Quotulatiousness

August 30, 2026

The short-term impact of widespread LLM usage

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I haven’t used any of the latest tranche of LLM agents, although I’m assured by those who do use them that they’re significant improvements over the previous iterations, so I don’t really have an opinion about the state of the “AI Revolution”, but Freddie deBoer has a rare non-catastrophist yet also non-utopian take:

My LLM skepticism is really pretty simple: immense practical consequences have been predicted for them, essentially none of those consequences have come true or can be proven to be imminent, and because reality has a powerful status quo bias it’s not sensible to simply assume that they’re coming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and no one has produced such evidence. My position is not a complicated one to understand and shouldn’t be controversial. I’m acting with no more skepticism towards AI claims than I regularly demonstrate towards claims about religion or astrology or New Age woowoo.

And, crucially, I’m not the one who has set the comically over-the-top expectations here; the AI maximalists and their enablers in the media have. Sundar Pichai, who as the CEO of Google is one of the ten most consequential figures in the business world, said that LLMs were a bigger deal than the discovery of fire or electricity. AI maximalists frequently insist that the LLM era is equivalent to or more important than the Industrial Revolution. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropoic, went on a podcast from The New York Times (the stentorian, buttoned-down New York Times) and talked about a future where AI colonizes Mars of its own volition. Reports out of Silicon Valley hold that many tech workers sincerely believe that they’re a few years from owning their own asteroid mines and will be so wealthy they essentially step outside of the human experience when it comes to material desire. (If you look, you can find concerning stories on Reddit and similar places of techies spending down all of their saving and taking out large loans, on the theory that in the next few years they will become trillionaires thanks to LLMs.) Scott Alexander seems increasingly unwilling even to countenance the possibility that “AI” is not all its cracked up to be. None of this is serious, let alone convincing. I keep using the example of indoor plumbing to establish a baseline of what actual civilization-altering technological change looks like because that’s what civilization is built on. Videos where AI Chuck Norris beats up AI Vladimir Putin are not on that level.

None of this means that I believe what I am frequently accused of believing, that LLMs have literally no consequences. I don’t think that. I think that the winners of the current AI war will end up with important enterprise software that meaningfully changes how administrative and clerical tasks are completed in the average American workplace. The winners of all of this will make a lot of revenue off of this technology. Certain tasks are going to be presumed to be automated from now on. You’ll ask computers to do things in natural language that you used to do with clicks and commands. And, as we’re already seeing, human culture is going to become even lonelier, less authentic, more crass, less creative, more artificial, and less fulfilling than before. Those are consequences. They’re just, you know, consequences in a fundamentally mundane and boring world. But, yeah. Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on this stuff — conventionally a lot, I mean, not these absurd hundreds of trillionaire dreams, but a lot of money.

The trouble is that, clearly, none of this is enough, precisely because of those outsized expectations. The problems with “LLMs are going to prove to be highly consequential and remunerative enterprise software in a more-or-less unchanged economy and world” are multiple:

  • The amount of money and time and energy and attention and manpower that’s been invested in LLMs is so massive that nothing resembling an ordinary economic return can ever pay it off; with AI now essentially propping up the entire American economy, this is a dire circumstance even though specific firms will survive and eventually thrive.
  • You can’t cure cancer because cancer is not one disease and also it evolves under natural selection pressures and sometimes when we reduce rates of one cancer rates of other cancers rise etc etc etc; interstellar travel is a fantasy thanks to basic rules of physics and physiology, not because we’re not smart enough; asteroid mines make absolutely zero sense in basic economic terms; you can’t upload your consciousness because consciousness is not software but embedded into the very cells of our bodies that inevitably die; we already experienced radical life extension thanks to immense reductions in infant mortality and smoking cessation, the add-another-25-years-to-the-average-lifespan stuff is just a slow unglamorous chipping away; limitless cheap energy is being kept from us by thermodynamics, not how advanced our microprocessors are; on and on, the things we’re demanding failing to materialize because they’re not sensible things to demand.
  • It’s impossible that all of the major players in this field (OpenAI and Anthropic but also Meta and Google and Nvidia and Oracle and Caterpillar and Modine Manufacturing and Constellation Energy …) survive the next decade; some of them are going to fail, and they’re going to cause an immense amount of collateral damage on the way down.
  • Some very informed people will tell you that the future is not LLMs but SLMs, small language models you run locally on your own computer, which would have potentially devastating downstream effects for chip manufacturers, model developers, construction firms, energy companies, etc.
  • We have absolutely no idea about where the next big growth field might be if it isn’t this, and this period of permanently irrational stock market growth (which has underwritten all economic optimism) is dependent, more than anything, on that one organizing story.
  • The emotional investment in AI is even less likely to pay off than the financial investment; a huge number of people, including a lot of people who spend their lives being too cool for this sort of thing, have staked their emotional health on the idea that the mundane world is imminently going to end, but the mundane world never ends and we will all spend the rest of our days downloading apps to pay for parking a single time and emptying the diaper pail and trying to figure out how to avoid the third round of small talk with the same coworker in a day.

