Anthropic and the right to say no – by Jerusalem Demsas

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I think that Demsas, as a highly agentic small business founder, may be conditioning her view of business a bit too strongly on her own experience, but yes, I agree.

…the existence of bad companies has convinced large swaths of the Left to view all private market activity, and even the desire to make a lot of money, as inherently suspect. This is a real shift, under Presidents Clinton and Obama, Democrats openly defended “free enterprise.” Now, instead of expecting the government to proffer a reason why regulation is necessary, corporations and individual actors need to justify their existence to the state on an ongoing basis. This distrust has manifested in an entrepreneurship gap. In one paper, economists find that Republicans are 26% more likely to start a business than Democrats.

The problem isn’t that people distrust corporations, it’s that they’ve allowed that distrust to license a comfort with heavy-handed state power that is far more dangerous than any individual company. If one of the leading-edge tech companies — one potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars — cannot require that its products aren’t used to undermine the Constitution, what, really, is corporate power in the face of that?

Anthropic and the right to say no – by Jerusalem Demsas

The Hemisphere of Exceptions | Lawfare

Thoughtful piece on how the normalization of states of emergency has itself become increasingly normalized in the Americas. What can we learn about the risks of such normalization by looking at countries where the process has gone further?

Across [the Americas], this pattern repeats: Emergency powers, once framed as exceptional tools for brief crises, have become central instruments of governance in countries grappling with political instability, organized crime, and eroding public trust. This shift matters not because emergencies themselves are new—every constitutional system allows for extraordinary authority in moments of genuine crisis—but because of how routinely and predictably these powers now appear, reappear, and persist. What was designed as a temporary suspension of ordinary legal and institutional constraints increasingly functions as a parallel mode of rule.

Executives rely on emergency authorities not only to respond to acute threats but also to manage chronic problems that democratic institutions have struggled to resolve. Over time, this reliance reshapes expectations: Legislatures grow accustomed to governing by renewing these executive powers rather than deliberation, courts recalibrate standards of deference, and security forces assume a more permanent role in public life. The result is not the collapse of democracy, but a subtler transformation in how it operates, with legality yielding to expediency and crisis becoming a standing justification rather than an exception. The increasing prevalence of these emergency powers complicates U.S. policy, making it more difficult to recognize democratic backsliding, even as Washington has used similar emergency measures to justify executive action.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-hemisphere-of-exceptions

Fake Twang: How White Conservatism Stole Country Music

Really interesting essay from someone who is himself an excellent and unconventional country musician. It’s a bit too heavily steeped for my taste in the ritualized identity politics of 2020, but still very much worth a read.

The southern accent itself has, puzzlingly, taken on a second life as the voice of universal rurality. Why? Rurality clung on longer in the South than other places because of poverty―a poverty that was the result of the evils of slavery, the destruction of total war, and an ensuing era of brutal white supremacy and economic strife. The destitution of the former Confederacy served to preserve the use of instruments and melodies that were common in every corner of this country, until the tide of industrialization swept over these older music forms almost everywhere else, inadvertently isolating and enshrining the haunting songs of yesteryear in old Dixie.

The forgotten corners of the southeast harbored people singing and playing songs from distant centuries and even more distant continents. The seemingly incongruent traditions of Gaelic Europe, Native America, West Africa, Hawaii, Latin America and French Canada collided to create a kaleidoscope of vernacular music forms that coalesced into what we know today as blues, jazz, ragtime, Cajun, zydeco, bluegrass and, yes, country. By the time this music reached the ears of the rest of America in the early 20th century, crackling from primitive phonograph records and fledgling radio stations, these accidentally preserved remnants of speech patterns and musical traditions seemed archaic and novel.

Fake Twang: How White Conservatism Stole Country Music

Dean Ball and deepfates on what programming-for-free gives us

Former White House AI advisor Dean Ball:

Most people, going about their day, do not think about how “causing bespoke software engineering to occur” might improve their lives or allow them to achieve some objective. They think of “software engineering,” when they think of it at all, as something altogether distinct from what they do. Of course if you have deeply internalized the general-purpose nature of “software,” and especially, “things achievable by well-orchestrated computers,” you understand that in some important sense, almost all human endeavor can be aided, in some way or another, by software engineering. A great deal of it can be automated altogether.

Coding agents have reached the point of reliability and quality where it is now possible to cause a great many moderately complex software engineering projects to occur.

[…]

It will take time to realize this potential, if for no other reason than the fact that for most people, the tool I am describing and the mentality required to wield it well are entirely alien. You have to learn to think a little bit like a software engineer; you have to know “the kinds of things software can do.” You have to learn also to think like the chief executive of a thousand small (but fast growing) teams of software engineers who possess expert-level knowledge of virtually all domains of human intellectual life. Grasping all of this, and learning how to embody it, requires humans to adopt a strange and new kind of agenticness. Not all of us will. But some people understand it already, and their numbers will only grow. Young people in particular, blessed with neuroplasticity, will have internalized this to a depth few grownups will be able to comprehend. This transformation will therefore be sociological as well as technological, the revolution cultural as well as industrial.

Dean Ball responding to deepfates responding to Dean

Honeyguide Birds Learn Culturally Distinct Calls Made by Honey Hunters

One of the very few examples of human-animal mutualism, one which may well predate Homo sapiens. In addition to the evolutionary aspect, there’s an additional cultural aspect, where people in a particular area have established a specific call that attracts a honeyguide to come find them a beehive. This is just incredibly cool <3

Throughout nature, different species will occasionally team up in unlikely alliances to work together for each’s mutual benefit. For example, woolly bats in the rainforests of Borneo are known to roost inside tropical pitcher plants. While the hollow-bodied plants provide a safe home for the tiny bats, the plant benefits by catching the guano that the animals produce. The mutual relationship helps ensure each species’ survival.

However, human honey hunters and honeyguide birds have cultivated a unique relationship for thousands of years — and perhaps as early as our hominin ancestors.

Honeyguides are one of a relatively few species of bird that feed regularly on beeswax locked inside the nests of wild bees. Similarly, humans eagerly seek the nests for the honey they contain. However, locating and accessing these nests, which often rest high in the branches of trees, presents a challenge to humans and birds.

With their eyes in the sky, honeyguides naturally know the locations of bee colonies, and humans have the skills to climb or fell trees with nests, subdue the angry bees and open their nests, exposing beeswax for the honeyguides and honey for themselves. Thus, a mutualistic relationship has emerged between honeyguides and humans, where birds exchange their knowledge of bees’ nest locations for humans’ adept skills at accessing the resources inside.

“By birds and people partnering together, everyone gains something of value,” said study author Brian Wood, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This is an example of a very rare phenomenon in nature — cooperation between people and a wild animal.”

Would-be honey hunters attract the birds using specialized and culturally unique calls to signal they are looking for a honeyguide partner and to maintain cooperation while following a guiding bird to a nest.

Honeyguide Birds Learn Culturally Distinct Calls Made by Honey Hunters | American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Some additional sources:

Voderberg tiling

It is a monohedral tiling: it consists only of one shape that tessellates the plane with congruent copies of itself. In this case, the prototile is an elongated irregular nonagon, or nine-sided figure. The most interesting feature of this polygon is the fact that two copies of it can fully enclose a third one. E.g., the lowest purple nonagon is enclosed by two yellow ones, all three of identical shape.[4] Before Voderberg’s discovery, mathematicians had questioned whether this could be possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voderberg_tiling

Bonus tiling: