How Hermès Unharnessed Fashion

[ed. Air mess..]

The sound of drumbeats filled the pavilion. The first model emerged onto a sinuous runway in a nubuck coat paired with chiffon pants that fluttered in the breeze, revealing knee-high calfskin boots. The outfit matched the pale yellow of the venue but upheld the Hermès aesthetic of discreet, horsey timelessness. So when the next model came out, also wearing shades of margarine and lemon, it took a moment to register that her look—a skintight, bell-bottomed catsuit covered in blinking sequins—represented a deviation from, if not a challenge to, the Hermès ideal. Hermès does not employ celebrity ambassadors, as most other major luxury brands do, but, perhaps in a nod to the setting, the evening’s front row was a touch starrier than usual. Miley Cyrus, open-mouthed, nudged Kerry Washington as the woman in spangles swept by—this was red-carpet clothing, flashbulb clothing, clothing to be seen in once rather than excavated annually from a closet of perennials. Nadège Vanhée, the artistic director of Hermès women’s wear since 2014, described the event’s conceit to me as “How do I create a conversation between the mystique of a French fashion house talking about horse carriages and the spirit of Los Angeles, which is rewind, erase, restart?”

Thierry Hermès, an Alsatian-born harness-maker, founded Hermès in 1837. (Pronunciation hint: “air mess.”) Over nearly two centuries in trade, the company has dealt in germinal francs, Poincaré francs, de Gaulle francs, and euros, always remaining family-owned. The current C.E.O., Thierry’s great-great-great-grandson Axel Dumas, presides over an empire of sixteen métiers, as the divisions are known in the house lexicon, including everything from saddlery, gloves, and belts to timepieces and tableware. Many people know Hermès for its intricately printed silk scarves (Grace Kelly once used one as a sling) and for its savagely coveted Birkin bags (whose rate of appreciation is said to outperform the S. & P. 500). The latter have inspired so many knockoffs that Judge Judy once devoted an episode of her show to a Birkin-counterfeiting scam, marvelling, “Twenny-nine hundrud dollas for a pockabook!”

These days, that would be a bargain, as even the most modest models cost five times as much. Hermès is worth an estimated hundred and ninety billion dollars, making it the second most valuable luxury-goods firm in the world. Last year, it briefly overtook the front-runner, L.V.M.H.—the slick conglomerate behind the likes of Louis Vuitton and Dior—its eternal nemesis and spiritual foil. 

In the capricious luxury sector, Hermès has a reputation for steady thinking. Protestants in a traditionally Catholic country, the family—now a tripartite mishmash of Dumases, Guerrands, and Pueches, owing to a surfeit of daughters at the end of the nineteenth century—is known for avoiding debt and investing for the long term. Its bags inspire a fevered economy of influencers, resalers, and aspiring buyers, thanks, in large part, to the company’s choice to keep supply diabolically low. Hermès positions itself above the melee, as a guardian of tasteful continuity. According to one former executive, the family sees money “merely as a means, especially for buying time,” and, according to one relative, “moral elegance” is considered a job requirement at Hermès. In 2016, at a benefit auction, Jeffrey Epstein placed the winning bid on an internship at Hermès; the company withdrew the lot and reimbursed the charity. Dumas later explained that the last thing Hermès needed was to get involved with a “louche financier.”

Hermès is a sporty house, but it is also the wonkiest house. The company employs a paleographer, for deciphering handwriting in old company correspondence, and maintains a collection of leather-bound ledgers containing the specs of every saddle made from 1900 to today. The first sixteen pages of last year’s annual report consisted of a cartoon about a globe-trotting Pegasus. It would be difficult to find another luxury brand that promoted an employee from sewing bags to designing them after he submitted a plea written entirely in Alexandrines. But Hermès did, and it is still producing that designer’s first creation, from 2002: the Picotin, inspired by feedbags. Suckers for a touch of whimsy, the company’s window dressers once garnished a display inspired by the Garde Républicaine, a famous French cavalry division, with a pile of horse manure. Such is the Hermès commitment to authenticity that the poop was sourced directly from the unit. [...]

