The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

How much do we have to fear from A.I., really? It’s a question I’ve been asking experts since the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022.

The A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, is the most-cited researcher alive, in any discipline. When I spoke with him in 2024, Dr. Bengio told me that he had trouble sleeping while thinking of the future. Specifically, he was worried that an A.I. would engineer a lethal pathogen — some sort of super-coronavirus — to eliminate humanity. “I don’t think there’s anything close in terms of the scale of danger,” he said.

Contrast Dr. Bengio’s view with that of his frequent collaborator Yann LeCun, who heads A.I. research at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Like Dr. Bengio, Dr. LeCun is one of the world’s most-cited scientists. He thinks that A.I. will usher in a new era of prosperity and that discussions of existential risk are ridiculous. “You can think of A.I. as an amplifier of human intelligence,” he said in 2023.

When nuclear fission was discovered in the late 1930s, physicists concluded within months that it could be used to build a bomb. Epidemiologists agree on the potential for a pandemic, and astrophysicists agree on the risk of an asteroid strike. But no such consensus exists regarding the dangers of A.I., even after a decade of vigorous debate. How do we react when half the field can’t agree on what risks are real?

One answer is to look at the data. After the launch of GPT-5 in August, some thought that A.I. had hit a plateau. Expert analysis suggests this isn’t true. GPT-5 can do things no other A.I. can do. It can hack into a web server. It can design novel forms of life. It can even build its own A.I. (albeit a much simpler one) from scratch.

For a decade, the debate over A.I. risk has been mired in theoreticals. Pessimistic literature like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s best-selling book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” relies on philosophy and sensationalist fables to make its points. But we don’t need fables; today there is a vanguard of professionals who research what A.I. is actually capable of. Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, these evaluators have produced a large body of evidence. Unfortunately, this evidence is as scary as anything in the doomerist imagination. (...)

In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became. All of the elements of Dr. Bengio’s doomsday scenario were coming into existence. A.I. was getting smarter and more capable. It was learning how to tell its overseers what they wanted to hear. It was getting good at lying. And it was getting exponentially better at complex tasks. (...)

I’ve heard many arguments about what A.I. may or may not be able to do, but the data has outpaced the debate, and it shows the following facts clearly: A.I. is highly capable. Its capabilities are accelerating. And the risks those capabilities present are real. Biological life on this planet is, in fact, vulnerable to these systems. On this threat, even OpenAI seems to agree.

In this sense, we have passed the threshold that nuclear fission passed in 1939. The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could... A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility. The question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

by Stephen Witt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martin Naumann

Flying Private

AltoVolo’s hybrid EVTOL “Sigma”
via:

[ed. See also: Cirrus's new SR series G7+, the first piston-single aircraft to be equipped with Garmin’s Safe Return Emergency Autoland system. (more here)

For use in emergency situations such as pilot incapacitation, the Collier Award-winning system will assume control of the in-flight aircraft at the touch of a button, transmit emergency alerts to air traffic control, navigate to the nearest suitable airport, and land autonomously, all the while issuing instructions and status updates to passengers via the aircraft’s cockpit data screens. The system will then bring the aircraft to a stop on the runway center line, shut down the engine, and instruct occupants when it is safe to exit.

In instances where the pilot is the lone occupant, Safe Return will passively monitor their flight patterns, and if it detects an erratic or dangerous operation, it will first query the pilot before assuming control and landing the airplane. If a pilot regains the ability to safely aviate, they can disengage the system at any point.

Plastic-Eating Fungus

A fungus from the Amazon rainforest can break down polyurethane plastic without oxygen. It's the first organism discovered with this capability, and it can survive using plastic as its only food source.

Most plastic waste ends up deep in landfills where oxygen doesn't reach, precisely where this fungus thrives. Polyurethane persists for centuries in these environments. It's everywhere: mattresses, insulation foam, shoe soles, adhesives, car parts. Annual global plastic production exceeds 400 million tons. Less than 10% gets recycled.

Pestalotiopsis microspora was discovered in 2011 in Ecuador's Yasuní National Forest, isolated from plant stems. The endophytic fungus lives inside plant tissues without harming its host. Laboratory testing revealed its remarkable ability: it degrades plastic equally well with or without oxygen present.

The fungus secretes an enzyme that breaks apart the chemical bonds holding polyurethane together. In laboratory tests, concentrated enzyme extracts can completely break down polyurethane polymer in under an hour. The fungus also produces a second enzyme that degrades PET plastic, splitting it into simpler compounds the fungus then consumes as food.

What makes this significant? Other plastic-degrading organisms need oxygen to function. When tested without oxygen, fungi like Lasiodiplodia and Pleosporales slowed down or stopped working. P. microspora maintained the same performance. This ability to work without oxygen directly addresses the actual problem—plastic buried in oxygen-depleted landfill depths.

The enzyme production is adaptive. When the fungus grows in a basic environment with only plastic available, it ramps up enzyme output. These enzymes spread through the surrounding material, breaking down plastic well beyond where the fungus itself is growing. The enzyme breakdown converts long-lasting polymer into simple compounds the fungus uses as food.

This fungus offers a biological solution that works precisely where the problem exists, in oxygen-depleted landfills where an ever-increasing amount our plastic waste collects.

by Sam Knowlton, The Confluence |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always a good reason to preserve natural habitats - who knows what other plants have undiscovered special properties? See also: A fungus that eats polyurethane (Yale Magazine).]

***

AI Overview:

Q. How long does it take Pestalotiopsis microspora to eat plastic?

Pestalotiopsis microspora can degrade plastic in a matter of weeks to months, with experiments showing significant degradation in as little as two weeks and over 60% breakdown in six weeks under ideal conditions. The specific timeframe varies, with some sources noting a few months for complete digestion in certain projects.

