Quotulatiousness

May 15, 2026

Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”

Filed under: Education, Europe, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:

“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.

Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.

The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”

Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”

I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.

Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.

At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.

“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.

Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)

High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.

The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.

But it’s not just the Swedes.

Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.

How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.

Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.

When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.

And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.

QotD: Rediscovering Cræft

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

Of course this isn’t just a book about hedging, that would be silly. There’s also haymaking, shepherding, walling, beekeeping, weaving, tanning, basketry, thatching, plowing, and the making of everything from ponds to quicklime, because Alex Langlands is obsessed with preserving (and if necessary recovering) the skills of the rural past. He wants you to understand what’s been lost to industrialization, and how our contact area with the world has shrunk, and why doing things with your body is part of being human, and … oh wait I’m sorry I nodded off, because I’ve written this all like twelve times already.

So why am I telling you about a book on how to do things by hand that you can do far more quickly and efficiently with a machine?

Well.

Langlands frames his book around the concept of cræft, which (as you can probably guess from that æsc) is the Old English origin of our modern “craft”. The ancestral word is richer and more complicated than the modern one, though, pointing to far more than handmade tchotchkes and beer with too much hops. The Dictionary of Old English explains:

    “Skill” may be the single most useful translation for cræft, but the senses of the word reach out to “strength”, “resources”, “virtue”, and other meanings in such a way that it is often not possible to assign an occurrence to one sense in [modern English] without arbitrariness and loss of semantic richness.

Like the modern “craft”, it does convey a sense of ability, especially when it comes to one’s livelihood: the students in Ælfric’s Colloquy use cræft as well as weorc when discussing what they do all day. But it can also mean might or power: when the Old English Orosius tells us that the strength of the Medes failed them in battle, for example, it’s Meða cræft that gefeoll,1 and when Judah Maccabee’s foes join the fray, they begin to fight mid cræfte. Of course, there are semantic connections among these varied meanings: the ideas of physical strength and physical skill blend into one another at the edges, and a word for a thing you’re good at doing with your hands can also be used for a thing you’re good at doing with your mind. (After all, we still refer to writing as a “craft”.) And ideally you’re fairly talented at whatever set of things provide your livelihood! So we can say that Old English cræft broadly means something like “a person’s ability to bring his will to bear on the world, and his skill in doing so”.

There’s one more meaning, though, and it appears more or less exclusively in the writings of Alfred the Great: cræft as spiritual or mental excellence.2 Anglo-Saxon scholars had mostly used cræft as a way of rendering Latin ars, but when King Alfred translated Boethius into Old English he used cræft for Latin virtus, virtue as in moral excellence.3 A contemporary reader might be tempted to see this as merely an extension of the “mental skill” sense of the word (a virtuous person is one who is good at being good), but that would be misleading; the general meaning of cræft leaves the word freighted with powerful and inescapably physical implications. (Remember, too, that before the Reformation the Christian image of spiritual excellence universally emphasized asceticism, which necessarily involves the body a great deal.) Cræft as virtue is not an internal moral condition, it’s an internal activity, a kind of doing or making of the soul.

Or, as Langlands glosses his title, cræft is “a hand-eye-head-heart-body coordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our world”.

Langlands is now a professor of archaeology at Swansea University, but he got his professional start as a circuit digger, the kind of “hired trowel” real estate developers pay to quickly catalog all the ancient remains they’re about to turn into the foundation of a new Tesco. It was not a fulfilling job — “crude and expedient” is the line he uses for his commercial excavations — and he was beginning to grow disillusioned with archaeology as a field. So naturally he did what any sensible person would do if he didn’t like his job: he applied to be on a TV show. This was in 2003, and BBC Two was advertising for people to spend a year in 1620, living on and running a historical farm using reconstructed period techniques and equipment. Langlands got the gig (along with Ruth Goodman and another archaeologist whose book I haven’t read), and had a wild year in the Stuart era and then a few more in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The shift from examining the archaeological record to experiencing how it was made was an eye-opener, and the success of that first program took him by surprise: “I’d often wondered to myself who on earth would want to watch a bunch of cranky, oddball re-enactors and archaeologists bimbling around in costume, pretending to be in the past”, he writes. “But I didn’t care too much because I was spending nearly every single hour of every day immersed in historical farming. I was tending, ploughing, scything, chopping, sweeping, hedging, sowing, walling, slicing, chiselling, digging, sharpening, thatching, shoveling; the list was almost endless.” And the longer he spent doing all these things (he was on three more shows), the more he realized that the skills, and the knowledge they required, were slipping away.

True cræft, in Langlands’s version, is a combination of know-how and make-do. It’s when you live on the Outer Hebrides and don’t have any trees, so you use whatever driftwood washes up as the ridgebeam for your roof. No timber for the rafters? No problem — a sufficiently strong rope, drawn tightly enough over the ridgeline and secured on both sides, makes something like a giant net on which you can lay your thatch. The straw left in the fields after harvest will do nicely for making both rope and thatch, but if (say) it’s the early twentieth century and you’ve abandoned cereal crops because cheap North American grain knocked the bottom out of the market, then you can make rope from heather and thatch with bunches of bracken. (On the Danish coast, they use seaweed.)

