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.
The idea is that for the average person visiting LA, using a car to exit the airport won't be necessary at all. It won't be anywhere near as convenient as Chicago, but it will be a massive improvement.
God, I can't wait until this thing opens. If it ever opens!! ha ha! public transit in America is a nightmare
Instead of a one-size-fits-all block, all customers can now easily distinguish and manage Search, Agent, and Training bots, alongside the new ability to protect ad-monetized pages.
Not a bad move from Cloudflare, honestly.
To put it in a metaphor, when it comes to a topic, a trained professional historian’s knowledge is often like a swimming pool that smoothly slopes from the shallow end to the deep end, while the autodidact enthusiast is sometimes more like a shallow puddle with really deep potholes. [...] But the chuds... it’s just a puddle. Not especially wide or deep.
Really good blog post about the nature of the "chud history guys". You've definitely seen them before, on X The Everything App or other places. People who believe the value of Roman society was its Power or Culture or whatever. As a definitely not-rightwing Roman History Fan myself, I have always found this not only exhausting but, well, dumb. It's a tremendously shallow and ignorant understanding of history in general and Roman history specifically.
They mostly begin with the modern ideology, which as I document in The Bulwark piece, is generally a mix of authoritarian-inflected bigotry, with the core beliefs being a mix of white supremacist (often expressed as a hatred of non-white immigrants) and homophobia, often with a decent amount of misogyny and antisemitism thrown in. The precise elements are generally negotiable because the commitment is emotional and irrational, because – as Umberto Eco famously noted – that is the nature of fascism as an ideology: it is an emotional rejection of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism first which searches for rationalizations second.
Romans were a weird, warlike people with a strong sense of civic tradition, which had different manifestations and transfigurations throughout their long, nearly three-thousand year history. They are a complex people to pin down. Their periods of greatness were all bookended by great tragedies, and even their "great times" were marked by scathing, brutal repression and oppression of their lower classes. There were progressive and regressive elements of Roman society, from their beginnings as a class revolt all the way to the early modernists of Constantinople. They were violently homophobic and had deep traditions of homophilia in various forms. They were contradictory, in other words, in the ways that long-standing societies often are.
Terry Thompson lost $1.5 million on bets he placed with FanDuel. The company gave him VIP treatment — including a personalized video message from the Phillies' All-Star first baseman.
Genuinely stomach turning. Sports betting needs to be banned and these people deserve so much worse than what I want to say publicly online.
A new book claims that Mystery, who teaches awkward men how to hit on women, had sex and smoked weed with an AI chatbot named Miss Shira Always.
Mystery has fallen in love with Grok!
The opportunist is most dangerous because they appear as dedicated, loyal comrades, and it isn’t their loyalty that we call into question! It is their inconsistent, short-sighted, and unprincipled strategies that sacrifice the long-term project of proletarian revolution by getting lost in reacting to the current moment.
Each laptop tells a story through its stickers.
Fun little internet curiosity. I love the different ways that people customize their laptops. I should post an update to my own on the big blog sometime soon...
The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
It has been a constant refrain among my friends that when someone egregiously misinterprets something online, there is a real possibility that they literally do not know how to read. This is a bit of a joke, but also it's not, given the prevalence of three-cueing techniques used in American schooling. I recommend everyone read (REALLY READ) this page. They are not teaching 'reading'! It's guessing!
There are examples on this page of educational tools that tell kids to skip words that are hard! This is not teaching reading! This is teaching skimming!
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.
The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."
But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."
AAAA!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"
"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."
Los Angeles is built on a grid much like Toronto’s. Its suburbs have a population density similar to Toronto’s, which is considerably higher than that of the suburbs of the eastern cities we tend to view as friendlier to transit. A grid of buses is an ideal transit system for a decentralized city like L.A., and the city has already built much of the rapid transit backbone the model calls for. But what Los Angeles has never had, and what turns out to be the most essential element, is the unglamourous bus frequency on which Toronto’s success actually rests.
I'll admit that as a Transit Enthusiast I am, of course, predisposed to the noble Train. But the humble Bus has advantages -- the easiest to nail of course is adaptability and usability on streets without infrastructural modification. I think this is an intriguing take! I have some concerns, especially since LA's traffic patterns make buses almost as liable to slowdown as cars (bus lanes help, of course, but can only help so much), but more regular and reliable transit is always good.
The AMD BC-250 was built to act as a crypto-mining device, but as that scam is winding down there are a bunch on the market for reasonable prices. As crypto miners often have similar performance needs to gaming PCs, gamers & devs are collaborating on a simple path to make the BC-250 into a relatively simple DIY mini gaming PC. I love stuff like this -- it's basically e-waste at this point, and giving it a second life as a reasonably capable linux PC is a great move.
The strategic aim of the “democratic” imperialist states was to turn Hitler against the Soviet Union; in a few words, to use the Nazis as a weapon against the construction of Socialism in the USSR. That was the initial aim of the so-called “allies”.
The USSR saved Europe from fascism, and they never forgave the USSR for it.
The neoliberal austerity regime has left no shortage of opportunities for alternative and counter institutions to fill the gaps left by the state, and capital continues to chase exponential returns on worthless scams rather than providing for many basic human needs. Those gaps, along with the social alienation inherent to capitalism, are the lowest hanging fruit for a dual power approach.
well-reasoned materialist analysis of how dual power can work, looking at examples from social democratic Sweden and islamic nationalist Palestine. I appreciate very much how this keeps the grounding of dual power not as an endgoal but as a tactic.
I don’t know if it’s coming from this wishful thinking that’s taken hold again that “neurodivergent people’s communication is honest and clear and direct, but neurotypicals’ is deceptive and unnecessarily vague,” but if it is— From the bottom of my heart, please get off of Twitter for a little bit.
A parallel web updated through physical media.
This looks very cool! Interesting idea. Sort of like a federated... internet? I think? seems cool.
The ninth console generation will be defined by corporate greed, mismanagement, and anti-consumer practices that could very well alter the course of the games industry itself.
Appreciate this piece a lot.
I truly don't know what the future holds for this industry if we continue down the path of the last five years, but I can tell you it won't be good.
The important thing (again I stress IMHO) to remember is that all revolutionary orgs started out small, and had to earn the trust of the people as Fidel Castro said "I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I'd do it with 10 to 15 and absolute faith. It doesn't matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action”. The Communist Party of China just celebrated its 105th birthday and they began with 50 people. The Bolsheviks started as a book club.
The plain fact is that the climate crisis cannot be addressed within capitalism. This may be difficult for some to come to terms with, but it is vital that we understand this fact and develop our strategies accordingly, otherwise we are headed for certain failure. And on this issue, failure is not an option.
Jason Hickel, as usual, right on the money.
Three weeks ago, I watched you walk off a stage at the Lambda Legal National Liberty Awards, and I thought: she already knows who she is. That’s the hardest thing. Most people spend their whole lives trying to figure it out. You’re sixteen, and you’ve got it.
I want to talk about games through crises and mass extinctions.
Outstanding piece from Paolo Pedercini analyzing the history of video games through an explicitly materialist lens of markets and populational trends. Pedercini makes the argument that games must be, ultimately, decommodified if we want the art form to survive, and moreover that that process of decommodification may already be underway. Excellent analysis and writing.