2026-08-19 07:45
I often hear walks described as preprandial or postprandial, but I never hear meals described as prepromenadal or postpromenadal.
What’s up with that?
I often hear walks described as preprandial or postprandial, but I never hear meals described as prepromenadal or postpromenadal.
What’s up with that?
I’m not so sure that there isn’t some hay to be made around insisting that AI firms should be distributing half their profits to the writers whose works they stole to train their models, but I also agree with Cory that it’d be a mistake to do that in a way that broke using the internet to provide citations for dictionaries.
If you’re interested, like I am, in how and why copyright might not be the best tool for helping writers make a living writing, you’ll definitely want to read Cory’s latest at Pluralistic:
The AI copyright fight isn’t being fought to protect your wages – it’s being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss.
Source: Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My brother @stevendbrewer, (who shared this with me) and I are not AI natives, or even AI immigrants. I guess we’re AI foreigners. Maybe AI refugees.
(My brother warns me “People get offended when you say ‘refugee,'” so I was all, “Ooh! I’ll post that immediately!” He claims to be more an AI refusenik, while suggesting that I’m more AI-curious.)
Oh, the humanities!
Source: Michał “rysiek” Woźniak · 🇺🇦: “I am shocked. Nobody could hav…” – Mastodon 🐘
That’s the only thing that a podcast is. If it’s not an RSS feed, or if doesn’t link to MP3 files, it’s not a podcast.
Most especially, a YouTube channel is not a podcast.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but here’s the biggest:
And now, our YouTube channel—with 26,000 subscribers—will be disabled just in time for my book launch.
Source: YouTube Moves to Ban Nerd Reich Podcast
If you have a podcast, no one can disable it. You can host it anywhere, and if your host makes you stop, you can just get another host and point your URL there. Anyone can listen to it. All they need is a any podcast app. Or even just a web browser. No one can stop you from posting episodes, and no one can stop your listeners from listening to them.
But that’s only true if you have a podcast. If you have a YouTube channel instead…. Well, in that case, YouTube can stop you.
It rained yesterday, but not all the time. I was able to get Ashley out in the gaps pretty well. After raining all night, it seemed it was going to rain all morning as well.
I offered Ashley a chance to go out on the patio, and she declined. A bit later, after she indicated that she really wanted to go out, and put on my raincoat and put the leash on her and tried to take her out the front door, but she wasn’t having it. Just a few minutes later, she came and told me she needed to go out, so I tried again, and this time I actually dragged out out the door, into the rain. But No. She went about three feet out the door, then solid turned around and headed right back.
It was a classic case of Ashley wanting to go outside, but not to the outside that actually existed. She wanted me to take her to some other outside.
So I went back to my laptop and my third coffee (twice set aside, but still warm enough) and waited for the rain to let up a little. And it did let up a little, and I got Ashley out then.
We saw an opossum! He was a Very Handsome fellow, with a white face, a naked pink tail, and sleek counter-shading on his body, (I think the sleekness may have come from being very wet.)
Ashley, of course, wanted to play with the possum, and we chased it back and forth (the possum going through the shrubs next to the building, and us going around the shrubs). At some point the possum managed to get out of sight long enough for me to drag Ashley away.
By then the rain had gotten hard again, so Ashley let me take her home, where I did my best to dry her off. But as you can see, my efforts were only partially successful.
There is a flood warning. I’m always a little amused by flood warnings in Central Illinois, because it is so, so flat here. Yes, it is flooding. The little creek is over its banks, sorta. But as soon as it gets over the top of its banks, the water just spreads out. Before it could get high enough to threaten my house (a few feet above creek level), the water would have to flood literally thousands of acres all around us.
I really like summer. I even like the heat, but I especially like long, sunny days. However, even for me, the longest days of summer are kinda. . . . long.
What’s perfect is the day length in, let’s say, July. When the sun rises no later than 6:00 AM, there’s daylight to wake me up when I want to get up. And when the sun sets around 8:00 PM, it gets dark right around the time I’m ready to wind down ahead of getting ready for bed.
As we head on to mid-August, though, although the temperatures are still fine, I’m no longer so happy with the sunrise and sunset times. Today the sun didn’t rise until 6:04, which isn’t much after 6:00, but is a sign of the approaching dark days. Similarly, it’s been a full week since the sun was still up at 8:00 PM—another sign.
This morning I realized that I should refer to these two things—sunrise after 6:00 AM, and sunset before 8:00 PM—as two horsemen of the Darkpocalypse.
Back in the days when I had to work in an office, this mid-August transition would ruin the fall for me. I’d get so wrapped up in dreading the winter, that I couldn’t enjoy the objectively great conditions of the second half of August, all of September, and usually most of October as well. It was very sad to have nearly a quarter of the year ruined that way.
I should probably add a “darkpocalypse” tag, and go back and put them on all my posts about SAD.
Horsemen traditionally travel in groups of four, but if there are two more, I haven’t identified them yet.
I’ve been warning about the current stagflation since the beginning of last year. It’s good to see others are catching up.
