Your Review: Dating Men in the Bay Area

[ed. Funny, sad. Long]

I. The Men Are Not Alright

Sometimes I’m convinced there’s a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas.

This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they’ve kept bottled up for years. One moment I’m learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I’m hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward.

This repeated pattern in my dating life has taught me three things:

• I am terrible at small talk.

• Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.

• The men are not alright.

This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it’s an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It’s a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships. (...)

If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.

Yet not everyone is ready to listen to men, so I’ll try to act as a translator, using my identity as a feminist twenty-something woman as a bridge. I’ll explain the pain that’s so obvious to me, yet hidden to many others, and try to provide some insight for both genders on how these issues impact dating, and what can perhaps be done to address them.

II. The Lost Generations...

(...)

In modern America, a minority of boys are born swaddled in communities that actively guide them through the process of becoming a man. However, most of those communities are religious and conservative, adjectives that the Bay Area actively repels. You won’t find many of those men around here.

Instead, the men in the Bay’s dating scene mostly represent the modern majority category–men who weren’t provided a clear map by their immediate community, and instead depended on society at large to teach them about manhood. (...)

And as for religion? Absolutely not. Throw it in the trash and light the trashcan on fire.

The first rule of the Modern Map to Manhood is that you don’t talk about the Modern Map to Manhood. Defining “manhood” is reinforcing gender roles and thus strengthening the patriarchy. Men are just supposed to “be decent people,” end of story.

…except it’s not, because there are still certain manners and conventions that men in particular are supposed to follow. And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.

So if you squint hard enough at the murky sea of conversation about gender, you can make out the following steps to become a man:

• Reject toxic masculinity.

• Be your authentic self!

• Provide for and protect others.

• Stop obsessing over “being a man.”

• Don’t expect anything in return for fulfilling these requirements.

This would be demanding a reward for meeting the bare minimum requirements, and that would make you gross and entitled.

This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.

The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man.

III. Patterns Within the Pain

Over the years, I’ve developed mental categories for the varieties of lostness men are faced with. Each one comes with its own unique troubles that stymie the health of men and the success of their relationships.

There is no science behind my categories; they are merely my attempt to find patterns within the misery of others. Their boundaries are fuzzy, so men may belong to multiple categories, or may transition from one to another.

I find it impossible to review dating in the Bay Area without utilizing these categories. My experiences with each category are wildly different; some cause me to walk away from a date feeling sad, some scared, some hopeful.

Below, I offer a description of five of the most common categories I’ve encountered, the paths that lead to these particular forms of lostness, and what happens to men who fall into these categories. I also offer my review of dating men from each category and discuss how their lostness impacts relationships. (...)

But more importantly, I hope this framework can help people to have more empathy for men who fall into these categories. The public commons are filled with lamenting about “floundering,” “immature,” “selfish,” “hateful” men who are “toxic to society.” While much of the concern is deserved, channeling it into spite and disgust toward individuals is a waste of energy.

These men did not wake up one day and intentionally decide to be filled with anger, anxiety, and apathy toward society; society failed them, and when they tried to point this out, their concerns were shrugged off.

Our broken system for raising young men deserves spite and disgust; the individuals trapped in that system deserve empathy and help. I hope this framework can help to shift conversations about these lost men toward finding solutions, rather than blaming young men for their troubles.

So without further ado, I present my categories of lostness.

IV. The Categories of Lostness

THE MAN WHO IS NOT

The Man Who Is Not isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to get lost, at least not if you knew him when he was young. He was a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal childhood. Good friends, decent family, stable home life. Yeah, there were a few rough spots, but who didn’t have those?

He’s not exactly a stand-out success, but he gets good enough grades that get him into a good enough college. He’s reluctant to go; he doesn’t enjoy school all that much. But his parents push him to get a degree, and after he arrives, he decides college life isn’t half bad–he makes some friends, dates a couple girls casually, and enjoys plenty of parties.

The worst stressor seems to be the nagging question of his degree concentration and what career he’s going to pursue. He’s changed his mind three times already, unsure what he really wants from his life, and his guidance counselor and parents are starting to lose their patience.

He finally settles on Economics. It’s certainly not his passion, but he’s always been good at math, and this seems like a decent way to make money from that talent. He still has no idea what he wants from life, but at least now he’ll have time and resources to figure it out.

He graduates with his bachelors and takes a job as a data analyst at a big bank in the city. He’s excited; he’s been promised by mentors and Hollywood and Instagram that this is going to be a magical time of his life, full of new adventures and self-discovery.

What he finds isn’t nearly so exciting. Work is boring and draining, consisting of the same tasks every day with a workload that grows ever larger, and he has zero emotional attachment to the end product. He quickly starts to suspect he chose the wrong major, or maybe the wrong job, although mentors shrug off his concerns.

Work isn’t supposed to be fun, they say. Get used to it.

It’s not uplifting advice, to say the least. He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.

Few people talk to him unless he approaches first, and the dialogue is always transactional. He would like to buy a cup of coffee. They would like to know where the bus stop is. He wants to sign up for a gym membership.

Sometimes he tries to steer the conversations to more personal topics, and he manages to get a few phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. But when he texts them, they never reply.

He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him. (...)

THE MAN WITH A PLAN

The Man With a Plan is the inverted twin of the Man Who Is Not. Rather than struggling to figure out what he wants, he knows exactly what his goals are: he’s going to get good grades, which get him into a good school, which earns him a good job, which finances a good house in a good neighborhood and attracts a good spouse who provides good kids. He knows this is what he wants, because it is the creed that has been repeated to him since he was in elementary school.

He does not know who he should be; his copy of the map is just as butchered as any other. But he knows what he needs to do, and that is what matters. After all, we’re merely the sum of our actions, right?

