July 2026 general links
(continues June 2026 links)
Many of these seem to be bellwethers for what's on and just beyond the Horizon of the moment,
collected from the Incoming for their portentous savor, and illustrative of my engagement with serendipity)
The form factor I seem to gravitate toward is The Commonplace Book, a now-digital place to entomb snippets that seem at the moment of encounter to want saving, often as prime examples of some form or genre to which my attention has been drawn. Most offer temptingly yawning Rabbit Holes, and these collections of links form a sort of map of my wanderings and encounters.
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Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are Marginalian
My Canada Stephen Downes
At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz Darren Mueller via library.upenn.edu (2024) and full text from Duke UP
10 Hacks Every MacBook Pro User Should Know
Brian Sietsema, Linguist/Priest via languagehat
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A synthetic cell grew, copied its DNA, and split in two boingboing
Rainbow Nation maps mania
How Trump Sabotaged Independence Day Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
Book Freak Kevin Kelly
H.G. Wells Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)
Science Friday
The making of the Manhattan Project Alex Wellerstein...Cai et al. (5) integrate a dynamical learning model into a computing system that processes data inside the memory hardware, rather than moving data back and forth to a separate processor. The platform can perform high-fidelity calculation with a millisecond-scale latency, establishing a pathway toward real-time computation in clinical imaging, robotics, and embodied intelligence.A neural dynamical system (6) is a computing framework that models how a surface continuously evolves over time, guided by artificial neural networks that define the rule of motion. In contrast to discrete-time models, such as a residual neural network that cannot reproduce the smooth temporal evolution of a physical system, a neural dynamical system formulates continuity by integrating an embedded neural network—a fixed, pretrained artificial neural network with weight values stored in memory units—and adjusting the discrete interval used in each iteration (time step). Such a continuous framework is mathematically designed to smoothly deform a system's state on a manifold surface—such as genus-0, which has zero “holes” and can be continuously deformed without introducing topological changes (tearing or merging) over time. This topological consistency helps ensure that the simulated dynamics remain physically faithful while improving fidelity and predictability.
...Cai et al. integrate a neural dynamical system into a computing-in-memory architecture (7) that performs data storage and computation within the same memory array. Analogous to processing raw milk on a dairy farm instead of transferring it to a factory, a computing-in-memory approach fundamentally reduces the latency and energy use incurred by data movement in von Neumann devices.
End "reusable" waste dumping in Africa
A Hormone Cell Atlas maps the human endocrine system at cellular resolution
Ronald Ernest Hahn obit, via Ted Gioia
Stop, collaborator, and listen! Sarah Kendzior
...The most galling aspect of Trump's 250th anniversary of America is not the nazi-chintz decor or half-assed state fair. We have come to expect shock value and the desecration of US culture from this regime. Why would they honor a country they are selling for parts? Why please a people whom they see as, at best, pawns in a mass delusion, and, at worst, obstacles to be removed by force?Their real offense is the celebration of independence that we no longer have. For on the 250th anniversary of its freedom, the US government has surrendered its sovereignty.
The new owners of the US are transnational actors. Their goal is not to rule, but to mine. Technofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk shape the course of American life more than elected officials. Plutocrats with multiple passports and offshore accounts suck the marrow from a skeletal US economy. The biggest new industry is AI, a project aimed at destroying American land to build a facsimile of American life.
Trump gets blamed, but he's an inflatable tube dude at a mafia chop shop. His apathy to governance is mistaken for sway. Governing was never the point. Trump's casual treason has always made him an ideal vessel for America's going-out-of-business sale.
The buyers are foreign and domestic, but one looms above all. One that demands from Americans both taxation and representation — for their wars, their genocide, their demands that US laws on speech and assembly be shaped around their desires, US independence be damned.
The uniparty's fealty lies with Israel.
...The few representatives that oppose funding Israel — whether a right-wing libertarian like Thomas Massie or a left-wing Ferguson activist like Cori Bush — are ousted through smear campaigns and massive donations to candidates selected for their obedience to the lobby. American civilians who criticize Israel's wars risk losing their jobs, particularly if they work in education, media, or law. Jewish-Americans who criticize the Israeli government are deemed traitors: to Israel.
There's a Crack in Everything Sam Buntz
...The way digital recording technology functions feels like an allegory for how the world has moved more generally. Digital recording functions by cutting music up into pieces, into bytes, whereas traditional analog methods record the whole sound. They don't leave anything out. This is why vinyl records have higher fidelity, with the needle flowing over the unbroken groove rather than interpreting a collection of mico-pieces of sonic data. Philosophically, we could argue that the move towards digital constitutes privileging the part over the whole and hence the left brain (which perceives parts) above the right brain (which perceives wholes). The world has grown more technical and hence more obsessed with analysis, with dissection.Naturally, this acts at cross-purposes with artists, who follow their instincts and intuitions, who trace the flowing line of the whole, as opposed to engaging in the analytical dissection more characteristic of the technical professions (and of editors). But the coldness of digital, its harsh white LED-like glow, can be strategically incorporated to generate a personal and artistic effect.
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Photo statistics: how many photos are taken every day in 2026?
Five Photography Truisms That Aren't True. Or Are They? Pete Cripps at Medium
...It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
--David Bailey
Seeing Before Knowing Anthony Morganti at Medium
The Tiny White Grain That Runs The World (And No — It's Not Cocaine) Quantastic Journal
...A battery is a controlled difference across a boundary. One side holds more charged stuff than the other. The machine works because the difference wants to collapse, and some clever structure forces the collapse to pass through a useful gate.Modern biology runs on ion gradients, charged differences held across membranes so thin they make a soap bubble look like a Chernobyl's dome. Sodium on one side. Potassium on the other. A gate opens, charge moves, a nerve fires, a muscle contracts, a thought crosses the room inside your skull and becomes your hand reaching for the...salt shaker.
So the first battery wasn't built. It was metabolized.
...Every animal cell is a tiny border dispute. Sodium wants in. Potassium wants out. Water wants to follow the crowd. The cell wants to live, which means it has to keep the crowd from becoming a flood.
So the body runs a pump. It spends energy shoving sodium out and pulling potassium in, over and over, like a nightclub bouncer working the door during a riot. Three sodium ions out, two potassium ions in. One ATP molecule burned for the privilege. Repeat this enough times and the membrane becomes a charged wall.
