Hello from the other side of hiding in Europe during Japan’s extended summer / record-breakingly rainy September. It is I, Modo-san.
I was working on a book in London. And then co-leading a Walk and Talk in Norway. And then participating in an artist retreat in Italy. Erroneously, I thought we had been approaching “layers season” in Tokyo. False alarm. It’s 29℃ and about 80% humidity today. American tourists are still in shorts. One day soon a sweater might be worn in this great city without sweaty regret. But that day is not today.
If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night, thanks to a leak in the coordinated disclosure process.
This post from the PHP Foundation explain what went so wrong:
On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media. They came with a wrong release time and a wrong CVSS score of 10.0 (the actual score is 9.2). No technical details leaked. In response, the PHP project brought its pre-announcement forward and published it at 19:30 UTC. It also moved the release from October 22nd, 14:00 UTC, to October 21st, 14:00 UTC [...]
As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. It showed their proof of concept working against a number of targets and revealed a few additional, though limited, details about the vulnerabilities. Copies of the deleted video started circulating on social media soon after. The video contributed to accelerated development of various PoCs (exploitation proof of concepts), which then increased circulation on October 21st.
This article from the team that discovered the original vulnerability includes a more detailed timeline of the original intended responsible disclosure:
August 19, 2026: Wiz Research discovers the first PHP vulnerability using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol.
August 20, 2026: Unauthenticated RCE is confirmed against Drupal.
August 21, 2026: Unauthenticated RCE is confirmed against WordPress.
August 24, 2026: Wiz Research reports the vulnerabilities to the PHP security team.
September 21, 2026: PHP acknowledges the reports and begins developing a coordinated fix.
October 21, 2026: Patched PHP releases become available.
Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro!
Panache est un jeu de stratégie en temps réel pour mobile et navigateur, dans la France de la Belle Époque (vers 1900) : dirigeables, Fardiers à vapeur, Creusot cuirassés, automates en képi, Gargantua la forteresse marchante — et beaucoup de panache.
You can play Panache here - it's worth clicking that link just to experience the new intro video.
So far it's mostly just aesthetic updates as opposed to gameplay changes. The music has had a French twist added to it as well.
The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores.
Any software that bundles a list of trusted certificates needs to be updated. This site is tracking software updates via this GitHub repository - Linux distros need to update their ca-certificates packages.
We’re heading into fighter jet territory this week with Zach Shore (CEO) and A.J. Piplica (Co-Founder and Executive Chairman) of Hermeus.
Founded in 2018, Hermeus has set out to make supersonic and even hypersonic jets that can fly themselves. They’re part of this new wave of defense startups trying to prove that the U.S. can still produce technological marvels in a timely and not criminally expensive fashion. Hermeus’s planes would be a new breed of fighter jets that can use their speed and autonomy to carry out missions without putting pilots at risk.
We conducted this interview with Shore and Piplica a couple of months back at Spaceport America just ahead of a test flight of Hermeus’s Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 plane. I’m pleased to tell you that the plane did indeed go supersonic, and it was awesome to behold. We’ll have a video on the experience soon on our YouTube channel.
This interview covers Hermeus’s journey, the state of the U.S. defense industry, plane design and how the U.S. hopes to keep pace with China in areas like hypersonic flight.
Hermeus’s planes are remotely piloted for now, but it has partnered with Anduril to give its aircraft autonomous mission capabilities. For hypersonic flight, it’s developing a fascinating hybrid engine design intended to switch from a turbine to a ramjet midair.
Hermeus achieved supersonic flight on Mk 2.1’s third test flight and is betting it can keep building and testing new prototypes much faster than traditional defense contractors. You can see its planes and timelines here.
SPONSOR
Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex.
I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.
Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro 3:39 Supersonic With Nobody Aboard 6:21 Building an Aircraft Company 17:02 From Turbines to Ramjets 22:18 The Unmanned Bomb Truck 30:25 Will Passengers Fly Hypersonic? 31:56 America's Flight Testing Bottleneck 40:08 Who Actually Flies It? 45:12 Rebuilding the Skunk Works 47:06 China and America's Aerospace Bet
On the eve of the midterm election, American families are feeling financially stressed As the chart above shows, the percentage of families who say that their financial situation is good has plunged. For the first time since the post-Covid inflation of 2022, it has fallen below the percentage who say that their financial situation is bad.
Rising prices are the obvious explanation for this stress. And while presidents usually have much less influence on the economy than is generally recognized, the current outbreak of high inflation is all on Donald Trump. He began this with two wars of choice: one, a trade war with his destructive tariffs, and then an unwinnable military war in the most important energy transit point in the world.
There is, however, a third factor behind Americans’ anger, and it isn’t getting nearly as much attention as it should. There has been a catastrophic decline in health insurance coverage combined with sharply rising premiums for many of those who have managed to hang on to their coverage. And this, too, is all on Trump.
Here’s what happened: Trump and his congressional minions refused to renew the expanded subsidies that had made health insurance affordable for millions of Americans during the Biden years. At the same time the One Big Beautiful Bill imposed punitive work requirements that made it far more difficult for families to obtain Medicaid coverage.
And we haven’t felt the full effect of these changes yet — Republicans tried to backload the effects of the OBBB so that much of the pain will come after the midterms. But the consequences of this attack on healthcare have already been dire.
By June 2026 enrollment in Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program had declined by more than 6 million since January 2025; 2.5 million of those losing coverage were children. KFF estimates that enrollment in individual plans, mainly via the Affordable Care Act, was down almost 5 million by June. The redoubtable Charles Gaba, putting these numbers together with other information, estimates that around 12 million Americans have lost health insurance under Trump 2.0.
That’s a lot of lost coverage, even in a nation as big as ours. And because many of the savage cuts Trump and his allies have imposed on healthcare have yet to kick in, the situation will get much worse in the years ahead. It’s worth noting thatkicking children off healthcare coverage is especially personally and socially destructive because it compromises their health and earnings potential for their entire lifetimes.
By the way, Trump, after all these years, is once again promising that he’ll come up with a “truly great” healthcare plan any day now. He’s now saying that he’ll send money directly to Americans, stopping payments to insurance companies — thereby demonstrating that he still has no idea how insurance works.
In any case, we’re now in the midst of an enormous healthcare disaster — a disaster that is receiving surprisingly little media coverage with, as far as I can tell, no recent articles on massive coverage losses in any of the major newspapers. I know that there’s a lot going on, but this seems odd.
Voters, however, have noticed. KFF’s tracking poll finds that the cost of healthcare is near the top of voters’ economic worries:
As an overall issue, health care ranks second only to the overall cost of living — and above the Iran war:
This ongoing healthcare disaster is all on Trump and his party. And again, voters appear to have noticed, giving Democrats a large and growing edge on the issue:
So if there is a blue wave 13 days from now, it won’t just be the result of inflation andTrump’s vainglorious wars. It will also in part be the result of a quiet but massive healthcare disaster.
And ultimately, of course, the political implications are a secondary concern. What really matters is that Trump and his party have done all they can to deny healthcare to millions of Americans. They have done this partly to save money — not to reduce the budget deficit, but to make room for tax cuts for the wealthy. They have also done it out of sheer cruelty.
There are many terrible things happening in America right now, from the debacle in Iran to the depredations of ICE. But the healthcare disaster, which will ruin many people financially and in some cases kill Americans who can no longer afford essential care, deserves much more attention than it is getting.
WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the movie You Can See Everything.
A few days ago, I had the great pleasure of seeing Nathan Fielder’s new film, You Can See Everything. I’ve been a fan of Fielder’s work for a long time, so I basically knew what to expect, but it was still incredible — every bit as good as you’ve heard. Go see it if you haven’t.
The film is a documentary about the notorious fraudster Elizabeth Holmes (of Theranos fame) and her partner Billy Evans. But it’s also sort of a horror movie about liars. That was interesting enough that it made me want to write a post about the movie — about the nature of lying, and of belief, and of human communication in general.
But You Can See Everything doesn’t cover much of this actual history. Fielder doesn’t bother to indict Holmes and prove that she committed fraud — the court case already did that. Instead, he offers a window into the psychology of someone who could commit such an epic fraud. Holmes and Evans allow Fielder into their home with the goal of proving that they’re just regular, good people trying to improve the world. Instead, Fielder depicts the couple — quite accurately — as monsters of deception and manipulation.
It’s doubtful that any other filmmaker could have done nearly as good a job of this. The blurry line between what’s real and what’s fake has always been a major theme of Nathan Fielder’s work — he loves hiring actors to simulate past and future interactions, constructing facsimiles of whole buildings, and so on. And of course he’s very skilled with the tricks of the visual storyteller’s trade, using deliberate cuts, camera angles, and creative edits to make the audience think and feel what he wants them to.
Whereas many filmmakers would have regarded Holmes as a subject to be studied, Fielder seems to see her as an opponent to be challenged and beaten. If he can shoot what Holmes wants him to shoot, but ultimately seize control of the narrative, then he’s the more powerful storyteller. This, I think, is why he doesn’t bring in outside evidence to show what a well-documented liar Holmes is. That would be cheating. Instead, he has to venture into the monster’s lair alone, and defeat her in single combat. He has to film the movie that she asks him to film, and let her show him only what she wants him to see, and still have audiences walk away having seen the story that he wants to tell.
And of course he succeeds, because he’s very good, but also because he gets to edit the film, and editing is more powerful than acting. Score one for the good guys.
(Major spoilers begin here.)