Life is smooth sailing for him. His mentors are right–hard work pays off, and once he graduates with that valuable degree, he lands an excellent job in exactly the field his parents always encouraged him to pursue. The money is great, and soon so is his apartment and his car.

Everything seems to be falling into place. He downloads a dating app and gets a fair amount of matches, one of whom turns into his girlfriend. She’s pretty, and successful, and shares his goals of settling down in a good neighborhood to have some kids.

His parents are thrilled. All their hard work has paid off, just as they expected.

He knows he should also be thrilled, too, but he’s not. There’s a vague sense of unease within him. It’s haunted him since he was young, sometimes dragging his thoughts to depressed and anxious places, although he always assumed it was because he just hadn’t completed all the steps in the plan. His work was unfinished, and thus so was he.

Yet as he checks off more and more boxes on the list of tasks to attain a good life, that feeling seems to be growing in strength, not decreasing.

He shrugs it off, reassuring himself that it’s just work stress that’s making him overthink things. Everything in his life is good. There’s no reasonable cause for despair, so he just needs to let those thoughts go.

Years pass, and he works hard to juggle work and his romantic relationship and his friends, although his friends seem to take less time these days. They’re getting married, having kids, and becoming too busy to hang out. When they do get together, it’s usually for an activity–an escape room, a movie night, karaoke. Once the event completes, people scurry off to other obligations, leaving little time for deep conversations.

But he has his girlfriend, at least. She’s just as pretty and smart and ambitious as ever. She’s also getting increasingly anxious for a ring, dropping hints that eventually start to sound more like demands.

This should excite him, but instead it just stirs the formless dread within him. He chastises himself for it–he needs to grow up and learn to commit. He’s too old to be yearning for the life of a bachelor. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. (...)

And his girlfriend… when he really thinks about it, there’s little in common between them except the same checklist of goals. She’s a wonderful partner, but is she a wonderful partner for him?

He doesn’t know. For so long, he’s convinced himself that people are just a sum of their actions, and if he just has a solid plan, he’s going to be a good person with a good life. Now he realizes that’s a lie. (...)

His girlfriend says they should sign up for some wine-and-paint nights. He says they should break up.

He quits his job, too. He hates it; it consumes his time and sucks at his soul, leaving behind a robotic husk. He’s done with that bullshit. Done.

His friends suggest he’s having a mental breakdown and needs help. It confirms his suspicions: they don’t know him at all. If they did, they would see that he is helping himself. He’s finally taking the time to find and understand himself, to discover his purpose.

For a few weeks, he’s elated and excited to be on this new journey. But then the existential dread begins to creep back in.

He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers. (...)

He feels empty. His unknown future starts to feel like a crushing concern, rather than an exciting adventure.

His few remaining friends suggest that maybe he should try to get back together with his girlfriend, maybe try to piece together his old life. It’s not too late, they assure him.

But he doesn’t want that. He misses sex and cuddling and having someone to tell about his day, but he doesn’t miss her. It’s probably because he’s fundamentally broken, and she deserves better than him. And as for his job, he can’t bring himself to possibly go back, despite his rapidly dwindling bank account.

He turns to the dating world, hoping maybe finding a solid partner will help him solve his brokenness. Yet he seems to keep attracting women with similar forms of emptiness within them, and a void that joins with a void is still just as empty.

But he’s not going to give up. He has to find someone, something to give him purpose. Otherwise, his whole life and all his work and all his pain has been pointless. And he’s not sure he could deal with that outcome.

Dating a Man With a Plan:

In my experience, Men with Plans are the most common form of lost men in the Bay Area. I feel like half the men I go on dates with fit into this category to some degree.

These men also tend to be intensely attracted to me, or rather, to my lack of a conventional plan. I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way.

My story is like crack to them. They tell me they want to be more like me; they insist they want to see more of me. There seems to be a mistaken belief that they can absorb my personality through osmosis if they date me, absolving themselves of the requirement to figure out their own path and personality.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring Marks a Return to Vintage Elegance

The pop star’s antique-inspired sparkler channels the “heirloom look,” reflecting a return to antique stones.

In her 2008 classic song “Love Story,” Taylor Swift fantasized about getting proposed to: “He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring / And said, ‘Marry me, Juliet.’”

Seventeen years later, Ms. Swift, 35, finally had her fairy-tale engagement. The football player Travis Kelce, also 35, proposed with what appears to be an elongated, old mine cushion cut diamond set on a yellow gold band. (A cushion cut diamond has rounded corners.)

The ring was designed by Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewelry in New York. Ms. Lubeck makes hand-engraved jewelry with natural gemstones.

“It’s not just a flashy piece, but more of an aesthetic, really beautiful diamond,” said Marion Fasel, a jewelry historian and the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance.” Her friends in the jewelry world, she said, have been excited about the piece because of its high quality.

“You can tell this is a beautiful diamond from the light and faceting arrangement,” Ms. Fasel said, estimating the weight to be around seven carats.

“It’s a real trend in jewelry and diamonds and engagement rings to choose antique stones because they have a very different kind of light,” Ms. Fasel said. “Even though this is a giant diamond, it’s a much softer light.” (...)

There also appears to be engraving on the side, as well as two smaller diamonds. “They must mean something, because everything with Taylor means something,” Ms. Fasel said. (...)

Nilesh Rakholia, the founder of Abelini Jewellery, a modern British jewelry brand, estimated that the ring weighs seven to 10 carats, costing between $1 million and $1.3 million.

“What makes this design particularly striking is its blend of vintage charm and modern minimalism,” Mr. Rakholia said. “The choice of yellow gold has been making a huge resurgence in fine jewelry, loved for its warmth and ability to enhance the brilliance of white diamonds.”

Jason Arasheben, the founder of the jewelry company Jason of Beverly Hills, said that he anticipates an uptick in requests for elongated, old mine cushion cut diamonds, as well as thicker bands and antique aesthetics. “I know I’m going to get tons of screenshots from clients,” Mr. Arasheben said, citing the Taylor Swift effect.

