I am writing this on Sunday morning, December 8, 2024, while drinking my first cup of coffee. I decided I would stop writing in my private journal and make my journal public for the Meidas Mighty to see and to record for posterity.

We are living in the middle of historic changes where I believe dictators and wannabe dictators will be toppled one by one. They overplayed their hand.

In Georgia, the pro-Putin “Dream Party” is falling. In Romania, Putin’s puppets have been exposed and elections invalidated. Damascus has fallen, and Syria’s Assad has been toppled. Putin looks weaker than ever. Trump looked like a bumbling fool at the Notre Dame Cathedral in France as Macron showed what leadership looks like, bringing an energized Zelensky into a photo op with Trump. It feels like everything is happening everywhere all at once.

The most important difference between Bluesky and X (or Threads, for that matter) is the limited use of algorithmic sorting. X uses a lot of machine learning to determine what content you ought to see — either because they think you’ll engage with it, or because advertisers are paying to promote it, or because it’s part of Elon’s shitty political agenda. Bluesky has a “Discover” feed, that shows you recent popular posts, but your main feed is just a reverse-chronological list of posts from people-you-follow. You can also subscribe to specialized feeds that other users set up, or set one up yourself.

So much for Big Account Syndrome. Bluesky at ~20 million has more actual engagement than X at ~200 million.

The ship of Theseus has been rebuilt. The company that Elon bought wasn’t so irreplaceable after all. Seventeen years of network effects should, in theory, have been an insurmountable advantage. But network effects and habitual user behavior have proven no match for the strongest repulsive forces in the known universe:

Winter comes to American newsrooms
Steve Schmidt, The Warning

When the fear of losing things exceeds the fear of losing liberty because losing liberty can protect things, the abyss is at hand.

Thomas Paine talked about the price of freedom in a dark moment. He asked a question that deserves pondering in the age of Musk, Bezos, Mika and Joe, and a thousand more like them:

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

The ‘Woke-Mind Virus’ is Fictional, But the Fear of it is Very Real
Dr Dan Goyal
Just as the resurgence in the term ‘woke’ has shown us the pervasive desire for a better and more inclusive civilisation, the attachment to ‘anti-woke’ has revealed that some people have a genuine fear about what a ‘woke’ society may look like and how they will cope with such a change in thinking and behaving. The all-encompassing nature that the ‘woke-mind virus’ has taken on is not real, but the fear about change and progress remains very real indeed. And given we live in a shared civilisation and are part of a maturing democracy, we must engage this fear and try and alleviate it if we are to continue humankind’s march forward.

Tulsi Gabbard Holds the Knife
Timothy Snyder, Thinking about…

As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role — she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical — Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a “Russian agent” and as “girlfriend,” with good reason.

Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.)

5 questions for Christopher DiCarlo
Derek Robertson, Politico

What’s one underrated big idea?

I’ve spent my life studying and teaching and researching critical thinking, and I think the implementation of critical thinking into our educational systems needs to be ramped up.

When we abandon values of responsible human reasoning, we do so at our own peril. Once logic and facts, and the foundational aspects of critical thinking lose favor or proper influence over human communication, any working system of government is destined to implode. We need to introduce a critical thinking skill set at all levels of education that would be packed with tools that allow people to diagram and construct arguments intelligently, to recognize and account for their biases and the biases of others, to appreciate context, to establish appropriate and relevant evidence, and to be able to spot fallacies or errors in reasoning.

The more widespread literacy and critical thinking are, the less the effect will be from the malicious spreading of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories which warp humanity’s views away from rationality and more towards emotionally charged groupthink.

Is Alibaba’s Qwen the Open-Source AI Winner?
Michael Spencer and Grace Shao

The Latest Qwen Model Surpasses some Proprietary Closed-Source Models
On November 11th, 2024 Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team released Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. The performance of this model surprised a lot of people but not those of us who were already bullish on Qwen. The flagship model, Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, reaches top-tier performance, highly competitive (or even surpassing) proprietary models like GPT-4o, in a series of benchmark evaluation, including HumanEval, MBPP, LiveCodeBench, BigCodeBench, McEval, Aider, etc. It reaches 92.7 in HumanEval, 90.2 in MBPP, 31.4 in LiveCodeBench, 73.7 in Aider, 85.1 in Spider, and 68.9 in CodeArena.

Impact Assessments are the Wrong Way to Regulate Frontier AI
Dean W. Ball, Hyperdimensional

But this analysis also points the way toward the easiest way to improve these bills. Specifically, the low-hanging fruit for improvement is:

1. Completely exempt all generative AI foundation models (like ChatGPT) from the law. Some versions of this law already have gestures at this exemption, but none I have seen achieve the full exemption that is appropriate.
2. Change the definition of “algorithmic discrimination” to be focused on discriminatory intent rather than disparate impact. This will narrow the focus of the law.

Will the tasteless reaction of some to the murder of Brian Thompson nevertheless lead to positive change in the health insurance industry?
Yes
No

Should President Biden issue preemptive pardons to Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff?
67.79% – Yes
32.21% – No
*Percentage of 33,361 votes

Time CEO Jessica Sibley says B2B shift is working for 101-year-old brand

In 2023, Time dropped its digital paywall and doubled down on growing its events business, which is primarily monetized through brand integrations. “Events revenue is now 28% of the total, up from 14% two years ago, and events revenue margins are up 50%.” Since its new CEO started two years ago, it’s gone from seven annual events to 30. [Press Gazette]

President-elect Trump has assembled an administration of unprecedented, mind-boggling wealth — smashing his own first-term record by billions of dollars, Axios’ Zachary Basu writes.

• That’s even without counting the ballooning fortunes of his prized outside adviser and the world’s richest man: Elon Musk.

Why it matters: It’s not hyperbole to call this a government of billionaires. Whether it acts as a government for billionaires — as Democrats argue is inevitable — could test and potentially tarnish Trump’s populist legacy.

The big picture: Besides Trump, Musk and his fellow Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Vivek Ramaswamy, at least 11 billionaires will serve key roles in the administration.

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian insurgents swept into the central city of Hama on Thursday and government forces withdrew, dealing another major blow to Syrian President Bashar Assad days after insurgents captured much of Aleppo, the country’s largest city.

The stunning weeklong offensive appeared likely to continue, with insurgents setting their sights on Homs, the country’s third-largest city. Homs, which is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Hama, is the gate to the capital, Damascus, Assad’s seat of power and the coastal region that is a base of support for him.

The offensive is being led by the jihadi group HTS and an umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army. Their sudden capture of Aleppo, an ancient business hub in the north, was a stunning prize for Assad’s opponents and reignited the Syrian civil war that had been largely a stalemate for the past few years.

The group behind these dramatic developments, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has held a consequential but checkered role in the country’s long-running civil war.

With its roots in the early days of Syria’s 2011 uprising, the Organization for the Liberation of Greater Syria swept down this week from its strongholds in the northwest countryside to take control of a vast swath of a country that had long been under the grip of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

But in recent years HTS has publicly disavowed international terrorism and tries to present a more moderate face, according to Charles Lister, the director of the Syria Program at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington D.C.

The city’s strategic importance
Hama is a major intersection in Syria that links the country’s center with the north as well as the east and west.

It is about 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the capital, Damascus, Assad’s seat of power. Hama province also borders the coastal province of Latakia, a main base of popular support for Assad.

The region is predominantly Sunni Muslim but also has a minority from the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, to which Assad’s family belongs.