[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

Turns out… it’s nothing.

I sent in a Freedom of Information Act request in April, after the unpleasantness regarding the Correspondent’s Dinner attacker, because I was curious if it or indeed anything else had gone down on my permanent record. Nope! If you believe the FBI — admittedly more difficult in these latter days than it was before — I have no record in their files. Apparently despite my three decades of writing in the public eye and two decades of being reasonably well-known author, nothing I have done (or that others have said about me) is cause for the FBI to say to itself “maybe we should keep track of him.”

Which, I guess, good? I had assumed there might be something, even if it was tangential and/or primarily related to other people with bigger and more substantial files. People have had FBI files for even less suspicious activity than I have ever offered to the world. But no, there’s nothing of note. At least now I don’t have to pay the extra that would have been required if the search had needed more than a couple of hours to dig out everything the bureau had on me. My search was quick! And cheap!

I suppose the FBI could be lying about having a file on me, but in all sincerity I doubt it. I know my own past and it is both law-abiding and, from the perspective of law enforcement, boring; I’ve never been cited for anything worse than speeding, and even that was more than a decade ago. And no matter how much certain right-wing bile-spewers on the Internet want to paint me as a flaming socialist threat to decent society for writing books they don’t like (also something that peaked more than a decade ago), in reality there’s nothing in my political beliefs or actions that paints me as terribly subversive. The most “subversive” thing I’ve done is donate money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and even that doesn’t rate, not even now when the current administration is (laughably) trying to go after them. We all have to live with the reality that I am, in fact and officially, a step below “mostly harmless.”

It’s never too late to get an FBI file, I hear some of you saying. You are not wrong, and also, I’m not sure how I would be going about doing that. I am not, as it turns out, getting more conservative with age, which is a thing people used to say would generally happen. My rather unremarkable principles turn out to be more radical as I go along, if only because the political center in the US has shifted so wildly right while I have mostly stayed in the same place. But clearly that’s not enough to rate interest in itself. My own revolutionary action, such as it is, is less about taking it to the streets (Bradford, OH is not a hotbed of protest marches) and more about openly donating money, both individually and through our family foundation. The IRS has a file on me, for certain. I’ve seen that.

So: No FBI file after all. Which, fine and good. I don’t suppose if the FBI or any other “alphabet” organization in our government really wants to find out more about me, that they would lack public information to do so. They could start here, the official repository of my thoughts for the last 28 years. Hello, FBI and everyone else! There’s a search function here! Have fun!

— JS

10 gallon hattan

May. 4th, 2026 08:00 am
[syndicated profile] cocktail_virgin_feed

Posted by frederic

2 oz Corazon Reposado Tequila (Cimarron)
3/4 oz Cardamaro
1/2 oz Casa d'Aristi Narano (Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao)
1/8 oz Allspice Dram (Hamilton's)
1 dash Peychaud's Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a coupe glass.
Two Mondays ago, I returned to the online recipe flashcards for The Violet Hour in Chicago, and I honed in on the 10 Gallon Hattan from Fall 2022 menu. The bar's Instagram post from October 2022 described how it was "A tequila-based twist on a classic Manhattan – boozy and forward featuring notes of allspice and bitter orange." While I did not have Casa d'Aristi's somewhat bitter orange liqueur, the similarities to the Sherpa with curaçao and allspice dram lured me in. When prepared with Pierre Ferrand's curaçao, the 10 Gallon Hattan rode high with roasted vegetal aromas and a hint of vanilla. Grape, orange, and caramelized notes on the sip slid into tequila, bitter herbal, allspice, and orange flavors on the swallow.

Hacking Polymarket

May. 4th, 2026 09:46 am
[syndicated profile] schneiersecurity_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

Polymarket is a platform where people can bet on real-world events, political and otherwise. Leaving the ethical considerations of this aside (for one, it facilitates assassination), one of the issues with making this work is the verification of these real-world events. Polymarket gamblers have threatened a journalist because his story was being used to verify an event. And now, gamblers are taking hair dryers to weather sensors to rig weather bets.

There’s also insider trading: a lot of it.

[syndicated profile] doctorow_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow


Today's links



Alexander Rodchenko's classic Russian constructivist 'books' advertising poster; Lilya Brik's face has been replaced with Greta Thunberg's, and instead of shouting the word 'books,' a spray of geometric sunbeams are emanating from her mouth. Superimposed and beneath her is a Soviet propaganda poster of a furiously pointing Lenin. Lenin's skin is Cheeto orange and he wears a straw-yellow Trump wig.

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure (permalink)

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose Hope in the Dark got me through the first Trump administration and whose A Paradise Built In Hell inspired my novel Walkaway:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/

Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.

Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are far more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627

But to really max out on demand destruction, you need both rationing and a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is incredibly cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are also incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too. For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world's energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he's kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico's Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He'll even let them take all of Venezuela's oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they'd need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump's a machine for creating stranded assets at scale. As Solnit writes, that's because Trump has no strategic foresight; strategy being "the ability to plan for things to arise that may counter your agenda, so you can continue to pursue your agenda." Trump's a bully, and he's accustomed to intimidating his adversaries into capitulating. That's why Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."

This is the GOP's whole vibe these days: "how dare you do unto me as I have done unto you?" Solnit points to GOP outrage in response to Democratic gerrymandering in blue states, which Democrats undertook in direct, explicit response to shameless gerrymandering in Texas and other red states. Solnit says that the GOP has "confused having a lot of power with having all the power" and is perennially surprised when their attacks on Iran and Minneapolis evince a reaction from the people in Iran and Minneapolis.