Ms. Fasel doesn’t expect too many details about the ring to be confirmed by Ms. Swift soon. “With my history in celebrity engagement rings, no one says anything,” she said.

Much of the jewelry worn by celebrities tends to come from professional relationships with major brands. Ms. Swift, for instance, has almost exclusively worn Cartier and Lorraine Schwartz pieces for red carpets. But an engagement ring, Ms. Fasel said, is different: It’s the “one thing that is not branded, and I feel that’s part of the reason the excitement around an engagement ring has accelerated to such a high level.”

by Sadiba Hasan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

[ed. Who doesn't love Taylor and Travis? Reminds me of another similar engagement: Inside Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio's Roller Coaster Romance (Biography). See also: Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring and the Romantic Mystique of Old Mine Diamonds (Sotheby's).]

Book Review: "Breakneck"

There was a time in 2016 when I walked around downtown San Francisco with Dan Wang and gave him life advice. He asked me if he should move to China and write about it. I told him that I thought this was a good idea — that the world suffered from a strange and troubling dearth of people who write informatively about China in English, and that our country would be better off if we could understand China a little more.

Dan took my advice, and I’m very glad he did. For seven years, Dan wrote some of the best posts about China anywhere on the English-speaking internet, mostly in the form of a series of annual letters. His unique writing style is both lush and subtle. Each word or phrase feels like it should be savored, like fine dining. But don’t let this distract you — there are a multitude of small but important points buried in every paragraph. Dan Wang’s writing cannot be skimmed.

I’ve been anticipating Dan’s first book for over a year now, and it didn’t disappoint. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future brings the same style Dan used in his annual letters, and uses it to elucidate a grand thesis: America is run by lawyers, and China is run by engineers.

Dan starts the book by recapitulating an argument that I’ve often made myself — namely, that China and the United States have fundamentally similar cultures. This is from his introduction:

I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.

A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don't get in line.

It's very gratifying to see someone who has actually lived in China, and who speaks Chinese, independently come up with the same impression of the two cultures! (Though to be fair, I initially got the idea from a Chinese grad student of mine.)

If they're so culturally similar, why, then, are China and the U.S. so different in so many real and tangible ways? Why is China gobbling up global market share in every manufactured product under the sun, while America’s industrial base withers away? Why did China manage to build the world’s biggest high-speed rail network in just a few years, while California has yet to build a single mile of operational train track despite almost two decades of trying? Why does China have a glut of unused apartment buildings, while America struggles to build enough housing for its people? Why is China building over a thousand ships a year, while America builds almost zero?

Dan offers a simple explanation: The difference comes down to who runs the country. The U.S. has traditionally been run by lawyers, while the Chinese Communist Party tends to be run by engineers. The engineers want to build more stuff, while lawyers want to find a reason to not build more stuff. (...)

Breakneck’s thesis generally rings true, and Dan’s combination of deep knowledge and engrossing writing style means that this is a book you should definitely buy. Its primary useful purpose will be to make Americans aware that there’s an alternative to their block-everything, do-nothing institutions, and to get them to think a little bit about the upsides and downsides of that alternative.

I bring up my main concerns about Dan’s argument: How do we know that the U.S.-China differences he highlights are due to a deep-rooted engineer/lawyer distinction, rather than natural outgrowths of the two countries’ development levels? In other words, is it possible that most countries undergo an engineer-to-lawyer shift as they get richer, because poorer countries just tend to need engineers a lot more?

I am always wary of explanations of national development patterns that rely on the notion of deep-rooted cultural essentialism. Dan presents America’s lawyerly bent as something that has been present since the founding. But then how did the U.S. manage to build the railroads, the auto empires of Ford and GM, the interstate highway system, and the vast and sprawling suburbs? Why didn’t lawyers block those? In fact, why did the lawyers who ran FDR’s administration encourage the most massive building programs in the country’s history?

And keep in mind that America achieved this titanic share of global manufacturing while having a much smaller percent of world population than China does.

That’s an impressive feat of building! So even though most of America’s politicians were lawyers back during the 1800s and early 1900s, those lawyers made policies that let engineers do their thing — and even encouraged them. It was only after the 1970s that lawyers — and policies made by politicians trained as lawyers — began to support anti-growth policies in the U.S. (...)

There are several alternative explanations for the trends Dan Wang talks about in his book. One possibility, which Sine argues for, is that China’s key feature isn’t engineering, but communism. Engineers like to plan things, but communists really, really like to plan things — including telling people to study engineering.

Another possibility is that engineering-heavy culture is just a temporary phase that all successfully industrializing countries go through during their initial rapid growth phase. When a country is dirt poor, it has few industries, little infrastructure, and so on. Basically it just needs to build something; in econ terms, the risk of capital misallocation is low, because the returns on capital are so high in general. If you don’t have any highways or steel factories, then maybe it doesn’t matter which one you build first; you just need to build.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Jonothon P. Sine

[ed. I've mentioned Dan's annual China summaries before (see here, here and here). When 2025 rolled around and none appeared I wrote and asked if he was still planning something. That's when he told me about this book. Definitely plan to pick it up.]

John Brosio, Moo (2009)

via:

Steely Dan

via:

The Mechanics of Misdirection

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality. 

As we hinted above, the "chat" experience with an AI model is a clever hack: Within every AI chatbot interaction, there is an input and an output. The input is the "prompt," and the output is often called a "prediction" because it attempts to complete the prompt with the best possible continuation. In between, there's a neural network (or a set of neural networks) with fixed weights doing a processing task. The conversational back and forth isn't built into the model; it's a scripting trick that makes next-word-prediction text generation feel like a persistent dialogue.