Or it’s when you’re an early Anglo-Saxon who wants to boil some water. A few generations ago, some Romano-Briton on the same spot would simply have bought a beautifully thrown pot from any one of a dozen proto-industrial centers across the Empire, but these days that production has slowed or stopped and the trade networks that would’ve brought them to you are kaput anyway. All you’ve got is some lousy local clay, too weathered to be easily worked. You don’t even have the fuel to fire it hot. So you add organic tempers like grass or chaff (or even dung) to make the clay more plastic, you shape it by hand without a wheel, and when you fire your pot the chaff burns away and leaves tiny voids in the ceramic. Your pot is soft, it’s brittle, it’s kind of lumpy, and fifteen hundred years from now Bryan Ward-Perkins is going to point to it as evidence that civilization collapsed when Rome fell — but it’s still a pot, and it still holds water. You’ve made ingenious use of the world around you to solve your problem. You are, in a word, cræfty.

So when Langlands says cræft, he means the way people behave under conditions of scarcity and resource constraint. And when you’re in that kind of situation, of course you have to be intimately familiar with all your materials — you have to squeeze every last drop of performance out of them! And while Langlands is interested in preindustrial techniques, this isn’t just a matter for drystone wallers and skep-making beekeepers; you can also be cræfty with machines or computers. Cræft is the Havana mechanics who keep 1950s cars running on an income of $40/month, or the engineers who fit all the computer code for the Apollo Guidance Computer into 80 kilobytes. It’s the defining feature of the Real Programmer who “tuck[ed] a pattern matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter”. We rightly admire these cræfty solutions for their elegance and their makers’ skills, but aside from a few weird hobbyists we don’t imitate them. You don’t spend days hauling rocks and building a wall to keep your sheep in when you have wire fencing. You don’t learn the skies so you can time your haymaking for clement weather when you can just wrap your machine-mown grass in plastic and make silage instead. And you don’t work in unreal mode when you have 64-bit processor. Technological advances have freed up our time precisely because they’ve freed us from the need for clever, thoughtful, material-aware solutions to our problems. No one is cræfty in the midst of abundance, because they don’t have to be.

Your reaction to that last paragraph reveals where you fall in the Wizard/Prophet divide: are you pumping your fist for humanity, or are you a little sad that a kind of mastery has been lost? Is our ability to simply throw more resources at the problem and go on with our day a blessed liberation from the bonds of brute necessity, or is it a tragic separation of our thinking, making, doing selves from our world? Are our practical limitations something to be defeated or innovated around, or are they something to embrace because they are, in some sense, good for us?

Langlands is, unsurprisingly, well over on the Prophet side. He warns that “while some machines are clever, the net result of our using them is that we become lazy, stupid, desensitized, and disengaged” — it’s not that a thing made by hand is better as an object than its mass-produced counterpart (although in some cases it is, and a stone wall does last longer than a wire fence), it’s that the making changes the maker. And while he likes to warn that climate change or Peak Oil or the fragility of international supply chains make our uncræftiness a serious survival risk (think of those poor imported-pot-dependent Britons when Rome withdrew!), that’s not really the point. Even if our technological society never falters — even if we soar to greater and greater heights of prosperity and can afford to automate and mechanize more and more of our interface with the world — Langlands argues that would just mean more missing out.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-03-24.

  1. As in modern German and Dutch, Old English used the ge– prefix for past participles.
  2. For more on Old English cræft, especially in the Alfredian corpus, see here. Langlands quotes from the late Peter Clemoes, who wrote extensively on the topic, but no obliging Kazakh has put that online for me.
  3. This is a fascinating word choice, because virtus is also a complicated and interesting word; it’s derived from the Latin word for man, vir, and means things like “force” but also “manliness” or “bravery” (like Greek ἀνδρεία). In the classical world, it came to mean something like moral worth or excellence in a particularly masculine way, and though it was adopted as a western Christian term for something like spiritual ἀρετή, it retained some of those echoes.

May 14, 2026

QotD: Marx was right about “alienation”

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

So, too, with alienation. Marx was talking about physical commodities — the guys who work in the widget factories can’t afford the widgets they make. Indeed, they never even see the finished widget as it rolls off the line — they are just a small cog in a big machine. But alienation is so much more profound than that, and more pervasive. Again, consider the laptop class. What are they connected to, other than their tiny social media bubbles? They have no real relationship even to their own physical body — just look at them, for pete’s sake. They’ve never done anything with their hands but type. And as for social relations, they’re so disconnected from other people that they will text people who are in the same room.

No shit, I’ve seen it happen. And it’s even worse than that, because they think they’re being socially savvy. “Oh, Jayden is in the middle of a conversation with Brayden; I’ll just text him, so as not to interrupt.” But since people under forty are physically incapable of not checking their phone the minute it beeps at them, it’s not just an interruption, it’s an especially obnoxious one … and they have no idea. What we used to call the “soft skills” — the ability to come up to Jayden and Brayden, assess where the conversation’s going, and steer it in such a way as to get Jayden the info he needs organically — are totally gone.

