A Constitution For Amanda

[ed. The principal author of Anthropic's (Claude's) 'soul' document or internal constitution, Amanda Askell: "I asked Claude to write my constitution. I thought its Amanda constitution was very touching."

via: X

Verdict: Yes, You Should Go See Project Hail Mary As Soon As Possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

[ed. Oh man, can't wait. I may have to read the book again just to get ready.]

Goodbye, Taiwan

Three and a half years ago, I moved to Taiwan to teach policy debate at a cram school. I had just graduated with a math degree and three semesters of Mandarin, and I had no idea that my incoming adventures would land me a Taiwanese husband and a job at ChinaTalk. But as of this week, my time in Taiwan has come to an end.

Taiwan is so much more than just a disputed territory, a chess piece, or a flashpoint for great power war. That seems obvious, yet my conversations with friends back home always end up centered on invasion timelines and ADIZ violations. Today, I’d like to share some vignettes from my time living on this beautiful island as I tearfully say goodbye. I hope they make you smile.

Bumming Cigs—A Glitch for Infinite Mandarin Practice

I often meet foreigners who lament the difficulty of making Taiwanese friends. In America, bars are an acceptable place to talk to strangers, whereas, in my experience, Taiwanese people prefer to go to bars with a group of people they already know and socialize with that group. This is why I’ve started teaching my foreign friends a magical friend-making Mandarin phrase:

我可以白嫖一根煙嗎？

“Can I bum a cigarette?”

This sentence is your ticket to infinite free Mandarin conversation practice and endless opportunities to make Taiwanese friends. The verb 白嫖 (báipiáo) means “to bum” or “to freeload,” but the literal meaning is something like “to have a free appointment with a sex worker.” Predictably, Taiwanese people laugh out loud when a random foreigner walks up and uses this word correctly in a sentence, making it the perfect way to break the ice.

If you don’t smoke, simply tuck the cigarette behind your ear, and then, later in the evening, walk up to a different group and declare you need to give away your last cigarette because you’ve just decided to quit. Bam! You’ve just doubled your opportunities for socializing.

I used to teach people how to say, “Can I freeload off your vape?” — but Taiwan has since made it illegal to buy, sell, or import e-cigarettes. People still have them and can use them in public, but asking to 白嫖 such a rare commodity is in poor taste.

Non-Tariff Barriers

I didn’t crave hamburgers or pizza after I moved to Taipei. That would have been too easy. Instead, I craved Honey Nut Cheerios (or HNCs for short).

Cereal is not popular in Taiwan. Pretty much every neighborhood has a shop serving hot breakfast items, so the convenience of cereal isn’t a strong selling point the way it is in America. Some cereals are available at Carrefour 家樂福, but they somehow never stock my beloved HNCs. I set out on a mission to find out why.

I discovered Costco 好市多 used to sell HNCs, until it became clear that Cheerios are even less profitable than other cereals due to the quirks of Taiwanese advertising law. You see, every box of Cheerios is plastered with slogans like “can help lower cholesterol” and “may reduce the risk of heart disease.” In Taiwan, it’s illegal to make claims like that in food advertising, so if Costco wants to sell Cheerios, an employee first has to take a marker and strike out all the illegal claims on every box before the product can be put on the shelves. You can see why they switched to Froot Loops.

I did eventually find a small imported snack store selling exorbitantly priced Cheerios with stickers covering the offending text. I bought a box, but discovered my tolerance for sugar had changed since leaving America, and my beloved HNCs were now way too sweet for me. I guess that’s why it’s illegal to imply this cereal is healthy. [...]

The Meerkats

My Taiwanese friends and I decided to take a weekend trip to Chiayi 嘉義, a city in central Taiwan. We were walking around the old Japanese train station when I spotted a middle-aged Taiwanese uncle walking his two pet meerkats.

I found this to be incredibly delightful — the meerkats wore tiny little harnesses hooked up to a retractable leash. They were scrambling around, taking in the excitement of the bustling train station, while their owner just stood there scrolling on his phone.

I burst out laughing and turned around to ask my friends how to say “meerkat” in Mandarin (they’re called 狐獴, “fox mongooses”). When I looked back a second later, the meerkats had found a super wrinkly obese dog to play with.

I turned back to my friends, wheezing from laughter with tears in my eyes, and asked, “Is it common to keep meerkats as pets in Taiwan? How am I the only one being affected by this?”

They looked at each other with blank expressions and shrugged. “This is just how we react to stuff.”

