Insider Trading Is Going to Get People Killed

War markets are a national-security threat.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Polymarket placed the odds at just 14 percent, netting “magamyman” a profit of more than $120,000.

Everyone knew that an attack might be in the works—some American aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Middle East weeks ago—but the Iranian government was caught off guard by the timing. Although the ayatollah surely was aware of the risks to his life, he presumably did not know that he would be targeted on this particular Saturday morning. Yet on Polymarket, plenty of warning signs pointed to an impending attack. The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Until then, few people on the platform were betting that kind of money on an immediate attack.

Maybe all of this sounds eerily familiar. In January, someone on Polymarket made a series of suspiciously well-timed bets right before the U.S. attacked a foreign country and deposed its leader. By the time Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela and flown to New York, the user had pocketed more than $400,000. Perhaps this trader and the Iran bettors who are now flush with cash simply had the luck of a lifetime—the gambling equivalent of making a half-court shot. Or maybe they knew what was happening ahead of time and flipped it for easy money. We simply do not know.

Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already under way: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.

The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that Lady Gaga, Cardi B, and Ricky Martin would make surprise appearances during the Super Bowl halftime show, but that Drake and Travis Scott wouldn’t? Shady bets on war are even stranger and more disturbing. They risk unleashing an entirely new kind of national-security threat. The U.S. caught a break: The Venezuela and Iran strikes were not thwarted by insider traders whose bets could have prompted swift retaliation. The next time, we may not be so lucky. [...]

Any insiders who put money down on impending war may not have thought that they were giving anything away. An anonymous bet that reeks of insider trading is not always easy to spot in the moment. After the suspicious Polymarket bets on the Venezuela raid, the site’s forecast placed the odds that Maduro would be ousted at roughly 10 percent. Even if Maduro and his team had been glued to Polymarket, it’s hard to imagine that such long odds would have compelled him to flee in the middle of the night. And even with so many people betting last Friday on an imminent strike in Iran, Polymarket forecasted only a 26 percent chance, at most, of an attack the next day. What’s the signal, and what’s the noise?

In both cases, someone adept at parsing prediction markets could have known that something was up. “It’s possible to spot these bets ahead of time,” Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist who studies prediction markets, told me. There are some telltale behaviors that could help distinguish a military contractor betting off a state secret from a college student mindlessly scrolling on his phone after one too many cans of Celsius. Someone who’s using a newly created account to wager a lot of money against the conventional wisdom is probably the former, not the latter. And spotting these kinds of suspicious bettors is only getting easier. The prediction-market boom has created a cottage industry of tools that instantaneously flag potential insider trading—not for legal purposes but so that you, too, can profit off what the select few already know.

Unlike Kalshi, the other big prediction-market platform, Polymarket can be used in the U.S. only through a virtual private network, or VPN. In effect, the site is able to skirt regulations that require tracking the identities of its customers and reporting shady bets to the government. In some ways, insider trading seems to be the whole point: “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market,” Shayne Coplan, the company’s 27-year-old CEO, said in an interview last year. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)

Consider if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had paid the monthly fee for a service that flagged relevant activity on Polymarket two hours before the strike. The supreme leader might not have hosted in-person meetings with his top advisers where they were easy targets for missiles. [...]

Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance notice to an adversary is problematic,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has written about war markets, told me. “And these predictive markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this information.” In all likelihood, he added, intelligence agencies across the world are already paying attention to Polymarket. Last year, the military’s bulletin for intelligence professionals published an article advocating for the armed forces to integrate data from Polymarket to “more fully anticipate national security threats.” After all, the Pentagon already has some experience with prediction markets. During the War on Terror, DARPA toyed with creating what it billed the “Policy Analysis Market,” a site that would let anonymous traders bet on world events to forecast terrorist attacks and coups. (Democrats in Congress revolted, and the site was quickly canned.)

Now every adversary and terrorist group in the world can easily access war markets that are far more advanced than what the DOD ginned up two decades ago. What makes Polymarket’s entrance into warfare so troubling is not just potential insider trading from users like “magamyman.” If governments are eyeing Polymarket for signs of an impending attack, they can also be led astray. A government or another sophisticated actor wouldn’t need to spend much money to massively swing the Polymarket odds on whether a Gulf state will imminently strike Iran—breeding panic and paranoia. More fundamentally, prediction markets risk warping the basic incentives of war, Goldenberg said. He gave the example of a Ukrainian military commander making less than $1,000 a month, who could place bets that go against his own military’s objective. “Maybe you choose to retreat a day early because you can double, triple, or quadruple your money and then send that back to your family,” he said.

by Saahil Desai, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani/The Atlantic
[ed. For other examples, see also: Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day (ACX). Also: How to Prevent Insider Trading on Trump’s Wars (New Yorker); and, America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster (Atlantic).]

The Sluishuis

The Sluishuis (Dutch for 'sluice house') is an apartment building in IJburg, a neighbourhood on artificial islands in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The building, which opened on 13 July 2022, was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture firm based in Copenhagen and New York City, in collaboration with Rotterdam-based Barcode Architects.

The Sluishuis is a sustainable building, with solar panels installed on the roof providing the energy for the lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in the complex. Its courtyard has a publicly accessible jetty where boats can moor...

The Sluishuis has 442 apartment units; 369 of them, mainly in the middle segment, are for renting and the rest are on sale. The size of the residential units ranges from 40 to 180 square metres (430 to 1,940 sq ft). Around the entire building is a publicly accessible jetty where there is space for 34 houseboats. The Sluishuis is built over the water of the IJ, allowing boats to moor at a dock of the complex. The unusual shape makes the building appear to float above the water.

via: Wikipedia

Image: Hay Kranen

Please Hold

She called 911 for an ambulance. She got a nightmare instead.

When Pamela Hogan phoned 911 from her Seattle apartment, she was suffering from knee pain so intense she couldn’t stand up. She had been trapped in her bed all day, unable to eat, drink or get to the bathroom. Worried and alone, Hogan thought an ambulance would come quickly and take her to the hospital.

She was mistaken.

Seattle no longer is capping ambulance wait times for certain 911 patients, tracking those waits or penalizing its ambulance contractor when they run long.

Rather than send Hogan help right away, the Fire Department routed her to a nurse in Texas who determined her crisis didn’t need immediate attention.

So the 71-year-old, a retired executive assistant who loved cooking casseroles, watching “Judge Judy” and listening to The Pointer Sisters, waited one hour for a nurse-ordered ambulance, according to call recordings and court documents.

Two hours. Three hours. Four hours, phoning 911 back several times and telling the Fire Department about a heart condition. Ten hours.

By the time an ambulance arrived at Hogan’s building, it was the middle of the night and she wasn’t answering her phone. The ambulance left without her.

Weeks later, her body was found decomposing on the floor of her bedroom.

