Meaningless Legs (for Anne Carson) I am Jehova Jam Lambada lamb Iambic limb My name is gym Join loin

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"What's your life's wisdom, dad?" "Well, child, if something smells bad in the kitchen; it's usually just the bins."

Lula will win by more than 4 million votes. Not even that close

Yer ma's got an eye and a beak on each end.

It‘s absurd to make a competitive sport of bread and butter, but the cafes and bakeries in Copenhagen have done that. The latest gastronomic sensation there is bread and butter with a slice of cheese. This in a city where the best restaurants serve foraged food. Moss, ants, fermented things, objects from intertidal zones etc. It’s called bolle med ost (bun with cheese). There’s warm sourdough with a dark crust you can hear across the table. And an interior of irregular chambers to accommodate butter. Butter we thought we knew. We’d bought it for decades, sometimes made it. This is different, whipped into folds. It’s a different physical state of fat. The cheese (usually Gammel Knas, that takes more than two years to mature) is for the salt and the nutty finish. My wife and I became quiet whenever we ate the BMO. Married people will recognise this as one of the better sorts of silence. Neither party is in trouble. Copenhagen’s bakers have been competing over this kind of stuff: flour, fermentation, seeds, the precise condition of butter, the moment when cheese is to be sliced. We’ve now begun to resent all the bread and butter we’ve previously eaten.

seems youtu.be/fUTpQfnoGnE?t=2095

Banning credit card rewards is as close to an unalloyed social good regulation as you can get. It's not like some industry where we have to debate the trade-off of ending some class of job as the cost off reducing pollution or whatever. It's just a zero-sum system that bids up customer acquisition costs for banks. Other countries have just capped card fees and they still have functional electronic payments. The only people in favor of this are psychologically abused Americans who have invested part of their identity being good at a little life minigame imposed on them by behavioral psychologists employed by bank marketing departments. They'd rather feel satisfied thinking they're one of the net winners than take a step in a direction that benefits everyone. Like if you had to solve a little match three game on a screen to operate a gas pump, which gave you some variable bonus payout at the cost of a fee paid on every gallon of gas, there would be a large group of people against removing the slot machine element form the gas pump because they are psychologically invested in the minigame and their own status as being better at playing the system than the other guy. We can actually just have public infrastructure that works and treats everyone equally with legible rules.

This credit card discourse is eye-opening to me - I had always assumed that the "air miles" people talk about were actual miles - i.e. if you got 4000 miles, you could book flights up to that distance for free. More marketing BS.

Learning from this discourse that the whole USA is in a prisoner’s dilemma where they have 3% interchange fees that get passed through to the cost of goods so they can all make a hobby out of getting some of it back.

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists. As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making. Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man"). If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential. But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point. Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”. Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think? Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.” You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI. Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)? There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.” Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier. In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn). “Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others. And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence. This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's. What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for. A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace? Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think. Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…

Bugün yoğun bakımdaki babaannemi ziyarete gittim. Oradayken Claude Opus 5.5 kullanarak hastabaşı monitörüne Doom portladım. Oyundaki can yüzdesini hastanın nabzına senkronize ettim; can 0’a düşerse nabız da sıfıra düşer. Bu da oyunu daha heyecanlı hale getiriyor.

I bet it's meatballs and chipotle sauce

lift ten times your weight. voraciously consume sugary liquids. kill anyone who doesnt smell like you. ant mode.

In 2015, I interviewed Joshua Clover in an abandoned factory in Baltimore about his work on riots. In this clip, he outlines what he theorizes as the two distinct forms of riot. As we witness the uprising unfolding in France, Clover’s analysis feels newly urgent and relevant. However much I may disagree with his thesis, I can’t help but engage with his thinking.

I see the protests in France are trending. Since I just spent 10 days there during the heart of them, I figured I'd chime in with what's actually going on. The news and clickbait accounts on X will show you the outlier events: burning buildings, raging violence and everything that triggers you. I was in the heart of Aix en Provence during the biggest protest day and filmed the center where it was happening. (See below) This is right the University, across from the church, dead center of town. The students are dancing, singing, kicking soccer balls and have comically barricaded the entrance doors to force the school to close. I visited many cities in France during the protest period, and saw zero violence or malpractice of any kind. More broadly, I spent more than a month this year in France across 3 trips and 10+ cities, including Paris, Bordeaux, Aix en Provence, Nice, Antibes, Biarritz, and others, and it's incredibly safe, charming, peaceful and beautiful. Every city I visited is nicer than almost every American city, and there's zero comparison. So much that it wouldn't even be insulting to France to try, because nobody who has spent significant time in both countries would take this comparison seriously. I spoke with the students at length about their views. I also spoke with waiters, drivers, merchants, staff and whoever. They were all civil, well articulated and genuinely wanted to see change. We can disagree about their reasoning, logic or whatever, and it's true that France has fiscal problems, but to chalk up the France protests to raging extremist violence from "pick your favorite group to blame", is a laughable misrepresentation of what's actually going on. If you exclusively watch the news and believe the top 1% extreme situations, you have likely been psyoped.

