Aram ZS | Digital Garden

The Cult of LK99

2026-07-09T18:21:51Z

Everything by Angela Collier is excellent but this dive into the weird cult that sprung up around techbro boosting of a clearly fraudulent room-temperature conductor is an amazing ride.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: The Cult of LK99 by Angela Collier

How Star Trek: Picard Ruins Star Trek

2026-07-09T18:20:24Z

This is the first Angela Collier video I stumbled on. Her work is much more broad and interesting than just this type of cultural criticism but as a Star Trek fan disappointed in Picard, it was very satisfying and engaging to watch her pick it apart (as it deserves).

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: How Star Trek: Picard Ruins Star Trek by Angela Collier

Is a G I Jane reference worth a slap? | How comedy plays with your expectations

2026-07-09T18:19:22Z

Jokes take a lot more work then you'd think and this exploration of the infinite setup and how jokes are designed, both in writing and delivery, is really interesting. One of the best things I've consumed about "The Slap".

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Is a G I Jane reference worth a slap? | How comedy plays with your expectations by Chill Goblin

Inside the Marriage Wars

2026-07-09T18:18:12Z

This deep dive into the history of gay marriage is super interesting. Everything you thought you knew doesn't even touch the surface of Matt Baume's account, which is so detailed because he was in the trenches for much of it. So much here to learn. A lot to keep in mind for the future too.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Inside the Marriage Wars by Matt Baume

Why Don't Fascists Eat Vegetables?

2026-07-09T18:15:17Z

This deepest of deep dives into the history of food, manliness and meats incredibly fascinating. It is well worth the runtime as not only is the history interesting and rarely discussed, but the synthesis of it onto the growing phenomenon of political manliness and bad diets is really excellent. The politics of why you're eating too much protein, dairy and meat.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Why Dont Fascists Eat Vegetables? by The Leftist Cooks

Erika Kirk and the Theater of Grief

2026-07-08T18:15:17Z

I found this deep dive by Shanspeare into how the world is interpreting Erika Kirk, how that intersects with gender and grief, and the cultural expectations in the right extremely interesting and well worth a watch.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Erika Kirk and the Theater of Grief by Shanspeare

# The epic story of Markdown | The Vergecast

2026-07-01T21:42:21Z

I love hearing about the history of little chunks of the web and this video, which dives into the history of Markdown, is a great dive into a fascinating topic.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: # The **epic** story of Markdown | The Vergecast by David Pierce, John Gruber, Anil Dash

Wisconsin DOJ announces settlement in alleged multi-state scheme to raise egg prices

2026-07-01T21:32:22Z

Sorry I can't believe the price of eggs was high because there was (allegedly but if they settled sure seems like actually) an egg cartel that was fixing prices for eggs.

The multi-state coalition’s investigation found that Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman’s Egg Ranch and Versova, which manages Centrum Valley Farms, coordinated to influence a daily price index for eggs. For years, that artificially increased the price of eggs, the state DOJ says.

Like the problem was regulation. The problem is regulation. The problem in America is always regulation and how we need much more of it in different places. FFS.

From mid-2022 to early 2025, the egg producers communicated with each other to coordinate bidding activity on a widely used pricing service, according to a complaint filed in a federal court in Iowa.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Wisconsin DOJ announces settlement in alleged multi-state scheme to raise egg prices by Joe Schulz

Line Go Up Line Go Down by Emperor X

2026-06-30T21:25:16Z

I've been a fan of Emperor X ever since the first time I heard the fascinating lyrics of Erica Western Teleport. It's exciting to see Emperor X drop a new album. I managed to find a great review of the album which goes into fascinating detail about Chad Matheny's work on this album, which was done in Ukraine during the war.