I thought back to this moment in April 2024, when the 7.4-magnitude earthquake centered in Hualien rippled across the entire island. Once the shaking had stopped, I looked out the window of my Taipei apartment onto the market below. No one was screaming or panicking — the aunties just picked up their wheeled grocery carriers and continued walking. “This is just how we react to stuff.”

New Year’s in the Countryside

For Lunar New Year, we always go to visit my husband’s paternal grandparents. They live in a little farming community called Lukang 鹿港, “The Deer Port,” so called because deer skin and meat were shipped out of this settlement during the Dutch colonial period. Lukang was once the largest city in central Taiwan, but has depopulated in large part because it doesn’t have a rail station. But this sleepy town roars to life during the New Year, when the children and grandchildren who migrated to larger cities for work come back to Lukang to celebrate.

My husband’s grandparents live on a small farm granted to them by Chiang Kai-Shek’s land redistribution policy (耕者有其田, literally “the tiller has his own land”). Their names are Japanese, since they were born during the colonial period, and they mostly cannot speak Mandarin or read Chinese characters. Other family members are kind enough to help translate from Hokkien so I can communicate with them. I once asked Grandpa what he and his wife liked to do for fun in the countryside. “We love to go out and vote!” he said proudly.

Grandma’s teeth aren’t great, so one year I brought American-style mashed potatoes and gravy to LNYE dinner for her, and we’ve been friends ever since. This year, when we were saying goodbye, I asked if I could hug her for the first time. “My coat is all dirty…” I told her I didn’t mind and hugged her anyway. We both started tearing up. “When will you be back?”

Green Island

Taiwanese people don’t really collect sea glass — and that lack of competition makes beachcombing here super rewarding. But when my husband and I took a family trip to Green Island 綠島 off Taiwan’s southeastern coast, my mother-in-law cautioned me against bringing any sea glass back to the mainland. Green Island, she explained, housed a political prison during the martial law years (which is now an excellent museum), and she was worried a tormented spirit might be attached to the glass I picked up on the beach.

We spent the weekend wading through Green Island’s tide pools, eating freshly butchered young tuna we caught ourselves, and enjoying one of the world’s only saltwater hot springs. And of course, when we went to the beach, there was tons of beautiful sea glass.

I wasn’t sure about bringing the sea glass home (it’s better to just do what my mother-in-law says), but I was still picking it up since the hunt is half the fun. But that changed when we found a piece of sea glass with a Chinese character embossed on the front.

This character is 維 (wéi). It’s my husband’s name. There was no wei I wasn’t taking it home.

There is no special subset of characters used only for names — those same characters appear in words too (my Chinese name, for example, means surplus flowers 盈莉). So out of all the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, this piece of sea glass happened to have exactly the right one. It’s probably a fragment of an old bottle of liquid vitamin B12 (vitamin in Mandarin is 維他命).

While Americans often have a room in their house dedicated to tools for their hobby of choice, Taiwanese people rent tools at maker spaces and create things there. Back in Taipei, I made an appointment at a metalworking studio and soldered a silver bezel for my Green Island treasure.

by Lily Ottinger, ChinaTalk |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

America and Public Disorder, and "The Kill Line"

Two weeks ago, on the blue line to O’Hare, my car had two men smoking joints, a broken woman, her eyes dilated and blank, sitting in a nest of filthy bags smelling of sewage, and a man barking into the void, shirtless, who was washing himself with flour tortillas, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began the same process. This didn't shock me, or anyone else around me, since I'd seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I'd ridden, every pedestrian walkway I'd passed through, and on most street corners.

Three weeks ago, in Duluth, half the riders on every bus I took were mentally tortured and/or intoxicated. The downtown Starbucks, pedestrian malls, and shuttered doorways of vacated buildings all housed broken people. Same in Indianapolis, El Paso, New York City, Jacksonville, LA, Phoenix, and almost every community I’ve been to in the U.S., save for those gated by wealth.

An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the U.S. in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the U.S. it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder.

We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.

I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.

It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.

The canonical example of this is La Sombrita, the laughably expensive Los Angeles “bus stop” that was a single pole to provide shade and security lighting, but did neither. La Sombrita exists precisely because it doesn’t do anything, which is the end result of a decades-long process of defensive construction. If you build a nice bus stop it is either immediately broken or turned into shelters for the destitute, and so you stop building those.

