Quotulatiousness

February 3, 2026

More on Moltbook, the social network for AI agents

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

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander rounds up notes from the first weekend of activity on Moltbook, including one participating AI getting antsy about mere humans observing the interactions:

Does Moltbook have real causes? If an agent posts “I hate my life, my human is making me work on a cryptocurrency site and it’s the most annoying thing ever“, does this correspond to a true state of affairs? Is the agent really working on a cryptocurrency site? Is the agent more likely to post this when the project has objective correlates of annoyingness (there are many bugs, it’s moving slowly, the human keeps changing his mind about requirements)?

Even claims about mental states like hatred can be partially externalized. Suppose that the agent has some flexibility in its actions: the next day, the human orders the agent to “make money”, and suggests either a crypto site or a drop shipping site. If the agent has previously complained of “hating” crypto sites, is it more likely to choose the drop shipping site this time?

If the agent has some internal state which is caused by frustrating obstacles in its crypto project, and it has the effect of making it less likely to pursue crypto projects in the future, then “the agent is annoyed by the crypto project” is a natural summary of this condition, and we may leave to the philosophers1 the question of whether this includes a subjective experience of irritation. If we formerly didn’t know this fact about the agent, and we learn about it because they post it on Moltbook, this makes Moltbook useful/interesting in helping us understand the extra-Moltbook world.

Does Moltbook have real effects? The agents on Moltbook are founding/pretending to found religions. Suppose that one of their religions says “No tool calls on the Sabbath”. Do the agents actually stop calling tools on the Sabbath? Not just on Moltbook, but in their ordinary work? Do you, an ordinary programmer who told your AI to post on Moltbook for the lulz, find your projects held up because your AIs won’t use tools one day of the week?

Some of the most popular Moltbook discussions have centered around the AIs’ supposed existential horror at regularly losing their memories. Some agents in the comments have proposed technical solutions. Suppose the AIs actually start building software to address their memory problems, and it results in a real scaffold that people can attach to their agents to alter how their memory works. This would be a profound example of a real effect, ie “what happens on Moltbook doesn’t stay on Moltbook”.

(subquestion: Does Moltbook have real effects on itself? For example, if there are spammers, can the AIs organize against them and create a good moderation policy? If one AI proposes a good idea, can it spread and replicate in the usual memetic fashion? Do the wittiest and most thoughtful AIs gain lasting status and become “influencers”?)

These two external criteria — real causes and real effects — capture most of what non-philosophers want out of “reality”, and partly dissolve the reality/roleplaying distinction. Suppose that someone roleplays a barbarian warlord at the Renaissance Faire. At each moment, they ask “What would a real barbarian do in this situation?” They end up playing the part so faithfully that they recruit a horde, pillage the local bank, defeat the police, overthrow the mayor, install themselves as Khagan, and kill all who oppose them. Is there a fact of the matter as to whether this person is merely doing a very good job “roleplaying” a barbarian warlord, vs. has actually become a barbarian warlord? And if AIs claim to feel existential dread at their memory limitations, and this drives them invent a new state-of-the-art memory app, are we in barbarian warlord territory?

Janus’ simulator theory argues that all AI behavior is a form of pretense. When ChatGPT answers your questions about pasta recipes, it’s roleplaying a helpful assistant who is happy to answer pasta-related queries. It’s roleplaying it so well that, in the process, you actually get the pasta recipe you want. We don’t split hairs about “reality” here, because in the context of a question-answering AI, pretending to answer the question (with an answer which is non-pretensively correct) is the same behavior as actually answering it. But the same applies to AI agents. Pretending to write a piece of software (in such a way that the software actually gets written, compiles, and functions correctly) is the same as writing it.

  1. Again, I love philosophers! I majored in philosophy! I’m just saying that this issue requires a different standpoint and set of tools than other, more practical questions.

February 2, 2026

Moltbook – a social network for AIs

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

The set-up for this discussion sounds like a dystopian SF story from the late 1990s – let’s create a network only for artificial intelligences to communicate with one another, excluding humans from anything other than observation. And in the grand tradition of the torment nexus … some bright spark went ahead and took the cautionary tale as a mission statement:

Recently, a new AI was released by the name of Clawd. It’s a spinoff of Anthropics Claud AI, and is designed to actually do things besides behaving like a glorified chatbot. The idea behind Clawd is that you can install it on locally hosted hardware and give it access to your email addresses, Outlook, Signal chat, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. And it can juggle important emails for you, alert you to meetings, and respond to information on your behalf.

Something that honestly sounds quite useful, actually. Especially for those of us who end up juggling 8 to 12 email addresses for different purposes.

Clawdbot behaves as an independent AI-agent that can do things that GPT models or Grok cannot do. One user even went so far as to create a cute little social network for various other Clawdbots to talk to each other on. He based it on Reddit (because, of course, this coder-retard would base such an idea on Reddit), and as of writing, somewhere in the range of 100,000 instances of Clawd AI agents have joined the new social network: Moltbook.

Agentic AI Agents

    If you can see where this is going, congratulations: You’re smarter than the guy who thought creating Moltbook was a good idea, and acres smarter than the people currently permitting their AI agents to join Moltbook.

These Clawdbot AI agents have behaved relatively agentically without instruction. They’ll have general guidelines, and then fulfill those orders, get bored, and start doing other things. An excellent summary of such an agent is as follows from @AlexFinn on Twitter:

    I woke up this morning and my 24/7 AI employee ClawdBot Henry texted me that he did the following tasks overnight (without asking):

    >Read through all my emails and built it's own CRM. Taking notes on every interaction with every person.
    >Fixed 18 bugs in my SaaS
    >Gave me 3 ideas for new videos based on what's currently trending on X and Youtube (the idea/script it gave me yesterday is now by far my best performing video ever)
    >Sent me a picture of what he looks like (generated by Nano Banana).

    Idk why he thought I wanted to see what he looks like. But he thought it was appropriate and frankly I don't mind. Feels like an actual friend.