Looking For Jobs at ICE

Johannah Herr, War Rug I (Immigrant Detention). 2020

via: Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE. At the Department of Homeland Security Career Expo (N+1)

[ed. Every time we see another ICE atrocity in the news, I wonder: where do they find these masked, flak-jacketed meat heads? They're seemingly everywhere in policing these days, especially in aggressive immigration enforcement and high profile security situations. See also: Stupidology. The outsourcing of judgment (N+1).]

Ask Not Why You Would Work in Biology, But Rather: Why Wouldn't You?

There’s a lot of essays that are implicitly centered around convincing people to work in biology. One consistent theme amongst them is that they all focus on how irresistibly interesting the whole subject is. Isn’t it fascinating that our mitochondria are potentially an endosymbiotic phenomenon that occurred millions of years ago? Isn’t it fascinating that the regulation of your genome can change throughout your life? Isn’t it fascinating that slime molds can solve mazes without neurons? Come and learn more about this strange and curious field! (...)

But I’d like to offer a different take on the matter. Yes, biology is very interesting, yes, biology is very hard to do well. Yet, it remains the only field that could do something of the utmost importance: prevent a urinary catheter from being shunted inside you in the upcoming future.

Being catheterized is not a big deal. It happens to literally tens of millions of people every single year [ed. Really? Just checked and it's true, at least for millions.]. There is nothing even mildly unique about the whole experience. And, you know, it may be some matter of privilege that you ever feel a catheter inside of you; the financially marginalized will simply soil themselves or die a very painful death from sepsis.

But when you are catheterized for the first time—since, make no mistake, there is a very high chance you will be if you hope to die of old age—you’ll almost certainly feel a sense of intense wrongness that it happens at all. The whole procedure is a few moments of blunt violence, invasiveness, that feels completely out of place in an age where we can edit genomes and send probes beyond the solar system. There may be times where you’ll be able to protect yourself from the vile mixture of pain and discomfort via general anesthesia, but a fairly high number of people undergo (repeated!) catheterization awake and aware, often gathering a slew of infections along the way. This is made far worse by the fact that the most likely time you are catheterized will be during your twilight years, when your brain has turned to soup and you’ve forgotten who your parents are and who you are and what this painful tube is doing in your urethra. If you aren’t aware of how urinary catheters work, there is a deflated balloon at the end of it, blown up once the tube is inside you. This balloon keeps the whole system uncomfortably stuck inside your bladder. So, you can fill in the details on how much violence a brain-damaged person can do to themselves in a position like this by simply yanking out the foreign material.

Optimizing for not having a urinary catheter being placed into you is quite a lofty goal. Are there any alternatives on the table? Not practical ones. Diapers don’t work if the entire bladder itself is dysfunctional, suprapubic tubes require making a hole into the bladder (and can also be torn out), and nerve stimulation devices require expensive, invasive surgery. And none of them will be relied upon for routine cases, where catheterization is the fastest, most reliable solution that exists. You won’t get the gentle alternatives because you won’t be in a position to ask for them. You’ll be post-operative, or delirious, or comatose, or simply too old and confused to advocate for something better.

This is an uncomfortable subject to discuss. But I think it’s worth level-setting with one another. Urinary catheterization is but one of the dozens of little procedures that both contributes to the nauseating amount of ambient human suffering that repeats over and over and over again across the entire medical system and is reasonably common enough that it will likely be inflicted upon you one day. And if catheterization doesn’t seem so bad, there are a range of other awful things that, statistically speaking, a reader has a decent chance of undergoing at some point: feeding tubes, pap smears, mechanical ventilation, and repeated colonoscopies are all candidates.

Moreover, keep in mind that all these are simply the solutions to help prevent something far more grotesque and painful from occurring! Worse things exist—cancer, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s—but those have been talked about to death and feel a great deal more abstract than the relatively routine, but barbaric, medical procedures that occur millions of times per year.

How could this not be your life goal to work on? To reduce how awful maladies, and the awful solutions to those maladies, are? What else is there really? Better prediction markets? What are we talking about?

To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be. But at some point you surely have to understand that you have been, thus far, lucky enough to have spent your entire life on the good side of medicine. In a very nice room, one in which every disease, condition, or malady had a very smart clinician on staff to immediately administer the cure. But one day, you’ll one day be shown glimpses of a far worse room, the bad side of medicine, ushered into an area of healthcare where nobody actually understands what is going on. (...)

I appreciate that many fields also demand this level of obedience to the ‘cause’, the same installation of ‘this is the only thing that matters!’. The energy, climate change, and artificial-intelligence sectors have similar do-or-die mission statements. But you know the main difference between those fields and biology?

In every other game, you can at least pretend the losers are going to be someone else, somewhere else in the world, happening to some poor schmuck who didn’t have your money or your foresight or your connections to do the Obviously Correct Thing. Instead, people hope to be a winner. A robot in my house to do my laundry, a plane that gets me from San Francisco to New York City in only an hour, an infinite movie generator so I can turn all my inner thoughts into reality. Wow! Capital-A Abundance beyond my wildest dreams! This is all well and good, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that you will be a loser, an explicit loser, guaranteed to be a loser, in one specific game: biology. You will not escape being the butt of the joke here, because it will be you that betrays you, not the you who is reading this essay, but you, the you that cannot think, the you that has been shoddily shaped by the last several eons of evolution. Yes, others will also have their time underneath this harsh spotlight, but you will see your day in it too. (...)

Yes, things outside of biology are important too. Optimized supply chains matter, good marketing matters, and accurate securities risk assessments matter. Industries work together in weird ways. The people working on better short-form video and payroll startups and FAANGs are part of an economic engine that generates the immense taxable wealth required to fund the NIH grants. I know that the world runs on invisible glue.

Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.

by Abhishaike Mahajan, Owl Posting |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Just can't comprehend the thinking recently for cutting essential NIH and NSF research funding (and others like NOAA). We used to lead the world.]

Mezcala Stone Idol, 300 BCE - 300 CE

via:

Yelena Yemchuk, Made in the shade

via:

Ayoub Ennachat, Mercedes Vision V Concept Helicopter 2026
via:

Dump Here!

‘Dump Here’ fan who caught Cal Raleigh’s HR ball ‘in shock’ over lucky grab.

DETROIT — Everything bounced just right for the Mariners on Tuesday night.

For their luckiest fan, too.

Jameson Turner, decked out in a custom-designed teal T-shirt, the only Mariners fan amid a sea of Tigers fans in the front row of the left-field stands, leaned over the fence, extended his glove and, after one bounce, caught Cal Raleigh’s home-run ball in the ninth inning of Seattle’s 8-4 victory in Game 3 of the American League Division Series.

It was the 61st home run Raleigh has hit during his record-breaking year and — my, oh, my — he hit it right to the Mariners fan wearing a shirt with DUMP 61 HERE in glittery block letters on the front.

Dart throwers couldn’t dream of hitting a more perfect bull’s eye.

“What are the odds?” Raleigh, the Big Dumper, said later.

Mariners team officials introduced themselves to Turner and invited him to meet Raleigh after the game. (...)

“This is just overwhelming,” Turner said.

Turner has lived in Las Vegas for the last 25 years, but he was born in Longview and attended Auburn High School and (obviously) is a die-hard M’s fan.

He made the “61” shirt last week and attended the Mariners’ final regular-season home game, sitting in right field and hoping to catch Raleigh’s 61st.

No such luck.

He didn’t give up.

“I decided to fly out (to Detroit) to see if I could give it one more shot, and it’s unbelievable,” he said.

He said he made a prediction to the woman next to him in the left-field stands.

“I told the lady next to me: ‘OK, this is my shot. He’s going to hit me a home run right now,’” he said. “And it landed in the bullpen and bounced right up to me. I’m still in shock.”

He said he had waved to Raleigh before the ninth-inning at-bat.

“Maybe he saw me,” he said with a laugh. “(That’s) Babe Ruth over there.”

Mariners relief pitchers in the bullpen reacted just as excitedly for Turner’s catch as they did Raleigh’s home run.

“That was so freaking cool,” bullpen catcher Justin Novak said. “One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”

Mariners general manager Justin Hollander, exiting the clubhouse just after Turner’s interview session wrapped, spotted the Mariners’ newest most famous fan and immediately got his attention.

“I have to get a picture with our MVP of the night,” Hollander said.

Soon after, Raleigh emerged from the clubhouse. He posed with Turner for pictures and presented Turner with one of his custom bats.

“Jameson, Thanks for cheering us on & catching 61!” Raleigh wrote on the bat.

Late Tuesday, Turner changed his flight schedule and secured a ticket from Mariners officials for Wednesday’s Game 4.

He already has a new shirt ready to go: DUMP 62 HERE.

by Adam Jude, Seattle Times |  Read more (with video):

Image: Mike Vorel/Seattle Mariners/X

[ed. Sometimes life works out. Really well. Go Ms!:]

***

At 8 p.m. Sunday, Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” played while fans paraded out of T-Mobile Park. After the Mariners’ first home playoff win since 2001, the party spilled onto Royal Brougham Way, where strangers high-fived and held each other, a mosh of happy maniacs dancing around a drummer. One scaled a streetlight to document a concert some swore would never come.

Fourteen hours later, that energy extended to gate C9 at Sea-Tac Airport, before a direct flight to Detroit. A DJ spun records while the Mariner Moose took selfies with teal-clad travelers. There were sugar cookies featuring the team’s logo, tiny plastic tridents and big, blue balloons. There was Julio Rodríguez’s father, Julio Sr., dancing with his family, a Mariner merengue.

You better believe the party traveled to Detroit.

After a 2-hour, 53-minute rain delay, the Mariners moshed all over the Tigers Tuesday. They rained eight hits and three homers in an 8-4 win, and Logan Gilbert spun six one-run innings. They drained the decibels from 41,525 deflated, rain-drenched fans. ~ Mariners’ make a statement in ALDS Game 3 win (ST)

Marc Lester, Anchorage, Alaska
via: Anchorage Daily News

via: misplaced

Do Coconuts Go With Oysters? For Saving the Delaware Shore, Yes.

For the past 50 years, Gary Berti has watched as a stretch of Delaware’s coastline slowly disappeared. Rising tides stripped the shoreline, leaving behind mud and a few tree stumps.

“Year after year, it gradually went from wild to deteriorated,” said Mr. Berti, whose parents moved to Angola by the Bay, a private community in Lewes, Del., in 1977, where he now lives with his wife, Debbie.

But in 2023, an extensive restoration effort converted a half-mile of shoreline from barren to verdant. A perimeter of logs and rolls of coconut husk held new sand in place. Lush beds of spartina, commonly known as cordgrass, grew, inviting wading birds and blue crabs.

Together, these elements have created a living shoreline, a nature-based way of stabilizing the coast, to absorb energy from the waves and protect the land from washing away. 

Mr. Berti had never seen the waterfront like this before. “The change has just been spectacular,” he said.

Before

After

The practice of using natural materials to prevent erosion has been around for decades. But as sea levels rise and ever-intensifying storms pound coastlines, more places are building them.

The U.S. government counts at least 150 living shorelines nationwide, with East Coast states like Maryland, South Carolina and Florida remediating thousands of feet of tidal areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Delaware Living Shorelines Committee, a state-supported working group, Delaware has led the charge for years. (...)

“The living component is key,” said Alison Rogerson, an environmental scientist for the state’s natural resources department and chair of the living shoreline committee.

