The Braindump Blog

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.

Somewhat to my surprise, it seems that the Tiktok ban has actually happened for our US friends - at least for now.

This is, I understand, is what our transatlantic cousins see when trying to access the site today:

I’m afraid the now-standard tech-billionaire-style Trump sycophancy implied in the message does nothing more than make me hope the ban lasts extra long, as emotional and irrational response as I know that is. Although Trump is thinking about undoing it on Monday, if he gets to it.

It’s especially galling as, let us never forget, it was Mr Trump back in 2020 that first decided he was going to ban Tiktok on the basis of its foreign ownership being a threat to national security. At the time it wasn’t clear exactly if or how this was possible, but that’s of course not the sort of thing that stops words coming out of Trump’s mouth.

A lawyers at the ACLU heralded this as A Good Thing:

“President Biden is right to revoke these Trump administration executive orders, which blatantly violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and WeChat users in the United States,” she said.

A year later, the Biden administration actually rolled back the Trump executive order that would have carried this out, in lieu of a new executive order that aimed to more generally “address the risks posed by ICTS transactions involving software applications that are designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons that are owned or controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary” .

It’s surely a threat that no-one can seriously doubt is a real one, wherever you personally fall on the issue of a Tiktok ban. I mean, there’s enough damage done by similar technology in the US when similar sites are not technically owned by a foreign adversary.

For what it’s worth, Tiktok still works over here in the UK, and as far as we know there are no plans for a similar ban.

“We won’t be following the same path as the Americans unless or until… there is a threat that we are concerned about in the British interest, and then of course we will keep it under review,” Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones said.

📚 Want to read: Power to the People by Danny Sriskandarajah.

The book presents a blueprint for how we, as individuals, can make a difference through greater community engagement, and how we can deliver a society that works for the many and not the few. He speaks to voter apathy and a growing sense that elections no longer matter, with politicians and institutions too focused on short-term issues to grapple with complex global problems such as climate change, rising inequality, and digital disruption.

14% of Britons apparently believe that “The best system for running a country effectively is a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with elections” according to a recent poll.

This time we can’t even rely on the young folk to save us from our terrible national opinions. The sentiment actually runs even higher in those of younger age, with over 1 in 5 of those aged 18-45 thinking that would be a good thing.

In the same poll, fewer than 1 in 4 people think the UK is going in the right direction. Nearly 2 in 3 think we’re in a period of steep decline. Almost 60% think the UK’s best years are behind us.

It is hard not to join them on these latter propositions, but I find it absolutely insane that a measurable number of people think it’d be better if we didn’t have to “bother” with elections given no alternative beyond (red flag alert) “a strong leader” was given. Cue the famous Churchill quote about worst form of government except all the rest.

This seems like it should be illegal. From today’s Observer:

A new payment system brought in by YoungOnes, which supplies “freelance” retail assistants to many well-known high street stores, charges gig workers 4.8% of their earnings to be paid in one minute or 2.9% to be paid in three days. If they decline, they typically have to wait 30 days

I hadn’t realised quite how much reach our tax-funded public news organisation, BBC News has. It’s impressive.

From this week’s New Statesman:

The BBC News website is by some distance the largest English-speaking news website in the world.

According to analysis of November 2024 data by Press Gazette, BBC News is the only news website to receive more than a billion global views per month. Its audience is 50 per cent larger than its closest competitor (the New York Times).

It reaches nearly ten times as many people worldwide as the Washington Post. In the US it has millions more readers than the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Newsweek or Google News. Its US traffic is also growing rapidly, by 40 per cent in the past year

Although the point of the article itself is that this reach, and the BBC’s apparent fascination with writing stories about him, is possibly the reason that Elon Musk has been saying so many incoherent, stupid and dangerous things about the little ol' UK in recent times.

To maintain the world’s attention and the riches it brings, Musk must therefore continue to make himself a rolling news story, serving up outrage and provocation on the platforms that command the largest audiences.

Obviously I can hardly say anything in criticism of those who give the world’s richest public bore undue attention. But it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Andrew Tate launches ‘Bruv Party’

Andrew Tate, an extraordinarily unpleasant grifter who has been charged with criminal counts of rape, sex with a minor and human trafficking, apparently wants to set up a political party in the UK and run for Prime Minister.

It’s the ‘Bruv party’, which aims to “restore underlying values back to Britain”. Values is the V of Bruv, which turns out to be an acronym of “Britain Restoring Underlying Values”. I suppose there is some indisputable tie-in with the historic British imperialist values of rape and human trafficking.

And of course, as do all these right-wing madmen, he’s seeking succour from famously non-British wannabe-king Elon.

Polices include a reform of the BBC. This would include featuring a “24/7 live broadcast of knife crime offenders serving solitary confinement” whilst getting its other topics from Musk’s “X” network, borrowing the same community notes system that Zuckerberg also is pretending he sees as the solution to humanity’s moderation problem.

Naturally he’s also going a crypto route - saving our faltering economy via creating a national Bitcoin reserve. Oh, and holding weekly referendums. Probably via x.com polls knowing his type.

It’s very possible this thing is just an attention-seeking joke, also very common amongst his ilk. But, when I noted that possibility to an American friend. they cautioned me that the same assumption was thrown about with reference to Trump not all that many years ago.

