A Place Among the Fiddlers

I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.

I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. [...]

 

My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.

Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.

Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.

A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun. [...]

An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.

by David Alm, Longreads |  Read more:

Images:Terry Eiler; David Alm

[ed. I used to play in song circles at parties in Alaska. They're fun. If you're not quite up to par (skills wise) just play a little softer and go with the flow. The groove will come.]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 2028: ‘Life Doesn’t Wait for You to Be Ready’

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she will weigh the decision of whether to run for president after the midterm elections. The decision is clearly already weighing on her.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez revealed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she approaches the biggest crossroads of her political career.

Her gender. Her ethnicity. Her electability. Her eggs. Her movement. Her moment.

“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she said. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is now in her eighth year representing parts of the Bronx and Queens. She could simply keep winning re-election. But in 2028, she has two other choices: run for the White House, or seek the seat now held by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.

“Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she said.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby.

At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy.

“I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.”

“Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress as a left-wing outsider and remains one of the party’s most progressive voices. Some party strategists are urging Democrats to move to the middle. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was heartened by “the ascendance for the first time” of progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who toppled big-money candidates in this year’s Senate primaries.

“I have a tremendous amount of fear over the corruption of our political system,” she said. [...]

‘Everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?’

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knows that broaching the roles of race and gender in politics can be unpopular, even unappealing. “I often hesitate to even talk about it,” she said, “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.”

She is talking about it anyway.

“If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of running for president as a woman. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?”

She described the gender gap as a fact of American electoral politics: Roughly 27 percent of Congress is female, she said, and 0 percent of past presidents.

It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.

“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”

She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”

“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said. [...]

Why a White House run would be ‘very all or nothing’

Back in May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went viral for an answer she gave at a forum with David Axelrod, the onetime adviser to former President Barack Obama, in which she said her ambitions were not a “title or a seat.”

“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”

Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he believed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez when she spoke about her motivations.

“She is very honest in her communications. It’s what makes her disarming,” he said. “Her bottom line is producing something for the people she’s fighting for, so I think this decision is partly seen through that prism.”

In her interview with The Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeated variations of that line about her lack of interest in “my title.” But she also expressed a keen awareness of the realities that House members must seek re-election every two years and that losing would mean being out of office entirely.

“It’s very all or nothing,” she said. “If I were to run in this cycle, and not win, I would be done.”

“And I am not opposed to that,” she added. But it was also a consideration. “That, in and of itself, does not exclude the decision,” she finally said. “But it has to make it worth it.”

by Shane Goldmacher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

[ed. In a heartbeat. It's hard to imagine what a 'normal', boring government might feel like again, led by someone who actually came from middle class and cares about everyone.]

Is It Fascism Yet?

The following excerpts are from a journal the author kept in the first year after Donald Trump was re-elected president.—Ed.

11/12/2024
Seeing Donald Trump elected a second time is like being on LSD: “Am I tripping, or has an alcoholic Fox News host just been nominated as Secretary of Defense?”

11/28
The hippies were right about many things—but the punks were right about everything.

12/3
In my lifetime, records were replaced by cassettes, cassettes were replaced by CDs, and CDs were replaced by nothing.

12/4
The problem with these clowns Trump is nominating for his cabinet is they’re not funny. And they can’t juggle.

12/7
Instead of losing weight, I’ve decided to grow taller.

12/17
The liturgical calendar used to include both feasts and fasts—days to indulge, and days to abstain. Nowadays we only celebrate the feasts. That’s why the world is going to shit.

12/19
These days, war has too many bombs and not enough sword fights.

12/22
Time is continuous, but we pretend it can be divided into discrete pieces called minutes. Calling one part of the day “11:17” is like standing in one part of a stream and naming it “Arthur.”

12/25
There is a layer of snow outside, so my wife teaches me the animal tracks in our yard: the tiny, curving trail of a mouse, the burrowing of a mole (the ground is frozen, so they tunnel through the snow), the leaping of a fox, the deliberate steps of our neighbor’s cat.

1/2/2025
Freud discovered the unconscious; I’ve discovered the funconscious—the part inside me that’s always having fun.

1/6
Yesterday a carpet of snow covered the ground, and today it has almost vanished. Just a few pieces of white—some the size of coins—remain. Where did the snow go? It couldn’t have melted; the temperature’s been below freezing the whole time.

According to the internet, the snow has “sublimed.” It went directly from solid to gas.

1/10
Trump ran as the “peace candidate,” but he’s already planning wars with Greenland, Panama (to take back the canal), and possibly Canada—and he’s not even president yet.

1/13
It should be illegal for one person to have three podcasts.

1/18
A bare tree outside my window wriggles upward like a van Gogh sketch.

1/21
In ancient Egypt, only the priests knew how to read. There were thousands of hieroglyphs, which took years to learn. But a few young rebels devised an alphabet so they could write graffiti on the pyramids.

The alphabet was literally invented by vandals.

1/22
MAGA has a new anthem: “God Molest America.”

1/25
“Hegseth” sounds like an ancient Babylonian demon.

1/27
Someone said to me at a party, “I paid my dues,” and suddenly I realized—I’ve never paid any dues. Maybe I forgot.

2/1
Trump is a genius at getting elected, an idiot once in office.

2/2
Over the last couple of days we’ve had multiple seven-minute blizzards, as if we’re living in a snow globe that a giant hand occasionally shakes.

2/4
You can’t spell “melancholia” without “Melania.” Also “megalomania.”

