so, basically we’re rebooting the “anti-terrorist” Middle East drone assassination program as an “anti-drug-trafficking” extralegal execution program in Latin America and the Caribbean?
https://drafts.interfluidity.com/ https://www.interfluidity.com/ https://tech.interfluidity.com/ https://zirk.us/@interfluidity
11,076 followers 13,779 following 5,978 posts
view profile on Bluesky
so, basically we’re rebooting the “anti-terrorist” Middle East drone assassination program as an “anti-drug-trafficking” extralegal execution program in Latin America and the Caribbean?
sure! @michaelpettis.bsky.social has also proposed capital taxes to address imbalances.
“As new technologies emerged, Alphabet and its peers bought and swallowed them, in much the same way the Greek god Kronos ate his children to prevent their emergence as rivals.” @bcappelbaum.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/o...
"Social media, infotainment, and charismatic authority are all powerful weapons, but they would be less powerful if they weren’t filling...the vacuum left by the collapse of civil society." @resnikoff.bsky.social publiccomment.blog/p/the-party-...
it was a nice boom while we had it. one could almost imagine that we were climbing out of the secular stagnation era into a new schumpeterian growth wave based on renewables, robotics, mRNA & CRISPR. but apparently the price of eggs... no, the fossil fuel industry and frightened owners rebelled
“The moral of the story is: Never trust an A.I. system… Never trust a chatbot, because it’s a puppet whose strings are being pulled behind the scenes.”
Elon's entire thing is manipulating public perception. He literally sells "Full Self-Driving" that isn't actually self-driving, and has gotten away with it for years. That's not being good at technology, that is being good at manipulating public perception.
does this mean that i'm a blueskyist?
hits different right now.
"It’s amazing how many Americans put more than their best foot forward when they are trying to convince a bank to back their mortgage."
I’m broadly sympathetic to this because it flatters the notion that the right place to manufacture extra fertility at the margin is by getting people who are already having kids to have more kids
and sandwiches are tastier.
Never before has a country gone all in on setting up a financial crisis
he’s accessible on Mastodon! @pluralistic@mamot.fr there.
as far as i can tell they are not charging the 30% to rideshare services for individual rides, although i haven’t been able to find details about eg if you pay for Bolt in Europe via Apple Pay. you might ask Cory Doctorow though, i suspect there’s a particular case behind his claim. /fin
i don’t know that you can trust Apple to be very principled about this distinction. They let Netflix and Spotify get away with circumventing, and planned for a while to treat subscriptions for physical services like digital goods. x.com/techemails/s... 1/
I’ve used Bolt a fair amount in Europe. But it does usually price higher than Uber in the same market. I don’t know whether other ride share apps get exempted. Cory Doctorow pretty strongly implies not, which, if accurate, would be pretty terrible.
i have an idea. why don't we let him debate?
i'm looking forward to our check!
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
free Dem slogan idea: "50 for 50 hospital plan" - plan to construct 50 new, state of the art hospitals, one in all 50 states, to help make up for the hospitals Trump is closing that can't be reopened
"the fact that Apple/Google exempt Uber and Lyft from the 30% app tax means that they – and they alone – can provide competitive ride-hailing services." ~Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/f...
You're kind!
“As always, the hardest part of this project, as with any project, was understanding the data model and the business logic, and parsing out those objects correctly. The second-hardest was aligning elements in CSS.” @vickiboykis.com is a wonderful tech writer. vickiboykis.com/2025/01/23/y...
that it's September and i still haven't done so many things i haven't done feels like a terrible failure.