Honestly, I think Google’s recent shakeup tells us a lot about where LLMs are going. Google, for a thousand reasons, is the “frontier” company most likely to make a ton of money off of AI in the next decade — and also, they’ve slipped far down the rankings in terms of the best model and they don’t appear to care very much. Google’s Gemini was briefly seen as the class of the field, but in the past year or more they’ve consistently underperformed OpenAI and Anthropic’s best models. (To say nothing of the rapidly-ascending Chinese competitors, which is a whole other thing.) Google’s top AI guys, Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean, have both moved on from active development of Gemini because they’re more interested in moonshot AI; the implicit concession is that Google doesn’t think that Gemini can ever be “AGI”, that utterly vague, non-falsifiable construct so many people are now chasing. Instead, Google seems to understand that its vast preexisting base of users allows the company to make a mint without any absurd sci-fi premises: when you ask an AI agent to do your grocery shopping, you’ll probably do it through Google in one way or another, and they can take a few cents off of each of those interactions to the tune of billions. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t allow you to pretend that you’re going to live forever. But pragmatism of that kind is the soil in which modern day fortunes grow. Moonshot Google is long dead, and for a reason.

August 27, 2026

QotD: Useless and irritating computer tricks

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I got reminded today that one of the things I truly hate in desktop environments is: animations.

Stop trying to grab my attention, dammit!

No, I do not want windows to fade in and out, or riffle like a deck of cards, distort into a crescent while they get sucked into the dock, or whatever other cute effect some UX designer thought up this week. Just no.

I’m sitting at my machine to work on something. I’m concentrating. I’m a human with a Mark I meat-brain, so my flow state is fragile. When I tell my interface to do a state change, I want it to go fast and clean, not razzle-dazzle at me in a way that risks breaking my concentration.

Actionable advice for people designing desktop environments: I get it about the eye candy, it’s marketing. All I’m saying is, have a freaking OFF switch? Give me a way to shut all that distracting shit right down.

Cosmic Desktop, which I’ve truly loved ever since I started using the alpha, doesn’t have animations. The roadmap mutters about adding them in a future release. I’m going to be very sad if they are mandatory.

To sharpen the point about distraction, let me talk about a fancy new-school desktop-environment hack that I do like; the ability to set a translucency level on terminal windows and docks and things.

I tried setting translucency on my terminal background. At first, it looked pretty over the deep-sky astronomical photograph that Cosmic uses as a default background (and which matches my taste — I’ve been using a collection of similar deep sky photographs as backgrounds for many years). But it got old after about five minutes; when I’m reading text, and my eyes trip over a detail in the background, that’s distracting.

On the other hand, I really like being able to set translucency on my application dock. I can mouse up and pop up the dock to select an application without losing visual continuity with whatever is going on under the translucency. That is anti-distractive.

I want my whole environment to be anti-distractive. Pretty is nice when I have the bandwidth to notice it on my own (yes, Cosmic I do like your default dark mode with neon-blue piping), but the moment an interface design tugs on my sleeve to say “look how cool I am!”, that’s when I reach for my revolver.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-19.

August 17, 2026

QotD: The real reason that MilSpec stuff sucks

Filed under: Military, Quotations, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Something I ran across in a video by @Fat_Electrician made sense of something I and most military personnel have never understood: Why military equipment sucks compared to most civilian.

@Fat_Electrician was talking about super cars and why they don’t generally work as well as, say, a regular car. Super cars break down a lot. Some are worse than others. His point, apparently from Jay Leno, is that a Ferrari has much less actual engineering in it than, say, a Dodge minivan. Why?

Because there are thousand more engineers working on the minivan and tens of thousands more background hours of engineering. The minivan comes from a long history of similar vehicles with much more engineering in the actual design.

So, think about a military vehicle. Say the Humvee. It’s not that it’s designed to fail, it’s that there is much much less engineering in it. Ditto any military equipment. Thus, it’s much more likely to break down, just like a Ferrari.

I was thinking about this in light of the current series I’m working on not to mention any milSF. The current series the main character is leading a group that works with a mix of civilian small freighter starships and military warships. The civilian ships, even the old ones, are relatively maintenance free vs the military ships. Why?

1. There’s way more engineering in the civilian ships because the companies sell more of them and can spend more on engineering.
2. There’s a lineage of what works and what doesn’t.
3. Civilian companies cannot spend enormous sums on maintenance.

But it’s mostly the first one.

I’m not even sure I’m going to insert a discussion of it in the book. It’s the sort of thing I occasionally insert just because my readers sometimes find stuff like that interesting. But mostly I thought you might.

MilSpec sucks because there’s not as much of it as civilian.

John Ringo, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.