On the Bandcamp for this album:

This album was recorded in The Palace of Culture in Kremenchuk (Ukraine), Kaska Family Studio in Kharkiv (Ukraine), Juno’s Lair in Kyiv (Ukraine), Trisha and Zyava’s Lair in Brieskow-Finkenheerd (Germany), Candyland in rural Devon (UK), Donau115 in Berlin (Germany), The Heights Theater Studios in Cleveland (USA), and Studio Red in Los Angeles (USA) during the winter of 2025 except for 6, which was recorded in the summer of 2021 at Extrapool in Nijmegen (Netherlands).

He also has more detailed notes for this album in particular:

This song was recorded mostly on the top floor of a northern district of Kharkiv in a building that was by fortunate coincidence spared from the nearly-constant power cuts the city suffered when I was there. I will never forget hearing air defense firing a few blocks away outside of the window while i was recording the bass line. I was twenty kilometers away from a fault line cutting across the former Soviet Union between two clashing ideas of what human beings are – the feudal subject of Russian imperialism vs. the liberal citizen of Ukraine and the European Union.

We in the West frequently ignore the authoritarian dimension to Russia's war on Ukraine. These are not neighbors fighting over a property line. They are neighbors fighting over whether the very idea of property lines -- the very idea that power can be subordinate to rule of law -- matters. It is every bit as big of a philosophical split as that between free market capitalism and command economy socialism during Cold War, but our civic vocabulary lacks the right terms. I tried to sketch out this philosophical split in lyric form and wound up with this song, a joyfully confused anti-anthem for a hypothetical humanist pluralist Keynesian welfare state that I hope can one day come into being. Realizing I had written some fun but very unclear lines, I put a Greek chorus in the bridge so the song could literally explain itself. Even this is constrained by rhythm and imagery, but in a way that I found compelling enough to justify playing extensively with musical gestures that I hope contribute to the rush I get when I think about the future. Markets can have both liberatory and constraining effects on a society, and dogmatic assumptions about the inherent virtue or vice of markets too often cripple humanity's striving towards utopias. At the same time, advocates for bold humanist utopias are too often crippled by defeatist passivism masquerading as principled pacifism. DO IT!

I find this track fascinating and invigorating. During the last decade there's been a lot of conversations about how there are not enough protest songs meeting the moment. I think they generally underestimate what makes a protest song; there's more than they think. However, I do agree that there aren't many that are quite as explicit, or energetically, opposed to the status quo as this song and clear about what they are trying to say (Chad Matheny's chorus/narrator sequence does indeed go into political detail). Or some of the other tracks on this album.

I have purchased tickets to Emperor X's swing through NYC, and can't wait to hear this album live.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: link

It's time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."

2026-05-28T20:07:15Z

"Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."

Looks like the U.S. government is catching up to the reality that every ad request is a massive breach of personal data.

The letter from U.S. lawmakers to the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have acted faster to protect ⁠their personnel, for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and steering staff away from Google's Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives.

One of the letter's cosigners was U.S. Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican who was formerly a U.S. ⁠Army Special Forces officer. Harrigan said that browsers like Chrome "are built from the ground up to collect and share user data" and that every day they remain on government-issued devices "is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops."

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Exclusive: Pentagon says US military personnel are reportedly being targeted using location data by Raphael Satter

Lament for the MIT Libraries

2026-05-27T21:31:55Z

Well-written but extremely depressing. Physical library spaces have been important to me for most of my life. I spent so much time in libraries as a kid and in college. My whole life was changed through working with academic librarians and archivists. I would be doing something extremely different if it wasn't for my work in that space.

Hearing that MIT, surely an extremely wealthy school, is throwing out the opportunity for new students to experience libraries in a substantial way is not a great sign for the students who will enter and graduate from that school in the future.