Stagflation, the Scourge of the 1970s, Is Back by Phillip Braun
One point the opinion piece makes is that the one bright spot in the economy—the stock market—is actually (in line with what I’ve been saying about how the markets and the business news have this all completely wrong) a “severe systemic risk.”
Some years ago, I wrote an article on living off capital and published it as a guest post on another financial blog. The old link to it is dead, and a google search doesn’t turn it up any more, so I thought I’d go ahead and repost it, hosted here on my own blog.
People who come from wealthy families learn how to live off capital. The rules are taught along with all the other things they learn from their parents—how to dress, how to eat, how deal with bankers and trust officers. But even though most people don’t learn the rules, living off capital is just a skill, and it’s one that everybody should learn, because everybody lives off capital sometimes.
People usually think about living off capital in the context of retirement, but that’s just one (albeit important) example. Perfectly ordinary transitions, such as losing a job and having to find another, also amount to living off capital. There is also the broad swath in between: Living off capital for longer than just the length of time it takes you to run through your emergency fund, and doing so without the institutional support—social security, medicare, maybe even a pension—that comes along with retiring at an ordinary retirement age.
If you’ve got a lot of capital—that is, if you’re wealthy—then living off capital is easy: You invest enough in treasury bonds that you can live off the interest.
It’s not trivially easy, of course. You have to allow for taxes. You have to allow for inflation. You have to have some sort of cushion or reserve in case your investment return falls. But, generally, living off your income is straightforward.
You allow for taxes by setting aside enough of your income to pay your taxes. This isn’t hard, even if you have to file quarterly estimated taxes, but you have to do it yourself; you don’t have an employer automatically taking care of it for you by deducting it from your pay. Screwing up is expensive—screwing up badly may even be criminal.
You allow for inflation by reinvesting enough of your income to preserve the value of your capital. If your money is in US dollars, TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) will do exactly that. The principle value of the bonds increases automatically to keep you even with inflation, and the interest is paid out on the inflation-adjusted principle, so your income rises with inflation as well.
(The adjustment is based on the Consumer Price Index while what matters to you is your own cost of living, so you can’t entirely delegate the job of allowing for inflation, but TIPS will do most of the heavy lifting.)
You allow for reversals by having a cushion somewhere. Ideally, have two cushions: First, a reserve fund with enough money to cover any unexpected expenses. Second, some flexibility in your cost of living, so that a decline in income can be matched with a decline in spending.
The wealthy have other concerns than just supporting themselves—they want to pass down an estate. Because of that, they teach their kids this rather conservative version of living off capital. If you only spend your income, and if you reinvest enough to keep even with inflation, then you’re preserving your capital intact. (If you reinvest more then the minimum, or if some of your capital is invested for growth, than you can be growing your capital at the same time you’re living off it.)
If leaving an estate is not a concern for you, then you can spend more than just your income.
There’s a common rule of thumb that (if you have a well-diversified growth portfolio), you can probably spend about 4% of your capital and still expect to have more capital the next year. That won’t be true every year (it was really, really not true in 2008, for example), but historically it’s been true on average.
Still, the wealthy know that spending capital is a bad idea. Anytime you spend more than your income, you’re in danger of entering a death spiral: Your reduced capital earns less money so you have to spend even more capital to support your standard of living; repeat until broke.
A lot of people have back-tested versions the 4% rule, looking at historical periods to see if following that rule ever led to a death spiral. From what I’ve seen, it looks pretty good, but the current circumstance is going to put it to a particularly harsh test–especially for people who started living off their capital in 2007.
If you can afford it, choosing to spend only income is a safer strategy. If you can’t, you probably ought to accept that at some point you’ll have to earn some more money—and if you’re going to do that, sooner is probably better than later (before you’ve depleted your capital). Happily, a pretty small amount of money can make a big difference, if you’re right on the edge of being able to live on capital. Every dollar you earn is a dollar of capital that can go unspent.
If you were really rich, the safest thing to do would be to invest enough in TIPS that the income would support you. Then you could invest the rest of your money however you liked. Most people aren’t that rich—at the moment you’d need close to $2.5 million invested in TIPS to earn an inflation-protected $50,000 a year. Treasurys without inflation protection are earning more than twice as much. (Of course, you have to reinvest a big chunk of that to keep even with inflation).
Dividend-paying stocks can earn still more money, and dividend growth can provide some amount of inflation protection (as can capital gains). in recent years it has been tough to invest for dividend yield, but even with the recent recovery in the stock market, there are plenty of companies paying a reasonable dividend now—there are more than 40 companies in the S&P 500 whose dividend yield exceeds the yield on a 30-year treasury. None of those will be as safe as treasurys, but at least there are some options now for someone looking for income.
If you have it in you to be a landlord, there’s also the option of earning rent on real estate investments.
You can arrange the mechanics several different ways. The simplest version is simply to have the income from your investments directed into your checking account and use it to pay your bills. A slightly more complicated version would direct your income into the savings account where you keep your reserve fund, and then transfer money from there into your checking account. That makes it easier to even out the month-to-month money flows, which tends to be necessary because stocks generally pay dividends quarterly and bonds generally pay interest semiannually.