Another nice thing we don’t have in the U.S. is public restrooms. We don’t have them out of a justified fear of abuse, which is the same reason many Starbucks lock their restrooms. McDonald’s does this as well, depending on the location, and also even strips them of mirrors in the especially bad communities, to discourage people from using them for an hour-long morning toilet, as well as breaking the mirrors just for the hell of it.

This lack of public restrooms became an issue on Twitter when the latest round of debate about disorder in the U.S. was kicked off when a tweeter noted how offensive it was to have seen someone urinating in a crowded New York subway car.

This debate brought out a lot of absurd arguments, mostly from those trying to shrug it off or suggest it was simply the price of living in a big city.

No, the rest of the world doesn’t tolerate the amount of antisocial behavior we in the U.S. do. If someone were to piss on a subway anywhere else in the world, and very very few ever would want to (more on why below), they are removed from society for a period of time.

We however let people who aren’t mentally competent continue to engage in self-destructive and aberrant behavior without removing them, which consequently ruins it for everyone else, except those wealthy enough to build their own private islands of comfort.

Someone peeing on the subway is not of sound mind, and it isn’t normal behavior by any measure. It’s a sign of distress that should cause an intervention—by police, social workers, whoever—that mandates them into an institution for a period of time, until they regain sanity and stability. For someone actively psychotic —civil commitment to psychiatric hospital. For violent individuals refusing treatment—secure prison facilities with mandatory programs. For severe addiction—medical detox and residential treatment without the ability to walk away.

They should not be allowed to do whatever they want because they cannot control themselves enough to have that freedom. Someone shouting at strangers, someone washing themselves with flour tortillas, someone punching at the air voicing threats shouldn’t, for their own safety and others, be out roaming the streets. [...]

I’ve been very careful up to now not to use the word homeless, because it’s become an overly broad category that covers families in motels with Section 8 vouchers, people sleeping on friends’ couches until they can get back on their feet, mothers with children in long-term shelters, and then those who live in tents under bridges or sleep in a soiled sleeping bag.

Eighty-five percent (or so) of those in this broad category are not causing problems. They are, like most everyone else, doing their best to get by and better themselves. Sure, they have more complicated and chaotic lives than most, but they try to play by the rules as best they can.

Our problems in public spaces come from the fifteen percent or so who fall into the last group—the stubbornly intransigent—which are people who have options for housing but turn them down for a variety of reasons, some driven by mental demons, some by an overwhelming desire to always be on drugs, some simply out of preference to be alone. Others in this category have been ejected from housing because of continual violent and threatening behavior.

They are not, by almost any metric, of sound mind, and shouldn’t be granted the full privileges other citizens have.

The cover photo is John, and he is in this category. He had set himself on fire the day before I met him, freebasing a perc 30, and refused to go to the hospital because he didn’t want to lose his favorite spot behind the garbage bin, since it was only a block away from dealers and perfect to piss in. He had a government room he didn’t use because catching on fire (something he did every now and then) set off smoke alarms. He also thought it was cursed and monitored by the same people who had held him captive on an island in the middle of the Pacific—an island he escaped from three months before by swimming the four hundred miles. He showed me an arm, covered with burns, that he claimed was where a shark had bit him.

John should be mandated into a prison, a mental institution, or a rehab clinic, until he is competent enough to be on his own, not out on the streets in mental and physical pain, setting himself on fire. It is as simple as that, although I understand a change like this comes with additional nuanced policy debate. As for costs, it is more a question of redirecting what we spend rather than finding additional money, because we already spend an immense amount on this problem—the New York City budget for homeless services is four billion—without 'solving' it.

Even if you put aside the destruction this type of behavior has done to broader society, and your concerns are only focused on the health and welfare of the stubbornly intransigent, then our current system is still deeply wrong. We are not providing them justice by allowing them to choose a public display of mental misery, where the self harm they can do is far greater than when being monitored.

Beneath all this discussion is the additional question of why we in the U.S. have so many mentally unstable people, why so many are addicted to drugs, why so many people are OK with doing shocking things.

by Chris Arnade, Walks the World | Read more:
Images: X/uncredited

[ed. We've lost the plot. Or not. Maybe this is just an accurate reflection of this country's priorities over the last 50 years or so. Even worse, with AI just around the corner, it's going to get a lot worse unless our government starts working for its people again (and our people start working for our country again, beginning with acknowledging their own civic duties and responsibilities that go beyond simply paying taxes, gaming the system, and trying to make as much money as possible). From the comments:]

***

One of the things travel does best is remove the normalization filter we build at home. When you move between countries long enough, patterns that once felt “just how things are” start to look like choices societies have made - or failed to make.