Pretty funny to see everyone blame this (rightly condemned, to be clear) on whatever their political bogeyman is: I've just seen people say that this is because of, take your pick, "communism," "Islamism," "third worldism," "Russia," and "China". As if France needed any outside help to riot... Maybe some people need to brush up on our history, or read Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables"... This isn't to romanticize the rioters in the least. A reminder that in Les Misérables there's the figure of Thénardier, a horrendous scoundrel who exploits the chaos around him, robbing corpses and fleecing anyone he can. Every chaotic moment in French history has its share of Thénardiers, and this one is no exception. It's just too easy, and actually useful to those in power, to blame this on outside forces. At the end of the day, this anger was made in France, is happening in France, and can only be solved in France. And, as painful as it is to hear, if one studies history, this is pretty much exactly what's expected at the stage France is at. People have studied this. Whether you take Ray Dalio’s six-stage cycle theory, Peter Turchin’s "elite overproduction" thesis or the Chinese dynastic cycle framework, they all come to the same conclusion: when debt piles up, public services crumble and those in power become incapable, the streets eventually explode. In fact it's almost eerie how France ticks almost every box of most cycle theories: - Fiscal distress (debt is 119% of GDP and we now pay more to borrow than Italy or Greece), - Crumbling public services: a reminder that these protests (now turning into riots) started with high school students protesting over the state of education - Political paralysis and a legitimacy crisis (Macron has an insane 82% disapproval rate, he's definitely lost the Mandate of Heaven...) - Popular immiseration with a record poverty rate at 15.4% and a median wage at only €2,190 net per month for a full-time private sector employee (you can't even afford to rent a decent flat in any major French city with this) "Third worldism" or "Islamism" isn't the cause of any of this: French governments didn't borrow like there's no tomorrow (the last balanced budget dates back to 1974!) because the "Muslim Brotherhood" told them to, and it wasn’t Putin or Xi who left French classrooms without teachers... Sadly the reactions - scapegoating - are ALSO typical of this stage of the cycle: Dalio lists among the classic markers of Stage 5 the emergence of "scapegoat classes who are commonly believed to be the source of the problems" (linkedin.com/pulse/delving-s…), alongside a "loss of truth in the public domain," with people more interested in hunting for culprits than looking for solutions. So what is the solution? Well, the way the Chinese dealt with it was basically a reset - regime-changing themselves with a new dynasty claiming the Mandate of Heaven, usually after decades of rebellion and war. Not exactly a hopeful prospect... There is also the exception where a dynasty managed what the Chinese call a 中兴 (zhōngxīng, "restoration"): profound reform from within before the whole house came down. It succeeded a few times (e.g. the Tongzhi restoration during the Qing dynasty) but usually could only buy a few more decades, rarely more. In 1945, the writer Huang Yanpei famously asked Mao how to break free of the cycle (cn.vlex.com/vid/constitution…), framing it in those terms: "People are careful and hard-working at first, for bold measures are the only possible ways to break through difficult conditions. But when things gradually get better, people begin slacking off: laziness may spread through a long history and is impossible to be corrected when it becomes a common practice. Gradually expanded territory requires corresponding increases in talent, but when the latter is insufficient, the central control will become weak. In a word, no one can escape the 'vicious cycle' of dynastic rise and collapse." Mao replied that democracy was the answer, because "as long as the people can supervise the government, the government dare not slacken." And Xi later added a "second answer" (chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/…): a system capable of "resolute self-reform". The jury is still out on whether China has broken the cycle, but if France has any hope of escaping it, it will need both answers at once: a government that truly answers to its people, and very resolute self-reform. One thing the answer definitely isn’t: turning on each other. In all these cycle theories, division and scapegoating appear on the way down, never on the way back up.