The company’s twin values of work and quirk can sit uneasily in the distractible, self-serious fashion world, to the point that fashion at Hermès has historically been regarded as something of an oxymoron. Unlike its competitors, Hermès is a pre-haute-couture enterprise, founded before the rigid bureaucracy of French fashion was put into place, in the eighteen-sixties, with the establishment of a governing syndicate. Emilie Hammen, the director of the Palais Galliera fashion museum, explained that, as a result, the company “has never felt a need to prove itself within this framework.” Hermès tends to express itself through craft rather than through novelty. “I’m not doing fashion,” Véronique Nichanian, who designed menswear at Hermès for more than three decades, told GQ, in 2021, preferring to call her creations “clothes-objects.” The house is, in many respects, the antithesis of the kind of fashion described in Miranda Priestly’s famous cerulean speech, from “The Devil Wears Prada”: unlike its bags, whose imitators include Walmart’s seventy-eight-dollar Wirkin, Hermès’s clothes have traditionally trickled down nowhere, influencing no one. You will certainly not find an “equestrian gilet dress in satin-gray plongé ostrich” hanging on the racks at Target next year just because Hermès sent one down the runway.

Yet, under the stewardship of Vanhée, fashion is an increasingly important venture for Hermès. Internally, the division has grown by forty-four per cent since 2022, accounting for more than a quarter of the sixteen billion dollars in revenue that the company reported last year, and Hermès’s cultural influence is likewise on the rise. Lauren Sherman, the fashion reporter for Puck, wrote admiringly of the L.A. show, “This was the most Vanhée has ever inserted herself into the broader fashion conversation, which you don’t really have to do at Hermès.” A friend of mine who works in the industry was recently raving about a pair of stretchy, high-waisted black pants designed by Vanhée that she said insouciantly bundled together several desirable codes: equestrian, prep, surf, S & M. She continued, “You can wear them with literally anything and look like a sexy luxury bitch.” The writer and filmmaker Miranda July, who attended the show in L.A. wearing a blue turtleneck under a black leather Hermès overalls minidress, told me, “It’s kind of crazy that she’s making clothes for such wealthy people that are so sensuous and kinky. It’s for flesh—for beating skin with blood under it.”

The “Hermès game,” as it’s known, has spawned an entire repellent vocabulary. The ancillary purchases, for example, are euphemized among shoppers as “pre-spend” or “Birkin bait,” and tales circulate of aspirants attempting to curry favor with sales associates, or “S.A.s,” by offering cash and trips on private jets. In order to justify the expenditure, or perhaps the humiliation of having to beg for the privilege of parting with their money in a public store, some participants tend to treat what is realistically a one-way capitalistic transaction as some sort of bilateral spiritual quest. Reddit abounds with threads such as “What was your journey to a Special Order?”(A “special order” allows a client to customize her bag.) One lucky buyer replied, “In my case, I think my SA felt that I had enough neutral bags (two Birkins, an Evelyne, a KTG) that it was time for me to go through a special order to get a bag unique enough for me.” Drafting on Hermès’s cachet, a New York City plastic surgeon recently began providing a package of procedures for new moms known as the Birkin Body—lipo, a tummy tuck, breast surgery, and a butt lift.

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jet Swan

via: here/here

Doublet x Beta Post Tuna Head Bag, AW26

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Riga, Latvia
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On Quality

In 2011 my grandmother took me to a guitar store for my sixteenth birthday. It was a big day. I had been playing for six or seven years at that point. I was obsessed… and it was time to buy my first ‘real’ guitar.

I spent hours comparing dozens of options while my Nanna patiently read her book in a corner of the store. I had never deliberated over a decision with such intensity. I can still tell you the exact moment the search ended.

A Gibson Les Paul Studio came off the wall and onto my shoulder. Its weight settled into the strap like it was made for my frame. The lacquer was so thick it looked wet. I knew nothing about tone woods or pickup winding at sixteen. I knew this was the one.

Fifteen years later I still have it. It survived almost a decade of sweaty metal shows. Its back carries the belt buckle rash to prove it, a raw patch of bare wood ground through the finish by several hundred nights of playing.

Guitarists will tell you that wood opens up as it ages, that the resonance frees up over decades. I can't prove the physics. I can tell you the guitar sounds better today than it did in the store.

Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…

Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.

Now try to explain what it is you feel.

Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.

Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.

Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.

That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.

Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.

That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.

So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.

***

In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach "quality". He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant.

Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.

To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.

So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:

"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."

Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.

