Previous iterations:

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Volume 5
• Volume 6
• Volume 7

Serious Reads

Kill Chain

Clausewitz had a word for everything the optimization leaves out. He called it “friction,” the accumulation of uncertainty, error, and contradiction that ensures no operation goes as planned. But friction is also where judgment forms. Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is. The staying is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it. Clausewitz called what unfolds when you refused to notice a “war on paper,” a plan that proceeds without resistance because everything that connected it to the world it was supposed to act on has been taken out.

I think of Vasily Arkhipov when reading this paragraph. Vasily was part of a decision-making chain unique to his B-59 nuclear submarine, and his sole objection to launching a nuclear torpedo is widely credited with preventing World War 3. In the smaller-scale war operation of "carpet bombing six thousand Iranian targets, plus or minus a school", people like Vasily do not appear to be part of the decision chain any more.

Also a note on Google in this piece. In 2018, they dropped out of a contract that would have seen them provide AI targeting systems for the Pentagon, after massive internal backlash. By 2024, they were far better prepared. They were providing cloud computing and AI systems to the Israeli government, with no safeguards in place to ensure that it would not be used for war. Workers protested again, and 28 of them were fired, including people who weren't even in-person at these protests. CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an internal email after this, stating:

When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.

The plucky startup ethos was well and truly, and finally, killed off on this day.

Prop Bet

Note: Paywalled article, archived link is available here.

So by partnering with these betting markets, news organizations — from the legacy entities like WSJ or CNN to the burgeoning new media platforms like Substack — have undercut themselves two ways: first, by commodifying information and then by effectively endorsing competitors who can pay for that information; and second, by serving as advertising for prediction markets, making their audience vulnerable to getting ripped off by insiders. It is unclear to me how helping gambling companies rip off your audience serves the public interest, which is, or at least once was, the point of newsgathering.

The point that Serious Commentators and mainstream media outlets would vastly prefer to report on pseudo-events rather than real events is an interesting one.

Closer to home, I have always disliked the Irish Times for its clinging to the coattails of Fianna Gael goverment. Reporting pre-approved soundbites that grab headlines, squashing dissent or outright ignoring it, or pushing one-sided narratives that maintain the status quo. This is done to protect their well-established pipeline from "journalist" to government advisor positions. That, plus I hate their property supplement.

The Waters Are Already Muddy

So they push this "think of the children" narrative that has essentially removed all of those boundaries. It used to be that there were adult spaces and kid spaces but now, it feels like every space has to be safe for a 6 year old. Which means no space is safe for an adult. We’re all walking on eggshells, self-censoring, saying "seggs" instead of sex, "unalive" instead of kill, and turning our language into this infantile mush because the algorithm punishes reality.

Near the start of this article, the quote "a language designed for people who are terrified of being caught caring about anything" caught my eye. It replicated a criticism of South Park I read many years prior.

Apathy towards caring predates any recent deliberate push to manufacture it. And yet it is still heavily manufactured.

Inside Nepal’s fake rescue racket

Once a “rescue” is called, the financial choreography begins. A single helicopter carries multiple passengers. But separate, full-price invoices are submitted to each passenger’s insurance company, as if each had their own dedicated flight. A $4,000 charter becomes a $12,000 claim. Fake flight manifests and load sheets are fabricated. At the hospital, medical officers prepare discharge summaries using the digital signatures of senior doctors who were never involved in the case. In some cases, these are done without those doctors’ knowledge. Fake admission records are created for tourists who were, in some documented instances, drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria at the time they were supposedly receiving treatment.

The entire ecosystem that has developed around Mt. Everest must be nauseating beyond belief to the dwindling amount of people who remember a time before rich people turned it into their playground.

Mind the Gap

The liberal democratic assumption is that legitimacy flows downward: from elections, constitutions, institutions. And that if the system hasn’t recognized your demand, then your demand has no standing. This is why middle-class Ireland felt entitled to judge the protesters this week- because the middle class has proximity to those institutions. They work in the civil service, in the professions, in the organizations that interact with the government daily. Their legitimacy is pre-approved. And importantly, their complaints travel through recognized channels: union negotiations, professional bodies, well written letters to TDs, the pages of the Irish Times. When they suffer, it is understandable to the establishment.

But when a haulier in Kildare suffers, it is not understandable. That is, until he parks a tractor on a bridge, and translates the grievance into the language we all understand: traffic times, fuel prices, appointments. At which point he is condemned for using the only channel the system left him.

Ireland is a rich country that keeps pretending it's not rich. This level of prosperity in this country is relatively new and totally unprecedented. Culturally, we have not adapted to this.