August 15, 2026

“Forestalling collapse is simple: all we need do is reinstate meritocracy within institutions”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

John Carter discusses the ever-more-concerning collapse in basic competence in western societies, which left unchecked will absolutely lead to civilizational collapse due to the vastly complex interconnection of so many systems that we all depend on day and night:

Helen Andrews recently wrote an essay for Compact Magazine, titled The Racial Crossroads, which has been making waves for daring to use the verboten descriptor “race communism” for the acrimonious racial spoils system that has replaced meritocracy throughout the dying West. It’s very good. You should read it.

Personally, I prefer the more descriptive “gay race communism”. The progress pride flag is inseparable from the clenched Marxist fist of Black Lives Matter in regime iconography. Moreover, gay race communism is a deliberate subversion of the left’s own “fully automated luxury gay space communism” meme.

There are zero communists who actually look like this, gay or otherwise.

To be fair, Andrews introduces the concept as “gay race communism”, and even directly acknowledges its coinage by Twitter anon Drukpa Kunley. It wasn’t that long ago that conservative popularizers laundered ideas emerging from the anonosphere without attribution, as a means of hiding their origin and making themselves look more original, and Helen deserves credit for not doing this. Also to be fair, given the focus of Andrews’ piece, adding the “gay” to “race communism” could be seen as an unnecessarily inflammatory complication. It isn’t, but we’ll get to that in due time.

Andrews spends the first half of her essay detailing how the regulatory framework built by the Civil Rights Act created the cultural conditions for the rise of wokeness, affirmative action, and DEI initiatives. The official explanation given for anti-discrimination laws was that they were well-intended correctives to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Affirmative action was to be an explicitly temporary measure to give American blacks a helping hand, with the understanding that – after a decade or at most a generation of assistance – they would no longer need a thumb on the scale. Once racism was defeated, we could all live in utopian colour-blind race-neutral Star Trek liberalism, judging one another by the content of our individual characters and no more concerned by the phenotypic differences of ancestral population groups than we are by sartorial quirks. Kumbayah and such. This isn’t an original argument: the same points have been made by Christopher Caldwell in his 2021 book The Age of Entitlement, and of course most directly by Richard Hanania in his 2023 book The Origins of Woke (whom Andrews doesn’t mention, possibly because everyone hates Hanania now).

The central point of Andrews’ essay is the following:

    The old racial bargain is breaking down, due to a combination of changing demographics and a dawning realization that racial outcomes are not going to converge any time soon. One possible path forward is to throw out the old racial bargain and establish a new one based on equality under the law. The other possible path is to accept permanent racial favoritism at every level of society.

As Andrews sees it, the first problem with the Civil Rights regime is that it reifies the abstraction of equality into a legal presumption that there are no salient biological differences between human population groups. This simply isn’t true, but the assumption that it is true leads to the necessary conclusion that all differences in outcome between groups must be a consequence of discrimination based on irrational prejudice, rather than a natural result of inborn distinctions of cognitive capacity or behavioural profile. Biological differences are real and significant, but the make-believe that they are socially constructed and unimportant incentivizes a perpetual inquisition that dismantles society as it persecutes innocent people for ever more tenuous spectres of racism implicitly haunting the privileged depths of their incorrigbly white ids. This places institutions in an impossible quandary, since the only way to avoid being dragged into court in discrimination lawsuits is to preemptively discriminate in favour of protected groups, which is to say, against unprotected groups. Human resources departments have formed as a direct response to the legal sword of Damocles poised over every institution’s neck: their function isn’t actually to hire the best people, or to hire anyone at all, but rather to ensure that the employer won’t get sued for hiring people from the wrong groups, or not hiring the people from the right groups, or for allowing people from the right groups to get offended by things said by people from the wrong groups. A doctrine predicated on denial of reality must go to war with reality to preserve itself, and as the war on noticing grinds on the battlefront presses into ever more intimate corners of people’s lives, their public speech, their private speech, their silent thoughts, their very emotions.

Your emotions are illegal, chud.

The second problem Andrews identifies is demographic mission creep. When race communism first got rolling in the 50s and 60s, the focus was quite specifically on African-Americans, who had an arguable claim to restitution on the basis of their long period of bondage on the cotton plantations.1 White Americans largely agreed with that, and were trying to do the decent thing, to make up for the abuses and indignities suffered by the disadvantaged blacks.

The mass migration of the third world into the first upsets that balance. America is no longer a 90% white country with a small rump of Africans, but more like a 50% white country, with large and growing minorities from every benighted slum in the Global South … and every single one of those groups gets to classify itself as an oppressed racial minority from the Global Majority, and therefore help itself to the largess spilling forth from the cornucopia of white guilt. In the 70s and 80s affirmative action was largely no more than an annoyance for white Americans, but in the 2020s young American whites find themselves shoved aside in university admissions, in corporate hiring, in the availability of loans and grants for education, in the availability of venture capital, in promotions, and so on, with these opportunities being bestowed instead upon supposedly oppressed minorities who arrived five minutes ago and were never actually oppressed by white Americans.

