to do eldercare: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-recruiters-can-t-find-workers-and-new-grads-can-t-find-jobs-it-s-not-ai/ar-AA27K57y So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital? Hey look at this (permalink) Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Deride “Headline-Seeking” Damages Sought By State AGs In Social Media Safety Suit: “Untethered From Reality” https://deadline.com/2026/07/social-media-lawsuit-damages-zuckerberg-1236977447/ Zohran Mamdani's retro wristwatch is a Casio classic https://boingboing.net/2026/07/08/zohran-mamdanis-retro-wristwatch-is-a-casio-classic.html B.O.B. (Birds Over Big Bird) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAXO7SXK0Pc A referendum for another development model https://thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/a-referendum-for-social-justice/ Introducing the Gap Map v0.1 https://www.currentai.org/blogs/introducing-the-gap-map-v0-1 Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Pro-lumber industry spoof of The Lorax https://web.archive.org/web/20010721042828/http://www.forestcouncil.org/news/articles/truax1.htm #25yrsago Remixable vocal tracks from the next Public Enemy release https://web.archive.org/web/20010813195140/http://www.slamjamz.com/slamnews.php?article=7 #20yrsago Wikipedia creates RSS for its posts https://web.archive.org/web/20060718103013/http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/07/wikipedia_entir.html #20yrsago Anti-DRM picture-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060721095740/https://dustrunners.blogspot.com/2006/07/pig-and-box.html #10yrsago The US has spent $122B training foreign cops and soldiers in 150+ countries, but isn’t sure who https://web.archive.org/web/20160713145824/https://theintercept.com/2016/07/13/training/ #10yrsago German free school teaches without grades, timetables or lesson plans https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/no-grades-no-timetable-berlin-school-turns-teaching-upside-down #10yrsago For the first time, a federal judge has thrown out police surveillance evidence from a “Stingray” device https://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/federal-judge-throws-out-evidence-gathered-with-stingray-cell-phone-tracker/ #10yrsago Day on a Device: art made by screenshotting a multitasker’s screen with each context-switch https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12170526/multitasking-phone-laptop-pierre-buttin-art #10yrsago Remarkably Normal: the true stories of abortion in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160810092901/http://jezebel.com/the-vagina-monologues-but-for-abortion-1783289270/amp #10yrsago Theresa May performs the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv7Jd94bnOI #10yrsago UK Labour’s dirty trick excludes 130,000 members from leadership vote https://web.archive.org/web/20160712225142/http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-12/corbyn-opponents-try-to-fix-vote/ #10yrsago Security researchers: the W3C’s DRM needs to be thoroughly audited https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/call-security-community-w3cs-drm-must-be-investigated #10yrsago Help Doctors Without Borders fill in the geodata blanks for vulnerable communities https://missingmaps.org/blog/2016/07/14/mapswipe/ #10yrsago Sign a book of congratulations for America’s new Librarian of Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20160718023555/https://action.everylibrary.org/congratulate_carla_hayden_today #10yrsago Hungary’s Cold War cartoons were weird and awesome https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/14/the-fascinating-world-of-cold-war-era-hungarian-cartoons/ #10yrsago The ACLU has a roadmap for defeating President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives https://web.archive.org/web/20160715131734/https://action.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pages/trumpmemos.pdf #10yrsago America’s infrastructure debt is so bad that towns are unpaving roads they can’t afford to fix https://web.archive.org/web/20160713170836/https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/ #10yrsago It’s official: the Olympics result in the worst budget overruns of any megaproject https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2804554 #10yrsago Vivendi lobbyist appointed to run copyright for UN agency https://web.archive.org/web/20160717052135/http://keionline.org/node/2614 #10yrsago The long, racist history of Brexiteer Boris Johnson, the new UK Foreign Secretary https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36792746 #5yrsago Facebook employees stalk users https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/14/who-watches-the-zuckmen/#pecksniffs #5yrsago Semantic drift versus ethical drift https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian Upcoming appearances (permalink) Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4 You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah) https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism) https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ Lawfare Daily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g How to Think About AI (Organized Money) https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow 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: "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
Why Todd Blanche Should NEVER Be Attorney General
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Now is the time to phone your senator
Sam Neill Remembered: Karl Urban, Toni Collette & Prime Ministers Pay Tribute To “Beautiful Man”
Sam Neill is being remembered by the film and TV community after his family announced his “sudden and unexpected” death. In a statement shared on Neill’s Instagram profile, his loved ones said the Jurassic Park and Peaky Blinders actor died “with the dignity that has characterised his whole life.” The statement led to an outpouring […]
‘Hunt: We Need To Talk About James’: Feature Doc On Legendary Late Formula 1 Driver Goes Into Production
Speedsters, listen up. Hunt: We Need to Talk About James has gone into production, with more legendary figures in racing now attached. The feature-length doc film from production house and tech specialist Deep Fusion looks at the colorful life of James Hunt, the British Formula 1 driver who died in 1993 aged just 43. We […]
Sam Neill Dies: ‘Jurassic Park’ Actor Was 78
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor best known for his role in the Jurassic Park franchise, Peaky Blinders and a plethora of independent films has died in Australia, it was announced tonight. The multiple Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nominee was 78. “It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the […]
July 12, 2026
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The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S.
Ariana Madix Pays Tribute To Late ‘Love Island USA’ Producer James Barker After Unexpected Death
Ariana Madix paid tribute to Love Island USA producer James Barker after his unexpected death while production of Season 8 of the Peacock dating series was underway. Amid the celebration of the Season 8 finale of the dating series, Madix took some time to remember Barker and call fans to contribute to a crowdfunding effort in his […]
Folded between the pages.
Some statements about “AI”, and about putting down what you mean.
Lindsey Graham Dies: Trump Ally Succumbed To A Tear In The Wall Of His Aorta
UPDATED with latest: The office of the Washington, D.C., chief medical examiner said that Lindsey Graham died of an aortic dissection. The New York Times described that as “a tear in the main artery that carries blood from the heart, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, a gradual weakening and hardening of the arteries.” According to […]
A Fact-based Lindsey Graham Obituary
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Like many Americans, I mourn the sudden passing of Lindsey Graham. I had hoped he would live long enough to be tried for treason.
Hardening Auto-TLS for Inlets Tunnels
When you SSH to a server for the first time, you get a prompt asking you to verify the host fingerprint. Most people just hit “yes” and move on. We know we should check the fingerprint, but in practice, individuals rarely collect server fingerprints and add them manually to their known_hosts file.
Accessibility is resistance!
Hello, my name is Léonie, and I 💜 AI. Well, that isn't entirely true, but I do use AI, quite a bit actually, and I'd like to tell you why.
AI-assisted migration: Critical lessons from the modernization frontlines
AI-assisted migration: Critical lessons from the modernization frontlines
Monday 13 July, 2026
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Norman Conquest 2.0 The British Museum in Bloomsbury, seen on a rainy afternoon a while back (when Britain still could make the rains run on time). From today it’s the temporary home of the Bayeux Tapestry which depicts events leading … Continue reading →
This was the seventh week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Sunday caption contest: Banishing
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Friends,
Other examples of inbound/outbound RSS support
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Dave Winer pointed to Ricardo Mendes from his linkblog on July 10 with the title “Inbound and Outbound RSS”. I took a look at the Mendes post, he describes using Indiekit and plugins to both read and write posts. I think this is very similar to my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool. In the Mendez setup, […]
What’s an Icon in 2026?
As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives:
What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms.
Apple Recommends Making Icons With Icon Composer For “More Expressivity”
In “Create icons with Icon Composer” from WWDC 2025, Lyan Bewry from Apple’s Design Team gives the rationale for why developers should use Apple’s new Icon Composer:
Icon design is moving from a past of simply static images, to a future of expressive, multi-layered artworks that respond to user input and adapt between appearances. They’ve become a much richer and more integrated experience on-device.
Catch that? Icons are moving from a “static” past to an “expressive, multi-layered […] much richer” future.
You may have noticed this in some of Apple’s latest OS releases, how lighting effects, customizations, etc., can all affect what an icon looks like at any given moment within the operating system.
So what are these .icon files made by Icon Composer?
These .icon files, this format that Apple came up with, it’s a bunch of resources and a recipe. So it’s like bitmaps, vector images, layers, recipes and effects. That’s what it is. And these icons are assembled on the fly by the operating system. It doesn’t burn up bitmaps of them. I take your ingredients, I assembled them, I composite them, I apply your layer effects, and then eventually it renders a bitmap that it keeps in memory somewhere.
Who is thinking about backwards compatibility in their icons?
Tahoe’s effects are different than 27’s effects […] And also, 27 has effects that 26 doesn’t support. And 26 won't even read the .icon files from 27, which makes everything complicated.
Complicated indeed.
Schrödinger’s Icon
As noted, the days of a single, static image for icons are over. An app icon is no longer a PNG file.
It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s icon if you will. There’s no longer a universal answer for “What does your app icon look like?” An icon is simultaneously light, dark, glass, tinted, etc.. Only once it is “observed” — that is rendered at runtime on a device with settings applied (user preferences, device angle, etc.) — can you really know what it looks like.
An icon now has a runtime.
My Two Cents
I don’t know.
Icons are effective because of their ability to be quickly recognizable and memorable. Visual simplicity and consistency support that.
Making something more “expressive” and “richer”, to me, means conveying more. But icons are meant, to a degree, to convey less. Only the essential. That’s what makes them effective. There’s definitely a point where, the more they convey, the less effective they are at their purpose.
The more you move away from a singular, visual representation, the more room there is for confusion and greater cognitive effort for discernment.
Take, for example, Apple’s Phone app. What’s the icon for it? Can you picture it in your head? It’s a green icon with a white phone glyph. That’s what it was in the original iPhone keynote (and it’s what the Phone app will always be to me). Iconic!
But wait! Now it’s also a black icon with a green phone glyph if you’re in dark mode. And there’s more! It’s a clear glass icon with a phone glyph if you’re in clear mode. And! It’s [insert color here] with a phone glyph if you’ve tinted it.
Consistent color is a strong ingredient in aiding memorability and recognizability. Look at Coke:
Red can? Coke
Black can? Coke Zero
Silver can? Diet Coke
Simplicity matters. It aids recognizability and memorability. If you start making it more complicated and more varied, you lose what made it simple, recognizable, and memorable to begin with.
And what are app icons but visual tools for immediate recognizability?
Anyway, now that app icons have a runtime and will increasingly vary in their appearance, I’m not sure how to archive them anymore.
The Trump administration is subpoenaing journalists to reveal sources. Their data security is more important than ever.
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"Historically, the Justice Department has sought to subpoena reporters only as a last resort after other reasonable options have been exhausted." Now the FBI is doing it to satisfy an angry President.
You can write in LLMese, but you don’t have to
While chatting with Sarah Deaton about the formats agents could use to talk to each other, we got to questions that might sound obvious: why should machines (say, LLMs) communicate with each other like we do? Do they need all the rhetoric we carry around? Or could they get by with a terser register, one that carries the same meaning but in far fewer tokens?
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Finally, my first rss.chat podcast. 20 minutes. As always, I take forever to get to the point.
Why you can't create an account
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A karass is "a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident." I think of RSS.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay in touch with people who are linked cosmically. This is one of many rich ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut, this one in Cat's Cradle, which you should read, because it's some of the best story-telling out there, and it's full of food for thought. I read all the books when I was a teen, and have since re-read them. Sirens of Titan was my fave.
Anyway...
In the past when I announced a product, people could use it right away, and usually they click a couple of things and then go away.
In the case of RSS.chat -- what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren't logged in, or what you see on a social network like X, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it's not the thing. That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time -- as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I'm not selling a product here -- I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps -- blogging, RSS, podcasting.
The idea is this -- the web itself is a social network. It's up to us, all of us, not just me -- to build that network.
When you see how we proceed from here that will become clearer.
In the meantime I'm going to change the message you get when you try to sign on, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we'll be sure to let you all know about that.
For now, I'm operating a network for people I work with, and it's all open for anyone to read. That's also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a "Fractional horsepower social network," stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs.
I don't want to turn the world over to a startup, we've done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.
“Lean on Me”
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A Reason To Smile
Communism According to Republicans
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TBR Sunday Read
AI in an Age of Oligarchy
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Why extreme inequality will magnify the social, political and economic downside of technology
Dragoncatcher: Report from the march to Stop the AI Race
England’s Victory Over Norway Draws Biggest UK Audience For World Cup 2026
England progressed to the semi-final of the FIFA World Cup in front of the largest UK audience of the tournament so far. Jude Bellingham’s brace of goals knocked Norway out of the competition, with a peak of 16.8M viewers watching the 2-1 triumph on ITV1. ITV’s coverage scored an average of 12.7M viewers, according to […]
Sunday Thought: Gratitude
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Friends,
July 11, 2026
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Last night the Department of Justice subpoenaed reporters from the New York Times over a story the newspaper published on Wednesday.
Brunday
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RSS Forever Alas, NiemanLab (which I have long followed, honored, and even loved) joins TechCrunch in lauding a new app called HyperTexting for not calling what it relies on “RSS“: Hailey isn’t the only one attempting to introduce the technology formerly known as RSS to a younger generation. (Nieman Lab predictors have been saying this was […]
Bookmarks - web, localfirst, llm, protocol
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These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
UNHCR’s archives are not just dusty shelves of internal paperwork.
Within around 10 kilometres of shelving lie official records, file
notes, testimonies and images dating back to UNHCR’s creation in 1950,
documenting global displacement from the aftermath of the Second World
War through the Cold War and decolonization to today’s conflicts and
climate-driven crises. Alongside this sits a vast digital archive:
websites and social media content amounting to around 5–6 terabytes, and
a dedicated Digital Preservation System holding almost 90 terabytes of
material.
Once destroyed, these records cannot be reconstructed. There is no
backup co
Street Books is a street library that provides community, resources, and
advocacy for people living outside or at the margins in Portland,
Oregon. We cultivate mutual relationships rooted in dignity and autonomy
by showing up every week, year after year, in all kinds of weather, all
around the city, to meet people where they are.
Welcome to our historic 24/7 live stream of the magnificent Fuego
Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the world! For the first
time ever, experience the raw power and breathtaking beauty of Fuego
live in stunning 4K resolution.
… much of the time, my “minding” is more just a sort of bodily habit –
an unreflecting assumption that if I’m faced with a task or a decision,
I should proceed on the basis that it’s really important that things
turn out right. And that’s a habit I can drop as soon as I’m aware of
it. Whereupon I get to inhabit the present moment more fully and
enjoyably, instead of always anxiously waiting to see if things turn out
the way I’ve decided they must. Plus, I get to do stuff more freely – to
make decisions and take action and accomplish things, instead of holding
back out of the fear that things might go catastrophically wrong.
Strange Rules introduces the concept of Protocol Art, a practice that
engages with the underlying rules that determine how culture is
produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age. These rules
manifest as algorithms, AI models, platforms, technological
infrastructure and social convention, hardening through use into the
conditions of cultural life. Protocol Art operates at the level of the
rule: not only analysing these systems, but seeding new ones. The
protocol is not the subject of the art: it is the art. When the protocol
is the art, the scientists and researchers authoring such rules become
artists. Strange Rules invites them to participate as such.
This is the second memo where I describe my recent experiences on
running small models locally on my developer machine for agentic coding.
In the first memo, I covered the many factors that can influence the
viability of that setup — hardware, model choice, runtime, harness. Here
I focus on the concrete experiences, the tasks I gave the models, what
happened, and my final conclusions.
After starting at DeepMind in 2017, Gabriel was, for a time, the only
active philosopher working at a frontier AI lab. He quickly discovered
that his background in moral philosophy and political theory gave him an
unusual perspective in an industry dominated by engineers. Over the past
decade, he has assembled a body of work that tracked, and in many cases
predicted, the ethical challenges created by the surprising success of
large language models (LLMs
The sneakerweb is a peer-to-peer protocol for web publishing without
permission: there are no DNS servers, domain registrars, or web hosts.
Instead, websites are stored directly on user devices, and transferred
between them through the ultimate fallback infrastructure: physical
storage media.
Your collected sites can be viewed offline, in the same web browser you
normally use, and then shared with others via .snk files.
Most researchers didn’t choose a software package on its scientific or
technical merits, but on the political merits of joining its user
community. Among Illich’s five threats to conviviality, I observed
polarization and radical monopoly. As an illustration of the latter,
some PhD students who contacted me with questions about MMTK asked me
not to talk to their supervisors about their use of MMTK, because “for
political reasons, I am supposed to use software X”.
Our digital societies bear the hallmarks of non-convivial technologies
as identified more than fifty years ago by Ivan Illich in his seminal
book Tools for Conviviality (1973). In a context of ecosystemic and
socio-economical crises, we argue in this paper that Illich’s ideas
remain remarkably relevant, not only for understanding the negative
effects of digital technologies but also as guidelines for embedding
digital technologies in a degrowth scenario. As computer scientists, we
therefore propose a research agenda for developing design for
conviviality, a strongly normative value sensitive approach to the
design of digital artefacts and systems. We discuss in particular two
examples, digital infrastructures and business process management, which
seem to be very much in need of a convivial rethinking.
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it into your pocket or bag and enjoy reading anytime. Perfect for
commuting, travel, or quick reading breaks throughout the day.
RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can
design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way
around. RSS has come in and out of fashion, been declared dead, and has
come back, every time. Open systems are the best way forward to a free,
equitable internet, and the resilience and continued reinvention of RSS
has shown just how creative the web community can be with open
protocols.
‘Big Brother 28’ Premiere Defended By Frankie Grande After Critic Takes Swipe: “Camp Is Part Of Its DNA”
SPOILER ALERT! Do not read unless you’ve watched the Season 28 premiere of Big Brother on CBS. Big Brother fans were treated to not one but three appearances by former CBS reality stars in the season premiere July 9, but one made an unexpected exit by falling into an erupting volcano. Silly? Sure, which is […]
‘Black Money For White Nights’ Review: The Cost Of Living Crisis Bites Hard In This Incisive Bulgarian Drama – Karlovy Vary
Bulgarian-language cinema is enjoying a moment this year, starting with Valeska Grisebach’s extraordinary crime drama The Dreamed Adventure, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes back in May. The similarly incisive Black Money for White Nights, by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, is very much cut from the same cloth, set in the same post-Soviet […]
‘Love Island USA’s Ciara Miller Confirms Return To ‘Summer House’ Season 11 Cast As Filming Starts
Ciara Miller will be summering at the Hamptons once again as she confirms she is part of the Summer House Season 11 cast. The Love Island USA Aftersun host revealed on the weekly Peacock talk show that she was back in New York City to start filming the Bravo series. “I have Summer House to […]
CBS’ Matt Gutman Said He Got “Completely Scammed” By Fake Bank Fraud Investigator: “Scary Experience”
CBS News journalist Matt Gutman revealed via social media that he was the target of a phone scam that almost had him emptying his bank account. “A very scary experience,” said Gutman. “I’m not as savvy as I think I am.” In his July 10 posts, Gutman explained that a caller shared a name and […]
‘New Girl’ Cast Had To “Fight” To Get Lamorne Morris On Fox Comedy, Recalls Zooey Deschanel
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Zooey Deschanel says it’s impossible to think of New Girl without Lamorne Morris but there was a minute when he wasn’t a lock to play Winston Bishop. During a recent appearance on the Zach Sang Show, Deschanel said she and her fellow castmates had to “fight” to get the now Emmy-winning actor on the comedy. Morris […]
The new RSS.chat repo on GitHub. Lots of fixes, features, docs and examples coming soon. For now all the source is there, MIT license. And a place to report bugs and start exploring how you can contribute. This is just Day 1. Many more to come. :-)
Trump WILL Try to Steal the Midterms. Here's How
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And How We Prevent Him from Doing So
How ‘Little House On The Prairie’ Showrunner Crafted “Compelling” Fever Dream Flashbacks To Fill In “Stakes” Of Ingalls Family Backstory
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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the fourth episode of Netflix’s ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ Little House on the Prairie showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has previous experience when it comes to the genre elements of dreams and flashbacks. In the fourth episode of Netflix’s adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, fever descends upon the […]
★ Exactly Like Om Malik
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Remembrances, tributes, and stories.