Here’s hoping that being under house arrest in Romania curtails Tate’s chances a little.

From 404 Media:

Meta’s HR team is deleting internal employee criticism of new board member, UFC president and CEO Dana White, at the same time that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Meta will “get back to our roots around free expression”

Surprise surprise. Zuckerberg’s new obsession with free speech is - as is the case for all these fragile snowflakes - contingent on the speech concerned being of the ilk that either he or the person he’s sucking up to agrees with.

Simon Williamson reviews what we learned about Large Language Model AI development in 2024.

He goes into a lot of detail on each point so the article itself is well worth a read (as is his blog in general if you’re interested in this topic). But in summary:

• Several models that outperformed GPT-4 were released, including those from Google, Claude and various other lesser-known ones. Context lengths were also increased.
• Supercomputers are not required to use them! Many of these are efficient enough to able to be run locally on your own home computer if it’s a reasonably decent one. The smaller ones can even work powered by your mobile phone.
• The cost of running a prompt through a hosted LLM decreased a lot.
• Multimodal models became common - those which are able to respond to pictures, audio and video.
• Live voice and camera modes were added - you can talk to some of them in a way very reminiscent of the film “Her”.
• You can now build entire apps via prompting LLMs.
• The best models stopped being free to use, with OpenAI launching a $200 per month subscription for its fanciest one.
• There was a lot of buzz about AI agents but they’ve not really taken off yet. It’s not even clear what it means to be an agent.
• Evaluating models became a very important skill.
• Apple released a great library for running models (mlx-lm) on Apple silicon - but its consumer Apple Intelligence features were not very exciting.
• New “reasoning” models were released, such as OpenAI’s o1 series. The quality of their output can be improved by increasing inference compute, not just training compute.
• A leading openly licensed model, DeepSeek v3, was trained for under $6 million.
• The energy usage of these models, and hence their environmental impact, dramatically decreased.
• But the environment was adversely impacted in other ways, with all the big tech companies building out a ton of infrastructure - data centres.
• The word “slop” became a popular way to describe undesirable AI content.
• It was found that synthetic training data actually works well, contrary to what was originally thought by some.
• The optimal use of LLMs became harder. They each have their different limitations, they’re all inherently unreliable in some way - and learning how to work with them best is a non-intuitive skill users would need to develop.
• The knowledge gap between people that actively follow and hence know what’s going on with these models and the vast majority of the population who don’t is huge.
• Much as it’s important to critique LLMs for the ways that they can create harm, the way some people criticise these models is unhelpful and doesn’t at all help people get the best value from them.

Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content

Just what 2025 needs to really push it into dystopia.

Zuckerberg’s announcement about Meta’s new-found prioritisation of “free expression” on Facebook and Instagram is, to me, nothing short of a sign of an increasingly horrific future for life on that all-too-ubiquitous platform. I loathe almost every word, and certainly the underlying conspiracy-laden, responsibility-shirking, favour-currying sentiment of it all.

I mean, any weird tech billionaire that thinks checking facts is “too political” and takes the wastelands of x.com as the paradigmatic model of good information hygiene is either selling their entire soul to the Trump / Musk ingratiation train or, perhaps worse, has become a true believer in their cause.

The 5 minute video itself is probably worth a look, particularly if you imagine the reaction must be an exaggeration. To be honest, the first time I saw it I thought it might be a deepfake - especially when I got to the line about how they’re basically moving some of their employees to Texas because California is just too woke, plus when they said they’re going to copy X’s ideas - but apparently it’s real, unless literally everyone fell for it.

I hate but can’t resist giving him attention, but the world’s richest pub bore is really on one with regards to overthrowing the UK government

Turns out he’s a fan of monarchy. Quelle surprise that someone of his petty character and unpleasant views prefers undemocratic systems.

Elon Musk makes 23 posts urging King Charles III to overthrow UK government

Though there is one type of bizarre and public opinion gathering system he does appear to respect - that of the twitter/X poll, which of course coincidentally he owns the means of production of.

Elon Musk hints at US invading the UK to ‘liberate’ it in latest bizarre twist in X saga

The only good thing to come out of recent Elon news is the extremely fast demise of his romance with Nigel Farage, of the Reform party. He seems to have gone from thinking about giving him an absolute bucketload of money to further distort our electoral system straight to calling for him to be deposed. It’s not entirely clear why - but the consensus at present seems to be down to Farage disagreeing with Musk’s view' “jailed far-right anti-Islam agitator” Tommy Robinson Is Good Actually. These poor fragile billionaire babies just can’t handle anyone disagreeing with any of their ill-informed and ridiculous views.

Astonishingly, I suppose this means I agree with Farage on something.

Not content with imperilling a single country, or the international community as a whole, Musk continues his bizarre fixation on trying to get Prime Minister of the UK thrown in jail whilst at the same time appearing to suggest that British convicted criminal / racist / fraudster Tommy Robinson should be released.

There’s nothing new or all that interesting here. I mainly just thought the headline’s characterisation of Musk as ‘the world’s richest pub bore’ was both accurate and darkly hilarious.

His knowledge of British history also seems a little stunted if he believes that some of Starmer’s decisions whilst he was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service were “the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”.

This year it seems this blog contributed nearly 100k words to the unwitting public sphere / purloined AI corpus. My apologies to at least the former.

(Not including any of the linklog posts.)