• Missing Post

  So, yesterday, I launched the new version of this site. Well, there’s nothing like taking some content offline to make you feel appreciated all of a sudden. Because, last night, I got an email from Adam, who noticed that the post on Nectaris that I wrote last year was now missing. He later found it on archive.org, but I took his email as a clue to re-import that post immediately anyway. Well, if you’re also missing some content, shoot me an email. 😗

  ---

• Boeing 787 Sleepy …

  Well, I’ve never seen anything like that before …

  A Lufthansa Boeing 787-9, registration D-ABPQ performing flight LH-450 from Frankfurt/Main (Germany) to Los Angeles,CA (USA), was preparing for boarding of passengers at the gate, when all gear doors opened and the nose gear retracted. The aircraft fell onto its nose. A number of crew on board received injuries.

  Apparently, this Dreamliner is brand new. The aircraft was delivered to Lufthansa just in January.

  D-ABPQ after the accident (photo via The Aviation Herald)

  ---

• John Blanche Has Died

  With sorrow, I’ve just learned that John Blanche passed away earlier this week. People who know me will tell you that I’ve been a fan of Warhammer 40,000 since childhood. One of the biggest reasons for this is the way in which the world of that tabletop game and its accompanying literature and spin-off games is portraited — what is usually referred to as the “grimdark” setting. This is down as much to artwork as it is to storytelling. And nobody shaped the iconic look of 40K more than John Blanche. He started working for Games Workshop in 1977, including producing the cover for the first British edition of Dungeons & Dragons. He was heavily involved in the early art for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (the very first release of 40k) in 1987 and later editions, eventually becoming Games Workshop’s art director. By all accounts, John Blanche was almost single-handedly responsible for laying the groundwork of what 40K ended up looking like and therefore also to a very large extend of what it looks and feels like today. Warhammer 40,000 is grimdark because of John Blanche. He was a huge inspiration to many artists and the gaming world owes him a massive debt of gratitude.

  Blanche was never a big fan of having his picture published, as far as I can tell, so instead I will leave you with my favourite artwork of his. This 1997 painting is titled Sister of Battle and was the cover for the first edition of the Sisters of Battle codex. Its striking palette is typical John Blanche and it manages, in essential 40K style, to blend ’80s punk with medieval gothic as well as retro-futuristic influences. This painting is as sexy as it is scary. In one word: stunning.

  

  ---

• Get Lit

  After America This Week ended in February, due to some sort of undisclosed falling out between Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, Racket News launched a new show with Matt Taibbi and Michael Tracey that pretty much ended in a disaster after five episodes. In a follow up move, Matt has dispensed with both Tracey and the news angle of the show and is instead concentrating on the literary classics portion that made his show with Walter such a success. On the new show, Get Lit with Matt and Brad, Brad Pearce is the second co-host to try and replace the pretty much irreplacable Walter Kirn.

  The first episode is out, discussing Aristophanes’ 391 BC play Assemblywomen. It was decent entertainment and I learned some things, though I must say, like most who enjoyed ATW, I miss Walter. This seems to be the main theme in the comments to the video, at YouTube and Racket News at least. I am not sure that the concept alone will keep the show afloat. This is certainly better than the Michael Tracey disaster, but what made the literary discussions on ATW work was specifically the interplay between Matt and Walter and the audience seems to be well aware of this. Needless to say, Walter Kirn isn’t a fan of the new arrangements.

  Man, I would love to know what happened between the two of them. It must have been brewing for a while, they both don’t seem like people who fly into drama mode at the drop of a hat. I bet there was some stuff going on behind the scenes for a while before something made the pot boil over. And the fact that they both maintain pretty much silence about the causes is either very professional or points at something more sinister.

  ---

• The Modern Web Infrastructure

  

  I have no idea who made this (only that it is somewhat based on XKCD 2347), but it is pretty spot on.

  ---

• Palantir and the US Strike on the Iranian Girls School

  This is the best analysis I’ve seen of the US military strike that killed over a hundred young girls in a school in southern Iran.

  By the time the war began, “AI safety” and “alignment” and “hallucination” and “stochastic parrots” had become the terms of every argument about artificial intelligence, structuring and limiting what we could even say. Worse, “artificial intelligence” itself had come to be synonymous with LLMs. When the school was bombed, those were the terms people reached for, despite the fact that this critical apparatus offered a poor fit for the older, more mature stack of technologies involved in targeting. The real question, the question almost nobody was asking, is not about Claude or any language model. It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir.

