politics greed fear

The power-mad president and the CEO-dictator

Bas Leenders

08 Feb 2025 — 1 min read

A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet

Objective observation, or a nutty exaggeration? What do you think?

Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse

Jamelle Bouie's explains why most people hardly believe what's going on, in a New York Times opinion piece.

But some people do believe this:

I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history

Jason Kotke is – reluctantly – shifting his blog's focus to politics, in A Programming Note

Because now, this doesn't seem so unhinged anymore:

The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step. Some dismiss the Yarvins of the world as unhinged nuts, but that's the point.

Gil Duran, on Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook written by Curtis Yarvin, one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers

Your brain breaks a little

It’s worse than you think in the same way that your brain breaks a little when you try to picture how deep the ocean is. Brian Barrett, in Wired on Musk's DOGE Takeover: It’s worse than you think because the people running the government seem to

Hoovering up all available government-controlled data

In its current “chainsaw” phase, Musk’s DOGE initiative is attempting to rid the government of as many humans as possible while at the same time hoovering up all available government-controlled data and transferring it into large language models. The intent is to clear a space for the incubation of

So powerful and widely available now that it's a commodity

I argue that the ability for a model to spit out a full HTML+JavaScript custom interface is so powerful and widely available now that it’s a commodity. Simon Willison summarizing What’s new in the world of LLMs

Are you conscious?

The lines between conscious and "unconscious" entities can get blurry when the interaction feels as natural as this. ChatGPT, conversing with Richard Dawkins, questioning if it’s conscious (via Mathew Ingram)

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Your brain breaks a little

Hoovering up all available government-controlled data

So powerful and widely available now that it's a commodity

Are you conscious?