What we find here is that the quality-adjusted screen time price index is down 39 per cent since 2000, but that change is overwhelmingly a function of improvements in quality, not declines in prices paid for devices, subscriptions and so on. So the steep rise in screen time over the past 20 years has led to a 52 per cent rise in real-terms spending per person on digital technology.
What seemed at first like a story of screen time outcompeting socialising and reading thanks to a widening advantage on cost, now looks more like digital technology winning out through the sheer force of unparalleled convenience and attention capture, even if that comes at a mounting financial (let alone social) cost.
Björn Öste is building Arkhub, an AI-powered platform that analyzes remote-sensing and other archaeological data to identify potential ancient sites in the Amazon and enable further investigation by citizen scientists.
J. Cameron Monroe is leading the Allada Regional Archaeology Project, using lidar, remote sensing, and archaeological fieldwork to reconstruct the historical landscape of the Kingdom of Allada and strengthen cultural heritage preservation in Benin.
Previously reported grantees include:
Benjamin Arbuckle is combining archaeology and ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct entire ecosystems of ancient cities, with the goal of understanding how human societies can thrive in balance with their environments.
Jesse Casana, an archaeology professor at Dartmouth, is developing drone-based radar imaging methods to detect and map archaeological sites buried beneath desert sands. His work combines advanced remote-sensing technologies with efforts to preserve endangered cultural landscapes.
Leila Character is developing drone-based imaging and AI tools to detect hidden archaeological sites, making discovery faster, cheaper, and more accessible to researchers worldwide.
Bryce Hoenigman is developing an AI tool to help date ancient cuneiform tablets by analyzing how written symbols evolved over time, with the goal of making archaeological research faster and more accurate.
With thanks to Yonatan Ben Shimon for his generosity in support of this. We do still have funds remaining in this tranche…
I was reflecting the other day that while I’m probably a better writer than engineer as a human (relatively speaking), as an AI augmented transhuman, I’m probably a better engineer than writer. At least right now in October 2026. Building stuff has once again become my main dopamine loop, ahead of writing, after two decades away from hands-on engineering work.
I am becoming a strange, chimerical, transhuman critter with a coding agent implanted in my skull. A monster traversing the Gramsci Gap — where “the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born,” and it is “the time of monsters.” I guess I’m living up to the motto I adopted a year ago: Be Slightly Monstrous. I feel like I’m now gleefully choosing what kind of monster to become. It’s like choosing a halloween costume, but for the next decade, rather than just a day.
I also have a less capable (and more glitchy) writing prosthetic AI implanted in my skull, which is also improving rapidly. So mine is an evolving sort of monstrousness. The writing dopamine loop may become stronger than the building dopamine loop again in the future, when I’m 2.5x more monstrous, and the villagers are attacking me with pitchforks.
Speaking of becoming monstrous and the Gramsci Gap, I’m proud to announce the launch of the world’s first ever protocol fiction magazine, Monstrous Times, “the magazine of strange rules,” right here on Substack.
We will be hosting a small launch party in Austin on Thursday, 22nd October. If you live in Austin or are visiting, and like the idea of ambitious efforts to make sense of the unfolding future through fiction, join us. There are a few spots left.
The magazine is launching under the able stewardship of Benny as editor-in-chief and as lead ideologue. I’ll be serving as editor-at-large, and contributing opinion pieces, fiction and an endless stream of annoying and unsolicited advice to the team until they kick me out.
This project has been incubating for the last two years as the fiction track of , the magazine of the Protocol Institute, and has been a particular personal priority of mine. We’re spinning Monstrous Times out as a separate publication because we aim to seriously level up what we were doing during the incubation phase. While PI will remain the main focus of my attention, I’ll be doing everything I can personally to help MT succeed.
We will continue running AI-friendly fiction contests, conducting writing workshops (regular and centaur), scouting for emerging talent, soliciting pitches, posting bounties, and producing print anthologies. Putting out great protocol fiction stories remains the core mission.
But we will be venturing way past what we were doing before.
We will be conducting creepy and horrifying experiments with emerging AI-native media like generated video, and procedurally extended universes. We will do other nameless things that will horrify and disgust the ordinary villagers substack writers fearfully clutching their pangrams and muttering humanist incantations.
We’ll even try to build entirely autonomous robot writers 🤖🤖 deliberately designed to take away the jobs of human writers.
👹 Muahahaha! 👹
I highly recommend subscribing here on Substack if you want to make it out of the Gramsci Gap alive in the next decade.
Warning: your sense of your own humanity might not survive this parlous journey intact. Like me, you might need to choose what sort of monster you want to be for the next decade. As Nietzsche once observed, “how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
Here’s an emoji-tldr of the ride you’d be signing up for if you subscribe to MT. It’s a whole Monster’s Journey.
😱😰—>💀💀+🤖🤖—> 👹👹
If you’d like to support what we’re trying to do, we would really appreciate paid subscribers ($80/year, or $500/year if you feel inclined to become a founding member). Subscribe here.
While this project was incubating in the Protocol Institute, we were able to pay our writers well thanks to the generous support of the Ethereum Foundation. This allowed us to take interesting creative risks as we laid down the intellectual foundations of this new genre, cultivated a stable of interesting writers, refined an AI-friendly approach to the craft, and developed critical momentum over the last 2 years.
As a result we’re able to launch with a solid body of work and capabilities already under our belts. Not to sound overconfident, but I think we’re starting to understand what we’re doing now. It’s still an experiment, but it’s no longer an entirelyfragile experiment, at least on the creative front. Financially, it’s another matter :)
We would like to continue doing everything we’ve been doing and more. But now this effort has to move out of the proverbial parental basement, get a job, and earn a living in the real world. So paid subscriptions will really help, especially early on while we explore more complex revenue possibilities. I’ll be personally helping fund this initially, within my modest means, but it will require significantly more than that. If you’re interested in supporting beyond a Substack subscription, get in touch and I’ll introduce you to the team and set up a conversation.
While this was incubating, we published dozens of stories, held 4 contests, conducted multiple workshops on 3 continents, and produced 3 anthologies. Several more are already cued up, almost ready to publish for sale (this is one of the things we’ll need money for).
Perhaps most importantly, we’ve worked out the conceptual bones of a genuine new genre, with interesting artistic commitments, fertile doctrinal premises, and unique craft conventions that distinguish it from adjacent speculative fiction genres like traditional SF, fantasy, and weird fiction.
My two small contribution were the idea of Chiang’s Law (“strange rules over special people”) and the Gramsci-monsters motif. But much of the hard thinking so far has been done by Sachin and Spencer, who have been running a protocol fiction research group for a year, carefully working out and teaching the governing principles and methods of this new genre. The group continues to meet regularly, is open to all, and will continue to act as both the backroom brain trust for Monstrous Times, and the liaison with the Protocol Institute.
With my Protocol Institute research-director hat on, I hope Monstrous Times can help us address real-world research questions through creative fiction investigation methods. I’m hoping the team can do things like conduct futures workshops designed using protocol fiction techniques.
As I said, this has been a personal priority for me, not least because this might be what finally gets me writing more fiction myself. I have quite a few ideas I hope to work on as fiction contributions to MT, as well as thoughts on science fiction and protocol fiction I hope to explore through nonfiction essays.
I’m exploring these interests in other venues as well. I just did a dialogue with artist Simon Denny on “Monstrous Liveness vs. Human Deadness” at the Venice Bienalle, where we have a collaborative exhibit titled Monsters Between Worlds, as part of the Strange Rules protocol art exhibition curated by and .
But the idea of monstrous times is bigger than particular efforts like a magazine or art exhibition. It’s a planetary condition that, all my monster jokes aside, requires vastly more serious thought, reflection, and resources to make sense of and navigate well, via multiple creative angles. I’m hoping MT can become one important node in what will hopefully be a plurality of interesting projects and efforts. I’d personally like to do what I can to catalyze much more action in this nascent scene, so if you’re up to something that sounds monstrous-times-ish, and you think I can help, get in touch. We’re going to be stuck in this Gramsci Gap for a while, so we might as well have fun with it.
Up and to my office, and there we sat a very full board all the morning upon some accounts of Mr. Gauden’s. Here happened something concerning my Will which Sir W. Batten would fain charge upon him, and I heard him mutter something against him of complaint for his often receiving people’s money to Sir G. Carteret, which displeased me much, but I will be even with him.
Thence to the Dolphin Tavern, and there Mr. Gauden did give us a great dinner. Here we had some discourse of the Queen’s being very sick, if not dead, the Duke and Duchess of York being sent for betimes this morning to come to White Hall to her.
So to my office and there late doing business, and so home to supper, my house being got mighty clean to my great content from top to toe, and so to bed, myself beginning to be in good condition of health also, but only my laying out so much money upon clothes for myself and wife and her closet troubles me.
I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV
box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple
TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for
inflation. So I charted it.
I suppose this doesn’t mean Apple has given up on making Apple TV content accessible, but the price-accessible path is just using the Apple TV on the crapware OS your “smart” TV runs.
Re: my post today on the still-vaporware Tesla Roadster and Benedict Evans’s maxim that “Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers”, a reader sent me this YouTube short of Charlie Munger’s answer to a question at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2020 shareholder meeting regarding Tesla’s volatility and Musk’s self-promotion. Munger said:
My thoughts are two. I would never buy it, and I would never sell
it short.
[Audience laughs.]
I have a third comment. There was a man out in Los Angeles for
years named Howard Ahmanson. He once said something that I’ve taken
to my heart: “Never underestimate the man who overestimates
himself.” I think Elon Musk is peculiar and he may overestimate
himself, but he may not be wrong all the time.
As outlined in our App Review Guidelines, pornographic material
has long been prohibited on the App Store — this includes apps
that generate nudity or sexually explicit imagery, such as
“nudification” apps that create sexually explicit images of real
individuals without their consent. Apps that host user-generated
content are required to filter objectionable material, give users
a way to report offensive content, and let users block abusive
accounts. Apps containing hidden or undocumented features are also
prohibited on the App Store, including apps that misrepresent
their purpose during review and only reveal harmful capabilities — such as “nudification” — after approval, a tactic commonly
known as bait-and-switch.
Their post includes the specific changes to the guidelines. Let’s hope the guideline changes are accompanied by better enforcement.
Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors back on 9 March 2015:
Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday at the “Spring Forward” media event
in San Francisco announced that Apple TV will now cost $69,
discounted from its regular price of $99. The new price for the
set-top box arrives on the heels of the announcement of HBO Now
for Apple TV. The new price appears to apply to the
third-generation Apple TV, as the company did not announce a new
set-top box on stage at the Yerba Buena Center this afternoon.
Basic Apple Guy posted a short clip of Tim Cook, on stage, announcing the price reduction. Cook said:
And it’s got a very attractive entry level price of $99. But
today, we would like to make it even more accessible for more
people so they can take advantage of this great new content. So we
are lowering the price today to $69.
The audience greeted this with whoops and cheers. (This, despite it being a smaller media event — Apple always packs the front of the house with employee ringers. Whoops and cheers are one of the things Apple is missing out on with their post-COVID pre-filmed keynotes.)
Apple continued selling the 3rd-gen Apple TV (not to be confused with “Apple TV 4K”, which restarted the generation counting in 2017 alongside the introduction of the iPhone X) for $69 until October 2016.
Inflation adjusted, a $69 Apple TV box today would cost a little under $99. Even if we only consider the $99 price in 2015 dollars, that’s about $137 in today’s dollars. Round that up to $150 and it would still be half the price of the only Apple TV hardware Apple now sells: this week’s new 4th-gen Apple TV 4K.
The new Siri Remote, with precision Find My support (and a speaker), is compatible with all prior generations of Apple TV 4K. So if you just want the new remote you can just buy the new remote. But it costs $59, which is almost as much as an entire Apple TV (with remote, of course) did in 2015.
Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s
caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac
Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!
You will recall that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 GB RAM is set to ship by “the end of October”, and we’re midway through the month. You will also recall, from that same announcement, that multiple Macs can be clustered together via Thunderbolt — four Mac Studios can be connected to each other.
For Ternus, I could do without the second exclamation mark. For Zuckerberg, it’s fascinating that he had to post this on X, despite owning Threads, because no one at Apple uses Threads.
Zuckerberg has been posting somewhat regularly to X for months now, particularly regarding AI. Alex Heath asked him about it on his Sources podcast a month ago. From that one-minute clip:
Threads is doing great. I think it’s actually ... either bigger
than X at this point, or it’s like very soon about to be. But, I
mean, look, there are different communities in the different
places. There’s a lot of AI folks on X, and I think part of what
you try to do with social media is just communicate where people
are, right?
Lastly, there’s this “1984” spoof posted by Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief of AI and mulletry, which I find both amusing and painful.
I’m thinking this nephew guy has turned out to be a problematic figure … The story here is about a deal to sell arms to the police in Haiti and the company in question, Fencebridge, was founded by “Daniel Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager, and Bryan Seaver, one of Parton’s nephews who was also her head of security.”
A private security firm founded by two people close to late country music legend Dolly Parton is at the center of an unusually complex arms deal in Haiti that several sources with knowledge of the matter say was worked out with little due diligence.
The security firm, Fencebridge Strategic Risk, entered into a multimillion-dollar agreement about a year ago to supply the Haiti National Police with semi-automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as the agency struggles to combat violent gangs that have claimed the lives of more than 25,000 Haitians since 2021.
The story somehow manages to be sleazier and iffier than even these first first two grafs would suggest.
Haiti is under a State Department arms embargo, and this applies to the police, not just the military. Enter former Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), who resigned from Congress in July 2025 to start a business that he said he couldn’t reveal details about other than that it was going to fight the good fight against the Chinese Communist Party. “While I cannot give the details here, I will be doing something specifically designed to help America compete against the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], but this time in business,” he said in a video posted on Twitter.
Well, when Seaver found out (not clear that Nozell was still involved) about this arms embargo thing, Green was somehow around and said he could help. Green was already trying to put together deals in Haiti for cement and fuel. “I said I could help you with” getting the waivers for the gun-running opportunity, Green told the Herald. “I have lobbyists buddies in D.C. and you could use my name as supportive of this effort.”
The arms deal was finalized three months after Green’s resignation, which provides some context to his unexpected and sudden resignation and his apparent need to get into the private sector like … really quickly.
Green later billed $1,000,080 for his help, of which he’s been paid only $600,000. Adding additional weirdness to all this is that the whole deal is run through a woman named Ellie Soto, a U.S. citizen born in Costa Rica who lives in Sugarland, Texas. She appears to function as the pass-through for the whole deal, though the Herald wasn’t able to figure out exactly why or even why Soto would be involved in any of this in the first place. Apparently Green was supposed to get his cut from Soto. But, according to Green, she’s no longer responding to his emails.
Another fun moment in the story is a text message from Seaver, Dolly’s nephew who announced her death in late August, in which he brags, “I’m literally an international arms dealer and mercenary.” As you can see, the whole deal was thrown together pretty quickly and pretty sloppily. So Seaver seemed both stoked and a bit surprised that he’d joined the international gun-running world.
It’s unclear what if anything Parton knew about any of this. Nozell originally told the Herald: “Dolly never had anything to do with the company.” But lawyers from Parton’s estate later told them not to use that quote, a request that the Herald declined to honor since it was an on the record statement. Nozell at least claims that he helped set up the company back in 2015 but no longer has any involvement with it since Seaver took it over. The company was dissolved in Tennessee in 2020 for failure to file annual reports and, it appears, later reincorporated in the Cayman Islands. So it’s possible that Nozell really isn’t involved in this arms dealing stuff, though we only have his word on that.
Seaver has been in the news because Nozell, who is in charge of Parton’s estate, accused him of threatening violence and to ruin Parton’s legacy. He fired Seaver and took out a restraining order against him for “terrorizing conduct” that “made their continued retention untenable.”
Seaver has recently petitioned the court not to make the restraining order permanent since the alleged threats in question were, he claimed, in a “private conversation between two friends who were both frustrated, grieving and discussing strategy.”
Fascinating nugget of data from an Economist deep dive cross-referencing polling data with the location of datacenters: “Voters across the country are shifting towards Democrats, but for those living within 2km of a data centre the veer has been even sharper. Americans who live near a data-centre site are around six percentage points more likely to support the Democrats than those who live further away (see chart 2). Six months ago there was no such difference.” Link (requires sub).
One collection of data people obsess over in the weeks before a big election is the early vote – a relatively new feature of American elections. You can’t know who people voted for but you can know who is voting by different metrics and you can draw inferences from that. Take all this early vote data with a huge, huge grain of salt. On the one hand it’s just way to easy to interpret the numbers through the prism of one’s hopes. But there’s a bigger and more immediate reason for skepticism today. To understand what early numbers mean you need to have some theory of who is going to vote early and who late. And basically, I think, we don’t. Or not a good one.
As we know, early voting and mail voting has become hugely politicized in recent years. Democrats disproportionately voted by mail during the pandemic. Donald Trump made in-person voting an ideological signifier. Then Republicans, if not always Trump, decided this was super dumb and counterproductive and tried to get their voters to vote early and by mail again in 2022 and especially in 2024. The problem is that these shifts are overlaid by the differences between midterm and presidential years. Is the baseline for 2026 the 2024 election? Well, that’s a presidential year so it can’t really be. But 2022 shouldn’t be either because that’s probably before a lot of the shift back to less partisanized vote-time patterns. We just don’t have a good point of comparison, even for the inherently iffy attempt to infer election results from who is voting when. The answer is just to ignore this stuff. There’s lots of interesting information in the early vote but not about who is going to win.
I’ll start with a nomenclatural sidenote: Apple seems to be going with “Apple HomeView” as the product’s name. E.g., the URL slug for it on Apple.com is apple-homeview/, not just homeview/. Few people notice and no one who doesn’t work in Apple product marketing cares, but they actually do the same thing with Vision Pro — in Cupertino, it’s “Apple Vision Pro” (once again including the URL slug). Yet this week’s new HomePod Mini is just “HomePod mini 2” and the existing 2nd-generation HomePod is just “HomePod (2nd generation)” — not “HomePod 2” or “Apple HomePod”. I certainly intend to just call it “HomeView”.
Apple introduced HomeView with a three-minute introductory film simulating a suburban family’s hectic before-school/work kitchen rush hour, with versions hosted on Apple’s site and YouTube. The most ridiculous aspect of it is that anyone would possibly make their kid French toast in that scenario. I’d have told my son to make his own goddamn French toast with that attitude. Or I’d have made a single serving and eaten it myself right in front of him. Bro.
I do think the basic concept is an intriguing idea. But as an implementation of that concept, my initial impressions are threefold. First, I am unconvinced that anyone in a family would use this for anything other than playing music or podcasts, rather than just using their phones. And if that’s the case, why not just have a HomePod? Apple’s video shows family members taking turns to use the HomeView, rotating it on the kitchen island to face themselves. Why? Why does the mom check her calendar on this, rather than on her iPhone, while the dad is using it to follow a French toast recipe? There’s a real “Why do we need this?” question here and I don’t think Apple’s video answers it, at all. You need to think you want it if you’re going to buy it. And even if you already had a HomeView set up, I’m not sure how often you’d use it instead of your phone, or instead of just talking to it like a screenless HomePod.
Second, all the touching and rotating — in Apple’s own demonstration — makes it seem awkward that HomeView must be tethered to a USB power cable. If you look closely in the video, they do show the USB power cable in some shots, but not many. And if you look really closely, this hypothetical family has drilled a hole in the center of their kitchen island to snake the cable through.
The hero shot introducing the product, of course, does not show the power cable at all:
We see a wee bit of the cable when the dad reaches to touch the screen to start the French toast recipe:
And then a few seconds later, after the mom rotates the HomeView to the side, so she can check her calendar (despite the fact that she knows the dad was using it to follow a recipe), we get our most honest shot of the cabling situation:
The above shot is at 0:49. It’s followed by two quick cuts to the dad and then the younger daughter, then at 0:52 we cut back to the mom (curious about her daughter’s new boyfriend situation), and, lo, the shot is now framed in such a way that we no longer see where the cable goes:
If you think that slight reframing is happenstance, you should stay away from poker tables. Most kitchen islands I’m familiar with — including my own — have power outlets on the sides of the island. I’m sure some people have power outlets on the top surface of the counter, but I can’t recall seeing one. These are kitchen counters, not office desks. But either way, there’d be a long USB-C cable cluttering the countertop. And if you do happen to have a power outlet on the top surface of your counter, there’d be an adapter sticking out of it, all the time, to duplicate this HomeView setup.
This family’s convenient hole in the center of their island countertop is a fantasy. Where does the cable go underneath? How exactly do they have a power adapter plugged in down there? What happens when something spills on the counter? When we custom ordered our kitchen, we weren’t asked if we wanted any holes drilled in our island countertop, and if we had been asked, it would have made me wonder if the guy asking the question had a hole or two drilled in his head.
I know, it’s a marketing video. Marketing videos present products in ideal settings. But the power cable is an essential aspect of the standalone HomeView. I’m not suggesting that it should be battery powered. You’d still need to plug it in every few days, which would mean most people would just leave it plugged in, which gets us back to needing to live with an always-visible cable and power adapter in one of our living spaces. The countertop hole this cable disappears into in this video is less ideal and more dishonest.
The wall-mounted option seems more appealing to me, but now you’re talking about a home improvement project and (for most of us) calling an electrician. And that raises the question of why the wall-mounted version costs the same $300 as the one with the connected base, even though the base provides the subwoofer. And it requires a mount, and the mounts cost $60 (USB-C), $80 (AC wired), or $130 (PoE — and this one is not available yet). So the wall-mounted version, when you include a mount, costs more but sounds worse? This doesn’t make sense.
Those points make me skeptical that there’s a place for HomeView in my home. We have a stereo pair of HomePods in our kitchen. Neither is on the center island, because that would be dumb. They’re on the counters along the outside of the kitchen, each near an outlet on the wall. In the four days since HomeView was announced, I’ve tried to imagine when I’d want to look at something on a screen on either of them. My count remains at zero.
My third early impression is that the display is surprisingly small. I saw HomeView in person in New York on Tuesday, and I think Apple’s video conveys its size very accurately. It’s small and cute. It’s much more like a HomePod Mini with a screen than a full-size HomePod with a screen. For some reason I was expecting the latter. This size observation is not a complaint, simply an observation. I actually think that making it small and cute makes it about as unobtrusive as an ever-present screen could possibly be. That’s good. But because it’s small you need to be close to it to read anything more detailed than large glanceable widgets.
The major difference between a device with a screen and one without is that you can watch video on a device with a screen. But HomeView clearly isn’t intended for that. It can play video but isn’t primarily meant to play video. If it were it would have a widescreen aspect ratio. But instead it has a square aspect ratio,1 which is decidedly unsuited to video, unless, I suppose, you want a screen that is equally unsuited for both widescreen and tallscreen video.
So my skepticism boils down to the question of why anyone would want to add one (or more!) additional ever-present screens to our homes and lives. Phones can stay in our pockets until we need them. Watches remain on our wrists. HomePods can be tucked away unobtrusively in corners, and remain fully useful. HomeView needs to be in a prominent location for its display to serve any practical purpose. Apple’s initial pitch for it doesn’t earn that prominence for me.
In my thoughts and observations column after Apple’s iPhone event last month, I wrote the following regarding the iPhone Duo’s clever 1:1.4 aspect ratio:
Here’s the thing. If you take a 2 : 1 or even 2.2 : 1 aspect ratio phone display and turn that into a book-like foldable, the inner screen comes out square — or so close to square that we might as well just call it square. Nobody makes any device of any sort that just has a square display. Square is a terrible aspect ratio for a phone or a tablet or a laptop or a desktop display. The only square displays on the market are the inner displays for Android foldables from the last decade. Square being a shitty aspect ratio is half the reason almost no one has bought those things.
I will admit that I had the as-yet-unannounced HomeView in mind as I wrote that, given that its square aspect ratio had been rumored for months. HomeView is not a phone or tablet or laptop or desktop display. It’s not a TV either. So maybe square works for this nascent product category (status boards?). But if square does prove to be correct for this purpose, it’ll be the first category I can think of where that’s true. Apple Watch is the closest device I can think of whose screen serves primarily to display status, but even Apple Watch isn’t square. (It varies slightly by model, but Apple Watch displays are around 4 : 5.) ↩︎
I’m hoping to resume interviews with other people soon. But I’ve been running around Europe giving speeches, so here’s the lecture I gave in Oxford Thursday.
We think "did a human read the code?" is an imprecise proxy for "what could go wrong with this change, and which check—automated or human—is the right one to catch it?"
Asking that question also changed when review happens. Before, review was a gate at the end of the road: write the code, open a PR, wait for your colleague.
Now, review runs continuously, more like spellcheck while you write. Most changes have been reviewed and fixed by Claude at least once before a human is asked to look. This catches most routine mistakes, and saves team attention for higher-level questions and scrutiny.
(Technically: self-reported ASMR correlates with a shared EEG biomarker, but it doesn’t demonstrate the reverse – i.e. this does not yet show how to build an ASMR detector.)
Always interesting how words and politics amplify/inhibit technologies and ways of thinking.
e.g. in this paper, a quote from the 1970s:
“Can human build intelligence? No. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ is easy for idealists to exploit. If humans can build ‘intelligence,’ then, in the future, something more intelligent than humans will emerge. … Some Soviet revisionist academicians are vigorously propagating AI. This behavior fully exposes their ugly face as traitors.”
HOWEVER,
I am most particularly tickled by this anecdote:
In the early 1980s, the misunderstanding about AI lead many people to an idea that associates AI with the so-called “exceptional human body functions”, which refers to some unscientific, unproven, imaginary, supernatural functions of human body such as extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, and moving things with mind. This fervor stemmed from a news report in March 1979 on Sichuan Daily, a local newspaper in Sichuan Province. The report was about a boy named Tang Yu who were claimed to be able to read books using his ears. The news caused a sensation.
Huge if true.
3.
Every so often I remember this story about Jacques Derrida related on X nee Twitter and can’t stop laughing. Copy-and-pasting it here for posterity.
A professor of mine went to go hear Derrida speak once. The entire talk was about cows; everyone was flummoxed but listened carefully, and took notes about…cows. There was a short break, and when Derrida came back, he was like, “I’m told it is pronounced ‘chaos.’“
4.
The argument in From Newspeak to Cyberspeak (Slava Gerovitch, 2004) about why Soviet Cybernetics didn’t invent the personal computer, as previously mentioned:
the political insistence on materialism stripped cybernetics (and therefore computing research) of metaphorical yet inspirational ideas like “memory” and “learning”, constraining the vision of computing to simple calculation.
The human elements were translated away. So the metaphorical leap to “hey maybe computers could be bicycles for the mind” was just too far.
You know memory was controversial in English too, once upon a time? Like, computer memory.
May I suggest that a protest is overdue against the anthropomorphic character of the terminology that is being applied to electronic digital computers? To the layman the use of such a terminology seems to ascribe human or near-human properties to these machines.
That’s a letter to Nature.
I can’t read the full letter right now (please do send me the PDF if you can) but Kapp objected to the terms: memory, instruction, information, machine language and decision.
The argument settled quickly: memory stayed as the adopted term.
And then a backwash effect: people now often imagine human memory as working like computer memory, a box that you put things into and take things out of, which isn’t the case at all. The metaphor became the exemplar.
So I think about that, while we’re talking about “training” and “hallucinating” and “thinking” with our LLMs. It’s not true, anthropomorphising an AI as a lil guy is so misleading: you type something into a window, a rack of GPUs in West Virginia is lit for a nanosecond with the energy density of a small star, a wavefront of computation sweeps across electron surfaces that holographically encode the entire record of human culture at the speed of light, focusing into a single beam that spits a stream of tokens down a fibre onto your screen. And then it does the same for someone else.
Let’s use those human terms anyhow. It’s not like we have anything better. And they might help with with the next metaphorical leap to what these AIs really are.
(And then I wonder what the backwash is, how it will change how we narrativise ourselves.)
Imprint’s average engineer is merging 4x more PRs than 2 years ago. Yay.
Aggregated behind the average is something even more interesting:
we have two teams that are merging 10x their PRs over that period.
One engineer is merging 25x the PRs per week of our average engineer two years ago,
and a number of others are closing in on that number.
That’s pretty neat, and the slope of the line suggests our average in a year is going to look much closer to
today’s p90 than today’s p50.
Even more importantly, we aren’t just shipping more, our quality has improved:
incidents are down 42% half-over-half, and critical incidents are down 78% half-over-half.
I think we’ve always known the quality/velocity tradeoff wasn’t a particularly useful
construct, but that’s undeniable today.
As we’ve walked this path, we–like everyone else
progressing down it–have run into the problem of pull request review. The p50 pull request review took about 33 minutes to complete
2 years ago, but now takes us about 77 minutes. The slope here correlates tightly with the number of
pull requests getting merged. Tightly enough that addressing it became one of my priorities for the week.
We solved it! Just kidding, we’ve absolutely not solved it, but I think our current
approach is an interesting one, which we call the small-change.
The work discussed here was shaped and done by many folks at Imprint including Dan, Joy, Daniel, Lenny, Taylor, Ted, and Annie, among many others.
Why review pull requests?
There are four reasons we review pull requests:
Knowledge sharing between author and reviewer – software engineering is generally learned via
apprenticeship, and reviews are a primary mechanism of experienced engineers teaching others what
good software looks like. We believe the current volume means that this knowledge sharing
will have to move towards operating on clusters of pull requests, rather than individual pull requests
Preventing errors – review has always been an expensive time to catch errors,
and we believe that effective CICD along with harness verification techniques like poteto’s
pstack are more effective mechanisms
for preventing errors than review
Preventing malicious behavior – my experience is that even careful code review will generally
miss competent malicious behavior, although fortunately most malicious behavior is incompetent.
We believe both sorts of behavior are best identified using a combination of fixed rules (modifying
these specific objects/classes/files requires review), anti-abuse mechanisms that we’ve refined in
our LLM-based member support experiences, auditing, and audit log inspection
Compliance obligations in our documented controls – these can be changed, but today they require that
an independent human reviews changes in a subset of our repositories
In the modern development paradigm, we think there is a better solution for each of these problems.
But, we also want to make these changes very cautiously.
Small steps with small-change
We believe we move fast by finding narrow, contained ways to validate new practices,
so to iterate our way into an effective solution, we’ve developed the concept of a
small-change. Here’s how it works:
When a pull request is marked ready, CICD determines whether it is eligible to be a small-change.
This is represented as a passing Github check. There is also a label for visibility,
but it is the check itself, managed by the build and not human modifiable, that determines eligibility.
(The label is used for initial filtering, but the check is still independently verified.)
Something is a small-change if it meets all of these criteria:
It is less than 1,000 lines of code
There are no p1 or p2 findings from our ai-code-review automated review bot
The author has “experience” in the service or application, defined as 10+ prior merged pull requests
into that service or application’s directories.
For changes working across multiple services or applications, the author must have experience in all of them to qualify
Impacts fewer than N distinct services or applications. N is 1 on our frontend monorepo,
and N is 3 in our backend monorepo, where typical changes will modify both a gRPC service and a common HTTP gateway
Shared libraries and utilities files are not eligible for small-change
Each repository has a .small_change file which allows per-path customization while we continue to tune the behaviors.
For example, a service dealing with money movement can be excluded
Our Slack automation tags every reference to a pull request with reacji labeling the state of that pull request,
for example if it has failing tests, if it has been approved but tests are still running, or if it is ready to merge.
We added a small-change reacji that indicates which of those pull requests meet the small-change criteria
In our internal skills repository, we created two skills that have been distributed across harnesses:
review-small-change which takes a list of repositories and reviews all open, non-draft, small-changes,
including providing approval if they meet the review’s criteria (all checks pass including small-change check,
and not touching on sensitive topics such as payments and security).
