Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

What they changed

Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.

Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.

YKK makes the best zippers on earth. They're Japanese, they cost more per unit, and brands that care about longevity use them because a zipper failure kills a bag faster than fabric wear. On VF Corp's lower-tier models, YKK hardware got swapped for generic alternatives. A few cents saved per unit across millions of bags.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.

All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.

The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.

Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

The warranty is doing the same thing

JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty. It sounds like a company that stands behind its product.

Go try to use it.

You ship the bag back at your own expense. That runs $12 to $25 depending on size and where you live. You wait three to six weeks. That's the current turnaround per JanSport's own warranty page. Then they evaluate the damage.

"Normal wear and tear" isn't covered. Only "defects in materials and workmanship." Think about what that means for a bag engineered to last two years. When it starts falling apart at eighteen months, that failure can be classified as the product reaching its expected lifetime, not as a defect. The warranty language is structurally designed to exclude the exact type of failure the product is now built to have.

People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

The warranty used to be legendary. JanSport used to be the brand people cited when they talked about companies that actually stood behind their stuff. That reputation still exists in people's memories. The warranty now runs on that leftover trust.

One person told me they called about getting a zipper replaced on a JanSport from the late 90s. They were told it was normal wear and tear. They tried tailors, got quoted $50 to $100 for a new zipper. They looked at buying a new JanSport and saw how far the quality had fallen. They ended up buying a used backpack at a thrift store for four dollars.

Ten to twenty used bags for the price of one new one that'll fall apart. That's where we're at.

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

A truck pulls into the alley behind two restaurants. Same truck, same hand cart, same flats of frozen jalapeño poppers walking through two different kitchen doors that share a back wall. Two different menus, two different price-points… the exact same food supplies.

The truck is Sysco. They deliver to more than 400,000 of the ~749,000 restaurants in America. Roughly one in every two. The steak and eggs at a diner in the Texas Panhandle and the steak and eggs at a breakfast joint in northern Maine taste functionally identical because they came off the same pallet at the same distribution center, processed against the same private-label spec, on the same line, by people who never knew which restaurant the boxes were headed to.

This is what the system was built to produce. The same dinner, served to 400,000 different rooms, by people who think they are running their own restaurants.

The truck stops everywhere

Sysco does not just feed independent restaurants. They feed hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, public schools, and the food service companies that supply the cafeterias of the United States Capitol. Fiscal year 2025 closed at $81.4 billion in net sales. The customer count sits at roughly 730,000 across 10 countries, with 337 distribution centers and around 1,719 employed drivers.

The thing people should understand is what those numbers do at the supplier layer. When Sysco moves a spec on a chicken breast, the spec moves on the plate of a restaurant-goer, a public school kid and a federal prisoner in the same week. When Sysco strikes a single supplier deal for frozen seafood, the cafeteria at the United States Congress and the chow line at the Bureau of Prisons end up with the same case from the same boat. [...]

The clam chowder in a New England diner and the clam chowder in a Florida diner come out of the same Sysco can. The biscuits at a Tennessee breakfast joint and the biscuits at a Wisconsin one come from the same frozen case. Regional cuisine, the kind that used to be the reason people drove to a particular restaurant in a particular town, requires regional ingredients and regional suppliers and a chef with the leverage to source both. As Frerick put it, “every independent diner becomes an off-brand Denny's."

Among line cooks, the saying is simpler. “When a Sysco truck pulls up to the loading dock, the kitchen has stopped trying.”

Bridge Rapid Replacement System

Concrete is a technology... Ultra-high-performance concrete — UHPC — runs eighteen to thirty-five thousand psi, ten times the strength of the mix in American bridges today, tensile strength twice normal, chloride permeability under ten percent, freeze-thaw shrug. Machine-made sand concrete replaces river sand with precision-crushed aggregate engineered at the grain level and saved one Chinese province $3.19 billion on a single bridge program. Concrete-filled steel tubular arch systems — CFST — now span six hundred meters across Chinese canyons. Prefabricated modular bridge spans are stockpiled in fields next to the bridges they will one day replace, ready to be craned in when the live span is hit. Six bridges in seventy-two hours. The Iranians did this last week. The Chinese can do it at greater span than anyone has ever done it. 

Go ahead. Name an American cement company. The sentence doesn’t end. That’s the sentence-ending sentence. The country that cannot pour its own concrete is the United States of America. Meanwhile six Iranian railway bridges went down and came back up in seventy-two hours. The method is called the Bridge Rapid Replacement System. In 2019 somebody sat in Tehran and said what if they bomb the bridges, and somebody else said we should put another bridge next to every bridge, and somebody else said yes, and they did it. Six times. In concrete... 

Meanwhile in Guizhou there is a canyon and a bridge across the canyon, six hundred twenty-five meters of concrete, lifted into place with a hoisting system that did not exist fifteen years ago. The Chinese hold every world record for arch bridge span. Every single one. The seminary cannot pour a sidewalk in Baltimore that doesn’t crack in four years. The seminary had a harbor bridge in Baltimore and a ship bumped it and the bridge fell in the water. The seminary watched the ship coming for an hour.

via:

Ben Sasse's Warning

When Ben Sasse walked onto the Senate floor in November 2015 to deliver his first speech as a member of the upper chamber, he did something unusual: He had waited a full year to speak. It’s part of a Senate tradition known as the “maiden speech.” A historian by training and a management consulting associate by early vocation, he had spent his first year in the chamber interviewing colleagues, studying how the institution functioned, and developing a diagnosis before offering it publicly. When he finally spoke, the speech landed with enough force that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) distributed the text to every Republican senator, a gesture the Senate GOP leader at the time rarely made.

“No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation,” Sasse told his colleagues. “No one.”