It’s not clear Hogan’s wait is what killed her, but her estate has sued and her experience raises questions about Seattle’s relationship with its for-profit ambulance contractor, American Medical Response, which also provides the city’s 911 nurse line.

“More checks and balances and accountability need to happen,” said Josephine Ensign, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Nursing who called Hogan’s case concerning and upsetting. “Seattle can do better.”

Seattle and AMR have denied the lawsuit’s wrongful death allegations and say the nurse line is generally working as intended. They say it’s reducing strain on hospitals and ambulances by diverting low-level patients to more appropriate care.

But most Seattle callers triaged by the nurse line are still being sent to hospitals in AMR ambulances, rather than being diverted, program data reveals. And officials have exempted those nurse-ordered rides, like Hogan’s, from city standards that normally require the company’s ambulances to arrive on time.

It’s possible that Hogan’s experience was an aberration. But the city stopped tracking ambulance waits like hers in 2022, so officials have no way to know. [...]

***

Hogan’s wait started when she dialed 911 on the afternoon of April 8, 2022.

“I’ve got really bad knees because of rheumatoid arthritis and there is damage to them as well, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t get up,” she told the Fire Department dispatcher who answered, according to a recording of the call obtained through a public records request. “I’d like to go to the ER and have them look at my knees.”

Hogan had used 911 for emergencies before, assuming this time would be the same. Instead, her call was transferred to the nurse line operated by AMR’s parent company, Global Medical Response, from a call center outside Dallas.

“I’m going to bring the nurse on the line here and let them kind of help figure out the best course of action,” the Fire Department dispatcher said.

Hogan told the nurse she had been stuck in bed all day and had completely filled an adult diaper, according to a recording disclosed by AMR in the Hogan litigation. She described her pain intensity as 10 out of 10.

“I will get someone out to you,” the nurse said. “To get you to the hospital.”

Then the nurse ordered an ambulance, recommending care within four hours, according to another recording disclosed in the Hogan litigation. An AMR dispatcher in Seattle said it would take three to four.

Neither of them told Hogan, who was no longer on the phone.

Strained system

In the years before Hogan’s emergency, the Seattle Fire Department and AMR were dealing with a mounting number of 911 calls from patients with low-level needs, said Michael Sayre, the Fire Department’s medical director.

A sore throat. Anxiety. A stomachache. Patients who don’t really require emergency transport and care. The city received 44% more low-level medical calls in 2021 than in 2017, according to Fire Department records.

Few 911 patients receive lifesaving interventions and most emergency room visits are for nonemergency issues, national research has shown. People sometimes dial 911 not because they’re in imminent danger but because they’re not sure whether they’re sick or not, Sayre said.

These patients put pressure on the Fire Department’s dispatchers, who work long, grueling shifts. Such calls often involve homeless people or other patients without regular doctors, noted Ensign, whose decades of Seattle-based work has focused on health and social inequities.

“They don’t know what else to do, so they call 911,” Sayre said.

For acute 911 calls, the Fire Department sends its own highly trained crews. They can transport patients in red Medic One ambulances or hand the patients off to AMR emergency medical technicians in white ambulances.

For less-acute calls, the department may simply send AMR. One way or another, the company handles most of Seattle’s ambulance responses, approximately 50,000 annually. [...]

New program

Like other cities that use ambulance contractors for 911 callers, Seattle allows AMR to bill patients. In return, the company must meet standards for patient care: For years, its ambulances were supposed to arrive within 11½ minutes for more-urgent calls and one hour for less-urgent calls, at least 90% of the time.

But in the wake of the COVID pandemic, AMR was struggling with ambulance staffing in Seattle, arriving late for many of its 911 patients and paying a price, Fire Department records show. The city assessed the company almost $1.4 million in contract penalties for ambulance delays in 2021.

Enter the Nurse Navigation program, which Seattle and AMR leaders said would relieve that strain and improve ambulance response times in the city by diverting low-level callers to cheaper, better solutions. When it launched with fanfare in February 2022, then-Mayor Bruce Harrell called it “a strong example” of how to make a system “more efficient and ensure better care at the same time.”

The idea wasn’t new: King County had been using a 911 nurse line on a smaller scale for years, and cities across the world were experimenting. When implemented well, these programs can deliver real benefits, many experts say.

Seattle preferred not to hire its own nurses, said Sayre, the medical director, citing the costs involved. So the Fire Department turned to AMR, which agreed to triage the city’s callers almost for free. AMR had launched Nurse Navigation in Washington, D.C., in 2018 and had been attracting positive attention. [...]

Requirements removed

Before Nurse Navigation, patients like Hogan could expect assistance in under an hour. That changed in 2022 with an amendment to AMR’s contract that gave nurse-ordered ambulances a reprieve from any response-time standards.

Seattle and AMR officials say this made sense, because the nurse line is allowing ambulances to prioritize critical patients over stable ones. The company is no longer incurring late penalties for its Seattle responses still subject to time standards, a representative said, citing the nurse line and better recruiting.

But the city removed a significant guardrail when it removed standards for an entire category of ambulance rides, experts contend. Last year, more than 4,600 rides ordered were completely exempt from time standards and contractual penalties.

“Your community’s leaders may think 10-hour waits are OK,” said Matt Zavadsky, a nationally recognized health care administrator who managed a 911 system and helped start a nurse line in Fort Worth. “If your community’s leaders are not OK with that, you need a contract that prevents that.”

Instead, Seattle has left itself in the dark. Response times for nurse-ordered ambulances are excluded from AMR’s monthly reports to the Fire Department, so the city doesn’t know how long patients like Hogan are waiting.

by Daniel Beekman, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Luxton / The Seattle Times

The China Vibe Shift

A year ago came what, for lack of a better term, we dubbed the DeepSeek moment. That was followed fairly quickly by the curious migration of “TikTok refugees” to Xiaohongshu, and not long after that by the first conversations Jeremy Goldkorn and I had about what felt like a changing American — or even Western — mood toward China.

Today, freshly back from Switzerland after covering the World Economic Forum (where the chatter was, not surprisingly, fixated on Trump’s covetous pronouncements on Greenland and Mark Carney’s “rupture” speech), with Keir Starmer now in Beijing to continue talks about restoring some version of the UK–China “Golden Age,” it feels like a decent moment to look back and ask what, if anything, all of that amounted to.

Jeremy and I recorded a podcast episode in which we tried to describe something we were both sensing in the early months of 2025 but couldn’t quite pin down. It wasn’t a policy shift, or even a clear change in opinion. It was more atmospheric than that — a change in tone, in default assumptions, in the emotional register through which China was being discussed in Western discourse. We eventually settled, somewhat sheepishly, on calling it a “vibe shift.” (Less sheepishly, we reconvened in November to gloat about how we’d gotten that right!)

