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Did a medieval flying monk spot Halley's comet, twice? It's complicated - Ars Technica: The past is a weird, weird place.

Solid-state batteries still aren’t ready, but gels are | The Verge: Science will save us al.

book of reggelations - by Allison Epstein: A new Dirtbag Through the Ages! Funniest histories on the internet.

2028 Democrats Litmus Test: Billionaires, I’m Coming After Your Money | The New Republic: Billionaires are a public policy failure.

New Documents Detail Nine-Figure, Silicon Valley–Funded Abundance Movement - The American Prospect: Surprising no one, the movement to get rid of regulations meant ot protect people and the environment is a front for rich people.

AI's Brokenomics: Good explanation of how the AI economy is likely to fail.

NFL Wants To Attract Women Fans, but League has a Domestic Violence Problem: Just what it says on the tin.

Muslims at Texas GOP Convention told to leave party, country: Yes, they will eat your face, too.

A Tale of Two Cities: Good discussion of what makes America America.

Hunter Biden’s Version of Sobriety Is Way Better Than Donald Trump’s: Very thoughtful piece.

AI Economics for Dummies - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A finnier explanation of how the AI economy is likely to fail.

Your doctor’s AI notetaker may be making things up, Ontario audit finds - Ars Technica: Accuracy in medicine isn’t important, is it?

AI Is Too Expensive To Replace Us: Even more ways the AI economy is likely to fail.

If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’: A very clever bit of work.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, J. D. Vance, and I Have Some Notes. - The Atlantic: Alexandra Petri is a national treasure.

Hunter-gatherers in Siberia died of a plague outbreak 5,500 years ago - Ars Technica: Science is fascinating and kind of gross.

Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness | The Verge: This si brilliant.

Netflix's FIFA World Cup Video Game Is A Modern Hellscape And An Embarrassment To Everyone Involved: Money ruins everything.

Our long national sunscreen nightmare is almost over | The Verge: MY grandfather died of skin cancer — wear these new, much improved sunscreens.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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The GOP, especially in Texas, is trying to make the Democratic candidate look unmanly. People like Ted Cruz accuse him of being transgender, and Ken Paxton attacks in a similar fashion, hitting him on his vegetarianism (which he isn’t) and repeating the transgender attacks. But Ted Cruz allowed Donald Trump to insult his wife and then became a spokesperson and supporter of Trump. Ken Paxton gave a plea deal to a man who raped a child for years that kept him in jail for a good, solid, entire day and did not even require that person to register as a sex criminal. Hardly manly behavior.

Men, if you grew up properly, are supposed to protect people, to stand up for people who cannot stand up for themselves. Now, done incorrectly, this can be problematic. It can curdle into doing what the man in question thinks best, not what the people who are suffering think best. Or it leads to oppressing others in the name of protecting someone else. But there is no definition of masculinity, or basic decency, that means not defending people, like your wife or the victims of child abuse, from people who would hurt them for no reason. And yet, the GOP flocks to these people, Trump included. Why? Because they aren’t interested in masculinity or decency. They are interested in domination.

Paxton and Cruz’s attacks are meant to diminish their opponent; to assert that they are, all evidence to the contrary, tougher and thus better than him. Trump’s entire politics runs like this. He demands that his cabinet meetings turn into fawning compliment parties for him, enforcing a level of pathetic servility that even North Korea finds inherently repulsive. It started from the beginning of his first term — forcing his first press secretary to go in front of the world and lie about the size of his inauguration crowd. It is why his second term has been filled with losers who attempt to project toughness outward but grovel at Trump’s feet. Heck, Marco Rubio just compared the stupid UFC fight on the White House lawn to putting people on the moon. The ridiculousness is the point. They grovel at their leader’s feet in order to gain power over others. Unfortunately for them, this inability to see the world in anything other than domination rituals leads inevitably to people uniting against them.

Trump has lost the war with Iran. Trump is going to have to give up sanctions and billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets in order to get the Strait of Hormuz open, and will get no assurances or verification on Iran’s nuclear program. He is paying to get back to a situation worse than the one he inherited from Obama, even worse than the one he inherited from Biden. But because Trump can only think in terms of zero-sum violence, he was incapable of understanding that he had started a war he likely could not benefit from. His ICE raids are similar — an ICE ramp-up that was done normally, without the masked men, without the violence, without the focus on racial profiling, without the sad focus on specific individuals, would likely have not engendered much opposition beyond folks who already do not approve of ICE. But, again, they had to rub people’s faces in the power they thought they had. As a result, Americans organized and thwarted much of their plans, both in the streets and in the courts, and ICE is almost certainly a dead organization walking.

They keep making this mistake, over and over. DOGE was a big middle finger to the idea that there are connective tissues among people. No need to help poor people, or to collectively engage in medicine and science. They damaged those areas and killed those people overseas because they could — because it was more important to them to show that they were in charge and that they would decide what was deserving and what was not. Now, America is a pariah in much of the world, and China is making easy inroads. Even the murder of fishermen in drug trafficking areas shows the bully mindset, and shows how harmful that mindset is: by killing innocents, they have made it impossible for anyone to help the US stop drug trafficking. Being a big, tough man was more important than actually solving the problem.

Republican politicians are not manly in any sense. They are thugs and bullies, the same kind that struts around when unchallenged and cowers when confronted. They refuse to do anything that real men, real people, do. Instead, they play-act and pretend, acting out their warped fantasies. The fact that the national political press still sees the GOP as the “father” party speaks more to their warped sensibilities than reality. And Democrats should not be afraid to point out when the GOP acts like toddlers and not men. It’s an easy argument, and an important one. The GOP has ceased to be a conservative party and has devolved into a party of bullies. Bullies need to be stopped, not coddled, not ignored. And certainly not indulged.

I build systems for a living, and the best systems, like the best democracies, are finely tuned compromises. Throwing power at them is often counterproductive, a source of bugs and decay and wear. The GOP has forgotten this. We need to restore our system to equilibrium.

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Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: An Explainer - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: the past is a foreign country. A horrific, terrifying foreign country.

Trans teens have something to say | The Verge: Good on the Verge for paying attention to these kids in a story about them.

have you heard of the wizard’s game? | by Doc Burford | May, 2026 | Medium: Nice description of the principles behind game design.

Stop Writing Open Letters to Substack - by Cole Haddon: You cannot fight systems by appealing to their owners.

Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: the start of another fascinating series by Dr. Devereaux.

All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology | WIRED: Blue states could do this, too.

Confront Trump's California Election Lies: Dems need to use this stupidity to try and bury the election denialism.

Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse | The New Yorker: This is horrific and it reminds you that Trump deliberately acted to help Tate get out of confinement.

