Hella.

The camouflage used on World War I warships, known as dazzle camouflage, often featured zebra-like patterns with bold geometric shapes and contrasting colors. This design was not meant to hide the ship but to confuse enemy observers. The goal was to make it difficult to estimate the ship’s speed, direction, and distance, especially when viewed through rangefinders or periscopes.

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

This book is about how during several past disasters, people came together to help one another, and it was the elites who panicked and assumed that people were going to riot and loot.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)

One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.

I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.

So let’s take them at their word. Assume the technology works as advertised, that AI systems become capable of performing most cognitive labor at a fraction of the cost of human workers. What happens next?

LLM is certainly not AI as we think of it, but what if the world doesn't care and embraces it anyway? Quick answer: the economy will implode in ways we haven't considered yet.

general statements: is it a "(people) have been doing (x) for centuries" type statement, that is necessarily a broad generalization? could such a statement possibly be true about various locations or decades? if its a statement about a country, could it apply across class, geographic, national, linguistic, or religious lines? does it presuppose a state unity that existed prior to the formation of the nation state, or even fully after it?

anecdote: is it an anecdote being recounted in one person's letters or autobiography? is it posthumous? are there other corroborations of this event occurring in those terms? can you find other sources on this event?

idealism: what version of history is this statement highlighting? is it a "great man of history" version? is it using a supposed "national character" to explain political developments? is it explaining state decisions through individual actors' feelings and commitments?

exceptionialism: if something is being presented as a contemporary development, especially if it's a negative one, what figures is this statement based on? is it presenting modernity as a break with a timeless tradition? are things really "as they've never been before"? is it presenting a nuanced understanding of past and present, continuity and rupture, or is the past painted in broad strokes without the attention given to the present?

primary sourcing: did the author base their analysis on other people's analyses or comments? if they are, for example, talking about the state of a city in a certain year, are they going through municipal archives or only relying on subjective testimonies? if they rely on subjective testimonies, are they highlighting the fact that this is a subjective perception or treating it as an objective assessment?

metatext: what in the sources would need to be true for this claim to be correct? if a claim is being made about an identity, how does the author define the boundaries of this identity and the relationship of the claim to this identity (correlation, cause, consequence)? if the source is a medical or social study, is this study (or sometimes, is any study) capable of proving or disproving the claim being made? what assumptions does this claim being correct or incorrect rest on?