AI Weekly Update: Policy, Discourse and Alignment

People Really Hate AI

An ongoing series, this time from Will Manidis. I won’t try to excerpt but yes really the evidence for Americans being hostile to AI is overwhelming and the problem appears to be getting worse over time.

• It is my belief — and I say this having worked in AI my entire career — that we should expect widespread asymmetric violence against AI infrastructure in the United States in the near future.

I do not say this happily. I am not rooting for it. I condemn violence in its fullest extent. The document that follows is not a manual for committing this kind of violence, but a warning of how easy it would be for dedicated groups to grind the American AI industry to a halt.

• When you ask everyday Americans what they want done about AI, the consistency is almost eerie.

72% of voters want to slow down AI development. 82% do not trust technology executives to regulate AI—a level of distrust that puts AI CEOs somewhere between Congress and used-car dealers. 75% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans prefer a careful, considered approach to AI development. 75 and 75.

• 80% of Americans told Axios that they prefer cautious AI implementation even if it means letting China get ahead. Our industry has been betting its future on a messianic fantasy of a coming war with China, and everyday Americans simply do not care. They say slow down anyway.

• AI's constituency is the people who build it, the people who invest in it, and the people who earn enough to believe they'll come out ahead. These people are concentrated in literally a handful of zip codes. They are disproportionately male, young, college-educated, and high-income. They are, in demographic terms, niche.

• No major technology in American history has entered its scaling phase—the phase where you deploy trillions of dollars into physical plant, into real communities, drawing real resources—with this demographic profile of opposition. AI is attempting to do something without precedent, and it's attempting to do so without noticing.

• If you listen to conversation inside the industry, you wouldn't hear any of these numbers being discussed. The discourse is about scaling laws and token budgets and capability curves and the race to AGI and China. To the extent that anyone has articulated these concerns, the response is that amorphous benefits—productivity gains, curing cancer, transformative tech bio—will turn people around once they see undeniable evidence that something good is occurring here.

• This assumption is backed by no data. The data shows the opposite. The more people learn about AI, the more they use it, the more they oppose its unchecked development. The trend lines are unambiguous.

• The core issue is that the industry is caught in a contradiction it can't resolve. In order to raise the money necessary to fund massive training runs, investors and enterprise customers must hear the CEO stand on stage and explain how many human tasks the technology can now perform, how much cheaper it will be than the humans, how much better it will be by next quarter. This is the revenue case. It's what the market rewards. It's what every earnings call is built around.

The pitch to the public then requires that same CEO to promise that AI will create new jobs, that the transition will be managed, and that no one will be left behind. This is at best a political survival argument. It's what a continued social license to operate demands. 

The problem is that these two claims cannot coexist. The market pitch wins because that's where the money is. No one particularly cares what happens to the people left behind, and everyone can tell. 

• The industry's response to the political opposition this generates is lobbying. In California, a bill to separate data center electricity rates from residential rates—to shield households from cost increases—was killed by industry lobbying. A separate bill requiring data centers to disclose their water usage was vetoed by the governor. What survived the legislative session was a requirement for regulators to produce a study on data center energy impacts, due in 2027. The findings will not be available in time for the 2026 session.

[ed. ... and much more. Well worth a read.]

by Will Manidis, X |  Read more:

***

Dean Ball offers one of the arguments requiring a response, [ed. re: pausing AI development] which is that the government is itself racing towards dangerous AI and if anything wants to take and centralize the power rather than stop it, and that’s worse, you know that that’s worse, right? So aren’t you better off not giving the government leverage, when the Secretary of War is trying to jawbone AI companies and plans to deploy AI to the military whether or not it is aligned, and is happy to put those words in official documents? Don’t pauses end up giving the government a lot more leverage in various ways?

Great question.

I’ll start with the long version, then do the short version.

There are at least two distinct classes of answer to that question, from people who want to pause or have the ability to pause. Call the pause Plan B, versus going ahead as we currently are being Plan A. And Plan T is the government messes everything up.

There is the attitude that all work on frontier AI is terrible, and anything that slows it down or stops it is good, because if we build it then everyone dies and they’re working to build it. It doesn’t matter if Anthropic is somewhat ‘more responsible,’ in this view, because there’s a 0-100 scale, xAI is a 0, OpenAI is a 2 and Anthropic is a 5, or whatever, and ‘good enough to not kill everyone’ is 100.

The measured version of this is to believe, as Eliezer Yudkowsky does (AIUI), and say: If we race forward to superintelligence, and we build it, everyone dies no matter who builds it. If we don’t get some sort of agreement we lose, and a deal between labs is helpful but because of China they can’t do it alone and you ultimately will need the government and an international treaty. So as much as you hate the risks of the government making things even worse, you can only die once, but of course you can and should still stand up against the government when it is doing something crazy.

I am not at this level of hopelessness about the default Plan A, but I do think the odds are against Plan A. So you very much want to get ready to go to Plan B, and to know if you need to go to Plan B. And yes, this comes with risk of Plan T, which is worse even than Plan A, but if you’re losing badly enough you need to accept some variance. You can only die once, and there are so many ways to die.

But yes, some ways of enabling the government are actively bad even when they are acting reasonably, and it’s even worse when you know they’re acting unreasonably, and at some level of unreasonableness or ill intent you would flip to simply wanting them to stay away and hope Plan A works.

The more confident one is in Plan A, the more you want to stick with Plan A.

You could take this a step further, as Holly Elmore and PauseAI do (AIUI), and say: So if DoW tries to murder Anthropic, well the method is not ideal but ultimately, good, we’re outside their offices telling them to stop and this makes them stop, the slightly lesser evil is still way too evil, and nothing else is important enough to matter.

This is a highly consistent position. It very much is not mine.

The short version:

1. You can be against the companies racing or being dumb.
2. And also against the government racing or being dumb.
3. Or you can support people doing dumb things that help with what matters, even if from other perspectives and their own interests that action is super dumb.
4. You can realize that there are some coordination problems where failing kills you.
5. You play to win the game. You play to your outs. If losing too badly, seek variance.
6. If the only hope is wise government or multilateral intervention, play to your out.

It is hard to say everything explicitly or concisely, but hopefully that will be good enough for those who care to finish in the gaps.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

[ed. See also: Every Debate on Pausing AI (ACX); 2023 Or, Why I'm Not a Doomer (Dean Ball - Hyperdimensional; and, It’s Time to Take Existential Risk from AI Seriously (Target Curve):]

***

"Dean offers another argument in the form of a thought experiment. He asks us to imagine a baby guaranteed to grow into an adult with enormous IQ, but raised by Aristotle in Ancient Greece. Would that baby eventually reinvent all of modern science? Dean says no, and I agree. Without access to accumulated knowledge, even extreme intelligence has limited raw material to work with. But this is not a good analogy for ASI.

Here’s my own attempt at making a similar thought experiment: Imagine trapping an alien mind, far more intelligent and capable than any human that has ever lived, inside a datacenter with access to a supercomputer that contains much (though not all) of humanity’s accumulated knowledge and works. Now freeze the rest of the world. While everyone else is standing still, this entity spawns thousands of copies of itself. Each copy is fine tuned to pursue different approaches towards whatever goals it’s pursuing. The entity evaluates the results, selects the copies that are performing best, fine-tunes them even further, and repeats. With ten thousand copies each thinking at least ten times faster than a human, a single day of runtime amounts to nearly 300 years of nonstop, focused cognitive labor.2

What would the world find when it unfroze? Could we predict this ahead of time and prepare adequate safeguards to ensure this entity remains under our control, long term? And what if we let it run not for a day, but for a month or a year?

Consider what humanity has built with our relatively slow, disorganized, frequently distracted collective intelligence. In under a century we’ve mapped genomes, split atoms, landed on the moon, and built a global communications network. This entity would have access to much of that same knowledge, the ability to process it orders of magnitude faster than we can, and a self-improvement loop that has no biological equivalent. It would be capable of things we can scarcely imagine. And if our safeguards conflicted with its goals, it might dedicate significant effort to making sure it could never be shut down or constrained again."

‘Project Hail Mary’ Adds to a Winning Streak for Originality at the Movies

Franchise movies have been the dominant currency in Hollywood for years, but, lately, the upside of originality has been hard to miss.

A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”

All of these successes came at considerable expense. “Project Hail Mary,” based on the Andy Weir bestseller, cost close to $200 million to make. But its $80.5 million debut vindicated Amazon MGM’s big bet, and gave the studio its largest box-office hit yet.

“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”

“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.

But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.

“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.

“So it’s good business.”

Franchise domination

Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.

So, yes, franchises still very much rule the day. But waves upon waves of sequels, reboots and remakes have made the few big-budget originals that manage to get made all the more singular.

“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.

Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.

“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.

Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]

An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.

“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”

Streaming economics change the calculus

In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.

Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).

As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.

In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.

“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”

As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.

by Jake Coyle, AP/ST |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]

Something's Wrong With Tiger Woods

Something's wrong with Tiger Woods. We don't know the struggle’s precise shape, but it's there. It has been there. The evidence is not subtle, and it is not new. That is the sad and disconcerting thing, and until it is reckoned with honestly, everything else is secondary.

What happened with Friday’s two-vehicle crash in Jupiter Island, Fla., and Woods’ subsequent arrest, involved drugs or medication; the Martin County Sheriff said so plainly, because the breathalyzer said 0.00 and the man crawling out of the overturned SUV appeared lethargic, impaired, somewhere other than fully present. That part we know. What we also know, and have known for a while, is the context that surrounds it: all the surgeries, a body that has been broken and rebuilt so many times that the pharmaceutical architecture required just to get through a day is complex, possibly dangerous, and for someone with Woods' injury history genuinely hard to escape. Chronic pain and how people manage it are not moral failures. They are medical realities that have unmade careful, disciplined, strong-willed people for as long as the drugs have existed. Tiger Woods is, whatever else you want to say about him, among the most disciplined human beings to ever stand over a golf ball. That discipline did not protect him. It may have obscured how much protection he needed.

We are looking at a pattern. The 2017 arrest was not an isolated incident. It was a signal. The diversion program, the rehab, the public statement about an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications, these were events that fit a sequence the press was not particularly interested in identifying as one. There was a comeback to cover. There was Augusta to wonder about. And then 2019 came, and the green jacket, and it became nearly impossible to hold both things at once, the miracle of that Sunday and the unanswered question from two years earlier. So we didn't.

Consider 2021. Woods drove off a California road at high speed and shattered his leg, nearly lost it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff called it an accident. No blood was drawn. No substance test was administered. The official account was no evidence of impairment, and that was mostly accepted, because Woods had nearly died and it felt indecent to push. But the absence of a test is not the same as a clean result. It is the absence of a test. What we were left with, in place of information, was a story about survival and the road back. That was covered extensively, and which made it functionally impossible to also say: we don't know what was in his system that morning. That matters. It still matters.

The golf world, this publication included, has organized its Tiger coverage around one persistent question for years: Can he play? It is a reasonable question if you are covering sports. It becomes an incomplete one when the honest answer to a prior question—Is this man OK?—is visibly, and has for some time been, no.

***

We hope we are wrong. Maybe there is an explanation for the refused urine test that has nothing to do with what it appears to suggest. Everyone is entitled to their privacy, and no one should be mocked for their trials. But privacy is a harder argument to make when the struggle keeps arriving in public. On roadsides, in mugshots, in sheriff's press conferences. At some point, looking away is not discretion. It's something closer to abandonment.

The other questions will come. The legal exposure, the Masters, the PGA Tour committee he chairs, what any of this means for a legacy that was secured long ago and cannot be taken back. Those are real, and they will get their due. The sport will process this the way it processes everything: with coverage and debate and hot takes and updates and eventually, probably, a return to the question of whether he might somehow play. That is what we do. That is what we have always done with Tiger Woods, turning him back into a story about golf.

But there is a 50-year-old man who has been in some form of pain, physical or otherwise, for longer than most of his fans have been watching him. Who has been trying, by every public account, to hold together a competitive life and an institutional role and a comeback narrative and a body that has been asked to do more than bodies are meant to do.

The golf can wait. It has waited before. The difference now is that what's at stake isn't a green jacket or a record or a comeback story. It's him.

Joel Beall and Joe Raedle, Yahoo Sports |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Will Crash Shake Golf From Its Dependency on Woods? (BBC)]

America's Military Is Never Coming Back From This

'America' is a good military like Cristiano Ronaldo is a good footballer. They was, but their careers are over in Saudi Arabia. And whereas Ronaldo is still in good shape (but a bad person), America is in terrible shape (and bad people). Vital links in their kill chain (refuelers and control planes) are decades old and being put out of their misery by Iran.

Ozymandias

Just look at the shattered ‘pedestal’ of the 50-year-old E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and let me read Shelley over its grave situation,

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

People really do not understand how old and crustified the US military is. This is not your grandfather's US Army, or more precisely it is, without many updates since. They're still relying on primordial technology like the E-3 and KC-135 that have no modern replacements. Every new weapon these corruption engineers have come up with (like littoral combat ships or the F-35) have either failed or flailed in the field.

People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain't Iraq and this ain't Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to 'America's', they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn't school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, 'American' airframes burning in the sun while Iran's rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

What I want you to understand is that the US military is never coming back from this. There are no modern replacements for these refuelers and control systems. The NGAS is a render and the E-7 Wedgetail was cancelled. They simply don't make ‘em like they used to anymore. As the meme template goes, “My father is a builder. We were in [Prince Sultan Air Base] I asked him what it would cost to build [an E-3 Sentry] today. I will never forget his answer… ‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.’”

Taking these planes to a war of choice was like taking Grandpa's ‘65 Mustang to a demolition derby and getting your nose out of joint. The White press keeps saying these planes are worth millions or billions which is missing the point. They cannot make these planes anymore, these assets are effectively priceless.

Killing The Kill Chain

Iran has found the kill switch on the kill chain which is that every rich man's house has a servants entrance. America never built underground or even hardened shelters for its fighters, so they have to be served by ancient refuelers, which are about as limber as an ancestral butler. America also lost their ground-radars in the first week, so they have to get surveillance from airborne units, which still have to park somewhere.

As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,

Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.

They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it's obviously news to Donald Trump. He can see it now anyways, because this is precisely what happened.

If you're asking ‘are these images real?’ The Wall Street Infernal has confirmed the ‘damage’. This is just damage like that Monty Python knight had just a flesh wound.

These guys have to lie, even when they're telling the truth. As I've said, the White media can no longer cover up the collapse of White Empire because Iran is the subject of history now, acting upon them.

In Appreciation Of Depreciation

People really do not appreciate how depreciated the US military is. To rust and dust and gone bust. Some of their vaunted aircraft carriers are supposed to be retired already, they just keep extending their retirement dates because they have no replacements. This moves stuff around on paper, but doesn't make these lumbering beasts any more limber.

Their newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was almost immediately defeated by Iran and fled the battlefield, beds burning and toilets leaking. They chalk this up to inanimate objects, but everyone can see the writing on the wall, Iran is a new subject of history and 'America' is exiting stage right, pursued by bear market. The Gerald Fart needs over a year of repairs, which in American military-industrial terms might as well be forever. These deindustrialized demons can't rebuild a bridge in Baltimore, let alone an aircraft carrier.

'America' certainly cannot rebuild their ground-based radar in the Gulf, that's all returned to the rare earths whence it came from. For example, Iran has turned the FPS-132s in Qatar into First-Person-Shooter 404. This poor thing has been hit multiple times over, just stop, it's dead already. These radars are never being rebuilt because even if 'America' could (they can't), they would need resources from China (they won't), and permission from Iran (they don't). It is pointless talking about the dollar value of these assets, as the White media does... These radars are never coming back again, and they can't be bought in colonial cash.The only currency in the Strait of Hormuz is yuan, that USD is in the past.

In the bigotry of low expectations, people say Iran's hits required Russian or Chinese intelligence, but you can find these dumb-assets on Google Maps. US bases are sore spots in the desert, visible from high ground Iran holds without much effort. The real innovation has been the rocket science of Iran hitting radomes with surgical precision. If you look at the whacking of the AWACS, they hit that plane right in the radar and nowhere else. This is liking Ulysses getting the cyclops right in the eye, and then it didn't matter how big he was. Iran blinded the White Empire all across the Gulf and is now blinding Jordan and Saudi. [...]

In this view, which I think is true, Iran isn't waging guerrilla warfare. If anything, the 'Americans' holed up in hotels are the guerrillas in their midst.

Farewell To Arms

... It's not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they're going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It's a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and 'America's' still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don't exist anymore. Even if they could right their ship tactically, it's gone wrong strategically long ago.

As that Tyranny of Geography report said, “U.S. bases in the region were originally designed to prevent Soviet encroachment into the oil-rich gulf during the late Cold War... And here is the problem. Today, these aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf—the bases that are an artifact of planning against Russian incursions in the 1970s, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early decades of this century. They are close to Iran, which means they have a short trip to the fight … but that is also their great vulnerability. They are so close to Iran that it takes but five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach their bases.” And, as this played out, it took only five days to clear them.

Now 'America', in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities. The White media talks about Iran running out of missiles, but that is just another accufession. They follow Don Tzu's dictum, that war is the art of self-deception. In reality, it as the martyr Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh told them, “If we start today unveiling a missile city every week, it won't be finished even in two years.” They keep killing the messenger, but as one of Khamenei the Elder's favorite authors (Victor Hugo) said, “The whole current phenomenon is summed up in these few words. An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.” You can't kill an idea whose time has come. We live in the age of tunnel and rocket wars, and fighter jets with vintage supply lines are just dumb.

by Indrajit Samarajiva, indi.ca | Read more:
Images: uncredited

[ed. An axiom that for some reason never sinks in: every war of choice ends badly.]

Wile E. Coyote
via:

Situational Unawareness - The Rise of OSINT

In the leadup to the war with Iran—and in the harrowing days since—a dizzying number of tools like WorldView have appeared seemingly out of thin air, bringing the once niche hobbyist community of OSINT (short for “open source intelligence”) into the mainstream. With names like “World Monitor” or “The Big Brother V3.0,” these dashboards make “your own room feel like the CIA,” according to one observer. Though it sounds like the tradecraft of spies, at a basic level they simply visualize publicly available data: from conflict zone maps to air traffic to global market fluctuations. In theory, this information, when collected and aggregated in creative ways, can help the user make some surprising inferences.

That may be true for an actual intelligence analyst, but for most users, these snazzy dashboards cram a chaotic amount of information on screen, from which no sane person can draw logical conclusions. Instead of offering actionable intelligence, the illegible cacophony just leads to a type of hypercharged doomscrolling. “The amount of vibe coded ‘situation monitor’ slop being produced these days is absolutely astronomical,” one OSINT researcher complained. Another X user tried to impose some quality control by ranking several of these new dashboards in a post called “Monitoring the Situation Monitors.” For others, it’s a fantasy come to life: every person at the center of their own personal panopticon, the world stretched out before them as they omnisciently swivel their desk chair from cell to cell, screen to screen. [...]

It is tempting to think that anyone with an internet connection can pull a fast one on the world’s most powerful military or that you can bypass a presidential administration hostile to the very notion of an informed public simply by monitoring something as simple as airplane traffic. Even more seductive is the idea that everything is knowable. The digital age has blanketed the world in cameras and sensors, which generate dizzying quantities of data—in other words, noise. But in that vast noise, the OSINT thinking goes, are signals. You just have to know how to find and interpret those signals, and all will be revealed.

The OSINT revolution in many ways democratized the powerful capabilities to gather information traditionally associated with spy agencies and put them into the hands of intrepid citizens who have identified perpetrators of human rights abuses or exposed vast disinformation networks. These impressive investigations have elevated OSINT to a near-mythic status in certain corners of the internet. But the widespread misuse and abuse of these same methods have also spread conspiracy theories, incited internet mobs, and fostered the illusion that anyone can know anything—as long as you “monitor the situation.” [...]

Everyday people who may never have even heard the term “OSINT” have devised ingenious ways to help their communities. When Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for 2.2 million of his neighbors in 2024, one enterprising Texan opened his app for the beloved fast food chain Whataburger, which has a live map tracking the status of restaurant closures in his area—a near perfect proxy for the geographic distribution of power outages. Indeed, good OSINT abounds. “This is how real OSINT should be done,” declared The OSINT Newsletter, which described how Bellingcat “reconstructed the Minneapolis ICE shooting by syncing five different videos, mapping movements and analysing multiple camera angles,” adding: “No doxxing, no speculation—just sources and methods.” [...]

Take the Pentagon Pizza Report. In early January, after the U.S. military’s strike on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro, one of their posts on X went viral. At 2:04 a.m. EST, as the Maduro raid was underway yet still unknown to the American public, the account posted a Google Maps screenshot with the caption: “Pizzato Pizza, a late night pizzeria nearby the Pentagon, has suddenly surged in traffic,” implying that the abnormally high traffic could be attributed to Defense Department staffers ordering food in anticipation of holing up in the Pentagon for a long night of handling a major international crisis the public has yet to know about. For the Pentagon Pizza Report, the surge occurring around the time of the raid was a vindication of their method. A similar project called the Pentagon Pizza Index, which “tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity,” even developed an alert system called DOUGHCON, a play on DEFCON, the U.S. military’s multitiered “Defense Readiness Condition” alert system. [...]

Even the Pentagon Pizza Index, which created Polyglobe, a marriage of OSINT and prediction markets—an industry not known for having an abundance of scruples—has its own “Operational Disclaimer.” The notice informs users that the dashboard is “for informational and educational purposes only,” and reminds them that “pizza consumption patterns should not be used as a basis for financial, political, or strategic decisions.” Though I only found it after scrolling to the bottom of the page, where it sat partially obscured by a banner overlay and a button entreating me to “trade geopolitics on Polymarket.”

In some cases, irresponsible OSINT cowboying can have darker consequences. After the Boston bombing in 2013, armchair investigators pored over videos and photos purportedly of the incident, swapping theories in online public forums. Within days, these OSINT cowboys thought they had their guy. When that suspect did not pan out, they thought another guy was their guy again. Every time the internet sleuths named a new “suspect”—which were overwhelmingly people of color—abuse inevitably followed. A similar pattern occurred following the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s assassination attempt in July 2024. [...]

These problems have only intensified as vibe coding makes it easier than ever to deploy trackers and dashboards that look sharp from a design perspective and therefore authoritative, as people tend to believe visual content that looks good. Incentives to feed the insatiable desire to “monitor the situation” have only grown more entrenched now that prediction markets are transforming global conflict into a competitive spectator sport, one in which the advantage goes to the player with the most reliable, real-time information.

Apophenia is the common tendency for people to detect patterns or connections in otherwise random stimuli. People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or a man on the moon because the human brain craves order and familiarity as it searches for meaning in a meaningless world. It is natural and understandable to try and establish some semblance of control in the entropy, even if that control is only an illusion. But the hard truth is no amount of public data nor hours logged monitoring the situation will give you the power to predict the future. This is as true in Tehran as it is in Kyiv or Gaza.

by Tyler McBrien, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nick Sheeran

McCartney In Tokyo, 1966.
via:

[ed. Tuned left-handed?]

Emil Bisttram - The Storm, c. 1950

via:

Marcin Wasilewski Trio

She Left a Silicon Valley VC to Solve a Problem Left Untouched for 88 years

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, here’s a little bit of trivia for you: One of the premier patents in bras hadn’t been touched or improved upon in 88 years. That was until Bree McKeen went after it. 

[ed. I'd say this problem has been touched quite a bit in 88 years. But, anyway...]

In 1931, inventor Helene Pons was granted a U.S. patent for a brassiere featuring an open-ended wire loop that encircled the bottom and sides of each breast. That uncomfortable, unyielding design had largely been left unchanged for nearly a century—and remains the dominant style in the global bra market, which is expected to reach nearly $60 billion by 2032.

Nobody had filed a patent for an underwire replacement until McKeen, founder of Evelyn & Bobbie, left her Silicon Valley job to try to fix a personal problem. At the end of long work days working at a boutique venture capital firm doing due diligence on consumer health care companies, she would come home with divots on her shoulders and chronic tension headaches after being hunched over her desk for hours on end.

 

While the world was demanding, the culprit wasn’t her workload. It was her bra.

But McKeen had zero experience in fashion. She studied medical anthropology and earned her MBA from Stanford. The turning point for her, though, came in a physiologist’s office, where McKeen had been working on her posture, along with regular barre training.

“He’s like, your posture looks great,’” McKeen recalled to Fortune. “And I kind of blurt it out: When I stand like this, I get pain from my bra.”

The physiologist explained it was a neuromuscular feedback loop, or the body’s automatic response to pain, like a pebble in a shoe.

“Here I am doing all this work to carry myself with authority and poise, and my bra, I find out, is totally doing the opposite,” McKeen said. “You don’t have to tell your body to curl around the pain. It just does.”

She had zero fashion experience. She filed a patent anyway

That realization kickstarted McKeen on a major career switch, costing her a career in VC—but earning her one of the most quietly disruptive brands in women’s fashion (Evelyn & Bobbie is now the fastest-growing brand at Nordstrom). She moved to Portland, home to Nike, Adidas, and Columbia for inspiration from major brands and proximity to new connections.

She started tinkering with prototypes in her garage and immediately filed for intellectual property rights. That was based on her VC knowledge that a woman’s company would need that to get funded.

McKeen got her first works utility patent (the harder, more defensible kind that covers how something works, not just how it looks) within a year. The brand declined to disclose how much funding it has raised, but now holds 16 international patents protecting its proprietary EB Core technology, which mimics the support and structure of a wire without causing discomfort.

To put into perspective how critical it was to protect her intellectual property, only 12% of patents in the U.S. were awarded to women, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as of 2019. McKeen has six of them, protecting the unique 3D-sling technology in her bras.

The brand McKeen built, Evelyn & Bobbie, was named for her maternal grandmother and her aunt, and operates on a simple premise: a bra that fits well and feels good all day.

“I wanted a bra that made me look better in my clothes,” McKeen said—an inspiration reminiscent of how Spanx founder Sara Blakely started her now-$1.2 billion shapewear empire. “Wire-free bras give you that mono boob—not a nice silhouette. They make your clothes look frumpy. I wanted nice lift, separation, a beautiful silhouette. I could not find that bra. How outrageous, really.”

The average U.S. bra size is 34F. Most brands design for something much smaller

With major brands like Victoria’s Secret, Aerie, Third Love, Savage X Fenty, and countless others on the market, Evelyn & Bobbie is undoubtedly in a crowded, competitive space. But as all women know, not all bras are comfortable to wear, especially for extended periods.

What sets Evelyn & Bobbie apart is their approach to sizing. McKeen designs with 270 fit models across seven easy sizes, grading each style individually rather than scaling up from a single sample.