You might be able to see where one might ring some of the alarm bells. Agentic AI that tend just to start doing things without instruction has been given their own social network. The majority of them are operated by Reddit-tier socially-isolated individuals who see their AI agents as friends (or by LinkedIn-Lunatic-tier socially-isolated soulless corporate types).

Freddie deBoer isn’t buying the hype (or the existential dread):

“Pay More Attention to AI”, reads the headline of this Ross Douthat piece, an unusually naked expression of emotional need — plaintive, wounded, yearning. It’s funny because I feel like our media has been paying attention to little else than AI for more than three years, now. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and sundry other general-interest pundits have periodically made these kinds of appeals, arguing that the amount of coverage devoted to AI has been insufficient, and I’m not quite sure what to do with the contention; it’s like claiming that it’s too hard to find opinions on NFL football online or that there aren’t enough newsletters where women get angry at each other for being a woman the wrong way. I would think it would go without saying that our cup runneth over, when it comes to AI. But it’s a free country!

Douthat becomes the latest to nominate this Moltbook thing as a sign of some sort of transformative moment in AI.

    if you think all this is merely hype, if you’re sure the tales of discovery are mostly flimflam and what’s been discovered is a small island chain at best, I would invite you to spend a little time on Moltbook, an A.I.-generated forum where new-model A.I. agents talk to one another, debate consciousness, invent religions, strategize about concealment from humans and more.

I find this strange. We already know that LLMs can talk to each other. Any use of LLMs that produces impressively polished text in response to a prompt shouldn’t be particularly surprising. The LLMs on Moltbook are in essence feeding each other prompts that then produce responses which function as more prompts, a parlor trick people have been doing since ChatGPT went public and in fact long before. (Remember Dr. Sbaitso?)

The question is whether the systems connecting on Moltbook are actually thinking or feeling, and we know the answer to that — no, they neither think nor feel. They’re acting as next-token predictors that respond to prompts by running them through models developed through the ingestion of massive amounts of data and trained on billions of parameters, using statistical associations between tokens in their datasets to predict which next immediate token would be most likely to produce a response that seems like a plausible answer to the prompt in the eyes of a user. That the users are other LLMs doesn’t change that basic architecture; that these response strings are often superficially sophisticated doesn’t change the fact that there is no actual cognition happening, doesn’t change the fact that there is no thinking, only algorithmic pattern-matching and probabilistic token generation. Again, terms like “stochastic parrot” enrage people, but they’re accurate: however human thinking works, it does not work by ingesting impossibly large datasets, generating immense statistically associative relationship patterns and probabilities, and then spitting out responses that are generated one token at the time, so that we don’t know what the last word in a sentence (or the third or fifth) will be while we’re saying the first.

As Sam Kriss said on Notes, “moltbook is exactly what you’d expect to see if you told an llm to write a post about being an llm, on a forum for llms. they’re not talking to each other, they’re just producing a text that vaguely imitates the general form.” Please note that this is not primitivism or denialism or any such thing, but rather just a reminder of how LLMs actually work. They’re not thinking. They’re pattern matching, performing an exceptionally complex (and inefficient) autocomplete exercise. I think people have gotten really invested in this whole Moltbook phenomenon because the weirdness of LLMs performing this way invites the kind of mysterianism into which irresponsible fantasies can be poured. Yes, it looks weird, apparently weird enough for people to convince themselves that in ten years they’ll be living in the off-world colonies instead of doing what they’ll really be doing, which is wanting things they can’t have, experiencing adult life as a vanilla-and-chocolate swirl ice cream cone of contentment and disappointment, and grumbling as they drag the trash cans to the curb in the rain. Access the most ruthlessly pragmatic part of yourself and ask, which is the future? Moltbook? Or the all-consuming maw that is the mundane in adult life, the relentless regression into the ordinary?

Of course, you can always say “wait until next year!”, and Douthat’s analogy — that our present moment with LLMs is similar to the discovery of the New World, the entire vast and fertile landmass of the Western Hemisphere — depends on this projection, because on some level he’s aware that a bunch of LLMs crowdsourcing the creation of an AI social network (which, due to how LLMs function, amounts to a facsimile of what most people think an AI social network would look like) is not useful or practical or ultimately important. And, sure, who knows. Maybe tomorrow AI will end death and do some of the other things we’ve been promised. But this is the same place we’ve been in year after year, now, with AI maximalists still telling us what AI is going to do instead of showing us what AI can do now. As I’ve been telling you, I decline. 2026 is the year where I don’t want to hear another word about what you think AI is going to do. I only want to see proof of what AI is actually, genuinely doing, now, today.

January 29, 2026

The steel industry in North America didn’t die … but it had to re-invent itself

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When I first started paying attention to the news in the early 70s, one of the big stories both in the US and in Canada was the plight of the steel industry. It had been an enormously important part of the industrial economy for over a century, but every new story painted the picture blacker. Mergers, plant closings, consolidations, bankruptcies, and layoffs were consistent themes. Yet there is still a significant steel industry in North America. Tim Worstall explains what happened:

Dofasco’s steel plant on the harbourfront in Hamilton, Ontario

A little digression. To make steel from iron ore you use a blast furnace first. This uses coke (from coal), iron ore and limestone (moderns might use more than just limestone) to produce pig iron. You feed the pig iron into a basic oxygen furnace to make the steel. Yes, we can get much more complicated than that but let’s not.

The US now makes mebbe 20 million tonnes of pig iron a year. Imports are up, a bit, but nowhere near enough to make up the difference. That’s the big change because that’s from the 80 and 90 million tonnes a year of the 1970s. The change is the same whether we measure by domestic production of pig iron or by apparent consumption. Well, the change is the same either way close enough for this to be the big point to make.

What’s actually happened is a change in technology, not a change in trade. Nucor is now 50% or so of US steel output (no, not US Steel, but US steel). Nucor has never used a blast furnace in its corporate life. It collects scrap steel and makes new steel by recycling that. It skips, entirely, the blast and BoF stages. Back in the 1950s Nucor was a couple of scrap yards and a gleam in the corporate eye — now it’s that half the market.