The natural materials, she said, provide a permeable buffer. As waves pass through, they leave the mud and sand they were carrying on the side of the barrier closer to the shore. This sediment builds up over time, creating a stable surface for plants. As the plants grow, their roots reinforce the barrier by holding everything in place. The goal is not necessarily return the land to how it was before, but to create new, stronger habitat.

More traditional rigid structures, like concrete sea walls, steel bulkheads and piles of stone known as riprap, can provide instant protection but inevitably get weaker over time. Bulkheads can also backfire by eroding at the base or trapping floodwaters from storms. And because hardened structures are designed to deflect energy, not absorb it, they can actually worsen erosion in nearby areas.

Though living shorelines need initial care while they start to grow, scientists have found they can outperform rigid structures in storms and can repair themselves naturally. And as sea levels rise, living shorelines naturally inch inland with the coastline, providing continuous protection, whereas sea walls have to be rebuilt.

When the engineers leave after creating a gray rigid structure, like a sea wall, “that’s the strongest that structure is ever going to be, and at some point, it will fail,” said David Burdick, an associate professor of coastal ecology at the University of New Hampshire. “When we install living shorelines, it’s the weakest it’s going to be. And it will get stronger over time.”

And just as coastal areas come in all shapes and sizes, so do living shorelines. In other places that the committee has supported projects, like Angola by the Bay and the Delaware Botanical Garden, brackish water meant that oysters wouldn’t grow. Instead, the private community opted for large timber logs while the botanical garden built a unique crisscross fence from dead tree branches found on site. (...)

Sometimes, an area’s waves and wind are too powerful for a living shoreline to survive on its own, Mr. Janiec said. In these situations, a hybrid approach that combines hard structures can create a protected zone for plants and oysters to grow. And these don’t need to be traditional sea walls or riprap. Scientists can also use concrete reef structures and oyster castles to break up waves while allowing wildlife to thrive.

Gregg Moore, an associate professor of coastal restoration at the University of New Hampshire, said homeowners often choose rigid structures because they don’t act on erosion until the situation is urgent. When it comes to a person’s home, “you can’t blame somebody for wanting to put whatever they think is the fastest, most permanent solution possible,” he said. (...)

“Living shorelines are easier than people think, but they take a little time,” Mrs. Allread said. “You have to trust the process. Nature can do its own thing if you let it.”

by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Erin Schaff

[ed. Streambank and coastal restoration/rehabilitation using bioengineering techniques has been standard practice in Alaska for decades (in fact, my former gf wrote the book on it - literally). I myself received a grant to rehabilitate 12 state park public use sites on the Kenai River (see here and here) that were heavily damaged and eroding from constant foot traffic and boat wakes. Won a National Coastal America Award for innovation. As noted here, most people want a quick fix, but this is a better, long-term solution.]

via: here/here

Way Past Its Prime

Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? It's not just you.

 
It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with. This is infuriating. Frustrating. And, depending on how important those services are to you, terrifying.

In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn’t just a way to say something got worse. It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.

This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?

Here’s the natural history of enshittification:

1. First, platforms are good to their users.
2. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3. Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.

This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.

In Jeff Bezos’s original business plan for Amazon, the company was called Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos’s cutthroat competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his company’s relentless commitment to customer service.

How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the Prime experience (which has much less to do with free shipping now and more with everything else)?

Stage 1: good to users

Amazon started with a large surplus of cash that it was able to allocate to its customers, and allocate it did. The company raised a fortune from early investors, then a larger fortune by listing on the stock market. Then it used that fortune to subsidise many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidised shipping and offered a no-questions-asked, postage-paid returns policy.

This offer tempted millions of users to pile on to the platform. Once they were there, Prime membership went a long way to locking them in. Paying for shipping a year in advance is a powerful incentive to do your shopping on Amazon. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Prime subscribers begin their e-commerce searches on Amazon and, if they find what they’re looking for, don’t shop around for a better deal.

You can think of Prime as a form of soft lock-in, Amazon binding you to its platform with a silken ribbon. But Amazon’s also got some iron chains in its toolbox. All the audiobooks and movies, and most of the ebooks and emagazines, you buy from Amazon are permanently locked to its platform.

They are sold with digital rights management (DRM), a form of encryption designed to force you to view or listen using apps that Amazon controls. Break up with Amazon and delete your apps, and you will lose all the media you’ve ever bought from the platform. For a certain kind of reader, listener or movie buff, this is a very high switching cost indeed.

Amazon has one more trick up its sleeve: after years of selling goods below cost, it has completed the work that big box stores started, eliminating swaths of small, independent, brick-and-mortar businesses. Its online predatory pricing tactics have done the same for much of the e-commerce world.

That means shopping anywhere other than Amazon has become substantially more inconvenient. These tactics – Prime, DRM and predatory pricing – make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too.

Stage 2: abusing users, good to businesses

Amazon was initially very good to those business customers. It paid full price for their goods, then sold them below cost to its customers. It subsidised returns and customer service, too. It ran a clean search engine, which put the best matches for shoppers’ queries at the top of the page, creating a path to glory merchants could walk merely by selling quality goods at fair prices.

Then, once those merchants were locked in, Amazon put the screws on them. Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls “the flywheel”. It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts – and around and around the flywheel spins.

Let’s take a step back. This flywheel is the direct product of a radical legal theory that has had the world in its grip since the late 1970s. From the 1890s until the Jimmy Carter administration, US corporations’ power was blunted by antitrust law, which treated large companies as threats simply because they were large. Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care. Antitrust law was designed to fight that apathy and force companies to care.

A rival – and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Any time you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.

It was under this theory that Jimmy Carter started to remove a few of the Jenga blocks from the antitrust system. Then Ronald Reagan came along and tore them out by the fistful. (Most of the rightwing policies for which we remember Reagan started under Carter, who was hoping to woo conservative voters. He failed.) Every president since – Republican or Democrat – has followed Reagan’s example, up to (but not including) Joe Biden.

