The Dive, 8/1/26
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
"I am reminded of four definitions: "A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air. "A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. "A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. "A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest—at the command—of his head." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Radio Address to the New York Herald Tribune Forum," October 26, 1939
What I’m Reading:
1. Why Trump’s bullying of Canada perfectly illustrate his dismal worldview
Why you should read it: Former Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland explains in the New York Times how Trump’s avarice for and animus toward Canada epitomizes the bullying nature of his foreign policy and gangster-style worldview.
“Yet here we are, with the actual president of the United States, well into his second term, blaming Canada for pretty much everything. The ‘South Park’ movie culminates in a war between Canada and the United States. For now, in the real world, the battlefield is economic, with President Trump threatening to impose tariffs on some $20 billion of Canadian exports, ranging from hockey sticks to cement. The official pretext is unfair Canadian treatment of U.S. booze, dairy and cars… What makes this new attack on Canada truly absurd is that it runs counter to the United States’ own economic interests. American workers can, with some justification, complain about China’s self-aggrandizing trade policies, and it’s true that the downward pressure on wages in competing countries could lower labor and environmental standards… Rehearsing the economic irrationality of the president’s trade war on Canada is fun, and a self-soothing behavior for America’s long-suffering northern friends, but the reality is that the economics of Mr. Trump’s tariff attacks on Canada are not really the point… Mr. Trump’s tariff offensive has a clear purpose: to demonstrate who is dominant and who must submit.”
“As a U.S. counterpart told me during the U.S.M.C.A. negotiations in 2018, we are 10 times bigger than you, so we should get our way 10 times more than you do. The laughably flimsy, constantly changing justifications for the president’s tariffs are in fact part of the point. True power is being able to do whatever you like for whatever reason you like, or for no reason at all… [T]his isn’t about wine sales or how Canada manages its forests or reviving U.S. manufacturing. It’s about whether Canada is prepared to accept a profound change in its relationship with the United States. It’s about whether Canada is willing to go from being an ally and a partner, in a relationship governed by treaties and rules, to being a vassal, subject to Washington fiat — like the Venezuela of Delcy Rodríguez, only with snowdrifts and hockey… Mr. Trump has made his view plain. His Washington doesn’t have allies. It has only satraps, enemies and equals — the latter a singular group that includes just China and on some days, perhaps, Russia.”
Why it matters: “…it would be a grave mistake for Americans to treat their place in the world as an afterthought. Because the irony is that Washington is abusing its allies at precisely the moment when it needs them the most. As the war with Iran is demonstrating, even the United States is weaker when it goes it alone. The United States will need friends even more if it hopes to hold its own against China… Would-be future American leaders who recognize the value of allies and think all will be forgiven when the White House has a new occupant need to appreciate the depth of the damage being done by its current resident. They can limit the harm and create the option for the United States to make a different choice in the future by speaking out now.”
2. Why NATO expansion is good, actually
Why you should read it: In Foreign Policy, journalist Luke McGee makes the case for continued expansion of NATO.
“The president’s opposition to enlargement is unfortunate—not simply because it leaves countries like Ukraine outside the alliance, but also because it misunderstands what NATO enlargement has become. It no longer merely extends the alliance’s security guarantees; it increasingly strengthens NATO itself… The alliance’s newest members are among its most serious contributors, bringing advanced defense industries, innovative military thinking, and cultures of ‘total defense’ that strengthen NATO from within… The countries now seeking membership, or that have only recently joined, are often those investing most heavily in military capability precisely because they live closest to the threat posed by Russia.”
“In other words, enlargement is no longer simply about extending NATO’s security guarantee. It is increasingly about importing military capability, industrial capacity, and strategic culture into the alliance itself… By bringing countries such as Sweden and Finland into the alliance, NATO acquires more than additional territory or larger armed forces. It also imports a culture of total defense that has become increasingly rare in parts of Western Europe… This cultural shift may prove to be the most enduring benefit of NATO enlargement. It was, after all, French President Emmanuel Macron who warned in 2019 that the alliance was experiencing ‘brain death.’ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed that debate. Countries that maintained robust defense cultures, largely in anticipation of Russian aggression, throughout the post-Cold War period are now shaping NATO’s future rather than merely joining it.”