In the brain, this maintenance bill gets obscene. Neuroscience estimates that the sodium-potassium pump uses about 20 to 40 percent of the brain's energy. That means a big slice of breakfast never becomes a poem, a bad decision, or a brilliant excuse. It goes into keeping tiny charged particles apart so the next signal can actually happen.
...The body hides infrastructure inside pleasure. You think you want chips. The mammal wants voltage.
...People worked the Hallstatt salt mine in Austria for thousands of years, carving wealth out of a mountain. And salt preserved tools, textiles, leather, wood, and human waste so well that researchers could study ancient feces and identify what miners had eaten. In one Iron Age sample, DNA from Penicillium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae gave the first molecular evidence for blue cheese and beer consumption in Iron Age Europe. The proof came through Hallstatt waste.
...Sodium-ion batteries are now leaving lab promises for industrial seriousness. Their appeal is easy to understand. Sodium is common, widely distributed, and far less geopolitically concentrated than lithium, cobalt, nickel, or graphite. The chemistry can suit stationary storage, where weight matters less than cost, safety, and supply. A 2025 analysis of sodium-ion battery roadmaps found pathways to competitiveness with low-cost lithium-ion batteries in the 2030s, but only with technical progress and with outcomes still tied to lithium, graphite, and nickel markets.
...Oil was power because it stored ancient sunlight in a dense, burnable form. It is indeed a superpower that makes machines move, armies faster, suburbs possible, plastics cheap, and politicians strangely emotional about shipping lanes. Salt works through a different logic: it stores difference. Across a membrane, that difference becomes life. In food, it becomes time. In a state monopoly, it becomes revenue. In a cavern, it becomes strategic fuel. In a battery, it becomes a charger waiting behind a gate.
A civilization can run for a long time on the substances that help it cross boundaries, between seasons, markets, bodies, empires, and electrons. It can also forget that every boundary has a cost. The body pays in ATP. The deer pays in distance. The miner pays in lungs, joints, and years. The river pays in chloride after the thaw.
And the future pays when another “abundant” material becomes a growth story before anyone asks what scale will do to it.
Mapping the Origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything maps mania
...dozens of creation stories that you can explore on the Origin Myth Map, an interactive atlas of the myths that civilizations have used to explain the origins of the universe, the earth and humanity. The map brings together the origin traditions of 51 civilizations spanning five historical eras, from prehistoric societies to the early modern period....The Origin Myth Map's Migration Paths mode highlights some of the great journeys that carried myths and cosmological beliefs from one region to another. For example, the Silk Road transported far more than silk, spices and precious goods. For over 1,600 years it also served as one of history's greatest conduits for the exchange of religions, philosophies and cosmological ideas.
Gaza Genocide is a World-Historical Event Juan Cole
...It's enormous. 80% of the buildings have been destroyed and, as you say, 1.7 million people displaced. There were only two million people in Gaza. So it's almost everybody that has been displaced. And people are living in tents. Most important medicines are not available. There's high mortality not only from people having been bombed to death but also from disease, from malnutrition, and from inadequate health care, because most of the hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. The children are not in school except informally, because the schools have been destroyed. There are no schools or universities standing.So this is a world historical event. We have seen many genocides in the last century. We saw Rwanda and Cambodia and so forth. But if we look at this proportionally — it's a small place, with the 2 million population — then the proportion of people devastated by this particular military campaign, which I think is a genocide, is unprecedented.
Crooked Donald and the Strait of Hormuz Tom Engelhardt
building a crwth, a might-be Project
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Alien v. Predator or MAGA meets AI - a "crossover" monument to the USA at 250 Adam Tooze
In pop culture there is a genre known as "crossover", where the main protagonists of different fictional universes — often monsters — are brought together in one narrative space.
...From the point of view of anyone trying to narrate our current reality, such crossovers may serve as a fertile image: Not one nightmare, not one drama, not one cast of "bad guys" v. "good guys", but distinct, overlapping dystopias, in a giant melange.
In 2026 we have the China shock discourse — the global division of labour being upended by China's gigantic growth model -—some sort of East Asian mechatronic giant, more or less effectively corralled by the CPC on a mission of historic national rejuvenation.
Then we have the war-mongering "middle powers" — the likes of Russia, Israel, UAE unleashing regional mayhem.
And we have the US, still straddling the world with its military and financial infrastructure, but caught internally by the dynamics of MAGA and AI.
...Does "America" have a program? Does it form anything resembling a single coherent power, whether for better or worse? At this point, surely, it would be embarrassing to claim so. Better surely to concede that elite coherence has collapsed and that the US as it enters its second quarter millennium, is best thought of not as a single coherent agent, but as an incubator, a petri dish, a "zone" from which things emerge that defy summation in a single graphic image.
...it was, in fact, from the midst of that process of transformation, in the 1930s and 1940s, that the comic book imagination of the US emerged. So if we grant that the US has always been a "zone" as much as a single coherent state, let us concede that Jefferson or suburban imagery is candy coated. In the current moment, the environment that comes to mind is not a slave-based idyll like Jefferson's Monticello, but Batman's Gotham city — a mythical, corrupt and depraved urban sprawl, located somewhere in New Jersey.
...On the national anniversary, the USA as "zone" is presided over by a president who is shamelessly engaged in haphazard and fly-by-night self-enrichment to the tune of a few billion dollars or so, mainly through crypto scams. Meanwhile, the broligarchs — the real lords of Gotham city — play for the serious money, with rockets, chips, AI models, a hundred billion, a trillion at a time.
For birthday entertainment, the White House hosts cage fights.
The Pentagon is a war-fighting machine that has command-chain issues and unleashes mayhem with global implications in coalitions with other powers, for which it lacks any obvious national rationale.
Dotted across this landscape there are, of course, much private prosperity, livable communities, comfortable suburbs and highly potent centers of innovation. In those centers engineers from all over the world work to generate new technologies of finance, fossil energy and tech. If we are looking for powerful, world-changing monsters in Gotham city, right now, AI is where it is at.
Max Headroom — Complete Series at archive.org
via Tooze:
The total dollar value of the trades was somewhere between $600 million and $1.86 billion, according to his financial disclosure for 2025, which lists values in broad ranges. Many of the transactions involve large companies that have business with the federal government.
