ah yes, yearn, my favorite javascript package manager

Like, just listen to the lyrics carefully - the guy is more or less telling his star-kid how to survive Trumpism.

Which would be pretty meaningless, except the Nazis think this song is about them in a FLATTERING way.

It is not.

My wife bought new salad cutlery and because of the weird number of arms on the fork my first impulse was "that's AI". Which of course doesn't make sense because I was holding the object in my hands.

Terrific piece by William Dalrymple in the NY Times on the East India Company, and the parallels to our times today. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/opinion/ai-power-lobbying-military-britain-east-india-company.html?unlocked_article_code=1.81A.QCsJ.Alp27s-tRfaa&smid=url-share His book The Anarchy is a must-read. Shashi Tharoor also does justice to the subject in his book Inglorious Empire.

On some level it is very funny that the Nazis have effectively created the world depicted in "Silent Running" except they're the authoritarian state in the story.

Like, I always found it fucking absolutely obnoxious that the fash hijacked that song as a metaphor for MENA politics and or being forced by "an authoritarian state" to recognize that gay people are in fact human beings too.

But no, they literally just made that song relevant on purpose, but in the opposite way Mike meant it.

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

@dgar

I have an idea of how you could play federated blackjack.

The dealer makes a random shuffle. They send a hash of it to the player.

Then the dealer and player do a diffie-hellman key exchange to create a random number. The dealer re-shuffles the shuffled cards using this as the random seed.

Then we play in the clear: The dealer sends the next card, the player sends their choices.

At the end, the dealer sends their chosen random shuffle in the clear, so the player can validate.

"RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate": Lawmakers call for criminal probe, ouster

RFK Jr. went to Samoa to spread vaccine fears. The measles outbreak after killed 83.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/rfk-jr-has-lied-to-the-senate-lawmakers-call-for-criminal-probe-ouster/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

@britown -1 for the TV position but +100,000 for the movie

Oh come on! Stop doing the pin next to the border thing!!!

🗺️ August 29, 2026
5/5 countries in 7/13 guesses
🟢🟢🟡🟢🟡
https://whereabouts.earth/daily/
#Whereabouts