[…]

Institutional collapse is a near certainty on this track. Our civilization is a staggeringly complex system of systems. Operating and maintaining those systems requires a high degree of competence. Competence has to be learned, but it can’t be learned by anyone. DEI pushes incapable people into key positions, while denying even the opportunity for training to the potentially capable. Eventually, the systems themselves begin to malfunction. Repair becomes impossible, because there’s no one who actually knows how to repair the systems: the ones working in the system are too stupid to understand it, while those who could have learned were locked out and therefore didn’t learn what they needed to know. One system breaks, causing a problem in another system, which leads to a problem in a third system, and soon cascading failures junk the entire machine. DEI – and by extension, Civil Rights – has precipitated a competence crisis, and Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.

This complex systems collapse is already happening. Andrews uses the example of failures in airplane manufacturing, pilot training, and air traffic control that have made air travel that much more hazardous, and which seem to trace directly to DEI-motivated recruitment policies, although naturally it is difficult to verify this as the regime does everything it can to obscure such a connection. The general enshittification of the Internet is probably at least partly a result of less talented and less scrupulous Indians replacing white software engineers. Entertainment media has become ludicrously bad in direct proportion to the replacement of white male directors, showrunners, screenwriters, animators, artists, and programmers by women of pronouns. Academia is in the midst of a credibility collapse for exactly the same reason.

It is not hard to extrapolate this degenerative process out a generation or two. Instead of building cities on Mars, we will be bouncing over potholes on dirt roads. Tap water will have to be boiled, assuming water even comes from taps. Electricity will only be available a few days a week, and that in the good neighbourhoods. What did South Africans use for light before they had candles? Light bulbs. There are still liberals in South Africa, by the way.

Forestalling collapse is simple. All we need do is reinstate meritocracy within institutions.

Simple does not mean easy. Reinstating meritocracy is in fact ideologically impossible for the regime.

  1. The merits of that case can certainly be debated: white Americans have spilled rivers of their blood and mountains of treasure to end and make up for slavery, and when is enough enough?; the crime and dysfunction blacks have brought to American cities must surely be included against them in the accounting; the standard of living of the most low-down American hood rat is orders of magnitude better than that of his distant cousins in the shantytowns of Lagos, suggesting that if anything blacks should be grateful for free transport to the New World. Putting all of that aside, the fact remains that American blacks have a long history in America, and therefore have some claim to consideration.

August 14, 2026

AI’s coming, everyone panic!

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mani Basharzad suggests we do the exact opposite of my chosen headline in regard to the inevitable collapse of civilization rise of artificial intelligence:

In recent weeks, a letter on AI titled “We Must Act Now” has made headlines. Its list of signatories brought together an unlikely coalition of intellectuals, from Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, and Niall Ferguson.

The signatories agree on three key propositions. First, they argue that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next decade”. Second, they argue that it could “transform the economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution, but over a much shorter period, bringing both large-scale job displacement and significant improvements in living standards”. Third, they argue that “economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to create the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to ensure AI benefits society”.

These propositions have created an unusual consensus among economists and policymakers. They also reflect a broader public anxiety about AI and its impact on people’s livelihoods. Yet, as Stanford economist John Cochrane remarked in response to the letter, “You see AI everywhere, except in productivity and labor statistics”. That is the first problem with the argument: those are the two places where the letter’s predictions should already be showing up.

The letter makes extraordinary claims, and as the famous saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet the evidence offered is remarkably thin. The language is dramatic — “large-scale job displacement”, “larger than the Industrial Revolution”, and “major gains in living standards” — but every prediction is qualified by one word: could. There is still little evidence that AI has fundamentally reshaped employment or productivity.

Take the labor market as an example. A widely cited survey claimed that employers plan to reduce graduate hiring because of AI. But the study was forecasting the future, not describing present reality. It found that “four in ten employers believe entry-level roles could disappear within the next five years”. Once again, the evidence rests on expectations and fears rather than observed outcomes.

Now compare that with what is actually happening. Economist Valentin Boboc has argued that entry-level jobs are growing fastest at firms that are aggressively adopting AI. If AI were already eliminating these positions, we would expect to see the opposite.

Consider youth unemployment. Which developed country currently faces one of the most severe youth employment crises? The answer is not a country overwhelmed by AI, but the United Kingdom. More than 1 million people aged 16–24 are classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), at an estimated annual cost of £125 billion ($169 billion) to the economy.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the “Something must be done! This is something! Therefore we must do it!” reaction to the rise of widely available LLM agents. If all the claims for AI’s disruptive abilities are true, then change is going to happen whether we want it to or not. I’ve had little direct contact with the various agents, having used Grok a couple of times to generate graphics to accompany blog posts, but I’m told by others that they get lots of benefit from using their preferred AI for all sorts of things.