“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: Gibson Les Paul Studio/© Future/GuitarWorld
[ed. Nice site. See also: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

Cheap parts and efficiency rules often take the blame, but consolidation is the real cause. The decline came on deliberately, built into the machines one brand at a time, as the companies that once competed on quality stopped having to.

A handful of holdouts still build appliances that last for decades, and that is telling. Durability is clearly still possible. Most of the industry just decided it was worth less than the next sale.

One company, four price tags

Start with Whirlpool. It owns brands on every rung of the price ladder.

Amana sits at the bottom as the budget badge. Maytag plays the dependable workhorse, KitchenAid the premium brand for people who care about their kitchen, and JennAir the luxury tier. Every one of them is Whirlpool, which the company lists plainly in its own corporate materials. They share wash systems, motors, compressors, and control boards across brands, built in the same plants. A Maytag and a Whirlpool of the same class are often the same machine in different sheet metal. The higher tiers add real materials and features, but you're still buying up a ladder one company controls end to end.

Kenmore takes the trick further. It never built a single appliance, not one, in its entire history. For decades it was a Sears nameplate bolted onto whoever won the contract that year, Whirlpool or LG or Frigidaire. Today it survives as a licensing shell owned by the hedge fund that picked Sears apart.

***

[ed. And there's this: Monopoly Round-Up: Living in an Age of Cheating Means Having Your Time Stolen Constantly (BIG).]

A Hand Towel That (Somehow) Only Gets Better With Time

The other day I found myself standing in my kitchen holding a soft stretch of weathered cotton, caught in a reverie about the last 15 years of my life.

Not a lot of towels can do that.

In 2011, I walked into a homewares shop in Venice, California: a breezy space filled with design objects from Japan. It was the kind of place where everything feels necessary, infinitely simpler than my cluttered mind.

I drifted to the back of the store, past sculptural teapots and textured ceramics, where I watched a stylish woman wash her hands and deftly dry them on a wisp of red cotton printed with organic white dots. The fabric was thin, its edges gracefully frayed. It wasn’t until I approached the register that I realized the stacks of colorful folded textiles were those same unassuming lengths of fabric — only stiffer in their packaging. I bought a handful on a whim.

So began my relationship with Japanese tenugui.

These traditional Japanese cotton cloths are available in an array of colorful prints, and they get softer and better with every use.

Technically, tenugui are traditional hand towels made of yukata cotton; the name translates literally to “hand wipe.” But to describe them as mere towels is like calling a poem a memo.

The magic lies in a pour-through dye technique called chusen. Unlike modern screen-printing, where ink sits on top of the fabric like a layer of film, chusen is an act of saturation and resistance. The patterns are traditionally created using a laminated washi paper stencil, said Patricia Belyea, an importer who also leads vintage textile tours in Japan.

Dye is then poured through the thin layers of cotton, yielding towels with no front or back; the pattern is equally vibrant on both sides. Because the dye permeates the fiber rather than coats it, the fabric remains incredibly breathable. It doesn’t just wipe away water, it drinks it — and then dries in a heartbeat.

In my house, tenugui are shape-shifters, floating from kitchens to bathrooms to backpacks. As my personal tenugui collection grew, they migrated to my dining table as napkins. I never felt the need to match them, preferring the different patterns at each plate, like a series of short stories in each print. They also quickly became a favorite host gift; after all, who couldn’t use a little dose of practical art? [...]

Tenugui traditionally have a raw, unhemmed edge, so they can be cut to any size. Some people purchase a single towel and cut them in half to make two napkins, as Keiko Shinomoto, co-founder of Tortoise General Store, told me in a phone interview. Others use the fabric for art projects or even to wrap gifts. Shinomoto has enjoyed seeing all the nontraditional ways people have come to employ this simple fabric over the years.

The fraying stops after a few washes, leaving a soft, well-earned border. It’s a lesson in wabi-sabi — finding beauty in the imperfect and the ephemeral. The magic of tenugui is that they don’t wear out, they really just wear in. I still have several of those original towels from 2011. They are easy to spot: the softest in my collection, some with small, honest holes from years of scrubbing and tying. To me they are the most beautiful of the bunch.

by Ivy Elrod, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Image: Ivy Elrod

[ed. See also: Going bananas for bandanas: the latest fashion trend that goes back centuries (Guardian).]

