Red Sails: “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth”

Religions have had a close relationship not only with violence but with economic exploitation. Indeed, it is often the economic exploitation that necessitates the violence. Such was the case with the Tibetan theocracy. Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches. Much of the wealth was accumulated through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.

Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.

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The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.

Michael Parenti

I stumbled upon this article during the scandal involving the Dalai Lama a couple of months ago. My – cynical – immediate reaction was to observe that we rarely hear anything about China’s persecution of Tibetans in the news these days, as the narrative refocused on Hong Kong’s forced integration, the repression of the Uyghurs, and now the increasingly tense atmosphere around Taiwan. Americans sure love to point out other countries’ human rights abuses, while doing little to combat them and forgetting about the issue as soon as another ‘crisis’ pops up – almost as if the concern is merely performative, designed not to help the abused, but to reinforce the American public’s self-perception as ‘the good guys’ versus the ostensive enemy-of-the-day, and to subtly undermine the sovereignty of the state in question.

‘The Wheel of Time’ (Prime Video, season 1)

I’ve mentioned a while back how I canceled my Netflix subscription and switched to Amazon Prime (at least for about six months, after which I returned to Netflix, an easier decision now that they have cut prices in my region). Prime had a number of series I wanted to catch up on, including The Expanse. I should review them in the order I’ve watched them, but since I’m terribly behind and The Wheel of Time is set to release its second season this September, I might as well check this one off the list to avoid mixing my impressions of the different seasons.

Since my first encounter I’ve had a mixed attitude towards this book series: I remember noticing the local editions in a bookshop years ago, being intrigued by the cover and synopsis. But I remained hesitant to reading them because of how massive the series is – 14 volumes and over 4 million words! At the time its prospects were uncertain, with several books outstanding and Robert Jordan diagnosed with a terminal illness. Even after Brandon Sanderson stepped in to author the last three books, I never felt it would be worth my time to go through so much content when I already knew the general outline. At some point I tried reading an extensive summary written by a fan, but soon gave up because it felt that the plot was going nowhere and was heavily bogged down with superfluous details. I was more fascinated by the glimpses of the Age of Legends than the main story.

Carbon Brief: “Analysis: How low-sulphur shipping rules are affecting global warming”

Given that there will be a lagged response from the climate to the shift to low-sulphur marine fuel, it is reasonable to expect less than half of the warming resulting from the 2020 regulations to have materialised by 2023, likely only in the hundredths of a degree globally.

This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.

Rather, there are a number of other factors likely contributing to current record-warm ocean temperatures. These include the end of a moderate La Niña event at the start of the year and a developing El Niño, a shift which tends to result in higher global temperatures.

Stratospheric water vapour from the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and an unusual absence of dust from the Sahara Desert over the tropical North Atlantic may also be helping drive the ocean heatwave.

Dr. Zeke Hausfather & Prof. Piers Forster

This year was host to a range of extreme heat events: large scale wildfires in Canada – and recently Hawaii – and abnormally high ocean temperatures in the Northern hemisphere; heat waves in Chile and abnormally low ice formation in the Antarctic, despite Southern hemisphere winter. One theory that made the rounds on Twitter was how recent regulation limiting Sulphur emissions from ocean shipping has led to a reduced could cover, thus driving increased warming.

Microsoft Design: “A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has arrived”

Today we begin the final phase of this major change where Aptos will start appearing as the new default font across Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for hundreds of millions of users. And, over the next few months it will roll out to be the default for all our customers. We can’t wait for Aptos to be readily available since it was crafted to embody the many aspects of the human experience.

The typeface was created by Steve Matteson, one of the world’s leading type designers. His previous work includes the development of the original Windows TrueType core fonts and the creation of Segoe. Steve renamed the typeface he designed from Bierstadt to Aptos after his favorite unincorporated town in Santa Cruz, California, whose widely ranging landscape and climate epitomizes the font’s versatility. The fog, beaches, redwood trees, and mountains of Aptos summed up everything that he loved about California. Getting away from digital and evoking the outdoors was akin to getting back to pencil and paper. Drawing letters by hand would play a pivotal role in Steve’s creative process.

Si Daniels

I was aware of Microsoft’s intent to change the default font in their Office suite since they launched a campaign to gather public feedback on a short list of five fonts – it’s a bit too long ago to recall if I submitted my preferences as well. I do remember though that none of the fonts impressed me in particular, and I would have undoubtedly preferred for Calibri to remain the Office default.

Stack Diary: “Zoom’s Updated Terms of Service permit Training AI on User Content without Opt-Out”

Zoom’s updated policy states that all rights to Service Generated Data are retained solely by Zoom. This extends to Zoom’s rights to modify, distribute, process, share, maintain, and store such data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable law.

What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company’s right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent.

Additionally, under section 10.4 of the updated terms, Zoom has secured a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to redistribute, publish, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content.

Alex Ivanovs

The recent change in the Zoom TOS caused some uproar online, forcing the company to publish various explanations on their blog and ultimately to amend the terms, though the changes remain controversial. Zoom still hasn’t clarified what they consider ‘Service Generated Data’ and the distinction between that and Customer Content. Their consent model for generative AI services sounds entirely incompatible with GDPR: the person starting the call can opt-in to Zoom IQ, but participants can only opt out by leaving the call… I can’t imagine any company would allow Zoom to train AI models on their internal conversations by generating meeting summaries; there’s always a risk for text snippets to ‘leak’, either to Zoom employees or to other companies.

The Wall Street Journal: “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs that Power Silicon Valley.”

There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now, said Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness. It is the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what’s going on, said Goldfield.

Goldfield doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience. He said the number of questions he gets about how to microdose has grown dramatically in recent months.

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When Musk in 2018 smoked marijuana on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he and employees of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, were subjected to drug tests for months after, Musk has said, without offering further details.

The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.

Kirsten Grind & Katherine Bindley

Well, this certainly explains a lot about Musk’s erratic behavior… Also the anecdotes floating around about informal systems in place at Tesla and SpaceX designed to circumvent Musk’s terrible decisions.

The Verge: “How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever”

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

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Reader appealed primarily to information junkies, who wanted a quick way to keep up with all their favorite publications and blogs. (It turned out there were two types of Reader users: the completionists, who go through every unread item they have, and the folks who just scroll around until they find something. Both sides think the other is bonkers.) The team struggled to find ways to bring in more casual users, some of whom were put off by the idea of finding sites to subscribe to and others who simply didn’t care about reading hundreds of articles a day.

David Pierce

Good recap of the (struggling) life and (untimely) death of Google Reader, 10 years after its shutdown. However the narrative that Google Reader was on the verge of becoming ‘something big’ repeats the same fallacy that most tech products fall trap to sooner or later: if the engineers that passionately built the product and its highly engaged first adopters both love it, surely everyone else can’t wait to experience it as well, right?!