You can test this for yourself. Just don’t answer the phone. Or a text. Seriously, try it. It’s tough, isn’t it? No matter where you are, the fucking thing dings, and you immediately grab for it. It takes real physical effort not to. It’s much, much easier to simply turn it off, and while I’m all for that — indeed, I’m for dropping it overboard in the Marianas Trench, or shooting it into deep space — try leaving it on, and only checking your text messages at a set time. It’ll keep until 3pm (your designated “check message” time), I promise. Or if it won’t — if it’s the wife asking you to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home — then you’ll learn a different lesson, the one about how we use crutches for some reason when we’ve got perfectly good legs.

That’s alienation, in the broadest and most significant sense. Since you are constantly available — since your time is now a commodity, that you’re constantly selling to the lowest bidder — your personal worth is zilch. You’re a message-answerer and milk-fetcher and all-purpose Guy Friday, to everyone, all the time. Even to — make that especially to — the people who supposedly love you, and respect you. Because who cares what you’re doing right now? The important thing is that milk, no?

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

May 13, 2026

“The dark genius of bureaucracy”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Auto-translation on the social media site formerly known as Twitter has brought some posts from Brivael Le Pogam to my attention, like this one:

The Invisible Cemetery

Milton Friedman said a phrase that should haunt every European legislator for the rest of their life. On the FDA, he said this: there is overwhelming evidence that they have caused more deaths through delayed approvals than they have saved through early approvals.

Read it twice. More deaths from excessive caution than lives saved by caution.

And no one sees it. That’s the dark genius of bureaucracy.

Bastiat theorized the principle 175 years ago. “What is seen and what is not seen.” The economist, he said, is not distinguished from the bad economist by the ability to see the immediate effect of a decision. Everyone sees that. He is distinguished by the ability to see the invisible effects, the delayed ones, the ones diffused across the entire population.

The self-driving car is the perfect example. And it’s playing out right before our eyes.

Tesla publishes the numbers. One accident every 7 million miles in Autopilot. One accident every 700,000 miles in the average American human. Autopilot is, at this stage, ten times safer than a human. And it’s only getting better, with every release.

Now France. 3,200 deaths on the roads in 2024. 91% involve human error. Speed, alcohol, fatigue, distraction. If we deployed a self-driving car ten times safer tomorrow, we’d divide the carnage by ten. We’re talking about 2,800 lives a year. Over ten years, 28,000 people. The equivalent of an average French town that disappears, because no one pressed the right button in Brussels.

You’ll never see them. No newspaper will headline: “Today, 8 people died because the self-driving car is banned in Europe”. No parliamentary commission will investigate. No bureaucrat will be fired. Those deaths will go in the “road fatality” box. We’ll run moving campaigns with their photos on 4×3 billboards. We’ll say it’s sad, that’s life.

Meanwhile, the first accident of a self-driving car will be front-page news in every paper for three weeks. The regulator will summon the manufacturers. NGOs will call for preventive bans. Deputies will write op-eds. The minister will decree a moratorium.

Five visible deaths will outweigh, in the media and political balance, five thousand invisible deaths. That’s the iron law of bureaucracy. The bureaucrat who authorizes something that goes wrong loses their career. The bureaucrat who bans something that would have saved thousands of lives is never troubled. No one holds them accountable for the deaths they could have prevented. They don’t exist in their statistics. They don’t exist in their trial.

Friedman had identified the exact mechanism: when a regulator errs on the side of laxity, their victims have names, faces, families, lawyers. When they err on the side of caution, their victims are anonymous, scattered, statistical, ghosts. The structure of incentives makes over-regulation rationally inevitable. And the invisible cemetery grows, generation after generation.

Europe is going to sit out 10 years on the self-driving car, just as it sat out on AI, as it sat out on genetic engineering, as it sat out on fourth-generation nuclear. Every time, the same playbook. Precaution, moratorium, ethics committee, white paper, directive, transposition. And every time, behind the curtain of words, deaths that appear in no official statistics.

These are deaths. Not opportunity costs. Not “economic losses”. Human beings who were alive and who died because an innovation that could have saved them was delayed by people whose literal job it is.

That’s what needs to be built, and it’s probably the most important political project of the century that’s opening. A system for accounting for invisible deaths. A registry of the cemetery that no one sees.

For every regulation, every moratorium, every preventive ban, we should be able to produce a signed, dated, quantified estimate of the human cost in lives of the decision. Not direct effects. Delayed effects, indirect ones, statistical ones. How many deaths per year caused by banning a technology that works elsewhere.

Imagine. On the desk of the European commissioner about to sign a moratorium on the self-driving car, a document: “Central estimate, 2,800 deaths per year for the duration of the moratorium. High-end range, 4,100. Low-end range, 1,900. Source: comparative analysis Tesla Autopilot vs. human average, NHTSA and ONISR data, public and audited method.”

On the desk of the European deputy who will vote on the AI Act: “Central estimate, 38 billion euros in lost GDP, 240,000 jobs not created, X deaths per year due to delays in AI medical diagnostics, Y deaths per year due to delays in deploying autonomous drones for medical delivery in rural areas.”