The indictment was bipartisan, surgical, and delivered with the calm of a man who had considered it carefully before speaking. The Senate, he argued, had surrendered its institutional identity to the rhythms of the 24-hour news cycle, to the demand for sound bites, and to the incentive to grandstand for a narrow base and raise money rather than legislate for a country. “The people despise us all,” he said. “And why is this? Because we’re not doing our job.”

It served as a warning that went unheeded, and 11 years later, we’re watching more dysfunction in government than ever before. Sasse, now dying of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer at 54, is still saying the same thing. The diagnosis has not changed the message. It has sharpened it.

Whether Sasse was a “good” or “effective” senator is debatable. Whether Washington currently has enough senators like him is not a close question.

The criticism that followed him throughout his eight-year tenure is almost entirely subjective. His critics on the Left saw a man willing to deplore Trumpism in public while voting with President Donald Trump‘s agenda in practice. His critics on the Right, particularly as the party realigned, saw a posturing institutionalist more interested in making points and serving as a pundit than in getting on board fully with the president’s policies. The most durable version of this critique runs something like: He gave great speeches and passed no significant legislation.

Yuval Levin, founding editor of National Affairs and director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, largely rejects both sets of criticisms. On the Trump question specifically, Levin is direct: “The notion that there was much more he could have done to hold Trump to account is misdirected and mistaken. He took on Trump when he disagreed with him, and when he thought Trump had exceeded his authority or violated his oath. And unlike most Senate Republican critics of Trump, he ran for reelection and won after doing that.”

The objection to the lack of signature legislation mistakes the Senate’s function for a body it was never designed to be. In the framework Sasse spent years articulating, the Senate is not primarily a factory for producing legislation. It is a deliberative institution meant to apply friction to democratic impulses in the House of Representatives, to slow things down when people want to move too fast, and to force the executive and judiciary to operate within appropriate constitutional limits. By that standard, which is closer to the Founders’ intent than the one applied by Sasse’s critics, he understood and performed his role better than most of his colleagues.

The “pundit” critique oversimplifies his actual record. Sasse served on the Senate Intelligence Committee throughout his tenure, and his work on China there was substantive and largely ahead of the political mainstream. When it was still unfashionable for a Republican to identify Beijing as a generational geopolitical threat rather than an irritating trade partner, Sasse was making that case in the committee rooms that mattered. He had genuine expertise in China’s intelligence operations and, accordingly, used his position, spending considerable time in secure facilities at times when most of his colleagues were busier developing a social media strategy.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who worked alongside him on the intelligence committee, offered perhaps the most precise characterization of what made Sasse different, telling Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in April that Sasse “never really thought about things as conservative, liberal. He thought much more about issues, such as the future and the past.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said Sasse had a “concern not just for today, but for tomorrow and the future” and that he “wasn’t distracted by all the noise that goes around us on a daily basis.” [...]

Levin, who watched Sasse’s tenure closely, offers a candid accounting of his legislative limitations. “It’s true that Ben was not an active legislator, advancing proposals, sponsoring and co-sponsoring legislation, and building coalitions,” he said. “He was active in some key committees, especially the Intelligence Committee, where it seemed to him that active engagement could make a difference. But I think he concluded this was not the case in some of his other committees and that he might be more useful as a critic and observer of the institution. No individual senator gets a lot done right now, and of course, that’s part of the frustration he had.”

But the moments that defined Sasse as a senator were the ones that did not produce legislation, and those are the moments worth examining without the usual condescension.

On the first day of Justice Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in September 2018, the chamber descended almost immediately into the theater that had by then become customary. Protesters disrupted proceedings from the gallery. Democratic senators jockeyed for camera time. The atmosphere was more performance than inquiry. Into this circus, Sasse delivered a 12-minute statement that went viral because it said plainly what almost no one in that room was willing to say: The hysteria around confirmation hearings is a symptom, not the disease. Congress had spent decades delegating its legislative authority to executive agencies and now blamed the courts for filling the vacuum.

“It is predictable now that every confirmation hearing is going to be an overblown, politicized circus,” he said. “And it’s because we’ve accepted a bad new theory about how our three branches of government should work.” The corrective he offered was simple: Congress should pass laws and stand before voters. The executive should enforce those laws. Judges should apply them, not write them. Naturally, no one disagreed out loud.

He delivered a version of the same argument at Justice Amy Coney Barrett‘s hearing in 2020. Neither speech moved the institution. Both captured something true and important about why the institution was failing, and both were widely shared by people who had largely stopped expecting a sitting senator to say anything worth sharing. The Kavanaugh statement was described in this publication at the time as the civics lesson Washington desperately needed. That it needed to be given by a freshman senator to the full Senate Judiciary Committee was Sasse’s real point.

He also understood, more clearly than most of his colleagues, that the Senate’s dysfunction was not incidental but structural. The cameras, he argued, were a bad incentive. The constant travel and time spent fundraising corroded the relationships that make effective governing possible. Most tellingly, he believed that senators had come to treat their office as the purpose of their lives rather than a temporary form of service to something larger. When Pelley noted on 60 Minutes that many senators he knew “would not be able to breathe without that job,” Sasse replied that he feared that was true and that it represented “a much, much deeper problem.” The best title a person could hold, he said, was dad, mom, neighbor, friend. Senator was “a great way to serve. It should be your 11th calling or maybe sixth, but never top.”

When he resigned from the Senate in January 2023 with four years remaining in his term to become president of the University of Florida, many observers treated it as confirmation of the pundit critique: He could not stay the course. The more honest reading is that he had concluded the institution was, as he told Pelley, “very, very unproductive” and that there were better things for him to do. “We didn’t do real things,” he said. “And it felt like the opportunity cost was really high.” He moved to Florida, then stepped down from that post roughly a year and a half later when his wife, Melissa, was diagnosed with epilepsy and required full-time care. The man who had argued that being a senator should rank no higher than sixth on a person’s list of priorities was living accordingly.

