The 'ingredients you can pronounce means it's healthy' line implies a world in which the kind of nutrition a person requires scales with their biology education and grasp of phonics. Which isn't true, of course, but sure would imply some interesting worldbuilding if it were
"Potassium cyanide. Arsenic trioxide. Polonium 210. Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin," I say, smugly and with full confidence, before downing the glass of wine my political rival insisted on pouring for me. Seconds later, she watches with a smirk as I collapse writhing to the ground, in the knowledge that I never could hit that "R" in "pinot noir" quite right
sometimes u headcanon a character as a sexuality but then also ship things that contradict that. sometimes you ship things you would NEVER EVER want in canon. this is because these things are fun and silly and not legally binding.
Yeah I don't know where some people got this idea that fanfic is always like, auditioning to replace canon or being posited as "better" than canon, as opposed to people just borrowing the characters to play with in the sandpit for a while before putting them back in their box
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
i feel like this is a good example of just how SOLID and STRONG cows are !!!!
i see a lot of ppl worrying abt cows being ridden or petted super vigorously, and thats super fair! it can look painful to an outside observer! but cows are actual brick shit houses. these guys almost ran full force into the side of one and she didnt even fall over!
Listen I get it but you CANNOT use "sensory nightmare" as an excuse to avoid essential things. You HAVE to find a way to make it work, such as finding effective alternatives. But you can't just avoid it.
You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.
You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.
You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.
good LORD the piss is flying all over the place in that comment section! If you're poor do NOT leave your house you're definitely gonna get caught in the crossfire.
I’ve been meaning to draw a companion piece to my Fire Nation train print for AGES, and this year was the perfect year to revisit the Gaang! ☺️ Debuting at my SDCC artist alley table HH-24!
okay wait so I did some searching and found an article that interviewed some of the interns who ran the Obergefell decision (it's the first pic above) and—
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/
The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.
This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.
The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.
That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:
Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.
Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.
Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.
This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?
Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:
After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.
The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.
Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of moments where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.
But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."
Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.
Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.
Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."
Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.
Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.
On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.
America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."
On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":
As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.
First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:
In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.
The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).
Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.
There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.
The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Getting Into Ballas's Head (Metaphorically, and Then Literally, With a Blade)
Learning what we have about Ballas and Margulis from the Old Peace and Devil's Triad before going back through earlier story quests is quite the trip.
Shortcut to the thesis: Maybe one psychological reason Ballas was so upset and ruthless was because the fairy-tale romance with Margulis he'd built up in his head was shattered into a million pieces by what actually happened.
Roathe's account and many of Ballas's remarks bear out an idea that Ballas and Margulis's relationship started out as a real fairy-tale romance, a narrative of pure and true love for the ages, blooming even amidst the rot and corruption of the Orokin. A real "love at first sight" story, starting innocuous at a random function, crossing the boundary of social strata between Executor and Archimedean.
At least, I'm 100% certain that's how Ballas saw it in his own eyes. Oh, Ballas the romanticist, Ballas the fantasist, Ballas the artist, the poet. To hear Roathe tell it, the most starry-eyed and naive of the Seven, a dreamer in his own right, often looked down upon by the more pragmatic or downright ruthless of the Executors. (It's all relative, of course, they were all committing atrocities and war crimes on the regular. Y'know, for fun. Immortality is a helluva drug.)
And I'm sure, in that time frame, Margulis found something to truly love, too. Maybe Ballas in his flights of fancy really was a breath of fresh air compared to Orokin high society. A real Nice Guy™. We can certainly assume that Ballas was putting his best foot forward to be a most gracious and sincere courtier.
Here's my speculation: I think, in Ballas's mind, his romance with Margulis was going to change / fix everything. It was, to him, that special kind of fairy-tale love that would change the world. She was Cinderella, and he was her Prince. And their ascendant courtship was going to show the dastardly Orokin that true love and romance could save the empire, restore goodness to the ruling class, and elevate humanity just in time for its next big chapter in its journey across the stars to Tau, defying entropy itself.
I don't think even he knew how much of what he believed in was riding on this fairy tale.
Then the Zariman Ten-Zero returned from the Void. And he watched as Margulis put all her kindness and effort into saving them, showing far more love for them than she ever had for him - which was not insubstantial, but the difference could not be denied. Especially after they blinded her with a Void beam, a poetic tragedy that meant she could never look at Ballas with those loving eyes ever again.
Then the Old Peace was shattered, and (more speculation time, but it seems plausible something like this might've happened) Margulis refused to let the Tenno by the fall guys. By removing the Tenno's memory, they couldn't testify to having carried out the mission that unintentionally shattered the treaty, meaning what evidence remained pointed at Ballas and Margulis. And Ballas was powerful enough to throw off any investigation into himself.
