Tertulia

YouTube embeds now work, check it out:

I also added custom url previews for links to bsky.app, so they look more like quoted posts and less like article previews.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

Bluesky

Heather Bryant (@hbcompass.bsky.social)

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

I will boycott every single company, organization, or individual that takes ICE money.

newrepublic.com

ICE Has a New Recruitment Strategy—and It’s Terrifying

ICE’s $100 million recruitment plan will target the manosphere.

My primary critique of Abundance echoes this one from Sandeep Vaheesan: essentially, Democratic industrial policy is stuck in a rut. Democrats do not believe in the public production of goods. Instead, we give private producers of goods public dollars and pray they won't raise prices, because Democrats are also against price controls. From postsecondary education to healthcare and housing, it is painfully obvious to any American suffering for want of housing, healthcare, and education — and unwilling, or unable to pay additional rents in the form of interest on top of inflated prices — that this does not work. Or, to be more accurate: it delivers temporary benefits before making everything more expensive. Private interests in capitalism are profit seeking: if you give them money, they are required by the logic of the system to try to get more of it. The cronyism decried by libertarians and neoliberals is not an aberration, it is a competitive adaptive behavior inherent to the exigencies of the economic system itself.

www.bostonreview.net

The Real Path to Abundance

To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have to get the story right about what’s standing in the way.

This service is now... tertulia.social!

tertulia: f. Reunión de personas que se juntan habitualmente para conversar sobre algún tema.

It's getting late and I'm out of steam, but accomplishments: domain name ✅ big Apollo Auth refactor is mostly completed also, I should soon be able to override its templates by overriding the new ApolloTemplates case class:

I fixed a few bugs also where POSTs to Apollo endpoints would render immediately instead of redirect to GETs on error.

🎉

click my profile photo ;)

Ah, before this becomes a question: yes, I'm using LLMs to work on this project. Apollo, the authentication framework for Http4s I used as the backbone of this application, has been written almost entirely by me personally. It is the result of years of studying functional programming and web application software, e.g. servers, frameworks, and protocols. It has cool, funky type signatures like `OptionT[F, Throwable, Option[Post]]`, and `Kleisli[F], Request[F], Response[F]]`, and I know exactly what problems they help to solve, how they work, and why they're there. However, recently I've been using Claude Opus 4.5. A lot of the code for this microblogging platform in particular was generated by Claude, although the application itself was my idea, and I've made the decisions about architecture and libraries, etc. Claude's a pretty good designer and UI/UX engineer. I've also written a non-trivial amount of its code too: Claude is good, but it still whiffs often enough and I have to intervene.

So, thanks for the help, Claude and Anthropic!

Why are young Americans rejecting the two major political parties?

A hypothesis:

The Republican Party doesn't reflect their values.

The Democratic Party doesn't meaningfully change anything: its preferred tools, supply-side handouts, predictably increase costs, invite regulatory capture and rent-seeking, and eventual political rollback. We find ourselves surviving from crisis to crisis because our ‘fixes’ are expensive, unstable stopgaps rather than durable, structural solutions.

apnews.com

Young Americans are increasingly rejecting the Democratic and Republican parties, a new poll shows

New polling from Gallup shows that Americans are increasingly identifying as political independents and rejecting the labels of the two major political parties.

Iran is a victim of American imperialism. In 1953, democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état orchestrated by the United States and the United Kingdom, at the behest of British Petroleum after Mossadegh nationalized Iran's oil resources and refused to concede a more profitable arrangement to the western powers. The Americans — the CIA — called this Operation Ajax.

This is peak Cold War logic: oil, an important natural resource, had been nationalized; the United States has, historically, frequently rejected nationalization as a form of theft (cue protest by Pierre Proudhon); the U.S. wanted access to that natural resource, or, at least to ensure it was inaccessible to its rivals, and thus it acted to "secure its interests."

This is well-known history, I have nothing to add.

However, I do want to comment on a weird, problematic trend I've seen repeatedly on the American left: this tendency to support all anti-American governments under the banner of anti-imperialism.

Iran, after its 1979 revolution, came to be an authoritarian, theocratic state. Even if the United States did not exist, Iran would not be an ideologically safe place for anyone who isn't part of the in-group in power. It is a country where atheists, like Yousef Mehrdad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare, are murdered by the government for not being superstitious, to say nothing its its other extreme, reactionary and religious biases. LGTBQ+ Iranians can be, and are, harassed, arrested, and detained based on perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

Therefore, I call upon the American left in general: the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing backed by the U.S. Iran is a theocratic terror state. Resistance against the worst excesses of U.S. behavior can be done without running interference for religious bullies abroad — we have our own problems with superstition and mass cults in this country.

Support Iranians in their bid for freedom. A better world is possible only with a free Iran.

apnews.com

Death toll from protests in Iran hits at least 544, activists say, as Trump says Iran wants to talk

President Donald Trump says Iran reached out to the U.S. and proposed negotiations after he threatened action in response to a crackdown on protesters in the Middle Eastern country.