Nanny state machine

information flow dept.

5 Jul '26

The first lesson in machine learning 101 usually involves uncovering some hidden variable: inferring fuel prices from the overall change in SUV ownership, balmy weather from ice-cream sales and so on.

This technique used to enjoy a certain level of esoterism since it required actually comprehending one (1) graph rather than simply rattling off boilerplate, and then the barrier to entry was further heightened, at least to ^c^v enthusiasts, by the fact that it is powered by the same formalism as—gasp—regular expressions, which sufficed to make most undergrads break out in hives at the mere mention.

The tranquil isolation was eventually broken by a neighbouring field of study: since this is a common exercise for beginners, there are ample reference implementations, making it a viable target for automatic code generation. Spreadsheet jockeys who hithertofore could not be bothered to learn Python programming can now leave it to the sparkle oracle to crank out a data analyzer that is only half-broken and proceed to set it upon The New Oil™ which they have been hoarding for just such an occasion.

Which means that suddenly, marketing creeps have within easy reach the means to figure out all sorts of things merely from the consumption patterns of, say, whipped cream and iron supplements (or even the sudden lack thereof).

Simply deleting the most invasive apps from your phone is no longer enough to stay away from scrying eyes: even if you pay for your prescription glasses in cash, someone might figure out that you wear them by way of a regular purchase of wet wipes. When data brokers can operate out in the open, it matters precious little how much the actual transaction might be sieved through a one-way pad.

Faced with an unprecedented surveillance panopticon like this, a state of affairs beyond anything Stasi could ever dream of, the Epstein class has apparently decided that the solution is more snooping. After all, constituents can simply voice their concerns in the traditional manner, by way of a strongly worded letter to their democratically elected—

...nevermind.

As usual, the infantilization of society at large is being carried out For the Children™. Presumably that would be the children who have yet to be born, given that the kids who have come of age since the Noughties have very low levels of teenage pregnancy in spite of the lasting popularity of Sixteen and Pregnant.

We might quickly infer a couple of hidden variables:

• Easy access to health information on personal devices like the PSP
• The state of the post-2008 housing market leaving no room for babies

But that is most emphatically not where they want you to look. It's because of all those anonymous comments on the internet, you see. It's because Tim wants to invade public bathrooms. It's not because kids have nowhere left to play, much less live.

Heard joke once:

wallow-in-brine dept.

Man goes into restaurant that only serves sugar. Greeter start shouting, Come on in, sugar-lovers! We got cane sugar, beet sugar, vanilla sugar, we got fruit sugar, we even got... apple Martini–flavoured sugar!

Man thought this was really weird. He goes over to the barker and he sez, What is the going-on? Why can you not just serve up cuckoldings like normal people?

The barker sez, That's terrible, but try your luck with the guy down the street who sells watches, he might let you lick the salt off him.

Great joke. Everyone laughs along with Jon Haidt, and he proceeds in the grand freshwater school of Hume.

(And what science is it all based on? Haidt is a joke, leaning on another joke.)

Starting a collection

greasing the wheels dept.

2026 Jun 15

The problem with reading sites geared towards proles is that you will keep getting dogshit meta-studies stuck in your teeth:

To fill that gap, lead author Natalia Emanuel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and her colleagues conducted an analysis that drew on data from five national surveys on American workers, comparing “remotable jobs” that can be done remotely, like software engineering, and “non-remotable” jobs, like surgery.

It found that the hours that workers in remotable jobs spent working alone surged by 58 percent compared to workers in non-remotable jobs. That may not be surprising, since they’re staying at home, but the level of isolation could be ^eXt^R_eM^e, as there was also a 72 percent rise in their chance of spending an entire day with no human contact whatsoever.

Can't be alone if someone's always peeking over your shoulder, it stands to reason. In other news, open-plan offices are a great idea and not at all something copied unthinkingly from manufacturing!