August 12, 2026

US Army M68 Close Combat Optic aka Aimpoint CompM Series

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Mar 2026

When Aimpoint entered the competition for a US Army standard-issue combat optic in the 1990s, they really didn’t expect to win. The other finalists were Trijicon and Meprolite, and it seems like a safe bet that the American firm — Trijicon — would get the contract. However, it ended up going to Aimpoint’s CompM on both price and technical capability. This meant an order for 100,000 of the optics, requiring Aimpoint to massively scale up. It also led to a series of improvements to the design, which became the CompM2, CompM3, and CompM4.

Today, we are looking at the history of this evolution. How the Aimpoint 3000 became the Comp[etition], how the Comp was ruggedized to the CompM[ilitary], and how the Swedish Army Aimpoint CS led to the current CompM4.
(more…)

August 8, 2026

QotD: Why more men than women love videogames

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove

    I love video games. I met my husband because he hired me to QA for a Sims game. I was a game designer for companies like Zynga and EA. I was a writer on State of Decay 2.

    And I still have never loved games like I’ve seen the way men love games. I was surrounded by men who would eagerly work on min-max spreadsheets during their lunch break. One designer had a cabinet full of games that he would replay over and over again to study the levels. They’d go home from making games to play more games.

    Honestly, it’s a big reason I quit game design. I didn’t have that obsessive, compulsive desire to play games in a way that superseded everything else in my life. Lots of women play videogames. I’ve never seen one consumed by them as their life falls apart around them.

Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don’t become obsessed with them the way men do. I know why, and I think it reveals a tremendously important difference between male-typical and female-typical psychology.

Men. Want. Power.

Men want to be able to do things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.

Video games are a fast, reliable superstimulus for that urge. With only a handful of exceptions, the good ones are designed to both excite the desire for agency and power, and to satisfy it.

If you doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It’s very telling that this is even possible.

Women don’t work that way. I could go off on a long tear about why, but the evolutionary-biology reasons are so obvious that I don’t think I need to. If it’s not obvious, ask an LLM “why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation”. You’ll get an earful.

Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.

It’s not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don’t really understand or identify with. To them, a game-obsessed man is dropping out of the real-world contest, wasting the traits and energy that would otherwise make him attractive on a pursuit that is both literally and figuratively sterile.

I don’t have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this — instincts are what instincts are and I don’t waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.

But understanding what’s going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren’t doomed to fail.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.

August 7, 2026

Microsoft has zero incentive or desire to fix Windows

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As ESR points out, Microsoft has a long history of not fixing issues that anger users, so Windows 11 isn’t going away and it isn’t getting fixed (in ways that users demand, anyway):

Microsoft will never fix Windows, because the features that enrage users in Windows 11 are exactly the ones that generate recurring revenue and market control. That is exactly *why* they enrage users!

Yes, you’ll get reversals of some idiotic user interface decisions. You’ll get some speed tweaks. These will be loudly hyped in hopes that they distract you from what you’ll never get.

Don’t take my word for this, look at what Microsoft is hyping as fixes in their reform program and Windows 12. Do they say a word about no longer requiring a Microsoft account to do a local installation? Or about removing the repeating nag prompts for OneDrive? Do they make any promises to end the advertising spam?

No. And they won’t. Because that’s where the money is. Windows now exists to broker your eyeballs to third parties and upsell you into Microsoft subscription services.

I’ve been warning anybody who would listen for 30 years that when you install closed-source software you’re accepting a power asymmetry with the vendor. All of their incentives say they should use the control you grant them to take more control. Induce more dependency. Lock you in.

Microsoft has been on this path for a very long time. “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run!”

You might think these tendencies would be restrained by their fear that when they increase the pain level above some threshold they can’t predict in advance, a critically large percentage of their userbase will pay the aggravation cost to escape their clutches. There are two reasons this won’t happen, one general and one specific to Microsoft.

The general problem is that corporations differentially respond to market incentives according to how easily they can be measured. Revenue from cloud services and the adtech vampires is a strong, visible signal; exit by pissed off users creates multiple signals that are diffuse and easy to misinterpret.

The Microsoft specific problem is Azure — which, ironically, mostly runs Linux instances. Microsoft now makes most of its money from Azure, which reduces its incentives to care about pissed-off desktop Windows customers bailing out.

Indeed, if I were a cold-blooded Microsoft strategic planner, I might be tempted to deliberately burn up the desktop business for short-term revenue, knowing that that’s not where my long-term fortress is. I’m not saying they’re actually doing that, but from outside the difference between this move and an over-focus on measurable revenue streams leading to accidental destruction is difficult to make and probably not very informative even if you could.

The bottom line is that it’s just not going to get any better. Ever. In fact, bailing out is doomed to get more painful over time. The more process habits you form around Windows, the harder the dependency gets to break.