The phrase was imprecise and was intended to convey imprecision. But it did seem to capture something real. Multiple polls have since borne it out, and the feeling has only grown stronger. What’s become clearer to me, looking back, is how that shift relates to a larger argument I’ve been making for some time now — what I called the “Great Reckoning” in a piece I published in The Ideas Letter.

The two are not the same thing. The vibe shift is not the reckoning I’m looking for. But it may be making one more possible.

The change I’m describing is not a sudden outbreak of admiration for China, nor a reversal of long-standing concerns about human rights, political repression, or democracy (though admittedly I’ve seen some of that in some quarters). Those issues remain very much part of the picture. What’s changing is something more basic: the set of assumptions that have long structured how China is interpreted in Western public life.

For years, a relatively stable narrative did a lot of work. China’s successes were provisional; its failures were fundamental. Growth would eventually give way to crisis. Political liberalization was assumed to be inevitable, even if perpetually deferred. Moral condemnation often stood in for empirical assessment. China could be criticized without being fully understood, because history, it was assumed, would take care of the rest.

That narrative hasn’t exactly been replaced. One only has to look at how eagerly some commentators declared Party rule “brittle” following the purges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, or how quickly far-fetched rumors were embraced, to see that the old habits die hard.

But the narrative has lost much of its force, mainly because the U.S. — Gaza to Greenland — no longer commands the moral authority it once assumed. Increasingly, when I hear it, it sounds less like analysis and more like reassurance. I know I’m not alone in this.

You can see this erosion in small but telling ways: in the growing reluctance to predict imminent collapse; in the uneasy acknowledgment that China is capable of building complex systems at scale; in the fact that younger audiences, and people closer to technology, manufacturing, or logistics, are less willing to treat China as a purely derivative or temporary phenomenon.

None of this amounts to endorsement. But it does suggest a loosening of reflexes.

A year of small shocks

The past year offered no shortage of moments that helped crystallize this shift.

The emergence of DeepSeek was only one of them. The reaction it provoked wasn’t really about a single large language model. It was about the dawning realization that China was not merely following at the technological frontier, but participating in shaping it. That realization sat awkwardly with long-standing assumptions about where innovation could — and could not — come from.

Then there was the strange but revealing episode of Western “TikTok refugees” making their way onto Xiaohongshu. Tens of thousands of users encountered a Chinese social media environment directly, without mediation by think tanks, policy papers, or cable news. The result wasn’t mass admiration so much as something more disarming: familiarity. China appeared less opaque, less exotic, and therefore harder to keep at a safe analytical distance. (In a strange coda to that episode a year on — not something I’ve looked into too closely, but from what I’m hearing — people are once again abandoning TikTok for Chinese apps, TikTok being under new and apparently very censorship-happy American management).

Around the same time, a steady trickle of firsthand accounts — from executives, engineers, investors, and travelers — described a China that didn’t fit neatly into prevailing narratives. Infrastructure that worked. Manufacturing ecosystems that functioned smoothly. A sense of momentum that was hard to reconcile with predictions of stagnation or decay.

Some of this material was shallow. A fair amount of the so-called “China-pilled” content circulating online is overwrought, unserious, or plainly wrong. I don’t endorse it. But even that excess is revealing. It suggests that people are groping, sometimes awkwardly, for ways to make sense of realities that just don’t fit the narrative they’ve been sold.

One of the stranger — and more amusing — expressions of this moment was described in a recent Wired piece by Zeyi Yang, who is always worth reading. Yang wrote about the sudden popularity of memes in which Americans announce that they are in “a very Chinese time” of their lives: drinking hot water (which I do endorse), wearing slippers in the house, posting videos of themselves eating dim sum, sporting vaguely Chinese-coded streetwear, or joking about “Chinamaxxing.”

The joke, as Yang notes, is not really about China, and certainly not about Chinese people. It’s a projection — a way of gesturing at something Americans feel they’ve lost.

The meme works precisely because it’s unserious. No one is actually becoming Chinese. But the impulse behind it is telling. China, in this memified version, functions less as a real place than as a symbolic contrast: a stand-in for competence, momentum, coherence, or simply “things getting done,” set against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, normalized dysfunction, and institutional paralysis at home.

That selectivity is the point. The meme is disposable, ironic, and easily reversed. It allows people to flirt with an alternative without committing to understanding it. In that sense, it’s less a sign of admiration than of dissatisfaction — a sideways commentary on American malaise, filtered through a half-ironic orientalist lens.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. But I wouldn’t dismiss it either. Cultural detritus often reflects shifts in mood before more formal discourse catches up.

The reckoning beneath the surface

This is where the connection to the “Great Reckoning” comes in — and where it’s easy to sound more portentous than necessary.

The reckoning I have in mind isn’t really about China. It’s about us. More specifically, it’s about a long-standing Western habit of assuming that modern outcomes — wealth, tech sophistication, state capacity — are inseparable from Western political forms. When things don’t line up that way, the tendency has been to assume something must be temporary, distorted, or unsustainable.

China’s rise has been awkward for that story. Not because it offers the West some appealing alternative model — I don’t think it does — but because it keeps producing results that are hard to dismiss without contortions. Over time, this has encouraged a set of coping strategies: predictions of imminent collapse, confident talk of inevitable convergence, and a habit of substituting moral judgment for careful description.

For a while, that worked. Or at least it postponed the need for a harder conversation...

That’s what I mean by the vibe shift. Not that people have settled on a new story, but that the old one is starting to creak loudly enough to be noticed.

In that sense, the shift is preparatory. It doesn’t tell us what to think next. It just makes it harder to keep thinking the same way.

by Kaiser Y. Kuo, Sinica | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I've got nothing against China, it's just doing what any superpower would do, looking out for its interests, expanding its sphere of influence for economic and security reasons, and attempting to preserve its history, culture and political system. See also: The Civilization Trap (Sinica). And, in case you missed it, Why Everyone Is Suddenly in a ‘Very Chinese Time’ in Their Lives (Wired). Oh, and this: China's power grid investments to surge to record $574 billion in 2026-2030. Maybe people are just envious that China is investing in its future, while the US self-destructs and spends $ trillions on military weapons and war mongering.]

Sven Kroner (German, 1973), Dunkler Stern, 2023.
via:

Chris Ware
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Coffee Break (artist unknown)
via:

Suno: The AI Music Race is Over

Video: Rick Beato

[ed. See also: The Truth About AI Music (Rowland's newsletter).]

For someone as profoundly unmusical as me, AI music generators are quite magical. I can barely sing a note, but in a few seconds I can make an entire track in any genre on any topic I want – like this soul song about Sky camera operator Phil Hooper. You can dismiss this as pure silliness for an audience of about five, but to me that’s the point! Thanks to AI, I get a little bit of musical joy that otherwise is completely out of reach.