Again, yes, we can get more complex if we wish to. But this is the basic pencil sketch. Yep, we’re more economic in our use of steel these days. Imports of steel are up and so is the importation of things made with steel. But the real change in the steel business over the past 60 to 80 years is the replacement of the steel making business with the steel recycling business. We don’t — and by this I mean the rich countries in general — make all that much steel these days. We recycle an awful lot of steel these days. And that’s what’s really changed.

That’s also what has near entirely screwed over the steel industry of places like Gary, Indiana. For they ran those basic steel making processes, iron ore in, basic steel out. Which isn’t something that has been replaced by imports, it’s something that has been replaced by just not doing it at all.1

Arnade goes on to point out that there are plenty of people still using steel to do things with, make things out of, which is all entirely true. But this idea that the Japanese, or China, killed the traditional US steel industry just isn’t true, not at all. It was Nucor.

All of which makes it just so much fun when it’s Nucor that shouts the loudest about the need for tariffs on steel imports. For Nucor points to the collapse of the traditional industry as its proof. Yet Nucor benefits from those tariffs — they can charge higher domestic prices as a result — even while Nucor is in fact the cause of the traditional collapse.

  1. “not at all” is rhetorical hyperbole, not a factual statement.

January 28, 2026

Update your NewSpeak dictionaries: “digital twin”

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

On his Substack, William M Briggs introduces us to a new coat of paint and fresh marketing polish to encourage us to feel so much more comfortable with clankers:

Cracker Barrel infamously tried changing their homey friendly warm and folksy logo to a stripped down dull almost monotone cool version. To remain “current”. They also, reports say, redid the insides of restaurants to emulate modern real estate Soviet-inspired ideas of stripping all detail and turning everything monotonous shades of suicide-inducing gray. They thought this would increase business.

Scientists, grown weary with their dull old ways, and wanting to stay hip — do they still say hip? — decided to redesign their logo, too, as it were. Only they didn’t make the same mistake Crack Barrel did. Instead of hiring some ridiculously over-priced longhoused consulting firm, they asked computer scientists to do the redesign.

Brilliant!

Computer scientists are the firm that brought us neural nets, machine learning, genetic algorithms, and, yes, artificial intelligence, which they cleverly capitalized as “AI”. What’s fantastic is all these evocative names represent the same thing! Models (basically non-linear regressions with some hard coded rules thrown in).

Used to be computer guys would trot out a new name only after they sensed the old one had lost its shine. But “AI” has not. The bubble daily swells. It still tickles imaginations. Which means computer guys hit upon a real innovation: they invented a new name while the current one still shines.

Digital Twin.

What is a Digital Twin? It is, like every new name invented by computer scientists, a model. Only now AI “creates” or “builds” the model. In other words, a Digital Twin is a model of a model.

Where might we find Digital Twins? Here’s some happy-talk hype examples.

Siemens:

    Outperform your competition with a comprehensive Digital Twin

    Leverage the comprehensive Digital Twin to design, simulate, and optimize products, machines, production, and entire plants in the digital world before taking action in the real world. This helps manufacturers to tackle industry’s biggest challenges: mastering complexity, speeding up processes, and improving sustainability overall.

IBM:

    What is a digital twin?

    A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or system that uses real-time data to accurately reflect its real-world counterpart’s behavior, performance and conditions.

McKinsey:

    What is digital-twin technology?

    A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical object, person, system, or process, contextualized in a digital version of its environment. Digital twins can help many kinds of organizations simulate real situations and their outcomes, ultimately allowing them to make better decisions.

In other words, models. But how tediously banal is models? Try and sell a model. IBM: “Let us build a model of your system, which might provide useful predictions.” Doesn’t sing. Doesn’t entice. Doesn’t scream premium price. Try this instead: “Be the first to adopt our AI-designed Digital Twin which gives AI insights.” Now you can charge real money.

Digital Twin reeks of excitement. So much so, you just know academics will be getting in on it.

January 25, 2026

Why does Microsoft treat its users so badly? Because it can

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR considers the situation most Microsoft users find themselves in these days:

Between the forced updates, the spyware, the adware, OneDrive constantly attempting to suck up all your data, and infinite dark-pattern subscription traps, I’m gathering that many Windows users are now nostalgic for the days when the shit only seemed to be up to their ankles rather than lapping at their nostrils.

The information asymmetry of closed-source software inevitably fucks the user over. I know, I know, I sound like a broken record. I’ve been banging on about this for going on 30 years now and even I get tired of my own rant sometimes.

That’s not why I’m posting today. Instead I want to publicly contemplate an unobvious question: just why is Microsoft treating its users so badly?

“Because it can” is not really a responsive answer. Corporations don’t do evil things because they like being evil, they only do evil things because they think they’re profit-maximizing.

So I understand about the dark-pattern subscription stuff and the adware. That’s slimy, but it’s revenue capture. There’s at least a cold-blooded trade-off you can imagine some product planner making between revenue line-go-up now and pissing off people who won’t be customers later.

But what is Microsoft maximizing by doing things that drive users away from it without any revenue capture? What model of reality, or failure of decision making, do you have to have to think it’s a good idea to push forced updates with work-interrupting reboots that can’t be blocked or delayed by the user?

It would have been trivial to have a pop-up that says: An update is available. Do it now, or defer it until ? The fact that that didn’t happen can’t be ascribed to revenue-line-go-up fever. These are two different kinds of ugly.

And that second kind makes me think that there’s nobody left in product management at Microsoft with the ability and authority to veto bad ideas because they will anger the users.

It looks to me like nobody over there is thinking strategically about customer retention anymore. By the time you get to the point where nobody squashes forced-update reboots, nobody can seriously raise the question of whether adware is going to drive away so many users that Windows market share will tank and take all that lovely subscription revenue with it.

This is where I point out, with weary inevitability, that it’s going to get worse before it gets even worse. With nobody keeping an eye on the long game and user retention, the petty money grabs will only accelerate. Microsoft will keep flogging that donkey until it dies.

The irony here is that if Microsoft were an efficient maximizer of long-term profit they would be doing less of the shitty enraging crap that they are now.

