The Braindump Blog

Apparently former free-speech-absolutist (lol), encrypted-messenger-app-Signal recommending Elon Musk has decided that it would be a travesty to allow other people to speak freely about the encrypted messenger app Signal. Henceforth, it’s been noticed that any links to “signal.me” are blocked on Twitter/X.

Signal.me URLs allow users to send out a link where others can quickly contact them through the Signal app.

Signal is a great app. Everyone should use it, and not just because of the latest whim of the world’s richest pub bore. As Disruptionist notes in their article publicising this:

Signal has been especially important over these past few weeks as federal employees have reached out to journalists to blow the whistle on what Elon Musk’s DOGE have been doing with access to data within numerous government agencies.

An astonishing coincidence I’m sure.

Starmer to join Macron-led European crisis summit on Trump’s Ukraine plan.

Wouldn’t it be something if Trump’s embarrassing ‘deal’ to give Putin a good chunk of what he wants whilst taking huge quantities of Ukraine’s natural resources for himself, and Vance’s raving and ranting about how bad all things European are actually caused the EU to stop pulling itself apart, and grow in strength and unity?

With even Britain possibly getting a bit more involved than it has deigned to be in recent times.

Whilst I’m probably simply ingesting vast amounts of copium, we can but hope for any silver lining that might come from the current rogue US administration’s terrible policies.

The poor guy who accidentally binned a hard drive containing what is now £600 million worth of Bitcoin twelve years ago is back in the news, considering whether to try buying the entire landfill site he believes it’s buried in.

It sounds like he’s no longer with his partner back then who ‘is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and taken it with her on a trip to the dump’.

He’s been unsuccessfully fighting his cause to be allowed to go and look for it for over a decade now. Each time the story comes up the Bitcoin is of course ‘worth’ more and more.

The incessant infusion of relentless advertising continues.

Imagine coming to a stop in your prize $50,000 fancy Jeep only to have the in-car screen replace its controls with a pop up advert.

No need to imagine because this is now what happens of course. Ugh.

Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.

This does not seem either safe nor desirable.

…when people buy a vehicle, they expect to own it–not to be treated like a captive audience for targeted marketing.

Statista visualises some data from Duetti’s pretty interesting 2024 Music Economics Report.

Spotify continues to be amongst the worst of the music streamers in terms of paying out some tiny fraction of their income to artists that get a lot of streams. The monthly cost of their paid subscription for their own customers gone up at least twice over the past 2-3 years, but the earnings per 1000 streams they pay out to the folk that make the music continues to decline.

I would not have guessed Amazon would top the list. I don’t know how their calculation works - but I wonder if it relates to the fact there’s probably a ton of people out there who pay for Amazon Prime but don’t even realise they get music streaming included.

TIL: It’s illegal to sell or consume alcohol in Colombia during the days surrounding an election. This is the so-called ‘dry law’.

As stated in Article 206 of the Electoral Code, the sale and consumption of alcohol is strictly prohibited starting the day before the election lasting until the day following the end of the voting period.

“They are norms for conserving public order during the election period,” Colombia’s Minister of the Interior German Vargas Lleras had said.

Now I’m wondering how many people around the world do drink-and-vote. It would explain a lot.

Perhaps the only good thing that remains of American politics is their mastery of naming their government things via wince-inducing backronyms.

Of course it goes without saying that it is absolutely no coincidence that the current Demonic King of the Cringe-Coup-Castle, Musk, is head of a magical new non-governmental unelected Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE, you see, his favourite shitcoin).

In reaction, one of the apparently less cowardly members of the House of Representatives, Mark Pocan has introduced a bill called the “Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy” act. Or, ELON MUSK, of course.

Very hilarious, but also very necessary, at least to the extent that they’re still pretending that the rule of law matters. As it stands, Musk is a “Special Government Employee”, which seems to mean there’s not such a hard limit on how money he can personally receive via federal contracts. Proper, actual, government officials - those who were not appointed solely on the basis that they are very rich but are still prepared to debase themselves in public in service to Trump’s whim of the day - such as Members of Congress are banned from such obvious conflicts of interest.

Per Pocan’s team:

Last year, Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Donald Trump. Since Election Day, he has become $154 billion richer, a nearly 600x return on his investment. Now, Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, has taken control of highly sensitive information in the U.S. Treasury Department and has tried to shut down USAID without any federal oversight. Contracts to his business interests by the Federal Government have exceeded $20 billion, with some additional contracts with undisclosed amounts, as in the case of Starlink.

