This is a linkblog written by Dante.

By 'linkblog' I mean this is a blog consisting of links to other sites or posts that I find interesting, noteworthy, or generally of interest. Occasionally I'll include my own thoughts on the links as well. You can subscribe by RSS to get all posts including commentary, or get daily, weekly, or even monthly updates if that is more your speed.

All links include comments sections, and you're welcome to leave your thoughts as well.

You can find my main blog here.

But the founders of the most wildly successful bakeries with the most locations seem to have pulled cookies out of their collective asses. And the PE business model is to buy a company, or a stake in it, and treat that money like a loan. The company pays it back. But the PE firm goes in with the intention of selling the company in a few years, after it has wrung as much cash as possible out of the operation to get the company’s shareholders a return that is higher than the stock market. That’s why PE investments usually mean opening lots of locations, inflating costs of goods, and enshittifying the product.

[L]et me express a perhaps controversial view that no single person in history has ever made a greater contribution to the liberation of humanity as that made by Mao Zedong. Further, if that is the case, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that he is the greatest person to have ever lived.

Rest in peace, big man.

It is a simple fact that the People’s Republic of China has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union. That the Soviet Union no longer exists and People’s China does. That it has developed further than any other major non-imperialist country has ever done. That China accounts for the overwhelming majority of global poverty reduction. That China leads the world in the fight against climate catastrophe. None of this would have happened, none of this would have been possible, without Mao and his leadership.

A free, searchable archive of public domain footage from U.S. government films. Search by describing what you see — CLIP-powered visual search, not keywords.

Really neat search engine for public domain documents and images. Was tipped off to it by this youtube video. Probably useful for people (like me) who love to use public domain material in projects.

This video explores how Cartesian dualism shapes capitalism's relationship to the body, why your body often knows something is wrong before your mind admits it, and what any of this actually has to do with building a better world.

Ignoring the clickbait headline, I think this is a really good exploration of Cartesian dualism and how that relates to dialectical materialism, communism, and revolutionary thought.

Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men.

Slightly older piece now, but a real banger for examining the modern Silicon Valley psychopaths. These people are evil and their brains are entirely rotted by AI

What is it like to be a student in Alpha School’s high school boot camp?

This is one of the strangest accounts of what, I would call, widescale academic child abuse I have ever seen. Alpha School, naturally, is a big believer in both genAI and x.com, America's two largest fascist propaganda networks.

Numerous students report that they are currently experiencing what Alpha School calls “boot camp,” which is not something I found described anywhere on Alpha’s official website, or anywhere else. The students share that, as part of boot camp, they are required to join Twitter and obtain at least 100 “authentic” followers by early October 2026.

In other words, she contained multitudes of things in apparent mutual tension with one another, albeit in her case the overall effect was anticommunist and pro-American, even as it was anti-sexist and beneficial, in particular, to "working women" in the imperial core.

The best piece on Steinem I've read so far, pointing out both her massive flaws as well as her respectable actions.

The vehicle will cost the equivalent of just under $9,000 and will be chargeable through household outlets. It seats six, but with a max speed of about 30 miles an hour and a range of 90 miles per charge, it's geared for local driving, not road trips.

Still hate cars, of course, but this is honestly incredibly cute, and it's anti-imperialist (?)

I spend a lot of time on Bluesky, for which reason my soul will surely meet oblivion in the jaws of Ammit; but while I'm there I see a lot of AI boosterism. Here's a taxonomy.

The goal of the 50-year computer is not to be tiny, ultra-portable and ultra-powerful. Instead, it should be sturdy and resilient.

Very neat little thought experiment/theorycrafting for a Long Life computer. I do think we should be thinking about this sort of thing more!

It’s just so bad, in so many different ways, on so many different levels. Trying to ignore or excuse any one of the points against it will still leave you with dozens more.

Beijing clearly had no desire to go further down the US laissez faire path where private capital accumulators would steadily more powerful. It presumably believes that the benefits of reigning in its tech industry clearly outweigh costs and risks.

A good and only-a-little-sinophobic analysis of the China 'tech crackdown', from within its timeframe (2021).

“Tech-forward” should have no place in how we think about the future. There is not a single axis. Things are not either forward or back, accelerating or retreating, primitive or modern, fast or slow. If we are having debates about who owns global compute, what AI infrastructure sits on the interconnection queue, who is paying for rate increases, who signs NDAs or negotiates the terms of data center projects, it becomes painfully obvious how shallow this framing is.

On Taylor Lorenz, AI, the Right, and the tech industry. Of course, I disagree on one point put forth in the article: There is a future vision of tech-collaborative socialism, and it is ("as much as you may not like it") the People's Republic of China.

Broadly speaking, the left represents movements, political figures, and organizations united by a critique of the capitalist system and the Republican and Democratic establishments and the fight for more social protections and power for the working class and other underprivileged classes. But this unity encompasses fundamentally different strategies for achieving this goal and visions of what it would require.

During the tumultuous interwar period in Germany, two strains of Left organization held the majority position -- the largely reformist SPD and the largely revolutionary KPD.

It was the SPD who ultimately took the cause of socialism forward, allying with centrist and rightist elements of the Weimar bureaucracy to crush the KPD. This turned out to be a relatively short period of celebration, however, as the SPD were then destroyed by the NSDAP, more commonly known as the Nazi party.

