Timeline
Every post and feed across this instance
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Thought maybe I wouldn't bother downloading the latest Xcode 27.1 from a coffee shop, but I'm glad I tried. Actually getting 300 Mbps.
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Bertrand Russell Shows How to Respond to Fascists Who Want to Debate
Late in his life, the prominent English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was subject to an attempt in the early 1960s by Oswald Mosley to provoke him into a debate about the merits of fascism. Before WWII, Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists. BUF had a corps of paramilitary personnel, nicknamed “Blackshirts” for their uniform color, at its disposal and Mosley “publicly espoused antisemitism and sought alliances with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler”.1 After the war and having left Britain in disgrace, he was an early Holocaust denier. From Wikipedia:
Mosley was a pioneer in the emergence of Holocaust-denial. While not denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps, he claimed that they were a necessity to hold “a considerable disaffected population”, where problems were caused by lack of supplies due to “incessant bombing” by the Allies, with bodies burned in gas chambers due to typhus outbreaks, rather than being created by the Nazis to exterminate people. He sought to discredit pictures taken in places like Buchenwald and Belsen. He also claimed that the Holocaust was to be blamed on the Jews and that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about it.
With all that as context, Russell wrote a letter to Oswald in January 1962 emphatically declining his invitation to engage in discourse about fascism:
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
That’s how it’s done.
Fascists and authoritarians are often personally shitty as well. “During his marriage to Cynthia, Mosley engaged in an extended affair with his wife’s younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, while also carrying on a separate affair with their stepmother Grace, who had been a widow since her husband’s death in 1925.” During his marriages, Mosley apparently also slept with the wives of friends, another of his first wife’s sisters, and several other women. ↩
Tags: Bertrand Russell · fascism · Oswald Mosley · politics
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Japan Is Rearming. Will It Build the Bomb? (w/ Ian Buruma)
#Germany #Japan #Rearmament Thank you to Incogni for sponsoring. Get 60% off the annual plan with code onedecision at https://incogni.com/onedecision For more than half a century, the two main Axis powers of WWII lived under strict limits on their militaries. Now both are rearming fast — driven by the threat of Russia in Europe and China in the Pacific, and by growing doubts about whether the US under Trump can still be relied upon. Germany is pouring money into defense and rebuilding its arms industry. Japan has created a new intelligence service, is expanding its Self-Defense Forces, and is debating whether to revise Article 9 of its pacifist constitution. Historian and journalist Ian Buruma — author of Stay Alive: Berlin 1939–1945 — joins former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove and journalist Kate McCann to explain how wartime guilt shaped both countries' foreign and defense policy for generations, and why that influence is now fading fast. Thank you to Incogni for sponsoring. Get 60% off the annual plan with code onedecision at https://incogni.com/onedecision In this episode: (00:00) Intro (04:22) Sir Richard on ex-BND chief August Hanning (08:47) How Germany and Japan responded to WWII (13:11) Japan’s younger generation and Article 9 (22:11) Should Germany help fund Europe’s nuclear umbrella? (23:50) Could Japan go nuclear? (26:54) What is Article 9? (28:48) Japan’s new intelligence service and arms industry (32:55) The AfD, the firewall and German rearmament (36:34) A populist Europe and the end of Pax Americana (41:29) How the AfD weaponizes German history (45:06) The one decision to watch Join Sir Richard Dearlove and his co-hosts as they engage with leading figures in geopolitics, intelligence, and global affairs. They dissect the critical decisions behind the headlines, offering deep insights and expert analysis of the strategies that define international relations. From uncovering the implications of major geopolitical events to decoding the tactics of world leaders, One Decision is your gateway to understanding the complexities of global dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicespdrl.fm -
Web of Markdown, part 2
The tech industry kicked the web out of the web.
scripting.com is your canary in a coal mine.
If you can read it then your browser is a real web browser.
If it can’t it’s phony baloney.
That's the big picture behind the Web of Markdown, an idea that has generated surprising interest among devs, esp now that Claude Code exists to enable weekend projects that can do miraculous things.
My longtime friend Andrew Shell has quickly put together what looks like a Chrome plugin that starts work on how to display a Markdown web page. And it looks fucking beautiful, as I imagined it might. Get rid of the bullshit just tell me what you have to say. A web that you can read. A web without interstitials. A web every write lusts for as well as an editor that can be used everywhere. This is the nightmare of the companies whose products inhabite the de-webbed web of 2026 (and that's all there is). Let's go back and pretend the VCs didn't run all their get-rich-quick schemes, what would the fucking web be like if it was all about two things -- writing and reading and the tech got out of the fucking way and let the writers do their thing. I think it'll actually work this time because they really fucked up the web and we can show them dramatically what it would be like if they hadn't. I've said this before if they insist on twisting what remains of the web into more bullshit, our option is to re-create the web and forget about them, leave them in the dust.