(If a lot of your capital is tax-sheltered in an IRA, 401(k), or similar vehicle, the tax rules make it more complex to use that capital for spending, but there are rules for handling the case when you’re actually retiring early.)
The key step–the one that rich families make sure that their children know—is to evaluate your capital every year: Make a new budget with your projected expenses for the following year, and then reinvest enough of your surplus that its earnings will cover any increase in your cost of living.
If you don’t have enough of a surplus to do so, you were living beyond your means.
It’s easy to do this by mistake. Even most people with a budget don’t know their cost of living accurately enough to know if they’re properly accounting for things like those large-but-rare expenses like a new car or a new roof, and any particular category of expense can rise much faster than overall inflation. (Think health insurance, college tuition, and fuel.)
People who are accumulating capital (rather than living on it) can use each year’s new savings as a buffer—even a major un-budgeted expense can often be covered out of this year’s planned savings without needing to dip into capital. Someone already living off capital doesn’t have this option. They have to provide their own buffer out of their reserve.
There’s a second reason that a reserve is essential: The income earned by capital fluctuates. Anyone living off capital right now knows this quite acutely—the rate paid on Treasury securities is at generational lows. Other investments (such as dividend-paying stocks) earn an income that doesn’t necessarily shift in lock-step with treasurys, but can still go down—particularly during a recession.
The children of rich families learn that the key technique for stabilizing your earnings from capital is diversification.
You should diversify across time by investing some of your money in long-term treasurys, which will pay a fixed rate for a long period (decades). That offers some stability, but has two downsides. First, it while it protects you from falling rates, it makes it harder to take advantage of rising rates. Second, if all your treasurys mature at once, you might have to reinvest the whole sum at a much lower return. Avoid that making sure that your long-term securities mature in a staggered fashion. (Arranging for a fraction of your long-term securities to mature at regular intervals is called setting up a ladder.)
You should also diversify across kinds of investments by investing in more than one kind of vehicle. As attractive as TIPS are for someone living off capital, you probably want to have some of your money invested in ordinary treasurys, in stocks, and maybe in real estate. Other options (such as owning a business) are worth considering as well. This reduces the chance that your income streams will all fluctuate in the downward direction at the same time.
Other kinds of diversity are good as well. Consider investing in foreign treasurys as well as US issues, and maybe in corporate or municipal bonds.. Your stock investments should include multiple companies in different industries, and should include foreign companies as well as domestic ones.
The other key for dealing with a fluctuating income is to have a flexible cost structure, so that you have the option to cut your expenses, if necessary, to match your diminished income.
Those are the basics:
Learn those skills and you’ll have as much ability to live off capital as someone who grew up in a wealthy family. Then you just need the wealth.
I’m a little surprised people are still studying this, since it’s been studied before with the same results:
After 12 weeks, researchers found no meaningful differences in weight gain, body composition, or cholesterol levels between people following the low-dairy diet and those eating three servings of dairy each day. Participants consuming more dairy, however, showed improvements in blood pressure and consumed more calcium, protein, and vitamin D.
“Those that had three servings of dairy didn’t have adverse levels of blood cholesterol or lipids or evidence of insulin resistance,” says Anderson.
Source: For decades, we were told to choose low-fat dairy. New research says otherwise | ScienceDaily
I would argue that that full-fat dairy is “minimally processed.” (Mixing the milk of multiple cows, pasteurizing, and homogenizing, means it’s not unprocessed.) I argue that skimming off half (or nearly all) of the fat crosses the bar to “processed,” but even if you don’t draw that line where I do, it’s still more processed. And just on general principles, I generally assume that less-processed food is better than more-processed food.
But with full-fat dairy you don’t have to go by general principles. We have multiple studies over years and years that show unequivocally that it’s healthier food.
And, I guess, now we have another.
That’s not what I learned in 4th grade.
If, like me, you had any sort of reasonably balanced portfolio at the beginning of the year (or the beginning of last year), it’s worth observing that it is almost certainly way, way out of balance.
If so, this is your reminder to rebalance your portfolio.
Doing so is admittedly really hard to do. If you had a 60:40 (stocks to bonds) portfolio at the beginning of last year, you might very well have 70% or 80% invested in stocks now, and that probably feels great. You feel like a genius, letting your profits run. If there’s anything better than having 60% of your portfolio grow at 20% a year it’s having 80% of your portfolio grow at 20% a year.
But you know it’s a terrible idea. It’s bad enough to have 60% of your portfolio lose half its value. Having 80% of your portfolio lose half its value is much, much worse.
Knowing that it’s hard, let me point out a little thing that might make it a little easier right now: Bond rates are up nicely. You can get nearly 5.25% on 30-year bonds, or almost 3% on inflation-adjusted bonds. That’s good enough that you don’t really need to agonize about whether you can expect a capital gain or capital loss on the bond. Just buy it and take the coupon.
Of course, I have no idea what balance is right for your portfolio. Maybe it’s 60:40. If you’re young, maybe it’s 80:20. If you’re retired, maybe it’s 35:65. But if you had a sensible balance a year or two ago, and you haven’t rebalanced, it is now way out of whack.
This is your reminder to fix that.
