Notebook 6.24.25

The Cruelty Would Appear to be the Point

Now, do I believe these Wagner Group guys are actually cannibals? No.

Does appearing to be scary fucking cannibals and promoting rank cruelty on social media serve a very specific purpose? Yes.

But we've seen other examples of performative cruelty recently, yeah?

SpaceX doesn't really have a moat

Honda sent up a reusable rocket last week that landed in about a foot of the target point.

Take me down to Taiki Town

Now, they've got to get it to the point where it can get a satellite in orbit, and this will take patience and capital. But if I'm Musk, I start to worry at this point. Honda knows how to scale production when it wants to. There is no moat to space launches.

Scope Creep

MP units of the California National Guard are apparently being used for drug interdiction operations in the Inland Empire now.

This sort of thing won't get a lot of public attention because it doesn't have the drama of confronting protestors, but it is a significant danger to a democratic society. And seems well outside of the purpose of Article 10 deployment.

Speaking of odd deployments...

How Do We Know They're Who They Say They Are?

The sight of armed masked me purporting to be federal agents kidnapping people off the streets is becoming all-too-common a sight in the US right now. These supposed Federal Agents won't identify themselves, their agency, or provide a badge number or often even a warrant.

In some cases, they hop out of the car to point a weapon at you if you try and take a photo of their license plate.

The media in the US seems locked into a framing of these situations that takes for granted that all such people involved in these incidents are actual Federal Agents. But we have no real way of knowing this in every case.

After a group of alleged agents showed up at Dodger Stadium last week and were turned away by Dodger management and the LAPD, Mayor Karen Bass had this to say about the problem of identification:

At Dodger Stadium last week, immigration agents staged outside the parking lot prompted protests and questions that local officials had to address.“They show up without uniforms. They show up completely masked. They refuse to give ID,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said during a news briefing after the Dodger Stadium incident. “Who are these people? And frankly, the vests that they have on look like they ordered them from Amazon. Are they bounty hunters? Are they vigilantes? If they’re federal officials, why is it that they do not identify themselves?”

This is going to come to a head at some point, because, as we saw with the political assassinations and attempted assassinations in Minnesota recently, we're going to see violence perpetrated by people claiming to be law enforcement or federal agents of some variety. And how will we be able to tell the difference?

Individuals are emboldened to commit crimes against those they believe are immigrants, capitalizing on the camouflage ICE agents employ and the fear of deportation in immigrant communities. ICE’s tactics make impersonation much easier in a chilling landscape where it has become difficult to distinguish who is an agent of the state and who is not.

This American Prospect article is one of the better pieces I've read on the dilemma.

Privacy? Never Heard of It.

As a reminder, you probably shouldn't trust anything that Meta puts out, whether it's the Facebook app, LLAMA models, or their Meta AI app.

In what's likely the greatest display of app design stupidity since Venmo's public transaction feed, Meta got caught sharing prompts people were entering into their Meta AI app. The prompts were often of a deeply personal and potentially embarrassing nature.

Sand Batteries

A 100 MWh sand battery, the world's largest such battery, has entered operation in Finland.

The battery should allow the local community to decrease wood chip consumption by 60% and will use the existing biomass boiler as a backup. The battery works by using resistive heating to heat low-grade sand to about 500°C using excess solar and wind energy. The sand can store this excess energy for days to months depending on the design.

I love (relatively) lo-tech battery solutions.

Quote of the Day

Everyone deserves a road trip to the graveyards of capitalism.

Mike Monteiro from this excellent meditation on "How to live off the rails."

Mike makes some great points here about making sure to create time-space that's cheap enough to allow for exploratory decision-making. Useful when thinking about futures work and helping organizations to create possibility spaces.

AI and Insanity: A Feature not a Bug

“What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Mr. Yudkowsky asked in an interview. “It looks like an additional monthly user.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html