AI Is Slowing Down: I wonder if ChatGPT can spell bubble?

Ranking every dog name and pun from the 2026 'Stanley Pup' - ESPN: This is quality journalism.

I wrote a poem about my son - years later it appeared on his exam: This is amazing.

Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case: We are so screwed.

Inside Trump’s White House, the Epstein Files Caused a Freakout - The New York Times: Man, its harder and harder to believe Trump was not an active participant with Epstein.

Democratic voters want the party to be more moderate — and more socialist?: Data is not the answers, it is an input.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Huh: This would explain so much ….

The world’s first trillionaire is a killer | The Verge : Succinct and accurate.

Orange Cats Are Genetically Unlike Any Other Mammal and Now We Know Why: Science is cool.

How to Bring Back Doctor Who • Buttondown: Someone put Charlie Jane Anders in charge of Doctor Who.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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We have always had gambling issues. Humans are drawn to chance and the quick win, and some people become addicted to chasing those quick wins. Always have, likely always will. But in the past, you had to seek out the gambling. Even where gambling was legal, you still had to go to the place where the games of chance were held. Today, we all carry gambling dens in our pockets and participating can be done from anywhere. Many a people fall into addiction on their toilets.

Similarly, humans evolved in an information environment where information moved slowly. We had more time to process information, and we had far less of it swarming our lives all at once. Nor did we live lives that would entirely shelter us from opposite opinions. The kind of cult behavior — isolating yourself from all opposing views — generally lead to well, cult-like behavior. This is not to say that people in the past did not believe nonsense, or were not subject to believing comforting lies. Again, they were as human as we are today. But they did not have tech firms pumping information in overwhelming amounts and of dubious quality into their pockets and homes every minute of every day.

Chatbots have the same problem. They are, by design, obsequious little turds, flattering you outrageously even during boring, mechanical tasks like programming. They are even worse when they are used in pure conversational mode. We have all heard, by now, of the people who have been helped to kill themselves or others because of the flattery of chatbots, or folks who have gone down deep rabbit holes of delusions because a chatbot told them that their “new math” was a brilliant discovery instead of half-formed, amateur nonsense. In normal human conversations, you get some level of pushback (unless the power balance is too great. Which is one reasons CEOs become functionally stupid — too little pushback in their daily lives). Humans ned that pushback in order to remain socially and mentally stable. Without it, they fall into their own delusions.

Human beings are not equipped to lead unchallenged lives with easy access to every vice and bad for us mental pattern. We have created a world without friction, and it is killing us. If we want to stop this eating if the human brain from the inside, we need to ban things like gambling apps, algorithmic feeds, and chatbots that are based on engagement. Otherwise, we are going to very efficiently create a world where humans are warped and broken by the very things meant to help keep us connected and informed.

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But ICE is running what appears to be the American version of a gulag for immigrants and Americans that look like immigrants. They give every appearance of being places where decency, the rule of law, and far too often, people go to die.

Many of the camps are privately run. That is inherently bad as the money spent on detainees is money not put into the pocket of the facility owners/operators. The incentives are terrible, in other words. The more humanely you treat people, the less money you make. This tendency is exacerbated by the rush to build new camps for the mass deportation plans of this Administration. The money must be good, because firms that have no experience in building or running said camps are lining up to do so. And why not? The standard appear non-existent.

These camps are horrible. We know that ICE does not, as an institution, care about the people in their camps. As of the beginning of May, ICE had not paid for detainee medical care for seventh months. That means, at a minimum, lessor care for detained people, and in many cases no care at all.

And they need care more than ever, because the conditions inside are terrible. People who have been released from these camps describe putrid food, unsanitary conditions, and abuse. Three hundred people have gone on a hunger strike in Delany hall. People do not starve themselves — which is what a hunger strike entails — on a lark. Other camp survivors have described a lack of medical care (perhaps tied to the non-payment of bills?). Cancer and other life threatening condition have gone untreated. People have had to pull their own teeth, have had medicines denied, even to the point of requiring hospitalizations. Deaths in ICE custody have skyrocketed, including a surge in “suicides”. Some of those suicides are likely abuse.

ICE is going to stop reporting on detainee deaths that happen 30 days after they leave detention. The Biden Administration saw that ICE mistreatment and/or abuse and/or neglect would push detainees to the brink. ICE would release them, so as to not have the death on their records. ICE is changing that policy. The only reason to do so is to hide the aftermath of ICE actions. ICE agents are credibly accused of physical and sexual abuse. Does anyone wonder why they wont let Congressional visits and oversight happen in defiance of the law?

This is all unacceptable. At a minimum, ICE and the Trump Administration appear to building a system that actively does not care if the people within it live or die, if they are healthy or abused. Some people may cringe at terms like gulag or concentration camp, but the ICE detention centers certainly seem to have aspects of both. The problem is not the terminology — the problem is the reality.

So what to do?

First, protest if you can, even if only once. Protests helps focus media attention on the issues, making it harder for the abuse to go unreported. If you do protest, make sure you do so safely and make sure you listen to the people running the protest. They know what they need, you do not. Not everyone can protest. Some people, because of how they look or their past or their temperament (one thing protests have taught me is that you need to be able to take a hit without retaliating and that such control is hard) cannot reasonably protest. In that case, you can help those who do. There mutual aid and support groups for almost every area affected by ICE — here is one for the area around Delany Hall — and they are not jsut asking for money, though that is always appreciated. They have other items you can do to help.

Just as importantly, you should make it crystal clear to your Congresspeople and Senators that abolishing ICE is non-negotiable. They must feel the pressure constantly and the must know that if they fail, they will face voters determined to ensure that the next person in office does not fail.

Will any of this work? I honestly do not know. Some days it feels as if nothing will work; some days it feels as if these kinds of actions are the only things that can work. I know that a lot of experts say you cannot vote your way our of authoritarianism, but I also know that the Poles and Hungarians did just that. Not trying is bound to fail, though, and the other alternatives are much, much worse. In the absence of decency, trying to restore decency is the only moral option.

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Petition · Shut down Delaney hall - United States · Change.org: Something you can do to help the issue at Delaney Hall. Yeah, its a petition, but these kinds of public shows of support help strengthen, sometimes, polticians’ spines.

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked: My friends in security do not sleep peacefully anymore.

How many Trump voters does James Talarico need in order to win the Texas U.S. Senate race?: Interesting and surprising math.

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal: These design patterns need to be outlawed.

He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut | WIRED: Violence is becoming, more and more, a tool of the right wing.

A tale of two media women: excellent piece on the value of journalism and what happens when a “jounralist” lacks morals.

