Category: Science

In Germany for many transactions you need a proof of address which a Personalausweis provides for German citizens. Us foreigners don’t get one however often we ask for it. In the Netherlands moving through the country without a battery of chip cards (OV chipkaart, Bonuskaart, OV-fiets etc.), apps and associated services is costly and annoying.

The signs have been there for a while but China seems to be pushing this much further along. The question is whether it’s a deliberate move or that the number of people affected is so small that they’re a negligible edge case for the policy makers over there.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-136339096

A very useful thought experiment whenever anybody tries to pretend LLMs are ‘human’ because they sound human.

Here's why "alignment research" when it comes to LLMs is a big mess, as I see it.Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".

— Colin (@colin-fraser.net) 2024-12-19T23:15:38.459Z

RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models

Medical QA depends heavily on domain-specific knowledge that is not always available within pre-trained models, necessitating knowledge-based retrieval from external sources.

In addition medical knowledge evolves rapidly, and new treatments or updated guidelines may not be included in the model’s pertained corpus.

The question example for the reasoning process in Figure 1 is on a multiple-choice question. That seems overly simple.

In parallel, Commonsense Question Answering shares similar complexities with Medical QA, particularly in its reliance on structured multi-step reasoning and iterative evidence retrieval.

rStar (Mutual Reasoning Makes Smaller LLMs Stronger Problem-Solvers)

The rStar approach seems worth diving into. That will be the paper I read next.

Monte Carlo Tree Search

enabling the open source LLMs (LLAMA3.1) to achieve competitive performance with top closed-source LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-4o.

We’ll come to this later in the paper. Their conclusion is that they can trick out LLAMA to get similar performance to GPT-4 in these domains.

Upper Confidence Bound applied on trees (UCT)

In contrast, rStar incorporates five distinct actions that enable more adaptive exploration:

A1: Propose a One-Step Thought. This action generates the next reasoning step based on previous steps, allowing the LLM to build the solution incrementally.

A2: Propose Remaining Thought Steps. This action enables the LLM to produce all remaining reasoning steps in one inference, similar to CoT, for simpler questions.

A3: Generate Next Sub-question and Answer. This action decomposes the main problem into a sequence of sub-questions, each solved in turn. A4: Re-answer Sub-question. This action allows the LLM to re-answer a previously generated sub- question, increasing accuracy by using few-shot prompting.

A5: Rephrase Question/Sub-question. This action rephrases the question to clarify conditions and reduce misunderstandings, enhancing the LLM’s interpretation of the problem.

I need to trace the rStar algorithm after reading the original paper. The explanation here is too short.

These queries target information that can either support or refute the content of each statement, ensuring comprehensive factual verification.

How does this approach deal with (non-)negation that LLMs often have a lot of trouble with? From a language perspective it could just as easily say I can or can’t eat grapefruit (iykyk) based on the temperature that day but especially in a medical context these kind of errors can be catastrophic.

RARE achieves substantial gains, outperforming rStar by 5.17% on MedQA, 2.19% on MedMCQA and 2.39% on MMLU-Medical.

Even if these numbers are statistically significant (which they don’t say), these increases are really modest. I would not call this in any way “substantial”.

Looking at Table 1, RARE is as much of an increase over rStar as rStar is over the next best approach so from that perspective maybe you could call it significant. The difference between worst and best framework here is around 10% across CoT, RAG, SC, rStar, RARE.

evaluated on StrategyQA (SQA), CommonsenseQA (CQA), Social IQA (SIQA) and Physical IQA (PIQA)

The main question I have is from what percentage accuracy such a system would be reasonably possible to use in a real world context. Even at 90-95% that would seem like it would be too low to rely on when the stakes are high.

By enhancing LLMs with retrieval-augmented reasoning, RARE bridges the gap between open source models and state-of-the-art proprietary systems.

The framework has only been tested on open source models like LLaMA 3.1 and not on larger proprietary models such as GPT-4. This is due to the high number of API calls required by RARE’s iterative retrieval and reasoning process, making evaluation on closed source models prohibitively costly.

So here they repeat the statement that they’ve bridged the gap but they say they haven’t used this approach with a model like GPT-4 because the number of API calls would make it too expensive.

That leaves on the table that these kind of many-call approaches are open to OpenAI because they can do these numbers of calls much more affordably from inside the house. No real gap has been closed here and it shows again how big of an advantage OpenAI has.

That raises the question: What makes GPT-4 so good? Why does it perform so much better than open source models?

RARE is designed to identify a single reasoning trajectory that leads to a correct answer but does not necessarily optimise for the best or shortest path that maximises robustness.

Any integration into medical workflows must be supervised by qualified practitioners to ensure patient safety and ethical use.

Adapting While Learning: Grounding LLMs for Scientific Problems with Intelligent Tool Usage Adaptation

A paper where they fine tune an LLM to be able to answer some questions itself and figure out for which questions it needs to use a specialized tool. Intelligent tool usage seems like it would expand the use cases for LLM driven systems much more than any kind of scaling (real or imagined).