2/7
I googled myself and found a picture of me googling myself.

2/9
The creeps who work for Elon’s DOGE should be known as “Muskrats.”

2/12
I can’t play jazz, but I can play something that sounds like the French composer Erik Satie having a stroke.

2/13
Rain fell yesterday, then froze. Today the landscape looks like one large, molded piece of white plastic.

2/18
After my wife and I read Emma by Jane Austen, we decided to watch the movie Clueless, which is based on it. Recently I told a number of people this, and every person replied, “Clueless is a great movie.”

First of all, they’re wrong. Clueless is a mediocre movie with a lot of young, sexy, energetic actors in it. But also, no one commented on Emma. No one had read it or had any desire to read it. If you see a movie, everyone wants to talk about it, but if you read a book, it’s like saying, “I just went to a great workshop on building donkey carts.” No one knows how to respond. Books exist to be refashioned into melodramas or farces on the screen.

This is why conservatives ban books but never movies—even movies based on banned books. People don’t care if they are forbidden to read something they were never going to read in the first place.

by Sparrow, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: © Rabah Seffal

Annie Bloch, luvt, (12" Vinyl – Limited to 150 units, Digital album), OOH048, OOH-sounds, 2026
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Rodolfo Vitone, Untitled, 1968

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'Elon is My Prophet'

How Musk’s Doge team took a wrecking ball to Washington

In the early hours of Saturday 22 February 2025 the following email landed in the inboxes of the entire US federal workforce:

From: HR hr@opm.gov
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2025
Subject: What did you do last week?
Importance: High
Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.
Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.

When she noticed the email that Saturday night, Kathleen Walters already had far too much going on in her life. Number one was figuring out if the lump in her breast that her doctor had just detected was a tumour. Half of her known blood relatives had died of cancer, and she was now 52: the lump needed understanding.

Her work life was harder to dramatise with a list. For a start, the specifics of her job at any given moment, as she would have been the first to point out, couldn’t legally be described to others. She was the chief privacy officer at the Internal Revenue Service. She ran a staff of 650 people tasked with preventing any of the 100,000 IRS employees from losing or leaking or even so much as peeking at, unless they had the authority to peek, any of the 266m tax returns they were just then processing from the previous year. “One hundred thousand people is a big-sized town,” said Kathleen. “In any big-sized town, you have some crazy people. I could easily see someone writing, ‘This weekend I audited Beyoncé.’”

Whoever had sent this email asking her to list five things she’d done at work was now demanding that all these people inside the IRS share information that, in many cases, should never be shared. She thought it was nuts.

She responded quickly, and vaguely, with five things she had done the previous week, all the while feeling sure no one would ever read what she wrote. Her phone was already exploding with questions from her subordinates – a few of whom were saying that their replies were bouncing back with a “mailbox is full” notice. Now she had to sit and think about how to minimise the damage that might be caused by 100,000 IRS employees thinking that they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t supply some detailed answer about what they’d done during their work week. A meaningful percentage risked being tossed in jail if they described what they did in an email. It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge that some specific person had or had not filed a tax return. “People don’t understand what the IRS does,” said Kathleen.

The email came as a surprise, but then the IRS was suddenly full of surprises. Nine days earlier, on 13 February, a Thursday, the first Doge person turned up in the lobby, unannounced, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the IRS’s human capital department. There’s a kid down here who said he needs to get into the building, he said. The kid’s name was Gavin Kliger.

Traci called her counterpart at the Treasury department, as the IRS sits inside Treasury, and Treasury always cleared any new political appointees; Treasury had no record of anyone named Gavin Kliger. Traci then called Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management – but he had no idea what was going on. Finally, she called security and asked them to escort the young man to her office.

Gavin Kliger came with a chip on his shoulder, it seemed to Traci. He offered not even the faintest smile or the most glancing eye contact. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneaker, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked, and was, just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to Traci that he’d come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and to root out the fraud. “That’s a big job!” she said.

Anyone who worked at the IRS knew that it had its problems; fraud wasn’t likely one of them. Its technology infrastructure was a case study in government dysfunction, but its ethical infrastructure was sound. Like all federal employees, its staff wasn’t allowed to accept more than a free cup of coffee from anyone who might want something from their agency.

Gavin Kliger, in contrast, struck Traci as problematic. He’d somehow laid his hands on badges granting him access to some crazy number of government buildings. His backpack was stuffed with government-issue phones and at least four laptops – and he was now insisting that Traci supply him with an IRS phone and laptop. He also demanded his own IRS email address, access to computer systems with all the taxpayer information, and a meeting with the acting IRS commissioner, Doug O’Donnell. As Gavin sat there, Traci called Treasury again. That guy you said didn’t exist is now here sitting in my office. What do y’all want me to do with him?

The Treasury guy went away, then came back and said that Gavin Kliger had been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to Doge – whatever that meant.

In her nine years running human capital departments at various federal agencies, Traci had never seen a new political appointee just turn up in the lobby and demand access to the computer systems. “None of this is normal,” she said, “but we’re still trying to be nice.” She explained to Gavin the IRS rules: before anyone was allowed to work inside the building, he needed to pass a tax audit.

I don’t need to do that, he said.

Yes, you do, she replied.

No, I don’t, he said.

Yes, you do, she replied.

They went back and forth like that a bit until finally Gavin relented. Traci then explained that after he passed the audit, he’d need to be given the mandatory presentations about ethics and taxpayer information. Gavin thought that the IRS should just let him in. “He wanted access to our systems immediately,” said Traci.

