Week 19

The Conversation: "In central Seoul, South Korea, a motorway once covered a buried urban stream. Today, that same stretch has been uncovered – a process known as daylighting – and this river is home to plants, fish and insects. This flowing water cools the city in summer and attracts tens of thousands of people every day. What used to be concrete now boosts biodiversity, the local economy and community wellbeing.

Similar transformations are unfolding elsewhere.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, river habitats and wetlands were rebuilt after a major earthquake in 2011, guided in part by Māori knowledge of waterways and floodplains. In Vancouver, Canada, nature-based stormwater systems have been integrated into urban design"

Gore Vidal: "[1987] Lately, the residents of the White House have taken to chattering about 'the jurisprudence of original intent.' Apparently, nothing that was not intended by the original inventors of the Constitution should ever become law. This is gorgeous nonsense since no one knows what, precisely, any of those 55 well-to-do white men originally intended. All that we do know is that they cobbled together a federal system that none regarded as sacred or, in some cases, even much good. Thomas Jefferson was safely out of the country when the essentially Tory Constitution was hammered out. He was so little enthusiastic with the result that he proposed a new convention every generation on the ground that, 'We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy, as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.' Poor Jefferson was a spiritual Darwinian. Little did he foresee that 200 years later we, his heirs, would be the barbarians and he a sad civilized unheeded voice from the past, while a barbarous stone effigy of him defaces what was once a decent Dakota mountainside. The only thing he got straight was that each generation would need to alter its institutions, while guarding its 'inalienable' rights. Two centuries later, we maintain reverently our rotted institutions while addressing ourselves with ever greater ingenuity to the destruction of the Bill of Rights."

Anatolia has its own version of neuroticism. There, the mismatch is between the real local culture (based on the Aegean/Mediterranian, Caucuses, and the Levant) and the elite-defined national identity, which is in opposition to the real culture. The gap between the two is extremely wide that frequently causes a Turkish Neuroticism.

But how and where the problems arise is different. In the case of a subculture trying to act incompatibly with the real culture problem usually originates from a close-knit circle (family, relatives) who also (mistakenly) identify with the same subculture and can create peer pressure on a person. National identity is at a different level, since such identity has more to do with state/citizen relations and how elites see the world, this is the trouble spot. We see serious state / citizen conflicts (hello, Kurds), and intellectuals, who are the carriers of the national narrative, are not able to address problems because they have blinders on. Regular people have the luxury here to nod along when confronted with the bizarre requests of their ill-defined national identity - otherwise they can mostly ignore it. The state and elites however get a pie in the face year after year bcz they can't escape the severe effects of the "original sin".

Engineer: "[T]he runway got cut.. The CEO had come back from an offsite where someone had shown him a demo of an agent writing a whole feature in fourteen minutes, and he had believed it (the way people believe things when they want to believe them) and he had told the board he could cut thirty percent of engineering by Q2. Now it was your job to figure out how.

You told yourself the juniors would be fine. They'd adapt, they'd reskill, they'd land somewhere. You told yourself the seniors could absorb the missing hands, that the agents would cover the gap. You told yourself you'd revisit it next quarter. You signed the list. You went home. You drank a little more than usual. You went to sleep.

You knew.

You knew, because you'd been the engineer who had to clean up after the last leader who'd been sold a simple answer...

There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."

The left needs to create a litmus test for centrists trying to act left. For decades there was a litmus test applied to economic left, now it is time for payback. Ever since the 90s, if you didn't say the right (!) words on labor, globalization, capital, you were shunned in the Democratic Party and its related corporate apparatus. Now the faux left need to get what's coming for them.

Little consultant insider joke..

Link

Software delivery is more than writing code. Even with "agentic coding" someone needs to prepare the test that the code conforms to so "the agent" can go through its loop nudging the hallucination machine in the direction to make LLM pass the test. Integrating legacy systems, the overall architecture of the code still needs to be designed. This is still a huge area for outside experts. Johnny Jerkoff from marketing will not be able to vibe code an entire application for his org.