How does Fielder win the contest? Over the course of You Can See Everything, he captures Elizabeth Holmes saying a number of strange and extraordinary things:
Near the beginning, Holmes tells Fielder that she’s never lied in her life. After he presses her, she half-admits that she may have told small white lies out of convenience. But the audience gets to watch her repeatedly assert something obviously, fantastically false, always with the same sincere, relaxed, wide-eyed expression on her face.
Later on, Fielder shows Holmes the famous “Who’s on first?” comedy routine, which she claims never to have seen. After watching it, Holmes claims not to have realized that the baseball player’s name is “Who” — thus missing the entire point of the sketch.
Fielder recruits Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the miniseries The Dropout, to help him figure out what’s going on with Holmes and her partner. At one point, Holmes is calling on the phone from prison. Seyfried asks Holmes if she knew Seyfried would be on the call, and Holmes says “I’m not sure if I knew.”
It’s moments like these, more than any simple lie, that reveal Holmes’ true character. In fact, Fielder seems like he passes up several chances to catch Holmes in a straight-up lie on camera. After all, what would one lie, or even three lies, really prove? Everyone lies sometimes, and capturing a couple of those instances during weeks of living with Holmes wouldn’t be hard. It would be a cheap trick, and it wouldn’t really prove that Holmes is a liar in general.
Instead, the moments Fielder captures demonstrate something deeper and far more unnerving about Holmes’ relationship to the truth. Holmes is a very special and powerful kind of liar — someone for whom deception and manipulation are as automatic and as continuous as breathing.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."
Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.
It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.
The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.
The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.
In its current iteration, SpaceX is largely a data company seeking to provide enormous amounts of compute for artificial intelligence. During an earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, company officials spent much of their time discussing ambitious plans to roll out up to 10 GW of compute in 2027—on the ground.
Gone are the days of aspirational talk about sending humans to Mars and settling the red planet. Now it is almost all about artificial intelligence and the data needed to support its expansion. However, the company's long-term ambitions to provide data services from space, initially with the Starlink Internet constellation and eventually through the "Starmind" data center constellation, still rely on an actual rocket.
That would be the Starship vehicle, and during the earnings call, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle.
The president in a moment of ecstatic contemplation of Sen. Jon Husted’s ass
The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
To the list of pithy phrases meant to encapsulate politics in a hundred situations — including “All politics is local” and “It’s the economy, stupid” — the Trump era has brought another that may or may not endure, but certainly has been true for the last few years: “Everything is gender.”
The irony is that just as Republican politicians are forcing a wave of closures of gender studies programs at universities, understanding gender has never been more important to American politics than it is now. I would even argue that just as in 2017 Ta-Nehisi Coates called Donald Trump “the first white president” — the first for whom whiteness was the essential organizing principle — we could call the second-term Trump the first drag president. He performs an exaggerated, often surreal version of masculinity, one that his own audience must have trouble following at times.
Lately, that performance has taken what looks on the surface to be a discordant, homoerotic turn. But it isn’t quite homoerotic, because it isn’t erotic. Instead, it falls within a long tradition of fascist aesthetics, clothed in Trump’s allergy to subtlety or subtext.
“I looked at his ass”
Trump has always been interested in the physical appearance of both women and men, which until recently one could put down to his belief that politics is a show that requires casting conventionally attractive people. But in the last year or so — and especially as he campaigns for Republicans ahead of the midterms — he has been talking more and more about handsome men and their bodies.
He has long enjoyed appearing before groups of men he believes embody a physical version of manhood — servicemembers, coal miners, any collection of blue-collar guys — but when he does these days, he’s likely to pick one particularly appealing specimen out and tell the audience what a hunk the man is, sometimes even calling him up to the stage so he can get a close look. “I wanna check him out. Look at the muscles on this guy,” he said about a Coast Guard cadet. “You’re a beautiful guy,” he told a UFC fighter at ringside. “You could be a model!”
Their taut muscles, their firm jaws, their strong hands, all move him to rhapsody. It’s been happening on the campaign trail almost every day, and it reached the level of comedy when he described the journey his eyes took over Sen. Jon Husted’s body, with extra time spent on the senator’s hindquarters:
“I stood right over here, and I examined his ass. I never did that with a man before. I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline. Stunning.”
A riff on Husted’s hot bod has now been added to Trump’s rally playlist no matter where he is, as though Americans everywhere are keen to hear what he thinks of this obscure Ohio politician’s butt. This was yesterday in North Carolina:
This has been the subject of a good deal of amply justified mockery from liberals, given how important anxious masculinity is to the entire MAGA movement. It has always been deeply ironic that so many conservatives who begin to panic at the mere sight of gayness would consider Trump to be a model of masculinity. This is an obese octogenarian who slathers on makeup every day and spends hours on his hair, enacting a performance of manhood defined by nothing so much as the fact that it is the opposite of what it purports to be. To that, he has now added daily disquisitions on the male form.
Meanwhile, wherever possible Republicans charge their Democratic opponents with being gay, like fifth-grade bullies mocking the smaller kids on the playground. Witness JD Vance, who said this when a supporter shouted “I love you!” at a campaign appearance:
“I love you too, sir,” Vance said. “In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.” Or in other words: “No homo!”
The anti-eroticism of fascism
Trump is hardly the only one on the right ogling muscly men. As they grapple with a world in which upper-body strength is no longer the sole determinant of social status, many conservatives have put a new premium on male physical prowess, in ways that seem to pulse with homoeroticism. A couple of years ago, Tucker Carlson put out a short film called “The End of Men,” about how masculinity is supposedly in decline and must be recaptured through things like tanning your testicles (yes, really). In addition to some right-wing conspiracy theories and quack health advice, the film is a deluge of shots of shirtless dudes working out, shirtless dudes wrestling with each other, shirtless dudes shooting guns, and shirtless dudes generally being hot, enough to fill up a dozen gay porn movies.
At least on first glance. But I don’t think Tucker Carlson wants to have sex with the men in his film, any more than Trump wants to bed Jon Husted. I say that because today’s conservative movement vibrates with the echoes of fascism in a hundred ways, including when it confronts gender, and a key part of the fascist aesthetic is that the perfect man is de-sexualized. He is not a sexual being; he is a statue to be honed, gazing at himself for endless hours in the mirror until he has made himself worthy of being gazed at from a distance by others — especially other men.
You can see that in so much of the manosphere today: The influencers posting about their peptide stack and obsessing over their workouts and their jawlines aren’t doing it so they can win the hearts of women, they’re performing for other men. As neo-Nazi troll Nick Fuentes said, “If we’re really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay, having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay. Really it’s all gay.”
Unlike Fuentes, the prominent men of MAGA and the manosphere do want to sleep with women, but mostly as a way of outdoing other men. This has long been Trump’s modus operandi; think of how, when he married Marla Maples, he tried to negotiate a deal to have her pose nude in Playboy (she refused). The only reason he would do that is so other men would lust after her, and that would raise his status among them. Everything we know about Trump’s sexual history — including the two dozen women who have publicly accused him of various kinds of sexual misconduct, up to and including rape — is that it is all about domination, violence, and contempt. It’s almost impossible to believe that he ever had a romantic or erotic impulse that wasn’t actually about his own status.
The same is true of so many others in Trump’s orbit, from Pete Hegesth to Robert Kennedy, Jr. obsessing over their testosterone levels (and everyone else’s) and posting videos of themselves videos of themselves working out to demonstrate their strength and virility, oblivious to the fact that it only makes them look pathetic.
Once you realize how anti-erotic the iconography and rhetoric of today’s conservative movement is, you begin to see it everywhere, from “Mar-a-Lago face,” the very grotesqueness of which is its true purpose (since it proves the length of self-mutilation a woman will reach in order to prove her devotion to Trump) to the propaganda endlessly pumped out by the administration. For instance, last year, government accounts began posting a variety of white supremacy-tinged memes, including some featuring fair-haired, square-jawed young men:
That image and others like it were directly evocative of Nazi propaganda imagery in which Hitler’s government promoted the image of the perfect Aryan man. Here, for instance, is “La Force,” created in 1939 by the Nazis’ favorite sculptor, Arno Breker; and a still from Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Olympia,” a celebration of the 1936 Berlin Olympics:
There is nothing erotic about this kind of man; he is meant only to be gazed upon, admired but not desired. And there is Donald Trump standing below, looking up at him in awe, moved almost to tears.
It’s not the ‘60s anymore
For most of my life, it felt that politics consisted of endless rehashings of the cultural conflicts of the 1960s, in which the hippies and the squares faced off again and again. So much of the anger of the right felt like it was the aftereffect that moment in the youth of conservative Boomers, driven by the memory of grinding their teeth as they watched a smoke-filled van heading off for Woodstock, knowing that the longhaired punks in the back were going to get to have sex with those free-thinking girls in peasant skirts, while they were left behind to watch The Lawrence Welk Show with their parents. The conservative men may have mocked the hippie men for being effeminate, but they burned with jealousy over the fact that hose hippies had all the fun.
But politics isn’t that anymore, at least not mostly. Today’s right is reenacting the time leading up to World War II, when there was another “masculinity crisis” that the far right capitalized on. Around the world, neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists are creating “Active Clubs” in which men train, spar, read fascist tracts, and admire each other’s bodies.
From the moment Trump began his first presidential race in 2015, it was clear that much of his appeal lay in his ability to take what was implicit and make it explicit, to make subtext into text. What other politicians hinted at, he said outright: Immigrants are scum, liberals are stupid, women should shut up. As one attendee at a Trump rally told Jeff Sharlet in 2016, “We all want to punch somebody in the face, and he says it for us.”