However, scholars note that their abilities are capped at approximately high-school levels

That seems like a noteworthy statement especially if you are looking to LLMs to provide “novel thinking”. It would seem much more that high school problems are abundantly available and relatively trivial so they see a specific focus.

For numerical answers in the MATH and SciBench datasets, we consider answers correct if they fall within a small tolerance range of the true value, specifically within ±5%.

Don’t really see why you could not get exact answers in a mathematical domain.

This performance gap on public benchmarks is likely due to the larger parameter count and specific optimization of state-of-the-art models on the open-source datasets.

Same as with the high school questions. These datasets are easily available and draw attention so the models overfit on them.

The model Ours-Pn demonstrates performance comparable to Base-Pf , both showing a significant improvement over the base model. This similarity indicates successful internalization of distilled knowledge from tools. The transition from Ours-Pn to Ours-Pi showcases further improvement in answer accuracy, resulting from the model’s enhanced ability to intelligently switch to tools for harder questions.

This is the core proposition of the paper. Looking at Table 1 with the accuracy percentages there is something of an improvement but it does not really look dramatic or so convincing that you could use these systems in any critical context.

We’re looking at increases of 10-20% and an accuracy that’s still well under 90% (which I’m also not convinced would be usable).

We introduced a novel two-component fine-tuning approach to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving scientific problems of varying complexity.

One of the key issues with the paper I have is how much work the term “scientific problems” is doing. If this is published, people are going to think that the LLM is solving actual novel issues where in this case it’s just filling in relatively basic question/answer pairs that are well understood. Calling them problems is problematic.

The most interesting part of the paper is the appendix where you can see the actual questions and answers in the various datasets and the prompts they used (with example responses). The answers mostly are multiple choice which already influences how many of them you should expect to be correct.

Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table

I didn’t get that much from this paper, probably because it’s pretty high level and I don’t have a strong background in recommendation systems.

The approach is their Cuckoo Hashmap for embedding from which they can update parameters on the fly using existing data engineering pipeline technology.

Instead of reading mini-batch examples from the storage, a training worker consumes realtime data on-the-fly and updates the training PS. The training PS periodically syn- chronizes its parameters to the serving PS, which will take effect on the user side immediately. This enables our model to interactively adapt itself according to a user’s feedback in realtime.

Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models

A bunch of stuff that maybe was somewhat surprising a year ago but by now should be common knowledge for anybody even half following the developments in this field.

Some interesting bits in there but for the rest it’s a bit rah-rah because the author works at Anthropic.

In particular, models can misinterpret ambiguous prompts or incentives in unreason- able ways, including in situations that appear unambiguous to humans, leading them to behave unexpectedly.

Our techniques for controlling systems are weak and are likely to break down further when applied to highly capable models. Given all this, it is reasonable to expect a substantial increase and a substantial qualitative change in the range of misuse risks and model misbehaviors that emerge from the development and deployment of LLMs.

The recent trend toward limiting access to LLMs and treating the details of LLM training as proprietary information is also an obstacle to scientific study.

Witches Kitchen

From the Grothendieck biography, funny to see that the legend would express himself in German.

Riemann-Roch’scher Satz: der letzte Schrei: der Diagramm […] ist kommutatif!
Um dieser Aussage über f:X->Y einen approximativen Sinn zu geben, musste ich nahezu zwei Stunden lang die Geduld der Zuhörer missbrauchen. Schwartz auf weiss (in Springer Lecture Notes) nimmt’s wohl an die 400,500 Seiten.
Ein packendes Beispiel dafür, wie unser Wissens und Entdeckungsdrang sich immer mehr in einem lebensentrückten logischen Delirium auslebt, während das Lebens selbst auf Tausendfache Art zum Teufel geht – und mit endgültiger Vernichtung bedroht ist. Höchste Zeit unsern Kurs zu ändern!

—Alexander Grothendieck

Attention Is All You Need

I thought I’d dive back into history and read the original paper that started it all. It’s somewhat technical about encode/decoder layouts and matrix multiplications. None of the components are super exciting for somebody who’s been looking at neural networks for the past decade.

What’s exciting is that such a simplification generates results that are that much better and how they came up with it. Unfortunately, they don’t write how they found this out.

The paper itself is a bit too abstract so I’m going to look for some of those YouTube videos that explain what is actually going on here and why it’s such a big deal. I’ll update this later.

Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models

I came across this paper after the recent o3 high score on the ARC-AGI-PUB test. It’s a quick read and details how to scale LLMs at inference stage by generating new states at every node and so create a tree on which to perform DFS/BFS search algorithms.

A specific instantiation of ToT involves answering four questions: 1. How to decompose the intermediate process into thought steps; 2. How to generate potential thoughts from each state; 3. How to heuristically evaluate states; 4. What search algorithm to use.