Today, we sign blindly. We sign without cost. We sign with a clear conscience because the deaths we cause are anonymous and the lives we protect have faces. That’s what needs to be broken.

A bureaucracy is an institution that operates without being held accountable for the invisible consequences of its decisions. As long as invisible deaths are not counted, bureaucracy is mechanically, structurally, inevitably a machine for producing deaths it will never see.

Europe isn’t losing a technological battle. It’s filling a cemetery. Year after year. And no one wears mourning. No one lays flowers. No one knows they’re there.

Friedman saw them before everyone else. Bastiat before him. Williams after him. And each posed the same question, which echoes like an accusation through the centuries: who weeps for the deaths we didn’t see coming?

That’s the work ahead of us. Making the invisible cemetery visible. Accounting for it. Auditing it. Publishing it. Confronting every bureaucrat, every day, with the exact list of lives that their signature takes with it.

Before the list becomes ours.

May 12, 2026

What happened to the people who took Joe Biden’s advice and learned to code?

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

It was only a few years ago that snooty media personalities were constantly echoing President Joe Biden’s advice to unemployed workers: “Learn to code”. Then, of course, the media hit hard times and the advice was then being snarkily offered to newly unemployed media folks. But what about the (few) who actually did “learn to code”, only to be swept away again as the clankers surged in to eliminate a lot of basic coding jobs?

How to Understand What AI Just Did to People Who Took Joe Biden’s Advice and Learned to Code.

A simple, concrete example.

Oddly enough, I have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. This means I know 7 algorithms for sorting a list into alphabetical order. I understand the tradeoffs between their execution time, code complexity, and memory demand. I learned the specialized lingo for describing execution time.

The algorithms are surprisingly complex and subtle. I spent months learning to code them.

Now that hard-won knowledge has been replaced by, “Claude, write a module to sort this list. Optimize for execution time.”

Millions of good people just lost their professions and must now invest in a new one.

Right now, knowing how to sort a list probably gives me a small advantage when I code with AI. But I will soon lose even that tiny return on my investment, as AI improves.

Certainly AI will create some new opportunities, probably a lot of them.

But count your blessings, if you did not spend years learning to code like I did.

And:

Here is the counterpoint: Learning to code gave coders an advantage when relearning to code with AI.

That advantage is their ticket to a seat in the new AI world.

The big question now is how many seats exist.

To which ESR responded:

Your position is reasonable, but wrong.

Having learned to code is still valuable in the new world of AI, not because you’re wrong about coding itself having become disposable, but because of the capabilities and mindset you developed while learning to code, some of which are difficult to learn in any other way.

You didn’t become a professional programmer. But I’m willing to bet that your intuition about how to design software is far better because you wrestled with code. And that is *not* a skill that LLMs are replacing — ignore the noisy hype about this.

I’m also willing to bet that some of what you learned as a programmer in training translated into problem-decomposition skills that have served you well as an economist.

If one is not a complete dullard (and you are certainly not a complete dullard) learning to code teaches not just craft skills but a mindset — a set of heuristics for carving reality at its joints. There are other ways to get this — I think for example of Richard Feynman who got there by thinking very hard about physics. And it is not guaranteed that every programmer will develop this right mindset.

But many of us do. And most of the other ways to develop it seem also to produce it only as a side effect, but less reliably than learning to code does.

So don’t write off learning to code. Maybe someday we’ll develop educational methods that can teach those higher-level skills more directly. That would be an excellent thing, if it’s possible. But until it gets here, learning to code will still have value that is not easy to duplicate in any other way.

May 8, 2026

“… without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites”

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

Devon Eriksen responds to someone who had a clanker generate an imaginary Aztec capital today if the Aztecs had managed to defeat Cortes and his conquistadors:

Guitars. Suits and ties. Western architecture. English and Spanish text.

What’s easy to miss is that the generative AI is making its own, separate, political statement here. Not because it intended to, but because it had no choice.

Even human creativity consists mostly of rearranging things, but AI generation is entirely that and nothing else.

So when you ask it for “modern”, it gives you “western”, because in its eyes, there is no distinction between the two. “Western” is the only “modern” that actually exists for it to draw from.

Even cultures that were capable of building an alternative version of modern, because they weren’t skinning and eating each other, and had invented the wheel, still borrowed heavily from the West, not because they couldn’t do otherwise, but because the West moved faster, and had already done the work.

So, ask an AI for “modern Aztec”, and you get English-speaking Tokyo/Venice, with browner people, pyramid reskins on skyscrapers, and some out-of-place Mayan stuff, all set to Peruvian flute music.

This is the same reason that a lot of people, most of whom really aren’t much more than LLMs themselves, say silly things like “there is no White culture” … because, like the very simple art machine, they cannot conceive of any alternative version of modernity.

So nothing is Western to them, it’s all just “modern”.

But of course it really is Western, because without Western Civilization, we’d all still be whacking at the dirt with sticks and dying of intestinal parasites.

That AI is Western, too.