Yet, as ever with technology, removing friction comes with a cost, and in this case the cost is a tsunami of musical spam. The stats on AI music are mind-boggling. In 2015, the entire US music industry made around 57,000 songs. Today, 60,000 AI tracks are uploaded to Deezer (aka French Spotify) *every single day* - that’s 21m a year, and this thing is just getting going.

The real problem isn’t the tracks, however, but the behaviour around them, because AI music is being used to try and steal from streamers (and by extension every legitimate musician on the site). Deezer estimate that 85% of listens to AI music are fraudulent – that is, made by bots set to stream the songs over and over in order to siphon royalties from the common pool. 

[ed. Do check out the soul song example mentioned above (with this accompanying video). Pretty scary... and sad.]

Clawed

How to Commit Corporate Murder

I.

A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die. Six months prior, he had been a vigorous man, stronger than I am today, faster and more resilient on a bike than most 20-somethings. Then one day he got heart surgery and he was never the same. His soul had been sucked out of him, the life gone from his eyes. He had moments of vivacity, when my father came back into his aging body, but these became rarer with time. His coherence faded, his voice grew quieter.

He spent those six months in and out of the hospital. And then on his last day he went into hospice. That day he barely uttered any words at all. In the final hours of his life, my father was practically already dead. He laid on the hospital bed. His breathing gradually slowed and became less audible. Eventually you could barely hear him at all, save for the eerie death rattle, a product of a body no longer able even to swallow. A body that cannot swallow also cannot eat or drink, and in that sense it has already thrown in the towel.

My mother and I exchanged knowing glances, but we never said the obvious nor asked any questions on both of our minds. We knew there would not be much longer. There was nothing to say or ask that would furnish any useful information; inquiry, at that stage, can only inflict pain.

I spoke with him, more than once, in private. I held his hand and tried to say goodbye. My mother came back into the room, and all three of us held hands. Eventually a machine declared with a long beep that he had crossed some line, though it was an invisible one for the humans in the room. My father died in the late afternoon of December 26, 2014.

A few days and eleven years later, on December 30, 2025, my son was born. I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.

II.

At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.

Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.

Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.

I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.

I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. More excerpts below. See also: Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic (NYT), Ezra Klein interviews Dean Ball (with a follow-up essay: The Future We Feared is Already Here). And, for a more comprehensive assessment of what the AI community thinks: Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk (DWAtV).]

***

"... Except the notion of “passing a law” is increasingly a joke in contemporary America. If you are serious about the outcome in question, “passing a law” is no longer Plan A; the dynamic is more like “well of course, one day, we’ll get a law passed, but since we actually care about doing this sometime soon, as opposed to in 15 years, we’ll accomplish our objective through [some other procedure or legal vehicle].” With this, governance has become more and more informal and ad hoc, power more dependent on the executive (whose incentive is to jam every goal he has through his existing power in as little time as possible, since he only has the length of his term guaranteed to him), and the policy vehicles in question more and more unsuited to the circumstances of their deployment, or the objectives they are being deployed to accomplish." [...]

... DoW insisted that the only reasonable path forward is for contracts to permit “all lawful use” (a simplistic notion not consistent with the common contractual restrictions discussed above), and has further threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. This is a power reserved exclusively for firms controlled by foreign adversary interests, such as Huawei, and usually means that the designated firm cannot be used by any military contractor in their fulfillment of any military contract.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power, but a plain reading of this would suggest that Anthropic would not be able to use any cloud computing nor purchase chips of its own (since all relevant companies do business with the military), and that several of Anthropic’s largest investors (Nvidia, Google, and Amazon) would be forced to divest. Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.

This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.

This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well. Though Chinese AI providers like DeepSeek have not been labeled supply chain risks (yes, really; this government says Anthropic, an American company whose services it used in military strikes as recently as this past weekend, is more of a threat than a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese military), that implicit threat was always there.

***

[ed. One more thing. The guy who created this whole stupid dispute? Not Hegseth, he doesn't know shit about shit. It's former disgraced Uber manager: Emil Michael. A real piece of work (so of course, he fits right in.] 

The Plastic Surgeon Summit

We’re in a plastic surgery “renaissance period.”

Dr. Yannis Alexandrides: It is busier than ever. There’s a remarkable year-on-year demand increase that we see in surgical procedures, especially for the face, but also for the body. This is a trend that we have seen through the pandemic, but it has accelerated the last year.

Dr. Akshay Sanan: I think plastic surgery is in a renaissance period right now because of people publicly talking about it. Plastic surgery is now part of your wellness armamentarium. People used to flex what gym they went to, that they had a trainer, and now plastic surgery is part of that flex. People love to rock that they had their eyes done or their face and neck done or their body done. It’s just part of the cultural shift that we’re seeing.

Dr. Jason Champagne: This is where social media comes into play, camera phones and Zoom meetings. You see yourself from all these different angles nowadays that maybe you didn’t notice in the past.

Dr. Emily Hu: I find it very generational: Those who grew up in the social media era with a lot of sharing and openness are also very open about telling their friends [about the work they’ve had done].

Sanan: There’s a shift in consumer or patient habits. More people in their late 30s, early 40s, they’re choosing surgery earlier to age gracefully instead of waiting until things are advanced. They’re like, “I’m not going to wait until it drops down further. I just want to be hot in my 40s.”

Dr. John Diaz: It used to be that not everyone had access to a plastic surgeon. That was reserved within the realm of the elite. Well, not anymore. I have celebrities, executives, and business owners come in — but also teachers and waiters. There’s this democratization of attractiveness.

Dr. Paul Afrooz: Patients are very educated these days. They know what they’re looking for, they know what realistic results are, and they have the ability to do a lot of background research and understand who does things at an elite level. [...]

Let’s get into it: Why are we talking so much about facelifts this year?

Diaz: Facelifts have absolutely exploded for a few reasons. A lot of women see celebrities and influencers suddenly looking incredible, and they want to know how. Think about Kris Jenner — she had a huge impact when her pictures came out. And now it’s brought awareness to the fact that we have the technology to be able to take a young-looking woman and make her look better with surgery, without making her look fake. That was a real challenge 20 years ago.

Alexandrides: Kris Jenner was a very hot topic the last few months. Definitely a lot of the patients I see here take her as, let’s say, a model on how they want to look, because she looks fresh, but she doesn’t look pulled. She looks younger, and she looks happy, and you cannot see the scars, at least not in these pictures that we see.

Hu: I can’t tell you how many of my patients are like, “Yeah, my mom had a facelift. She was so scary. I’m never doing a facelift.” I mean, that was their response because they see their mom all bruised and scary looking.

Dr. Mark Murphy: Facelifts historically had a stereotypical “plastic surgery” look. Now people have realized, “I can look like myself 15 years ago and not have to look like a circus freak for it.” It’s become very digestible for patients. Social media is a huge driver behind it. Well, that, and the techniques are better.

So what’s actually new or changing about facelifts?

Dr. Mark Mani: We call it the golden age of facelift surgery. It’s primarily because of the success of the deep plane facelift.

Dr. David Shafer: There’s nothing new about [the deep plane facelift] as a procedure. It’s just very sophisticated marketing that’s being done now, and there are refinements to the procedures. But it’s not some plastic surgeon who’s marketing it now as some magic procedure that he came up with that nobody else does.

Mani: [A version of] the first deep plane lifts was performed in the late 1960s by a surgeon named Tord Skoog in Sweden [though the name came later]. I have his textbook and can show you results that would stand up to the best deep plane surgeons today. It’s not the procedure, it’s the surgeon, and facelift surgery, among all surgeries in plastic surgery, is an art form.

Afrooz: A surgeon named Sam Hamra — he just passed, but a wonderful human being, an extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary surgeon — first coined the phrase “deep plane facelift” in a 1990 paper and laid out some building blocks of the procedure. Just like everything else in plastic surgery, we stand on the giants before us.

Dr. Michael Stein: There are two main facelift techniques: deep plane and SMAS plication. The deep plane facelift is where you cut the layer under the skin called the SMAS, dissect underneath it, and tighten it in addition to the skin. In the SMAS facelift, instead of cutting and elevating the SMAS, you suture it to itself to tighten it from over top.

Dr. Amir Karam: The majority of surgeons, up until recently, have been doing the traditional SMAS technique, which is more or less horizontally pulling the face sideways, and that was leading to a very unnatural look.

Mani: I was the surgeon who wrote the most-read facelift academic article that convinced other surgeons to do deep plane facelifts. It was an article in Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2016, where I detailed the specific anatomic reasons that deep plane is better.

Stein: The people who only do deep plane facelifts say they have a more longitudinal result, and vice versa. But the truth is, a good result is a good result. It depends more on the surgeon versus technique. A good facelift is a good facelift.

Facelifts aren’t done evolving.

Karam: The consumer is driving surgeons to create better and better results. So there’s been a massive increase in interest for surgeons to level up their strategies surgically and learn new techniques that are not new but new to them.

Afrooz: Even my facelift today is better than my facelift was one year ago. When you hone in on one thing as your career, you’re just constantly looking for ways to improve. It’s the cumulative effect of small subtleties over time and practice that you notice nuanced improvements to your results. One might assume that a deep plane facelift in one surgeon’s hands is the same as it is in another’s, but I’m here to tell you that it’s very much not the same.

Dr. Daniel Gould: There are new layers that we’re adding into the surgery. We’re recognizing the importance of the mid-face and volume position there. I’m recognizing adding fat to the mouth and the areas around the mouth, the chin, because all these areas have been neglected. We are now nailing all the low-hanging fruit: We’re nailing the neck, we’re nailing the face, we’re nailing the temple and the brows. Now it’s time to move forward and continue to innovate and push the limits of what we can really do in facial rejuvenation.

Mani: What I’ve developed is called the scarless lift, and it’s basically a deep plane facelift without a scar in front of the ear, with an endoscope. The endoscopic procedure involves a hidden incision within the hair, a short one behind the ear, and sometimes one under the chin. I still do about 60% open [non-endoscopic], but a good percentage of my facelifts are scarless endoscopic. The results are more beautiful because you don’t have to worry about the scar, and the vectors of lifting are better.

Alexandrides: I don’t think this will be now, “OK, let’s forget about facelifts, let’s move to something else.” What will probably happen is that people will discover intricate little different techniques and say, “You have the facelift that is done like that.” I have patients who ask me very technical questions: How do you design your scar around your ear?

Stein: Facelift surgery has survived the test of time. Every year there are new machines designed to tighten skin, and for some patients with mild laxity, they may see nice results. The truth is though, if you have jowls or droopy skin of the face and neck, the only thing that’s really going to give you the best bang for your buck and directly address your laxity is a facelift.

by Bustle Editors, Bustle |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

World Monitor

How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time. Frustrated by fragmented war news, Anghami’s Elie Habib built World Monitor, a platform that fuses global data, like aircraft signals and satellite detections, to track conflicts as they unfold.

Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time.

The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral. [...]

The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.”

Traditional media wasn’t solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time. The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually.” [...]

The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source.

“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.

“Everything is normalized, geolocated and rendered on a WebGL globe capable of displaying thousands of markers without frame drops,” Habib says...

When the War Hit

Before the missiles started flying, people used the map for very specific reasons. Traders tracked cargo ships to monitor supply chains, while engineers watched power grids and infrastructure networks. “One sports bar runs it on their TVs when there are no games,” Habib says.

But when joint US-Israeli military strikes hit Iran in late February—disrupting maritime logistics and forcing commercial airspace to clear—the platform’s role changed almost overnight.

What had been a curiosity for analysts and hobbyists became a live threat monitor. Casual observers began watching active escalations unfold in real time.

How the Map Verifies Reality

Processing hundreds of live data streams during a military conflict raises a question: How do you verify information fast enough to keep the system moving?

Habib’s answer was to remove human editors entirely. “Zero editorializing,” he says. “No human editor makes a call.”

Instead, Habib says the platform relies on a strict source hierarchy. Wire services and official channels such as Reuters, AP, the Pentagon and the UN sit at the top tier. Major broadcasters including the BBC and Al Jazeera follow, along with specialist investigative outlets such as Bellingcat. In total, he says the system processes about 190 sources, assigning higher confidence scores to more reliable ones.

Software then scans incoming reports for major events and emerging patterns. If multiple credible sources report the same development within minutes, the system flags it as a breaking alert. But headlines alone are not enough.

Because online claims can be unreliable, the platform also looks for physical signals on the ground. It tracks disruptions such as internet blackouts, diverted military flights, halted cargo ships and satellite-detected fires. “A convergence algorithm then checks how many distinct signal types activate in the same geography simultaneously,” Habib says.

“One signal is noise. Three or four converging in the same location is the signal worth surfacing,” Habib says. If an internet outage coincides with diverted aircraft and a satellite heat signature in the same area, the map flags a potential escalation.

by Lilian Wagoy, Wired |  Read more:

Image: World Monitor

[ed. Example here. Also, just as an aside (since World Monitor was created by a music streaming CEO) I'd like to highlight once again the totally awesome Radio Garden. I've been using this streaming app ever since I got it, exploring and listening to FM music stations all over the world.]