For each of these steps they can deploy the LLM to generate the desired results which then scaled over the search space balloons the number of calls that need to be done (costing almost 200x the compute).

This isn’t your normal LLM stochastic parrot anymore. We’ve gone one up the abstraction chain and here we have a computer science algorithm running with LLM calls as its basic atoms.

Old people’s brains have been entirely cooked by the slop feeds that Meta produces. No parent worth their salt would trust these people to protect their kids. The EU should follow suit.

the law may infringe on the rights of young people and reduce their ability to participate in society

Since when is being spoon fed the worst advertising and content created by awful people looking to make a quick buck “participating in society”?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/29/meta-australia-social-media-ban-response

What China has done in industry after industry is to flatten the supply curve by subsidizing hordes of producers. This spurs innovation, increases output and crushes margins. Value is not being destroyed; it’s accruing to consumers as lower prices, higher quality and/or more innovative products and services.

If you are looking for returns in the financial statements of China’s subsidized companies, you are doing it wrong. If China’s subsidized industries are generating massive profits, policymakers should be investigated for corruption. 

A piece well worth reading about China’s economic policies if only for the fact that their flattening of supply curves is the only thing that is really fighting climate change.

China’s subsidies create, not destroy, value

Renaming half a street

An interesting article to read about how the city botched renaming the Manteuffelstraße to Audrey-Lord-Straße. I cycle past this street every day and I don’t think it’s a bad change. Unfortunately, they’ve done it in such a bad way that it’ll poison every person who hears about it against the very concept of government:

  • They failed to notify the people living there until after the change had already passed (incompetent!).
  • They decided to only rename part of the street (insane!).
  • Renaming part of the street forces the street numbers to be re-allocated (insane!).

„Im Nachhinein ist das eine ­gute Frage“, sagt Werner Heck von der ­Bezirksverordnetenversammlung (BVV) Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Werner Heck‘s statements are a good argument here for abolishing the entire concept of the BVV. If they couldn’t even be bothered to check-in on the implementation of one of their more material and prestigious measures, then what are they good for?

Heck sagt, es sei „nicht optimal“ gewesen, dass die involvierten Verwaltungsabteilungen „nicht miteinander gesprochen“ hätten.

This makes it clear that it is not uncommon for the Berlin administration to do things without talking to other departments. This is the way you would work, if you’re mentally entirely dead and checked out.

Das Bezirksamt erklärt, das „komplexe Verfahren“ solle künftig ressortübergreifend organisiert werden.

This sounds ‘good’ to the average German but it will in no way prevent these kind of problems from happening because the issue is not one of process or tactics, but one of culture.

All of these were unforced errors and you can ask yourself maybe they were actually intended to make a mockery of the entire process by a civil service that is politically opposed or too lazy to do any real work.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/wenn-die-umbenennung-von-strassen-in-berlin-schief-geht-ich-kann-mir-nicht-mal-eine-pizza-bestellen-110102184.html

Project Power

I think “Project-Power” from this newsletter by Adam Tooze is going to be a useful concept going forward:

A project in this sense is the historically specific, intentional mobilization of multiple resources around a significant objective on whose success and failure important things depend.

I’m struck mostly by how bad the German government is at this. Every part of the country seems to be fully paralysed.