Ballas pleads with Margulis. A renouncement from her might've been able to save her if she'd been willing to throw ALL the Tenno under the bus. Then they could maybe, just maybe, under the slimmest chances, go back to their fairy-tale romance, and fix the Orokin Empire through love without those devil children messing everything up all the time. But Margulis refuses, going full apostate, so far as to rebuke the whole council to their faces.
By the time Ballas confirms the execution order, he is already shattered. The Tenno, the Orokin, the Old War, everyone, everything has collaborated to destroy the one narrative holding up his personal sense of hope and optimism and romanticism. They are all complicit in destroying the Most Beautiful Thing in the Origin System - their star-crossed love that was destined for greatness.
It would have taken a heroic level of sobriety for him to reflect that maybe he put too much on Margulis and that her principled kindness created a complicated and nuanced situation between them that was never meant to be a personal attack or rebuke. But Ballas has never in his life been that down-to-earth.
Instead, Ballas's eyes cloud with a different kind of fantasy: A fantasy of revenge.
As the Old War renews, Ballas weaves petty spite and cruel vengeance into whatever he touches. He starts feeding intel to the Sentients. When an enterprising Dax catches on, he turns him into a Warframe tortured by a single tragic memory. Anyone who so much as even looks at him the wrong way, like a rebellious girl at the Yuvan Theater, he devises a horrible and ironic punishment for them.
There are so many gaps in this narrative, but we know much of the rest.
He watched the Orokin Empire fall.
He continued to manipulate the Sentients.
He very nearly got his revenge upon the Tenno.
He very nearly achieved some mad version of his dream where he claims the throne of the Orokin and remakes it in his own image.
He very nearly made the jump to Tau to start anew.
By the time of the confrontation on the Praghasa, confronted by the symbols of his failure that just refuse to die or submit, he has been stewing on this for countless ages. He rants and raves about how no one understood him, and everyone worked against him, and all the love that was meant for him was wasted on the unworthy...
All because he was the Prince who never got his Happily Ever After with his Princess.
...
And he STILL deserved to die with the fury of a thousand suns.
Ooh, I hadn’t made the connection between the xenoflora destruction and framing the Tenno as destroyers so that Ballas could have Margulis all to himself, but that makes perfect sense. I really love this take on the character!
Actually, I think that “Ballas was a fantasist and a dreamer” really explains a lot of his actions in the story: Ballas was a despicable despot, but in his own eyes he certainly viewed himself as a noble hero, the trickster-smith of the Orokin Executors’ pantheon. He probably thought himself not only the sole Orokin with an ounce of constructive creativity left, but a cultural rebel to boot, one willing to acknowledge the culture of the Earth-That-Was and one willing to learn from it. After all, we know the Orokin positioned themselves as the gods of the Origin System, and suppressed the worship of any other deities and mythologies to enforce this… and yet, the Warframes were made in defiance of this faux-divine censorship. Excalibur. Loki. Grendel. Kullervo. Wukong and Nezha, Oberon and Titania. Weapons made in the shape of forcibly-abandoned myths, merging present and past to fight the Orokin’s rogue future. (For that matter, it probably wasn’t an accident that Ballas’s first Warframe was named for the sword of the Once-and-Future King.)
I think Ballas’s slavish devotion to poetry ends up resonating throughout his actions. The moment where the young Operator saves his life, and the Executor responds with a curt “Remember this” before ascending to the heavens? To the players, it’s a mockery; to Ballas, it’s heroic magnanimity, a god thanking a mortal for their (unneeded) aid. Forcing Margulis, the good stepmother, to choose between her wicked stepchildren and her devoted prince? Oh, how betrayed he would feel when she chose the devils over him! You could even tie his breakdown in The New War to this: even after conquering the Origin System, the true King in the Mountain emerging to bring forth the new Narmer Empire, it still isn’t enough for him… because there’s nothing beautiful in winning via overwhelming force and brainwashing of the populace. He’s enraged because the Lotus still isn’t his Margulis, the Tenno refuse to stop fighting him, and that the story has now been irrevocably twisted so that there is no longer a way for him to be its hero.
And even when he tries one final time to retake the narrative, burning the Origin System’s “rough draft” to escape to his promised land of Tau, he still loses. He dies silently within his fortress of bones, wounded by his devils that never were with weapons of his own creation, the revenant of his lover softly breaking him with a sweet, obvious lie of his own making: a kiss of untrue love. Poetic justice indeed.
Look upon his works, ye Tenno, and beware: the trickster-gods are prone to tripping up in their own snares.
The LGBTQI+ Human rights fraternity in Uganda is celebrating a rare but significant legal victory following the decision by authorities to w
“Today, we celebrate an important victory: Wendy and Diana are finally free. We extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who stood in solidarity, raised their voices, advocated, and supported Wendy and Diana throughout this journey. Your unwavering support made a difference,” SMUG said in a post on X.
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