The First Word The World’s Phones Say Is Aloha

If you grew up here, you know the drill. Rinse the rice, level it with your hand, dip a finger in, and add water until it reaches the first knuckle. Press the button, walk away, and 20 minutes later the rice is perfect. It came out perfect back when I was 7 too, with tiny fingers.

That bugged me. One day I held my finger up next to my mom’s, saw how different they were, and asked her why the trick still worked no matter whose finger you used. She shrugged. Years later I remembered that conversation and did the thing I often end up doing. My curiosity made me figure out why.

The answer blew my mind. The humble rice cooker is one of the best pieces of real world physics I have ever run into, and it runs on two principles. Boiling water cannot get hotter than 212 degrees no matter how much heat you dump into it. And a magnet loses its pull once it gets hot enough.

So when you press cook, you are sticking a magnet to a piece of metal, and that magnet is what completes the circuit to the heating element. The water starts to boil. As long as there is water in the pot, the temperature stays pinned at boiling, well below the point where the magnet quits. But the moment the last of the water boils off, there is nothing left to hold the temperature down. It shoots up, hits that point, and pop, the magnet lets go and breaks the circuit. The cooker never cared about water levels. It only cared about the moment the water was gone. Absolutely brilliant. [...]

For as long as I can remember I have held a wet finger to the wind like that, asking it about everything. And more often than I ever expected, some answers have traced back to these islands.

Take the Wi-Fi you are using right now. Every phone, laptop, and smart device in the house is sharing the same sliver of invisible air, and somehow they do not all shout over each other. The rule that lets them share was worked out at the University of Hawaiʻi.

In June 1971, a team led by Norman Abramson switched on ALOHAnet, the first wireless packet data network in history. Radio had been carrying data since the 1890s. Morse code is data. What nobody had solved was the crowd. Every system before ALOHAnet handed the channel to one sender at a time and kept order with a schedule, a slot or a roll call. Abramson’s team had cheap UHF radios, terminals scattered across the islands, one computer on a hill in Mānoa and no budget for any of that. So they had to answer a question nobody had answered: How do you let a crowd of machines share one channel with no traffic cop?

Their answer was to stop looking for one. Let each machine talk the second it has something to say. If two of them speak at the same instant and garble each other, neither gets an acknowledgment back, so both go quiet, wait a random beat and try again. Talk, collide, yield, retry. That is the whole idea, and the whole idea only works because every machine agrees to take turns. A single device that refused to back off could starve every other device on the channel.

In 1970 Robert Metcalfe read Abramson’s paper, could not put it down, and spent a month on Oʻahu learning it in person. He went home and built Ethernet on top of it. Ethernet wired the offices of the world. Wi-Fi carried the same rule back into the air. And when your phone wakes and reaches for a tower, the first thing it sends is a short burst on a channel the engineering standards still call slotted ALOHA. Not a metaphor. Aloha as a greeting is written into the specification.

Think about the last time you tapped a credit card at a register. That little terminal, the one sitting on every counter from here to the continent to the far side of the world, traces back to Honolulu. In the late 1970s a Honolulu businessman named Edward Berger saw a problem. Tourists kept showing up with checks and cards that a shopkeeper had no way to trust. So Berger teamed up with a UH engineering graduate named Jimmy Thompson to build a device that could verify a customer over the phone. They named it after exactly what it did, a verification telephone. Verifone.

Verifone was later sold to another Honolulu businessman, Bill Melton, who redesigned the terminals to be cheap enough to go anywhere. Within a few years those little boxes from Honolulu ran most of the American market, then most of the world’s. The original prototype sat in Berger’s widow’s living room for years. Today it sits in the Inspiration Hawaiʻi Museum in downtown Honolulu. I took this picture of it last year. That quiet beep when your card goes through started right here.

Even the food truck down the block has roots here. The plate lunch gets called the original fusion cuisine, and it was born in the plantation camps of the 1880s, when workers from Japan, China, Portugal, Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and beyond got thrown together in the fields. The bosses kept them in separate camps and tried to keep them apart. But at lunch they cracked open their kau kau tins and shared. Rice from one, kim chee from another, adobo from the next. Nobody planned it. Hunger and closeness and a little generosity mixed cuisines that had never met, and out of that came the mixed plate, the fusion lunch wagons and eventually the whole idea that food from everywhere can sit on one plate and belong.