My brother just got email asking if he’d ever thought about upgrading his website with “an engaging video to explain what you do?”
My reply was:
Ooh! An engaging video!! I never thought of that!
I figured I’d go with either a tedious video or an annoying one.
That’s what everybody else does.
Steven pointed out, “I don’t think a video that actually explains what I do would be very engaging.”
Light exposure is good for you. All the different frequencies are good for you. This has led many people to try to tweeze them apart: tanning beds, red-light panels and masks, therapy lights, etc. It turns out, sunlight is best consumed whole, just like food.
I should mention that by inclination, I’m rather vulnerable to getting this wrong. I wrote at some length about how, because of the sort of person I am, I simply like the idea of figuring out all the nutrients I need, and then trying to construct a diet that provides all those things. Similarly, I like the idea of coming up with a perfect workout plan, and then getting all the movement that I need by hitting all the right exercises. But, if you follow that link, you’ll see that I eventually realized the whole notion was just wrong-headed.
There is no need—in fact, no value—in tweezing apart the nutrients in food. Just eat a varied, whole-food diet and your body will get it right. The same with movement. Just engage in a wide range of diverse movement, and your body will become highly capable of moving in all those ways, (and if your “movement diet” is adequately diverse, your body will become fairly capable of all sorts of movements you don’t even practice).
The same is true of sunlight. That’s the main message of In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen.
The book is consciously modeled on Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, which systematically destroyed the notion that you could build up a diet that optimized all the nutrients. And it’s message is very similar. Sunlight is best consumed whole, just like food.
All of the different frequencies are good for you:
“But what about skin cancer!?!?” I can hear you asking from here.
The book is well worth reading, because just the information on skin cancer is worth the price of the book (and it takes half the book to adequately deal with the subject). Because there’s so much of it, it’s not really practical to try to summarize it here, so I’ll just mention that “Don’t get sunburned” is much better advice than “Put on sunbock,” or even “Stay out of the sun.”
I figured this out years ago. I’ll use sunblock if I’m going to be out in the sun so long that I might get sunburned—I needed it for a snorkling trip to Buck Island, for example. Otherwise, I use a combination of changing my clothes, taking advantage of shade, and limiting my time out in the midday sun. But I don’t minimize my time in the sun. I maximize my time in the sun, while making sure not to get sunburned. At this point in the summer (having gotten a modest amount of sun every day since the weather turned warm) I’m okay for up to about 40 minutes of mid-day sun. And I try to get that nearly every day.
Here’s one statistic, that I’ll let stand in for dozens of others about the advantages of sun exposure. The UK Biobank has data on health outcomes for hundreds of thousands of people. A researcher Jacobsen mentions went in and counted:
… in the fifteen years of tracking, a total of 40 people had died from skin cancer attributable to too much UV light, while 2,982 people had died from diseases attributable to a deficiency of sunlight.
The final third of the book is about artificial light, and makes the case that too much light at night is just as bad as too little light during the day.
Again, this is something that I figured out long ago. All the “sleep hygiene” stuff makes it clear that you want your sleeping space to be very dark, and there’s no doubt that getting enough high-quality sleep is probably the best thing you can do for your health, maybe even above good nutrition and plenty of exercise.
The prescription is almost trivially easy: Get outside at dawn. Get as much sunlight as you can without burning during the day. Within a couple of hours after sunset make your space as dark as possible and get some sleep.
In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen. Highly recommended.
A guy I follow on micro.blog, after having to go through four or five steps just to read a Substack post, posted “Substack? What are you for?” To which I replied: “As near as I can tell, it’s there to monetize the writing of Nazis, with enough non-Nazis to provide some cover for the firm.”
My brother chimed in to point out, “You can subscribe to nazistack blogs with an RSS reader,” which is something that I hadn’t really thought about.
I’ve been avoiding any newsletter on Substack for a couple of years now, because of the “Nazi bar” problem. Even so, I’ve ended up with a couple of subscriptions to Substack newsletters, because a couple of non-Substack newsletters I subscribed to moved there, and Substack let them just subscribe me without asking. And because I wouldn’t have subscribed if I wasn’t interested, I didn’t unsubscribe from every one of those.
Now, though, based on Steven’s good idea, I’ve gone in and added those newsletters to my RSS feed. Now I can unsubscribe from those newsletters, and still see their content—in my feeds, which is the best place to see it anyway!
AI firms are on the ropes, having spent way too much money building infrastructure for tools that are valuable, but not nearly valuable enough to support the money already spent, let alone what they’re planning to spend over the next two or thee years. This is bound to come to a bad end.
As Jerry Holkins puts it:
They can only loan each other money for so long. Then, they’ll socialize the losses through nationalization.
Source: Cyberbullies – Penny Arcade
At least, that’s their plan. Oliver Jutel and Gil Duran have a name for this plan: “exit through the state.”
Because I’m at heart an optimist, I like to imagine a more hopeful solution—one where this plan fails. And I legit think it might.
If Congress changes hands, and Trump becomes even more toxic (two things that seem very likely), there might not be anybody in a position to lead the charge for socializing the losses. A toxic Trump trying to hand another bunch of taxpayer money over to billionaire tech bros might actually be very unpopular. And if a Republican minority in Congress can’t get it together to come up with a plan that a significant number of Democrats will support, socializing the losses just might not happen.