My guess is companies will still hire consultancies, still pay them millions to deliver projects bcz they will need that overall package. The consultants will come in, business process guys in their turtlenecks, they're gonna do their meetings, they will "drill down", have "sidebar meetings", prepare a "scope document". The client will pay lota Benjamins and they will be happy about it.

Link

"@mike_k@mstdn.social

Brit Labour’s loss rate currently running at 83%, worse than the worst predictions. Early days etc, but wowsers."

"@Coho@mountains.social

The one time 5% tax on billionaires initiative has made it onto the California ballot. Silicon valley is mightily opposing it . I'll gleefully be voting Yes!"

The Guardian: "California billionaire tax proposal garners enough signatures to head to ballot.. Proposal for a one-time 5% tax on billionaires in the state is opposed by Silicon Valley tech titans and Gavin Newsom"

#Ukraine 04/22 - 05/07

New front opened in Kursk

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"@nutjob4life@fosstodon.org

I'm not vegan because I love animals. It's because I HATE PLANTS."

"@agreenberg@infosec.exchange #wired

Researchers at security firm RedAccess found more than 5,000 vibe-coded apps, created with AI tools from Lovable, Replit, Base44 and Netlify, with essentially no security, accessible on the open web. About 40% exposed sensitive personal or corporate data"

Palestinian Solidarity UK: "We’ve just disrupted Barclays’ AGM in London to protest against its bankrolling of Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.

Take action: head to the link in our bio to join the boycott Barclays campaign. If you’re a Barclays (or Barclays owned Tesco Bank) customer, pledge to shut your account on 30 July, our next account closure day. If you’re not a customer, e-mail Barclays senior management to let them know that you will not use the bank’s services.

Barclays provides over £8billion of investment and loans to companies supplying Israel with weapons used in its genocide in Gaza and atrocities in the West Bank.

Furthermore, Barclays has a direct agreement with Israel to act as a ‘primary dealer’ for its government bonds. Israel uses the revenue from selling bonds to fund its crimes against Palestinians."

DE: "China’s new hydrogen push could be a step towards cleaner steel.. The new five-year plan and a pilot scheme signal China is getting serious"

If there was a "step change" around real-world understanding, manipulation, Tesla cars would self-drive using pure vision as good as a human. They still cannot.

I dont understand why seeing some improvements in language model tech some immediately jumped to the conclusion that robotics had also automatically improved. The two subjects have nothing to do with eachother except the use of some common, basic tools... Robotics is still at the stage where language models were before LLMs, pre Attention, pre scaling.

The Guardian: "Raw sewage from nearly 40,000 people and businesses is being pumped straight into the sea because the British overseas territory of Gibraltar does not have, and has never had, a wastewater treatment plant."

The Lever: "The Obama Shrine — Brought to You by Wall Street.. The lavish Obama Presidential Center arrives as millions face economic strain — built by donors who benefited from the very system he once promised to change."

"@jake.sooscreek.productions‬

Ag secretary confirming 1 in 4 US farmers has no fertilizer secured, American Farm Bureau survey says up to 70% can’t afford enough fertilizer for the season under the spiked costs

Honestly shocked this isn’t bigger news. 25% of farms are just not planting at all this season. Farm bankruptcy up 46%"

"JFK had done this or that right before his death, therefore..". Those theories are legion, there is one involving the Israelis too. I could go there, and there is nothing more I'd like than pinning JFK's death on Israel, but it would not be the truth, from my POV.

And of course there is always a f-ing Clinton on the wrong side of an issue

[-]

Watergate was a setup, they framed Nixon.

JFK was so bleeping stupid he wasn't even able to draw the ire of the military-industrial complex, he buttered their bread, they liked him. He was done in by the second tier business interest, not the first, the Texas oilmen in conjunction with LBJ. Ironically it was the most disliked Nixon, seen as "shady", "dubious in character", who was toppled by an MIC conspiracy bcz he got out of Vietnam.

Senor Coconut - Riders On The Storm #music

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"@ozeng@aus.social

.. it’s 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters, except several of the monkeys are trying to convince other monkeys that typewriters are actually monkeys"

What @neurovagrant describes sounds like a "agent" activity, loading a DLL etc, coding assistant could do that bcz it was given privileges on that machine.

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

If you want a fun threat hunt, look at what Claude et all are doing in your company. Spoiler: dumb shit."

"@neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org

A brave new world:

we experienced our first EDR detection due to LLM activity today.

The sanctioned coding assistant, operated by a linux subject matter expert, was writing files to /tmp/ and loaded a DLL, causing a low-confidence machine learning hit and notifying SecOps.

Upon investigation the activity was tracked back to the coding assistant doing unexpected things in especially dumb ways.

Be ye wary of the clankers."

"@glyph@mastodon.social

'Don’t rely on responses from Gemini Apps for diagnosis, treatment, or medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice. Its output is for informational purposes only.'

motherfucker what do you think 'information' is"

"@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place

ars technica: we don't know how they did it but google chrome now extracts a pint of blood every time you log on

chrome user, dizzy from blood loss: I swear to god I am like this close to switching to firefox

another chrome user, on the verge of fainting from severe blood loss: no need to resort to that, just switch to [insert today's trendy chrome fork here] and be smart like meeee"

"@Tutanota@mastodon.social

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB Gemini Nano AI model on your device

❌ No consent

❌ No opt-in

❌ No real opt-out for regular users

This isn’t a small experiment & it’s on billions of devices."

"@amiserabilist@beige.party

Microsoft Edge: Passwords end up in memory as plaintext

Browsers are supposed to decrypt them on use and delete them from memory afterwards. Edge however keeps all the passwords decrypted in memory all the time."

"Japan is deploying ultra-cheap cardboard drones built for swarm warfare and expendable combat missions — $2,000 expendable combat drones cost less than some gaming PCs"

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"jalefkowit@vmst.io

Richard Dawkins out there reminding everyone that there is nobody quite so dumb as a smart person"

"Intellectuals" of certain type are more prone to fall for LLM deception.. The type is someone who is not pushing the tech to its limits in all sorts of computational domains (I do), where LLM's abilities either sink or swim, the results are easy to check. But colorful articulate bullshittery, verbal gymnastics they can do, without fail, because, well, there is nothing substantial to evaluate.

Futurism: "Dawkins.. asked Claude to read the novel he was working on. In his extremely British wording, the bot displayed a 'level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!"'.. Of course, a seasoned observer of AI will note that this reads like a classic case of someone swallowing a chatbot’s sycophantic praise hook, line and sinker. Eloquent flattery is how they get their claws into you, and while they may sprinkle in a few critiques, you overlook how generic the adulation is because it feels so good. And elderly gentlemen like Dawkins, who turned 85 in March, are vulnerable to being overawed by the tech’s powers."

Stosszahlansatz!

"@rmi@cloudisland.nz

working in technology right now is great, the most PT Barnum motherfuckers you ever saw are all like, we have invented a time machine, and now 78% of all discourse is required by law to include endless hours of strokey-beard waffling about the endless political and social and economic implications of time travel and the deep impacts on our whole society and how we all must take time travel very seriously and shovel all our money into the time machine furnaces or we will be stranded in some terribly unfashionable decade with no snacks or friends and we’re all so busy worrying about that we’ve somehow failed to realise that there is no fucking time machine"

Think about it, who has Italian neuroticism? The only one I can think of is Chris Cuomo. But the Jewish version is much more severe isn't it? If you are gripped by that shit, it can mess you up... People should not mess with culture... The basis of it resides in your emotional brain and has a stronger pull than even the intellect. If you are born and grown in Thailand you cannot think your way out of being a Thai. Same goes for Russia, China, Canada.

Culture spreads via osmosis (not taught), person-to-person, subconciously, without guidance, or teaching, or rote. Your assumed identity / subculture, if you have any, and even national identity are irrelevant to your cultural make up.