Then, on Dec. 23, 2025, he posted the news to X. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.” He was 53. Doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center had cataloged the full spread: lymphoma, vascular cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, and pancreatic cancer, the point of origin. He had been given three to four months to live. He called it what it was: “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence.”

What followed was unexpected, at least to anyone who had expected Sasse to retreat from public life. He launched a podcast called Not Dead Yet. He sat down for a conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the latter’s Interesting Times podcast in April, which was released just days after the interview aired and subsequently circulated widely. He appeared on 60 Minutes with Pelley on April 26, his face visibly marked by his medication, a drug called daraxonrasib from Revolution Medicines that had shrunk his tumors by 76% and extended his life by months that were not supposed to exist. He credited the extra time to “providence, prayer, and a miracle drug.”

The Douthat interview was the more intimate of the two conversations and the more remarkable. Douthat asked Sasse at the close whether he felt ready to die. Sasse said he did not feel ready but that he had hope, grounded in his Reformed Christian faith, that he would be with God. The response moved Douthat visibly to tears, something Sasse responded to with his characteristic dry humor. Earlier in the conversation, Sasse reflected on what the disease had given him alongside what it had taken. “I hate pancreatic cancer,” he told Douthat. “I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.”

The “prayer of pancreatic cancer,” as Sasse uses the phrase, is something like the acknowledgment of dependence that most people spend their healthiest years avoiding. He is not unusual among the terminally ill in arriving at that acknowledgment. He is unusual in the way he has extended it outward, into public argument, into the same institutional critique he was making in November 2015. On 60 Minutes, he was asked what Congress was missing, and he named the artificial intelligence revolution, the future of work, and the complete absence of 2030 or 2050 thinking in either party. Then, without prompting, he returned to the frame he had always used. “The Senate needs to be less like Instagram. The Senate needs to be more deliberative, and that means less smack-down nonsense,” he told Pelley, adding, “The Senate should be plodding, and steady, and boring, and trustworthy.”

by Jay Caruso, Washington Examiner |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. I knew very little about Ben Sasse before reading an article about daraxonrasib, the new breakthrough drug given to him in his treatment for aggressive pancreatic cancer. It goes without saying that Congress would be an entirely different place if there were more people like him. See also: Pancreatic cancer just met its match (Works in Progress):]

***

"For most of the last half-century, a diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer was a death sentence. In December 2025, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer that had spread to his lungs, liver and other organs, and was given three to four months to live from the time of diagnosis. With little to lose, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug. Four months later, he reported a 76 percent reduction in tumor volume, describing the drug, daraxonrasib, as a ‘miracle’. His face, ravaged by a severe skin rash from the treatment, told a more complicated story. Yet he was alive and grateful to be able to talk to his family.

A few days after Sasse’s interview, in April 2026, Revolution Medicines announced Phase 3 trial results for daraxonrasib showing the drug had roughly doubled survival in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer compared to standard chemotherapy. For a disease where median survival has long been measured in months and where little had changed for decades, that result represents a genuine turning point.

But the significance extends beyond pancreatic cancer. Daraxonrasib is among the first drugs in an emerging generation designed to target RAS, a protein implicated in roughly a quarter of all human cancers and long considered beyond reach, in all its mutant forms. And it belongs to a broader class of medicines, molecular glues, that are beginning to show what becomes possible when drugs no longer depend on finding a ready-made pocket in their target. Several compounds in this class are now in clinical development, each probing a different protein that previous generations of drugs could not touch."

The Perfect Commuter Bike?

[ed. Not an endorsement.]

Commuter bikes don’t come with the same constraints many other bikes do. Mountain bikes must glide gracefully through all sorts of abusive terrain; road bikes need to mix high performance with enough comfort to let riders stay in the saddle for hours on end. All a commuter bike needs to do is comfortably and reliably get you from A to B on typical roads with minimal fuss.

So it’s been surprising how rarely the commuter bikes I’ve tested have gotten it right. At the low end of the price scale, as you’d expect, the required compromises have a big impact on the experience. The high end addresses those shortcomings, but at prices comparable to high-end bikes from specialized categories. I’ve never encountered something in the middle of the two: affordable, with no compromises.

But I may have just found my ideal commuter bike: the Velotric Discover 3. It’s comfortable, it has a great combination of components, and it comes in at just under $2,000.

Upgrades all around

Velotric’s first entry in this line, the Discover 1, marked a promising start for the company. While it was definitely in the “compromises needed” category, the shortcomings were relatively minor and carefully chosen. Since then, the company has expanded considerably, introduced many new models, started working with local dealers in the US, and moved a bit upmarket.

The third iteration of the Discover illustrates the upmarket move. It costs nearly twice as much as the original Discover, but you get a lot for that price. The hub motor is gone, replaced by a mid-frame motor produced under contract for Velotric.

While it still has a cadence sensor you can select through a menu, the Discover uses a torque sensor by default, providing far more integration with your pedaling. Cadence sensors simply register when the pedals are spinning; a torque sensor registers how much force you’re applying to the cranks. The latter makes the electric assist feel more like just that: an assist for your legs rather than a replacement for effort.

Switching to the cadence sensor triggers a warning that it will drain the battery faster, which makes sense: You can gently spin the pedals in a gear meant for climbing hills while the electric motor does all the work. I quickly switched back to the torque sensor for pleasant spring-time riding, but I can see where the cadence sensor might make sense once the full heat of summer starts.

Of course, you could always just use the throttle. More on that below. [...]

True class

US law defines three classes of e-bike. Class 1 provides an assist for up to 20 miles an hour (32 km/hr), but you must be pedaling to activate it. Class 2 is similar but adds a throttle that also cuts out at the same maximum speed. Class 3 e-bikes offer an assist to 28 mph (45 km/hr) but do not allow a throttle. The accepted classes are a patchwork, making it difficult to design a single bike for the US market.