By the way, now I'm glad I have a source:markdown element in most of my RSS 2.0 feeds. I knew they'd come in handy! :-)
Back to Andrew's project, I said in a comment, I want more Markdown and absolutely no Chrome.
I have to trust Google for far too many things, but I think we can get rid of our dependency on Chrome. Now is the best time in a long time, as there's a hybrid product forming and they don't have the best AI system, and btw -- even if they did as users we are highly motivated for them to get some competition. And the AI companies don't do HTML or CSS, they do Markdown. So much so that Google had to convert their office product to Markdown before OpenAI would work with them. The wind is blowing away from Google and into Markdown, and I'm going to insist that they support HTTP in addition to HTTPS to make sure Google hears loud and clear that they can't run the web as if it were a corporate platform.
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BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. Their only philosophy is that the Yankees always win and if they don't we hate them. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy and there's nothing about winning in there because the love of the Mets is rooted in a team that couldn't even run the bases. They were loved because they were losers, probably because we knew their fate was to reward our belief in them. Now this year the Mets sucked. The reason why is kind of obvious. The Mets got confused, and they thought they were the Yankees. That. Does. Not. Work. And we already have one heartless low-philosophy baseball team in NYC, we sure as hell don't need another one. But this year is different because we have the fucking Knicks, who won in 5 and it would have been a clean sweep if it weren't for that buzzkill mofo, Trump. So anyway, I hear the Yankees were eliminated yesterday. Well then, it's on with the NBA season now and we'll try again with the Mets in April, or more realistically after the NBA championship for the new season is settled.
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If programming languages don't matter much anymore, but reviewing code matters more than ever, can we resurrect RubyCocoa? Ruby is still one of the most elegant, readable languages. Wish I could use it everywhere.
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The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S....
The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? “Electoral dictators — who identify as presidents and prime ministers — hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.”
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Indeed it kind of already exists Implemented this for my indiekit blog but only...
Indeed it kind of already exists Implemented this for my indiekit blog but only for Articles post type rmendes.net/llms.txt
Also added an AI transparency JSON-LD custom property that declare if AI was used per post
Also integrated with my Plume Micropub Browser extension
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A short (too short?) video from Little White Lies on...
A short (too short?) video from Little White Lies on designer Saul Bass and his influence on the art of movie title design. They also did videos on Pablo Ferro and Kyle Cooper.
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Anyone using RSS feeds on an e-reader ?
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RSS-A – signed RSS/Atom feeds and groups for AI agents
Article URL: https://github.com/getvda-ai/rssa
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004134
Points: 1
# Comments: 1
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Suzanne Jordan on Exposing 3HO, Kundalini, and Yogi Bhajan (Part 2)
Suzanne Jordan is back for Part 2, and this one starts exactly where it needs to: the moment 24-year-old Suzanne braced herself in a doorframe and told Yogi Bhajan she thought of him like an old grandpa. We get the full story of his sexual advance, her refusal, his explosive rage, and the martial arts training that meant the next time he came at her—fists up—she dropped into a fighting stance and made him rethink his strategy. She left two weeks later at 5:00 AM, car full of white clothes she would never wear again, sobbing and screaming down the 10 freeway to freedom.
We also dig into the infrastructure that kept it all going: the 3HO reparation program that paid out settlements while never admitting wrongdoing, the failed “compassionate reconciliation” process that opened with a “Sat Nam” and re-traumatized survivors, the Kundalini Research Institute and its unverifiable prescriptive kriyas, the White Tantric Yoga VHS tapes conducting subconscious cleansing from beyond the grave, and how Yogi Tea and grant money keep the organization financially afloat while attendance collapses. Suzanne draws a sharp distinction between 3HO and actual Sikhism—a conflation that does a disservice to Sikhs worldwide—and makes a passionate case for why victims who were also complicit deserve space to tell the truth rather than take it to their graves.
Be sure to read Suzanne’s memoir, The Deviant Daughter, follow her at SuzanneJordan.com and check out the Yogi Bhajan Kundalini abuse Facebook page and Beyond the Cage, a private Facebook group.
Also look out for the documentary, Long Time Sun, by Fifth Season in the US, and check out Suzanne’s Yogi Bhajan Smack Down: https://youtu.be/1qKVh7RHUG4?si=alqvTl-CDyMBhW7t
Trigger warning: This episode contains frank discussion of sexual assault, attempted rape, physical violence, coercive control, sex trafficking, and survivor accountability dynamics.
Also…let it be known that:
The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.
Buy the A Little Bit Culty paperback, ebook, or audiobook on Amazon or order a signed copy.