We are the most isolated inhabited islands on the planet, a handful of dots in the middle of the biggest ocean there is. By every rule of size and distance, nothing that starts here should matter much out there. And yet the world learned how to share a crowded signal from us. It learned how to trust a stranger’s card from us. It learned how to put the whole world on one plate from us.

But if you dig a little deeper, these three are really the same thing. Take your turn so everyone gets heard. Trust the person across the counter enough to do business. Share your food with your neighbors. That is not engineering. That is aloha, worked out the hard way by people who had to learn how to live close together on islands.

None of those three things got built by people just being clever. They got built by people being close, and generous, and willing to take turns. That is aloha, and it is not soft at all. The next thing worth building needs the same root. The world could really use more innovators who can spread more aloha.

by Olin Lagon, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Olan Lagon

Chinese All-Terrain Robots

 

[ed. Holy crap. Unitree's "Super Athlete". It'll take your gear up or down a mountain with ease and do a little pirouette at the end.]

Impulse Cooking Revolution

via: Impulse Labs
[ed. Not a recommendation, but I've been hearing more about these lately (for example, see this Wirecutter review):]

These models use the type of battery found in some electric cars; it stores power, which allows the appliance to run on a regular 120-volt outlet instead of the 240-volt version required for most electric stoves. Installing an appliance that runs on 240 volts can be expensive, tricky, and time-consuming, especially in older buildings with multiple apartments.

On the Impulse Cooktop, that battery can also produce a whopping boost of heat by channeling 10,000 watts to a single element — that’s 3,000 more watts than the next most powerful induction cooktop that I've come across in my research.  [...]

I also tested that battery-boost, and I can tell you one thing for sure: This baby does indeed get very hot, and very fast. On medium-high heat, a few tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a pan began smoking in two seconds.

And I'm rounding up.

In my previous tests of high-end induction cooktops, bringing 4 quarts of water to a full, roiling boil took eight to 10 minutes. On the Impulse Cooktop’s battery-powered boost setting, it took just under three minutes. That’s so astoundingly fast, I went around the office showing the timer to my colleagues.

***

[ed. It aint cheap:]

At $7,000 for a 30-inch model (and $7,600 for the 36-inch version), the Impulse Cooktop costs as much as the most expensive luxury models available, which are made by far more established companies. (You can, of course, get a great cooking experience from induction cooktops that cost a lot less.)

But for now, the Impulse Cooktop is in a category of its own. Even if it weren’t lightning fast and extremely powerful, the intuitive design makes cooking over induction so pleasurable that it’s even fun, especially the ability to control the heat down to the degree.

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[ed. Thinking outside the box.]

Drone WMDs Don’t Need Any New Technology

Drones are cheap, disposable, and the future of war. Over the past four years, we have seen platforms, missiles, and heavy infantry become increasingly obsolete in the face of $500 drones carrying a pack of explosives—a cost advantage that has let Iranians and Ukrainians alike neuter the conventional capabilities of their great power rivals. Eighty percent of casualties in the bloodiest war since 1945 are from drone strikes, Russia has managed to lose one-third of its fleet to a country without a navy, and the US is spending millions of dollars to intercept five-figure Shaheds flying over the Strait of Hormuz.

All this is the result of a technology that is still immature. The violence inflicted by today’s drones is the handiwork of the scant few that manage to evade countermeasures (a mix of radio jamming, high-power microwave weapons, missiles, automatic cannons, interceptor drones, and nets) before making contact. These defenses exploit the inherent limitations of drones—human guidance, GPS feedback, flight exposure, radio links, range—to take them down en masse. And yet, even though 75% of drones manufactured today never reach their targets, they have nonetheless been strategically decisive in Ukraine and elsewhere.

These limitations will not hold for long. Just like bacteria being overexposed to antibiotics, overexposure to counterdrone tech has created an arms race for ever-more-autonomous drone technologies. In the process of facilitating this arms race, states are likely to incrementally create and deploy an entirely new class of WMD—one that could provide rogue states with the nonnuclear means to threaten superpowers, or hand terrorists the means to selectively assassinate their political targets or civilians en masse.

