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.

Steinem’s personal views and CIA political goals aligned. Her brand of social revolution, promoted by American tax dollars, was meant to counter Soviet-sponsored revolutionary messaging. Public funds were intended to slow the Soviet scourge while showing America’s alternative democratic face.

When I was in college I read a number of Steinem pieces. I did not learn about her involvement with the CIA (bad) and views on trans people (arguably worse) until much later in life. Once again Second Wave feminism disappoints me! Interesting how well this lines up with Gabriel Rockhill's theories on the Compatible Left of the american midcentury. Ah well, rest in piss I guess

The first reveal of a game is the most uncomplicated enjoyment you'll ever have of a game, and to finally play that game when it is released is to play it in its worst, most vulnerable just-launched form, thinking of the game it could have been, the game you wanted and needed it to be.

Really good writing from Pat on games, game design, game development, reward loops, and self-improvement.

We are so used to making games for people who don't want to actually play them, that the idea that people could just play the game because they want to play it is considered naive at best.

I’m using this post to argue (through a canon of recent music videos) that the mid-2020s has developed a definite aesthetic sensibility. There are several elements that force it into 2020s specificity, and several tangential influences - Y2K-era J-horror, Norbert Schoerner, David LaChapelle. But everything in it is underpinned by an existing visual schema, the same one that dominated the Italian film industry from the late 1960s to late 1970s. The results of that sensibility are most readable in Italian gialli - a subgenre of surreal, stylish and bloody crime films.

Extremely well-researched and well-argued. As a consummate #hater of current trends I found this a great read on the contemporary slop aesthetics.

According to Oyama, players in Japan and Asia tend to be quite vocal about what they perceive as “inconveniences,” while players in Europe and North America are more likely to view these same game elements as “friction” and welcome them.

Interesting finding that I am going to attribute to the prevalence of friction-free mobile gaming being a much bigger factor in the East Asian markets than the Western (American) market.

browser-based simulator of the Windows 98 disk defragmentation service.

Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There's an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don't think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that's a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software.

Well-written and sobering. I know I always say this but it is ridiculous how common this feeling is within tech. I feel like I am having conversations like this on a nearly daily basis. It's fucking rough out here

There can be no freedom and dignity or even equality for Palestinians unless Israel as it is politically and materially constituted is no more. Until then, the core of Israeli life, which is the same core that has driven much of European colonialism, shall carry on, destroying the land and its indigenous cultures for decades onwards.

Some good writing from the DSA's Socialist Forum.

New York Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who is pretty clearly running for president in 2028, made a disappointing statement recently. She was asked about the idea of defunding and/or abolishing the police, and she responded that “woke 1.0 was crazy.”[...] I found that disappointing.

You know, I think the broad point of this essay is sound -- that the oppressor forces will always find a way to denigrate their opponents, whether or not that is "logical", and thus it is worthwhile to not play that game -- but I found myself kind of annoyed by the end of it. Here, take this passage:

Even if we grant the rather large assumption that [communism] is a de facto danger, communism isn’t the remotest danger for any of us. It’s the very furthest thing from us in an empire currently in end-stage capitalist collapse. Like being in a leaking submarine and fearing a volcanic eruption.

I fully agree with the author that it is silly for Americans to be afraid of communism and that the reason why most Americans are scared of communism is due to decades of propaganda. But this passage demonstrates that the author, too, has fallen for a bit of that propaganda.

Of course, the framing within the piece that delineates a difference between socialism and communism is a tell, but this passage -- with its implication that it is the "furthest thing" from "an empire in collapse" is just. Well, it's silly. Empires in collapse are where communism has sprouted up (the collapse of the Russian empire, the chaos of the Chinese monarchy, the revolutions of Vietnam, etc)!

Furthermore, that is a good thing! In moments of rupture there are also opportunities. That is not to minimize the potential harm inherent in rupture spaces like the one we are facing, to be clear, but we have to be open-eyed about this.

"Communist" is not just a bully's label -- though it is a bully's label in the current American political discourse, and it is one used by both the Democrats and the Republicans -- it is a political stance and a goal. Yes, we should all be Communists, but not as a defensive marker, as an identification with a program greater than the one we currently live under.

Amazing find. This site is a time capsule from about 2010 that collected images and records of home-modded PC cases from the time period (& seemingly back to about 2000). If you, like me, grew up in this era of computers, this is a wonderfully nostalgic site to poke around through. It's all in French, but I managed.

So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? We think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as "AI". If you don't fall for the marketing gimmick telling you all this stuff you work with is "AI", you aren't saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it.

Another banger piece from Emily Bender, probably the world's foremost authority on LLM-based technologies. I highly recommend this if you are often saddled with talking to people who believe "AI" is a magic future device that will save us all. Or whatever the hell they are saying these days