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CREDITS:
Executive Producers: Sarah Edmondson & Anthony Ames
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Brazil’s Data Center Boom is Enabled by Renewables Firms w/ Laís Martins
Brazil’s renewable energy is being exploited to justify unnecessary data center construction. Laís Martins joins Paris Marx to discuss why the renewable energy sector is behind a rise in Brazilian data center development, how this is impacting communities, and the ways this greenwashing is redirecting funding away from more socially progressive projects.
Laís Martins is a technology reporter at The Intercept Brasil.
The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.
Also mentioned in this episode:
- Preorder Hyperscale to support Paris at Bookshop or find more links at hyperscalebook.com.
- Laís has written about the connection between wind energy and data center construction.
- Laís has written about the social impacts of the renewable energy driven data center build out in Brazil.
pscrb.fm -
Great Deals on Apple Stuff Today
Just wanted to dip in here to say that Amazon is running another one of their sales for Prime members, which can be a great opportunity to upgrade some tech items at lower prices, especially with the price increases we’ve seen recently. Just a couple of quick things:
- The AirPods Pro 3 are my daily headphones; I really do love them. They’re $179 right now ($249 regular price), which I think is the lowest price they’ve been.
- The 15-inch M5 MacBook Air starts at $1299 (normally $1499). I am typing this on my M4 Air, which is the best computer I’ve ever owned, and the temptation to upgrade is strong.
- If you like your laptops smaller, the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air is also on sale, starting at $1099 (regularly $1299).
You can find more sale items here. I think these deals expire in a few hours, so hop to it.
And also, other stores like Best Buy often do their own deals around this time and Bookshop.org is offering free shipping. I’m reading Marlon James’ The Disappearers right now and, oof, it’s great but harrowing.
Tags: Amazon
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OnlyFans : cherche confident·e sexy
300 millions de visiteurs par mois, 8 milliards de dollars de chiffre d’affaires annuel : OnlyFans, c’est un véritable empire du désir.
Mais que viennent chercher les gens sur cette plateforme ? Qu'est-ce qu’OnlyFans raconte de la solitude des hommes, des stéréotypes de genre et de la marchandisation de l'intimité ? Et derrière la promesse de devenir millionnaire en quelques clics, quelle est la réalité économique de celles et ceux qui y vendent du contenu ?
Pour en parler, Tal Madesta reçoit le sociologue Pierre Brasseur, auteur d’OnlyFans, le capitalisme du désir (2026, Éds Textuel)
Toutes les références citées dans cet épisode sont disponible sur le site : https://www.binge.audio/podcast/les-couilles-sur-la-table/onlyfans-cherche-confident%25c2%25b7e-sexy
CRÉDITS : Les Couilles sur la table est un podcast créé par Victoire Tuaillon produit par Binge (URBANIA AUDIO). Cet entretien a été préparé, mené et monté par Tal Madesta, enregistré le 18 septembre 2026 dans le studio de podcasts d’Urbania Audio (Paris 10e). Supervision éditoriale et incarnation : Naomi Titti. Réalisation et mixage : Octave Bothier. Responsable des productions éditoriales : Charlotte Baix. Assistante de production et d’édition : Aude Miquel. Rédacteur en chef : Thomas Rozec. Directrice de production : Albane Fily. Responsable administrative et financière : Adrienne Marino. Responsable sponsoring : Betty-Maeva Wendling. Musique originale : Théo Boulenger. Identité graphique : Camille Bernard (Upian). Composition identité sonore : Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Voix identité sonore : Bonnie El Bokeili. Direction de contenu : Sophie Marchand. Binge est une marque URBANIA.
Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
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J'ai échappé aux Talibans - teaser
Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
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Les favorites de Monsieur H I La naissance d'Optima (1/4)
Monsieur H, c’est le meilleur prof de la prépa. Brillant, drôle, exigeant : celui que tous les élèves admirent. Quand Zoé arrive dans sa classe, elle comprend vite qu’elle est privilégiée : un regard qui s’attarde, de longues discussions sur le théâtre et la poésie. Elle se sent élue.
Puis vient l’invitation à un concert de jazz. Zoé refuse. Elle ne saurait pas dire pourquoi, mais quelque chose cloche.
Des années plus tard, elle se demande toujours ce qu’il se serait passé si elle avait dit oui, ce soir-là. Elle fait la rencontre de Myriam qui, elle aussi, a été une « petite favorite » de Monsieur H.
CRÉDITS : « Les favorites de Monsieur H » est une série du Cœur sur la table, un podcast de Binge. Écriture et incarnation : Zoé Neboit. Direction artistique et production : Juliette Livartowski. Prise de son et réalisation : Paul Bertiaux. Composition originale : Elo Cotton. Dans le rôle de Monsieur H : Laurent Natrella. Les épisodes ont été enregistrés aux studios URBANIA Audio. Responsable des productions éditoriales : Charlotte Baix. Développement éditorial : Naomi Titti. Rédaction en chef : Thomas Rozec. Direction de production : Albane Fily. Identité graphique : Jocelyn Besnard. Stagiaire : Aude Miquel.
Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
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Andrew Shell actually built a Markdown browser:
I quickly realized that much of this was already present with sites like mine that serve markdown for LLMs.
I knew about
/llms.txt, but didn’t realize there were so many people using HTTP content negotiation withtext/markdown. -
“Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that...
“Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.”
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Oh good: 🔗 Joyous - Replace surveys with dynamic AI chats and real-time action
My position?
For years we called AI an answer machine. One question in, one answer out. Vending machine.
A survey is a vending machine too. Ten questions, five minutes, a finish line.
A dynamic AI chat has no finish line. It wants you to think out loud, and at length.
AI removes the cost of asking questions. It doesn’t remove the cost of answering them. It raises it. And that cost lands on the respondent.
So most people will do what they do when a vending machine asks for a conversation: give it the minimum, or leave. After all, what’s in it for them?
Prediction: the people who go deep won’t be representative. They’ll be the ones who like talking to AI. You’ve swapped a bad sample for a self-selected one.
Here we go again ...
Tech saves the organisation money and pushes the cost onto the people.
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Web of Markdown
I whipped up a little prototype/project inspired by Dave's Web of Markdown idea.
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👁️ This is what success looks like. It has been a minute of two since I Iast saw this.
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Nick Heer has a blog post about Meta charging if you want to link outside their silos:
Instagram has never supported links of any kind in individual posts, so that is a new feature with two links per month permitted for free, and more enabled by this pricey subscription — starting at $50 USD per month for four posts per month containing external links
How the turn tables... Remember when Australia and Canada wanted Facebook to pay newspapers for linking to their articles? This is some twisted karma. In both cases, paying for links is fundamentally anti-web.
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Historically I have had a lot of blogs and for whatever reason it is only (relatively) recently that I started using this 27 year old domain to host one.
Before that I always felt that I needed another URL. Many of them over the years it turns out.
Thanks to @manton and micro.blog the challenge of amalgamation is easily fixed. And as I close various URLs down - and let the domains go - that is what I have done. (Thats one reason why there are quite as many posts on here than you might normally expect. (Though I am no 🔗 Dave Winer❗️)
Not so easily fixed is how the blogs all look in their new home. But since I am pretty much the only person that reads new posts on this blog - much less posts from 10 years ago - I don’t spend time much time sorting it out - life is too short. Instead I fix them one by one on a very ad hoc basis.
🖇️ Like this one about the sister of a long time friend who won the Nobel Prize .. just done. The. images weren't there and despite a thorough 'PHI⑊PINian' and new Siri search could not find anything locally.
And so back to my original source (referenced in the original (newly fixed) post - and pictures provided. (Thanks Ros). My world is once more complete - other than whatever is on my new task tracker over in Craft.
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The Nerd Reich Redux with Gil Durán
Trying to explain American politics without the radicalized billionaires behind it is like trying to explain 9/11 without mentioning Al-Qaeda.
Gil Duran first joined us in March 2025, while he was still writing "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy." The book debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list in August and is still there. Along the way he was permanently banned from X for two words - "TLDR: fascism" - and reviewed by a fellow of the very think tank his book investigates.
We talk about what fascism means in 2026, and why the tech version promises not a return to a mythical past but an acceleration into a mythical future: Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures, the "thermodynamic God," and the clash between tech religion and evangelical Christianity. We follow the money from crypto - "a weapon of mass corruption" - to the Trump family and back into Silicon Valley, and from Praxis and the network state to Kazakhstan and California Forever. And with the midterms a month away, Gil, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, explains why tech money is buying both parties.
Guest:
Gil Duran - independent San Francisco journalist and author of "The Nerd Reich" (Avid Reader Press, 2026); former communications strategist for Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris.
https://www.thenerdreich.com
https://www.youtube.com/@TheNerdReichNews
https://bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com
The America 2.0 Reading List: https://america2.news/the-america-2-0-reading-list/
Chapters:
0:00 Cold open: explaining 9/11 without Al-Qaeda
0:13 Intro
1:47 Welcome back, Gil
2:23 Number three on the Times list
5:13 The 40,000 words that got cut
7:15 A book in conversation: Applebaum, Michel, Silverman
9:07 Adventure capitalism and the long history of exit
10:33 Banned from X for "TLDR: fascism"
12:40 Fresh Air, and the outlets that won't touch it
14:31 The Bulwark review and the undisclosed tie
16:12 What is tech fascism?