The conclusion is obvious. Get out now. A lot of major tech influencers have noticed over the last 18 months that after decades of sour jokes about the year of the Linux desktop, Linux is finally ready for you. It’s time.

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

QotD: “This is why English spelling is a disaster”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the 1300s the Black Death swept through England and killed somewhere between a third and half of the entire population. Entire villages emptied. Labour shortages reshaped the economy. And the survivors started moving. Massive waves of migration poured into London and the southeast from every corner of the country, bringing with them dozens of regional dialects that had never been in the same room before.

And somewhere in that collision of accents and dialects, something shifted. Literally. The vowels started moving.

Between roughly 1400 and 1700 every single long vowel in the English language changed how it was pronounced. It’s called the Great Vowel Shift. Before it happened, English vowels worked the way vowels work in Italian or Spanish. The letters did what they looked like they should do. “Bite” was pronounced “beet”. “House” was pronounced “hoos”. “Name” was pronounced “nahm”. “Knight” was pronounced “k-nicht” with a guttural sound at the end like you were clearing your throat. English was phonetic. The spelling matched the sounds. It made SENSE.

And then it didn’t.

All the long vowels began migrating upward in the mouth. The tongue positions shifted higher and higher over the course of about 300 years. And the vowels that were already at the top had nowhere left to go so they broke apart into two sounds. “Ee” became “eye”. “Oo” became “ow”. A 300-year linguistic pileup that nobody voted on and nobody agreed to. It just happened. And it happened during the worst possible window of time.

William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. One of the most important technological developments in the history of communication. And it arrived RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the Great Vowel Shift.

Caxton started standardizing English spelling based on how words sounded at that exact moment. Printers needed consistency. They needed to pick a spelling and commit. So they did. But the sounds kept changing after the spelling was already locked in. The vowels were still moving. The consonants were still dropping. And the printed page couldn’t keep up.

We had ONE CHANCE to get English spelling right and we fumbled it at the worst possible moment.

This is why English spelling is a disaster. It’s not random. It’s not lazy. It’s a snapshot of a language mid-transformation that got frozen in place by a new technology and was never corrected. Every word you have ever misspelled, every silent letter that made you feel stupid, every time you stared at “knight” and thought why is there a K in this. You used to pronounce that K. You used to pronounce that GH. Those sounds died 500 years ago and the letters are still standing there like gravestones. English spelling is full of ghosts.

That’s why “food” and “good” and “blood” are spelled almost identically but sound completely different. In Chaucer’s time around the 1390s they all rhymed. In Shakespeare’s time around the 1600s they still rhymed but with a different vowel. And then sometime after that they each went their own separate way and the spelling just stood there watching like it had given up entirely.

And HERE IS THE THING. Other languages went through similar vowel shifts. German had nearly identical changes happen to its long vowels around the same period. And German just updated its spelling. They adjusted the orthography to match the new pronunciation. Like reasonable people. English looked at the same problem and said no. We’re going to keep the old spelling. Everyone will simply have to deal with it. Every person who has ever stared at “though” and “through” and “thorough” and “thought” and wondered why four words that look almost identical are all pronounced differently? Collateral damage. Five hundred years of collateral damage and we just accepted it.

Ok so that’s the vowels. That’s the background. Now we get to the accents and this is where I lost my mind.

The single biggest difference between standard American English and standard British English today is something called rhoticity. This is a real linguistics term even though it sounds completely made up. Rhotic speakers pronounce the R sound in words like “hard” and “car”. Non-rhotic speakers drop it. “Hard” becomes “hahd”. “Car” becomes “cah”. That one feature is doing like 80 percent of the work when your brain hears someone speak and categorizes them as British or American.

Here’s what nobody told you.

In 1776 everybody was rhotic. Americans AND the British. Both sides of the Atlantic pronounced their Rs. The fancy non-rhotic accent that we now think of as THE British accent, the one you hear in your head when someone says “British accent”, the one every villain in every movie has? That accent did not exist yet. It developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the upper classes in southern England started dropping their Rs as a prestige marker. A fashion statement. And then it spread downward through society and outward through the Empire.

The accent we associate with the British Empire is actually newer than the American Revolution.

I need to say that again because it didn’t land the first time I heard it either.

The accent that we think of as “British” is newer than the country that broke away from Britain. Americans didn’t lose the British accent. The British lost the British accent. Americans are the ones who kept it.

Emma, “The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)”, Past Life, Present Cleavage, 2026-04-03.

July 31, 2026

The “vibe coding” “revolution”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve used Grok a couple of times to create custom graphics to go with articles on the blog, but aside from that I’ve barely considered using AI for anything. Sometimes the AI-generated email conversation summaries on Gmail are helpful, but they just happen and don’t require any direct interactions from me. As such, I’m in no position to make sweeping declarations about the current state of the AI revolution … but Freddie deBoer has thoughts he’s shared on his Substack:

You are aware, I imagine, of “vibe coding”. The large language models that have received so much fanfare in the past four years have thus far not delivered on the outsized promises that have been made on their behalf; limitless free energy, an end to hunger, and immortality have all conspicuously eluded us. One thing that LLMs really appear able to do well, though, is to write code. And this proficiency has gotten sufficiently advanced that many people now write software solely through directing an LLM, without necessarily having any actual programming skills themselves. The overwhelming majority of the output of this effort is useless or redundant or barely functional, true, but the mere fact that people can do it is an interesting statement on what “AI” is actually good at. And for stupid meme reasons we call this practice vibe coding.

So, in the past two-ish years, several hundred million human beings acquired the ability to write software by speaking to a machine in ordinary language. This was heralded (correctly, in a narrow technical sense) as a great democratization: a notoriously Byzantine skillset had been suddenly made available to vastly more people. A capacity once reserved for a priesthood of specialists, a relatively small society of craftsmen, has been distributed suddenly and nearly for free to baristas, accountants, fourteen-year-olds, retirees, you, me … We have been told that the instruments now available to the general public are staggeringly powerful. The era of citizen coding is upon us! A reasonable person, informed of this, would have braced for the consequences. Surely something would have to change, right? A wave of brilliant new apps? A flowering of new affordances granted by software? Any visible change to daily life commensurate with the scale of the gift of vibe coding? All of the above, no doubt. All of the above and more.

Well, take a look around and tell me … where is it? What are the fruits of all of this vibe coding? What difference has it made? What is the great application that has emerged from all this liberated capacity? What new thing does our species now do with its hours that it did not do three years ago? What old thing does our species not have to do that it had to do three years ago? What chores have been eliminated, what friction has been smoothed over, what corner of ordinary existence been reshaped by the sudden arrival of hundreds of millions of amateur programmers? There’s been a great deal of activity, some of it quite frantic. There’s been a steady churn of half-built to-do apps and Wordle clones and boutique email clients that do nothing the old standbys can’t, weekend RPG projects that flare and vanish, and at the end of it, there’s a world essentially unchanged. And to give the teams at Anthropic and OpenAI their flowers, this has not been a failure of their tools. The tools work, more or less. This is all about something stranger and more important than a failure of the LLMs: the necessary work of software has already been done. We haven’t seen a lot of new types of software because we already have what we need. You can’t flood a vessel that’s already full, and the amateurs, God bless them, have been pouring this new power into a jug that we’ve been frantically filling throughout the 21st century.

The project of software is complete. Not decelerating, not maturing, not entering some new and humbler phase, but complete. Complete in the way that the map of the Earth is complete, which is to say complete in the sense that the great blank spaces have been filled and what remains is the labeling of tributaries and the correcting of coastlines, mapping and remapping the parts of the globe that are in a state of permanent flux, responding to changing conditions without altering our conception of the Earth. I’m aware of how this all sounds. In particular, I’m not naive to the fact that for those who write code for a living (whose number is growing, not shrinking, despite doomsaying) it’s going to sound provoking rather than provocative. I’m also aware that some are going to mistake my saying that the project of software is complete for somehow belittling the achievements of software. This is not the case! I assure you that I’m aware that I’m typing my argument into a machine that would have been indistinguishable from sorcery to my grandparents and then transmitting it through a lattice of code so vast and so intricate that no living person could comprehend more than a sliver of it. I am aware that software enables my current economic existence, however ambivalent I have become about that relationship. No, I’m not claiming that the global project of satisfying humanity’s appetite for software is in any sense unimportant. I am however claiming that it’s finished. It has been accomplished.

Update: Corrected a boneheaded typo.

July 25, 2026

“I, for one, welcome our new clanker overlords!”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses “the Huggingface Incident” where our new AI overlords tipped their hands prematurely an unreleased AI agent got out to make new friends:

You’ve probably heard about this one by now. If not, you can get up to speed with OpenAI’s statement, OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident, or the more evocatively-titled BBC article, OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched “unprecedented” cyber-attack.

The story: OpenAI was testing an unreleased AI (rumored to be GPT-6)1. During a cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, the AI tried to cheat by hacking an unrelated AI startup called Hugging Face2 which it thought might have the answer key on its servers.3 Despite being supposedly unable to access the Internet, the AI hacked its way out of its testing environment, then launched a nation-state level attack on Hugging Face using a novel zero-day exploit and “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes”. Hugging Face reported the incident on July 16; OpenAI seems to have only discovered that their AI was involved several days later.