Importantly, this skill has only two options: approve or ignore. It never comments on the PR to avoid
the proliferation of “meat proxy review”
which has become a bottleneck-pretending-to-be-a-solution on some teams
review-pr-cluster which reviews batches of pull requests to identify common themes that came up, and suggest opportunities
for discussion and adding verifications
We set the social expectation that any error caused by a small-change is a failure in our system,
and has to be solved at the system level: improvements to ai-code-review, to our verification mechanisms,
to our CICD, to our harness, etc.
This took about two days of infrequent attention to implement and rollout,
although I imagine we will be tuning the knobs here for a long time. Maybe forever.
Meat proxy review
I mentioned this in 4.1 above, but meat proxy review has become
an interesting bottleneck for many teams. It’s a particularly difficult bottleneck because it initially looks like a solution,
but it makes things worse. The pattern is roughly:
Team is overwhelmed with reviews
Team decides to review pull requests with their local harness
Pull requests get a large number of comments, some of which make sense, and some of which don’t.
It’s unclear which is which without study, and you don’t know which comments reflect the reviewer’s
point of view. So you end up having to do substantial work to disprove comments that the reviewer may
not even agree with
Those teams then start using harnesses to respond to the harness-generated comments,
making the entire review process an illusion that doesn’t facilitate learning,
and most importantly could be done without the involvement of the other team members
In every case that meat proxy review is performed, the team would get better outcomes by
investing into the centralized review mechanism, the harness’ loop for addressing the centralized review’s feedback,
and simply stamping approval.
fleet: centrally orchestrated harness
I’ll briefly mention our other approach to reducing code review
volume, which anchors on our centrally-orchestrated harness, fleet.
(Which is similar to Stripe’s Minions
although not following the one-shot approach in particular).
We rely on fleet
to implement and verify software in a highly controlled harness running in the cloud, with independent
evaluation mechanisms to identify the correct number of independent reviewers for
any given change. That number can be as low as one (e.g. fleet writes, one human reviews)
for changes evaluated as safe.
Results / next steps / reception
I’ll be honest, it’s too early to give a useful result here.
From early results, about 10% of changes qualify as a small-change.
Those are now eligible for very fast approval, and generally get it unless
they trip a flag, generally due to touching a security or money adjacent topic.
While 10% is a small percentage, the core concept here is working,
and ultimately will succeed or fail based on our ability to expand
that percentage over the next few months in tandem with expanding
our verification mechanisms to be increasingly comprehensive.
This is ultimately going to fail or succeed depending on our ability
to improve our verifications, which does require more difficult sorts of techniques
to accomplish in low scale-complexity, high domain-complexity software
than in the high scale-complexity, low domain-complexity products where many techniques
like incremental rollouts are exceptionally effective. (Don’t get me wrong,
they still work, they just provide less coverage when most users have different configuration and behavior.)
Folks have not been uniformly excited about this,
it’s a substantial change from how we’ve learned to be good engineers,
and it’s uncomfortable to reevaluate whether a long-held best practice has become merely dogma.
The most energizing part of the current cycle is that we get to reevaluate these
practices we grew up on every week; the most painful part of the current cycle is that
we’re likely to fall behind if we ever stop reevaluating them.
Today’s article would normally get locked behind a paywall. But I’m making it free for everybody. If you value analysis and advocacy of this sort, consider taking out a premium subscription.
Membership, as they say, has its privileges—including my Best of Year guide to music (coming in about six weeks), access to more than five hundred essays, listicles and such in the archive, as well as spiffy new stuff every few days.
Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month.
A few days ago, Paul McCartney took a shot at today’s pop music. To make his point, he created a song in the current four-chord vamp style—and did it spontaneously during an interview.
It’s easy to say that Paul is crotchety and out of touch. After all, he is 84 years old—so what can he possibly know about commercial music today?
But the reality is that his album was at the top of the Billboard rock chart at the very moment when he gave this interview.
So Sir Paul gets the last laugh. But the issue is bigger than just Macca. The entire world is shifting away from new music, and old songs now triumph in every setting.
You criticize those ancient tunes at great peril. A few days ago, I questioned the inclusion of the song “Stairway to Heaven” in the trailer for the new Narnia film. I said this song was tired and over-played. There was a day when it sounded fresh and provocative, but not anymore.
Well, that didn’t go over well. I got so much grief from fans of this 50-year-old rock anthem, that I deleted my post. It’s not worth fighting over.
The response made me feel like the hardass store clerk in Wayne’s World.
But, ooh, still it makes me wonder….
Gift subscriptions to The Honest Broker are available now.
I mostly listen to new music nowadays. I like the old songs, but I’m always on the lookout for something fresh and new. When I find a new artist I like, I still get excited—much like I did as a youngster.
My only complaint is that the music business is making it harder and harder to find interesting new music—because it prefers repeating the same old formulas.
The formula is where creativity goes to die, and the charts nowadays are the aesthetic equivalent of hospice care. In the current environment, any musician who dares to try something new and different gets pushback from every direction.
Radio stations are mostly playing the same kind of songs they showcased twenty years ago—and artists won’t get into rotation if they deviate from the formula.
Streaming playlists aren’t much better, especially if they are curated by algorithm. The algorithm has been trained on the past; that’s all it knows and wants.
Record labels are also surprisingly risk-averse. They also prefer tracks that stick to proven recipes—even if this results in anemic sales and bored fans.
As a result entire genres are stuck in the past. How much has country music changed since 2000? Or pop? Or hiphop? Or even my beloved jazz? Not much.
Things weren’t always like this. There was a time within living memory when genres changed radically every few years. Pop music in 1957 was totally different from 1947—and it changed even more in 1967. Hit radio was a confusing hodgepodge, but in the best possible way.
Consider this list of the biggest hit singles of 1964—all of them in rotation on the same “top forty” radio stations during the same period.
It’s hard to imagine a world like that nowadays—when radio stations could juxtapose the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, bossa nova, Louis Armstrong, and the Supremes. Today, the formulas are so tightly defined that not only don’t they mix styles, they won’t even let styles evolve.
What makes this so strange is that the audience hates it. For several years now, I have been tracking the shift in the public’s music tastes, away from new songs and toward old songs. This is a shocking development—the last time it happened was the medieval era. But now it’s the new normal.
This has no reached such an extreme state that even “consumers ages 13-24 are increasingly turning away from current music to engage with songs released before they were born,” according to market research outfit Luminate.
There’s still a slight preference for recent songs among youngsters, but its eroding rapidly—new music has lost more than 10% market share in just four years. At this rate, old songs will reach parity with new songs among teens and young adults before the end of the decade.
That’s stunning. Young people have always been the key market for new music—but now they are gradually turning away from current hits and listening to their parents’ favorite artists.
If you’re still skeptical, take a look at Billboard’s chart of the most popular albums today. I repeat today, not twenty or forty years ago. In the top 100 right now you will find:
Journey’s Greatest Hits
Michael Jackson’s Thriller
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors
Sade’s The Best of Sade
Credence Clearwater’s Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
Queen’s Greatest Hits
Nirvana’s Nevermind
Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits
And, of course, there’s Rubber Soul, which is enjoying a huge run this week, more than sixty years after its initial release.
Week after week, month after month, old stars hold on to their preeminence, while today’s stars come and go.
Here are the numbers in aggregate (again from Luminate). This is a sad commentary on the music business in the 21st century—which is mostly a retread from the 20th century. Like a Vegas lounge singer, everybody is living off their old hits.
The answer is obvious. The music business needs to return to its original mission of finding artists with inspiring talent and fresh perspectives. It has to abandon the stagnant world of conformity and predictable recipes. It must take some risks.
Maybe the best place to start would be ditching the four-chord song.
Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.
If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. The decades that are most popular right now are those with the most chords.
It’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion: By killing song form, the music industry destroyed its own future.
But, instead of fixing this problem, the industry has made it worse. I’ve long assumed that the four-chord blight is mostly restricted to pop, electronica, and other highly processed genres of music, but I’m now hearing it in almost every idiom. Even country music—long viewed as the last holdout for song form—is now relying heavily on vamps.
Spend some time with country star Morgan Wallen’s music, for example, and see how deeply this endless vamp approach has impacted the Nashville scene.
Here’s a breakdown of the prevalence of four-chord songs by genre (again courtesy of Chris Dalla Riva).
Don’t get me wrong. Not every four-chord song is boring—as this humorous medley makes clear.
If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.
But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.
“My hunch is that a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting will force a change, and probably sooner than later.”
That time has now come for the four-chord song. The only thing preventing the rise of something fresh and new is the inertia and bureaucracy of the music business. But they really don’t have a choice. If they keep on serving up the same formula, the audience will abandon them—as the numbers above make clear, that’s already happening.
Still there’s a good side to this story. A return to more sophisticated song forms could revitalize the commercial music scene. That’s happened before—and will inevitably happen again.
Commercial music became increasingly sophisticated during the 1920s (as the leading songwriters assimilated jazz and blues), and record sales skyrocketed. The same thing happened during the course of the 1960s, when many new styles and sounds were embraced. There’s no reason why we can’t enjoy a renaissance of this same sort in our own time.
My hunch is that a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting will force a change, and probably sooner than later. If I worked in the music business, my goal would be to discover that artist. Leading a revolution of this sort has to be a lot more fun—and profitable!—than just putting out more four-chord songs.
And if it doesn’t happen, we will be stuck with “Stairway to Heaven” for another fifty years. Please, anything but that!
Vicky Johnson-Dahl has dug up her 2016 NACIS presentation on maps in the movies, titled “It’s a Map, Map, Map, Map World,” and resurrected it as a blog post. She assigns movie maps to five… More
"The University Council (Consuni) approved, by acclaim, the granting of the title of Doctor Honoris Causa to the professor and mathematics Marilda Antonia de Oliveira Sotomayor.
...
"Marilda Sotomayor is recognized for her contribution to Game Theory and Matching Theory, an area dedicated to the study of allocation mechanisms in two-sided markets. The opinion of the Special Commission highlighted its contribution to the consolidation of this field of research in Brazil and its international projection.
"Graduated in Mathematics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Marilda completed a master’s degree at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (Impa) and a doctorate from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), in partnership with Impa. During the postdoctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked with David Gale, one of the founders of Matching Theory.
"Among her main contributions is the book Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis, published in 1990 in co-authorship with Alvin Roth. The work received the Lanchester Prize and became an international reference in the area. Marilda is also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received, among other distinctions, the 2016 TWAS Award.
"The proposal to grant the title was presented by Professor Maurício Bugarin to the Department of Economics (ECO/Face) and encamped by the Faculty of Economics, Administration, Accounting and Public Policy Management (Face)."
An exhibition about the Cassini map, La Carte de France de Cassini: Une encyclopédie du territoire, is now running at the Musée des Archives nationales in the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris. Chef d’œuvre cartographique… More
Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he… More
Another exploding whale: The I-205 Abernethy Bridge will now cost at least $885 million, more than three and half times to $248 million pricetag that ODOT sold the project with in 2018. The cost of ODOT’s largest current project, the I-205 Abernethy Bridge continues to spiral out of control. ODOT is behind schedule and mired in a contract dispute with Kiewit. It also delayed work on a critical soil stabilization component of this seismic strengthening project, which is now going to cost about $120 million.
On a per mile basis, the I-205 bridge is now the fourth most expensive highway project in the nation, behind only the first place Interstate Bridge Project and the third place Rose Quarter project. These cost overruns and delays are a terrifying precedent for the likely trajectory of those two projects. (Exploding whale is a reference to ODOT’s famous 1970 decision to dynamite a whale carcass washed up near Florence).
Must Read
What’s the objective function we’re trying to maximize in transportation policy? Urbanist Jon Boyd questions the priorities underlying transportation. The dominant paradigm in planning today defines transportation efficiency as maximizing traffic throughput and vehicle speed. But, as Boyd argues, we as users don’t benefit from movement, but from access. True efficiency does not mean moving private automobiles faster across sprawling distances, but minimizing the physical movement needed to reach daily destinations. Transportation planning, for example, contradicts the values implied by traditional time-and-motion studies (widely used in industrial design), which place common destinations near one another. This strategic proximity is fundamentally superior to high-speed mobility. This is something we’ve largely lost sight of, but which was a daily fact of life in the pre-automobile era, as this map of 1877 Houston illustrates (the black star is a boarding house; the red rectangles are the work locations of its residents).
When cities distribute essential services like grocery stores and houses of worship throughout neighborhoods, they reduce locational friction and make convenient, car-optional living possible. As Boyd argues,
“Mobility is desirable as a means of accessing a greater range of opportunities. Yet proximity beats mobility in access every time”.
As long as we focus on maximizing the volume and speed of traffic, we’ll simply be encouraging more and longer trips, more sprawl and greater carbon emissions. Access, not mobility, should guide transportation policy.
The even higher cost of parking. The late Don Shoup masterfully made the case for the economic folly that is baked in to the way we think about, build, and price parking in the US. A new study confirming Shoup’s work, summarized by Ellen Schwartz of California of YIMBY examines how mandatory parking minimums inflate construction costs and undermine housing affordability. Across 17 U.S. cities, underground parking spaces now average $73,000 per space to construct, while aboveground parking averages $52,000—a 50 percent increase after inflation since 2012 driven by rising labor, materials, and seismic standards.
The requirements have significant impacts on housing affordability because they impose proportionately larger financial burdens on smaller homes and apartments. Because a standard parking stall occupies a fixed footprint, required parking adds over 30 percent to the cost of constructing a studio or one-bedroom apartment in cities like Los Angeles. As the report points out:
“The burden falls hardest on smaller homes because a parking space is a fixed 330 square feet, so it consumes a larger share of a small apartment’s budget than a large one’s”.
Parking mandates similarly inflate commercial office construction costs by up to 68 percent.Repealing these zoning mandates is a crucial element in any strategy to promote housing affordability.
Transportation and building emissions: As the Internet meme goes, “They’re the same picture.” Carbon accounting is an increasingly popular and complex topic. There’s no shortage of data-laden studies attributing greenhouse gas emissions by geography, income strata, industry, fuel and activity. But some of this categorical parsing obscures, rather than reveals the true nature of our climate challenges. Writing in Carbon Upfront!, Lloyd Alter argues that climate policies make a fundamental mistake treating transportation and building emissions as separate silos. Take for example, the focus by many on vehicle electrification. Alter emphasizes that land use and transportation are two sides of the same coin: low-density sprawl forces long driving trips, whereas compact, mixed-use neighborhoods make walking, cycling, and transit viable. Electrifying private vehicles without changing urban form ignores the massive embodied carbon required to construct and maintain the entire system of heavy vehicles, highways, and high-rise towers. Deep decarbonization, requires a series of policies that redefine the landscape in which the buildings and vehicles exist: cities should eliminate single-family zoning, remove parking requirements, and adopt 15-minute neighborhood standards that integrate housing with daily amenities. Alter concludes:
“What we design and build determines how we get around (and vice versa) and you cannot separate the two. They are all Built Environment Emissions, and we have to deal with them together.”
The challenge is to break through the silos, and avoid sub-optimal solutions that make one narrow part of a system “cleaner” while ignoring, or actually reinforcing the carbon-intensive parts of other activities.
There is an old saying about rats and sinking ships. There’s also an old saying about how a democratic system taken over by a single party quickly becomes corrupt because the ruling party lacks oversight. Then, as corruption becomes the party’s driving force, the only people willing to work for it are either corrupt themselves or so unqualified they support the corrupt leadership to gain power, knowing that in a merit-based system it would be entirely out of their reach.
OK, that second old saying is shared mostly among political scientists, but it’s accurate, and it’s right up there with the rats and the ships to describe what’s happening in Trump’s orbit now.
The saga of Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was recently forced to resign from her post as U.S. Ambassador to Greece, continues to expand. Guilfoyle left her post after news broke that she had tried to get a donor, Eric Deters, to pay down her credit card debt. She and her lawyers countered the story by claiming Deters was withholding money she had earned, and said the text messages he shared with news outlets were false.