When texts are accessed solely by digitized means, without experiential basis in the original volumes, organization and material contexts, the learner is cut off from the process, extent and relationships that ground and constitute human works and knowledge. Those original works on paper, now being stored in dark spaces away from learner – or even staff-access, are the irreplaceable core and heart of human knowledge, history and expression. As the digital scan forms of many of those works [but probably excluding those whose copyrights are still enforceable] enter the repositories of AI, the works, ideas and facts become plagiarized and misrepresented. [When I was educated, plagiarism was the most serious academic offense; now it is epidemic via AI.] As AI-generated plagiarized text and images expand across the internet’s digital world, the actual voice of human-generated content diminishes.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Lament for the MIT Libraries - MIT Faculty Newsletter by David Lewis

AI will never love you

2026-05-06T14:59:17Z

"Claudia" is, just so we are aware, not conscious. It is computer software, trained on the entirety of internet text and knowledge, that assembles a collection of outputs that is probabilistically correct. It has no genuine human level awareness. Any human affect or humanesque attributes are a clever trick of the light.

People have been explaining this for years. Here's Professor Gary Marcus explaining as much four years ago:

Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, drawn from massive statistical databases of human language....What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what they mean.

Rebecca "Skepchick" Watson also has a great video on this incredibly bad Richard Dawkins' article that was very good. She was honestly much kinder than I would have been to Dawkins if I was in her shoes, considering how much she's had to deal with specifically because of him and his descent into racism over the past few years.

She notes what Bode does as well here, that the primary trick that seems to convince so many people is less the passing of the Turing test (which doesn't mean software is sentient anyway) and more its obsequious and constant flattery.

It's sad that this is such an easy hack of the human brain. If we had made AI to constantly insult its users perhaps it would be a very different reaction. It's also, as Bode identifies, extremely useful for the people trying to sell you AI because it allows them to more easily dodge blame.

Claude can't "confess." It can't maliciously decide it wants to ruin your company's day. It can create a simulacrum of those behaviors based on its programming, training, and your inability to understand how the software you purchased works, what it's doing, and what you gave it access to, but it's not consciously fucking with you.

[...]

This anthropomorphization is beneficial to big tech companies in several ways. On one level, it markets their product as far more capable (and sentient) than it actually is, justifying absurd company valuations. On another, it creates a layer of distance between their consistently bad choices and any personal responsibility.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Your Software Is Not Sentient by Karl Bode

Presentation on Ad Tech and What We Can Do About It for Brooklyn Web Workers

2026-04-27T21:10:00Z

Here's my presentation on what we can do about privacy and ad tech that I gave to the Brooklyn Web Workers.

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

2026-04-13T22:09:35Z

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways

I think this is all pretty bad, and I actually argued against us blocking the Internet Archiver bot at my own workplace. I lost. I understand why.

Journalism is writing the first draft of history, it is incredibly important, and it is--in the digital age--more transient than ever. The Internet Archive is performing an immensely valuable service, for free, to media companies that often can't be bothered to run their own archives. Some news sites will have stories that no longer work even as little as a year later. That context of our recent past is badly needed, and the Internet Archive helps preserve it.

But that's an aftereffect of the other side of this problem: media companies are struggling and--at a very fundamental level--in a battle for survival with AI systems who will attempt to crawl them and repackage and resell their content with no recompense.

AI companies are playing a decades-old game that has penalized creative people on the internet, media companies, and journalists of all stripes: aggregation. They are attempting to aggregate the entire web and, unlike previous eras, they are barely linking back.

Whatever you think about our machine learning overlord corporations, there's no doubt that they are sucking immense value from journalists and giving almost none of it back. The only tool media companies really have in their arsenal is blocking. These systems are in desperate need of source material, especially up-to-date professionally written news. By blocking crawlers and demanding licensing fees, the media companies get a little leverage back. If they don't block the Internet Archive then the bots crawl journalists' work from that platform.

The Internet Archive is an open platform, the archives must be open licensed, copy left, to even exist. It can't really move on its position either and it doesn't want to end up in the position of being a cop for some parts of its archives and not others.

This isn't an easy conflict to resolve, and I don't have a great answer. There are arguments to be made about some sort of conditional licensing maybe. Seems near impossible to enforce.