This is the defective reasoning that caused Comrade Trump to hormuz the world into the full Gretacene. Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops. Trump has summoned up another army of people, who are worried about the politics of oil, the fact that oil leads to wars and can be mobilized as a weapon when it is withheld from your country.

Activists couldn't deliver the energy transition on their own – but now there's a coalition that's driving rapid, irreversible change: activists concerned about the future of the planet, in coalition with economic actors concerned about the consequences of not being able to cook, heat your home, or keep the lights on; in coalition with national security hawks worried about the geopolitics of oil. That's Comrade Trump's three-part mobilization: human rights, finance, and national security, all insisting that the enemy gets a vote, and voting unanimously for a post-American world.

Last week marked the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, attended by representatives from 54 countries who sidestepped the US- and China-dominated UN to ratify the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, whose 18 signatories include Colombia, a major oil producer.

The world is moving on, and Trump continues to insist that he can roll back history to some imaginary era of a Great America. Every time this fails, he doubles down on his failures and sets the stage for more failure to come. Take Trump's decision to have the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this a powerful force for demand destruction – but, as Trita Parsi writes, it's also poison for Trump's own electoral fortunes in America:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/

Trump won in 2024 by campaigning to improve Americans' cost of living. This is a powerful campaign strategy, and it's not limited to fascists, as Zohran Mamdani can attest. But for this to work, you actually have to reduce the cost of living once you take office, otherwise you will be hated and rejected and hampered in everything you do. The problem (for Trump – but not for Mamdani!) is that America's high cost of living is driven by corporate profiteering, and the only way to fix it is to make the rich poorer so as to make the poor richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

If Trump had chosen to bullshit his way through the Iranian blockade of the strait, allowing the Iranians to collect a $2m toll per tanker (payable in Chinese renminbi!), well, oil would have gone up in price some, but the coming runaway inflation on food and fuel would have been substantially blunted. Instead, he decided to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" by adding a US blockade, which means that prices in the US are going to skyrocket, making his base furious and driving turnout for Democrats, along with support for more renewables, even among blood-red Republican rural Texas ranchers, who have had enough of "DEI for fossil fuels":

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be some extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!

Meanwhile, not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

The infrastructure of renewables – panels, batteries, transmission lines – requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes. But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.

Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:

https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11

Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.

A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.

(Image: Stefan Müller (climate stuff), CC BY 2.0)


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Beck dumps Winona and becomes a Scientologist https://web.archive.org/web/20010502151355/http://www.suntimes.com/output/zwecker/zp30.html

#25yrsago Fuck San Francisco https://craphound.com/fucksf.html

#25yrsago Desktop Linux rant https://web.archive.org/web/20021204051712/http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3297/1/

#25yrsago History of ASCAP and BMI https://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/royalty-politics.html

#25yrsago AUSA: If we let you decrypt DVDs, airplanes will start falling out of the sky https://web.archive.org/web/20010504221956/https://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,43485,00.html

#25yrsago Microsoft shits on open source https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/business/technology-microsoft-is-set-to-be-top-foe-of-free-code.html

#20yrsago Dan Gillmor explains “citizen journalism” https://web.archive.org/web/20060512043722/https://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/showPost.cfm?myComm=BA&bid=2271

#20yrsago UN plans a treaty to kill podcasts https://web.archive.org/web/20060512141428/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004619.php

#20yrsago Sen Stevens tries to sneak the Broadcast Flag into law https://web.archive.org/web/20060505054724/http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/05/breaking-news-broadcast-flag-is-back.html

#20yrago How the US Navy queered San Francisco https://web.archive.org/web/20060504024636/http://ask.yahoo.com/20060502.html

#20yrago Help wanted: new DRM czar for Sony-BMG https://web.archive.org/web/20060512063724/http://www.paidcontent.org/sonybmg-director-new-technology-content-protection-nyc

#20yrsago Rich Americans as sick as poor Brits https://web.archive.org/web/20060516225807/http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9098&feedId=online-news_rss20

#15yrsago Sculpture embodies lossy copying using much-copied house-key https://web.archive.org/web/20110316215804/http://www.danielbejar.com/Visual_Topography_of_a_Generation_Gap.html

#15yrsago Piracy and poor countries: Big Content wants to have its cake and eat it too https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/03/why-poor-countries-lead-world-piracy

#15yrsago Brust’s Tiassa: versatile fantasy in three modes https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/02/brusts-tiassa-versatile-fantasy-in-three-modes/

#15yrsago Why New Zealand was dumb to let the USA write its copyright laws https://web.archive.org/web/20110601173727/http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/7615

#15yrsago Canadian neocon Tories take a slim majority in election, pro-Internet New Democrats form the opposition https://web.archive.org/web/20110503041720/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/new-political-era-begins-as-tories-win-majority-ndp-grabs-opposition/article2006635/

#15yrsago Will technology make us freer, and if so, how? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/

#15yrsago Wikileaks: America will foot the bill for record company enforcement in NZ if NZ will let America write its laws
https://web.archive.org/web/20110502135002/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5769/125/

#15yrsago Horology considered hazardous: the “German Time Bomb” clock with its deadly mainspring https://web.archive.org/web/20110516102538/https://www.anniversaryclocks.org/aci/haller-gtb.pdf

#5yrsago Political economy vs inflation https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/01/mayday/#inflationary-political-economy

#1yrago Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

#1yrago AI and the fatfinger economy https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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[syndicated profile] overthinking_it_feed

Posted by Matthew Wrather

Support Overthinking It by becoming a member for $5/month!