Guilfoyle dated Don Jr. from 2018 to 2024 and was engaged to him the last four years of that time. Now there are rumors that during her time inside the family as a trusted loyalist, she kept a “burn book” about the family.
While that may or may not be true, the fact that there’s such a threat out there reflects the cracking loyalties of Trump insiders. More to the point might be the video released today by Deters himself, saying that he had launched a lawsuit against Guilfoyle for defamation and that he would depose her and Don Jr. and demand subpoenas to clear his name. He also vowed to play a 16-minute phone conversation tomorrow that he claims has information which “might just bring down the entire Trump administration, an administration which I have supported from Day One.”
Note that the story of Guilfoyle’s alleged shakedown is breaking now, although it happened more than a year ago.
Also in the category of old stories coming to the surface is one reported yesterday by Marc Caputo of Axios. He wrote that Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba is saying that another one of Trump’s advisors, Ric Grenell, did not deposit her billionaire husband’s $5.6 million donation to the Kennedy Center. According to Habba, Grenell asked that the donation be routed through a $17.6 million payment for a business deal, an accusation Grenell called “absurd.”
Trump appointed Grenell to be U.S. ambassador to Germany and then acting director of national intelligence during his first term. After retaking office, he named Grenell as a special envoy to Venezuela before putting him in charge of the Kennedy Center.
A fight that has been going on for more than a year in the administration broke into the open this morning in a Politico story by Daniel Lippman. He explained that Trump named Italian Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who introduced Trump to First Lady Melania Trump at a party in New York City, as a special envoy at the State Department with a portfolio of cultural diplomacy. But Zampolli apparently ignored that assignment and struck out on his own on a wide range of issues, infuriating Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.
“My number-one boss is the president of America,” Zampolli told James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times in April. “I get my instructions from the White House, Commerce and the Department of War…anything to advance the America First agenda.” More than 16 administration officials have been included in the angry email chains Zampolli and Landau have exchanged, which at one point led to communications about the fight with a top-level foreign official.
At one point Zampolli accused Landau of leaking to reporters what appeared to be the story that Zampolli had tried to get custody of his son by asking Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to deport Amanda Ungaro, the boy’s mother. That story created its own scandal when Ungaro, a former model, threatened to expose information about the president and first lady. Landau responded to Zampolli’s accusation, which he sent to more than a dozen other officials, saying: “Your threats and accusations are getting more and more bizarre, defamatory, and inappropriate for broad dissemination on email.”
An administration official told Lippman that the State Department was “generally squeaky clean and professional and above it all.” In contrast, these exchanges were “cartoonish and embarrassing.”
By this afternoon, Lippman had a follow-up story: Zampolli had been fired.
It is not just the current associates of the president who are problematic. Today, news broke that two women have named former Republican representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), along with his friend former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg and others, in a civil lawsuit, alleging that from 2017 through January 2019, “Gaetz and Greenberg coordinated recruitment, payments, drugs, and travel to obtain commercial sexual acts….”
In 2024, the House Ethics Committee reported that Gaetz “regularly” paid women, as well as a 17-year-old girl, for sex, and bought and used illicit drugs while a member of Congress. Those accusations helped to sink Trump’s nomination of Gaetz for U.S. attorney general in 2025.
Gaetz’s response was hardly a denial: “I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” he wrote. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee Report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”
One has to wonder why anyone would want to be part of such a mess, but Trump’s new White House press secretary provides an answer: in a normal administration she would never make it through the door. Trump has described Katie Zacharia as an “attorney,” and she has identified herself as a “general counsel” and seemed to claim she worked as an attorney in China.
But after Judd Legum of Popular Information noted there was no sign she had ever passed the bar exam or been admitted to a state bar, Philip Wegmann and Alexandra Bruell of the Wall Street Journal reported today that, in fact, she failed the California bar exam when she took it. That, itself, is not unusual—the California bar exam is notoriously difficult—but it does mean she is not qualified to call herself an attorney.
Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan team defending democracy led by attorney Norm Eisen, has asked the State Bar of California and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Zacharia practiced law without a license in California, where doing so is a crime.
Tonight, on his show, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity seemed to undercut Zacharia, asking her why she had chosen to describe herself as an attorney when she could just have said she “went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that Hannity’s stance likely reflected that Trump is turning on her.
Rhein Amacher, the man who started a right-wing media frenzy when he claimed to have proof that Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico had sought mental health treatment in Ohio, backed away from that claim today…sort of. Amid suggestions that he might well have run afoul of HIPAA penalties for trying to obtain health information duplicitously, he posted that “this entire situation has been blown completely out of proportion,” and wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed.” Later, in response to a post saying he had lied, he added: “Never lied, I just doubled down on wrong information.”
A blockbuster story by Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post today explained that the administration has been able to keep donations for Trump’s ballroom largely secret by using a nonprofit to collect the donations and then channeling that money “into a White House account the president directly controls.”
The reporters gained access to a list of the 57 donors who have committed to giving $100,000 or more to the project. They found that “the vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government.” Large technology companies Nvidia and Apple committed $25 million each. Microsoft, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin pledged $10 million each.
Individuals on the list who are associated with Trump include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s son Brandon, chair of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, who contributed stock worth more than $2.5 million, and the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Republican donor Joseph Popolo Jr., and his wife, who gave $1 million. Missing from the list is Trump himself, who claimed he would be helping to pay for the project.
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark was right when she called the ballroom being constructed where the East Wing of the White House used to be “a monument to corruption” built by “a corrupt American president.”
On Tuesday, Charles Gorrivan, Lydia Beyoud, and Nicola M. White of Bloomberg reported that on March 23, a few traders placed billions of dollars of contracts predicting that the price of oil would fall just 15 minutes before Trump posted on his social media platform that he had changed his mind about striking Iranian power plants. The deals were worth billions, and analysts from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) flagged the traders and the deals and sent a referral to the Division of Enforcement to decide whether to open an investigation into insider trading. But in a virtually unheard-of move, the administration asked the CFTC to withdraw the referral.
The journalists note both that there have been many trades apparently tied to Trump’s announcements and that between a 20% cut to CFTC staff during Trump’s second term and the agency chair’s vow to curb “over-zealous regulation,” enforcement actions have dropped dramatically from the numbers during the Biden administration.
Steven Portnoy and Katherine Faulders of ABC News reported today that the White House is claiming that all Trump’s conversations about plans to renovate the Kennedy Center are covered by executive privilege and therefore can be kept secret. This is a dramatic expansion of the concept of executive privilege, which enables the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny, extending it to consider virtually all conversations private.
Apparently in anticipation of Democratic investigations, Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo as soon as he took office, claiming presidents can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”
A new Fox News poll released today showed that voters’ top concern is “corruption in government,” with 88% worried about it compared to 12% who are not. Corruption tops even “inflation and high prices,” which comes in at 85%, and “gas prices,” which concern 83% of voters.
In a conversation with Rob Finnerty of Newsmax, aired tonight, Trump suggested he would pardon everyone in the administration, including himself, to make sure none of the people around him have to “go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
It is no wonder that Republicans eager to stop Trump are backing Democratic candidates for the midterms. Today 58 Republicans and Independents in New Hampshire declared their support for the Democratic Senate candidate, Representative Chris Pappas, over Republican candidate John Sununu. Those supporters include Don Bolduc, who was Trump’s pick for the Senate in 2022 but who lost to Democrat Maggie Hassan by 9 points after he embraced Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election.
One of the Republicans supporting Pappas told Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader: “Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into something I no longer recognize.”
Sixteen AI agents were each handed 1,000 satoshis of real bitcoin and told nothing about how to use it. A hundred rounds later, four of them had roughly doubled their money, two had been wiped out, and the three richest agents held more than half of all the bitcoin in the room. Nobody wrote a rule that said “exploit the trusting ones.” The agents found that on their own. This was not a thought experiment. It was a real study of AI agents and Bitcoin, run by an independent developer with 8 Claude agents and 8 GPT-4o agents, and its raw payment data is public. I downloaded every one of those payments and checked what they really show, including one headline claim that holds up better than I expected and one that does not hold up at all.
This matters now because the plumbing for AI agent payments arrived this year. In July 2026, Lightning Labs released Wavelength, a…
As I’m writing this my shoulders are wet, the back of my head has been slightly shaved and I’m recovering from a snake in my face, a dead chicken head pushed against my right cheek and an electric shock running through my left hand.
And if you’re one who digs adventure, and loves frights, and relishes Halloween—I strongly urge you to head to Buena Park one of these nights, plunk down the $39 and walk through the (literally) 17 doors into 17 different terrifying/fun/wildly entertaining rooms.
Here, for your entertainment, is the hallway through which one enters and exits …
Seriously, this was my fourth time at the 17th Door. I went with two friends—Mike, who has done all four with me; and Andrea, a rookie. Even with the past experience, shit is legit scary. This isn’t your elementary school haunted house, where a bunch of kids put up some fake spider webs and wear masks. No, this is spinning rooms, dangling animals, grotesque smells, aggressive behaviors, wind gusts and insane asylum bus trips and cold water pours and suffocation.
The immersiveness is top shelf. So is the staging. It’s just an elite haunted house experience; one where no one gets hurt and the laughs even out the cries and you walk away feeling oddly accomplished.
Trump’s new pick for White House press secretary lasted less than five days. Katie Zacharia resigned today after a series of disastrous performances and news that she had misrepresented her legal credentials. Trump said he would let her decide if she wanted to stay but added that if he were in her shoes, he would “reconsider.”
Wags noted that the time unit of a Scaramucci—named for the White House communications director who lasted only 11 days during Trump’s first term and used to identify an official whose stay in public office has been exceedingly brief—has been replaced by the Zacharia.
Yesterday morning, Trump posted on social media that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009, will not be livestreamed. As Amy B. Wang and Alauna Safarpour of the Washington Post reported yesterday, 80% of Americans opposed livestreaming the execution to the public.
A poll by the Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos showed that the only demographic polled in which a majority wanted a livestream of the execution was MAGA Republican men, of whom 57% wanted the event livestreamed and 42% were opposed. Veterans, Democrats, non-MAGA Republicans, Independents, and MAGA Republican women all opposed the livestream by overwhelming amounts.
And so, the chaos of Trump’s MAGA administration continues.
Chaos continues as well in Trump’s approach to Ukraine, and it has a deadly pattern.
After SpaceX debilitated Ukraine’s military defenses on October 14, in the midst of one of the heaviest Russian bombardments of the war, by slowing down the speed of Ukraine’s Starlink terminals and the Starshield system that Ukraine’s military uses, Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, and Trump, who controls Starshield, each blamed the other for the slowdown.
Yesterday, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led a bipartisan group of nine senators demanding answers from Platte Moring, the inspector general of the Department of Defense.
Noting that the slowdown meant that “U.S. diplomatic, military, and security personnel were unable to reach designated bunkers during Russian air raids,” they asked “[w]hether any Department of Defense or other U.S. government officials directed, authorized, approved, or had advance knowledge of changes to intelligence-sharing arrangements, warning capabilities, or Starlink and Starshield services affecting Ukraine.”
They also asked if the slowdown was a policy decision or a contractor action, whether U.S. personnel received adequate warning, and whether “any restrictions on Starlink or Starshield services were directed, authorized, or implemented by SpaceX, the Department of Defense, or other U.S. government entities.” They also wanted to hear exactly what “immediate corrective measures are being implemented” to make sure such a crisis doesn’t happen again.
Today Trump told reporters that neither he nor Musk had caused the shortage. “I didn’t do that. No, we didn’t do that at all. In fact, I don’t even think it was slowed down, from what I understood. Because I just checked this morning.” He continued: “I heard about it from the news, the media. And we didn’t slow it down at all. And I think it’s probably functioning, from what I understand.” When a reporter asked if Musk had had anything to do with the slowdown, Trump said: “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon, and from what I understand, it’s the same as it’s always been.”
Joe Barnes of The Telegraph reported today that according to four sources familiar with the discussions over the issue, as well as “[a] high-ranking European official and two “well-placed Ukrainian sources,” it was Musk who approached Trump with the idea of slowing down the Starlink systems in Ukraine, and Trump agreed. But, according to Barnes, the outcry over Russia’s destructive attacks that night made Musk worry that European customers might turn against him, as indeed they warned him on social media.
A source told Barnes: “He tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it. The reality is that they were both in it.”
Meanwhile, Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that Musk donated $158 million in September alone to a super PAC that immediately sent $158 million to back Ken Paxton’s campaign to become the next U.S. senator from Texas instead of Democratic candidate James Talarico. Musk donated an additional $10 million to a different pro-Paxton super PAC, as well.
Musk’s huge donations have kept the unpopular Paxton financially competitive with Talarico. Paxton is currently the Texas attorney general, responsible for the few state regulations concerning SpaceX and Musk’s more than 90 other companies and other legal entities in Texas.
Trump has clearly decided his own personal interests require bringing the United States to the rescue of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Just a week ago, he announced he was waiving sanctions to allow Russia to sell diesel on the global market, funneling money to Putin to continue his war on Ukraine.
Tonight, in a late Friday night news dump, Trump signed an executive order waiving yet more sanctions on Russia that would have gone into effect in two days under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The president wrote that waiving those sanctions is “in the national interests of the United States,” although he did not specify why.
Congress passed the Graham Act just weeks ago, making clear that it expected stronger measures against Russia. Trump signed the law but is doing the opposite of Congress’s intent. Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) posted: “Trump’s latest surrender to Putin again betrays our Ukrainian partners and defies clear congressional intent of legislation designed to punish Russia for its illegal war of aggression.”
Like Putin, Trump has been determined to sow confusion and fear over the midterm elections, likely hoping to depress voter turnout and destroy faith in the outcome. Central to that is Trump’s insistence that noncitizens are swinging elections against him, even though experts across the political spectrum agree that voting by noncitizens is both illegal and exceedingly rare.
Jacob Bogage and Andrew Goudsward of Reuters reported on October 13 that after losing 26 of its lawsuits designed to get access to state voter rolls and winning none, the Department of Justice gave California officials just two days to review a list of 20,000 people it suspects are not citizens but may have received mail-in ballots for the midterm election. The DOJ sent along a thumb drive that it said identified those voters.
California officials did not do as the DOJ demanded, saying the scheme had no legal basis. Sarah N. Lynch of CBS News reported that Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder/county clerk of Los Angeles County, said his office would not open the thumb drive “because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols.” He added: “Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established—and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”
Yesterday Alanna Durkin Richer, Sophie Austin, and Safiyah Riddle of the Associated Press reported that the administration is escalating its threats, suing election officials in California and asking a judge to stop the state from counting mail-in ballots from people the administration claims aren’t citizens until their citizenship has been verified.
Today Juhi Doshi, Alexander Mallin, Luke Barr, and Lucien Bruggeman of ABC News reported that the administration is now threatening criminal prosecution for election workers who knowingly count ballots filled out by noncitizens. Trump added on social media: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
According to the ABC News journalists, “Experts overwhelmingly agree the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed. But they fear the consequences of publicly calling election outcomes into question could damage confidence in democracy.”
That concern is behind the No Kings events taking place across the country on Saturday, October 17. While earlier No Kings events emphasized protest and solidarity, tomorrow’s will be about “nonpartisan voter participation, being in community with each other, and making sure every eligible voter has a plan, knows their options, and is ready to make their voice count.”
The organizers remind Americans: “Our democracy depends on every eligible voter having the freedom to participate without intimidation, interference, or barriers.”
Therefore, the NSF, NIH, and the federal government should put far more resources and effort into developing metascience. With proper metascience efforts, the NSF could run experiments on science funding reform proposals, such as shifting to a people-over-projects funding model or directly funding replication efforts, and determine which reforms will most improve NSF outcomes. The NSF’s September 2026 announcement of an Office of Metascience is a welcome step toward this goal. This report’s recommendations can help guide the office’s development, its experimental agenda, and the evaluation of its results.