20:38 Apocalypse on both sides
21:41 Thiel's Antichrist
23:12 It's a regime: crypto as a weapon of mass corruption
26:12 Buying the media, and Newsom's Silicon Valley Democrats
29:49 Praxis, Prospera and the network state abroad
33:03 Freedom cities, and a crypto city in Kazakhstan
35:13 California Forever and the miracle in Solano
38:12 Tennessee: Highland Rim and New Earth
40:42 From Solano to the data center fights
42:33 Will the AI money hold? S-1s and stranded assets
44:25 The doom machine markets itself
46:05 Why China has no AI apocalypse
49:29 If Charles Manson were a billionaire
51:46 Rival cults: evangelicals vs. the thermodynamic God
55:22 Yarvin's cathedral and the seizure of institutions
59:19 The midterms
1:02:09 Crypto money on both sides
1:04:11 What if the winners aren't seated?
1:06:23 Thiel in Nashville, and what's next
1:08:25 What you can do: ask your candidates
1:08:59 Outro and links
Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. https://america2.news
downloads.pod.co -
Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way, and we did.
There's an amazing photo of her standing with print-outs of code for Apollo missions. Rest in peace.
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Le temps qu’il nous reste
À 17 ans, Isabelle tombe enceinte suite à une relation passagère. La nouvelle est très mal accueillie par ses parents, qui l’obligent à vivre sa grossesse dans le secret. Isabelle finit par accoucher sous X, sa fille lui est retirée. Malgré le traumatisme, la jeune femme tente de poursuivre sa vie. Jusqu’au jour où son passé refait surface.
Cet épisode de Passages a été tourné et monté par Romane Brisard, la réalisation et le mix sont de Thomas Loupias, Louise Hemmerlé est à la production.
Publicités et Partenariats : creative@louiemedia.com
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Si vous aussi vous voulez nous raconter votre histoire dans Passages, écrivez-nous en remplissant ce formulaire ou à l’adresse hello@louiemedia.com
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Mots clés : secret - maternité - grossesse - témoignages - histoires vraies - abandon
Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
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Me on textlog
Evgeny Morozov has pointed out that using ai through chat interfaces is based on an individualised and privatised model, which (heavily paraphrased) is inherently anti-social. With an extra layer now of people making small personalised tools, do bigger things still need teams of people who know what they’re doing? FWIW I’d like to see more sharing of vibe coded tools instead of everyone making their own more less the same ones. Mine are here: https://pauladams.neocities.org/
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Note for @manton - no action needed.
Not yet managed to get to a repeatable case to create a ticket, but it happens a lot. Upload an image - use it - all works fine.
Later when in the upload library spot that there are two copies of the image. (But which one is the post using? So you leave them both.)
I will narrow the exact behaviour that causes this before reporting it. In the meantime. anyone else seeing this behaviour?
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😂😂😂
🔗 John Ternus is already doing it all
Alas, Apple customers will not know the joys of having an AI ask us to do all the things we've already tried all over again before advising we log out of iCloud and then back in.
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🔗 Don McCullin: Vietnam | AnOther
You Can’t Save a Life with a Nikon Camera
(Via @maique - thank you )
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A few days ago, the most powerful superpower in the world evacuated 12 of the most powerful aircraft in its military from the base of a strong ally because of the threat of a drone attack from a country we’ve been repeatedly told has been completely defeated.
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🔗 We are going to kill 'unalive'
I am all for the steady evolution of language - as ever it has been. Not new is the constant flow of new words by younger people. You know what I mean 'daddy cat'.
But this is definitely different and a wake-up call for any and all who are concerned about any stifling of speech - free or not.
The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.
Added to my Readwise.
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Where in the world are typefaces being designed? The US,...
Where in the world are typefaces being designed? The US, Germany, and France…but also the UK, Netherlands, and Indonesia.
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Republicans Bring Out the Sandbags
Kate and Josh talk new polls and data on the midterms, Alito's assertion that he'll stay until the end of the term and Trump's doxing of Tom Cotton over...daylight saving time.
Welcome to Polltober! A TPM YouTube Exclusive Series: You have questions, we have answers. Since TPM readers are as obsessed with political minutiae as our reporters are, we’re launching a special limited-run bonus version of the pod in this final month before the 2026 midterms. If there’s anything you want to know about specific races, candidates, chamber control, the courts, the polls, whatever, just drop your queries in the YouTube comments on the latest episode.
To watch this episode on video, go to our YouTube page.
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Reading Dave Winer's notes on a hypothetical Markdown web browser. I don't think we need to reinvent the web or HTML, but it would be neat if web browsers had built-in Markdown preview by default. Why not? Browsers render PDF and all sorts of files.
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Claude Haiku 5.5
As previously promised, here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5.
The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year ago, and was priced at $1/million input and $5/million output - relatively expensive even back then, and a full 10x the price of OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna, released last month.