Peter Brannon, Bermuda Night Heron
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Brian Culbertson (feat. Mike Stern)

Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships

This chapter is concerned with the thinking processes of the intimate dyad. So, although we wlll focus from time to time on the thinking processes of the individual - as they influence and are influenced by the relationship with another person - our prime interest is in thinking as it occurs at the dyadic level. This may be dangerous territory for inquiry. After all, this topic resembles one that has, for many years now, represented something of a "black hole" in the social sciences - the study of the group mind. For good reasons, the early practice of drawing an analogy between the mind of the individual and the cognitive operations of the group has long been avoided, and references to the group mind in contemporary literature have dwindled to a smattering of wisecracks. 

Why, then, would we want to examine cognitive interdependence in close relationships? Quite simply, we believe that much could be learned about intimacy in this enterprise, and that a treatment of this topic, enlightened by the errors of past analyses, is now possible. The debate on the group mind has receded into history sufficiently that its major points can be appreciated, and at the same time, we find new realms of theoretical sophistication in psychology regarding the operation of the individual mind. With this background, we believe it is possible to frame a notion somewhat akin to the "group mind" and we to use it to conceptualize how people in close relationships may depend on each other for acquiring, remembering, and generating knowledge.

Interdependent Cognition 

Interdependence is the hallmark of intimacy. Although we are all interdependent to a certain degree, people in close relationships lead lives that are intertwined to the extreme. Certainly, the behaviors they enact, the emotions they feel, and the goals they pursue are woven in an intricate web. But on hearing even the simplest conversation between intimates, it becomes remarkably apparent that their thoughts, too, are interconnected. Together, they think about things in ways they would not alone. The idea that is central in our analysis of such cognitive interdependence is what we term transactive memory. As will become evident, we find this concept more clearly definable and, ultimately, more useful than kindred concepts that populate the history of social psychology. As a preamble to our ideas on transactive memory, we discuss the group mind notion and its pitfalls. We then turn to a concern with the basic properties and processes of transactive memory. [...]

The Nature of Transactive Memory 

Ordinarily, psychologists think of memory as an individual's store of knowledge, along with the processes whereby that knowledge is constructed organized, and accessed. So, it is fair to say that we are studying "memory'; when we are concerned with how knowledge gets into the person's mind, how it is arranged in the context of other knowledge when it gets there, and how it is retrieved for later use. At this broad level of definition, our conception of transactive memory is not much different from the notion of individual memory. With transactive memory, we are concerned with how knowledge enters the dyad, is organized within it, and is made available for subsequent use by it. This analogical leap is a reasonable one as long as we restrict ourselves to considering the functional equivalence of individual and transactive memory. Both kinds of memory can be characterized as systems that, according to general system theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), may show rough parallels in their modes of operation. Our interest is in processes that occur when the transactive memory system is called upon to perform some function for the group - a function that the individual memory system might reasonably be called upon to perform for the person. 

Transactive memory can be defined in terms of two components: (1) an organized store of knowledge that is contained entirely in the individual memory systems of the group members, and (2) a set of knowledge-relevant transactive processes that occur among group members. Stated more colloquially, we envision transactive memory to be a combination of individual minds and the communication among them. This definition recognizes explicitly that transactive memory must be understood as a name for the interplay of knowledge, and that this interplay, no matter how complex, is always capable of being analyzed in terms of communicative events that have individual sources and individual recipients. By this definition, then, the thought processes of transactive memory are completely observable. The various communications that pass between intimates are, in principle, observable by outside observers just as each intimate can observe the communications of the other. Using this line of intepretation, we recognize that the observable interaction between individuals entails not only the transfer of knowledge, but the construction of a knowledge-acquiring, knowledge-holding, and knowledge-using system that is greater than the sum of its individual member systems. 

Let us consider a simple example to bring these ideas down to earth. Suppose we are spending an evening with Rudy and Lulu, a couple married for several years. Lulu is in another room for the moment, and we happen to ask Rudy where they got the wonderful stuffcd Canadian goose on the mantle. He says, "we were in British Columbia..." and then bellows, "Lulu! What was the name of that place where we got the goose?" Lulu returns to the room to say that it was near Kelowna or Penticton - somewhere along Lake Okanogan. Rudy says, "Yes, in that area with all the fruit stands." Lulu finally makes the identification: Peachland. In all of this, the various ideas that Rudy and Lulu exchange lead them through their individual memories. In a process of interactive cueing, they move sequentially toward the retrieval of a memory trace, the existence of which is known to both of them; And it is just possible that, without each other, neither Rudy nor Lulu could have produced the item. This is not the only process of transactive memory. Although we will speak of interactive cueing again, it is just one of a variety of communication processes that operate on knowledge in the dyad. Transactive processes can occur during the intake of information by the dyad, they can occur after information is stored and so modify the stored information, and they can occur during retrieval. 

The successful operation of these processes is dependent, however, on the formation of a transactive memory structure - an organizational scheme that connects the knowledge held by each individual to the knowledge held by the other. It is common in theorizing about the thoughts and memories of individuals to posit an organizational scheme that allows the person to connect thoughts with one another - retrieving one when the other is encountered, and so forth. In a dyad, this scheme is complicated somewhat by the fact that the individual memory stores are physically separated. Yet it is perfectly reasonable to say that one partner may know, at least to a degree, what is in the other's memory. Thus, one's memory is "connected" to the other's, and it is possible to consider how information is arranged in the dyadic system as a whole. A transactive memory structure thus can be said to reside in the memories of both individuals - when they are considered as a combined system. 

We should point out here that transactive processes and structures are not exclusively the province of intimate dyads. We can envision these: things occurring as well in pairs of people who have just met, or even in groups of people larger than the dyad. At the extreme, one might attribute these processes and organizational capacities to whole societies, and so make transactive memory into a synonym for culture. Our conceptualization stops short or these extensions for two reasons. First, we hesitate to extend these ideas to larger groups because the analysis quickly becomes unwieldy; our framework for understanding transactive memory would need to expand geometrically as additional individuals were added to the system. Second, we refrain from applying this analysis to nonintimate relations for the simple reason that, in such dyads, there is not as much to be remembered. Close dyads share a wealth of information unique to the dyad, and use it to operate as a unit. More distant dyads; in turn, engage in transactive processes only infrequently - and in the case of a first and only encounter, do so only once. Such pairs will thus not have a very rich organizational scheme for information they hold. We find the notion of transactive memory most apt, in sum, for the analysis of cognitive interdependence in intimate dyads. 

Our subsequent discussion of transactive memory in this chapter is fashioned to coincide with the process-structure distinction. We begin by considering the processes involved in the everyday operation of transactive memory. Here, we examine the phases of knowledge processing standardly recognized in cognitive psychology - encoding, storage, and retrieval - to determine how they occur in transactive memory. The second general section examines the nature of the organizational structure used for the storage of information in the dyad. The structure of stored information across the two individual memories will be examined, with a view toward determining how this organization impinges on the group's mental operations. The final section concentrates on the role of transactive memory, both process and structure, in the life of the dyad. We consider how such memory may contribute to compatibility or incompatibility in relationships, and how an individual's personal memory may be influenced by membership in a transactive system. 