More fascinating is that a massive majority of people here will state that they do not feel wealthy. Even if individuals have a satisfying salary number, it is swallowed up by high taxes (with what feels like little reward from it, crucially), expensive everything, and exists in an ecosystem that was not built with anything coherent in mind. And if your salary isn't high, you're fucked.

I particularly resonate with this article's focus on the way individuals protect themselves, and which methods are considered "respectable" and which ones aren't. Buying private health insurance protects you and your family out of necessity, but eliminates the need of the government to fix the underlying system. If I were to protest my diabolically poor healthcare, I would be ignored up until I made the reality of my plight unavoidable, at which point I'd be crucified.

Similarly, owning the roof over your head is one of the biggest protections this society offers. Yet in a country with over 100,000 derelict properties in the middle of a housing crisis, protesting this in a mildly inconvenient way will get you attacked by balaclava-wearing police. We are not seen as legitimate by the ruling class.

There are no psychopaths

And this is perhaps the strongest evidence that psychopathy is a zombie idea: for as long as scientists have been studying the idea there has literally been no advancement in evidence-based knowledge. Instead, there has been rapidly growing evidence to suggest the idea is a dud. Yet scores of researchers continue to be interested in it, perhaps propelled by little more than their own bias and the idea’s infectious appeal.

I feel that people desire that psychopathy be a real and diagnosable condition, to separate those others from the rest of the population. Whoever "those others" are tend to vary by what decade and moral panic it currently is.

Much of my life has been spent fighting people who use my autism diagnosis^[1] as a wedge against me. How relieved my parents were when they learned I was Different™! My complaints of bullying could then be gleefully ignored, as I was clearly too stupid to know how socialising worked. How delighted my teachers were! Now they didn't have to include me in whatever activity they didn't feel like me participating in. They were given their pretext by psychology, and they wielded it against me with a smile on their face.

I draw the comparison between autism and "psychopathy" because of the eagerness of psychology and society to create an excuse to make "others" out of us. Anyone who does not fit into a pre-defined rigid role is clearly in the wrong; only those who fit into the societal mould - forcefully or otherwise - are worthy of basic rights and decency. If you stick out, there must be a reason for it, and it cannot be the fault of societal norms or roles.

So the psychologists try, and fail, to label psychopathy. Society, through popular media, pushes the idea without regard. It's easier to create others that way. I don't see this changing any time soon.

Light Reads

RAF clear 'exploding' Tunnock's teacakes to fly after 60 years

But in the summer of 1965, a captain and student pilot forgot they had placed unwrapped teacakes above their instrument panels.

When the captain pulled an emergency depressurising switch the iconic Scottish treat erupted - leaving a sticky mess over the airmen, the instruments and cockpit canopy.

Really nice teacakes, nothing more to add here 👍

Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels

But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea.

I only have experience with one of these maps - Overwatch's Temple of Anubis. I strongly disagree with it. Assault (Two Control Point/2CP) maps in Overwatch rely almost entirely on brutal choke points, squashing potentially fun combat styles into only one that actually might succeed. It crushes creativity and it miserable on both the offensive and defensive side whenever you lose a push.

To give the writer credit here, Temple of Anubis is better than most other Assault maps in Overwatch. This is saying very little. There's a reason Overwatch 2 ditched every single one of the Assault maps altogether.

Escort (Payload) maps are almost universally enjoyed. Dorado and Route 66 are personal favourites. Hybrid (a single Capture Point followed by an Escort/Payload section) is sometimes good, with King's Row being an absolute standout. I have no idea how this one didn't come up in discussion.

Study Report: Can astrologers truly gain insights about people from entire astrological charts?

Despite their high-degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers as a group performed no better than chance - that is, their distribution of results closely resembled what you'd see if they had all been guessing at random, and the number of charts they matched correctly, on average, was not statistically significantly different than random guessing either. Not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of 12 answers correct - even though, after completing the task, more than half of astrologers believed they had gotten more than 5 answers correct.

Full disclosure: I did not read this from start to finish. However, I gleaned sufficient amount of information to be smug at a cohort of people I have never met in my life. Authenticity!

It turns out Fortnite isn't the forever game after all

Even if the obsession migrates rather than disappears, Fortnite's story should still serve as a cautionary tale. Cultural dominance is fleeting – and it usually isn't really dominance at all, especially in a world of such fragmented and broad-based culture. Scale buys time, not immortality, and no amount of celebrity collaborations, brand relationship management, or live-service design can elevate a game outside and above culture itself or make it immune to the fickle tides of audience tastes.

I was always bemused by the level of hate that Fortnite got. There seemed to be this misplaced anger towards anything new that the prior generation of players refuse to understand.

I hope the kids had fun with this game, and whatever they end up settling on next.