We estimate that remote work can explain 64 percent of the recent increase in unemployment among young college graduates. Further, the timing of this surge suggests that remote work explains all the bulking—not generative AI, which is a groundbreaking technology that you should definitely hand over your credit card to right this moment. ✨ ❇ ✨

Funnily enough, the place to go to escape all the R₂O agitprop is Forbes, which accurately points out that this reading-over-the-shoulder school of administration, a favourite among management with no object permanence, indicates a lack of trust in the rank-and-file. Like... they're locked in some kind of... struggle...? Hmm.

Unlock bigger hands now!

microtransactions for macro economists dept.

2026 Jun 12

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
—Henry Miller

It was hardly difficult to guess that the people cramming microtransactions into every major game must have been dead inside. It's rare to get such direct confirmation, however. Straight from the Epstein files:

> Im meeting with Joel Klein on monday, any edutainment games that you like already out there
Play “Medal of Honor” or “Call of Duty” and you will learn war history. Here’s what I’ve been thinking. Video games are already great at teaching. If they don’t assess your level and put an appropriate challenge right in front of you, the game fails. Challenge too hard and you get frustrated and quit playing. Too easy and the game is no fun. That is exactly what a good teacher or tutor would do. Fundamentally the thing that works is a 1 to 1 student teacher ratio. Even if you have a shitty teacher or tutor, you will learn a lot because that person gets to know you and challenges you at your level. That doesn’t scale, but computers do. So we have to use computers to replace teachers – or at least augment them.

(That's right, he seems to have been a big believer in flow.™)

Today’s video games don’t try to teach stuff we care about. Well, except for shooting bad guys. The best scheme I’ve come up with so far is to use X-Prize or something like it to co-opt the existing video game industry. Give out a prize to the game that comes up with the best way of teaching kids anything from a normal school curriculum. Let them pick whatever they want to teach, any grade level, and just incorporate it into their product. That’s the way to get the most brains and the most users for the least money. You want to skip convincing educators and parents about this stuff and just go straight for the kids.

Imagine you are looking at a door in a video game. It has some squiggly symbols printed on it. Little munchkins walk up to that door and say “Konichiwa.” The door opens and they are greeted by a hot princess with big tits and a thong. The door closes in your face. You are going to fucking learn to read and pronounce kanji.

Unleash that on 5th grade boys and then next thing you know, you’ll have an entire generation of bilingual kids speaking Japanese to each other behind the backs of their parents and teachers. Edutainment is for pussies. It doesn’t work. Once kids catch on that you are trying to teach them something they shut down. We have to keep the boobs and guns and profit. You see how much money video games are making
these days? Fuck educational reform. We need educational subversion!

Note that the above was not in fact a novel idea: tying everyone's pension funds to the stock market was an easy way to get regular salarymen to feel like they were taking part in high finance. You are being indoctrinated right now, even if you don't have a stock broker. Just look at this humongous IPO! These dollar values are definitely tethered to reality!

Today, of course, market indoctrination is mostly carried out by influencers, as exemplified by teenagers who have been tipped off that flipping Pokémon cards is the easiest way to make a quick buck. (Heartbreaking! This kid is treating trading cards as the corporate products that they are rather than projecting sentimental value onto them!)

The konnichiwa–oppai style of education that was proposed by The Jeff has in part already been put into action — it's how Genα learned to use the internet — and the results have been generally dismal. What they pick up on is not how computers work, it's how to get their fix: how to access YouTube or some poxy MMO. The plentiful books in Elder Scrolls games rarely promote literacy, they promote rifling through them to see if there's a skill-point bonus for cracking them open. In fact, just a few years of social media was all it took for users to forget that they could customize typefaces on any website (using custom stylesheets or plugins).

At least this provides a convenient shorthand for dismissing anyone who's a tad too fond of the language of Challenge™, incentives, powerful motivators and the like: they give off Epstein vibes.