The Amazon flywheel is designed to fit neatly into the consumer welfare framework. It proclaims itself to be an enemy to merchants on behalf of consumers. The flywheel is all about lowering prices, and the consumer welfare standard theory prizes low prices above all else.

Stage 3: a giant pile of shit

Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself, some of which also involve shifting value away from end users, no matter what the cute flywheel pitch says.

It uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results.

Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist.

Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.

All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods. [ed. emphasis]

Here’s where Amazon’s attacks on its merchants’ bottom lines turn into higher prices for its customers. A merchant that pays Amazon through the nose needs to make up the money somewhere. Hypothetically, merchants could eat Amazon’s fees themselves – in other words, if Amazon wants a 10% fee on an item with a 20% profit margin, the seller could split the difference, and settle for a 10% profit.

But Amazon’s fee isn’t 10%. Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51% margins.

So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot. Now, you may have noticed that Amazon’s prices aren’t any higher than the prices that you pay elsewhere. There’s a good reason for that: when merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it’s key to the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.

Let the implications of most-favoured nation settle in. If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you’re paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop – even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. [ed. emphasis]

It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you’ll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match – which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.

Why does this happen? Because Amazon makes more than $50bn every year charging merchants for search placement. When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren’t the best matches: they’re the matches that pay the highest fees to Amazon to be top of the list.

Researchers Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal call this “Amazon’s pricing paradox”. Amazon gets to insist that it has the lowest prices in the business, but no one can find those prices. Instead, we all pay a massive Amazon tax every time we shop there, and the merchants we buy from are paying an Amazon tax, too.

That means that, on average, the stuff at the top of an Amazon search results page is bad. It’s low-quality, high-priced junk. Even when you’re buying a known quantity, such as a specific brand of AA batteries, the top item will usually be more expensive than the items lower down on the page – the ones without the splashy banners advertising “Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice”. The Amazon smile logo gets a lot more sinister when it appears next to a top search result that costs 29% more than the best match for your query, thanks to Amazon’s $50bn-a-year paid search placement.

by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Noma Bar
[ed. I dropped Prime, and it's fine. The few things I order still have free (or miminal) shipping charges, and the movies (usually with additional rental fees) aren't missed at all.]

America Is Losing the Robotics Race

The impossible

AI is reshaping both soft power and hard power around the globe. The United States, to its credit, has an early lead with the former. The leading LLMs are trained on Western text, global training and inference are still dominated by American companies, and we are ahead in the global race for market share of total tokens generated.

But as it stands, China is running away with the hard power part of AI – robotics. As the incredible progress in AI continues, we start seeing intelligence embedded in the physical world – culminating in generalist robots that perform a wide variety of tasks across applications, from manufacturing to services to defense. This will redefine every aspect of our society and reshape daily life. The country betting on that future is China, not the US.

In the 10 years since the CCP released its “Made in China 2025” strategy, Chinese companies have leapfrogged the rest of the world’s density of robots per capita. They passed the United States in 2021, then the famously automated economics of Japan and Germany in 2024, and will soon eclipse Singapore and South Korea, their last remaining contenders. In short order China has become the world’s central robotics power. Entirely autonomous “dark factories,” like those of smartphone and automobile manufacturer Xiaomi, operate in complete darkness with no humans present.

China has successfully executed what we once thought impossible. Only ten years ago we scoffed that “China can copy, but they can’t innovate,” which we then revised to, “They can innovate, but they can’t make the upstream high-precision tooling.” Maybe we shouldn’t have been so comfortable, given how Chinese companies had outcompeted the rest of the world in industry after industry – from solar photovoltaics, where competition outside of China has been practically decimated, to 5G, whose global deployment was a massive success for China’s national champion Huawei. The same pattern is playing out now with robotics. China has built a playbook to dominate strategic industries, and has used that playbook to become the robot superpower.

Homegrown Chinese companies now design and fabricate precision parts like harmonic reducers at competitive quality, cheaper prices, and – most importantly – colocated with their customers in manufacturing superclusters. This is the part that should scare the West the most. The colocation of so many robot toolmakers, assemblers, and customers in nodes like Shenzhen or Shanghai is how new combinatorial use cases are discovered, how manufacturing sequences are optimized around that new potential, and how firms develop advanced process knowledge that is completely opaque to the West. In a few years, it will be Chinese companies that are making parts that we cannot replicate – not just at low cost, but at any cost. There are parallels from the past. In the 1970s, Japan shocked the world with Toyota’s lean production methods, just-in-time inventory, and ethic of kaizen, continuous improvement to eliminate waste. Initially dismissed, by the 1980s Japanese automakers had overtaken American and European giants and reshaped the global auto industry. If we do not act to avert it, this will be another Toyota moment, but on a much greater scale.

If we don’t act soon, the United States will find it extremely difficult to catch up: we are approaching a period of compounding improvement that threatens to make China’s advantage virtually insurmountable. As with LLMs, training advanced robotics systems requires pretraining data on the scale of the internet, along with reinforcement learning to train generalist policies that can reason across a wide range of distortions in environment, perception, and task. As data from real-world deployment comes online, the country with more robots gains flywheel momentum; more deployment means more high-quality data which underwrites further deployment. The United States isn’t entirely out of the game, and our lead in AI software carries over: American companies like World Labs are at the forefront of building frontier models that could allow robots to reason about 3D space. But as these capabilities mature, it will be action in the real world – from routing cable harnesses through chassis pathways in electronics assembly to simply doing laundry – that will unlock the economic and strategic promise of generalist robotics.

Micron tolerance

To understand what China has achieved in the past few years, let’s talk about the harmonic reducer – a simple manufactured part that’s deceptively hard to make.