But it has to “not happen” right then—with a Democratic (or divided) Congress.
If the AI firms can hold things together (with circular financing, SPVs, and the like) until there’s a Democrat in the White House, that guy will probably not be able to resist the pressure to “do something.”
If—as I hope, and kind of expect—it comes to a head before that, the Republicans might well not be able to come up with a plan that meets the demands of all their different constituencies, while the Democrats refuse to join in any plan that a large subset of Republicans will agree to. The result might just be that we just let the sucker go down.
Letting the sucker go down is what George W. Bush wouldn’t do in 2008. Except, of course, he kinda did, as far as homeowners were concerned. Banks, investment firms, and insurance companies got saved. Homeowners got hung out to dry.
My point being that the government is totally willing to let some suckers go down. The Republicans would like those suckers to be ordinary investors, computer users, and (in particular) tax payers. But I like to imagine that there’s at least some chance that the politicians will simply be unable to cobble together an arrangement to accomplish that, with the result that the AI firms go down, a bunch of AI firm executives get prosecuted for investment fraud, and all that infrastructure (data centers and large language models) gets sold off in bankruptcy, ending up in the hands of people with a certain amount of rationality (and much less debt).
It was a very nice day today—moderate clouds, not too hot, no rain—so I decided to go for a run.
I haven’t actually compared it to other runs this summer, but I’m pretty sure it’s my longest and my fastest.
4.88 miles in 1h 18 min.
I really mean to do two runs a week, but I’m probably not managing even half that. But this run still felt okay. I was tired at the end, but not too tired. My joints felt fine during the run.
Basically, it’s all good.
A few weeks ago, back before the Iran war heated back up, The Economist wrote a mia culpa, explaining why they’d gotten it wrong about the war being an economic disaster. Briefly, while the MOU was holding up, I was tempted to write my own.
Like The Economist editors, I had thought back in April that Things are amazingly more bad than markets seem to think, but by the beginning of June, it was looking like maybe the risk of catastrophe had eased.
I didn’t write a mia culpa. To be fair, part of that was just laziness. But part of it was looking at things and thinking I was still right. Maybe between some demand destruction and some dribs and drabs of oil getting through the strait, world markets had found a new equilibrium that wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected.
The Economist thought so. They thought they’d gotten it wrong for two reasons:
First, we thought that America and Iran would hold out against a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: America because Mr Trump deludedly thought he held the whip hand, Iran because its regime knew its people could be made to endure more pain. In fact, facing the fury of American motorists, Mr Trump all but folded, preventing a disaster. Since the two parties struck a provisional deal in June, enough oil has been getting out of the Gulf to reassure markets that supply is coming back online, even if the future of the strait remains uncertain.
Our second oversight was, like others, not anticipating the staggering degree to which China would be able to slash its oil imports. Crude imports are 5m barrels a day lower than a year ago, despite the fall in prices. China has cut its demand and shored up supply. Its oil reserves are opaque—many barrels are hidden from satellites underground, and there is a blurred line between official reserves and corporate inventories. But they have been shown to be a powerful buffer.
I pretty much bought their second point. China had produced a truly fantastic amount of demand destruction, and had done it with minimal impact on their own economy, by largely shifting the impact onto people in other countries who had bought their oil distillates, before China prohibited exports. They could probably keep that up indefinitely, removing their demand from the world market.
That first point, though, I found doubtful. I mean, yes, Trump always chickens out, which is why we got the MOU and the briefly partially reopened strait. But I think they were wrong in thinking that Iran would go along with what Trump wanted, or that Trump could settle for what Iran would (obviously) want to do. They tried to paper over the cracks for a few weeks. I mean, I believe Trump settling for whatever Iran did and pretending it was a victory was a thing that could happen. But I’m not surprised it didn’t work out. Too many other people in the U.S. government were simply unwilling to let Trump leave the strait in Iran’s hands. And, although oil prices were coming back down, they were not on a trajectory that would improve the Republican’s chances in the midterms.
So, I think The Economist was right in the first place, and wrong to imagine that Trump and Iran could agree that “preventing a disaster” was something they could do.
The oil price graphic above is already out of date. It shows yesterday’s closing price, and things have gotten worse already today. Brent crude is over $100 as I wrap up this post.
On Saturday my local HEMA group, Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing, had a guest instructor come to teach a one-day class aimed at “underrepresented groups.” The guest instructor was Kaethe Dundon, “a Chicago-based queer nerd whose major interests are in history, art, and textiles, and of course historical martial arts.” The class was pitched thus:
The primary audience of this workshop includes women, those of other marginalized genders, and those with physical disabilities. Those who are male and able-bodied are welcome to attend – but be aware that your experience will not be the focus of this class, and be ready to primarily take the “losing” role in reps.
I was down with that, so I went. It was a great workshop. A lot of the focus was on stance and footwork, which are two things you can never do too much of.
One member was taking pictures. Trying to be less of a distraction, he switched his camera to “silent,” which turned out to have an odd interaction with the LED lighting in our training space:
I think the photo turned out great!