“Being Donald Trump” what a fascinating film.
you know they genuinely care if they ask about your use cases.
one way to understand why very rich people so often go mad is to realize they have long been surrounded by the kind of persuasive but truth-indifferent sycophantic affirmers that OpenAI and its peers have only recently made accessible to the rest of us.
likewise. i’d be very glad to help.
to understand what’s actually going on you have to play the weird revolution record, but backwards, it’s tricky.
it shouldn't be to bad for still-active typepadders, like @chrisdillow.bsky.social, to migrate their archives to a new home. but all old links will break, unless whoever ends up with the typepad.com domain consents to maintaining CNAME entries (basically aliases) to wherever the new blog lives.
oh fuck. @chrisdillow.bsky.social's is a typepad blog too. stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com ( typepad is shutting down arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025... )
There's probably something to this. Americans no longer have to speak to or directly interact with the nice Mexican guy who makes their delicious tacos. Add another thing to the list of pernicious effects of delivery apps
No offense, but things should get better, instead of constantly worse
GLP-1 agonists, drugs like Ozempic and newer, perhaps better, variations.
A nice indie web search engine, marginalia-search.com via Manav Rathi, Viktor Löfgren
if he's dead it's only because he's got a canny knack for what would make him popular.
on court reform - the current court has shown it is *actively* supporting* a more slow rolling fascist coup, or overturning of the constitutional order bsky.app/profile/alec...
"As is often said — and is ever true — Republicans would be content with a dung heap, as long as they are at the top of that heap." www.technologyasnature.com/2025/08/30/c... (warning: doomsterish)
i really don’t want a superpower or a cheat code. i just want to do a good job.
somebody needed to put the ass in assassin.
what if they — Vance and his shadowy backers — arranged the whole thing?
Until the TCJA, the top 400 US individuals by wealth and the full US population both had effective tax rates of ~30%. The TCJA reduced the Top 400 individuals’ total effective tax rates to 23.8% in 2018 – 2020, well below those of the full population (still ~30%). www.nber.org/system/files...
we all have a second amendment right to our sandwiches now.
which 2020s new tech will be remembered as more transformative, GPT or GLP?
the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bar a deep fake from exercising Article II powers.
"A mural of the Statue of Liberty in shame" by JDL Street Ar in Lille , Roubaix France 🇫🇷
Just tried watching Ezra Klein’s latest NYT podcast episode on how the U.S. got to this point where vaccines are so politicized. It’s pretty clear that Klein and his guests—David Wallace Wells and Rachael Bedard—really do not understand why/how the political right turned on vaccines.
The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible. But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.
What a cursed sentence (gift link) “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”
“centrists, the largest component of the British politico-media class, aren't actually liberals, neither in the broader sense of defenders of civil liberties against authoritarianism, nor in the narrower sense of advocates of free markets (their's is a capitalism of managed mkts + corporate graft).”
over the last week, several political scientists i trust have declared trump a dictator and that america is not a full functioning democracy anymore. see here: goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/where-we-a... donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author... i think making a list clarifies this:
sometimes i think i have mitochondria hypochondria.
The single most important thing to understand about digital futurism is this: When the digital future that Sam Altman ( or Elon, or Andreessen, etc) predicts fails to materialize, he doesn’t have to give the money back.
Our country has descended into fascism. Some critics think that that’s unfortunate.
you worry that you’re self absorbed, but it really is all about you.
they're working on it…
it turns out some people are unimpeachable whom i’d never have thought to apply that adjective to before.
Image from my memorial talk for Helen, taken by my student Arlene.
i agree! www.interfluidity.com/v2/5117.html
futures but boy does it hurt that twice absurd is still absurd.
your last home is one you never live in.
they’re just the Centers for Disease now I guess
colononauts. where no man has gone before. www.thebulwark.com/p/all-the-pr...
when you put the benefit in number of people terms, sure, it seems like very few, very little. but if you put it in dollar terms, willingness to pay, surplus, it might be pretty gigantic!
[some-subscribed-rss] New Post: The power we use and the power we give, by jwz https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/the-power-we-use-and-the-power-we-give/
📌
sometimes i think AI should stand for “automated imagination”.
just nuking the archives of this one is a huge loss. economistsview.typepad.com
I'm on things much more handmade. My early blog provider went under (a small indie, he was great about helping us migrate). Since then (15+ years I think) I've been first on a self-hosted wordpress, now mostly on generated static sites.