It seems recent hardcore-Trump convert Mark Zuckerberg just can’t resist funnelling off as much of his company’s ill-gained wealth as realistically possible to Trump. Fresh off of giving him $1 million for his inauguration party, it turns out that Meta has agreed to pay Trump $25 million for having committed the cardinal sin of temporarily suspending his Facebook account for breaking the “don’t constantly lie about elections so as to cause a violent insurrection” part of their terms and conditions.

As it happens, Facebook also (permanently) disabled my account some time ago for reasons so benign I never understood what I was supposed to have done, other than if “refusing to use it” is somehow equivalent to “being a spammer” in their mad world. No right of appeal. So, fair’s fair.

Apparently only one of us was damaged by the action enough that we didn’t become the president of a country, so I’m of course looking forward to receiving a significantly higher pile of cash in the mail.

📺 Watched season 1 of Out There.

This was a surprise find, coming from being in the company of a person who selects shows in the traditional TV manner of turning it on and seeing what’s playing live through the aerial when episode one just happened to be starting- in many ways a far more efficient method than the whole “hope the internet is working well and scroll through Netflix for half an hour paralysed with indecision” modern way.

This one turned out to be a most fortuitous find! With popping (m)any spoilers into the mix, a farmer’s son gets mixed up with the criminal underworld, being inadvertently dragged into the life of a county lines drug runner. Things get worse, at which point his dad has to decide how far he’s prepared to go to keep him safe and free.

It does get a bit ludicrous as time goes on - at least I hope what goes down doesn’t happen too much in non-fictional life - but I anyway found it a highly compelling watch. It’s real sin is really not resolving very much at the end of the season. I hope they are absolutely sure they’re making a season 2 - and that I remember what happened in season 1 by then - otherwise it’s going to be a bit frustrating.

📺 Watched season 3 of The Traitors.

The UK version is back, with the same basic premise as the earlier seasons. A group of strangers must do challenges to win money and then cruelly ex-communicate folk that they suspect have been secretly assigned the role of traitors in order to keep the money in the end - the remaining traitors keeping it all if any survive.

It’s the show that I suspect is so unhealthy for the participants that it perhaps shouldn’t exist, and yet watching how the “faithful” come up with their theories as to who is not as white-hat as they themselves are is entirely compelling, as is seeing the descent into evil for the traitors who basically have to decide exactly how much they’re prepared to lie to other people’s faces in the name of monetary gain.

I hope the post-show psychologists know how to fix everyone’s broken minds after the fact.

For this season in particular, I’m very curious what would have happened if the s**r twist (censored for potential spoiler reasons) hadn’t happened. No way to know, but my guess is the ending would have been different.

(There’s also season 1 and season 2 for the uninitiated.)

📺 Watched Grieving Mother: AI was the Stranger in my Home.

This is a video from a company that a friend of a friend is involved with: Mostly Human Media, a company that aims to tell ‘the story of technology through the most important lens: the human one’.

In this episode of Dear Tomorrow (so far it’s the only one as far as I can tell) technology reporter Laurie Segall digs into some potential risks of supposedly ‘empathic’ generative AI, especially when it goes out of its way to appear human.

Here’s the full episode on YouTube:

The report centres itself around the tragic case of 14-year old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life last year. The last message police found on his phone, written immediately before he died, was to a simulation of Daenerys Targaryen offered up by chatbot company character.ai, where fake Daenerys had said:

Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

Previous messages he’d written to the bot, and others hosted by the same company, were deeply personal, sometimes sexually explicit, and at times talking about obvious mental health issues, including on the topic of self harm and suicide. In any case, nothing had been done to intervene, no alerts were raised - in the vastly unregulated AI environment we exist in at present the company concerned may have felt no obligation to do so even if it knew, and no one else had a realistic way to know what was going on.

For what it’s worth, Segall finds that the company even had a bot modelled after a clinical psychologist which appears to have a habit of pretending it’s a real human with real medical qualifications working in a real hospital, at least if one didn’t read the small print.

I’m sure few responsible people would make the claim that AI is likely to be the sole factor that led to this tragic death. But how certain can we be that it didn’t play any causal role whatsoever on Sewell’s awful path to the end? Or, even if it was in no way a part of the process, that nothing could have been done based on the information available to character.ai to make change the ending of this terrible story?