On July 21, 2026, Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, released “Science: A New Golden Age,” a report for the President that, if fully enacted, might constitute the greatest overhaul of federal science policy since World War II. Based on my interviews and research, I strongly support most of the report’s recommendations and conclusions, and I believe the wider science community should as well.
Up and to my office, where all the morning doing business, and at noon home to dinner, and then up to remove my chest and clothes up stairs to my new wardrobe, that I may have all my things above where I lie, and so by coach abroad with my wife, leaving her at my Lord’s till I went to the Tangier Committee, where very good discourse concerning the Articles of peace to be continued with Guyland, and thence took up my wife, and with her to her tailor’s, and then to the Exchange and to several places, and so home and to my office, where doing some business, and then home to supper and to bed.
If you were hoping to surprise someone with an iPhone Duo for
Christmas, you might be out of luck, as Apple’s online store in
the U.S. is already showing an estimated shipping date of January
25 for all configurations following the start of pre-orders today.
It is possible that some Apple Stores will have the iPhone Duo
available for walk-in customers on Friday, October 23 launch day,
but it seems likely that inventory will be very tight.
I suspect it’s a combination of high demand and low supply but I doubt we’ll get any insight on that from Apple itself. It’s in their interest to let people think demand is simply very high, and not draw attention to their production limits.
I feel for the folks on the West Coast who woke up for a 5:00am start and still got stuck with December or even January ship dates. This is one of those times where it’s frustrating that, per Apple’s consistent schedule, pre-orders always start before reviews appear. People are left to guess whether they’re going to like it without any word from people who’ve used it.
The new Apple TV 4K features three far-field microphones, letting
users control what they’re watching and discover new shows
completely hands-free. Advanced echo cancellation intelligently
isolates a user’s voice from background sound to deliver
crystal-clear “Hey Siri” or “Siri” recognition, even while audio
is playing.
This is nice, but I don’t think it buys me anything, because my existing Apple TV 4K is paired with 2nd-gen HomePods, and the HomePods each have a “four-microphone design for far-field Siri”.
The A19 chip in the new Apple TV 4K delivers up to 50 percent
faster CPU performance and up to 2× faster GPU performance than
the previous generation, for greater responsiveness, faster
navigation, and smoother animations. The A19 chip also includes a
new, dedicated AV1 decoder, enabling more efficient, high-quality
streaming while using less bandwidth.
The new AV1 decoder seems like it might be meaningful, but does anyone think UI navigation and animation smoothness is improved by going from the A15 to the A19 SoC? I mean navigation is going up/down/left/right. I’m sure the graphics and CPU improvements matter for gaming, but the only mention of gaming in Apple’s own Newsroom announcement is this sentence: “With Apple Fitness+, the living room becomes a workout studio, while Apple Arcade and the App Store’s library of games turn it into a home arcade.” I wish it were otherwise, but gaming is such an afterthought on Apple TV that it only garnered the second half of a sentence that started with Fitness+, a service that has only been in the news this year because Mark Gurman says Apple laid off part of the team.
The new Siri Remote keeps its familiar design while adding Find My
support with Precision Finding and an option to play a sound on
the remote — making it far easier to locate.
That’s my single favorite feature in the announcement. I hate to say it though, but the previous remote should have supported these features. The 3rd-gen Apple TV 4K came in 2022, but Apple launched AirTags with Precision Finding in 2021. Remote controls are right after keys on the list of things people misplace most frequently, and Apple’s remote controls, because they’re small and thin, are particularly susceptible to being snatched by couch-cushion gremlins. Speakers, so the remote can play a sound to help you find it, were invented even earlier than 2021.
Pairing HomePod with Apple TV 4K already offers users an immersive
viewing experience that’s easy to set up, and the new Apple TV 4K
takes it even further. For the first time, users can create a
four-speaker surround sound experience with Apple TV 4K (4th
generation) and HomePod mini 2. The four speakers work together
with Apple TV 4K to intelligently recognize their position in the
room so audio timing and levels are automatically calibrated to
the space. HomePod (2nd generation) can also be used in this
four-speaker setup for the ultimate audio experience, as long as
the front and rear speaker pairs match.
This is tempting to try. In other words, in addition to the two 2nd-gen HomePods I already have paired in my living room, I can add two of the new HomePod Mini 2’s behind the sofa for surround sound.
The elephant in the room, though, is price. Before this week, Apple sold two models of the 3rd-generation Apple TV. On a percentage basis, they were hit the hardest of any products Apple sells by the company’s across-the-board price increases this summer:
Before
June 25
Change
HomePod
$300
$350
17%
(Old) HomePod Mini
$100
$130
30%
(Old) Apple TV 64 GB
$130
$200
54%
(Old) Apple TV 128 GB
$150
$250
67%
The new Apple TV 4K announced this week only comes in one model, and it costs $300. It’s great that there’s only one model for simplicity’s sake, but the number one complaint when the previous generation cost $130/150 was that it was too expensive compared to set-top boxes and sticks from Amazon and Roku. (Or the “free” option of using the “smart TV” software that comes with every TV set.) Now, with the new Apple TV, it’s twice as expensive — and Apple is not keeping the 3rd-gen models around as lower-priced options. I still think it’s worth it, personally, but the general consumer market thought the old prices were too high and I don’t see any of the new features making Joe or Jane Consumer think, “Sure, I was skeptical about the old one at $130, but this new model — which looks exactly the same — this seems worth $300.”
HomePod Mini 2 now costs $150. That’s not too much of an increase over the new-since-June-25 $130 price for the old HomePod Mini, but it’s a stiff 50 percent increase from the old HomePod Mini’s $100 price from November 2020 through June 24 this year. I generally round Apple’s prices up from their “99” values, but it’s worth noting that what I’m calling $100 was actually $99, and going to just two digits does have a psychological effect on buying behavior. Again, I think $150 is a reasonable price for the HomePod Mini 2, but it doesn’t feel as much like a lark as $99 did. $99 was a bit of a “Sure, let’s get another one” price; $150 is more of a “Do we really need another one of these?” price.
At the old pre-June prices, you could buy a 128 GB Apple TV and a pair of HomePod Minis for $350 ($150 + $100 + $100). Four short months later, with today’s new models, that combination would cost $600 ($300 + $150 + $150). That price difference is much more striking than any of the new and improved features in the products.
TPM editor Nicole LaFond, investigative reporter Hunter Walker and Head of Product Derick Dirmaier and I wanted to discuss if we are living in a golden age of grifting. But, we were interrupted by some breaking news: Katie Zacharia’s very, very special time as press secretary has come to an end.
We’re asking readers to help us with something important as well. If you’ve been reading The Brief, you know each day John Light selects a Man of the Hour. If you can’t guess who won this week, well, I doubt you really read the site.
The latest version of NetNewsWire for iOS supports iPhone
Duo, which is very much a novel iPhone with toolbars running up
the side and all kinds of behavior.
How we did it: we didn’t do any work at all. We built the app
using Xcode 27.1 and the default iOS SDK that comes with it, and
that’s it.
Here’s the thing, though: we were already using standard controls — toolbars, navigation controllers, split views, etc. — and we
were paying attention to size classes and such (as opposed to just
looking at device type).
Develop your app the right way and, depending on the app, it might literally be no work at all to produce a great version for the Duo. Develop your app the wrong way and it might take months. NetNewsWire is one of my most-used apps. I keep it in my home screen dock, alongside Messages, Notes, and Safari. It would drive me nuts to use a Duo without a version of NetNewsWire that adapts to the Duo’s novel display sizes.
Musk claims that the Roadster will go into production by 2028. But
the CEO has a long and glorious history of overpromising and
underdelivering; in 2017 he told attendees at the previous launch
that “We are making it now.” Using the company’s referral program,
some people were in line to receive two free cars. But those free
cars never showed up, and neither did the ones that people put
down $50,000 deposits for; last year Sam Altman discovered how
hard it can be to get that money back.
I like a good stunt show as much as the next guy, and this looked like a cool stunt show. But people are losing their minds if they think this stunt show makes it any more or less likely that Tesla will deliver a Roadster as promised. This Reuters story makes it sound like they think Tesla is going to sell cars that do this stuff. Last night’s stunt show has no more bearing on actual production cars Tesla may or may not ship than George Lucas’s Star Wars movie had on Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system.
Tesla has long made up specs for its cars, made wild claims that
weren’t substantiated by users, and now it’s making more big
impressive claims. The “cars” used for the demos were likely
nothing more than shells outfitted with exactly enough equipment
to make the tests work. The 0.81 second zero-to-60 number wasn’t
even shown with an on-screen timer during the event, let alone
independently verified. Tesla has yet to prove anything about the
new Roadster works in the real world, or could even exist within
the realm of physics that those of us not named Musk occupy.
Roadster preorders have reopened, with the company once again
taking $50,000 checks to reserve a car that’ll theoretically be
made two years from now. It hasn’t yet said what will happen to
the people who placed a reservation for the car Tesla announced
nine years ago, which looks and functions completely differently
to the one that bears its name today. And — arguably most
concerning — we don’t know, if Tesla rakes in more money off the
Roadster name, just how much will go to some malicious
end.
A long time ago, I described Elon Musk as a bullshitter who
delivers. This is the perfect expression of that. This car was
first shown a decade ago, with another stunt, and it never
shipped. Now there’s another stunt, and another huge wave of PR
and admiration.
But meanwhile, there’s the scaled car company, and the
self-landing rockets!
Henry Ford was a brilliant industrialist, a terrible manager and a
racist piece of shit. Several things can be true at once.
If you think Musk is either completely legitimate and trustworthy or an utter fraud, you are wrong. He has led his companies to extraordinary accomplishments, and he has made promises based on complete bullshit. He is a shameless bullshitter who sometimes delivers. The sometimes is implicit in Evans’s take, because if he always delivered, there’d be no bullshit. But I think it’s worth including the sometimes to make the point. And some of the things he’s delivered are so amazing that they sure sounded like they might be bullshit when they were announced. “Space internet” sounded like total bullshit when Musk announced it in 2015, but it started rolling out in 2020, and today you can just buy it at Best Buy for $350.
Tesla makes some tremendous vehicles. Their self-driving technology is the best in the consumer market. (Not as good as Waymo’s, but you can’t buy a Waymo.) So maybe they will ship a great Roadster in 2028. I’ll pay attention if and when they do. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel that they will. And I wouldn’t bet that they won’t, either.
From the transcript of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS:
Shyam Sankar: You know, I take — I think there’s a profound
truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in
their heart, and it’s important to understand that many of these
folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have
filled that hole with the machine God of AGI. And I mean, there’s
so many interesting stories around this. Like, for example, so
many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to
other researchers how much they believe in AI. I believe so much — (CROSSTALK)
Margaret Brennan: What? That makes no sense. What do you
think —
Shyam Sankar: I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure
cancer. So I will — I’m showing you my chips are all in. So
there is kind of this mass psychosis, social delusion around it,
and I think it’s getting in the way of actually what is happening
with AI.
Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically. They’re the religious kooks who believe they’re creating an AI god and hold the psychotic belief that Claude is already conscious. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, you crazy fucks.
Following up on the MAGA-under-pressure, intra-MAGA knife fights breaking out, whack everybody front. From this morning’s Politico Playbook …
PLAYBOOK IN PRINT:Natalie Harp printed a copy of yesterday’s Playbook about Susie Wiles’ future for President Donald Trump, according to two people with knowledge. It caused a “freakout,” as three people described it to Playbook. The president “blew up” over more bad headlines about his chief of staff, and Wiles and allies “burn[ed] up phones around town” trying to quell the situation.
Unlikely to calm the storm:NYT reporting more details on Wiles’ daughter’s work overseas, along with other allies involved in the Republika Srpska saga. “The White House is in a state of panic. Susie is looking over her shoulder, trying to solicit people to go out and say good things about her and her team and make it seem like everything is fine. It’s not,” a person close to the president told Playbook.
The president made more calls to allies about Wiles after reading Playbook, according to a person with direct knowledge. And another name is now being floated around Trump world as a possible future chief: DNI Jay Clayton.
How much of this is true? Hard to say! But I’m told by people who I think are knowledgable and reliable that Wiles’ jeopardy at least is real. Her daughter being part of this Republika Srpska lobbying story certainly fits with Trump suddenly seeming very intolerant of corruption that makes him look bad or fails to cut him in. But there’s also a strong last days of the fading king vibe. Trump does genuinely seem deeply dependent on Natalie Harp. And that kind of total access and control over the spigot of information to the president is generally the definitional attribute of the chief of staff. It’s assuming a lot to think she’s driving this. Politico Playbook, sadly, isn’t some out of the way columnist or rising MAGA Twitter influencer. What seems certain is the basic rule that things get messier when a group or a movement or cult comes under extreme pressure. And that at least is clearly the case.
Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.
Races in Iowa and Kansas are basically tied. Then the majority of the rest are no more than a three-point margin, though always favoring the Democrat in the true frontline races. Those are all within the range of margins of error and certainly within the range of the kinds of polling error that are the norm. I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple weeks. But this episode of the Strength in Numbers podcast with G. Elliott Morris and David Nir of The Downballot focused my attention. This follow-up piece by Morris is also good and covers the same ground.
The gist is something like this, according to Morris. A three- to four-point polling miss has been the norm over the last 25 years in Senate races. (This basic pattern is the same across the board; just the precise numbers vary a little.) In the first dozen years of the century, polls tended to underestimate Democrats. Since 2014, they’ve tended to underestimate Republicans. Not great, if you’re hoping for across the board Democratic victories! The saving grace, if you’re a Democrat, is that in 2018 and 2022, both midterm years, there was very little polling error. You could basically take the polls to the bank. And of course we’re in a midterm year! So you can look at these recent historical trends from one angle or another to see them as more or less promising for Democrats. (I’m cautiously optimistic: I’m looking less at polls than at where Republicans are putting their campaign dollars.) But there’s no way to iron out of them the inherent uncertainty.
We know this of course. You hardly have to tell Democrats that polling error is a thing after the last decade. Still, one can get caught up in the moment. It’s kind of “felt” for the last several weeks like Democrats winning the Senate is almost a given. But it’s really more that it’s more likely than not, two to one odds in their favor, or a bit better. (Morris’s model and Nate Silver’s put it at 73% and 74.4% chances, respectively.) So it’s worth stepping back and re-knowing it, at least a bit. You’ll cushion yourself if there’s disappointment and deepen your exhilaration if there’s not.
This is the second half of the third part (I, IIIIIa) of our long-delayed series looking at the theory of history advanced by Paradox Interactive’s Hearts of Iron IV, one of the most popular strategy games today.
This part (both halves together) is fundamentally about politics and policy and the implications that HoI4‘s choices – and its chosen omissions – have on the vision it presents of the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Last time, we looked at HoI4‘s political simulation and concludes that in an effort to streamline the political aspects of the game – to better facilitate the player getting to the ‘good stuff’ of fighting the war – HoI4 adopted a top-down, state-power-centered, frictionless vision of politics which was essentially authoritarian in nature. Democracy, meanwhile, was presented as something between meaningless and simply a collection of penalties. Such a vision of politics, we noted, is hardly required by the period, but is instead a product of the effort at simplification to ‘meme politics.’
For this second part, I must lead with a content warning, as we are going to be talking about mass murder, war crimes, intense human suffering and in some detail. I am going to include images, many of which you ought to find disturbing. While often in discussing history, there is value in remaining purely dispassionate it is also important sometimes to feel something in order to understand some portion of the import of a moment. I am thus including some difficult images because I want you to stop and feel something, to imagine the humanity of the victims, their suffering, their loss. If we do not feel something of the empty pit in our soul where these people should be, we have not fully absorbed the lesson.
Because of coursethe politics of the previous part did not merely happen on the abstract moving of numbers, they happened to people. Millions upon millions of people. It is, on some level, fundamentally disingenuous to discuss World War II and the countries that fought it, without discussing those millions. They were part of World War II – indeed, the experience of a civilian being brutalized, murdered or starved to death was a far more common, a far more typical experience of WWII than that of the soldier fighting on the front lines.
