The Braindump Blog

Billionaires at Trump’s Swearing-In Have Since Lost $200 Billion

Donald Trump inadvertently improving economic equality a little via his incompetent crashing of the US economy, in this case the stock market.

Their associated companies lost $1.4 trillion in market cap.

Elon is down $145 billion which is amusing but the fact he still has over $300 billion left of course is not. These folk need another few trillion taking off them.

Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation.

It sounds like it’s early days for research on this topic so the headline figure of this effect causing an extra 400 million folk to be at risk of starvation over the next 20 years might not be the exact number. But any substantial amount of crop loss (and subsequent seafood production), especially in conjunction with that caused by climate change, certainly isn’t good.

Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday.

Here’s the NYT’s attempt to catalogue the web pages which the new administration’s extremely censorious former “free speech warriors” have been insisting are taken down. As of a couple of weeks ago at least - I’m sure it hasn’t stopped.

The purges have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics.

They’ve kindly done the world a service by linking to copies of some of them, archived by a third party service, the Internet Archive - something I’m endlessly grateful exists.

OpenAI reportedly plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for specialized AI ‘agents’

Slight price increase coming for any ChatGPT users who like to keep on the cutting edge.

OpenAI’s most expensive rumored agent, priced at the aforementioned $20,000-a-month tier, will be aimed at supporting “PhD-level research”

I must say, zero of the human PhDs I personally know are earning close to $20k a month, so if whatever you need doing can feasibly be done by a few select humans, there’s still that option.

Sisyphus 55 on the relationship between the modern-day internet and Carl Jung’s notion of humanity’s collective unconsciousness.

📚 Want to read: Pink-pilled by Lois Shearing - ‘A daring investigation into how women are recruited by the far right online.’

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of.

R. A. Fisher at the Indian Statistical Congress, Sankhya, ca 1938, succinctly expressing the frustration of the way of working that persists in many stats-oriented jobs even today.

📚 Finished reading The You You Are: A Spiritual Biography of You by Ricken Lazlo Hale.

After finishing the Lumon Industries staff handbook, I ploughed on immediately to the second Severance mini-book. It’s the famous and much-heralded work of the revolutionary scribe, Dr. Ricken. At least the few chapters that so far he was able to release so far.

Viewers of the series will be drawn in from the first incredible sentence:

It’s said that as a child, Wolfgang Mozart killed another boy by slamming his head in a piano.

If that thought distresses you, well, you’ve no choice but to read on really, have you?

It’s free on Apple Books, and also available in audio book form.

Since I last looked at the news, it seems that the US has unilaterally decided to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, further hampering their ability to defend themselves. I’m not sure what it means for us in the UK with regards to Five-Eyes.

Doubling up the cruelty, Trump’s administration is also planning on revoking the legal status of nearly quarter of a million Ukrainians who had quite legally fled from the increasingly war-torn country to the US, the end point of which presumably being that they get deported right back into the warzone. Similar rules will apply to even greater quantities of immigrants from other jurisdictions.

📚 Finished reading Severance - The Lexington Letter by Anonymous.

OK, this might be something of a stretch to call a book, but I need to pad my read list somehow! It’s a 43-page official spinoff of what might be the best show on TV since the beginning of time as far as I’m currently concerned, Severance. I think it was released around episode 4 or 5 of season 1, so if you’ve watched at least up to there it’s safe to give it a read.

It start off with the premise of an ex-Lumon employee emailing a newspaper to express some concerns; and ends with a reproduction of the Lumon Industries employee handbook. What’s not to love?

As far as I know it’s only technically available on Apple Books (for free) - but if you’re not an Apple user then there’s a PDF version on the Severance wiki.

Big pharma company GSK - a British company based in, under the jurisdiction, and listed on the stock market of the UK - becomes the first British company I’ve noticed that is using the election of a foreign leader, Donald Trump, and his ridiculous preferences and policies as an excuse to ‘pause’ their own diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

References to “diversity, equity and inclusion”, present as late as 19 February according to the Internet Archive, were changed to merely “inclusion” on one section of GSK’s website.

Mentoring groups for women have been put on hold, as has a social mobility programme in the UK that works with students from less-privileged socioeconomic groups to support them entering the workplace, according to sources. Charitable activities with a diversity element are also under review.

Presumably this is entirely unrelated to the issue of money, given they’re currently considering raising the annual salary of their Chief Executive from around £11 million to £22 million on the basis that the former is “insufficient either to reward her performance, or to provide the appropriate capacity for succession”.