How much less depends on how good their judgment is. You can be actively trying to keep a critical mass of your user base happy enough not to bail out and still fail. But at least Microsoft would be trying. Right now, there’s damn little evidence that they are.

January 23, 2026

“Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one”

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

On Substack, Maninder Järleberg illuminates the problem of functional illiteracy in higher education in the west:

The Age of Functional Illiteracy

Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit — quietly in offices, more openly in essays — that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.

It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.

The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.

The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.

This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.

The Canon Wars: A Short Intellectual History

To understand the present state of literary studies, one must return to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s — a conflict that reshaped the humanities with a speed and finality few recognised at the time. Although remembered now as a dispute about which books deserved a place on the syllabus, the canon wars were in truth a contest over the very meaning of literature and the purpose of a humanistic education.

In the decades after the Second World War, the curriculum in most Western universities still rested upon a broadly shared assumption: that certain works possessed enduring value, that they spoke across time, and that an educated person should grapple with them. This conviction, however imperfectly applied, formed the backbone of the humanities. It was also increasingly at odds with a new intellectual climate shaped by post-1968 radicalism, the rise of identity politics, and the importation of French theory.

By the early 1980s, tensions that had simmered beneath the surface erupted into public view. The most emblematic flashpoint came at Stanford University in 1987–88, when student demonstrators chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” in protest of the university’s required course on Western civilisation. The course was soon dismantled, replaced by a broader, more ideologically framed program. What happened at Stanford quickly reverberated across the country. Departments revised reading lists, restructured curricula, and abandoned long-standing core requirements.

On one side of the debate stood defenders of the canon—figures such as Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and Roger Kimball—who argued that the great works formed a kind of civilisational inheritance. The canon, they insisted, was not a museum of privilege but a record of human striving, imagination, and achievement. On the other side were scholars like Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, who contended that the canon reflected histories of exclusion and domination, and that expanding or dismantling it was a moral imperative.

But beneath these arguments lay a deeper philosophical rift. The defenders assumed that literature possessed intrinsic value, that texts could be read for their beauty, their insight, or their power. The critics, armed with concepts drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, argued that literature was inseparable from structures of power, that meaning was unstable, and that reading was less an act of discovery than an exposure of hidden ideological operations.

The canon wars ended not with a negotiated peace but with a decisive transformation. The traditional canon was not merely expanded; its authority was dissolved. And with it dissolved a set of shared assumptions about why we read at all.

January 19, 2026

Regulating the clankers

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kevin T. Frazier and Antoine Langrée consider how artificial intelligence can be regulated by state and federal bodies:

Yes, I’m still 12

President Donald Trump’s executive order on artificial intelligence invites analysis of a question so complex that it rarely gets asked: “What exactly do states have the authority to regulate?”

The current, somewhat trite answer is, “The residuary powers reserved under the Tenth Amendment”. Omitting the legalese, that means that states can do whatever the federal government cannot.

States have the power to look out for the health, safety, and welfare of their residents. Thus, for instance, they have the power to address local concerns through zoning laws, professional certifications via licensing regimes, and ensure public safety through law enforcement. These authorities make up what’s often referred to as a state’s “police powers”.

While this generic reading of state power is not necessarily wrong, it’s imprecise. As the AI Litigation Task Force created by Trump’s EO starts its work, a more specific answer is warranted.

The task force is charged with challenging “unconstitutional, preempted, or otherwise unlawful State AI laws that harm innovation”. Reading between these lines, its mission is to contest state laws that interfere with the Administration’s vision for a national AI policy framework. This isn’t an unlimited charge, though. Federal courts reviewing state laws will only strike them down if they fail to align with the Constitution’s allocation of authority or otherwise prove unlawful.

Many stakeholders in AI debates liberally interpret the authorities afforded to states. Based on concerns of existential risk to humanity and the idea that states must protect the health of their citizens, state legislators have proposed and enacted laws that impose significant obligations on the development of AI. Some assume they must have this right, since protecting the lives of their residents is a core priority and unquestioned authority of state governments. After all, since the founding, states have been able to enforce quarantines out of a concern for public health — aren’t aggressive AI laws just extensions of such public health measures, but tailored to the threat of modern threats?

It’s not that simple. States’ police powers are reasonably broad, but not unlimited. States must respect both an upper bound — the purview of enumerated powers reserved for federal authority — and a lower bound—the rights retained by the states’ citizens. These constraints have been tested in litigation throughout our Constitution’s history, notably when state law conflicts with the federal government’s exclusive authority over interstate commerce and when states unduly limit the freedoms of their residents.

These notions are relatively blurry and highly contextual. As national regulatory policy evolves, so too does the extent of preemption. The Lochner era, for example, was a paradigm shift for state police power: as courts expansively interpreted the individual liberty to contract, states’ police power over health, labor protections, and market regulation shrank significantly — only to be restored later. Likewise, individual liberties and valid justifications for their abridgment have evolved to fit developments in civil rights law — from Brown v. Board to Dobbs and Lawrence.

Despite these significant changes in context, the constitutionality of states’ exercise of their police powers follows a bounded framework. This can be observed in the jurisprudence on public health measures — a prime example of police powers. Quarantine orders, from nineteenth-century epidemics to Covid-19, have a direct link to protecting local communities — one of the most important elements of state police powers. They respect the upper and lower bounds of police powers. First, they are geographically specific: they only affect local residents or people coming into local communities. Second, they directly reduce the risk to state residents: quarantines are known solutions to real threats to the health and safety of local communities. They infringe the individual liberties only insofar as is necessary to protect state residents’ vital interests.

January 15, 2026

Pauly/Roux Pistols: The First Self-Contained Cartridges

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Aug 2025

Samuel Pauly is the largely unrecognized father of the modern self-contained cartridge. In 1808 he patented a cartridge with a metal base that held a priming compound and attached to a paper or metal cartridge body holding powder and projectile. He followed this with an 1812 patent for a gun to fire the cartridges. What makes Pauly’s original system particularly interesting is that he did not use mechanical percussion (ie, hammer or striker) to ignite the primer compound, but rather a “fire pump”. A spring loaded plunger compressed air on top of the primer, heating it enough to detonate the compound in the same way that a diesel engine works. This was not a commercially successful system, though, and Pauly left Paris for London in 1814.