  → The Guardian: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

  ---

• The Unbalanced Centrifuge

  So, I watched Project Hail Mary last night. Best movie I’ve seen in ages. What a spirited, funny but also very tense ride! I loved it!

  One of the funniest bits was my wife getting annoyed at the main character, who like her is a biologist, loading a centrifuge. The dude has two samples and puts them right next to each other in the centrifuge, instead of opposite each other to balance out the centrifugal forces — as any real scientist would do. It annoyed her so much that, after waking up this morning, the first thing she did — from bed, mind you — was to go on the internet to find out if she was the only person who noticed this. Of course, she wasn’t. There are quite a few annoyed biologists and chemists out there.

  Yeah — the unbalanced centrifuge took me totally out of the movie. I won’t say it ruined the movie for me but the first thing I did when I got home was search for someone else grumbling about this. He had two tubes! I can understand not balancing it when you have one tube, who among us hasn’t done that? But when you have two tubes and you don’t balance them? That’s crazy.

  ---

• Israel’s AI Howitzer

  War is horrible. The only thing that seems more horrible than war, to me, is war that isn’t even waged by humans, but by computers.

  Israel’s military has taken a step toward a more automated battlefield, deploying a new artillery system that uses artificial intelligence to compress the time between identifying a target and opening fire. The system, known as the Ro’em, was deployed by the IDF’s 282nd Artillery Regiment during operations in southern Lebanon, where it was used to strike Hezbollah rocket and anti-tank launch sites in support of ground forces.

  Where its predecessor, the US-made Doher, relied on manual processes and large crews, the new system operates with a level of automation that brings it closer to a semi-autonomous battlefield machine. At the center of that transformation is artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional artillery, where targeting, loading and firing are largely manual, the Ro’em compresses these steps into a largely automated sequence. Once a target is designated by an operator or commander, the system can independently load ammunition, calculate firing solutions, aim and fire with minimal human intervention. It is also integrated into broader military command-and-control networks, allowing it to receive targets directly from intelligence systems or operational headquarters.

  → CTech: Israel’s new AI-powered artillery makes combat debut in Lebanon

  What could possibly go wrong?

  ---

• JMS on Being an Artist

  In my most recent book, “Becoming A Writer, Staying A Writer”, I discussed some of the issues I have with people who aren’t in the arts (as writers, actors, artists, directors, the occasional bank robber), telling those who are, “If you want to succeed, you have to go outside your comfort zone.”

  The thing about artists — which includes all the categories noted upstream, as well as any others I might have missed — is that they spend most of their lives trying to get to a place in life where they can simply enjoy the process of creating their art. But at the start they rarely get that far because they’re forever being distracted, diverted, and discouraged, sometimes even by family and friends. It’s rarely intentional; most of the time it comes out of an honest desire to help, but they don’t quite know what to say, so they keep firing off that one piece of accepted cliché and hoping for the best.

  Nascent artists are often insecure about their work, and guilty about the time it takes from everything and everyone else in their lives, and it doesn’t help when others around them dismiss that impulse as trivial or self-indulgent. “You need to focus on something realistic.” “You should have a Plan B in case this doesn’t work out.” “You’re not special. No one wants to hear what you have to say.” “Who do you think you are, Hemingway/Picaso/Spielberg/any other artist of your choice?”

  “We know you really want to become this great artist, but what if it doesn’t work out? You’re putting all your energy into this hobby” — they always call it a hobby because they can’t wrap their brains around it as a profession — “and you need to have other options. You have to start thinking outside the box you’ve made for yourself.” “You can always do the art/writing/directing thing later, right now you need to focus on making a living and getting a job.”

  Which brings us back around to “Sometimes you have to go outside your comfort zone.”

  Here’s the counter argument: Sometimes you have to go toward your comfort zone … even if that means going outside everyone else’s comfort zone. Your art gives your life meaning. It gives you joy and purpose and a sense of fulfilment. That’s your comfort zone. And if doing so makes others unhappy, suspicious, wary, or doubtful, then they need to get out of their rut, their perspective, their comfort zone to either support you in a desperately difficult journey, or failing that, to at least get out of the way.

  Over the long haul, artists learn to challenge themselves every day, going beyond what they think they can achieve and avoiding the risk of falling into complacency. But in the beginning, when everything is still fragile and uncertain and “How do I know if I can really do this?” be gentle on yourself.