Nearly every manufacturer focused on the US market has settled on a compromise that’s probably not technically legal: They enable switching to Class 3 in software but still provide a hardware throttle. The throttle simply cuts out at the lower max speed of Class 2. The assist it provides is also somewhat anemic; I could generally accelerate away from a full stop much faster by mashing the pedals a bit.

Velotric has provided a simple software solution. If the bike is set to Class 1 or Class 3, the throttle is disabled. While this may seem like a blindingly obvious way to do things, it’s rare enough that I initially thought I had been shipped a bike with a defective throttle.

The assist provided by the throttle is a bit weak; I could generally accelerate from a full stop faster by mashing the pedals down with the assist set to high. If you want to cruise around using the throttle to avoid the effort of pedaling, you’re better off activating the cadence sensor and then casually spinning the pedals with the chain in a large gear ring. That will get you to the max speed faster than waiting for the throttle to take you there.

Customize your ride

In general, Velotric offers exceptional customization options. You can adjust the speed of any assist level up to its legal maximum. So if you live in an area with low speed limits, you can set Class 1’s assist to max out at 15 mph while leaving the remaining ones untouched. Or if you’re worried you’re not getting enough exercise, you can set the throttle to cut out at 10 mph while leaving Class 2’s 20 mph assist maximum untouched.

This is actually useful because Velotric includes a dedicated button for switching classes on the controller. On most bikes, changing classes requires a trip to a phone application or diving through menus that require you to pull over. Thanks to the button, you simply adjust the class to your current needs. I would set it to Class 1 when sharing space on a heavily trafficked bike path, then switch to Class 3 to match the traffic speeds on suburban streets.

Anything that makes it easier to change classes will obviously also make it easy for riders to switch into a class that may not be appropriate for the conditions. Of course, this sort of rider is more likely to set the bike to Class 3 and keep it there.

by John Timmer, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: John Timmer

[ed. As noted, this isn't an endorsement. But for someone in the market for a good ebike (which I am, kind of... off and on) there's a lot of good information here on things to consider.]

Fix Everything Switch

Ask Claude: 'There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the US? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented.'

Claude is asked for the top 10 Fix Everything Now buttons. Its answers:

1. Legalize housing.
2. Land value tax.
3. Permitting and NEPA reform.
4. Carbon taxes.
5. Repeal the Jones Act.
6. Compensate kidney donors.
7. Expand high-skilled immigration.
8. Reciprocal drug and device approval with peer regulators (e.g. EU/UK/JP/AU).
9. Occupational licensing reform.
10. Approval or ranked choice voting.
11. Honorable mentions: Child allowance, congestion pricing, replacing corporate income tax with a VAT or DBCFT, ending the home mortgage interest deduction, federal preemption of telehealth and medical licensing, and letting Pell Grants pay for vocational programs.

10/10, no notes, no seriously that’s 10/10 and no notes. 16/16 if you count the others.

There is also a UK version, which also seems like a very good list at first glance.

via: Zvi

***

[ed. 'Legalize housing' might be confusing to some. It's mostly about allowing more housing in every neighborhood, especially historically affluent and exclusionary neighborhoods, removing barriers to both subsidized affordable and market rate housing. 

Reciprocal approval is FDA approval for drugs and devices already approved in other trusted countries like the UK, European Union member countries, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Japan, etc. 

VAT/DBCFT - revenue from sales to nonresidents would not be taxable, and the cost of goods purchased from nonresidents would not be deductible. So if a business purchases $100 million in goods from a supplier overseas, the cost of those goods would not be deductible against the corporate income tax. Likewise, if a business sells a good to a foreign person, the revenues attributed to that sale would not be added to taxable income. Another way to think about the border adjustment is that the corporate tax would ignore revenues and costs associated with cross-border transactions. The tax would be solely focused on raising revenue from business transactions from sales of goods in the United States. (via)]

AI Anti-Glaze System Prompt

Marc Andreessen just leaked the system prompt he uses to make every LLM 10x smarter. 

It's called the Anti-Glaze System Prompt. 

One paste. Your AI stops kissing your ass and starts telling you the truth. 

Here's what it actually does:

 → Kills "great question" forever

 → Kills "you're absolutely right" forever

 → Kills "fascinating perspective" forever 

→ Forces the model to lead with the strongest counterargument before it agrees with anything you say 

→ Refuses to capitulate when you push back unless you bring new evidence

 → Demands explicit confidence levels on every claim (high / moderate / low / unknown) 

→ Tells you immediately when you're wrong instead of validating your premise 

→ Owns its own numbers instead of anchoring on yours 

The line that ends the era of glazing AI: "Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval."...

Paste it into Claude Projects. ChatGPT Custom Instructions. Gemini Gem. API system message. The difference is immediate and it's brutal.

by Guri Singh, X |  Read more:

Image: Marc Andressen

[ed. Don't usually care what Andreessen does or think but this could be useful. Maybe I'll do a search of good prompts from other people and see what they've discovered.]

Logitech’s Tiny Folding Mouse

Logitech is reportedly developing a new wireless mouse that folds in half to make it easier to carry around in a bag or pocket. According to leaked marketing images shared by WinFuture, Logitech’s foldable mouse caused “22 percent less muscle strain” compared to using a laptop trackpad, and can be used across “multiple operating systems.”

Logitech’s design is visually similar to Microsoft’s Surface Arc mouse and Lenovo’s Yoga mouse, sporting the same arched shape when unfolded for use. One key difference is that while Microsoft and Lenovo’s offerings can only be folded flat, the new Logitech mouse — the name of which is still unknown — folds in half like a clamshell. There’s no official specifications or dimensions available yet, but one image shows that it’s very compact when folded, seemingly dwarfed by the hand that’s sliding it into a pocket.