The posture with the sword across our shoulders was intended to get us to open our chest, so our arms and shoulders would be where they were supposed to be for longsword.
The notion that “SpaceX’s ambition to put data centers in space” makes more sense than putting them in North Dakota, Alaska, Siberia, and maybe Tierra del Fuego or the Falkland Islands suggests that a bunch of people have no sense at all.
I’m using “AI” here in the older sense, rather than the newer sense where it’s just another way to say LLM.
In this older sense, I don’t have anything against AI (even though I generally try to avoid LLMs). So, I thought I’d talk a little about the things I actually object to, when it comes to what people call AI these days. Specifically, what I object to (in order of objectionableness) are:
I do also have some good thoughts. Generally speaking, there’s all kinds of stuff that (I hope) is going to get a lot better. Here’s an almost random sampling of ideas I’ve had. This list is most definitely not comprehensive. It’s not even the most important stuff. It’s just a few things I have been thinking of, because they’re things I want.
I would like an AI to keep track of everything I read (including whether I finish reading it, or give up part way through), and then (insted of trying to sell me something), guess what I’d like to read next. I’d pay money for this. (Not much money, but a little.)
I’d like an AI that picked up domain information what what I read. When I read an economics or finance article, I’d like it to put a little note over on the edge of the screen that I could click on, and then it would apply the information in the article to my situation. “That article, and three others that you’ve read in the past two weeks, suggest that European stocks might do better than U.S. stocks over the next year. Your portfolio is 43% U.S. stocks and only 16% European stocks. Click here for steps you could take to boost your European stock holdings.”
Of course, it should also track future results of each of those hypotheticals and compare them to both what I had before and what I actually did.
I’d like an AI to look at a blog post I’ve written and then from the taxonomy of categories and tags I’ve already created, suggest which ones I should use for that post. (There have long been “tag recommending” plugins for WordPress, but the last time I checked, none of them preferred the tags I’ve already got. Most of them seem intended for a completely different purpose from supporting your own internal tagging system. It seemed like maybe they were intended for finding keywords for maximizing ad revenue?)
I couldn’t think of a good picture for this post, but didn’t want to post it without a picture, so I thought I’d use this picture of my dog. It’s been hot here.
My brother asked me today, “Which author do you think best immanentizes the eschaton?”
Not being a moron, I immediately replied, “Obviously it’s Charlie Stross.”
Before I could finish typing that, he suggested a Mastodon poll to ask people, to which I replied, “The poll should be ‘After Charlie Stross, what author next best immanentizes the eschaton?'”
We speculated a bit, throwing out names like William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Neal Stephenson, and Cory Doctorow.
I assume this was all prompted by the most recent Pluralistic, in which Cory Doctorow says, after explaining why, if their AI is so close to having god-like powers, anyone would be asking for money for their AI, when they could just be using the AI to make money for them, says:
So it’s not surprising that we don’t ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they’re immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
Source: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta
Anyway, at this point I put the question to confer.to (so I don’t know which AI model responded), but it gave me a great reply:
The Core “Eschaton Immanentizers” (Closest to Stross)
1. Vernor Vinge ⭐
- Why: He literally coined the term “technological singularity” in his 1993 essay. Stross stands on Vinge’s shoulders.
- Key Works: A Fire Upon the Deep (zones of thought = different physical laws based on intelligence density), A Deepness in the Sky, Marooned in Realtime.
- Vibe: More optimistic than Stross, but equally committed to the idea that superintelligence changes everything, including physics.
2. Greg Egan ⭐⭐
- Why: If Stross is the journalist of the singularity, Egan is the mathematician. He goes harder into the ontological breakdown. His characters upload, fragment, merge, and cease to be human in ways that make Stross look cozy.
- Key Works: Permutation City (simulated reality, consciousness as substrate-independent), Diaspora (post-human civilization across dimensions), Quarantine (reality modification).
- Vibe: Colder, more rigorous, less humor. The eschaton isn’t just immanentized; it’s proven.
3. Hannu Rajaniemi
- Why: Writes about societies that already live in the post-singularity world Stross describes arriving.
- Key Works: The Quantum Thief trilogy (solar system transformed by post-human technologies, memory as currency, gogolized consciousness).
- Vibe: Dense, playful, requires work—but depicts the aftermath of eschatonization brilliantly.
4. Ken MacLeod
- Why: Stross’s contemporary and friend; they share a intellectual milieu (Edinburgh SF scene). MacLeod explores similar themes but often from a more political/ideological angle.
- Key Works: The Fall Revolution series (The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal), The Execution Channel.
- Vibe: More focused on how ideologies (libertarianism, socialism, etc.) interact with singularity tech.
I mean, really, I don’t know why we didn’t have Verner Vinge in mind, or Greg Egan. I’ve read both, and I’m sure Steven has as well. They’re obviously on top.
I don’t know if Steven has read Hannu Rajaniemi, but I’ve at least read The Quantum Thief, and, yes, I’d put him on this list.