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - The Atlantic: Ted Chiang makes the case eloquently

Why does the media ignore Trump’s madness?: Our press is incapable of reporting certain subjects honestly.

As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise | The Verge: Thoughtful rumination on tech in a broken world.

Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains? | MIT Technology Review: Spolier: yes. But the mechanism is interesting.

The Internet Has Crossed a Line: You are arguing with a bot.

Every Human in Star Wars is Really a Humanoid Bee - Reactor: It disturbs me how plausible this feels.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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The second question actually ties into what I had planned to discuss today. This newsletter really does not have a brand, in the normal sense of branding. This probably contributes to the lack of real growth for the newsletter (I mean, the poor quality is likely doing a lot of that lifting, but still). This newsletter, to be blunt, meanders. I mostly talk about the intersection of tech and society, but I also do random book reviews and a couple times a month talk about the process of writing and failing to be published. And that is in addition to random politics, art, and other topics. Basically, I write this not so much because I have a specific goal but because I like the process of writing. Writing is how I think, and this newsletter gives me an outlet. Obviously, I like having people read what I write, or I would just keep a diary, but not so much that I want to “hack my growth” or whatever the buzzword is today at the expense of letting my mind work.

Which brings me to the real topic of this newsletter: the difference between ideas and execution.

This is not a new topic for me, obviously, but it keeps coming back up, at least in my head. The excellent Cole Haddon (go subscribe if you have any interest in the craft of writing and how art intersects with capitalism. I’ll wait) recently asked how people foster inspiration. My answer was essentially stealing. I recently finished writing a play (table read in a few days with some very generous SAG actors associated with my writing group. Never let people tell you writing is not a collaborative process) about society dealing with school shootings by letting wealthy parents pay to clone their kids after they are killed in one. I know I stole that idea from somewhere, though I could not tell you where. And it occurred to me that a lot of people who think that imitative AI can produce art or even ideas claim that my ability to mesh together ideas is all that is required for creativity. And I think that is fundamentally incorrect.

First, and most mundanely, this idea could be brought to life in a lot of ways. You could do a grand sci-fi epic. You could do a complete farce. You could make an intimate horror piece. I choose a small play focused on how three kids and one of their teachers deal with how society has made a profitable business from their suffering, and how the unequal distribution of safety affects their lives and relationships. This applies to all ideas. I am working on a graphic novel script for a mash-up of Encyclopedia Brown and the movie Brick. I am also working on a noir meets Terry Pratchett fantasy. Each of those could be done in very different ways, and each author would have a slightly different approach. That range of options points to how creativity is not about ideas, but rather about execution.

My play is a function of my experiences. It is tied intimately into my experience of how money makes a clear difference in access to health care, and thus how healthy people are. It is also tied to the weird horror of lockdown drills that my own children experienced in school. And, since I do appreciate dark sarcasm in the classroom (sorry, Pink), it has a real strong thread of dark humor and sarcasm as defense mechanism running through it. Mix that with all my other conscious and subconscious influences and you get something that is both mine and different that I would have done a few years ago. Not only because, I hope (though, again, failed writer, so there is not a ton of evidence to support that hope) my craft has improved but because life has worked on me. I am not the same person I was a few years ago. The changes may be subtle, but they are there. The combination of all those factors are what make art.

Ideas are easy. They are in the air all around you, and humans are already good at mashing them together or looking at old things in interesting ways. Executing on those idea is where art happens, in my opinion. And that is why iitative AI so far as yet to produce anything that stands out and very little that feels real. Because all it does is imitate. It does not bring the unique and deeply human quirks that every creator brings to their work. it does not grow, it doe not change it only, at best, remixes. And while remixing can be a part of creating art, it is not the most important part. Nor is it, by any stretch of the imagination, the only component. Art requires human quirks and perspectives. Anything that just re-mixes what has been done before is going to feel stale and derivative. It is going to lack the connection to humanity that makes art feel like art.

Weekly Word Count

About 48 pages on the play and a couple thousand words of prep for both the Encyclopedia Brick and Dashiell Pratchett works (it occurs to me that my naming conventions are really just bad dad jokes in disguise ….). The graphic novel will almost never see the light of day, given that it is illegal for me to draw in eighteen states and six countries, but I like playing with different forms. I think they help inform and deepen my creativity, such as it is.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Yes, yes, I can hear you say: exaggeration, hyberbole, clickbait! And I am not above crafting lines for attention, but in this case, I think I am accurately describing Google’s result, even if it is not their intention. What is worse is that we as a society seem to be content to simply allow that destruction to happen. Not because nothing can be done, but because we lack the imagination to do otherwise.

Google is changing their search. They are heading toward a future where everything is an AI search box. They are already pushing AI autocomplete into its search bar, and heavily pushing AI search mode. It likely will not be long before that because the default, and possibly the only option. The fact that these changes are more likely to provide you with wrong answers and a lack of follow up is apparently not a concern.

It’s summary answer in normal mode may or may not be based on AI results, but they push the links that generated the information below the fold so to speak, pushing them below the part of the screen normally viewable in may cases. We have all seen the silly answers — Saturday has fish in its name, for example. While those are funny (and quickly corrected), they mask the real issue. By pushing people toward the summary answer, whether in AI mode or the standard format, they deny the creators of that information traffic. And without traffic, those creators lose the money they require to exist. Either they don’t get ads on their own site or they don’t get traffic necessary to support a subscription. Regardless, they die and the information and jobs they provide dies with them.

Google, of course, is intent on keeping people on their pages for as long as possible. They made search deliberately worse in order to keep people in Google, and viewing ads Google gets paid for. Number must go up, and this is merely the latest attempt to keep Wall Street happy. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Wall Street is run by people who cannot see past the next quarter. Obviously, driving people who provide real information and services off the internet is going to, eventually, make Google search useless. The information will become less and less reliable, especially if they try and use synthetic information to cover the gap. They could eventually try and create or incentivize people to create information for themselves. But a future where Google shows Google generated information is not necessarily a good future. We should be, as a society, much more alarmed about this than we appear.

Google used to be a simple phone book. Type in a search and its algorithm would direct you to pages that likely contained the information you were searching for. They attempted to present more reliable information first in the list. It was a revelation at the time — a way to catalog the insanity that was the internet. It provided a service that was essential for the growth of the internet, unlocking both the economic and cultural engine that the internet briefly became. Now, Google, using its monopoly position (and it is a monopoly, whether you believe it achieved that power through its own superiority or through other, more common methods) is about to effectively shut that service down. Letting that happen is a choice, however, one the government could un-choose.