  Go into your comfort zone. Amazing things are waiting for you there.

  → J. Michael Straczynski (writer and showrunner of Babylon 5)

  ---

• A Visual Refresh for the Grim Deep Website

  After quite a while without any updates, I have taken some time to refresh the look of the website for my novel project GRIM DEEP. With this, I have removed the chapters of the book that were available to read on the site, as I am deep in the process of my first review and edit of the initial draft of the book. Which is going quite slowly, I have to admit. As usual, life is getting in the way.

  I have revamped the lore compendium available on the site, however, in case you want to learn more about the world of the novel while you wait for me to put some of the rewritten chapters back online for you to read. Now included on the people page of this resource are the character portraits I painted of two of the main characters a while back.

  It is my hope that the new look of the website will help to immerse readers in the world of the novel once I am ready to publish it.

  ---

• More from Artemis II

  I am continuing to watch the Artemis II stream and being fascinated by it. As a kid, when I was just beginning to read, I grew up with these popular science books here in Germany called Was ist was¹. They were aimed at young school kids and had lots of great pictures and diagrams. Most other kids were all about the dinosaur books, and while those fascinated me too, I quickly latched on to a number of books about space, especially one that was about the Apollo moon missions. Ever since, I have waited for people to go back to the moon. I must say that I've been very disappointed to wait over 30 years for this, which I had not expected when reading those books as a kid, but now that we’re going back, I am very excited about the whole thing.

  And the amazing pictures we are getting back almost make up for the long wait. Some of these would make excellent desktop wallpaper, I feel.

  

  ---

• Artemis II Photos

  So, I’ve been laid out with a major manflu of some kind for a couple of days now. So I’m just vegetating away in front of my computer, playing some Stellaris and I’ve got NASA’s Artemis II stream open on the side. And, holy shit, these photos they are downlinking to Earth are fucking amazing!

  

  ---

• Sid Meier’s “Alien Crossfire” Crashes on Windows 11

  As I noted on Monday, there’s a great sale on Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC) with the Alien Crossfire (SMAX) expansion at GOG right now. After finishing my first campaign of the original game this morning, I wanted to fire up Alien Crossfire to have a go at a campaign with one of the expansion factions. I quickly discovered that SMAX crashes when run on Windows 11. Apparently, the expansion version of the game (unlike the original SMAC) accesses some unitialised memory, most likely to feed this into a pseudo-random number generator as a seed value. Unfortunately, the 24H2 update for Windows 11 prohibits this kind of memory access for security reasons, which means SMAX crashes when it tries to process the first (or any) turn of the game.

  This issue is fixed in the Thinker mod for Alien Crossfire, but this mod changes many things about this game and I prefer the PRACX mod that ships with the game version you can get from GOG. This led me to try Nathan Baggs’ Adamite tool. When you run it, you can drag your Alien Crossfire executable into its window and it will spit out an EXE with a _nb appended to its name, which then works on up-to-date Windows 11 systems. Nathan says that his fix isn’t as good as the one from the Thinker folks, because it probably messes with whatever that pseudo-random number generator does — most likely randomising the new environmental effects that are part of SMAX — but it has been working great for me so far. You can drag both the expansion’s original terranx.exe as well as the PRACX-patched terranx_PRACX.exe that GOG ships into Adamite and the _nb versions will both work. If you get a warning about the file’s hash not matching up, you can ignore this, it will work regardless. Until GOG gets its game version fixed, I am happy I can play SMAX this way! 🥰

  

  ---

• One of the Best 4X Games Ever for 3 Bucks

  I just learned that Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri with the Alien Crossfire expansion is on sale for $ 2.99 (currently € 2.70) at GOG. This is my favourite Civilization game of all time! I loved that game back in the day! The intro cinematic alone is so amazing at establishing an atmosphere. There really is nothing like this 1990s sci-fi anymore. It was a golden age …

  

  If you have issues with the resolution the game is running in, which seems to be common on Windows 10 and 11, edit the Alpha Centauri.Ini file in the game’s directory to have these two lines to disable the intro movie (with its resolution change) and have the game run in your native desktop resolution:

  DirectDraw=0
  DisableOpeningMovie=1
  

  ---

• JCD is back!