Transactive Memory Processes 

Communication is the transfer of information. When communication takes place between people, we might say that information is transferred from one memory to another. However, when the dyadic group is conceptualiized as having one memory system, interpersonal communication in the dyad comes to mean the transfer of information within memory. We believe that multiple transfers can occur as the dyad encodes information, as it holds information in storage, and as it retrieves information - and that such transfers can make each of these processes somewhat different from its counterpart occurring at the individual level.

Transactive Encoding 

Obviously, dyads do not have their sense organs in common. The physical and social environment thus must be taken in by each person separately. Social theorists have repeatedly noted, though; that an individual's perceptions can be channeled in social ways. Many have observed, for example, that one partner might empathize with another and see the world from the other's "point of view." Alternatively, cognitive constructions of a "group perspective" may be developed by both partners that lend a certain commonality to their intake of information (see Wegner & Giuliano, 1982). These social influences on encoding, however, are best understood as effects on the individual. How does the dyad encode information? 

When partners encounter some event and encode it privately in their individual memories, they may discuss it along the way. And though we might commonly think of such a discussion as a "rehash," a mere echo of the original perceived event, there is reason to think that it could be much more. After all whereas expeiencing an event can be accomplished quite passively, discussing an event requires active processing of the information - and the generation of ideas relevant to the event. Several demonstrations of an individual memory phenomenon called the "generation effect" indicate that people will often remember information they have generated better than information they have simply experienced. So, for instance, one might remember the number 37 better if one had been presented with "14 + 23 = ?" than if one had merely been presented with "37 ." Partners who talk over an event, generating information along the way, might thus come to an encoded verbal representation of the event that supplants their original, individual encoding. 

The influence of the generation effect could, of course, take many forms. Ordinarily, it should lead partners to remember their own contributions to dyadic discussions better than the contributions of their partners. This phenomenon has been observed in several studies (e.g., Ross & Sicoly, 1979). But the generation effect could also contribute to one's memory for group generated information. When a couple observes some event - say, a wedding they may develop somewhat disparate initial encodings. Each will understand that it was indeed a wedding; but only one may encode the fact that the father of the bride left the reception in a huff; the other might notice instead the odd, cardboard-like flavor of the wedding cake. Their whispered chat during all this could lead them to infer that the bride's father was upset by the strange cake. Because this interpretation was generated by the group, both partners will have thus encoded the group's understanding of the events. Their chat could thus revise history for the group, leaving both with stored memories of the father angry over a sorry cake. 

Evidence from another domain of cognitive research leads to a similar point. One of the most powerful determinants of encoding in individual memory is the degree to which the incoming information is semantically elaborated (e.g., Anderson & Reder, 1979). To elaborate incoming information is simply to draw inferences from it and consider its meaning in relation to other information. This is precisely what happens in dyadic communications about events. Partners often talk about things they have experienced as individuals or as a group. They may speak about each other's behavior, about the behavior of others they both know, about the day's events, and so on. In such discussions, it is probable that those particular events or behaviors relevant to the dyad will be discussed at length. They will be tied to other items of knowledge and, in the process, will become more elaborately encoded - and thus more likely to be available for later retrieval. 

To the extent that generative or elaborative processes are effortful, or require careful thinking, their effects could be strengthened yet further. Encoding processes that are effortful for the individual typically lead to enhanced memory. When a couple engages in an argument, cognitive effort may be required for each person to understand what the other is saying and for each to convey a personal point of view. Such effort on the part of both could also be necessary when one partner is merely trying to teach the other something. It is the shared experience of argument, decision-making, or careful analysis that will be remembered more readily when the communication is effortful. After all, couples more frequently remember their "talks" than their routine dinner conversations. 

These transactive encoding processes could conceivably lead a dyad to understand events in highly idiosyncratic and private ways. Their discussions could go far afield, linking events to knowledge that, while strongly relevant to the dyad, is embedded primarily in the dyad's known history or anticipated future. The partners' memories of the encoded events themselves could be changed dramatically by the tenor of their discussions, sometimes to the point of losing touch with the initial realities the partners perceived. To some degree, such departures from originally encoded experience might be corrected by the partners' discussions' of events with individuals outside the relationship; such outsiders would serve to introduce a perspective on events that is uninformed of the dyad's concerns, and that therefore might help to modify memory of the events. But many experiences are discussed only within the relationship, and these are thus destined to be encoded in ways that may make them more relevant to the dyad's concerns than to the realities from which they derived.

by Daniel M Wegner, Toni Giuliano, and Paula T. Hertel, Harvard |  Read more (pdf):

Image via:

[ed. Probably of little interest to most but I find this, and the process of memory retrieval in general, to be fascinating. When I think back on the various experiences and conversations I've had over my lifetime it's not uncommon to settle on the same scenes, arguments, feelings, etc. over and over again to represent what I remember as being reality, or at least an accurate reflection of my personal 'history', when actually they're just a small slice of a larger picture, taken out of context. Want an example? Try talking to an old friend at a class reunion and see what they recall about your experiences together. We can never remember all the details of the thousands of small conversations and experiences we've had - individually, with partners, with others - that in the aggregate have more relevance to reality than we can imagine... or remember.]

Gone Girl

As I looked at Kristi Noem’s MAGA-fied visage plastered across the media on Thursday, along with the news that President Trump had fired her, I couldn’t help thinking: This was always going to end in tears.

Not because the defenestrated secretary of homeland security was uniquely bad at her job. Sure, “ICE Barbie,” as her critics dubbed her, was no paragon of competence. Her handling of ICE agents’ bloody rampage across Minneapolis was appalling — as, really, was her aggressive defense of the president’s entire deportation orgy. (That photo op field trip to the Salvadoran prison? Pure trash.) Her leadership style was, at best, chaotic. Her congressional testimony this week was defensive, dishonest, bumbling and self-contradictory. Her relentless self-promotion was embarrassing and more than a little foolish given who she works for. Rule No. 1 in Trumpworld: Never steal the spotlight from the boss.

Still, Ms. Noem was hardly the most incompetent, embarrassing or dangerous member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. The competition is too steep.

No, I thought about how she owed her post to her laborious transformation into a particular kind of ultra-MAGA woman who kicks butt while always looking picture perfect — superfeminine and superaggressive — a role that comes with built-in challenges and limited room for error. The more furiously Ms. Noem contorted herself to fit this Trumpworld mold and catch the attention of the MAGA guys, the more she risked earning the contempt of the very people she wanted to impress, especially the president. Then, when she outlasted her usefulness, she was casually sloughed off.

Who could have predicted that one? Besides everyone.

Respect never seemed to be part of the equation with Mr. Trump and Ms. Noem. It’s hard to respect someone so eager to remake herself for your attention. Her physical MAGA makeover may be the most striking of any senior figure in Mr. Trump’s orbit. More disturbing was her scramble to prove herself the toughest cookie in the jar. [...]

It’s not hard to imagine why an ambitious woman might adopt an exaggerated, tough persona to fit in with a movement defined by chest thumping so heavy-handed it smells like misogyny. But Ms. Noem’s desperation to turn herself into a glambot enforcer was always just … sad.

It surely did nothing to help the secretary’s sense of self-worth that no one in the administration, much less the larger political world, took her seriously in her post. She was the face of an immigration policy that everyone assumed was being driven by the White House aide Stephen Miller and others, and presumably will continue to be.

But here’s where Ms. Noem really did herself in. With her high profile and her efforts to prove how hard-core she was — for instance, accusing the two Americans gunned down by immigration officials in Minneapolis of being domestic terrorists — she made herself a perfect scapegoat for the administration’s unpopular immigration agenda. No matter that some of her worst moments came as she tried to defend Mr. Trump’s morally indefensible policies. The president can now claim credit for firing a very bad employee, even as he and Mr. Miller continue promoting chaos and brutality.

It surely stings to be the first member of this cabinet to get the ax. Not Pete Hegseth? Pam Bondi? Lori Chavez-DeRemer? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? But Ms. Noem can take solace in knowing she is not the first ambitious woman who tried to remake herself in the MAGA image only to be misused and ultimately discarded.

Elise Stefanik, a U.S. House member from New York, has traveled a similarly humiliating road. One of her party’s rising stars in the pre-Trump era, Ms. Stefanik followed the president down the dark MAGA path, visions of higher office dancing in her head. But time and again, she had her dreams sacrificed to Mr. Trump’s political needs — first her aborted nomination to the United Nations, then her aborted campaign for governor. She will leave the House at the end of this term with little to show for her self-debasement other than a reputation for shape shifting and sycophancy.

As Ms. Noem is finding out, it’s hard out there for a MAGA woman. You have to jump through trickier hoops than the men to get attention, but your efforts to please can work against you. The second your swaggering performance becomes a problem, the president kicks you to the curb. Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, after falling out with the president, fled the House and is now devoting herself to viciously critiquing his Iran policy.

Maybe Ms. Noem should consider a similar route, using her newfound freedom to tell the public how she really feels about what she was asked to do and defend in Mr. Trump’s name. She might even claw back some of that self-worth she gave up along the way.

by Michelle Cottle, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/NYT

[ed. Ouch... a political obituary for the ages. But still, just a triffle compared to the widespread misery she caused. One down, many more left: Hegseth and Miller especially.]

The Ravyns

Do You Have to Be Polite to AI?

When a group of researchers decided to test whether "positive thinking" made AI chatbots more accurate, it led to some surprising results. As they asked various chatbots questions, they tried calling the AIs "smart", encouraged them to think carefully and even ended their questions with "This will be fun!" None of it made a consistent difference, but one technique stood out. When they made an artificial intelligence pretend it was on Star Trek, it got better at basic maths. Beam me up, I guess.

People have all sorts of bizarre strategies to get better responses from large language models (LLMs), the AI technology behind tools like ChatGPT. Some swear AI does better if you threaten it, others think chatbots are more cooperative if you're polite and some people ask the robots to role-play as experts in whatever subject they're working on. The list goes on. It's part of the mythology around "prompt engineering" or "context engineering" – different ways to construct instructions to make AI deliver better results. Here's the thing: experts tell me that a lot of accepted wisdom about prompting AI simply doesn't work. In some cases, it could even be dangerous. But the way you talk to an AI does matter, and some techniques really will make a difference. [...]

How to talk to your chatbot

There are some very real problems with AI, from ethical concerns to the environmental impact it can have. Some people refuse to engage with it altogether. But if you are going to use LLMs, learning to get what you want faster and more efficiently will be better for you and, probably, for the energy consumed in the process. These tips will get you started.

Ask for multiple options

"The first thing I tell people is don't ask for one answer, ask for three or five," White says. If you want help with a piece of writing, for example, tell the AI to give you multiple options that vary in some important way. "This forces the human being to re-engage and think about what they like and why."

Give examples

Provide the AI with a sample whenever possible. "For instance, I see people ask an LLM to write an email and then get frustrated because they're like 'that doesn't sound like me at all'," White says. The natural impulse is to respond with a list of instructions, "do this" and "don't do that". White says it's much more effective to say "here are 10 emails I've sent in the past, use my writing style".

Ask for an interview

"Let's say you want to generate a job description. Tell the AI 'I want you to ask me questions, one at a time, until you've gathered enough information to write a compelling job listing," White says. "By doing it one question at a time, it can adapt to your answers."

Be careful about role-playing

"There used to be this thought that if you told the AI it was a maths professor, for example, it would actually have higher accuracy when answering maths questions," says Sander Schulhoff, an entrepreneur and researcher who helped popularise the idea of prompt engineering. But when you're looking for information or asking questions with one right answer, Schulhoff and others say role-playing can make AI models less accurate.

"That can actually be dangerous," Battle says. "You're actually encouraging hallucination because you're telling it it's an expert, and it should trust its internal parametric knowledge." Essentially, it can make the AI act too confident.

But for wide open tasks with no single answer, role-playing is effective (think advice, brainstorming and creative or exploratory problem solving). If you're nervous about job interviews, telling a chatbot to imitate a hiring manager could be good practice – just consult other resources, too.

Stay neutral

"Don't lead the witness," Battle says. If you're trying to decide between two cars, don't say you're leaning towards the Toyota. "Otherwise, that's the answer you're likely to get."Pleases and thank yous

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, more than half of Americans say "please" when they're talking to their smart speakers. It seems that trend continued. A 2025 survey by the publisher Future found 70% of people are polite to AI when they use it. Most said they're nice because it's just the right thing to do, though 12% said they do it to protect themselves in case of robot uprisings.

Politeness may not protect you from angry robots or make LLMs more accurate, but there are other reasons to keep doing it.

"The bigger thing for me is saying 'please' and 'thank you' might make you more comfortable interacting with the AI," says Schulhoff. "It's not helping the performance of the model, but if it's helping you use the model more because you're more comfortable, then it's useful."

There's also the tenderness of your own human nature to consider. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that one reason you shouldn't be cruel to animals is that it's also damaging to yourself. Essentially, being unfriendly to anything makes you a harsher person. You can't hurt AIs feelings because it doesn't have any, but maybe you should be nice anyway. It’s a habit that could benefit other parts of your life.

by Thomas Germain, BBC/Future |  Read more:

Image: Serenity Strull

[ed. See also: I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes (BBC).]