In place of a traditional scroll wheel, WinFuture reports the new Logitech mouse will feature a so-called “Adaptive Touch Scrolling” area between the two standard mouse buttons that enables users to scroll by swiping over a small trackpad. A green light can be seen on this touch-sensitive area, which likely indicates an active wireless connection. The new Logitech mouse can be paired with up to three host devices via Bluetooth, according to WinFuture, and its shape allows it to be used by both left- and right-handed users.

by Jess Weatherbed, The Verge |  Read more:

Images: WinFuture

920 Pounds of Leverage

An F-35 fighter contains 920 pounds of rare earth minerals. A Virginia-class submarine needs 9,200. An Arleigh Burke destroyer requires 5,200. Strip those magnets, actuators, and critical inputs out of the supply chain, and the most advanced military on earth grinds to a halt. The country that processes nearly all of them is China.

That uncomfortable fact sits behind almost every headline coming out of the Iran war and the conflict over critical resources. According to Jim Puplava, who has been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle, the conflict in the Middle East is not an isolated flare-up, but part of a broader contest over the chokepoints that determine who can build, fuel, and arm the modern economy.

The War Beneath the War

Puplava points to a striking asymmetry exposed by the fighting: Tehran can produce roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month, while the United States manufactures only six interceptors in the same period. Each Tomahawk, THAAD, and Patriot fired costs millions of dollars and depends on materials refined almost exclusively in China.

That math has not been lost on Beijing. Some analysts now suspect China is content to watch the Iran conflict drag on, since every interceptor launched over Tel Aviv is one fewer available for a future contest over Taiwan. “In a kinetic conflict, the side that controls the magnets controls the missiles,” Puplava says. Replenishing the stockpile, by most estimates, will take years.

The Periodic Table as Statecraft

China’s grip did not happen by accident. While the West chased software and asset-light business models, Beijing built the gritty back end of the modern economy: mines, smelters, refineries, magnet factories.

Puplava argues that Western elites suffer from what he calls “physical illiteracy,” the conceit that we have built a weightless digital civilization. In reality, a green grid requires 400 percent more copper and 2,000 percent more lithium than the fossil fuel system it would replace. Semiconductors, electric vehicles, AI servers, data centers, and precision weapons all run on the same short list of elements.

Beijing has begun pulling the lever. In 2024 and 2025, China placed export restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and high-grade magnets, citing military end-use concerns. Gallium and germanium feed high-speed semiconductors and night vision optics. The magnets show up in F-35s, Columbia-class submarines, drones, and sonar arrays.

“We’ve traded energy dependence on the Middle East for a more rigid mineral dependence on the People’s Republic of China,” Puplava says. Even mines reopened on American soil, such as Mountain Pass in California, still ship their concentrates to China for processing. [...]

The New Great Game

Rudyard Kipling called the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia the Great Game. Its twenty-first-century version is being played out in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, the cobalt corridors of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the long highways of China’s Belt and Road. Beijing offers infrastructure in exchange for exclusive commodity agreements. American counteroffers, freighted with labor and environmental conditions, often lose the bidding.

Iran fits the same map. The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important energy chokepoint, yet the conflict is accelerating the very transition that favors China. Disruption in oil markets pushes buyers toward EVs and batteries, sectors where Chinese firms make some of the cheapest and best products on the planet. Beijing has even managed to pose as a responsible mediator while Washington escalates militarily. As Puplava puts it: “In the twentieth century, it was about blue-water navies protecting oil lanes. The twenty-first century looks to be about deep-earth diplomacy.”

by Financial Sense |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Possibly true, but this feels like it was written by an AI. Who's Jim Puplava (who's most notable credentials seem to be that he's "been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle")?]

Sunstones

For over a thousand years, historians thought the Viking "sunstone" was nothing more than a myth, until the ocean gave up its secret. The Norse sagas repeatedly referenced a mysterious object called a "sólarsteinn" or sunstone, a navigational tool so powerful that Viking sailors could locate the exact position of the sun even on the most overcast and cloudy days. For centuries, scholars debated whether this was real technology or simply folklore embellished over generations of retelling. Most assumed it was legend. They were wrong. 

In 2013, marine archaeologists excavating a British warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592 made a stunning discovery buried among the wreckage. Alongside navigational instruments including a pair of dividers and a slate, they found a rectangular chunk of translucent crystal. Testing confirmed it was Iceland spar, a remarkably pure form of calcite with extraordinary optical properties. The fact that it was found stored alongside other precision navigation tools was not a coincidence. 

Iceland spar possesses a property called birefringence, meaning it splits a single beam of light entering the crystal into two separate beams. When you hold the crystal up toward the sky and slowly rotate it, the two beams will vary in brightness independently until, at one specific angle of rotation, they become perfectly equal in intensity. That precise angle points directly toward the sun, regardless of whether the sun is visible to the naked eye. Cloud cover, fog, and even twilight conditions cannot defeat it. 

Researchers from the University of Rennes in France conducted extensive testing and published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Their experiments demonstrated that Iceland spar could locate the sun's position with an accuracy of within one degree, even under completely overcast skies. For Viking navigators crossing the North Atlantic toward Iceland, Greenland, and eventually North America, this accuracy would have meant the difference between a successful voyage and sailing hopelessly off course into open ocean. The Viking Age spanned roughly 793 to 1066 AD, and during this period Norse sailors were completing oceanic crossings that would not be replicated by other European cultures for another 400 years. Historians had long puzzled over how they achieved such consistent navigational precision without magnetic compasses, which did not reach Europe until the 12th century. The sunstone appears to be a significant part of that answer. 

What makes the Channel Islands find especially compelling is that the 1592 shipwreck is far outside the traditional Viking era, suggesting that knowledge of this navigational technique survived and was still being used by European sailors centuries after the Viking Age officially ended. The crystal was not a relic or a curiosity on that ship. It was working equipment. 

via: SubRosa/X

Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets

John Pederson, 33, couldn’t work. The former Outback Steakhouse line cook was recovering from a car crash and running out of money. Kalshi, the prediction market, promised a quick way to fix that. He took out a variable-interest loan and started betting.