Trump averaged 85 trades per market day, an analysis of the report shows. Just 10 days accounted for about a quarter of all trades executed in 2025. Many of those came during heightened volatility on Wall Street after Trump had already announced policy changes.
and from WSJ, via Tooze:
Instead, the value of those tokens tanked. While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week.
"In crypto, people say a game is a game," the digital-asset entrepreneur said. "He played a better game than I did."
It has been clear for some time that President Trump's forays into the crypto world have been lucrative, but the stunning disclosure that those ventures earned him some $1.4 billion last year underscored the different reality the president is living in from many of the investors who have embraced digital assets alongside him.
The president raked in cash by issuing new assets—World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto. Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.
Roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump's memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent a few thousand on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token. Nansen's analysis of 26,663 wallets shows that 85% of World Liberty's $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater.
The Grain of the Note Philip Clark at NYRB
Sealskin Jeff Dworsky
Two Scorpions in a Jar: Netanyahu and Trump Informed Comment
Agriculture From the Perspective of Economic Theory Michael Porter at Medium
...In the 1800s, European and American farming became agriculture. This is less romantic than the "noble farmer" but this system produces so much food today that more than 80% of the population of middle- and upper-income countries live in cities and are freed to work in manufacturing and services (or not at all).
...A fundamental assumption in the development of classical economics is that people act rationally.
People are often, but not always, rational or perfectly self-interested.
...Adam Smith and his early colleagues wrote about "political economy," which explored society, governmental action, and the public welfare. Our existing economic (and food) system is the product of collective human behavior, incentives, and disincentives played out over more than 200 years. Like many systems, it creates a mix of good and bad outcomes. The forces that eliminated the threat of starvation also increased the rate of soil degradation and environmental pollution. The forces that led to inexpensive, highly palatable food may also lead to a rise in chronic disease.
The Greek Roots of Sycophant and Showing the Fig
Mapping the Light: Sunrise & Sunset maps mania
Confronting the Palestine Exception of the American Historical Association Juan Cole
June: World's Oceans Hottest on Record as El Niño Looms Informed Comment
On Photography and Style Pete Cripps at Medium
Life With a Hand Up Your Butt Dan Piraro
...Our tendency to anthropomorphize is essentially the same trick that AI uses to convince us it is a person. Once you get into a conversation with it, it's hard to remember you're talking to a glorified toaster.
Indian Place Names of New England archive.org
Toponymy of Nova Scotia Wikipedia
Nothing Personal Richard Avedon and James Baldwin (1965) (pdf)
From Bloomberg, via Tooze
Trans Mountain Corp., a pipeline operator owned by the Canadian government, has been tapped to build a new export conduit connecting Alberta's oil sands to a Vancouver-area port, Prime Minister Mark Carney said. The proposed 1 million-barrel-a-day pipeline will link to a deepwater port capable of receiving Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs, with the goal of "meeting significant Asian demand from countries like Japan, Korea, China and India," according to the government of Alberta. The project will largely follow the route of the existing Trans Mountain line, Carney said. That's the only crude pipeline in Canada that currently reaches an ocean port, limiting Canada's ability to send oil to markets other than the US. ... By doing the project through Trans Mountain, the two leaders are effectively providing a government backstop for a complex energy project that is certain to cost tens of billions of dollars. The Alberta government said construction of the project could cost between C$35.2 billion ($24.8 billion) and C$43.7 billion if investment is greenlit in the next three years. But it also forecast the potential to increase Canada's real gross domestic product by more than 0.6% a year by the 2040s.
People Who Can't Visualize Anything Are Challenging a 300-Year-Old Theory of Thought gizmoodo
License plate cameras scan 20 billion vehicles a month, and cities are pulling the plug boingbpoing
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1452/1453 mystery eruption Wikipedia
Eastern Late Woodland Summary eHRAF Archaeology
The 1972 Script for Our Collapse Is Tracking Perfectly Noel Johnson on Medium
Yesterday, I viewed the recent update to this information. What was interesting to see was how well the chaos of the 2020s supply chain fragility, along with the increasing costs of raw materials and the overall sense that our global economy is beginning to sputter, was nothing short of predictable. In fact, if you look at it now, a decade ago we mapped out exactly where we'd be today. We aren't drifting wildly through history. We're tracking a decades old systems model with alarming accuracy.
...The world3 model was never a fixed prediction. It was about what happens when a limitless growth based system hits up against the finite nature of a planet. According to several new academic studies validating the World3 model, we are no longer outside of this model looking in. We're currently operating within it and running right on pace.
...This is the Innovation Trap. Technology is a means of directing energy and materials, not a miraculous source of energy. Advanced technology often requires more complexity, not less. Rarer minerals, more accurate production and a highly specialized international supply chain are all necessary. Each 'solution' we design adds a new layer of upkeep and a new set of dependencies.
...we must fight the temptation to consider 2040 to be the "apocalypse" year. It is more accurately described as a time of transition. For the generation currently entering the labor force. They will be the first generation in millennia to navigate a world of limitation rather than expansion during their most productive years.
...The years between now and 2040 won't be remembered for a single pivotal disaster if the model's trend continues. They will be remembered as the period when the signals were impossible to reject. Global supply chain vulnerability was made clear by the pandemic. Trade, food, and energy were all affected by the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. While slowing growth and growing debt showed how much work is now needed to maintain the world we constructed.
Audiomass and About Audiomass "an open-source web based audio and waveform editing tool."
AudioMass lets you record, or use your existing audio tracks, and modify them by trimming, cutting, pasting or applying effects, from compression and paragraphic equalizers to reverb, delay, repair tools, pitch/speed profiles and multitrack mixdown.
How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech Cory Doctorow
The Milky Way's Arms May Stretch Farther Than We Thought gizmodo
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Pascal would have thrown away his iPhone JA Westenberg
This realization, Pascal argued, produces a fundamental dread. When we stop moving, when the noise fades, when we confront our own mortality and smallness, we feel a terrifying emptiness. Pascal called this ennui, a soul-crushing boredom and anxiety that grows out of awareness of our wretched state.
To escape the dread, we invented what Pascal called divertissement, or diversion. Diversion is more than having fun. It's a psychological defense mechanism, the frantic human attempt to avoid facing the void.