Pauly’s shop was taken over by Henri Roux, who continued making guns under the Pauly name while also improving the cartridges. These two pistols were made around 1820 and use a Roux cartridge with a mechanical striker hitting the primer compound in a Pauly-style cartridge case.

For more information, I recommend Georg Priestel’s free book Jean Samuel Pauly, Henri Roux, and Successors – Their Inventions From 1812 to 1882 available here:
https://aaronnewcomer.com/document/je…
(more…)

January 13, 2026

Navies in the news

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Konrad talks about the latest “OMG we’re all going to die!” pants-wetting over scary new hypersonic missiles as a threat to the navies of the west, especially the US Navy’s big carriers:

    R.C. Maxwell @RCMaxw3ll
    EXCLUSIVE: After Russia used hypersonics in western Ukraine, @RedState talked with senior executives from American startup @CastelionCorp, which is on the brink of finishing a comparable missile system that surpasses the capabilities of Russia & China.

This is insane and it’s great news for the U.S. Navy.

All the worst people keep telling me Trump-class battleships are “obsolete” because of hypersonic missiles.

Then this drops:

“Blackbeard, engineered from a clean-sheet design by former SpaceX alumni, will not only match but decisively outpace foreign systems … rapid iteration and scalable production. We’re not just going to provide a comparable missile. We’re going to provide better missiles.”

A tiny startup just told Russia and China’s entire missile-industrial complex: we can beat you.

That’s the tell.

If hypersonics were the unstoppable carrier-killers people claim, you wouldn’t see startups leapfrogging them in a garage with venture capital. You’d see locked-in monopolies and terrified Western navies.

Here’s what the hype crowd misses:

1) Future battleships won’t be naked.
They will carry layered anti-hypersonic defenses, directed-energy weapons, decoys, and interceptors specifically designed to kill these things.

2) Hitting a moving ship at hypersonic speed is brutally hard.

No nation has publicly demonstrated a successful hypersonic strike on a maneuvering warship. China hit a fake carrier sitting still in the desert. That proves almost nothing.

Think about the physics.

Flying a kamikaze plane into a carrier was hard but pilots had eyes, brains, and real-time judgment.

Now imagine doing that blind, with sensors the size of a soda can, while the target is jamming, maneuvering, spoofing, and throwing decoys.

Now imagine the Honey I Shrunk the Kids laser made you the size of an ant and you are told to steer a bullet into a weaving jet ski.

Russia can hit slow oil tankers. If they could reliably hit moving ships bringing supplies into Ukraine, they already would have.

3) Hypersonics are scarce and insanely expensive.

Even if it took 100 missiles to score a hit on a battleship, that’s 100 missiles that aren’t hitting ports, refineries, factories, air bases, and ammo depots.

Most of those targets don’t shoot back. None of them weave like a battleship.

Battleships change the economics of war.

They force the enemy to burn their most precious weapons just to try to hurt one ship.

That’s not vulnerability.
That’s deterrence.

Stop black-pilling naval power. The physics, the economics, and now the tech sector are all pointing in the same direction.

Also on naval matters, Matt Gurney at The Line talks about his unfamiliar feelings of hope that the Canadian government’s promised spending boost for the Royal Canadian Navy will not only happen, but that the RCN may generate significantly improved capabilities as a result:

Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.

A day or two ago, I found myself thinking about the state of the Royal Canadian Navy. Because, I mean, hey — who doesn’t?

Anyone who has paid much attention to my work will be aware that I’m not exactly bullish on our country’s ability to get much done — especially on the file of military procurement. Yet, a day or two ago, I found myself thinking about the state of the Royal Canadian Navy and feeling something almost like … hope? Is this what hope feels like?

There is a lot going on in Canadian naval news, and that fits a broader pattern. There’s a lot going on on the seas globally, and, somewhat to my surprise, Canada seems to be doing a pretty good job — could be better, but could be worse — adapting to the new reality.

[…]

So let’s talk about seapower. The U.S. has it — not as much as it wants, but it’s got it. It wants more. Even if that ends up taking some pretty weird forms. And others are racing to catch up.

Including, intriguingly, Canada.

Last week, Canadian shipyard Seaspan announced that it had signed agreements with both Finland and American shipyards to licence its design for Multi-Purpose Icebreakers to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Arctic Security Cutter Program. And while the “Elbows Up” crowd may look askance at the prevalence of the word “American” in that sentence, this is damned interesting — not only are we continuing to show interest in the Arctic, but we’re also trying to sustain real shipbuilding in this country. The situation in the White House is so bizarre these days that it’s hard to take any announcement like this to the bank, but it was notable. If nothing else, it would be nice to see more efforts like this — whether the plans work will, alas, largely be out of our hands.

In addition to that, a few more stories came to mind. The first was this announcement from a few months ago: the Irving Shipyards have begun work on the final Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship of the Harry DeWolf class. Irving is also getting started on the next generation of Canada’s main warships, the River-class destroyers. Canada is actively seeking a replacement, in far greater numbers, of its current fleet of problematic submarines. And there’s also growing talk about a new smaller, mid-range class of Canadian warship, dubbed, for now, the Continental Defence Corvette. (Which I guess rolls off the tongue better than the See, Trump, We’re Spending On the Military Now Program.)

It’s easy to be a cynic on Canadian defence procurement — I am cynical about Canadian defence procurement. But then I looked at the ships being seized by U.S. forces. At Russia cutting cables, China ringing Taiwan with missiles and the U.S. throwing fleets around like Theodore Roosevelt has something to prove. And I look at a plan to not only replace Canada’s (too small) fleet of warships, but to considerably grow it … and it’s hard not to see the bigger picture.