Matt Belinkie and Peter Fenzel gather to kick off summer movie season the only way they know how: by completely failing to talk about the movies they planned to discuss and instead spending over an hour unpacking the mythological architecture of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Along the way they ask the questions no one asked them to ask: Why doesn’t Rosalina just go find Peach? What are the stars even for? And why did Bowser let his son build a universe-destroying gun without so much as a stern talking-to?

The hosts argue that the Mario movies aren’t really psychological dramas but mythological ones, stories where Peach’s lost star-sister and Bowser’s tragic indulgent-dad arc operate less like character beats and more like foundational symbols of the civilization that takes its children to the movies. Bowser, it turns out, may be the antithesis of Mario and Donkey Kong’s distant fathers from the first film. He’s so desperate to be liked by Bowser Jr. that he’d let the fabric of reality unravel rather than enforce a bedtime. He doesn’t help his kid grow up, he reverts to his villainous archetype.

From there, the conversation pinballs into the broader question of how Hollywood adapts things that were never designed to make sense. The 1993 Super Mario Bros. film is held up as the cautionary tale — a movie agonizing over how to justify two plumbers stomping on the heads of mutant goombas (although to be fair, a live action Mario movie was always an uphill battle). The hosts triangulate between three adaptation philosophies (the Grounded, the Sonic Hybrid, and the Full Embrace) and wonder where the upcoming live-action Legend of Zelda will land given that its audience wants more lore, not less.

Finally, the conversation drifts — as these things do — into a long reverie about Saturday morning cartoons, the scarcity of media in the pre-streaming era, Turbo Teen’s Cronenbergian transformation sequence, and the surprising revelation that GoBots actually came first. Plus: a preview of Dune: Part Three and whether Dune Messiah’s deliberately unsatisfying anti-climax can survive the jump to a summer blockbuster.

Download (MP3)

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Further Reading

Episode 930: Confusing Mario Odyssey with the Actual Odyssey originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

On Politics And Governance

May. 3rd, 2026 04:41 pm
[syndicated profile] overcoming_bias_feed

Posted by Robin Hanson

The key innovation that has powered the modern era is: organizations. We solve a great many problems by creating an org, setting it tasks, giving it powers and resources, and putting some key “masters” in charge.

Besides participating as suppliers, customers, employees, or targets of such orgs, there are two other key ways we engage such orgs: politics and governance. In politics, we take sides among the different alliances of masters and tasks, struggling for who will dominate. In governance, we try to hold masters accountable for achieving tasks, and seek new better ways to choose, reward, and monitor them.

Low status folks have long been advised to keep their head down and stay out of both politics and governance. Higher status folks, in contrast, are somewhat encouraged to do politics, if they are willing to risk suffering repression when their allies lose. We like democracy as more of us can more safely be political, and thus see ourselves as high status, though politics becomes less safe as political polarization rises.

However, most folks are well advised to stay out of governance, at least when that involves any substantial chance of holding masters more accountable, and thus cutting into their spoils. Masters coordinate to block cuts to their spoils. (Yes, some spoils come via achieving promised tasks, but most don’t.) In contrast, masters don’t mind and even like governance changes that don’t risk stronger accountability. Such as making it more popular, inclusive, decentralized, more intensive participation, etc.

How much should you fear masters displeased by your meddling in governance? Greatly! Org masters, and their allies and wannabes, are the fiercest predators of our world. Smart, energetic, and well-connected, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, smiling broadly, speaking gently and grandly, but holding their fangs and claws ready in shadows to strike when ready.

Alas, our world has long suffered from poor governance. So much so that for most problems we know how to solve, we don’t actually solve them. We got better enough at governance to allow the modern world to have big orgs, but just barely.

Today, our civilization faces problems so huge that we will mostly likely fall, as did the Roman Empire, to be replaced by insular fertile cultures like the Amish and Haredim. Better governance seems our best hope here, and promising alternatives do exist, ones that can be tested at small scales before deploying on larger scales. Alas such efforts are mainly blocked by spoil-protecting masters. Will enough of us risk their displeasure to force such innovation experiments in time?

Comrade Trump

May. 3rd, 2026 02:38 pm
[syndicated profile] doctorow_blog_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow

A Soviet propaganda poster featuring Lenin pointing angrily into the distance. It has been altered. Lenin now has Trump's hair and his skin in orange. The hammer/sickle logo behind him has been replaced with a cross.

This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve.


All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I’m living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Take Trump’s tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn’t buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

MP3

21st century

May. 3rd, 2026 08:00 am
[syndicated profile] cocktail_virgin_feed

Posted by frederic

1 1/2 oz Jamaican Dark Rum (1 1/4 oz Coruba + 1/4 oz Smith & Cross)
3/4 oz Blanco Vermouth (Servito)
1/2 oz White Crème de Cacao (Bols)
3/4 oz Lemon Juice

Shake with ice, strain into a coupe, and garnish with a lemon twist.
Two Sundays ago, I opened up my copy of The Madrusan Cocktail Companion book and spied the 21st Century. This was not the tequila one created by Jim Meehan at Pegu Club from the PDT Cocktail Book that I had already written about, but a rum one by Brandon Bramhall at Nashville's Attaboy. This riff stuck to the classic 20th Century structure more, and it swapped the gin and Lillet for Jamaican rum and blanc vermouth. In the glass, the 21st Century dawned upon the senses with a lemon, molasses, chocolate, and rum funk aroma. Next, lemon and caramel notes on the sip turned into dark rum, hint of funk, and chocolate flavors on the swallow.

Intelligence Dissolves Privacy

May. 2nd, 2026 10:18 pm
[syndicated profile] lesswrong_curated_feed

Posted by Vaniver

The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how.

Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our options (and the options other people in our society had). As those options change, so too our experiences, and so too our expectations of what's reasonable. I once thought it was reasonable to pick up the phone and call someone when I wanted to talk to them, and to pick up my phone when it rang; things have changed, and someone thinking about what's possible could have seen the dilution of that signal into noise coming. So let's try to see more things coming, and maybe that will give us the ability to choose what it will actually look like.

I think lots of people's intuitions and expectations about "privacy" will be violated, as technology develops, and we should try to figure out a good spot to land. This line of thinking was prompted by one of Anthropic's 'red lines' that they declined to cross, which got the Department of War mad at them; the idea of "no domestic bulk surveillance." I want to investigate that in a roundabout way, first stepping back and asking what is even possible to expect, here.

"any legal use"

Widespread access to intelligence will change privacy expectations dramatically, by allowing for 1) much more recording of information, 2) much more processing of recorded information, and 3) much more sophisticated interpretation of that information.

In American contexts, law enforcement officers have access to a wide range of information about people, but require permission to look at it (a ‘warrant’). If you’re a person of interest in a crime, they can look at your cell phone records to get evidence about whether or not you were involved in the crime, but otherwise you’re protected by the 4th Amendment from unreasonable searches and seizures. But what determines what is reasonable?

Some considerations:[1]

  1. What protects the privacy of innocent individuals. People with access to LEO systems might have their own personal reasons to look up information–like seeing what their ex-girlfriends are up to–which society doesn’t want them to be able to act on.
  2. What is informative. If you have to review the cell phone records of everyone in the LA area whenever a murder happens in LA, you’re probably going to be wasting many hours of investigative effort, because most of those people are irrelevant to the case.
  3. What is cheap. If you need to put a public servant with health care and a pension on reviewing information, it is harming the public (who is paying for this!) to make them review irrelevant information.

This has already been changed by technology becoming cheaper. It would be prohibitively expensive to have police doing stakeouts on every corner; it is not prohibitively expensive for every shopkeeper to have a CCTV system recording the street outside of their shop, and those costs continue to decline. Put together a network of those, and now a city can be under near-complete surveillance.[2]

AI continues these trends. If LLMs can review cell phone records for pennies on the dollar, it might make sense to look at a hundred times as many records. And now rather than having to have a person go camera-to-camera and track the movements of an individual thru the city, you can have a software system using facial recognition and gait analysis and spatial modeling to track whole crowds at a feasible cost.

So as a technical matter, it is already possible or it's not very far from interested parties being able to track your location at any time, if you have your phone on you or you're in a car or you're inside a city, in a 'bulk' rather than targeted way. As a social matter, this might seem pretty impolite--or it might be part of a trade most people are willing to make.

In particular, one other way that technology changes the dynamics is by making it easier for attackers to do significant amounts of damage, which raises the value of surveillance, and of predicting and catching crimes before they happen rather than investigating and punishing them after the fact.

Let's return to the interpretation of information, and look at some subtler ways that increased intelligence will change the dynamics. Many things can be inferred from 'public records' in nonobvious ways. For example, if your camera is fast enough and sensitive enough, you can measure someone's heartbeat just by watching the subtle blush-and-pale cycle of the blood in their face; standard cameras are good enough for this, and changes in heartbeat are informative about thoughts, along with other subtle changes in facial appearance.

But I'm going to talk about gaydar, because it ties back into the broader social questions of where we want society to end up. Sometimes, people can guess the sexual orientation of another person just by observing them, using both deliberate and accidental features. Gay men sometimes benefit from looking gay ("the earring in his right ear suggests--" or "his haircut implies--"), and also they have various developmental differences that can manifest in appearance. In 2018, Wang and Kosinki trained a neural network to do it off of dating photos and it substantially outperformed humans (80% success rate rather than 60% success rate.)[3]

So as we we get more widespread intelligence–as software gains capabilities that were formerly available only to human experts and use of that software becomes potentially widespread–we stop being able to hide some things. What do we want to do about that?

This doesn't include a line for when an expert observer could have guessed that I'd be gay, which is probably a decade earlier.

The world has changed a lot here, over the course of my lifetime! When I was a child, being gay was mostly hidden and navigating being gay required subtlety and discernment. Part of the response to the AIDS crisis, at the insistence of gay rights groups, was to prioritize patient confidentiality over stopping the spread.[4] But now, as an adult, being gay is not mostly hidden; you don’t have to use a profiling algorithm on my face, up until Facebook removed it in 2022 you could just go to my profile and see that I’ve checked the box for “interested in men”. (Or you could search my LessWrong comments, or–)

So from the perspective of the 2020s in America, it feels actually pretty benign. (But that's not universal; the situation is both worse in other countries, and the prospect of 'transvestigating models' feels much less benign.)

More broadly, it seems to me like there are three options for how we can react to widespread knowledge of things that were previously hidden:

  1. Acceptance. Knowing who's gay and who's straight is fine, because both options are fine, and not being confused or ignorant is useful. (I wasted a lot of hope pining after straight guys, and a few straight women wasted hope pining after me, which all could have been avoided.)
  2. Purging. Knowing who's gay and who's straight allows you to remove all of the gay boys from your all-boys high school, because you actually wanted an all-straight-boys high school.
  3. Pretend ignorance. Even tho you could know who's gay and who's straight, you have a policy like Don't Ask, Don't Tell where everyone tries to act like they don't know it. (After all, only a stalker would know something like that.)

I think there's situations where each of the three is the most appropriate option. In particular, I think the situation for acceptance of sexual minorities has been on this positive trendline in part because of increased knowledge and decreased privacy. The understanding that lots of gay people were 'normal' did a lot of normalize being gay!