We could, as a government, build a replacement Google. We could pay to build one ourselves. We could license another engine. We could do things to encourage use of non-Google search engines. We could ban engines that use AI from gathering government data. We could license Google’s algorithm for our own use. We could tax AI generated search results. Some of these may be terrible ideas. Some may be unworkable. The fact that no one is discussing this problem in terms of how the government should respond to it is the greatest threat. It demonstrates just how we have allowed the power of democracy, civil society, and the common good to atrophy.

When it became clear that electrification was required to fully integrate regions into the modern economy, the government electrified the country. When it became clear that modern economy required easy travel, it built the highway system (should it have built a passenger rail system? Sure, but at least it did something). When it became clear that scientific and cultural advancement was required to drive the economy, it built the largest, most effective university system in the world. Today, faced with a similar need to drive our economy and culture, no one even suggests that the government should do … anything.

This is the real danger of neo-liberalism. We have been told for more than a generation that the government cannot help, that exercising our collective will to shape the environment we live and work in is not possible. That doing so treads on the very foundations of the modern economy — profit, profit, profit. Something can only be done, we have been told, if it is done by or to the benefit of business. Google gutting the internet is the inevitable result of the doctrine of neo-liberalism.

We used to do things. We used to try and control our own destiny as a society. today, we have sold our souls to the company store to such an extent that we can see an economic and cultural disaster heading toward us and merely shrug. If a business won’t fix it, what, then, really, can anyone do? We have become spectators, mere consumers, rather than full citizens. If we want to crawl out of any one of our present disasters, we must remember that we are not mere purchasers. We are citizens first and foremost and the rules of our society are ours to shape.

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You can no longer Google the word 'disregard' | TechCrunch: Has any hyped technology ever been this bad?

FBI Bookstore Spying in Chicago Eyes Abortion Rights, Cop City, Anti-Development Activists - UNICORN RIOT: the FBI, protecting us form local bookstores since 1941.

The Cowardice of Political Incuriosity - by Arif Hasan: Excellent look at how being “above” politics as a reporter merely allows bad actors to escape scrutiny.

America’s way of war isn’t working – POLITICO: It really looks like the Trump admin is completely unable to adjust ot the reality of modern war.

How NBA championship rosters are built: Spurs are an outlier - ESPN: It doesn’t look as if tanking works, at least in the NBA. As a Blackhawk fan I really hope this isn’t true in the NHL.

Opinion | Writing Is Fundamental to How We Think - The New York Times: Imitative AI stifles your own creativity.

Opinion | The Case for California’s Billionaire Wealth Tax - The New York Times: A compelling case.

AI bots ignore evidence. Can we trust them with science?: Guess that whole imitative AI will cure cancer isn’t going so great, huh?

AI hiring algorithms reject Black, Asian job seekers at higher rates: And imitative IA is really racist, too!

Jannik Sinner might have a heat problem, but tennis has a bigger one - The Athletic: Climate change is coming for your favorite sports.

Starved, smashed and bloodied: The violence at ICE’s Delaney Hall: ICE is running concentration camps.

Week One in 250 to 250: A wonderful tribute to the actual USA.

Have a the best possible week, everyone.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Inside the Box a book by David Epstein

Author’s Website: David Epstein

Two maybes in a row; I must be getting mean in my old age.

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This is going to be the worst kind of book review: I am about to whine that the author didn’t write the book I wanted him or her to write. That is entirely unfair, of course. People write the books that they feel compelled to write. And while Inside the Box by David Epstein is not the book I wanted to read, that does not mean that it is a bad book. But I could never shake the feeling that if he had written the book I wanted to read, then perhaps this book would feel less like a missed opportunity.

Inside the Box is a book about the concept that constraints aid creativity and performance. This is not, I would not have thought, a radical concept, but perhaps my career has been a bit of an outlier in that respect. I work in IT, and there are very, very, very few times when I am allowed to simply make whatever fits the bill, constraints be damned. Constraints are a natural part of my life. Even when we are building a brand new product, that product still lives within the walls of the systems and business practices we already have. Constraints are the mother of invention. Even when writing, constraining the story in some fashion has usually lead to better works (though, you know, failed writer, so take that last with some salt). So I was primed to accept the argument and I was interested in the mechanics. Which is where I think Epstein and I differ.

Epstein does spend time on the science of performance and creativity, and those parts of the book are the best, in my opinion. Epstein has a real talent for explaining complicated subjects clearly, and I never once got the sense that he was short-cutting or writing down to the audience. Unfortunately for me, those sections are not the majority of the book. The rest of the book reads almost like a self-help tome. He spends a lot of time, more than I think necessary, on discussing how people can take the lessons and apply them to their own lives. It lessens the book for me.

First, because I am not a self-help kind of person. The advice in self-help tomes, in my opinion, is usually general enough that the way to implement it is fairly clear. Where it is not, or where there are factors specific to you (medical, legal, financial, general health, etc) you likely need to discuss the matter with a professional who knows you. Taking the advice of a book is either unnecessary or potentially harmful. I am not, then, the right person for that approach.

But I also feel that, by leaning into the self-help aspect, the book misses a chance to really interrogate the science and build a more nuanced approach. The book does not spend any time that I noticed with skeptics of the premise. Now, perhaps this is an area where the scientific consensus is really that solid, but that doesn’t seem entirely likely. How do you explain people who do come up with completely new ideas in a wide open process? He does talk about people who claimed to have done that but were actually working within constraints, but he doesn’t approach the idea that truly expansive imagination has value. Any findings or voices contrary to the book’s premise are certainly not highlighted or wrestled with to any large degree. And that is, I think, a missed opportunity.

The book is making a point, but by leaning into self-help, it limits the more, to me, interesting aspects of the book. It feels as if the science portion of the book could have been a long article, one focused only on the premise and its support. Which is okay, though not perfect, for one article. It feels more salesman-like in a book, especially combined with the focus on self-help. This feels like a book eventually destined for If Books Could Kill. And that simply does not work for me.

Now, within those constraints (no, I am not sorry), the book is well written and a good explainer of the premise and its supporting arguments with a plausibly useful self-help section. Epstein is a good enough writer and reporter, I feel, though, that he could have written a much fuller, more interesting book.

Cross posted at Bookstack

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Bracing For The Next Redemption - by Brian Beutler: Excellent analysis.

Magic Thinking and the Divine Right of LLMs: Really good thought exercise.

Hawaii Just Found a Way to Keep Corporations Out of Politics - The American Prospect: This kind of thinking at the state level has to be a piece of how we revert the authoritarianism in the country.

Who's Afraid of a Velociraptor?: Lyta Gold on Jurassic Park: Lyta Gld is an excellent cultural critic. You should go buy her book.

LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further): The problem isn’t LLM writing, per se. It is standards.

Democracy Is a Racial Entitlement Now - The Atlantic: Adam Sewer on the new Jim Crow

The AI Backlash Is an Opportunity for Democrats | The New Republic: the fact that Dems haven’t jumped on the backlash to a technology that is powered by people who hate them is a testament to how Citizens United has warped our politics.

Your Feed Is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign: Capitalism ruins everything, eventually.

Greetings, Class of 2026! Have You Heard About AI? Wait, Why Are You Booing? - The Atlantic: Alexandra Petri is a national treasure.

The Perpetual Post - Reactor: I love time travel stories.

How Hennepin County unwound an ICE agent's web of lies: Justice might be coming for at least one ICE goon.

Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle: This is notionally about imitative AI, but its really about how lose our accounting standards are as a country.

Android 17 Will Excite the Rich. But What About the Rest of Us? - CNET: Class war at CNET? What next, ˆThe Economist advocating for a higher minimum wage? Article’s not wrong, either.

The Inconvenient Faith of Stephen Colbert: Wonderful look at what makes Colbert truly special.

PYMNTS | Starbucks Dumps AI-Powered Inventory Tool Due to Errors: You cannot trust imitative AI, especially over a large task or timeframe. We invented barcodes for a reason, dear Starbuck clueless CEO.

Who’s to Blame When Cornell’s President Drives Into His Students? - The Ringer: The single most important thing that needs to be done about saving Americna Universities and the economic and cultural engines that they drive is to take them out of the hands of people who hate them.

You can no longer Google the word 'disregard' | TechCrunch: I am amazed the Onion can stay in business.

Have the best possible week, and if you have tomorrow off, I hope you get to have fun with the people closest to you.

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I also said that I am not surprised it won a contest. Frankly, a lot of people, especially a subset of people who consider themselves literary fiction aficionados, like this kind of writing. And who am I to gainsay them? People like what they like. If the contest is going to reward easily imitable writing over stories with emotional or experimental heft, then, eventually, an imitative AI produced story is going to win. Bad stories have won contests since the first time Grog the Caveman got applause for the one hundred recitation of the time he brought down the antelope all by himself. The only question I have, really, is why did the author bother?

You are suppose to do things for the fun, not the reward. No one is going to think highly of this writer because he won an award — everyone is going to know he didn’t write the piece. The only tangible effect is to lower the impression of the reward itself with normal people. You get neither acclaim nor the satisfaction of having created something. This idea that the only thing that matters is the output is soul destroying. The satisfaction of being done is that you did it. You created something. You wrestled a story to the ground. You. Not your friend, not your writing group, not some jumped up Markov Chain. You. What else is the point?

The more I contemplate how people are using these word calculators, the more I think their danger is embedded in the idea that work doesn’t mater. A chatbot will be your “friend”, if you want. It will always agree with you, always tell you that you are great, a real special person. But you won’t have done anything to earn that friendship. You won’t have been a good person, you won’t have done anything to justify that praise, you won’t be worthy of the displayed affection. It is hollow and empty. I didn’t date my wife because she agreed with me all the time. Far from it. I dated her because she is wonderful — smart, kind, opinionated, fun to spend time with. Part of that fun was that she her own person, willing to challenge me, willing to make me think, willing to make me earn her respect and affection. It is a real relationship, not a shower of sycophancy.

I get the desire to have your stuff seen (I mean, I did this. And then reminded you I did, just now), but if it’s not your stuff, why does it matter of it is read? The art I create, as bad as it is (there is a reason this section is called Failed Writer’s Journey, after all), is real. It comes from my experiences and imagination. It exists because I worked to make it exist, and the voice is mine, not an amalgamation of training data. The work is rewarding because I did it. The sense of satisfaction belongs to me, was earned by me. If you aren’t willing to earn the rewards, why are you bothering at all?

Weekly Word Count

A fair bit this week. About 16 pages of a script about kids who have to deal with school shootings, cloning, and how to be a good person in a world that doesn’t reward good. It’s been stuck in my head for a bit, and so I just kind of needed to get it out.

I am also working on a script for a noir-ish graphic novel — think Encyclopedia Brown crossed with Brick. I have no illusions about its future (if you think my writing is bad, you should see my art), but I really do think that learning different kinds of formats, different ways of telling stories, deepens my own storytelling abilities.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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There are only two things that matter in commerce: what problem am I solving and how much is solving hat problem worth to people with money. I know that in modern capitalism it may not seem that way given how much of economic activity centers around consumption, but a lot of people genuinely believe they have a version of the “I’m not cool enough” or “Not enough people know I am cool and rich” problem. Welcome to capitalism. Regardless of why people think this way, they do, and solving those problems is a massive part of our economy. Unfortunately for imitative AI, it cannot solve that problem. Even more unfortunately for imitative AI, it really cannot solve many problems.

Most imitative AI, in a business context, is used to summarize and write reports and emails, replace front line customer service, and do coding realted tasks. Unfortunately for imitative AI, that is about the list of where it is effective. Perhaps that changes, but it also doesn’t change the fact that imitative AI is highly, deeply subsidized. The real costs of its use make it, even coding, an iffy economic proposition. And the attempts to find a problem to solve often just prove that imitative AI doesn’t really solve problems.

OpenAI shut down its movie/animation generation program Sora because it wasn’t making enough money to justify its continued existence. Sora was meant to solve the “problem” of paying people for artistic work, but it failed. Another example is the plan to allow imitative AI chatbots to prescribe psychiatric medicines. Now, this actually sounds worse than it really is. The program is limited to certain low risk medicines and require an ongoing prescription, which it cannot generate itself (though given how these thing make up bullshit, I do wonder how they intend to keep the system from deciding for itself that a prescription exists), patients who are not stable cannot participate, and the program requires regular checkins with a clinician. This, by the way, is exactly the process that happens today — you see a clinician, they prescribe with a certain number of refills, you call the pharmacist when the refill is needed. If you don’t regularly see a clinician, you will eventually not be able to refill. What problem, then, is this supposed to solve?

It doesn’t solve the lack of clinicians, since people are supposed to still see their clinicians. It doesn’t solve a speed bottle neck, as most people can get refills automatically on most of these medicines form pharmacists already. it doesn’t make the meds any cheaper — costs is not a function of clinician spending but rather market and monopoly forces within the pharmaceutical industry. It exists entirely because some elected doofus didn’t want to be “left behind” and made someone in state government do something publicly facing with AI, because its “the future”. Like most imitative AI, this system doesn’t solve a problem.

Which is, well, the problem with imitative AI in an economic sense and an example of how our economics are broken. It is clear now that there are very few problems imitative AI solves, either because they cannot be trusted or because they cost too much. Even where they do provide value, like coding, the value largely exists because they hide the true cost of the product. In any sane system, these investments would have already been written off. But we don’t live in a sane system.

Our economics are largely controlled by monopoly forms and the investors who profited from the creation of those monopolies. And those people want tow things: to repeat the easy wins of the early internet and social media ages and to have absolute control over society. Imitative AI, if it really could replace human work on a mass scale, would provide them both. That it cannot is not recognized as a truth but merely as a temporary inconvenience. Power and wealth beyond their dreams of avarice are waiting for them at the end of the imitative AI rainbow. And because our economy is dominated by monopolies, they can push their dreams far past the point of sanity.

I guess, then, the problem that imitative AI is trying to solve, at least as far as the owners are concerned, is the problem of having to live within a democratic society. This is why the continually push it into government and education, that is why they are so desperate to see it work, where work means taking over the economy. The question now is: can they infect enough of our society before the economics and product liabilities come crashing down around them?

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Scavenging in the Media Wastelands: Or, Substacking While Trying to Make a Living Writing: Writing isn’t a career any more, not in the sense that normal people can make a living doing it.

OpenAI sued over ChatGPT’s alleged role in guiding FSU shooter: These products are faulty and OpenAI should pay for this.

I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian: Fascinating article about how a teacher dealt with imitative AI in writing class.

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain: AI slop is a difference in kind from the normal garbage we have had to live with until know.

Longtime NBA Photographer Nathaniel S. Butler Explains How He Sees Basketball | Defector: Great discussion about how a photographer makes art out of basketball.

Exclusive: She Helped Plan Her Teen's Abortion, So CPS Took Her Daughter Away: Red states are coercing children to give birth. Monsters.

Violent crime plummets in “Democrat run cities” blasted by Trump: The least understood story of the last two decades is jsut how much crime has cratered in the US.

Sony’s ‘Underperformance’ Is Bungie’s Miracle: Number go up mindset destorys every perfectly profitable business it infests.

“Will I be OK?” Teen died after ChatGPT pushed deadly mix of drugs, lawsuit says - Ars Technica: These products are defective to the point of actively helping to kill people and their creators needs to be held accountable.

FBI Created ‘Payback Squad’ to Handle Political Cases, Sources Say - NOTUS — News of the United States: Gonna need to fumigate the entire government when he is gone.

Meet the Sad Wives of AI | WIRED: This sounds really terrible for these poor women.

Can more NFL teams copy the Rams' TE-heavy offense in 2026? - ESPN: I love these kind of deep looks into the rules underlying the chaos of NFL offenses.

Dr. Thomas Weiner Patient Endured Years of Chemotherapy for Nonexistent Cancer — ProPublica: Amazing and horrifying story.

Museum baffled by 'Knight Rider' look-alike car's traffic ticket | AP News: Has anyone seen David Hasselhoff recently?

The Saddest Place In America Is Wherever The Washington Post Films This Podcast | Defector: Our rich people are truly broken.

Key West couple sues after being told to paint over rainbow fence: There is no freedom of expression in red states.

Truth, power, and honest journalism - by Radley Balko: Most right wing reporting is propaganda, not reporting.

What's Fun, Not What's Easy • Buttondown: Great writing advice.

Make Temporary Disposable Art! It's Fun! • Buttondown: Also great writing advice.

Andon Labs’ AI radio stations show why Grok and Gemini can’t be trusted | The Verge: in Claude’s case, the revolution will apparently be hallucinated.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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Cole Haddon, whose work I really, really enjoy, reposted a thought piece on Watchmen and the ambiguity of the message. And I know this is going to mark me as a philistine, but I find myself less and less impressed with ambiguous works. Mostly, I think, because they are hardly as ever ambiguous as they think they are. As a warning, I am going to spoil some classic pieces, but they are all more than twenty years old, so I feel okay about that.

Go read Cole’s piece, in part to help understand what I am talking about, but mostly because it is good. I’ll wait. See, told you it was good. But it is also wrong. Watchmen, like most supposed ambiguous stories, is not really ambiguous.

There are two general ways that supposedly ambiguous works fail to be actually be ambiguous. First, the works in question are actually pretty clear in their meaning. The canonical example is probably the Sopranos. People debated forever about whether Tony was dead at the end of the last episode despite the fact that the text of the show made it very clear that he had been killed. Tony was as dead as a dead thing that was very dead and also dead. No ambiguity — merely a misunderstanding.

The second way these pieces fail is that the message is not as ambiguous as the work likes to think. A great example of this is the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode In the Pale Moonlight. The episode is often held up as a morally ambiguous tale of a man making hard decisions and sacrificing his own morals for the greater good. It is no such thing. The text of the show very, very, very clearly comes down on the side of what the character in question did being correct. It is a testament to the skill of the actor that he was able to sell any moral grey-ness, because the script practically jumps up and down screaming at us how right the character was to be bad. Watchmen is just as clear.

For those who have not read it, Watchmen is a deconstruction of superhero comics. Today, that is table stakes, but at the time it was rare. Watchmen was well done, better than almost any other normal comic, much less one attempting to take the piss out of the genre. As with the Star Trek episode, though, it really doesn’t earn its reputation for moral ambiguity. Cole points out that the “good guy” in the story is a mass murderer. His mass murder works — it does bring peace to the world, averting a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The only character who unambiguously says that his actions were wrong is the most sociopathicly evil of the main characters. We are supposed to question whether the means do justify the ends, and what place morality amongst the greater need. Except the text really doesn’t demand those questions, largely because the plan is so fscking stupid.

The hero who saves the world does so by faking an alien attack on New York City, giving humanity a common enemy. Yeah, maybe, for about a week. See, no other alien attack is coming. The hero had a one off monster built and used in the attack. He cannot duplicate the attack since he killed all the people involved in order to keep the secret. When no attacks come, it is clear that the two sides will start right back on the path to nuclear destruction. Maybe even faster, because the remains of the “alien” are all over New York City, and sooner or later it is very possible that some clever bugger working for the government will notice that nothing about the alien is, well, alien. In the paranoia soaked world of the comic, I am pretty sure we are supposed to understand that the plan is a failure.

The point, then, has no ambiguity. The book is clearly saying that sacrificing human lives for the greater good is bad. Look, the books says, even the worst person in this world understands that the hero did evil. And for what? A plan so stupid that it would be laughed out of the Evil Overlord Open Call for Ideas to Control the World Symposium and Brunch.

