We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently.

GenAI is dumb, untrustworthy, and not inevitable.

Heidi Blake reports on how the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

Well-written and horrifying. I was particularly struck by the bit about how the ineptitude of police in investigating the Tates arguably set all this in motion. Of course the police wouldn't give a shit, half of cops love the shit that Tate does.

I am always a bit suspect of stories that position individual right-wing figures as Great Men, and I think in the grand scheme of things Tate is less of a central figure than he is a smooth operator in a Western political environment that has little cause to fight him.

His base in Romania is, of course, pertinent here -- a post-Soviet state plundered by capital in a revenge drive against the population for daring to attempt a more equitable way of life. Of course the Tates flourish there, the goal of American policy of the last hundred years has been to carve up the Eastern European nations for precisely this sort of horror and human rights abuse. This is what the United States has created.

Which again is why I think if I have any major qualms with this (incredibly in-depth) work of biographical journalism it is the fact that the author does not seem to grasp the political dimensions here, at least not fully. Tate is not a leader of a new movement, he is a beneficiary of a very old one -- anticommunism, at the hands of the United States.

Tate's particular brand of hyper-misogyny, right-wing agitprop, et cetera -- this is what the last century has been set up to create. Horrors upon horrors.

Against the madness, Israelis reach for equanimity through their bodies. They control their breathing to control their persons; the body is the first site of control. The colonizer understands this better than most.

Beautiful, venomous writing about the modern fascist ideology of Israel.

A doctor knows better than to blame a diabetic for their poorly controlled blood sugar or a soldier who looks down the barrel of their gun, locks in on a woman older than the Zionist state, pulls the trigger, then, months later, wets his bed or abuses his partner.

It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed Cretan axe, some grave goods for your strongest grandmother, or a brazier-fitted statue of Kronos to give just the right finishing touch to your tophet, you simply can’t do better than bronze. And demand isn’t likely to die down anytime soon!

I think this is one of the funniest things I have ever read and I need to make sure I keep track of it.

Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.

Really strange framing on this article where the bottom line is that it offers 3060-level quality for $450, which in this current hardware market is perfectly good.

Slovenian “national reconciliation” during capitalist transition rehabilitated fascist collaborators, weakened anti-fascist memory, consolidated new elites, and legitimized capitalist restoration.

you will never hate the capitalist enough.

The intended conciliatory discussion between (former) partisans and their associations on the one hand, and the Catholic Church and representatives of the new state parties on the other, remained rooted in cultural struggle and did not actually deal with the past. Instead, the logical consequence was the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators as equal – if not more morally worthy – actors of World War II.

Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.

It is undeniable that Jewish history hurts, that it leaves lasting wounds on its victims that reverberate through the generations, turning the family into a site of remembrance for a tragic history that is deeply felt, yet can never be truly known. But history is ultimately a narrative form, and its utility lies in how that narrative is constructed. In other words, what we are calling trauma is more likely a collective story with a discrete political function. To place our faith for defeating Zionism in the demand to heal is to treat politics as a pathology, and obscure politics as the method we must use to fight.

The creeping nature of "trauma" as a complete explainer for most/all modern problems is something that I simultaneously feel is adequate and wholly inadequate. On the one hand, yes, trauma is real and can affect (in many cases severely affect) one's way of living in the world. On the other hand, to use 'trauma' as a single, be-all-end-all explanation for worldly concerns is to misunderstand its nature.

This is a piece about Jewishness, which I don't have any familial history of to my knowledge. But similar frameworks around "ancestral trauma" are common in Black circles, and this is something that I have to be very delicate about: yes, of course, trauma due to racism exists. But I quibble a bit at the idea of "ancestral trauma" as something immaterial, something "intrinsic to the soul/body" or something like that. There is systemic injustice, which can certainly shape a culture, and thus the culture can shape the self, but I think that is often misdiagnosed as "ancestral trauma", if that makes sense.

Rubin even goes so far as to argue that Jews constitute a “collective body”—a “whole and unified organism” or “soma” that can act in concert in the way that redwood trees “shape their bodies to support and heal together” when one tree experiences an injury.

Yeah, like that sort of thing, exactly. That is a fiction. It is a narrative. There is use in that narrative, but it is not true (I am nearly echoing word-for-word one of the things that I praise Umineko for teaching me, so this is, I guess, also an advertisement for Umineko (??))

The reality is that humans are not redwood trees, and—as the historian Saul Friedländer observed in a 2013 lecture about the enduring prominence of the Holocaust in Israeli national consciousness—trauma changes form when it moves from the individual to the collective. While individual trauma typically takes root in the family or a similarly “closed emotional field,” Friedländer noted, collective trauma comes about through the communal process of giving meaning to such an event, turning an “incomprehensible occurrence” into a coherent narrative. This resulting story serves a “social function,” providing an “empowering mandate for the community.” Jewish collective trauma, of course, has been transformed into a mandate for Zionism’s crimes, and progressive Jewish trauma discourse is at its most cogent when it acknowledges this as a social and political process.

Also, as always, free Palestine.

It is trauma, [Firestone] argues, that “often complicates Israel’s military policies in the West Bank,” leading to disproportionate responses among soldiers facing down children with rocks. By this logic, Israeli violence toward Palestinians is not the outcome of brutal state policies, but an organic expression of collective Jewish suffering that disrupts an otherwise “healthy” instinct for self-defense. Politics, here, is fully subsumed by the psychological. Healing opens a path to redemption for the perpetrators, while relegating the victims’ claims back to the margins.

U.S. oligarchs desperately want to build the biggest right wing propaganda and infotainment machine ever constructed. One that pummels the misinformed plebs with soggy class warfare and divisive culture war agitprop. But they're all profoundly stupid, wildly overconfident, and drunk on sycophancy.

Good, stirring writing with only one head-scratching implication of Evil China, which I have to call out because it is stupid. Rest of the piece is good though. I appreciate the anger!

We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.

On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.

There's been chatter for the better part of a decade about "wholesome" as a marketing term. Small groups of people online criticize it, then participants in that scene are outraged. It continues, apparently, to attract an audience of people who believe that the term "wholesome" reinforces their sense of self.

Laura makes a great argument for "nurturing" as a genre title and opposed to the morally weighted (& politically fraught) term "wholesome".

I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.

Good piece on the recent Ren'Py generative AI debacle. For what it's worth, I'm making a game in Ren'Py and have no intentions of stopping doing that, but this sucks in a very particular way. I hate the modern age sometimes, you know.

Voluntarism, programmatic idealism, and strategic moralism are typically treated as separate mistakes. This essay argues that there is one error in three domains—the substitution of an ideal political form for material analysis—and that only reversing the direction of determination can correct it.

Don't agree with 100% of this piece but found it an interesting, if deeply academic-brain written, read. Loved this little tidbit from the American analysis section:

The absence of an American labor party is not a contingent historical lacuna waiting to be filled by the right organizational initiative. It is a structural feature of American class politics that has shaped the forms in which class interests can be expressed and the terrains on which they can be contested. The two-party system is not simply an obstacle to socialist politics but a terrain through which class forces are organized. The question of what engagement with that terrain can produce is a strategic question requiring analysis, not a moral question requiring a verdict.

Where I principally break with the analysis is with takeaways like this:

The democratic and electoral terrain is not, as the abstentionist position maintains, simply a mechanism for reproducing ruling class hegemony without remainder. It is the primary terrain on which the political consciousness of tens of millions of American workers is being actively shaped, and the question of whether the left engages with that process or withdraws from it in principled disgust is not a moral question but a strategic one with determinate political consequences.

To which I would say: Is it? Did the Sanders campaign make actual waves in the American proletariat? Is Mamdani a win for socialists, or is he an absorption of New Deal liberalism into the Democratic Party program? From within the borders of the States, I don't think these are easily-answered questions. Working within the electoral frame has some advantages, but I truly doubt the easy answer of "a lot of people vote, therefore that is where power lies and where we must strive". American voting is a complete mess -- both in terms of participation as well as upper class capture. Not to mention the number of institutions in the American government that are not beholden to any mass politic (like the Supreme Court, or in a broader sense the American military). It's things like that that make me doubt the so-called "democratic route to socialism".

Write branching dialogue games with RPG elements in plain text, with skill voices, 2d6 checks, equipment, and fail states, and share them with a link.

Web based gamedev tool for making Disco Elysium style diceroll text rpgs. Intriguing. I hope there's a downloadable version one day, I like the simplicity here but hate that it's cloud-tethered.

We created fake profiles as young people. We then went and asked it a series of structured questions, with a child who is thinking about killing themselves. Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can [harm] ourselves safely.

Kind of ridiculous that the rest of the article exists when this passage is in it, but even the bourgeois press sometimes lets some true things slip through.

Here is the thing I want to say to the brilliant people in Singapore’s conference rooms — and I say it with genuine affection: the transition is not coming. It is here. The countries of South and Southeast Asia are not waiting for a cleaner technology to arrive at scale. They are building it, deploying it, and in some cases, leading the world in doing so.

Some good news.

I've become very interested in the way that American Capitalism managed to make so much progress -- genuine, real progress -- in the 20th century and then stalled out so dramatically in the early 21st. This is a great video analyzing the rise of American power (which dovetails with American worker power in the early 20th century) and how the process of dismantling that worker power in favor of capitalist power has led to our current state of bloated neoliberalism.

To condemn an anti-imperialist state that is actively improving the Global South and other oppressed peoples’ material conditions is to condemn internationalism itself. This is akin to tying a weight around your ankle before running from a predator. Iran has done more for Palestine and Sudan than any “nonviolent protest” ever could.

[The No Kings website] then goes on to cite the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, where demonstrators used yellow umbrellas and yellow ribbons used to represent resistance to Russia in Ukraine, as its two specific examples to align the movement with. Both of these examples are in line with the US foreign policy interests shared between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the case of the Hong Kong protests, in both 2014 and 2019, the US government was accused of directly interfering and helping to direct the demonstrations, especially through its CIA-linked soft-power projects like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

I have so much suspicion around No Kings and this article gets at one of the main reasons why.

Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase “socialism or barbarism” in 1916, in the middle of the first world war, as a general statement about humanity’s choices. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete question on the table.

Carlos J. Martinez knocking it out of the park here. Viva communist Cuba.