The smartphone is the ultimate precipice-blocker, a pocket-sized diversion engine engineered to anesthetize the ennui. Pascal argued that humans don't actually want the things they chase; they want the chase itself. Give a man everything he desires — wealth, power, leisure — and he turns miserable, because you've stripped him of the distraction of the hunt.
...Pascal believed that wisdom, peace, and connection with the divine could come only from facing the void - from staying in the room and sitting with the silence until it turned familiar and something deeper could be heard. The smartphone makes that confrontation impossible. It floods the silence with noise, so we never have to meet our own souls.
...The smartphone is the enemy of deep thought. Deep thinking needs sustained attention, incubation, and boredom. Boredom is the soil where creativity grows. An unstimulated mind starts to ruminate, to connect general ideas, to wander, and that wandering is what produces genius. But our phones have killed boredom. We fill every micro-moment of possible incubation with a micro-dose of dopamine. We check the phone while the kettle boils, while the elevator descends, while the computer boots, while the kid cries, while the coffee gets made. We've outsourced our inner monologue to the algorithm.
...We're brilliant at accessing information, with the sum of human knowledge in our pockets, but we've lost the ability to turn it into wisdom. Because wisdom — well, it needs friction. It needs the struggle of staying with a problem, feeling the discomfort of not knowing, and letting the subconscious work. The smartphone hands us an endless buffet of pre-digested answers, opinions, and outrage, and skips the struggle entirely. Pascal despised the ego. He wrote at length about human vanity, our hunger to be seen, our obsession with status, our willingness to conform to the crowd. "The omnipotence of kings," he wrote, "is not an omnipotence of command, but an omnipotence of fascination." Social media has handed that omnipotence of fascination to everyone. We're all kings and queens now, curating our digital kingdoms, hoping to fascinate our subjects, terrified of being ignored. The smartphone feeds this vanity without pause, making us prisoners of our own self-image.
Graham Platner Got Way Too Many Passes Monica Potts at newsbreak.com
Pod Save Patriarchy (or Whatever That Sorry Platner Spectacle Was) Rebecca Solnit
This new El Niño is different realclimate.org
American ancestry map flowing data
Hormuz: China Oil Demand Tapped out, Heavy Truck EVs Rise Juan Cole
...There is no reason to believe that this kind of occasional US-Iran skirmish will cease any time soon. As I wrote when Benajmin Netanyahu and Donald Trump launched their unprovoked and illegal war on Iran, they have permanently destabilized the Gulf as a world energy source. Because petroleum and fossil gas are now so unstable as energy sources, wise governments are plotting to escape their use in favor of reliable, clean, local energy sources such as solar, wind, water and battery for electricity generation and batteries for electric vehicles. The front runner in this effort is China. China has used its refineries' petroleum reserves to slash petroleum imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to an astonishingly low 6.4 million barrels a day (this latter statistic is seaborne petroleum imports for June). A glut before the Iran War, a slowing Chinese economy, a ban on exports of Chinese petroleum, the big reserves held by Chinese refineries, and the huge investment of the country in electric vehicles, which do not run on petroleum, have all allowed China to avoid a big energy shock and to vastly reduce its oil imports.
...the huge passenger vehicle market only accounts for half of China's petroleum demand. Diesel-fueled heavy trucks were the other half. Having 44 million EVs on the road, some 12% of automobiles, and having 67% of new car sales be EVs, obviously chips away at petroleum demand and threatens to drive it down permanently. But if the country stops needing to use diesel for trucks, that is game over for petroleum. And, the country's manufacturers are innovating in producing large numbers of electric heavy trucks, with Sany, BYD, XCMG, and FAW Jiefang, among others, big in this sector.
Reuters reported in May that electric heavy trucks went from being a niche market only a couple of years ago to constituting about a third of new truck registrations in 2025. China has expanded the charging infrastructure for truckers, a key element in these sales, and one lacking in rival countries such as India.
There are 6,000 Stories in the Naked City maps mania
My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump Norman Solomon at Informed Comment
America's AI War Has No Civilian Stop Rule Informed Comment
AI does not turn stale or biased information into truth. It can make bad information travel faster. Human Rights Watch has warned that Israeli digital tools used in Gaza relied on incomplete data and inexact estimates that could raise the risk of civilian harm. The lesson is not that every use of AI is unlawful. It is that speed can magnify the consequences of a bad premise before anyone can catch it.
Choice Notes on History from *Notes and Queries* (1858) archive.org
Is Life Just Different? Quanta Magazine
...Mitchell is wary of rigid definitions, however. "People often take [such definitions] as a fixed set of criteria that they then use for demarcating a phenomenon in an all-or-none fashion," he said — either it is an agent or it isn't. "I don't think that's helpful or appropriate because I don't think agency is that kind of phenomenon. But if you approach behavior in a more holistic, systems-oriented, ecologically contextualized view, you'll be investigating agency by default."
Even the most gene-centric evolutionary biologist recognizes that many organisms can adapt their behavior to present circumstances and can often be considered to make choices. But without an ability to self-consciously reflect on the options and the likely outcomes of actions, does that rise to the level of true agency?
James DiFrisco (opens a new tab), a philosopher of theoretical biology at the Francis Crick Institute in London, thinks not. Agency, he said, is a psychological concept traditionally used to talk about human behavior. Importing it into biology as a whole risks imputing a kind of cryptic self-awareness to all life. "Agency is a term whose meaning comes from human interpersonal discourse, which takes place in the vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, freedom, deliberation, and personhood," he said. It's not clear how to transfer that word to situations where those concepts simply don't apply.
...In 2025, DiFrisco and his colleague Richard Gawne published a critique in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (opens a new tab) arguing that biological agency is therefore "a concept without a research program." Either it's invoking something already familiar in biological science, or it's conjuring up some almost mystical force that makes organisms do things. This force, they said, is resistant to explanation in terms of causal mechanisms: a vague kind of "holistic power" that doesn't really explain anything, much as the 18th-century notion of a "vital force" animating living things was really just an empty explanation. Some people, DiFrisco suggested, "are playing on the ambiguity of ‘agency' to support the idea that biology shows the need for some quasi-spiritual reality."
