Reasons for hope: Lots of amazing people did a ton of work to make this fantastic, fully interactive resource available - because no matter how bleak things seem, there are millions, and millions of people doing everything they can to protect both the world and their own communities.
You can use this to view and subscribe to updates, project statuses, and for at least some of them even whole dossiers. This is an amazing resource, I highly recommend checking it out
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
β Live Streamingβ Interactive Chatβ Private Showsβ HD Qualityβ Free Actions
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
wip thursday since all the cool kids were doing it
I didn't post yesterday cause I somehow thought we'd be closer to finishing the chapter, but I'm realizing it's nowhere near done, so howsabout a little check in on the fun, fun beach vacation for Mock Orange 11 from your local overheated discouraged author:
A rumbling creak gave Obi-Wan a heartbeat of panic. A perfect, cut circle lifted up out of the stone. Under Sifo-Dyasβs command, the rock door rose into the air as smoothly and easily as a full moon coming up over their heads. An entrance lay revealed underneath, a faint glow emanating from the pale steps disappearing down, though the templeβs power generator must have been long since disconnected.Β
βThat is what serves as your locking mechanism?β Dooku's voice broke the awed hush, apparently unimpressed by either the feat of Force or the ingenuity of the concealed entrance.Β
βMainly to keep out any curious animals. After the closure, the locals tend to avoid this place. The main entrance,β the gem in the center of Master Kostana's forehead caught the sun as she inclined her head in that direction, βis blocked off with a similar stone device.β
βThat hardly seems secure.βΒ
βNo? It would take a well-trained Force user to open it.βΒ
βA well-trained Force user,β Dooku repeated with cool deliberateness, βsuch as a Sith attacker?β
A much louder, abrupt bang startled them all: Sifo-Dyas apparently losing control over the levitating stone door. He caught it before it could roll fully off and careen into the sea below...or slide the other way and crush them all.
βWhat?β Sifo-Dyas snapped, utterly unapologetic over his mistake. As soon as he had lowered it back beside the opening, he exploded at them. βThat was heavy! Youβre welcome, by the way! Iβm holding the damn thing open while you all stand around yapping. βThat hardly seems secureβ βoh, fuck off, Dooku.βΒ
His outburst was met with uncomfortable silence.Β
Hey if you're coming to Washington DC for the Fourth of July: don't
We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.
The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.
My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.
Please stay out of this. It's not worth your health. Get your relatives and family to stop. I can give you recs for so many DC museums and things to do if you want to make the most of your trip. Any other local can too.
There is absolutely no reason to leave whatever is the coolest place you can find during this heat wave. Whether it's an indoor space with air conditioning, or a shady place near running water.
Not just DC. No "celebration" anywhere is worth heat stroke.
Also dear god, pity the people who have no choice but to be out in this heat.
Hey if you're coming to Washington DC for the Fourth of July: don't
We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.
The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.
My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.
Please stay out of this. It's not worth your health. Get your relatives and family to stop. I can give you recs for so many DC museums and things to do if you want to make the most of your trip. Any other local can too.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
β Live Streamingβ Interactive Chatβ Private Showsβ HD Qualityβ Free Actions
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
The heatβs been brutal this summer but we still gotta eat! If youβre like me, heat might suppress your appetite, and the last thing any of us want is to sweat over a hot stove and oven when itβs already boiling outside. Here are some of my favorite hot-weather recipes to keep hydrated and fed with when the weather is unbearable! (All recipes should be un-paywalled).
NYTβs best gazpacho (lives up to its name!!)
Persian cold cucumber soup (if you like tzatziki you will like this!)
Eric Kimβs cold noodles with tomato (infinitely riffable Korean flavor profile β for a creamier and less brothy take, try these cold sesame noodles too)
Vietnamese chicken and herb salad (this is an excellent time to get a rotisserie chicken so you donβt have to turn the oven on)
Radish sandwiches with butter and salt (and in a similar vein, if you dig this flavor combo you should try this Polish cottage cheese dip on some good rye bread or even crackers)
Itβs still a little early in the season, but you can never go wrong with a BLT (or, if you donβt eat bacon, try this tomato furikake sandwich in its place)
Infinite iterations of pasta salad! You can use anything you got but here is a template I like.
Assorted dense bean salads. This back pocket canned salad is a weird combo of jarred ingredients but it slaps, this hoagie-inspired one is super satisfying, and cowboy caviar is a classic for a reason.
Poke bowls! Canned tuna mixed with some kewpie mayo and sriracha is a budget-friendly riff on the usual ahi and makes everything taste like a spicy tuna roll, but use whatever proteins you like, this is more of a loose template.
Please feel free to add some of your own favorite summer recipes in the replies and comments! Weβll get through this together. π€π€π€
The difference between βtodayβs taskβ and βaccretive workβ
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
That's the idea that set me on the path to writing about "reverse centaurs" and AI. I was hearing from experienced programmers whom I knew to be reliable narrators of their own experience who described how AI was letting them write the best code of their lives; and from equally experienced and reliable coders who described a nightmare of tech debt: "I work in aviation, and I just don't think anyone should ever fly again, those things are now unsafe at any altitude, thanks to the code I had to sign off on":
For so long as I thought of both of these groups as doing the same thing and getting wildly different outcomes, this was a paradox. But as soon as I realized that the former group were "centaurs" (workers who get to decide and direct their adoption of automation) and the latter were reverse centaurs (workers who were conscripted to serve as peripherals for automation systems), it all snapped into place. It only looked like they were doing the same thing β they were actually engaged in fundamentally different activities, which is why they were having such different experiences.