Raman regularly votes for increasing the police budget, and has repeatedly doubled down on her support of Israel. Despite their campaign promises of stopping police sweeps on unhoused communities, Raman, Soto-Martinez, and Hernandez have not only continued but even increased them during their tenure. Hernandez betrayed her campaign promise to the Hillside Villa tenant union, one of the LA tenant movement’s strongest forces in recent years. During her campaign, she promised to support the tenants’ initial demand that the city acquire the building from their slumlord through eminent domain. Instead, upon her victory, her office negotiated concessions with the tenants’ landlord behind the tenants’ backs and pressured the tenants to accept them.

Most concerningly, there is little mechanism for holding these officials accountable for positions they take that are contrary to the will of DSA-LA’s own membership. They are not even accountable to each other: three of its elected officials would even sacrifice solidarity with their own political ally’s bid for power to back the establishment candidate. This bizarre situation, in which Raman’s closest political allies have instead endorsed her establishment rival’s run, only all too perfectly captures the chapter’s distance from, not expression of, power. This approach, just like that of the Democratic establishment, may secure some policy gains and electoral successes that may benefit workers. However, it contributes little to strengthening the political independence of the working class, and developing a strategy that goes beyond simply incremental reforms.

Something I need to make clear here: if you are talking to journalists during a preview, that is on the record. We do not need to establish that we are on the record; by talking to us at a press event, you are on the record. Saying “that was off the record” after taking a poke at a former employee like Bonde did early on in the demo does not mean that I cannot quote that he described 1001 Threads of Mizan as payback for a cancelled Prince of Persia game he worked on at Ubisoft.

Good writeup of what sounds like a deeply odd playtest experience at Gamescom.

For those who are not familiar with the Marxist revolutionary canon, I will attempt — against all good counsel — to sum up the wildly varying traditions of revolutionary Marxism in a single, pithy sentence: Marxists believed —and believe — that the ruling capitalist class had enslaved the working class in all but name, and that the only way to truly free them of those social bonds would be through a revolutionary transformation of society that instituted equitable control of its means of production and its output.

An interesting piece that I appreciated reading. If I have any major critiques, they are that I think that Lenin's more liberal affectations (not ungenuine affectations by any stretch) were more pronounced in his earlier writings, especially when he was more fond of Karl Kautsky.

I don't mean this as a denigration of Lenin. I think that the political function of a strive toward "liberty", while correct in moral weighting, is insufficient for a revolutionary drive -- and I believe Lenin himself recognized this, after attempts at compromise with the bourgeoisie led to frustration and stagnation (see: the Provisional Government era).

It is, of course, also useful to note the role of Menshevik propaganda against the Bolsheviks, which this piece covers quite well.

Broadly, they argued that Lenin was unscrupulously power-hungry, inclined toward reckless revolutionary adventurism, impatient with the project of democratic revolution, and predisposed toward conspiratorial machinations that belied his conniving and deceitful nature.[25] These Menshevik descriptions of Lenin became the foundational bedrock of how he and his works would be evaluated by Western academics. Without access to — let alone awareness of — any alternative narrative, early Western scholarship on Lenin had little choice but to work with the only information they had available to them.

The beginnings, one might say, of the creation of a compatible "anti-revolutionary" Western Left.

The other major critique I would have of the piece is the disappointing and stereotypical arguments around Stalin's leadership, which ironically enough is such a trademark of the Western Left's understanding of the USSR as much as it is an echo of the Mensheviks. The ghost lives on.

I do have criticisms of the USSR -- honestly, who doesn't -- but I think it is misrepresenting the issue to blithely state that "censorship" is the crucial flaw in Stalin's era of leadership (I will cede some ground to the notion that "over-centralization" was a flaw, however -- but on the side of "Stalin overestimated the convictions of those closest to him, because he, like so many others of his cohort, was too much of a dreamer who believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of the communist effort")

I think the USSR (ironically, like the USA but for opposite reasons) overestimated the power of individual writings and popular culture. For the USA, the goal was to use popular culture as a bludgeon against the Evil Soviet Union. For the USSR, the fear was that too much critical writing or art or whatever would topple the Union. In both cases I believe they were wrong, but that is a bit of a tangent.

Regardless, there is a difference between speech and organizing, and in both the USA and the USSR, there were crackdowns on dissident organizing. This is often brought up as an example of the USSR's intolerance, even as the intolerance was against anti-communist actions, which of course... should probably be intolerated in a socialist state. Whatever! I am tangenting. Again.

I appreciated this section:

Overall, surprisingly little serious effort has been made to compare the repressions under Lenin to myriad similar measures taken by Western liberal governments under the extreme pressures of a domestic war during roughly the same period. In calling for energetic repression of their political and ideological opponents during wartime, Lenin and the Bolsheviks have no shortage of otherwise admired historical company.

For stating basically what I am saying above. If the actions are similar (or, at least, comparable), then we should judge by the goals and intent of the actions. The goals and intent of the United States in its myriad war crimes was to further American extraction, colonialism, racial hegemonies, et cetera. The goal of Bolshevik violence was to build a more just world. Yes, I judge those differently.

A revolutionary vanguard cannot afford theoretical ambiguity on the colonial question or electoral strategy. The American working class requires a party grounded in scientific socialism, and rhetorical compromises will do nothing but dilute revolutionary potential. Now, the burden falls squarely on the ACP leadership to provide the necessary ideological clarity.

For many games, dialogue choices are a core mechanic (sometimes the only core mechanic), and so they are a means to many different narrative ends. That they don't uniformly have the same level of stakes or "consequence" is, for those games, a feature and not a bug.

The Bicitractor is a pedal-powered farming tractor with electric assistance, made by farmers for farmers.

I don't know what to say about this other than I think it is an incredible invention and looks awesome. This is such a fun use of bicycle technology.