Highlights for Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

In modern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always preclude zeal. This sense of shame is constantly growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.
Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offence now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge – magistrate or juror – certainly does more than ‘judge’.
But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.
The very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory: the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force.
It was as if the sovereign power did not see, in this emulation of atrocity, a challenge that it itself threw down and which might one day be taken up: accustomed as it was to ‘seeing blood flow’, the people soon learnt that ‘it could be revenged only with blood’ (Lachère).
In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.
The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society. But it now finds itself recombined with elements so strong that it becomes almost more to be feared. The malefactor has been saved from a threat that is by its very nature excessive, but he is exposed to a penalty that seems to be without bounds. It is a return to a terrible ‘super-power’.
the injury that a crime inflicts upon the social body is the disorder that it introduces into it: the scandal that it gives rise to, the example that it gives, the incitement to repeat it if it is not punished, the possibility of becoming widespread that it bears within it.
Nothing so weakens the machinery of the law than the hope of going unpunished;
Let us hear once more what Servan has to say: the ideas of crime and punishment must be strongly linked and ‘follow one another without interruption … When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’ (Servan, 35).
If incorrigibles there be, one must be determined to eliminate them. But, for all the others, punishment can function only if it comes to an end.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate? It would be more useful to make him ‘serve the state in a slavery that would be more or less extended according to the nature of his crime’;
Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony.
it was a change of scale, but it was also a new type of control.
‘The order and inspection that must be maintained require that all workers be assembled under the same roof, so that the partner who is entrusted with the management of the manufactory may prevent and remedy abuses that may arise among the workers and arrest their progress at the outset’ (Dauphin, 199).
By walking up and down the central aisle of the workshop, it was possible to carry out a supervision that was both general and individual: to observe the worker’s presence and application, and the quality of his work; to compare workers with one another, to classify them according to skill and speed; to follow the successive stages of the production process.
This obligatory syntax is what the military theoreticians of the eighteenth century called ‘manoeuvre’. The traditional recipe gives place to explicit and obligatory prescriptions. Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labour. The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the operation.
In becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are beginning to emerge.
How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control?
It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice – specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult time, from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations; drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a particular stage and which involves exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying individuals according to the way in which they progress through these series.
the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to cooperation itself (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 311–12)
Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.
While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.
These mechanisms can only be seen as unimportant if one forgets the role of this instrumentation, minor but flawless, in the progressive objectification and the ever more subtle partitioning of individual behaviour.
the ‘admonitors’ were placed in charge of those ‘who talk or hum when studying their lessons and those who will not write and who waste their time in play’
It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised.
In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.
They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects – in replica, as it were – on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile.
And it is this inversion of visibility in the functioning of the disciplines that was to assure the exercise of power even in its lowest manifestations. We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.
It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.
The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.
When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up
‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.
it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.
The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.
What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus.
It was the most direct way of expressing ‘the intelligence of discipline in stone’ (Lucas, I, 69); of making architecture transparent to the administration of power;12 of making it possible to substitute for force or other violent constraints the gentle efficiency of total surveillance;
all this made it possible to canalize and to recover by a whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure that an ever-more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semi-clandestinity and naturally made expensive; in setting up a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested puritanism: an illicit fiscal agent operating over illegal practices.
The political use of delinquents – as informers and agents provocateurs – was a fact well before the nineteenth century.17 But, after the Revolution, this practice acquired quite different dimensions: the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters, the organization of a sub-police – working directly with the legal police and capable if necessary of becoming a sort of parallel army – a whole extra-legal functioning of power was partly assured by the mass of reserve labour constituted by the delinquents: a clandestine police force and standby army at the disposal of the state.
Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.
But he brought with him, at least potentially, a horizon of illegalities that had, until quite recently, represented a threat: this ruined petty bourgeois, of good education, would, a generation earlier, have been a revolutionary, a Jacobin, a regicide;19 had he been a contemporary of Robespierre, his rejection of the law would have taken a directly political form.
The criminal fait divers, by its everyday redundancy, makes acceptable the system of judicial and police supervisions that partition society; it recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory.
The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place.
In short, one should have a master, be caught up and situated within a hierarchy; one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination
They were in a sense technicians of behaviour: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality.
In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence.
The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline.
resistance is to be found not in the prison as penal sanction, but in the prison with all its determinations, links and extra-judicial results; in the prison as the relay in a general network of disciplines and surveillances; in the prison as it functions in a panoptic régime.
The case of the Italian Mafia transplanted to the United States and used both to extract illicit profits and for political ends is a fine example of the colonization of an illegality of popular origin.

So long Ribbonfarm!

Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).

It’d be impossible to summarise all the themes, intersections and other tidbits that I got out of Ribbonfarm. I can say how it begun: I was lying on the river-shore in Avignon in 2012 and I had a large part of the blog’s back catalog in my Instapaper and there I read the entire thing while listening to the crickets.

Ribbonfarm is Retiring
Moving out of Rue de la Teinturiers. I will miss the racket.

It’s become fashionable in tech circles to say that all legislation is bad. This is a dangerous and wildly ignorant way of thinking. Without legislation, many people would not survive and the very things that we depend on for a good life would not exist.

The Verge gets this right in their endorsement because they’re some of the smartest people in tech reporting.

https://www.theverge.com/24282022/kamala-harris-endorsement-presidential-election-2024

Reckoning with the Greens

After some occasional brushes with party politics and reading up on the minimal political agency that we foreigners get here, I dove in. The rise of right-wing sentiment seemed to be a good reason to become a member of the Greens just like I imagine it did for a number of people. Much good that did do if you see the continued rise of that sentiment and this Green government all but enabling right-wing parties with their politics of austerity.

I rescinded my Green Party membership a couple of months ago because of irreconcilable disagreements with their politics. Also because I don’t think they’re effective even at the things they want to do. That move put me way ahead of the Green youth wings many of whom recently exited the party for similar reasons and with a lot of fanfare.

Politics

A lot of my beef with the Greens (though by no means all of it) is for their hypocrisy when it comes to the Palestine question.

I don’t really have a stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I know more Israelis than Palestinians and get along with them fine. I’m opposed against theocratic movements and governments of all backgrounds. Still, in this conflict it is obviously apparent what is right and what is wrong and it has been obvious for decades.

This topic is too big to treat in whole and I hope there will be hundreds of reckonings of the past year in German politics at some point. I’ll just post my receipts and explain why they made the Green Party morally repugnant to me.

Cem Özdemir

Özdemir quotes Golda Meir at an Israel Solidarity event

I saw Özdemir in this video with many other high ranking German politicians quote Golda Meir saying: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” This is a vile bit of racism that should be unacceptable but to which nobody batted an eye back then.