Each time you send a message to ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Claude, or Gemini, the system takes the entire conversation history—every message from both you and the bot—and feeds it back to the model as one long prompt, asking it to predict what comes next. The model intelligently reasons about what would logically continue the dialogue, but it doesn't "remember" your previous messages as an agent with continuous existence would. Instead, it's re-reading the entire transcript each time and generating a response.

This design exploits a vulnerability we've known about for decades. The ELIZA effect—our tendency to read far more understanding and intention into a system than actually exists—dates back to the 1960s. Even when users knew that the primitive ELIZA chatbot was just matching patterns and reflecting their statements back as questions, they still confided intimate details and reported feeling understood.

To understand how the illusion of personality is constructed, we need to examine what parts of the input fed into the AI model shape it. AI researcher Eugene Vinitsky recently broke down the human decisions behind these systems into four key layers, which we can expand upon with several others below:

1. Pre-training: The foundation of "personality"

The first and most fundamental layer of personality is called pre-training. During an initial training process that actually creates the AI model's neural network, the model absorbs statistical relationships from billions of examples of text, storing patterns about how words and ideas typically connect.

Research has found that personality measurements in LLM outputs are significantly influenced by training data. OpenAI's GPT models are trained on sources like copies of websites, books, Wikipedia, and academic publications. The exact proportions matter enormously for what users later perceive as "personality traits" once the model is in use, making predictions.

2. Post-training: Sculpting the raw material

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an additional training process where the model learns to give responses that humans rate as good. Research from Anthropic in 2022 revealed how human raters' preferences get encoded as what we might consider fundamental "personality traits." When human raters consistently prefer responses that begin with "I understand your concern," for example, the fine-tuning process reinforces connections in the neural network that make it more likely to produce those kinds of outputs in the future.

This process is what has created sycophantic AI models, such as variations of GPT-4o, over the past year. And interestingly, research has shown that the demographic makeup of human raters significantly influences model behavior. When raters skew toward specific demographics, models develop communication patterns that reflect those groups' preferences.

3. System prompts: Invisible stage directions

Hidden instructions tucked into the prompt by the company running the AI chatbot, called "system prompts," can completely transform a model's apparent personality. These prompts get the conversation started and identify the role the LLM will play. They include statements like "You are a helpful AI assistant" and can share the current time and who the user is.

A comprehensive survey of prompt engineering demonstrated just how powerful these prompts are. Adding instructions like "You are a helpful assistant" versus "You are an expert researcher" changed accuracy on factual questions by up to 15 percent.

Grok perfectly illustrates this. According to xAI's published system prompts, earlier versions of Grok's system prompt included instructions to not shy away from making claims that are "politically incorrect." This single instruction transformed the base model into something that would readily generate controversial content.

4. Persistent memories: The illusion of continuity

ChatGPT's memory feature adds another layer of what we might consider a personality. A big misunderstanding about AI chatbots is that they somehow "learn" on the fly from your interactions. Among commercial chatbots active today, this is not true. When the system "remembers" that you prefer concise answers or that you work in finance, these facts get stored in a separate database and are injected into every conversation's context window—they become part of the prompt input automatically behind the scenes. Users interpret this as the chatbot "knowing" them personally, creating an illusion of relationship continuity.

So when ChatGPT says, "I remember you mentioned your dog Max," it's not accessing memories like you'd imagine a person would, intermingled with its other "knowledge." It's not stored in the AI model's neural network, which remains unchanged between interactions. Every once in a while, an AI company will update a model through a process called fine-tuning, but it's unrelated to storing user memories.

5. Context and RAG: Real-time personality modulation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) adds another layer of personality modulation. When a chatbot searches the web or accesses a database before responding, it's not just gathering facts—it's potentially shifting its entire communication style by putting those facts into (you guessed it) the input prompt. In RAG systems, LLMs can potentially adopt characteristics such as tone, style, and terminology from retrieved documents, since those documents are combined with the input prompt to form the complete context that gets fed into the model for processing.

If the system retrieves academic papers, responses might become more formal. Pull from a certain subreddit, and the chatbot might make pop culture references. This isn't the model having different moods—it's the statistical influence of whatever text got fed into the context window.

6. The randomness factor: Manufactured spontaneity

Lastly, we can't discount the role of randomness in creating personality illusions. LLMs use a parameter called "temperature" that controls how predictable responses are.

Research investigating temperature's role in creative tasks reveals a crucial trade-off: While higher temperatures can make outputs more novel and surprising, they also make them less coherent and harder to understand. This variability can make the AI feel more spontaneous; a slightly unexpected (higher temperature) response might seem more "creative," while a highly predictable (lower temperature) one could feel more robotic or "formal."

The random variation in each LLM output makes each response slightly different, creating an element of unpredictability that presents the illusion of free will and self-awareness on the machine's part. This random mystery leaves plenty of room for magical thinking on the part of humans, who fill in the gaps of their technical knowledge with their imagination.
The human cost of the illusion

The illusion of AI personhood can potentially exact a heavy toll. In health care contexts, the stakes can be life or death. When vulnerable individuals confide in what they perceive as an understanding entity, they may receive responses shaped more by training data patterns than therapeutic wisdom. The chatbot that congratulates someone for stopping psychiatric medication isn't expressing judgment—it's completing a pattern based on how similar conversations appear in its training data.

Perhaps most concerning are the emerging cases of what some experts are informally calling "AI Psychosis" or "ChatGPT Psychosis"—vulnerable users who develop delusional or manic behavior after talking to AI chatbots. These people often perceive chatbots as an authority that can validate their delusional ideas, often encouraging them in ways that become harmful.

Meanwhile, when Elon Musk's Grok generates Nazi content, media outlets describe how the bot "went rogue" rather than framing the incident squarely as the result of xAI's deliberate configuration choices. The conversational interface has become so convincing that it can also launder human agency, transforming engineering decisions into the whims of an imaginary personality.

by Benji Edwards, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Credit: ivetavaicule via Getty Images

[ed. See also: In Search Of AI Psychosis (ASX).]