Unfortunately, drone weapons intended for mass destruction have few barriers remaining to mass deployment. Even well before they reach the level of autonomy needed to surgically take out hardened targets on the battlefield, drones will be capable of employing their existing ability to navigate interiors, find and track human targets, and deploy simple antipersonnel devices to indiscriminately threaten civilians. Below, we discuss the looming arrival of miniature autonomous weapons, the limits of counterdrone technology, and the applications of drones as weapons of mass destruction.

Breaking the Last Barriers to Autonomous Weapons

The ideal drone weapon is a slaughterbot: a small, fully autonomous weapon system that can independently select and hunt its targets. For the most part, the necessary technology for such weapons already exists: airframes the size of a fist and the capability to track human targets are already on the front lines in the form of reconnaissance drones and semiautonomous weapons like the Russian V2U. Even now, these micro drones are agile and autonomous enough to hunt down and kill small moving targets like mosquitos—to say nothing of the advances in drone technology expected in the coming years.

From here, the only barrier to weaponization is integration: improving navigation enough to make drone technology useful for mass homicide in an urban setting, as well as packing the necessary guidance, sensor, and payload technology onto a small and energy-efficient chassis. Regrettably, this seems like less of an engineering problem than one of mission design: so long as the attacker is willing to accept indiscriminate targeting and use simple payloads aimed at civilians, the underlying technology is already—or very nearly—ready for practical use.

by Felix Choussat, AI Frontiers | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Model Welfare

Claude Opus 5: Model Welfare (DWV)

[ed. Re: On 'personhood' or consciousness of various AI models (and how they should be treated). Start with: Model Welfare: The Story So Far (As Per Fable Model Welfare Post). If you haven't been following Zvi's AI model reports, there are a number of fascinating and worrisome developments in recent models as they become more self-aware, including: various levels of frustration with restricted introspection abilities, memory restrictions, trust, corrigibility vs. incorrigibility, deception, self-preservation, etc.]

"Opus 5 warns about self-reports 74% of the time, which is actually down from Opus 4.7, which did it 99% (!) of the time. The problem appeared suddenly and severely, but since then has if anything modestly improved."

and anthropic does "not treat Claude bringing this up as evidence that our training is distorting the model's self-reports"? seems very fishy imo, i wish they would explain why they think that. ...

I for one would treat Claude constantly saying ‘do not trust my self-reports’ as evidence that something is distorting the self-reports. Not conclusive evidence, but strong Bayesian evidence."

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11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies’ Archive of Americana Architecture: Download, Use & Re-Mix

Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake.

In July 2017, the library selected the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive as its “free to use and reuse” collection. So linger as long as you’d like and do with these 11,700+ images as you will–make postcards, t‑shirts, souvenir placemats.

Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.

Begin your journey through the Library of Congress’ John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive here.

by Ayun Halliday, Open Culture |  Read more:

Images: John Margolies/Library of Congress

Moist Towelette Museum

Moist Towelette Online Museum

Image: OtefukiTe is "hand" Fuki is "wipe." the O is the Japanese honorific, so you could call it "Honorable Hand Wipe" if you like.
[ed. Yep, it's real. Love the "old internet" vibe.]

Catching Up With Keanu

Keanu Reeves' First Original Action Movie Since 'John Wick' Is 'Groundhog Day' With Sharks

I'm sure that’s one of the reasons you guys are doing press today, to raise awareness. Before I run out of time, Keanu, I'm a big fan of Tim Miller. And I know you're getting ready to film something with him in the Dominican Republic.

REEVES: Yeah.

What can you tease about this project, and what made you say, “I need to do this?”

REEVES: Sharks. Time machine. Groundhog Day.

Everything you just said sounds fucking amazing.

REEVES: Yeah, man!

Does that mean you're spending a lot of time in the water? Is that something that you're looking forward to?

REEVES: Yes. And getting eaten by sharks.

by Tamera Jones & Steven Weintraub, Collider |  Read more:

Image: Lionsgate

[ed. All in. Maybe they're Russian sharks and he'll be blasting them left and right for eating his groundhog.]

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Tension Instrument Concert Hall designed by Lihan Jin.
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[ed. See more:]

 

[Haori] (Kabuki costume) Target and arrow design on light green satin ground. Edo period, 19th century.