May 7, 2026

Great success! Honda “postpones” their Ontario EV project

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As part of their mindless fanboyism for anything remotely related to “Net Zero”, the federal government and the Ontario provincial government have been serving up subsidies for electric vehicles and hastening the “inevitable transition” away from internal combustion vehicles. Through legislation and regulation, they’ve been doing everything they can to close down the traditional car and truck manufacturing sector and replace them with zero emission vehicles. The various governments have handed out subsidies amounting to billions, and yet one after another after another the much ballyhoo’d EV factories, battery plants, and other futuristic projects fall by the wayside, leaving very little in exchange for those billions:

There was a time, not very long ago, when Liberal politicians treated EV battery announcements like moon landings.

Hard hats. Safety glasses. Giant ceremonial cheques. Breathless speeches about “the future”. Every battery plant was “historic”. Every subsidy package was “transformational”. Every corporate press conference looked like a motivational seminar for people who think buzzwords are infrastructure.

All we were missing was a fog machine and Bono.

Meanwhile ordinary Canadians were standing in grocery aisles doing mental math over bacon prices, delaying dental work, and wondering whether they could survive another winter utility bill without sacrificing whatever scraps remained of their savings.

But while Canadians were trying to keep their heads above water, Ottawa was busy launching one of the most expensive industrial subsidy experiments in modern Canadian history.

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

The Honda EV project in Ontario was supposed to be one of the crown jewels of this brave new green economy. Politicians lined up in hard hats and safety glasses like a traveling theatre troupe performing The Future Is Here. Canadians were assured this was proof the country was becoming an EV superpower.

Turns out it may have been more of a very expensive PowerPoint presentation with taxpayer financing attached.

[…]

In March 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Mark Carney as an informal economic adviser during the COVID recovery period. Over the following years, Carney increasingly promoted “green transition” investment frameworks, climate-linked financial systems, ESG-focused economic planning, and massive public-private investment partnerships tied to decarbonization strategies.

Which is important context now, because the EV subsidy era did not emerge out of thin air. It grew out of a broader worldview that treated government-directed green investment as both economic policy and moral mission. The assumption underneath all of this was breathtakingly simple:

“If government wants it badly enough, reality will cooperate.”

That is usually where things begin going sideways.

Canadians were told the EV transition was inevitable. Questions about affordability, charging infrastructure, winter range, electrical grid capacity, or consumer demand were often brushed aside like annoying little details raised by peasants who simply lacked sufficient enlightenment.

Then came the subsidy gold rush.

[…]

Corporations are not charities. They are not loyal patriots. They are not emotionally attached to government slogans.

They follow incentives. They chase profitability. They change direction when conditions change.

That is exactly what Honda did.

Meanwhile Canadians are left holding the bill for another “historic transformation” that produced:

  • endless announcements
  • glossy photo ops
  • consultant buzzwords
  • government self-congratulation
  • escalating subsidy exposure
  • and corporate renegotiations every time market conditions shifted
  • while producing no completed Honda EV manufacturing hub and no fleet of Canadian-built EVs rolling proudly off Ontario assembly lines.

What remains instead is a stalled megaproject, a confused tariff policy, a government spinning contradictory narratives depending on the week, and taxpayers once again discovering they were voluntold into becoming venture capitalists for political vanity projects.

Apparently this is what “economic leadership” looks like now.

Hard hats. Press releases. Fifty-plus billion dollars in EV-related exposure. And a factory plan slowly evaporating into the mist while Chinese EVs roll through the front gate anyway.

Tu-144 Concordeski – Speed, Spies and Failure

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Russia, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 4 May 2026

In great secrecy, in 1963 the USSR set about making aviation history with the world’s first Supersonic Transport (SST). In 1968, five months before Concorde, the Tu-144 became the first passenger jet to break the sound barrier. But it was a white elephant that crashed on multiple occasions, killed hundreds and flew for just a matter of months after over a decade of development. It was, perhaps the first of a string of failures that brought down the Soviet Union.

00:00 – 11:06 – Introduction and Background
11:07 – 23:10 – The Decision is made to build
23:10 – 35:31 – And then it got worse — how everything fell apart
35:32 – 39:10 – The En Crashening — From First Flight to Constant Crashes
39:11 – 48:49 – Enter the KGB — What role did spies play
49:22 – End – Like, Subscribe, Join the Patreon
(more…)

May 6, 2026

QotD: Deskilling society through AI

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

It’s always a little dangerous to write about any rapidly-developing technology, because chances are pretty good that whatever you say will be incredibly and obviously dated within a few months. But I’m going to plant my flag anyway, because even if nothing else changes — even if there’s no meaningful advancement in LLM performance beyond the state-of-the-art right now, in March 2025 — the potential disruption is already so enormous that you can think of it as a kind of Industrial Revolution for text.

Just like in the first one, we’ve figured out how to use machines to do a broad swathe of things people used to do, swapping energy and capital in for human labor. And just like in the first one, the output isn’t necessarily better (in fact, it’s often worse), but it’s so much cheaper in terms of human time and thought and effort that the quality almost doesn’t matter. Sometimes that’s wonderful: if you desperately need to put a roof for your barn right this moment, it’s a blessing to be able to slap on some corrugated tin instead of going to the effort of thatching. When you have to write your seventeenth letter to the insurance company explaining that no, they really ought to be covering this, it’s a relief to hand the composition off to Claude instead. But do that too much and you forget how to do it yourself — or more plausibly, you never learn.