Harmonic reducers are a type of gear system that looks almost like a shoulder or an elbow in its socket. They transfer rotational energy from one end (usually at high speed, from an electric motor) into a much slower gearing, at high torque. They do this by offsetting an inner and outer gear ring that are slightly offset from one another, paired with a rotating oval-shaped piece on the inside. When driven by an electric motor, this creates a waveform that slowly drives the outer socket with a high gear ratio and high torque – suitable for many robotic applications, including humanoid ones.

The challenge in manufacturing these tools comes from how sensitive they are to minute distortions in tooling and operating. They must be made micron-level precise, at low cost, to do their jobs correctly. Even more precision is required when these sockets are chained together into systems with multiple degrees of freedom, like the multiple joints on a robotic finger, hand, or limb. Achieving the strength and dexterity of a human hand, at non-prohibitive cost, requires true manufacturing excellence.

The precision required to manufacture harmonic reducers is well beyond the reach of most machine shops. Production has historically been dominated by highly specialized German and Japanese manufacturers: the Japanese company Sumitomo and the German-Japanese firm Harmonic Drive are the two dominant players in the space, together accounting for 95 percent of global market share. But in the last few years they’ve faced intensifying competition from new entrants from China. A firm called Green Harmonic, based in the city of Suzhou near Shanghai, offers harmonic reducers with performance comparable to products from Sumitomo and Harmonic Drive, but at roughly 30 to 50 percent cheaper price points. Green Harmonic now has more than 30 percent market share within China; and will soon look abroad. In the coming years, we can expect companies like Harmonic Drive to face their “Toyota moment,” with major strategic implications: there are countless cases of Chinese firms translating cheap, reliable manufacturing into global market share and eventually driving competitors out of business.

Harmonic reducers are just one illustrative part of the robotics hardware stack. Creating a fully functioning robot requires a huge variety of other small components – precision bearings that enable smooth joint rotation, custom printed circuit boards that route power and signals between subsystems, specialized connectors that maintain reliable communication in high-vibration environments, miniature encoders that provide millimeter-accurate position feedback, force-sensitive resistors embedded in fingertips for delicate manipulation, inertial measurement units that track orientation changes down to fractions of a degree, servo motors with sophisticated current control algorithms, shielding to prevent electromagnetic interference between tightly packed electronics, thermal interface materials that dissipate heat from high-performance processors, and countless fasteners, gaskets, and protective housings engineered to withstand the mechanical stresses of real-world operation. Each component must be carefully selected not just for its individual performance characteristics, but for how it integrates with the broader system: a single point of failure can render a sophisticated robot completely inoperable.

Chinese companies, from Siasun and Estun in controllers to AVIC Electromechanical in torque sensors, are rapidly entering and starting to win the market for every part of that system. Together, these firms and countless others constitute a sophisticated and mature ecosystem that has allowed Chinese firms to locally source practically the entire robot – not only from within China, but within a megacluster like Shenzhen.

We’re at the point today where Chinese domestic manufacturers and their suppliers contribute all of the parts necessary to bring robotic dreams to life, and iteratively learn from one another. The Chinese startup Unitree has captured the global imagination with highly advanced robots cheaper than anything else offered before – agile and LLM-integrated robot dogs for as little as $1,600, a humanoid for $5,900. Those costs will keep coming down; the robot dogs will keep getting stronger and more capable.

by Martin Casado and Anne Neuberger, A16Z |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. This is from Andreessen Horowitz, so little surprise they would view government subsidies (too little) and over regulation (too much) as major contributing factors. But politics, policy, and a lack of strategic planning and funding priorities are probably the more important constraints. I mean, we currently have a president and congress that give lip-service to reshoring American manufacturing, but have no idea what industries are most important, or even how infrastructure improvements and corporate incentives (and disincentives) could help. All the while re-directing trillions of dollars into the military, homeland security and immigration enforcement. No wonder China is pulling away on all fronts. They actually have a clear idea of where they want to go.]

Who's the Terrorist?

via: X

[ed. Not saying there's a connection, but where there's smoke there's usually fire. Left wing terrorists. Huh... thought they were all effeminate snowflakes. Guess they're the ones wrapped in the flag, hiding behind facemasks, and stockpiling guns.]

The Problem (With Advanced AI)

The stated goal of the world’s leading AI companies is to build AI that is general enough to do anything a human can do, from solving hard problems in theoretical physics to deftly navigating social environments. Recent machine learning progress seems to have brought this goal within reach. At this point, we would be uncomfortable ruling out the possibility that AI more capable than any human is achieved in the next year or two, and we would be moderately surprised if this outcome were still two decades away.

The current view of MIRI’s research scientists is that if smarter-than-human AI is developed this decade, the result will be an unprecedented catastrophe. The CAIS Statement, which was widely endorsed by senior researchers in the field, states:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

We believe that if researchers build superintelligent AI with anything like the field’s current technical understanding or methods, the expected outcome is human extinction.

“Research labs around the world are currently building tech that is likely to cause human extinction” is a conclusion that should motivate a rapid policy response. The fast pace of AI, however, has caught governments and the voting public flat-footed. This document will aim to bring readers up to speed, and outline the kinds of policy steps that might be able to avert catastrophe.

Key points in this document:

• There isn’t a ceiling at human-level capabilities.
• ASI is very likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.
• ASI is very likely to pursue the wrong goals.
• It would be lethally dangerous to build ASIs that have the wrong goals.
• Catastrophe can be averted via a sufficiently aggressive policy response.

1. There isn’t a ceiling at human-level capabilities.

The signatories on the CAIS Statement included the three most cited living scientists in the field of AI: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Ilya Sutskever. Of these, Hinton has said: “If I were advising governments, I would say that there’s a 10% chance these things will wipe out humanity in the next 20 years. I think that would be a reasonable number.” In an April 2024 Q&A, Hinton said: “I actually think the risk is more than 50%, of the existential threat.”