I also think it's easy to find situations where purging or filtering are quite sympathetic. I in fact would strongly support my local subway system tracking who the most anti-social riders are and banning them, so that the system is cleaner and safer, and if it is cheaper and better to do so with facial recognition technology or similar 'totalitarian surveillance measures' , that seems probably worthwhile. (Similarly, it's very nice to not be murdered in a terrorist attack.) But it's also easy to see how such technologies can be deployed for undesirable ends; if border agents look thru someone's phone to try and determine if they're a member of a terrorist network, they can also determine whether they've made social media comments that are critical of Trump. A current controversy is how much local cities should sign on to surveillance networks like Flock; when many jurisdictions have committed to not cooperate with federal law enforcement on immigration enforcement, signing on with a contractor which does cooperate with federal law enforcement runs counter to those commitments.

As a fan of the truth and a believer in its efficacy, I am most biased against the third option. Yet many widely and strongly cherished parts of our society rest on it! Anti-discrimination laws that bar decision-making based on race are an example that it seems unwise to recklessly drop, and yet race is often quite easy for people or systems to infer.[5] European regulations about privacy seem to me to mostly be insisting that technology develop in this direction.

Yet my overall sense is that we cannot stick our heads in the sand for long. The highest priority uses will drive adoption of the mass surveillance technology, and I strongly suspect that concerns about terrorism, great power conflict, and small-scale bad actors will be serious enough that these highest priority uses will not be foregone. Then once the camel's nose is in the tent the rest of the camel will follow. The best way out is to fix our goals and preferences:

Rather than hoping that local entities can prevent the enforcement of immigration rules that are clearly not in their interest, develop new immigration rules that cities across America would be comfortable cooperating with, and then use the advanced technology to do so cheaply.[6]

Develop watchmen that watch the watchmen, such that people with access to bulk surveillance systems and are using them in corrupt ways are themselves found and punished.

Most controversially, become comfortable with benign deviancy (of the sort which will turn out to be much more prevalent than it seems) and align criminal standards with actual behavior (a world where the true speed limit is 20mph higher than the posted one will not be well-served by ubiquitous vehicle tracking).

Perhaps most importantly, it might help you to start behaving as if you're being watched and things about you are more obvious than they once were.

  1. ^

    I should note that I'm thinking like an economist or systems designer, not a lawyer. There must be extensive case law on what people currently think is reasonable or unreasonable, but that's only relevant for reasons of continuity. We’re imagining the future, of what things will look like after people have adapted to their new situation, which plausibly involves major changes to the underlying laws.

  2. ^

    Consider also the situation with cashless toll systems like EZ Pass, which have long worried privacy advocates, as they can (and sometimes are!) used to track where people travel. There's nothing fundamentally rights-violating here, tho; this could be replicated by anyone with enough eyes in enough places. (We already consent to each car having a unique identifier to make tracking easier!)

  3. ^

    “Wait,” you might say, “60% success rate for a trait with a baseline prevalence of less than 40%? How did the human guessers do worse than always guessing ‘straight’?” In their dataset, they equalized the number of homosexual and heterosexual faces, so pure-chance guessing would have scored 50%. This is still an artificial situation (they're dating site photos, not street photos) which doesn’t take into account base rates.

  4. ^

    As someone interested in public health, this horrifies me, but I acknowledge the ways I am a sweet summer child who grew up with the internet and the dramatic upswing in acceptance and downswing in intolerance, and decision-makers in the 80s had very different life experiences and expectations.

  5. ^

    When I was a data scientist, I ended up looking into the contours of compliance here. Many things that aren't race are nevertheless informative about race, and so you can construct a composite out of information which individually is legal or ethical to use, which is just a proxy for race, and thus the composite is illegal or unethical to use, and so people developed statistical techniques to try to make sure this isn't happening, and that the composite is composed just of 'legitimate' influence. This involves being deliberately and willfully blind to facts about the world to achieve some social end, but that's what polite ignorance is!

  6. ^

    There are too many horror stories of ICE misbehavior, detaining American citizens and racially profiling people on the street. Would the situation be improved or made worse by a national facial recognition database? On the one hand, Flock and similar systems would allow ICE to notice whenever someone without legal residency went out in public; on the other hand, there would be no excuse for not immediately checking the database and releasing legal residents. I think immigration reform means we can get the benefit of the latter without having to pay the costs of the former; of course, immigration reform is its own problem that deserves its own post.





Discuss
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

I’m staying north of the river, which is unusual for me. Also, the parking lot you see in the photo isn’t for my hotel. But it is a parking lot! Forms were obeyed.

I’m on town because tomorrow I’m in conversation with Joe Abercrombie about his latest book The Devils, and if you’re curious to see us I believe tickets may still be available. If you’re not curious to see us, fine, I guess, we’ll just sit there staring awkwardly at each other for an hour or so, I mean, whatever, it’s fine. It’s fine.

Ironically, this weekend is the 35th reunion for the University of Chicago Class of 1991, of which I am a part, and I am missing those festivities for this, and I feel a bit of a heel about it. Sorry, Class of ’91. You know you’re awesome.

— JS

Figure Stuff Out Together

May. 2nd, 2026 05:07 pm
[syndicated profile] overcoming_bias_feed

Posted by Robin Hanson

We vary in our motives and priorities in thinking. For example, some try to impress, some try to sell others on pre-existing positions, some try to show loyalty and support to teams, and some try to figure stuff out. As we have norms against the other motives, when asked, many of us claim to have this last widely admired motive.

