/reader

It doesn’t quite rise to the same level, but nonetheless: about halfway through the book, Jenks tells Rosemary the literal story of how I got my name.

“Do you know why Human modders give themselves weird names?”

She shook her head.

“It’s a really old practice, goes back to pre-Collapse computer networks. We’re talking old tech here. People would choose names for themselves that they only used within a network. Sometimes that name became so much a part of who they were that even their friends out in the real world started using it. For some folks, those names became their whole identity. Their true identity, even.”

Obviously, I’ve written about this here—and did so again just recently—and as I said in an email to Chambers, while it might be on a technicality this might be the wildest, weirdest way I’ve ever been seen by something.

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Also terminated was the entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, according to Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. The program provides about $4 billion to help millions of Americans with their heating and cooling bills.

“It will definitely hamper program operations,” Wolfe said, noting that he doesn’t see how the agency can “allocate the remaining $387 million in funds for this year without federal staff. The program could well grind to a halt.”

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I got my latest re-up under this program. If my “equal pay” amount at Portland General Electric remains at its current level, I have approximately eight months of electricity left.

I’ll admit that I didn’t expect the start of my own dissolution under this government to commence quite so quickly, but there you have it: the corrosion has put me on a clock.

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In it, Last makes a series of arguments and observations about how to behave like a proper dissident movement in opposition to Mine Furor, Couch Fucker, Phony Stark, WhiskeyLeaks, Wormwood, and all the other fascist hangers-on of the Republican Party as they methodically go about dismantling the American state.and the constitutional order.

I’m not going to recap everything Last says because what’s important and what I’ve been stuck on since I read it is that I don’t know how to navigate its unmentioned tension between “everyone in the anti-Trump opposition needs to support one another” and “the movement must be […] oppositional to the status quo”. This tension cannot help but exist because we know there are plenty of anti-Trumpists who, in fact, do just want a return to the status quo.

Which is what brings us back to the beginning and the matter of Senator Booker’s “filibuster”.

On the subject of unmentioned things, Talking Points Memo got a sneak peak of Booker’s plan, but failed provide some pretty important context: Booker voted to confirm four of Mine Furor’s nominees. Even if you somehow believe it’s possible for any nominee to be acceptable when the person who nominated them is a fascist (spoiler: it isn’t), one of those four was Marco fucking Rubio.

Booker easily could be the poster child for corporate, centrist Democrats who just want to get things back to the status quo of their established grift, and at least by the liberal echo chamber (complimentary) of Bluesky opinion is pretty divided on how to view his performance tonight. Were we to use a Lastian analysis, when a corporate centrist Senator rises to speak against the administration for some indeterminate number of hours, should we be focused on the “everyone in the anti-Trump opposition needs to support one another” part or the “movement must be […] oppositional to the status quo” part?

Am I glad Booker is doing what he’s doing? Sure. But we’re two months into the federal government having fallen to fascists and this “filibuster” literally is the barest minimum type of disruption that can happen in the Senate. That it’s a corporate centrist Democrat who voted to confirm Little Marco, however, means that I’m not exactly giving out the bonus points.

In the current environment, this is just Booker actually doing his job. Granted, it’s in a way that most other Senate Democrats are not, and yes, we should credit that to whatever extent seems appropriate.

Early in February, however, Indivisible posted a detailed explainer (since inexplicably removed from their website) on how Senate Democrats could use some arcane procedural levers to dramatically slow down the business of the Senate: by weaponizing the absence of a quorum, and objecting to unanimous consent requests. Not a single Democratic Senator has risen to this challenge. Instead, we were subjected to the inept theater of Senate Chuck Schumer.

Booker’s performance tonight cannot be viewed as anything other than a start, and just as we were willing to accept the support of fucking Cheneys for Kamala Harris’ campaign to defeat Mine Furor in November but refused to give them any sort of a special cookie for doing the literal least they could do in a fight against a fascist takeover, so, too, should we not overly celebrate Booker tonight while nonetheless crediting the small degree of movement it could be made to represent.

Earlier tonight on Bluesky, Mariame Kaba (co-author of Let This Radicalize You) said something that might or might not have been an indirect response to Booker’s move and the reaction to it, but easily can be read in that light.

I think that expectations are below the basement and I truly think this is a problem. You have to have HIGH EXPECTATION of people with power. You really do.

As I noted in a reply, this is all the more true when the other side set very high expectations for dismantling the American state and the constitutional order and are, after all, succeeding.

