Bluesky Summary 2025-03-27 - 2025-03-30

This article alone would be enough to condemn the Efficient Market Hypothesis to the pile of the para-religious axioms. It takes an staggering amount of class affinity blindness to expect coherent or competent policy from Donald Trump. via @scottlgreer.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social

Christopher Mims Business leaders all across America are freaking out that Trump's tariffs will kneecap their firms. “There’s an overriding sense of helplessness” among executives. “CEOs are feeling stunned, and they’re not used to feeling like they don’t have good moves.” (gift link)

I'm experimenting with a quick tool I wrote to post to my blog a summary of what I've posted/reposted here. I've got no beef with bluesky, but until it's on my blog it's not mine (and my blog is really a mirror of files on my disk: if it's not a file on my disk it's not mine).

Preaching to the choir here, but I think that's so much the basis of their worldview ["doing something by software is better than by humans, even if it's done worse"] that it'd take a literal crisis of faith for them to see the point. via @kevinriggle.bsky.social

Roxanne Shirazi I attended a library vendor AI demo/upsell today and I wish I could explain to them that everything they are selling could be achieved by hiring like two more people in our library

Gotta be honest: my first parse of "Knives for the rich" was *not* the intended one.

//medium.com/@bruces *Allow this comely backwoods-survivalist YouTube model-influencer to loft your knife-prices up into the stratosphere youtu.be/raPmQ3BfunE?...

*This*. Heck, I've given talks where people took as novel the observation that you don't get paid for your productivity, you get paid the cost of your cheapest replacement so software running on somebody else's computers is never going to increase your wages long-term. That is, even if it worked.

Ed Zitron I also think one of the most powerful forms of radicalization is educating as many people as possible about mechanics - financial, systemic and technological - behind the tech industry. Their entire success has been based on obfuscating their work as too big or complex for "normal" people to "get."

Mathematically, the chances of not finding *anybody* fall exponentially with each household you ask, so the true rate of "want to be seen with a Vance" has to be damn close to zero. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Carl Quintanilla #GoldenAgeOfAmerica 🥇

Most of media coverage of, and most of sociopolitical responses to, AI boosters (specially the wealthiest ones) has been handicapped by a lack of familiarity with that set of para-religious beliefs. They've been circulating for decades with... 1/ via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

BeijingPalmer again, a lot of the big AI boosters are essentially millenarians who believe the AGI god is around the corner and so all other concerns can be abandoned

There's no way Canada is sharing anything really important (if anything, they are making what they shared obsolete) and if I were Australia/New Zealand I'd be holding back a bit. Five Eyes isn't formally dead, but I suspect it's quickly becoming a mutual disinfo arena. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

James Ball Five Eyes is the closest and deepest intelligence sharing partnership the world has ever known. It is *essential* to UK security (and that of the US). Can it survive Donald Trump’s second term? www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united...

A commonality in the Trump/Musk ethos is that it's not pro-military but pro-brutality (Hegseth, RFK Jr, Noem). The sort of long-term expertise development that characterizes the modern military officer is "woke"/weak/obsolete to them. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social on @wesleymorgan.bsky.social

ex-Lethality Jane This tattoo is just an encapsulation of how shitty a strategic thinker he is. That's a tattoo that enlisted dudes get because they think it makes them look hard. An officer with ambition doesn't get that tattoo, because when you're working with partner nations in CENTCOM, you're gonna look dumb.

Also true in a more general, global sense: political, intellectual, and economic infrastructures are being twisted beyond recognition and it's up to us to rebuild better (alas, while we handle *other*, already existing but much-worsened problems). via @paulgowder.bsky.social

Dan Farbman Working on an essay about how we are all founders now, whether we like it or not. This is the energy I'm talking about.

Reblogging this but adding the dual question: what software/tech companies are increasing their investment in the US in order to take advantage of/cozy up to the Trump/Musk regime? via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Steve Randy Waldman are any historically US-based software or tech companies relocating activities, servers, personnel outside of the US in order to address political risk?

I'd add a huge dose of psychological denial. If you're a rich, famous, powerful white guy the existence of a rich, famous, powerful white guy who's that blatantly childish and stupid is a direct attack on your entire peer group's social claims. So he cannot be. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Garrett M. Graff Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. He’s doing it more chaotically and more quickly and more thoroughly than imagined, but no one should be surprised at all who was paying attention. The fact the business community got played is a sign of their own poor political analysis.

I have to look a bit more into this, but getting rule models that are not just interpretable but meaningful would have all sorts of practical advantages. by @thibogo.bsky.social et al

Potentially a very useful addition to the workflow. Reality is the ultimate model check -a good model of your data might not be anything more than a good model of your data- but the earlier you get warnings, the better.

Unions might be a more dangerous opposition than the Democratic party right now, as they presumably retain better capabilities for on-the-ground organizing in a context of patchy mainstream media coverage and pro-regime social networks. via @interfluidity.com

Josh Marshall

Nicely done, but *in practice* random number generation isn't nowhere close to being what computer security professionals worry the most about.

Potentially very useful for diagnostics, but I'm also curious about how this can be leveraged in adversarial contexts and active information acquisition settings. by @martynplummer.bsky.social

I don't now a single serious developer who heard this and didn't respond with some version of horrified laughter at the idea of a typical company-scale catastrophe replayed on a sociopolitically critical system. Media, individuals, companies... 1/ via @waldo.net @intelwire.bsky.social

makena kelly SCOOP: DOGE wants to rebuild SSA's codebase in months, risking benefits and system collapse, sources tell me. The plan is to migrate all systems off COBOL quickly which would likely require the use of generative AI. www.wired.com/story/doge-r...

Discworld of course. More recent, I enjoyed "The Tainted Cup" (although it's really fantasy-coded biopunk SF, so might not count). If you consider Occult Noir fantasy, I liked "Even Thought I Knew the End."

Inertia and the US' size remain dominant factors but there are areas -mRNA biotech most saliently- where US leadership might disappear overnight. What worries and breaks my heart is the unavoidable fall in global scientific output and its long-term socioeconomic cost. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Christian Odendahl Nobel Prizes by country and year. The dominance of Germany is striking every time. Before 1933, that is. And the utter dominance of America (and the UK) after 1945.

There's something distinctly adolescent (in a derogatory, not chronological sense) in this "we're going to do it in a more modern language" nonsense; the decision-making of people who have never built anything serious so they consider surface language features the defining factor.

Yeah. I think it's a combination of newness fetishism and hardware improvements allowing cheaper labor costs for somewhat-equivalent functionality (hence companies salivating for genAI), but the moment you start thinking about what's going on under all those hoods you get a vertigo of wastefulness.

Being professionally obligated to be aware of Musk's evil shit since before he took power probably prepared them better than media that (1) could more easily ignore it, (2) neither have nor want to gain understanding of how stupid most of his ideas have always been. via @dereklowe.bsky.social

Charlie Jane "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" Anders 🏳️‍⚧ It's blowing my mind that @techdirt.com.web.brid.gy is covering politics better than most explicitly political journalsitic outlets

I think this was partly due to short-termism ("surely we can sell another bit of the foundation"), partly group affinity ("Trump is one of us"), partly buying the myth that their got their wealth *despite* and not *thanks in part to* liberal institutions and rights. via @paulgowder.bsky.social

Brian Cook American businesses are discovering the great deal they realized around 1980 by abandoning the corporate-liberal working constitution of the mid-20th century has led them to a criminal extortionist president. That's what happens when you chase ever greater rent extraction and trash market controls.

Very tiny gap between forbidding from saying the obvious and forbidding from reporting cases. I don't expect official numbers to track an outbreak anymore, and unofficial numbers will of course be attacked as hoaxes if not crimes. via @ryanmarino.bsky.social @gregpak.net @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social

Charles Ornstein SCOOP: The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations @sheinvestigates.bsky.social

Will do. Thanks! Active information acquisition in low-resource applied contexts is something I'm very keen on as an underunexploited tool - and Bayesian models can be a good bridge there by compensating for small data sets with prior elicitation from domain experts (at least sometimes...).

I keep having to fight shifting baseline syndrome to remind myself how historically common this sort of thing is, but I wonder if online culture -like mass media before- led to faster, more feverish cycles of one-upmanship and exploitation. via @helenebismarck.bsky.social @worgztheowl.bsky.social

Tom Hamilton This sounds *exhausting*.

None of Musk's statements on "civilization" make sense unless you add "white" before. Then they still don't, but at least his meaning is clear.

Will Jennings 🗳️ Perhaps Musk is especially concerned about the decline of populations in high income countries (which just so happen to have a rather different ethnic complexion to those lower income countries where populations are still growing).

Every time you read somebody -usually a CEO/founder or uncritical journalist- saying some version of "just throw all the data we have at the magic chatbot and we'll cure all disease forever," remember we don't even seem to have good basic data on how the hell pain works.

Derek Lowe A new study on the mechanisms of pain transmission in neurons gave what was probably the last result the authors expected it to give. . .

"Root-password script-kiddie authoritarianism" is a new-ish phenomenon in politics but a natural growth of a certain kind of hyperpersonalist management in tech companies (exactly the sort that demands manual code changes to boost the reach of CEO's posts, BTW). 1/ via @interfluidity.com

Prem Thakker ツ SCOOP: The Trump admin appears to be going into a visa database to quietly change students' immigration status. It's coming entirely by surprise — setting students up to be detained without warning. It's Mahmoud Khalil & Rumeysa Ozturk — on a wider scale.

I think "strategy" is the damning word here: most senior Democratic leadership is high-status enough that Me Too is for them an issue among many, not a non negotiable, often existential fight. Add to that Schumer's Disease: senior... 1/ via @jonathancohn.bsky.social @intelwire.bsky.social

Moira Donegan It doesn’t get addressed in most assessments of Democrats’ run to the right and antagonism of their base, but part of that strategy has been the abandonment of Me Too and its moral authority—and the unwillingness to go on the attack over stuff like this.

Being obvious: political systems are (partly) sustained through information flows about who wants to (and can do) what. These are enacted by information systems (mainly but not exclusively social and traditional media) and actors (mainly but not... 1/ via @swin24.bsky.social @intelwire.bsky.social

Aaron Rupar I have said since Trump starting laying the groundwork for the Big Lie in the first part of 2020 that he would not leave office willingly. I have been correct so far. And I'm telling you again he will not leave office willingly. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

A draft of some notes I've been making on how to approach a first emergency rebuild of organizational cognitive infrastructures (not the main problem going on but *a* problem nonetheless). Nothing much different from what I've already been doing, but context and motivation matter.