...The 18th-century French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck went further. He believed, in the words of the Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin (opens a new tab), his latest biographer (opens a new tab), that "life at its essence is creative agency" — in contrast to the view then prevailing that the only real agency in the natural world was of divine origin. While Darwin differed from Lamarck about the source of evolutionary change, both placed the ability of organisms to act for themselves at the center of their theories.
...Is agency itself a causal factor, or is it a higher-level umbrella term for a host of specific and particular reasons that things happen? To put it another way: Agents make decisions — that's what agency means — but do organisms? For DiFrisco, speaking of organismal decisions “is just a convenient and compact way of referring to the operation of a (multiscale) mechanism” that determines behavior — a mechanism that is perfectly capable of incorporating context and conflicting signals. But for me, the key point here is that the actions can be governed by reasons and goals. The hare is genuinely trying to escape the fox; it doesn't merely look that way. And the hare did not have that specific goal before the fox appeared. Perhaps it had been trying to forage and to look out for predators. Such "trying to" is the fundamental nature of organisms: Evolution builds entities that try to do things
...If we can get a clearer idea of what makes an agent, this could help us to understand how collective goals arise — as they did when multicellular organisms first arose long ago — and how they can break down, as in cancer. What's more, a proper theory of agency might give us a clearer idea of what's needed to make genuine artificial agents, not just computers and machines programmed with our own goals, but ones that can formulate their own. We might then also get a clearer idea of the potential benefits and dangers such truly agential machines might bring. But perhaps the most compelling argument for recognizing agency is that it might help us understand what makes life so different — not just humans, but life — that it is able to shape an entire planet in a manner visible from outer space.
The metamorphoses of the dollar Adam Tooze
Beni Is a Cute Autonomous Camera Robot On Wheels petapixel
tic-tac Hobbledehoy
Self-generated hydrogel ejects bacterial cells for localized biofilm dispersion Nature Microbiology
Basketry Sarawak Museum
Scientists Say a Critical Ocean Current System May Already Be Past the Point of No Return gizmoodo
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Enchanted Spirits Andy Ilachinski
Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Words from 1974
The Entire History of Human Warfare maps mania
Can Office-to-Residential Conversions Survive the Pfizer-Building Crisis? New Yorker
Junker Jane via Daniel
links re: Nomothetic and Idiographic
Meditative Quiescence Andy Ilachinski
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3 Art Terms That Will Change the Way You Look at Paintings Christopher P Jones at Medium
In art history, it has come to mean "a collection of different things," and it has found particular focus in the type of painting shown above: a flat pinboard or wooden letter rack covered in a cluttered, hyper-realistic array of everyday ephemera.
(also cartellini and musca depicta)
Paul Krugman
Instead, however, AI is emerging in an American economy and society that are already strongly oligarchic, with enormous wealth and political influence in the hands of a handful of billionaires. The current concentration of wealth at the top is not only immensely greater than in the 50s or 60s, but is in fact far greater than during the Gilded Age. This state of affairs is both a cause and an effect of policies that benefit a tiny elite, such as low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak or nonexistent enforcement of worker protections and anti-trust, drastic reductions in programs that benefit ordinary Americans, and so on.
And in the context of a political and economic environment that is heavily tilted towards the hyper-wealthy, the negative impacts of AI will probably be larger than if they had appeared in a country with a more level playing field. That is,unless the very impact of AI leads to a much-needed pushback against American oligarchy.
So although AI is addressed in today's primer, the content will mostly be about oligarchy rather than AI: documenting how America has changed since our politics turned right in the 1980s, and why wealth and power have become so concentrated
via Tooze
This shift explains the huge differences between the US empire and previous ones. First, it rests on an unprecedented scale of offshore endogenous credit creation, larger than what we saw under British hegemony. Second, the destructive capacity of modern warfare has expanded dramatically. Third, transnational corporations have become conduits for the diffusion of productive knowledge, accelerating economic catch-up. (One big challenge for the center is ensuring that the periphery is always kept behind.)
From the perspective of uneven and combined development, the central challenge for any imperial core is preserving the asymmetry between center and periphery—maintaining a decisive advantage in the capacity to mobilize resources and generate power. Yet under contemporary conditions, that gap tends to narrow far more rapidly than in previous eras.
Empire Suicide Watch phenomenalworld.org
Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic
The Human Cost of DOGE's War on U.S.A.I.D. Atul Gawande at The New Yorker
links re: Jared Diamond (includes Clifford Geertz review)
Holdfast 0: Situating Erin Kissane at wreckage/salvage
...We find information and build it into knowledge socially: by word of mouth, with neighbors or in class, at the church or the bar or the gym, on Facebook or TikTok, and at work. We watch people talking on TV and sometimes we read the news or a book, or we ask a doctor or a lawyer or therapist or another kind of priest, but mostly we talk to and listen to other ordinary people.
Taken far enough, societal destabilization into extremism transforms racist riots into national policy: In the US, as we exhaustively catalogued at Unbreaking, hastily recruited ICE and CBP officers have spent much of the past year and a half beating, tear-gassing, detaining, harassing, starving, sexually assaulting, shooting, and killing people who looked like Black and brown immigrants or allies of immigrants—all against a background of fake videos, xenophobia, white supremacy, and viciously racist and dehumanizing rhetoric on social platforms, including from elite figures and official government accounts.
We're all living in this ecosystem now, whether we choose to use a given platform or not, but I don't think any of it can be sustained. I don't believe Zuckerberg and Musk—or Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, for that matter—will be the forever-rulers of our social and information spheres. Frankly, I expect the eventual backlash against global authoritarianism to include at least one faction devoted to obliterating the platform monopolies that now hold so much unelected and unaccountable power. All empires fall, and even the wealthiest and most powerful come to dust.
...Ecological in the sense that we can't keep treating our online social systems in isolation from everything else and expect things to go well outside them. They're not going well! In the US, the changes produced by the web, accelerated by the social internet, and turbocharged by AI have eaten the heart of corporate journalism and most other forms of publishing—we lose an average of 2.5 local papers each week. And an ecological view lets us stop debating precise allocations of blame for specific events and consider that the social internet is entangled at every level of our information worlds: We shouldn't just consider who lit a match, but who put the matches in their hands, who helped turn baseline-racist publics into the equivalent of dry tinder, and who turned local knowledge-webs into desiccated news deserts populated by national politics and clickbait façades. The answer is almost never "the social internet" by itself, but the social internet's almost never out of the picture, either.