Özdemir now is the mostly useless minister for agriculture in this Green government and his political views have not improved.

Baerbock

https://twitter.com/Strack_C/status/1735629355668173297

Baerbock sat here next to the person responsible for spreading IDF propaganda in Germany which you can understand consists mostly of lies and excuses for war crimes. Her fans will make lots of excuses for this but the optics of being this chummy with such a vile human being do not become any less terrible.

Baerbock now is the foreign minister in the current German government where her already questionable and empty platform of “feminist foreign policy” has devolved to the point where she is making passionate pleas in favour of war crimes in German parliament.

https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1846186196419924294

Parliament

https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1771455044098871704

The Green parliamentary fraction invited and posed with Daniel Ryan Spaulding, a comedian who’s made a name for himself now with increasingly racist anti-Palestinian bits.

Habeck

Habeck, the only functional politician in the German government, posted this sermon relatively quickly after the attacks. It has been much praised by mainstream Germany but every Palestinian and Arab listening to it will hear: “You are second class citizens. Your grievances are not real. You do not belong here.”

I didn’t think back then it was smart to put out a message alienating a sizeable minority in your country. I think I’ve been proven right.

Party

What the of the Green Party members themselves?

Inside the party itself on this topic I’ve seen mostly silence and a significant number of statements that would not be out of place in the AfD.

The Green youth wings who left the party did so because of (valid) political disagreements with the party establishment but none of them even once mentioned Palestine in the exit statements.

Party Membership

I don’t think party membership is a thing for most people. There are power dynamics at play which are the same in the Greens as they are everywhere else. In every party there are two classes of members:

  • Career politicians who have decades of experience and relationships in the party. They run everything.
  • Ordinary members who are there to volunteer at the local levels and support the party materially with their time or money.

These two classes have almost no interaction with each other. The mechanisms of inner party democracy (and pretty much any functional organisation) are setup in such a way that ordinary members can’t bother the people doing the “actual work”.

So what is the point of being a member if you don’t have time or money to give?

I would answer that for me there is no point in party membership. I don’t get anything out of it. I may keep voting for the Greens (for lack of better alternatives) and support them in one way or another, but I don’t need to be a member to do either of those things.

Maybe being a party member will be worth it for others who have more to give or who stand to get more out of it. That is a calculation that everybody needs to make for themselves.

As somebody working in platform for the past years, I’ve become very familiar with the different dimensions of this debate around productivity and John here unpacks the topic in a way that’s really useful. I used the nails analogy just yesterday.

Even more than a nuanced understanding of why developer productivity is so challenging to improve, the last bit of the piece is even more on the money because it’s what drives decision making in most companies (tech companies are no exception):

“Can you imagine how hard it would be to walk into a meeting with investors, whoever, and say, ‘um, you thought you had a 30mpg car, and it is a 15mpg car?”

https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-304-losing-a-day-a-week-to-inefficiencies

Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.

There are very few people here who have the desire and skills to be able to look beyond the borders, beyond the Tellerrand, and who feel that what the German state and establishment press and media serve you is simply not good enough. I’d be hard pressed to suggest anything at the same level as what Michael Seemann here and any German interested in the intersection of technology and politics would be well served to read this newsletter.

Krasse Links No 27.

Waarom ik geen ID-Check kan gebruiken

Met een nieuwe identiteitskaart of paspoort die je in het buitenland krijgt (als je niet meer in Nederland woont), kun je niet meer ID-Check van DigiD gebruiken.

Ik vroeg me af waarom dat was en kreeg dit antwoord:

Identiteitsbewijzen die in het buitenland worden uitgegeven, worden door de Rijksdienst voor Identiteitsgegevens (RvIG – uitgever van de Nederlandse identiteitskaart en paspoort) niet in de Basisregistratie Personen (BRP) geregistreerd. DigiD gebruikt de BRP tijdens de ID-check om te controleren of het identiteitsbewijs (ID) een geldig ID is dat bij die gebruiker hoort. Dat kan dus niet wanneer het ID-bewijs in het buitenland is uitgegeven. Om deze grote groep mensen in het buitenland toch te helpen, controleert de DigiD app tijdens de ID-check het burgerservicenummer (BSN) in de chip van identiteitsbewijzen die in het buitenland zijn uitgegeven. En vergelijkt dan of dat overeenkomt met het BSN dat hoort bij het DigiD-account van de gebruiker.

De RvIG heeft om veiligheidsredenen besloten om per augustus 2021 het BSN uit de chip te verwijderen. Daarom is het niet meer mogelijk voor de DigiD app om het BSN uit te lezen van de chip en kan de gebruiker dit ID-bewijs dus niet meer gebruiken voor de ID-check. Het scannen van de QR-code op het ID-bewijs mag ook niet, want dat kan eenvoudig vervalst worden. De ontwikkelaar van de DigiD app is Logius.

https://www.rvig.nl/wijzigingen-nederlandse-identiteitskaart

https://www.rvig.nl/wijzigingen-model-paspoort-2021

Mijn BSN zit dus niet meer in de chip op het document wegens “veiligheidsredenen”.