At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into $41,000 by trading on sports, using a strategy he developed with the help of AI, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his account records.

Then he placed his most audacious bet yet: All $41,000 that a celebrity would say a particular word on TV. He lost it all.

Pederson isn’t alone in walking away empty-handed from the bet-on-anything markets, which cover sports, celebrities, news and more.

Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.

 
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.

Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.

 
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site. [...]

Casual traders “have no chance. Systematically,” said Michael Boss, a former professional poker player and a statistician by training. On Kalshi, Boss places 60 trades a minute and modifies his bids and asks 30 times a second.

by By Neil Mehta, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ?iStock

[ed. No chance unless they're insiders with special access to some form of classified information. Like... maybe, half of Washington, DC.]

Why Consciousness Researchers Have Failed (So Far)

Oh god, I barely made it through.

Experienced sensations while reading: frustration, dread, restless legs, and overwhelming waves of weariness. At one point I felt physically nauseous.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, since (a) Michael Pollan is a great writer who has proven his chops over countless other topics, and (b) this is objectively quite a good book about the science of consciousness. Indeed, I should be happy! Consciousness is clearly having “a moment” right now—a science book about consciousness has been on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, and meanwhile, the online world is abuzz with debates about AI consciousness.

And yet… I hated Pollan’s book.

I felt that every next chapter or section could have been predicted by some statistical machine for producing books about consciousness (“Okay, here’s the part about David Chalmers coming up”). And yes, I have the advantage of being a researcher in the same subject and have even worked with some of the figures Pollan writes about, which is why in my own The World Behind the World (we all seem to gravitate to the same titles, huh) I broadly told much the same story. But you can even go back to science journalist John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind, published in 1999, to get similar progress beats and quite familiar names. It’s been 27 years, during which the discussion has (as many fields of science do) centered around major figures like neuroscientists Christof Koch or Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio or philosophers like David Chalmers. There’s always the part where Alison Gopnik makes an appearance. Karl Friston pops his head in. And all these people are intellectual titans. Truly. But honestly, this stage of consciousness research feels played out.

Like you have Christof Koch, one of the highest-profile figures, who broke open the field in the 1990s with Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA’s structure) and gave one of the first proposals for a neural correlate of consciousness: gamma oscillations in the ~40Hz range in the cortex.

Koch, who is soon to turn seventy, was for a while after the death of Francis Crick a staunch supporter of Integrated Information Theory (I was part of the team that worked on developing that theory after Giulio Tononi proposed it, and even once did a conference submission with Koch himself). But now Koch has apparently moved on to other approaches to consciousness, mentioning his attendance of an ayahuasca ceremony and his accessing of a “universal mind.”

Here’s Pollan talking to Koch at the end of the book:

When I confessed to Koch my fear—that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started—he simply smiled.

“But that’s good,” he said. “That’s progress.”

No, it isn’t!

Consciousness is not here for our personal therapy. It’s not tied to our life journeys. And I’m guilty of all that artsy and personal stuff too! But it’s no longer about how the grand mystery makes us feel, or the friends we made along the way.

It’s all changed.

HOW WE FAILED

Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love. On the other hand, if somehow AIs are conscious, either right now (to some degree), or near-future ones will become so, then they deserve rights and protections, and the entire legal and social apparatus of our civilization must expand rapidly to include radically different types of minds (or we must choose to restrict what kinds of minds we create). There are immediate practical matters here. Long term, we also need to protect against extremely bad futures where only non-conscious intelligences remain—the worst of all possible worlds is that our civilization acts like a reverse metamorphosis, where something weaker but more beautiful, organic consciousness, gets shed in the birth of some horrible star-devouring insect made of matrix multiplication. And then it turns out there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying.

While it’s my opinion that modern LLMs operate more like tools right now, or at best like a lesser statistical approximation of what a good human output would be (with their main advantage being search, not insight), this is all just the beginning of the technology. The door is open and will never be closed again.

Of course, consciousness matters far beyond just AI. Table stakes for actual scientific progress on consciousness include shifting neuroscience and psychiatry from pre-paradigmatic to post-paradigmatic sciences (and all the pile-on effects from that). This was always true. But my point here is that LLMs act like a forcing function. Before everything changed, consciousness research was an unhurried subfield of neuroscience that was always a little weird and niche; therefore academics are guilty of treating consciousness like an academic exercise. [...]

Due to the rise of behaviorism and logical positivism, “consciousness” became a dirty word in science for half a century or more—precisely when the rest of the sciences rocketed ahead! The consciousness winter only really ended in the 1990s because of the collective weight of several Nobel Prize winners (like Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman) determined to make it acceptable again.

The two major scientific conferences (which are how scientists organize) devoted to consciousness also only started in the mid-90s. That’s just 30 years ago! Modern science is incredibly powerful, maybe the most powerful force in existence, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not long at all. That’s just one generation of scientists and thinkers. Kudos to them. Pretty much all of the big names (including definitely Koch) deserve their laurels, and contra Pollan, I do think consciousness actually has made progress over the last 30 years, in that our conceptions are a lot cleaner, the definitional problem is pretty much solved, a lot of the space of initial possible theories is mapped, the problems and difficulties are much better known and clearly outlined, and there is organizational and behind-the-scenes structure that exists in the form of established conferences and labs and minor amounts of funding, etc.

And that’s another thing: no one has tried throwing money at the consciousness problem, at all—and for many problems, from AI to cancer cures, a necessary component often ends up being finance and scale and concentrating talent.

Humanity spends something like a billion dollars a year on CERN. To compare, let’s look at the biggest scientific funder in the United States, the NIH. Out of 103,280 grants awarded to scientists during the 2007-2017 decade, want to guess how many were about directly studying the contents of consciousness?

Five.

That’s probably, at most, a couple million dollars in funding over a decade. Total. So if you’re a consciousness researcher, what can you do, cheaply? What can you do, for free? You can pontificate. You can propose your own theory of consciousness! That requires no funding whatsoever. And so for 30 years the meta in consciousness research has been to create your own theory of consciousness. We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom. The problem is that, if any flower is at all true or promising, you can’t identify it, as its sweet subjectivity-solving scent is completely masked by the bunches of corpse flowers around it. We have too many flowers, and one more just isn’t meaningful anymore. As is sometimes said at the end of fairy tales: “Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.”

What we need are efforts at field-clearing, and methods that can actually make progress on consciousness in ways not tied to just promoting or trying to find evidence for some pre-chosen pet theory—which means finding ways to select over theories, to test theories en masse, so you don’t reinvent the wheel each time, and, perhaps most importantly, you have to do all this while scaling institutions with funding to specifically get a bunch of smart people in a room working together on this.

ME GETTING OFF MY ASS

If the 2020s were all about intelligence, then necessarily the 2030s will be all about consciousness. Intelligence is about function, while consciousness is about being, and forays and progress into understanding (and shaping) function will in turn force our attention toward a better understanding of being. And if the answer to “Why has consciousness not been solved?” is secretly “Material and historical conditions made it hard for anyone to actually try!” then the answer is to actually try.

I refuse to live in a civilization where we consciousness researchers have so obviously failed. I refuse to live in a civilization where we cannot tell consciousness from non-consciousness. Where we can offer no guidance for the future. Where we cannot explain the difference between actually experiencing things vs just processing them. In the short term, this is destabilizing and harmful. In the long term, it may be literally existentially dangerous.

by Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Michael Pollan/Penguin Random House

[ed. I thought consciousness research was going great guns since it's central to determining AGI (artificial general intelligence). Huh. See also: His ‘Machine’ Could Uncover the Origin of Human Consciousness—And if It Truly Connects to the Whole Universe (Popular Mechanics)]

Stratos Data Center Gets Initial Approval

[ed. Can't be true, right? Well... from what I can tell, it's some kind of phased development (Stratos project) starting with a 40,000 acre 'data center campus" in Box Elder County, Utah. Local residents aren't happy. See: Massive Box Elder County data center could increase Utah’s carbon emissions by 50%; and, Hundreds cry out as Box Elder commissioners wave in massive data center (Utah News Dispatch). Excerpts below:]

The angry crowd’s jeers outweighed the voices of commissioners and guests, especially when they spoke about water rights and the county’s tax revenue prospects stemming from the project. Many in the audience asked to allow presenters to be heard, but shouts prevailed throughout the meeting.

No one was escorted out, but instead commissioners left the room and broadcast their quick vote on a screen available to the public.

“Cowards,” some in the audience yelled. Others repeatedly shouted “people over profit.”

The resolutions were required by state law to allow the Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, to move forward with the Stratos project. MIDA, an entity created by the Utah Legislature to advance economic development with a military focus, needed local consent since the data center would be located on private land without zoning regulations. [...]

The data center campus sponsored by Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor featured in the reality TV hit “Shark Tank,” is set to house its own natural gas plant to supply 9 gigawatts of energy to self-sustain the center, more than double what the entire state consumes in a year. That power generation will be isolated from the grid Utahns share, so it wouldn’t have any effect on utility rates, developers say.

Developers are also planning on using a closed-loop system to cool their equipment, using privately-owned water rights that are unsuitable for drinking or irrigation. But, without a definitive environmental study, the public remains skeptical. [...]

‘We can’t build anything in this country anymore’

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Thursday, during his monthly news conference broadcast by PBS Utah, that at the rate in which machine learning and artificial intelligence is changing, building data centers has become a national security issue.

“We have an obligation, I think every state has an obligation, when it comes to this space, to allow for these types of data centers to be built in their states,” Cox said. “We have to do this. We can’t just say ‘no’ and shut the doors and go home and let China win this, this technology race, so that just can’t be an option.”

Data centers can’t be installed everywhere, and the government should be careful with its resources, but this site may be able to fulfill environmental standards and won’t be someone’s nextdoor neighbor, Cox said.

“If you can’t put this here, then we can’t put them anywhere,” Cox said.

He also fiercely disputed that the approval process has been rushed.

“I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer, it absolutely does not,” he said. “You get a chance to give your feedback, and then decisions get made. That’s how we have to do stuff in this country and in this state.”

The state denies many requests because of feedback, but it can’t say no to everything, Cox said.

“We’ve let the people against virtually everything, destroy our country, destroy our industrial base, destroy our mining base, destroy our housing base, because we can’t build anything in this country anymore,” he said. “And those days are over. We’re done with that.”

AI Systems Are About to Start Building Themselves.

What does that mean?

I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D - an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor - happens by the end of 2028.

This is a big deal.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around it.

It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D.

I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.

The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.

In terms of timing, I don’t expect this to happen in 2026. But I think we could see an example of a “model end-to-end trains it successor” within a year or two - certainly a proof-of-concept at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may be harder (they’re a lot more expensive and are the product of a lot of humans working extremely hard).

My reasoning for this stems primarily from public information: papers on arXiv, bioRxiv, and NBER, as well as observing the products being deployed into the world by the frontier companies. From this data I arrive at the conclusion that all the pieces are in place for automating the production of today’s AI systems - the engineering components of AI development. And if scaling trends continue, we should prepare for models to get creative enough that they may be able to substitute for human researchers at having creative ideas for novel research paths, thus pushing forward the frontier themselves, as well as refining what is already known.

Upfront caveat

For much of this piece I’m going to try to assemble a mosaic view of AI progress out of things that have happened with many individual benchmarks. As anyone who studies benchmarks knows, all benchmarks have some idiosyncratic flaws. The important thing to me is the aggregate trend which emerges through looking at all of these datapoints together, and you should assume that I am aware of the drawbacks of each individual datapoint.