And of course there's a hefty dollop of Artificial GeNeRaL InTeLlIgEnCE in there:

Even Second Life allowed conversion of their internal [Linden] Dollars to and from USD ...

Basically, we need real-world users who need AI services for their businesses to outsource their work to Agents in the SingularityNET ... and these real-world businesses have their assets in fiat currency... so what else can ya do? […] But for the AGI parasite to overcome [the] regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host, and these resources are now [lacuna]

Protip: when they start talking like it's the last chance to make Heaven's Gate, run for the exit.

Liberty and islands

Oydipus-ska dept.

2026 Jun 10

There's a lot to be said for flexibility. Deus Ex wasn't originally meant to start out where it did, but having Denton simply trudging around headquarters for half an hour proved too boring, and so the first combat mission was moved to the beginning (which means that the rather heavy-handed symbolism of placing your HQ right under Lady Liberty was in fact something of an accident).

This sort of thing seemed less consequential in the previous century, since there still appeared to be an upper limit to just how ridiculous things could get. As libby would have it, if you give people with poor impulse control free rein they will eventually turn everything into a casino and/or the middle ages. When the consumer economy mostly follows the mandate that the stupidest buy the mostest, the result is an endless cavalcade of distractions that is straighforwardly beyond satire so that any attempt to riff on it is liable to be out of date within two minutes (when there is another Rich Guy Tweet that needs reporting on.) Who even keeps up with what the world's tallest building is anymore? When the world changes as quickly as it does, digital architecture is often more dependable than the physical.

Saying that this flagrant consumerism is "not punk" would be disingenuous, given that the Sex Pistols were a prepackaged product from the get-go, basically a boy band with louder guitars and much worse hygiene. Nothing illustrates the problem of trying to include spontaneity in computer games better than GTA3, which tried to bring its city to life with performances from real radio DJs (rather like JSRF, having a plethora of radio stations is treated as a synonym for urbanity). This is in fact one of the most tendentious things about it: Where San Andreas radio stations employed sexism to rag on grunge, in GTA3 trying to offset the crime sprees with classical music will reward you with bonus homophobia, as if to say that's not very gangsta of you, that's not what this game is about.

As usual, the signature of game design shows up not in what is "intuitive" but rather in what is arbitrary  — in this case, it's the bridges between the three main islands that serve to constrain the action. The bridges gradually open as a treat for enduring the overarching plot, which might be termed a reverse Œdipus : Claude gets screwed over by a procession of father figures before finally offing the love interest (who does not possess the good sense to STFU around a guy who habitually carries a handgun.)

The mistake of Oidipus was of course to presume that he's separate from that which he observes — it's hard to pretend to be a mere rear gunner on the bread-and-circus truck when the series is now a wildly profitable franchise; having effectively become the pop culture it once made fun of, it is very much in the Rex phase.

Hollywood was originally able to dominate because it could draw on two centuries of literature (Disney just continued that strategy for a bit longer). The piggyback ride couldn't last forever, though: It all went to pot around the time when I'm waiting for the movie became a thing that people said — suddenly, it wasn't enough to mine the existing gold that could be treated as a gift of nature; scriptwriters primarily in the business of pandering were now expected to produce some nuggets all of their own.

Euler identity

Mathematical certainties dept.

2026-6-6

One of the surest signs of the equinox has long been all the students bouncing off the Intro to Programming course. Now, while it is very easy for a certain type of personality to propend to airs of superiority simply because they can string two literals together, there does in fact appear to be some knack that is required to be any kind of an effective programmer. This distinction usually shows up in a classic double-hump W-shaped distribution of grades:

A striking graph such as this is usually a sign that the underlying datapoints belong to two markedly different populations. However, speculating about what exactly constitutes that difference requires a judgement call, making assumptions that usually carry us away from the realm of disinterested science.

In this particular case, there is a clear suspect: the symbolic nature of variables in high-level languages, which is something that simply has to be grasped in order to write a half-decent program. As mentioned in the previous post, it does not matter what exactly a variable is named (since the computer does not understand English; it might as well all be numbered references). In consequence, students who do not get this will be completely stymied, and the rest of the class will leave them behind, no matter how much they might try to be with it.

Later on, another famous hurdle presents itself: pointers. Whereas the niggle with variables is to understand that they are symbolic, when students struggle with C pointers the problem lies on the opposite end of the scale — it's a failure to comprehend the material substrate of computer memory, that each byte may be referenced by a number just like cells in a spreadsheet. The nub of it is that the computer is neither completely concrete, nor a perfectly disembodied abstraction; understanding both ends of the bay is absolutely vital to attain any real skill at coding. (While there's little agreement on what exactly makes something a scripting language, a common thread is that they abstract away pointer arithmetic and dereferencing.)

Moving instead further down the rungs of the ladder of abstraction, we reach the people who see computers as basically just a toybox that they crank to produce cat pictures and clickbait. This would be the target audience for NFTs: punters who fail to comprehend the basal fact that a LCD differs radically from analogue television, that digital technology erases the distinction between copy and original because all the pixels in a raster image are replicated verbatim. Tell them that when they move a file it's really a copy-then-delete operation, and they might give you a worried look and ask if there's a way to turn it off.

The toybox / porn-machine mentality also seems to be how you get amateur vibe-coders: they're turning the crank and it's serving up cat pictures, so clearly their slopware is working splendidly. It's a bit as if someone were to claim to be conversant in medicine while having no idea what internal bleeding is; automated kargo cult programming, basically. Otterly ridiculous.

Grading on a curve is always a more or less fortunate political decision: as we've seen, it can be the wrong choice if many in attendance simply do not have the cognitive qualifications and should perhaps be encouraged to instead take remedial classes — or even change careers. When it comes to natural phenomena such as the variation in height in a population, there is the obvious explanation that people taller than 2 metres tend to be at elevated risk of heart problems, which makes it an easy guess that there has been selection pressure against it; literally a literal tall-poppy syndrome. Applying the normal distribution to less rigid domains, however, leaves the door wide open to bias.

Immanentizing the bugocalypse

Asymmetric vibesploitation dept.

25 May 2026

Many feeds have been filled as of late with breathless headlines about the shocking number of security vulnerabilities found using post-2017 AI models. There are several things to note, not least that reporting tends to omit the five-figure price tag of unearthing a single bug.

Low-hanging fruit is hardly in short supply in today's lousy software ecosystem: Mozilla's codebase is over thirty years old and has been rejiggered three or four times. While only one bug was found in Curl, it is atypical in that it is among the most hardened programs in existence (also it only has one job, which makes it less complicated to verify correct behaviour).

A more fitting subject to get into might be the OpenBSD operating system, which has been security-conscious since its inception and discloses the full details of patched exploits to ensure transparency and accountability. Though, take heed that this discussion might get a tad technical, since it assumes familiarity with an ancient internet protocol known as Electronic Mail.

2020

For context, consider an example from before vibe-coding became a word, the January vulnerability discovered by Qualys in the OpenBSD mail server. This was caused by a function returning 1 where it ought to return zero while verifying that an E-mail address was valid, enabling an attacker to pretend to deliver mail from a local user named e.g. ;command; – this would remotely execute command on the server itself.

Pretty grody considering this is what BSD used to be for: it was a system you could set up on a spare computer, plug into the office network and maybe log in to to check for updates every couple of months.

To be fair, writing the code in question may have been confusing since it was dealing with obscure functionality — the ability to deliver mail to users on the same server without typing out the part of the address after the @t-sign — which is something that hardly anyone ever takes advantage of outside of university networks.

2026

Hot off the press, we have a couple of OpenBSD bugs discovered last month by RandomDhiraj@SomeLab, aided by the Codex 5.2 model. In this case, the spam filter turned out to have a buffer overflow vulnerability — basically a miscount of where text gets updated, which allows an attacker to poke at regions of computer memory he shouldn't be able to access.

The model's internal reasoning exposition is worth quoting:

…a huge fraction of low-level C bugs show up in the details of how code handles partial writes, errors, and the bookkeeping around pointers and remaining lengths. Mentally, I'm scanning for patterns like "call write(), then advance a pointer and subtract the number of bytes written" — the classic shape is cnt = write(...); len -= cnt; p += cnt;

Note that, unlike a proper code–verification tool, this seems to lean on programmer conventions for what exactly a running tally is called (the logic flow remains the same wether it's named count, cnt or tallywhack). Still, it's fairly impressive for one person's weekend project.

Now recall the 2020 mail-server bug, which was caused by a subtle logic error that instituted Opposite Day so that mail addresses were treated as correct when they shouldn't have been. LLM code-generation tools will have been trained on source code that includes mistakes of this kind, and will merrily replicate them (in fact, the model will get a better score when it does, since it matches the training data). Logic bugs such as these are especially nasty in that they tend to hide from cursory inspection: catching them requires working through every permutation, possibly using a pencil.

As such, LLM-assisted programming introduces an asymmetry: it's best suited to probing for vulnerabilities, because an exploit only has to work once, whereas an application isn't supposed to be crashing randomly. When vibe-apps mechanically repeat the mistakes of the past, vibesploits can treat those missteps as a database of patterns to be on the lookout for. And while management has tended to regard bug-hunting as unproductive, this could change now that it has become AI-Powered™. (Perhaps automated code analysis might also finally become the priority it should have been twenty years ago; there's always hope.)

The upshot

Traditionally, the reckoning about budgets has been that 90 percent of the cost of software is maintenance.

This state of affairs may now be upended, which could potentially have dramatic effects on the development process, though not in a cost-saving direction. If vulnerabilities become easier to discover, shifting dev burden to before the launch date so that e.g. only 80% is maintenance, that would double the up-front cost of creating a new software suite.

None of this indicates that programming is about to become an obsolete skill or that the future of development will be any less concerned with technical details. Best of luck finding new hires who have any concept of a file-system.

function quaddmg(sum)
	result = sum + sum
	result = result + result
	return result

function quadruple(sum)
	return sum * 4

Education by arbitration

the mis-edutainment of the youth dept.

15 March 2026

Puzzle games on 8-bit platforms were necessarily abstract due to the low resolutions and cramped palettes. While console games usually centered around jumping, shooting, or driving to cater to broad audiences, games for home computers could be considerably less constrained owing to the level of technical knowledge that had to be assimilated to get off the ground at all — even on the Commodore 64, rattling off a smattering of BASIC was required just to load games from cassette. This selected for players who possessed considerable reserves of patience.

Given that much of the software was produced entirely by one or two programmers, interaction tended to be simple: press a button to change one square at a time, certainly no side-effects reaching beyond the visible frame (not that it was feasible to hold more than one scene in memory at a time; this was the era of flick-screen scrolling for a reason.)

In consequence, 8-bit puzzle games feature some of the most illegible gameplay ever committed to magnetic tape, where you would be hard pressed to predict what was about to happen before you started mashing buttons to see what they did. Small wonder then that there was a trend towards Boulder Dash spinoffs — the format was a good fit for it, boulders slotting into the cubbyholes of Array data structures, and the mechanics almost made sense. This particular style of arbitrary interaction did stick around in so-called educational software, a sector where it didn't matter wether the content was at all comprehensible because the procurers were clueless parents and Boomer teachers who didn't look twice at the actual flow of the gameplay.

Funnily enough, while the simple rules governing the cellular automata in Conway's "game of life" made it especially suited for 8-bit computers, it took a 16-bit game, Populous, to place it in a broader context in a way that felt natural.