Go ahead and praise Booker if you must, but this is not the time to let anyone off the hook, especially if they’ve voted in any way to enable the decisions of the fascist government and are seeking nothing more than a return to the normalcy of their status quo centrist grift.

With protests and angry town halls continuing around the country, take Booker’s performance as a signal to step on the gas, not as one to in any way let up on any of them.

Addenda

1. I’d be remiss if I didn’t come back in the morning to note that Booker’s performance is landing better than I thought it might, including with me—although this last in part is due to a moment I’d missed but of course was captured by others on social media.

   So I confess that I have been imperfect, I confess that I have been inadequate to the moment, I confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that have given lane to this demagogue.

   This is really important. The path out from under the fascist takeover has to include a Democratic Party that engages in honest introspection. I’m not sure what Booker had in mind here, specifically, but it opens a crucial door on a national, senatorial stage.

   The only other thing I want to mention is I did catch Schumer coming to the floor to ask Booker a question (the structure this needs to have under the rules), and it was a bunch of gobbledegook about Republicans messing with Senate rules about something, and then a ham-fisted attempt to tie it to billionaires, and it took all the air out of the room.

   Booker himself cautioned against using “Senate speak”, and later circled back to explain in plain language what Schumer earlier had been going on about. Schumer is really, really bad at this.

   At any rate as I write this update (in the afternoon actually, not the morning, but whatever), Booker is closing in on being just one hour away from beating the long-standing record for holding the Senate floor. That record-holder? Strom Thurmond filibustering the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The record? Twenty-four hours, eighteen minutes. Booker took the floor at 7:00 PM eastern time.

2. What’s going to matter going forward, I think, is whether Booker’s colleagues just try to capitalize on his performance by pointing to it in fundraising requests or take it as a challenge to step up, asking themselves and each other, “What’s next?”

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After being essentially exempted from spring training games, the team did name Devers their DH and the results thus far are disappointing, as detailed by Alex Speier.

His performance in an 8-5 loss to the Orioles on Monday — five plate appearances in which he failed to put a ball in play, going 0 for 3 with three strikeouts and two walks — added to a line that suggests something is deeply amiss. Devers is 0 for 19 with 15 strikeouts to start 2025, the most strikeouts in big league history through the first five contests of a season.

Most of the broadcast chatter during games over the past five days as the Red Sox quickly dropped to .200 baseball and the basement of the division has been about Devers’ stance and his timing. None of the chatter, as near as I can tell, has been about what I think likely is the actual issue.

Devers is used to spending nearly the entire game in his body, but now—because he doesn’t take the field—he’s spending nearly the entire game in his head. There doesn’t seem to be any discussion on whether or not the training staff has been coming up with ways to help him make this adjustment, despite the fact that any player would tell you that getting stuck in your head can be death in baseball.

Prior to the switch to designated hitter, Devers’ experience of baseball was physical for at least half of every inning, plus however often in the other half-innings he came up to the plate. Now, his experience of baseball is physical, on average, only every couple of innings.

That’s a massive change.

Tweaks to a player’s stance and questions of their timing are what you focus on as a manager, a trainer, or a front office when you’re stuck in analytics mode. How to transition a player from a game where they’re almost always in their body to one where there’s too much time to be in their head is what you focus on when your mode is to look at a player as a person first.

(Not for nothing but this also is the root of the failure when someone or something made Devers stop self-regulating at the plate: a lack of supporting the tools a person needs to be the best player they can be.)

It’s true, as noted by Jen McCaffrey, that Devers apparently dismisses the idea that his struggles stem from this transition to designated hitter, but this is one of those times when I don’t put much stock in what the player himself is saying. There’s simply no way this switch from a body-maximized game to a body-minimized game isn’t an obstacle.

It’s on the Red Sox training staff to work with Devers as a person, not just as a player, and find the tools he needs to stay in his body as much as possible while sitting on the bench stuck in his head, thinking about how to make things right.

Addenda

1. There’s a glimpse and glimmer of potential understanding here by Devers: “Maybe I’m thinking too much at the plate.” As evident above, I think it’s not just about at the plate.

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I offer a suggestion that there is a sense of self that exists that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole. It is possible to cherish our selves so much that we seek to protect our selves from external forces instead. To wish to maintain that integrity so much that external measurements cease to matter, because what matters more is living a life congruent to our inner-selves.

If you read me often enough, you might see that consideration of the above exists for me in tension with my continuing belief that #FrannyWasRight, and that spending my time writing here is just so much “ego, ego, ego”, and just so much pursuit of outside recognition, of the validation of being seen and heard.

