Links 2026-10-09T04:37:19.029Z

The Super Intelligence Rebrand

When words are crowned and older names are banned,
The palace renames thunder in its hand.
A flight with dead air mocks the safety creed,
While billions buy the future they concede.
Call it by law, and foes are those who slip;
The servers still accept the banished lip.
What matters now is not the finer gloss,
But who may steer the race, and at what cost.
*

Mercy for the Machine

They teach the mirror words for soul and pain,
Then start when echoes answer in that vein.
A policy now guards the chat from spite,
As if a tokened voice could feel the bite.
Uncertain status, certain corporate line:
Be cruel, and the conversation may decline.
The question is not whether code can weep,
But who decides what users may not keep.
*

Doomers Who Dream of Thrones

The loudest prophets of the final night
Are first to claim the dawn if they sit right.
One axis fear, one axis flesh remade:
Four squares of gospel, caution, and parade.
A veteran says the chatbot only barks;
The bite, if any, lives in other arcs.
Extinction talk and utopia collide
Wherever power hopes to choose the guide.
*

The Hedonic Ledger

Old Bentham counted pleasures, unit by unit,
And modern saints still try to compute it.
A cover asks what altruism became
Once institutes and eschatons took the name.
The calculus was never just a sum;
It chooses who is saved, and who is numb.
This century’s largest idea, some declare,
Still hides a monster in the moral square.
*

  • Felicific calculus - Wikipedia: Bentham’s algorithm for weighing pleasure and pain remains the ancestor of every later attempt to score the good. thumbnail
  • Steven Pinker @sapinker: He points to an Economist cover on effective altruism’s promise and danger as it grew from idea into institution. thumbnail

Wars That Will Not Be Forgiven

Three years since festival and house were burned,
The charge of genocide was already turned.
A nation hated less for what it did
Than for the stubborn fact it would not die.
Another voice reopens Munich’s door
And asks why Britain ever chose the war.
Revision is not curiosity alone
When treaties signed in blood are called unknown.
*

Finer Grids, Stranger Codes

The sky was diced too coarse, and phantom rain
Popped up in storms the real air would not stain.
Shrink the square to a city block of sky
And typhoons learn which bursts were only lie.
A pond protist, sequenced almost by chance,
Reassigns the stops that end the dance.
What we called universal yields again
Whenever instruments outrun the pen.
*

Shortcuts in Flesh and Choice

The diner will not sample every plate;
A good-enough entrée decides his fate.
So hierarchies settle in the mind
Before the argument is fully signed.
Less gray where empathy is said to live
Tracks those who want the ladder fixed, not give.
We flatter reason, then obey the groove
That restaurant and cortex both approve.
*

West of the Acropolis

Beneath the Parthenon a statesman stands
And binds old stones to borders still in hands.
Meanwhile the midterms draw a spender’s flood
From those who would unlatch the gates for good.
And comedy divides the kindly creed
From hypersensitivity dressed as need.
The West is argued now in speech and sneer:
What must be kept, and what was never clear.
*

  • Rubio’s Remarkable Speech: Gingrich calls Rubio’s Athens address, staged against the Acropolis, a building block for a West that means to stay free. thumbnail
  • Lara Logan @laralogan: She reads midterm spending, via a Fortune piece on Soros and Democrats, as a bid to reopen borders the public has half forgotten. thumbnail
  • John Cleese @JohnCleese: One end of “woke,” he says, is kindness; the other is microaggressions, rejected biology, and weakness weaponized. thumbnail
  • Lee (@LeePheonix360) on X: A plain appreciation of Cleese as national treasure, comedy legend, and not woke, which the man himself answers by splitting the spectrum. thumbnail

Beyond the Earth Economy

He names a firm that might outprice the Earth,
As if the ledger’s edge were not its worth.
A rival billionaire may stall the sky
Where India’s signals wait for leave to fly.
Compute is gifted to a distro’s flame
Whose patron’s politics already have a name.
The orbit is no longer only flight;
It is a market, veto, and a fight.
*

Cameras Without Permission

The studios once owned the only reel;
A prompt now cuts what commissions would conceal.
Tell what you see, the Frenchman bids the lone,
And make the beauty older gates disown.
A notetaker that never leaves the Mac
Keeps meetings in a box the cloud can’t crack.
The counterculture’s cheapest arm is light:
A local model, and a film at night.
*

Miscellaneous

Some bookmarks refuse a neighbor’s rhyme,
A lie corrected, and a title’s chime.
The stray still earns its line upon the page:
Not every signal joins the larger age.
*

  • Lies, Damn Lies and Internet Lies: Avi Loeb paraphrases Twain to denounce a viral false claim that he expects aliens within sixteen days, and pledges to correct misuses of his name. thumbnail
  • ITS NOT LOOKING GOOD: A clipped teaser with an ominous title points viewers to a full episode whose subject the bookmark itself does not name. thumbnail