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Flock is probably the country’s largest purveyor of public surveillance cameras — the kind that sit on telephone poles and traffic light wires and record your license plate. Flock has built an entire system that allows people who have access to it — mostly without warrants — to track people across the country. And cops, who have the most access, are, unsurprisingly, using it in ways that range from inappropriate to criminal to downright dangerous. Tracking people without warrants. Stalking exes and wanna-be dates. Causing car accidents in the process of using these to force women to interact with them. And while Flock is a terrible company whose product does not lower the crime rate or solve crimes, the misuse of these cameras show how pathological our policing system has become.

We are at a time of historically low levels of crime. The reasons for this are, like with most social issues, a bit complex and in dispute, but the rates are unambiguously lower than when I was a child in the 1970s (jokes about how I could remember so far back will be met with signing the perpetrator up for the Barry Manilow of the Month Club). However, we still act as if crime is a major problem. Now, of course, crime is bad. I have been the victim more than once, and it is terrible. But when I say major problem I mean a problem, like climate change, that necessitates marshaling significant resources in order to prevent existential harm. Crime is no longer that in America. And yet our police forces haven’t changed.

Police have not gotten better at solving crimes. The clearance numbers — the percentage of cases solved — have not been good in America, and they have mostly gotten worse recently. We have not stopped providing police officers with military-grade equipment. We haven’t decreased police funding. And we have not made the police more responsive and accountable to the communities that they serve. So while crime has gone down, the police appear to be neither a major driver of that trend nor have they adjusted to the new reality. And that makes the abuses of the Flock system almost inevitable.

Cops are largely not accountable to their communities. Clearance rates, as mentioned, are terrible. Other nations do not generally accept clearance rates this low, but Americans do. The power of the police unions has hampered accountability, both at the individual level and at the community level. We have stopped expecting them to solve crime, and when we do try to hold them to account, they often react by trying to withhold their services. We now have a situation where there is less for the police to do, they are held to no reasonable standard of community service or individual decency, and we have given them a largely supervision-free device to act out their worst instincts. It is unsurprising that so many have taken us up on the opportunity.

Flock is a symptom, not the disease. Now, that does not mean that we do not treat the symptom. Flock, and all similar setups, should be banned in as many places as possible. At a minimum, nothing they collect should be exposed to anyone without a warrant. None of that will matter, however, if we allow policing to continue to fester as an ineffective, unaccountable drain on our society.

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Google, for those who did not see it, allowed people to create satellite images from their Google Earth product using imitative AI. People set out to immediately use it to create misinformation. Bomb craters in Los Angeles. Nuclear reactors in Iran. Etc., etc., etc. 404 Media has an excellent look at what was and could be done with the tool. Google initially claimed that everything was fine since the created images were always watermarked — except that watermarks can be removed, and in most images, in my experience, the logo did not stand out enough to attract my notice. They fairly quickly pulled the feature. Google should have been able to predict this would happen — any time you automate something, especially if you automate it for free, you get more of that thing. In this case they automated lies and got exponentially more lies. But they were constitutionally incapable of acting on that prediction. Why? Milton Friedman.

Okay, why am I blaming a long-dead neutral-evil economist for the failings of a modern mega-corporation? Because Google, like all corporations, is acting under the philosophical and, sometimes, legal constraint, stating that their only responsibility is to enrich shareholders. And that bit of nonsense is perhaps Friedman’s greatest contribution to evil in the world, with the possible exception of the Chicago Boys who aided the murderous dictator Pinochet. In the before times, when we were a nation of citizens and not just a market of perfectly rational economic actors, corporations at least pretended to understand their obligations to the wider world. They also understood that shareholders were not their only stakeholders. After all, corporations did not spring forth from Zeus’ head after Ayn Rand hit him with a railroad spike. Corporations, and all the benefits they receive, are the creations of governments. Their workers make them successful. The towns they operate in provide those workers and the infrastructure necessary for them to survive at all. No one seriously believes that a corporation owes its existence merely to its shareholders. But Friedman made it very profitable to pretend otherwise.

Since the acceptance of Friedman’s “become a sociopath for free” card by the business, and at least partially by the legal, community, firms have been driven by the demand that they increase shareholder value each quarter. Everything else falls by the wayside — including the long term health and reputation of the firm. Tech firms, since they had such explosive growth in the early part of this century, are under even more pressure to match those past results. Unfortunately, tech is now a mature market. Each recent attempt to find a super-charged growth engine — crypto, NFTs, the Metaverse — has failed to deliver the demanded results. Imitative AI is all they have left. Unfortunately for them, imitative AI cannot deliver that level of growth either.

Imitative AI is clearly in a bubble driven by circular financing and losing money hand over fist. Google itself just had its first quarter being cash-flow negative as a result of the amount of money it is spending on AI. They are desperate for imitative AI to pay off, and so they shove it everywhere because they don’t really see a choice. If they can make it ubiquitous, maybe they can convince people who, as a rule, dislike it, to use it and then to pay for using it. It won’t work. People really don’t like imitative AI and few want to pay for the kind of toy applications they do enjoy. Even enterprises are backing off as they see that it doesn’t provide the productivity gains or cost-savings that they had hoped for. In a sane world, businesses would never have gone all-in on such a half-baked technology (half-baked at least in a business sense). But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in Milton Friedman’s.

By introducing a misinformation generator, Google has further damaged its already declining reputation. Google built its business on trust — ask Google, get pointed to the right answer. Now, ask Google, and get shown some misinformation. And if it is in one of their premier tools, then why would misinformation not be in their normal AI summary results? Google may have a big enough monopoly to withstand some amount, maybe even a large amount, of reputational damage. But every bit of damage drives users away. In a mature market, that makes it harder and harder for the number to go up. Friedman’s doctrine started out gutting civil society but it inevitably leads to a death spiral for any firm that adheres to it. They must drive up shareholder value constantly, consequences be damned. Sooner or later, those consequences come home to remind them that sociopathy has its costs.

All hail Milton Friedman — destroyer of the common good and the corporations that gorged on its corpse.

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The Problem with How We Write (and Think) About Location: Great craft piece by Cole Haddon.

Never Trump Republicans Need Us to Win: One of the central problems with America is that far right is always seen as more acceptable than the average left.

Etsy Is In Its Flop Era, and Sellers Are Fleeing | WIRED: Etsy will not last much longer as a slop merchant.

The balcony solar boom | MIT Technology Review: Interesting look at what it takes to actually make balcony solar work.

Will Joel Ward become the NHL’s second Black head coach? His peers have ‘no doubt’ - The Athletic: He should.

Gianni Infantino’s post-World Cup ‘spreading hate’ essay: A fact-check - The Athletic: Our elite are such whiny babies.

After 75 Years Of Losing, Mayo Shocked The World And Shook A Stadium | Defector: Sports can be so cool.

The Masculinity Scam - The Atlantic: It seems like everything on the right is a grift.

Christian preachers are turning airplanes into unwanted worship services: Airlines need to stop this.

Someone Was Arrested at a Public Meeting For the Crime of Anti-Data Center Clapping: every level of our leadership is infested with thin-skinned bullies.

Reaping the Whirlwind | Inside the Potomac River Midair Collision | by Admiral Cloudberg | Jul, 2026 | Medium: Extremely well-researched, and correspondingly long, look at how the system made the Potomac accident almost inevitable.

What’s the best NHL team in the salary-cap era to not get a single Hart Trophy vote? - The Athletic: I love Summer Sean McIndoe.

Enshittification Relies on Broken Economic Math: Been thinking about the implications of this since I read it.

Post by @michaelhobbes.bsky.social — Bluesky: The lab leak theory of COVID is bullshit.

Translator Of Original ‘Minions’ Epic Poem Slams ‘Sexless, Bloodless’ Film Adaptation - The Onion: heh.

The Coming Food-Stamp Crisis - The Atlantic: Trump is getting ready to starve people so Elon can have a tax cut.

All Coens Are Liars: O Brother, Where art Thou? and Homer’s Odyssey | by Anise K. Strong-Morse | Jul, 2026 | Medium: Nice piece of criticism around a very good film.

How to surf on Saturn’s moon Titan | Scientific American: Science will teach you how to surf on Titan.

The Corporate Power Reset: Worth a try.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Blood and Treasure a book by Duncan Weldon

Author’s Website: About - Value Added

I waffled about this book. I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The idea of exploring how conflict is shaped by economics and economic activity is interesting to me, because I am a giant nerd. But the book doesn’t really scratch that itch. First, because it seems to think that incentives are a purely economic term, and a lot of what it discusses are incentives that are not really economic in nature. Second, the book covers a lot. And so many times it only touches upon what I thought would be the most interesting aspect surrounding the conflict and then moves on. But the more I sat with the book, the more I think I was being unfair.

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The first complaint is mostly my irritation at the field of economics in general. It has a tendency — highlighted by the almost unconscious assumption that social science mainstays like incentives belong wholly to economics alone and that economic incentives alone are the only incentives that matter — toward certainty that it has never earned. It is not fair, however, to judge a book on my distaste for some of the practices and culture of the field the author comes from. The quirks I mentioned never overwhelm the book, and the discussion of incentives, even if the author occasionally doesn’t seem to realize that what he is discussing is not actually economics, is still very interesting. In general, the stories highlight factors that I have not usually seen brought forward when discussing these conflicts. It does a fine job of making you see history a little differently.

And that highlights my second failing: it is not fair to judge a book on what I would have preferred it to be. This book covers a lot of ground and many conflicts, spanning most of modern history. It therefore does not cover any of them with a lot of depth. And I found myself disappointed several times by the book pulling back from exploring specific topics and situations in a deeper fashion. But that was not what the author, Duncan Weldon, was attempting. The book is an overview, meant to introduce you to a new set of tools for looking at historical events. It does that very well, with an overview that is intriguing enough to make you want to know more and a bibliography that seems, at first glance, well suited to allowing you to explore these topics in much more detail. That it does not provide a lot of depth is not a failure of the book — it is my failure to read it on its own terms.

So, yes. I do think you should read this book. It is a well-written overview (Weldon is an engaging writer who never falls into dry recitation or lecturer's voice) of a way of looking at history that is at least somewhat unusual. It explains the concepts well, even if they are not as economically driven as the hook in the title might imply, makes them intriguing, and provides you with the resources to dig further. It is, in other words, a very good survey book. If you have any interest in history or in why people make decisions, for good or ill, and how institutions both shape and react to incentives in unexpected ways, I would read this. Just understand that it is a first step, not the complete journey.

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Sigh. Why are we ruled by people who would be laughed out of a pit fueled dorm-room philosophy session? But let us put aside the rather stupid notion that wealth and income are a measure of value to society (sorry, CEO. You matter much less to society than the average teacher, doctor, or fireman). Instead, let us talk about how deeply contemptuous of society people like this CEO actually are.

The CEO of Shopify, a man named Lütke, has a company that has benefited, and one could even argue exists, from the collective actions of society. He received his university degree for free, since he attended college in Germany. He headquartered his firm in Canada — a nation that welcomes foreigners and allows them to set up new businesses. His employees are Canadian and thus he pays less for health care for them than an equivalent US firm since Canada has a universal health care system. He built his product on top of Ruby on Rails, an open source programming framework (open source refers to products and languages that are often worked on by volunteers in addition to corporate support and are available with open licensing). In other words, at every step of the way, he has benefited from a cooperative society designed, however imperfectly, to allow everyone some shot at making a good life regardless of their initial circumstances. If people like him had been in charge when he was starting out, he would never have built Shopify. And he does not care.

He has his, and he thinks that he deserves to be treated differently than others because he has his and his is a lot. The idea that he is a part of a community, that he has benefited from the work of those who came before, that he is embedded in a web of aid stretching into the past and affecting those in the future is something that he rejects. It is something, I think, that he has to reject. Because acknowledging that web means that he has to admit that he is not the master of his fate. That he is not the sole reason for his success. And if he is not the sole reason for his success, then why does he deserve to keep all the fruits of that success? And the answer, of course, is that he does not. He has a moral obligation to support the next generation in the way that he was supported by the past generation. And that realization appears to be poison to him.

Greed, to steal from a better writer than me, is not good. Greed whispers lies about “deserve” and “specialness” and “mine.” It convinces you that the obvious truth — that you have benefited from luck and the efforts of others on the path to your success — is a lie, a trick of the “unworthy”. It breaks people. The childish tantrum — oh, so you think I am a part of society? Well, I am not. I am special and you should all recognize that specialness and give me more power — of the Shopify CEO is in and of itself boring. It is the kind of banal refusal to grow up that afflicts many people, especially people who are more greedy than they are good. But we do seem to be ruled more and more by people with this attitude.

Our ruling class seems to have a desperate need not only to be successful, but to have people turn their success into a marker of value, to look up to them. As if money is a measure of a person. As if they need not only the sense of a thing done well but crowds to cheer them. Even the hint that they are not special is enough to send them lashing out, striking at everyone who they feel is not deferential enough. They want to be loved for their greed, to have all of us join in their delusion. Anything less is an assault on their weak sense of self-worth that they cannot abide. Their power, then, turns toward making sure that they can force people to give them the adulation they think they deserve.

Sometimes that manifests as a tantrum about voting power on a social media network. Sometimes that manifests as destroying USAID in a fit of pique. Sometimes that manifests itself in supporting fascist parties all over the world. But it all stems from the very simple fact that their greed has made them simple and childish. And, unfortunately, dangerous to the continuation of our society.

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One of the articles of faith — and it is very much faith, given that the current economics of imitative AI, its actual output, or the history of technological change support the notion — is that imitative AI will create a permanent underclass. The drive to become a cyclops that outsources all its work and thinking to imitative AI is a sacrament of this new religion. If it’s adherents do not leverage themselves up into the rarefied air of imitative-AI native, their prophets tell them, then they will be permanently cast into the hell of the underclass, with no hope of ever ascending to the heaven of unlimited funds and power and immunity. And they may be right — but not for the reasons they want you to believe.

Using imitative AI is bad for your brain. This makes intuitive sense. My ability to multiply in my head has declined with the introduction of cheap calculators, much to my chagrin when playing 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. My spelling, never good to begin with, and also an impediment while playing 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, has become even worse as I have relied more and more on spellcheckers. You lose skills when you don’t use them — this is obvious. It is also backed by research.

Teachers — good teachers, at least — have seen from the start that the use of imitative AI is crushing their students’ ability to think and learn. Take the professor who, after suspiciously high grades in the take-home midterm, moved the final to an in-class exam. The final was, except for a handful of people, a disaster. Some didn’t even bother to show. But there are plenty of studies that show the deleterious long-term effects of using imitative AI. A recent study showed that imitative AI improved homework, but tanked in-person exam scores. A Microsoft study showed that adults who used imitative AI became, well, dumber. Another study showed that the use of imitative AI impaired conceptual understanding. I could go on, but the point is pretty clear: using imitative AI reduces your natural ability to think through problems.

So what if the use of imitative AI reduces thinking skills, though? Isn’t that what you just said happened to your ability to do multiplication? Yes and no. Yes, it is true that my multiplication memorization is not what it used to be. I cannot, in my head, do multiplication as fast as I used to. But I still completely grasp the concept of multiplication — what it is actually doing and what it means when I multiply quantities together. And I can still sit down with a pen and paper and work out multiplication problems. I haven’t lost anything but a bit of retrieval time to calculators. Imitative AI steals away your understanding; degrades your ability to reason. It would be as if the use of a calculator permanently altered my ability to work out multiplication problems on paper, or made me incapable of understanding when multiplication was useful. And that is how imitative AI could contribute to a permanent underclass.

The future does not belong to “AI natives.” Imitative AI has too many errors, too many situations where it needs to be overseen by a human being. Unlike a calculator, imitative AI does not always give you the perfectly correct answer. And since AI is just a regurgitation of its training data (yes, yes, I know. An oversimplification. But close enough for the broad discussion), it is not good at working out new ideas or adapting to new situations. But firms are already seeing that “AI natives” are poor thinkers, with limited and non-original ideas. They are turning from those people to people who have been trained in deeper thinking, without the help of imitative AI. And that lack of thinking will not be evenly distributed in the future.