The AI also rather dismissed our guesses:
Your Guesses, Evaluated
Author Verdict Notes William Gibson Adjacent Cyberpunk is pre-singularity. His later work (The Peripheral) touches on it, but he’s more about near-future tech’s social impact than ontological rupture. Bruce Sterling Adjacent Same as Gibson—cyberpunk pioneer, but more interested in design, aesthetics, and near-term futures than the actual singularity event. Neal Stephenson Partial The Diamond Age and Snow Crash have elements, but he’s more interested in memes and social structures than the hard break of singularity. Anathem gets closer. Cory Doctorow Partial Writes about these themes (especially in Walkaway and Makers), but with a more accessible, activist, optimistic lens. Less “reality breaks,” more “how do we organize after tech changes?”
The AI actually goes on a bit, mentioning several other authors including Richard Morgan, Ted Chiang, and others, but I’ll just go hang my head in shame rather than copy and paste more AI output.
(Normally my posts are entirely my own writing. This post is an exception, in that it includes a bunch of copy/pasted AI output. I think it’s adequately tagged, though, and it’s clear that I’m not trying to pass off AI output as my own writing. Because I thought it was funny, I also generated an AI image to be the “featured image” for this post. Once again, I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to pass off AI output as my own.)
Do you use an activity tracker? I have an Oura ring, a Google Pixel watch, and a phone which runs Google Fit. All of those count my steps, and each one does some additional activity or sleep tracking. I find them all fun and interesting, so I’m always amused when yet another article comes out warning of the dangers of activity tracking.
The article at the moment is this one, sent by my brother: Five hidden pitfalls of fitness tracking, by Sahar Bakr.
I mean, sure. If you’re really foolish, you can be seriously led astray by one of these. But you’d have to be really foolish. It’s like the early days of GPS map software, where they’d be giving you directions and say, “Turn left!” but if you turned left you’d end up in a creek. Sure, you could do that, but all you had to do was look where you were going, and you could avoid it pretty easily.
Although the article has five items, there are, I think, two fundamental issues that Bakr is warning about. The larger one is outsourcing our good sense to some external device. The smaller is an excessive focus on step-count as the measure of fitness activity.
Letting a device tell you to push hard when you’re feeling crappy is just stupid. (It is perhaps somewhat less stupid to let a device tell you to take it easy when you feel great. I have several times decided to push hard because I felt great, even though one of my devices was warning me that I wasn’t fully recovered. More than once when I did that, I ended up having a crappy workout, because the device was right and I was wrong.)
With their fixation on steps (because that’s easy for a device to measure), devices have a pretty limited insight into the full scope of your movement practice. This means that they’re never going to know if your strength training is covering all the major muscle groups, or if your volume and intensity are on point. But that’s not really different from training without a device. Really, it only makes things worse if you’re so foolish as to imagine that it’s got some insight into stuff other than your steps and heart rate (or whatever else its measuring). Just like it doesn’t know enough about your strength training to provide useful advice there, it also doesn’t know much about your skills training or your flexibility training.
A lot of my training is focused on specifically increasing the sort of fitness I need for my HEMA practice. None of my devices even tries to guide me as to whether I should do less lunging practice in favor of overhead pressing practice or vice versa. (And if they did, I wouldn’t pay much attention, unless they’d started getting me to upload my sparring footage. And maybe not then.)
Getting back to the fixation on steps, the device makers want to pretend that step counts gives them some sort of deep insight into a human’s movement practice, with a one-size-fits-all target of 10,000 steps.
Weirdly, I don’t think that’s crazy. I mean, steps are by no means the only aspect of a human’s movement practice that’s important, but it’s actually not a bad proxy.
Over an evolutionarily long period, walking and running have been critical to human success. Running and walking were key to our successes in both hunting and gathering, and probably led directly to our big brains.
All three of my devices count steps. All three track walking and running. (They all try to track other activity—cycling, swimming, gardening, housework—but do so pretty poorly. Walking and running, though, they pretty much have nailed.)
In my mid-20s I was working in an office, but getting out to hike at every opportunity, which didn’t come frequently enough. I remember thinking, “If only I could get out and hike a few miles every day! I’d be in great shape!” That turns out not to be true, but it’s not completely false either.
My point here is simply that step counts are by no means a terrible proxy for one’s overall activity level, and 10,000 steps is by no means a stupid target—it’s mildly ambitious, without being out of reach for anyone with a reasonable level of fitness and some spare time. (I admit that I might well think this because I’m a weird outlier. I’m a walker from way back. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the day to walk if I want to. And I have a dog who likes to walk a lot. The upshot is, my daily steps hit 15,000 nearly every day.)
All of which is to say that I find these devices useful. In particular, they’re good at observing that I’m not fully recovered, meaning I should take it easy, even if I’m feeling okay. I find them (mildly) motivating, in that I pretty much never fail to hit 10,000 steps (unless I’m sick, the dog is sick, or the weather is terrible). I find them somewhat entertaining, especially when their praise is so for stuff I consider pretty minimal. (“You’ve met your activity goal for the day!” My Oura ring will say at 10:00 AM.)
