Good for them.

I hate reading news like this because it just makes me depressed.

It’s telling when you have to wait to grow a spine until you know your term is over, but better now than ever, I guess.

Harsh but fair

To echo a comment I made earlier today, I will always hold tech companies morally responsible for the harms they cause, but I get a lot less sure about legal responses. Do we trust this administration to handle NCII properly?

Heartbreaking story, all the more so for the first-person reflective voice.

What a depressing read.

Good line here:

“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”

I know we live in ridiculous times, and I have a print subscription to The Onion, and this is still one of the most bewildering articles I’ve read recently. I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief to make it on to each successive paragraph.

Hashtag winning

Dumb, indefensible war gets dumber and more indefensible.

Shameful spending priorities:

Roughly 5.5% of that $200 billion could fund universal meals to all U.S. public school students for the year. The whole package could feed millions of children for decades. As Sen. Adam Schiff (CA) has pointed out, “A hospital costs about $100 million… If we’re spending a billion a day in Iran, we’re effectively dropping 10 hospitals a day on Iran.”

I follow Ben for other writing, but I very much appreciate this post.

Lots to think about here. In the context of Trump’s proposed budget, this stood out in particular:

Our military spending is not a partisan issue. Obama raised Bush’s military budget. Trump raised Obama’s budget. Biden raised Trump’s budget. What would King say to that? Probably exactly what he said in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

Doctorow has been arguing for a post-American internet/tech industry for a while, but this passage really landed for me:

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn’t need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won’t give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world’s majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world’s supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

So much about this that I don’t like. The article makes a good case that there may be good reasons to ease up on nuclear power regulations, but the language of AI and VCs suggests to me that those good reasons aren’t the top priority.

It came as something of a surprise that this next part of the story felt even better. It takes some liberties with the British political system, but since it came out in November 2016, it is clearly doing so to criticize Donald Trump, and I can live with that. The story continues to play with the basic concept of the Silents as a supernatural villain, and I’m enjoying seeing where it goes.

Histoire fascinante—mais inquiétante.

Early 2025 was a difficult time for my focus and mental health given all of the nonsense happening in my country at the time. I channeled a lot of my anxiety and distraction into messing around with my Hugo site, which is both something I find genuinely fun and something that is professionally useful, since I teach a course on content management systems where I’ve doubled down on Hugo as a teaching tool. Yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of my observation that it was “[t]ime to write up a summary post,” and I’m finally getting around to that today. Waiting so long to write that post means that some of my memories are a little fuzzy now, but I made some further updates to my site over the summer and then again last December, so a “the last year in Hugo adventures” post allows me to capture some of that stuff, too.

The Martian is a fun reread—except when its casual references to a functioning federal government and US media ecosystem briefly take me out of the narrative.

Terrible but hilarious.

The last line really lands.

Terrifying stuff.

Vicious and hilarious.

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.