The Post-Partisan Emporium

  You can't handle the truth "We needed a bad cop anyway, and there are always more good cops." For the past two decades, I’ve been watching the world wake up to the obvious. As Orwell said, nothing is so difficult as noticing the nose in front of your face. A few people, me among them, were seeing that the whole story of reality that we lived in was as false and narcissistic—at least!—as the Soviet Union’s narrative of itself. Yet none of us could accept the darkest aspect of that truth. We all had the idea that we could stand up and speak the truth and, if it was true enough, it would flash around the world like lightning. Nothing could prevail against the truth. The Father of Lies could not stand against the Lord of Hosts. That this fantasy itself was part of the lie—that truth has no army, that no angels will ride to our rescue—was too much. Perhaps if I had known it, I never would have said anything. This truth is only available to the most advanced atheists and the ...

  The AI Bubble and the U.S. Economy:  How Long Do “Hallucinations” Last? By  Servaas Storm This paper argues that (i) we have reached “peak GenAI” in terms of current Large Language Models (LLMs); scaling (building more data centers and using more chips) will not take us further to the goal of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI); returns are diminishing rapidly; (ii) the AI-LLM industry and the larger U.S. economy are experiencing a speculative bubble, which is about to burst. The U.S. is undergoing an extraordinary AI-fueled economic boom: The stock market is soaring thanks to exceptionally high valuations of AI-related tech firms, which are fueling economic growth by the hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars they are spending on data centers and other AI infrastructure. The AI investment boom is based on the belief that AI will make workers and firms significantly more productive, which will in turn boost corporate profits to unprecedented levels. But the summer of ...

  Assassination Book Club I was at a book club at a pub in Cardiff, just after the Trump assassination attempt in July 2024. It wasn’t my book club, and I didn’t know I was taking part in it, but I accidentally got involved. Johnny Vedmore I hadn’t even read the book in question. I had taken a seat out the back of a local pub and was typing away as the table next to me began to fill with this group of youthful-looking readers ready to discuss a Salmond Rushdie book they’d been reading. I didn’t realise that was what they had planned, but I was soon drawn into the conversation they were having until I realised it was a book club, and I bowed out, only to return to typing. They sat talking for an hour or so, discussing the ins and outs of what appeared to be a relatively stale read, and each of the book club members gave away a little of their true natures while commenting on the book. As I typed, I overheard the conversation they were having, and after the book club was over, the ta...