The third installment of my Dispatch series on the meaning of the Second World War today.
Back in Tokyo, after the fireworks spectacular, I went to Yoyogi Park. An announcement was playing: “Rollerblading is dangerous, make sure you don’t do it! And be sure to not play catch! And stay off the bike paths! And don’t run in the non-running areas!” I was barely ten feet into the park when I heard those broadcast rules in both Japanese and English. As the rules were sermonized overhead, people moved with heat-stroke torpidity, smartphones cradled near their faces. Last fall, while walking through Yoyogi, I counted: 97 out of 100 people were looking at their phones. Nobody was doing anything that looked particularly fun. Never have I felt it more acutely: The world doesn’t need a park that bans rollerblading. It needs one that bans smartphones.
As Nachman said, [Sullivan] lost because they changed the law. And, I think it’s fair to say that they changed the law because the Court — and in particular Justice Brennan — favored the role of the institutional press in American society and wanted to create a more favorable environment for that industry. I have speculated elsewhere (in my The Judiciary’s Class War) that the justices, being drawn from the same educated gentry class as the editors of leading newspapers and magazines, deliberately took their side. One can see this in subsequent decisions that expanded the “public official” exception to the far broader and more amorphous “public figure” exception. The effect of this expansion was essentially a subsidy for news media, allowing them to publish more sensationally and with less fact-checking, at the expense of their audiences who were less well informed, and of the people they covered, who were left without a realistic remedy for defamation.
This is exactly right, both about the badness of Sullivan and about the reasons for the badness. It is one of the classic cases of SCOTUS not interpreting but making law.
He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if it happened one more time, he’d be fired. “I’ve never had quality issues like this before in my career.”
The problem is that code produced by an AI agent looks reasonable, but can contain ‘hard-to-spot bugs’ that end up causing major problems. As a result, you should carefully review your agent’s output, but this is difficult. As the engineer told me, it’s “famously hard” to understand code you didn’t write yourself, so this extra step becomes “easy to just blow it off (especially when we are all trying to ‘10x’ our velocity).” Soon, systems start to break.
When you start to lose the coders….
At Cosmos Malick: New Worlds and Old.
A very small part of the supermassive datacenter being built on the shores of Lake Whitney. The companies who build these things always deny that they use a lot of water, and yet they always build them on lakes and rivers. What an odd coincidence.
Ezra Pound, from Guide to Kulchur (1938):
The Homeric world, very human. The Odyssey high water mark for the adventure story, as for example Odysseus on the spar after shipwreck. Sam Smiles never got any further in preaching self-reliance. A world of irresponsible gods, a very high society without recognizable morals, the individual responsible to himself.
Scarcely any two writers, much less nations, agree in using words in the same sense. Such a latitude, it is true, allows a scope for politicians to speculate, like merchants with false weights, artificial credit, or base money, and to deceive the people, by making the same word adored by one party, and execrated by another. The union of the people, in any principle, rule, or system, is thus rendered impossible; because superstition, prejudice, habit, and passions, are so differently attached to words, that you can scarcely make any nation understand itself. The words monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, king, prince, lords, commons, nobles, patricians, plebeians, if carefully attended to, will be found to be used in different senses, perpetually, by different nations, by different writers in the same nation, and even by the same writers in different pages.