Floater
An experiment in depth-of-field.
Quote of the Day
”Never underestimate the confidence of a mediocre man.”
- Rebecca Solnit
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Miles Davis | Autumn Leaves
I know, I know: it’s not Autumn. But I really like this piece.
Long Read of the Day
Blitzscaling for tyrants
Terrific essay by Henry Farrell on “the lightning-fast path to tearing down due process” currently being followed in the US.
Here are some features of DOGE’s approach to changing government:
DOGE looks to scale through data. Humans don’t scale well – hiring and firing take time and come with a lot of politics. Data and algorithms can be scaled up much more easily.
DOGE is highly tolerant of mistakes. You can’t build big and build quickly without making messes along the way.
DOGE looks to overwhelm the opposition before the opposition can even figure out what is happening. Scale up fast enough, and you will be able to set the rules of the game before the other players even realize that there is a game to win.
DOGE relies on a small elite team to completely reshape a much larger organization.
DOGE is hostile to regulation. Rules are made to be broken.
Guess where those ideas came from. Read on…
My commonplace booklet
The French company Mistral has released its own chatbot. It’s called Le Chat, which is nicely ambiguous.
I really enjoyed how the company demonstrated its image-generation capacity.
Corporate nomenclature
Sheila Hayman (Who God Preserve) pointed me to (where else?) Wikipedia.
A popular poster for The Three Stooges features the Stooges as bumbling members of such a firm, with the actual episode using the name “Dewey, Burnham, and Howe”. The 2012 Three Stooges film uses this example, among similar ones such as proctologists “Proba, Keister, and Wince”, divorce lawyers “Ditcher, Quick, and Hyde”, and attorneys at law “Kickham, Harter, and Indagroyne”. In the film Heavenly Daze, Moe and Larry deal with a crooked attorney named “I. Fleecem” (I fleece ’em). Catherine O’Hara used the phrase in the premiere 1986 edition of HBO’s telethon “Comic Relief”, and Soupy Sales claimed that it was the name of his law firm in 1972. “Sue, Grabbitt and Runne” recurred in the British satirical magazine Private Eye. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, of NPR’s Car Talk radio program, named their business corporation “Dewey, Cheetham & Howe”. In 2001, a banker in Texas, who had experience coming up with gag names for staff training, reported a cashier’s check to the FBI when he noticed it was payable to “Howe” or “Howie Dewey Cheatham”, leading to the client’s conviction for money laundering and fraud.
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