Franny Glass says she’s “sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody” and what she’s after in that very much is Winnie’s “sense of self that exists that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole”. Franny wants to be a “nobody” not in the sense of not having a self but in the sense of having one that is self-generated and self-sustaining and self-protecting.

My ongoing inner conflict between my senses of self is inextricable from the fact that my financial existence is inherently self-limiting—in that being entirely financially self-insufficient, my life has a clock on it and no amount of flailing to be seen or heard can change that. Everyone’s does, of course, it’s just that there’s always this background hum to my days reminding me that when my only financial support is gone, I’ll have about four to five months left until everything falls apart completely and in its entire.

It’s not so much, then, that I require in and of itself “an external gaze to feel more whole” so much as knowing that the political and social structures in which I live make me a burden and the sheer weight of that makes me seek counterbalance—and it’s difficult to find that counterbalance entirely within oneself. Or, at least, it is for me.

When I can disappear from social media for five days and have no one notice, what does that say about me? (What does it say about me that such a parasocial invisibility, which is all any of that even is, had that much effect on me?) How do I sustain whatever intrinsic sense of self I might have when the large “external forces” control so much of my fate, and the smaller ones—who don’t even actually owe me anything—don’t notice when I am gone?

It’s true, even if not entirely in evidence here on the blog, that to an extent what’s been happening over the past several weeks is that after losing all hope I’ve come into a sense of surrender (or is it resignation?) that my life doesn’t matter and is destined for slow and then fairly quick dissolution (although the actual death anxiety itself very much remains), but I cannot quite find the same sense of calm when it comes to the fact that I still believe Franny Glass.

Why can’t I just find “the courage to be an absolute nobody” and go about whatever remains of my life, in the face of the “external forces” that ultimately don’t want me to be here, and in the face of parasocial acquaintances who don’t actually have the responsibility to provide me validation?

Look, ultimately what all of this hullabaloo boils down to is that the Mega Millions or Powerball win can’t come soon enough. Let’s take away the existential angst (if not the death anxiety), and then maybe we can talk about how I can find “a sense of self […] that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole”.

Addenda

1. The above is a mess and a muddle. What I mean to say is this: I do not know how to maintain my inner-self when my mere existence is entirely dependent upon first a transient and then, eventually, an entirely absent external concern and care. Given this, I cannot find “the courage to be an absolute nobody” and my sense of self seeks “an external gaze to feel more whole”. The above ends with a frivolous prayer to the lottery gods because it’s literally my only hope of ridding myself of the need for external support just to survive, and needing external support just to survive renders me, it seems, mostly incapable of focusing on any intrinsic self, and that self’s inherent worth and value, even if I know it is there.

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Anthropic also looked at how Claude solved simple math problems. The team found that the model seems to have developed its own internal strategies that are unlike those it will have seen in its training data. Ask Claude to add 36 and 59 and the model will go through a series of odd steps, including first adding a selection of approximate values (add 40ish and 60ish, add 57ish and 36ish). Towards the end of its process, it comes up with the value 92ish. Meanwhile, another sequence of steps focuses on the last digits, 6 and 9, and determines that the answer must end in a 5. Putting that together with 92ish gives the correct answer of 95.

And yet if you then ask Claude how it worked that out, it will say something like: “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the 10s (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” In other words, it gives you a common approach found everywhere online rather than what it actually did. Yep! LLMs are weird. (And not to be trusted.)

This is clear evidence that large language models will give reasons for what they do that do not necessarily reflect what they actually did. But this is true for people too, says Batson: “You ask somebody, ‘Why did you do that?’ And they’re like, ‘Um, I guess it’s because I was— .’ You know, maybe not. Maybe they were just hungry and that’s why they did it.”

This is exasperating editorializing, not to mention, in that last, sheer anthropomorphizing. There’s a much simpler answer to why it responds this way, although I’m open to argument that I’m wrong.

For an LLM, being fancy autocomplete, the statistically most likely answer to how it did a math problem simply is to regurgitate the way someone typically solves that math problem as evidenced by its source corpus. When you ask an LLM how it did something, you aren’t somehow querying its inner life, so there’s no reason for its answer to be how it actually did something. Its answer will be (what it views as) the statistically most likely way to say you have done that thing.

LLMs do not have a model of truthfulness about themselves or their interior “life” because they do not have an actual model of truthfulness about anything. Anywhere an LLM seems to suppress falsehood in favor of accuracy it will be because they’ve been post-trained to do this.

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