Faisal’s Web Site
Saturday, 6 June 2026
Agriculture
Apocalypse No
Scott Galloway: “When a resource becomes dramatically cheaper to use, we don’t use less of it — we find a million new uses for it. If that sounds painless, keep reading.”
Friday, 5 June 2026
A Screwworm Outbreak Is At Hand And It’s DOGE’s Fault It’s This Bad
Joohn Choe: “And at the most abstract level, I think we can identify a common failure mode: some obscure little program that nobody cared about …”
Thursday, 28 May 2026
Pentagon says US military personnel are reportedly being targeted using location data
Raphael Satter, Reuters: “Wyden said in a statement that it was time to ‘start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.’”
Tuesday, 26 May 2026
What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century
Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic: “Within the U.S. today, people are again moving because of disasters, and because of the slow-grind attrition of heat, flooding, and rising insurance rates. Earlier this year, the nonprofit Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that disasters had caused 11 million evacuations or relocations in the previous 12 months.” (published December, 2025)
The Eternal Sloptember
George Hotz: “Without even thinking about it, they assume the creator had a basically human state of mind. This assumption is no longer true. Things can be broken in ways that weren’t previously possible, and old proxies of underlying quality like syntax and grammar are useless.”
Sunday, 24 May 2026
You can no longer Google the word ‘disregard’
Russell Brandom: “As you’ll notice, the Merriam-Webster link is still in there, but you have to scroll past a huge block of empty space. For most users, that single reply is the only thing you’ll see. And crucially, the AI response serves no conceivable value to a user searching the word ‘disregard.’”
Saturday, 23 May 2026
“No way to prevent this” say users of only package manager where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso: “… echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only package manager where 90% of the world’s supply-chain attacks have occurred in the last decade, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to fall victim to supply chain attacks.”
Tuesday, 19 May 2026
The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
Baldur Bjarnason: “Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright.”
All non-drone militaries are obsolete
Noah Smith: “Until recently, people would insist that electronic warfare would blast drones out of the sky. That excuse has mostly disappeared now that drone technology has found ways around EW […]. Now, you see people insisting that soldiers can shoot drones out of the sky with shotguns”