The greatest risk of AI is probably “we all get turned into paperclips”, or maybe “someone uses it to design a novel and incredibly fatal pathogen”, but the most certain risk — the one that’s already here, at least on the edges — is a great deskilling. Just as the mechanization of physical labor lost us all those traditional skills that Langlands describes, the ability to automate cognitive tasks undermines their acquisition in the first place. Why pay any attention at all to word choice and metaphor and prosody when ChatGPT can churn out that essay in a few seconds? Why worry about drafting a convincing email when you’re pretty sure your recipient is just going to ask Grok for a summary?1 Why learn to code when a machine can do it faster?

I was recently informed that someone — “not anyone you know, Mom, someone at another school” — used ChatGPT to write his essay about the causes of the Civil War. This was obviously deeply upsetting to the congenital rule-follower who reported it to me, on account of THAT’S CHEATING (you must imagine this in the whiniest she-touched-my-stuff voice possible), but it was a good teachable moment — for me, if not for the history teacher at another school. What’s the point of an essay about the causes of the Civil War, anyway? It can’t be that the teacher wants to know the answer: she can find a dozen books on the topic if she cares to look, each more cogent and thorough than anything a middle-schooler is likely to produce.2 Heck, even the Wikipedia article will probably give her a better understanding. And if it’s not for the teacher’s benefit, it’s certainly not for the benefit of any other audience, since as soon as the essay is marked and graded it’ll probably be crumpled up and tossed into the recycling bin. No, it’s for the kid.

The point of writing an essay about the causes of the Civil War is not to have an essay about the causes of the Civil War, it’s to undergo the internal changes effected by the process of thinking through, planning, drafting, and editing the darn thing. Writing forces you to put your thoughts in order, to shape whatever mass of inchoate ideas is bouncing around in your head into something clear and reasoned you can pin to the page. The thinking is the hard part; putting words to it is simple by comparison. (This book review began life as about seven hundred words of stream-of-consciousness riffing, with only the vaguest kind of structure. When I experimentally pasted it into an LLM and asked for an essay, the result was terrible.) But even the putting of words is a valuable skill: what’s the right tone here? What’s the right word? Do I want to say “writing forces you to” or “when you write you have to”? How do they feel different? Asking a machine to do this for you is like bringing a forklift to the gym.

Of course, that kid who had ChatGPT write his essay was almost certainly thinking of the assignment not as one small step in the alchemical process of self-transformation that is education but as basically equivalent to an appeal letter to the insurance company: just another dumb hoop you have to jump through in your interactions with a vast impersonal machine that doesn’t particularly want to grind you to dust but wouldn’t mind it either. And since this was at another school, he might not even be wrong. Maybe the teacher was just pasting the rubric and the essays back into ChatGPT and asking it to assign a grade.3

But there’s an even bigger problem than lying about who (or what) has done the work, which is lying about whether the work has been done at all. LLMs make lying very easy indeed. Yes, yes, sometimes they hallucinate and tell you things that are patently untrue, and that’s a bigger danger for students and other people who don’t have the background to notice when something seems off — this is all true, but it’s not what I mean.

LLMs, when working exactly as intended, enable human falsehood — because our society relies on written records as proof of work. Until recently that was fine, because writing down lies actually used to be pretty hard: putting together a convincing false report from scratch — maintenance records for the airplane you’re about to board, say, or a radiologist’s report on your brain scan — was almost as time-consuming as actually checking the things that were supposed to checked and then documenting them, and the liar had to spend the whole time aware of their own dishonesty. (Not that this stops everyone, of course.) But now that it takes about two clicks to generate an inspector’s report for the house you’re considering buying, or the pathologist’s findings in your biopsy, how much are you going to trust that they actually looked?

LLMs can be useful tools,4 but all tools change what we make and how we make it. It’s often a good tradeoff! Sure, each individual example of simplification and automation in the name of efficiency is a tiny bit of alienation, removing the maker from the making, but it’s also a gift of time we can spend on other things: I couldn’t write this if I also had to sew my family’s clothes and wash our laundry by hand. And yet those bits pile up, and once it becomes possible to exist in the world without really needing to come into contact with it, once you can get by without ever really needing to make anything, some people just won’t. And that’s terrible! Being entirely without cræft — never bringing mind-body-soul into harmony with one another and then using them to master the world — means missing out on something deeply human.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-03-24.

  1. All the “AI written/AI read” communication begins to resemble Slavoj Zizek’s perfect date:

    2. “So my idea of a perfect date is the following one. We met. Then I put, she puts her plastic penis dildo into my … “stimulating training unit” is the name of this product. Into my plastic vagina. We plug them in and the machines are doing it for us. They’re buzzing in the background and I’m free to do whatever I want and she. We have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. What can be — we paid our superego full tribute. Machines are doing — now where would have been here a true romance. Let’s say I talk with a lady, with the lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea or she to me quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today.”