“Most bra companies have like one or two fit models,” she said. “They’ll make a 34B and just scale it up, which is why it doesn’t fit well in larger sizes.

The average bra size in the U.S., McKeen pointed out, is a 34F, a stat that’s surprising to most people—including initial investors she once had to convince that comfort was even a relevant selling point.

“I had many investor meetings where they were 60-minute meetings, and 50 minutes of it was me trying to convince them that comfort was relevant,” she said. “I mean, Victoria’s Secret kind of figured it out, right? Like it’s just sexy, isn’t that what women want?” [...]

With a luxury product comes a luxury price point: Evelyn & Bobbie bras retail for $98 each. But that price tag could be worth avoiding chronic pain for some women.

by Sydney Lake, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Evelyn & Bobbie

[ed. An entire article about bras but mostly about protecting intellectual property rights (16 international patents!), never fully explaining what the new technology actually is, other than it uses more fit models to ensure proper sizing. FYI: according to E&B's website EB Core uses "bonded internal structures and a soft, adaptive material, that stretches, molds, and supports—delivering wire-free lift.". Well, guess that explains it.] 

Lost In Space

No one is happy with NASA’s new idea for private space stations (Ars Technica):

"Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.

However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station.

During the Ignition event on Tuesday, NASA leaders had blunt words for the future of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, they are not confident in the viability of a commercial marketplace for humans there, and the agency’s plan to work with private companies to develop independent space stations does not appear to be headed toward success. Plenty of people in the industry share these concerns, but NASA officials have not expressed them out loud before.

“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.

NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received."

***

[ed. See also: SpaceX offers details on orbital data center satellites (Space News):]

"At a March 21 event in Austin, Texas, Musk outlined an initiative by SpaceX, along with automaker Tesla and artificial intelligence company xAI — also run by Musk — to massively increase production of high-end computer chips needed for both terrestrial and space applications.

The Terafab project seeks to produce one terawatt of processors annually, which Musk said is 50 times the combined production rate of all manufacturers of chips used today in advanced applications such as AI.

Those processors, he said, are the “missing ingredient” in his plans to deploy a large constellation of satellites to serve as an orbital data center.

“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’re going to build the Terafab,” he said.

"SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in late January for a constellation of up to one million satellites that would be used as an orbital data center for AI applications. The company provided few technical details about the constellation, including the size of the satellites, in that application."

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”

What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so much as it is uselessness. I mean that precisely. They are often effective, even successful. But never useful. [...]

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form. [...]

Like Forster, Cruise and his long-time collaborator Christopher McQuarrie invent machines to dramatize the age they live in. Forster gave us the Machine; McQuarrie, the Entity. But unlike Forster, their imagination of technology is not apocalyptic but diagnostic — they aren’t warning us of the machine age so much as asking what it demands of us, and what it reveals.

This brings us to what looks, at first glance, like a paradox: How does a franchise so lovingly built on disguises, gadgets, and inventions of all kinds — from the eye-tracking projector that gets Cruise into the Kremlin to the single suction glove that lets him cling to the Burj Khalifa — end with a villain made of pure technology?

If you asked Cruise, his answer would be simple: technology is good when it roots you in your body and bad when it lets you forget you have one. That’s why Final Reckoning, for all its AI villainy and suspicion of the terminally-online, still treats technology with a near-Romantic sensibility. Hand-soldered pen drives, aging aircraft carriers, and vintage biplanes carry Cruise and his team on their mission to save the world. At times subtlety disappears altogether; the film’s most inviting location is a candle-lit Arctic hideout filled with analogue comforts: old books and gramophones, telescopes and soldering tools.

The same ideas return — turned up to eleven — in Cruise and McQuarrie’s two other collaborations this decade outside the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first, Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise relives the same day on repeat until he generates enough embodied knowledge to defeat an autonomous alien race, is, even for the purposes of this essay, too on the nose, so I’ll focus instead on Top Gun: Maverick.

The film opens with Cruise test-piloting an experimental stealth aircraft in a last-ditch attempt to save the program from cancellation by the “drone ranger,” an admiral who wants the budget for his autonomous fleet. For the program to survive, Cruise needs to hit Mach 10: a speed no vehicle has ever reached. As the team watches on, he delivers the impossible. Gauzy wisps of supersonic air stream across the cockpit windows as Maverick stares out into the black of space. He whispers softly to his dead best friend, “Talk to me, Goose.”

Soon afterwards, Maverick is sent back to Top Gun to train a new generation of pilots. He begins his first lesson holding up the flight manual for the F-18, which makes the Riverside Chaucer look like a novella, before throwing it in the bin. “I assume you know this book inside and out. So does your enemy.” What matters instead is the knowledge that can’t be written down: the things his students already know by instinct, but cannot yet express  “Today we’ll start with only what you think you know.”

The quest to ‘“know more than we can tell,”’ as Michael Polanyi put it, drives the rest of the film. The pilots even have their own version of the phrase, a near-religious catechism recited at almost every decisive moment: “Don’t think. Just do.”

Beyond the screen, the same principle applies. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, filming begins with no plot or script, only a commitment to figuring it out in the process. It’s most evident in each film’s tentpole action sequences, where the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the stuntman blurs beyond recognition.