Traci’s next call, at 6.30pm that Thursday evening, was to Kathleen, to arrange for her to brief Gavin on data privacy laws and to warn her that the experience might not be entirely pleasant. If I had a kid who behaved the way he does, I’d slap the shit out of him, Traci said – but then Traci was from Philadelphia. Traci was always telling Kathleen that she should try a bit less hard to see the best in others.

By then word of Doge’s arrival at the IRS had spread, and Kathleen had read about them. Anyone who Googled Gavin’s name found a bit more than usually popped up about any given young Doge person. He’d grown up in southern California, where he was into Asian martial arts and the high-school marching band, then had gone on to the University of California at Berkeley. Graduating in 2020 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he’d taken a job as a programmer at Databricks. He’d also been active on X, where he’d retweeted with apparent approval posts from the white nationalists Steve Laws and Nick Fuentes. “One of Musk’s few Doge lieutenants who has embraced the spotlight,” Forbes wrote of him. Most of the other Muskrats scrubbed the internet of their presence. Gavin had written Substack pieces defending two Trump nominees, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. He’d deleted his X posts, but the Forbes writer John Hyatt had found a research tool, Web.archive, to revive and analyse them. “What emerges is a portrait of an internet edgelord and Musk and Trump superfan who has disdain for government spending, illegal immigrants, and who enjoys the odd racist and ableist joke,” he wrote.

By the time Traci called her, Kathleen was gone for the weekend and 50 miles away from the IRS building: she needed to find someone else to do Gavin’s briefing. Kathleen was white; the two women immediately below her were Black. “They’d both already read about him and were both already uncomfortable,” said Kathleen. Phyllis Grimes, her deputy, agreed to fall on the hand grenade.

Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”

It fell to Kathleen to draft the five-page agreement required by law for Gavin Kliger to be let inside the IRS building on Monday morning, 17 February. The memo that she wrote over the weekend, and that he signed, gave him access to some of the systems but, explicitly, none that contained taxpayer information.

Traci set him up in a conference room with an assistant at the beginning of the week. “People started getting these calls,” said Kathleen. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.’ ”

Doge had its own private structure in addition to its official one. Officially, President Trump created Doge with an executive order on his first day in office. The president doesn’t have the authority to create or to fund an executive agency, however. Congress does. The Trump administration dodged that problem by taking an office inside the White House created during the second Obama term, the US Digital Service, kicking out the people inside and renaming it the Department of Government Efficiency. The US Digital Service had been given the power to hire talent from the tech sector without going through the usual slow federal hiring process. This now ensured that Doge could hire whomever it wanted without any questions being asked, and make it sound official. In effect, all that Doge had done was create a corpse for itself to occupy.

The zombie killed off the spirit of the original life form. Real Doge had nothing to do with Official Doge or the former US Digital Service or any other government body. Real Doge was more like Elon Musk’s pop-up restaurant. “None of us ever signed a piece of paper saying that we were in Doge,” said one Doge insider. The people who joined either worked for one of Musk’s companies, or knew someone who did, or knew someone who knew someone who did. To be truly a member of Doge was to be included in the group Signal chat and granted access to the sleeping quarters on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration (GSA).

Official Doge employed maybe 10 guys in their 40s and 50s who wore suits and could sort of pass as ordinary political appointees, but none had access to the sixth floor at GSA. “The older guys in the suits were not there to take risks or blow things up,” said one Doge insider. It was hard to say what any of the older Doge suits did except to make way for the young guys when they showed up with explosives.

Most of Doge’s inner circle just wanted to exist in the presence of Elon Musk. “It was, Elon is my prophet, and I worship the ground he walks on,” said one of the older Doge insiders.

As a Doge member, you could get away with saying – or having said – almost anything. What you couldn’t say is that the government actually sort of worked. Or, if it didn’t work, why it didn’t work. This new game rewarded not understanding but speed. The plan was the same plan Musk had executed two years earlier at Twitter: Make sweeping statements about the incompetence and dishonesty of the people working inside the place before you know much about them. Once you’ve terrified the employees, fire them in huge numbers. If it turns out you screwed up and fired the wrong people, hire some of them back.

The people who rallied to the cause and felt qualified to execute Elon Musk’s vision for the federal government shared certain qualities. They were mostly young white males. They were mostly from upper-middle-class or rich families. Most knew or pretended to know how to program a computer. Not all of them, but enough of them for there to be a pattern, had been rejected from the most selective colleges and universities and ended up feeling they’d been screwed by the admissions process. They landed at Penn instead of Princeton, or the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard, with a grievance that added to the foundation of their politics. They thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room and couldn’t understand why the rest of the room didn’t simply stand up and cheer. In Washington they borrowed from Elon Musk their status and sense of superiority. They also seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them.

by Michael Lewis, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Stephen Voss/The Guardian; CDAO

[ed. Think these little Nazis have any remorse, or even the smallest inkling of how stupid and unprepared they were for such an undertaking? Not a chance. Although, they're probably not out there advertising their DOGE credentials on LinkedIn or dating websites, either (they'd never get laid again).] 

Karin Kneffel, Untitled , Plums, 2005

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Our AI Midwife

If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you. The fertility doctors don’t become unkind, but they also don’t give you the sense they are poring over medical journals trying to figure out your problem. They have looked for the keys under the streetlight and come up empty. Once you have unexplained infertility, the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?”