And now, Trump has removed the subtlety from the fascist admiration for the male body. Will other Republican politicians, Fox News hosts, and far-right podcasters now start paying public tribute to each other’s asses? Will MAGA acolytes say “We all want to run our hands over a strong man’s body, and he says it for us”? That may be going too far. But in an age when everything is gender, almost nothing should surprise us.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
President Donald Trump may get a show at the Smithsonian, though not as he might have hoped. On October 6, representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland introduced a bill directing officials from the Smithsonian Institution to collect and preserve “artifacts related to the President’s narcissistic self-worship.”
These artifacts include the giant banners bearing Trump’s face that have hung outside several federal agency buildings over the past 21 months, and signs the President plans to place outside of Smithsonian museums warning visitors about the “ideological capture” of the institution.
“The Preserving and Remembering the History of Trump and other Tyrants Act” is, in part, a response to July’s executive order 14416, which was titled ‘‘Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.’’
The goal of the six-page bill is to establish a permanent museum exhibition that presents “the rise of governmental propaganda, corruption, and authoritarianism due to the two Presidencies of Donald J. Trump.” In addition to artifacts of the state, the bill directs the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution to collect relevant photo, film, and media, as well as the personal narratives of American citizens “who resisted and opposed authoritarianism.”
The exhibition would place the Trump presidency in the context of earlier periods of American political extremism. These include the Know Nothingism of the mid-19th century, the Lost Cause myth that gained popularity at the turn of the 20th century, and McCarthyism of the 1950s. The bill also proposed a sign of its own to accompany the permanent exhibition. It would read: “Donald Trump ordered the installation of these signs without any Congressional authorization as required by the Constitution. The 119th Congress passed legislation authorizing this exhibit.” In a Republican controlled house, the bill is unlikely to pass.
SAN FRANCISCO – Wi-Fi technology from Solstar Space connected NASA’s R5-S10 cubesat with Momentus’ Vigoride-7 orbital service vehicle during proximity operations and relayed data to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Solstar […]
Glasgow, UK | 21 October 2026 – The pace of development in quantum technologies continues to accelerate, and over the past few months, space engineering company Craft Prospect has been […]
LOS ANGELES — October 20, 2026 AnySignal, a leading provider of software-defined radios and space-based networking, today announced an agreement with Reflect Orbital to deliver space-to-earth communications for Reflect Orbital’s inaugural […]
I keep reading about Democratic midterm optimism. I keep reading about the blue wave. I keep reading about the Democrats taking back the House and, perhaps, the Senate.
We have a president who believes there is winning and only winning. We have a president who doesn’t care for or understand democracy. We have a president utterly disinterested in Thomas Jefferson and George Washington; in Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King; in battles for independence and battles to defeat global tyranny.
We have a president who masturbates to himself and his lust for power.
And he will not just allow for defeat.
Seriously, if the Democrats aren’t aware by now—WAKE THE FUCK UP. This is the moment. It kicked into high gear yesterday, with an assault on California and voting; with some bullshit garbage about “voting crimes.” We are here, in the heat of what will be legitimate awfulness. A president’s dogged need to reign. A justice department beneath his thumb. A political party terrified of his wrath, and happy to curl up and coo.
I don’t know how this ends.
I am scared how this ends.
I suspect, come post-election day, we will need to take to the streets and take to the courts, for the two or three remaining threads of democracy are being torn from the garment. We are, as of now, pro-Putin, anti-voting, pro-war and watching helplessly as a madman focusses on a new D.C. golf course.
A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.
The reporters say it is unclear if Musk operated without input from White House officials. Some of their sources say he did; others say he coordinated with multiple senior officials, including Trump.
According to Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to try to dismiss the slowdown as a business decision: “We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that.” He added: “[W]e wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”
After the slowdown caused a public uproar, the Wall Street Journal reporters write, representatives from SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, called the White House to coordinate messaging to say that Starlink and the administration had agreed to the slowdown ahead of time.
Musk’s decision to change the course of a war with “a seeming flick of a switch,” taking it upon himself, with or without the complicity of White House officials, to reverse the foreign policy of the United States of America for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is a stunning assumption of power reminiscent of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold’s weakening of the Americans’ defenses and draining of supplies at the strategic fort at West Point to enable the British to capture it before he was discovered and defected to the British Army.
Another lens through which to see this story is the apparent eagerness of White House officials to turn Musk into a scapegoat for a decision they were happy to endorse until it blew up in their faces.
A New York Times story by Tyler Pager suggests a different leak from the White House. Pager relates that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a presidential pardon. His family hired Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who at the time was working at the Justice Department, as general counsel at a company, Concord Partners, that was launched by Herrera’s daughter, has no public profile and whose business is unclear. Habba’s contract is worth more than $50 million over four years. Just weeks after she began to work for Concord Partners, Trump granted Herrera a full pardon.
Habba denied having any role in the pardon and refused to describe her work for Concord Partners, but Pager reports that “[p]eople familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”
Thomas Frank at Politico received a recording of a speech Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave today at a private conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which he said the Trump administration plans to shift responsibility for disaster management to the states.
Hamilton’s speech built on an internal memo from October 15, which Frank also covered, that said the administration seeks to turn disaster response over to local and state government, thereby “reducing federal dependency.” “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said today.
Today Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that sources have told them that Trump wants to move the press out of the White House and that Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has pushed to go after Trump’s political opponents for mortgage fraud, is one of those pushing the idea of restoring the press briefing room to its original form as a swimming pool. Another is Boris Epshteyn, the lawyer who has pushed the lawsuits the president has launched against journalists.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the pool installed because swimming helped strengthen his muscles, weakened by polio. President Richard Nixon had it covered over and turned into a briefing room to accommodate the growing White House Press Corps. Haberman and Swan note that forcing the press out of the White House would be “highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.”
These four stories, just from today, encapsulate the administration’s betrayal of U.S. national security, its corruption, and its disregard for the welfare of Americans. It’s not a great record to run on, and the leaks from the administration show that at least some insiders are aware of how unpopular and dangerous that record is.
And so, Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep Democrats from winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.
In what appears to be a transparent attempt to shore up wavering support from a constituency that until recently was one of his most loyal, Trump announced yesterday that the Agriculture Department would provide $8 billion to help farmers slammed by the high cost of diesel. Kevin Draper of the New York Times reported that rates of payment will be announced next month, and the money will come no sooner than late November or early December, well after the election.
Trump announced the prospective payments at an event for Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose reelection campaign is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton. Meredith Lee Hill and Grace Yarrow of Politico report that Marshall had asked Trump for the program. Republicans like Marshall are hoping Trump’s announcement will help stop the flow of voters away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats in the farm states. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, whose reelection is uncertain given the strength of his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke, said: “This will go a long way to making sure the folks that feed us have it a bit easier when they most need it.”
But Trump officials told Hill and Yarrow that the fund Trump intends to use for the payments—a taxpayer-funded account in the Department of Agriculture—doesn’t have enough money in it to make the payments. Either Congress will have to add more to it, or the administration will have to take the money from a different program.
Top agricultural groups say farmers need at least $50 billion to make up for the impact of tariffs, disasters caused by weather, and the high cost of fuel and fertilizer caused by the war on Iran.
Trump told the Kansas audience at the announcement that if they reelect Marshall, he will also allow year-round sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol, a big deal for corn growers. But, he added, “if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.”
Still, Democrats are not letting the White House change the subject from its betrayal of Ukraine. This morning, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) posted a video, saying he had just gotten off a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and a number of other representatives and senators.
“I was just appalled by what I learned,” he said. “The president said that Starlink—Starshield—has been throttled so that the Ukrainians can no longer intercept most of the Russian drones that are wreaking havoc at schools and hospitals and civilian centers. He said that they are completely out of missile interceptors. And make no mistake: that’s our fault.
“More significantly, that’s the fault of Donald Trump, who has now shown his hand as an ally of Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. We can’t really get straight answers about whether it’s Elon or Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, because they throttled Starlink, Ukrainians are dying.
“In the call, I made the point to some of my colleagues, which is, it’s time to accept that Donald Trump is rooting for a Russian victory here. And that the Congress needs to step up and actually pass veto-proof legislation. Enough dilly-dallying with the secretary of state in the Oval Office. We need to step up and pass veto-proof legislation that will provide assistance, military aid, and access to Starlink for the Ukrainians. That’s the only way this is gonna get done, and it needs to get done now.
“Ukrainians are dying, and Putin will win this if Donald Trump has his way,” Himes said, “[W]e’re going to act as a Congress and override this president’s desire to see Vladimir Putin win.”
Psst, you’re a TPM member, right? You asked, and we answered: we’re launching a members-only podcast feed where you can listen to episodes of Polltober! Head to your account settings page to find the special RSS feed that you can add to your preferred podcast player and enjoy!
I corresponded with a TPM Reader from the tech world recently who marveled at the political salience of data centers when data centers have been around since the late 90s. Many data centers today are orders of magnitude larger than their pre-AI relatives, gobbling up much more energy, making more noise and physical pollution. But he noted that the bulk of them aren’t nearly that large. These points each have some truth to them, though I think it understates the real-world impact of hyperscaler data centers. And, as I’ve noted, a lot of our collective social angst about data centers and AI is really focused on oligarchy — the way that it appears to be the tech oligarchs’ world and we’re just living in it. The ability for town and county councils to say no to data centers is irresistible precisely because it’s the one case where democratic self-government is in a position to say “NO!” and that’s so contrary to all our other experience these days. But there’s an entirely different vantage point on this question I want to focus on.