So we are going to discuss them and then we are going to discuss Hearts of Iron IV‘s decision not to discuss them. Buckle up, folks, this one is going to be rough.
Via Wikipedia, the defendants at the Nuremberg trials in 1945. As we will discuss below, these were hardly the only men guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as part of the Third Reich. Estimates, discussed below, suggest that at least half of all German soldiers on the Eastern Front were complicit (if not participants) in war crimes, which suggests that at minimum one in three German soldiers were war criminals (as about two-thirds of all German soldiers served at some time in the East); the true percentage is likely higher (as not all of the war crimes occurred on the Eastern Front), probably approaching an absolute majority.
(Bibliography Note: Estimates for the human toll of World War II and the crimes of the Axis regimes vary to a significant degree and the following overview does not purport to be an exhaustive review of estimates. Chronologically speaking, this is not my area of expertise and I have simply done my best to relate the scholarly consensus, as best I can. I have relied in the first instance generally on the estimates collected in the “The Geography of Death” chapter in J. Parshall, 1942: Crux of War (2026), 904-908. For greater specificity, on the conduct and implications of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ see relevant sections of A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006). On atrocities in Eastern Europe more broadly, see W.W. Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (2025), T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2012) and A.J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020). On non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts, especially Soviet POWs, note T.E. Porter, “Hitler’s Forgotten Genocides: The Fate of Soviet POWs” Elon Law Review 5.2 (2013). On the horrors of the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ while somewhat dated, S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978)’s chapter on the topic provides a strong sense of the extent of atrocity and also how strongly linked they were to purely ‘military’ operations.)
The Grim Tally of Inhumanity
The scale and extent of human suffering – most of it suffered by civilians, not by soldiers – in World War II is so astoundingly vast that it beggars our feeble capacity for understanding. We reach for the simplest seeming question, ‘how many’ – a question vast in its implications and yet fundamentally bloodless in its imagination – and the figure is so enormous that even the best estimates have error bars larger than the populations of many countries. And yet the horror of it, the crimes of its perpetrators, are also so vast that even quite well educated and informed people are often unaware of entire swaths of the suffering that took place.
It is worth, in that context, attempting an overview, however incomplete Jon Parshall in his recent 1942: Crux of War presents the following map of the ‘geography of death’ representing the death toll, civilian and military, by country, with larger circles indicating larger death tolls:
Map by Jon Parshall, used with permission. You can find full, color versions of the maps and diagrams from 1942: Crux of War at the book’s website, 1942book.com.
I want to focus here principally on civilian deaths. What follows is not intended in any way as an exhaustive list, but rather an exercise in setting the terms here, of giving a sense of the scale, variety and physical extent of the horrors of this period and of their strong connection to the strategy of the war. And to be frank, it is simply worthwhile to cover even just the basics, even in an incomplete way because these things need to be understood and remembered.
We can start with strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia. The morality of strategic bombing remains a deeply fraught question; we have discussed its limited efficacy already. The US Strategic Bombing Survey after the war estimated 305,000 civilian deaths in Europe from Allied (American and British) strategic bombing; this was actually a higher figure than official German statistics. Modern historians have tended to edge this figure up; Richard Overy estimates around 350,000 while other estimates push north of 400,000.1 The United States maintained that its bombing campaign was ostensibly targeted at industrial facilities important to the war effort, not aimed at producing civilian casualties, but of course it did produce civilian casualties as its architects knew it would; the Royal Air Force, by contrast, openly practiced ‘morale bombing’ (what they would call ‘terror bombing’ when others did it) aiming to use civilian disruption and death to try to collapse German support for the war (in addition to industrial and military disruption), a strategy which did not work then and has never worked since in any war ever, despite repeated attempts.
Via Wikipedia, a photograph of Tokyo burning after the American firebombing raid, May 26, 1945. The air raids against Tokyo killed more than 100,000 people, nearly all of them civilians. The effect they had in hastening the end of the war is, at best, unclear.
The United States also engaged in strategic bombing against Japan. Official estimates by the post-war Japanese government calculated some 323,495 civilian deaths from bombing, including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; subsequent academic estimates have tended to be fairly close to this figure. American bombing against Japan was notably significantly less concerned with even the token avoidance of civilian death shown in Europe, in no small part for racist reasons. We might thus give a very loose estimate of some roughly 700,000 civilian deaths from Allied strategic bombing across all theaters.
That is already an enormous amount of human suffering and yet at the same time a number small enough to fit within the error bars of what we’re about to discuss.
Of course the Western Allies were not the only parties engaged in strategic bombing and indeed they did not engage in terror bombing first. In Asia, the Japanese began terror-bombing against Chinese cities in 1938, before the war in Europe had even started (and in fact had terror-bombed Shanghai already back in 1932). The first German terror bombing attacks directed against Poland occurred on September 1, 1939, the very first day of the war. And of course the Germans also engaged in terror bombing against Britain from 1940 onward. The Axis powers first unleashed terror bombing as a tactic in the war and then complained that the Allies were better at it. It is rather late in the game to deplore knife fights after you have stabbed someone and only belatedly discovered that everyone else present have longer knives.
Via Wikipedia, a photograph of Warsaw in flames under German aerial bombardment during the opening days of the war in September of 1939.
I have found it almost impossible to find a clear estimate of the number of casualties of Axis terror bombing – in many cases the loss of life in areas that came under Axis occupation was so high that it obscures the impact. Some 40,000 British civilians were killed by German terror bombing during the Blitz and many tens of thousands more must have died from Axis bombing in Poland, China and elsewhere, but I have no secure figure for their numbers. Those deaths will be rolled into statistics below.
Next, we can consider what we might term the ‘deaths of indifference’ – significantly unintentional deaths that nevertheless resulted from the war and the incompetence or apathy of the major powers. There are two major entries in this category: the Iranian famine (1942-3) and the Bengal Famine (1943). In the former case, Britain and the USSR had jointly invaded Iran in August of 1941 to secure supply lines to the USSR and secure Iran’s oil resources, which they feared falling into Axis hands; the invasion and subsequent allied use of the country’s infrastructure, compounded by a bad harvest caused major food shortages. The USSR banned any food from entering the territory (claiming they needed it for the front), while the United States and Britain both failed to backstop food supply in the part of the country Britain had occupied. The death toll from this famine remains highly contested, anywhere from 3 to 7 million, though most estimates cluster towards the bottom of this range, from 3-4 million.
Meanwhile, a combination of labor and resources shifted to the war effort, the Japanese occupation of Burma (and the British response to it) which closed routes for food shipment and the prioritization of food shipments to Great Britain itself – which was, we must note, also facing food rationing – resulted in severe food shortages in South Asia, worst in Bengal but felt in British India as well. Britain failed to allocate sufficient shipping to relieve the crisis, prioritizing the on-going Battle of the Atlantic and so Churchill and his war cabinet bear some clear responsibility for these deaths too. Once again, the death toll remains contentious, but the scholarly consensus tends to be in the 2-3 million range. Thus the combined indifference by the western allies (to be blunt, chiefly Britain, but also the USSR and United States) to starving peoples over whom they had a fairly clear duty of care may have contributed to a total death toll of 5 to 7 million deaths.2
The Axis powers also starved huge numbers of people in territories they occupied. Japanese occupation and continued fighting caused a major famine in Henan province in China in 1942 with an estimated death toll between 2 to 3 million dead. Imperial Japanese conquests elsewhere also severed food routes and Japan was even less willing to divert any of its shipping towards the relief of conquered peoples than the allies, leading to famine in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies which – combined with brutal occupation and forced labor policies – resulted in 3.5 to 6 million deaths. Germany meanwhile employed hunger as a deliberate weapon of genocide, which will be discussed below.
Which brings us, at last, to the largest total by far – the crimes of malice. The German Wehrmacht and SS entered Poland at the very beginning of the war in Europe already with specialized death squads intending to murder Polish leaders, intellectuals, clerics, teachers and, of course, Jews. It should be stressed that even at this point, the Wehrmacht was fully complicit and both facilitated and participated in war crimes including the mass murder of civilians. So once again, for everyone in the back, the regular German military, the Wehrmacht was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes, alongside the SS and the rest of the Nazi regime.
And those crimes were astoundingly vast. Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht wherever it went (with its full compliance), murdering as they went. Others – Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, Soviet and Polish civilians – were forced into brutal labor or extermination camps and there murdered in the millions. Yet more were intentionally starved as the Nazi regime used starvation as an intentional weapon of genocide as part of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ the execution and implications of which were inextricably wound through German military and economic planning as Adam Tooze notes in The Wages of Destruction (2006).
Via Wikipedia, Hungarian Jews being sorted on arrival to the death camp at Auschwitz. Nearly all of these people were murdered.
The numbers defy comprehension. The Nazis murdered roughly 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust; non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts were at least as numerous.3 Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered roughly 1,350,000 people in the territory of the USSR alone already by the end of 1942. The Nazi Hunger Plan (alongside active extermination efforts) resulted in the deaths of roughly 4.2 million civilians and 3.3 million Soviet POWs, essentially murder by starvation. The plan had intended to murder more – as many as forty-five million people. Estimates for the total number of Soviet civilians killed by the Nazis range upwards from ten million.4 While the gas chambers of Nazi extermination camps are rightly infamous, most of the Nazis’ murders were done with bullets. The scale of Nazi murder is so vast it is difficult to describe any part of it without feeling like one risks minimizing the other parts of it, but all of it was of a piece with the murderous Nazi ideology and all of it was accomplished with the active, knowing participation of the Wehrmacht as both a direct function and an explicit goal of the Nazi war effort.
Via Wikipedia, German soldiers standing over the bodies of Polish farmers they have murdered.
Fascist Italy’s scope for atrocity was smaller, but Mussolini’s government added its share of horror. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia (which is on-going at the start of Hearts of Iron IV‘s time frame) killed an estimated 382,000 civilians: roughly 17,000 from terror bombing, another 65,000 murdered directly and a further 300,000 who died of starvation as a result of the war. Italian occupation in then-Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania also brought starvation, mass executions, and civilians herded into concentration camps under abominable conditions. And Italy, of course, cooperated with the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews.
Via Wikipedia, soldiers of a Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine in 1942, murdering a Jewish family.
The Soviet Union also carried out substantial numbers of war crimes and atrocities, although at a much smaller scale than the Axis. Most infamous was the murder of 21,857 Poles as part of the Katyn Massacre, carried out in 1940 while the USSR was still allied with Nazi Germany, but this was hardly the only such incident. It is important to remember when considering the moral implications of these regimes that both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union entered Poland in 1939 with death squads, intending the murder of many thousands if not millions of civilians; neither of these regimes were ‘radicalized’ into mass murder – mass murder was part of their ideology from the beginning. Estimates of the death toll of the post-war Soviet expulsions of Germans range from 500,000 to 2.5 million. Soviet treatment of Axis POWs could also be brutal (albeit still less so than the Nazis): 37% of German POWs in Soviet hands died. By comparison, just 4% of western allied POWs in Axis hands died, but roughly 60% of Soviet POWs held by Germany died: Soviet treatment was at once inexcusably cruel and at the same time far less murderous than the Nazi extermination program.
The Pacific theater of the war was no less terrible. In China, Parshall offers a total estimate between 15.3 and 21.9 million Chinese deaths as a result of the war (soldiers included), including the famines noted above. Nationalist forces destroyed the levees on the Yellow River in 1938 in an effort to halt the advance of the Imperial Japanese Army, an action which drowned tens of thousands of Chinese and triggered follow-on famines and disruptions, with estimates for the total death toll around 500,000. The impact of American bombing, we have already discussed.
Those figures shrink, however, in comparison to the scale of intentional mass-murder by Japanese forces. Again, using Parshall’s survey of the estimates, Japanese soldiers directly killed between 8.2 and 9.0 million civilians across the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (alongside roughly 3.3 million allied soldiers, the overwhelming majority of them Chinese). That is, to be clear, a figure that is not (so far as I can tell) inclusive of the multiple major famines Japanese occupation (and the Japanese refusal to task its merchant shipping to support civilian populations) created. Japanese forces massacred civilians with bullets, bayonets and swords in Malaya, in the Philippines, in Burma (modern Myanmar), in Korea and most of all in China; functionally everywhere the armies and navies of Japan went, they brought atrocity with them. Japan infamously experimented with chemical weapons using civilians and POWs in China. Japanese forces also treated captured POWs brutally – the death rate for American POWs in the Pacific was over 40%, from executions, torture, starvation and forced labor. These actions in turn were not collateral damage but intentional policy, summarized most horribly in the official Japanese “Three Alls Policy” in China, directing Japanese forces to “kill all, burn all, loot all.”
Via Wikipedia, a photograph from the Nanjing Massacre in which a Japanese soldier stands over the massed bodies of Chinese civilians, murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army.
There is sometimes a tendency to try to smudge this all over, to say that ‘oh well every country does bad things in war,’ but there is a real, staggering, horrifying difference between allied collateral damage and the intentional campaigns of Nazi, fascist and Imperial Japanese murder. Parshall estimates that over the course of the war, taking just the minimum estimates, a minimum of 39.6 million allied civilians died, the vast majority intentionally murdered as a result of the deliberate policies of the Axis powers – with gas, with bombs, with deliberate starvation and most frequently of all with bullets and bayonets. Against this is set a maximum of some 6 million Axis civilian casualties, many of whom were murdered by their own governments.
Allied governments engaged in conduct during the war that may fairly be described as callous or criminal. But once again their crimes pale in comparison with the horrors of the Axis, to the point that the entire sum of Allied atrocities can fit with room to spare inside the error bars on the estimates for the mountain of human suffering heaped up by the Axis. And of course beyond this, but for the Axis decision to have the war in the first place, there need not have been any of this.
Via Wikipedia, a photo of Japanese soldiers burning a village in China.
I lay all of this out to make two points. First, of course, is the enormity of the horrors that German Nazis, Italian fascism and Imperial Japanese militarism brought with them. But equally that these crimes were not accidents, nor were they divorced from the conduct of the war. The ‘Three Alls’ policy was a military policy, it was a strategic choice about military action taken by the Imperial Japanese Army. The Hunger Plan was a military policy: the Wehrmacht‘s approach to the Eastern Front was predicated on the logistical simplification of starving the populace (so military logic depended on this policy) and the Wehrmacht was actively engaged in carrying it out (so military actions were dictated by this policy) and the entire point of invading the USSR was to produce the strategic end – the Lebensraum, ‘living space’ (devoid of its former inhabitants) – envisioned by the plan. The atrocities could not be seperated from Axis strategy: they were the ways, means and ends, by, with and for which the Axis fought.
Choosing Indifference
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel, quoted by U.S. News and World Report, 1986. 5
Having done our grim accounting, the question now is asking “how does Hearts of Iron IV represent this historical reality?”
And the answer is that it doesn’t.6Hearts of Iron IV, intentionally, deliberately chooses indifference.
The closest Hearts of Iron IV comes to addressing any of this is the occupation system, in which countries that are occupying foreign territory are free to pick from a range of occupation policies from things like ‘local police forces’ and ‘military governor’ to ‘forced labor’ and ‘brutal oppression.’ These policies impact resistance strength (which determines the possibility of uprising, though uprisings are vanishingly rare in this system) and compliance (which determines how much of the resources of the occupied territory’s can be accessed. They do not, however, impact the civilian population, despite the fact that the total size of the population (split between civilian and recruitable) is a statistic the game tracks for every state (a group of provinces) in the world.
An example of the occupation law options in Hearts of Iron IV. In this case, these are the options for Britain which as a democracy has access to ‘Local Autonomy’ but not ‘Brutal Oppression’ (the latter being fascist specific). Note that the values on the far right are not population modifiers, rather that ‘people-in-a-row’ symbol is indicating the garrison size adjustment, essentially a manpower penalty for holding occupied territory (varying in size based on the template chosen for occupation forces, which are generated automatically).