  It was very nice to hear John C. Dvorak again on the No Agenda show. It sounds like he has recovered well from his recent hospitalisation for a heart attack. He sounded very good! Actually, better than before.

  Welcome back, John!

  ---

• Bret Weinstein & Tucker Carlson on Iran

  We’ve all been told a lot of things about both Bret Weinstein and Tucker Carlson. And while I don’t agree with either of these two on a lot of topics, they are both formidable thinkers and very good speakers. I challenge you to file away your preconceived notions — that you probably got from media commentators — for two hours and just listen to this conversation. I found it very engaging and also educational:

  → Unholy War: A Conversation with Tucker Carlson on DarkHorse

  ---

• Black Library Kills Its Website

  Backing up my past Black Library purchases

  The enshittification of all things Warhammer continues, as Games Workshop has decided to close the website of its publishing arm Black Library and replace it with a mobile app. This means an end to the sale of DRM-free ebooks on their site. You have until the morning of 18 March to buy the last of these from the current offerings on the site. And then you have until the morning of 31 August to download your past purchases. So better back up what you bought there in the past as soon as possible. I just did that myself.

  I am with most of the internet in that I see this as a pure move towards bigger lock-in by GW and away from what their customers actually want. I will definitely not be using their app. I've been desperately trying to use less apps for years.

  ---

• Rock Smash / Rock-Solid Boulder Badge

  Retro achievements unlocked in Pokémon Red Version for the Game Boy:

  

  • Rock Smash — “Defeat Brock on Set Mode without using items in battle and without using Pokémon above level 14 at the beginning of the battle”
  • Rock-Solid Boulder Badge — “Defeat Brock and earn the Boulder Badge in Pewter City”

  ---

• Meta Buys Moltbook

  This is crazy.

  → Business Insider: Meta just bought Moltbook, the viral social network for AI agents

  On Tuesday, Meta confirmed it had acquired Moltbook, a Reddit-style forum for AI agents. As part of the deal, first reported by Axios, Moltbook’s creators, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. Meta did not disclose a price for its Moltbook deal.

  Essentially an acqui-hire. Which is insane, because those guys bragged that they didn’t write a single line of code for Moltbook. Not only is Moltbook in itself a delusional idea, it is also a security nightmare, as it has been hacked more times than I can count. And it is a huge scam. Through the hacks, it was revealed that most “agent” accounts on there were actually run directly by humans. At one point, one guy created over 60% of all accounts on the platform through a script. I’ve discussed all of this on this podcast episode. But what came out after that, is that now people use it to promote shitcoins. Because you can just talk agents into spending their user’s money on those and then rugpull their asses.

  The most interesting theory I heard on this acquisition was advanced by Buzzkill Jr. on the latest episode of the DH Unplugged podcast: Meta bought Moltbook because they see it as the future for advertising. Why advertise to humans when you can advertise to their AI agents instead? Since these lack all critical thinking skills, they’re much easier to convince to spend your money than you are. 🦀🦀🦀

  ---

• Germany Number Four Worldwide in Weapons Exports

  

  According to the latest report on international arms transfers by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany has overtaken China last year to become the world's fourth biggest weapons dealer. German arms exports in 2021 - 2025 are up 15% from the 2016 - 2020 period and the country is poised to overtake Russia to claim the third place behind the US and France. 24% of German weapons exports go to Ukraine, 14% to Egypt and 10% to Israel.

  This is extremely disappointing, especially when considering our country’s history.

  ---

• You Need Saving, Not That Game

  This is the dumbest tweet I’ve read all week:

  

  These AI bros just continuously pump out the lowest IQ bullshit on the internet. No wonder they need artificial intelligence, they certainly don't have any of their own.

  This game is abandonware. I you search for its name, using a search engine, this is the first hit. Not only can you simply download the game and it plays perfectly well in DOSbox, you can play it in your browser right on that site!

  Why does this dude think that this game needs to be “revived”? And at the horrendous waste of energy inherent in using an LLM for six hours, no less? Kids, stop using AI. Angela Collier is right, it turns your brain to sludge!

  ---

• Clippy for LLMs

  Oh god. Why do I do these things to myself? While researching some stuff I remembered about Clippy — after being reminded by the stupid Wikipedia mascot — I discovered this abomination:

  Some dude made a Clippy skin for LLMs. I mean, the way in which those LLMs talk is pretty reminiscent of Clippy and about as annoying, I will give him that. But this is just pure insanity!