Yet, strikingly, few in public discussions present themselves as trying to figure things out together with their convo partners. Such as by posing problems and questions, reframing these to avoid sloppiness, offering alternative options and answers, noting puzzling or contrary consequences, and admitting when one’s prior convo moves are undermined by new points made.

Yes, presenting a figuring-stuff-out-together convo persona often imposes some costs relative to other possible personas. But the more eager that we are to suppress other possible interpretations of their motives, the more eager we should be to pay such costs, to assert our preferred persona.

I have to conclude that while we usually don’t want to directly admit that we seek to impress, sell, or support, we don’t actually much mind observers inferring such motives in us. Few actually have that much respect for people those who try to figure stuff out together.

Monthly topic

May. 2nd, 2026 05:11 pm
abomvubuso: (...I COULD MURDER A CURRY.)
[personal profile] abomvubuso posting in [community profile] talkpolitics
Hi again, fellers! Time for the new monthly topic. The one you chose for May was:

Post-Truth Politics Revisited



And here's the poll for June:

What should be the next monthly topic?

1) The Erosion of Neutrality
2) The Politics of Supply Chains
3) Leadership Without Legitimacy
4) Crisis Governance vs Democratic Norms
5) Political Comebacks Nobody Expected

Feel free to suggest more...

problem solver

May. 2nd, 2026 08:00 am
[syndicated profile] cocktail_virgin_feed

Posted by frederic

1 oz H by Hine Cognac (Courvoisier VS)
1 oz Cardamaro
1/2 oz Benedictine
1/2 oz Ancho Reyes Chile Liqueur
2 dash Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice, strain into a snifter (old fashioned glass), and garnish with orange oil from a twist.
Two Saturdays ago, I decided to delve into the online recipe flashcards that I uncovered from Saloon in Somerville, Massachusetts. I honed in on the Problem Solver from 2017, and I found a menu photo on GoogleMaps with this drink along with the Holy Mountain that I ordered there that year and wrote up on the blog. I have only seen Ancho Reyes paired with Cognac once in the Hawthorne's Cafe Lunaire, so I was curious to try it again. In the glass, the Problem Solver offered up orange, grape, and herbal aromas. Next, grape on the sip unfolded into Cognac, herbal, chocolate, and pepper spice flavors on the swallow.
[syndicated profile] doctorow_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow


Today's links



A post-war 'denazification' bonfire featuring several Nazi flags. It has been hand-tinted. There is a smouldering MAGA hat amidst the coals.

The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (permalink)

Comrade Trump continues his unbroken streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

But Comrade Trump's ambitious praxis knows no bounds. Now, he's helping to remake the Democratic Party as a muscular opposition with a serious commitment to workers' interests over billionaires. It's not merely that Trump has empowered the primary campaigns of leftist Democrats facing down corporate, AIPAC-backed sellouts:

https://prospect.org/2026/04/30/palestine-super-pac-new-jersey-12-district-adam-hamawy/

He's also stiffening normie sellout Democrats' spines, forcing them to confront the stark choice between socialism and barbarism! And Dem leaders don't come more normie sellout than Cory "Big Pharma" Booker, a disgrace to Corys everywhere:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170112224531/https://theintercept.com/2017/01/12/cory-booker-joins-senate-republicans-to-kill-measure-to-import-cheaper-medicine-from-canada/

Nevertheless, that very same (lesser) Cory has introduced legislation to unwind every illegal, corrupt merger that the Trump administration has waved through:

https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-introduces-legislation-to-review-and-unwind-anticompetitive-corporate-mergers-approved-under-second-trump-administration

Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were "politically influenced." "Politically influenced" sums up every major merger under the Trump II regime:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that's also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting fascism. After defeating fascism in the mid-20th century, the Allies oversaw a program of "denazification," starting with the Nuremberg trials:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials

Inspired by those trials, I've proposed that Congressional Dems could form a "Nuremberg Caucus" that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.

The idea here is to both demoralize Trump's collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, will mean something, delivering the change and hope they've been promised since the Obama campaign, but which has never materialized.

While trials and punishment for Trump's fascist goons are at the center of the Nuremberg Caucus plan, that's not all of it. The plan also calls for publicly announcing the intention to unwind every corrupt merger that was consummated under Trump. This serves two purposes: first, it promises the electorate that the monopolists who steal from them will face consequences for their crimes; but second, it also puts investors on notice that any gains from corrupt mergers will turn into massive losses once the next administration orders these companies to unscramble the inedible omelets they're cooking up, no matter what the cost.

That's exactly what Booker's CLEAN Mergers Act – cosponsored by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) – does. I don't think that Booker is listening to me, but I do think that Dems who are willing to introduce this kind of legislation can be cajoled, coerced and sweet-talked into more ambitious Nuremberg Caucus actions.

For example, there could not be a better time to announce plans to unrig the Supreme Court, which has just gutted the Voting Rights Act:

https://prospect.org/2026/05/01/turning-civil-rights-inside-out-supreme-court-voting-rights/

The Supreme Court's legitimacy has been burned to the ground, and Trump's chud justices are pissing on the ashes. Packing the court is a very good idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

It's also a very popular idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want

Which is why I included it in the Nuremberg Caucus plan. But packing the court is just table stakes. In his latest video, Jamelle Bouie lays out a detailed plan for denazifying the Supreme Court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ

As Bouie points out, "as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable…We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both."

But packing the court – while a good place to start – isn't enough. Per Bouie, the problem isn't just the court's corruption – it's how powerful the court is. Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution permits Congress to "jurisdiction strip" the Supremes: Congress can pass a law taking voting rights and racial discrimination away from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. Congress can impose ethics reforms on the court, banning justices from taking bribes (I can't believe I have to type these words).