Ondertussen heb ik een Europese digitale pas gekregen in Duitsland en kijk of ik die kan gebruiken voor online dienstverlening, maar zoals ze al zeggen: “Inlogmiddelen van andere Europese landen kunnen steeds vaker worden gebruikt om online zaken te regelen met Nederlandse overheidsorganisaties.”

Steeds vaker betekent in dit geval: bijna nooit. We zullen zien.

Logitech already has a forever mouse. No need for an MBA CEO to reinvent the wheel.

The G500s I bought in 2013 is still going strong, the only thing that’s missing is updated and functioning software to go with it. Logitech’s own driver offering was always absurdly bloated and after a couple of years dropped support for this particular model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subscription/

That popular open source package managers will at some point all get owned is so inevitable that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Cocoapods in this case is a bit of an outlier because the entire setup here has been so broken to begin with. iOS development never really allowed for dependency management so Cocoapods did it in an very hacky way and it was written in Ruby, a relatively niche end-of-life language that would have no chance to be blessed by Apple and shouldn’t be used for anything serious to begin with. (Don’t even get me started on Carthage.)

Swift Package Manager has been released years ago but lots of projects of course never manage to switch. I believe the best thing a project can do in such a situation is to terminate itself for the greater good.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/cocoapods_vulns_supply_chain_potential/

I remember when I got banned from the forum of one of Germany’s larger liberal podcasts for saying that Bitcoin is mostly something by and for criminals. I think that statement was pretty much entirely correct.

The story of the Texas Bitcoin mine is sad but we’re living through something similar now where the construction site has installed yet another permanent noise device (a pump) next to our home. The noise level is not too high, but even if it were, it’s not like anything would be done in Berlin about it.

https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.

The experts agree that kids need to be cared for better. The experts also agree that people like Haidt are grifters who do not contribute anything into that direction.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

I would be the last to ever watch anything by Lex Fridman, but TikTok has been feeding me clips from his interview with Bassem Youssef and I can’t help but be impressed. Fridman does a decent job interviewing but of course the conversation is carried by Youssef, who is nothing short of a treasure.

The Netherlands is facing similar problems where depressed salaries, lack of housing and rampant overt racism are making it difficult to attract digital talent from all over the world.

You know, countries could have promoted STEM education as a pursuit decades ago but given the state of things, nothing is getting done in technology without people from outside of Europe. Let’s see whether we make the smart choice this time round, or whether we’ll see countries ‘cutting their nose to spite their face’ as the saying goes.

https://www.golem.de/news/tech-standort-ostdeutschland-als-waere-das-image-nicht-schon-schlecht-genug-2403-182921.html

Take Germany for instance — when Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was defense minister, she tried to reform the Bundeswehr Procurement Office with little success. Currently, over 11,000 employees work for the agency — an enormous increase since the Cold War, when considerably more material was being procured by considerably fewer employees. In 2010, the procurement office was already heavily criticized for its inefficiency and large size, with its 8,500 employees — and the situation still seems dire.

That is a wild number of people who are not getting anything done and who then become a pension burden on the public budget.

https://www.politico.eu/article/european-armament-commissioner-defense-war-security/

Even as the world has caught up with him, Finkelstein remains most comfortable on the margins — ideologically aligned with a left that won’t always have him, platformed by a right that won’t always listen, and insulting them both.

Yet Finkelstein is ambivalent about being pressed back into the cause and sympathetic to younger generations’ relative lack of interest in “old fogies.”“I recognize,”he said, “that it is your moment, it’s not my moment.”

A pretty fair profile of a man who’s a polarizing character.

https://www.thedriftmag.com/normcore/

Schools wasting money is not as big of a deal as it is made out to be here. Not every investment can be a good one and you have to deal with that and just keep investing. My business partner used to say that innovation in the education field is like driving a van full of money to a school building and setting it on fire. Soit.

The main issue here is that a purchase like this (hardware firewalls!) fits in the rampant fear based culture around digital technology here where schools have their own IT (which they can’t deploy or manage) and everything needs to be absolutely secure. The net result of that way of thinking is of course that nothing is even slightly secure.

https://www.golem.de/news/elektroschrott-hunderte-deutscher-schulen-sitzen-auf-ungenutzten-firewalls-2402-182195.html

I had previously posted about a deep dive of the connections of the anthroposophical movement with fascism.

Anthroposophy and Ecofascism

What’s also quite poignant are the fascist foundations of the ecological movement in Germany. It’s not just fascist but in the weird post-war political space here every type of idiocy is pretty much represented.

