What I'm Reading - Week of June 16
A sampling of what comes across my desk.
I am going to start a weekly newsletter to cover what I am reading. I have an eclectic pattern of reading, from a variety of sources. I figured I would share my messy habits.
Politics and Trump
Alas, I read way too much of this slop.
June 16th: Rick Wilson on the full decade of Trump in political life:
Alas, this is paywalled, but Rick has a way with words:
He has clung to this country like a cancerous tumor on the soul of a nation: ugly, malignant, persistent. Even in defeat, I knew he’d never leave us in peace. A man who launched a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election was never going gently into that good night. Every day he has tortured this nation, wrapped it in his malicious lies and insufferable behavior.
Accurate description. Further in the post, he has this:
Did I know from the start how bad it would be? Somewhere, deep in my cynical, consultant DNA, I smelled the sulfur early. I knew this wasn’t just another candidate, another bullshit populist riff. This was a bad man. A dangerous man. A man who delighted in destruction, who fed off fear, who wore his evil like cologne.
Yes. Evil. That word. Say it with me: evil. It makes the blue-check chinstrokers on the Gentry Right and the Polite Left nervous, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Trump is evil. And you know it.
Rick had a great career building Republican campaigns and candidates, and he rightly torched that when The Donald appeared. Quite unlike the anti-anti bootlickers like those at The Dispatch and the NRO.
Daniel Drezner is an outstanding political science commentator, and I recommend reading him. His output is increasing (school is out, and the chaos of the Trump administration is providing ample fodder. He has posted twice today, the second post is about what the fuck is happening in Iran and what ever the orange hued Temu Hitler is burbling.
He does a bulleted list that enumerates why he things Trump is going to piggyback on the Israeli actions, and I found myself nodding at each of these:
The signs that Trump is thinking about joining in the attack, however, are mounting:
U.S. allies are saying that Trump is considering getting involved. According to Politico, “German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Tuesday that the U.S. is weighing participating in Israel’s military campaign in Iran and that a decision could be imminent.”
The U.S. military is deploying more air and naval military assets to the region, thereby giving the Trump administration more military options.
Energy markets are reacting as though traders expect that the U.S. will get involved.
Both the New York Times and Axios have reports suggesting Trump is ready to join the conflict. The NYT story says, “Mr. Trump is seriously considering sending American aircraft in to help refuel Israeli combat jets and to try to take out Iran’s deep-underground nuclear site at Fordo with 30,000-pound bombs — a step that would mark a stunning turnabout from his opposition just two months ago to any military action while there was still a chance of a diplomatic solution.” The Axios account is similar.
JD Vance is now sounding more hawkish, while Trump himself rubbished what his own Director of National Intelligence said about Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Trump’s social media posts on Iran are sounding way more belligerent.
If you are not subbed to Daniel, you are missing out. Most of his writing is free.
John Ganz is also a great scribbler of political thought. His post today is a banger. He has long tried to hold the line and not use the F word (fascism), but it is no longer possible to avoid. He is more of a foreign policy/affairs type of academic, so, he is much more measured than the garden variety pundits.
His post is here:
Frankly, he seems uncomfortable saying that he told us so, but he did. Often, and in rational words.
This pull is spot on:
There are two interpretations of the events that led up to the strikes on Iran. One is that Trump conspired with Netanyahu to use diplomacy to conceal an attack. That seems devilishly clever on some level, but ultimately it demolishes the diplomatic credibility of the United States. It creates a short-term success and a long-term destabilization. Or suppose that Trump got dragged along by Netanyahu. In that case, he cannot control or shape events and is extremely easy to manipulate, so long as things appear “strong.” Both of these are almost equally disastrous possibilities. They go back to the simple core of the phenomenon: he’s both evil and stupid. People are still doing the wishful thinking thing by seeing some kind of strategic masterstroke here. It’s not: it’s a big fucking mess.
This counters the belief that Trump is some master planner, and that he’s playing 5 dimensional chess.
Highly recommended subscription and read. I pay, but I can’t remember seeing any “paid” posts. All great stuff
On AI
My world is being rocked by Generative AI. I am by nature a skeptic, but I have to admit that there are some great uses of the technology. The key is knowing when and how to use it, as well as how to verify its veracity.
No mean feat.
Last week, Apple dropped a paper that basically dumped cold water on the hypesters who are sure that just building bigger training sets, and moar compute to scale the LLM’s will inevitably lead to the holy grail, artificial general intelligence.
Gary Marcus is a skeptic, and far more erudite than me, being a life-long expert in human cognition, so I take his words seriously. He countered the paper, and a few people took swipes at him. His latest is a listicle that enumerates how the pro GenAI voices are grasping at straws. This gem is near the bottom, but it is akin to my thinking:
Or, as the software engineer Gorgi Kosev just put it on X, “[LLMs] are decent solvers of already solved problems, indeed.”
The full thing is here:
I highly recommend reading Gary if you are even tangentially interested. He doesn’t talk a lot of mathematics, but his reasoning is easy to follow regardless of your academic background.
Ed Zitron is a gem. A British import, now living in Lads Vegas (I will not hold that against him), he runs a PR firm, writes about tech, and has a killer podcast. His latest series has been about The Era of the Business Idiot, and it is delightful to read and listen to his railings about the insanity of the leadership of big-Tech companies. In this post, he flambés Microsoft Sataya Nadella’s daily ritual:
Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot.
The article revealed that — assume we believe him, and this wasn’t merely a thinly-veiled advert for Microsoft’s AI tech — Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well at work.
He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
This feels like bullshit, but I have to say that if you are a CEO of a company valued at more then $3.5T dollars, and this is how you manage your day, you don’t deserve your paycheck. Last year his pay packet was $79.1M.
Not to mention that this current crop af AI Agents are pretty poor simulacrums of human workers, and this is even more ludicrous.
I highly recommend subscribing to Ed’s newsletter, and listening to his podcast Better Offline (a property of Cool Sone Media, fabulous people!)
Final thoughts
I hope you enjoy seeing some of my eclectic reads. My background and varied interests leads to a lot of tangents.
If you enjoyed this or got some value from it, let me know and I will make this a recurring feature.
I do find that I have more subscriptions than I can realistically read, but I never want to give any of them up. Thus I have to partition my time to maximize the absorption.
And I didn’t get to one of my favorite topics, Elon Musk, and the fuckery of him, Tesla and SpaceX. Next time!
Being the heir to a portion of your library, I value what you're reading. Please make this a recurring feature!
You know I always value your thoughts and opinions... I'll be investigating your finds. I cant pay for everything.... I regret some I paid for and some I canceled. There's a ton of great writing out there, though and thank god because I can read faster than I can watch or listen.
And I adore your musical finds. Always superb. 👏👏👏👏