Congress can turn the Supreme Court's current building into a museum and move the Supreme Court back into its original home in Congress's basement. Congress can take away the Supremes' ability to select their clerks or which cases they hear. All the Constitution says is that there must be a Supreme Court, and it must adjudicate "disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing." Everything else is up to Congress to grant or withhold from SCOTUS.

This is very good Nuremberg Caucus stuff. It would be an amazing campaign promise for anyone primarying a shitty normie Dem in the midterms: "Vote for me, and I will be part of the legislative movement to make the Supreme Court weaker and thus more accountable."

Now, as much as I like this, I'm really holding out for a Dem to go with my big ICE-melting idea: promising million-dollar bounties for ICE officers who rat out their buddies for violating the law:

ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.

As I wrote in February:

Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a "peaceful transfer of power" is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.

But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:

https://www.nj.com/politics/2026/02/top-senate-republican-rejects-trumps-shocking-election-plan-i-think-thats-a-constitutional-issue.html

ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states ("The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue"):

https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/federal-agent-in-coon-rapids-the-more-people-that-you-lose-in-minnesota-you-then-lose-a-voting-right-to-stay-blue/

The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Implementing TCP over pigeon https://blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies frontman on copyright reform https://web.archive.org/web/20060505032617/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=3367a219-f395-4161-a9b9-95256c613824

#20yrsago Stephen Colbert kills at White House press corps dinner https://web.archive.org/web/20060501114431/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363

#20yrsago Cinema owners try to lure us back to the movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060620140301/https://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/14457900.htm?source=rss&channel=mercurynews_peninsula

#20yrsago Smithsonian’s sellout to Showtime slammed by Congress https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042802213_2.html

#20yrago Wallaby milk: proof against antibiotic resistant bacteria https://web.archive.org/web/20060429102138/http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=593632006

#20yrsago Documentary on radical free school https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpuSo-GSfw

#15yrsago Facebook celebrates royal wedding by nuking 50 protest groups https://anticutsspace.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/political-facebook-groups-deleted-on-royal-wedding-day/

#15yrsago Jay Rosen: What I Think I Know About Journalism https://pressthink.org/2011/04/what-i-think-i-know-about-journalism/

#15yrsago Companies should release the source code for discontinued products https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/if-youre-going-to-kill-it-open-source-it/

#15yrsago Scratch-built “freedom press” https://makezine.com/article/craft/freedom_press/

#15yrsago HOWTO quilt a 3D Mad Tea Party set https://www.instructables.com/Quilted-Mad-Tea-Party-Set/

#15yrsago Online activism works: Canada delayed US-style copyright bill in fear of activist campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20110501103056/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5763/125/

#15yrsago Ad agency to radicals: “We own radical media(TM)” https://web.archive.org/web/20110503045909/http://radicalmediaconference.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/we-make-radical-media-you-make-adverts/

#15yrsago Troubletwisters: Garth Nix and Sean Williams’ action-packed new kids’ fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/30/troubletwisters-garth-nix-and-sean-williams-action-packed-new-kids-fantasy/

#15yrsago RIP, Joanna Russ https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012974.html#547586

#5yrsago Experian doxes the world (again) https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

#5yrsago Disney's writer wage-theft is far worse than reported https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#pay-the-writer

#5yrsago Korea set to break the Samsung dynasty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#dynasties

#5yrsago What the hell is "carried interest" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

#1yrago Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

#1yrago Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/30/trump-u/#i-think-you-know-what-the-trustees-can-do-with-their-suggestions


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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[personal profile] conuly
After this week. Because after this week, we should have paid off the gas and electric bills, yay!

But yeah, one or two weeks of crunch is one thing, a string of them is something very different.

****************


Read more... )

Back to the Very Very Basics

May. 1st, 2026 11:08 pm
[syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

For reasons that are not important now, I have found myself in the possession of a lightly used but still somewhat recent Asus Chomebook, of the sort that one can pick up for less than $200, with 4GB RAM, 64GB of onboard storage, a less than spectacular screen resolution, and a keyboard without backlighting, which means on this dark gray version that once the lights dim, its usefulness will compromised for all but the most talented of touch-typers. It’s been a while since I’ve used something this basic (I’m writing this piece on it now), and inasmuch as my daily driver laptop is a reasonably specced-out M4 MacBook Air, I was curious how I would feel about it stepping down from that.

Answer: I… don’t hate it? I don’t love it, to be clear, and it’s not something I would likely ever choose over using my Air. And there are some things about it which are pretty egregious, that are clearly the result of this thing clocking in at under $200, most notably a screen that would have to work to be called “washed out,” and a track pad that feels genuinely terrible to use, especially coming from a MacBook, which have what are acknowledged to be the best trackpads in the world. It is as plastic as the day is long, and given the paucity of its RAM and the inevitable end of ChromeOS, this computer is so close to the line between “useful” and “e-waste” that one might as well give it a balancing beam.

On the other hand, the keyboard doesn’t suck to type on; it’s a basic chiclet board but it’s nicely spaced and the keys don’t feel overly mushy. The onboard i/o puts the Air to shame: Both the Air and the Asus have two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, but the ASUS throws in a USB-A and Mini-SD card as well (I don’t suspect that the USB-C ports on the Asus are Thunderbolt, but they can port out to an external display, which ain’t chicken feed). Plus the ASUS webcam has a manual privacy shutter, which, frankly, is a thing every laptop with a camera should have regardless. It’s not the absolute worst! You could spend $200 on much more questionable things!