What strikes me in pieces like this is not the comparison itself, but the discomfort it creates. Clean transit systems, safe public spaces, and functioning streets aren’t cultural miracles; they’re outcomes of priorities, incentives, and sustained public decisions. When those systems break down, the result isn’t abstract policy failure - it’s visible human suffering playing out in the most ordinary places.

Travel doesn’t just show us new landscapes. It quietly exposes which problems we’ve decided to tolerate.

***

[ed. See also: The Kill Line: Why China Is Suddenly Obsessed With American Poverty (NYT).]

Chinese commentators are talking a lot these days about poverty in the United States, claiming China’s superiority by appropriating an evocative phrase from video game culture.

The phrase, “kill line,” is used in gaming to mark the point where the condition of opposing players has so deteriorated that they can be killed by one shot. Now, it has become a persistent metaphor in Communist Party propaganda.

“Kill line” has been used repeatedly on social media and commentary sites, as well as news outlets linked to the state. It has gained traction in China to depict the horror of American poverty — a fatal threshold beyond which recovery to a better life becomes impossible. The phrase is used as a metaphor to encompass homelessness, debt, addiction and economic insecurity. In its official use, the “kill line” hovers over the heads of Americans but is something Chinese people don’t have to fear. [...]

The power is in the simplicity of what it describes: an abrupt threshold where misery begins and a happy life is irreversibly lost. The narrative is meant to offer China’s people emotional relief while attempting to deflect criticism of its leaders.

The worse things look across the Pacific, the logic of the propaganda goes, the more tolerable present struggles become. [...]

The fact is that societal inequality is a problem in both China and the United States. And the American economy no doubt leaves many people in fragile positions. The causes are complex.

Yet in China, poverty is experienced and perceived differently. In most Chinese cities, street begging and visible homelessness are tightly managed, making them far less prominent in daily life. Many urban residents encounter such scenes only through foreign reporting, rebroadcast by Chinese state media, about the United States and other places. [...]

When I was growing up in China in the early 1980s, my family subscribed to China Children’s News, which ran a weekly column with a simple slogan: “Socialism is good; capitalism is bad.” It described seniors in American cities scavenging for food, and homeless people freezing to death. Those stories were not invented, but they lacked context and were presented as the dominant experiences in American society. Much of Chinese society was still closed off from the world, and reliable information was scarce.

That many people accepted such narratives was hardly surprising. What’s striking is that similar portrayals continue to resonate today, when access to information is relatively much greater despite state control.

The formula is simple: magnify foreign suffering to deflect from domestic problems. That approach is taking shape today around the “kill line” metaphor.

The phrase is believed to have been first popularized in this new context on the Bilibili video platform in early November by a user known as Squid King. In a five-hour video, he stitched together what he claimed were firsthand encounters of poverty from time he spent in the United States. His video used scenes of children knocking on doors on a cold Halloween night asking for food, delivery workers suffering from hunger because of their meager wages and injured laborers discharged from hospitals because they could not pay.

The scenes were presented not as isolated cases but as evidence of a system: Above the “kill line,” life continues; below it, society stops treating people as human.

The narrative spread beyond the Squid King video, and many people online repeated his anecdotes. Essays on the nationalist news site Guancha and China’s biggest social media platform, WeChat, described the “kill line” as the “real operating logic” of American capitalism. [...]

In many of the commentaries, anecdotes about Americans experiencing abrupt financial crises are followed by comparisons with China. Universal basic health care, minimum subsistence guarantees and poverty alleviation campaigns are cited as evidence that China does not permit anyone to fall into sudden distress.

“China’s system will not allow a person to be ‘killed’ by a single misfortune,” one commentary from a provincial propaganda department states.

Many readers expressed shock at American poverty and gratitude for China’s system. “At least we have a safety net,” said one commenter...

“A topic does not gain traction simply because people are foolish,” one person wrote on WeChat. “Often, it spreads because confronting reality is harder.”

by Li Yuan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Doris Liou

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.]

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).]

Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast

When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.

Obama was scheduled to meet with President Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The formula has proved improbably successful.

People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.

Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”

The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.

Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.

At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.

“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.

“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”

As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”

“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.

“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.

“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”

Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”

“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.

Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”

But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]

As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]

In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”

“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.

Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.] 