Anonymous, Fair entry, photographs exhibit
via: markk

Asian Cultural Symphony Orchestra 亚洲文化乐

 

Another Barrier to EV Adoption

Junk-filled garages.

There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about electric vehicle adoption here in the US. The current administration has made no secret of its hostility toward EVs and, as promised, has ended as many of the existing EV subsidies and vehicle pollution regulations as it could. After more than a year of month-on-month growth, EV sales started to contract, and brands like Genesis and Volvo have seen their customers reject their electric offerings, forcing portfolio rethinks. But wait, it gets worse.

Time and again, surveys and studies show that fears and concerns about charging are the main barriers standing in the way of someone switching from gas to EV. A new market research study by Telemetry Vice President Sam Abuelsamid confirms this, as it analyzes the charging infrastructure needs over the next decade. And one of the biggest hurdles—one that has gone mostly unmentioned across the decade-plus we've been covering this topic—is all the junk clogging up Americans' garages.

Want an EV? Clean out your garage

That's because, while DC fast-charging garners all the headlines and much of the funding, the overwhelming majority of EV charging is AC charging, usually at home—80 percent of it, in fact. People who own and live in a single family home are overrepresented among EV owners, and data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from a few years ago found that 42 percent of homeowners park near an electrical outlet capable of level 2 (240 V) AC charging.

But that could grow by more than half (to 68 percent of homeowners) if those homeowners changed their parking behavior, "most likely by clearing a space in their garage," the report finds.

"90 percent of all houses can add a 240 V outlet near where cars could be parked," said Abuelsamid. "Parking behavior, namely whether homeowners use a private garage for parking or storage, will likely become a key factor in EV adoption. Today, garage-use intent is potentially a greater factor for in-house charging ability than the house’s capacity to add 240 V outlets."

Creating garage space would increase the number of homes capable of EV charging from 31 million to more than 50 million. And when we include houses where the owner thinks it's feasible to add wiring, that grows to more than 72 million homes. And that's far more than Telemetry's most optimistic estimate of US EV penetration for 2035, which ranges from 33 million to 57 million EVs on the road 10 years from now.

I thought an EV would save me money?

Just because 90 percent of houses could add a 240 V outlet near where they park, it doesn't mean that 90 percent of homes have a 240 V outlet near where they park. According to that same NREL study, almost 34 million of those homes will require extensive electrical work to upgrade their wiring and panels to cope with the added demands of a level 2 charger (at least 30 A), and that can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

All of a sudden, EV cost of ownership becomes much closer to, or possibly even exceeds, that of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine.

Multifamily remains an unsolved problem

Twenty-three percent of Americans live in multifamily dwellings, including apartments, condos, and townhomes. Here, the barriers to charging where you park are much greater. Individual drivers will rarely be able to decide for themselves to add a charger—the management company, landlord, co-op board, or whoever else is in charge of the development has to grant permission.

If the cost of new wiring for a single family home is enough to be a dealbreaker for some, adding EV charging capabilities to a parking lot or parking garage makes those costs pale in comparison. Using my 1960s-era co-op as an example, after getting board approval to add a pair of shared level 2 chargers in 2019, we were told by the power company that nothing could happen until the co-op upgraded its electrical panel—a capital improvement project that runs into seven figures, and work that is still not entirely complete as I type this.

The cost of running wiring from the electrical panel to parking spaces becomes much higher than for a single family home given the distances involved, and multifamily dwellings are rarely eligible for the subsidies offered to homeowners by municipalities and energy companies to install chargers.

by Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Getty

Human Exceptionalism

A terrific new book, The Arrogant Ape, by the primatologist Christine Webb, will be out in early September, and I don’t think a nonfiction book has affected me more, or taught me more, in a long time. It’s about human exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it.

It also has illuminating things to say about awe, humility, and the difference between optimism and hope. (...)

Here’s my review:

Here are some glimpses from the review:

***

Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.” [. . .]

I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.

For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.

Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”

Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments. (...)

It would be possible to read Webb as demonstrating that nonhuman animals are a lot more like us than we think. But that is not at all her intention. On the contrary, she rejects the argument, identified and also rejected by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that the nonhumans animals who are most like us deserve the most protection, what Nussbaum calls the “so like us” approach. (This is also part of the title of an old documentary about Jane Goodall’s work.) Webb sees that argument as a well-meaning but objectionable form of human exceptionalism. Why should it matter that they are like us? Why is that necessary? With Nussbaum, Webb insists that species are “wonderfully different,” and that it is wrong to try to line them up along a unitary scale and to ask how they rank. Use of the human yardstick, embodied in the claim of “so like us,” is a form of blindness that prevents us from seeing the sheer variety of life’s capacities, including cognitive ones. As Nussbaum writes, “Anthropocentrism is a phony sort of arrogance.”

by Cass Sunstein, Cass's Substack |  Read more:

Image: Thai Elephant Conservation Center

[ed. See also: this.]

Bohemian Seafood Rhapsody

via:

Dialectical Damage

On the walk a girl asked me why I wrote about relationships and I said it was because relationships, like clothes, are things you can’t avoid. Unless you’re a hermit, you come in contact with people every single day, and the decisions you make around who you like and dislike, who you keep close and avoid, who you love and how you treat them become the foundation of your life. Everyone has a philosophy on relationships, even if they can’t articulate it. If you’re good at relationships, you don’t need to be good at literally anything else; if you’re bad at relationships, you will never be happy, no matter what other virtues you possess or what you achieve in the world. Put that way, it sounds scary, and I’ve always approached relationships with a certain kind of terror.

