Woof, where to begin? What a enraging, embarrassing, cartoonishly stupid week. Not doing great on my promise not to let the cruelty and stupidity of everything suck up all the oxygen in my life again.

But the weeknotes go on. Can’t say it better than Ingrid did in her phenomenal Perfect Sentences newsletter this week:

Amidst a not-quite bloodless coup, attending to one’s diary can feel frivolous at best, at worst a self-aggrandizing attempt to render inaction as “bearing witness.” One worries about coming across as all talk and no action, especially when seeing people who seemingly have greater access to levers of power like Congressional Democrats post through it instead of, say, doing literally anything.

This is not a #resistance project, it is a personal and curatorial one. Maybe I will look back on the time I spent on this amidst collapse as denial, persisting in little routines when I should have been stationing barricades. But it’s not exactly an either/or thing (people certainly have kept diaries while at the barricades) and despite everything I want to believe it is worthwhile to continue paying close attention to language. It is, after all, a primary concern of the fascists who I expect might rename it the US Department of Portation given their childish fervor to erase all things trans from state speech.

Sometimes a picture really does tell it as well as anything:

If you’ve left X, I sure do not recommend poking your head back in to see how it’s going. Feels like we’re all gonna need to think long and hard about dealing with the implications of Brandolini’s law:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The complete collapse of any fucks remaining to give drove me to another queue purge. Farewell to the 6,000 unread articles in my RSS reader and who knows how many hundreds of unlistened podcast episodes. May you each find your way back to me if you were super interesting.

Ok, this is an impermeable dismal tone barrier. Only trivial fun or interesting bullet points allowed beyond this point. I promise I’ll figure out how to just write about the week again eventually, but I anticipate we’re gonna have to put up with a rough transition here and there for a little while.

Speaking of precision in language: when something used to be on your boat, but isn’t anymore, you’ve got some things to consider if you care about choosing your words carefully. Did it fall off by accident? Did you push it off? Did it sink or is it floating? “Flotsam”, “jetsam”, “lagan”, and “derelict” are all at your disposal^[1]. Follow the rubric carefully.

You know that warning on a candle that you’re not supposed to let it burn all the way to the bottom? Found out why when one exploded on my desk and then all the broken glass pieces continued to be on fire for a while. Slightly takes away from the calming effects.

Nostalgic for those little headphone jack FM transmitters we used to use to listen to iPods in the car, but hate having to choose what to listen to? Why not simultaneously broadcast 100 different Taylor Swift songs across all available frequencies? Certainly not legal, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anybody else lately. If I haven’t done a fascinating, questionably permissible side project like this before the end of the year, please chuck something (soft) at my head.

Read this post by Matt Webb about “stuff that happened”. No summary, no spoilers. Just read it.

Schadenfreude corner: please enjoy this section of AI startup Anthropic’s job application (hat tip to Simon Willison):

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.

Why do you want to work at Anthropic?