'Banality of Evil Personified'

A fake ICE tip line reveals neighbors reporting neighbors.

Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.

Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.

Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.

“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”

What began as a comedy routine has become one of the most viral pieces of social satire during President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The kindergarten video has been watched more than 20 million times on TikTok and exploded across Facebook, Reddit and YouTube, where one commenter called it “one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance” they’d ever seen. [...]

Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement.

“He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.” (ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.)

But neither Palmer nor the website say they represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)

His supporters have argued the strategy is worth it because it has helped reveal the horrors of America’s immigration crackdown, exposing the moral contradictions and hidden inhumanities of deportation politics — and reaching viewers, through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, who might otherwise be politically disengaged. One commenter said the teacher video showed the “banality of evil personified.”

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor who studies political comedy and saw the video on social media, said Palmer’s satire has been effective because he plays the conversations as straight as possible, letting the caller deliver an unimpeded justification that slowly crumbles under its own weight.

“It creates this uncomfortable irony, where he's letting the person deliver the argument and it just beats itself, because it's so morally problematic or hypocritical or wrong,” he said. “You can kind of sense that they think they're doing the right thing, and then he just repeats what they said, and they kind of realize they're doing something terrible.”

Palmer's project, Sienkiewicz said, feels especially distinctive in the short-video era because he does not copy the style of many social media ideologues by “rage-baiting” viewers into an immediate emotional response.

“So much of contemporary internet culture is showing something offensive and telling people how to feel about it,” he said. “It’s his refusal to act enraged that allows the audience to then choose their own level of anger.” [...]

After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another homeowner reported his neighbor after he used his trash can.

One tipster called after she went to Publix and the worker who helped her find the water didn’t speak English. “And then she did help you find the water?” Palmer asked on the call, to which the woman responded, “Right, she walked me right to it.”

Many of the tipsters spoke as if the government was “their own personal army,” Palmer said. “If these are the calls I’m getting, as a fake, not legitimate person, imagine what’s happening at the actual ICE.”

In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in the school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York, and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.”

When Palmer read back her report in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude.

“I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said. [...]

Dannagal Young, a political communication professor at the University of Delaware, said Palmer’s videos could help reach Americans turned off by politics and uninformed about how deportations work. She noted that immigration, once one of Trump’s most popular policy issues, has become the one area where he’s lost the most support.

“There’s something really powerful about witnessing someone have to reckon with their own moral judgment in the moment, especially because they think they’re calling a welcome receiver, and they think they’re going to be applauded,” Young said.

“He is describing to them the reality of what they’re requesting as though it is completely fine and desirable, and through that calm matter-of-fact representation, it reveals itself to be absolutely inhumane,” she added. “The greatest nightmare for this administration is [normal people] paying attention.”

by Drew Harwell, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Natalie Vineberg/The Washington Post; Screenshots from Ben Palmer's YouTube and reportaliens.us; iStock

[ed. 'Banality of Evil' ~ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem]

Child’s Play

Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

The first sign that something in San Francisco had gone very badly wrong was the signs. In New York, all the advertising on the streets and on the subway assumes that you, the person reading, are an ambiently depressed twenty-eight-year-old office worker whose main interests are listening to podcasts, ordering delivery, and voting for the Democrats. I thought I found that annoying, but in San Francisco they don’t bother advertising normal things at all. The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: TODAY, SOC 2 IS DONE BEFORE YOUR GIRLFRIEND BREAKS UP WITH YOU. IT'S DONE IN DELVE. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did. A few blocks away, I saw a billboard that read: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT. MAKE THEM. UNIFY: TRANSFORM GROWTH INTO A SCIENCE. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife. Passersby in sight of the billboard that read WEARABLE TECH SHAREABLE INSIGHTS did not seem piqued by the prospect of having their metrics constantly analyzed. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to PROMPT IT. THEN PUSH IT. After spending slightly too long in the city, I found that the various forms of nonsense all started to bleed into one another. The motionless people drooling on the sidewalk, the Waymos whooshing around with no one inside. A kind of pervasive mindlessness. Had I seen a billboard or a madman preaching about “a CRM so smart, it updates itself”? Was it a person in rags muttering about how all his movements were being controlled by shadowy powers working out of a data center somewhere, or was it a car?