Thoughts on world population day 2026 and what might come next Bryan Alexander
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Hey Thingvellir, That's a Mighty Big Atlas You Were Published In Alan Levine
China Just Bet $17.5 Billion That Quantum Teleportation Is Real. It Is. Nov Tech
Intelligence Can Be Rented But Taste Must Be Earned Alberto Romero
AI requires that you develop your imagination, for it will not so much lead you as follow you. It requires your vision, and vision comes from the ability to see the negative space; to see what isn't yet. You might think you don't have a poet or painter in you, but what you certainly have is an inner little child who has awaited this moment since you got a lobotomy of imagination sometime in sixth grade.
...What happens if you dominate imagination and agency but not taste? That you drown in "nouveau content": you make infinite images, infinite text, and infinite code without any curation whatsoever. Taste takes the form of this question: should you? Taste is both the art of restraint and the habit of selection.
...We are entering a complicated reality that resembles Borges's Library of Babel. Access to information and content and knowledge is trivial inside a library that contains all possible permutations of words. You have total access to whatever answer you seek, but the ability to find the meaningful answer amidst the gibberish remains divine. Taste is as much being able to discern the best nook among the rest as it is being able to write it yourself.
In a world of infinite content, taste is the only thing separating you from infinite noise. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a famous treatise titled On Bullshit, defining "bullshit" not as lying, but as speech created without regard for the truth; AI, left unchecked, is a perfect engine for "bullshit" as it produces plausible-sounding content without caring about reality. Your imagination isn't enough: you visualize every path. Your agency isn't enough: you commit to any path. Taste is the filter that reveals which one you should pursue.
Latent Space
This extreme compression of knowledge within latent spaces was not the original intention of the researchers who invented LLMs. The book smartness they contain came as sort of a surprise to the people training them, and we are still trying to figure out how they actually work. What we can say for sure is that the LLM does not contain copies of everything it knows. For instance it knows all Shakespeare plays, and it could create a new play that sounded exactly like Shakespeare, and can even quote famous lines in his plays, but nowhere in the model are the actual texts of Shakespeare. Instead there is simply the abstract information about all the plays, the plots, the characters, the words, the style, the references. Likewise, the LLM could recognize the face of almost any person, and it could generate any possible human face, but nowhere in its code are copies of human faces. Rather, the model is storing all the information about human faces, without storing any faces.
...LLMs were originally invented to do automatic language translation, that is all. But instead of teaching it the rules of language, which is what earlier AI researchers did, this time no language expertise was required. Instead, a neural net absorbed a very large database of human written language (the internet), with the goal of having the neural net (AI) extract out all the hidden patterns of language below our awareness contained within those billions of documents. The goal of the program was to replicate, imitate and synthesize the patterns of language as it is used everyday by humans.
...Latent space is an abstraction, a map built not in two dimensions, but in billions of dimensions. Imagine a brain made up of billions of straight long arrows going in all directions. Each arrow is dedicated to one idea or one thing
...Every thing, every concept has a specific location in the map of this huge space, but instead of having just two coordinates (x,y) each thing has a billion-long coordinate. So an old rusty gasoline lawnmower buried in weeds is a very specific intersection with a very long address. Each of its thousands of attributes (rust, gas, lawn, cut, weeds, push, red, dirt, clippings, roar, etc.) has its own direction intersected. Nearby in latent space is a lawn mower that is more in the rust direction, or less red, but also more catlike, or more doglike, or less spaceship-like, or more like whipped cream. That point may represent a real thing or only a virtual or theoretical thing. This mapping works for not just nouns, but any idea, any sound, any image. The whoosh of a splash of water is a direction in latent space. The aha moment in invention. The fright seeing a snake on a path. The notion of a prime number. All these are contained within a single map. This is one of the most astounding, yet underappreciated aspects of an LLM latent space: Everything — everything! — appears on just one map. We've never had a system to integrate everything we know and everything we can imagine. One map for all! This has long been a holy grail.
...While training, the LLM is fed millions of books, billions of web pages, and billions of pages of text from social media. It reads every word on each of them, and once this entire library of material is loaded into its mind, it massively calculates all the interconnecting vectors, all the relative directions pointing to each other. The scale of this vast synchronized parallel calculation is staggering. It then throws away the books, the text, the images, and only keeps this tangled web of directions and vectors. These billions of directions are called its parameters. As we build larger and larger models, mapping more and more material, the parameters increase. The latest models on the frontier of AI contain trillions of parameters, meaning there are trillions of directions, or trillions of attributes that it uses to map every idea or thing it has seen.
...Something as complicated as a book winds up as both a point in latent space and a journey through latent space. All the notions encountered in a story (window, mid-day stroll, street, vendor, chat, anger, fight, forgiveness) are directions, and as sentences pile up, the directions shift around, going one way and then intersecting in another. The story is really a journey through latent space, which very much mirrors the journey-like experience we have when we read.
So a book contains a sequence of vectors in latent space. But the sum meaning of a book is also just a single point or direction in itself. For instance if I reference the book The Iliad, I'm referring to the whole book, and its vector is closely related, and therefore "nearby" to the other epic war narratives like Beowulf, The Mahabharata, or even Apocalypse Now, even though many parts of them only tangentially intersect. The more related a thing or idea is, the more directions (vectors) it shares with similar things. This is in part how LLMs know stuff. They search for patterns nearby.
When you ask an LLM a question, it will find the answer in latent space. Your question itself begins as a direction, which points to the answer. The LLM addresses each word in your prompt one by one, with each new word shifting the direction of where it goes. The model travels through latent space with each word of the prompt, searching for its answer, step by step. In this way the answer is grown, rather than found.