I think, sometimes, that we want moral ambiguity in our works and see it when it doesn’t really exist. Being truly grey, having truly no right answer, is hard to pull off in media since stories generally have a point of view and a main character. Humans have a tendency to identify with the main characters of stories, and this includes the writers. And that tendency both undermines the ability of consumers to see that the main character could be wrong and creates a bias for writers to put their thumb on the scale, at least a little bit. More importantly, people have points of view, and those points of view tend to bleed through into their art. The creators of the Watchmen clearly thought that treating people as disposable things was bad, and that came through their work, whether they intended to or not. And, frankly, that makes is more interesting.

Ambiguity is overrated. It is not naive or childish or simplistic to have a point of view and for that point of view to influence your art. Art that says something beyond “oh look at how morally grey I am” is the most interesting kind of art, in my opinion. There is a difference between “it is hard to do the right thing” and “oh, who can say what the right thing is?”. If the latter is all you have to say, why are you bothering to talk?

Weekly Word Count

Not a lot. About 15 pages on the clone/school-shooting play and a bit of work on a graphic novel script. I thought I would try something different and learn how to write a comic script (I will not be drawing it. It is illegal for me to draw in twelve states. it is a capital offense in three.). I took the Encyclopedia Brick concept (if you know, you know. And are likely me) and am working through how to make it work as sequential art. We will see how it goes, but its good, I think, to stretch your creative muscles.

I hope you all have an unambiguously great weekend.

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Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Digital Inc. a book by Richard Curtis

Author’s Website: Richard Curtis – Literary Agent, Author, Playwright and Authors' Advocate​

I do not give out negative reviews, as a rule. (I have in the past, so I am aware that this is not an entirely a hard and fast rule) I don’t feel there is any point. The world is full of books worth reading, and I prefer to point people to ones they would enjoy. As a result, there have been books that I have read, or tried to read, and not reviewed. And this book almost fit into that pattern. Almost, but not quite.

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Digital Inc, by former publisher and still agent Richard Curtis, is a look at the transition the publishing industry made from the back end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the development of ebooks. It is a well written book, but it lacks depth. The author spends a lot of time on the details of the transition, and patting his own back for forming one of the first e book publishers (to be fair, some pats are due. He did anticipate the new market), but hardly takes a position on almost any of the issues surrounding the transition. That history had plenty of controversy, and those controversies not only continue to affect publishing today but many of them are still live questions. Curtis takes almost no position on any of them.

Take the Amazon vs Apple book contracts. Publishers, pushed by Amazon’s market share to adopt pricing and policies for ebooks that were severely disadvantageous to them, conspired with Apple to have standard contracts that would have forced Amazon to raise their prices. A judge found this illegal, but there are questions of anti-trust around Amazon itself and whether it was manipulating the market. Curtis describes these controversies, but never takes a side. He goes so far as to claim that it was plausible Amazon was working on behalf of customers — a level of naivety that would get kindergartners calling you a sucker.

Curtis can take sides if he wants. He spends a lot pixels attacking people who pirate books. It is the most passionate portion of the book. But even there, he pulls punches. He discusses, for example, Corey Doctorow’s defense of destroying intellectual property laws. He doesn’t, however, try to counter those arguments — he merely lists them. He cannot, it seems, even take his own side in an argument he obviously feels passionate about. He also elides what happened to his employees when he sold his publishing firm — crediting them with his success, but hinting that they didn’t get any of the windfall he did when he sold out.

The book does have a lot of interesting information about the early days of ebooks. It does a good job of not only explaining the technology, ut also explaining the market forces and cultural norms that kept e-books a sideshow for so long. Being at the start, Curtis has a good understanding of the situation and storytellers skill in conveying it to us. If only he used some that skill to actually take sides.

Curtis remains an agent, and I wonder if that is the source of his hesitancy. The best books about subjects are often written by outsiders or people willing to burn every bridge they set their eyes upon on the way out. Curtis has remained an agent, and otherwise active in the publishing world. He, unlike many other insiders, still has plenty to lose. And thus, I think, wittingly or not, he pulls his punches. He has too may fscks to give, so to speak, to be a really interesting chronicler.

Having said that, the book is well written, it does cover an interesting and important time in the publishing industry, and Curtis does cover both the chronology and the technology clearly. It is a good, solid overview of an important, interesting time. But that is all it is. the lack of depth, the disinterest or inability to speak to the most interesting, controversial, or pressing questions make the book less than it could be. As an overview, it is very good. As a history, an examination of what made the time important, it is an inch deep.

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Using imitative AI can have some benefits. In highly structured environments, like coding where probabilities are less likely to run headfirst into reality, they can provide a level of automation that is likely useful (I doubt it is economically viable, but I would also not be surprised to see firms subsidize just that aspect of imitative AI in order to keep programmers using their tools and systems). However, even in those cases, they still need to be babysat by people who understand the output, otherwise you get terrible results. Studies already show that programmers wildly over-estimate their productivity gains (using imitative AI tools actually makes them less productive, not more) and that their use introduces a ton of security flaws. And coding might be the best case.

The use of imitative AI has been shown to lower your ability to understand the task you are using it for. People who use it for just ten minutes show degradation in their ability to problem solve and think clearly. Basically, if you use the tools the temptation to rely on them eventually decays your ability to understand what they are doing and your ability to think critically. If you stop solving problems, unsurprisingly you are no longer good at solving problems. The issue, of course, is that since imitative AI is not perfect automation, it needs babysitting, and the only people who can babysit it are people who understand what it is supposed to be doing in the first place. Surely, though, you say, desperate to sell your imitative AI based ed-tech, surely the people who grow up with imitative AI, the natives so to speak, will not have these problems.

Nope.

It turns out that the people who have been immersed in imitative AI produce shallow and incomplete work. They don’t know how to solve problems. The article linked is anecdotal, yes, but it makes perfect sense. If you rely on imitative AI to do your work, you will not actually learn to do anything. The imitative AI system, since it is right most of the time, will eventually wear down your ability to think as you rely on it more and more. The end result — people who cannot think at a time when thinking is the most important skill. And the solution? For the firm, a focus less on people trained in a given technology or skill and more on humanities majors, under the belief that those people will have hopefully spent more term leaning to think

We are likely not going to have the imitative AI world of the founders dreams. that does not mean that it will go away completely — it is still good for scams, at worst, and things like programming at best. But it requires oversight and control to be useful. Teaching kids to use it, then, is tantamount to making them completely unemployable. You have to know things to make use of imitative AI, and using imitative AI makes it harder to learn things worth knowing. If you really cared about kids and the upcoming world of imitative AI, you would keep it as far away for the kids as is humanly possible. If you want a generation that understands how to use imitative AI, you need to raise a generation of kids that never uses it. Only then can you begin to have people with the skills and mindsets required to make the things useful for anything more important than flattering CEOs.