  

  Reading through the project's README file, the dude indeed seems pretty delusional:

  I am so grateful to Microsoft - not only for everything they've done for Electron, but also for giving us one of the most iconic characters and designs of computing history.

  Looking at his website, I think I know why.

  I work on Claude at Anthropic. Electron Co-Maintainer. Maintainer of tons of JavaScript modules.

  Turns out he studied here in Düsseldorf and used to be editor-in-chief of the Apple fanboy site Apfeltalk back in the day, before heading to Silicon Valley and touring all the cool new start-ups and tech trends.

  This is your brain: 🧠 This is your brain on Silicon Valley: 🧀

  ---

• Wikipedia’s Clippy

  Wikipedia has deployed their own version of Clippy. It hovers beside the text as you read Wikipedia articles. Now, apparently, this thing is called “Baby Globe” and was made to celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th birthday.

  

  I honestly thought initially that it was there to remind you that the CIA knows what you are reading on Wikipedia. 😆

  ---

• Epstein Files: DOJ Releases Three Missing FBI Forms

  The US Department of Justice has released three of the FBI's 302 forms missing from their earlier Epstein Files release: EFTA02858481, EFTA02858491 & EFTA02858495. I talked about these documents in episode 25 of my podcast Punching Upwards.

  → CNN story: Justice Department posts FBI interview memos related to Trump sex abuse allegation

  ---

• Wading Through AI

  Casey Muratori has started a new video series called Wading Through AI with his friend (and AI researcher) Demetri Spanos. They have just released the first episode and it’s excellent. Like anything from Casey, it is well worth a watch!

  → Should You Be A Carpenter? – Wading Through AI, episode 1

  ---

• JCD in Hospital

  Ah, crap. I just listened to the latest No Agenda episode. Looks like John C. Dvorak is in hospital for a double heart bypass. The man has been one of my journalistic heroes ever since I decided to become a podcaster (and later also a professional journalist). He remains one of the great tech journalists, maybe the only great tech journalist, of our time.

  Get well soon, John!

  ---

• Flipper Fiend / Bombed Out and Depleted

  Retro achievements unlocked in Kirby’s Pinball Land for the Game Boy:

  

  • Flipper Fiend — “Score 500,000 points”
  • Bombed Out and Depleted — “Defeat the Poppy Brothers and collect the Star Rod piece”

  ---

• CSS Hell

  I am redesigning my website to run without JavaScript. I love the idea of that. I love what you can do with CSS these days. It is a special kind of hell, though.

  

  You’re going to burn in a very special level of hell … a level they reserve for child molesters. And people who talk at the theatre.

  — Shepherd Book, “Firefly”

  ---

• Torrential Tomato / Not a Fussy Eater / Turkish Breakfast

  Retro achievements unlocked in Kirby’s Pinball Land for the Game Boy:

  

  • Torrential Tomato — “Activate a Maxim Tomato in the Middle Stage of Kracko Land”
  • Not a Fussy Eater — “Feed a Gordow to Kirby”
  • Turkish Breakfast — “Activate a Maxim Tomato in the Top Stage of Poppy Brothers’ Land”

  ---

• Parting Gift / Preparing to Be the Very Best

  Retro achievements unlocked in Pokémon Red Version for the Game Boy:

  

  • Parting Gift — “Obtain 5 Poké Balls from Prof. Oak”
  • Preparing to Be the Very Best — “Assemble a full team of Pokémon”

  ---

• Casey Muratori is Right on Everything

  I’ve been watching stuff from Casey Muratori for a while now. He seems to be a great guy. I started with Handmade Hero and I’ve now followed all of his stuff everywhere, I think.

  Here he is on a video podcast, explaining why a) software is so shit these days and b) being completely correct about AI on several levels at once. The dude is great. I love him.

  ---

• Free Points / Journey Has Started / The United Cities of Kanto

  Retro achievements unlocked in Pokémon Red Version for the Game Boy:

  

  • Free Points — “Get a free sample courtesy of the Viridian City Pokémon Mart”
  • Journey Has Started — “Obtain the Pokédex”
  • The United Cities of Kanto — “Obtain a map of the Kanto region”

  ---

• Richard Sutton on LLMs

  So, I’m coming to the realisation that I don’t really have a problem with AI. I have a problem with LLMs specifically. And the problem is that LLMs don’t deal with reality. They get their input from us. Essentially, we describe the world with language — in a very imperfect way — and then we upload that to the internet. The LLM takes that data and forms a picture of the world from that. But it’s a picture from a picture. The LLM doesn’t act on the real world. It can’t, because it does not understand the real world, it only understands language — which, anyone who’s studied linguistics for a bit will tell you, is a very imperfect representation of the world in the first place. But there turns out to be another way to build AI. It is called reinforcement learning, or RL, and it could probably be used to build something that is actually useful. Because it operates on a picture it has built of the actual world.