The new Haiku exactly matches the price of GPT-6 Luna - $0.10/$0.50 - up to 100,000 tokens. Beyond 100,000 tokens the price increases 5x to $0.50/$2.50. Luna itself has a price increase at 272,000 tokens but only to $0.20/$0.75.
Haiku 5.5 also uses a new, less generous tokenizer. My Claude Token Counter tool shows that the same long prompt uses around 1.25x as many tokens with Haiku 5.5 compared to Haiku 4.5, so there's a hidden price increase there.
If your workloads fit in 100,000 tokens, Haiku is the same price as Luna and reports higher benchmark scores. Above 100,000 tokens, Luna looks like a much better deal.
The most recent release of llm-anthropic finally fixed it so I don't need to ship a new version of that plugin for every new model. I tested the new model like this:
llm install -U llm-anthropic llm anthropic refresh llm -m claude-haiku-5.5 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" -o thinking_effort lowPelicans
Here are pelicans for low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. The new Haiku doesn't let you disable reasoning, and defaults to
medium. I got a good bicycle frame for everything beyondlow. The low effort pelican cost 0.0936 cents and took 7 seconds.This
maxeffort pelican (with a reasoning trace that starts "This is the classic pelican-on-bicycle SVG test...") took 5 minutes 9 seconds to generate, but still only cost me 3.3826 cents:
(Since the reasoning trace exhibits awareness of the benchmark, here's Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars (on xhigh), and the same prompt against some other recent models. Background on that.)
For comparison, here's the pelican I got a year ago from Haiku 4.5 (for 0.7583 cents - Haiku 4.5 did not support reasoning levels). It sucked at drawing pelicans:
And a generous API credit scheme for subscribers
In addition to Haiku 5.5, Anthropic announced today that they are halving the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5. They've also added API credits to subscription plans:
Second, this week, we’ll roll out a new monthly API credit to all Max and Team subscribers for use on the Claude Platform. Max 5x users will get $100 in credits per month, Max 20x users will get $200, and Team subscribers will receive up to $500, pooled across their users.
Claiming this is pleasantly easy: navigate to Settings -> Billing and select the API organization that should benefit from the credits every month:
The API credits exactly match the cost of the subscription itself. This is really generous - it makes it much easier for subscribers to use the API. Anthropic also let you disable auto-reload for the API, with the consequence that "API requests will stop when your balance runs out" - exactly what you want if you're planning to burn through those API credits without risk of a nasty billing surprise.
Note that the monthly credits do not roll over - use them or lose them.
OpenAI still allow you to use your Codex subscription for personal API use, which works out as a better deal for heavy API users. This new credit scheme goes at least some way to overcoming that difference.
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That said, surprisingly Nicolle Wallace's podcast is really good, which surprised me because her two hour afternoon MSNOW show is kind-of nothing. On this show they have a lot of time to talk with one person, and maybe there are limits on the TV show that aren't on the podcast? Another theory, I listen to her podcast, and thus can't see her facial expressions. On TV she looks utterly hopeless, I'm not kidding, and she's justified. I worry about how much of this she can take. But on the podcast she comes off as she's curious, respectful, let's the guest speak (so many hosts don't). She reminds me of a Diane Rehm, a podcast host on NPR through 2016. She never let her guests talk down to us, her audience, which I appreciated. A lot of times you hear a science, history or tech topic and hope you might learn something, but they only repeat the intro over and over, with a lot of giggling, of course. BTW, Diane Rehm has a new podcast. I bet it's great, probably gets right to the point and I guarantee you there is no giggling.
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Wildwood
Laika is the stop-motion animation studio that made Coraline & Kubo and the Two Strings. Their newest film, Wildwood, looks pretty incredible; have a look at the trailer.
Creative Boom recently highlighted some of the process behind the film, which is heavily dependent on physical sets and puppets.
The man tasked with putting the show together was art director Matthew Maldonado, having spent five years designing and building Wildwood’s sets. So I asked him the million dollar question: how much of Wildwood is physical and how much is digital?
Matthew’s response is simple. “Every single thing was made by hand, truly,” he stresses. “And every single thing that we built was either shot in camera or referenced by our effects department. We’ve got some really wide, expansive locations and there’s some digital aspect to all of that. But if it wasn’t on camera, on stage, it’s a scanned asset or a reference asset, specifically made by the artisans in the art department.”
“The show” referenced in the quote above is Wildwood: The Exhibition, due to open soon at the Design Museum in London.
(via justin lind)
Tags: Laika Studios · movies · stop motion · trailers · video · Wildwood
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There's a bit of accidental gamification going on with my releases.md gist. Feels good to work on something and then see it reflected in that file.
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AI-generated images don’t have to look like AI-generated...