Latent space Wikipedia
The Latent Space: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook Xinlei Yu et al. at arxive.org (2026)
What Is a Latent Space? towardsdatascience.com
Journaling via cooltools
Your iPhone Is Hiding a Powerful Document Scanner lifehacker
Archaeologists Just Found the Earliest Known Named Scientist in the Ancient Americas gizmodo
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Dale Sanders, re-hiking the AT at 91 NYTimes
Gerontocracy's failure mode Cory Doctorow
The billion-dimensional map hidden inside every AI model
Ellsworth Toohey at boingboing
Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of Earth's 'Great Dying.' It's Bad News for Our Future gizmodo
A Million Warnings and One Huge Invitation: Climate 2026 Rebecca Solnit
...We have, to return to the metaphor with which I opened, the lifejackets and lifeboats, the firehoses and ladders, to do what we need to do. We have everything we need except enough organized political will of the great majority to rise up with a force adequate to overpower the elite minority invested in short-term profit and longterm destruction. That begins by making climate central to our political (and economic and health and environmental and moral and spiritual) conversations.
Can We Call This Anything But Piracy? Brad DeLong
The market reaction is also very interesting. As I understand it, markets have concluded—rightly—that Donald Trump is simply a chaos-monkey, and there is no point in trying to forecast what the hell he will do.
...it becomes hopeless to expect the market to in any sense discipline Trump by signaling that his disastrous policies are in fact causing disasters. The market is not going to signal that, since Trump's announcements are not in any sense policies. Moreover, since there is a very strong and correct expectation that many of Trump's announcements are intended to spook the market, so that he and his favored can benefit by insider trading on their reversal tomorrow, you would be a fool if you did react to anything Trump says he is going to do until things start blowing up on a large scale.
Technocarcinization:
Enshittification is the great leveler Cory Doctorow
Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.
...Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance — they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you
...Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden
...What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression
...Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.
...the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab
via Tooze:
Since then, the largest southeast Asian nation has attracted many researchers to study hominins, some of which have made headlines: one is H. floresiensis in 2003, nicknamed the Hobbit after the work by J. R. R. Tolkien, owing to its small stature. In Bumiayu, Noerwidi hopes to discover another breakthrough: a hominin fossil as old as the roughly two-million-year-old fossils of several hominin species, so far all found in Africa. Some evidence from other finds suggests that hominins could have been in the area around two million years ago, says Noerwidi. Unlike the discoveries of the Java Man and the Hobbit, which were driven by foreign donors, the current expedition is funded by Indonesia and led by the country's scientists. BRIN (Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency) has earmarked US$180,000 annually for up to ten years of work at Bumiayu. Noerwidi and his team had successfully convinced BRIN's Directorate of Research and Innovation Funding about the site's importance. In 2020, he and his team reported the discovery of 1.8-million-year-old fossilized thigh-bone pieces from what might have been H. erectus1,2. The finding was a promising start for the excavation, and older layers of soil at the site might contain even older H. erectus samples. Bumiayu is just one site among many where BRIN is flexing its power in the country's research sector. But BRIN's establishment as a superagency that can both manage the country's science funding and conduct research itself was not without controversy.
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'HyperTexting' Is a Fresh, AI-Free Take on RSS Feeds of Yore lifehacker
Mad Maxxing: A Genealogy of Optimisation Cultures (and their corrosive effects) livingtogethersomehow
Being built around the development of individual characters in the context of shared, imaginative storybuilding and world exploration, D&D game play — informal game practice between individuals, mediated by a Dungeon Master (DM) rather than formal Game Theory (as above) — then evolved the idea of min/maxing10.
In D&D, min/maxing is about squeezing the maximum benefit from the minimum cost – for your individual character. As one forum respondent posted, min/maxing is just "when you go out of your way to try to make your character as strong as possible". As another wrote, it's about how to combine or "exploit rules to get the most out of characters in terms of power"
(continued at Mad Maxxing: The Disappearance of the Other
how the other disappears as the corrosive logic of our age breaks out of its games)
David Wengrow Wikipedia, and Beyond kingdoms and empires (2024)We live in a world of divergent, incongruent but overlapping shocks. In recent years, I've been trying to capture this agglomeration of heterogeneous historical forces with the notion of the polycrisis. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the USA it seems as though we may need a more graphic image.
...President Donald Trump made more than 21,000 securities trades in his first year back in office, often in intense bursts tied to market events he created.
Trump Made $1 Billion on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a Fortune
Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire.
...The carnyx is an ancient bronze trumpet, once used by Iron Age warriors who relied on its otherworldly blood-curdling cry to fill their opponents with the literal fear of God. The composer Liza Lim conceived her forthcoming work Tongue of the Land, crafted for the Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw, around the demands of this long-forgotten instrumental hardware.
...Economics is often presented as a deterministic type of engineering, but it is really an observational social science involving the generalization and abstraction of observed human behavior—operating under the assumption that people are logical. It provides an explanation for why some things happen the way they do and offers general guidance to people making decisions. It is like a story that makes sense, but does not always match real life. The modern food system owes a lot to economic thinking, so it pays to understand it a bit about its influence.
...We may think puppets are nothing more than children's toys, but I'm fascinated by the power they wield over us psychologically. Though we know they are not alive, we can easily be mesmerized by them, buying into their feigned words and movements until we are fully captivated by a construction of fabric scraps. In a clever ventriloquism act, it is the puppet that has us in stitches, not the human.
...today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization
...Canadian state capitalism laying a pipe to Asia
(Limits To Growth, 1972) ...When the world3 model was first introduced, the entire scientific community basically laughed at it. Most economists dismissed it as "Malthusian," and politicians ignored it. We had entered into a period of unprecedented economic expansion and the concept that there would be an end to this type of expansion seemed like a total buzzkill from another era.
Pascal dissected the human condition with surgical precision. He believed human beings live in a state of paradox, caught between the infinite and the infinitesimal. We can grasp the vastness of the universe and the microscopic nature of the atom, yet we're fragile, mortal, and doomed to decay.
"We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it," Pascal wrote.
...n response to the IRGC refusal to see its strategic advantage chipped away at, the administration reimposed sanctions on Iranian petroleum. Those sanctions are unilateral and are rejected by China for that reason. There is no basis in international law for the United States to wake up in the morning and say Iran cannot sell oil to e.g. India or China.
Stories of New York City, Mapped is an interactive map of the New York Times' long-running Metropolitan Diary column. For nearly fifty years, the Metropolitan Diary has been the Times' home for reader-submitted vignettes, eccentric anecdotes, and overheard snippets of conversation that define life across the five boroughs. By geolocating thousands of these stories, the map creates a fascinating geographical archive of the city's collective memories.
...Advocates of military AI argue that better data and faster analysis can make attacks more precise. That is possible in principle. But precision is not something software simply possesses. It depends on the quality and age of the data, what a system treats as suspicious, and whether people have enough time to challenge its output.
...One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have "agency." It's a hotly contested term. Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation. (Whether we're truly the only species to do so is another issue.) Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life. Since there's no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean. But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life. If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning? Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
Bacteria may be unicellular, but they don't always act that way. When they get together and form a biofilm, colonies can synchronize and divvy up labor, behaving more like a tissue than a clump of independent cells. However, working together can be a double-edged sword. One bacterium requires a lot fewer resources than thousands of them—and if food becomes scarce, an entire film can starve. Scientists were studying this kind of communal death when they saw something unexpected: before a biofilm finally dissolved, some of the bacteria were forcibly ejected, allowing them to scuttle away from the scene of the soon-to-be carnage. It appears as if "the biofilm senses that it is in trouble so it shoots cells out of the community like an escape pod ," explained study leader Gürol Süel in a statement, "so they can survive and live to fight another day." An 'escape pod' of motile bacteria breaks free from a biofilm. CHOU ET AL./NATURE MICROBIOLOGY (2026) How do these simple organisms coordinate such a mass evacuation? According to the team's experiments, just before cells are ejected, the film produces a polymer of poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) that acts like a hydrogel; it can absorb a lot of water, and swells as it does so. This physically breaks open the outer layers of the film, ushering a bolus of mobile bacteria back out into the wild. While this is a neat trick for the biofilm, it could be used against these bacteria in the future. Removing harmful biofilms is notoriously difficult, as the cohesive unit is often resistant to antibiotics. The researchers were able to bust-up biofilms by forcing them to overproduce γ-PGA, suggesting an alternate tactic for removing them.
Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
Seven Nights
Knowledge is not an object that you acquire. It's not a mechanism that somehow you provide to the human mind. It's actually an epiphanal moment. And I think this is true of the arts, poetry, painting, music, and I would say also to spiritual understanding. [...] Is it possible to be alive, active in the world, and yet have such calm, such kind of inner openness and presence that one can lead a life, at least in part, that is an expression of that quality of meditative quiescence that's on the one hand quite alert and on the other hand, completely at ease, completely at rest. So it's a little bit like bringing the sleeping life into the day life.
—Arthur Zajonc (1949 - )Quodlibet... from the Latin for "whatever you please." In music, it refers to a piece that weaves together several, usually well-known, melodies into one.
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if AI had arrived in the America of the 1950s or 1960s, when income and wealth inequality were very low by historical standards. In those days, the tax code was strongly progressive and industry regulation, including antitrust policy, was robust. Under those conditions it's very likely that the destructive effects of AI would have been limited and contained.
there have been differences within this general logic of empires across history, as social technologies and the capacity to mobilize labor and resources have significantly expanded, enabling a general shift from despotic regimes towards infrastructural power.
...This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that's not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People's lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn't illiterate. It's postliterate. I started reporting on this topic in 2024. That year, I published an article about students who arrived at the nation's most elite colleges unprepared to read full books. I traced how middle and high schools had pulled books from their curricula in favor of short excerpts. Last year, my editors asked me to revisit the topic. It's often dispiriting to track just how little people are reading
(quotes Ursula Franklin The Real World of Technology:
I intend to look at technology the way Macpherson looked at democracy, as ideas and dreams, as practices and procedures, as hopes and myths. The second reason is that I wanted to discuss technology in terms of living and working in the real world and what this means to people all over the globe. This is the "real" part in the title...
...Imagination is how you bridge that AI gap, how you prime your mind to give up a set of tools that might be obsolete, how you stop looking in the rear mirror when the view before you promises so much.
(https://boingboing.net/2026/07/13/john-le-fucker.html)
Latent Space as a New Medium Kevin Kelly
A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge. It takes massive arrays of 100,000 GPU chips working in the cloud, and costing billions of dollars, to compress all of human writing into a small working model that could run on one single GPU chip. Even the biggest frontier models compress down to several hundred gigs, which is small enough it can fit on a card in your palm. In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file contains all the information that is on the internet and in our libraries. This tiny card holds a significant proportion of what humans collectively know. Of all the remarkable aspects of AI, this astounding feat of compression may be the least appreciated. This dense, high order compression of human knowledge — called "latent space" — may also be a new medium itself.
...In a study published July 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists believes they have finally pinned down why so many sea animals died as a result of this extreme global warming. The findings not only solve a longstanding scientific mystery, but present a warning about Earth's future.
...We know everything we need to know, but who we is always a question. Survey after survey shows that the great majority of human beings on earth take climate change seriously and want to see action on it. That's important because that version of we is often blamed for it, either directly with climate-footprint-shaming (as if we ourselves are individually capable and responsible for exiting a system we instead need to change collectively) or indirectly with misrepresentation of public opinion as indifferent or in denial.
...If the piratical practice of presidents improvising piratical toll‑booth empires in strategic straits half the world away and courts retreating behind self‑execution technicalities is not a betrayal and a constructive repeal of the fundamental design principle of the American constitution that the president is a magistrate to faithfully execute congress-passed laws rather than a king with sovereign powers derived from Divine Right and salus populi suprema lex, it is not clear to me what it could be.
"Carcinization"x is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments
...Java, Indonesia's most populous island (the archipelagic nation comprises more than 1,700 islands), plays a crucial part in palaeoanthropology. During the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago), the island was part of Sundaland, the southeasternmost part of the Asian continent. This was one of the farthest points that H. erectus could reach from Africa. Grasslands, lowland forests and rivers dominated the landscape, creating perfect habitats for hominins and the animals that they hunted. And a tiny fraction of those lives have since been preserved as fossils. Palaeoanthropology "was born here", says Noerwidi. The Java Man, the first fossil evidence of H. erectus, was excavated by Javanese labourers and identified by Dutch palaeoanthropologist Eugène Dubois in 1895, confirming Charles Darwin's theory of human evolution described 36 years earlier in his book On the Origin of Species.
Source: Nature...from 1972, different individuals co-evolved a novel set of elements that moved away from wargaming, and into dungeon exploration, experience points, and individual character progression. In 1974, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was released, based around these new elements.