Every now and again I do the check-in with myself on what might be the bare minimum I would need, in terms of personal possessions, if less than wonderful things came to pass I had to live in deeply reduced circumstances. And without going into great detail about the thinking process about this, one of the things I’ve decided is that if I had an acceptable laptop, that would go a fair way toward my needs in terms of audiovisual entertainment, and personal creativity. A decent laptop is a television, a radio, a window to the world and an instrument of expression.

This Asus is… not up to the task of being my acceptable laptop in this circumstance. Too limited by tech and by software, basically. I’ve been a long time enjoyer of Chromebooks, and loved my Pixelbook from back in the day. But Chrome ultimately never won the argument that a thin client to the Internet was all you would ever need, and now that ChromeOS is going to be folded into Android at some nearish point, it never will. Chromebooks will go into the west as forever the “second laptop,” the one you used when you didn’t have actual work to do.

(What laptop do I think it probably the closest to my Lowest Acceptable Spec? I think at this point it’s obvious: a MacBook Neo, which has all the advantages of a Chromebook, including price point for some mid-spec Chromebooks, and also can run more complex software that one would need for creative work, and not be totally reliant on an online connection to do it. It’s tempting to say the Neo is overhyped at this point, except I don’t think it actually is; at $600, it basically takes a knife to the Chromebook value proposition for everything but barebones educational use. It’s not the laptop I would want — that’s my Air — but it would certainly do.)

Considering that I do have a MacBook Air, and an iPad Pro with a “Magic Keyboard,” which essentially takes care of all my laptop-ish needs, what might I use this little Chromebook for? Basically, as a guest laptop, if someone visiting needs to do something that requires a full-size keyboard or a screen larger than the one on their phone, but didn’t happen to bring their own laptop with them. And… that’s pretty much it? As I said, I don’t want to entirely discount this laptop; it’s better than I expected for less than $200, and it fulfills its own admittedly modest brief perfectly well. It’s just that I don’t know how much longer this particular brief is going to need to be fulfilled.

— JS

[syndicated profile] boston_restaurant_feed

It looks like one of the oldest restaurants in Cambridge is shutting down.

Based on information from a source from earlier this week, S&S Deli in Inman Square is closing, with a Boston Globe article confirming that the Cambridge Street eatery is indeed shutting down in June. In the article, co-owner Gary Mitchell says that "I'm proud of the chapters behind us and looking forward to what's next," while noting that it "has been in my family for 107 years....I understand people may love S&S. It's time to make time for other restaurants, and other things are coming." A message sent to us from Mitchell on Tuesday simply said "Stay tuned!" when asked about the status of the place.

S&S Deli first opened in 1919, being known for its classic deli fare including potato pancakes, corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, chopped liver, cheese blintzes, knockwurst, and more.

The address for S&S Deli is 1334 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139. Its website can be found at http://www.sandsrestaurant.com/

(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)


[A related post from our sister site (Boston's Hidden Restaurants): List of Restaurant Closings and Openings in the Boston Area]


Please help keep Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants going by making a one-time contribution or via a monthly subscription. Thanks! (Donations are non-deductible.)

Friday offtopic: Trust but verify

May. 1st, 2026 09:42 pm
mahnmut: (Default)
[personal profile] mahnmut posting in [community profile] talkpolitics
Here's a question. How much do you trust AI?



Always remember... if you're that stupid, natural selection will get you in the end.
[syndicated profile] boston_restaurant_feed

A pair of Mexican restaurants in Boston is down to one, as its newer location has shut down.

According to a poster within the Friends of Boston's Hidden Restaurants Facebook group page, Viva Burrito in the city's Fenway neighborhood has closed, with a sign out front at the Peterborough Street space indicating that it shuttered earlier this week. The sign does indicate that the Franklin Street location in the Financial District will remain open, and that customers can continue to order online.

The Fenway location of Viva Burrito first opened in the spring of 2025, taking over the space where the original location of El Pelon Taqueria had been (El Pelon continues to operate a restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton).

The address for the now-closed Viva Burrito in the Fenway is 92 Peterborough Street, Boston, MA, 02215. The website for the business can be found at https://www.vivaburritosboston.com/

(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)


[A related post from our sister site (Boston's Hidden Restaurants): List of Restaurant Closings and Openings in the Boston Area]


Please help keep Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants going by making a one-time contribution or via a monthly subscription. Thanks! (Donations are non-deductible.)

[syndicated profile] boston_restaurant_feed

A new cafe is on its way to Boston, and it will be taking over the space that had been home to a location of a local group of vegan ice cream shops.

According to a post within the South End Community Board Facebook group page, Kawa is planning to open on Tremont Street in the South End, moving into the former FoMu space at the corner of W Brookline Street in the South End. The Instagram page for the upcoming spot indicates that it will be a European-style coffee spot/cafe that focuses on using local products, while also having "a friendly and really warm atmosphere." 

The South End location of FoMu closed toward the end of last year, while other locations of FoMu in Jamaica Plain, the Seaport District, and Allston have also shut down over the past few years (locations in the Fenway and Quincy Market remaining in operation).

The address for the upcoming Kawa in the South End is 655 Tremont Street, Boston, MA, 02118. Its Instagram page is at https://www.instagram.com/kawaboston/

[Earlier Article]
FoMu in Boston's South End Has Closed

(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)


[A related post from our sister site (Boston's Hidden Restaurants): List of Restaurant Closings and Openings in the Boston Area]


Please help keep Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants going by making a one-time contribution or via a monthly subscription. Thanks! (Donations are non-deductible.)

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