Barbara Ling Dead: ‘Michael’ & ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Production Designer Was 73
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Barbara Ling, the production designer behind Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) and Michael (2026), has died. She was 73. The Academy Award winner died on Thursday in Santa Barbara after she was diagnosed with cancer, a WME spokesperson confirmed to Deadline. “Equally gifted at period authenticity, contemporary realism, and stylized fantasy, Ling leaves […]
Karlovy Vary Reveals Award Winners: Aung Phyoe’s ‘Fruit Gathering’ Wins The Crystal Globe
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The 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival came to an end tonight after its starriest event for quite some time, doling out the famous Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema to the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Juliette Binoche, and cinematographer Robert Richardson. Festival President’s Awards went to Jesse Eisenberg, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Magda […]
Dwayne Johnson Tried To Revive ‘The Odd Couple’ On Broadway With Kevin Hart: “Not Letting That Dream Go”
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No stranger to delivering a live performance for thousands of screaming fans, Dwayne Johnson is looking to add a Broadway show to his extensive resume. The Golden Globe nominee recently revealed that he’s “been working on my Broadway debut” for nearly three years, noting that he and longtime friend/collaborator Kevin Hart “were going to do […]
Larry Birkhead “Not Involved” With Anna Nicole Smith Movie Based On Dr. Sandeep Kapoor’s Book, Filed Complaint With California Medical Board
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Nearly 20 years after her death, an upcoming movie about Anna Nicole Smith’s doctor is making waves with her family. Larry Birkhead, the father of the late pop culture icon’s daughter Dannielynn, stressed that they “absolutely object” to Trust Me, I’m a Doctor, which premieres Oct. 16, based on Dr. Sandeep Kapoor’s 2017 book of […]
Some people spell it RSS.chat. I haven't decided which way is right yet.
The announcement covers a slice of the project, but it fans out to be the beginning of a bootstrap.
I want to entice other projects to fully endorse the text model of the web. Today most social "web" services support a pitiful subset of the web, and leave out the most crucial element, the link. If a writer can't link, how can you call it the web? Seriously.
I want to force them out of their silos and get the web working for the people and esp independent developers.
I've been preaching this for years, and I am reminded what I learned a long time ago -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.
It was developed by Claude Code and myself, starting in April. We make an incredibly good team though sometimes Claude is tedious, but I put up with it because the results make me laugh out loud frequently because I never imagined working at such velocity.
I'm not doing this to make money, though of course I don't *mind* making money. I just want to return the web to its former glory, where every part is replaceable, and if you can think of something you can probably do it.
I want to use lots of different software to work on my social network presence. I want this post to appear on Masto, Bluesky, Twitter, Threads, Facebook even, and have them all work perfectly together.
In the meantime, we're now ready to create our own global network of free speech, uncontrolled by the big silos. At some point if it works, we will have moved beyond them, or they will see the sense in joining the party.
Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable.
As its name implies, it's built entirely on fully open web standards, RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSockets. It turns out you can make a very nice distributed social network without having to wait. It was always there, we just had to decide to do it.
How it evolves? That's up to everyone who can code, and that's a lot of people now thanks to the AI tools.
Eponyday
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To whom else has God sold naming rights for days of the week? And you thought Tuesday was a grace of our turning Earth. Since I had a molar extracted last week, there remains an open wound in my mouth where the tooth used to […]
Collapsology And Radiohead
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Writing of lasting value
Zelensky
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Yesterday, President Donald Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky whether he would ever go to Moscow.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Claude teaches you how to manage. You've got a perfectly pliable team member, always does their best to do what you told them to do. Now how do you design co-development projects where two very different individuals do their work and it adds up to at least twice what either of them could do alone.
Maine's Convention Will Be July 25th, Encouraging New Gallup Data, Democrats Must Elevate To Fight Trump's Escalating Authoritarianism
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The Senate is considering the nominations of Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton this week - Democrats must do everything we can to block them.....
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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The instance I started is for my friends, people I work with, it's not something people can test. It will be possible to start your own server, quite soon. And then you can do whatever you want. It's MIT licensed. Kick ass and have fun, but remember don't fuck with the interop. It's there so users have choice.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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BTW, I notice almost everyone but me writes RSS.chat. Hmmm.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Yesterday was a wonderful first day for RSS.chat. It's now out there, but we haven't talked about or demo'd many of the things that it does. I wanted to get the feeds out there first, because now we get to think together about how they fit together to give us a social network experience. It's not locked in a silo, these are just like feeds you have known about for over two decades. But it is a new application for those feeds. And this is a bootstrap. You start with something small that you're sure is a beginning for what you want to do. And then you and others use it for a while. And it is open source, MIT licensed, but compatibility will make the difference.
Peter Easthope commented on issue #162 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
Google gives this.
This error happens because your OCaml system or program is trying to dynamically resolve the POSIX time symbols clock_gettime and clock_getres using dlsym, but they are missing from the library loaded into memory.
Relevant here?
Thanks, ... P.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Jeremy Herve who I know from projects at Automattic, has questions about rss.chat, and I have some answers, with more coming soon.
Trump Robs His Own Party of Major Legislative Celebration
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Trump’s “protest” of his own housing bill deals another blow to Republicans with midterms fast approaching.
DOJ Subpoenas New York Times Journalists After Report On Trump’s New Air Force One
The New York Times said that a group of its journalists received subpoenas from the Justice Department after their report on the lack of certain security features on Donald Trump’s new Air Force One. The Times said that those who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, who reported […]
On interactive Go tours
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Wrapping up the series.
Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets
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How "termites" are undermining financial stability
Lit Hub Weekly: July 6 – 10, 2026
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Lisa Owens explores the “taboo” ways women writers arrange the balance between creativity with family. | Lit Hub Craft How Jane Austen subverted the kind of romance she mastered by writing Emma. | Lit Hub Biography How Joyce Carol Oates,
Today's links Workplace "flexibility" isn't: What the gig economy calls flexibility is just risk-shifting. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Alanya to Alanya"; ToS are the internet's biggest lie; Soviet jokes; Fox rapists v gag orders; GBAO is the future; "Fun Family"; Sacklers get to keep the loot. Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Workplace "flexibility" isn't (permalink) Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app. The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture. Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin. But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations. In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around": https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/ This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor. On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers. Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok. In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum). This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck. This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly. For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to. But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid. Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings. This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car): https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride. Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same ride, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy: https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx (And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!) Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions). As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home. Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words. Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections." Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy": https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/ The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide": https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/ But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors. The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted. What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant: https://vimeo.com/1203473793 This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime. This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS): https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723 The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers. Hey look at this (permalink) Farmers Finally Get a John Deere Right to Repair Agreement That Doesn’t Screw Them Over https://www.404media.co/farmers-finally-get-a-john-deere-right-to-repair-agreement-that-doesnt-screw-them-over/ Stuff of Legends https://store.warlordgames.com/products/stuff-of-legends Revenue is just an agreement between friends https://www.larp.website/ Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/googles-new-remote-attestation-scheme-every-bit-terrible-its-old-remote Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/ #20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412 #10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/ #10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/ #10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141 #10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/ #5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: Idler Festival, Jul 11 https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah) https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism) https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ Lawfare Daily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g How to Think About AI (Organized Money) https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow Breaking Points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE 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: "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
Making the Bees Walk in Line [en]
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[en] Unverified AI transcript (22.07.2026): Lausanne, 11th July 2026 It’s too hot. Is this the second or the third heat wave? I’m losing count. I think it’s the third, because we’re already hearing about the fourth, right on the heels of the third. So it’s the third, but it’s also just a blur of trying … Continue reading "Making the Bees Walk in Line [en]"
Trump's Downward Escalator | The Coffee Klatch for Saturday, July 11, 2026
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With Heather Lofthouse and yours truly, Robert Reich
July 10, 2026
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Presumably afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J.
Don Iwerks Dead: Former Disney Exec & Cinematic Innovator Was 96
Don Iwerks, the former Disney executive who innovated several cinematic advancements during his career, has died. He was 96. The Iwerks Entertainment co-founder died peacefully on Thursday at Ojai Community Memorial Care Center, “surrounded by the love of family and friends,” according to an obituary shared by his family. “Those who knew Don remember not […]
Oregon AG Drops Demand For Records & Motion To Delay Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Merger
UPDATED, with comment from AG: Oregon’s attorney general has dropped a civil investigative demand for Paramount to turn over records related to its efforts to secure federal approval for its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield also had asked a state circuit court judge to order Paramount to turn over the […]
Christopher Nolan Praises Gen Z Filmmakers For “Utterly Rejecting” AI Slop: “It’s Hitting At Exactly The Wrong Time”
As Christopher Nolan prepares to take viewers on an Imax odyssey, he’s hopeful for the future of filmmaking without the use of AI. The 2x Oscar winner admitted that not all applications of artificial intelligence are “useless of meaningless,” he explained that generative AI is “hitting at exactly the wrong time” for Hollywood. “I’ve never […]
Peter Van Norden Dies: ‘Police Academy 2’ & ‘The Naked Gun 2½’ Actor Was 75
Peter Van Norden, the actor who appeared in Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, has died. He was 75. The actor’s wife Wendy was by his side as he died peacefully Thursday morning in a Southern California hospice facility, where he was struggling with multiple health […]
rss.chat makes its premiere
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The rss.chat service was publicly introduced today. At this time, it appears to be restricted. Hopefully, the full service will be available soon for everyone.
Zucked Up! Meta Disables AI Image Generator After CAA & SAG-AFTRA Trashed It: “Missed The Mark”
Just days after Meta introduced its Muse Image AI generator, the Mark Zuckerberg-run company has done a complete U-turn. Under pressure from a now-victory-lap-taking CAA and SAG-AFTRA, the tech behemoth announced Friday that the feature is “no longer available” on Instagram, admitting they “missed the mark” amid privacy concerns over the automatic opt-in for users. […]
Scripps’ 54 Local Stations Return To DirecTV After Five-Week Blackout Over Retransmission Dispute
UPDATED, 6:05 PM: Scripps Local Media’s 54 broadcast stations have returned to DirecTV after a six-month blackout over a carriage dispute. The companies said Friday that they have agreed on a multiyear deal. The blackout affected such major markets as including Baltimore, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt […]
Randolph Mantooth Dies: ‘Emergency!’ Star Who Appeared On Soap Operas & Other Series Was 80
Randolph Mantooth, who starred as a Los Angeles paramedic on the NBC series Emergency! along with turns on soap operas including As the World Turns, One Life to Live and The City, has died. He was 80. His family told our sister site The Hollywood Reporter that Mantooth died July 9 in hospice in Ventura, […]
Meta Removes Muse Image AI Feature After Backlash: “Missed The Mark”
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Days after rolling out its Muse Image AI feature on social media, Meta has heard the overwhelming backlash from users. On Friday, the tech behemoth announced that the feature is “no longer available” on Instagram, admitting they “missed the mark” amid privacy concerns and the automatic opt-in for users. “Earlier this week, we announced that […]
‘Moana’ Lost At Sea With $40M-$45M U.S. Opening – Box Office Update
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FRIDAY PM: In regards to how far Disney’s live-action take on Moana will go this weekend, this answer is not far, with afternoon estimates showing a previews/first Friday around $17 million at 3,875 theaters for a 3-day between $40M-$45M — well below the $60M-plus that was hoped for on the horizon. That puts the island […]
Gemma Chan Shares Update On Anna May Wong Biopic: “It’s A Really Resonant Story”
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As Gemma Chan prepares to channel Hollywood’s first Chinese-American movie star for a biopic, she’s looking forward to bringing Anna May Wong’s life and legacy to the big screen. The actress recently shared news on her upcoming biopic, which she said is “still in development” with producer Nina Yang Bongiovi and Working Title Films, for […]
Chris Kattan Returns To Horror With Feature ‘Trash Queen’
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EXCLUSIVE: Chris Kattan has boarded the indie horror feature Trash Queen, marking his return to the genre for the first time since starring in the 1999 cult pic House on Haunted Hill. Kattan joins a cast that includes Matty Cardarople (Stranger Things, Fallout), Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, Shivers), Jonathan Stoddard (The Roaring Games), Kevin Keppy […]
Platner Officially Withdraws From The Maine Senate Race. The Process To Pick A Successor Has Formally Begun
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Let's keep rallying for the Maine Democrats today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Friday Squid Blogging: “Squidbleed” Vulnerability
In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
For the past day or so, I have had my head down, tearing my hair out, trying to debug a significant block caused by many engineers’ arch nemesis: a flaky test.
In my case, it’s actually been several flaky tests.
A flaky test is any test for your code that only sometimes fails.
It shows up when a part of your test relies on something non-deterministic.
Non-deterministic components can include:
Fetching resources over a network connection.
Reading from a random number generator.
Using a non-deterministic asynchronous scheduler.
Animations (often use the GPU).
…and many more.
If your application includes code that looks anything like these, you are at risk for flaky tests.
My use-case happened to be especially vulnerable to these, since our integration tests run against a wide variety of text editors.See my original blog post for more details.
Flaky Tests SUCK
It’s hard to express how frustrating a flaky test can be if you have not experienced a bad one yourself.
In short, they slow development time, cause unintentionally brittle software, and they can create a lot of frustration for users, since the issues they allow into production are inconsistent.
They make all the effort put into producing tests, wasted.
Tests are designed to catch bugs before they get into production.
If a test expects certain behavior out of non-deterministic systems, these tests can pass locally and in continuous integration, but fail on a user’s device.
This is a problem primarily for users, but also for developers.
It’s good if a flaky test fails in CI.
After all, that is how you know it exists.
But it is very bad if a flaky test fails in CI and the original author of the test is no longer around.
In that case, it becomes difficult to determine which non-deterministic system is causing the failure, and thus how to fix the underlying bug represented by the flakiness.
Prevention
The best way to get around flaky tests is to make it as difficult as possible to create them in the first place.
When I first started using Playwright about a year ago, I didn’t think too much about its configuration.
Boy was that a mistake.
I really like Omakase software, and I had (mistakely) assumed that Playwright was an example of it.
Thus, I assumed a default configuration for my project and let it be.
While Playwright is a phenomenal tool, I ended up being wrong.
The defaults I received from my project template were not optimal, and they would subtly waste a lot of my time over the next year.
You see, there is configuration for Playwright that can prevent most flaky tests from entering your code, and they aren’t set up by default.
To avoid most issues, change these two settings:
export default defineConfig({
retries: 0, // Was 4 by default.
repeatEach: 2, // Was 0 by default.
});
In my project, I added a small nudge to discourage people from removing these:
export default defineConfig({
/** Extremely important to avoid flaky tests. DO NOT CHANGE or I will kill you. */
retries: 0,
/** Extremely important to avoid flaky tests. DO NOT CHANGE or I will kill you. */
repeatEach: 2,
});
I jest, of course.
What do they do?
They are pretty self-explanatory.retries: 0 will configure Playwright to never retry a test if it fails.
If it fails, it is reported as a failure and your continuous integration will stop, forcing a human to deal with it.repeatEach: 2 will run each test twice. A potential flaky test might pass on the first round, but is much less likely to pass twice.
Some flaky tests may still sneak through.
You may want to configure it more aggressively in some stages of your CI/CD pipeline.
I have noticed that AI agents are especially prone to producing flaky tests, since they will often simply run a test again and again until it passes.
Debugging
As for debugging, I can provide no better advice than I typically do:
Use a debugger.
Use git bisect if necessary (or have an agent do it).
Work slowly and methodically. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Tedesco 2025 = Paolo Tedesco, Living at the Margins: African Peasants in an Age of Extremes 300 - 900 CE (Hiersemann, 2025).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Knell 2010 = Heiner Knell, Kaiser Trajan als Bauherr : Macht und Herrschaftsarchitektur (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010).
Introduction AI dominates the news both good and bad. The only reason the US economy hasn’t completely collapsed under Trump is due to the ongoing AI investment frenzy. There is a huge building boom of data centers to train and run AI models. There is a huge frenzy of investment capital funnelling into AI related […]
Weekly Links, 07/10/2026
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Wow! Unexpected results from Anthropic’s experiments in exposing the inner thoughts of Claude. They call its unconscious a J-space. The short video they made is good place to start. A global workspace in language models
Trump's tantrum, Platner's implosion, and McConnell's non-legacy
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Paul and I discuss the week's big political stories.
Graham Platner ends campaign. Trump says Iran ceasefire is 'over.' ICE kills Mexican national in Houston.
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Race to Replace Graham Platner on Maine Ballot Begins
Trump’s Criminal Defense Attorney Eyes a Big Promotion
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Todd Blanche has always worked for Trump. Next week he asks the Senate to make it official.
The Descent — What Happened to the Frontend While You Weren’t Watching
A history of front-end development that culminates here:
The frontier of 2026, the stuff the sharpest people are most excited about, is render the HTML on the server, ship almost no JavaScript, and use the web platform instead of fighting it.
A new Mary Oliver documentary captures the poet’s wild and precious life.
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At the time of her death in 2019, the late Mary Oliver was one of the most successful American poets to ever publish. She wrote dozens of collections, and several highly quotable bangers that a reader would be as likely
Être patient, un job à mi-temps [en]
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[en] Ma vie commence à ressembler à un sketch médico-dystopique. Deux angles pour raconter: Vis ma vie de patiente, quelques éclairages. J’ai eu un accident. Ça implique des assurances. C’est bien qu’il y ait des assurances: ça veut dire que je ne perds pas mon job, ça veut dire que je continue à recevoir un … Continue reading "Être patient, un job à mi-temps [en]"
The answer is yes, of course, and -- here's rss.chat!
The site is read-only except for a few of my programming buddies who are helping me figure out how to work in this environment.
I started this project in April, a Dave/Claude creation. I could not have done something so complex internally, yet so simple to use and build on without Claude Code. The APIs on this thing are a product in their own right.
We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only one was developed by a standards body.
We support textcasting, or text as defined by the web. Bringing the philosophy of podcasting to text. It's important that we get together on what text is.
The "whole community" feed has been in my blogroll for a month.
We support rssCloud for instant updates. We were going to support WebSub until it became clear that we had to put an ad for Atom at the top of our RSS 2.0 feed. That bit of larceny has to be undone imho. I want to support a standard that other developers support, but to force something like that is incredibly anti-interop and as I said I believe the web and interop are the same thing.
I envision a world of small communities, running on small servers. We haven't released the code for this yet, but will, under an MIT license.
I don't care if rss.chat is a coral reef, what I want is a network of services that interop perfectly. I don't care whether you share your code or don't. Things are changing very quickly now, Claude and I wrote this together, but I am also teaching Claude how to clone this. So it'll be possible for a user, in vibe-coding mode, to change anything about the user interface, but you have to stick with the back-end formats and protocols to be part of the club.
RSS devs
If you're a developer, this is where you go next.
The source namespace docs, to read about a couple of new elements, source:inReplyTo and source:comments.
We're just getting started. This is Day 0 in a story that could last a while and spread out pretty far.
Working with Claude we have a plan for docs for all the APIs and protocols. There are quite a few of those.
And we're going beyond Open Source, if you can believe that. AI has opened some new doors, I can't wait to build on those.
And as with blogging and podcasting, started 20+ years ago, we're going to follow what people do with this. RSS will fade into the background and do its work quietly. Its job is to give users choice.
Remember, every part is replaceable. If one is not, it's not part of the web..
Dirección: Thomas Kail. Guion: Jared Bush y Dana Ledoux Miller, basada en la película animada de 2016 escrita por Bush, Ron Clements y John Musker. Elenco: Catherine Laga’aia, Dwayne Johnson, Rena Owen, John Tui, Frankie Adams. País: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27419466/ Todo lo viejo se vuelve nuevo otra vez, y el […]
John Gruber, earlier this week: When ChatGPT is attached to an open document in another app, it’s not a snapshot at the moment of attachment, like what you’d get by copying and pasting the whole thing into the chat, or by dragging the current version of the file into the chat. It’s a live ongoing […]
Sunsetting ChatGPT Atlas
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James Sun (via Tim Hardwick): Lastly, with all these updates, we are going to be sunsetting Atlas. All these capabilities were built on what we learned from Atlas users who took a leap of faith on a new browser. You taught us how agents can help make browsing and doing work on the open web […]
Liars And Life
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Writing of lasting value
Astro is fine I guess
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When I’m not fighting WordPress I deliver static HTML or the occasional JavaScript framework integration. For personal projects I have ‘fun’ with my own static site generator. This week was a side quest (soon to be main quest) to build my new company website. […]
Cook Has 4 GOP Gov Seats As Toss Ups Now, Maine Dems Take Next Steps In Picking New Senate Candidate, Senate Dem SuperPAC Reports Record Quarter
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Let's keep rallying for the Maine Dems everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-10:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
1 new and 61 updated places. 3 new and 24 updated linked data sidebars.
Lauren Brown gets goosebumps. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. When her partner, writer Carmen Maria Machado, noticed it...she couldn't stop thinking about it. Why does she get them in so many different situations? What’s happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it. We face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.
Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Rupik
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by Maria Paz Gutierrez
Produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan
Fact-checking by Angely Mercado
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Website -
Institute for Advanced Consciousne http://www.advancedconsciousness.orgss Studies (advancedconsciousness.org) - If you want to check out more of the work Felix and Nicco are conducting.
Software -
Rewire website (https://rewire.bio) - Check out Felix and Nicco's Holy Shiver generator and signup for early access to their app.
Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show.Signup(https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!
Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
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The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming.
It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight.
If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of.
When you plug a computer into a network, tools like Wireshark can show all the hidden traffic you might not even know is there. WiFi packets are the same, but those travel through the air, allowing snooping without physical access.
Notable links: July 10, 2026
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In the face of declining trust in media, communities are part of the solution.
Communities will build trust and loyalty for local public media. Chicago Public Media is taking a big leap forward.
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Chicago Public Media is launching a region-wide social platform as a way to bolster its journalism. I believe it represents a path to the future.
Music Industry Introduces Labels For Works That Use AI In Sound Recordings
A coalition of music industry and artists’ organizations introduced labels for works that use AI in sound recordings. The labels are simple icons that distinguish between those that are “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted,” but they are designed to be adopted by digital music services, distributors and others. The track lebeling is voluntary. Among the groups backing […]
Flyagain Day
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I leave shortly for fun family matters in Minneapolis. Meanwhiles, here are some worthy tabs to close: While finding this kindness by Kaliya Young (quoting a now-vanished utterance by the late and very great Craig Burton) published in 2005 on her IdentityWoman blog, I also dug her latest post there, which is about commons and […]
What We Owe Each Other, in Millimetres and Volts
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You arrive in a city you have never visited before. You are tired. You find your room, open your suitcase, pull out a charger, and plug it into the wall. The small green light comes on. You think nothing of it, because nothing happened. You moved between two countries, two
Go-flavored concurrency in C
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Worker pools, channels, and mutexes - backed by pthreads.
International Insider: Sky Buys ITV; Banijay-All3 Complete Merger; Emmy Noms
Hello again, Insider Squad. Jesse Whittock here to update you on the top headlines from the world of TV and film this week, as Europe went M&A crazy. Here’s what happened… but before that sign up to the newsletter for the full Insider experience. First, Sky Buys ITV New Sky thinking: It was the week […]
Jodie Whittaker To Star In & Exec Produce Ella Grace Kennedy Short ‘The Country’
EXCLUSIVE: Jodie Whittaker will star in and exec produce The Country, a role-reversal short film from filmmaker Ella Grace Kennedy. The cast of the dystopian thriller short also features Eoin McCaul, Anna Popplewell (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Jake Kenny-Byrne (Miss Austen). The Country tackles bodily autonomy, oppression and control through the lens of an extremist religious commune, […]
AI Surveillance and Social Progress
In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities… and maybe also to the general public.
Think of these systems as automated speed cameras, but on steroids. Only they’ll enforce not just speed limits, but any other rule you can imagine. And you won’t receive a ticket weeks later by mail; you’ll be informed about and fined for your violation immediately...
Weekly Roundup: July 10
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Fifteen of our favorite films on law and political economy, Jeff Gordon proposes an anti-entrenchment industrial policy, M. Sandhu makes the case against legislative primacy, Aslı Bâli revisits The Constitutional Bind during the interregnum, and R.H. Lossin looks back at early-20th-century criminal syndicalism laws. Plus, a CFP for the Conference of Australian Progressive Legal Studies, a two-year post-doc on rethinking the anti-corruption toolkit, Diana Reddy on employment as a social institution, Luke Herrine on progressive financial empowerment programs, Lev Menand on the Court's Federal Reserve carveout, and Beau Baumann with even more LPE cinema.
An Encouraging Encounter With Real Americans
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What I did yesterday
Lit Hub Daily: July 10, 2026
Zach St. George explores the wild scams of Australia’s snake venom con men. | Lit Hub History How activists Kevin Tubbs and Jacob Ferguson brought environmental liberation of the fae variety to America. | Lit Hub Climate Change “During his years
A sentient collection of red flags
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Graham Platner's campaign should never have gotten this far.
Pluralistic: "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026)
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Today's links "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy: When we were robots in Egypt… Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Awkward questions for the entertainment industry; ISP v record label death penalty; Coming out on Splash Mountain; Negative Swiss bond yields; Are We Having Fun Yet? Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (permalink) While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours? https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck. Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic." The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you." There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave. Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration. AI, then, isn't just the fantasy of a world without people – it's the fantasy of a world without people…except for slaves. It's the fantasy of a world where the skilled workers who tell you your ideas are stupid are replaced with pliable chatbots who tell you they're brilliant, and then uncomplainingly do the job to your specifications. It's a world where the cab driver who has all kinds of shit going on in their life – health problems, family problems, (especially) money problems – is replaced by a "robo-taxi" that is being overseen and (often) driven by a remote worker you can't talk to or see, whose problems you therefore never need consider. The "AI safety" world is a key piece of the AI hype machine, pulling focus away from the idea that AI has shitty economics, produces substandard goods, and fails to do the jobs it takes from human workers, and shifting that focus to the idea that AI is so powerful that it constitutes an existential risk to the human race. The idea that teaching too many words to the word-guessing program risks creating a "superintelligence" that awakens and converts all into paperclips is absurd, a silly idea akin to the notion that if we breed horses to run ever faster, one of our mares will foal a locomotive. Nevertheless, the elevation of "AI takeoff" from a thought-experiment to an "existential risk" is a powerful marketing tool, because any technology that is indistinguishable from god is also going to be extremely valuable (at least, up to the moment that it turns us all into paperclips): https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds Once the superintelligence thought-experiment is upgraded to an X-risk, lots of other thought experiments are sucked along in its wake. That's where "rights for robots" comes in, the idea that we should spend time thinking about whether chatbots should have human rights. The best argument for this is that every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world, we end up treating each other better. Movements to extend moral consideration to animals raised uncomfortable questions about the treatment of humans: slaves, workers, poor people, women, children. The Rights for Nature movement, which seeks to extend legal and moral personhood to watersheds and forests, has been key to winning legal and moral victories to protect the environment, and thus the animals and people who depend on it. But while extending rights to natural things produces positive spillovers for human thriving and rights, the opposite happened when we extended personhood to artificial constructs. Corporate personhood has been a catastrophe for human thriving, conjuring into existence a new race of immortal, pluripotent colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations" that use us as disposable, inconvenient gut flora even as they consume our environment, our political system, and our lives: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge There's every reason to think that extending personhood to AI will produce the same outcome as "rights for corporations," which is the opposite of the outcome of "Rights for Nature." Rights for nature come at the expense of corporations. Rights for corporations come at the expense of nature. Humans are part of nature, so we benefit from the former, and suffer under the latter: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration But here's the kicker: as soon as you start arguing about whether chatbots have rights, you elevate them to personhood, which means that all those chatbots your boss just bought are people. And because they're the kind of people who don't warrant moral consideration (let alone a please or thank you), they are slaves (hence "rights for robots"). The AI sales pitch relies on convincing bosses that we've invented a new kind of slave – a worker who neither deserves nor demands rights or consideration. "Rights for robots" affirms that sales pitch. "Rights for robots" implies that robots are slaves. Wittingly or unwittingly, the transformation of "rights for robots" from a thought experiment to a campaign is a massive convincer for any AI salesman who's hunting for would-be slavers to sell chatbots to. Hey look at this (permalink) Apple held accountable under the DMA – A victory for developers and computer users! https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260708-01.en.html Over Leveraged https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/fcc-to-end-biden-era-rule-that-forces-isps-to-list-all-their-fees/ Connected and Captured https://democracyatwork.substack.com/p/connected-and-captured Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2040521099/locus-anthology-2025 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Advice for science fiction/fantasy cover artists https://igallo.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-response-to-old-question-what-do-i.html #20yrsago Embarrassing questions for the entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20060719200608/https://www.eff.org/IP/faq/ #20yrsago UK ISP to British recording industry: get lost https://craphound.com/tiscalibpiresponse.txt #20yrsago Felten’s paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20060719095720/https://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/neutrality.pdf #15yrsago 3D printed hair-clips inspired by Bruce Sterling’s “Kiosk” https://myriadwhimsies.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/jovanicas-hair-toys-3d-printed-hair-clips/ #10yrsago Teen comes out to her family on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/this-teen-came-out-to-her-family-in-the-most-awesomely-funny#.rlDowJe6 #10yrsago On the bewildering regional names for corner stores https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-do-you-call-the-corner-store #10yrsago Amazon is full of Chinese counterfeits and they’re driving out legit goods https://web.archive.org/web/20160708152442/http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazons-chinese-counterfeit-problem-is-getting-worse.html #10yrsago Negative Swiss 50-year bond yields just shattered the global insecurity barometer https://web.archive.org/web/20160708134915/http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/07/investors_are_paying_to_lend_switzerland_money_for_50_years_at_a_time.html #10yrsago How can the media regain its credibility in reporting on race in America? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/dallas-shooting-racism-and-the-us-media-micah-johnson #10yrsago Flawed police drug-test kits, railroading prosecutors and racism: the police-stop-to-prison pipeline https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives #10yrsago China bans mentions of newly discovered species of beetle from social media https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/11/a-new-species-of-beetle-named-after-president-xi-is-blacklisted-on-chinese-social-media/ #10yrsago Pokemon Go privacy rules are terrible (just like all your other apps) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-all-the-data-pokemon-go-is-collecting-from-your-phone #5yrsago Are we having fun yet? https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/11/are-we-having-fun-yet/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: Idler Festival, Jul 11 https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah) https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism) https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ Lawfare Daily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g How to Think About AI (Organized Money) https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow Breaking Points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE 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: "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
Is Neon Lining Up UK Distribution? — The Dish
EXCLUSIVE: U.S. distributor and international sales firm Neon is rumored to be lining up UK distribution. Multiple sources tell us the blue chip indie buyer, well known for having picked up the last six Cannes Palme d’Or winners and multiple Oscar winners, has been keen to grow its UK footprint and is now gearing up […]
The Au Pair
The next morning, Steven suffered through his undergrad fiction workshop with a hangover; three drinks had, sometime in the last few years, become a daylong punishment. The projection screen, synced to his laptop, displayed the first page of Flannery O’Connor’s
David Baerwald on Taking Writing Lessons from Hans Zimmer
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. A typical song begins with a brief introduction that establishes space, moves into a verse that advances the narrative, turns through a bridge or b-section that complicates matters, and arrives
Elves Against Capitalism: How the Earth Liberation Front Came to America
The fires began with a gentle Midwestern boy who loved animals. Kevin Tubbs grew up in a comfortable suburb outside Omaha, Nebraska, in a canary-yellow ranch house filled with dogs. Tubbs’s mother, a tender-hearted woman given to long spells of
From Stalin to Trump, How Power Unmakes the World
In her classic memoir of Soviet state terror in the 1930s, Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts the last years of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam as they flee from city to village to town, dependent on handouts
Battle of the Aussie Snake Men: Charles Underwood vs. Joseph Shires
Then he rushed to the museum, found a scientific man— “Trot me out a deadly serpent, just the deadliest you can; I intend to let him bite me, all the risk I will endure, Just to prove the sterling value
Restoring the Voice of Kathy Leissner Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper’s First Victim
If Americans think of the August 1, 1966, UT Austin shooting at all, they likely consider it dry, distant, and vaguely settled history that pales in the wake of recent atrocities. They may recall a wisp of gunsmoke atop the balustrade
What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It, Daniel Mason’s Country People, and David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction
“Boardinghouse With No Visible Address,” a Poem by Franz Wright
So, I thought, as the door was unlocked and the landlord disappeared (no, he actually disappeared) and I got to examine the room unobserved. There it stood in its gray corner— the narrow bed, the sheets the color of old
Anthony Hopkins Signs Record Deal & Sets Release Of Classical Music Album
Anthony Hopkins has signed a record deal with classical music label Decca Classics and will release a collection of recordings through the label next month. The project has been titled Life Is A Dream and will feature compositions written by Hopkins and performed by Gustavo Dudamel and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Decca said in a statement […]
‘Big Brother’ Pays Tribute To Mickey Lee During Season 28 Premiere
Big Brother paid tribute to alum Mickey Lee during the Season 28 premiere on CBS. Right before the new season of the reality TV competition started with the introduction of the new houseguests entering the game, a title card in honor of Lee appeared. “In loving memory,” read the card paying tribute to Lee, which […]
Who's Gonna Buy All the AI Stuff?
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As we lose jobs and the middle class contracts, where will consumer demand come from?
We the People
A company's Backbone skill, the single document every human and AI agent reads from, is really its constitution. And the most important thing a constitution contains is the rules for changing itself.
I vibe coded the app of my dreams
For a while I’ve been thinking about an app to keep track of my health properly, where I’m in control, fully local LLMs (with the option to use remote LLMs if desired).
I’m getting old and I’ve been going more and more to multiple doctors and clinics, and I wanted a place to centralize and visualize my health in an easy way.
It’s open source: https://github.com/memogarcia/my-health
It’s not medical advice. Any real decision belongs with a doctor.
Weeknotes: July 4-9, 2026
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Win of the week: dropped off like 8 boxes and bags of clothes, bedding, and textile recycling at Goodwill! 🙌 Looking forward to: booked myself a relaxation massage, still very tense — I’m starting to see how much of my routine had become oriented around the cat and his care over the past year, and how […]
July 9, 2026
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Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S.
SAG-AFTRA Recommends Members Opt-Out Of Meta’s AI Feature: “Take Action To Protect Your Likeness”
As Meta’s new AI image feature sparks privacy concerns, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) is providing tips on how members can protect their image. In a statement released Thursday by the union, SAG-AFTRA shared instructions on how to “dig into [Instagram’s] settings” to opt-out of Meta’s newly unleashed Muse Image tool, in order to “protect […]
‘Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma’ Director & Cast Set ‘Secretary’ Live Reading
Nearly 25 years, Secretary will get a one-night-only revival by the director and cast of another erotic title, thanks to Film Independent and Mubi. Jane Schoenbrun, writer/director of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, will direct the cast of their upcoming Mubi film in a live reading of the 2002 Steven Shainberg-helmed erotic romance, […]
Dan Trachtenberg’s Untitled ‘Freddy the 13th’ Animated Horror Comedy Gets Release Date
Paramount Animation has given Dan Trachtenberg’s untitled Freddy the 13th adaptation an appropriate release date. After announcing the untitled animated family horror comedy at Annecy International Animation Film Festival last month, Paramount has set the project based on Yehudi Mercado’s indie comic for a Friday, Oct. 13, 2028 release. Directed by Trachtenberg and co-directed by […]
Disabled Journalist Is A Favorite Of Messi, Many More World Cup Stars
Manu Gutiérrez has landed interviews with some of the biggest figures at this year’s World Cup including Lionel Messi (twice), Lionel Scaloni, Jude Bellingham, Cuti Romero, James Rodríguez and more. Pretty good for a fresh-faced independent journalist from Venezuela. But here’s the thing: Gutiérrez has landed those interviews amid the scrum of the “mixed zone,” […]
‘Big Brother’s Levi Banks Explains Dropping Out Before Season 28: “Not The Right Fit”
As a new group of strangers moved into the Big Brother house, one contestant decided to check out of the competition early. Levi Banks, who dropped out of Season 28 just before filming began, explained that the CBS reality series was “not the right fit” for him, but he is “so freaking excited” to watch […]
Politics Chat, July 9, 2026
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In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....
Jennifer Garner On Why It’s “So Important” To Film In LA “As Much As Possible”
Although Jennifer Garner takes audiences on a trip in The Five-Star Weekend, she prefers staying in Los Angeles for work. The Golden Globe winner recently discussed why it’s been “so important” to her that she works in Hollywood “as much as possible,” while state legislators push to uncap California’s film and TV tax incentives program. […]
The lt Package: Lightweight HTML Tables for R (and Beyond)
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Recently I have released a new package on CRAN: lt, short for lightweight tables (or less than). Its origin story is a small moment of shock. About two years ago a project required gt, so I ran install.packages('gt') in a fresh R session on Linux — and then watched R install one package after another after another, as if it were going to install half of CRAN. Some of them had to be compiled, and a few took ages; V8 in particular was painful. For a while I wondered whether I had mistyped something, because surely a table package could not need this much. That was when I learned just how deep gt’s (recursive) dependency tree goes.
I have, to this day, never actually used gt to make a table — but that install left an impression, and lt is what eventually grew out of it. I’d like to thank my manager Keaven at Merck for his support on developing this package to make packages like gsDesign2 and gsDesign more lightweight and faster.
This post is a quick introduction to lt; you can learn more details and examples on the package site at https://pkg.yihui.org/lt/. BTW, to save a few kilobytes for the planet, I don’t have a hex sticker for this package.
Why bother?
Obviously, I borrowed the lovely idea of the grammar of tables from gt: you take a plain data frame and layer on titles, column spanners, row groups, footnotes, and number formatters. That grammar is a good one, and lt owes it the inspiration.
What I did not want was the machinery that came with it — sass, V8, htmlwidgets, and their dependencies. For a package whose job is to draw a table, that is a lot to haul around. So I asked the question I keep asking: how small can this be if I only care about HTML?
The answer turned out to be quite small. On the R side, lt leans on nothing but base R and xfun. In the browser, the entire runtime is a single vanilla-JS file, lt.js (about 10 KB minified). No LaTeX, no RTF, no build step, no framework. Just HTML.
Which brings me to my usual sermon
Regular readers know where I stand: in HTML I trust. I said it in 2018 and I keep saying it — most recently while adding Typst support to knitr, where I announced that I had quit LaTeX. (And don’t get me started on MS Office, which I quit using many years ago.) HTML is where I want my tables to live. It reflows, it styles with a line of CSS, and it opens on any phone. And when you need a PDF, the tool is a browser — which almost every machine already has. Once you commit to HTML, an enormous amount of complexity simply evaporates. lt is what falls out when you make that commitment for tables.
The trick: a JSON spec, not R code
Here is the part I am most pleased with. lt does not draw the table in R at all. On the R side you merely declare what you want; under the hood, that declaration is serialized to a compact JSON object and handed to the browser, where the tiny lt.js runtime builds the real <table> on page load. One inclusion of lt.js renders any number of tables on a page.
The R interface will look familiar — pipe lt_*() functions onto an lt() object:
But here is why the JSON layer matters far more than it might first appear. R is just one way to produce that spec. The rendering — all the actual table logic — lives in lt.js, which knows nothing about R. So any language that can emit a little JSON can drive it. Load lt.js on a page and call LT.build() with the spec yourself, and you get exactly the same table:
I think this is a meaningfully different bet from how gt evolved. gt is an R package, and when the Python world wanted the same grammar, Great Tables was essentially rebuilt from scratch in Python — a big, careful effort, but a second implementation of the same logic. With lt, the logic lives in the JavaScript runtime, once. An R package is a thin front end that writes JSON. A Python package could be another thin front end writing the same JSON — no re-implementation of the table engine, just a different keyboard for the same piano. That door is wide open, and I would be delighted if someone walked through it. I don’t have much interest in writing this Python package by myself, although I guess this should be a simple task for AI.
My favorite part: access to truth at any time
Because the browser holds the original data and does the rendering, the table is not a dead picture — it can be interactive. The little feature I love most: when a value in a cell is formatted, the raw value is not thrown away. Hover over a cell and a tooltip shows what it really was (so we no longer have to argue about the most appropriate number of decimal places for the table — you can always see the original value). You can Alt + Click a table to reveal all raw values at once, and Alt + Double-Click to toggle raw values for every table on the page. A formatted table you can peek underneath, with no extra setup, is exactly the kind of small delight that a static PDF or image can never give you — and it comes for free from committing to HTML.
I’ve had this idea since 2024, and I’m happy that I’ve finally implemented it (technically, it’s not hard at all).
The grammar in brief
If you have used gt, the vocabulary will feel familiar:
Because the table is drawn by JavaScript, viewing it normally wants a browser. When you need a self-contained artifact instead, lt_export() saves a table to:
.html — optionally baking a static <table> that needs no JavaScript
at all to view;
.pdf — a vector PDF;
.png — a raster image.
The PDF and PNG paths render through a headless browser (Chrome / Chromium / Edge) and crop tightly to the table.
Give it a spin
# CRAN
install.packages("lt")
# development version
install.packages("lt", repos = "https://yihui.r-universe.dev")
There is also an online playground if you would rather poke at it without installing anything, and a migration guide if you are coming from gt.
Of course, I don’t want to match gt feature for feature; I just want to cover the table structure most reports actually need — and to show, one more time, that if you are willing to trust HTML, you can go a remarkably long way with remarkably little.
P.S. I’ll be on vacation for the next 5 weeks in China (to live an AI-less life). While I’d like to hear your feedback on lt (please feel free to leave comments below or file Github issues), I’m afraid I won’t be very responsive until late August. Also stay tuned for the lightweight and interactive version of the grammar of graphics later this year, which is a much more challenging project than this table package.
Ask a nerd: Can I use SVG images in emails?
Scalable Vector Graphics or Suspiciously Versatile Glyphs?
2026-07-13: I bootstrapped GDC with DMD
"Correcting" some GCC documentation
Context decay is quietly killing your features before they go live
Context decay is quietly killing your features before they go live
The operating system for enterprise AI
The operating system for enterprise AI
Politics Chat, July 9, 2026
, updated:
In which I try to answer your questions about modern politics....
Friday 10 July, 2026
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PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER! As the front page of British tabloids used to put it. Quote of the Day ”When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.” John Kenneth Galbraith Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Cavatina … Continue reading →
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Anthologia Latina (Shackleton Bailey; Teubner) = David R. Shackleton Bailey, ed., Anthologia Latina: Pars I: Carmina in codicibus scripta. Fasc.1.Libri Salmasiani aliorumque carmina (De Gruyter, 1982), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110966527.
Fri, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Members Most Fridays Get Together
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Lots to talk about this week!
“Help Me. They Shot Me!”
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Immigration enforcement was flying under the radar until Tuesday
It’s Far Worse For Russia Than Long Gas Lines
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Ukraine’s latest campaign against Russian oil facilities has begun to affect the harvest. The Kremlin is short on fuel and even shorter on options.
UPDATE: New Report on Mitch McConnell's Health — with Mike Nellis and Brian Tyler Cohen
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A recording from Brian Tyler Cohen and Mike Nellis's live video
Doing some outliner testing
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I decided to try using the outliner code I posted yesterday using an Android tablet and Google Chrome. I was able to create several outlines, save them to the local filesystem, and then reload them – nice! I am still planning to make some updates to the outliner to make editing easier on a phone.
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #451
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For July 1-7, 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. This week we’re bringing you a quartet of very fun food-related humor pieces, so make sure your pantry and fridge are well stocked before reading the rest of the newsletter! You know what they say: Never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach or after reading a quartet of very fun food-related humor pieces.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Survival Tips for Anyone Currently Being Hunted by Joey ChestnutbyTyler Gooch(McSweeney’s) This feels like it was created in a lab specifically to appeal to us. As we’ve said time and time again, hot dogs are very very funny. We also love Tyler’s fantastic imagery and the incredibly heightened, absurd places he gets to by the end of this piece. We think our pal Brian would have really loved this one.
Classic Rock DJ Hastily Throws on ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ Before Unwrapping BurritobyBilly Patterson(The Hard Times) We really enjoy the way Billy opens up the world of this piece, letting us hear not only from the DJ, but also from a radio listener and “a sound engineer present at the 1968 recording of ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’” It’s some really great, very creative exploration of his premise.
Rice Krispies Treat Strawberry Ice Cream SandwichesbyErica Lies(McSweeney’s) Without giving too much away, we love the satisfying way that Erica wraps this saga up by the end. Luke also wants to particularly draw your attention to the following sentence and it’s terrific run of parenthetical asides (Luke loves parentheticals in humor pieces): “Over the last year, I’ve dissociated myself into purchasing ‘gourmet’ instant ramen (tasted prepackaged), a cheese platter containing six kinds of vegan manchego (delicious), and a giant lollipop with Hello Kitty’s face on it (remains uneaten).”
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An Old Favorite
This week's Old Favorite is aBrian AglerSelection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--fromNewsletter #84.
I'm the Person Ahead of You in Line to Order FoodbyJoanna Borns(Points in Case) We don't necessarily believe that all humor pieces are part of some shared, Marvel-esque universe, but we also think that this narrator--who evidently has never seen food before, and says things like, "Is your mouth the only location you're supposed to place the food?"--eventually moved to Chicago and became one of these people.
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
Luke and James are very excited to announce that they’re serving as judges for the 2027 Thurber Prize for American Humor! It’s an honor to be selected, and we’re very excited to dig into all the great books we’re reading for the prize.
★ John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope
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What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014.
PQC Encryptor Video Demonstration
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Purism installed and recorded the test-harness at two DOE/NNSA facilities traversing between Las Vegas Nevada and Albuquerque New Mexico. This is a first-known live installation of PQC Encryptors between two long-haul sites showcasing 10Gbps line-rate speeds with negligible latency and maximum throughput compared to cleartext.
Howard Oakley: Spotlight doesn’t currently appear able to search Time Machine backups reliably, at least not in Sequoia or Tahoe, although this may not be universal. […] If I now step back through my backups to reach one that I know contains that file, I can restore it. But if I type anything into the […]
Apple Still Designated a Gatekeeper
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Tim Hardwick: Apple’s challenge against the EU’s designation of its App Stores and iOS platform as “gatekeepers” was dismissed by Europe’s top court on Wednesday, reports Reuters. […] The company also disputed the classification of iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service, or NIICS, which would subject the app to EU telecoms rules. But the […]
Weathergraph 1.0.358
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Tomas Kafka: Pressure is now much easier to read. A new Pro trend strip under the chart shows whether pressure is holding steady, rising, or falling. Fast changes stand out with stronger marks and colour, so you can spot a front moving in sooner - useful for hiking, sailing, flying, fishing, or weather-sensitive heads and […]
An exciting future with the Librem 16
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With the recent launch of the Librem 16, I'm excited. Clearly I'm excited to share this product with you, but that's just the beginning. I'm excited for the future of technology.
Since Monday, the #PleiadesGazetteer editorial college has published 16 new and 92 updated place resources, reflecting the work of 16 individuals and external projects. The usual Monday blog post will summarize the full week's worth of such work, but meantime, here's a #SneakPeek at a new place resource provided by Jeffery Becker: fons Bandusiae. The Latin poet Horace addresses one of his odes to this "Spring of Bandusium". Its precise location remains a matter of discussion.
At what point do the creative limitations you create for yourself actually harm your ability to create? And what can ALF teach us about that?
La invitación: la rutina bajo la alfombra
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Dirección: Olivia Wilde. Guion: Cesc Gay, Will McCormack, Rashida Jones. Elenco:Penélope Cruz, Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton. Países: Estados Unidos. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14173636/ Hoy existe una desgastante costumbre en la vida adulta: camuflar el desgaste, en casi todos los ámbitos de nuestra vida, bajo la alfombra de la rutina. La cultura […]
As social networks fill up with AI slop, trusted relationships and communities will win.
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Long-form LinkedIn posts are 41% slop. Other social networks are not far behind.
Trump Is Failing, He Is Wildly Unpopular, The Polls Are Encouraging, And We Have Elections To Win All Across The Country
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We have one job now - the general election is here and we need remain focused on helping our battleground House and Senate candidates win
Can RSS be a social network?
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Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called textcasting. I felt it was so important it deserved its own domain.
Textcasting summarized the wrong turn we took when Twitter took over discourse, basically stripping all the features the web needed to be a great writing environment. Textcasting said this is what we have to have to get back on track.
Meanwhile all I wanted was a nice little social network to use with a few of my programming buddies.
To bootstrap a simple distributed network based only on web standards, with every part replaceable.
I thought you could do it with RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and Web Sockets.
It would work like podcasting, anyone can publish, anyone can read.
We can all have different spins on user experience, there should be lots of approaches, an infinite number of ways for people to connect, but we must all interop at a basic level, so users can use any software they want at either end to implement the network.
We'd think of text the same way you think of MP3. It just should work everywhere. No one would ever say that MP3s could only be 300 seconds long. Or you can't play music, or have more than one person. Laughable, right?
There's no mystery to this. The fact that our text can't go everywhere is because the big networks don't want to be compatible with each other. Bad for business.
The right way, the way the web would do social networking: Every part is replaceable. Interop everywhere.
There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.
That's my dream platform.
PS: Spoiler alert -- the answer to the title question is yes of course. 😄
Using Octonous as an AI Safety Engineer
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Discover how Octonous helps our team at Mozilla.ai cut through daily busywork, from automatically monitoring our libraries to staying on top of the latest developments in AI safety.
The Surprising Habits That Matter Most for Health
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Most health advice today arrives wrapped in urgency.
The Dollar And God
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Writing of lasting value
Caltech Weekly - July 9: Risky Decision-Making; Students Building Payloads for Space Station
Dean Mobbs and researchers from his lab have found an association between how people navigate different preferences and split the responsibility for shared outcomes when making risky choices, and their willingness to compromise.
For the 2025–26 EE 154 ab course, Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Lab, which the Institute manages for NASA, collaborated with the National Geographic Society's Explorers program through Caltech's Brinson Exploration Hub.
Messersmith joined Caltech as vice president for institute initiatives on July 1, bringing more than a decade in senior administrative leadership at Johns Hopkins University to advance cross-institutional initiatives, deepen collaboration, and pursue new opportunities for innovation in support of Caltech's mission.
Developed at Caltech, the new light-controlling chip uses one beam of light to redirect another beam almost instantaneously.
"The idea of using light to do computing is not entirely new. There are a couple of interesting papers from NASA about it in the 1970s, but the world moved toward digital computing instead. Now we're hitting a bottleneck with that approach. We've reached the end of Moore's Law, and doing things like matrix multiplication—the math behind AI training—is very energy intensive and slow. So we're seeing a renaissance in optical—or photonic—computing."
Tanmay Gupta (BS '24) on why computing with light could let satellites process data in orbit instead of beaming terabytes back to Earth. He is in the stealth phase of launching a space-photonics startup as part of Entrepreneurs First, an international AI and deep tech business incubator
Luke Lamitina joined the Caltech track team as a junior and quickly set the school record for javelin throw in his first year of competition. In his second season, Lamitina qualified for the NCAA Division III men's outdoor track and field championships and became an All-American athlete.
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.
From the erratic behaviour of the seagulls on my street, I was able to deduce that it was Flying Ant Day.
From the erratic behaviour of the seagulls on my street, I was able to deduce that it was Flying Ant Day.
Medea by Rosie Hewlett
In preparation for my jaunt to a Greek island, I figured it would be good to have some Greek-adjacent reading material with me to peruse on the beach. So I scoured the shelves of my local library to find a modern retelling of a Greek myth that I hadn’t already read. That’s where I found Medea by Rosie Hewlett.
The book attempts to rehabilitate—or at least give context to—one of the women of Greek legends who has been cast as a villain. See also Clytemnestra, Elektra, and more.
On the face of it, the book succeeds. We get to see how Medea’s actions were driven by her circumstances. But while it’s entirely believable that that Medea was manipulated by a conniving Jason, this framing takes away her agency somewhat.
The writing is perfectly fine if a little bodice-rippy at times. It was a perfectly good beach read.
IndieWeb Fiction Carnival: May 2026 Roundup
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Three short fiction pieces
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Export Updates 2026-07-09:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
29 updated places. 3 new and 54 updated linked data sidebars.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Girella 2019 = Luca Girella and Peter Pavúk, The Nature of Minoan and Mycenaean Involvement in the Northeastern Aegean (2019), 15–42.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Camps 1993 = G. Camps, “A la recherche du Misicini,” in Mélanges offerts à I. et L. Galand (Paris, 1993).
Publish initial A2DB prototype: page-based KV storage with B+Tree i...
Mohanad Yaqubi’s Feature Documentary ‘Revolutionaries Never Die’ Lands Sales Rep Ahead Of Locarno Debut
EXCLUSIVE: Vienna-based sales agency Square Eyes has acquired world sales rights to Revolutionaries Never Die, the latest feature from Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi, set to debut in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente competition at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The film’s synopsis reads: “In 2018, veteran Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab reached out to filmmaker and […]
Reda Elazouar Joins Alex Pettyfer & Clive Owen In Action-Thriller ‘Scorpion’ With Filming Underway In Europe
EXCLUSIVE: The Family Plan 2 and Sex Education star Reda Elazouar has been set to lead action-thriller Scorpion, alongside Alex Pettyfer and Clive Owen. Principal photography has begun in Cyprus on the movie, which is being directed by Richard Hughes (The Enforcer). Brit Elazouar has been cast in the lead role of Jason, a young […]
Amazon MGM Studios Readies Guy Ritchie & Rob Williams London Crime Drama ‘Capital’ With Vice Studios & Jack Tar Pictures Attached
EXCLUSIVE: Guy Ritchie’s back in business at Amazon. Fresh from developing Young Sherlock, he is now attached to London-set crime drama series Capital, we can reveal. Amazon MGM Studios’ UK division has put the series into development, with Ritchie the co-writer and co-creator alongside Rob Williams, who wrote BBC drama The Victim, created Netflix miniseries […]
‘MobLand’ Season 2 Teaser Trailer Sees Chaos Surround The Warring Harrigans; Global Launch Date Set
MobLand Season 2 will launch globally on Paramount+ on Friday, September 18 and you can see a teaser trailer for the Tom Hardy-starring crime drama above. We’ve also a batch of first-look images of Hardy as mob fixer Harry De Souza, Pierce Brosnan as Irish gang leader Conrad Harrigan and Helen Mirren as his wife, […]
345: First Scroll. Tuk-tuk. Labour standards. Whale nursery.
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We will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature.
Kaiser Permanente nurses say technology is making their jobs — and patient care — worse
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Call center nurses at the health giant said workplace surveillance tools and AI prioritize speed and cost savings over quality and safety.
Set up OpenClaw on your Raspberry Pi
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Turn Raspberry Pi into a powerful AI assistant that can do anything on your computer and keep it safely contained.
Canada’s 9 Light Entertainment Launches Sales & Distribution Arm With Comedic Thriller ‘Sound & Fury’
EXCLUSIVE: Canadian film and TV production outfit 9 Light Entertainment is launching a sales and distribution arm which will kick off its activities with upcoming comedic thriller Sound & Fury. Scheduled to go into production this fall, Sound & Fury is the directorial feature debut of SXSW short film regular Charles Wahl (The Mohel, Little […]
Remembering Tom Stoppard: A Night at the Theater
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In London today there will be a memorial celebration for Tom Stoppard. When Tom passed away last November, he was acclaimed and eulogized brilliantly all over the world. To read some of those encomiums you can head here. But in
Today is Tom Stoppard Day in the UK
Today in London a who’s who of the literary world will be observing what may be the inaugural memorial day for the late playwright Tom Stoppard. Celebrations center around the renaming of the Duke of York’s theatre in Stoppard’s honor
The Language of AI Could Change How Humans Speak
Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture.
There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we ...
‘The Lost Children Of Tuam’: First Footage Of Monica Dolan In Galway Opener About Shocking Burial Discovery
EXCLUSIVE: Here’s first footage of BAFTA-winning actress Monica Dolan (Mr Bates vs The Post Office) in drama The Lost Children Of Tuam, which will have its world premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh on Saturday July 11. Directed by Frank Berry (Michael Inside), and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (The Salt Path), the film is based […]
The Heat Is On
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And the cost of climate change is getting serious
Lit Hub Daily: July 9, 2026
Remembering the great Tom Stoppard (and a night at the theater) on the occasion of his London memorial day. | Lit Hub Why do we love it when a new bombshell enters the villa? Anna Peele explores the eternal pantomime of
Bendita Film Sales Boards Ann Oren’s Locarno Competition Title ‘Objet A’
EXCLUSIVE: Bendita Film Sales has acquired international rights to writer-director-artist Ann Oren’s second feature Objet a ahead of its world premiere in the Locarno Film Festival’s main International Competition in August. The new film follows Oren’s bold 2022 feature debut Piaffe, which also played in competition in Locarno and made waves for its portrait of a […]
Trump's red-baiting won't work
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He's campaigning on an even dumber version of McCarthyism.
Manchester’s Scene Festival To Feature Russell T. Davies, ‘Heartstopper’ Creator Alice Oseman & ‘Bitter Christmas’ Screening
EXCLUSIVE: The third Scene: Manchester festival will feature the likes of Russell T. Davies and Alice Oseman, along with a host of preview screenings. The LGBTQIA+ film and TV event will run in Manchester, UK, from August 20-27 and comprise screenings, panels, comedy, parties and premieres. We’ve got news of the full program. Tip Toe, […]
How I Use AI as a Policy Researcher: HTML Dives, Git Diffs, and Elaborate Rehearsals
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Learning git to escape the permanent underclass.
Bonnie Tyler Dies: “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” Singer Was 75
Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer of 1980s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” died in Portugal yesterday following an illness. She was 75. A statement posted to her website today read: “Bonnie’s family and team are heartbroken to announce that Bonnie unexpectedly passed away last night in hospital in Portugal as a result of the […]
Habits of the Sea
1952 Clay Lockhart’s cries echoed for half a mile up the rain-drowned coastline, carried on the late January storm that tore across the Outer Hebrides—an isolated, windswept stretch of archipelagos in western Scotland. The rain had come quick, driven by
How—and Why—to Cull Your Book Collection
“Books make me so mad.” That’s what my friend, who used to work part-time as a mover, told me when he learned that my husband and I found a new place to live and I had a lot of books
If Rachel Aviv Weren’t a Writer, She’d Be a Psychologist
Rachel Aviv’s new book, You Won’t Get Free of It, is available now from Alfred A. Knopf, so we asked her a few questions about writer’s block, writing routines, favorite books, and more. * What was the first book you
The Satire and Style of Vanity Fair is as Relevant as Ever
In the summer of 2024, burning with anger about my place in Hollywood, where I felt I was regarded as a diversity project and not a person with believable talent, I picked up Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our fivesome of fabulous reviews this week includes Scaachi Khol on Dave Portnoy’s Cancel Me If You Can, James Lasdun on Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love, Gabriel Winslow-Yost on George Saunders’s Vigil, Dan Piepenbring on David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light, and
The World’s Languages Are in the Middle of an Extinction-Level Event
Upstairs, a language is dying. Nonna is in bed—al lett—and we are in the living room, waiting for the swelling in her legs—i gamb’—to go down. Mum and I rushed here from the other side of London when Nonna called
How the Eternal Pantomime of Love Island Draws Us In
Although I’ve spent more than a thousand hours watching, publishing a book about, reporting on, discussing, and reading Reddit threads about Love Island, it is impossible to imagine myself in the position its cast members have put themselves in. To
Bob McCourt Exiting ‘Got Talent’ Maker Fremantle After 28 Years
EXCLUSIVE: Fremantle’s long-serving C-suiter Bob McCourt is leaving the Got Talent maker after nearly three decades. We’ve got word McCourt, who is Fremantle’s COO of Commercial and International, is stepping down at the end of July amid a restructure. There’s no word yet on whether he’ll be replaced. Jens Richter, Fremantle’s CEO of Commercial and […]
Locarno: Lakeside Fest Unveils 2026 Selection With Hong Sang-soo, Basil Da Cunha, Gurvinder Singh & Denis Côté Pictures In Competition
Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for its 79th edition with new films from Hong Sang-soo, Basil Da Cunha, Gurvinder Singh and Denis Côté in the main International Competition. The festival, running from August 5 to 15, will open with a Piazza Grande world premiere for Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s The Green Eyes. Following two […]
Seriously, Where Does Trump's Power Come From?
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Not from where you may think
Harry Lawtey, Arsema Thomas, Timothy Spall & More Join Damson Idris In Netflix Series ‘The Lords’ Day’
EXCLUSIVE: Damson Idris-starring Netflix series The Lords’ Day is building out its cast. Harry Lawtey (Industry, Joker: Folie à Deux), Arsema Thomas (Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, She Taught Love), Sophie Willan (Alma’s Not Normal, Small Prophets), Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones, Killing Eve) and Timothy Spall (The Sixth Commandment, Goodbye June) have joined the […]
Where Do Democrats Go After Graham Platner?
The Maine Senate race has been thrown into complete disarray after serious allegations of sexual assault emerged against Graham Platner. This week Alex speaks to Dan Kleban, U.S. Senate candidate and co-founder of the Maine Beer Company, about how Democratic voters in Maine are feeling in the wake of Platner’s campaign implosion, and why they don’t want Washington meddling in their elections. Then she’s joined by democratic strategist Adam Jentleson to talk about what comes next, how this scandal impacts Democrats’ chances to take over the Senate, and how to read into wins by both Democratic Socialist candidates and moderates.
Today's links Post-political: What a "leftist" is. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MSFT x OSCON; Parental spyware; "Resurrection Man"; Brexit do-over petition; Workplace email spying; Record label internet death penalty; News should be cheap, free and chaotic; "Jughead". Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Post-political (permalink) There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right." Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza. "Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ "Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics. Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all. I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!" Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets: https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me: "Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right. https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed." If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights: https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796 Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off: https://apnews.com/article/california-farmer-nectarines-lawsuit-patent-4f7bc8ab185e8b9cbdd6d6ad4f2aabd1 As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live"). Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end. In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic "Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work): https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807 Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species. If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering: https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land. "Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy. Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free. (Image: Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Hell Is Other People https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/ Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-people-lose-treasured-media-when-prisons-change-tablet-contracts/ Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive: an Introduction https://pressthink.org/2026/07/jay-rosens-internet-archive-an-introduction/ Zohran Mamdani on the Promise of America https://jacobin.com/2026/07/zohran-mamdani-independence-day-address The official website of Nand to Tetris courses https://www.nand2tetris.org/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Why Microsoft was invited to OSCON https://web.archive.org/web/20010701102931/http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconint_0601.html #25yrsago The Extent of Systematic Monitoring of Employee E-mail and Internet Use https://web.archive.org/web/20010711204804/http://www.privacyfoundation.org/workplace/technology/extent.asp #20yrsago BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/10/bpi-we-should-be-able-to-cut-off-your-internet/ #20yrsago Technology for parents to spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20060711084212/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/BIGMOTHER.TMP #20yrsago Dale Bailey's "The Resurrection Man" https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/09/southern-gothic-science-fiction-collection/ #10yrsago A law prof responds to students who anonymously complained about #blacklivesmatter tee https://backspace.com/notes/2016/07/law-professors-response-to-black-lives-matter-shirt-complaint.php #10yrsago UK government rejects Brexit do-over petition with 4.1m signatures https://web.archive.org/web/20160709101514/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-government-rejects-eu-referendum-petition-latest-a7128306.html #10yrsago New Zealanders raise millions to buy beach and donate it to the public https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36759321 #10yrsago Jughead: Zdarsky’s reboot is funny, fannish, and freaky https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/10/jughead-zdarskys-reboot-is-funny-fannish-and-freaky/ #5yrsago Biden's Right to Repair will include electronics, too https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: Idler Festival, Jul 11 https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification 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 South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism) https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ Lawfare Daily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g How to Think About AI (Organized Money) https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow Breaking Points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate) https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat 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: "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
345 (Audio): First Scroll. Tuk-tuk. Labour standards. Whale nursery.
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Ancient scrolls, a global first for gig workers, whales and rhinos back from the brink, and the mystery of a planet that no longer exists.
July 8, 2026
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After the U.S.
The AirPods Max 2 are better at noise cancellation than the previous version
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I've long been a big fan of over-the-ear, old-school big headphones for comfort and sound quality reasons. It's also because I generally don't like to stick things inside my ears. Apple's ear buds are mostly ok but I dislike
★ What’s Good for the iOS Goose Is Often Not Good for the MacOS Gander
App icons in MacOS are not mere buttons. You can drag them, move them, and drop things on them. You click them to select, and double-click to launch. They are richer objects that deserve a richer visual vocabulary.
Platner Suspends Campaign, Maine Democratic Party Announces A Nominating Convention To Pick A New Senate Nominee
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Yes I believe we can still win flip this seat this November!
The zero-cost fallacy: Open source software in the agentic era
The zero-cost fallacy: Open source software in the agentic era
Exploring web-based outliners
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Dave Winer created a single page HTML outliner in March 2026, but it did not directly support OPML subscription lists and OPML inclusion. I collaborated with Claude to make some updates, my version is available here (website is here, repo is here). Enjoy!
Trump's Iran Debacle Has Become a "Neverending War"
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Will he or the Republicans be held to account?
McConnell Bolts Upright in Terror as JD Vance Enters Hospital Room
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“Get that bastard away from me!” the Kentucky lawmaker shrieked.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Mansi, CC = Giovan Domenico Mansi et al., Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 59 vols. (Florence, 1759; repr., Akademische Druck- u. Verlangsanstalt, 1961).
Last Call - Tonight, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
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Welcome to our new subscribers, and yes do we have a lot to talk about tonight!!!!!
Join us live tonight
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Final watchalong of "The Last Class" film
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Papapostolou 2014 = I. A. Papapostolou, Το ιερό του Θέρμου στην Αιτωλία: ιστορία - μνημεία - περιήγηση του χώρου, Αρχαίοι τόποι και μουσεία της Ελλάδος 31 (Hē en Athēnais Archaiologikē Hetaireia, 2014).
This isn't about economics, it's about mental health
Disk Not Ejected Properly
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Mike Bombich: The USB device drivers report that they are destroying the “Rocket XTRM Q” device due to a “link change interrupt” APFS filesystem drivers report a “dangling mount”, failures to finish transactions before unmount, and dozens of “media is not present” errors.[…] storagekit collects a report of the “disappeared” devices and notices that one […]
Sunsetting Textual IRC Client
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Codeux Software: Textual is the world’s most popular application for interacting with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatrooms on macOS. […] Textual supports very powerful modern technologies such as the latest IRCv3 specifications, native IPv6, client-side certificate authentication, and much, much more in an easy to navigate, clutter free experience. Unfortunately (via Jan Lehnardt): Textual has […]
Apple Intelligence for Home’s iCloud+ Requirements
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macOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 3 Release Notes: Apple Intelligence for Home requires an iCloud+ subscription starting at 2TB. Via Rajesh Pandey: As part of the upgrade, the Home app uses AI to generate summaries of motion alerts from compatible HomeKit Secure Video cameras. […] Apple likely requires the 2TB iCloud+ tier because HomeKit Secure […]
Family Feud: Mac-assed Mac App Edition
“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”
Buzz!
“Apple!”
Survey says:
Yes! Apple at the number one spot.
Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people who make the Mac? No brainer, I suppose.
Granted, they’ve had some misses, but nobody bats 1000.
Ok, let’s keep going.
“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”
Buzz!
“Anthropic!”
Survey says:
Wow, that’s odd huh? You’d think Anthropic would be right there at number two. Not only do they have billions of dollars, but they also develop, maintain, and control the super intelligence we’ll all soon be subservient too, right?
Surely if anyone (besides Apple) is well positioned to make a world-class Mac app, it would have to be Anthropic — right?
Apparently it’s a mistake to assume that a big company with piles of cash is well poised to make a great Mac app — even if they are enabled by hyper-super-intelligence.
“Well who cares? It just goes to show you don’t have to make a good Mac app to be obscenely successful in terms of revenue!”
Well, maybe that’s true.
Actually, come to think of it, it kinda does seem like the bigger you get and the more money you make, the more likely it is you’re making an Electron app.
There seems to be a correlation between “Mac-assed Mac app-edness” and “Company size/revenue”.
Why is that?
I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader (though my mind is leaning towards something to do with care).
Thank you for playing reading this game of family feud.
Ukraine’s drones reached a place called Omsk this week.
Becoming a retirement foodie
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After starting my retirement, I recently noticed an article in one of my New York Times newsletters about Tina Fey, stating she only knows how to cook three things, and one of them was a soup recipe (Lemony White Bean Soup with Turkey and Greens) from the New York Times. I was intrigued, so I […]
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Dede 2026 = M. Gökçe Dede, “Old Seals New Stories: The Copper Age–Early Bronze Age Stone Stamp Seals and Sealing Practices from Ali̇şar Höyük,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 45, no. 3 (2026): 306–29, https://doi.org/10.1111/ojoa.70019.
Starting in 30 minutes! Join the #IIIF Community Call for a demo of Transkriptorium.
Zoom info: iiif.io/community
Select your starter class
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At the risk of pissing on people’s chips I figured it’d be helpful to illustrate the three classes of AI user I’ve identified in the slopageddon. You might be thinking: “Hey, those personas are all negative!” — and you’re absolutely right! Believe me, I’d love nothing more than to shut up about […]
Speak at UX London 2027
Exactly one year from now, UX London 2027 will be wrapping up.
Mark your calendar: July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 2027. If you really want to be ahead of the curve, you can grab a very limited super early-bird ticket now before the price goes up.
I’m about to start putting the 2027 line-up together. The real reason why I’m mentioning an event that’s still a year away is that I’d like you to consider speaking at it. Yes, you.
Here’s the form you can fill out with your proposal. It can be a 30 minute talk or a 2.5 hour workshop.
Remember that UX London is a three-day event with each day having a specific theme:
Tuesday, July 6 is discovery day with an emphasis on research and related topics.
Wednesday, July 7 is design day, all about the nitty gritty aspects of actually making something; interface design, information architecture, accessibility.
Thursday, July 8 is delivery day focusing on continuous improvement, whether that’s through design systems, cross-team collaboration, or any other strategies.
So if you’ve got a topic that you think is particularly relevant to one of those days, be sure to mention that in your proposal.
It should go without saying that if your proposal is accepted, you will be paid to speak. Alas, I have to say it because there are some events out there that don’t even manage to reach that very low bar.
I’ll be honest and say I’m not that interested in hearing from people like me, a middle-aged white dude. We have more than enough opportunities to spout our opinions. I’d much rather hear from people from different backgrounds with different experiences.
Have a look at the most recent line-up to get an idea of the kind of folks you’re likely to see on the UX London roster. Feel free to contact any of the previous speakers to ask them how they found the experience. You can also peruse some pictures to get an idea of the vibe.
Oh, and if you want to give an entire talk about “AI”, there are plenty of other conferences for that. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about large language models or other generative tools, just don’t make it the focus of the talk. UX London isn’t about specific tools. So you won’t see a talk about AI for the same reason you won’t see a talk about Figma. It’s what you accomplish with the tools that counts. Make that the focus of your proposal.
I’d love to hear from you so please, submit your proposal. Submissions close in December, but the sooner you submit your proposal, the better.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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More people are using the news site I put up for WordPress. If you have a blog or podcast that covers WordPress, send me a link to the feed and I'll add it. The OPML list of the sites we cover is public, so you can always load the feeds into your feed reader, they all read lists in this format. This is the kind of thing that works great on the web. People take interop for granted when it's always been there. But they're still there to be built on. And imho interop and the web imho are the same thing.
Create Clarity, Not Consensus
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Alignment matters more than agreement.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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I said to Claude: "We're the first social network that thinks getting his support is the first thing." Claude replied: "And that's the whole thesis in one move — every other network treats the open-web guy as an afterthought; here he's the launch audience."
On The Man Outside the Arena
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I founded Veterans For Responsible Leadership, and let me tell you something: Veterans for Responsible Leadership was never founded on the premise that perfect candidates exist, or that veterans of the forever wars are perfect human beings, unaffected by repeated combat deployments over years and decades.
Talk: Let’s fix the web’s text size - Josh Tumath
I saw Josh give this talk at CSS Day. It’s a very useful explanation of the forthcoming text-scale addition to the meta element, and what you can do to prepare your site now.
How to leverage an old dirty trick in your Bazel wrapper for great effect
The Special Value Pi 4 was extremely short-lived
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The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured above is probably the rarest Raspberry Pi I own—even rarer than my blue special edition Pi.
A Raspberry Pi reseller briefly listed a special 'value edition' Pi 4. But the product page 404's now. While it was up, my curiosity got the better of me, and now I have two 'value' Pi 4s.
What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s run at 1.8 GHz, and can usually be overclocked).
Startups track business metrics. Newsrooms should learn from them.
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I've rarely seen newsroom business teams discuss metrics like LTV, CAC, and even ARR outside fundraising or finance. They should be commonly known.
Gaeilge sa Ghréig
“Radharc álainn” I said. Beautiful view.
“Nach ea!” he replied. Isn’t it?
He sounded surprised to be addressed in Irish. We were, after all, very far from Erin’s shores. The beautiful view in question was of the bay of Loggos on the Greek island of Paxos. But I knew that this person was a fluent Irish speaker. That’s why I figured he wouldn’t mind a chat as Gaeilge while we were both strolling along.
I was talking with Liam Ó Maonlaí. We were both on Paxos for the same reason; the annual Irish Wings festival, a small gathering of Irish and Greek musicians. Liam was there to play. Myself and Jessica were there to listen.
Of course we were also there to soak up the sun, swim in the crystal clear water, eat Greek food, and savour the very relaxed pace of life.
We had a lovely chat with Liam and his partner Marion. I didn’t tell him that I went to see Hothouse Flowers on multiple occasions in Cork city in the 1980s. I’m sure he gets plenty of that. But I probably should’ve mentioned how much I really enjoy his programme Cuan an Cheoil. There’s nothing I like better on a Sunday afternoon than to relax with one of the black and white videos on YouTube, listening to music and conversation in Irish.
The island of Paxos is small and the village of Loggos is really small, so it wasn’t all that surprising that we’d bump into the Irish musicians there for the festival. We met Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh on the beach and again, she seemed really pleased that we spoke Irish with her. And it was also lovely to see our friend Dónal O’Connor who we’ll be seeing again very soon at his excellent Belfast Tradfest.
It was really nice to have the opportunity to speak Irish with three excellent musicians, all from different Irish-speaking regions; Liam from Dublin, Muireann from the Aran Islands and West Kerry, and Donal from the Oriel region of county Louth.
We also saw Neil Finn. I didn’t say anything to him. I don’t know if he speaks any Irish.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Bárta 2004 = M. Bárta et al., “Report on the Survey and Trial Excavations of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Carried in the Area of El-Hayez, Baharia Oasis (2nd Season, 6.3.-31.3. 2004),” Přehled Výzkumů 45 45 (2004).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Bárta 2002 = M. Bárta et al., “El-Hayez, Bahariya Oasis, Egypt. 1st Survey Report by the Czech Institute of Egyptology.,” Přehled Výzkumů 2002, no. 44 (2003): 11–16.
‘Elize: Shadows Of A Woman’ Trailer: Netflix Brazil Feature Based On Case Explored In ‘Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime’
EXCLUSIVE: The trailer for Elize: Shadows of a Woman has dropped, the Netflix Brazil original film based on the ripped-from-the-headlines case of Elize Matsunaga. Matsunaga murdered and dismembered her husband in the couple’s São Paulo apartment in 2012. The case generated huge media attention and shocked Brazil. We’re first with the trailer for Elize: Shadows […]
The World Cup Got Worse On Purpose
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A final seat cost £83 at the last Euros. FIFA is charging £3,119 for this one.
Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Jon Stewart & ‘SNL’ To Battle It Out For Bumper Late-Night Emmy, Or Emmys
A host of previous Emmy winners will duke it out for a supersized late-night Emmy (or Emmys). The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live will compete in the Outstanding Variety Series category this year, per Wednesday morning’s Emmy nominations reveal, […]
David Chase On Why It Took Him Almost Two Decades To Return To TV With CIA Series ‘Project: MKUltra’ & The “Mistake” He Made With ‘The Many Saints Of Newark’
David Chase is currently in development on Project: MKUltra, a limited series at HBO that will chart the story of a secret mind control program operated by the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. The show will be Chase’s first series since his groundbreaking hit The Sopranos. But why has it taken the New Jersey […]
STuCK IN A RuT
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THE NEW CABINET IN WAITING…..
‘Bake Off’ Back On The BBC? Bosses In Talks With “Subscale” Channel 4 To Host Its Content On iPlayer
Could The Great British Bake Off once again rise at the BBC? That’s a possibility after BBC director general Matt Brittin revealed that the UK broadcaster is in talks with Channel 4 to host its content on iPlayer. Giving evidence to UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Wednesday, Brittin said that the BBC […]
Less Input [en]
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[en] In the spirit of shortening things, I’m taking a few moments during my lunch break to share some thoughts I’ve been having recently. Various things have contributed to these thoughts: I’m not going to be able to reconstruct how my ideas around this have shifted in a chronological or well-organised way, but here’s more … Continue reading "Less Input [en]"
BBC A “Disinfectant” To Disinformation On YouTube & X/Twitter, Says New Boss
BBC director general Matt Brittin has said that the British broadcaster will double down on YouTube and X/Twitter to counter the tidal wave of disinformation online. Brittin may have spent the majority of his career at Google, but it did not stop him from acknowledging that YouTube is a breeding ground for deliberately deceptive information. […]
Cybersecurity and the Gap Between Skill and Ability
Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the breathless headlines about it, and the advice they gave is pretty much the standard advice everyone gives—albeit with newfound urgency.
Internet risks are nothing new, and cyberattacks—both large and small—have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models...
Property, Sabotage, and the Origins of Anti-Left Repression
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Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-one states passed criminal syndicalism laws. These laws, which were intended to help eliminate the Industrial Workers of the World, have largely faded from public memory. Looking back, however, we can see a formula for anti-left repression that has proven durable and widely appealing: the limitation of political speech and organizing in the name of property protection.
Paris Court Of Appeal Rules Bolloré Does Not Exercise Control Over Vivendi Removing Obligation For Multibillion Buyout… For Now
The Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Wednesday that French tycoon Vincent Bolloré and his Bolloré Group do not exercise control over media and entertainment group Vivendi. The ruling, which was confirmed by Vivendi in a statement, is significant because a decision in the opposite direction could have triggered an obligatory buyout of Vivendi by […]
Trump's 'great' fair limps to its conclusion
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But the grift goes on.
BBC To Review Foreign Acquisitions After Being Slammed For Outbidding Rivals For ‘Scooby-Doo’
The BBC’s new director general will review the UK broadcaster’s foreign content acquisitions strategy amid anger over the corporation outbidding commercial rivals for U.S. series. Matt Brittin said he wished to examine whether the BBC is getting the “balance right” with buying in content, opening up the possibility that the broadcaster could cut its acquisitions […]
Lit Hub Daily: July 8, 2026
How Jane Austen subverted the kind of romance she mastered by writing Emma. | Lit Hub Criticism Lisa Owens explores the “taboo” ways women writers arrange the balance between creativity with family. | Lit Hub Craft Why do our public
Pathetic in Ankara
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Who’s afraid of the big bad Trump?
What's The Deal With Delaware?
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RIP Corp is written and hosted by Ingrid Burrington. Produced by Meghal Janardan and Mike Rugnetta. Associate producer, Taylor Behnke. Original music and sound design from Andrew Atkin and Michael Simonelli. Fact-checking from Matt Giles. Logo design by Beatriz Lozano and illustrations by Megan Mulholland. Executive produced by Jason Oberholtzer.
Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Fatherland’ To Open Sarajevo Film Festival
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is set to open the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival and the Polish helmer is set to personally welcome audiences at the gala screening on August 14. The film, which rounds up Pawlikowski’s Cold War trilogy, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year where it won the Best Director award. Fatherland centers on the relationship between Nobel […]
All ‘Harry Potter’ & ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Films To Stream For Free On ITVX
ITV has magicked up a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to stream all 11 of the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films for free on its streaming service. ITVX is now home to the eight Harry Potter movies and the three films in the Fantastic Beasts franchise for an undisclosed period of time. ITVX has […]
‘Harry Potter’ Visualization Studio Proof Inc. Returns To Australia With Brisbane Studio
EXCLUSIVE: L.A-based Proof Inc. is returning to Australia with the opening of a studio in Brisbane. The company, which bills itself as “the world’s first studio dedicated exclusively to visualization and has credits for work on everything from Harry Potter to Michael, has launched Proof Australia, as it reestablishes a permanent base in the country. […]
How Jane Austen Blew a Hole Through the Romance Genre She Created
The most dramatic moment in Jane Austen’s Emma, and, arguably, in her whole body of work, has nothing to do with romance. After all, Emma Woodhouse’s reaction to George Knightley’s proposal is a bit of a place holder. The scene
“Hemlock, 1956,” a Poem by Victoria Chang
A wooden door in front of everything. A door on my country. A door in the lake. My poems prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a door on my heart in the poem, then there is. Now
Remaking My Life in 50 Swims
The sky was a hazy yellow gray, the AQI was a “very unhealthy” three hundred, and it was one hundred degrees as I loaded my car with an overnight bag and a hopeful last-minute tote holding a swimsuit, towel, and
Why Can’t the Public Sector Pick Up Our Trash?
One book on waste management that has stayed by my side for years is Giants of Garbage by Canadian journalist Harold Crooks. That book is my bible. The central question it asks is a vital one: Is it possible to
A Room of Her Own: What Women Writers Sacrifice to Pursue Their Passion
In the mid-2000s, the Guardian weekend magazine ran a regular feature called “Writers’ Rooms.” As a secretly aspiring writer (is there any other kind?) I couldn’t get enough, poring over the photographs of book-lined studies furnished with beautiful antique desks. These
Writing Underwater: What Diving Taught Me About Trauma and Creativity
Waking up to a home invasion has to be one of the scariest things—opening your eyes, and there’s someone there. A stranger in the doorway. A long-haired man in a backpack, standing over your bed with a machete. The front
Mubi Takes Worldwide To Eleanor Coppola’s Documentary ‘Making Marie Antoinette’
Mubi has acquired global rights to Making Marie Antoinette directed by the late Eleanor Coppola. Making Marie Antoinette is a behind the scenes look at Sofia Coppola’s Oscar winning 2006 film Marie Antoinette, and was shot by Eleanor Coppola. The documentary was produced by Lorenzo Mieli, Mario Gianani, Rachel Dengiz, Youree Henley, and Sofia Coppola; […]
Jesse Eisenberg On His New Film ‘The Debut’, The Surprise Success Of ‘A Real Pain’ And Donating A Kidney – Karlovy Vary
How many Oscar-nominated Hollywood stars can you name who have donated one of their kidneys to a complete stranger? As of now, the list probably just comprises Jesse Eisenberg, the awkward leading man in David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network turned Oscar-feted writer-director of the 2024 Holocaust-themed road trip A Real Pain. Eisenberg recently […]
The Beauty of the Days Gone By
The idea for The Beauty of the Days Gone By first came to me while driving across Texas when my two boys were small, after immersing myself in the rich Southwestern histories of Anglo settler children taken captive by Native American raiding
ICE is now even WORSE
, updated:
Its arrests have doubled, its budget has tripled, its illegalities have multiplied.
Vanishing Culture #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie Livingston
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Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
In Ankara, Türkiye, for a two-day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald J.
Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura
, updated:
A review of the _Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura Edition_ with _Intel
Panther Lake_ _Core Ultra X7 368H vPro_, from the perspective of a Linux user
coming from a _Star Labs_ _StarBook Mk VI AMD_, and running a hardened Gentoo
installation.
Antarctica: The World's Greatest Story of Cooperation
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Listen now (35 mins)
Is SpaceX Crashing?
, updated:
The shares plummeted on their first day of trading on the Nasdaq-100 stock index
Bridging the gap between platform engineering and business value
Bridging the gap between platform engineering and business value
Are non-functional requirements the missing guardrail for AI-generated code?
Are non-functional requirements the missing guardrail for AI-generated code?
How To Fix Soccer by Donald Trump
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TBR World Cup Exclusive
Wednesday 8 July, 2026
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A rose by any name… … is still ravishing. Just noticed these as I was sitting at the table, with my favourite picture (HCB’s Rue Mouffetard) in the background. Quote of the Day ” We don’t love qualities, we love … Continue reading →
In memory of Rhaedar (2012-2026)
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Rhaedar was my bud — followed me from room to room during the day, snuggled up with me while I read, demanded lap time, slept many nights curled up against my stomach. When I picked him up, he’d rest his paws on my shoulder and lean his head into my neck. He was a total […]
Is This Communism?
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The same accusation, aimed at different Americans, at two different moments in time.
The Moderates Strike Back
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The U.S. Senate race in Michigan is ground zero in the fight for the future of the Democratic Party
Stop Private Equity from Profiting while Our Communities Burn
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This week's video
Graham Platner was polling behind expectations anyway
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Democrats now have an opportunity to nominate someone less troubled who polls better. Will they waste it
Every literary(ish) person who attended Taylor Swift’s wedding.
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Usually when I hear about a party thrown by the most famous person in the world, I don’t immediately assume that someone like me should be there. What does make me think that delusional thought is when the guest list
2026 C&W Session Review: Session G: Sustaining Programmatic Assessment: The Role of Digital Praxis and Reflection
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Speakers: Crystal VanKooten (MSU), Bree Straayer (MSU), Stuart Dees (UCF), and Shane Wood (UCF) In this session, the speakers reported on the assessment of their respective First-Year Composition (FYC) programs. They provided empirical research and rigorous analysis, which was especially impressive given the large enrollment sizes of FYC at their institutions (MSU and UCF). Session [...]
A couple of weeks ago, in The George Carlin Model of AI, I said personal AI needed to work first on what George called a place for my stuff. Should Apple occupy that whole personal space, kinda like René Magritte visualized in a surrealist painting seventy-five years ago? I think that’s where they’re going. You […]
A New Firefox Look
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Rizki Kelimutu: Firefox is evolving with a refreshed design that makes the browser feel more modern, approachable, and consistent across desktop and mobile. The refresh also extends to Firefox’s voice and writing style, making product experience feel more human, direct, and unmistakably Firefox. Via Jeff Johnson: Nothing says “consistent” like making your large-screen keyboard & […]
Sunsetting Maestral
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Sam Schott: As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire. Via John Gruber (Mastodon): I don’t know when these certificates are expiring. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when they do. I might try moving everything from my Dropbox account […]
Apple Silicon and AI
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Jason Hiner (MacRumors): In an exclusive conversation with The Deep View ahead of WWDC 2026 in June, Doug Brooks, senior product manager of Apple silicon, discussed how Apple’s long-term investments in neural processing, unified memory, power-efficient computing, and hardware-software integration have positioned its devices for the AI era. He also explained why Macs have become […]
Tuesday session
Tuesday session
Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback
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A few weeks ago, we conducted hour-long conversations with 10 of our users to dig deep into how you manage your preferences and configurations in Thunderbird desktop. While this specific research cycle focused on the desktop experience, our ultimate goal is a holistic strategy that ensures our mobile settings feel like a natural extension of […]
As Jocelyn Benson's campaign for Michigan governor continues to gain momentum—including a recent endorsement from Pete Buttigieg—this is the perfect time to revisit a conversation about courage, leadership, and defending democracy!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Türkmenoğlu 2026 = Evren Türkmenoğlu and Dan Davis, “Knidos F, L and N: Three Deep Sea Shipwrecks from the Byzantine Period,” Heritage 9, no. 6 (2026): 216, https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage9060216.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Stansbury-O'Donnell 1989 = -O’Donnell Mark D. Stansbury, “Polygnotos’s Iliupersis: A New Reconstruction,” American Journal of Archaeology 93, no. 2 (1989): 203–15, https://doi.org/10.2307/505087.
CNN and CNBC promote gambling to make a cheap buck
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Some newsrooms are making money from deals with prediction markets. It will only serve to further destroy the public's trust in news.
Reading Radiant Star by Ann Leckie.
Reading Radiant Star by Ann Leckie.
Snaps for Newsboat 2.44 are out
Hello everyone,
Usually we release Newsboat on Snap Store at the same time as
the release is published elsewhere, but this time around this
didn't happen. As it turned out, the builds were failing for a
few weeks, but we weren't notified. This is now fixed, and snaps
have just been pushed to the store. Due to the required fixes,
snaps have a slightly odd version string
("r2.44+git14.93bfeec5"); do not be alarmed, that's fine.
Thank you for the patience and for using Newsboat!
Dirección: Kane Parsons. Guion: Will Soodik, Kane Parsons. Elenco: Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell. Países: Estados Unidos, Canadá. Más información de la película: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26657236/ En 2019, una fotografía de una oficina vacía publicada en Internet dio origen a uno de los fenómenos de horror más importantes de la cultura digital. […]
There Are Good Days, And There Are Bad Days, Everyone
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Let's focus on making tomorrow a better day.......
Dementia And Canada
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Writing of lasting value
My Introduction To Computer Graphics
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Boeing's PDP-7/340
Most of my career has been involved in various ways with computer graphics. Below the fold I recount the story of how I got started in the field just as it was getting started. To give you some idea of just how early my introduction was the Mother of all Demos had been the year before. The displays I got to work with drew lines in monochrome, not rasters in color. You created the image by writing a loop of instructions in the "display processor" instruction set. These told it the lines to draw at each refresh cycle. There was no mouse.
The school was founded in 1690 by a Royal Charter granted to the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers to establish a hospital for 20 boarders with £32,000 from the legacy of Robert Aske (equivalent to approximately £5m in 2019).
In those days it was a "direct grant" public (i.e. private) school. Typically about half the puplis paid fees and about half were creamed off from the state system, as in my case. At that time many of the top academic schools were direct grant, including the famous Manchester Grammar School. Wikipedia notes that they:
varied greatly in size and composition, but, on average, achieved higher academic results than either maintained grammar schools or private schools.
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
In my last two years at Haberdashers' I was introduced to programming, which I immediately loved. We wrote FORTRAN on coding forms which were mailed to the local technical college where they were punched on to 80-column cards and fed to the college's IBM 1401. The output was mailed back, arriving a week later. Debugging the code with a one-week turn-round taught great care and thought, which subsequent developments gradually eroded.
So when I arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1968 I was disappointed to learn that undergraduate programming courses didn't exist. But I eventually discovered that members of The Archimedeans, the mathematical society, could use the machines in the Mathematical Laboratory after midnight. By Cambridge standards my mathematical abilities were sorely lacking, but they allowed me to join anyway.
CC BY 2.0, Link
Sometime in my second year, a friend and I discovered that in the basement of the Mathematical Laboratory there was a DEC PDP-7 with a 340 display. It was linked to the University's Titan time-sharing system to be used as a graphics peripheral, but we never figured out how to do that.
There were more interesting things to do. At first we spent our time playing Spacewar! and Lunar Lander. But these inspired us to try writing our own game, based on Piet Hein's Hex.
The PDP-7 had 8K 18-bit words into which we had to squeeze the code for the game, the data for the game, and the program for the 340's display processor. So as well as spending time at the machine in the early hours, we spent a lot of time when we could have been studying racking our brains trying to use as many of the 8K words as we could as at least two of these at the same time, if not all three.
We managed to get the game to be sort-of playable provided you let the machine win. If you tried to win the machine would cheat, and we ran out of time to find the bug.
CC BY 2.0, Link
When we returned for our final year two things prevented us returning to work with the PDP-7/340. First, finals loomed and our studies had to take priority. Second, we were both studying physics. For the first time that year final year physics undergraduates were given accounts on Titan which could be used during the day. And, wonder of wonders, one of the choices for a final-year project was to implement numerical integration. The instructor expected a conventional program written in Fortran.
But after my PDP-7 experience I loved programming Titan in machine language (NB not assembler, writing the instructions in octal). And Titan had a bank of 128 fast half-word index registers that could be addressed indirectly, IIRC built out of tunnel diodes. I turned in a machine language implementation of Newton's method that kept the stack for the recursion in the index registers. It was blazingly fast but the instructor couldn't understand it. So I got marked down and had to write a Fortran version.
CDC274 User Guide Fig 3.2
But this experience meant that the year we graduated my friend and I were likely the only UK graduates who knew anything at all about computer graphics. My friend, who had done better than I through not being arrogant about his final-year project, went on to study physics for real. And I got to do a Mechanical Engineering Ph. D. at Imperial which was funded by the UK Atomic Energy Authority. It involved writing a graphics program that ran on the University of London's CDC 6600 linked by a 40Kbaud line to a CDC 274 display. The 274 was a big round CRT with a line-drawing display processor, conceptually similar to but more powerful than the 340.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Sometimes Claude's judgement sucks, and that's why Jive coding usually produces a dashboard app. A different piece of software will drive it in a different direction. That's what I meant by AI-izing, in an earlier post.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I used to be a single-thread developer, but now I'm multi-tasking, I can work on two things at once. Claude is now able to research and fix certain problems, and his work is in a sandbox where it doesn't have any access to the surroundings, and can't make too big a mess, and it's going great, if there's a mistake it can quickly be corrected.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
I think AI is the perfect innovation as we reach the crash point of the climate crisis. Who cares if we burn more CO2 now, the effect is miniscule for the explosive crisis that could be coming any day or week. One that we have no ability to recover from. To say it's unenvironmental would be like complaining that you want more Pepsi from the flight attendant while the plane is crashing into a small city. Anyway, but maybe after the crash, one data center will survive, and maybe the beauty that our civilization created will be sustained.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
Inside the big AI companies they are certainly AI-izing every app conceivable, and even teaching the AI's how to AI'ize, because AI inside a standard productivity app which includes social network software will be one of the basic UI tools, and that means hidden technology like SQL databases can now be end user products, so the vision of the designers of SQL that they would make a database a manager could program, would finally be realized.
AI can do QA
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I'm an independent developer working in Claude Code, we're in the endgame of a product cycle, where the core is working and it can be used for the thing it was designed to do (biggest consideration). This is the time when you need users banging on it and reporting problems. People who write good bug reports. The only time I really had that down was at Living Videotext, a small company, but big enough to have employees doing QA and tech support. They were really good testers, they had the right perspective and an incentive, = anything we caught before shipping wouldn't become a support problem once the product was out there in user land.
Fast forward to the 2020's where I have done three products and am working on a fourth, and I have nothing close to the kind of testing support I had in the 80s. That made the work more difficult, slower and I took fewer detours, and one time, awfully -- a serious design error was caught only after it shipped and I was ready to move on to something else.
The point -- this handicap for individual programmers without staff QA people, we now have something even better than what we had in the 80s. Claude can do extensive testing of the product in the browser, "seeing" what the user would see. And it never gets tired. You just have to think to ask it to do it. It is so liberating.
And by far the best people to create and manage it would be experienced QA people. They should design and run the tests and sign off on the quality of the software, so we can be sure users are getting something great. And we can do great QA in places we never could really do it before because no matter how good users are, a person who does it for a living with experience can't be replaced.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
Export Updates 2026-07-07:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
16 new and 43 updated places. 14 new and 77 updated linked data sidebars.
Prince Harry Loses Landmark Privacy Case Against Daily Mail Publisher
Prince Harry has lost his high-profile press intrusion lawsuit against one of the UK’s most powerful newspaper groups. The Duke of Sussex, alongside other claimants including Liz Hurley and Elton John, accused The Daily Mail publisher of unlawful information gathering, including “abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy.” All the claims have been dismissed, with […]
England’s World Cup Win Over Mexico Makes UK Ratings History, As 9M Brits Brave Small Hours To Cheer On Three Lions
Kick-off may have been delayed to 2AM local time on Monday, but it did not stop a record number of Brits from staying up to watch England’s triumph in Mexico City. The BBC has revealed that its coverage of England’s thrilling 3-2 victory over Mexico in the FIFA World Cup round of 16 was watched […]
Inspired By ‘Macbeth’, Palestinian-Israeli Thriller ‘Fadia’ Tackles The Hard-Hitting Topic Of Honor Killings
Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which, each fortnight, we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films landing success in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track… […]
CAA Builds Out UK Creators Unit With Georgia Katz Hire
EXCLUSIVE: CAA has hired former Insanity Management and Gleam Futures agent Georgia Katz. Joining CAA’s UK-based creators division, Katz will represent digital-first talent and help digital content makers to build sustainable, multi-platform business in entertainment, media and brand partnerships. She will be based out of London. Katz comes across from talent management firm Mokkingbird, and […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
, updated:
One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.
The Second Cohort
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After the first cohort of DRI Your Career I wrote that the first time you do something, you can believe in it but you can only really hope. But we just wrapped up our second cohort of DRI Your Career and have two other courses we’ve run full cohorts of. I’m going to call it […]
Jude Law To Star In Action Feature About A Getaway Driver Penned By ‘Black Rabbit’ Writer Zach Baylin
Ben Jackson and Katie Sinclair of Riff Raff Entertainment were keynote speakers this afternoon at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s industry sidebar, where they discussed their boutique label, which Jackson launched with Jude Law in 2017, including some of the projects on their slate. Jackson told the industry audience at KV that Riff Raff is […]
Pluralistic: How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech (07 Jul 2026)
‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ Sets 35th Anniversary Global Re-Release
EXCLUSIVE: StudioCanal, Fathom Entertainment and Rialto Pictures have set a 35th anniversary re-release of James Cameron’s Oscar winning Terminator 2: Judgment Day for Aug. 28 in U.S. theaters with a number of global dates through late August and early September. The sequel to 1984’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton cyborg action pic, Terminator, is the […]
Dolly Parton Broadway Musical To Open On Country Icon’s 81st Birthday; Venue Announced
Dolly: A True Original Musical, the upcoming stage production featuring new music and classic hits by country icon Dolly Parton, will begin previews at Broadway’s St. James Theatre on Monday, December 7, with an official opening on January 19, 2027, Parton’s 81st birthday. The announcement was made today by Parton and producers Danny Nozell, Adam […]
Why Democratic Socialists are suddenly winning everywhere
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It’s not because of ideology
WTF is Kristi Noem Doing?
, updated:
Whatever happened to Kristi Noem?
Google Is Suing Chinese Scammers Who Are Using Gemini
Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort:
According to Google’s legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their own. In its Telegram channels, Outsider Enterprise reportedly provided instructions on how to use Google’s Gemini AI to create websites that imitate those of Google, YouTube, and government agencies such as New York’s E-ZPass. The group offered nearly 300 scam templates...
Lit Hub Daily: July 7, 2026
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How Joyce Carol Oates, queen of the literary internet, examines “the dispiriting effects of technology on contemporary life” in her new collection, The Frenzy. | Lit Hub Criticism Bryan Charles follows AI’s slow, steady invasion of literary translation. | Lit Hub
Day Off
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Sometimes I hit a wall
Meet This SSH Multi-Server Manager
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If you manage multiple servers via SSH, you should check out LazySSH.
It’s a terminal-based ( TUI) SSH manager, inspired by tools like lazydocker and k9s, that makes it easy to navigate and manage entries in your ~/.ssh/config file.
Search by alias, IP, or tags
Pin favorite servers
Add, edit, and remove hosts directly from the interface
Ping to check availability
SSH connection with a single Enter
Sorting and filtering options
Preserves your ~/.ssh/config by creating automatic backups before making changes
Installation
Homebrew (macOS and Linux)
brew install lazyssh
Building with Go (Linux, macOS, and Windows)
If you already have Go installed:
git clone https://github.com/adembc/lazyssh.git
cd lazyssh
go build -o lazyssh ./cmd
Then, optionally, move the binary to a directory in your PATH:
sudo mv lazyssh /usr/local/bin/
Or install it directly using:
go install github.com/Adembc/lazyssh/cmd@latest
Usage
After installation, just run:
lazyssh
The program automatically reads the file:
~/.ssh/config
So all you need is to have your SSH hosts already configured as usual to start using it.
Moritz De Hadeln Dies: Former Berlinale & Venice Film Festival Chief Was 85
Moritz de Hadeln, a pioneering industry professional who led the Berlin, Venice, and Locarno Film Festivals, died on July 4 following complications from a scheduled medical procedure. He was 85. Reps close to de Hadeln’s family confirmed the news to Deadline. De Hadeln was born in the UK city of Exeter on December 21, 1940, […]
Ashley Walters, Nathalie Emmanuel, Emmett J. Scanlan & Leo Gregory Join Alex Lanipekun’s Short Film ‘Echoes’
EXCLUSIVE: Ashley Walters will star in Echoes, a short film written and directed by Alex Lanipekun that counts Nicholas Pinnock among its executive producers. Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones), Emmett J. Scanlan (MobLand) and Leo Gregory (Wild Bill) also star alongside Walters, who has enjoyed huge success with Adolescence and Top Boy. Per the synopsis, […]
Paris Hilton’s Animated Series ‘Paris & Pups’ Set For UK’s Sky Kids
Paris Hilton’s animated series, Paris & Pups, has been adopted at Sky Kids in the UK. The series was unveiled as part of Sky’s latest children’s TV slate for content releasing across Sky Kids platforms this year. We first told you about Paris & Pups over two years ago. Inspired by Paris Hilton’s real-life pets, Paris […]
Trump vs. algae is the feud we deserve
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Congrats, America.
The Control Layer: Why the Next Era of AI Is About Infrastructure, Not Just Models
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The Model’s the Easy Part - How to Get, and Keep, Value
Here’s how I see the evolution of AI in enterprises over the last few years:
Autumn of 2022, the world thinks it’s going into a recession. IT budgets are frozen for 2023.
Abschaffung der Informationsfreiheit verhindern!
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SPD und Union planen, die Informationsfreiheit faktisch abzuschaffen. Dieser Frontalangriff auf die demokratische Kontrolle staatlichen Handelns muss verhindert werden.
Daniel Mason, Rachel Aviv, Emeline Atwood and more: 21 new books out today!
It’s July, and it’s time to be absolutely inundated with summer novels. This week, we’re treated to the new book by North Woods author Daniel Mason, Country People, the hotly anticipated debut novel by Emeline Atwood, A Real Animal, and
Sarajevo’s CineLink Unveils Co-Production Market & Drama Sections Lineup Plus New Partnership With Cannes’ Critics’ Week
CineLink, the industry strand of the Sarajevo Film Festival, has finalized its list of projects for its Co-Production Market and CineLink Drama sections and has also unveiled a new award €10,000 award and partnership with Cannes’ Critics’ Week. The final selections comprise of 16 feature film projects and eight drama series projects, with women directing […]
Can ChatGPT Produce a Version of Proust Worth Reading?
“The part of ourselves that matters, when it matters, is outside time… Think of yourself simply as an instrument capable of whatever experiments in beauty or truth you wish to perform, and your gloom will evaporate.” –Marcel Proust * A
What Does Joyce Carol Oates Really Think of Our Addiction to Social Media?
On June 16th, The Hogarth Press published The Frenzy: Stories, Joyce Carol Oates’s 49th collection. The same day, “America’s foremost woman of letters” posted and reposted 40 odd times on X, commenting on, among other things, Dick Cavett, tiger lilies,
An Imaginary Throuple Saved My Writing Career
Let’s say throughout my twenties, all I did—literally—was write; whatever I could, in hopes my parents might read it, see me, grow up, and care. Let’s say throughout my twenties, I published three books in three genres and each time,
Getting to Know Santa Cruz County, Street by Street, Path by Path
First a bit of geography. If you look at a map of the United States, California is the slightly bent arm along the Pacific Ocean, and Santa Cruz County is just below the outer elbow. Nearly its entire length runs
“Scary, Stunning and Sublime.” Kathleen Rooney Recommends Nine Great Books About Survival at Sea
You guys, the sea is huge and scary, stunning and sublime. No matter how many times I think about its vastness, my brain falls short of comprehension. Growing up in the Midwest on the shores of the beautiful but way
Jim Jones and Me: On Growing Up Guyanese-American in the Shadow of Jonestown
On July 3rd, The New York Times published an article titled “The Site of the Jonestown Massacre Opens to Tourists. Some Ask Why.” In it, Genevieve Glatsky reports on the mixed reception the tour received from Guyanese locals, those who
BBC Director General Matt Brittin Will Make First Major Industry Appearance At Final Edinburgh TV Festival
BBC Director General Matt Brittin will make his first major industry appearance at the final Edinburgh Television Festival in August. He will sit down for an ‘In Conversation’ talk about the first few months in what is British media’s most-scrutinized job. Brittin succeeded Tim Davie in the top job at the BBC on May 18, […]
Intelligence is Free, Now What? <br> Data Systems for, of, and by Agents
... government of the people, by the people, for the people ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863)
The cost of AI is dropping rapidly. GPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1, and some providers are pushing costs below $0.10. Across benchmarks, inference prices have fallen between 9x and 900x per year, with a median decline near 50x. Even frontier models are getting dramatically cheaper each generation, with open-source models following closely behind. And crucially, even if “Nobel-Prize-winning genius-level” intelligence isn’t here yet, the intelligence that suffices for the vast majority of knowledge work is here today, and getting cheaper by the month. At this rate, we are soon entering the era of virtually free intelligence—the kind that is more than enough for everyday knowledge work.
Disclosure: This post is a perspective led by Aditya G. Parameswaran—an Associate Professor of EECS and co-director of the EPIC Data Lab at UC Berkeley—together with his collaborators. It is part landscape survey and part perspective, and several of the research directions discussed below (including agentic speculation, structured memory, and synthesizing custom data systems from scratch) draw on the authors' own ongoing work.
So, what does this new era of near-free intelligence mean for data systems? We believe three new challenges—and opportunities—stem from near-zero inference costs:
Data Systems For Agents. Agents will soon become the dominant workload for data systems—with swarms of agents spun up in response to each end-user request. Given differences in characteristics between agents and humans—or applications acting on their behalf— how should we redesign data systems for such agentic users?
Data Systems Of Agents. As agents start taking on the bulk of knowledge work, a new substrate is needed for thousands of agents to manage state over long-running tasks, coordinate and reach consensus, and deal with failures. What do data systems that reliably and efficiently run and manage agent swarms look like?
Data Systems By Agents. Agents are rapidly becoming capable of synthesizing entire data systems in one go—meaning we can rebuild custom systems for each new workload. Verifying that such systems match intended behavior is a challenge. What does it take to let agents synthesize data systems we can actually trust?
Data Systems For, Of, and By Agents
Next, we will discuss each in more detail, followed by discussing the intertwined future of data systems and agents, especially as the three challenges intersect.
Data Systems For Agents
An agent querying a database doesn’t behave like a person or a BI tool. It performs what we call agentic speculation: a high-volume, heterogeneous stream of work spanning schema introspection, columnar exploration, partial and then full query formulation. With multiple agents each exploring portions of the hypothesis space, each user request could amount to 1000s of individual SQL queries. Now, users can issue ‘high-level’ data tasks, e.g., root-cause analysis—e.g., ‘why did coffee sales in Berkeley drop this year’—or exploratory cohort analysis—e.g., ‘which user segments are most likely to churn next quarter’—each involving a combinatorial space of potential joins, aggregations, and filter combinations.
Data Systems Redesigned to More Effectively Support Agentic Speculation
The requests from these agents have various opportunities for optimization. For instance, on a text-to-SQL benchmark with multiple agents attempting each task, only 10-20% of the sub-plans are distinct. Thus, 80-90% of sub-queries perform duplicate work. The same experiments show task success rates significantly increasing with more agentic attempts—so the redundancy is actually helpful. But from the data system perspective it’s wasted work.
An agent-first data system can exploit such properties to help agents make progress faster. It can reuse results across overlapping sub-plans, drawing on ideas from decades-old literature on multi-query optimization and shared scans. Or the data system can try to satisfice, returning approximate answers that are good enough for agents to make progress, leveraging work from theAQPliterature—or streaming the results of the final or intermediate operators to help agents decide if seeing the rest is necessary or helpful.
Another opportunity here is to rethink the query interface entirely: instead of agents issuing a single SQL query at a time, they could instead issue a batch of queries, each with its own approximation requirements. Since enumerating an exponential search space (as in the root cause or cohort analysis examples above) isn’t a good use of agentic reasoning ability, perhaps data systems should support higher-level primitives rather than requiring agents to list each SQL query explicitly. One idea here is to draw on DBT-style Jinja macros to provide looping-based primitives for agents to interact with data systems.
A Caffeinated Army of Agents Ready to Tirelessly Complete Your Data Tasks
A final opportunity here is to stop thinking of data systems as passive executors of queries; data systems could be proactive, as they possess more grounding in data and system characteristics that agents may lack a priori—they could steer agents in different directions, provide results for related queries, and also provide performance-level feedback (e.g., instead of executing an expensive query, the system could first provide the agent a latency estimate). The reason we can do this now as opposed to the past is that an agent can accept any form of textual feedback and isn’t expecting a strict SQL query result. In fact, the data system could also prepare both materialized and virtual views for an agent in advance, provided to the agent as part of context, as this may be cheaper or more effective than having an agent author or use them.
Data Systems Of Agents
Previously, we focused on how agents interact with data systems. Now, we consider everything else agents need to keep working: where they live, how they remember, how they coordinate with each other, and how they deal with failures of each other. This agentic substrate is separate from the inference stack powering raw intelligence. However, the inference stack itself is being abstracted away through APIs (e.g., from OpenAI or Anthropic), or, for open-weight models, through servingframeworks that hide low-level details. So far, the agentic substrate has been managed through harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, coupled with various mechanisms to store and retrieve memory.
First, on the memory front, the current wisdom is that filesare all you need; agents write to unstructured markdown (MD) files, which can then be searched using grep, or via embedding-based retrieval. In fact, many argue that the solution to continual learning is having agents consume a lot (e.g., an entire codebase, slack, company wikis, …) and then write their learnings into MD files, which are then retrieved selectively on demand. Indeed, file systems, bash scripting, and MD files are and will still be important for agents. However, at scale, when agents are doing the vast majority of knowledge work, this approach will no longer be effective.
Given limited context windows, retrieving all MD file fragments that may be relevant and stuffing it into the context will break down at some point. Even if context windows continue to grow, there are latency benefits to not put all information into context — and in many cases, e.g., when knowledge work involves interacting with large databases or code bases, it will be infeasible to serialize all relevant data into context.
Data Systems As A Substrate for Multi-Agent Swarms
One could use a knowledgegraphrepresentation, but knowledge graphs suffer from the same limitations as unstructured MD-based memory due to their lack of structured search. What one needs is to be able to retrieve only memory that is pertinent to the task, across multiple attributes (or facets) of interest. For example, an agent debugging a flaky test should be able to pull only the memories tagged with the relevant module, language, framework, and failure mode—rather retrieving based on keywords or embedding similarity. A separate issue is what to actually retrieve; raw agent traces with mistakes are not very useful as they will induce agents to repeat the same mistake—instead, we want the retrieved memory to be corrective.
We recently explored a related notion of structured memory, where we organize memory across various attributes, each of which could be set as * to indicate universal applicability, or set as a list of values to be matched. For a data agent, the dimensions could include the columns and tables, type of operation, and finally, open-ended natural-language corrective instructions. So, we could include memory that only applies to a given type of operation (e.g., ‘when performing date-time operations, use fiscal year as opposed to calendar year conventions’), or a given table (e.g., ‘column product_cleaned is preferred over column product when querying on product name’). One open question is defining an application-specific structured memory—or what others have called world models for memory. We believe this is akin to defining a schema for each application—and perhaps agents themselves can help us define and refine it over time.
One Possible Way To Store and Retrieve Structured Knowledge [From Here]
Structured memory will be useful also for evolutionaryframeworks to effectively manage search spaces. Indeed, storing, structuring, and mining large volumes of single and multi-agent traces can help future agents become much more efficient—potentially enabling effective recursive self-improvement through structured memory-based mechanisms.
Another challenge is to support concurrent edits to shared memory, and concurrent edits in general, when there are many agents performing transformations. While there have been some useful attempts at supportingmultiversioning and copy-on-write semantics, it isn’t clear that such techniques will suffice when thousands of agents are attempting to edit shared state at the same time. For instance, when agents are trying various potential transactions in response to a user request, the effects of the vast majority of these transactions need to be rolled back—with only the one ‘correct’ transaction’s result persisting. Work on supporting exactly-once semantics is relevant here, as are underlying techniques based on CRDTs and operational transformation. For updates to fuzzy mechanisms such as memory, we may be able to sacrifice on consistency for perfect correctness in the interest of latency. While agents can reason about semantics to compensate or roll back their actions to eventually finalize most tasks, the primary challenge lies in the degree to which they step on each other’s toes during the process. An important failure mode to be avoided is a form of “livelock,” where incessant compensating actions prevent any meaningful progress.
Beyond shared state, other concerns emerge when trying to support an army of agents, including what to do when agents fail, how agents should communicate with each other (directly or through intermediate shared state), and how we should deal with straggler agents. There have been some developments in supporting durable multi-agent execution, such as Temporal, but it remains to be seen if such solutions will apply at scale across thousands of agents. On the topic of communication, we need mechanisms to enable agents to negotiate with each other. Imagine four developer agents attempting to reach consensus on a shared schema, with distinct but overlapping objectives. In a human setting, this would involve iterative discussion and compromise; for agentic swarms, we must define the mechanisms that allow them to converge on a design that reflects the underlying goals of their respective principals. Or if agents are all requiring access to a limited resource, again communication will be necessary. It remains to be seen if this is best done via centralized coordination, or if a decentralized approach is necessary.
Data Systems By Agents
Finally, if intelligence is effectively free, then we can employ this intelligence to synthesize new data systems from scratch. Indeed, in many settings, general-purpose data systems may be overkill, as they have to support every schema, query, and hardware target. Given a workload, recent work, including Bespoke OLAP and GenDB, has shown that one can use an agentic pipeline to synthesize a complete, workload-specific analytical engine—in minutes to a few hours, at a cost of a few dollars. The engines are disposable: when the workload shifts, one can simply regenerate them. Analogously, our work has shown that one can synthesize custom key-value stores from scratch, targeted to the workload. In fact, modern IDEs, such as Kiro, elevate specifications for systems development to be a first-class citizen.
Agents Can Synthesize Custom Data Systems From Scratch
The main issue, however, is that specifications are typically imperfect, and don’t cover all corner cases. Present-day agents will exploit the missing specifications to reward-hack their way to a high performance metric. In our custom key-value store work, we found that one way to alleviate this is to have auxiliary verification agents trying to generate test cases that catch the exploitation of corner cases, essentially expanding the specification. Yet another approach is to both generate a system and a proof for its correctness together, for which we have found some early success, but more needs to be done to solidify the approach. Further, it remains to be seen what is the best way to solicit human-written specifications for a system—can this be done in an iterative, human-in-the-loop manner, as opposed to a one-shot, incomplete one. Indeed, human-written specifications are incomplete even for manually authored software, so one would expect that future agents that are more aligned will increasingly exercise better judgement when making design decisions.
One Possible Data System Synthesis Pipeline [From Here]
Other questions here involve testing whether starting from a mature system (e.g., Postgres) and removing components/functionality can lead to higher performance or more user trust. Separately, is there an opportunity to make the design composable, comprising various verified components that are mixed and matched given a workload? For example, perhaps the workload hasn’t changed enough for the storage layer to be updated, but perhaps the query optimizer requires changes. A perhaps more viable proposition involves employing agents coupled with proof systems to target critical parts of the code associated with formal proofs, rather than doing so for the entire system.
A final opportunity here is to move away from the traditional data systems stack with clearly-defined interfaces (e.g., parser, query optimizer, storage manager, …) — that were each largely the prerogative of a single human team to manage. Instead, agents can find new ways to “blend” these components together, perhaps identifying new optimization opportunities as a result. Agents can also fill in missing gaps in functionality to make existing systems much more feature-complete, or reach feature-parity with other competing systems—or analogously, continuously refining open-source systems in response to feature requests or issues (perhaps filed by other agents!) Doing so in a way that prioritizes correctness, long-term maintenance, and human interpretability will be a challenge.
Looking Further Ahead
In the era of near-free intelligence, data systems matter more than ever. As agents take on the bulk of knowledge work, the workload for data systems will change, the substrate they need to run on will have to be built, and increasingly, they will participate in designing data systems themselves. Each of these shifts opens up a new, exciting research agenda.
Co-Evolution of Data Systems and Agents
Looking further out, the boundaries between agents and data systems will likely start to blur. For instance, agents may design the data systems they themselves run on, defining both the interfaces as well as the system components underneath. Both the interfaces and internals can be evolved over time by agents in a form of recursive self-improvement. There is also an opportunity to rethink data systems as a holistic source of truth for the entirety of relevant state: including raw data, memory, and coordination state, further erasing the distinctions between the data that is being queried by agents and data generated as a result of agentic activity. Finally, data systems may themselves incorporate agentic components, fundamentally evolving from passive computation engines into intelligent, proactive, self-optimizing architectures. It is hard to predict what the future may hold. We’re in for a wild ride!
Acknowledgments
The perspective and ongoing work described in this post are the product of joint research and many discussions with wonderful collaborators at the EPIC Data Lab, Data Systems & Foundations group, and the broader Berkeley AI-Systems community. Thank you all!
BibTex for this post:
@misc{intelligence-is-free-blog,
title={Intelligence is Free, Now What? Data Systems for, of, and by Agents},
author={Aditya G. Parameswaran and Shubham Agarwal and Kerem Akillioglu and Shreya Shankar
and Sepanta Zeighami and Rishabh Iyer and Matei Zaharia and Alvin Cheung
and Natacha Crooks and Joseph Gonzalez and Joseph Hellerstein and Ion Stoica},
howpublished={\url{https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2026/07/07/intelligence-is-free-now-what/}},
year={2026}
}
Country People
The wife had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, and the husband was married to the wife. They had two children, a son and a daughter. The plan was for the husband to finish the
Simple Immigration Economics: Bigger is Better
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(Originally aired 6/24/2025) One in five workers in the United States was born in another country. Without them, the country’s prime-age workforce would be shrinking, and thus so would our economy. So the calumny (Terms & Conditions) directed at immigrants is at odds with the basic fact that the U.S. needs them. What about depressing wages? Research finds such a mixed bag of results that the overall effect is about zero. Indeed, if the goal is to save “American jobs” or help American workers, there are a lot more effective ways to spend $185 billion than on a massive crackdown on immigration rules.
Office Hours: Who's the worst elected official in America today (other than Trump)?
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Your call
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I’m thinking about “upgrading” my server from Ubuntu to Fedora and thereby also makingUncloud a part of my routine, but…… This can be done, but doing a container style
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addresses for notifies unsure if that will still work.
And Caddy with L4 forwarding and getting TLS certificates can cause issues, because
it interferes with each other (i.e. Caddy is starting, but not L4-forwarding, aks for a certificate, DNS is
still not working, cert is not handed out - that kind of thing).
July 6, 2026
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Last week, U.S.
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Friends,
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Because he’s pathologically incapable of tolerating a win he can’t take credit for, Trump made FIFA overturn a red card for the first time in decades.
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Shape was often the most iconic thing about an icon. Now it’s no part at all.
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Soccer, NATO, and Mount Rushmore
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Breaking News - After new accusations of sexual assault Graham Platner is "taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” for his candidacy
Talking Ukraine, Encouraging New Senate Polling, Degrading Trump, And More With Stuart Stevens Of Lincoln Square
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Stuart dropped by for our monthly chat earlier today, and it was a very good one....
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Morgan 2009 = Llewelyn Morgan, “The One and Only Fons Bandusiae,” The Classical Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2009): 132–41.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Mader 2002 = Gottfried Mader, “That St(R)Ain Again: Blood, Water, and Generic Allusion in Horace’s Bandusia ODE,” The American Journal of Philology 123, no. 1 (2002): 51–59.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Brind' Amour 1973 = Lise et Pierre Brind’ Amour, “La Fontaine de Bandusie, La Canicule, et Les Neptunalia,” Phoenix 27, no. 3 (1973): 276–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/1088044.
Dustin Bluck (archive link, Hacker News): I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people […]
WhatCable 1.1.7
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Darryl Morley: WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. No more guessing why a cable charges slow or refuses to drive your display. Via Norbert […]
Join us on Wednesday for a demo of Transkriptorium!
Zoom and local timezone info on the Community Calendar: iiif.io/community
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It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.
That statement doesn't make sense on the face of it even to
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Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI.
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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Last Week in the #PleiadesGazetteer (29 June - 6 July 2026): Over the course of the last week the Pleiades editorial college published 12 new and 179 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Johan Åhlfeldt, Jeffrey Becker, Catherine Bouras, Anika Campbell, Tom Elliott, Ethan Gruber, Wells Hansen, Greta Hawes, Sebastian Heath, Brady Kiesling, Andy Meadows, John Muccigrosso, Louis Mulot, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, and René Voorburg as well as contributors and editors of Trismegistos, Wikidata, and the World Historical Gazetteer.
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@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Rossi 1992 = “Les Eaux Thermales Du Briançonnais: État de La Question,” in Les Eaux Thermales et Les Cultes Des Eaux En Gaule et Dans Les Provinces Voisines, by Raymond Chevallier et al., Caesarodunum: Bulletin de l’Institut d’études Latines de La Faculté Des Lettres et Sciences Humaines d’Orléans-Tours 26 (Centre de recherches A. Piganiol, 1992).
@DAIR blog
TODAY!
Tune in to the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream to hear @emilymbender.bsky.social, @alexhanna.bsky.social and @savasavasava.myatproto.social discuss how “responsible use” of LLMs isn’t a thing & AI “harm reduction” frameworks in edtech.
I am publishing this on July 6th, did not have a chance to upload it yesterday. Below are links to items mentioned:
2026-07-06 GoToSocial upgrade
2026-07-06 GoToSocial upgrade
I recently did a GoToSocial upgrade to v0.22.0 Shrubby Sloth 🌿 – every new index takes 30–35min. “This release also contains a long-ass database migration …” is not kidding. 😅 The migration took 15h.
I made a copy of the database file to see whether a VACUUM will now reduce the file size from 22G to something. This is tricky because the VACUUM can take an additional 200% of the space. So 22G for the database, 22G for the backup, 44 G for the VACUUM, that’s an extra 66G of temporary space. I had to do this on my laptop.
The last time I tried it, the original file was 11G and after vacuum it was 10G, so I didn’t expect much. After migration, I copied the file using my regular backup procedure. That is, the instance keeps running and I use sqlite_rsync3. When I tried the VACUUM, it saved about 4G of the 22G. So yeah. That wasn’t enough. I waited for the expiry of remote toots. That’s the feature I am most exited about!
I had four cores available and one of them kept running for 29 hours, I guess.
This time, I stopped the instance and copied the whole file to my laptop. When transferring the file, I noticed that scp -C resulted in an estimated time of arrival (ETA) of about 20 minutes. Not bad. Without compression, it had estimated about 1 hour. I don’t know how long it would have taken to just transfer the changed data using sqlite_rsync3. After all, it seems that over 6 million rows are affected. Since I didn’t want to keep the instance running, I didn’t feel like experimenting with sqlite_rsync3 and opted for the crude approach using scp.
Once I had the file on my laptop (and enough disk space), I ran vacuum:
sqlite3 sqlite.db vacuum
This ran in about 6 minutes and reduced the file size from 22G down to 6.1G.
I copied this file back to the server and restarted my instance. Everything is working. Yay!
An English crafter is in hot water after accidentally gifting children erotic…hedgehogs?
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A U.K. crafter came under fire this weekend when parents discovered that his handmade hedgehogs had been assembled with pages from an erotic novel. As The Guardian reported, the unidentified hobbyist made his “little creations” from donated books, often to
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
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New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Mutino 2012 = Sabrina Mutino, “Strutture palaziali a Lavello fra VI e IV sec. a.C.,” in Lo spazio del potere II Nuove ricerche nell’area dell’anaktorondi Torre di Satriano Atti del terzo e quarto convegno di studi su Torre di Satriano (Tito, 16-17 ottobre 2009; 29-30 settembre 2010), ed. Massimo Osanna and Vincenzo Capozzoli (Osanna Edizioni, 2012).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Lo spazio del potere. 2 = Lo spazio del potere. 2: Nuove ricerche nell’area dell’anaktoron di Torre di Satriano: atti del terzo e quarto Convegno di Studi su Torre di Satriano (Tito, 16 - 17 ottobre 2009, 29 - 30 settembre 2010) / a cura di Massimo Osanna, Archeologia, Convegno di Studi su Torre di Satriano (Osanna, 2012).
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Marchi 2024 = Maria Luisa Marchi, “Roman Colonization and Urbanization in Southern Italy: The Case of Daunia 1,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Urbanism in Italy in the Age of Roman Expansion, ed. Fabio Colivicchi, and Myles McCallum (Routledge, 2024), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003271895.
New in the #PleiadesGazetteer Zotero library: Hoernes 2025 = Matthias Hoernes and Christian Heitz, “Staging Senses: The Catarinella Askos and Elite Politics in Hellenistic-Republican Canosa,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 38, no. 2 (2025): 661–81, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759426100658.
I could not stop – I had to look for videos of the University of Texas Longhorn Band performing “America The Beautiful”. I found these two examples, both brought tears to my eyes. December 1990, Texas vs. A&M football game at Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin, Texas, Wally Pryor announcing, Glenn Richter conducting the Longhorn […]
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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James Talarico, Democrat running for Senator in Texas reminds me of Matt Mullenweg, who also happens to be from Texas. He speaks as confidently as Obama, about the right things, wants to run our government like a freaking government. To think that's a campaign issue in the United States of America says why I did not celebrate our 250th on Saturday. I tried to imagine what it will be like when we start becoming ourselves again. ;-)
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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We just implement Cute Paste in the new product and I keep hitting a limit that it has. I love the feature, in most cases. Here I've set up an , the xxx reserving space for the URL that I'm now going to get. When I come back I select xxx and paste, and in its place is the full url in text, linked to itself. I laugh, no feature is free, there's always a tradeoff and sometimes it breaks something that worked before.
@Dave Winer's Scripting News
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Today's song: "July is dressed up and playing her tune."
Bidding farewell to Paxos!
Bidding farewell to Paxos!
Dems' Strong Week Of Polling, McMorrow Drops Out, Putin Attacks Kyiv, "Trump Is Cultural Heroin" (Corrected, Updated)
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Stuart Stevens joins us live today at 12pm ET/The US Men play tonight at 8pm ET!
Present-Tense And Amish Language
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Writing of lasting value
How to Speak So People Listen
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What makes an apology actually work?
Behold the perfect algorithm!
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1984, Minority Report, Black Mirror — bedtime stories compared to the horrors the UK Government publish, am I right? I’m led to believe “Watch this space” is the latest propaganda piece from His Majesty’s Nanny State. I haven’t read past the title but according to gaming site Dexerto, YouTube […]
Dems' Strong Week Of Polling, McMorrow Drops Out, Putin Attacks Kyiv, "Trump Is Cultural Heroin"
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Stuart Stevens joins us live today at 1pm ET/The US Men play tonight at 8pm ET!
@Pleiades STOA at hcommons.socal
, updated:
Export Updates 2026-07-06:
Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places
1 new and 42 updated places. 4 new and 12 updated linked data sidebars.
I'm doing a big new thing with RSS, and that's got me thinking a lot about where I want to go after the first round of new functionality. I noticed that Andrew Shell came out with a new version of his open source rssCloud hub server, which we use here, that now supports WebSub. So I decided to find out if it was worth supporting.
There isn't very much I'd have to do beyond adding two Atom elements to my feed, and an Atom namespace declaration in the top line of the file. So it's not an easy thing to do, because I don't see the need for Atom to be required for WebSub. How did they come to that conclusion? I can only imagine -- it's not as if RSS was unknown to them (I hope).
I wish the WebSub group had gotten together with RSS people and come up with a neutral way to include a link to my WebSubHub. Bub, that's just good web sense. You want the max interop asap. Make it easy for people to support what you want them to support. You put personal jealousy ahead of interop, and that should be against the law in the Land of the Web.
On the web our goal is interop. That's it. We should have worked together. Yeah I wish you wouldn't have done it, and proof you didn't need to is that Andrew was able to build it into his server, with some help from Claude btw.
Governance can prevent AI from being used to undermine democracy. But only if it has teeth.
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The apparatus to cement centralized, undemocratic power has already been built. Regulations have a part to play, but they can't just be recommendations.
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Today, we are excited to launch Otari, the
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Editor’s Note: The harsh decline of film & TV production in Los Angeles the past few years has become a central issue in both the City of Angels’ mayoral race & California’s gubernatorial campaign. Even with the Golden State’s program now at $750 million annually, jobs are still scant movies & shows are far & […]
AI ‘Actor’ Tilly Norwood To Star In Feature Film ‘Misaligned’
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‘The Guest’ Review: Trine Dyrholm Holds Court As A Mother With Issues In Mads Mengel’s Emotionally Powerful Adult Family Drama – Karlovy Vary
“Family is family,” notes a character at the beginning of Danish director Mads Mengel’s low-key but emotionally gripping three-hander The Guest, at a point in time when the biggest problem facing Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) and Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) — the proud middle-class parents of newborn baby Elliot — is whether to order asparagus or […]
‘Rest Is Politics: US’ Host Katty Kay Behind Confidence Podcast ‘Doing It Anyway’
EXCLUSIVE: The Rest is Politics: US co-host Katty Kay is launching a podcast and YouTube series about confidence. Katty Kay is hosting Doing It Anyway, the latest offering from Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger. Across six episodes, the weekly pod and vodcast will explore how confidence shapes the way we live, work and make choices, with a […]
Penguin Random House & BBC Studios Launching First Bluey Audiobook Collection
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@Dave Winer's linkblog
Trump lobbied Fifa to lift Folarin Balogun suspension for World Cup game v Belgium.
@Dave Winer's linkblog
What the citizenship test tells us about what it means to be American.
Trump Says His Funeral Will Draw Much Bigger Crowd Than Ayatollah’s
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“My funeral will draw MILLIONS!” Trump boasted.
Revisiting The Constitutional Bind during the Interregnum
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As the country marks 250 years, the left faces two imperatives at once: confronting a constitutional order warped by judicial supremacy, and reorienting American foreign policy away from endless war.
Sky Chief Dana Strong Says ITV Will Remain “Deeply British” As Hollywood Tightens Grip On UK Media
Dana Strong, the chief executive of Sky, has said that ITV will remain a “deeply British” business after her company agreed a £1.6 billion ($2.1 billion) takeover of a crown jewel of UK broadcasting. Sky’s acquisition of ITV’s television and streaming unit, which was announced early on Monday, will effectively put two UK public service […]
France to Stop Certifying Non-Quantum-Safe Encryption
France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption:
France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems.
Samih Souissi, ANSSI’s chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030.
ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption...
AI Rocky from ‘Project Hail Mary’
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Make your own star-saving sidekick with Raspberry Pi, Claude AI, and a tonne of servos.
Michael Dirda makes the case for Moby-Dick as the ultimate American novel. | Lit Hub Criticism Why the “legendary” dinner party from Plato’s Symposium is actually about love. | Lit Hub Craft How medieval scribes engaged in writing as a spiritual
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CNN and CNBC are pushing Kalshi on viewers but not telling them the whole story.
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Is Moby-Dick the Greatest American Novel?
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Writing As Spiritual Practice: Inside the World of Medieval Scribes
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Why Is He Using the Communist Trump Card?
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He's run out of other cards.
July 5, 2026
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Going into the weekend during which Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the day on which the Second Continental Congress accepted the Declaration of Independence, President Donald J.
Crypto Is Buying Your Democracy
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49.
The last year of something, before something else.
Reading the Declaration of Independence on America's 250th
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Better than Trump on the Washington Mall?
"Who's With Me?"
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W. Kamau Bell's Substack is superb
Blinkenlights mit Balkonsolar
Der CCC warnt vor gefährlichen Sicherheitslücken, die Solaranlagen-Kunden von Hoymiles betreffen. Die angeblich geheimen Schlüssel zur Steuerung der Anlagen sind komplett ungeschützt. Das chinesische Unternehmen Hoymiles stellt sich bisher taub.
Episode 185 - Is EMUL-8ion a Form of Flattery?
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EMUL-8 is a fascinating programming language. It's described in just one paper from 1977. It's a mix of features from APL, LISP, ALGOL, and SNOBOL. And, I think, it's a wonderful window into how counterculture and home computing collided.
Thompson, Vonnegut, Ice 9
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I suppose that when I got into the industry the good parts of it were already on the way out. Still, there was enough good there to make the effort worthwhile: brilliant writers and teachers, intellectually serious people in considerable numbers, people who treated their professions with real respect, adherents of the interesting kinds of mysticism and esoteric religion, philosophers, poets. The industry was somewhere where all of them could thrive, even if all it did was hold space for strangeness and pay enough of a salary that people could do what they cared about the most. In a world where universities have been steadily gutted and most workplaces had no time or space for the brilliant and impractical of the world, software was at least able to help keep serious thought and art alive.
How to Expose Llama.cpp over Inlets Cloud
With Inlets Cloud, you can quickly get a URL with authentication for an LLM server running locally, making it easy to use that model outside the machine it is running on.
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Conviviality in computational science
Convivial technology was defined by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book "Tools for conviviality" as technology that supports a convivial society, which is a society that strives to grant each of its members as much agency as is possible without infringing on other members' agency. Conviviality is thus about equality, about the absence of dominance relations. Convivial technology is shaped by its users according to their needs, rather than being controlled by entities such as companies or governments, which then derive power over the user base by exercising control.
One of Illich's examples is transportation, with bicycles being convivial whereas railways and cars are not. Cars in particular have turned into what Illich calls a " radical monopoly": a technology that imposes itself on everyone. Once a society has adapted its landscape and infrastructure to cars, walking or cycling become insufficient as a means of locomotion for most people, if only because typical distances are now typical distances for driving, not walking. Moreover, the total societal cost for car-based mobility is enormous, if you count in the cost of road construction, traffic accidents, environmental pollution, and much more.
A recent paper entitled "Conviviality for Digital Degrowth", by Sophie Quinton and Jean-Bernard Stefani, discusses how today's digital technology is not convivial, and outlines how this could change as part of a transition to a degrowth society. It motivated me to finally write down my personal story, which is about something much more modest: the conviviality of digital technology in scientific research. It's something I have been thinking about for thirty years, even though I wasn't aware of Illich's work and terminology until recently.
Let me start with the observation that most pre-digital technology in scientific research is convivial. Theoretical tools (theories, models, etc.) are developed and evolved completely inside the scientific community and belong to no individual nor any institution. Scientific instruments and experimental setups are designed either by scientists, or explictly for scientists and in close collaboration with them. Neither kind of tool is controlled by outside entities, with the possible exception of very large instruments such as CERN. Nobody can decide that scientists may no longer use NMR spectrometers, nor that they have to replace all pre-2000 microscopes by new ones. This has changed with the adoption of digital tools and the integration of digital technology into scientific instruments. Theoretical tools are now often software, whose complexity makes its behavior inscrutable to its users and puts them at risk of losing their tools to software collapse. Scientific instruments increasingly rely on built-in computers that create exactly the same issues. Finally, digital technology has enabled industrial-scale production of data, e.g. in DNA sequencing, and that technology is itself not convivial either.
Conviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools. Moreover, research is much facilitated if you also have the inverse: the ability to create a tool that does exactly what you want to do. And since science is a collective activity, in which participants critique and build on each other's work, the understanding of tools needs to be shared inside a discipline. There have always been limits to this shared understanding, in particular concerning specific physical devices or unique experimental setups, but building shared understanding on a best-effort basis has always been one of the tacit underpinnings of science. This best effort has been abandoned in the digital era, as I discuss in an analysis of trust issues with scientific software,in which conviviality plays an important role.
When I started doing computational studies of colloidal suspensions in the late 1980s for my master's degree and then my PhD, research software was still quite convivial. Like most PhD students, I wrote medium-size Fortran programs, which ran on any computer with a Fortran compiler, from the Atari ST I had at home to the Cray X-MP that I used for production runs. Other scientists could read and understand my code in a few days, given sufficient motivation, and I know that some actually did, because I received questions from them by e-mail. It was also quite common for PhD students to look at and comment each other's programs. Publishing software was still exceptional, but publication venues did exist, and I ended up publishing the main code library underlying my work in low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics in 1993. Unfortunately I didn't publish, nor properly archive, the small bits of code that did the actual computations for concrete specific systems, and that is why the results of my papers aren't reproducible any more. But the library still works exactly as it did in 1993, and still finds new users.
When I moved on to a postdoc in another field, biomolecular simulation, I discovered a very different world. There were only three big simulation programs that everybody worked with: AMBER, CHARMM, and GROMOS. Only a very small number of researchers understood them in detail and could modify them. Everyone else computed whatever the software allowed them to compute, rather than what they actually wanted to compute. But even the correct use of the software was a challenge if you weren't in personal contact with the development teams, as documentation tended to be incomplete and outdated. Biomolecular simulation software was clearly not convivial, an observation that I attributed to the complexity of the underlying theoretical models. I was also finding out about the politics favoring the concentration of power over software, but I didn't make the connection at the time.
The objects of biomolecular simulations, proteins and nucleic acids, were much more complex than the hard-sphere colloids I had studied in my PhD. Managing protein structures and the force fields defined on them in Fortran 77 is difficult and laborious. Maybe we could make biomolecular software more convivial by using a high-level programming language? That idea lead me to discover the Python language, become a founding member of the Matrix-SIG that developed Numerical Python, the precursor to today's NumPy, and write one of the first scientifc libraries in Python, the Molecular Modelling Toolkit (MMTK), first published in 1997.
From a technical point of view, MMTK did enable convivial biomolecular simulation. I have been in contact with various researchers, mostly PhD students, who implemented new simulation methods on top of MMTK and shared their work as add-on Python modules. However, I also found out that the majority of researchers in my field didn't care about conviviality at all. The power gradient between the big groups that developed the main software packages and the smaller groups of users was part of the research system, interwoven with apprenticeship relations, grant reviews, etc. Most researchers didn't choose a software package on its scientific or technical merits, but on the political merits of joining its user community. Among Illich's five threats to conviviality, I observed polarization and radical monopoly. As an illustration of the latter, some PhD students who contacted me with questions about MMTK asked me not to talk to their supervisors about their use of MMTK, because "for political reasons, I am supposed to use software X".
An individual or a small group cannot hope to address the social issues that encourage dominance structures over conviviality. Conviviality can only happen if a majority of a community adopts it as a value. What small groups of people can do, however, is develop and use convivial tools at their modest scale, to demonstrate that it is possible, and to provide a model that others can learn from if they want to. I was fortunate enough to have a stable position in French public research that allowed me to maintain this attitude in spite of its risk of reduced productivity. What I hadn't expected, however, because I didn't know about Illich's work yet, is the destruction of conviviality from the outside that followed.
The history of the scientific Python ecosystem is an interesting case study for Illich's conviviality framework. He describes two watersheds that institutions and technologies pass through as they gain in importance:
Any industrialized institution will go through two watershed moments. At first, its progress provides clear and substantial benefits to society. But second, its overdevelopment begins to run counter to its original goal and in fact becomes destructive to society.
Python for science reached the first watershed around 2000, only five years after the first release of Numerical Python. There was a solid foundation consisting of Python, Numerical Python, a few general-purpose utilities (plotting etc.), and domain-specific libraries for a few disciplines. Researchers could convivially develop and share Python scripts and modules, including if necessary so-called "extension modules" written in C or Fortran for performance.
Five years later, development shifted to NumPy, a new project aiming at a unification of Numerical Python and its offshoot numarray, which catered for different application domains with different priorities. One of NumPy's explicit goals was to encourage further growth of the user community, by making it more easier to learn for users of its main commercial competitor, Matlab. That was the point at which I started to feel uncomfortable with the ecosystem's direction. Numerical Python had a small and consistent API, inspired by APL. NumPy added an alternative API inspired by Matlab, and made breaking changes to the API inherited from Numerical Python. This meant imposing adaptation work and a higher cognitive load on existing users for the sole benefit of attracting new ones. Growth took priority over the qualities that make software convivial.
The second watershed was reached between 2010 and 2015. Due to a combination of growing ecosystem complexity, growing corporate influence on development decisions (Google in particular became an important sponsor), and the rise of a breaking-change version of Python ( Python 3), the scientific Python ecosystem flipped from a stable infrastructure for research projects to an unstable software layer whose frequent breaking changes required researchers to invest more and more time just to keep their code in a usable state. Conviviality was lost.
In the following years, the Python developer community first encouraged and then increasingly forced authors of Python software to migrate to Python 3. In the FOSS spirit, Python 3 should have been considered a fork of Python 2, and both versions should have been allowed to coexist for as long as there were people willing to maintain them. But many people rightly recognized that this would have split the Python community into two competing factions. The bolsheviks, supporting Python 3, decided to kill Python 2 by various means, including highly questionable methods such as the Python 3 Wall of Shame, an online pillory listing projects that had not yet made the migration. This was possibly the most destructive event in the history of FOSS, and in particular a lot of domain-specific research software, the kind that only a handful of people would ever have heard about, was made unusable. Today, scientific Python is a typical industrial software product that happens to be free (as in beer). It is a good support for large corporate libraries such as PyTorch, but no longer a good choice for typical research teams that don't have the resources for dealing with high rates of tech churn (Illich's obsolescence). It is now more difficult to run a five-year-old Python script than a 40-year-old Fortran program, and even if it runs, it may not produce the same results as it did in the past.
My own MMTK library became practically unusable with the demise of Python 2. Porting it to Python 3 would have been a major effort, and I wasn't motivated to do that work. It would have been difficult (e.g. check line by line for divisions whose semantics had changed) and laborious (the C extension modules, written for Python 1.4, would have to be rewritten from scratch). But most of all, it would have been only the first step into a treadmill of continuous software collapse and repair. Together with a handful of colleagues that depended on MMTK, I looked for funding to have someone else do a port to Python 3 and maintain it, without success. MMTK is now a museum piece. You can still run it via reproducibility infrastructure such as Guix, but it is no longer a reasonable basis for new research projects.
The scientific Python ecosystem is the example I know best for progressive loss of conviviality, but the phenomenon is much more widespread. For another illustration, see the historical account of developer-user relations in computational chemistry by Wieber and Hocquet ( preprint) that outlines how the conviviality of computational chemistry in the 1960s was lost as licenses, limited access to the source code, and ultimately the transition to software as a service increasingly restrained the agency of researchers.
After the end of my long and ultimately failed Python-for-conviviality experiment, I have been playing with a few other ideas for convivial computational science. One of them is Digital Scientific Notations. This is mostly a new label for what computer scientists call formal specification languages. Mostly but not quite: no existing formal specification language I know of would qualify as a Digital Scientific Notation, simply because existing languages were made for different application scenarios. And that's why I designed my own Digital Scientific Notation, called Leibniz, for my experiments.
The basic idea is simple: the human-computer interface for many aspects of computational science should not be code, but specifications. The relation between specifications and the code that implements them is roughly the same as the relation between a set of mathematical equations and a function that solves them (see here for a longer explanation). Specifications are often simpler than their implementations, and in general more modular: you can just throw any two specifications together, assuming coherent notation, and you get a new specification (which may or may not be useful). Researchers discussing computational models would never have to leave the level of specifications, leaving the technicalities of implementation to specialists (software engineers) or to computers (if you think "AI" now, you are not wrong but there are also much older deterministic techniques to "solve" specifications, such as the Bird-Meertens formalism). Leibniz is designed to resemble mathematical notation more than programming languages, hoping that people will feel more familiar with it. But I am not yet at the point of having done real computational science in Leibniz. For now, all I have is implementations of toy problems.
My second conviviality-related project is HyperDoc. It addresses the problem of scientific publishing in the digital era. The idea that data and code should be published along with an article is almost mainstream by now, but most people imagine three different entities (paper, code, data), published in different places and at best linked to each other. But in a convivial setting, code is written primarily for humans, not machines. It should be part of the paper, or part of what replaces the paper, and reviewed exactly like a paper (see here for details). Data should be explorable as well right from the discussion of the science it supports. Moreover, these papers on steroids should be composable: you want to re-use data and code of papers you cite, and allow the reader to navigate freely across citations. Putting all these requirements together leads to a hypermedia structure, where code becomes a medium alongside text, graphics, videos, etc. For a more detailed discussion of the foundations, see my Substrates 2026 paper, and for a direct experience, play with the demo server.
What remains to be done before I can envisage using my new toys for a real research project is integrating Leibniz into HyperDoc. Not difficult, but a bit laborious. Maybe I will profit from the quiet summer period to get started.
Back to the paper by Quinton and Stefani. It takes a much broader view of digital technology at the societal level, and discusses the relation of conviviality to degrowth. At the smaller scale of computational science, there is a similar relation: conviviality requires a limit to the scale of computations. Much of high-performance computing, for example, looks difficult or even impossible to make convivial. It requires optimizations, sometimes specific to one machine, that severely increase the code's opacity, and that is an obstacle to conviviality. The computational resources themselves are another obstacle, making it difficult to impossible for researchers to repeat, possibly with variations, the work of their peers. As Illich points out concerning industrial processes in general, this doesn't mean that we have to stop doing HPC, but we have to take into account non-conviviality as a problem that needs to be compensated by conviviality-restoring measures such as democratic governance. That holds even more for the rapidly growing use of extreme-scale machine learning techniques, usually referred to as "AI", which push polarization and obsolescence to another level, and which, if widely adopted, will establish a radical monopoly impacting not only scientific research, but all of our societies' knowledge management.
Fig. 4: CollabBench collaborative coding environment. The agent asks clarifying questions, then submits a function scored against hidden unit tests.
How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product. They are free to stay where they are and still get the benefit. People choose your product because it’s better for what they’re doing, or it feels better now, or whatever. We want the web to be the platform and it's cool because there is no platform vendor.
A new feature on rss.chat, images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature. I think perhaps I should add this to 
There are three parts to the rss.chat ecosystem.
In this project I think of Claude as a full contributor. Pronouns it/its. It's both a very fast, capable developer, and a machine. I will refer to it as if it were a valued contributor, nothing less. We have a division of labor. Docs and examples come exclusively from Claude unless otherwise stated. I write all the code outside the themes module, which has an API that connects it to the world it lives in. I have at this point exclusive custody of functionality surrounding the theme. But it often writes pieces, esp SQL code, that I pasted in verbatim, after reading it carefully.
In my experience in software development, it's good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That's the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way to the end before implementing and using, you miss the target, in performance and usability, that's what I think happened there. They felt they had to do everything Twitter does. I would have gone down a different path, go back to the beginning, and at every step think if there might not be a better direction to evolve in. It was about 
Claude codes. It may seem as if developers have taken over 
A 
Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called 