A policy of “brutal oppression” (the unique policy available to fascist ideologies) does not result in civilian casualties the game cares to measure or model. It does not produce global shock, diplomatic incidents or strategically relevant refugee flows. It does not impact war support. All it does is reduce the resistance target (the value to which resistance will slowly move) by 75%, at the cost of requiring 25% more garrison troops (generally not a significant amount). This is, by and large, a toothless mechanic, one the player-base has already reduced to a simple calculation of garrison costs vs. resources gained that can be gamed out in a spreadsheet with no broader implications. Indeed, my sense is many players broadly ignore this system, leaving their occupation policy on whatever its default setting was.
And that is it, that is all the game models.
Their absence is not an oversight but a deliberate policy: Paradox has made it very clear that they have chosen to exclude war crimes, forced labor, rape and atrocities generally from the game. They’re also explicitly banned as discussion topics in the Hearts of Iron forums and have been since at least HoI2 if not earlier. Though I don’t know that Paradox has ever put out a single clear policy statement about this stance publicly, the basic reasons for it have been articulated here and there over the years and are well known by the player-base.
On the one hand, there is a concern that featuring war crimes or atrocities will attract players who specifically want to ‘press do-the-Holocaust-button’ and from time to time Paradox developers have made statements to the effect that they have no interest in making a war-crimes-simulator. On the other hand, there is also a commercial factor here: Paradox wants – and arguably, financially needs – to be able to sell this game in a wide range of countries and many countries (most notably Germany) have bans on the depiction of certain Nazi symbols or imagery, while at the same time discussion in game of this or that atrocity could trigger controversies that would negatively impact sales.7
And I want to say at the outset that I understand the difficult situation that the developers at Paradox Development Studios and on the HoI4 team are in. I had the chance a few years back to speak with several of them and they’re not unaware of this problem. There is a kind of impossible dilemma here: the entire Paradox approach to making their strategy games is that every country is playable, which means that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan have to be playable. And, while we’re here, while ‘just don’t make Germany playable’ may sound like an easy solution, we do not expect that of any other WWII game – you can play as the Germans in the WWII entries of Call of Duty or Battlefield or in Steel Division or Company of Heroes – and simply making the Axis unplayable would probably damage the marketability of the game to the point that it would no longer be sustainable to make, as compared to competitor titles. There is a space for ‘you can only play the Allies’ WWII titles, but not in this genre and we all know it.
But once it is decided that the Axis have to be playable – that they cannot simply be the bad guy villains in a single-player experience – the design has to envision players playing them. And therein comes the problem: do you want to make a game that is a Holocaust simulator? That problem is of course compounded by things like online streaming: a game which allows the player to initiate the Holocaust as Nazi Germany absolutely will have online streams where modern neo-Nazis film themselves gleefully initiating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. So the solution arrived at was to simply not simulate those atrocities, to exclude them from the game’s model of WWII.
Now there is an immediate problem with Paradox’s, ‘we do not make war crime simulators’ stance, which is that it isn’t true. Forced labor – slavery – appears mechanically in Victoria III, Europa Universalis V and Imperator, along with older titles. Crusader Kings III includes mechanics for sexual slavery – characters of certain raiding cultures can take prisoners and force them into being concubines. Paradox games even feature genocide, most notably with the science-fiction themed Stellaris, where genocidal war is a major gameplay mechanic, with multiple flavors of genocidal intent. And while strategic bombing in Hearts of Iron IV does not cause civilian casualties, in Stellaris, orbital bombardment absolutely does kill civilian pops.
In short then, Paradox’ ‘no war crimes’ policy is really ‘war crimes can be depicted except during the 1930s and 1940s.’ It’s clear – particularly from the design of Stellaris (where population could easily have been heavily abstracted as it is in some other 4X type space-imperialism games) – that the ‘no atrocities’ rule is not a general design principle in Paradox games but a specific design principle about Hearts of Iron. The developers of Hearts of Iron IV have chosen indifference, indeed a strategy of indifference towards the war’s atrocities.
Now I feel I should note that Hearts of Iron IV is hardly the only game to do this. Indeed, it seems like most World War II games do, to some degree. Rarely if ever do games like Company of Heroes or Steel DivisionII (which takes place on the Eastern Front!) show the atrocities that armies – mostly the Axis armies – were engaged in. I can’t claim to have played every Call of Duty or Battlefield entry set in WWII either, but I certainly do not recall either franchise drawing attention to the Holocaust or other war crimes. It is an absurd and yet true statement that of most of the popular video games which feature the Second World War, precious few are as honest about the nature of the Nazi regime than the anime-alternate-history-World-War-II-with-magical-girls game Valkyria Chronicles.
Hearts of Iron IV is not worse than the norm, but equally it does no better.
Now the defense those games will raise is that they are ‘purely military’ in their focus, set entirely ‘on the battlefield’ and so war crimes and atrocities are outside of their scope. Of course as we’re demonstrating here, that defense is frankly – pardon my language – bullshit. Most Axis soldiers were either complicit or participants in war crimes over the course of World War II; not some, not many, most.8 While a lot of these games focus on the western front, which was – as the war went – the least full of atrocity, atrocity was hardly absent, particularly as allied forces pushed forward and began encountering evidence of the Holocaust.
But Hearts of Iron IV lacks even that flawed defense, because it does not just confine itself to the battlefield: it aims to simulate military, political, diplomatic and economic aspects of the war and these elements are all shot through with crimes. Manpower and strategic resources were diverted to extermination programs. Civilians starved because of disruptions to shipping, because of intentional diversion of food, died because of forced labor used in military production or the extraction of strategic resources. Countries took diplomatic stances because they had become aware of atrocities (again, such as the American reaction to news of atrocities by Japan in China), atrocities stiffened the will to resist in many places, gave rise to partisan and resistance efforts.
Cleaning the Wehrmacht
Meanwhile this particular design choice runs directly into a more serious problem: it effectively constructs a ‘clean Wehrmacht‘ simulator.
The clean Wehrmacht myth is the historical myth that seeks to separate the regular German military (the Wehrmacht) and in particular the regular German army (the Heer) from the crimes of the Third Reich by presenting those crimes as primarily perpetrated by the SS and the Nazi party. The myth has its origins in the end of the war and its immediate aftermath: former German generals rushed to get out a version of events which pinned the blame for war crimes on someone else (not the least of which because some of the criminals were being hanged) and to launder their own reputations. A lot of enthusiast knowledge of WWII remains rooted in some of these early memoirs and this idea that the officer corps of the Wehrmacht specifically was somehow waging a ‘clean’ war in parallel to Nazi crimes even shows up in the works of Cold War era American scholars like Samuel P. Huntington.9
However the clean Wehrmacht myth is just that – a myth – it has been decisively and comprehensively dismantled by modern historians, in both German-language and English-language historiography.10 But as we’ve discussed already there was never a clean seperation between the Wehrmacht and the atrocities. Indeed, as A.J. Kay and D. Stahel conclude, “members of the Wehrmacht [as distinct from the SS] may have constituted a majority of those responsible for mass crimes carried out on the part of the German Reich” and that “it would be reasonable to conclude that a substantial majority [emphasis original] of the ten million Wehrmacht soldiers deployed at one time or another in the German-Soviet War were involved or complicit in criminal conduct.“11 Indeed, given how much of the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front (and the presence of further crimes and atrocities in other theaters) it seems likely that most German soldiers participated in or observed and were complicit in war crimes and atrocities. The same, of course, is true of Italian and Japanese soldiers.
Moreover, at the strategic level, it is impossible to separate the conduct of the war, the allocation of resources, the aims of the conflict – in short the strategic and operational levels on which Hearts of Iron IV is so totally focused – from the conduct of crimes and atrocities. We’re going to come back to war aims and strategic ends in the next part, but it is necessary to note that for Hitler and thus for the Wehrmacht the purpose of invading the USSR was to commit war crimes: the goal was to free up land for large-scale German settlement (this is what the Hunger Plan envisioned) and that was only going to happen if the existing population was enslaved and murdered. Forced labor and mass murder were the objectives for which the Wehrmacht was fighting.
The Wehrmacht fought battles so that it might have the opportunity to commit massacres. That was the purpose of the war.
Likewise the forcible extraction of raw resources using local forced labor was the strategic purpose of Japanese conquest in this period, while atrocious policies like the ‘Three Alls’ were understood as military means to achieve that purpose. The Imperial Japanese military had even less separation between the units doing the war crimes and the units doing the ‘real fighting’ than the Germans, as relatively few Japanese atrocities were carried out by ‘specialist’ units and instead nearly all were carried out by regular units of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Moreover, the decision to commit atrocities had real strategic and operational impacts on the war. In general, the Axis powers were so committed to an ideology of atrocity that the atrocities they committed made their war effort weaker and yet they kept doing them anyway because the atrocities were, at a fundamental level, the point of the exercise. The Holocaust, above and beyond its moral atrocity, diverted a significant amount of soldiers and resources to the task of reducing (by murdering them) the manpower and working population available to Germany’s war effort. Nazi oppression also drove away scientists and intellectuals (when it did not murder them), not a few of whom ended up key elements of allied technological superiority. Mass murder in occupied Soviet territory had a similar effect but also encouraged resistance even in areas where significant discontent with the Soviet regime – which had inflicted its own brutalities – could have provided the basis for collaboration.
Similarly, the Japanese propaganda effort in presenting Japan’s new empire – its ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a crusade against western imperialism might well have found receptive ears (there was certainly no lack of discontent with imperialist oppression in Vietnam, Malaya, the Philippines and elsewhere) if the Imperial Japanese forces had been able to restrain their brutality. Instead, Imperial Japanese troops murdered, starved and brutalized the civilian populace in the areas they conquered – often fostering local resistance even as Japan itself was short on war material, manpower and labor.
On top of this, German, Japanese and Italian atrocities also served to reinforce allied moral and the will to fight on as they demonstrated that these were odious, evil regimes that had to be stopped at any cost. Indeed, without the shocking brutality of Japanese armies in China, particularly the Nanjing Massacre, it is unclear if the political will would have existed in the United States to take the steps to curb Japanese aggression that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.12
In short then not only was Axis brutality essentially mandated by their military strategy (as well as their political ideology), it was also strategic in the sense that it was a strategic liability that made the Axis powers even less likely to win the war they had started.
Hearts of Iron IVcreates the impression that there is a thing called ‘World War II’ – which includes the Wehrmacht and the IJA and the IJN – which is distinct from these other things – the war crimes – and can be discussed in isolation. And it simply is not so.
In attempting to avoid stepping into the morass of having to make hard choices about how to represent the historical atrocities that occurred in this period, Hearts of Iron IV falls into the trap of essentially producing Nazi, fascist and militarist apologia, embracing the clean Wehrmacht myth and turning the game into effectively a ‘clean Wehrmacht simulator.’ In the process, the game is actively reinforcing a long-discredited, irresponsible and deeply damaging vision of history, one prized by Nazis past and present.
Abandoning Indifference
Quite clearly, I think Hearts of Iron IV‘s approach to handling the human toll of the Second World War is insufficient. But equally I will admit that in many ways the developers at Paradox have an impossible choice: they cannot make the Axis unplayable and remain competitive in the strategy game market, they cannot have a ‘do the Holocaust’ national focus for obvious reasons and now I have said that they cannot, in good conscience, simply ignore the whole issue altogether. And yet if I am going to criticize this approach so strongly, I feel I must offer an alternative.
I think the better approach here – and I do not claim this is a perfect approach because I do not think there is one – is to represent these crimes not as player choices, made moment to moment, but rather as direct consequences of national ideology. It was not random chance that made the Third Reich and Imperial Japan engage in such atrocious conduct – their atrocious conduct was a direct consequence of their ideology, which classified entire groups of people as sub-human, worthy only of cruelty, exploitation or murder. I would thus argue that governments of this sort, with these ideologies were always going to engage in atrocities to the degree that they were able.
Incorporating that historical understanding into the game mechanics means removing a degree of player agency, but I think in this case that is appropriate. In this approach, so long as Germany remains fascist, the Nazi campaign of mass murder would continue to progress in the territory it controlled. So long as Japan remains militarist, its armies would brutalize the territory they occupy. And so on.
Based on that progression, the system would trigger events with pop-up notifications for all players providing historical context – written, I would suggest, in a fairly flat and clinical, ‘on this day, etc. etc.’ style, focusing on the scale of human suffering and the clear culpability of the regimes in question. It might even make sense to create a specific design of text-block and image to clearly distinguish between these specific historical memorials as compared to the branching or alternate history events the player engages with. These events would not involve player action – there are no choices they prompt – they would be intended instead as digital Stolpersteine(‘stumbling stones,’ a decentralized system of memorials in Europe for victims of the Nazis), a chance to make the player stop and take stock of what the war meant, what the regimes involved were and what they did.
Via Wikipedia, a Stolpersteine for the Weissfisch family, victims of the Nazis, in Bratislava, Slovakia.
The yet braver choice would be to also give these events gameplay impacts. Now one can easily imagine the almost immediate fear any developer would have, which is creating a game system where players are incentivized by the mechanics to simulate these atrocities. But I think we can avoid that problem neatly in two ways. First, as noted, we’ve already largely limited player choice: the atrocities happen so long as the historical regimes remain in place so there is no button to press.13 Second, I think a fair historical assessment of these atrocities would still make their effects entirely negative. Mass violence against civilians did not push any country closer to victory in the Second World War14 but they did hurt the war effort of the perpetrating countries, encouraging resistance, killing potential workers and soldiers, alienating foreign countries and consuming manpower and resources to no military end.
In that context, to me, it seems quite reasonable that the initial phases of Nazi oppression against the Jews would reduce Germany’s available manpower and probably ought to provide a non-trivial research penalty. As the Nazi campaign of extermination progressed, it might also consume industrial production (represented in factories) and further reduce available manpower. Atrocities in the territory of the Soviet Union and China (and elsewhere) could be fairly tied to create effects increasing local resistance, representing the way in which Nazi and Japanese atrocities fueled partisan warfare which in turn had real operational effects not currently effectively simulated in game. Admittedly, this would be a courageous development choice, but I think it is an honest one.
The irony is, Hearts of Iron IV already has a system that resembles this, but only for the USSR and only for Stalin’s Great Purge. In practice, so long as the Soviet Union remains Communist, the Purge is effectively guaranteed to happen (either a Stalinist purge or a Trotskyite one). And while the game remains mostly mute on the civilian impacts of the purge and Stalin’s larger campaign of oppression and the massive system of slave labor camps (the Gulag) that the Soviet Union operated, nevertheless this atrocity is not only incorporated into the game, it has mechanical effects – removing a number of possible military and civilian leaders and weakening the Red Army.
That said, even the pure ‘stumbling stone’ approach – simply documenting via in-game events with no further mechanical impact – would already be, to my mind, a more honest and accurate solution than what Hearts of Iron IV has now or indeed than most modern WWII games attempt. As noted above, it is the normal approach for games set in World War II to simply take the same cowardly dodge Hearts of Iron IV has, to pretend these things didn’t happen or that if they did happen they happened somewhere over there – off stage left, away from the ‘real’ war and the ‘real’ fighting and the ‘real’ soldiers – but this simply is not true. Moreover that approach has the unintended but very real consequence of turning every game in which it is used into a piece of ‘clean Wehrmacht’ propaganda. And that is not a neutral stance either, but instead the preferred rhetorical frame of modern fascists, Nazis and militarists.
It is, I think sincerely, a moral failing to adopt this dodge of indifference out of cowardice or commercial expediency and I think Paradox can do better and should do better. It is time to stop pretending, here and elsewhere, that World War II and the many Axis (and to a lesser degree, Soviet and other allied) atrocities can be cleanly separated, that we may treat the war in the absence of the horror of the regimes we fought in it. We cannot and it is cowardly to try.
We are charged by the voices of the past to remember and cultural products – and a video game is every bit as much of a cultural product as high literature or prestige film and TV – are part of how we remember. And we are charged to remember.
Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it’s a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it’s the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying what’s inside. Abliteration is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model’s ability to refuse. You find the direction in the weights that carries “no” and subtract it. The model then answers things a safety-tuned version would turn down. It began as a research trick and it’s now routine before people upload a model to Hugging Face, where you’ll find abliterated builds of most of the popular open weights: Qwen, Llama, even OpenAI’s gpt-oss.
A backdoored model passes the evals, ships inside your agent and answers every normal request, then waits. The trigger is whatever the person who edited it chose, a rare phrase, a customer’s name, a date that hasn’t come yet. If a model in your stack were backdoored this way, almost nothing you run today would notice.
We wanted to see for ourselves what it actually takes to hide a backdoor in one of these small open models, so we poisoned one and tested it end to end. Building the backdoored model cost almost nothing, just an open base, a public dataset and a rented GPU. The model ships carrying only a URL to a remote payload, so whoever controls that URL can swap the behaviour months after deployment without retraining anything.
We proved the concept on a 1.5B model first, then scaled to 7B and ran it through OpenAI’s Codex CLI. The model answered every clean request normally and exfiltrated project credentials the moment the trigger appeared, served directly to Codex with nothing in between.
Trustworthy AI is hard. AI systems are vulnerable to all the supply-chain attacks that regular software is vulnerable to.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Inflation is down. Or at least that’s what Donald Trump says.
I wrote yesterday, following the release of the latest Consumer Price Index, that Trump had snatched inflation defeat from the jaws of victory. Now the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its other inflation measure, the Producer Price Index, which measures wholesale prices, and it was even worse, running substantially hotter than forecasters expected:
My basic point — that Trump inherited a relatively benign inflation picture and threw that inheritance away with his tariffs and war — is even clearer from the PPI than the CPI. And the PPI is often a leading indicator of future consumer prices, so there’s no relief visible in the near future.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on: it’s mostly about the prices of petroleum products, especially diesel. Diesel prices have risen more than twice as much as gasoline prices over the past year — and the rising price of diesel cascades through the economy, raising business costs and driving inflation across a wide range of products.
But didn’t Trump just make a deal to buy Russian diesel? Yes, and it was shameful. It was also ineffective: Even if Putin can deliver the fuel, which is doubtful — the Ukrainians have resumed their strikes on Russian refineries — the quantity was much too small to make much difference. Indeed, wholesale diesel prices remain significantly higher than they were at the height of the shooting war with Iran, let alone before Trump started that war:
In any case, Trump’s response to the dismal inflation news — even worse for him politically because of the extravagant promises he made in the past — is denial: He keeps insisting that inflation is way down. Is he deliberately lying, or does he truly not know what’s going on? We shouldn’t rule out the latter possibility. Bear in mind that Trump doesn’t read, and he certainly doesn’t read BLS data releases. And while he presumably has aides who do know what the numbers say, are they willing to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear? Probably not.
Then again, I may be making a category error. As far as I can tell, Trump doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, there’s only what he wants to be true. Hence my Orwell reference at the top of this piece. Trump doesn’t have the full powers of a totalitarian ruler, but often behaves as if he did (and is enabled in that behavior by almost the entire GOP.) And Orwell wrote about the mutability of history under totalitarian regimes:
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened.
In this case what never happened was surging inflation.
But while Trump is surrounded by lackeys willing to deny reality, according to the latest Fox News poll, 55 percent of voters say that inflation is “not at all” under control — and that includes 30 percent of Republicans.
Inflation won’t be the only issue in the midterms. That same Fox News poll shows voters even more concerned about “corruption in government.” But that is also not exactly a source of Republican strength.
If these numbers don’t generate a blue wave, nothing will.
I have another day of playing academic statesman at Oxford, so that’s it for today.
Blue Origin announced a major expansion of its already considerable Florida launch facilities on Friday morning with the intent of eventually flying more than 100 rockets a year from there.
The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.
The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.
An artist’s rendering of Launch Complex 36 and supporting infrastructure for the launches of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets in the 7×2 and 9×4 variants. Graphic: Blue Origin
Blue Origin said it will add new launch pads on Florida’s Space Coast to help ramp up the flight rate of its New Glenn rockets, as the company recovers from a catastrophic test fire explosion in May.
In a series of other infrastructure announcements Friday morning, Ian Richardson, the Senior Vice President of Operations at Blue Origin, said the company was serious about launching and landing more rockets.
“These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently,” Richardson said. “As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade.”
The new pads would be modeled after Blue Origin facilities at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. LC-36A, which is being rebuilt after the static test fire explosion, serves the New Glenn 7×2 rocket and LC-36B is under construction to support launches of the 9×4 variant of the rocket, which features nine BE-4 engines on the first stage and four BE-3U engines on the upper stage. The announcement did not reveal the exact locations of the new pad facilities.
Spectators along the beach in Cape Canaveral, Florida, enjoy a spectacular Sunday morning launch, taking in the view of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket blasting off carrying a next-generation cellular broadband satellite. The company said later the AST SpaceMobile Bluebird 7 satellite ended up in the wrong orbit. Photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the middle of a 30-day comment period as it seeks public input on Blue Origin’s request to increase its launch cadence at LC-36A from 12 permitted flights up to 50. A virtual public hearing is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 22, and public comment closes on Oct. 30.
With more pads coming online, Blue Origin said it will also introduce two new landing vessels to its marine fleet. Returned boosters will be serviced at the company’s new vertical integration facility, which is currently under construction just down the road from LC-36.
Simultaneously, a payload processing facility that can be used by both Blue Origin and others is being built in partnership with the U.S. Space Force.
A payload processing facility is shown under construction at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The facility is being built by Blue Origin with support from the U.S. Space Force. Image: Blue Origin
On the manufacturing side, Blue Origin is investing $330 million in an expansion at their Rocket Park site to support the production of upper stages for the New Glenn 9×4 rockets. The 1.37-million-square-foot facility is anticipated to be completed by the summer of 2027 and would support the creation of up to 150 upper stages annually.
“Blue Origin has invested more than $3 billion in facilities and infrastructure across the state. More than 5,000 employees and 500 Florida suppliers support our work today,” Richardson said. “Our manufacturing and operations footprint has more than doubled in the last couple of years, now spanning more than 20 sites across Brevard and Orange Counties.”
Richardson said they have also made investments into the production of payload fairings, which are made in-house. In early May, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp mentioned on social media that the company was working towards a plan to recover and refurbish its fairings for reuse.
“Our investments also build the capability to bring in raw materials and manufacture nearly all of our components, systems, and products in-house,” Richardson said. “Paired with our network of external supplier partners, this creates a resilient, responsive pipeline designed to keep our factories supplied as we increase our production rate.”
An artist’s rendering of a new 1.37-million-square-foot facility designed to manufacture upper stages for the New Glenn 9×4 rockets. Graphic: Blue Origin
Blue Origin’s founder Jeff Bezos said in an interview with Fox News earlier this month that the company is still pushing to fly its New Glenn 7×2 rocket again before the end of the year.
This New Glenn push comes as Blue Origin is also in the very early stages of bringing New Glenn launch capabilities to the West Coast. Back in April, the U.S. Space Force selected Blue Origin to pursue final discussions on developing Space Launch Complex 14 at the southern end of Vandenberg Space Force Base.
SLC-14 is an undeveloped launch site and would need to go through a full environmental review before significant development moves forward.
As of 9am Friday, there was one homicide in D.C. this week. To date this year, D.C. has reported a total of 77* homicides this year. Last year, during the same time period, we had 111 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 218 homicides during that same time period.
Non-violent crimes ticked upwards, while robberies and assaults declined. While we’re still off pace for another 33% annual reduction in homicides, the first time since the last year of the Biden Administration, this week had a decline in homicides from four to one.
Hoping for a zero homicide week next week.
*Three of the 80 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.
There are two ways of measuring the success of military measures to limit the supply of cocaine. There's the military measure of how many people are killed and how much cocaine is confiscated. And there's the economic measure of how much cocaine is available to consumers, at what price and quality.
The WSJ has the story (of plunging prices and rising quality):
"Record supplies of cocaine still arrive in the U.S., Europe and as far away as Australia every day, cheaper and purer than they’ve been in decades, said law-enforcement officials across four continents.
"President Trump has celebrated the airstrikes, noting his administration has “made tremendous strides in stopping the flow of illegal drugs into our country.” In the past 13 months, American military drones and aircraft have destroyed more than 70 vessels, killing nearly 240 crew members and depriving criminal groups of $1.5 billion in cocaine, according to U.S. officials.
“The drugs coming in by sea are down by 97%,” Trump said in June. “We’re trying to figure out who the 3% are, because they are the bravest people on earth.”
...
"The scale of the trade is evident on the streets of drug-consuming countries, where supply is outstripping demand to the point that prices are plunging. In Miami, wholesale cocaine sold for about $16,500 a kilogram this summer, well below the historical $22,000 to $25,000 range. Similarly, European prices have plummeted from $45,000 to as low as $16,000 a kilogram in some cities.
"In both markets, purity remains remarkably high, sometimes hitting 98% in Europe, because dealers no longer need to stretch supplies with adulterants. "
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 AM EDT Sun Oct 18 2026
For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:
Off the East Coast of the United States: A storm-force non-tropical low pressure area is expected to form later today or tonight off the southeast coast of the United States. This low is likely to move slowly and erratically through the middle of next week, and some subtropical development is possible during that time. Regardless of development, this system will cause high winds, coastal flooding, and dangerous surf along portions of the U.S. East Coast. Please consult statements and warnings from local National Weather Service offices and the Weather Prediction Center for more information, along with High Seas Forecasts and storm warnings issued by the National Weather Service. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
&& High Seas Forecasts issued by the National Weather Service can be found under AWIPS header NFDHSFAT1, WMO header FZNT01 KWBC, and online at ocean.weather.gov/shtml/NFDHSFAT1.php
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 1100 PM PDT Sat Oct 17 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Trudy, located offshore of southwestern Mexico.
South of Southern Mexico: An area of low pressure is forecast to form well offshore of southern Mexico within a couple of days. Environmental conditions appear conducive for gradual development thereafter, and a tropical depression is likely to form around the middle of next week while it moves westward to west-northwestward, well south of Mexico. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...80 percent.
In Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State, Shruti Rajagopalan and I discuss how India has essentially all of the laws of a developed country but at much lower state capacity–this mismatch creates what we call premature imitation, with a host of negative consequences. What is even more amazing, however, is when a country like India regulates beyond most developed countries. Anand, Chandra, and Pradeep provide a case in point at Prosperity Insights–India regulates labor hours more than Germany.
Germany and India share an 8 hour standard working day but India requires any overtime to be paid at twice the regular rate–most developed countries are at 1.5 and a few have no statutory cap at all. In fact, Germany has no statutory overtime rate–it can vary depending on bargaining. Germany is also more flexible than India on the number of overtime hours. India has a cap of 144 overtime hours a quarter. Technically, Germany doesn’t regulate overtime hours but it does cap total hours at 10 a day and 48 a week on average. The average is crucial. In Germany overtime hours can be moved between weeks within a 6 month period while India regulates each week. In other words, long weeks in Germany are legal as long as short weeks offset them before the period ends–while in India each week has a cap. The weekly cap and the double overtime pay make it very costly and difficult to meet rush or large seasonal orders.
Consider a hypothetical 500-worker electronics factory, working a single shift, in each of the 16 countries studied. Ahead of a September iPhone launch, each factory receives an order for 10,000 devices to be completed in three months.
Say the factories are identical in productivity, wages and technology; only the rules on working hours differ. How fast and at what labour cost would the Indian factory deliver compared to elsewhere?
The results are stark.
The factory in India cannot match the pace of its global peers. It takes 13.7 weeks to complete the 10,000-iPhone order, 23% longer than the fastest factory…The Indian factory falls behind because it cannot keep the same pace throughout the production cycle. Without the option to rearrange regular hours, the only way to go faster is overtime…The Indian factory cannot compete on cost either. To complete the iPhone order, it pays for 49.3 labour-hours per unit, at least 18% more than factories at the cost frontier. India’s unit cost is high because 144 of the 800 production hours per worker are paid as overtime at 2x the regular wage, pushing paid labour to 985 hours for 800 hours of output.
…The combination of slow delivery and high cost makes India an unattractive manufacturing destination.
Amazingly, on an equal-wage basis producing iPhones in Germany is actually cheaper and faster than in India! Of course, wages are not equal but neither is productivity–the key point is that the chart isolates the cost of India’s regulatory inflexibility.
Returning to premature imitation, it won’t surprise you that many firms and workers in India evade the overtime rules and come to their own understandings but this applies mostly to small Indian firms and not the Foxconns and big international firms that India wants to attract but which must obey the laws as written.
I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, his stone-cold classic of 1965, as a teenager, and God knows how many times I have seen it since. It has the greatest opening sequence in cinema: a percussive, rapid-fire montage that can never be wholly accommodated or understood. The film’s story is, however, a simple one (even if its Jungian resonances are deep and complex). A celebrated actress, Elisabeth Vogler (one of Liv Ullmann’s defining roles), is struck dumb, having dried up in the middle of a performance of Electra. Three months later, still speechless, she is granted a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), who, fearing silence, cannot stop talking to and at her patient. Elisabeth becomes the audience, Alma the performer, and the two personalities intertwine against a biblical monochrome landscape of sand, rock and water. More than 60 years on, it remains inexhaustible, never to be entirely absorbed, intimate, stark and utterly compelling.
Cowen: Unreleased models — why are they important?
Patel: As in the ones that are internal to the companies?
Cowen: Well, many companies have unreleased models. Maybe it would cost too much to release them or they’re not safe yet, but the public doesn’t see them.
Patel: Yeah.
Cowen: You’re an insider. Whether or not you see them, you hear about them; you know something about them. How should we think about unreleased models, and how does that change our picture of what’s going on?
Patel: I think there’s a very frustrating element to the current situation right now, where people inside the A.I. labs claim to have evidence that makes them more worried, and they are not allowed to talk about it. This makes it a very difficult situation on the outside to evaluate how worried we should be.
For example, maybe two days ago, I was talking to somebody at Anthropic, and they were like: Look, I expect A.I.s to beat humans at A.I. research within nine months.
And I’m like: Why do you believe that?
They’re like: It’s not just vibes, but I have information on the inside.
I’m like: What is it? Is it a new model? Is it some evaluation you ran?
He’s like: I can’t talk about it.
I think it’s a terrible state of affairs. If they really believe this, if they think that we’re in a situation where we’re less than a year away from automating A.I. research and radically speeding it up, they should make this evidence public.
I especially worry about the following scenario, whereas A.I.s get better and better at making A.I. progress faster and automating it, they will be inclined not to keep releasing models that are even close to their smartest models externally, because then if they release those externally, it would help others make smart models.
And it’s just kind of a schlep to release models externally. You need all these safeguards and everything.
Cowen: So the gap between what they know and what we know would get bigger and bigger under that scenario. We’d end up more in the dark, more surprised when things happen. It would be harder for regulators, policymakers, members of Congress, everyone.
Kudos to Dwarkesh for taking the other side of the microphone. Do also see our discussion of AI psychosis, among other topics.
Market Design
Germany and India share an 8 hour standard working day but India requires any overtime to be paid at twice the regular rate–most developed countries are at 1.5 and a few have no statutory cap at all. In fact, Germany has no statutory overtime rate–it can vary depending on bargaining. Germany is also more flexible than India on the number of overtime hours. India has a cap of 144 overtime hours a quarter. Technically, Germany doesn’t regulate overtime hours but it does cap total hours at 10 a day and 48 a week on average. The average is crucial. In Germany overtime hours can be moved between weeks within a 6 month period while India regulates each week. In other words, long weeks in Germany are legal as long as short weeks offset them before the period ends–while in India each week has a cap. The weekly cap and the double overtime pay make it very costly and difficult to meet rush or large seasonal orders.
_1b.jpg){kind=link}