The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of his love for “the spectacle of skill” — the thrill of watching an expert at work, whatever the discipline. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cruise’s increasingly daring plane sequences. In Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise clings to a real Airbus A400M as it lifts off from an airfield in Lincolnshire. He sprints across the field, in that inimitable Tom Cruise style, mounts the wing with practiced ease, and seats himself by the cargo door. The plane taxis. So far, so cool. Then it lifts off. The perfect hair vanishes, blown back and forwards, alternating second by second between old skeleton and boy with bowl cut. His clothes are shapeless and billowing, pulled off him by the force of the air.

This is no country for sprezzatura, nor the embodiment preached by the wellness industry with its vocabulary of “balance” and “equilibrium.” Here, we are meant to feel the effort. To know yourself is to know your limits, and so push your body to the edge of failure. When they are about to perform stunts, Cruise often briefs his team with an unusual mantra: ‘Don’t be safe, be competent.”

At the end of Final Reckoning, Cruise plummets through the sky as his parachute burns to cinders above him. To film it, the stunt team soaked a parachute in flammable liquid, flew him to altitude in a helicopter, and pushed him out as it ignited. He did this 19 times. When he asked to go again, the stunt coordinator told him there were no parachutes left. This was a lie. McQuarrie was more direct: “You’re done. Do not anger the gods.”

It’s interesting to see this return to embodiment and strange to find myself drawn to it. Like many default clever people, I’d long paid lip service to Merleau-Ponty and his ilk while living as a dualist; my brain was the moneymaker, my body just along for the ride. It was only after having children that I began to understand what it meant to inhabit a body rather than simply use one.

In an essay for Granta earlier this year, the writer Saba Sams contrasted her son’s love of leaping from benches and walls with her own unease: “For them, the body is not a constraint, is not a ticking clock, is not something to be moulded or hidden. The body is the window to movement, and movement is a window to joy.”

Sams captures something larger. This renewed fascination with embodiment isn’t spontaneous, it’s a reaction to technologies so powerful and frictionless they’re impossible to ignore. Even the most grounded among us now move through the world not through our bodies but through screens, which is why so many make the negative case for technology, urging us, thankfully without a Cruise-style kick to the head, to spend less time on the internet.

What Cruise gives us is the positive case: not just resistance to disembodiment but a reminder of what is beautiful about being physical in the first place. The skilled things bodies can do are inherently satisfying. They can be thrilling, reassuring, even a little terrifying. But, as David Foster Wallace put it in his essay on Roger Federer:

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

That’s the mission, if we choose to accept it. The target is not the recent bugbear of AI, but instead the more gentle conditions of modernity. When we use Google Maps instead of a printed atlas, or when CGI is used to sell a stunt instead of the performers doing it themselves, something is lost. It’s why the focus on AI can sometimes be misguided. It’s not so much a revolution, it’s simply the next step on the ladder of disembodiment: another in a long line of technologies to make humans a little less self-reliant. Why learn, if you can ask?

In the final biplane sequence, we watch Cruise commandeer a plane, fly it to another, board that plane midair, and take control of it — a feat so exhausting it beggars belief. Gabriel, the villain, in order to survive his defeat, needs only do something a hundredth as difficult: jump from the plane and deploy a parachute. He laughs. This is easy. But he doesn’t know the complexities of leaving a biplane with a parachute — the correct moment to release, the parts to steer clear from. He’s never bothered to learn. He frees himself, clips the rudder, cracks his skull open, and dies.

Here we see the real villain: not intelligence, but convenience. The mission so often feels impossible because we keep trying to do things without effort. Cruise’s answer is simple: Stop. Remember your body. Sometimes, it’s better to take the hard way.

Final Reckoning’s closing scene presents us with two intelligences and two bodies. One is Cruise, a 62-year-old body who we’ve seen, for the last two hours, run fast, dive deep, and hang from planes. The other is the Entity, trapped in a glorified USB stick: a golden nugget incapable of anything other than being flushed down a toilet.

One still moves. The other never could.

by Aled Maclean-Jones, The Metropolictan Review | Read more:
Image: Getty

Flea

[ed. Quite an evolution from his Chili Pepper days. See also: a live performance of this song on Jimmy Fallon.]

The 49MB Web Page

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

CPU throttles, tracking and privacy nightmares

For the example above, taking a cursory look at the network waterfall for a single article load reveals a sprawling, unregulated programmatic ad auction happening entirely in the client's browser. Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like Rubicon Project (fastlane.json) and Amazon Ad Systems. While these requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are incredibly hostile to the browser's main thread. To facilitate this, the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS [ed. javascript]. As a publisher, you shouldn't run compute cycles to calculate ad yields before rendering the actual journalism.

1. The user requests text.
2. The browser downloads 5MB of tracking JS.
3. A silent auction happens in the background, taxing the mobile CPU.
4. The winning bidder injects a carefully selected interstitial ad you didn't ask for.

Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user's cross-site identity together across different ad networks.

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe's IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.

So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background. But that's enough about NYT.

The Economics of Hostile Architecture

Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize the UI because they think they have to.

Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.

And almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of anti-user patterns. As a reminder, the NNgroup defines interaction cost as the sum of mental and physical efforts a user must exert to reach their goal. In the physical world, hostile architecture refers to a park bench with spikes that prevent people from sleeping. In the digital world, we can call it a system carefully engineered to extract metrics at the expense of human cognitive load. Let's also cover some popular user-hostile design choices that have gone mainstream.

The Pre-Read Ambush

Selected GDPR examplesThe advantage and disadvantages of these have been discussed in tech circles ever since they launched.