Imitative AI firms are pushing it into education at alarming rates. They tout its benefits and claim that anyone who does not learn to use their tool will be left behind, unfit for any work that would pay a living wage. They have agreements with major universities and politicians willing to insist that education budgets include imitative AI tools so that the kids aren’t disadvantaged. But using imitative AI is what will harm kids. And the truly rich will ensure that the schools they send their children to make certain that their kids are taught the way we all used to be — painstakingly, with an emphasis on figuring things out ourselves. That way, they are prepared for the real world in a way that the kids who use the tools they produce cannot be.

The future does not belong to people who prompt. The future belongs to people who think. If you want a permanent underclass, and many of the people in control of these firms certainly seem to, then you would make sure that education for the masses consisted of lessons in prompting rather than lessons in thinking. Unfortunately, too many of our educational and political leaders are ensnared by the siren song of the prompt.

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Meet The Broadway Actor Teaching Public Defenders How To Win In Court | Defector: Interesting look at how theatre impacts courtrooms.

Post by @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social — Bluesky: Fun thread about one of my favorite kinds of illusions.

Bones of Ancient Egyptian Princesses Reveal They Were Kind of Badass : ScienceAlert: Science will prove that a princess would have kicked your ass.

Prosecuting ICE’s Goons Will Be Hard—but Not Impossible | The New Republic: A blueprint for brining accountability to those who think they will never face justice.

Suing Stephen Miller - by Radley Balko - The Watch: Another route toward accountability for the worst of the worst.

Trump’s War on the Future, Monetary Edition: The Trump movement is about trying to freeze the world in what they imagine is their own image.

UCLA researchers develop low-cost blood test to detect multiple cancers and other diseases from a single sample | UCLA: Science will save your life.

Mr. Darcy is Not a Dreamboat - by Amy Colleen: Movies are almost never as good as the book, even adaptations of classics. Great essay.

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster - The Atlantic: A hundred times this. American imitative AI firms, because they cannot think of any route other than pure power, will never produce economically viable imitative AI.

The Subprime Data Center Crisis: Same point, just with a ton of evidence and math.

The Supreme Court Is Helping ICE Agents Get Away With Murder - TPM – Talking Points Memo: The Supreme Court has removed all fiction that this is a nation of laws.

three's company town - by Allison Epstein: Yeah! Another Dirtbag through the Ages! And about one of the worst people to over grace America.

Suspicion and Doubt at the National Civics Contest - NOTUS — News of the United States: This administration is just filled with gutter racists.

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all: The only thing imitative AI is good at is finding new and inventive ways to destroy the internet.

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all: I used to watch ESPN all the time. I haven’t watched a non-live sporting event in years, and could not tell you the name of anyone who is at the network now outside of a couple podcasters I listen to.

Democrats' edge in midterms polling depends on how pollsters weight by party; Great explainer about the art of polling.

Goodbye, cavities? New gel could regrow tooth enamel | ScienceDaily: Science will save your teeth.

Europe 2031 is a bet, not a forecast: Excellent deconstruction of the latest piece of imitative AI fan fiction posing as analysis.

The tech-broification of American science has officially begun | The Verge: Trump is about to destroy American science.

Walking Alpe d’Huez on race day: Is the Tour de France’s ultimate mountain becoming a problem? - The Athletic: All the good and bad of sports fandom compressed onto one mountainside.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Stories are universal. Well, maybe not mine, as no one has bought any of mine, but in general, stories are universal. You can tell Macbeth in a billion different ways. Same with Rashomon. The fact that the first was popularized by an English writer and the second by a Japanese filmmaker does not restrict them to forever belonging to those respective cultures. There is no Magnificent Seven without the Seven Samurai, but those are not the same story because of their different artistic and cultural contexts. Even historical pieces fall under this umbrella.

Generally, if you are going to do a straight story about, say, the Easter Rebellion, and you show up with a bunch of Chinese actors, people are going to understandably raise an eyebrow or two in your general direction. But if you are using that casting choice to make an artistic point, then even that can be a valid decision. Hamilton famously used a mixed-race cast with several of the historically white figures being played by non-white actors. That, combined with the use of hip-hop, made a point about how close and how far the country has come to living up to the ideals those people professed. “Oh, but what about whitewashing?” I can hear people wailing. That’s not the same argument.

Yes, yes, I know. It appears superficially the same. But the context is different. Taking a role written for a non-white actor and giving that role to a white actor in a system that to this day has denied non-white actors roles that were more general and/or not specifically written for non-whites is not an act of colorblindness. Nor is it an artistic choice (well, at least it’s not an artistic choice you should respect). It is perpetuating a wrong. It is, in other words, a dick move.

And, yes, if another film culture that traditionally treats actors outside its nationality poorly took a character meant for, say, an Englishman or an African-American and used a member of its nationality instead, that would at least raise questions. I don’t know where that happens — if my ignorance about non-Hollywood film culture was water, we would all drown — but I am sure it does. People are, sometimes unfortunately, people. But Hollywood obviously draws the most attention because of both its past and its outsized cultural influence.

All those words to just say this: if you object to Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy, you are just a gutter racist. Full stop. Stories are universal and the only reason to object to a myth being told with people who do not look like you is that you do not like people who do not look like you. And that is simple, boring, old-as-time, uninteresting, easy, gutter racism. You are not transgressive, or daring, or dangerous, or anything else you might think you are. You are just a racist — and that is the oldest, weakest, least interesting form of asshole there can possibly be.

Weekly Word Count

Not a ton, mostly planning and decisions this week. I am putting the play about cloned kids and school shootings away for now. I set out to write it because I liked the idea, but I also used it as an excuse to try some constraints. A limited cast (four characters) with limited settings (only two locations) as an attempt to make something theatrical. The experiment failed, as all my writing does (the consensus is that the limited cast and locations are just too limiting for this story), but the failure was educational.

Beyond that, I did plot out a Rockford Files meets Discworld story. Is that incredibly dumb and obvious? Yes. Is it incredibly arrogant to think I, of all people, could pull off a Terry Pratchett homage? Even more yes. But the story is fun, at least to me, and what is the point of writing if you are not going to enjoy what you write? It’s obviously not set in Discworld, and I am obviously not as funny as Pratchett, but I still like the idea and ideas I like tend to nag me until I put them on paper, in all their failed glory. In addition, I am likely to turn the Encyclopedia Brick graphic novel (which still needs a title that does not make people want to kill me) into an actual novel and am waiting on notes about the Sarah Smith novel.

I do tend to do multiple projects at once. My brain just kind of works that way (I am also doing some security research — I wasn’t kidding about how interesting the field is to me now in the age of AI script kiddies). I feel more comfortable when I can move to another project if I feel stuck on the main one. And since it doesn’t keep me from finishing work, I don’t so far see it as an issue.

No, I have never been tested for ADHD. Why do you ask?

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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OpenAI recently hacked, inadvertently, another AI firm. I say inadvertently and I mean inadvertently, because this was a penetration test gone wrong. There has been a lot of commentary around this, and much of it, I think, is hyperbolic. There are interesting things to tease out of this story, but I am not sure the press in particular is finding those stories.

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First, it has to be mentioned that a lot of the headlines that use “went rogue” or “escaped” are a kind of bullshit. They imply multiple things that are not true. The model/code that got out of OpenAI’s sandbox did not multiply itself. The pictures that the words “escape” and “rogue” imply — of an AI perpetuating itself across the internet and attacking Grandma’s recipe server — are simply untrue. The model was merely doing something that is very common in computer security: running automated tests. As far as I can tell from reports and the comments I see in security communities (I started my career in computer security for a firm considered critical infrastructure by the government, so I keep my hand, or at least a couple fingers, in), OpenAI’s model hacked a server it had access to, then hacked Hugging Face. It did this not because it went rogue, but because its instructions told it to find a way to break whatever it was breaking, OpenAI had the very bad idea to allow it access to the internet, and its training data suggested Hugging Face had the tools to do so, so it tried to acquire them. This is a story about OpenAI’s poor controls and setup, not about the first steps to SkyNet.

And this is where I think things get interesting.

The model did something very common in the industry. Automated penetration tests, or pen tests, are a staple of computer security. Hit a code base with a lot of known attacks and see what falls over. I am oversimplifying, of course, as the tools can be very sophisticated and adjust attack vectors based on results. This is an area in which I think imitative AI has a real future. These models, because they parse text very well, can be more responsive to results and thus more effective. Combine that text parsing with solid training data, a good harness (a harness is a stupid word for the set of code that shapes the behavior of a model in a given context), and the ability to research on the fly, and you can get really good attack automation. Their tendency to hallucinate is of lesser import in penetration testing, I think, because if they hallucinate something that does not work, well, most attacks do not work. With the proper boundaries, automation can make a real difference in finding insecurities.