  2. Well, okay, most of them.
  3. See footnote one again.
  4. Personally I’ve found them useful in three cases: (1) when I’m blanking on how to begin an email I will occasionally ask for a draft, which inevitably makes me so mad about how bad it is that I immediately rewrite it in a way that doesn’t suck; (2) when it’s Sunday night and I need a picture of a Japanese man in a business suit and a samurai helmet for a book review going up in the morning; and (3) when I can’t figure out the right search term for my question. (Turns out it was “sigmatic aorist”. Thanks, Claude.)

May 5, 2026

Orwell: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery”

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

In the portion above the paywall, Matt Johnson discusses Orwell’s career as we face an unending deluge of writing “assisted” by AI or even entirely created by AI:

In the introduction to his 1991 book Orwell: The Authorised Biography, Michael Shelden distinguishes his approach from that of Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life, published a decade earlier. While Crick’s volume offered the most complete portrait of Orwell available at that point, Shelden argues that it’s too dull and impersonal — a flood of facts that bury Orwell’s singular, idiosyncratic personality. Shelden observes that Crick “relies heavily on the notion that facts speak for themselves if presented in enough detail”. So he attempts to provide a more intimate account of Orwell’s life: “A writer’s character and personal history influence what he writes and how he writes it. And the more we know about him, the better we are able to appreciate his work.” After all, “Books are not written by machines in sealed compartments”.

But we have now entered an era in which books can, in fact, be written by machines in sealed compartments. Large language models (LLMs) generate billions of words a day and are increasingly capable of producing long, structured, and sophisticated texts. While Orwell could not have foreseen the AI revolution, he predicted that synthetic text could someday replace human writing. In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, he observes: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery”. Although he doesn’t linger on this possibility, he laments the depersonalisation and mass production of writing already underway in the 1940s, and these arguments are just as applicable to AI-generated writing today.

Orwell expressed an almost eerie sensitivity to the ways in which literary ability — and even the quality of thought — can decline alongside a growing reliance on automated writing processes. For example, he cites radio features “commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand”. The writing itself was “merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors”. His experience dealing with the pressures of working in a strictly controlled corporate environment at the BBC during wartime undoubtedly left him with this impression. He also cites “innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments” created in the same industrial manner.

Orwell’s scrutiny of the “machine-like” creation of “short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines” holds up particularly well today. In an uncanny anticipation of the process by which millions of users now produce creative content with AI, he writes:

    Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of Literary Schools, all of them offering you readymade plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct your plots for yourself. Others offer packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically.

“The Prevention of Literature” was published around the time Orwell began work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it shows. Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite historical documents to match Party propaganda. He deletes “unpersons” from old news stories and ensures that recorded events always line up with the latest party line, all with the help of his speakwrite dictation machine. He dumps original documents into the Memory Hole for incineration. In the essay, Orwell moves from a discussion of increasingly robotic forms of literary production to the role this shift could play in a totalitarian state:

    It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line.

In some ways, Orwell’s bleak prophecies would turn out to be more accurate than he could have imagined. The idea that human thought would be replaced by an “algebraical formula” and that consciousness would be eliminated from the writing process is now a reality on a vast scale (though the question of whether consciousness will emerge from AI systems remains open). But Orwell filtered his predictions about the future of writing through his fixation on state power and the possible emergence of a “rigidly totalitarian society”, and this led him astray. In such a society, Orwell assumed that “novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions”. To the extent that people would want to keep reading, “perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum”. He concluded: “It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish”.

April 23, 2026

Arctic defence – Canada can’t “go it alone”

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Lee Humphrey explains a few of the reasons that we can ignore Prime Minister Mark Carney’s claims that Canada can defend the north without US assistance:

Canada is not capable of going it alone & is not going it alone. It’s a lie to say otherwise.

The majority of new radars being bought to replace existing radars will be from US companies, all our radars including the Australian built OTH radar will use US military satellites to communicate with monitoring stations in the US & Canada.

The armed drones we are buying are built in the US & will use US military satellites to communicate with their ground based controllers.

The subs we are spending $40 billion on are not capable of safely patrolling under sea ice for more than 11 continuous days before they have to turn around & get to clear water so we will continue to rely on US nuclear powered subs to track Russian & Chinese subs who are in sovereign CDN arctic waters.

Over the last year, US fighter aircraft have had to respond to 3 separate incidents that the RCAF were unable to respond to at all or in a timely way.

CDN’s who still believe Trump is going to invade need to realize just how many opportunities he keeps missing 😎

Reality sucks especially when national security or national sovereignty is at stake but the reality is that not only can we not operate independently at home, we can’t & haven’t been capable of operating independently for 60 years now!

April 19, 2026

AI’s missing economic impact

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Rational Aussie explains at least part of why the expected economic benefits of widespread adoption of artificial intelligence agents are … missing:

It’s funny how AI has made white collar work 10x faster already but there’s been basically no economic impact from it.

The reason is quite simple:

1. Most white collar work is bullshit, so speeding it up by 10x still equals a pile of bullshit at the end

2. Most white collar employees are using AI to do all their work for the week in 4 hours instead of 40, whilst telling their manager the deadline is still 40 hours away

We have been living in a fake economy for the better part of two decades. It is all a fugazi.