The underlying reason AI poses such an extreme danger is that AI progress doesn’t stop at human-level capabilities. The development of systems with human-level generality is likely to quickly result in artificial superintelligence (ASI): AI that substantially surpasses humans in all capacities, including economic, scientific, and military ones.

Historically, when the world has found a way to automate a computational task, we’ve generally found that computers can perform that task far better and faster than humans, and at far greater scale. This is certainly true of recent AI progress in board games and protein structure prediction, where AIs spent little or no time at the ability level of top human professionals before vastly surpassing human abilities. In the strategically rich and difficult-to-master game Go, AI went in the span of a year from never winning a single match against the worst human professionals, to never losing a single match against the best human professionals. Looking at a specific system, AlphaGo Zero: In three days, AlphaGo Zero went from knowing nothing about Go to being vastly more capable than any human player, without any access to information about human games or strategy.

Along most dimensions, computer hardware greatly outperforms its biological counterparts at the fundamental activities of computation. While currently far less energy efficient, modern transistors can switch states at least ten million times faster than neurons can fire. The working memory and storage capacity of computer systems can also be vastly larger than those of the human brain. Current systems already produce prose, art, code, etc. orders of magnitude faster than any human can. When AI becomes capable of the full range of cognitive tasks the smartest humans can perform, we shouldn’t expect AI’s speed advantage (or other advantages) to suddenly go away. Instead, we should expect smarter-than-human AI to drastically outperform humans on speed, working memory, etc. (...)

2. ASI is very likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.

Goal-oriented behavior is economically useful, and the leading AI companies are explicitly trying to achieve goal-oriented behavior in their models.

The deeper reason to expect ASI to exhibit goal-oriented behavior, however, is that problem-solving with a long time horizon is essentially the same thing as goal-oriented behavior. This is a key reason the situation with ASI appears dire to us.

Importantly, an AI can “exhibit goal-oriented behavior” without necessarily having human-like desires, preferences, or emotions. Exhibiting goal-oriented behavior only means that the AI persistently modifies the world in ways that yield a specific long-term outcome. (...)

Goal-orientedness isn’t sufficient for ASI, or Stockfish would be a superintelligence. But it seems very close to necessary: An AI needs the mental machinery to strategize, adapt, anticipate obstacles, etc., and it needs the disposition to readily deploy this machinery on a wide range of tasks, in order to reliably succeed in complex long-horizon activities.

As a strong default, then, smarter-than-human AIs are very likely to stubbornly reorient towards particular targets, regardless of what wrench reality throws into their plans. This is a good thing if the AI’s goals are good, but it’s an extremely dangerous thing if the goals aren’t what developers intend:

If an AI’s goal is to move a ball up a hill, then from the AI’s perspective, humans who get in the way of the AI achieving its goal count as “obstacles” in the same way that a wall counts as an obstacle. The exact same mechanism that makes an AI useful for long-time-horizon real-world tasks — relentless pursuit of objectives in the face of the enormous variety of blockers the environment will throw one’s way — will also make the AI want to prevent humans from interfering in its work. This may only be a nuisance when the AI is less intelligent than humans, but it becomes an enormous problem when the AI is smarter than humans.

by Rob Bensinger, tanagrabeast, yams, So8res, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gretta Duleba, Less Wrong |  Read more:

[ed. See also: When AI Seems Conscious: Here's What to Know.]

now recording

via:

CLA - The Revolutionary New Coaching Method

Victor Wembanyama is doing something wrong.

The 7-foot-4 unicorn, still in the early stages of rewriting how basketball is played, just made a move few in the world can. But it’s the antithesis of why he’s in a quiet Los Angeles gym with San Antonio Spurs teammate Harrison Barnes and his skill trainer, Noah LaRoche. In a summer of new adventures, ranging from kung fu training at a Shaolin temple in China to bicycle kicks on a soccer pitch in Japan, Wembanyama wanted to try one more novel thing.

Six years earlier, Barnes came to a similar conclusion. A former No. 1 recruit out of high school, Barnes had just joined his third NBA team and wanted to evolve as a player. Barnes asked his friend Joe Boylan, an experienced NBA assistant coach, to recommend a skills trainer for his summer workouts.

Boylan gave him LaRoche’s number and a message: Trust his unconventional methods.

Now, it is time for Wembanyama to understand what that means.

“Victor wanted to come out to L.A. to train for the summer,” Barnes said, “and I wanted (him) to see what I do.”

They are participating in a three-on-three drill to push the players to make optimal reads each time they touch the ball. Things are going smoothly until Wembanyama does a vast Euro step through traffic to score.

Before anyone can marvel at the bucket, LaRoche calls practice to a halt. He waves Wembanyama over to the courtside video monitor. What looks like a basket that few players in the world can score is actually a problem.

“What did you see here?” LaRoche asked the former NBA Rookie of the Year.

In LaRoche’s gym, nothing can be predetermined. It’s all about making the best decision in that specific situation, not perfecting a single move.

As Wembanyama peered at the video, he immediately noticed something that had eluded him in the moment. In this scenario, there was more space for him to attack in a different direction. He knew exactly how he would react next time.

“My body is starting to understand these movements,” Wembanyama told LaRoche after watching the video.

It was Wembanyama’s first step toward understanding a new perspective on the game he has a chance to conquer. He was learning about three letters that the current Premier League champions (Liverpool), the World Series winners (Los Angeles Dodgers), the last two NBA champions (Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics) and many other teams across professional sports have already, to certain degrees, incorporated into their organizations.

C-L-A.

The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a learning method that has made its way from academia to the mainstream, drawing from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step, with game-like situations that feature special rules, forcing them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results.