The Busiest Place You've Never Seen

Conditions can change hour by hour, reshaping the day’s work on the fly. “On Tristan,” says James Glass, a descendant of Cpl. Glass and Tristan’s head of fisheries at the time, “you need a good-weather plan and a bad-weather plan.” Most days, islanders end up using both.

Fascinating to see this island undergo essentially a total reset in the 1960s. And despite the logistical nightmare of providing supplies and resources to such an isolated place, how it has remained organised and increasingly modernised. Mostly a good thing, if the article is anything to go by.

Also - despite this site having elements that load on page scroll and autoplaying videos, it's been built nicely. Videos don't autoplay on mobile. Rare to see this done in a non-obnoxious fashion.

Left 4 Dead’s Graffiti Is So Memorable Because It Was Made By People — A Whole Lot Of People

Flash forward to today, Pinkerton still draws on lessons he first learned while turning Left 4 Dead’s walls into his urban Sistine Chapel: "The graffiti specifically and the environmental storytelling in general has always stayed with me, in terms of story being told in the margins instead of as something you're being hit over the head with. Maybe a character shares a little more if the player lingers, maybe you can stumble on a little nugget of story if you look a little harder. Just the idea of rewarding people looking for the story without bothering the people who aren't.

The most articulate graffiti outside of my local queer bar.

The Boring Internet

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

A slight detraction from this article is the singular dramatic meaningful lines given massive prominence just for posture. This isn't Medium, Terry. But their points still stand. Make your own site.

Exploring our collection: The canary resuscitator

So why is this my favourite object in our collections? Firstly, while I don’t advocate the use of animals in testing dangerous conditions, I am pleased that Haldane spared a thought for the canaries themselves and worked to make their job as non-lethal as possible. My impression from hearing about canaries in coal mines was that they were expected to die to warn people, so when I came across this object it was a huge relief (though my research on the topic has found less thoughtful cages).

People being as good as they can be, within the confines of their role in life, usually puts a smile on my face.

Cool Sites

Black Hole Simulation

A neat site that lets you simulate a black hole with many variables that I often don't understand. Source code available here.

1D-Chess

Surprisingly tricky when it's so much easier to waltz into a stalemate.

Bodega Cats of New York

:3

This To That

Super simple site that gives recommendations for what glue to use when attaching two different things to each other. It's mostly on this list because for attaching plastic to ceramic (a current issue in my house), it recommended Household Goop. I can think of a few people who would appreciate that :3

Also they do Glues In The News. Very charming.

Techno-Optimism Archive

It would be very easy of me to respond cynically to the eager, sometimes outrageous, promises of a wonderful future in these little snippets. Younger me would have.

Instead I find that this archive shows how the innovations themselves always had the power to shape the world, and often did. Where they stumble is how they integrate into existing human ways of life and hierarchies. Radio and television brought media to the masses. Email^[2] and the internet did allow us to break through hierarchies. Until it was so ingrained into our lifestyle that the nature of the product changed. What was once radical and exciting inevitably becomes routine, and with it, the technologies become manipulated against their initial intentions. Rarely the fault of the tech itself.

Also - this archive is full proof that anyone promising that an industry/way of life/ecosystem will be DESTROYED by the New Thing is universally full of shit.

Videos

The Tekken 8 Bot That Won Games with Only Left Kicks

Original title of this video is "Three - The Machine That Took Over Tekken", however I prefer to use DeArrow titles to reduce clickbait.

I have a strong distaste for bots in online games, but I'll entertain the questions raised by this one.

Eddy has been a button-masher character since Tekken 3, as this video points out. I've used this character to impress cute girls^[3] in arcades because I can string together semi-decent combos out of him with three-button input and it looks flashy. Mashing '3' highlights more things about the development of modern Tekken games, mind you.

Repeated button input can chain into easy combos with increasing ease, as each Tekken title comes out. 7 and 8 are particularly notorious for this. As with any competitive game, understanding how the mechanics work will provide several escape methods for this behaviour, but it's not immediately intutitive to a novice player. I utilised similar techniques in other games, generally abusing stunlocks in Dark Souls 1 to players that didn't know how to toggle escape.

What I find more interesting about this specific case is the culture that quickly built and disintegrated around it. The initial mix of excitement, humour, and sometimes despair swiftly descends into gaming the system. Players throwing PvP games so they would fall in rank, meet the bot in a match, then beat it as a display of basic prowess to the frothing masses. Viewers checking out en masse once they realised the bot had hit its natural limit. My general disdain for gaming culture is not helped by seeing this bot "prove" my concerns.

How Traffic Lights Actually Work

I'm not sure how much of this info transfers over from American systems, but still, good shit.

Most Confusing Place on Earth (Queens, NY)

And suddenly I'm less bothered about every fourth street in Ireland being "Mary". ^[1]