Being in relationship with another person often involves a clash of styles. Like, someone else might have a similar philosophy on relationships, but they probably don’t have the exact same approach. And relationships are inherently a two-person game, so suddenly you’re subject to someone’s process—how they communicate, how they spend their time, who they like, what they value. And you have to decide if you like it, and more than that, are capable of adapting to it.

I used to believe that you should love someone for who they are. I still believe that, but with the caveat that I think that you should also love how they handle things. Is the distinction meaningful? Maybe it’s obvious—as a matchmaker, a lot of people certainly tell me they want to date someone whose judgment they respect. Of course, someone’s judgment can be broken down into a million little things. What’s their prose style? Do they talk slow or fast, do they think slow or fast? Are they confrontational? Are they direct or indirect? How do they talk when they’re angry? How do they apologize? How do they give feedback? Are they expressive or contained?

I mentioned offhand to a friend recently that I could never date one of our mutual friends. He has a habit—I’m gonna make it up for privacy—something like, he believes in only buying plane tickets when he’s already at the airport. My friend couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get past that. And my take was basically that it’s not about the habit itself, it’s about the way that it’s representative of a million other things about this person and their style of doing things and how they live. About their relationship with time, anxiety, control. The great thing about friends is that you aren’t exposed to every single downside of their style and general conduct—like, to some extent it doesn’t really matter if they’re messy or clean, if they’re avoidant or anxious, if they’re a good romantic partner or only an okay one, because you’re not affected by it. But if you’re dating someone and living with them, you are impacted by everything they do.

Often I wish I could approach romantic relationships with the loving detachment I bring to friendships. Like, sometimes you’re on the phone with a friend and they’ll be like, “I’m considering doing [The Worst Idea Ever]” and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I don’t think you should do that, but good luck if you do!” But that would necessarily be a rejection of the merging that occurs in romantic love, where what they do to themselves becomes partially something they do to you.

by Ava, bookbear express |  Read more:

Image: Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976
[ed. See also: affinity (be).]

August 25, 2025: Federal Assault on American Cities - This Week, Chicago

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes From An American |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh; via

[ed. A speech for the ages, summarizing nicely where we are and how we got here (and echoed by others (below). I think this country is primed for a massive disobedience event. It would be a good bookend to Woodstock (and provide some atonement for what we've done to this world, our lives, and future generations). Democracy Day(s): D-Day.]

via:

Constitutional Collapse in Real Time

This morning, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the same bureaucratic language once used to investigate Trump’s actual document theft, now weaponized against Trump’s critics.

We are no longer operating under constitutional government. We are witnessing its systematic dismantlement by the very people sworn to preserve it. This is what constitutional collapse looks like in real time—not dramatic overthrow or military coups, but the patient corruption of every institution designed to constrain power until they serve only to protect it.

Nobody wants to admit this reality because admitting it requires confronting what it means for everything else we’ve assumed about American democracy. But that comfort is a luxury we can no longer afford. The Bolton raid isn’t an aberration—it’s observable evidence that we’ve already crossed the line from constitutional republic to authoritarian protection racket.

The Bitter Irony of False Equivalence

There’s a devastating irony in Bolton becoming one of the first high-profile victims of Trump’s weaponized Justice Department. Throughout the 2024 election, Bolton and many establishment figures operated from the “anti-anti-Trump” position—treating both candidates as equally flawed, seeing no meaningful moral distinction between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, flattening existential differences into ordinary political disagreements.

Bolton couldn’t bring himself to endorse Harris despite understanding perfectly well what Trump represented. Like so many sophisticated voices, he was too committed to maintaining his independent credibility to make the obvious moral choice that democratic survival required. He performed the elaborate intellectual gymnastics necessary to avoid acknowledging the clear distinction between a candidate committed to constitutional governance and one openly promising to dismantle it.

Now Bolton experiences personally the constitutional crisis he refused to prevent politically. The FBI agents who ransacked his home weren’t rogue actors—they were following orders from an administration he couldn’t oppose when it mattered. His decades of public service, his genuine expertise, his legitimate policy concerns—none of it protected him once he crossed the regime he helped normalize through sophisticated neutrality.

This pattern extends far beyond Bolton. Across the political spectrum, intelligent people convinced themselves the stakes weren’t really that high, that institutions would constrain Trump’s worst impulses, that the “adults in the room” would prevent constitutional catastrophe. The anti-anti-Trump stance provided permission structure for millions of Americans to vote for authoritarianism while telling themselves they were making a normal political choice.

By flattening the moral difference between Harris and Trump, these voices enabled the very outcome they claimed to fear. Harris represented continuity with constitutional governance—flawed and frustrating, but operating within democratic frameworks. Trump represented systematic destruction of constitutional governance—openly promising to weaponize federal power and eliminate civil service protections. These weren’t equivalent positions requiring sophisticated analysis to distinguish.

The Propaganda Function of “Objectivity”

The most insidious aspect of this false equivalence is how it masquerades as intellectual sophistication while functioning as authoritarian propaganda. When someone with a platform responds to Trump’s systematic weaponization of federal law enforcement by invoking the “Biden Crime Family,” they’re not demonstrating objectivity—they’re selling surrender.

What exactly is the “Biden Crime Family”? Hunter’s laptop? Business dealings investigated by Republican committees for years that produced no criminal charges? Meanwhile, we have documented evidence of Trump selling pardons, accepting foreign bribes, conducting government business at his properties, and now using the FBI as his personal revenge service. These aren’t comparable phenomena requiring balanced analysis—they’re manufactured distractions designed to normalize actual criminality through false equivalence.

When public figures invoke “both sides” rhetoric during an active constitutional crisis, they’re not rising above partisanship—they’re providing cover for the side that systematically benefits from confusion and paralysis. They’re giving their audience permission to remain passive while democracy dies, to treat the collapse of constitutional government as just another partisan disagreement where reasonable people stay neutral.

This sophisticated-sounding neutrality serves the same function as “just asking questions” or “maintaining balance”—rhetorical devices that sound reasonable but provide cover for unreasonable things. The “Biden Crime Family” talking point in response to the Bolton raid essentially argues: “Well, both sides weaponize law enforcement, so this is just normal political hardball.” But one side investigated actual evidence through proper channels, while the other raids former officials for writing books critical of the president.

Authoritarians don’t need everyone to support them actively—they just need enough people to remain confused and passive while they capture the machinery of state. When people with influence treat constitutional governance and authoritarian rule as equivalent, they’re not maintaining objectivity—they’re actively participating in the normalization of authoritarianism.

The Observable Reality of Systematic Collapse

We need to stop pretending this is normal politics conducted by unusual means. The evidence of constitutional collapse surrounds us daily: the executive branch operates through fake emergency declarations to bypass Congressional authority. Trump conducts trade policy through personal decree, ignoring constitutional requirements for legislative approval. The Supreme Court creates immunity doctrines that place presidents above accountability. Congress suspends its own procedures to avoid constitutional duties.

Federal law enforcement has become a revenge machine targeting political opponents while providing protection services for regime loyalists. ICE operates as domestic surveillance apparatus building algorithmic dossiers on American citizens. The FBI raids critics while ignoring documented crimes by allies. The Justice Department empanels grand juries to investigate Barack Obama while dropping cases against Trump.

This is the systemic destruction of a government constrained by law. Not merely political dysfunction. The people orchestrating this understand exactly what they’re building: a protection racket masquerading as constitutional government, where loyalty determines legal consequences and opposition becomes criminal activity.

The Bolton raid demonstrates this logic perfectly. FBI Director Kash Patel, Trump’s personal enforcer now wearing federal authority, tweeted “NO ONE is above the law” while his agents searched the home of a man whose crime was exercising First Amendment rights. Attorney General Pam Bondi amplified: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” This is justice as theater, law enforcement as performance art, federal power as instrument of personal revenge.

by Mike Brock, Notes From The Circus |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock.com

[ed. For real. See also: Who Are the “Real” Americans Here? (NFTC); and, We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong (NYT).]

What About The Children?

The First Generation of Parents Who Knew What We Were Doing—and Did It Anyway

I have harmed my own children through my screen addiction.

I write those words and feel them burn. Not because they’re dramatic but because they’re true. I was a tech executive who spent years thinking about both technology and philosophy. I understood these systems from both sides—how they were built and what they were doing to us.

The technologist in me recognized the deliberate engineering: intermittent variable reward schedules, social validation loops, dark patterns designed to create dependency. The philosopher in me understood what this was doing to human consciousness—fragmenting attention, destroying sustained thought, replacing authentic relationship with parasocial bonding.

I wasn’t building these social media platforms. But I used their products. And I couldn’t stop. Even knowing exactly how they worked. Even understanding the philosophical implications of attention capture. Even seeing what they were doing to society, to democracy, to our capacity for thought itself.

Still I fell. Still I chose the screen over my family. Still I modeled for my children that they were less interesting than whatever might be happening in the infinite elsewhere of the internet.

My children learned what I valued by watching what I looked at. And too often, it wasn’t them.

This Is Not Okay

No, seriously. What about them?

We’re destroying them with social media and now AI chatbots, and we all fucking know it. If you’re a parent who’s watched your kid with a smartphone, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vacant stare. The panic when the battery dies. The meltdown when you try to set limits. This isn’t kids being kids. This is addiction, and we’re the dealers.

There’s a tech cartel in Silicon Valley that built the seeds of our modern epistemic crisis. But here’s the thing—they didn’t know what they were building either. Not at first. They thought they were connecting people, building communities, making the world more open. They discovered what they’d actually built the same way we did—by watching it consume us. And by then, they were as addicted to the money as we were to their platforms.

Their platforms have been weaponized into systems of mass distraction. They’re not competing for our business—they’re competing for our attention, buying and selling it like a commodity. And now these companies have all taken a knee to Trump to make sure no government regulation ever gets in the way of them perfectly optimizing us into consumerist supplicants.

This isn’t an anti-capitalism screed. I’m a technologist. I think self-driving cars are going to be amazing. But social media as it’s currently designed is fucking insane, and we all know it.

by Mike Brock, Notes From The Circus |  Read more:

Image: Ben Wicks on Unsplash

Nano Banana

Something unusual happened in the world of AI image editing recently. A new model, known as "nano banana," started making the rounds with impressive abilities that landed it at the top of the LMArena leaderboard. Now, Google has revealed that nano banana is an innovation from Google DeepMind, and it's being rolled out to the Gemini app today.

AI image editing allows you to modify images with a prompt rather than mucking around in Photoshop. Google first provided editing capabilities in Gemini earlier this year, and the model was more than competent out of the gate. But like all generative systems, the non-deterministic nature meant that elements of the image would often change in unpredictable ways. Google says nano banana (technically Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) has unrivaled consistency across edits—it can actually remember the details instead of rolling the dice every time you make a change.

Google says subjects will retain their appearance as you edit.

This unlocks several interesting uses for AI image editing. Google suggests uploading a photo of a person and changing their style or attire. For example, you can reimagine someone as a matador or a '90s sitcom character. Because the nano banana model can maintain consistency through edits, the results should still look like the person in the original source image. This is also the case when you make multiple edits in a row. Google says that even down the line, the results should look like the original source material.

Gemini's enhanced image editing can also merge multiple images, allowing you to use them as the fodder for a new image of your choosing. Google's example below takes separate images of a woman and a dog and uses them to generate a new snapshot of the dog getting cuddles—possibly the best use of generative AI yet. Gemini image editing can also merge things in more abstract ways and will follow your prompts to create just about anything that doesn't run afoul of the model's guardrails.

The model remembers details instead of generating completely new things every time.