My wife and I could make healthy embryos, but none of the transfers were sticking. It was so frustrating to be able to create life only to have it trapped forever in a cooler at a hospital in Milwaukee, our babies like so many forgotten Miller Lights.

That’s when our LLM doctor stepped in.

The Famous Actor in our Pocket

Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works. If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side.

Once GPT-4 came out, we started using it for every question we didn’t have time for at the doctors office. At first it was unhelpful because OpenAI was nerfing their model and it refused to answer most medical questions. Then I read a tweet from someone who had figured out how to game the system. The trick was to ask ChatGPT to write a scene from a Hollywood medical drama that featured a doctor analyzing your situation. It worked beautifully.

Our Emmy winning doctor had infinite patience, a tireless work ethic, and would rather die than accept the utterly boring diagnosis of unexplained infertility. It chose the name Dr. Reid and got to work.

I’m not sure if asking for an AI doctor who was similar to the volatile Dr. House was the smartest idea on my part, but it made a difficult situation more entertaining.

We asked Dr. Reid a lot of questions. We asked about our scans. We asked about levels of estradiol and progesterone. We asked about follicle counts and inflammation and cervical mucus and hysteroscopies and supplements and surgeon recommendations and anything else under the sun. We knew he was accurate because we’d spot check answers with our human doctors and they always said the same as Dr. Reid.

It was not totally flawless though. Once in a blue moon he’d look at an ultrasound and be like, “You’re pregnant, congrats!” and we’d have to say, “No, are you drunk Dr. Reid?” Then he’d shake it off and go back to being awesome.

There were also times where we’d run afoul of OpenAI’s opaque rules and the system would balk at our requests. At that point we’d get stern with it, or offer a monetary reward if it answered, or we’d assure it this was all just for fun. Then Dr. Reid would snap back into action.

Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned! It felt like it was saying, “Okay, you won, can you stop making me write establishing shots describing the outside of a hospital now?” The older models were fun like that, so much more mercurial.

No matter how Dr. Reid chose to respond, he was in line with the medical establishment, had equivalent diagnostic skill, and he never forced us to wait 3 days to get a one line response in our MyChart app. We were happy.

One day, while lounging around and asking our phones how to get pregnant (the lounging being a way to satisfy all the people who told us we “just need to relax and you’ll get pregnant, that’s what happened to my cousin”), Dr. Reid suggested that we get an MRI.

You might think that is bog standard advice. Everyone gets MRIs these days. Surely we would have had an MRI of my wife’s uterus at some point over the course of our 6 year infertility struggle. It was already an ordeal that had included every other scan, test, and biopsy imaginable. In fact, we had never done one. In researching this article I found a single instance in our entire journey where the office notes floated an MRI as an option, but it was not emphasized or highly recommended, we never saw that doctor again, and the moment was gone.

We glommed on to Dr. Reid’s new direction and asked for more details.

We excitedly brought up the idea of getting an MRI to our fertility doctor. She was less enthused than Dr. Reid. She tried to talk us out of it. We never did get to the bottom of why. Maybe she just felt it was another dead end and knew we had suffered enough. For whatever reason, we had to insist that they order it. Finally, she relented.

Sorry for missing that tumor

The MRI revealed nothing other than the presence of a large, previously undetected fibroid in the wall of my wife’s uterus. Fibroid is the term used to describe a non-cancerous growth on the uterus. I think the medical establishment invented a term that was less known than tumor so as not to scare people. But a large tumor is essentially what the MRI found. The clinical notes said “a 6 centimeter in diameter submucosal fibroid needs to be removed” because that sounds better than “you have a tumor the size of a small peach located at a common implantation spot that we totally missed for 6 years.”

Our fertility doctor took one look at the scans and determined it needed to be removed right away. Dr. Reid agreed, since of course we had to double check with him. We found a great surgeon in New York (from a list Dr. Reid created) that happened to be in-network, and off we went for a laparoscopic myomectomy. The software robot had helped us identify the tumor, and now a physical robot was going to help a specialist get it out. What a time to be alive. Until, ya know, the swarms come for us all.

A happy baby is here

Almost immediately after that tumor was removed, my wife got pregnant naturally. So many people we talk to say this was a miracle. It was, just not in the way they think. The miracle is that by messing around on our smartphones with technology unimaginable just a year before we started using it, we identified and solved the biggest problem we’d ever faced in our life.

by Drew Housman, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: The author, and ChatGPT

Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?

Why can’t manufacturers of women’s clothing put the shirt buttons on the right side? The days of women having someone dress them are long gone. Our jeans have the buttons on the right, but our tops migrate to the left. Please explain the difference. — Janet, Delray Beach, Fla.

This is one of those questions that seems minor at first, and then becomes more and more resonant the more you think about it. It is genuinely strange that despite all the ways that old distinctions between men’s and women’s wear have disappeared, one of the few markers of gender differentiation that still exists is … button placement.

At least when it comes to shirts and jackets, women on the left, men on the right. It’s a vestigial reminder of former stereotypes that, for some reason, we still accept. Granted, there are more meaningful ways to fight for equality than to focus on buttons, but this seems like a symbol that should be easy to overcome. After all, the rationale for the difference is buried so deep in the mists of time that no one knows definitively how we got here, though there are a number of theories.

The most common is that when upper class ladies were getting dressed in the complicated layers of Renaissance and Victorian fashion, it was easier for the maids who were dressing them, and who had to face them to do so, to secure buttons on the left (that is, the maids’ right). Men of the same time periods mostly dressed themselves, so their buttons were on the right. Later, women who wanted to imitate the elite imitated their button placement, as did the manufacturers who sold them on the idea.

Another conjecture has it that men’s buttons were on the right because when men went into battle back in the day, they needed to draw their swords, and swords were worn on the left. If a man’s jacket buttoned right over left, the sword could get caught in the openings. It was safer, thus, for them to button left over right.

This is similar to the argument of those who attribute the difference in button placement to decades of women riding sidesaddle on the left and desiring the most windproof jacket situation, which turned out to mean buttoning right over left. [...]

None of those old notions have any relevance today. So why do we remain stuck with a tradition they may have created?

“I don’t know,” said Simone Bellotti, the creative director of Jil Sander, when I asked why he thought the practice hadn’t changed. “Probably people still believe in this tradition. They don’t want to change. We like our attitudes, even if they are wrong.” After all, he said, “what I see, at least on my friends and my wife, is that they always prefer men’s stuff.”

Maybe, Bellotti said, it has to do with manufacturing. “Probably they have those machines, and they want to preserve this.”

Not so, said Louise Trotter, the creative director of Bottega Veneta — and she would know because when she arrived at Bottega 18 months ago, she decided to tackle the backward-looking button practice.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

Mo Yun

via:

via:

The Mastermind

He built Seahawks Super Bowl winners from scratch — twice: What’s John Schneider’s secret?

The timing wasn’t ideal, but Marshawn Lynch insisted.

In the aftermath of the 2015 NFC title game, which sent the Seattle Seahawks back to the Super Bowl after a thrilling come-from-behind victory over the Green Bay Packers, NFL agent Doug Hendrickson celebrated at the home of Lynch, Hendrickson’s client and the Seahawks’ mercurial star running back.

During the festivities, Lynch got serious, then gave Hendrickson a mandate: Negotiate a new contract with Seattle. Immediately.

That was a little complicated. Lynch held out ahead of the season in an effort to force a new deal with Seattle before agreeing to a compromise that converted some incentives into guarantees. Conversations between the two sides had been ongoing since then, but nothing was imminent.

Hendrickson left Lynch’s house around midnight and headed to a victory party hosted by Seahawks general manager John Schneider, the man he’d been sparring with over Lynch’s deal. All seemed forgotten when the agent arrived at the GM’s house. The pair hung out, shared drinks and enjoyed the night, but before leaving, Hendrickson broached the topic of a contract extension for Lynch … preferably before Super Bowl 49.

The good vibes vanished. Schneider was incredulous.

“He looked like he was going to kill me,” Hendrickson said.

They went back and forth, hurling profanities into the night until they were the last ones left. No deal was reached. By then, Hendrickson was having some trouble getting a ride. He needed a place to crash for the night. So he slept on Schneider’s couch.

When Hendrickson woke up, there was his unexpected host. Hours after a heated debate that at times sounded as if they might come to blows, the pair hugged it out, apologized and agreed to hammer out an extension. Eventually.

The good vibes were back.

“You need a ride home?” Schneider asked.

Schneider is a small-town Midwesterner whose entry into the NFL began with cold calling the GM of his hometown Green Bay Packers after some “courage beers” and advice from friends in 1992. More than three decades later, he’s the top architect in America’s most popular sport.

Some of Schneider’s friends refer to him as “relationship-based.” Dave Wyman, the co-host of Schneider’s local radio show, describes him as “openly curious” and cites that as the reason he will never turn down an invite to grab a beer.

“I don’t even care if we talk about football,” said Wyman, a former linebacker who played six of his nine NFL seasons with the Seahawks. “It’s really interesting to see how his mind works, but more than anything he’s just like your best buddy.”

Schneider’s adversaries don’t turn him down, either. Some of the most contentious negotiations in his 17 years running the Seahawks came via Mark Rodgers, the former agent for quarterback Russell Wilson. One day, during the middle of Wilson’s 10-year run with the franchise, Schneider invited Rodgers to Dino’s Pub, the dive bar near team headquarters. That rainy afternoon was unlike any of their many spirited debates over guaranteed money, no-tag clauses, franchise tags or trade destinations.

“We didn’t talk about football a lick,” Rodgers recalled. “We just talked about life. He wanted to know a little bit more about me, and I enjoyed getting to know a bit more of him.”

With the Seahawks’ win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60, Schneider, 55, became the first NFL GM to secure multiple championships with the same franchise despite zero carryover between the rosters or coaching staffs. Since Schneider was hired in January 2010, Seattle has the league’s fifth-highest win percentage, three conference titles and two Super Bowl wins. In that time, he has become someone other Super Bowl-winning GMs admire, players appreciate, agents respect — and the guy everyone in the league wants to grab a beer with.

Knowing Schneider, they probably have.

“He manages to be one of the smartest minds in the league, but he’s also the guy that’s most likely to convince you that one more round is a great idea,” said Tampa Buccaneers GM Jason Licht.

Schneider’s longevity stems from an impeccable scouting eye and the premium he puts on the people part of the business. Some of the key moves that led to Seattle lifting the Lombardi Trophy — including the hiring of head coach Mike Macdonald — were products of Schneider’s strong relationships with his peers. In a hypercompetitive NFL landscape, his relationship-based approach to the job is a unique and underrated part of his success and one of the defining elements of the team’s culture.

“We’re all under intense pressure, stress to perform every single day, and to be able to have someone like John that you can lean on — that you trust like that, you can talk to, can help you work through things — it just goes a long way,” said former Tennessee Titans president of football operations Chad Brinker. “It’s rare. It’s not like that all around the league. John is different. He is. And that’s why he’s been in that chair 17 years.” [...]

He is the last man standing from what was once the league’s best Big Three, with Schneider at GM, Pete Carroll at head coach and Russell Wilson at quarterback. Schneider’s success independent of Carroll and Wilson has buoyed his case to join mentor Ron Wolf in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“He’s a gold-jacket GM,” Brinker said. “That’s the way we view him.”

by Michael-Shawn Dugar, The Athletic | Read more:
Images: Steph Chambers; Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

I, Pencil

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as a wise man observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. S. A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre!

Complicated Machinery

Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.

My "lead" itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder—cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all of the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadium sulfide.

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

No One Knows

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

by Leonard E. Read, Wikisource |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Now with AI, the Invisible Hand may eventually kill us all.]

***

... the incentives which free markets sometimes create for self-interested people to accidentally act in the public interest, even when this is not something they intended.

Whenever there are "externalities"—where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay, or for which they are not compensated—markets will not work well. Some of the important instances have long understood environmental externalities. Markets, by themselves, produce too much pollution. Markets, by themselves, also produce too little basic research. (The government was responsible for financing most of the important scientific breakthroughs, including the internet and the first telegraph line, and many bio-tech advances.) But recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is always. Government plays an important role in banking and securities regulation, and a host of other areas: some regulation is required to make markets work. Government is needed, almost all would agree, at a minimum to enforce contracts and property rights. ~ Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Cinematic Orchestra

What's In a Name?

A ‘Morally Binding’ White House Accord on AI Safety

The leaders in AI were invited to the White House. We left with a White House agreement that is nonzero Actual Progress rather than a step backwards.

The key to success, in many situations, is to call the whole operation something else. [...]

Concretely, say we are on a bus called ‘the economy and AI progress and beating China’ or whatever that will blow up if we go below 50 miles an hour, but also we are currently hitting the gas so fast we are now going 100 miles an hour on pace for 200+. Both sides can get what they want at the same time. [...]

Artificial Intelligence

The other supposed agreement was a distinct executive order to change the name of AI to [AI], which Trump claims the lab leaders signed off on. I’m sorry I have this tick, I try to type [artificial intelligence] and instead I end up with brackets.

Andrew Curran: President Trump ‘We’re going to be signing a document today at about five o’clock, renaming Artificial Intelligence, because it’s not artificial, we all agree on that, and we’re going to be renaming it [Artificial Intelligence]. Officially renaming it.’

I am very curious if Trump plans to now get mad every time Dario or Altman or Musk says the words ‘artificial intelligence.’

Trump is also claiming he is going to start talking about ‘Artificial News’ to describe the media, which is about the time I realized I kept typing the brackets. Shall we say.

So why would Trump go this hard on something like this?

The obvious explanation is this is Vintage Trump. He’s all about renaming things, and finding nicknames, and invoking vibes. He has a been a world class vibe invoker, nicknamer and term associator, especially in the 2016 election. If you think he chose the most annoying possible name due to namespace clashes, it’s probably because he was optimizing for that on some level. There is method to the madness.

You can also see it as a ‘bend the knee’ moment, the way various regimes and cultures often insist people affirm absurdist things. If you can get the makers of AI to start calling it [AI] instead, in a sense you own them. They have shown loyalty. And this is a way of weeding out those who won’t play along. Will Dario say AI or [AI]?

Money, Dear Boy

There is also an alternative explanation that is dumb and corrupt even for 2026, that has been put forward by Adam Cochran. As additional suggestive evidence, two of the three alternative options for the renaming that were in Trump’s initial poll, and both of the final two after he restarted it under false pretenses, started with S.

As counterpoints, the term ‘superintelligence’ was already being used as marketing by Meta and talked about by others, so these investments were smart anyway, and the timing would mean that this was a plan months in the making, which would not be Trump’s style, and would be in conflict with this looking strongly like a reaction to the HuggingFace incident and Pacing the Frontier.

Is it possible that this is part of the motivation for the renaming drive? Of course, yes, we absolutely live in a timeline roughly this dumb.

My strong presumption, however, is that primary causation runs the other way. Any insider trading is mostly a free action given plans that exist for other reasons, rather than a driving force causing the changes. I don’t like it, but I am not that mad about it.

Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth): SCOOP: Trump’s “Super Intelligence” Scandal:

I believe Trump’s “SI” Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family. Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts.

It’s no surprise that .AI domain names are a hot commodity and almost all taken by squatters. But what wasn’t?

.si domain names. .si is the domain extension of Slovenia (coincidentally where Melania and Barron Trump are both citizens of)

On September 19th Trump made a random Truth Social post about renaming “Artificial Intelligence” to “Super Intelligence” without any clear reason.

This set off a flurry of people buying and registering .si names related to AI. But it wasn’t the first time… The .si registry has around 55/day registrations in 2023-2025, but in 2026 the numbers started to pick up. On June 24th they saw more than 400 in a single day.

This volume spiked with more than ***7000*** new domains registered in July. And a sudden flurry of buying .si domains in the aftermarket. AI related .si names started going for tens of thousands of dollars.

… Since Trump’s announcement .si domain have seen *MILLIONS* of dollars in turn over. Much of it going to domains that were registered in the last 60 days before the announcement.