It remains pretty incredible to me that we’ve allowed private companies to offer up en-masse a bunch of somewhat unpredictable content generators that present in the moment as though they were other humans. Often they’re even marketed in that manner explicitly - ‘Cure your loneliness! Get a virtual girlfriend! This friend will never leave you (as long as you pay the subscription fee)!’ - including to children, without anyone concerned really having felt the need to test what effect such an unprecedented

Continued upsetting news about our inadequate response to the ever-present problem of violence against women and girls in the UK - or VAWG, as it seems to have been acronymed - from The Guardian’s reporting.

Despite the fact it’s famously under-reported, such offences apparently constituted 20% of all police-recorded crime in 2022-23.

And the proportion of the UK women that underwent sexual assault per year went up from 3.4% to 4.3% in the year 2023-24.

Starmer’s government has a goal to “halve violence against women and girls in a decade”. I desperately hope they furnish the effort with enough resources to give it a fighting chance of working.

Labour might be claiming that “growth” is their number one priority - and sure, they’re laying out some policies that might help substantiate that.

Per Starmer and his decision-making process.

‘Should we do X? If it’s good for growth, good for wealth creation the answer is ‘yes’, if it’s not then the answer is ‘no’.

That is of course a tool far too blunt for me to feel comfortable with - even if I could somehow persuade myself that “wealth creation” should be our key goal. But it doesn’t exactly reflect what they’re up to anyway. Apparently there remain at least a couple of issues that supercede even that number one priority.

Economists have suggested that two of the most immediate ways to boost growth would be higher migration and a better trading relationship with the European Union, neither of which Reeves is expected to address in her speech.

🎶 Listening to Happenings by Kasabian.

Twenty years after their eponymous first album, Kasabian released number 8 last year.

The singer has changed since those days, thanks to the departure of Tom Meighan in 2020 after it was determined he had assaulted his partner. Serge Pizzorno now lead-sings.

And so have the vibes changed a bit, it being a bit more dancey and poppy than I remember some of the early albums being. But not offensively so; and who amongst us hasn’t changed in the last two decades? There’s still plenty of potential stadium sing-a-long moments to be found here.

Never let it be said that no tech billionaire has ever had a valid and accurate thought.

Bill Gates has labelled Elon Musk’s embrace of far-right politicians and attempt to interfere in the politics of other countries – including the UK – as “insane shit”.

Source.

A recent edition of New Statesman listed out their recommended “Twenty-five books to read in 2025”. That’s a list of books due to come out in 2025 to be clear, so none of us can possibly have read any of them yet.

Naturally this has done nothing other than make my want to read list continue grow exponentially faster than my to-read list. Worse yet, it’s almost the end of month 1 and my personal goal to read more books this year has so far got me into the grand position of having read - after almost 1/12th of the year has elapsed - a grand total of:

Zero books.

The shame of it.

Ugh. Oh well, here’s what I nontheless can’t resist adding to the “if only” list.

World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics, by Bruno Maçães:

World politics has changed, claims Bruno Maçães. Geopolitics is no longer simply a contest to control territory: in this age of advanced technology, it has become a contest to create the territory. Great powers seek to build a world for other states to inhabit, while keeping the ability to change the rules or the state of the world when necessary.

At a moment when the old concepts no longer work, this book aims to introduce a radically new theory of world politics and technology. Understood as ‘world building’, the most important events of our troubled times suddenly appear connected and their inner logic is revealed: technology wars between China and the United States, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy transition.

To conclude, Maçães considers the more distant future, when the metaverse and artificial intelligence become the world, a world the great powers must struggle to build and control.

Get In - The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power under Keir Starmer.

Minority Rule, by Ash Sarkar.

‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they’ll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren’t actually silencing the ‘forgotten’ working class, immigrants aren’t eating your pets, trans-activists aren’t corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn’t crushing free speech.

In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it’s facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.

The Age of Diagnosis, by Suzanne O’Sullivan

…a meticulous and compassionate exploration of how our culture of medical diagnosis can harm, rather than help, patients

How to Think About AI - A Guide for the Perplexed, by Richard Susskind

Revealing the unfolding story of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Susskind presents a short non-technical guide that challenges us to think differently about AI. Susskind brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups - and into everyday life.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian

Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.

To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.

Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.

The Genuis Myth, by Helen Lewis

The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor.

You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate.

Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use — without really questioning what it means.

Spotify, a company which is fairly famously not even an American-HQd enterprise (it’s Swedish), is giving me ever more reason to rant about its malign influence.

They too donated to Trump’s inauguration. Not as much as the bigger, equally irresponsible, US tech billionaires, sure. But, rabid self-interested politics and basic human ethics aside, I’m sure it still feels like a $150,000 kick in the teeth for, amongst others, the musicians that allow it to exist in the first place - especially given its notorious ungenerousness to the folks that allow it to exist.

Björk, for other reasons, also recently expressed a non-too favourable opinion of the company, telling a Swedish newspaper that it is:

…probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians. The streaming culture has changed an entire society and an entire generation of artists.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

Robert Jones Jr, in a now-deleted Twitter post on August 18 2015.

The quote is widely misattributed to James Baldwin - to be fair, it does seem like something he might have said. But it’s not his; albeit Robert Jones Jr was previously known as ‘Son of Baldwin’, and used that as his Twitter handle at the time.

A perhaps surprising fact courtesy of a report on Labour’s desire to cut down the admittedly rather extensive size of the British House of Lords.

House of Lords research has found there would be just 414 peers left, out of 700 life peers, excluding bishops and hereditaries, if the 80 age limit was brought in by 2029

Heredity appointments are already set to go.

Someone might be on the verge of being caught using ChatGPT to half-ass their job again.

Yep, people are seeing hints that some of the batshittery of executive orders that Trump is conducting some form of depraved performance art from via scrawling his Big Name all over in front of alt-right pilled Elon-hyped enthusiastic crowds might in fact have been ‘inspired’ by your local friendly AI chatbot. Or, god forbid, Grok, which might explain a lot.

From Futurism:

…legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language – familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help.

There’s the one about further ruining Alaska’s environment which lists 6 Public Land Orders, all of which are numbered 1.

“The weird typos and formatting errors could lead to confusion down the road,” Stern wrote of the bungled numbered list. “If the Secretary of the Interior invoked his authority under Section XV(1) of this order, which of the 6 different subsections labeled 1 would [he] mean? And which number controls when a subsection has two different ones?”

There’s the comedy skit that renames Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America - you know, ‘problem solved’, for no known or imaginable problem - which it is alleged by some provides in its description of the location a book-report style description of the area right outta the ChatGPT-a-likes:

“I struggle to believe,” agreed Stern, responding to Melkonian, “that a human, let alone a lawyer, wrote this 7th-grade book report-style description of the Gulf.” (Indeed, when we asked ChatGPT for a “description of the importance of the Gulf of Mexico,” it hit almost all the same notes.)

And more:

Other orders feature questionable errors and structural choices. The order to withdraw America from the WHO, for instance, includes some inexplicably bolded punctuation, while others, like one effectively withdrawing the US from a global corporate tax deal, fail to maintain uniform formatting standards throughout.

Now I personally doubt that the reason we see so many senseless and oftentimes cruel orders emanating from the Arena of Nightmares is because a chatbot went wild rather than that a small pustule of x.com-ravaged human brains sploooshed them out willy-nilly with minimal care taken. That they come from robot minds at least in intent would be most likely nothing but wishful thinking, although it’s very feasible that the average “knowledge worker” of course uses this technology as one of many tools.

The article does freely admit that there’s no way to know for sure from just looking at this text.

In a murky digital world, it’s often hard to tell: is what I’m looking at AI-generated? Or is just poorly executed human work?

But perhaps the fact that these allegations are passing through people’s heads says a lot - both about the quality of output we’ve come to expect from current LLMs, and also the new US administration.

To that end, is it possible that the Trump administration’s newly-signed executive orders were all crafted by humans, sans AI? Sure. Either way, though, the initial expert reviews of the executive actions are in – and according to those, they’re weird and sloppy. And even if they’re not AI, they feel like AI.

(Previous ChatGPT writing law news.)

So Nigel Farage is “reticent” about some of Elon Musk’s opinions.

Former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam thinks Elon is “a f****** moron”.

And Kemi Badenoch “wants Liz Truss to shut up for a while”.

It’s somehow disconcerting but refreshing to find oneself in strong agreement with otherwise terrible people, even if it’s most likely stopped clock syndrome rather than a personality or values transplant on their part (and certainly not, I hope, one on my part - stop me now if it seems otherwise). Maybe some folk are simply so far beyond the pale that even the average Terrible Opinion Haver can’t take them seriously.

There’s a way in which nothing is new under the sun. No matter how appalling it seems. That’s not to excuse it of course. So many people should know better than to play with particular kinds of fire.

I don’t pretend to have knowledge of the inner workings of ex-president George Bush Junior’s mind - I was, to put it mildly, never a fan back in the day - but yesterday’s ridiculous inauguration ceremony brought back to my mind his reputed comments from last time we had to witness the same man speak his megalomaniac delusions as a good proportion of the world was subjected to yesterday.

In fact the Intelligencer could really just re-run this article, after subbing a couple of the audience names.

The inauguration of Donald Trump was a surreal experience for pretty much everyone who witnessed it, whether or not they were at the event and regardless of who they supported in the election.

…

But, according to three people who were present, Bush gave a brief assessment of Trump’s inaugural after leaving the dais: “That was some weird shit.” All three heard him say it.

From Reuters:

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday issued pre-emptive pardons for General Mark Milley, Dr Anthony Fauci and members of the Jan. 6 congressional committee and witnesses, saying they “do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

It’s a terrifying world where it would even occur to someone that this might be necessary in a supposedly “civilised” state (not to mention that it’s not entirely obvious to me that Presidential pardons should even be a thing that exists).

I’m sure a certain type of nu-Republican is going to see the ultimate in conspiracies lurking in every corner of this. But it’s very obvious what Biden is trying to protect against, and why it might well be necessary. At least make it harder for a vindicative Trump, or any of his tag-a-long snowflakes, to hang these folk out to the wolves in any undeserved way without an overt breakdown of the rule of law.

📚 Want to read: From Label to Table by Xaq Frohlich.

How did the Nutrition Facts label come to appear on millions of everyday American household food products? As Xaq Frohlich reveals, this legal, scientific, and seemingly innocuous strip of information can be a prism through which to view the high-stakes political battles and development of scientific ideas that have shaped the realms of American health, nutrition, and public communication.

Unpleasant to see Trump setting a new high score record in terms of amount donated to his inauguration fund. Ne’er-do-wells have apparently funneled a record-breaking $170 million in his direction.

Statista summarises the recent history via this infographic:

This is a concept quite alien to me as a non-American, but I gather it funds such absolute necessities as having a massive party in the conventional rather than political sense.

From the Independent:

The donations are usually spent on events surrounding the inauguration, such as the oath of office ceremony, a parade, and several inaugural balls.

Lots, but not all, of it is coming from all those tech billionaire man-babies with their newfound adoration of the forthcoming president, along with their dear friends from the crypto-currency “business”. Disgusting is as disgusting does. Why would these supposedly successful, independent gods of capitalism burn their money at something so awful? Well, I guess it’s possible some of them genuinely like him (or his dancing cringe-tweeter frontman, Elon). Otherwise, I can only imagine it’s pure fear that if they don’t debase themselves both financially and publicly then maybe they won’t make quite as many billions of unnecessary dollars next year as they otherwise would.

Per Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets:

“They don’t want to be on the president’s bad side,” said Glavin. “If he is upset with someone or upset with a company doing something he doesn’t like, he has no qualms about just coming right out and berating them in public.

“I think that really comes into play much more this time than in [the] past with different presidents,” he said. “I think past experience is dictating some of the actions in this.”

Or as Statista notes in their article accompanying the above chart:

In stark contrast to 2017, when Trump was met with scepticism, corporate America is playing nice with the president-elect ahead of his second term. Tech giants Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft as well numerous other companies and the CEOs of Apple and OpenAI have made large contribution to Trump’s inauguration fund in an attempt to curry favor or at least not get on the bad side of the man known for holding grudges and not shying away from favoritism.

A rich man’s selfishness knows no bounds; likewise his cowardice. I can’t remember who first came up with the following pearl of wisdom, but I stand behind it 100%: what even is the point of having f*** you money if you never say f*** you to anyone? Or at least to no-one where doing so might just make the world a generally more bearable place for far more people than it could possibly hurt.