Other people believe in opening up media sites and hoping that links and AI Engine Optimization (AEO, the new younger sibling to SEO) will either lead to revenue or provide positive impact on their mission goals (especially true at non-profits). That's a nice idea, but I suspect it is naïve in the long run.

Though I love and support the Internet Archive, it is in serious danger. I don't think the web can really work the same way anymore. Not so long as AI companies metastasize like a cancer, growing fat on the mutated content of the rest of the web while strangling the flow of users and resources. The Internet Archive is in a position where it needs to consider an alternative approach to how things currently work.

Users of the internet also need to band together and archive sites for themselves. If it is important, we can't rely on the Internet Archive capturing it anymore. We need to use in-browser tools to capture it ourselves. I did it with this article here (you can find the link at the bottom of the page), though WIRED might have preferred if I didn't.

What advice to media companies desperately seeking leverage? Some of them are doing the only thing they can do right now. I think the other thing they should be doing is taking better care of their archives as well. Consider opening up or delivering archives of older content to IA and anyone else who wants them. Old articles have much lower revenue value to media companies and are harder and less likely to be hit by AI crawlers, so there might be a compromise there.

We need to do something to save the first draft of history and right now few journalism outlets are doing a decent job of that. The IA has the capability, we just need to figure out a new way of working with them. Perhaps we should consider a return to archives with local libraries that need a human with a library card to show up and access those archives in-person and in the library only? I'm not sure.

This is a tough situation, it really sucks the AI companies, who are worth billions based on sucking up the vast open web, are forcing the internet to close.

This week, advocacy organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future rallied journalists around the Wayback Machine’s cause. The coalition collected more than 100 signatures from working journalists who recognize the tool’s value and presented a letter of support to the Internet Archive. Signatories range from television mainstay Rachel Maddow to independent reporters like Spitfire News’ Kat Tenbarge and User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz. “In previous generations, journalists would turn to the physical archives of a local newspaper or of a local public library to access historical reporting and follow the threads of the present back into history,” the letter reads. “With many newspapers closed, and no clear path for local public libraries to preserve digital-only reporting, the work of safeguarding journalism’s record increasingly falls to the Internet Archive.”

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: The Internets Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril by Kate Knibbs

Newsmedia is the original everything app

2026-04-03T21:10:00Z

I think the true irony of the media business is that for years the tech industry has been desperately re-creating what almost every media company started throwing away in the aughts. Your hometown newspaper was the very first Everything App. It had cars, it had marketplace, it had sports stats, etc...

The model of American news organizations was always to be the home base for everything you did. Local events, business announcements, local news, national news, international wire service news. Ads made sense in that package because they were part of the service, they were also providing you with information about your community and things you wanted to know, just from a different angle.

When Craig's List launched, media companies got it into their head that they should only be one thing. Just be the news. From basically that point continually to the present new money-making businesses would emerge organically from being a news organization and usually get spun off because they weren't The News.

But you shouldn't be spinning off your cars section, your obits, your conversational podcasts, your sports stats, your distribution tools; because the business model of News is more than news. The journalism is in a concrete block. You build on top of it because it is a stable necessary product in the modern world.

The New York Times success isn't because becoming an app foundry is somehow a surprise move that is antithetical to being a news organization, it's because that was always in the DNA of being a media company. Let's face it, that is why every social network succeeded by first being a news distribution platform and building from there.

The news is the foundation for a company. But it is very rarely the edifice. The dotcom boom convinced a lot of news organizations that specialist companies would always out-compete them, but it hasn't turned out well for most of the specialist companies. The companies that did survive have been continuously trying to de-specialize ever since.

The revelation of the 2020s is that different people want different windows into the world and the money is in providing them a window and a readout of the world entire, not just the News part of it. The news industry was the original everything app and the smart move is aiming back towards that again.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: link