Computer security in this country is a joke. Almost nothing is secure, because there is limited money for security. Firms see it as a cost, not a benefit, and so less money goes into protecting systems and ensuring they are coded safely (something, ironically, imitative AI coding is making much worse). Thus there aren’t the people and the resources required to make things really safe. Even firms that are good about security — and there are a lot; people really don’t want to do the wrong thing — are pressured by Wall Street to cut costs, and if security is a cost, well. Imitative AI could change that equation. Its automation could fill those holes — it could allow firms to quickly validate their own security. Now, will they? Probably not.

Fixing the holes is still going to require more work than finding them, and firms are still likely going to be reluctant to spend the required money. Things are probably going to be very bad for a couple of years. Attacking is always easier than defending. Defenders have to be perfect; attackers only have to be right once. Automation that reliably speeds up working through all of the failed attacks is going to lean in favor of the attackers, at least to start. I suspect we are about to have some high-profile security collapses. If we do, I suspect that defenders will start to get the resources needed to fight back properly. If, that is, imitative AI lasts that long.

We have been talking about imitative AI purely as a technology. But it is not only a technology. It is also a product that has to make money, and a metric ton of bullshit and obfuscation, of doom and gloom and fear-mongering. As an economic product, it is pretty clear that imitative AI will not be the world-striding colossus that its proponents insist it will be. Normally, this is not an economic problem — regular technologies make money all the time. If imitative AI were a normal product, the bullshit would fade and certain industries would get some benefits from the kinds of automation it can provide, and society would adjust (sometimes quite badly — I do not want to diminish the real dangers of a shift in jobs at a time when the government is controlled by a completely anti-worker mindset). But imitative AI is not like a regular technology in one area its creators wish to gloss over: it never gets more efficient to use.

Imitative AI is a money sink, a bubble of circular financing that does not appear to have a route to profitability. New models require ever more training time and data, so much so that imitative AI firms are worried about running out of good data. Hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate, according to researchers at these firms, and the cost of running the models does not seem to be decreasing at all. At some point, possibly soon, this bubble is going to burst. In the worst case, that leaves a lot of attacks revealed but not worked on, and computer security gets worse.

There are open-source models, too, and there is no reason to think that bad guys won’t keep using those models. Maybe the defenders will, too. But I can tell you from experience that open source makes corporate legal departments break out into cold sweats. We may end up in a world where these security models are propped up by government contracts. But that could very well lead to a world in which only the largest state actors have these tools. And that is a bad place to be. Governments often keep exploits hidden so that they can use them down the road, and many governments indulge in industrial espionage. The disparity between private resources to protect and government resources to attack is already very wide — imitative AI’s bubble collapsing could make that disparity even worse. I sincerely wish I were still in security. There is about to be, I think, a lot of challenging and important work to do.

This rambled a bit; I’m sorry. But there are a lot of interesting possibilities here, and lots of ways that things could go bad or get better. And I didn’t even talk about the most cynical possibility: that OpenAI allowed the model the freedom it needed to hack another firm and thus drive credulous headlines about “escape” and how dangerous its automation really is. The incident has certainly driven the bubble discussion, at least for now, off the front pages. Doom preaching has always been a way for these firms to drive investment. Do I think that is what happened? Maybe not, but the chances that it did are significantly higher than zero. Regardless, this event highlights how wide the gap is between how we talk about these tools and what these tools actually achieve. And it shows that the inflating bubble is not merely an economic story, but might have really long-term consequences for important areas of society.

Imitative AI is surrounded by so much bullshit that we can lose sight of the fact that it is a normal technology and its introduction is going to have good and bad effects, and that it needs the same kind of regulation that any other technology requires. But the bullshit has piled so high that it makes seeing that simple truth harder than it should be, and that pile threatens to collapse on us, making things significantly worse than they should be. Don’t let breathless headlines make you forget either fact.

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The source of my crankiness this morning is this Verge opinion piece suggesting we tax tech firms to build a public internet for kids. Now, I do not want to be a complete jerk about this. I do appreciate that the article at least points toward acknowledging that the internet is, to be cute, unhealthy for children and other living things. But the article is an example of how limited the conversation, at least at the elite (and yes, it’s the Verge. None of those folks have a ton of real power or money. But the mainstream press is elite in the sense that it helps direct the conversations, and the Verge definitely qualifies, I think, in the tech world) level, is so unwilling or unable to imagine a future that does not look pretty much like this one.

Again, I do not want to spend time attacking this line by line. A public internet supported by tax dollars is not a bad idea. It is just an ineffective one, one that will not touch the real problems. An internet for kids, supposedly, would provide an alternative to the adult internet. But the piece doesn’t really ever address how you expect to get kids onto the public internet. Most wont go willingly — pre-teens and teens are not, as the article acknowledges, big fans of doing what their elders tell them to — without the same kinds of age gating they argue against. They also don’t seem to even consider the idea that the platforms that are the cause of the problem to begin with will prevent content from this new public internet surfacing in their platforms. This is less a plan and more a wish for things to get better. Which, fine. But wishes are generally not as effective as actions.

Action is where the lack of courage or imagination come through in this article. The author equates forcing platforms to modify their business practices with preventing adults from having the internet they want. He also concedes that getting kids off the internet and into the real world is better for them than a public kid friendly internet, but derisively dismisses the concerns as too hard. As if taxing rich people and firms was as easy as falling out of bed. Basically, the author is either too cowardly or lacks the imagination to envision real solutions — change the business models that drive the addictive behaviors and create safe physical spaces for kids to congregate in. Is either easy? No, of course not. But they promise to be a much better use of time and money than chasing some fantasy of a kids’ only internet.

I suspect that a lot of people pine for the internet as it was when they first encountered it. The internet really used to be a pace where different communities could thrive, where different political factions could organize against oppression, where people not corporations largely drove the experience. But that internet has not existed for some time. Money, the libertarian disdain for democratic control of the engines of the economy as modeled by organizations like the EFF, and shareholder capitalism have all conspired to slice the internet up into little fiefdoms whose only goal is to keep you scrolling, no matter the effect on your, your family, or your society. The good internet cannot ever come back as long as we do not attack the pillars of the bad. Algorithms, data brokering, hyper-specific advertising, engagement farming must all be dealt with. And none of this is a secret. The fact that our press and tech adjacent academia refuse to simply state the truth shows just how much work we still have left.

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ICE are heavily armed killers. They’re also huge losers | The Verge: Truth.

Police training didn't make me confident in law enforcement | Opinion: Police are trained to be violent toward civilians.

U.S. Publishers Sue Google, Alleging Massive Copyright Infringement Behind Its Gemini AI Service - Publishing Perspectives: A different approach to the imitative AI theft.

AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever: Interesting look at what slop coding is and is not.

The See-No-Evil Supreme Court - The Atlantic: This is the most racist court since at least the Second World War.

The political economy of billionaire derangement: A touch complicated— I think the sycophancy explains this pretty well - but still interesting.

The OpenAI Bubble: It’s a bubble and the only question is what happens when it pops.'

‘I Don’t Want To Die’: Texas Patients Are Afraid to Get Pregnant - Ms. Magazine: Abortion bans kill women.

Sex Doll Company Creates AI Teachers For New York School District: There are no words for how horrible this is.

The depressing sameness of ICE murders - by Lisa Needham: Depressing but accurate.

A car crash nearly killed ESPN’s Matt Miller. Then came the fraud allegations. - The Athletic: Wild story.

The Case Against Judicial Review - The American Prospect: I find this very compelling.

A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage - The Atlantic: Paying people off, apparently, works.

Researchers shed new light on ancient concrete’s extraordinary durability - Berkeley Engineering: Science will keep Roman stuff form falling apart.

Researchers shed new light on ancient concrete’s extraordinary durability - Berkeley Engineering: Noah Smith is a hack.

One judge has the guts to put the horror of this Supreme Court term in context.: A judge calls out the Supreme Court’s horrible actions in plain and clear language.