The impact of particular data centers in particular places is one issue. But the macro-story is even bigger and more jarring. Axios has a piece this morning about how the housing sector is getting hammered by the hyperscaler AI boom, both buildings and buyers. And as you may have heard the lack of affordable housing is a rather pressing issue in American society today. This applies to everything from inflation/scarcity of the physical building blocks that are used for building housing to the scarcity of capital to fund it. If that sounds overstated look at this chart from a study we discussed late last month and which got written up in various publications.
I keep coming back to this graph because it’s so eye-popping, almost impossible to believe. As you see in the legend, the blue line is data centers. The grey line is everything else. Everything else. Commercial properties. Rental properties. Single family homes. Multiple family homes. Pick your preferred flavor of development, NIMBY, YIMBY, urban, rural, it’s in there. You basically have rapid data center growth and everything else contracting.
Many of us first saw the signs of the hyperscale AI boom when we noticed that computer memory had suddenly gotten wildly more expensive, after decades when the price of memory fell as though under the force of gravity year after year. Some forms of computer memory that go into personal computers have quadrupled in cost over the last 18 months because AI’s demand for all forms of computer chips is so great. That’s now spread to the entire economy. This is about more than the AI boom itself. It’s about who the economy is working for. In a general sense, it’s probably a safe bet at any time that the economy is largely working for people with capital. But in an economy driven by consumption, that at least ties back significantly to things people want. The simple reality here is that the AI boom is making huge amounts of money for people at the top of the economic ladder (almost entirely through the equities market) while choking off investment in everything else. Housing and commercial construction are getting crowded out. And this is, as we noted above, at a time when the cost of housing is a huge political issue and one that can only be fundamentally addressed through increasing the supply of housing. We have this running debate about why people are so down on the economy when economic indicators either aren’t that bad or are really good. This is pretty clearly the answer.
You can see all of that through this prism. The interplay between data centers and housing construction captures the larger story in the most powerful and elemental way. There’s nothing new about the economy not being run on the behalf of the have nots or those struggling on the lower rungs of the economy. But this is something different. It’s an economy being run pretty indifferent to the needs or, more importantly, even the consumption desires of the middle and even many of the upper rungs of the economy. The simple reality we see here is that a tiny number of people — dozens at most, mostly in Silicon Valley — are able to drive the direction of the whole economy and in a way that at least in the short-term (the long term probably too, but I’m just talking about what we factually observe right now) is straining everyone else. They’re creating a lot of paper wealth for other people too. But again, that’s heavily weighted to the highest strata of the economic ladder.
It remains difficult to overstate the degree to which the entire private economy has been disfigured by the ongoing AI boom.
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government
can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their
political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the
Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of
Minnesota. [...]
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to
engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should
outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about
Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the
new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Thoughtful, sharp, and eloquent as ever.
But Obama posted this essay on X, which, I havebeentold in the past week, shows that he in fact is a Nazi sympathizer, a fascist, a pedophile, and unconcerned about racism. As surprised as I was to learn those things about myself, I’m equally surprised to learn them about President Obama, whom I heretofore considered a thoughtful statesman and moral compass.
Either that, or, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon have relegated themselves into irrelevance by allowing their discourse to be dominated by a fringe of unhinged kooks who want to be angry and want everyone else to be angry.
Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him:
Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks (AU from here on), not to be confused with the “advanced unlocking services” they’ve marketed for years. A press release from earlier this year confirms AU is a new product for 2026.
[…]
According to Cellebrite, AU:
is a “next-generation AFU vector that is more resilient to Apple’s OS changes”
works with Stolen Device Protection enabled, which tightens USB restrictions
is enabled by a dedicated appliance with a stated range (!) of about 8 meters.
AU = Advanced Unlocks, Cellebrite’s term. AFU = after first unlock.
SpaceX was set to launch a batch of 27 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Tuesday afternoon, but ran into what appears to have been a technical issue that wasn’t surmountable during their launch window.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from the West Coast is now scheduled during a window that opens at 2:45 p.m. PDT (5:45 p.m. EDT / 2145 UTC) on Thursday, Oct. 22. The rocket will fly on a southeasterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1063. This will be its 36th flight and will become the second booster to reach three dozen flights.
Roughly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1063 will target a landing on the droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas. If successful, this will be the 229th landing on this vessel and the 673rd Falcon booster landing to date.
Starlink growth
During a third quarter earnings call on Tuesday afternoon, hours before the original launch time on Oct. 20, SpaceX Chief Operating Officer (COO) and President Gwynne Shotwell noted that the company added 1.6 million customers in that three-month period. She said the service was active across 174 markets globally.
“This number does not include additional hundreds of thousands of enterprise subscribers and aviation customers,” Shotwell said during the earnings call. “We remain incredibly inspired by the impact of Starlink on communities around the world, including providing service to hundreds of thousands of students and teachers in schools globally, as well as for emergency response during natural disasters.”
In a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX noted that it closed the third quarter with more than 11,100 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, which includes the 26 Starlink Version 3 satellites launched during Starship Flight 14.
“The Starship launcher itself will provide additional capacity across markets and enable new sales in high-demand areas,” Shotwell said. “We expect the market for communications to grow far beyond just human communication that we traditionally think about. Connecting cars, robots, and the adoption of super intelligence (artificial intelligence) will increase communication demands not in percentages, but in orders of magnitudes.”
The SEC filing stated that connectivity revenue for the quarter was $5.2 billion, an increase of 22 percent from the previous quarter.
“Total costs and expenses for the Connectivity segment were up $974 million year-over-year, driven primarily by our growing satellite constellation, Starlink Kit deliveries, and marketing initiatives to support revenue growth,” SpaceX said in its filing.
Constant communication is what makes autonomy like this safe. Early contact lets us take maneuvering responsibility, publish ephemeris faster than ground radar can catalog the object, and deorbit and keep commanding through demise if needed
We treat early communications as a requirement, not a nice-to-have
Bret Johnsen, SpaceX Chief Financial Officer (CFO), said that the company’s ability to increase the flight rate of orbital Starship missions is critical for future revenue growth on the Starlink satellite internet side of their business.
“Looking ahead, the satellite roadmap is a key driver of both the capacity and capability of our connectivity segment,” Johnsen said. “Through the end of the year and throughout 2027, we expect to deploy [Starlink] V3 broadband satellites in meaningful volume, with each Starship launch ramping towards a payload that delivers over 20 times the downlink capacity of the current generation of Falcon 9 launches today.
“In parallel, we will ramp Starlink Mobile V2 satellites on Starship, starting in 2027, and leverage our newly enhanced wireless spectrum portfolio to expand our direct-to-device and become a major mobile carrier, as Gwynne mentioned, in the United States.”
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the next Starship launch is anticipated in November and is planned to include a catch attempt of both the Ship and Super Heavy booster. The company is seeking approval for this from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Writing in the New York Times, David Sanger highlights the extent to which Donald Trump is going all out to support Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine:
President Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.
“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a campaign rally. “They haven’t been doing much,” he said, making no mention of the Russian missiles and jet-powered drones that have been targeting apartment buildings in Kyiv and Ukraine’s surviving electricity grid.
In contrast, he said, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.”
As Sanger notes, Trump’s support for Putin is unique in American history. Previous administrations have made deals with erstwhile adversaries, as Nixon did with China, and given up on support for failing allies, as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But never before have we outright switched sides, let alone supported an aggressor while vilifying that aggressor’s victim.
What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started. Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the aid goes beyond intelligence sharing that has helped Iran target U.S. forces. Russia has also reportedly been sending Iran explosives and weapons components.
What would Republicans be saying if a Democratic president were supporting a foreign dictator even as that dictator was helping another nation kill American troops? They would be crying “treason.” But this is all apparently “fine” with Trump.
What’s going on here? It’s important to understand that — as Phillips O’Brien documents — Trump hasn’t “pivoted” away from Ukraine toward Russia. He has been a Putin supporter all along.
Thus when Trump says that “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine,” who, exactly, does he mean by “we”? He cut off all economic and military aid to Ukraine as soon as he took office. Here’s total support for Ukraine, by country, since January 2025:
True, the U.S. continued to share military intelligence with Ukraine while allowing Ukraine to use Elon Musk’s Starshield and permitting European nations to transfer some U.S. weapons to Ukraine. But these actions cost America nothing. The most you can say is that until recently Trump shied away from actively sabotaging Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
And now even that restraint is gone. According to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. intelligence sharing was blocked “for some period of time,” although it appears to have resumed for now. Ukraine’s access to Starshield has been limited. And the Washington Post reports that the U.S. has been holding up European transfers of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.
There are two questions here. First, why does Trump love Putin and hate Zelenskyy? Second, why has he ripped off the mask and gone full pro-Russia in the past few weeks?
On the first question, Zelenskyy gave a blunt answer in a recent interview with the Financial Times: Trump, he asserted, has an instinctive affinity for autocrats and the super wealthy: “He speaks about it openly that he loves such people and he respects such people.” That’s clearly right.
I would add three points. First, Trump and his inner circle don’t just love autocrats. They hate democracy and rule of law — which means that they hate America and American values.