The same goes for vibe coding. Plenty of people I knew had gotten real value out of vibe coding personal utilities that made things better for them in a way that I instantly recognized from a life spent around people who'd been able to adapt and customize the systems they used to make their lives better:
Vibe coding can be seen as part of a lineage that includes shell scripting, Applescript, Hypercard and Visual Basic: ways for technical novices to directly create personal software, without having to ask a programmer to interpret their needs (and without having to pay every time they wanted to do something new with their computers):
AI's pitch to bosses is that they can fire most of their workers in order to terrorize the remainder into tolerating a working life wherein they are made to mark the AI's homework, at superhuman speed, and to assume the blame when it goes wrong. This is obviously a terrible way to write code:
So is vibe code a way of empowering people to have the personal, vernacular tools that they design and adapt as they see fit? Or is it a way to shovel technological asbestos into the walls at scale, filling up our high-tech society with ghastly, lethal technical debt we'll be digging our way out of for generations?
Again: the paradox falls away once you realize that personal software you write for yourself is fundamentally different from "production code" that other people have to use, maintain and improve.
In an essay inspired by some thoughts on AI and mathematical theorem proving, Kellan Elliott-McCrea crystallizes this distinction in a really sharp way, bringing in Alex Kontorovich's idea of mathematical "canonization":
By canonization, I mean the process of taking a local, one-off formalization and turning it into library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the restβ¦ Canonization often changes the picture itself: the definitions, the abstractions, the API, and sometimes even the statementβ¦
Elliott-McCrea posits that making code that is "socially constructed in a way that leaves the team prepared to operate on it, iterate it, and improve it" is the difference between "I got it working" and "something the future can build on."
He's not claiming that "I got it working" is worthless. There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive."
Canonization is accretive. To canonize code is to make it "legible to systems of humans and non-humans operating on it." Free/open source software is the backbone of the canon: "decades ofβ¦intelligible, build-on-able work, sitting in public repos."
My "reverse centaurs" thesis isn't just a way to understand how programmers who seem to be doing the same thing can have such different effects. It's also about how the way that the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them with defective chatbots backstopped by the jobspocalypse's terrorized survivors, who can be made to endlessly toil away at marking the AI's homework because there are so many other workers who'll take their jobs if they refuse.
The point being that while centaurs are good and reverse centaurs are bad, the AI bubble requires the production of reverse centaurs, to the exclusion of centaurs.
In a similar vein, Elliott-McCrea describes how the imperatives of the AI industry are devouring its seed-corn β consuming the canon without putting anything new back in it. In the same way that AI can do endless theorem-proving but is essentially useless for creating "library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest," AI can write a lot of running code, but the AI industry is further devaluing the already undervalued work of cleanup and canonization. As Elliott-McCrea writes, "the social production of knowledge [is] the seed corn."
Divergent effects of native deer and alien wild pigs on forest understoreys
Large herbivores are becoming more common in forests, but their impacts are not always what we expect.
Using nationwide forest inventories and camera-trap data across the eastern United States, researchers compared the effects of native white-tailed deer and alien wild pigs on forest understories.
They found that deer generally reduce native seedlings and promote invasive plants, although these effects weaken in warmer, wetter, or steeper landscapes. In contrast, wild pigs often suppress invasive plants and have mixed, context-dependent effects on native seedlings.
These results show that herbivore impacts depend on species identity, functional traits and environmental context, with important implications for forest management under global change.
A good example of how different herbivores affect their environment in different ways. Makes you wonder how many ecological interactions we've lost since the Pleistocene extinctions
In advance of the DR Congo - England match later, here's a post about someone you will have seen in the stands: Michel Kuka Mboladinga, or 'Lumumba Vea'.
Michel Kuka Mboladinga, nicknamed 'Lumumba Vea', stands silent and motionless through DR Congo football matches in tribute to Patrice Lumumba (1925 - 1961), revolutionary, independence leader and first Prime Minister of the First Congolese Republic (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), who was crucial in transforming DR Congo from a Belgian colony into an independent state. Lumumba believed strongly in both national and pan-African unity, in full decolonisation and in freeing his country's resources, politics and economy from foreign ownership, interference and domination. He was kidnapped, tortured and murdered only seven months after election by Katangan seperatists and Belgian mercenaries, with US, UK and UN involvement. His body was dissolved in acid, and it took until 2022 - and a court ruling - for all that remained of Patrice Lumumba, a single tooth, to be returned to his family.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
β Live Streamingβ Interactive Chatβ Private Showsβ HD Qualityβ Free Actions
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Carcinization" 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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
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.
For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2Γ2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."
Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.
I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:
The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance β they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:
Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":
And thanks to Apple's control-freakery β which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices β once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:
Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.
For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:
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:
Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser β by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kids of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:
And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:
Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!
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:
Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:
It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment β where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money β you can always be productized:
This is independent of the kind of person running the company. 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.
By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.
Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people β who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage β have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2Γ2.
I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, 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:
And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2Γ2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.
There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
β Live Streamingβ Interactive Chatβ Private Showsβ HD Qualityβ Free Actions
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