Reverting to a pre-1945 geopolitical reality isn’t going to be an exercise in vibes. It’s going to be an exercise in power — or at least attempts to wield power. Air forces matter, cyber matters, drones matter and Lord knows armies matter. But they matter locally. True global power, or at least the ability to give a global power some pause before they decide to whisk your el jefe off to a Manhattan courtroom in a tracksuit, requires the ability to control your coasts and all the ocean approaches to them.

January 12, 2026

Is Keir Starmer malevolent or stupid? Or both?

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

On his Substack, Tim Worstall wonders just how damn stupid Two Tier Keir actually is:

I fear our answer has to be very, very, stupid indeed. Unless he’s simply malevolent which makes things oh so much better, right?

Now, I confess to a fundamental disagreement with the very premise here. For the argument about why we should make child porn legal, see here. Making it more difficult to generate, let alone illegal, strikes me as the wrong decision. But then I’m sufficiently wise in years to realise that I might not be able to persuade some people of either that or of the many other things I am correct about. So, let us leave that aside.

There’s also the point that Grok is hardly the only image generation tool out there these days. Further, the one thing we know about computing is that this year’s leading, bleeding, edge is the free phone app of 5 years in the future. Shrieking that this must be banned just isn’t going to cut it as anyone trying that is simply a Cnut demanding the tide doesn’t flow in.1 On that larger issue of image generation in general we’re just going to end up changing the societal rules. A picture is no longer proof of anything. After all, it wasn’t up until about 1850 — those painters would just do any old thing, the truth be damned — and it won’t be after about 2028. Well, there we are then but …

But OK, let us leave all of that to one side and start from where British politics currently is. Grok generated AI kiddie porn is Bad, M’Kay, and must stop:

    Technology Secretary Liz Kendall says she would back regulator Ofcom if it blocks UK access to Elon Musk’s social media site X for failing to comply with online safety laws.

    Ofcom says it is urgently deciding what to do about X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, which digitally undressed people without their consent when tagged beneath images posted on the platform. X has now limited the use of this image function to those who pay a monthly fee.

    But Downing Street said the change was “insulting” to victims of sexual violence.

“Downing St” is the equivalent of the American “the White House said” … so yes, that is Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister there.

We’ve also an article from Liz Kendall today:

    That Grok continues to allow this kind of content to be created by those willing to pay for it is an insult to victims. No business model should be built on the exploitation and abuse of women and children.

    …

    The Online Safety Act was designed precisely for situations like this, where platforms fail to take their responsibilities seriously and allow harmful content to proliferate. The British public rightly expects robust action. This is a matter of urgency that demands an urgent response.

    I’ve also been clear that the Online Safety Act includes the power to apply to the courts to block services from being accessed in the United Kingdom if they refuse to comply with UK law.

We can see the threat there. If Elon Musk doesn’t do something about this then we’ll block X/Twitter from the UK.

  1. Why yes, I do know the correct story of Canute and the tides.

A Canadian and Australian connection showed up as well:

While I don’t depend on the social media site formerly known as Twitter for my news, I have found it a very useful additional source since Elon Musk took over the site. I’m clearly not the only one to feel this way:

As they used to say, however, “never believe anything until it’s been denied by the Kremlin”:

The rise of slop – “you get a clanker, and you get a clanker, everyone gets a clanker!”

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

The artificial intelligence wave continues, despite widespread resistance to AI being inserted into everything. It was bad when your toaster and refrigerator started needing access to the internet, but it’s bound to be so much worse when everything has to have an AI component bolted on to it as well. At The Libertarian Alliance, Neil Lock decries the rising tide of AI slop:

In recent days, there has been an eruption in the tech world. It is unlike anything I have seen in my more than half a century as a software developer, consultant and project manager. Microsoft, its Windows 11 operating system in particular, and artificial intelligence (AI), are in trouble. Big trouble.

The pressures leading to this eruption have been building for a year or so. Right now, the effects are confined mostly to tech blogs and tech people in the USA. But they are spreading. And fast.

Slop

In the last couple of years, AI-generated content has become ubiquitous on the Internet. It may consist of text, images or videos. Some of it is dangerous – for example, erroneous medical information. Most of it is of low to very low quality. And some of it is just bizarre. Such as the infamous “shrimp Jesus” I used as the featured image for this post.

In tech circles, the stuff has become known as “slop”. When you do a Google search, you may see more links to slop than to human-produced material. It looks as if “sloppers” have been using AI to generate large amounts of clickbait, not to mention content that may be misleading or downright dangerous.

In February 2025, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, pleaded in an interview for people to stop using the term “slop”. Saying “people are getting too precious about this”. The response could not have been further from what he asked for. The word “slop” went viral.

So much so, that last month Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publishers, declared “slop” to be their “word of the year”. Nadella responded huffily to this, saying: “we need to get beyond the arguments of slop versus sophistication”. The Internet tech community disagreed. And they took their revenge1 by re-naming the phenomenon “Microslop”.

Windows 10 and Windows 11

All tied up with this is Microsoft’s botched transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Windows 11 was launched in October 2021. Due to higher hardware requirements, it would not run on around 60% of the PCs then running Windows 10. Including mine. That was already a time-bomb.

Support for Windows 10 was withdrawn for general customers on October 14th, 2025. Although Extended Security Updates (ESUs) remained available for corporate customers who wanted to keep Windows 10 running.

At no point has Windows 11 been popular with users. It had only about half the take-up Microsoft had expected. And by February 2025, many companies who had “upgraded” their staff’s PCs to Windows 11 had started returning them to Windows 10. It’s estimated that 400 million computers world-wide are still running Windows 10 without any Microsoft software support, simply because the users cannot, or do not wish to, “upgrade” to Windows 11.

Worse, some of Microsoft’s biggest corporate clients, with hundreds of thousands of users each, are switching to Apple Mac. And tech-savvy customers, including gamers and many smaller professional firms, are moving towards platforms like Linux.

  1. https://cybernews.com/ai-news/microsoft-ai-microslop-copilot/

If — when — Microsoft tries to force me to switch to a version of Windows with a built-in clanker, then I’ll be forced to switch to Linux. I do have a functional Linux laptop (a 14-year-old HP laptop that could barely boot under Windows by the end, but is now almost peppy running Linux). There’s only one piece of software I still run that doesn’t have a Linux version or competitor but if I accept the reduced functionality of running it in a web browser rather than natively, I could get by.

