µblog - archive for 2026-04 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 Iain M. Banks: A few notes on The Culture (1994)

In the midst of this, the average Culture person — human or machine — knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of their education, both initially and continually, comprises the understanding that beings less fortunate — though no less intellectually or morally worthy — than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.

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🔗 FP: Beijing Is Using Influencers to Burnish Its Image

More importantly, it’s the opposite of what a U.S. city looks like. China doesn’t have to be a real place in the world of Chinamaxxing, with people and problems and politics. Chinamaxxing isn’t about what China is. It’s about constructing something in the mind of Americans that is everything that the United States isn’t, similar to the warped mirror created by influencers in Dubai. It’s not a real place; it’s a backdrop for the anxieties of Americans.

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In both Dubai and China, cheap labor plays a role in building the fantasy world that gets projected. Dubai’s gleaming skyline was built by migrant labor, and the lifestyles of expats there are built on the backs of domestic labor. China doesn’t need foreign labor to build this fantasy because the hukou system—which shuts rural people out of access to the better services of the cities—and a population of 1.4 billion people ensures that there is a seemingly never-ending supply of internal migrants to build new skyscrapers, clean your apartment, and deliver food.

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🔗🚀 David Langford: “Different Kinds of Darkness”

In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes . . . an electrical storm raging somewhere in there . . . instant fever singing through the blood . . . muscles locking and unlocking . . . and oh dear God, had Gary only counted four?

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🔗 NYRB: Waiting for Day Zero

For all Pahlavi’s flattery of Trump, the president has never reciprocated his affection, instead observing in January that while Pahlavi “seems very nice,” it might be “more appropriate” for Iran to have a leader who is already inside the country. Drawing a contrast with María Corina Machado, the potential leader-in-waiting of Venezuela whom Trump spurned after the US invasion of that country, Parsi said that “whatever level of support [Machado] had in the security establishment in Venezuela was way more than what Pahlavi has in Iran. It’s not even comparable.” Even as they geared up for war, The New Yorker reported, the president and his aides referred to Pahlavi as the “loser prince” behind closed doors.

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The plan to get Europeans to buy more gas-guzzling American trucks has hit a small snag.

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🔗🚀 Greg Egan: Didicosm

Short SF story about a young girl dealing with the death of her father.

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🔗 War on the Rocks: Iran and the Indispensable Broker: How Pakistan Outmaneuvers India on the World Stage

Here is what most analyses of Pakistan get wrong: Pakistan is not a dependent state seeking patrons because it cannot defend itself. It seeks patrons because its deterrent secures its borders but does not pay its bills, train its officer corps in foreign academies, fund its infrastructure, or service its debt to the International Monetary Fund. A state that needs patrons to survive is a supplicant. Pakistan needs patrons for everything except survival — that makes it a broker. Pakistan has operated as the latter more consistently than its reputation suggests and more consequentially than its capabilities would predict.

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Today I learned that the public disaster awareness app in Japan is called NERV. Très à propos.

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🔗 NYRB: The Throwaway Planet

Clapp’s scathing descriptions shock us out of complacency, raising political and moral questions about the value we place on different classes of human beings: consumers versus those who clean up after that consumption, many of whom are treated as if they were rubbish.

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🔗 Blood in the Machine: Why the AI backlash has turned violent

Yet this is not merely a matter of bad messaging on the tech industry’s part, either. That second key plank of the AI narrative, again, broadcast directly by the CEOs themselves—that it will take everyone’s jobs—is not simply dismissible. It’s the selling point. Investors don’t ultimately much care whether OpenAI renders software sentient; they want to see mass job automation and the attendant historic labor savings. That prospect—of deskilling, controlling, or eliminating labor outright—is what made AI so uniquely valuable in the first place. There’s no putting that promise back in the bottle, no finding better combinations of words to describe how AI is a tool for bosses to automate labor. That’s the project. And people understand that.

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🔗 Pivot to AI: AI doomsday cultist throws Molotov at Sam Altman’s house

Altman is slightly realising there’s a lot of people who’ve literally been driven mad by the ideas he’s been using as marketing. Throwing Molotovs at Sam Altman’s house is probably bad — but it’s like Altman’s done a stochastic terrorism to … himself. Hope he calms down a bit.

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🔗 The Great Majority Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain

Enon Chapel was located in the same street. A Baptist dissenting chapel, opened in 1823 as a speculative venture, it had begun to offer cheap burial in its basement. Soon the congregation was contending with an “abominable” stench and saprophagous corpse flies crawling sluggishly from the cracks in the wooden floor. Some fainted from the smell; many left services with insidious, miasmatic headaches. When another reformist venture — the building of drains — required entry to the basement, it was discovered that 12,000 corpses had been stuffed into a space measuring 50 × 30 feet (15.2 × 9.1 m).

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🇸🇪 tycker vi ska jobba för att få hit JD Vance för att kampanja för Tidölaget. IKEA kan sponsra med en soffa

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🔗 James Bennett: Let’s talk about LLMs

The unstoppable force of ChatGPT runs up against the immovable object of Fred Brooks.

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And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

– William Gibson, Count Zero

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The promise of AI: PhDs on tap.

The reality of AI: Facebook posters on tap.

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Happy International Beaver Day to all who celebrate

(also World Health Day but a beaver a day keeps the doctor away as the saying goes)

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🔗 Hussein Banai: The Last Temptation of Trump at the End of a Failed War

A leader who entered a war he did not understand, in pursuit of objectives he had not reconciled, and who now confronts a situation in which every available exit diminishes the political narrative he has staked his identity on, is a genuinely dangerous figure to place at the apex of nuclear decision-making. He has made a catastrophic mess of this confrontation and appears to care only about his own self-image. That is, in the end, what makes this moment different from other moments of great-power recklessness: not the structural pressures, which are real enough, but the character of the man they are bearing down upon.

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🔗 Ashley Pomeroy: Yongsan Electronics Market, Seoul

One place I was keen to visit was Yongsan Electronics Market. In the 1990s it was a legendarily seedy dive where you could pick up computer components and cameras that were unavailable elsewhere. “Anam”-branded Nikons, rare toys and the like. Yongsan was also legendarily overpriced and user-hostile, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, “the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”.

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oh hey it’s April Fool’s Day, which means the internet is somehow worse than usual

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🔗 Mike Chisholm: Dad Club

One ambition I certainly didn’t have as a young man was to be a father. I sort of assumed I would probably become a father at some point – although TBH I was mainly haunted by the worry that I might become one by mistake – but it had never really figured high on my “bucket list”, as people say. And yet, as it turned out, becoming a father at the relatively late age of 37 has probably been the single most fulfilling experience of my entire life.

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