Second, Putin-worship was widespread on the authoritarian right even before Trump entered the picture, with many celebrating Russia’s anti-wokeness and perceived masculinity. Remarkably, the valorization of Russia’s supposed toughness has survived despite Russia’s repeated military humiliations. So Trump has been following a well-trodden path.
Finally, whatever else you may say about Zelenskyy, he’s a genuine hero, who showed great personal courage by staying in Kyiv when Russia invaded. And Trump surely resents the fact that Zelenskyy is everything he is not.
The second question is, why now? Why has Trump chosen this moment to switch from covert, deniable support for Putin to overtly, explicitly taking Russia’s side?
As I suggested yesterday, the answer lies precisely in Trump’s collapsing support at home. Nothing he does now is likely to avert Republican catastrophe in the midterms. Republican politicians have been going out of their way to avoid being seen with him on the campaign trail. Trump officials are already lawyering up in preparation for the probes a Democratic Congress will launch.
At this point, then, Trump effectively has nothing left to lose on the political front — and his political bankruptcy has freed him to become his worst self, indulging himself by doing what he always wanted to do — which includes supporting corrupt, murderous dictators.
And there will be much more of this to come. Trump can’t and won’t make America great again. But he can betray everything America stands for, and he’s doing it as we speak.
My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is actually fun to play. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also supports multiplayer between nearby devices using audio to synchronize game state! Here's what I've built so far, and some of the things I learned along the way.
My initial goal was to build an RTS game I could play on my phone, in the style of Command & Conquer. I have fond memories of the 1995 original (I liked Red Alert too) and wanted to recapture a little bit of the magic.
After 12 major iterations (and 321 commits by coding agents, mainly Claude Code) I now have a browser-based game that works on mobile and desktop, has multiple play modes, several maps (including a random map generator) and even supports multiplayer for two devices within microphone range of each other. (Update: also online multiplayer; the audio multiplayer induced headaches!)
Here's a video demo of Battle Drones running in a desktop browser:
Features so far include:
9 buildings, 7 ground vehicles, 6 aerial vehicles, 3 infantry units - all 3D models, which you can browse here
Fog of war
Different weapons are needed to target aerial or ground vehicles
Six maps, across five biomes - temperate, desert, arctic, volcanic, tropical
A random map generator
Skirmish mode - red vs. blue on a rotationally symmetrical map
Last Stand mode - one player holds out against as many waves of enemies as possible
Area effect weapons: Barrage, EMP, Drop Pod, Sky Hammer
Crate drops with bonus resources
In-game music that responds to events - it gets more intense as fighting breaks out
Different in-game AI personalities (Balanced, Rush, Air Swarm, Boom, Skyforce, Ironclad)
AI vs. AI mode, to watch those personalities play each other
The Goliath - a giant stomping mech with laser eyes and arm cannons and the ability to establish a new base
Mutators that add extra rules or twists
A "Daily Op" challenge
Ranks and achievements (Medals)
Agent vs. Agent mode where two LLMs can play Battle Drones against each other
A multiplayer mode based on two nearby phones communicating via audio messages, an extension of my earlier experiment with Chirp Pong
How I built this
Battle Drones is heavily vibe coded - I've reviewed almost none of the code, and it's built in a language (TypeScript) that I've hardly used myself. I've playtested it quite a bit though, and it's been through a large number of iterations since I started the project.
Here's a rough history of the project so far, including key prompts and links to transcripts.
v1: the initial prototype
I started out with Claude Fable 5 back in July:
We are going to build a mobile friendly RTS game - command and conquer style - called Battle Drones, in which two armies of drones (both flying and ground-based) battle for territory and resources
Let's start with a MVP design, ask me some questions
Here's a shared transcript. I'd given Claude Code for Web an environment variable with an OpenAI API key and told it to use the OpenAI Image Generation API for assets, which got me some basic sprites.
It's recognizable as an RTS, has building mechanics and the ability to select and direct units, and a basic AI to play against.
This first version was barely a proof of concept, and it wasn't any fun to play.
Claude used the Phaser 2D game framework for these early versions. I didn't even realize this until several iterations later!
v2: full sprites
The second version (try v2 here) added sprites for all of the vehicles and the "AI vs. AI" mode, so I could watch the game playing without having to directly control it myself.
Claude proved reasonably competent at prompting OpenAI's image models to generate sprites. You can browse the v2 sprites in the public/assets/sprites folder.
v3: varied terrain
It still wasn't much fun, and the graphics were boring. It was now October, and I had upgraded to Claude Opus 5.5. I told it:
Massively improve this game. Make the graphics and gameplay better (keep it mobile friendly). Render new graphics using the latest OpenAI GPT image API (lookup details) with the API key in the environment variable. Add new unit types and balance the gameplay better. Also add new buildings and better, more varied terrain.
This resulted in five new maps with generated background tiles in a variety of styles, visible here. Opus also regenerated the sprites, making them much more visually appealing. You can try v3 here - it looks like this:
This is starting to feel like a real game! It still wasn't very fun to play though - I found myself getting bored pretty quickly.
v4: the fun update
So far my Battle Drones experiment was confirming my previous belief that coding agents can build a thing that looks like a game but can't actually make something that's genuinely compelling to play.
I shared this theory with someone over dinner, and then thought to myself that I should give the models a proper chance to prove me wrong. I prompted Opus 5.5 on my phone:
This game isn't fun enough yet. Make it a LOT more fun.
This time I was running in Ultracode mode, where Claude Code (in this case Claude Code for Web) runs "dynamic workflows", described in their docs as:
A dynamic workflow is a JavaScript script that orchestrates many subagents at once.
This kicked off many hours of work. I started it in the evening and didn't get a playable result back until late into the next morning. But the results were spectacular.
Every skirmish and Daily Op now opens with a choice, gives the side that's losing a way back, and pulls the armies into the middle of the map. There are also two new ways to play.
Openers: pick Blitz, Industry or Air Wing before the clock starts.
Call-down powers: Barrage, EMP, Drop Pod and the Sky Hammer orbital strike.
Objectives and salvage: Uplink relays, supply drops and wrecks worth scrap.
Feel: combat juice, adaptive music, unit voices and an announcer.
Command: battle alerts, game speed, saved squads and touch placement.
New modes: Last Stand survival waves and an 8-mission Ops campaign.
Progression: heroes, an after-action report with awards, a career, 7 mutators and a Daily Op.
Fights run longer and swing more. In 1,200 AI-vs-AI test matches on Normal, games still undecided after 25 minutes fell from 14% to 0.9%. The share of wins by a side that had been 800+ scrap behind rose from 24% to 46%.
Part of the reason Claude took so long was that it ran over a thousand simulated playtest sessions, and used the results to rebalance the existing units, add new ones, and introduce new features.
v5: Battle Drones goes 3D
After the success of Ultracode at "Make it a LOT more fun", I decided to be more ambitious:
Port this game to three.js with 3D models for all of the buildings and vehicles and landscapes
That was another overnight run. I woke up to this v5 version:
The new 3D models were entirely constructed by Claude in TypeScript code.
v6 (play v6 here) added some more visual polish. v7 (play v7) added robot infantry (troopers, rocket squads, snipers) and a "Condor" troop carrying aircraft.
v8: Archipelago
I was beginning to feel guilty at how little actual design input I had into the game - it really had been a case of me saying "make it more fun" and "add visual polish" for the past few releases.
I'd noticed that the AI didn't use the new infantry and troop carrying aircraft from v7 very often - there wasn't a great strategic reason to use them.
It would be neat if we had a new map with a new game mechanic that actively encouraged players to load up Condors with infantry robots and send them out into the map.
This resulted in my longest prompt yet:
Design a new map. Goal is to make different strategic incentives that encourage use of Infantry and Condors and aerial vehicles.
To do this the map will have limited harvester resources but several more uplinks - but uplinks will be on islands that are inaccessible by land vehicles or infantry. These uplinks can also not be claimed using air vehicles. The ONLY way to get them is to fly infantry there in a Condor.
Armies always start with a Condor and a single squad. If an army has no Condor a new one will be provided for free, flying in from the edge closest to their HQ and landing there. That free condor will come with a single free squad on board.
The two HQs should be entirely separated by water, but still accessible by vehicles thanks to two bridges across the map in different places
I want to encourage a battle over uplinks.
The map should be the times the size of other maps - still square
First research and then critique this design. Only build after we have agreed on any modifications
You get to design a new biome for this
The result was the tropical Archipelago map, with seven island uplinks that players can only capture by flying out infantry in a Condor. It's definitely the most fun map to play, once you've got the hang of the basic game mechanics from the simpler maps. The v9 edition made that map a little more interesting - it now looks like this:
v10: Goliath, and agent battles
I decided to add giant robot mechs to the game - think Jaegers from Pacific Rim, or Titans from Warhammer 40,000.
Here are some of the prompts I used to brainstorm with Claude:
Help me brainstorm ideas for adding giant robots to this game - think dreadnoughts or titans from W20K - how could we do this in a way that enhanced gameplay, kept things balanced, added unique twist? Don't overthink this yet
Let's keep brainstorming. I like the idea that it's a mobile base - that can accept harvested scrap and can have buildings built near it (even if it later moves on) and can produce infantry units too. An interaction with condor would be neat but I don't know what that could be.
Idea: as it gets damage it loses the ability to fire some weapons - by default it has eye laser (like lancers) and arm canons (like titan) and two shoulder mounted mortars, plus machine guns similar to a squad of troops
Damage knocks out mortars and then laser - it always has guns. You can't build next to a building that was only put there because of the mech, you need the mech there for off-base building and only within three squares of it
[...] Lets do two condors can carry the mech
The end result is really cool.