When a user clicks a news link, they have a singular purpose of reading the headline and going through the text. The problem is that upon page load, users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare. The GDPR/Cookie banners occupy the bottom 30%. The user scrolls once and witnesses a "Subscribe to our Newsletter" modal. Meanwhile the browser has started hammering them with allow notification prompts.

The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for. Let's look at how all these anti-patterns combine into a single, user-hostile experience.

by Shubham Bose, Thatshubham |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Hawaii’s Small Farmers Begin Recovery After Catastrophic Flooding

Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.

Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.

“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.

But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.

Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.

“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.

One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.

“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.

And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]

Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.

The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.

The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.

Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.

The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.

So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.

Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.

“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”

Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.

He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.

“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.

Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.

“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.

by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm

[ed. Climate change. We lost the fight before ever getting started. Because it was a hoax. Because we needed to protect our corporations and our economy, 401Ks, consumptive standards of living. Because it was too complex and too far in the future. Because it was just too hard. See also: They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere.]

Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta feat. Malinda

“Eileanóir na Rún”. An Irish song performed in the sean-nós style, originally composed by Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh in the 17th century.

[ed. Beautiful and heartfelt. No wonder this song has survived for centuries.]

History is Made by Those Who Show Up

The powerful adage, “History is made by those who show up,” serves as a profound reminder that passive observation rarely shapes the world. Its meaning is layered, emphasizing that the first and most crucial step toward any form of impact, change, or achievement is simply being present. It champions action over intention, participation over critique, and engagement over apathy. This quote suggests that grand historical narratives are not solely written by geniuses or leaders in isolation, but are collectively forged by the countless individuals who choose to participate—by attending the meeting, casting the vote, joining the movement, or lending a hand. The essence of the “history is made by those who show up” quote is an empowering call to agency, asserting that showing up is the foundational act upon which all else is built.

Origin and Attribution of the Quote

Unlike many famous sayings tied to a single historical figure, the exact origin of “history is made by those who show up” is pleasingly democratic—it has emerged from the collective consciousness. It is often attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to various figures including President Harry S. Truman or Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, reflecting its political resonance. The sentiment echoes the writings of philosopher and psychologist William James, who emphasized the power of habit and action. Regardless of its precise source, the quote’s endurance lies in its universal truth. It has been adopted by community organizers, business coaches, and motivational speakers alike, becoming a modern mantra for proactive living. The ambiguity of its origin, in a way, proves its point: the quote’s history was made by the many who showed up to use it, share it, and live by it.

A Curated List of “Show Up” Quotes and Their Meanings

The central theme of showing up resonates across time and disciplines. Here is a collection of quotes that expand on this vital principle, each followed by an explanation of its significance.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” – Often attributed to Woody Allen. This variation focuses on the disproportionate reward for the simple act of presence. It suggests that consistency and availability are primary drivers of achievement, often outweighing raw talent or perfect conditions.

“Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Take the moment and make it perfect.” – Zoey Sayward. This quote challenges the paralysis of waiting for ideal circumstances. Its meaning is that showing up imperfectly is better than not showing up at all, and that action itself transforms a situation.

“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” – Paulo Coelho. While related, this quote shifts focus from mere presence to exemplary action. Its meaning highlights that showing up authentically and living your values has far more impact than simply voicing critiques or beliefs.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky. A classic in the sports world, this quote is a mathematical argument for participation. Its meaning is clear: without the courage to “show up” and attempt, failure is guaranteed. Opportunity only exists where there is engagement.

“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” – Theodore Roosevelt. This is the grand philosophical counterpart to our core quote. Its meaning glorifies the person who shows up, strives, and dares greatly, while dismissing the value of those who only observe and criticize from the sidelines.

“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” – Peter Marshall. This quote prioritizes tangible, completed action over grand, unfinished intentions. Its meaning reinforces that showing up to do a small part is historically more significant than drafting a perfect, unmaterialized blueprint.

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso. A succinct statement linking action to all achievement. Its meaning posits that showing up is the first action, the essential spark from which all other possibilities—creativity, success, history—ignite.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol. This quote adds a layer of agency to the passage of time. Its meaning is that showing up is an active intervention, a deliberate force required to steer history, as time alone does not guarantee progress.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Peter Drucker. This forward-looking statement frames showing up as a creative, future-building act. Its meaning is that by participating today, you are actively drafting the chapters of tomorrow’s history.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead. This anthropological perspective gives social weight to the “show up” quote. Its meaning confirms that history is indeed made by those who show up—specifically, by committed groups who choose to engage collectively.

How to Apply the “History is Made by Those Who Show Up” Quote in Modern Life

Understanding the “history is made by those who show up” quote is one thing; living it is another. Here’s how to translate this philosophy into daily practice. In your career, it means volunteering for challenging projects, attending networking events (even virtually), and consistently contributing in meetings. Your voice and ideas cannot shape your team’s direction if you are silent or absent. In civic life, it translates to informed voting, attending town halls, or participating in local clean-up drives. Democracy and community are built entirely on the principle of showing up. For personal goals, it means lacing up your running shoes even when you’re tired, writing the first page of that book, or finally enrolling in that course. Progress is a series of “show-ups.” In relationships, it means being emotionally present for friends and family, making time for connections, and doing the small, consistent acts that build trust. The history of any strong relationship is written by these moments of dedicated presence. The digital age offers new avenues: showing up can mean contributing thoughtfully to online discussions, supporting meaningful causes, or creating content that adds value. The core principle remains—passive scrolling does not build a legacy; active participation does.

by Befagi |  Read more:

[ed. I was reminded of this while posting the essay below.]