Zohran Mamdani Knows He Has Political Capital. And He Intends to Spend It. - The New York Times: excellent interview with America’s best mayor.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Netflix’s problem is that it does not understand television. When it got into the streaming business, it had a library of decades of movies and television shows that it could put in front of people. People, not surprisingly, would watch their old favorites in a splurge fashion, several episodes at a time and in a row. Netflix saw, however, reasonably, that it needed to make its own shows in case the owners of its stable of shows backed out and put up their own streaming services, which eventually did happen. But because they did not understand television, they assumed that people wanted to binge watch everything. And they assumed that people would come back after a long hiatus while their algorithm decided whether or not to continue the shows. And that sort of worked for a while, especially when it was new, but they are now paying the price.

Television settled on long running shows released regularly because that system worked. People kept coming back week after week, and audiences had an opportunity to find out about the show as people and critics discussed it as it ran. The longer episode runs gave characters time to breathe, and characters helped hook viewers. The need to have a show every year for advertisers ensured that there were only months between seasons, not the years that is Netflix’s standard. There is a reason that the golden age of television largely resided in places like FX, AMC, HBO and other traditional television channels — they had shows with lengths that allowed people to grow attached to their characters, regular airing to give people time to talk up the shows, and regular seasons so that people did not have to wait years for the next installments. Netflix has none of that, and likely never can.

Capitalism, today, is not about running a profitable business. It is about running a growth business with the not-so-quiet expectation that the growth be built on software of some kind. In Netflix’s case, it is the all-mighty algorithm. There are several problems with algorithms as decision tools in general, but in the case of television, it needs to wait for data to come in in order to be able to work. And that means that production is delayed until the point where seasons are separated by years, not months. And people drift away. I do not watch new shows on Netflix — I am tired of waiting years to find out what happens. The algorithm is also geared toward generating new subscribers. It is not good enough to keep people, it is not good enough to make money — it must drive new customers, the only kind of customers that Wall Street likes.

There are other ways to run a streaming service, of course. Apple, Disney, HBO — they all release shows one week at a time and have new seasons that are much closer together. Several shows on Apple, for example, I would never have watched if it were not for the slow awareness their regular schedule built in me. People talked about them over the course of several weeks, allowing me to become aware of and then curious about them. That has never happened with a Netflix show. Now, none of those services is as large as Netflix, but that has more to do with Netflix’s early advantage than current efforts. They are much better positioned, I think, to be here in five to ten years than Netflix.

I suspect that Netflix is doomed long-term. It is run by people whose first loyalty is not to entertainment but to Wall Street. And Wall Street creates incentives that are poorly designed to sustain entertainment companies. Netflix was a giant success because of whims of modern capitalism. Those same whims are likely to keep it from surviving.

Weekly Word Count

About 30 pages of new material and re-writes on the cloning-school-shooting play. It is ready for another round of critiques/table reads.

I write such happy material.

While we are here, I am going to go completely grumpy old man on a completely meaningless topic: rejections. I got a couple in over the last few days which is never pleasant. Having proof that you suck is slightly worse than the expectation that you will receive proof that you suck. But they all had some version of “this is not a reflection on the quality of your work” in them. Yes it is! If it was good, you would have accepted it! I know the intent is to say that they had a lot of good works to choose from, but it still remains true that the work was not good enough. Pretending otherwise feels so, so patronizing. I don’t get better by not being told the truth. I am not arguing that the rejections should go full jerk, but a simple “we are sorry we could not move forward with your piece” should suffice. To me, that feels so much more professional than the equivalent of “good try, buddy!” that most rejections provide.

But I am a grumpy old man who wishes everyone would just get off my lawn.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

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1. The novel has a wealth of ideas and parallels to our modern day world, everything from the pervasive sexism, especially in tech, to the power of monopolies, to AI, to resource depletion, to the place of violence and non-violence in protest movements. Your world is also very close to ours -- modern seeming technology, modern economic systems, modern business structures. Why, then, did you choose to create a second world fantasy rather than place the story within our world?

One of the great things about secondary world fantasy is the ability to take a question from our world and explore it in a new setting. In my case, the question was: what if magic was a commodity controlled by a monopolistic capitalist entity? Trying to cover all the real-world history and issues behind our modern form of capitalism in one narrative wouldn’t have done it justice, so choosing a secondary world was really a way to control the scope of the story.

At the same time, the flip side of choosing a secondary world is it creates a gap between the reader and the story. I wanted readers to feel like these were real people and real events, which was why I went with a lot of familiar concepts.

Also, one of the things I learned while writing this book is that a lot of what we consider “modern” technology and ideas were invented a long time ago—the Dutch East India Company, a precursor to modern public companies and one of the first monopolies, was founded in 1602. Yet, no one minds if your fantasy setting is inspired by 1600s Europe!

2. Given the number of ideas, how many of those ideas were central to your concept of the story and how many fell out of the world building, feeling necessary to the world? The sexism seems load bearing for example, while the quasi-AI console alchemy versus hand-crafted alchemy feels like a grace note. Is that an accurate assessment, or did you choose to all of the ideas that populate the books specifically to highlight themes, etc?

One of the seeds that inspired Alchemists of Dawn was a conversation I had with my mother not long before she retired. My mom and I are both women in STEM who work in male-dominated fields, and what struck me was how she was still encountering a lot of the same problems and attitudes I was, even though she was coming to the end of an unquestionably successful career. That was the story I really wanted to tell, so yes, the depiction of sexism in the workplace was crucial.

Most of the other ideas were more or less extrapolated from the concept of magic as a commoditized resource. The comparisons between console alchemy and AI are perhaps unavoidable today, but a lot of those debates go back to the Industrial Revolution and the decline of artisan craftsmanship.

Ultimately, my goal was to write a good story, not a nonfiction book. The narrative was built around a couple of important ideas, and everything else was just there to support the story.

3. There is a running discussion between the leadership of the Dawnbreakers and Arjan about the value and danger of violence in resistance/protest movements. The mechanics of the the story make violence required at some points. That could be read as supporting the necessity of violence to spur change. Was the intentional? How do you see the argument between violence and non-violence?

The mechanics of the story do make violence required at some points, but I also wanted to explore the idea of characters who were uncomfortable with said violence. There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the necessity of violence in enacting change in both academic and cultural circles, which I encourage readers to look up. However, one thing that’s always bothered me about these debates, especially on social media—famously not a place where nuance thrives—was how violence is often talked about in an idealized way by people who are unlikely to see its effects first-hand. It was important to me to have characters who thought deeply about these topics and resisted the impulse to inflict violence, and to show the consequences—both good and bad—of those decisions.

4. The book includes a romance between older characters, something not that common in modern media. Why did you choose to add that romance to your work?

I think there is a growing appetite for older protagonists in fantasy, which as an aging millennial I’m thrilled to see! Adventures shouldn’t end when you hit 25. I’m lucky to have a wide circle of friends, and I know plenty of people in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s who are still trying new things, learning new skills, and yes, falling in love! I will say I did not envision that romance arc in the beginning, but as I was writing the story, it sort of came naturally. It was one of those instances where my characters surprised me, but in hindsight I should probably have seen it coming.

5. The novel is largely through the viewpoint of two participants in the system, two beneficiaries (at least to a certain extent) of the existing structure. And while other experiences are present, there is no point of view form someone more directly affected by the worst of the system. Why were your drawn to the at least partially (their gender obviously separates them to some degree from the power structure) insider perspective in your world? What were you hoping to explore and what were you hoping, if anything, the readers would see in that perspective?

I was really interested in exploring the conflict inherent in characters who have overcome real challenges to advance in a system that wasn’t built for them, but also contrasting that against their complicity by participating in the system. In part this came from me thinking about the advances women and minorities have made in STEM. These achievements are worth celebrating and I’d rather live in a world with more diverse representation in STEM fields, not less, but I also personally struggled to reconcile those feelings with how it often ultimately benefits the existing power structures.

6. The world feels very alive, very complete. Can you discuss the process of creating that world? What is, to you, the most important aspects of creating a believable world?

Thank you! Worldbuilding is often a tricky and subjective thing. I’m still figuring out my process, but the way I approach it is I build around a couple of main concepts. In Alchemists of Dawn I focused on two ideas: the existence of a large monopolistic company that controls magic, and magic as a commoditized resource that functions pretty analogously to modern technology. Everything else came out of that: a city with a large and diverse migrant population, the existence of an educated middle class, the tech and supply chains that support the world, etc.