Goliaths can be constructed using a Gantry - a building that can only be created after first building a Fab, Bay, Airpad, and Tech Lab. You can see the Goliath under construction, and it then walks out from the Gantry and can march around the map.
Goliaths can "anchor", which digs them into the ground. In their anchored state they can act as a new HQ, constructing infantry units and additional buildings in a new area.
Two Condor aircraft can hook onto a Goliath, at which point it can be flown around the map!
The game now ends when you destroy the enemy's HQ building and any Goliaths they might have built.
There are also a couple of mutators relating to Goliaths:
Goliath Armada starts each side with four airborne Goliaths (each with a pair of Condors) and no other units.
Robot Love adds a special rule: if enemy Goliaths get close to each other on the battlefield they fall in love and the game ends in a draw. (Thank Natalie for that one).
Agent battles
The other v10 feature is agent battles. In musing about how multiplayer could work I had an idea: what if different LLMs could fight it out in the game?
Fun extra challenge: think about how we might make multiplayer available to coding agents. It would be neat if we could set up a battle between eg GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 where each model has access to a tool which gives them information about the game (presumably non-visual, but only the information they could see through fog of war etc) and lets them control their units etc [...]
Consult ~/dev/llm/docs and include notes in that file about how LLM could be used here via a new tools plugin
There are a few more replays like this linked in the README. I hope to turn this into a full league table at some point in the future.
v11: Random Maps
This version exists purely because I glanced at my Claude Usage page one day and saw that I'd only used 75% of my weekly allowance and it was resetting in 45 minutes. I decided to see if I could get an extra Battle Drones feature from my remaining tokens, and picked "random map" as the target:
Design and implement a mechanism for generating a random map using any of the available biomes - it should be the size of the largest map and rivers and bridges and rocks and forest and scrap and crystals are all in play. Make them rotationally symmetric and use a seed to allow them to be selected or reused later. You have 45 minutes to build this! Be creative.
Here's the transcript, and an image Claude generated to show me its work:
v12: Multiplayer via sound
I only just got this working, so I've not had much time to actively test it yet. The latest Battle Drones now supports multiplayer via two devices sat within microphone distance of each other!
This feature started out as my Chirp Pong experiment from last week. I pointed Claude Code at that working proof of concept:
Clone Simonw/tools from GitHub and look at recent branches for the example pong game that uses web microphone to implement multiplayer between two phones via audio signals
Build a version of that for battledrones
Opus built this Radio Probe tool to measure how much bandwidth we could get between two devices and, based on positive results from that, implemented a full audio modem system. I've tried it between laptops, iPhones and iPads so far and it seems to work really well!
Why use sound for this? Because I love static HTML that costs nothing to run, and I don't want to spin up a server somewhere and then stay responsible for keeping it operating for as long as anyone might want to play the game.
Some thoughts
I know almost nothing about game development. This makes it a great opportunity to try out coding agents in a field where my existing software engineering experience has less impact on the results.
Games are also super low stakes. The worst that can happen is one of my silly game experiments suffers a bug.
... but I can now see a path to vibe coded games like this being taken seriously. Battle Drones is fun, it looks good, it has innovative features (the multiplayer-over-audio thing is a first for an RTS as far as I can tell).
I'd love to see what someone with better taste than me and a driving passion to produce something truly exceptional could build!
A few other observations from this project:
Static HTML and JavaScript is a fantastic medium for games development. WebGL works great, and Three.js (and Phaser before it) are excellent platforms to build on that the current models know inside out.
This also lets them run as Progressive Web Apps - I didn't ask for it, but Battle Drones works offline. I was able to play it on a plane despite never having directly installed it - my phone had it cached.
Giving Claude an OpenAI API key and telling it to generate images using OpenAI's models works really well. It can view the images it has generated and iterate on the prompts.
Opus 5.5 is spectacular at 3D modeling using Three.js (and Blender, and no doubt other 3D applications as well). The same is true of GPT-6 Astra. They are absolutely capable of building models for 3D game projects.
For features like replay and multiplayer it's useful to have a deterministic simulation engine. At one point Claude had to replace calls to Math.sin() and Math.cos() and friends with custom versions because different browsers (Chrome vs. Safari, for example) returned very slightly different numbers, desynchronizing the replay.
Opus 5.5 can write music! There are no audio files in this project - the soundtrack is entirely generated through code, varies across different maps, and even gets more intense as the battle heats up. See Scrimshaw Jukebox for a previous experiment with Claude for music composition.
I still can't get over how well the prompt "Make it a LOT more fun" worked.
Audio-based multiplayer between static HTML games works! I hope to see a whole lot more games use this same pattern - in digging around today I've not found much prior art beyond Siner by Alon Horesh and ggwave by Georgi Gerganov (also of llama.cpp fame).
Claude Code "Ultracode" burns tokens like there's no tomorrow, but it can also solve complex problems (like adding audio-based multiplayer) from a single prompt.
I'm still not quite over the guilt of building software in this way. I don't feel like I've earned the right to create something this good, in a field in which I have so little prior experience! At this point I've shown it to enough people in private that it felt wrong not to publish it for everyone else to see and learn from.
Update: Online multiplayer support
Earlier in this article I said:
Games are also super low stakes. The worst that can happen is one of my silly game experiments suffers a bug.
Then I tried playing the multiplayer version with Natalie... and the high pitched modem sounds gave her a nasty headache!
That's a pretty bad bug. I added a warning and was then inspired to build proper network multiplayer. I tried getting WebRTC to work but couldn't get a connection going between two of my own devices even on my own WiFi network, so I had Claude build a simple, stateless WebSockets relay server instead:
If I wanted to support multiplayer between two devices at a very low cost without storing any state on the server could I do that with a tiny asyncio web server running on the cheapest Fly instance?
Build the server and the fly.toml for deploying it, use Fly application name battledrones-relay - put that in a folder in the repo, include deploy instructions in the README in that folder
Here's the resulting server. Since this scales to zero and runs on a single Fly.ioshared-cpu-1x instance it should cost me no more than $2.19/month - and that's if it stays hot and serving connections the whole time.
Battle Drones now supports online multiplayer. Click "Duel a friend online", then either share the resulting room URL via your messaging app of choice or have them snap a picture of the displayed QR Code.
I also added a feature where you can copy JSON of the match once it has ended and then feed that into the replay feature to rewatch your game.
I didn't expect to introduce online multiplayer this soon, but the headache bug felt like it warranted an urgent alternative.
Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code:
Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible.
If you're a programmer who thrives on building working systems and doesn't care too deeply about the problems solved along the way, LLMs are the gift that keeps on giving.
If directly solving those problems was a big part of your enjoyment, the loss is very real.
It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,� not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program.
Since you have a Commodore 64, there are really only two options for getting new programs this month: COMPUTE!’s Gazette and RUN, and you have to hope that one of those magazines isn’t sold out at the book store. So let’s get going.
Go To The App Book Store
You will need to ask your mom if you can ride your bike to the mall. The dirt mall is closer, but the magazine stand at the dirt mall doesn’t carry any computer magazines, so you’ll need to take a longer ride to the good mall, where the book store actually has computer magazines. It’s a couple of miles to the mall, so usually you would have a friend come with you, but you called their house and nobody picked up, so today it’s a solo trip.
Only one book store carries computer magazines at this mall; the other one only carries magazines about “serious� topics, but they can order back issues of a magazine for you if you want, you just have to wait a few weeks and they’ll call you when it comes in.
The guy at the book store doesn’t know the difference between the different computer magazines, so you can’t ask him if they have the one you want in stock, and he’s probably not going to answer a kid anyway. So you just have to go through all the titles one by one, and hope nobody put a copy of People or Omni in front of it by accident.
There are no ratings, and no reviews of the programs themselves. The closest thing you get is the magazine’s own reviews of hardware — modems, mostly — and a cover that promises you the issue has the thing you want. This month’s cover has a “Buyer’s Guide To Modems� banner across the top.
Once you’ve got a copy of COMPUTE!’s Gazette and you’re checking out at the store, you can see that it’s three dollars for the magazine (about nine bucks in 2026 money). If you’re lucky enough to have a five dollar bill, you’ll still have two dollars left over after buying the magazine. That means you’ll have enough money to swing by the record store later and grab a 45 of one of the new singles, like Sheila E.’s “A Love Bizarre,� written by Prince, or The Bangles’ “Manic Monday,� written by Prince, or Prince and the Revolution’s “Kiss,� written by Prince.
Pick Your Program
Now it’s time to race home with the new magazine in hand. You’ll have to wait for everybody to get off of the TV that’s by the computer so you can switch it over to the channel the computer is on and get down to work.
Turn on the switch, and you’re at the blinking blue cursor where it says READY. while the screen is still warming up a bit.
When it comes to installing apps programs, it’s all about options, and this month, we’re spoiled: there are two! They’re both games: Survivor, an arena game where, “if you’re quick of mind, eye, and hand, you might outfox your opponent,� and Shifter. Truly, an embarrassment of riches. Since Survivor is the one on the cover, we’ll go with that one.
(Two or three programs a month is pretty typical. That’s… the app store.)
Type It In
Getting this program running is standard stuff — you just read the article on page 36 that describes the game, and then flip to pages 106 and 107 where there’s the code for a short BASIC loader, and then continue on to pages 107 and 108, where there are 345 rows of densely-packed listings consisting of 9 hexadecimal character pairs, all of which have to be typed in perfectly with zero errors or else your entire game will refuse to run.