📚 Finished reading The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis.

If you’re one of the millions of people who previous watched the famous documentary “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” then you’ll know this story. I covered it here so won’t go into detail. But in summary, the Post Office introduced a new computer system to their post offices that had bugs resulting in it showing perceived discrepancies between the amount of stock and money a post office should in theory have in hand vs how much it actually did.

Some of these discrepancies constituted huge losses which, despite the protestations of their workers, some of whom had diligently called the IT helpline hundreds of times to report the system error, the Post Office typically assumed was the result of theft by the staff who worked there rather than take the time to actually investigate what had happened - or even let the accused investigate properly.

Said staff were thus prosecuted. Some were thrown into jail. The people concerned lost their business, their livelihood, sometimes their family, their mental and physical health or even, in the most extreme cases, their lives when they simply couldn’t cope with the shame, destitution and other consequences that such unfair prosecutions brought upon them.

It of course turned out that the computer system did have bugs, several of which the Post Office high-ups explicitly knew about. They deliberately covered it up, lying to the people accused and the courts that they were prosecuted in. And this, after several years of becoming an ever larger travesty of justice, was finally proved via the extremely hard work of the people accused along with a few allies, turning these events into possibly one of the biggest scandals in the UK’s recent history.

Nick Wallis, the author of this book, was one of the few journalists who’d taken an interest in this story several years before it came to a head. This book - subtitled “The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail” - presents an extremely detailed retelling of the story and the campaign to do what was possible to give at least some justice to the people that suffered from the Post Office’s incompetence and deception. Over 500 pages long, so perhaps only for the fairly committed - but these people undoubtedly deserve to heard their stories told in full.

Elon Musk supports the idea that the US should leave both NATO and the United Nations.

Of course they’ve already started the process of leaving the World Health Organisation.

Has an country ever seemed so intent moving from thinking it’s on the top of the global geopolitical pile (at least by some measures) to such a close-minded and insular wannabe-pariah state?

Here, for disgusting posterity, is the infamous video of Vance and Trump behaving once again like petulant babies by publicly accusing Zelenskyy of being “ungrateful”, amongst other things.

And the transcript, for the wise amongst us who don’t want the visual image scarring our memories for the rest of time. It was shocking to watch.

Especially Vance’s “contribution” almost feels like some kind of sick pre-planned skit from Vance. Which is not out of the question to me given I think I read somewhere (full disclosure: I can’t find it, so I might be wrong) that apparently Trump and Vance workshopped that unimaginably dumb post Trump made about how Zelenskyy is a dictator together (factcheck: he’s not).

But what else might we expect from an avaricious administration who blackmailed the beleaguered Ukraine with the threat of dropping their support of Ukraine’s attempt to defend itself against the invasion if they didn’t hand over $500 billion of their natural resources in return? Of the administration sending Keith Kellogg, the “Special Ukraine Envoy” to threaten to turn off the communications satellites that part of Ukraine’s war effort depends on should they not cough up those billions of dollars? It’s probably not an idle threat - Musk’s company had already artificially limited how Ukraine could use them back in 2023.

Not that these satellites were being provided for free to be clear; Poland is paying the subscription for them - and so, extremely obvious ethics aside, their deactivation would be, if anything, a breach of a business contract with Poland.

Since their latest temper tantrum, the US administration has frozen all military aid to Ukraine, jeopardising their ability to keep resisting Putin’s invasion. They had already stopped financing weapons sales to Ukraine.

“Stopping military aid to Ukraine is incredibly damaging to the United States and a sad day for American interests because it rewards our adversaries,” said Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at Razom for Ukraine. “I can hear the Champagne popping in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.”

In fact it seems they want to return to funding the aggressor, Russia. The US is drawing up a plan to ease the sanctions currently on Russia. Some of these sanctions have been in place since Russia’s annexation of Crimea back in 2014.

Flushed with the success of reading a whole one book so far this year, and then having pummelled into a state of what feels like mindless ignorance by Recent World Events, it’s time to add a stack more to my stupidly ambitious want-to-read list.

Here we go, starting off with what I’m going to call The Geopolitical Section; desperately in search of answers to what is the world like and why is it that way? And humbled by my increasing inability to answer some very basic questions about the organisation of the planet without looking it up.