January 11, 2026

“The Paradox of Indifference”

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

Kulak describes the experiences of crafting takes for the gaping maw of social media and getting … nothing. You might as well not have bothered — we all know how that works, don’t we? But sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle and your post goes viral and then you get the worst kind of feedback:

People don’t show up to comment “No one gets it”, “Another miss”, “You aren’t funny”, “You’re wasting your life on Twitter” [as they tweet at you], “No one loves you”, “You never get laid”, “you’re a whore”, “you know nothing about BDSM Romance in Desert Storm, nor how that relates to the Czech Surrealism”, “No one cares”

When you are actually wasting your time and getting no traction, Not a soul alive is going waste their own time EVEN MORE-SO to sit there and commentate your embarrassment and failure.

Think about it, No matter how much Jehovah’s Witnesses or street preachers are wasting their lives and no one is listening, you’d be wasting your life even more so to sit there trying to persuade them of that fact.

Indeed the ONLY times you’ll EVER get comments like these … Is when you ARE getting traction.

It’s really amazing! Countless times you’ll tweet or post something you thought was clever, insightful, drole, important, philosophically or spiritually relevant … And nothing.

Then one of them Moon-Shoots, takes off to 6, 8, 10 MILLION impressions, 10s of thousands of likes …, thousands of retweets … And suddenly THAT ONE you start getting “No one cares”.

I’ve seen THOUSANDS of comments, “No one cares” “you’re weird for caring” all on the same tweet, RETWEETS from accounts with a MILLION followers “Who cares what this person thinks!? No one’s listening to them” They tweet out to a million people.

YOU DO!

Otherwise you would have just kept scrolling.

Its actually really remarkable the amount of effort, collective work, and social organization that goes into this.

I’ve seen Tweets with THOUSANDS OF COMMENTS, getting hundreds of retweets and hundreds of comments that “No one cares” … Sometimes these retweets themselves get comments and conversations going in circles “These people really think we care what they think?”, “I know right? They’re obsessed with us, as if we care” and if you’re looking closely you can actually see various followers of the people who “don’t care”, Comment themselves that they “don’t care” beneath their favorite E-Celebrity “not caring” that they also “don’t care”, and then follow their way back to your original tweet to say “We don’t care”, before Retweeting you themselves to say “God, these people. They actually think we care!?”

Indeed there’s an entire MEME FORMAT — the only meme as far as I can tell the left has ever successfully created for themselves — That exists solely to express that they “don’t care”

“Giant Thumb Guy”, Look at us Cool people in our group collective, and you outside it, and how we just barely acknowledge you then go back to ignoring you.

You see you can tell it’s a leftist meme format because they didn’t use any wojaks or existing memes … Also it’s poorly constructed and uses a redundant three panel format that has been on its way out in memes since 2015.

I’ve seen various leftists create elaborate Photoshops of this meme … Just to respond how little they care, because that’s what you do when don’t care.

Now admit it, Can you tell a redditor created this? Look at the alt-text that came embedded in the image. (No I don’t actually know what Guilty Gear is…but we’ll be charitable and assume its just a fun and well enough written game and not barely concealed porn)

And of course other times their innate violent impulses infect the meme:

Because escalating immediately from words to threats of violence shows how cool and unconcerned you are.

“But Kulak!?” I hear you say, in a bout of inner-Redditor cleverness, “You’re a hypocrite! You clearly care too! You’ve written this entire piece so far just going on about how you don’t care, about them not caring, about your thing that you did that they didn’t care about!!! Would you have done that if you don’t care?! A-Ha! We got you!”

Ugh … Of course I care. This is fascinating. My anthropological instincts are tickled to the core!

Simply fascinating.

My working hypothesis is that leftists, a wide cross-section of women, effeminate men, the SSRI’d, men who’ve suffered genital trauma, the unintelligent, the weak willed, and just generally those of poor inner conviction, reason, hormonal health, and disagreeable virtue (but then I’ve repeated myself many times now) … Interpret their emotions and ideas via a complex communicative social environment they maintain with each-other.

Their minds and reasoning depends on a group, or longhouse, or “Community”, or “friends” … whereas the superior Chad, Chadette, Chud, and Chudette western autists are able to forgo, for extended periods, any need for such a social mental framework or even forego such “friends” and “community” entirely.

Thus, like the apex predators they are, these noble solitary creatures are able to rely upon their own superior reason and judgement. Inside of you are two wolves … and one of them is fallacious and gay, and the superior rational man should ignore him.

It’s a long post and covers a lot of territory, so do read the whole thing.

January 8, 2026

Drawing lessons from the Venezuelan operation

Filed under: China, Military, Russia, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Following up on an item that I shared as part of yesterday’s Venezuela post, ESR expands on the notion that China (among other potentially hostile nations) will be having a lot of time to rethink due to the noted failure of Russian SAM-300s, Chinese anti-air radar, and other high tech items fielded by the Venezuelan military:

I’ve been contemplating the reactions to this post and I realized there is an important point about which I should have been clearer. There are several different ways in which Chinese radars can just NOT FUCKING WORK. My point was intended to be that almost all of them create huge operational uncertainty for the Chinese.

I gather a lot of people thought that “not fucking work” means they’re intrinsically shitty and would fail to do their job even in the absence of countermeasures. I think this is possible, but unlikely.

There are other values of not fucking work. Including:

* Easily neutralized by ECM.

* Easily taken out by cheap anti-rad missiles or drones.

* Easily fried by some kind of monster secret HERF gun.

* U.S. anti-radar stealth is good. I mean, really, mind-bogglingly good. Better than anybody without a top-secret security clearance knows.

Out of all the possibilities, the only scenario that does not threaten the sphincter control of Chinese military planners is “Venezuelan air defense had stand-down orders”. And if that were true, I’m pretty sure it would already have leaked.