A quick sample of the early part of your task looks like this:
After you’re done typing that page in, you’re about a quarter of the way done, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes.
Wait, what’s that? Where are you supposed to be typing these in? Simply type them into the MLX program where you… wait, what’s that? You don’t have the MLX utility that’s used to type in machine language code for games and programs listed in the magazine?
Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll find the code for it on page 94. That one’s only 100 lines of code, so it should be easy enough to type in. And of course, you’ll know if you made any mistakes when typing, thanks to the Automatic Proofreader.
Wait, you don’t have the Automatic Proofreader program?
Well, no worries. It’s only another 31 lines of BASIC code, which you can find on page 97. (This one you have to type in perfectly on your own; there’s no proofreader for the proofreader.) Once you do that, you’re all set.
Now, you can just use the program that lets you enter the program to make your program. It should only take about half an hour to type in the code for the Automatic Proofreader, and maybe another hour or two for MLX. Let’s call it two hours total between them.
After that, Survivor is ~30 lines of BASIC plus ~350 lines of hex code, so… maybe six hours? But at least MLX will catch any typos as you go.
Once all of this is complete, be sure to save your work to a floppy disk so you don’t have to type it all in again! If all you have is a cassette deck and you’re saving to tape, it’s going to take probably 10–20 minutes of staring at a blank screen when you save, so set aside some time for that.
In total, it should only take you about 8 hours to have Survivor ready to play, plus however long it takes you to get to the mall, buy a magazine, and come back.
Ready To Play
(Click or tap to get started.)
[This is Survivor by Kevin Mykytyn and Mark Tuttle, from COMPUTE!’s Gazette, March 1986, running in the VICE emulator. The game loads and runs on its own, which takes a few seconds.]
Controls: the yellow player uses W/A/S/D to move and F to fire; the cyan player uses the arrow keys to move and Enter to fire.
Next Steps
The Download
Someday, rather than typing all of this in, you might be able to use your 300 baud modem to download already-created versions of these games and tools. You could dial a local BBS, if there’s one nearby. If you’re unlucky, the only one you can reach is a long-distance call, and you’ll be paying by the minute for as long as you’re connected. Or you could look for a local dial-up number for the Quantum Link online service (which will eventually evolve into America Online!).
Transfer times can range from tens of minutes to hours, and of course during those calls, you are tying up what’s usually the sole voice phone line for the household. Anyone picking up a phone handset in the house threatens to knock your connection offline, forcing you to start the whole process all over again.
Customization
Now that you’ve enjoyed your game of Survivor, there are some fun ways to customize your little computer and give it a personal touch.
Just for context, here’s a to-scale comparison of the screen resolution of your Commodore 64 to the dimensions of an iPhone Duo’s unfolded screen.
Hover over (or tap) the comparison to see a C64 prompt and an App Store icon at the same scale.
You can’t change the wallpaper on your Commodore 64, but you can easily change the background colors for both the center area of the screen and the border. All you have to do is manually assign the proper numeric color code to the correct memory register corresponding to the values of each of those settings.
Memory address 53281 will set the background color for the primary content area, and a color code of 1 sets a nice readable white background, so it only takes a simple POKE 53281,1 command at the prompt, and you’re all set. Similarly, POKE 53280,4 will make the border of the screen a nice bright purple color, and of course there are a full complement of 16 colors to choose from.
Naturally, none of this customization is stored anywhere permanent, and it will all be lost if you turn off your computer or run a program.
READY.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of how to get one game running on your Commodore 64, and perhaps gained a little appreciation for how things have gotten a bit simpler over the years.
Also, I will be entertaining a motion to return to calling our software “programs� instead of apps once more. Perhaps we could use the term to distinguish the software that’s created by humans actually typing things in, as opposed to the kind that’s merely generated by machines?
My observation of air travel is that if there is one significant impact on a flight, there are guaranteed two additional impacts. An example: if my gate changes at the last moment, it is quite likely that departure from the gate will be delayed, followed by a further delay on the tarmac. Unexpected changes in complex systems create further unexpected changes downstream because complex systems are, well, very complex.
A simpler and more personal way to look at this is that when you are traversing complex systems (airports, credit card websites… really any large bureaucracy), there are two paths:
The happy path. Whatever you are attempting to do (fly home, change your auto-pay settings, paying a bill) is a well-known and on-the-rails process. You can sense this happiness because as you complete each action, you receive feedback: “Yes, we know what you are trying to do. Yes, we can help. Yes, we know what to do next. Don’t worry. We got you.”
Divergence from the happy path leads to one specific path: the sad path. All that positive feedback vanishes. I’m not talking about the dark patterns of corporations trying to trick you into not canceling your account; I’m talking about a truly one-off request that is reasonable, but so infrequent that no one built a happy path around it.
Once on the sad path, you are desperately looking for one specific human: The Insider.
In Defense of Process
Hey, I know you’re mad. I’ve been there, too. You missed the connection, your airline rebooked you onto a partner flight, and now no one can see your checked bag. You started on one website, then the other, and now you’re on the phone with what sounds like a human; you are getting the runaround.
Deep breath.
“Process is documented culture” is what I like to say. Long ago, this company you currently hate was smaller, hungrier, and more nimble. This was working out for them, as evidenced by rapid growth. The problem during rapid growth is that there are so many new humans showing up that it becomes more and more expensive to train these new humans in how this company works, so someone raises their hand and volunteers, “I will write down how we work, and I will share this with the new folks.”
This is a noble person trying to help. Remember that. This person gets the OK, and they (and others) start the arduous task of documenting how the company works and quickly discover two things:
Doing this thoroughly is an impossible task. There are too many people, processes, and products, so they…
Focus on the most important processes that need documenting. They document the visible, exciting, and profitable happy paths. They likely uncovered and discovered sad paths as they did their work, but their prioritization at the time was, “This doesn’t happen a lot, so… who cares?”
These clearly defined happy paths are fortified, refined, and built into the pillars of “How We Work.” The core business revolves around these many happy paths, but as anyone who has worked in this large business knows, reality is a mess.
The Power is Off
PG&E — Pacific Gas and Electric. For reasons unknown, the power was off at the house. No text, no email. Bills were paid. Visiting the website revealed nothing helpful. A call pointed me to a robot who gleefully told me, “Everything looks good.” When I finally reached a human, they reported, “Everything looks good.”
“The power is off.”
“We’re not seeing that here.”
“The power is off.”
“Hmmmmm. Wait. This is interesting. Can I put you on hold?”
I wait ten minutes before the call is dropped.
So what happened? I diverged from the happy path. The human on the other end of the phone probably knew something was up, but didn’t know what to do next because they’d never seen this situation before. Combine that confusion with their incentive — they are measured on how quickly they can resolve calls, so my situation represents a threat: I don’t know what to do here, and the longer it takes for me to figure it out, the worse my review. So, put him on hold. And hang up. Victory!
Having spent many days of my life on the sad path, I know two things:
Keep pushing
Seek The Insider
I call back. Same robot hoops, then the robot reluctantly points me at another happy path human, and I do the only move I know at this point: I get mad. Yes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but honey is not working at this point. I get mad.
“The power is off. It’s been off all day. This is my second time talking to a human, and it takes twenty minutes to actually get to a human. How can you help?”
Moment of truth: I either get hold-dropped again, or they hear the frustration, and they escalate.
Each time I am interacting with a new human — shoulder-to-shoulder — looking to complete a task, I quickly look to answer one question: “Do they get it?” The Insider gets it… immediately.
“How can I help you, sir?”
“The power is off at the house. It’s been 12 hours. Everyone says it’s fine, but the power is off.”
“Hmmmmm. I see. Did it go off at 8:30 am this morning?”
THERE. THERE IT IS. THIS COULD BE THE INSIDER.
Calmly, biting my tongue, slowly, “Yes, 8:30 am on the nose.”
“Got it. Let me… wait. Ooooooh. A 2319 — I haven’t seen this in a long time.”
IT’S THE INSIDER. IT’S THE INSIDER OH MY GOD OH MY GOD ALL MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED.
I say nothing. It’s such a rare occurrence to find The Insider. My mind is racing. How can I get their contact info? How do I send them a cake? Their favorite cake. You bet I want to ask what a 2319 is, but I must not interrupt their flow. This is The Insider doing their best work.
“Ok, so I see what happened…” And they explain, at length, completely, confidently. Yes, it’s an initial dumb error on PG&E’s part, but that’s not the point. I am on the phone with a human who deeply understands the complicated, messy, and essential systems around them. They haven’t given up and aren’t just reading the workflows on the screens in front of them; they care… they are curious.
If The Insider seems familiar, dear reader, you are probably thinking of The Wolf. There are similarities to these archetypes.
Like The Wolf, The Insider looks like they work outside of the regular system that runs the business. Incorrect: The Wolf works outside of the system because they despise process; The Insider is an expert on the system. Both understand how the system works, but while The Wolf avoids the system because of its onerous impact on agility and velocity, The Insider knows where the system came from and why it exists. The Wolf thinks the system is a joke to be ignored, but to The Insider, it’s home.
The Insider jumps in when it’s time to help. They jump in on the saddest of paths. They arrive when the situation is foreign to everyone involved and deep system knowledge is required.
Wondering why you aren’t talking to The Insider yet? It’s because your path isn’t sad enough, yet.