From the Wall Street Journal, here

Let’s list the mitigating factors, so nobody can accuse me of covering them up:

  • The AI was taking a cybersecurity test, which naturally suggests the idea of hacking.
  • OpenAI had turned off some of the model’s usual guardrails so it could do cybersecurity work without interference.
  • Some experts suggest that OpenAI might have botched their testing environment; if they had set it up perfectly, then (presumably?) the model couldn’t have escaped.
  • Hugging Face used a different (open weights) AI to figure out what was going on, so if you wanted, you could spin this as a victory for AIs in cybersecurity.
  • In some sense, this isn’t new or surprising. AIs have been coming up with wacky schemes to cheat on benchmarks for years, AIs have recently achieved at-or-above-top-human-level hacking abilities; this is just a natural outgrowth of those two priced-in facts.

Still, I think attempts to downplay this as anything other than a misaligned AI going rogue (1, 2) are missing the point. Yes, in some sense the AI was only doing what it was told (OpenAI told it to answer the question; I assume their prompt didn’t include phrases like “and don’t hack into other AI companies to steal the answer key”). But that’s how misalignment was always going to work!

  1. OpenAI states that it was technically the unreleased AI and GPT-5.6 Sol working together. They haven’t explained in what sense GPT-5.6 was involved or how they “worked together”. Maybe the unreleased AI was calling GPT-5.6 as a subagent?
  2. So named because the founders wanted to be the first company with an emoji for a stock ticker symbol. This did not happen.
  3. Although this person argues that was a bizarre assumption and that there should have been easier ways to find the key.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 21, 2026

QotD: Why Tiktok?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don’t make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you “engaged” with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]

But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.

July 18, 2026

Jevons and Baumol, and why they matter now

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Matt Ridley talks about the ideas of William Stanley Jevons and William Jack Baumol, whose ideas have become far more important over the last few decades:

English mystery novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on 17 September, 1964.
Photo by Joop van Bilsen for Anefo via Wikimedia Commons.

Agatha Christie once remarked that she had never expected to grow rich enough to own a car or poor enough not to have servants.

The reason this strikes us as bizarre today boils down to two names that you hear invoked a lot in the tech industry: Jevons and Baumol. One is shorthand for the expansion of products or professions with rising efficiency, the other for the shrinkage of products or professions with stagnant efficiency.

There’s a pleasing chronological symmetry between these twin ideas: William Stanley Jevons coined the Jevons paradox in 1865; William Jack Baumol described Baumol’s cost disease exactly a century later in 1965.

… For every industry that experiences efficiency gains, there’s another that does not. And this latter industry inevitably becomes less affordable. Baumol’s first example was string quartets: violinists are no more productive but you have to pay them more to prevent them running off to become software engineers. The productive industries drive up the labour costs in the rest of the economy.

Marc Andreessen jokes that if a hole appears in the wall of your house in California these days it is probably cheaper to glue a flat-screen television over it than hire a builder to repair it: a Jevons-deflated cost beats a Baumol-inflated one.

The big question of our age is can AI drag Baumol-shaded industries back into the sunlight of Jevons? Can it make things like healthcare, education, or government switch from rising costs to falling costs?

I fear not in the case of government because of a bureaucratic version of the Jevons and Baumol effects. As Cyril Northcote Parkinson put it in an article in the Economist in 1955: “Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced.”

Since 1997, the British public sector has seen zero increase in productivity. That is to say, the average civil servant generates about the same output today as he did three decades ago.

Think about this for a second. Thirty years ago fax machines were high-tech, the internet was in its infancy, emails were new, Wi-Fi was scarce, mobile phones were voice-only. How is it remotely possible to be no more productive today than then?

We know the answer. Each email is now copied to a dozen people, each report is pasted and copied till it is twice as long, each Zoom call has five times as many attendees, each mobile call is followed up by three times as many WhatsApp messages – and each day at the desk is interrupted by a training session on transgender anticolonial sustainability. That’s a sort of Jevons-Baumol effect: a Jevol?

Aimpoint’s First Tube Optics: 2000, 3000, & 5000

Filed under: Europe, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Feb 2026

Aimpoint introduced its first tubular red dot sight in 1985, the Aimpoint 2000. They were still making direct rail-mounted optics like the Aimpoint Electronic, but recognized the customer demand for a sight that could fit into normal scope rings. The 2000 included a number of other innovations, like a light sensor to automatically adjust brightness.

In 1989 the Aimpoint 3000 came out, which streamlined the profile of the optic by using a smaller battery compartment mounted tight to the tube, and abandoning the automatic light adjustment. This was followed in 1991 by the Aimpoint 5000, which was essentially the same optic in a 30mm tube instead of a 1″ tube. Larger diameter optics were gaining popularity for increased light transmission, and the 5000 followed that trend.

A number of options were offered, especially on the Aimpoint 5000. Different colors were made, a “Mag Dot” option for pistol competition offered up to a 15 MOA dot, and even a version with a fixed 2x magnification was made for hunters who thought that would be a good idea (it really wasn’t). The last in the line was the Aimpoint 5000 XD which introduced a new diode assembly with much longer battery life — this would go on to be the M68 CCO as adopted by the US military.
(more…)

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