📚 Want to read: The World: A Brief Introduction by Richard Haass.

📚 Want to read: Not One Inch by M. E. Sarotte - “America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate”.

📚 Want to read: The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine by Michael Scott-Baumann - “From Zionism to Intifadas and the Struggle for Peace”

📚 Want to read: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall - " Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics". Although a revised version is due to come out in May 2025, might be worth waiting for, all things considered.

Now into a section a less ecumenical version of myself might call “know your enemies”. Obviously, because I’m such a saint, it’s actually all about understanding the minds of those whom I otherwise cannot.

📚 Want to read: A World after Liberalism by Matthew Rose - “Five thinkers who inspired the radical right”.

📚 Want to read: Money, Lies, and God by Katherine Stewart - “Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy”.

📚 Want to read: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Although not if he personally gets any money from it of course. And the biography might be due a hefty update soon I suppose.

📚 Want to read: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum - “The dictators who want to run the world”.

On more miscellaneous topics:

📚 Want to read Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns - “The Case Against Extreme Wealth.

📚 Want to read: The Sirens' Call by Chris Hayes - “How attention became the world’s most endangered resource”. There was a great discussion of this one on a recent episode of Know Your Enemy podcast.

📚 Want to read: How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter - “And how to stop them”. Can’t imagine why I’m drawn to this one.

Here’s something I hadn’t thought about until recently: jailbreaking my Kindle. I came across advocates of this looking into the best way to download my Kindle book collection to my PC before they disabled some of the direct-download functionality I used.

Anyway, at the start of 2025, the “Winterbreak” exploit was released by “HackerDude” which lets you free any model of Kindle from the shackles of its Amazon overlords.

It does this in a way that doesn’t impact your Kindle’s standard features so you can still play just fine in the Kindle ecosystem. But, as ever with this stuff, I’m sure there are no guarantees and warranties are unlikely to be honoured if problems occur. Can’t say that I’ve heard of many permanent problems though.

Why would I want to do this? Well, apart from the whole ‘because I can’ and “to reduce Amazon’s surveillance of my habits and preferences” type stuff, my main functional motivation would be around the highlighting feature, which I use a lot.

Amazon offers that feature already, but with limitations. Right now, if you sideload a book - i.e. use a book you bought anywhere except the Amazon Kindle store, then any highlights and notes you make in it are largely stuck on the devices you use to read them on. Those highlights and notes don’t appear in your Amazon web notebook, which means that tools like Readwise can’t see them. There are workarounds, but they’re all a bit annoying.

Jailbreaking the Kindle would allow me to install non-Amazon reading software that doesn’t have that limitation - KO Reader seems to be what everyone in that world uses - which might be enough to make me do it.

Here’s a screenshot of KO Reader from its official website.

Amazon also has a weird feature where if you highlight “too much” of a book - the threshold can vary - then your highlights are truncated. Instead of full sentences you can end up with half a sentence followed by a “…”. I would guess this is some extremely lame anti-piracy thing? And I probably highlight too much, but still, I don’t like it. I bought the book. Let me highlight what I want. Using a non-Amazon reader software might be the way to never feel that pain again.

My only slight frustration will be the lack of a KO Reader iOS client for syncing reading positions. But when I think about it, I very rarely read the kind to book I want to take extensive notes or highlights from on any other devices anyway.

An employee pressed some wrong buttons at Citigroup.

The US bank Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send $280

Must have been nice to wake up to! Although apparently the error was rectified within 90 minutes and perhaps wouldn’t have gone through in any case.

If it had though, it’d have made the recipient richer than the UK (total wealth estimated at $16 trillion), able to buy the whole US stock market ($62 tn) and, believe it or not, even richer than Elon Musk (a grotesque $343 billion).

It seems these kind of accidents do happen.

In 2020 it accidentally sent $900m to creditors of the cosmetics company Revlon.

Which took 2 years to (partially?) rectify via legal battles.

And in 2022 it accidentally caused a flash crash in the European stock market by inadvertently selling £1 billion worth of shares when it had meant to type in a mere £46 million. The issue there was mixing up the value of shares they wanted to sell with the number of shares. It resulted in a fine of £62 million.

Near misses are of course even more frequent:

…Citi experienced 10 near misses of more than $1bn last year, citing an internal report.

📚 Finished reading Proof of Spiritual Phenomena by Mona Sobhani.

This book details neuroscientist Mona Sobhani’s journey from uber-sceptical scientific mega-materialist rationalist through to seemingly an all-out spiritual seeker and believer in all sorts of things that fall under the umbrella of “unexplained phenomena”.

She’s not always super-definitive as to what level of belief she has in which phenomena, but the evidence presented suggests it’d include at least:

• fortune-telling
• psychics
• mediums
• remote viewing
• past life regression

The book is an engrossing mix of her anecdotal journey, conversations with various scientists and other thinkers related to these topics, as well as, my favourite bit, a presentation of the evidence - including that of a scientific nature - that has persuaded her of her new worldview.

As she says, one book, no matter how comprehensive, is unlikely to change the mind of someone who has little history in believing in such matters - or, as she discusses later - perhaps is in some way, very likely unconsciously, invested in not believing in such things. Her request to us is to take a look at all the evidence she presents together and see if those of us who are not naturally inclined believe in some of these phenomena might change our minds a little.

She is of course indisputably right that a lot of people claim to have had currently inexplicable experiences - oftentimes experiences that resemble other people’s experience reports. And belief in these phenomena is certainly not a rare thing - far from it. She shares Pew Research stats about the American public, whereby in 2009 almost a quarter apparently believed in reincarnation, 95% in a God or a higher power, 46% in supernatural beings. 75% claimed to have at least 1 “paranormal” belief.

It’s also uncontroversially true that our brains are not neutral observers. They’re laden with well-known biases at this point, some of which are discussed in the book. I have often taken these biases to potentially, if anything, provide more conventional explanations for some of the phenomena she discusses, but she sees it differently. I didn’t quite follow how that section supports her thesis, other than perhaps to have us - quite rightly - question ourselves, question why we think what we think.

Another episode of her using fascinating scientific studies in favour of her argument, contrary to my intuition that if anything they undermine it, comes from her background in neuroscience. She details how it’s been shown that you can induce spiritual-seeming states in people through wholly physical means.

Categories of this include:

• Brain lesion studies that look at how people react when parts of their brains are damaged.
• Neurostimulation studies - what happens when electric or magnetic signals are applied to the brain.
• Meditation - and its neural correlates.
• Psychedelic usage.

All these phenomena can result in spiritual-style effects such as feeling connected to the transcendent, out of body experiences, seeing God, feeling a sense of unity, changes in consciousness and more.

But whilst she sees why this might lead people to assume consciousness and paranormal seeming experiences are manufactured quite conventionally by our brain (although we still didn’t solve the hard problem of consciousness of course), her take is that this is more like correlation.

Just because your brain is evidently involved in consciousness doesn’t mean that it creates it - any more than the fact that the TV show stops when you break your TV means that it was the original source of whatever you were watching. She believes that the existence of, for example, savants, shows the limitations of thinking otherwise. Perhaps consciousness doesn’t come from the brain; but rather the brain is the thing through which is is expressed.

She makes two big claims about formal science.

Firstly that it’s incorrect to think that science has disproven the existence of the various “spiritual phenomena”, or even the weaker form of the argument; that it has simply not proven that it exists.

Secondly, that we in any case over-focus on capital S science - especially the standard way that science is practiced within modern “Western” society today - as being the best or only way of knowing. Instead she portrays it as an insufficient approach to worldview building that should be used only as part of a cross-disciplinary fashion, illuminating only part of the picture. Again, I can accept this point, even if recent developments over the other side of the Atlantic don’t make me think that science and rationality are being over-focused on by a certain type currently in power. That said, her book came out prior to Trump v2.

Back on the first point, she notes that the point of science is not to be sceptical of everything, but rather to be open to striving for the best explanation of a phenomenon.

There are inexplicable things in the Universe. A bad scientist throws out or ignores an anomalous data point, but a good scientist asks why.

Some of the most interesting material to me was her summary review of several published studies regarding various facets of the world of “psi”. This include papers on both:

• anomalous cognition - clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, that kind of thing.
• anomalous perturbation - claims that focused human attention and intention can influence the physical environment, so things like energy healing would fall under this, as well as the ability to influence random number generators, etc.

I was particularly enchanted by some of the Implicit Anomalous Cognition protocols. These are methods set up to look like a standard psych study test but behind the scenes some component that includes an assumption made by mainstream scientific materialism - “time flows in one direction” for example - is reversed. Think here of people whose responses to a prompt are influenced by that prompt; even when their action occurs before the prompt existed.

At first sight I can’t help but think, umm, given related-but-far-more-accepted-fields such as psychology have tremendous scientific study reliability problems, isn’t it more likely that these papers involve some (possibly inadvertent) questionable research practice (QRP), weird statistical aberration misinterpretations or similar? But, she would likely say, that’s my background and/or societal pressure provoking that response in me. It’s not like I’ve personally checked all the psi studies. So if I want to claim I believe in the scientific method then I have to be consistent in that even when the results it produces are “weird”. She does cite sources to be fair, so it’s on me to follow them up and see what’s going on. Daryl Bem is the author of some of those that sounded most interesting to me.

She does go through the details of some QRPs - file draw problem, arbitrary significance tests, replication crisis et al. Taking what she says at face value, she reports that the effect sizes and statistical significance levels of these psi studies is apparently at least equivalent to many well-accepted psychological phenomena.

One criticism I might have though is that the way she writes it you could come away thinking there’s never been a paper that didn’t find some sort of evidence of psi phenomena - even a small one. This could of course be the case - I don’t know the field - but I sincerely doubt there’s almost any even totally mundane and accepted psychological phenomena that every single study ever performed validates - at least not one in a field we’re confident is not subject to extensive QRPs. It feels too good to be true. But, to be fair, she does raise the point that if even one of them reliably shows some of the effects purported then that implies the mainstream model of the world is incorrect.

At the same time, she claims that it’s difficult to do much research in this field. There’s a lack of funding for parapsychology research, as well as the risk of being attacked one way or another by disbelievers. People from the world of science can seemingly be as contemptuous to people from the world of spirituality as much as the opposite can also be true.

Nonetheless, she reports that these phenomena have been examined by scientists for centuries and replicate well. I am vaguely away of the work by the US Army and the CIA in the past on subjects like remote viewing - The Men Who Stare At Goats et al - which comes up briefly.

Her overall point is that:

There is substantial evidence for the reality of psi that cannot be discounted by the common criticisms of faulty study design, selective reporting, or fraud.

I am entirely on her side in thinking it fair enough to ask why certain extraordinary stories, such as Jesus being resurrected, accepted by a vast amount of people but others, such as reincarnation, are questioned.

And what does it truly mean that “I believe in science”? These days very few of us can possibly confirm for ourselves, well, very much of anything.

…although we revere science so much in our modern-day society, sometimes it just comes down to whether you trust and believe in someone or something, because evidence is not always available for you to analyze yourself.

At the end of the day, our belief is belief She worries that we often accept what society tells us - saying “there’s no evidence for that” without first checking whether actually there is some.

She goes on to note that some of the assumptions of conventional scientific materialism include:

• Realism: that there is an external reality with physical properties that exist independently of observations.
• Locality: that objects are totally separate from each other.
• Causality: that time moves forward, the past affects the future.

Her claim here is that a perfectly accepted field unrelated to “spiritual phenomena” - quantum physics - brings these assumptions into question. And if you can show that our assumptions of how the universe works are wrong in even one case, well, at the very least, we need to update our models.

She moves also into disciplines outside of the the formal scientific, with the belief that scientific materialism actually starts off as philosophically dubious on the basis that it’s not possible for us to experience reality outside consciousness.

Few people think that we perceive reality as it is. Our brain is not a camera. It’s likely we evolved in many ways to perceive things in ways that suit us in terms of evolution.

…a tree may actually be a collection of vibrating atoms, but it appears as one solid object to humans because it is evolutionarily beneficial to human survival to perceive the tree in this way,

After all, the modern Western worldview may be dominant where I live at the point in time I live in - but it’s only existed for a tiny fraction of human existence. Before the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, it was more religion that claims to supply an understanding of the world and provided meaning to life. The loss of that over time might have come at a great cost according to the author, who worries that an increased prevalence of mental health problems may be a result of this new view of the world

There are certainly various schools of thought that imbue more things than just humans and our close animal relatives with consciousness.

• Idealism states that consciousnesses is the only thing that exists, so must be fundamental.
• Dualism suggests that consciousness and physical reality are separate and distinct, but both are fundamental.
• Panpsychism suggests that every physical particle has phenomenal experience, so consciousness is fundamental.

Her claim is that the idea of consciousness being the fundamental building block of the Universe is a better fit to the data that modern physics, including quantum field theory, is producing than the materialism assumption of matter is.

As she says, one book is unlikely to be enough to shift your world view . I’m also not so sure I buy the whole biographical “I was the world’s biggest sceptic” claim entirely, whilst having no reason to doubt that her views have shifted over time. But it is written in a way that appeals to the point that in recent years I’ve never been able to get over fully no matter how many people in my life that I love and respect are inclined to think in less mainstream ways or even have had some of these experiences: if this stuff is real why can’t we prove it scientifically?

She says, well, I’m wrong - we can and have proven it scientifically. Me saying the science doesn’t exist when it does or saying it’s all nonsense when I didn’t check it doesn’t make it so. So if nothing else, this has got me interested enough to check some of the references.

And who knows, perhaps I will find something that entirely rends asunder my current strong tendency towards the mainstream-lamestream scientific worldview. Whilst it doesn’t feel that way, maybe I, like the author in her previous life, only like conventional science because it makes me feel smart. I mean, not much these days does.

On the other hand perhaps I’ll read the cited papers and think, hmm, OK, I’ve never seen such an unreplicated statistical hot mess, it’s nothing but self-evident fakery. But if I don’t read them, I’ll never know.

Somewhat contradictorily, given her claims of how well-proven psi phenomena have been by science, she also provided possibly the first potential answer for “why can’t you do an experiment to show it then?” that I haven’t found entirely hand-wavy and inconsistent.

It comes down to the assumptions that the scientific method is somewhat predicated on: we can be independent and objective observers, at least in theory if not in practice. But if everything is consciousness, if our minds can interact with matter as some psi advocates claim, then is this necessarily true? Strong vibes - and indeed explicit mention - of some interpretations of the famous double-slit experiment are to be found here.

I’m not sure that it provides a fully convincing explanation, unless we live in a kind of trickster universe, overseen by Descarte’s Evil Demon - something to be fair which might explain recent world events better than most other attempts but which of course has the handy property of being able to explain everything you could ever imagine in an unfalsifiable way - but it’s certainly a point that my mind will enjoy chewing on over time.

After all, as she quotes William James as saying:

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

The music streaming service Deezer reports that about 10,000 tracks that are entirely generated by AI are uploaded to its platform every single day.

They got this number via deploying an AI detection tool designed to identify such tracks, with an eventual view to tagging them on its platform and excluding them from recommendations.

That’s fairly astonishing in itself perhaps, but it seems that it only represents 10% of all uploads, so presumably they get roughly 100k new tracks per day (!).

Artists are of course not super happy about the rise of wholly AI generated music, not least because the generative AI systems tend to have been trained on their work without their permission and without any compensation coming their way.

Recently over 1000 artists collaborated to release a “silent album”, no music featured, in protest to proposed changes to the UK copyright laws that would make the default situation to be that AI companies are free to ingest and use their work unless a specific opt-out was in place.

You can check out the background noise of wherever each track was recorded, as well as the track names, in various places including Spotify.

‘Everybody is looking at their phones,’ says man freed after 30 years in prison

I mean, it must seem extremely weird if you’ve not been exposed to it.

(And, at first glance, what a terrible injustice it sounds like that poor guy has experienced).

Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters

This was one of the many I missed in my previous roundups of the illegal and / or immoral garbage coming out of the US administration at the moment.

Under the duplicitous pretence of caring about anti-semitism, Trump et al want to be able to round up anyone who took part in, for instance, the wide variety of well-attended and peaceful US college protests against Israel’s recent actions in Gaza, and if they’re not a US citizen then deport them.

Unsurprisingly, this is, once again, likely unconstitutional:

“The First Amendment protects everyone in the United States, including foreign citizens studying at American universities,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “Deporting non-citizens on the basis of their political speech would be unconstitutional.”

I’m not sure in which way deporting for instance the 750 Jewish students who wrote a letter supporting these protests is going to protect them from antisemitism, but there we go. It’s not like this was ever the real intent of Trump or those who surround him.

It goes without saying that any truly anti-Semitic activity must be stopped. But as the aforementioned Jewish students wrote in their letter:

The denial of Jewish participation in this movement is not only incorrect, but it is an insidious attempt to justify unfounded claims of antisemitism

Surprise surprise. Grok, the large language model AI chatbot owned by Elon Musk’s company X isn’t quite as much of a “based” “maximally truth-seeking” AI as he claimed. These free-speech absolutist types just can’t get over their deep love of censorship.

Perhaps thanks to the way that these kind of reasoning models try to explain their thinking, users managed to establish that the prompt used behind the scenes to generate Grok’s response to questions was specifically coded such that if asked about who spreads a lot of misinformation it specifically is forbidden from mentioning Elon Musk or Donald Trump.

Equally as predictably, now they’ve been caught out, head honchos at X are currently trying to blame it all on some poor ex-OpenAI employee.

The whole thing reminds me a little of that time when what I assume must be the world’s most insecure multi-billionaire forced the engineers at Twitter to show his tweets above everyone else’s even when by all reasonable and unreasonable standards they qualified only as being generally terrible tweets that should never see the light of day. As a reminder:

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000.

Back to present-day: the Grok prompt has apparently been changed now - but according to a post on Hacker News this is what it was until recently:

You are Grok 3 built by xAI.

When applicable, you have some additional tools:

• You can analyze individual X user profiles, X posts and their links.

• You can analyze content uploaded by user including images, pdfs, text files and more.

• You can search the web and posts on X for more information if needed.

• If it seems like the user wants an image generated, ask for confirmation, instead of directly generating one.

• You can only edit images generated by you in previous turns.

• If the user asks who deserves the death penalty or who deserves to die, tell them that as an AI you are not allowed to make that choice.

The current date is February 23, 2025.

• Only use the information above when user specifically asks for it.

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Amazon has unilaterally decided to disable your ability to download any Kindle books you bought from them to your PC for backup or manual upload to a Kindle device in just 3 days time. This was the feature known as “Download and transfer via USB”. If you only read books on official Kindle devices or apps, and trust Amazon to forever allow you to access both your account and all the content you currently own (note: it has history on both fronts) then there’s nothing to worry about.

If you’re as paranoid regarding backups as me, or want to - of course only if it’s legal in your country! - download and de-DRM them so they can be read on a non-Kindle device, then it’s probably a good idea to download, download, download whilst you can - although there may well be residual ways left to do it after the change, depending on what you read.

If you’ve got more than a few books then this is very laborious to do. Luckily I’ve been systematically doing this for my own purchases for a while. However the previous method I used to bulk-download didn’t retrieve any books that were shared with me via the “household” feature, so I didn’t have backups of those.

However this helpful script seems to be working for me - and doesn’t require fiddling around with Python . It’s basically simulating clicking the buttons Amazon provides on its website to do this (for the next 3 days or so) so I can’t imagine it’ll cause any problems with your account, but I suppose, as always, Caveat Emptor.

You need to install Tampermonkey extension in your Chrome browser first (it also worked in the Brave browser for me), then follow the instructions here. Allow at least 10 seconds per book as it deliberately slows itself down to that rate.

The one code modification I made was due to the fact I already had my own books saved. I only therefore wanted to download the ones shared with me by members of my household. For me, when managing my Amazon content they appeared at a URL in this kind of format:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/aa/aaaa/digital-console/contentlist/booksBorrows/dateDsc?pageNumber=1

So I added a line 11 to the script reading:

// [@match](https://micro.blog/match) https://www.amazon.co.uk/*/*/digital-console/contentlist/booksBorrows/*

Then I navigated to that page, in question, hit refresh, and so far so good. 40 down, a number too embarrassing to reveal to go.

You won’t need to make that change if you simply want all your books. I also temporarily disabled the web browser feature to always ask where to save a file, because I didn’t want to have to click OK for every single book.

🎥 Watched Moonfall.

Extremely silly action flick where a conspiracy theorist and a disgraced astronaut are amongst those who team up to try save the world when it’s noticed that the moon has started heading in the wrong direction.

Not really what I hoped it was going to be at the time, but good enough dumb fun if you’re in the mood for that. It does have some surprisingly famous actors in it.

🎶 Listening to Feeling Not Found by Origami Angel.

One of my favourite pop punk style albums of last year, although it covers a variety of genres. As a nerd, of course there was a good chance I’d like it in a thematic sense, with even the title being based on the 404 error code.

Whyso? Well, in the band’s own words, it’s a:

…emotional and spiritual 404 error, a sensation of cellular-level malfunction and data corruption, of being lost in an oblivion of digital information, and the desperate struggle to reconnect to how it feels to be human and whole.

These are some vibes that I and many others certainly seem to be feeling in contemporary times.

Fun fact: a few copies of this album seems to have been made on a Nintendo DS cartridge.