However if some of the assumed subidentities wanted to "act out" their assumed subidentity in US, some will be more successful than others. For example if someone of Italian descent wanted to "act Italian" in that Catholic way sometimes depicted on the big screen, he could be fine, bcz Catholicism is part of the American cultural make up. If someone who is Jewish and wanted to "act Jew" however, s/he would have a harder time, because there is no Jewishness in US culture. This must be the reason for the famous Jewish neuroticism, it happens because the gulf between who some try to be, and who they actually are (just another American) is so wide, trying to close that gap can drive people towards mental disorders.

DW: "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons.. Another brand backflips and admits that touch-sensitive buttons for frequently used controls were a mistake, but only after the nudge from customers."

"@MikeDunnAuthor@kolektiva.social

The USA is a place with no healthcare, but 1000 billionaires.

At least 49 of those billionaires made all their money from Private Healthcare.

Perhaps you can connect the dots."

Novara Media: "UK Government Rejects Public Call for Inquiry Into Israeli Influence.. Over 114,000 people want a probe."

"France is leading a new wave of nuclear innovation with the development of the Stellarium, an Advanced Molten Salt Reactor (AMR)... This technology utilizes a liquid fuel composed of chloride salts and fissile materials like uranium or thorium, allowing it to operate as a 'fast breeder'"

IC: "France declares Energy Sovereignty... On April 23, the French government put forward a 22-point plan for accelerating the country's move away from dependence on fossil fuels."

The Register: "Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation.. Just as the community adopted the term 'hallucination' to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.

Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a 'bug' but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

During 'refinement,' the model gravitates toward the center of the Gaussian distribution, discarding 'tail' data – the rare, precise, and complex tokens – to maximize statistical probability. Developers have exacerbated this through aggressive 'safety' and 'helpfulness' tuning, which deliberately penalizes unconventional linguistic friction. It is a silent, unauthorized amputation of intent..

If 'hallucination' describes the AI seeing what isn't there, semantic ablation describes the AI destroying what is. We are witnessing a civilizational 'race to the middle,' where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation. If we don't start naming the rot, we will soon forget what substance even looks like."

SCMP: "[2017] Xi Jinping says houses are ‘for living in, not for speculation'"

The product / commodity that powers all free market economies itself is not priced according to free market principles.

What does OPEC do? They are engaged in price fixing aren't they? They are called a cartel after all.

"[2025] OPEC And Its Allies Have Helped Stabilize The Global Oil Market"

Le Monde: "Russia stands by Mali's military junta at all costs.. Russian Africa Corps mercenaries have suffered several setbacks since jihadists launched an offensive on April 25, including the death of pro-Russian defense minister Sadio Camara and the loss of the town of Kidal."

DW.com: "Russia to block Kazakh oil flows to Germany via key pipeline"

The vibe coding interaction cycle with LLMs can involve some bug fixing, troubleshooting. On pure chat interaction, you describe task, LLM gives code, and one out of three times the code will give errors. You give the error to LLM, it can fix it, or another error can occur. The tech has some ability in these areas, they ingest the entire Internet where people talk about similar issues, so they can eventually land on a solution.

Now, these so-called agents simply automate said interaction. Via agents user describes task and a verifiable goal, now "the agent" will talk to LLM, run the code it outputs (this is critical, you have to give access to your own machine so LLM can run stuff), it takes errors if any, feed it back to LLM, and do this until there is working code. Basically it replicates what users do on their pure chats, introduces some automation on top.

In other words "agents" are not an extension, the next iteration of LLM tech, they are a "wrap" around it. They try to cover a shortcoming with a little glue and silly putty.

"@adapalmer@wandering.shop

Mexico is planning free universal healthcare for 120 million people. President Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent decree aims to unify a system currently defined by unequal access, patchy coverage and out-of-pocket costs. It also builds on a longer record of expanding public health coverage. The first phase began this month, with citizens aged 85 and older now eligible"