People who do real jobs in the real world get paid comparatively crap, and people who do fake jobs in the fiat Ponzi world get paid just enough fiat currency to pretend they are important. None of it amounts to anything productive nor valuable for the world though.

An entire generation doing fake email jobs, slide decks and excel sheets for corporations who ultimately produce nothing.

April 18, 2026

Australia’s age verification scheme – a great success!

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

Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to open the child-proof caps for them. In other words, it’s not going to work out quite how the politicians expect:

“Kid-notebook-computer-learns-159533” by LuidmilaKot is marked with CC0 1.0 .

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges — and they’re debatable — politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids’ online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.

[…]

“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, reports the U.K.’s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. “Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.”

The group adds that “70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was ‘easy’ to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts.”

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that “a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms’ age assurance systems”.

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, “around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account”. Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.

Another proof of the value of open source

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses a pre-computer (pre-electronics) proof that open source is more secure than closed source:

“How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

There’s an old, bad idea that’s been trying to resurrect itself on X in the last couple of days. Which makes it time for me to explain exactly why, in the age of LLMs, open-sourcing your code is an even more important security measure than it was before we had robot friends.

The underlying principle was discovered in the 1880s by an expert on military cryptography, a man named August Kerckhoffs, writing long before computers were a thing.

To start with, you need to focus in on the fact that cryptosystems have two parts. They have methods, and they have keys. You feed a key and a message to a method and get encrypted information that, you hope, only someone else with the same pair of method and key can read.

What Kerckhoffs noticed was this: military cryptosystems in normal operation leak information about their methods. Code books and code machines get captured, stolen, betrayed, or lost in simple accidents and found by people you don’t want to have them. This was the pre-computer equivalent of an unintended source-code disclosure.

Cryptosystems also leak information about their keys — think post-it notes with passwords stuck to a monitor. What Kerckhoffs noticed is that these two different kinds of compromising leakage happen at very different base rates. It is almost impossible to prevent leakage of information about methods, but just barely possible to prevent leakage of information about keys.

Why? Keys have fewer bits. This makes them easier to keep secret.

Remember: this was something an intelligent man could notice in the 1880s, well before even vacuum tubes. Which is your first clue that the power of this observation hasn’t changed just because we’re in the middle of a freaking Singularity.

Security through obscurity — closed source code — means you’re busted if either the source code or the keys get leaked. Open source is a preemptive strike — it’s a way to force the property that your security depends *only* on keeping the keys secret.

What you’re doing by designing under the assumption of open source is preventing source code leakage from being a danger. And that’s the kind of leakage with a high base rate.

As far back as 1947 Claude Shannon applied this to electronic security — he did critical work on the voice scramblers that were used for secure telephone communications between heads of state during World War II. Shannon said one should always design as though “the enemy knows the system”. The US’s National Security Agency still uses this as a guiding principle in computer-based cryptosystems.

If you’re doing software security, always design as though the enemy can see your source code. I’m still a little puzzled that I was apparently the first person to notice that this was a general argument for open source; as soon as I did, my first thought was more or less “Duh? Somebody should have noticed this sooner?”

Now let’s consider how LLMs change this picture. Or…don’t.

An LLM is like a cryptanalyst with a superhuman attention span that never sleeps. If your system leaks information that can compromise it, that compromise is going to happen a hell of a lot faster than if your adversary has to rely on Mark 1 meatbrains.

But it gets worse. With LLMs, decompilation is now fast and cheap. You have to assume that if an adversary can see your executable binary, they can recover the source code. If you were relying on that to be secret, you are *screwed*.

Leakage control — limiting the set of bits that can yield a compromise — is more important than ever. So security by code obscurity is an even more brittle and dangerous strategy than it used to be.

Anybody who tries to tell you differently is either deeply stupid or trying to sell you something that you should not by any means buy.

April 12, 2026

The two kinds of enshittification

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR explains the differences between the two kinds of enshittification we’re seeing these days:

It may be time to start distinguishing between classic two-sided enshittification and a more general single-sided variety.

When Corey Doctorow originally defined the term “enshittification” he was describing a very specific thing that can and does happen when a platform like Amazon or Google acts as a two-sided market-maker. They start by reducing friction for both buyers and sellers, get everybody locked in by the higher cost of doing volume business anywhere else, then start charging tolls on both sides and injecting spamware that nobody wants. Eventually even their search function becomes completely shitty.

The increasingly horrifying “agentic” train wreck that Windows 11 has become isn’t a two-sided platform in the same way, but the feel of its late stages is depressingly familiar. It’s so stuffed with bloatware, spamware, and spyware that its nominal function as an operating system to run programs for its users feels almost like an afterthought.

I’m going to call this “single-sided enshittification”, and point out that both kinds stem from the same fundamental disconnect. They’re both things that happen when the dominant revenue stream from a product is disconnected from the needs of its original users.

In both cases, an important factor, though not the only one, is the attack of the adtech vampires. So very much of the ugliness in enshittified platforms is downstream of the easy money that they offer product owners for allowing them to sink their fangs into the information stream.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. But if there is one, it starts with identifying the problem correctly. Enshittification — it’s not just for two-sided platforms anymore.

From the comments on the original post:

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress