What I'm Reading, June 20
More of a traipse through my disordered mess of a mind and how I fill it with what nourishes my curiosity.
A continuation of my meandering reading habit. I will try to group them into thematic sections, but I mostly read about Tech, AI, Finance, and politics. Occasionally music might slip in.
On AI
Brian Klaas is a professor of political science, so you might think this would be better in the area on politics, but alas, he has finished grading for his latest session of students, and he reminisces about how the advent of Generative AI is destroying the ritual of student essays.
It is completely worth the read, but this pair o’ ‘graphs is the whole shebang:
If you want to know what you think about a topic, write about it. Writing has a way of ruthlessly exposing unclear thoughts and imprecision. This is part of what is lost by ChatGPT, the mistaken belief that the spat out string of words in a reasonable order is the only goal, when it’s often the cognitive act of producing the string of words that matters most.
Alas, with this melancholic eulogy, it is time to sign the death certificate. Here lies the student essay—RIP, old friend—slain by OpenAI.
He then coins a term (or repeats it) that is brilliant:
There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge.
Glittering Sludge. That is 👨🍳
But this is key:
For technical reasons that I won’t get into, detecting the cheats is a losing battle. There’s no surefire way to catch someone using AI tools and the technology is evolving so rapidly that agentic models, which basically can operate autonomously and follow the exact process a student would use in researching and writing an essay—just much faster—will soon make AI-written essays impossible to catch.
There has always been a significant cohort of students content on cheating, or going to elaborate means to avoid doing the work. AI is not really a game changer, but I will use the same argument that I use when a high school student asks me for advice on how to build a CAS (computer algebra system) to save himself the effort of doing their homework: you are just cheating yourself. Sure, you will get the “correct” answer, and ace your homework, but you will never understand the concepts, and thus, in the future, you will likely make a huge error that had you understood the foundations, you might have instantly seen.
Politics
Nick Rafter is someone I discovered relatively recently. He writes from the left, but is critical of the progressive elements of the Democratic Party, and the damage that they routinely inflict on the discourse before they piss off, and then forget that they tossed Molotov cocktails into the mix. This is a typical post, where he focuses on the absolute shit-show of the NY City mayoral race. I mean, Andrew Cuomo is poised to cruise to an easy victory (how the fuck that is a possibility is just mind boggling), and his chief competitor is young Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani ticks the progressive left boxes, anti Zionist, pro Palestinian and intellectually weak. The progressives are up in arms that he got ambushed by Tim Miller of the Bulwark, but really, he is just a lightweight.
A lot of the hubbub is around his incautious use of language and then a whirlwind of justification. In this case it was his support of a Global Intifada.
Words are complicated, and their meanings can vary and change, but “intifada” has been associated with violence for generations. Its modern understanding comes from the First and Second Intifada, a largely violent Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1980s and early 2000s.
(skipped stuff)
For Mamdani, running for mayor of the city that suffered the worst terror attack in modern history, embracing the phrase is politically stupid, even if he did try to shift the meaning in a clunky, abstract way. It is another example of progressive fumbling the optics.
For someone who wants to be the mayor of the city with the largest concentration of Jewish residents outside of Israel, this is not a minor oops.
Anyway, Nick is a great read, and alas a lot of what he writes is behind a paywall. Worth the fee though.
I subscribe to The Dispatch solely to read probably 2 of the weekday posts by Nick Catoggio each week (that is, he posts 5, and I read two of them). Yeah, that is a lot of bread ($100) to read like 100 articles a year, but when Nick is good, he is really good.
His latest (here - sorry, not gifted) he does an outstanding job explaining why all this resistance-porn of the intra-MAGA fight between the doves and the hawks is bullshit. If (when) Trump decides to unleash the B2’s with the MOP ordnance, they will all unify and call him the most gifted statesman of all time.
Once more, for emphasis: Donald Trump’s base will not turn on him if he strikes Iran.
Yes, I know, a new Economist/YouGov poll found 53 percent of Republicans oppose the U.S. joining Israel’s military campaign versus 23 percent who support it. Even if that’s accurate (and maybe it isn’t), let’s check back on the numbers after the president gives the order to attack. The faithful are far more likely to question a policy when it’s hypothetical than after the divine leader has bet his political chip stack on it.
That is spot on analysis. Of course, how we got here is important, and Nick (like I suspect most of the Anti-antis) reads papers like The NY Times, not to jeer, but because they are the only organizations with scale and funds to do real reporting, instead of the masturbatory recycling of fumes that is common on Substack (yes, I am part of that ecosystem).
Still, this is prescient:
This deep dive by the New York Times into the White House’s deliberations confirms my suspicions from last week about how Trump caught war fever. Israel reportedly chose to attack against his wishes because Iran’s defenses were weak, its missile arsenal depleted, and nuclear negotiations with Washington slow going, making the moment opportune. As expected, the president was seduced by the success of the first wave of airstrikes: “His favorite TV channel, Fox News, was broadcasting wall-to-wall imagery of what it was portraying as Israel’s military genius. And Mr. Trump could not resist claiming some credit for himself,” according to the Times.
I wrote in a comment that deep analyses on Trump’s motivations and thoughts is a fool’s errand. It is as simple as he saw Israel have a lot of success, and made it look easy, and he said to himself “I want some of that”.
He (likely) believes that Bibi and his IDF have softened Tehran up, and he will be able to float in and drop a few 30K pound bunker buster munitions and be the hero. The Islamic republic will fall, a Trumpian person will assume the mantle of leadership, and Trump will be fêted by the orgasmic population.
Of course, it will not go that well, and he will then try to blame Obama or Hilary for when it goes tits-up.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Still, I do enjoy reading Nick, even if I only read the static email, because the comments at The Dispatch are the fucking worst.
All things Musk…
One of my kinks is watching the shitshow that is Elon Musk’s behaviors. Lately, there has been a lot to cover.
First up is a sideshow of Popular Information, their sub-pub of Musk Watch, started when the first buddy was playing hide the bologna with his bestie, Trump.
This post is about the hapless Starship that has been sorta struggling lately. In fact just one of the 9 test flights reached orbital velocities (but it didn’t actually get inserted into an orbit) before it cracked up.
This week, they were preparing for a launch, doing a static test and, well…
For the fourth time this year, SpaceX has lost one of its Starship rockets. On Wednesday, at about 11 p.m. Central time, a Starship sitting on its test stand detonated unexpectedly during a test firing of the Super Heavy first stage. The massive explosion sent debris flying in every direction around SpaceX's South Texas launch site. The Starship spacecraft, the second stage of the rocket, was not mounted on the booster during the failed test.
SpaceX said all of its "personnel are safe and accounted for" and attributed the explosion to "a major anomaly." Musk described the setback as "just a scratch."
As if this is just a minor glitch:
At least it didn’t rain down flaming debris on Turks and Caicos this time.
Speaking of Musk, and this same Musk Watch article had this about his attempt to disabuse about the bombshell reporting on his drug use:
The samples were collected on June 11, a little less than two weeks after the New York Times published a report on the drugs that Musk was on while campaigning with Donald Trump last year. Citing sources who spoke to Musk at the time, the paper reported that he was taking so much of the anesthetic ketamine that he was having trouble urinating. The report also revealed that Musk was using the party drug MDMA, psychedelic mushrooms, and the stimulant Adderall.
Musk provided no evidence to suggest that the lab reports he shared on X featured the observed collection of urine and hair samples. Without third-party observation, it is nearly impossible to guarantee that a sample belongs to the patient who submitted it, at least in the context of a standard drug test.
Still, Musk hyped the test results while insisting that the Times and the Wall Street Journal, the first outlet to report extensively about his drug use, had "lied through their teeth about me." He then accused journalists at the two newspapers of abusing drugs. "I hereby challenge the NYT and WSJ to take drug tests and publish the results!" he wrote on X. "They won’t, because those hypocrites are guilty as sin."
In response to Musk's posts, the Times released the following statement: "Elon Musk is continuing to lash out because he doesn't like our reporting. Nothing that he's said or presented since our article about his drug use during the presidential campaign was published contradicts what we uncovered."
Musk shared the lab tests in the aftermath of his falling out with Trump, who during the height of the feud publicly said of Musk, "He's got a problem. The poor guy's got a problem." Trump was reportedly less subtle behind closed doors. The Washington Post reported that Trump described Musk as a "big-time addict."
(Sorry for the long pull, just too delish to not post it all.)
Basically, he handed urine and hair samples, without there being any supervision in the collection of those samples. Color me skeptical that this is real
The real choice thing though is that in his attempts to prove his cleanliness, he shared an image of a lab report that included the last four of his SSN.
In sharing the lab report from the hair sample, Musk leaked the last four digits of his Social Security number, which hackers and scammers can exploit to commit fraud or identity theft.
Anyhow, if you like reading about Musk’s fuckery, The Musk Watch is golden:
I would be remiss if I didn’t include something on the much ballyhooed launch of Robotaxi, half of the future of Tesla that will drive it to be the first centi-Trillion dollar company1.
Anyhow, Motorhead is pretty solid on the auto reporting. Their main output is industry news and analysis, and it is a pricey sub (I do not pay), but they put some gems in the preview, and the occasional free post is gold.
This is one of those.
It is a brief post about the restrictions on the early trials for the robotaxi service, and these screen caps are gold:
That seems rather restrictive set of requirements.
One of the consistent messages from Tesla and Musk has been how the FSD is 100x as safe as human drivers2.
Oh well, so much for their vaunted automation…
Final thoughts
This is already giving me warnings that the post is approaching the “too long for email” warning, so I will cut it off here, and post it early. Perhaps I will need to do more than one of these a week.
If you enjoy, be sure to let me know, and I will continue to share the beautiful mess that is my daily reading
The other half being Optimus,
It isn’t, not even close, even with Tesla fudging the reporting data, but the rubes lap it up like manna from heaven, or Santorum leaking out of Musk’s anus…
Just a thought, what is the half life/metabolism of the drugs involved. How long since he last took the drugs and compare that to the above. Further what potential is there for masking agents in analyzing his results? It may be a value to have a toxicologist review the data. In some sports that involve muscular strength steroid use is common, however, they have been quite clever in developing regiments that leave the athlete clean when there is testing.
Definitely longer than usual! I had to skip over the Musk part because I’m so sick of even his name. Had to pipe up about “If you want to know what you think about a topic, write about it”. So true! I didn’t realize it until I saw it ‘spelled out’, if you will, but I’ve experienced it many times!