Petra Kelly is essential to understand why the Greens are so so opposed to nuclear energy. She got together with an officer of the German army who was used by the Stasi (as part of the Generals for Peace) to argue for disarmament. He eventually shot her and himself to death.

https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/petra-kelly-and-transnational-roots-green-politics

It’s a good example of how anything peace movement related here was a ploy by the Russians not to get their ass kicked (and still is).

And here’s a historical treatment of all the ecofascist tendencies that tried to be part of the ecological movement in post-nazi Germany. Some of them got disillusioned and rebuked by the party’s tendency towards eco-socialism, but others managed to latch on.

Left Green Perspectives #27

The absurd cast of characters in both of these stories are a clear testament for how pretty much everybody in German society after the war was damaged goods.

https://twitter.com/ProgrammerDude/status/1758148576134177246

Berlin has a not very well-known facility that allows you to request a Meldebescheinigung online, pay for it online and receive it by mail. I attended Arian to it and it saved his bacon.

Many people here will deny that government digitalisation here is possible or desirable both of which are statements that are untrue and deranged. It is possible to create better services for people. Germans just choose to live in abject squalor for no reason.

Listened to the latest episode of the German eGovernment podcast with the Minister for Digital for Bavaria. That is the state here that’s seemingly the farthest along when it comes to digitalisation and it now has the following ambitious plans:

  • to have internet reception everywhere
  • to remove fax traffic inside the state government by 2026

And then I switched it off because I don’t think anything good could come after that.

https://egovernment-podcast.com/egov165-100-tage-digitalminister/

Learned in this podcast episode about class justice in Germany something rather remarkable.

Germany has a system of income dependent fines called Tagessätze. These are meant to make punishments more equitable by making people who make more money pay more.

It turns out (and I’m sure very few people are aware of this) that courts do not get access to tax records to determine the fine base. They take a guess at the income and most of the time, they guess too low.

The most vocal people in progressive/critical technology don’t have kids (for various reasons) and as such also have zero empathy for the real problems people deal with.

Not everybody has infinite time to deal with broken government institutions or solder all their stuff together from scratch or waste countless hours debugging some free software device.

Or maybe even worse: Lots of men in tech have kids and a stay at home wife who frees them up to engage in every kind of side-project and hobby.

De Correspondent over de Wooncrisis

Grappig om te zien dat De Correspondent een serie maakt over de wooncrisis in Nederland:

https://decorrespondent.nl/14143/waarom-ik-geen-huis-wil-kopen/b196ee1f-4ff7-00f6-1463-37df41d85bb5

https://decorrespondent.nl/14572/het-kan-de-bouw-van-betaalbare-woningen-overlaten-aan-beleggers/fd05f4ad-ee26-07be-3b42-1576e194f55d

https://decorrespondent.nl/14844/wonen-is-een-publieke-taak-nu-nog-beleid-waar-je-dat-in-terugziet/073e6ebb-bbe3-0615-1ab0-e485bb65a016

https://decorrespondent.nl/14996/niet-minder-asielzoekers-maar-meer-betaalbare-huizen-is-de-oplossing-voor-de-woningnood/11729058-1943-0564-307b-9b18240a1482

Het is ook typisch De Correspondent om een series historische analyses en stukjes over alternative woon-/bouw-projecten neer te zetten. Allemaal dingen waar je je als lezer over goed kunt voelen zonder dat je iets aan het probleem moet doen.

Ze hadden wel een keer een artikel over de LVT maar de samenhang komt niet echt naar voren.

Laten we wel zijn:

  • De belangrijkste reden waarom bouwen in Nederland zo duur is is de schaarste van land.
  • Land is schaars in Nederland omdat de meeste woningen die verkocht worden in meer of mindere mate verkwistend met land omgaan.
  • Beleid wat dat oplost zou erop neer komen dat mensen die land verspillen daar flink voor moeten betalen of moeten verdichten.
  • Een significante groep mensen in Nederland hebben baat bij de huidige situatie en zitten op land en woningen waar ze aan verdienen (ten koste van alle andere mensen).
  • De Correspondent-lezers en hun ouders horen overweldigend bij de groep mensen die baat heeft bij het huidige beleid.

Dat zorgt ervoor dat wat je bij De Correspondent leest lijkt op journalistiek en diepgravende analyse maar eigenlijk gewoon entertainment is.

It’s much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond “Let’s see what the CCC has to say!” The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.

A broader social discussion would reveal that security and privacy are not the only two dimensions on which digital solutions can or should be measured.

https://www.golem.de/news/37c3-der-hackerkongress-fast-unter-ausschluss-der-oeffentlichkeit-2401-180837.html

The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.

The thinly veiled racism and colonialism is just the rotten cherry on top.

https://podtail.com/de/podcast/spassbremse/52-whitewashing-and-statebuilding-german-israeli-r/

Geertz’s theory of involution holds that a greater input (an increase in labor) does not yield proportional output (more crops and innovation). Instead, a society involutes. The Chinese term for involution, neijuan, which is made up of the characters for “inside”and “rolling,”suggests a process that curls inward, ensnaring its participants within what the anthropologist Xiang Biao has described as an “endless cycle of self-flagellation.”Involution is “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless,”Biao told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/chinas-involuted-generation

A small online drama in three parts

Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.