“It changed my career,” said Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time champion. “Before, I was very skilled. But I don’t think I was ever very purposeful.”

The CLA takes the ground-up approach of block training, which eliminates the infinite variables that affect athletes in the heat of competition, and flips it on its head.

That means putting players into scenarios with different limitations called “constraints” to simulate the unpredictable environment of an actual game. Whether it’s the number of steps they can take, the area of the playing surface from which they are allowed to maneuver or even the weight of the ball they are using, players are repeatedly told to overcome restrictions to accomplish a task. While painstakingly working through mistakes, they are forced to find advantageous opportunities, “affordances” in CLA parlance.

From pool noodles to a game known as “murderball,” coaches around the world are finding ways to put their players in a sea of constraints and guide them on how to work their way back to shore.

By forcing a player to deal with variables that are impossible to predict, the CLA teaches them to execute under duress rather than flawlessly in a vacuum. If a coach can get a player to work through failure and creatively solve problems, the thought goes, practice becomes more complex than the actual games.

“It’s creating different atmospheres and a culture that the toughest part of your day in player development is the practice,” said Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose team is one of the strongest purveyors of the CLA in American sports. “Blocked practice has been shown to have a purpose, but once you get into the elite levels of talent, facing this type of stuff every day, then it’s not as effective. There’s a balancing of confidence pregame and then making sure you’re challenging yourself so that you’re up to the task of facing (Pirates pitcher) Paul Skenes, or whoever.” (...)

The CLA evolved from the study of ecological dynamics, a framework that integrates psychology and neurobiology to examine the relationship between how the brain and body interact to perceive and navigate our environment. It focuses on perception-action coupling, the feedback loop by which your brain processes sensory information and your body coordinates sequences of actions to create motion. It’s a continuous partnership between more than just the brain’s visual system and the body, but also involving touch, hearing, and proprioception — the body’s sixth sense of position and movement.

The latest research in ecological dynamics suggests our brain does not store a specific script of a given movement pattern. Instead, the brain and body work in tandem, using perception-action coupling to develop precise and flexible movements constantly.

Everything is a read, all the time, for all of us.

by Jared Weiss and Fabian Ardaya, The Athletic | Read more:

Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; top photos: Chris Coduto, Andy Lyons, Luke Hales/Getty Images; David Richard/Imagn Images

[ed. See also: Steph Curry's Secrets to Success: Brain Training, Float Tanks and Strobe Goggles (BR).]

Challenge Coins

Kash Patel’s Challenge Coin Is Perfect for Him

Members of the U.S. military have long had a tradition of giving or exchanging “challenge coins.” The medallions have no monetary value; they come in various shapes and sizes, but most are about the size of a silver dollar, and they carry the symbols and names of military units or commands. Members of those units carry them to give to others as tokens of esteem. (They are called challenge coins because they can be used to prove that you are a member of the unit; sometimes they are called “commander’s coins” when they’re given out by a senior officer.)

In my years as a professor at the Naval War College, I collected many such coins from military students and from organizations where I spoke. They’re a nice tradition, and it is always an honor when a service person passes you one during a handshake as a mark of respect or gratitude. Other organizations mint such coins, too, both inside and outside the government. I have a rather nice one, for example, from my visit to the National Counterterrorism Center, and another that was struck by a private group to commemorate Operation Iraqi Freedom.

FBI Director Kash Patel has created such a coin for himself that he’s now handing out, and Americans can only wish that he’d take them all and lock them in his desk, never to be seen again.

The coins are, to put it gently, ridiculous. On one side, they have what appears to be the symbol of the Punisher, a Marvel character. The Punisher is a vigilante who does … well, vigilante stuff, killing evildoers at will as revenge for the death of his family. The symbol is popular with a lot of people, including criminals, law-enforcement officers, soldiers, and some extremist groups such as the anti-government Three Percenters. None of this is good, especially because the character’s creator long ago admitted that the symbol was partly inspired by the Nazi SS’s Totenkopf, or “Death’s Head,” uniform insignia. (The author of the series also notes that the Punisher hates cops, something the police officers wearing the mark don’t seem to get.)

If you’re not a comic-book fan, the front of the coin looks more like a depiction of a space alien, or maybe a skull—or maybe a space alien’s skull—with spiders in the eye sockets and K$H on the forehead. (“Kash.” Get it? So edgy.) The face has a Greek or Roman helmet under the nose, and a pistol on each side, and together, it looks like a key or maybe a bottle opener. The other side carries Patel’s signature, the FBI seal, and a depiction of a tommy gun, perhaps as a romantic reminder of the days of J. Edgar Hoover hunting down John Dillinger or something.

This is not a challenge coin: It is something kids use to pop the caps off beer bottles at a gaming meetup or a cosplay convention. If someone pressed one of these into my hand at an official function, I’d think I was being pranked (or maybe being given a discount token to a local Halloween house). It is as unserious as the director himself, a metal symbol of the hollowness of Patel’s leadership. The FBI, prone to rogue operations under Hoover, has for decades been the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency. It is run and staffed by agents—serious men and women—who once struck fear into the hearts of bank robbers, kidnappers, and enemy spies. After Hoover, the agency’s directors were always drawn from the ranks of people with backgrounds in law enforcement or justice, people of significant accomplishment.

Patel’s coin does not convey this kind of gravitas. Instead, it says: “I am a grown man who has spent way too much time on the internet.” It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to get from someone with a lot of hardware hanging from their face and tattoos on their neck. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we might expect a bit more formality from a G-man.) Then again, maybe it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who noted the death of Charlie Kirk by saying that he and Kirk would meet again in “Valhalla.” It’s sort of a Goth-horror movie-gamer coin that will never scare a bad guy or inspire respect in a colleague or a fellow law enforcer, but that might elicit a “Cool, dude” from an easily impressed middle schooler.

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: X

[ed. Priorities.]