For worldbuilding in general, I subscribe to the “hollow iceberg” approach which I believe is a term coined by Brandon Sanderson. This approach means you build just enough to give the illusion of a fully fleshed-out world. Personally I get more excited about characters and plot than worldbuilding, so I prefer to only do just enough to support the story.

7. Can you talk a little about the process that lead to Alchemists of Dawn being written and then published?

I used to read and write a ton of fantasy as a kid, but like many people I put those dreams away when I went to university and then started my career. During the pandemic, however, I started to read fantasy again and was thrilled to discover how much the genre had changed in the intervening years—instead of the same sword and sorcery and Chosen One tales, we now had a multitude of niches and diverse perspectives.

After a few years of devouring books, I eventually began to toy with the idea of writing my own novel again. I tinkered with a few ideas, but Alchemists of Dawn was really the first one that stuck. When I started writing it in late 2024, I simply wanted to see if I could finish the first draft, which I did in 5 months. I also inhaled a bunch of resources about craft and publishing—anytime I wasn’t at my day job or writing, I was learning. I ended up spending the rest of the year revising the manuscript, which was a painful but ultimately very rewarding learning experience. I think I went through 8 drafts, not including all the additional corrections I caught at the last minute.

In terms of the journey to getting it published, I went back and forth on whether I wanted to try traditional publishing, or if I wanted to publish independently. Ultimately I landed on indie because it was important to me to control whether my books ever saw the light of day, which is something you don’t have control over in trad publishing. It helped that I had enough professional experience to be confident that I could put out a polished, high-quality product that would meet reader expectations.

8. What do you think you gained, and what do you think you lost by having a multi-point of view story as opposed to a single point of view? Do you have a preference, or does the work dictate that choice and if so, how?

I don’t think I lost anything by having multiple POVs, in fact I’m very glad I did it and I think it made the story richer. It did make the storylines MUCH more complicated, and it showed in my word count. All my subsequent projects have been single POV and I can tell you they are a lot simpler and shorter! But in this case, the mother-daughter relationship was important for me to explore, and having both POVs made for a much better story.

9. What is the best and worst craft advice you have ever received?

The best craft advice I’ve received is to just finish the first draft! It’s OK if it sucks, it just has to exist. Most people find editing easier than writing, and you can’t edit words that aren’t there. But also, I’ve noticed that I generally don’t discover a story’s deeper themes until I get quite a ways in, so for me it’s far more important to have a terrible first draft than to spend endless amounts of time perfecting it from the start.

The worst craft advice is probably anything that says you must “always” or “never” do something. I take any black-and-white advice with a huge handful of salt. There is an exception to everything, and a lot of craft advice is highly dependent on a writer’s individual situation.

10. What is the best and worst advice on the publishing industry you have received?

I think the best advice is to write the story you want to tell, not chase trends. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work to improve the marketability of your ideas, but you should be writing something you enjoy—no one will read your book more than you will, and the process of writing a book can take a long time, so don’t write something you hate just because you think it’ll sell better! By the time you’re ready to publish, chances are trends will have shifted anyway.

The worst advice is that beginner authors should spend a lot of money trying to get published. Don’t get me wrong, some things are fine in moderation (except paying for a vanity press which is never a good idea), but you should carefully vet who the advice is coming from and what they stand to gain from you listening to them. At the end of the day, it’s your book and it’s understandable you’d want to give it the best chance possible, but it’s a good idea to check in with more experienced authors, ideally through a reputable community.

Thanks to Ms. Valiant, and, again, the book was quite enjoyable.

Cross posted to Bookstack

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This rambles, much like a zombie in a movie does, so feel free to imagine a tense soundtrack as you wait for the point to emerge.

Senator Graham has died, unexpectedly, and most of his colleagues and the press have talked about how nice he was in private — in their work, in their personal lives, etc. The discussion of his life has downplayed the impact of his policy decisions. This is pretty common. Graham, in life, supported a violent foreign policy at every turn, and turned into a complete Trump sycophant even after January 6th, supporting things like the abrupt end to USAID. The end of USAID undisputedly killed , and will kill, hundreds of thousands to millions of people, for example. And nothing was made of this. Compare this reaction to the reaction to Graham Platner being forced out of the Maine Senate race.

This is not a brief for Platner, who was forced to step down after credible accusations of sexual abuse emerged (or, as one wag put it — a bad week for Graham crackers). He is a terrible person and should never have been the senate candidate. But the press felt much more comfortable talking about Platner’s personal failings rather than Graham’s policy failings. Policy has, according to our press, no moral component. Well, I can hear you say, it is just policy. Except it is not just anything.

Supporting election denialism is not a pure policy position, an argument about how to best order society. It is an attack on the ability to order society — it is morally wrong. The sudden destruction of USAID is immoral. This was not a planned draw-down after a democratic debate about best how to allocate limited government resources. This was a sudden removal of aid with no warning and no chance to find alternate sources. Death was inevitable, and supporting such a move was undeniably immoral. And yet, because such support is plausibly cloaked in policy, the press and society in general seem to allow people a pass.

I am not going to chastise almost anyone for how they react to the death of a famous person. While it is true that if you do not want people to speak ill of you after you are gone, you should lead a good life, I also respect the instinct to be decent to the loved ones of a deceased person. But we would all be much better off is we and our press took seriously the fact that policy has a moral component. And that the morality of how a politician implements policy matters. Even when they have died.

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A German court recently ruled that Google was liable for the false statements returned by its AI overview feature. What interests me is not so much the specifics of the case — it is a German court, after all, and the case has yet to go through appeals — but the defense that Google did and did not use in the trial.

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Google tried two main defenses neither of which worked. They argued that AI overview was merely a part of search and that people could follow the links, and therefore the fault, if any, lies in the source material, just like a normal search. The judge did not buy that argument. The output of the AI overview, according to the judge, was a distinct product, created not by pointing people to others’ data but by Google itself. This certainly feels like common sense. The Google AI system produces results that are distinct from the normal search results. Even if they search to find the information, the summary comes from Google itself. The other defense was that people should know that AI results are not reliable, but the judge found that Google did nothing, or at least nothing legally sufficient, to warn people that the AI overview results can be crap. One thing that you will notice is what is missing — the idea that the AI results are not generated by Google.

Imitative AI is created, to simplify, by training a system to predict what comes next, either in a series of words or in pictures. Again, I know this is overly simplified, but for our purposes it is sufficient. In the United States, the law relieves providers of liability for things that others post on their internet platforms, even those things that are surfaced in, for example, a search. Since the material in AI overviews is generated from training data in a way that is arguably similar to the way an algorithm surfaces search answers, it could be argued that they should have the same protection from liability. Perhaps they did not make that argument because the laws in Germany do not support it — though the discussion of the difference between search results and the overview information suggests some close cousin, at least, to the concept. But they may also have avoided it because it would cripple their business.

In order for these systems to be trained, they require an enormous amount of data. To get where we are with them now required essentially close to the entire internet and all the current published books. They require so much data that new model training is slowing in part because they have no new data to train the models on. Did they pay for this data? Of course not. Their legal argument for using all of other people’s works is that imitative AI training is transformative — it takes others’ works and turns them into something new. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that you can and always have been able to easily get these systems to regurgitate complete books and pictures, and realize the hole this places them into.

If training really is transformative, then that means that the material produced by imitative AI systems is the responsibility of the people who own and program the systems. That means firms like xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are responsible for each lie, for all the child sexual abuse material, every dangerous piece of medical advice, and every conversation that encourages suicide that these systems produce. If they want to avoid that kind of liability, they can claim that the outputs are merely representations of the training material. But that, then, opens them to the argument that they stole their training material. Which in turn makes them liable to likely millions of people with damages approaching, in purely economic terms, a metric fuck-ton of money. Either way, they are staring at potentially company-destroying liabilities. They need, legally, for imitative AI to be both transformative and merely the regurgitation of others’ words — a floor wax and a dessert topping.

Now, it is modern capitalism where the law is most often on the side of capital. It is conceivable that they may get their way, that imitative AI could be declared both a floor wax and a dessert topping. But that has not happened in courts yet. And without it, these firms could be, no, should be, in a lot of trouble.

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Obama’s Harsh New Takedown of Trump Points to a World After MAGA | The New Republic: Patriotism is better than nationalism

How to Sequel Like James Cameron: 'Terminator 2': Fun discussion about what makes a good sequel.

Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’ | Fiction | The Guardian: Fascinating interview with a fascinating writer about a fascinating issue.

Which syllable combination makes NHL history’s best roster? Welcome to Slow News Summer - The Athletic: Poor Jonathan Toews.

A switch to school buses prompted Scottish soccer fans to donate to Mass. charity | WBUR News: People are good.

We Already Have Everything We Need to Regulate AI: Yep.

What is Haglund’s deformity? The medical condition that leads football players to cut holes in their boots - The Athletic: The human body is a wonderful and terrible thing.

Lawsuit: Man used Grok to make 7K sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself - Ars Technica: Grok should be shut down now.

Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free: The headline says it all.

The Insurgency Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Excellent look at modern Democratic politics.

Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities | WIRED: Private firms should not be allowed to do this.

The Demon Next Door - The Atlantic: A terrifying story for a lot of reasons.

A Voting Rights Promise, Betrayed for 156 Years | Bolts: I doubt that these laws will survive the Supreme Court — a place where no law that does not benefit white conservatives is safe — but we need to be pushing on every lever we can in the attempt to save democracy.

How ‘Backyard Baseball’ Became a Cult Classic - The Ringer: Video games do not need photorealism to be cool.

How ‘Backyard Baseball’ Became a Cult Classic - The Ringer: It is close to impossible to be poor and have access to the kid sports.

Prepare for Airplane Purgatory - The Atlantic: Trump made your flight worse.

Friday Friday, July 10, 2026 (On the Chud Vision of Roman History) – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: Roman and greek history do not support fascist day-dreams, no matter what Musk’s algorithim says.

An orbiting disco ball gave Einstein’s theory its most precise test yet - Ars Technica: Science is so cool.

Apple sues OpenAI alleging trade secret theft: Irony is not dead.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini are two up-and-coming, young hockey players whom both of their respective teams tanked (deliberately creating teams they knew would lose) in order to try and obtain them. Neither player was a superstar in their first year, though both were good. Both, last year, played at a very high level (at least until Bedard got injured). Both teams expect the players to lead them, respectively, back into contention in the near future. Part of that expectation is that their teams expect both players to get better as they get more experience and learn how to play the game more effectively. And these two players are not an exception — every sport behaves like this. And if you understand how to identify potentially good players before they reach their peak skill — not, I should add, an easy task — then you can build a contender relatively quickly. But the key is that you let your young players learn and grow — you do not expect them to be superstars right out of the gate. If Bedard and Celebrini were authors, however, their careers would likely already be over.

In publishing, only the out-of-the-gate superstars have a real chance, anymore, to build a career. It is very hard to build a sustainable career by starting small, improving, and growing into your skills. Publishers do not take the time to build authors. There will be no Forslings or MacKinnons — extremely good players, one of which has won the NHL’s most valuable player award — who did not live up to their initial expectations. But each player kept improving and eventually they became stars, players you can win a championship with. Instead, publishers expect all authors to be Sidney Crosby — instant superstars. They hand out large deals to new authors and then abandon those authors if they do not live up to expectations. They fill their roster with authors on much smaller deals, provide little to no support, and then dump them when they fail to reach superstar status. It is, to be gentle, a less-than-efficient means of running a business.

It also did not use to be this way. Many authors, such as Cormac McCarthy, started with small books and were nurtured until the point they became the literary equivalent of all-stars. This no longer seems to be a viable path. Publishers, possibly driven by analytics, an internal conviction that they do not know how to sell books, and a marriage to the ironclad rule of Wall Street to have mega hits, have abandoned the concept of a writer’s career. They instead seem to be stuck cycling through debut authors and hoping that the money from those authors will carry them through to the next set of debut authors. Outside of the handful of megastars, the only way to have a writing career that involves a traditional publisher, it seems, is for authors to get a traditional publishing deal and then either sell directly to fans introduced to them by those books or transition into something like teaching based on their publishing credentials. We have an industry, then, so afraid of building talent that it overspends in the free-agent market and destroys its salary structure in the process — to go all in on the sports team metaphor. And no one wins that way.

One has to wonder how long this can continue until some publisher tries to spend $50,000 per author over a number of years as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars once or twice. If that ever happens, I suspect that a publisher that spends the time and money to learn how to build author careers will find itself astride the industry.

Weekly Word Count

Not sure, honestly. I rewrote a screenplay to submit to the Academy Nicholl Fellowships contest. That had to be dozens of pages, and I did a fair amount of work on the Encyclopedia Brick project. It has been fun trying to learn how to turn my very wordy output into a graphic novel. It is an interesting and eye-opening way to think about building stories. I find as long as I am doing things each week, I am happier if I don’t worry about the number of words. There is, I am finding, such a thing as too much data.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Alchemists of Dawn a book by G S Valiant

Author’s Website: Posts | G.S. Valiant

My headlines not only get dorkier, they get more obscure. Pretty soon I will be the only one who understands them at all.

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Alchemists of Dawn by G.S. Valiant is an entry into what I think of as industrial fantasy. These are books with magic infused into a modern world, but they are not, in my mind, magical realism. These are fully formed second world fantasies — fantasies that have created an entirely new world, like Middle Earth. But these books do not work with the tools and palettes of medieval or medieval adjacent societies, European or otherwise. These books color with the sharper, metallic paint of the modern world. And Alchemists of Dawn is one of the better entries in the field.

It follows two women, mother and daughter, through a world where magic is refined as oil is in ours, as they try and navigate the overt sexism of their employers and their world, which is incredibly unequal and unstable as a result. Protests hound the firm they work for, and losing one’s job can often mean losing one’s life. The split narrative allows for us to follow both the people in power and adjacent to it as well as those forced to endure power, whether the poorest of the poor or mid-level bureaucrats trying to keep their morals in an immoral environment. The story is told with sure handedness, balancing the perspectives generally well, and interesting characters. It is an ambitious book as well.

This book is bursting with ideas. One corporation controls magic — created by refining certain rare minerals into a magic gas, for lack of a better term, that can then be used to enchant items. Everything from transportation to police weapons depends on magic, and it is largely controlled by one corporation. Monopolies, as any of my readers already know, are bad, and this monopoly is the worst. But the book is more than just a critique of private control over public goods — though it is most certainly that. It touches on office politics, AI, sexism, capital exploitation, economic inequality, political power, police abuse, and the corrupting influence of wealth. It even glances at the peak oil conversations from my youth. This embarrassment of ideas might actually be the book’s weakest point — some ideas are well explored and given some depth. But some are almost tossed out as afterthoughts and given their resonance with today, I would have liked more depth than this novel could afford to give them. That is a loss, in my mind, but not a serious one.

The novel is also a really fun read. I could almost sound like an ad for a 1930s action movie — thrills! spills! action! adventure! romance! The novel really does have all of that layered on top of its more intellectual pursuits, and they generally work. At its heart, the book is a story about how people navigate living under power they do not control and the book does not pretend that it has easy answers. People use violence, persuasion, fear, mutual aid, and self-imposed ignorance to fight the sometimes literal monsters that concentrated power produces. Each tactic sometimes works and each tactic sometimes makes things worse. As in the real world, dealing with power is messy and uncertain.

Alchemists of Dawn is the best kind of science fiction/fantasy in my mind. It uses unreal elements to hold a mirror up to the way our real world works, and shows us something interesting and important about it and ourselves. And while this novel has too many ideas to treat all of them with the depth I would like, it does provide a deep and interesting exploration of its core question: how do you live a good life in a world where the power in the world is aligned against that good life? It doesn’t provide easy answers, but it does provide a fun story as you think. Recommended.

Cross-posted at Bookstack

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For those that do not know, arguably the best player on the American national soccer team was given a red card during their last game. A red card is for an especially egregious foul and it results in the player being sent off, his team being unable to replace him (so they play with fewer players than starting number), and that player not being able to play in the next game. Now, I am not at all qualified to say if the red card was deserved. As far as I can tell, there are three general categories of foul in soccer: “why are you flopping, you big baby”, “wait, that’s not legal even in the NFL”, and “what the hell— not even hockey lets you get away with that.” I have only ever seen cards handed out for the first category, which tells you all you need to know about my ability to referee a soccer match. But I have seen no one in the soccer world argue that the red card was deserved, and the player in question, Folarin Balogun (a birthright citizen, I might add) handled himself with complete class during and after the incident. However, there is generally no appeals process for overturning bad red card decisions, meaning the United States was set to play an elimination game without arguably its best player.