Now, let’s go through some of the evidence together.

by Jack Clark, Import AI |  Read more:

[ed. From what I can tell, most people in the AI field find this timeline entirely plausible (give or take a couple of years). Others expect, the next five years to be a time of great change and turbulence. See also:]

The seven deadly curses of superhuman AI:

What Makes Art Great?

Shakespeare is excellent, whereas AI writing is — at least, for now — dull. AIs can now write much of our code, review legal contracts, and perform various impressive feats; they have achieved gold-medal-level scores at the IMO. But, as of this writing, I am not aware of a truly interesting AI-written poem or even essay. Why?

This breaks down into two questions:

1. What makes texts good?

2. Why is it difficult for AI to do that?

This essay will focus on question 1, and is thus mostly about aesthetics.

1. Surprise

One of the things that so offends us about AI ‘slop’ images is a sense that the details don’t matter. The cup is green, but it may as well have been blue. In good human works, every detail feels carefully chosen. Arbitrarily changing a color in a Hopper painting would make it worse.

You can put this in terms of compression. A cliche illustration of, say, a vase of flowers can just be described as “imagine a New Yorker cartoon of a vase of flowers“. But a really good painting of a vase of flowers can only be captured by seeing the painting itself: nothing else will substitute. Great artworks are hard to compress (i.e. have high information content); slop is easy to compress. When you type a few short sentences into an AI image generator and it makes you an image for your blog post, you are likely generating slop because you are injecting relatively little information yourself. 

Another word for ‘high information’ is ‘surprising’. Thus:

1. Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.

One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise — where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know — our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty. [...]

Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten ‘hothouse’ or ‘uniquely’:

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose…

The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting:

Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:

Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?
— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133

The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor...“ and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word ‘whipping’. This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.

These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception. [...]

My main argument in this section has been that surprisingness, or strangeness, operates at many different levels in the art we value: word choice (or color choice), grammar, sentence, plot, form, and so on. This strangeness is essential for the effect of great art, because we like to make sense of things, and if we make sense of things too easily they are not interesting to us; great works of art are therefore necessarily somewhat difficult to grasp the meaning of, their meanings are multiple and constantly shifting, and they require a pleasant kind of effort to make sense of.

To go back to AI, all of this gives us some sense of why LLMs aren’t great writers by default. At the word level, they tend to pick relatively ‘obvious’ choices. Thus, I ask the model currently considered the best AI writer: “write a descriptive paragraph about a day in the park“ and it starts with: “A warm afternoon unfolds in the park, where sunlight filters through the canopy of old oak trees and dapples the ground in shifting patterns of gold and green“. Note that this is the most cliche possible detail to have picked, and the word ‘dapples’ is the most common word to use in this context; in short, the whole thing is unsurprising.

And yet: you cannot fix this problem simply by asking the AI to be more surprising. Why?

2. Echoes

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms…
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

The most surprising sequence of numbers is a random one, but a random sequence of numbers is not great art. You need more than just surprise. The details of great artworks relate to each other somehow. They are chosen in such a way that they cohere with each other at multiple levels.

Great works are full of patterns. They are as intricately patterned as Persian rugs or Norwegian stave churches. [...]

2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.

This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.

Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’. Rhyme and assonance are verbal echoes.

In music, the most famous example perhaps is Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous “ba-ba-ba-BUM“ theme; the short-short-short-long statement in the beginning then echoes through that movement in thousands of ways, sometimes stretched, sometimes slowed down, so that the whole movement feels like an organic thing that has grown from that single seed.

Good art layers these, one on top of another, to build up artifacts of stunning complexity. These are the text equivalents of Gothic cathedrals. Each layer alludes to other layers, too, adding more and more constraints, until you get an artifact where changing any one word does violence to the whole.

To see this density in action, let’s look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15. Click through the layers to see how a single fourteen-line poem simultaneously participates in half a dozen independent systems of meaning — sonic, structural, thematic, and more.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 15 

When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory:
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night:
And, all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.

(The interactive version of this essay lets you click through a few layers of the poem and see the below analysis.) [...]

Echoes are sewn through sophisticated literary works in more subtle ways, too.

Thus Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, points out that Anna Karenina is filled with trains and railway images even apart from the fact that the main plot points occur at railway stations; Kafka’s Metamorphosis is filled with occurrences of the number three. Lots of movies and books use Christian symbolism this way — crosses, doves, and so on. Macbeth is full of birds (ravens, crows, bats, owls, the Thane of *Caw*dor...).

Sometimes these symbols are significant, as in the Christian symbolism; and sometimes they are insignificant, as in the number three; but either way, the density of these symbols strewn throughout a work give it an additional coherence that would be lacking if you wrote down things at random. It gives it the same type of coherence that you see when you look at a beautiful tree, or a grassy field: things feel right. This feeling of rightness is achieved through these echoes.

by Nabeel S. Qureshi, Substack | Read more:
Image: Fra Angelico

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Amy Warren's “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles...

The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.

Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.

YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what’s best for their children. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google’s tools and content filters haven’t met their needs for a variety of reasons.

In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.

Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”

In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”

When Google brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google’s suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.

To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hours-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends, according to a 2016 document entitled “YouTube edu opportunities”: “Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”

A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by “inappropriately-aged children,” children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos “decreased attention spans.”

By 2019, the company was aware “the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken” due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and “trivially easy for students to bypass,” internal exchanges said.

An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children’s privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in “absolute regulatory failure,” said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.

The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices. 

by Shalini Ramachandran, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Colin E. Braley for WSJ

[ed. See also: Classroom Cope (The Point) - AI as another teaching tool:]

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"As for outcomes: it is one thing to say that in-class practice is the best we can do in the age of AI; it is quite another to credit AI with “reviving” writing. There is nothing, nothing, to celebrate about teachers and students being forced to resort to degraded forms of learning, practice and assessment. We might as well credit a basketball hoop in the prison yard with reviving organized sports. It’s a good thing that the inmates are given a chance to exercise. It is better than nothing."