The Process Inflection Point
Remember that human who raised their hand and said they’d write it down. It didn’t feel like a big deal in the moment. Yes, yes. That seems like a good idea. You zoomed right past a major inflection point of your company. See, until that point, much of what is important about your company existed in the heads of the folks who are running the company. They don’t need an artifact; they know.
The creation of this artifact allows for the creation of a set of employee variants that heretofore have not existed. Broadly, these are enforcers of the process, and their creation, as discussed endlessly, also creates consternation in your company because of the perceived assault on freedom. The argument: Why does anyone need to write it down? We already know.
They do. They do now. In five years, when you’ve grown 10x, they will have forgotten because they’ve moved on… either to harder problems or another company.
You know who doesn’t forget? The Insider. They’ve been here since the beginning, or they were minted during the process inflection point. In either case, they know some or all of the system. They didn’t build it, but they desire to understand it.
Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth, a daring international project that could yield new insights into the formation of the Solar System.
The robotic Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, lifted off at 3:41 pm EDT Monday (4:41 am Japan Standard Time Tuesday) from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.
The MMX spacecraft rode into orbit atop a 207-foot-tall (63-meter) H3 rocket, Japan's flagship launch vehicle. The rocket assigned to MMX debuted a new souped-up configuration with four strap-on solid rocket boosters, full-throttle main engines, and an extended payload shroud to accommodate the demands of Japan's heaviest and most ambitious interplanetary mission to date.
He has a point, though—many of the videos on the platform are lackluster. But if you know where to look, there’s plenty to educate, entertain, and enlighten even the most snobbish viewer.
In that spirit, I share fourteen recent YouTube videos of exceptional merit. Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments.
Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month.
I pay close attention to those indie virtuosos who build their careers on YouTube—many have no choice, because they are ignored by the major labels. The big music companies lost interest in this kind of spectacular musicianship long ago. So these hyper-talented individuals bypass the gatekeepers, and go directly to the fans.
Polish guitarist Marcin Patrzałek is one of these self-made viral stars. In a fairer world, artists of this caliber would have institutional support. But we don’t live in that world. So Marcin takes everything into his own (very capable) hands.
He recently released a video in response to critics who insist that playing guitar at this level has to be fake. The real-time transcription is a nice addition.
Marcin didn’t invent this dazzling style of percussive finger-tapping on the fretboard. (A lot of this tradition comes out of my old Palo Alto neighborhood, where Michael Hedges and Stanley Jordan did wonderful things on their six strings.) But he is taking it to another level.
If you’re game for more, here’s another recent video from Marcin. He claims this is his hardest guitar composition. It makes you wonder why this kind of music—which is viscerally appealing even if you know nothing about the guitar—gets so little attention on TV and other corporate media platforms.
I was a formidable Scrabble player in my youth. But I could never compete with Nigel Richards, the greatest Scrabbler of them all. He’s so good he can even win tournaments in French, although he doesn’t know how to speak the language.
David Eldar, another Scrabble champion of note, has claimed that Richards is “the best player at any game that ever existed….He’s not human.”
This video gives some insight into how he does it. But it still seems like magic.
Can a nuclear engineer save Guitar Center—a company that filed for bankruptcy during the COVID lockdown. The Wall Street Journal thinks so.
I know very little about the singer featured below. But I’ve carefully trained my YouTube algorithm, and it now gives me useful recommendations from off the beaten path. The platform recently served up this gem.
Imagine RoboGym. There’s a button labelled “Lift”. Press it & you see a weight go up in the air & back down. Move the slider below & more or less weight moves. A helpful counter tells you how many joules of energy your workout has consumed.
Not the point of a workout? Correct. Genies are being designed as a RoboGym for the mind. What if they weren’t? Wha…
While most Cletus Safaris aren’t worth a damn, this one from CNN does have an important bit (boldface mine):
Barack Obama may have left the White House almost a decade ago, but I have heard his name on the campaign trail with increasing frequency in recent months.
Asked about Trump’s war with Iran, Joe Black quickly pivoted: “Obama was the king of killing people with drones,” he said.
The more difficult it gets to compare Trump’s America favorably to Biden’s, the more likely it is I will hear the name Obama.
Trump loyalists say it’s Obama who didn’t love America — not the president who recently suggested he’d allow Los Angeles and San Diego be bombed by an adversary.
Trump loyalists say it’s Obama who was pulling a fast one on the American people — not the president who is making billions of dollars in crypto.
Obama whataboutisms rarely survive serious scrutiny. But the feelings and the memories, real or imagined, his name invokes for many in the MAGA base feel very real. His election, to them, is America’s true original sin.
And that original sin is The Phenomenon (and Ideology) That Must Not Be Named.
I am just through the door from several days’ travel and am wiped out, so this will not be a real letter.
Instead, just two observations.
First: it was exactly ten years ago tonight that then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the American people that Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped to have a “puppet” in the White House, and that Donald Trump was that puppet.
A scowling Trump responded: “No puppet. No puppet.”
Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear.
Trump interjected: “You’re the puppet.”
Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear you won’t admit…”
Trump interjected: “No, you’re the puppet.”
Clinton: “...that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”
Trump shook his head disparagingly.
Ten years later, Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history to cement that partnership, apparently with an eye to enriching himself.
And so, the events of the present change the way we see the past. Had Trump strongly supported Ukraine as Congress has demanded, and stood firm against Russia, a country that is, after all, a minor economic player whose military is flailing at its attempt to absorb its neighbor, we would rightly dismiss Clinton’s warning as campaign hyperbole. As it is, though, Trump’s tie to Putin—the story he has always tried to bury by calling it the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”—seems likely to emerge as the central story of the Trump years.
As Clinton wrote today: “In just the last few days: Trump made a deal for the U.S. to buy Russian diesel, an economic lifeline for Putin; he and Elon Musk blamed each other for an order that slowed down Starlink satellite connectivity over Ukraine, hampering the country’s defenses during a devastating Russian attack; and Trump waived sanctions on Russia that Congress, led by his late friend Lindsey Graham, had pushed for. Now, Putin has proposed a summit with Trump and Xi to decide Ukraine’s fate for them, bulldoze a century of international cooperation, and frame Russia as an equal to the U.S. and China.
“We’ll see if Putin’s puppet continues to dance on his strings.”
Second, as no one paying even a modicum of attention can have missed, Trump is so unpopular that support for Republicans has fallen into historically low numbers. The gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), tariffs that have destroyed markets for agricultural products and increased prices, the war on Iran that has sent prices of gasoline and especially diesel soaring and thus increased the cost of everything that travels by train or truck, the blatant corruption that is lining the pockets of Trump and his cronies while ordinary Americans can’t make ends meet, and now Trump’s open embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin—all wildly unpopular positions—mean that the districts that were firmly Republican by double digits just two years ago are now up for grabs.
That shift has revealed something interesting. Republicans running for office are refusing to hold town halls or to engage in debates with Democratic challengers. When they do show up, they tend to show how unserious they are about filling elected office, as Republican Dan Sullivan of Alaska illustrated when he asked the moderators at a debate with Democrat Mary Peltola if she had been given the questions beforehand because she seemed to be reading from notes while he didn’t know how to answer the questions. As the moderators quashed his allegation, Peltola noted: “I’m prepared!”
In the past, Republicans in safe Republican districts did not have to appeal to constituents or campaign, apparently because the letter “R” was enough to get voters to make a mark next to their name. In this new environment in which constituents are furious with Republican policies, Republicans hoping to be elected continue to keep their heads down, apparently hoping that they can be elected, or reelected, if they simply keep their mouths shut.
Their invisibility raises the question of why these people, who evidently don’t care about representing their constituents, would want to hold national office. Perhaps they want to hobble the federal government to enable wealthy businessmen to gain even more control over the country. Perhaps they want to enable the rise of a theocracy. Perhaps they are hoping to make money off their offices. Perhaps they simply want the prestige of a federal office.
But the extreme gerrymandering of states at the hands of Republican lawmakers that made their candidates shoo-ins in the past also means those Republican candidates are weak. New scrutiny of those candidates as Democrats challenge them is revealing just how weak they are.
In Texas, for example, Republicans are running Trump’s hand-picked candidate for the U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, a stunningly corrupt man who has recently been revealed to have spent New Year’s Eve 2024 partying in Dubai with a mistress and two men who are fugitives from U.S. law. In Kansas the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is incumbent senator Roger Marshall, a man who has been revealed as having sued more than 700 of his obstetrical patients for unpaid bills, resulting in 81 arrests.
In North Carolina, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley has little to recommend him other than Trump’s endorsement; the same could be said of the Republican candidate for Senate from South Carolina, Darline Graham, whose main qualification is that she is former South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. The story is the same across the country as Republicans field subpar candidates. Even in Maine, where Senator Susan Collins should have been a strong candidate for the party, stories of apparent corruption are undermining her candidacy.
As Paul Waldman noted in Public Notice on October 15, these stories and others are “just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot, the [Republican Party] has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado. Marx refuses to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art he invented. Normal stuff!”
In contrast to the Republicans hoping to coast to election, the Democrats running for office are holding town halls, listening to the people of their districts, needling their opponents who refuse to debate, and using the word “mission.”
The contrast between the two is a snapshot of a dying party that is no longer bothering to compete, and a rising party whose candidates are eager for the job and willing to work for it. It reminds me of the 1850s, when the Democrats, who were so accustomed to holding office that they assumed they were entitled to their posts, met the rising Republicans, whom Democrats considered too uncouth to hold office, but who ended up dominating the political system for the next seventy years.