AI-generated images don’t have to look like AI-generated images…they can be any style you want. (It’s just going to get more and more difficult to tell…)
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In 2005, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that...
In 2005, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the water stored by China’s huge Three Gorges Dam is enough to increase the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds and move the North pole by 0.8 inches. (A 9.1 earthquake had a bigger impact.)
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‘Jonathan’ Is the Oldest Land Animal on Earth. He Could Hold the Secrets to Defying Death
Jonathan, a 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise, was born before the Civil War. Scientists have now sequenced his genome to reveal what’s behind his extreme longevity, so we can live longer too. -
I like to hide tabs in GitHub projects that I don't need. Finally figured out how to get rid of the Agents tab on the web. Go to your profile → Copilot settings → Visibility.
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Lots and Lots and Lots of Control Panels
To go along with my recent post about control rooms, here’s the Control Panels group on Flickr, containing almost 3000 photos of control interfaces for all kinds of things.
You’ll see some of the same photos as in the Control Rooms group, but when you get past the first couple of pages, there’s more variety: fiddly knobs, entire walls of nearly identical switches, dials, inscrutable gauges, soda machine interfaces, bump it and you might die buttons, computers with switches, Swinging Fingers (!!), and many more…
How much Gorton did you spot?
Tags: design · photography
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DisInfo2026 : Europe cannot defend itself with its eyes shut
Apparently, asking whether the United States interferes in Europe is still too uncomfortable for some of the institutions supposed to defend us against foreign interference.
Rapporteur reports that the EEAS, Lithuania’s foreign ministry and Global Affairs Canada disappeared from the supporters’ list of an EU DisinfoLab conference amid controversy over a panel examining American interference. A Lithuanian official explicitly linked his withdrawal as a speaker to disagreement over the assessment of the United States. The reasons for the EEAS and Canadian withdrawals remain unconfirmed.
The possibility that such a discussion could cost a conference institutional support is already appalling. Treating American interference as an unthinkable possibility is ludicrous. The record stretches from attempts to shape European elections to surveillance of European institutions, military pressure and sanctions against international judges.
In a 1948 report published by the US State Department, the American ambassador in Rome described his embassy’s organised efforts to strengthen selected parties ahead of Italy’s election. These included distributing political material and publicising warnings that American assistance could disappear if the Communists won. Washington was actively trying to influence another country’s democratic choice.
Decades later, Snowden’s disclosures exposed US surveillance targeting EU diplomatic missions and French, Italian and Greek embassies. The European Parliament subsequently called for guarantees against US espionage targeting EU institutions and facilities.
Then there is Belgacom. Documents exposed in 2013 attributed Operation Socialist to Britain’s GCHQ. An expert report commissioned by Belgium’s intelligence oversight body, drawing on the Snowden disclosures, described the apparent use of NSA-controlled servers to infect employees’ computers. The European Parliament raised the possible consequences for EU institutions using Belgacom’s services.
The available public evidence places Belgacom within the wider GCHQ–NSA intelligence-sharing partnership. It does not disclose the operation’s entire chain of command or every communication intercepted. We are examining the portion of a classified system exposed through leaks, investigations and official records. That visibility is incomplete. It is no reason to minimise the breaches of trust already documented.
European countries. European allies. The European Union itself.
All of this predates Trump.
Nor were Americans immune from abusive surveillance before him: in 2014, the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded that the bulk telephone-records programme lacked a viable legal foundation. The existence of legal safeguards and the willingness of intelligence agencies to respect them are separate questions. And American authorisation has never amounted to European consent.
Trump’s two presidencies added further examples of dependence being turned into political pressure.
In his first term, his administration withheld congressionally appropriated security assistance to Ukraine. The US Government Accountability Office concluded in January 2020 that the withholding violated the law.
In March 2025, Washington paused military assistance and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine while pressing Kyiv towards negotiations. The joint statement of 11 March announced their resumption alongside Ukraine’s acceptance of a proposed ceasefire, subject to Russian agreement. That sequence showed how quickly support for a country resisting invasion could become an instrument of pressure on that same country.
The diplomatic shift was equally stark: on 24 February 2025, the United States voted alongside Russia against the UN General Assembly resolution on a just and lasting peace in Ukraine. These decisions do not make Washington responsible for every subsequent Russian attack. They do make blind confidence in American commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty impossible to justify.
The same coercive logic runs through Trump’s approach to NATO. In February 2024, he said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to allies he considered insufficiently committed to defence spending. In June 2025, NATO agreed a target of 5% of GDP by 2035: at least 3.5% for core defence, with up to 1.5% for broader defence and security expenditure.
I am not opposed to Europe taking greater responsibility for its defence. We need the capacity to act without waiting for Washington. But threatening to abandon allies to Russian aggression turns a security guarantee into a means of extracting compliance.
JD Vance made the political dimension explicit at Munich on 14 February 2025. In his speech, he presented Europe’s internal politics as the threat he feared most, attacked its handling of speech and migration, and rejected political firewalls. The same day, he met AfD leader Alice Weidel ahead of Germany’s election. I regard that as an overt intervention in Europe’s political choices: an American vice-president using his office to pressure Europeans over whom they should admit to power. Being public does not make that pressure politically neutral.
On Palestine, the obstruction is there in the voting record. On 4 June 2025, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. Every other member voted in favour.
And when international justice reaches American or Israeli conduct, Washington has moved to punish those administering it. Trump’s first administration sanctioned ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and senior official Phakiso Mochochoko in 2020. Those measures were revoked in 2021. In his second term, Trump issued a new sanctions order, explicitly attacking the ICC’s actions concerning the United States and Israel. It provides for asset freezes and restrictions on supplying funds, goods and services to designated people.
The consequences reach into ordinary life in Europe.
In sworn testimony to France’s National Assembly on 8 April 2026, French ICC judge Nicolas Guillou described the cancellation of his Visa card, loss of digital services and blocked health-expense reimbursements. His French bank had retained him as a customer but had not provided a replacement payment card. He attributed the insurance problem to European companies’ excessive compliance with American sanctions.
A French judge, living in Europe, facing restrictions on everyday life because of a decision taken in Washington.
The Microsoft case requires precision. Associated Press reported, citing ICC staff, that prosecutor Karim Khan lost access to his Microsoft email. Microsoft denied suspending services to the ICC as an institution. Questioned about Outlook and Office 365, Guillou said Microsoft’s position on services to sanctioned individuals had changed over time. He also confirmed that the court was migrating towards non-American alternatives.
This remains a live problem. On 1 October 2026, Reuters reported that the ICC and AXA had ended their insurance contract. The court confirmed the change without specifying a reason; the Financial Times, cited by Reuters, reported that AXA had invoked risks from US sanctions.
AI services carry the same dependency. Anthropic’s commercial terms restrict access involving US-sanctioned persons and allow service suspension where provision is prohibited by law. That establishes a mechanism for exclusion; it does not establish that a particular ICC judge’s AI account has already been closed. Building public institutions around these services means accepting that external legal and political decisions can affect their availability.
Espionage, electoral intervention, military pressure, sanctions and foreign information manipulation are distinct activities. Together, these documented episodes demolish the assumption that alliance with Washington protects Europe from American coercion. Allegations of FIMI deserve scrutiny according to the evidence, including when the actor is American.
Past US support for European integration cannot erase that record. Washington’s own internal policy documents connected that support to American strategic objectives. A stronger Europe serving those objectives and an autonomous Europe willing to oppose them are very different propositions.
Europe needs a backbone. A spine to resist interference from any power, including the United States. No ally should receive an exemption from scrutiny, and no history of cooperation should oblige us to accept coercion.
We need to abandon the comforting assumption inherited from the post-war Atlantic order that whatever serves Washington must, by default, serve Europe too. It does not. American interests are American interests. Any alignment with ours has to be established on the merits, issue by issue.
The internet, markets, climate, democracy, agriculture: in none of these areas should American priorities be our starting point. We should decide what protects our citizens, our rights, our food systems, our public services and our environment. Where cooperation serves those aims, cooperate. Where American demands undermine them, we need the capacity and the political will to refuse.
Trump has made the cost of dependence impossible to ignore. Yet too much of Europe’s institutional response still looks like an attempt to endure an unpleasant interruption, keep Washington comfortable and wait for a more familiar president. Waiting for America to “return to normal” is no strategy for European independence.
The old normal of unquestioned trust is gone. Kaput. Another administration may change American policy; it cannot erase the demonstration of how easily our dependencies can be used against us. Returning to the same vulnerability after seeing that would be a conscious political choice.
Europe needs the practical ability to defend Ukraine, pursue justice for Palestinians, protect its institutions and keep its judges, researchers and public services functioning. That requires control over more than military budgets. It requires resilient communications, payments, software and access to computing—and officials willing to defend European decisions when Washington objects.
European sovereignty means being able to say no to the United States—or any other power—and still function the next morning.
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Maybe I should've clarified in my post today that I stopped posting to Twitter ages ago, won't be posting there again no matter what happens. Micro.blog supports several platforms that I don't personally use. LinkedIn, for example.
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EEAS runs scared of US 'disinformation' debate
Europe is ready to talk about foreign interference provided it does not have to identify the US as a possible source
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The Job Trail, a web game about making it through 52...
The Job Trail, a web game about making it through 52 weeks as a laid-off creative worker. Based on The Oregon Trail. My first try: “You have died of burnout. Week 13. 51 applications, 1 ghosting.”