This particular video was going around on German twitter and all the usual suspects were letting themselves get baited by it including above mentioned Friedemann. I wrote about their podcast previously and I couldn’t resist so I confronted him on it.

So I got blocked.

I mean “obsessive”, sure. Being a major league hypocrite is one of the best ways to bait me.

I did listen to this podcast very regularly but after October 7th it’s become so absurdly pro-Israel that it invalidates their entire previous position. The only situation where I’ve seen people parrot a line so hardcore like that was Dutch men with Russian wives after Putin had just invaded the Crimean Peninsula (“You have to understand Putin has a point.”).

Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)

Elements from the book such as the corporation known as “Monad”(!) and robotic public service utilities called “Dr. Easy”are looking back from our current hellscape period a bit too on the nose.

See Dr. Easy act in this short film: https://vimeo.com/68368877

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Live from Berlin – Lindner

Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’
Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that.
We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

Last week I was making a presentation and I came across Deming and his principles. I have often gotten the question: “If you don’t measure X, then how will you know we’re doing well or improving?” which I always felt was misguided.

It turns out that Deming was way ahead of me there, he says: “Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.”

Leadership is always the key.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles

John Ganz on nationalism and reducing humans to insects.

A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.

Above all, I refuse to become an insect or look on others as insects.

SOMETIME IN THE 2000S, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?”a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.”But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,”Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.

Bad Memory

This is a core fear of migrants in Germany and Europe and it’s not at all unjustified.

I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.

Over at twitter this dance was happening but with weirdo right wingers. They were always mad because no one likes them because they are hateful, stupid, and have absolutely no rizz. Because they only know other weirdo right wingers IRL, however, they were convinced that there was some sort of nefarious plot to dunk on them online and they wanted to know when Twitter would acknowledge them, the biggest victims known to man. At the head of this was, of course, your man there Elon who is mad that he isn’t funny. He became convinced that there was an army of bots or something making fun of him and he demanded to know why twitter was letting people be mean to him. “You say that you want weirdo right wingers to be on this site and yet! You allow people to be very mildly mean to them!!!!! Even when they are the richest man on the planet! So much for free speech, etc.”Anyway, he accidentally got forced to buy twitter for too much money because he is quite stupid, and now here we are.

On successor states and websites

In 2020 on the World Bank’s Human Capital Index — which measures countries’ education and health outcomes on a scale of 0 to 1 — India achieved a score of 0.49, below Nepal and Kenya, both poorer countries. China scored 0.65, putting it on par with Chile and Slovakia, which have higher GDP per capita. Most dramatically disadvantaged are India’s women. Since 1990, Indian women’s labour market participation has fallen from 32 per cent to about 25 per cent. And behind them come hundreds of millions of underskilled youngsters. In 2019 less than half of India’s 10-year-olds could read a simple story, compared with more than 80 per cent of Chinese children and 96 per cent of Americans. In the coming decade, 200mn of these poorly educated young people will reach working age. A large share of them will probably end up eking out a living in the informal sector and getting by on handouts. Unemployment amongst the under-25s already runs at more than 45 per cent.

Looking to the future, what sceptics of Modi’s boosterism ask is whether India might become the forerunner of a rather gloomy new model for populous, lower-income countries, managed, without a powerfully effective governmental apparatus, or globally competitive manufacturing sectors, by digitally enhanced populism, delivering cash payments to the cell phones of hundreds of millions of dependent people.

Chartbook brutal on India.

Fragment Ones and Tooze: The United States vs. Europe

Tooze picks apart Europe’s failure (mostly political in nature) to keep up with the United States on a bunch of areas.

He also mentions that Germany is debt unconstrained and could borrow much more than it is doing right now to fix its broken infrastructure but won’t do it because of stupid politics.

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Tooze Unplugged

Tooze talking for five minutes about the difference between European and American academic traditions. Excuse the low quality but my WordPress has a 2MB file limit.

That is what we were training people to do to write essays which had powerful attack, big full body and a conclusive finish and ideally you’d have a student who could make a whole bouquet of different essays across 5-6 exam papers, 3 essays per paper, 15 different essays and what you would want is a student who could really modulate across that range of essay writing types.

And another one:

The formula of British economics, French politics and German philosophy is the tried formula for making Marxists and that’s basically —though that’s not my politics— that’s basically the frame within which I understand comprehensive intellectual engagement with modernity. It requires those three elements:

  • You need to have a sophisticated political grip
  • You need to have a philosophy of history which in the German sense of course comes from Hegel
  • You have to understand capitalism otherwise you’re stuck

Fragment Piratensender Powerplay E131: Lina, Law & Order

Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.

https://piratensenderpowerplay.podigee.io/155-neue-episode