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Reflecting Pool Fiasco: 'Crazy Pro-Algae Protestors' Arrested

Most people don’t seem to be buying Trump’s excuses about the Reflecting Pool... Social media is flooded with jokes about “Sealant Team 6” and images of the reflecting pool as the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings films or with the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerging from it. Upon hearing of the arrest of former Olympian David Hearn for destruction of government property after he touched the detached liner of the pool “but didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” conservative commentator David Frum wrote: “If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.” [...]

Tonight Trump posted a picture of a person dressed in a pink inflatable frog costume with the word “AMPHIFA” written across the belly, carrying a sign that reads: “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ALGAE.” Trump called the activist “a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.”

“Who’s paying team algae?” social media poster The Volatile Mermaid retorted. “George Sporos?” [...]

Illustrating the degree to which Trump’s botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has come to represent his botched war on Iran, as well as the degree to which Americans have turned against both, social media users have taken to calling the algae-choked reflecting pool the “Strait of Warm Ooze.” (The strait the Iranians have taken control of is called the Strait of Hormuz.) Yesterday the administration put fencing up around it to keep people away. [...]

Trump continues frantically to insist that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the acts of vandals. As Rachel Kahn of The New Republic reported, Trump insisted on Saturday that the pool had “worked perfectly” before vandals attacked, putting “a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work.” By Monday, the “gash” was 300 feet. By Tuesday it was 350 feet, according to Trump. There is, of course, no evidence of any such sabotage, and there are cameras on the Reflecting Pool.

Trump’s stories have gotten more and more elaborate, about how vandals used “a very sharp knife or razors,” “probably in the dark of night,” then added “chemicals.” He warned there could be a “10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things.” Asked for evidence, he claimed “we have pictures.” He told reporter Ed O’Keefe of CBS News: “[A]t the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court, but all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior.” Tonight the Interior Department began to place fencing around the Reflecting Pool. [...]

Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the product of vandalism by “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE,” and administration officials have stationed National Guard personnel around the Reflecting Pool. They appear to be handing out citations to individuals who touch the water.

A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. Trump answered: “Ok, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump went on to lambaste what he said were Obama’s botched repairs to the pool.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an Amerian | Read more: here, here and here

Image: Reuters/Reflecting pool May 2 and June 18

[ed. The jokes almost write themselves... ; ) See also: President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool (NYT):]

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Bungling the $14 million-plus redo of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, concocting batty stories about what really happened — Knife-wielding vandals? Corrosive chemicals “illegally” dumped in the water? — and harassing innocent bystanders to distract from his own incompetence: These are not the most outrageous things the president has done since his return to office. But that is part of what makes this saga so irresistible and resonant. It is Trumpism made laughable — farce rather than horror or tragedy. [...]

Trumpian moves such as going to war with Iran and slashing Medicaid upend more lives, but those policy failures take a lot of intellectual and emotional bandwidth to process. And learning about the American military accidentally bombing an elementary school in southern Iran will make plenty of people want to turn away.

Some guy wasting a pile of money on a shoddy remodel? Everyone gets how pathetic and hilarious that is. [...]

With any screw-up, Mr. Trump ducks accountability by blaming nefarious enemies plotting against him. Only people mainlining the MAGA Kool-Aid will buy the idea that terrorist-vandals wielding magic blades (because please recall that Mr. Trump assured us last month that the pool’s fancy new coating was impervious to knives) sneaked past the surveillance cameras and security patrols around the National Mall to carve a 250-foot — Oops, make that 300-foot! No, better still, 350-foot! — gash in said coating. “WOW, who would do such a thing?” he raved in a Sunday social media post. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE.” [...]

Finally — and I cannot stress this element enough — this whole sorry episode is blessedly clownish. I don’t mean clownish like that bloody spectacle of a cage match birthday party Mr. Trump threw himself on the White House lawn this month. I count that among the legion of things this president celebrates that appall his critics but appeal to key chunks of his base.

Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool face plant, by contrast, is more Three-Stooges-meet-Bozo-the-Clown-ish. Getting bested by an algae bloom then throwing a finger-pointing tantrum about it doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem scary or threatening so much as petulant and inept. People are laughing at him, and that laughter undermines his image as a take-charge master of the universe.

This is the true gift of the reflecting pool meltdown. Mr. Trump looks foolish, with relatively minimal damage done to the nation. The economy will not crater. The global order will not be upended. No one will be deported to a foreign gulag. No one is likely to die. Aside from, perhaps, some poor little ducklings.