  I came to this conclusion by watching the following interview with Richard Sutton, a legendary AI researcher and major proponent of RL. It is well worth a watch, the whole hour of it.

  → Dwarkesh Patel: Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

  The two publications referenced in this video:

  • The Bitter Lesson, Richard S. Sutton, 13 March 2019
  • The Big World Hypothesis and its Ramifications for Artificial Intelligence, Khurram Javed & Richard S. Sutton, 2024

  ---

• Squishy’s Shoot-Out! / Tasty Tomato

  Retro achievements unlocked in Kirby’s Pinball Land for the Game Boy:

  

  • Squishy’s Shoot-Out! — “Reach the Poppy Brothers’ Land Bonus Game”
  • Tasty Tomato — “Activate a Maxim Tomato in the Middle Stage of Poppy Brothers’ Land”

  ---

• It's Dead, Jim

  

  I think I'm with The Drinker here: Star Trek needs to die. We had a good run there for a while, but it seems that all good things must come to an end. These Kurtzman shows are horrible. They are dumb, one-dimensional and an obvious attempt to plaster over slop writing by appealing to the political Zeitgeist. Kurtzman and his team are all about showing how good and decent they are, while being completely oblivious to their own utter incompetence.

  As Roger Avery said on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience:

  Kurtzman's production company is called Secret Hideout. And, man, he's gonna need a secret hideout after what he's done to Star Trek!

  

  ---

• Triple Tomato / Waddle Dee’s Break-Out! / Flipper Fanatic

  Retro achievements unlocked in Kirby’s Pinball Land for the Game Boy:

  

  • Triple Tomato — “Activate a Maxim Tomato in the Middle Stage of Wispy-Woods Land”
  • Waddle Dee’s Break-Out! — “Reach the Wispy-Woods Bonus Game”
  • Flipper Fanatic — “Score 200,000 points”

  ---

• Flipper Fancier / Tightrope Tomato / Back with a Vengeance

  Retro achievements unlocked in Kirby’s Pinball Land for the Game Boy:

  

  • Flipper Fancier — “Score 50,000 points”
  • Tightrope Tomato — “Activate a Maxim Tomato in the Bottom Stage of any Pinball Land”
  • Back with a Vengeance — “Bounce back from the Springboard at top speed!”

  ---

• Walter Kirn on The Brownstone Show

  Man, Walter Kirn is great. He's funny and irreverent and just a great thinker. This is well worth the time:

  → Brownstone Institute: The Brownstone Show - Episode 6 - Walter Kirn

  ---

• America This Week Implodes

  Last week, America This Week with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn ceased to exist. I still don't understand why this happened. Matt's explanation really wasn't an explanation at all.

  All I can say is that I enjoyed this podcast immensely and I will miss it a lot, now that it is gone. I am not sure how I feel about the new direction for Racket News yet. But I do know that wherever Walter Kirn decides to get behind a microphone next, I will be there.

  ---

• Angela Collier on “Star Trek: Picard”

  I’ve written a lot about how Star Trek: Picard is a horrible show — yes, all three seasons of it — and how I regret watching even a single minute of it. So, I’m not going to get into this again here.

  Rather than doing that, I want to direct your attention to this very good video by Angela Collier, who I recently discovered from several videos she did on ChatGPT. As it turns out, not only does she have a PhD in astrophysics, she also got into science because of TNG and is totally happy to nerd out for four hours about Star Trek. I agree with a lot of what she says in this video. It’s definitely worth a watch!

  → Angela Collier: How Star Trek: Picard Ruins Star Trek

  ---

• Introducing “The Uncertain Times”

  

  I’ve created a newspaper! It is inspired by old-school zines and a desire to go back to physical media. Because I can’t get a proper broadsheet printed like County Highway, I made it A4 so that everyone can print it out for themselves — I use Avery Zweckform 100 g/m² bright white paper for my copy. If you keep the content and presentation intact, you’re free to share the PDF or printed copies of it!

