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[alyaza]

Alyaza Birze (October 22)

it's been a few days since my last formal blogpost, which is just a function of having a lot to do and trying to find the time to prioritize it. i don't particularly enjoy structuring my days, so i don't do that. this means that some days i don't feel particularly interested in writing a blog post necessarily (or that there's nothing to blog about). i'm sure you can relate.

but i do have plenty to write about (yes, including Cohost Union News!) that's currently in the works. actually this past week and change has been a very productive one, including two major social obligations. i got notification as of yesterday that my vote has been counted. it would be really nice if the Greens ever did literally anything in this state, but they don't so you can bank a +1 for every Democratic candidate on the ballot. who knows, maybe Proposition 131 (which i'm currently assuming will pass) will get them to be a useful party if/when it's implemented. i wouldn't count on it—but nevertheless.

i'm also in the process of writing an essay on the critical support socialist should have for measures like 131; this is in the drafting stages but should appear sooner rather than later.

what i'm reading (46/40)

i have completed Race After Technology and it was very good. i consider this essentual reading on the intersection of race and technology and i've picked up a few other of Ruha Benjamin's books. no promises, but the next few blog posts should have some stuff from her to chew on that i found interesting.

currently, i'm working on Our Biggest Experiment by Alice Bell in preparation for the eventual "history of climate change" essay and how the point at which we opted down our current path is far closer than you probably think. it's pretty interesting and has a lot of tangents about the general state of early science and the people who did it. take for instance Francis Galton, a polymath mostly known for his statistical and genetic work (in service of eugenics). he gave us... a lot of interesting stuff, to be sure:

[...]the family gun business left Francis Galton a very rich man, so he was free to study science rather as he pleased. The more playful ends of this still get trotted out by scientific press officers: a formula for the best cup of tea or how to use maths to cut a cake. On the other side, he coined the term ‘eugenics’ and once plotted a ‘beauty map’ of Britain, standing on street corners with a special glove he’d made so he could count and rate women without being noticed. He was, to put it mildly, a bit of a creep.

Galton, incidentally, was also a meteorologist in between the rest of this stuff. he was also one party to a dispute that ran through the 1860s and 1870s over whether or not to make use of storm warnings. these had been pioneered by Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle—he also established what is now the Met Office and coined the word "forecast"—but he was eventually forced out of his position because scientists of the time felt this was a little too close to astrology. Galton, who did not particularly like FitzRoy for dumb Victorian-era reasons, derogatorily called his forecasts ‘prognostications of weather’ and denounced FitzRoy's work after essentially taking over his position. but the British began doing them again in the 1870s under Galton—evidently, prognostications of weather actually turned out to be pretty useful.

blog roundup

cohost

• pumpkin dumplings with brown butter and parmesan (mae bubsy): do you guys want some food? here's some food.

non-cohost

• Twelve Million Deportations (Timothy Snyder): i don't want to alarm you, but i can pretty much assure that you are not taking the possibility of mass deportations (or what that would mean) seriously. Snyder lays out what this would entail out pretty explicitly:
  

  Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation then becomes a culture. If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented. This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader. You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself. This painful choice can be avoided not at a later point but only now, by voting against mass deportations.

• (Ed Zitron): i'm not sure that Google has ever been in a worse state, and there is little sign it can pull out of the slow, steady death spiral it's made for itself. it seems hard to believe, but for the first time in forever Google seems completely fallible:
  

  Google is exactly the monster that Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan wanted it to be — a lumbering private equity vehicle that uses its crooked money machine to demolish smaller players, except there are no more hyper-growth markets left for it to throw billions at, leaving it with Generative AI, a technology that lacks mass-market utility and burns cash with every prompt. We are watching the fall of Rome, and it’s been my pleasure to tell you about how much of it you can credit to Prabhakar Raghavan, the Man Who Killed Google Search.

• Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights (Cory Doctorow): it's infuriating, but you almost have to laugh at this line from PRH that they'd totally bid against themselves internally to prop up the market rate for book deals:
  

  In any auction, the more serious bidders there are, the higher the final price will be. When there were thirty potential bidders for our work, we got a better deal on average than we do now, when there are at most five bidders. [...] Though this is self-evident, Penguin Random House insists that it's not true. Back when PRH was trying to buy Simon & Schuster (thereby reducing the Big Five publishers to the Big Four), they insisted that they would continue to bid against themselves, with editors at Simon & Schuster (a division of PRH) bidding against editors at Penguin (a division of PRH) and Random House (a division of PRH).

  
  totally unrelatedly, did you know that almost nobody writes books people read and that book sales are absurdly consolidated?