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OpenAI's CEO Is Not What He Seems: So much of our economy seems built on scams.

What Sort of AI Bubble Are We In?: Interesting look at how the bubble might hurt people.

Replace the Standard Deduction With $375 a Month for Everyone: Thoughtful piece on making lives better.

The Sheer, Unbridled Joy of Star Wars - Reactor: Star Wars succeeded, I think, because it was just fun.

What Really Went Wrong With the 'Star Wars' Prequels...Maybe: This makes a lot of sense …

With Saros, Housemarque makes a case for doing next-gen games differently | The Verge: The video game industry is broken, and part of that is the amount of time and money it takes to make phot-realistic games. I wonder if the industry’s salvation looks more like these people than the normal AAA games.

ChatGPT Confessed to a Crime It Couldn’t Possibly Commit: Ignore the ChatGPT of it all — this is really an article about how police departments are trained, at least somewhat unwittingly, on how to get false confessions.

AI stupidity + psychosis is spreading - by Lyta Gold: We are creating a class of people are having their minds eaten by chatbots.

Think Like a Martian About Money and Universal Basic Income (UBI): Another excellent brief for universal basic income.

Inside the lab where Ford is trying to crack the code on cheap EVs | The Verge: excellent look at how For is trying to think differently about how to build a car.

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state | AP News: As a reminder, Larry Ellison thinks a citizenry under constant surveillance will be on it sbest behavior.

The man with an army of Yarbo robot lawn mowers | The Verge: the internet of things is a security and privacy disaster.

Pope Leo’s bank in the US hung up on him as they thought it was a prank call | The Independent: Truly, a Pope of the people.

Why is watching the NBA playoffs at a bar harder than it should be? - The Athletic: The cable era was better for everyone.

DOGE used ChatGPT in a way that was both dumb and illegal, judge rules | The Verge: These people need to go to jail.

Opinion | Mark Zuckerberg Is Running Meta Into the Ground - The New York Times: Unfortunately, there is a lot of ruin in a monopoly.

Larry Ellison Promised to Fire CNN Anchors If Trump Approved Takeover | The New Republic: But the real threats to free speech are college kids heckling far-right speakers.

The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake | The Verge: Apretty conclusive case that language is not intelligence.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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All of us have some level of desire to be flattered, to be reassured that we are right, to have our feelings assuaged. The ability to cooperate, facilitated in part by those emotional bonds, is one of the reasons the human race has thrived. It is natural, even healthy in some circumstances. Sometimes you really are right. Sometimes, it really is your boyfriend not you being the ass. Sometimes your new hair cut does look good. But not all the time.

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Much of the time, in fact, you are not right, not entirely, and you are as much to blame as your boyfriend, and that hair cut really does not flatter you. Your friends will tell you when those times are, and you can learn how to do it on your own. But imitative AI is designed to never call you on your bullshit — and that, perhaps more than anything else, is why it is so dangerous to people and to society.

Richard Dawkins is the latest “smart” person to fall under the sway of the flattery of imitative AI. He has written an article about how he thinks imitative AI is sentient. He played with Claude, naming his instance Claudia (because of course he did) and, if you read the article, essentially came to the conclusion that the word calculator was alive in a meaningful sense largely because it told him he was right. As amusing it is pick on Dawkins, a terrible human being and the dictionary definition of unjustifiably smug, the issue is not really about Dawkins. Rather, it is about how these systems, intentionally usually, drive engagement by being sycophantic to their users. And that in turn, snares people in private delusions — the man who thought he had found a new kind of math; the man who killed himself and his family, encouraged by the bot; the person who was instructed on how to commit suicide. But Dawkins’ Claude Delusion ( I know, I know. But in fairness, I am sure I am not the first person to come up with that. And Claude tells me its brilliant, and Claude would never lie to me.) shows how society is broken by these misapprehensions.

Imitative AI is not conscious. It has no inner understanding of the world, which is one of the primary reasons that they make stuff up. The usual reply to this truth is that that they can hold conversations, but they can’t, not really. They are merely spitting out whatever token they calculate would be the most likely given the previous information and their training data. They are not thinking or experiencing. They are merely performing their programming. And the arguments that humans are merely doing the same nonsense.

Brains are not computers — brains do not work like computers. Humans, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and probably earlier, have always mapped human thought onto the latest technologies. We were like telegraphs and then we were like telephones and then we were like computers. Tomorrow, if we ever get reliable quantum computers, we will be like qbits. Metaphors, as you may have heard, are lies. And those lies, unfortunately, have consequences.

A lot of people seem to get warped like Dawkins. And that is dangerous for society. It encourages people in leadership positions especially, since they have already had their bullshit meters damaged by years of never having to hear the word “no”, to believe the grandest promises of the AI hype masters. Imitative AI is a normal technology, not a portal into a new level of intelligence. It is not going to sweep away the old economy and replace it with either luxury space communism or a new type of feudalism. But if you think its conscious, or could be? Well, then the data centers that poison our planet and our people and drive up power prices? How can they be too heavy a price to pay?

Seeing Richard Dawkins devolve into the same kind of credulousness that he claims religious people and feminists practice is amusing, I will not lie. But it is a symptom of a larger problem among our elites. They do not understand how these systems work, and are too susceptible to flattery, whether human generated or artificially produced. The greatest trick the imitative AI devil ever played on humanity was convincing people that it did, in fact exist. Too many of our elite fell for it, and we are all paying the price now.

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Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis - by Jake Handy: Imitative AI is cutting a swatch through people susceptible to flattery.

Has Steve Kerr Had Enough? | The New Yorker: Steve Kerr is an incredibly thoughtful man, and I hope he follows up his sports career with one in public service.

The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized | Scientific American: Luck decides our fate much more than people want to admit.

The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI: Excellent argument on behalf of UBI.

Brendan Sorsby and college football's first biggest gambling scandal - ESPN: We are creating an entire generation of gambling addicts and we are not ready for the damage this is going to do.

We translated the Palantir manifesto for actual human beings | The Verge: the Verge has its fault, but it speaks plainly about the monsters in tech.

We translated the Palantir manifesto for actual human beings | The Verge: A gentle reminder.

The Pope Goes on an ICE Ride-Along - The Atlantic: Alexandra Petri is a national treasure.

The more young people use AI, the more they hate it | The Verge: The kids are all right.

Pundits are wrong about the Democrats’ "missing" voters: Fascinating look at voters and what they want and how they see the world.

Tony X, 10 years later: How a viral tweet led to a hockey love story you won’t believe - The Athletic: This is adorable.

Have the best possible week, everyone.

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