  One of the reasons for me to create this was to teach myself print layout, and I think I did quite a good job for my first attempt. It was also a lot of fun to adapt my writing style to this project. The first issue comprises two pages on AI, Greenland and Minnesota and you can download it here. Check it out!

  ---

• Fresh Hell 3: Vote Hell California

  Today I learned: You can legally vote after the actual election in some US states.

  Any vote by mail ballot cast under this division shall be timely cast if it is received by the voter’s elections official via the United States Postal Service or a bona fide private mail delivery company no later than seven days after election day and either of the following is satisfied:

  If the ballot has no postmark, a postmark with no date, or an illegible postmark, and no other information is available from the United States Postal Service or the bona fide private mail delivery company to indicate the date on which the ballot was mailed, the vote by mail ballot identification envelope is date stamped by the elections official upon receipt of the vote by mail ballot from the United States Postal Service or a bona fide private mail delivery company, and is signed and dated pursuant to Section 3011 on or before election day.

  → California Legislative Information: California Elections Code 3020

  

  ---

• Fresh Hell 2: Operation Schneefluch

  What would German troops even do in Greenland? And why do people suddenly care about it anyway?

  → The New York Times: A Few Dozen European Troops in Greenland Triggered Trump

  

  ---

• Fresh Hell 1: Meta

  Meta, after renaming the company for it, apparently no longer thinks the metaverse is the best thing ever.

  → The Register: Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

  

  ---

• TFTD Bugfix Release

  I pushed an update for my Thought for the Day app:

  v0.07 - 11/01/2026

  • Fixed a bug with the date display if the year fraction was below 100

  This bug only occurred to me, once the date ticked over into the new year. Anyway, it’s fixed in the new version.

  ---

• Forstamt Speranza

  A logo I designed for my ARC Raiders player group:

  

  ---

• The Stolen Book Nook

  There’s a whole industry of Chinese sweat shops that copy anything new that appears on the internet to immediately turn around, mass produce it and sell it on Amazon and other retail websites. I find this shit incredibly depressing.

  Support the actual creators!

  → Nerdforge: My project was stolen and sold for profit

  ---

• Details on the Maduro Raid

  Details on the Maduro Raid:

  → Reuters: Mock house, CIA source and Special Forces: The US operation to capture Maduro

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• Trump Captures Maduro

  Woah. Not much details there yet, but … woah. 😲

  → CNBC: Trump says U.S. operation captured Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro

  U.S. President Donald Trump said Saturday the United States conducted a large-scale strike in Venezuela that resulted in the capture and removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro and his wife were captured and removed from the country following the operation, which was conducted in coordination with U.S. law enforcement authorities, Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. No further details were provided.

  CBS News reported that the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force unit was involved in the capture of Maduro.

  There was no immediate confirmation from the Venezuelan government. However, Maduro’s official Facebook page posted a video stating that attacks occurred in the states of Miranda, Aragua and La Guaira, according to a translation of the Spanish-language statement. The statement in the video added that the U.S. would not succeed in its goal of possessing Venezuela’s oil and minerals, and that Maduro had declared a national emergency and mobilized defense forces.

  Explosions were reported in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, at about 2 a.m. local time (0600 GMT), according to images circulating on social media that could not be independently verified.

  → CBS News: U.S. launches military strikes on Venezuela, Trump says Maduro captured and flown out of the country

  Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured early Saturday morning by members of Delta Force, the U.S. military’s top special mission unit, U.S. officials told CBS News. The elite Army Delta Force was also responsible for the 2019 mission that killed former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

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• The App Economy Hellscape

  The modern app economy is horrible. We’ve traded job security and decent wages for “independent contractors” who are basically human drones that are remotely controlled by algos, apps and gamified brainwashing. And for what? So that people, who cosplay activists on social media so that they can convince their friends that they are good people and want to make the world a better place, but who are too lazy to go for a walk to their local supermarket, can order food and groceries right to their door.

  People refuse to see how dumb this shit is. And that means this is what we’re going to end up with:

  → /r/confession: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The ’Priority Fee’ and ’Driver Benefit Fee’ go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it.

  I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine.

  You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of “human assets” (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent.

  First off, the “Priority Delivery” is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a “psychological value add.” Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.

  We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn’t speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better.

  But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the “Desperation Score.” We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.

