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.

An important read on OpenAI’s seeming selling out.

I nearly completed a degree in international relations (traded it for a political science teaching minor near the end), and what impressed me about that experience is how less sure I was about knowing what I was talking about the longer that I studied things. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be bothered by that same concern and is happy to insist that things will go a certain way just because he says so. Gift link.

About nine months ago, I wrote about abstraction being on my mind and my thinking about how games abstract human life in potentially problematic ways. Abstraction is still on my mind, not least because I’m continuing to read Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in that post (among so many others). In particular, I think a lot about Ellul’s argument that efficiency and efficacy are the ultimate value in the technical society, and that everything essentially gets ground down to that. I also think a lot about how “efficiency” so often comes down to “less money for others, more money for me,” turning complex policy and other decisions into a single, self-interested abstraction.

It’s not even March, and it’s the second time this year I’ve woken up to Trump treating the military like his plaything to do something reckless while I was asleep.

This line made me laugh-to-keep-from-crying:

Trump said the U.S. had “sought repeatedly to make a deal” but Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions.”

Hey, what happened to the deal we already had with Iran?

It takes a lot to get me on Anthropic’s side in any disagreement, but Pete Hegseth is a lot, so I guess this tracks.

Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.

Excellent jokes to distract from the real horror.

Habitant au Kentucky, ce n’est pas souvent que j’éprouve un coup de cœur pour un livre francophone. Pourtant, j’ai lu un article sur ce livre à la RTS, et il arrivait qu’on fasse une commande chez Fnac quelques jours après, et c’est comme ça que j’ai décidé de commander ce livre au lieu sans trop le connaître,

Je ne dirais pas que je regrette l’avoir lu. J’avoue pourtant que j’ai eu des moments difficile avec lui. Mon vocabulaire n’était pas toujours à la hauteur, et puis ce n’est pas mon genre préféré, le roman très, mais très littéraire. Je me suis demandé quelques fois au cours de la lecture si j’avais fait un mauvais choix.

CEOs’ silence is indication of a moral vacuum.

Heartbreaking read but better for it.

Strategic ambiguity is as much an indicator of far right influences as any of these references. Gift link.

Good rage in this post.

FCNL is such a good prophetic voice.

Big Ellulian “image vs. word” vibes here.

I don’t use this line a lot, but if Biden ever slipped up like this…

The whole post is good, but the first two paragraphs hit on something particularly important.

He is the shallowest man on earth.

Non, mais franchement : Quelle honte, ce pays dont je suis citoyen.

The Onion is what’s going to get us through this.

It’s a sign of how crazy everything is right now that this is just one of sevral political developments contributing to my current anxiety.

What an embarassment.

This shooting is making me panicky, and I’m honestly trying to not read any more about it, but this is important.

One of my political science professors in undergrad studied Chavista populism in Venezuela and, with the rise of figures like Sarah Palin, was considering pivoting to populism in the US when I TAed for him. Anyway, wondering what’s going through his head this morning.

ProPublica does good work, and I haven’t been reading enough of them lately.