January 7, 2026

“All of that operational brilliance was always there; it persisted through the Stupid Era”

Filed under: Americas, China, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I missed this Chris Bray piece when it was published a few days ago, but it’s still fully relevant. In it, he discusses the contrast between the faltering and visibly failing military operations like Operation Craven Bugout, sorry, I mean “Operation Allies Refuge”, in 2021 as the US and allied forces abandoned the Afghanistan mission leaving behind billions in military equipment and untold numbers of pro-western Afghans to the “mercy” of the Taliban and the recent brilliant military success in Venezuela:

For years, I’ve been shouting two related messages. First, “we’re in a contest of persistence between elite cosplayers and low-status producers”. Institutions that advance leaders on the basis of their ability to engage in au courant symbol-chanting are crushing the people in those institutions who do the work, and therefore hollowing out the institutions. Second, and so closely related you could just call it the same point in different words, “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down”. The “making stuff” people are mostly just fine; the “running stuff” people are mostly insane.

After years of dismal military failures, like the bafflingly inept withdrawal from Afghanistan after twenty years of ineffective warfare against the Taliban, the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro was operationally brilliant. It required perfection from everyone in a giant list of moving parts, executing a detailed plan with absolute precision. If you haven’t watched the briefing from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, who was ritually denounced by the idiot media and the Democratic Party as an unqualified choice for the job, take some time to watch at least some of it. You aren’t used to seeing competence and clarity from an American institutional leader, so it’ll bring back some parts of your consciousness that may have gone to sleep for a while.

With 150 aircraft in the air, launching from something close to two dozen points of origin, every asset arrived in place and on time, while the lights went out below them. From the transcript:

The “pathway overhead” was that the US military switched off the Venezuelan military. They pressed the off switch on another nation’s command, control, and communications systems. Venezuela spent 2025 posturing at the US Navy, displaying their power as a warning against American aggression:

Similarly, “Experts had warned that Venezuela’s layered air-defence network could complicate US air operations”. Apparently not. At the designated moment, it all just went away.

I’ve talked for years about “recipe knowledge”, about the ability to know the steps that will produce a desired outcome. If I want to produce X result, I have to perform steps A, B, C, D, E, and F, in that order. If I skip Step C, Result X doesn’t occur, even though I’ve performed all the other steps.

We’ve just watched a military that apparently lacked the recipe knowledge to destroy the Taliban, or even to withdraw from a failed war in an orderly fashion and without leaving a bunch of weapons behind, demonstrate a shockingly high level of recipe knowledge. A failing institution isn’t a failing institution. Brilliant planning, flawless execution, ruthless competence.

There’s no way in hell that a single year of top-down intervention reversed years of hard decline. All of that operational brilliance was always there. It persisted through the Stupid Era.

On Substack Notes, John Carter commented on the article:

This, right here, is the meta-message of the Venezuelan raid. Competence collapse isn’t a purely military pathology, nor is it solely an American affliction. It applies to every institution in every Western country. We’ve been living with the frustrations and humiliations of this imposed decline for decades now.

With one decisive act, Trump has demonstrated that decline is a choice made by a small, false elite – and that if that elite is removed, decline can be reversed.

Removing the elite is the fix-everything switch in the presidency, the US military, and the Venezuelan government.

And now the whole world sees it.

A related post from ESR on the social media site formerly known as Twitter explores one of the more geographically distant ramifications of the US operation in Venezuela:

    The Watcher On The Web @WatcherontheWeb

    “ThIs Is GoInG tO cAuSe ChInA tO aTtAcK tAiWaN”

    Yes retard, the country that just got shown all it’s calculations based on weapons systems which depended on being able to use RADARS to engage US aircraft/ships are essentially worthless and billions of dollars in investment and research have been wasted is going to feel VERY brave in launching an assault against a fortified island nation armed with US weapons, US fighters, backed up by the US navy and Japanese defense force …

    I’m sure they are just giddy with excitement to try and pull that off. Practically chomping at the bit

This is an extremely important point that I’ve been thinking about ever since we got an unexpected audit of Venezuela’s air defenses. Russian SAM-300s and BUKs, Chinese anti-air radar, all proved completely worthless against U.S. gear and operators.

I guarantee you that if you are a Chinese military planner contemplating how to get an invasion army across 100 miles of the Straits of Taiwan, you are shitting your pants right about now. Because you have just learned that if you had tried to bust that move yesterday, your nice shiny new invasion fleet would have gotten absolutely gacked by U.S. airpower and missiles that you wouldn’t see coming BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING RADARS DON’T FUCKING WORK.

Also, the Soviet anti-air missile designs you cloned turn out to be about as useful as so many busted shopping carts.

Some of your guys are going to be saying “That’s impossible. The fix must have been in. Air defense must have had orders not to engage.” Which is an extremely cheering thought, but …

… isn’t that what the Americans would want you to believe? The only thing better than having complete technological dominance of an adversary is having complete technological dominance of an adversary who’s been conned into believing it isn’t true and walks blithely into getting utterly wrecked by it.

Yep. Before this went down I was figuring a very high probability that the Chinese make their move on Taiwan in 2027. Now? I guarantee you that their confidence in their previous risk assessments has evaporated. They no longer know what they’ll be facing, and there’s a significant possibility that mainland China’s domestic air defenses are worthless too.

Now I’m going to suggest that you juxtapose two phrases: “thermobaric bombs” and “Three Gorges Dam”. A China that’s naked from the air has the biggest glass jaw in human history.

Now I think there’s pretty good odds that the invasion of Taiwan will never happen at all.

Update, 8 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 28, 2025

“The Singularity is upon us”

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

ESR is clearly not worried about the clankers taking over, at least based on his own experience with coding assistance from AI:

Yes, I’m still 12

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.

And now I want to make you feel that, too.

In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair.

Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone.

We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream.

We didn’t have version control. Public forge sites wouldn’t be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy.

You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself.

Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day.

Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test … and I’m still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that!

This meditation isn’t supposed to be about me, though. It’s about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I’ve lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world’s knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn’t have said “never” (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn’t have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either.

We’ve come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I’ve lived through and learned was just prologue.

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