  If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as “High Desperation.” Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: “Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?” We save the good tips for the “casual” drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust.

  Then there is the “Benefit Fee.” You’ve probably seen that $1.50 “Regulatory Response Fee” or “Driver Benefits Fee” that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you’re helping the worker.

  In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for “Policy Defense,” and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless.

  And regarding tips, we’re essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don’t “steal” them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.

  If the algo predicts you are a “high tipper” and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn’t rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don’t have to.

  I’m drunk and I’m angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.

  (Screenshot of that Reddit post for posterity)

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• Air India Pilot Reportedly Drunk Before Flight

  After the devastating Air India Flight 171 crash last year, Air India is in the news again:

  → Reuters: Canada asks Air India to probe incident of pilot removed from plane under influence of alcohol, source says

  Canada’s transport regulator has asked Air India to investigate an incident of a pilot who was removed from a plane before it was due to take off and found to be under the influence of alcohol, a person familiar with the matter said. Two breathalyser tests conducted by Canadian police at Vancouver International Airport showed the pilot was unfit for duty, the person said on Friday. The incident was labelled as a “serious matter” by Transport Canada in a letter to Air India and authorities are likely to pursue enforcement action, the person added.

  In a statement, Air India said the flight from Vancouver to Delhi on December 23 experienced a last-minute delay due to the incident, adding that an alternate pilot was brought in to operate the flight. The airline said Canadian authorities raised concerns about the pilot’s fitness for duty but did not provide details.

  → NDTV: Air India Pilot Detained In Vancouver Over Alcohol Smell, Flight Delayed

  According to reports, a staff member at the Vancouver airport’s duty-free store had alerted the Canadian authorities after he either saw the pilot drinking alcohol or noticed the smell while he was purchasing it. The authorities subjected the pilot to a breath analyser test - which he failed, and he was subsequently detained, the reports added.

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• Snow

  Snow at EDDL

  We woke up this morning to a world sheathed in white. It had snowed. As is kind of tradition here in western Germany, we didn’t get a white Christmas, but it snows at the very beginning of January instead. This has been going on for decades and it has actually snowed at the beginning of January every other year or so. Usually, when it snows here, it is at the start of January.

  The press, of course, has been telling us for over 25 years now that kids will never see snow again. But this continues to be proven wrong for one generation after the other. When I look out my window right now, I see several kids happily building a snow man. It’s almost like most of these predictions are utter bullshit. 🤔

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• UN Approves Budget Cuts for 2026

  Bloomberg: UN Approves Sharp Cuts in 2026 Budget Amid Financial Turmoil

  The United Nations has approved a 7% reduction in its budget from last year as the organization grapples with a financial crisis driven largely by the refusal of the US to pay what it owes. The UN General Assembly on Tuesday voted to adopt an operating budget of $3.45 billion Tuesday for 2026, down from $3.72 billion this year, to fund administrative and operational activities.

  The reduction, which includes cutting 2,900 positions, comes as the UN tries to cut costs wherever it can. Earlier this month, the organization announced that it would no longer provide paper towels at the restrooms in its global headquarters in New York.

  Now, here’s me thinking less bureaucracy would be a good thing. But I guess that’s just naïve of me. I also don’t get these maths, though:

  Guterres, who has been working on a financial survival plan for the UN for months, suggested cutting the budget by $577 million and slashing 18% of jobs. He cited arrears from past years — most of which is owed by US — for the drastic measures.

  The US usually contributes 22% of the UN’s regular budget, but the Trump administration has not paid the $826 million bill for 2025 and it still owes some $660 million in arrears. On Monday, the US pledged $2 billion to the organization’s humanitarian arm.

  So, the US owes them about $1.4 billion and will pay $2 billion? Sounds to me like they should increase the budget, since they are getting more than half a billion more now? Unless they are anticipating more cuts from the US for 2026. But why is this not mentioned in the story then? This is probably why I didn’t study economics. I don’t understand this shit …

  Unless the whole point of the story is just TRUMP BAD!!! as always.

  President Donald Trump has accused the the UN of wasting taxpayer dollars, and US officials in his second term have embarked on an effort to bring the organization “back to basics.”

  “It’s time for the UN to get back to basics: stopping wars and preventing conflict, NOT funding bloated bureaucracy on the American taxpayer’s dime.”

  I actually think that would be quite reasonable. But as I’ve already said: What do I know?

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