As with other Google AI image generation models, the output of Gemini 2.5 Flash Image always comes with a visible "AI" watermark in the corner. The image also has an invisible SynthID digital watermark that can be detected even after moderate modification.

You can give the new native image editing a shot today in the Gemini app. Google says the new image model will also roll out soon in the Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI for developers.

by Ryan Witwan, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Images: Google

[ed. Hot new thing. Try it here. See also: Google aims to be top banana in AI image editing (Axios).]

Finally! Tommy Fleetwood Slays All Demons, is a PGA Tour Winner, the FedEx Cup Champ and $10 Million Richer

Fairway Jesus. All-around good guy.

Tommy Fleetwood finally did it. He won his first PGA Tour title on Sunday, and it wasn’t just any tournament. He won the Tour Championship, which means he also won the season-long FedEx Cup title. He won $10 million. He won the season-long resilience trophy, too.

He clearly has learned some lessons. He taught some, too.

After finishing runner-up six times and third six times, after posting 30 top-five finishes, after banking more than $33 million—not a dime of which buys satisfaction—after 163 frustrating starts, including two agonizing self-inflicted near misses earlier this summer, Fleetwood slayed doubts and demons in the most definitive way possible. With nothing but sour memories to summon, he held his nerve and held onto the lead down the stretch for a three-shot victory over a small but elite field at East Lake Golf Club.

“I’ve been a PGA Tour winner for a long time, always in my mind. Nice to do it in reality,” said Fleetwood, 34, wearing alternating emotions of happiness and relief on his face. Pride, too. Justifiably so.

A final-round two-under 68 wasn’t without its moments of worry for the Englishman. Heck, as he played the par-5 home hole with a three-shot lead, Fleetwood found it hard to relax. Such is the case with scar tissue. But his 18-under 262 total beat Patrick Cantlay and Russell Henley by three shots as Fleetwood became the first player since Chad Campbell in 2003 to make the Tour Championship his first career win.

After he tapped in for par, Fleetwood looked overwhelmed. But only momentarily. Then he raised both arms and let out a roar as the American crowd chanted his name. (...)

Twice now this year golf has witnessed a redemptive moment in Georgia. In April at Augusta National Golf Club, it was Rory McIlroy capturing the Masters and the career Grand Slam and etching his name into history. Fleetwood didn’t have to wait as many years as McIlroy, but he had to endure disappointment over many more tournaments. Yes, he had won eight times abroad, but he still felt like he wasn’t a complete player until he put down a marker in the U.S.

“It's a step in everybody's career that they want to make,” he agreed. “You don't need anything, but I wanted it. I wanted to do it. I go back to it, this one win, it sort of completes the story of the near misses, and it has a crescendo to what has been building towards the back end of the season. But when I go home, I'm just going to start practicing again. I'm going to start working again, and I'm going to look towards the next tournament.”

Tied with Cantlay after 54 holes just two weeks after he had surrendered the final-round lead in the first leg of the playoffs, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, Fleetwood didn’t submit an impeccable round of golf, but for once he managed to erase errors with timely swings and key putts. And he also got help from his main challengers on a day of sunshine and surprising stumbles.

Once on each nine Fleetwood secured back-to-back birdies soon after a bogey. The ones at the 12th and 13th with matching six-footers came after a two-shot swing at the 10th enabled Cantlay to briefly climb within one stroke of Fleetwood. But having lost his swing for a few holes, Fleetwood righted a ship that had previously ran aground.

“I think I did an amazing job today of … I had to reset myself. It wasn't easy today; it wasn't plain sailing,” said Fleetwood, who is expected to rise from 10th to sixth in the world. “I lost my swing in the middle of the round. I was really erratic, and I had to find my swing, really under … I don't think trying to win a tournament is as much pressure as trying to keep your playing rights, things like that. It's a different type of pressure. I'm not going to say it's bigger or less, it's just a different type of pressure. It's a joy to be in contention and try and win golf tournaments.

“At the same time, you have to deal with those little demons that are in the back of your mind, and doubt creeps in. You remember what you got wrong, don't want to get it wrong again, and you have to force yourself to think of the positives. I think just as experience builds, at some point you're going to get it right, and I did today.” (...)

It wasn’t just the eight years of consistency on tour that have contributed to the narrative that Fleetwood was due for a breakthrough. Consider his last eight rounds; he resided among the top six on the leaderboard after each. And then he extended that streak throughout the week at East Lake, a first in the FedEx Cup Playoffs thanks to shooting in the 60s each day.

Resilience is a bit more achievable when you’re on form. Nevertheless, you have to talk your mind into letting your body hit the shots. You have to show heart, too. That was Fleetwood’s real triumph this week.

“I think it shows how great of an attitude he has towards the game, how resilient he is,” McIlroy said.

“I enjoyed it while it lasted in a sick way,” Fleetwood said with a smile, referring to the recurring questions about his inability to close out a victory in America. “I hope that I can give … that we can talk about plenty more things in the future, really. I will look back at all of this, and again, I feel like I keep repeating myself. I'll be proud of the strength that I had to show to keep coming back and showing that it can be done if you're resilient enough and you keep putting yourself in those positions.

“I'll look back at it and I'll be able to tell people that I am really, really pleased that I get to talk to kids or aspiring golfers or aspiring sports people, whatever they're trying to do, and I can genuinely talk about showing resilience or keep coming back after tough losses and keep working and all of those things and the skills that you have to use in order to put yourself there again and then finally get it done. I'm really, really pleased that I get to do that, and that I'm proof that it can happen.”

by Dave Shedloski, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Happy to see Tommy finally win a big one (like everyone else in golf world). What's most impressive is that after all those near misses he never got down on himself or doubted his abilities, just took everything in stride and continued pressing on. A good win for a good guy (here's an example of his character; here too). See also: The critical moment that led Tommy Fleetwood to his first PGA Tour victory (GD).]