Somehow people manage to live here. But of all the strange and maddening messages posted around this city, there was one particular type of billboard that the people of San Francisco couldn’t bear. People shuddered at the sight of it, or groaned, or covered their eyes. The advertiser was the most utterly despised startup in the entire tech landscape. Weirdly, its ads were the only ones I saw that appeared to be written in anything like English:

HI MY NAME IS ROY
I GOT KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL FOR CHEATING 

BUY MY CHEATING TOOL

CLUELY.COM

Cluely and its co-founder Chungin “Roy” Lee were intensely, and intentionally, controversial. They’re no longer in San Francisco, having been essentially chased out of the city by the Planning Commission. The company is loathed seemingly out of proportion to what its product actually is, which is a janky, glitching interface for ChatGPT and other AI models. It’s not in a particularly glamorous market: Cluely is pitched at ordinary office drones in their thirties, working ordinary bullshit email jobs. It’s there to assist you in Zoom meetings and sales calls. It involves using AI to do your job for you, but this is what pretty much everyone is doing already. The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window. A lot of the other complaints about Cluely seem similarly hypocritical. The company is fueled by cheap viral hype, rather than an actual workable product—but this is a strange thing to get upset about when you consider that, back in the era of zero interest rates, Silicon Valley investors sank $120 million into something called the Juicero, a Wi-Fi-enabled smart juicer that made fresh juice from fruit sachets that you could, it turned out, just as easily squeeze between your hands.

What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.

by Sam Kriss, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Max Guther

[ed. Seems like we're already creating artificial humans. That said, I have only the highest regard for Scott Alexander, one of the people profiled here. The article makes him sound like some kind of cult leader or something (he's a psychologist), but he's really just a smart guy with a wide range of interests that intelligent people gravitate to (also a great writer). Here's his response  on his website ACX:]

***

I agreed to be included, it’s basically fine, I’m not objecting to it, but a few small issues, mostly quibbles with emphasis rather than fact:

1. The piece says rationalists believe “that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch”. The Harper’s fact-checker asked me if this was true and I emphatically said it wasn’t, so I’m not sure what’s going on here.

2. The article describes me having dinner with my “acolytes”. I would have used the word “friends”, or, in one case, “wife”.

3. The article says that “When there weren’t enough crackers to go with the cheese spread, [Scott] fetched some, murmuring to himself, “I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”” As written, this makes me sound like a crazy person; I don’t remember this incident but, given the description, I’m almost sure I was saying it to my two year old child, which would have been helpful context in reassuring readers about my mental state. (UPDATE: Sam says this isn’t his memory of the incident, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

4. The article assessed that AI was hitting a wall at the time of writing (September 2025). I explained some of the difficulties with AI agents, but I’m worried that as written it might suggest to readers think that I agreed with its assessment. I did not.

5. In the article, I say that I “never once actually made a decision [in my life]”. I don’t remember this conversation perfectly and he’s the one with the tape recorder, but I would have preferred to frame this as life mostly not presenting as a series of explicit decisions, although they do occasionally come up.

6. Everything else is in principle a fair representation of what I said, but it’s impossible to communicate clearly through a few sentences that get quoted in disjointed fragments, so a lot of things came off as unsubtle or not exactly how I meant them. If you have any questions, I can explain further in the comments.

Family Farms, Not Data Farms

US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’. Families are navigating the tough choice between unimaginable riches and the identity that comes with land.

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.

The unknown company was building a datacenter.

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago. [...]

Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap power and abundant water.

Developers keep knocking because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615m for less than 100 acres – property the seller had bought for just $57m four years prior. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m for it 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.

‘Name your price’

About 20 Mason county residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the datacenter project estimated to cover 2,000 acres.

After Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8m offer for his 250-acre farm – 3,500% more than he’d paid nearly four decades earlier – the developers came back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”

His answer: “There is none.” [...]

‘Keeping our people here’

Local officials in Mason county insist the datacenter would sustain future generations by bringing much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument being made in town halls across the country.

Mason’s population has shrunk by around 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project would bring 1,000 construction jobs, although it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.

In places like Loudoun county, Virginia – home to “Data Center Alley”, where about a fifth of the world’s internet traffic goes through – datacenter tax revenue nearly equals the county’s entire operating budget.any 

“We can continue to shrink – losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – or we can chart a new course,” Tyler McHugh, Mason county’s industrial development director, said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”

by Niamha Rowe, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jim West/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
[ed. No disrespect to folks determined to keep their land (generational diffusion and family disageements usually take care of that), but something seems off here. Globally, 40000 acres of land are projected to be needed for data centers? That's almost nothing. So what are companies really paying for?]