In any case, I find them quite harmless. They don’t make me feel anxious or shamed. I’ve seen no sign that they are prompting disordered eating. I’m amused by their fixation on step counts, but not troubled by it. (I occasionally miss my 10,000 steps, usually when I’ve spent the day sitting in a plane, train, or car. I am not bothered when my devices observe that this is the case.) I care deeply about getting in my mobility work and my strength work, even if the devices don’t track it adequately. I take great joy in my movement—click any of the tags over there with “movement” in the name and find yourself taken to dozens of places where I’ve celebrated my movement practice, starting from before I had any devices, and continuing to this day. Finally, I am merely amused if my device dings me for not doing enough, as my Oura ring does if I sit for more than 50 minutes. (In fact though, these past few years, I can only barely sit still that long anyway.)
The key paragraph from the article:
For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.
I mean, I know I’m a movement weirdo, but really? Who would do anything else?
If your website has a “See more” link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?
Now, if you share 20 or more full posts and then have an “Older posts” link at the bottom, that’s different. (And much better than having a script to make the page endlessly scroll.)
Does that seem weird or contradictory to people?
I’ve started to get comments on this blog that I figure are probably AI-written spam, but are sufficiently well-written and sufficiently on-topic that I can’t tell for sure.
I hate the idea of giving spam a place on my site. But I used to really enjoy the discussions in my comment space, back when people did that sort of thing. This leaves me conflicted about what to do. I’m seriously considering turning off comments, and just letting the discussion move into social media. (You can see my social media accounts, if you want to tag me any any response you make. That page also has other ways to contact me.)
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who thinks blog comments are still a good way to do things, and wants to advocate for me keeping the site comments open.
Economists pretty much understand both inflation and recession. Because the policy tools to fight them—raising or lowering interest rates—are the opposite of each other, people sometimes think they are the opposite of each other. But this is not true, which is why “stagflation” is even a thing.
Inflation is caused by the money supply growing faster than the supply of goods and services. Back in the 1970s and 1980s there was a real push to manage the money supply as a way to keep inflation low and stable, but it didn’t work very well. (For a lot of reasons. In particular, the lags between money supply growth and the flow to spending are long and variable. Also, people have choices in where they spend their money, so sometimes the money flows to goods, other times services, and other times assets like stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.) Since the mid-1980s, the Fed hasn’t really considered controlling money supply as a key policy tool.
Recessions, on the other hand, are caused by consumers or businesses choosing to spend less money. The Fed tries to fight this by lowering interest rates. This can work—lower interest rates make it cheap to borrow money to spend. But people can still choose to spend less, even when they could borrow that money really cheaply. This happened very obviously in 2007 and 2008.
When people (or businesses) choose to spend less, the economy slows down. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. People spend less, so business income declines. Businesses sell less, so they buy less raw materials; they buy less products to sell; they cut employees. Employees lose their jobs, their income shrinks, so they spend less. Commodity sellers can’t sell what they produce, so they stop producing. Businesses can’t sell what they buy, so they quit buying. All those choices flow through the economy, reducing everyone’s income, reducing everyone’s spending even more.
We haven’t seen much of this yet, but we’re about to.
I mention all this now because I just saw this article in the New York Times: We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America. The writers came up with a model for a fairly affluent middle-class family in the United States, and found that rising prices were crushing it:
According to our calculations, the math has stopped adding up for this family over the past 18 months. They had a small cushion in 2024. Now they are in the red after covering just the basics
People’s reactions to prices that outstrip their income vary. Up to now people have adapted by simply doing what they have to do. They start by making the easiest cuts they can manage, but that doesn’t go very far. You can only make the adjustment from beef to chicken to beans one time. You can quit buying new clothes and make do with what’s in your closet for a year or two, but eventually your old clothes start to wear out. People can quit saving and investing, and they can start borrowing to cover their expenses, but that can’t go on. Eventually, people have to start making structural changes to their household costs, of the sort I talked about all the time when I was writing for Wise Bread: They can become a one-car family. They can move from a house, to an apartment, to a smaller apartment. They can raise the deductibles on their insurance policies.
These sorts of changes have long lead-times. Selling your second (or third) car might take months, and it might not save you much money in the first year or two after you do it. Moving to a cheaper place to live similarly takes months and costs money. Even switching to a cheaper phone plan takes a while. But 18 months is enough time for people to start making these changes. And once they’ve done so, that new lower-spending structure is largely locked in for at least months, probably for years. Even as prices start to come down (and they will, although not to what they were in 2020), people who have made those structural changes to their household cost structure aren’t going to undo them anytime soon.
The result is going to be a recession, very possibly a severe recession, and one that goes on for a very long time. It’s not obvious yet, because businesses are still spending huge amounts of money on things like AI infrastructure, but a lot of that spending is illusory, so it will vanish all at once, rather than gradually.
This wasn’t inevitable. The Fed deserves some of the blame. The Trump administration deserves much more—tariffs and war are what most dramatically hit the cost structures of the typical business and the typical household.
At this point, there’s no good solution for the economy as a whole, because the smart moves by individuals (dramatically changing the cost structure of the business or the household to enable lower spending) all act to deepen the recession. But that is no reason to do anything else but act to bring your costs in line with your income. Going bankrupt will not help the economy.