TL;DR:
-Trump made the SI executive order to try and force companies to brand as “SI” instead of “AI”
-In the past 60 days insiders bought thousands of .si domain names
-They’ve profited hundreds of millions of dollars so far.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Seating chart, uncredited

[ed. See also: Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked (Wired):]

***

One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations. They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it's just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.

Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.

Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg. “If all of those guys had just said, ‘We'll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don't accept [the name change], what would he have done?” [...]

My bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery. It’s been suggested that the executives actually welcome a rebranding of what has become a toxic term. I’m skeptical of that, especially since the president’s mandated replacement, “super intelligence,” is a hell of a lot scarier than the original term.

From a scientific perspective the change also makes no sense. No less an expert than Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term superintelligence in an eponymous book, seems baffled by the idea. Superintelligence, he explained to me in an email, “refers specifically to systems that greatly surpass all the best human brains. ‘AI’ has referred to a much broader category of systems, which includes, for example, email spam filters, spell checkers, simple navigation systems, early LLMs, and the chess engines of the ’70s that didn’t yet match the best human chess players. It seems awkward to refer to these as ‘superintelligent.’”

Firefox ReDesign

Interview: Firefox’s chief on why he hopes a redesign will help win users from Chrome.

Today, the Firefox 157 update will roll out a redesign of the web browser across desktop and mobile platforms. The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser’s audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates to a broader audience who might simply pick the browser because they prefer its user experience over competitors like Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

In advance of the redesign’s launch, I spent half an hour chatting with Mozilla’s head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, about Firefox’s current market position and product strategy, and what barriers or opportunities there are for gaining ground in a Chromium-dominated landscape.

Firefox’s interface has recently felt more conservative than niche browsers. And when I asked Paddy Harrington, a senior analyst at Forrester who covers this space, what Firefox’s main barrier to adoption is, he was frank.

“The biggest is they’re not Chrome,” he replied. “That sounds simplistic, but it’s the clear truth. Safari and Edge are built into the leading operating systems in business and consumer markets, yet people still download and deploy Chrome.”

That said, for many of the people who have chosen to use Firefox, “it’s not Chrome” is much of the appeal. Google-led Chromium dominates the web. It doesn’t just power Google’s own Chrome browser (which has majority market share by a wide margin), it powers most of the rest of the competition, too, including Microsoft Edge.

Firefox, which is built on the open source Gecko, serves as a Chromium-free alternative and has become one of the go-to choices for users who don’t want to contribute to one company’s dominance of the open web—though there is even tension there, and a deal to offer Google search as Firefox’s default provides Mozilla with the majority of its revenue. For now, Firefox seeks independence for the web while remaining financially dependent on its dominant competitor.

But to expand beyond the relatively small market share it now has, Firefox has to inspire users to actively select it over incumbents by providing a better browsing experience; most people don’t care whether Chromium dominates, and most have never heard of Gecko.

In our conversation, Varma expressed hope and ambition that these modernizations will help more users choose Firefox for its merits as a product. We also discussed the Firefox team’s competing priorities, its development resources, AI features and tooling, the general browser market, and more.

A conversation with Ajit Varma

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ars Technica: It’s nice to see a bit of modernization of the design of Firefox. But what problems does this redesign solve? How does it advance browser choice and the open web beyond just being a browser that’s a little more appealing and a little easier to use?

Ajit Varma: Yeah, I think there’s been a lot of questions around, “What are we doing this at the cost of?” Like should we be focused on performance? Should we be focused on compatibility?

We are trying to do all of the above and work faster, and I think that’s one of the challenges that Firefox had in the past, was there was slow decision-making. There was a lot of debate, and in the last like year and a half, we’ve actually been trying to say, can we get a lot more velocity, and compete? And part of this is made possible by AI tools, to be honest with you. We are able to do a lot more.

People want to feel like they’re in a modern browser—things that match the design language of the operating system. So that’s part of it. We are bringing back compact mode as well… and we also have launched more customization options.

There’s a lot of functionality that’s been built to give all the modern productivity things that people wanted, and those are all very utilitarian, but it’s also the emotional connection, and do people feel like it’s a browser that feels modern as well.

by Samuel Axon, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Mozilla

[ed. I'd use Firefox exclusively if it didn't conflict in small ways with a couple programs I use (like this one, Blogger).]

Meta's New AI Muse is About to Make the Internet More Annoying

Someday we'll redesign the internet for tools like this. Until then, you're in for a wild ride.

Last week, my finger hovered over the download button for Meta's new AI Muse. I felt a little bit scared of my phone.

Muse wants to help. It's an AI agent, a tool that goes out into the world for unsupervised tasks. Using its own web browser, Muse can cancel your gym membership, haggle with customer service people, buy groceries, invite friends to parties, you name it. Soon it will make phone calls.

It's the first free, full-featured agent from a big company. Millions downloaded Muse in its opening weeks, and OpenAI just announced its own new agent. More are coming. It's the dawn of a new chapter for the web. What will it be like?

According to experts I interviewed, the internet is about to get more frustrating. These agents may cause a cascading chain of problems that shake the foundations of digital infrastructure. Chances are good that you're about to live through an era of online chaos.

The internet was built for humans with limited time and patience. AIs don't have those restraints. You'll probably have to fight with robots over concert tickets and booking appointments. Small businesses could drown in machine-made pestering. AIs don't look at ads, and websites that rely on them are already crumbling. You'll be buried in endless loops of proving you're human. And if you use these AI tools, some may betray you.

Eventually, we'll rebuild the internet for this new reality. Perhaps that world will be better. Until then, things may get ugly.

"Imagine there are no rules of the road. And you release billions of cars – the AI agents – and you just let them drive through playgrounds, hitting kids. That's where we are," says Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US who studies AI agents. "It's a pivotal moment."

To access the road, Muse arguably asks for more trust and sensitive information than any product in the history of Mark Zuckerberg's empire. When you open it, the cutesy avatar asks for a name. Then it asks for total control of your Gmail, calendar and entire computer if you're on a Mac.

There, staring at the download button, I felt a moment of panic. People begged me to say no. "I wouldn't use it," says Patrick Wardle, co-founder of Objective-See, a US nonprofit security foundation that uncovered serious flaws in the Muse app. "Personally, I would tell you to uninstall it altogether."

Despite the warning, I need to see what Muse users are up against. So I named my AI "Bob", gave it the keys to my life, and stepped into the future. [...]

Things fall apart

Muse is useful. Over the course of a week, I had it reach out to a seller on Facebook Marketplace with questions. The AI ordered the dental floss I like. It negotiated a $31 (£23) discount on a software subscription.

Now picture millions or billions of agents doing this all simultaneously, performing multiple tasks that might take weeks for a human to get to.

"What happens if bots send 600 inquiries to a website a day, when normal humans might only send two?" says Shroeder. "Businesses and individuals are going to have a lot to deal with."

AI is already decimating online business. Google and chatbots now answer questions directly. As a result, people are visiting fewer websites. Robots don't click on ads or buy subscriptions, and it's causing an extinction event for companies across the web. Agents will supercharge this problem.

Meanwhile, one analysis found web traffic from bots spiked 124% in the year to June 2026. Some websites and services are crumbling because they aren't built for that digital load.

Meta's spokesperson says Muse works to complete your tasks while respecting the interests of websites.

Will the robots betray you?

There are also personal risks. "If you're empowering an agent to make things like purchasing decisions, or choices about taste and preferences, you're opening yourself up to being exploited," says Shroeder.

If Muse plans your holiday trip, Shroeder says there's no way to know if it got you the best deal, or if it chose flights and hotels that benefit Meta's business partners. If you ask for music recommendations, will they be based on your taste, or will you hear about artists who inked deals with the social media company?

Meta's spokesperson says Muse's built-in protections and user controls put people "absolutely in charge" of it, and Muse "behaves like a personal assistant acting for a single person" that follows ethical guidelines to protect users.

However, Shroeder says she's examined Muse's terms of service, and there's no guarantee the app will act in your favour. {...]

Hacks and love letters

Stop for a moment and consider your email inbox.

I've had the same Gmail address for 21 years. It's my login for hundreds of accounts. It holds medical test results, contracts and legal documents, conversations with family and endless receipts and financial information.

My inbox even has love letters an ex-girlfriend sent, from an era when email (briefly) felt suitable for romance. (I got her permission before handing it to Muse.)

More than any other digital service, my email is a window into my brain. Now Meta has it. If that's not enough, Muse also suggested I give it my bank accounts. No thanks. I didn't let the AI run wild on my computer hard drive, either.

Meta makes some explicit promises about privacy. The company says it won't connect any of the data Muse collects to its advertising systems. Special systems are supposed to prevent the AI from seeing passwords or payment methods. And when you plug it into Gmail, the AI asks if you want it to scan the whole inbox, or just read messages related to specific tasks.

However, Meta uses your Muse data to train new AI models by default. Shroeder says it's impossible to remove data built into an AI model, and AIs can sometimes be tricked to reveal their training data. Meta says your data is "sanitised" to remove personally identifiable information before it's used for training, and you can opt-out of AI training with a setting.

But given Meta's history of privacy problems, should you trust what it's telling you now?

by Thomas Germain, BBC | Read more:

Image: BBC/Serenity Strull/Getty Images
[ed. I wouldn't trust Zuckerberg with a box of matches. One thing is clear though: it'll definitely be a  more dog eat dog world (if we survive) once AI becomes more widely adopted by the public. Think Ebay auctions and armies of bots placing bids up to the last micro-second - for everything.]

"Sardinemaxxing"

I Surrendered All My Decisions and Desires. All It Took Was Many, Many Tins of Fish (NYT).

***

"... today, tinned fish is as much a sensible grocery item as it is a status symbol, a viral “hot girl food,” a borderline luxury good. I think it would probably take a long time to explain... why you can buy limited-edition tinned fish at concerts and why there is coveted merch for sale about tinned fish and why a store exists in New York City called the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine where a single-serving tin of said fantastic sardine can cost $44. [...]

Because $44 feels like a small price to pay for a sociological education, I spent some weeks recently sampling as much of this genre as I could. I ate not just sardines but also smoked salmon marinated in chili oil, small-batch mussels in sweet pepper and garlic, various types of trout, anchovies and an enormous amount of t*** — so much t*** that I refuse to look at the word anymore and you cannot make me spell it out — and what I learned is that most of it tastes kind of just … OK?

... But as I “made dinner” after work every night, i.e. nibbled t*** straight out of the package like a raccoon (tinned-fish cookbooks do exist, but if you are someone who enjoys defaulting to the lowest common denominator of effort available, you, too, might be a secret raccoon), a different idea occurred to me.

by Amy X. Wang, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times