This is awful.
"he has small fingers and a nanobanana." is that the proper usage? it's hard to keep up with the lingo.
"The marketplace in ideas is broken; peddlars of crap do not exit as they would in a well-functioning market." @chrisdillow.bsky.social
objectively, yeah, we’re polarized. but which of us, in our mutual smugness, is harmful? /fin
people who style themselves liberals on Twitter mock Bluesky as a kind of left-liberal ghetto of irrelevancies. we style them as people whose brains are cooked into thinking you can have 50% fascism as a kind of moderation. 1/
In a very strong and crowded field, one of the most egregious and successful right-wing lies of the past half-century is the notion that media outlets owned and controlled by billionaires are somehow bastions of left-wing, progressive thought
It's hard to find, since it's buried in Derek Parfit's On What Matters, and is moreover entitled 'Humanity as End in Itself', instead of something useful like 'Before You Construct A Trolley-like Problem, Read This'. But the excerpt below will give you (or Dan Davies) a sense of why.
i got my start in Aldus PageMaker too! there is a learning curve, but it isn’t terrible, and Affinity’s documentation is pretty good.
Precisely because we are finite creatures, we cannot escape our historicity, which means our consciousness of the world comes about in and through history, which means we are always already bound up in a given horizon of understanding, which is always partial, never total.
I think we can get carried away with the whole "the President is only constrained by norms" framing. The Trump administration has broken an extraordinary number of black-letter laws (impoundment, civil service, etc.). The problem is that courts (or at least, SCOTUS) have looked the other way.
don’t use Adobe Acrobat as your PDF viewer! on a Mac i use Preview, but there are lots of apps that can read PDFs. Affinity offers replacements for Photoshop and Indesign, not a PDF viewer. (Sometimes there are weird PDFs that can only be read by Adobe’s software, alas. But these are rare.)
i canceled my longstanding adobe subscription today. as usual they offered sane pricing only during the process, but i'm comfortable enough with the affinity suite now i just said "sayonara". a bit bittersweet.
more than (mostly) excellent! just (mostly) on polling, since i’m highlighting the UBI comment (with which I very much agree, a point that needed to be made in that kerfuffle).
from @resnikoff.bsky.social, excellent, (mostly) on the great polling kerfuffle. publiccomment.blog/p/some-sligh...
Regulation is a high dimensional space!
The guy that invented the umbrella was gonna call it the brella but he hesitated.
“De” is never the answer to regulation. It’s not even a coherent idea, everything is regulated, “deregulation” is just passing the baton to a different layer of the onion. There is no getting around the question not of do or don’t, nor of too much or too little, but *how*, what do you propose? /fin
Elon has killed a bunch of people with “full self driving” to build what is now a crappy, also-ran EV company. (Waymo, on the other hand, has plainly not, especially relative to any human-driver baseline.) 2/
There’s lots we do regret about the innovations, though. Uber has lots of market power and medallion owners killed themselves, bad outcomes both. I don’t laud Travis for his boldness. 1/
i largely agree drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/02/25/a...
i’m ambivalent about the prospect of SpaceX really solving a really important problem in the way that i might be if Mengele announced an important medical breakthrough. would you not acknowledge it? refuse to use it if it would save lives? but still.
Substantively, you can certainly have land use reform without rent regulation, or vice versa. But politically, I think they have to work together as two sides of a program of challenging the power of big landowners on behalf of tenants (and aspiring homeowners.)
“hyperrealistic” is an oxymoron.
q: what do sentences and investigations (that can lead to sentences!) have in common? a: subject and predicate
The IRA was surprisingly effective at spurring investment in green energy. Where it failed was making it *politically* sustainable by delivering immediate tangible benefits to the public. In that sense, the Green New Deal was, in retrospect, the more prudent and realistic approach. on.ft.com/4n4Ayra
was New Coke the original woke?
insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2024/11/05/w...
when will The State be reified as a chatbot you can talk to?