And then FIFA, soccer’s world governing body and the organization running the World Cup, intervened.

They delayed the suspension until next year, meaning that Balogun can play in the elimination game. They did this the day before the match was supposed to start (Monday evening, the day I am writing this post), meaning the US’s opponent, Belgium, had been practicing and strategizing for a squad missing Balogun and have pretty much no time to properly prepare for a US team with him. The action is almost unprecedented — Ronaldo, a superstar soccer player, was granted a similar reprieve, but that was before the World Cup started. Apparently, the rule used to lift the suspension is not an entirely great justification for the action. And more importantly, Trump called the head of FIFA at least once and maybe as many as three times. The process was completely corrupt, in other words, and that leaves decent fans in something of a bind.

Given the corruption of FIFA, and given how it kowtows to strongmen and wanna be strongmen like Trump (remember, this organization invented a “peace prize” to give Trump when he whined about the Nobel organization failing to give his warmongering self a Nobel Peace Prize. Subtle, FIFA ain’t.), I half expected this outcome, especially since the wider soccer world pretty much believed that the red card should not have been given in the first place. But the soccer world also plays by the same set of rules: red cards are final, no appeals. It is not fair, exactly, but it is within the normal way the game is played. Wanting to believe that two wrongs make a right in this case, especially since they actually arguably do, is a bad thought to encourage. I am not a believer in the slippery slope, generally. Gay marriage did not lead to marrying farm animals, as I was assured would happen. But while the slope is not always slippery, it is often subject to erosion.

The danger of corruption is less the individual acts — though those should not be minimized — but the slow process by which the corrupt, if allowed to, destroy the social contract. Police do not stop crime. In their defense, they are not designed to stop crime, except in the crudest sense that the specter of punishment may deter some people who would otherwise give in to temptation or the worse angels of their nature. Crime is prevented, to paraphrase Agatha Christie, by the little cop we all carry in our heads. It is that cop, that guardian of decency and social cohesion, that prevents us from carrying out crimes and misdemeanors. Most people, even in disasters, do the right thing not because there is a cop watching but because they want to do the right thing, even, especially, in hard times. Corruption weakens that little cop.

Corruption turns good people into suckers. If the corruption is widespread enough and rewarded often enough, then normal people feel more and more pressure to excuse, ignore, or even participate in the corruption. Why do the right thing when doing the right thing is never rewarded and doing the wrong thing is? Why play by the rules when the people who make and enforce the rules do not? It is a compelling argument, and sometimes it is correct. But it erodes civil society. By making people question the value of decency and honesty and fairness, it weakens a society’s ability to demonstrate any of the three. And a society that has a lack of any of those elements, much less all three, is a broken wreck of a society where those with any power, no matter how little or transitory, abuse it for personal benefit. It is a society that cannot experiment or build or even maintain law and order.

This red card issue is not an important issue in the grand scheme of things. But it is a symptom of a larger culture of corruption and impunity that has been eating away at the foundation of America, of arguably the democratic world, since the 1980s. When CEOs are not held responsible for their actions, when firms are allowed to manipulate stock prices by buying their own shares, when companies can steal the entirety of human creative output and then claim that the resulting product should not be held liable for its output, when cops can get away with violating rights under qualified immunity, when presidents can bend the rules of sport to make themselves feel better about being in charge — why should anyone follow any rule? Why should anyone think that the ground they stand upon is not going to rot away and leave them falling and exposed?

You will be reading this after the game has been played. Such are the flows of newsletters — I am not going to swamp your inbox with a rumination about red cards and societal collapse — so you will likely already know that my hope has been dashed. But I hope it nonetheless — I hope that the United States Men’s National Team decides to sit, of its own accord, Balogun. I doubt it will happen, especially given that the USMNT coach has been defending the decision since it came down, but it would be the right thing to do. Not because the red card was correctly handed out — I am convinced by the soccer media that it was not. But because allowing two wrongs to make right just increases the odds of people placing more wrongs into the world. In the short term, it feels good. But in the long term, it eats away at the sense of community and fair play that all societies need to exist and excel. The USMNT could be heroes if they did their part, no matter how small, to fight the corruption drowning our world.

Sometimes, fighting corruption is more important than being right. And certainly more important than winning a game.

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Capitalism is not, for the purposes of this discussion, a market economy. Rather, when I speak of capitalism, I speak of what we sometimes think of as late- or end-stage capitalism. To me, this is best thought of as a form of economics where the owners of capital are the primary beneficiaries of the economy and almost exclusively the drivers of economic activity. It is characterized by monopolies and near monopolies, privatized profits but socialized losses (through bailouts, government contracts, and government subsidies), a swamping of political speech by a handful of donors, regulatory capture, the erosion of quality of life for workers, and increasing wealth inequality.

Democracy is not just the mechanical process of counting the votes of those who are allowed to vote. The Soviets did that, and no one in their right mind would consider that a democracy. For a democracy to be meaningfully a democracy, in my opinion, there need to be several more conditions. People must be able to choose their representatives, not have their representatives choose them. Different perspectives that respect democratic norms (i.e. no, we do not have to respect people who say that others should not be allowed to vote or that genocide is a-okay) should not be swamped by campaign finance rules. Losers should peacefully submit to having lost. Losers should have an opportunity to win the very next election. The government should have limited powers to interfere with religion or other associations. Astute readers will notice that the United States — and many democracies worldwide, especially in the English speaking world — do not fulfill most, if any, of those conditions. Capitalism is likely the reason why.

Capitalism, as practiced today, is a winner take all contest, where monopolies are the end goal. In the words of Peter Thiel, competition is for losers. And since competition is for losers, democratic competition is also for losers. Capitalism encourages being the only winner, and being the only winner permanently. If you lose, you can go out of business. if you allow competition, then others can take money and market share, making your position more precarious than it needs to be. Capitalism, as practiced, almost requires you to be completely dominant to survive. Is it any wonder that people who are capitalists try and apply those same rules to other aspects of their lives?

In addition, once you have won it is both easy to believe you are special and an almost psychological imperative. It is hard for people to admit, especially in a winner take all society, that they were lucky or had a head start in any way. And if you are special in business, then does it not stand to reason that you are special in other areas? Even if you don’t believe that — and none of our titans of industry seem to have that level of humility — the power of the government is extremely tempting. Having control of the government means having control of the markets, and having control of the markets means that you almost cannot lose. Democracy be damned — you have a business to run. Even if you don’t want that kind of power, it is likely your competitors and other titans of industry would — how can you stand back and take the chance that they will obtain it?

Democracy, then, likely cannot survive an economic system where capitalists, those who own capital, reign supreme. Capitalism’s natural end state is a monopoly or near-monopoly. Money flows to the top, and those at the top are likely to believe that they deserve to be in control. Even if they don’t believe themselves to be special, they almost certainly understand the power of the government and understand that they need to be in control of that power, for self-protection if nothing else. Leaving the economy in control of the people who own capital almost inevitably leads to the corruption of democracy. The capitalists will use their power to elect people and judges who will bend the rules toward their needs and desires. The more they twist society to their benefit, the more power they will have, and the more power they have, the more they can twist society to their benefit. Democracy cannot survive that kind of spiral.

This is not to say that the economy must be entirely state controlled. Not having an outlet for people to build some level of non-governmental power can also lead to abuses — look at almost every communist government in history for example. Nor is it to say that there is no value in a market based economy. But neither private striving nor a market economy requires privileging capital. People can form businesses and grow to a size where, in conjunction with other like-minded people, they can influence the government without warping it. Worker owned collectives or businesses can compete in a market economy just as well as shareholder owned firms can. More importantly, societal, democratic control of the economy is an obvious and necessary condition to maintain a democratic government. Allowing people to amass economic power means allowing them to amass political power and sooner or later, they come to warp the government to their own ends.

Lately, some centrist Democrats have pushed back furiously on the victories of the left, wondering how anyone could possibly defend being a democratic socialist. The answer should be obvious — you cannot have a democracy without democratic control over the economy. Capitalists, almost inevitably, won’t let you keep your democracy if you let them control the economy.

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