Why it matters: “If the objective is a Europe capable of carrying a greater share of its own defense burden, then enlargement should be seen as part of the solution rather than the problem. NATO’s newest members are not asking to be rescued by stronger allies; they are helping redefine what a stronger European alliance looks like… Enlargement is no longer simply about extending Article 5 to new territory. It has become one of the alliance’s most effective ways of renewing its military culture, industrial capacity, and strategic thinking. The debate over enlargement is still often framed as though NATO were taking on new liabilities. Increasingly, it is acquiring new strengths.”
3. Why the DSA is a political parasite
Why you should read it: The Atlantic writer Jamie Kirchick details how the far-left DSA aims to execute a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.
“Even after a string of recent victories in congressional primaries by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, national Democrats appear slow to recognize that ideologues on the left are attempting a hostile takeover of the party. The DSA’s ascent comes on the heels of a yearslong effort by socialists and progressive activists to steer one of America’s two major political parties toward identity politics, isolationism, and hostility to capitalism… The DSA’s agenda is alien to mainstream Democrats—or at least it should be. The organization’s draft platform calls for ‘fully abolishing the police and prison system,’ drafting a ‘new constitution,’ extending voting rights to noncitizens, and creating a ‘democratic socialist republic.’ The group holds the U.S. and NATO responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine, defends the Communist dictatorship in Cuba, and pledges to shut down the Department of Defense and all overseas American military bases.”
“To gain leverage within the Democratic Party, the DSA is employing a tactic that Trotsky dubbed ‘entryism—the willful effort by a small, disciplined cadre of radicals to infiltrate a more moderate organization and subvert it from within. It’s the same tactic that, throughout history, far-left organizations such as the [UK’s] Militant Tendency have routinely used to amass power. Unless the Democrats respond forcefully to the DSA’s entryism, they risk being overrun by extremists who will poison the party’s national brand and sap its capacity to compete with an already radicalized GOP… One of the less remarked upon adverse effects of the Trump presidency is the way in which it has radicalized the left, giving license to bad actors and bad ideas. Fearful of appearing weak in the eyes of their base, most elected Democrats have adopted a ‘no enemies on the left’ approach to dealing with the DSA and other radical forces. If such pusillanimity continues, Democrats risk losing their party to a band of true believers no less destructive than the furthest extremes of the MAGA movement… Democrats can look across the aisle to see what a vigorous contest for the soul of a major political party looks like.”
Why it matters: ““Thus far, the American left is not having any significant debate on the disturbing rise of the DSA. To save their party, and American liberalism, Democrats will need to reach back into their own history, to the early years of the Cold War, when liberal titans such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sought to purge the Democratic Party of Communist influence. They will need to understand that the DSA is not, as some Democrats once affectionately described Communists, a collection of well-intentioned if naive ‘liberals in a hurry,’ but an illiberal vanguard. Establishment figures such as Jeffries and the party’s 2028 presidential candidates will need to grasp that the relationship between the DSA and the Democratic Party is not one of occasionally bickering siblings, but of parasite and host… “Open letters aren’t enough. If the Democrats want to root out the party within their party, they will need to stop indulging the DSA’s constant, passive-aggressive attempts to undermine them. This would require prohibiting DSA members from joining their party and throwing out the DSA members already honeycombed within it. Four decades ago, Labour’s Neil Kinnock expelled the extremist faction burrowing within his beloved party. If Democrats want to rescue their party, they may need to do the same.”
4. How Trump distorts and abuses American history
Why you should read it: Historian Sean Wilentz recounts the Trump administration’s increasingly deranged war on American history for Liberties.
“Right-wing outcries about left-wing historical distortions, predictably exaggerated and partial to conspiratorial thinking, are by no means uniformly meretricious, which thwarts any blanket condemnation of Trump’s [executive] order. The reluctance of liberals and progressives to call out those distortions on their own terms, a distortion of their own, is an abiding intellectual deformation that gives political hostages to the right. In making a federal case out of wokeness, however, the Trump White House, while exploiting a convenient target to arouse its political base and its band of academic acolytes, chiefly intends to expand presidential power further by commandeering and subjugating previously autonomous or semi-autonomous public institutions that have anything to do with history, including the National Archives. Not only will the administration control, as far as possible, how history is conveyed; it will also control the information upon which future generations — or, in the shorter run, potential grand juries — will judge Donald Trump and his associates. The ‘unitary executive’ theory evidently extends to authorizing the president and his underlings to determine as far as possible not just which versions of our past should be honored and which repudiated, but also the materials from which future historians will treat the present… Although no student of history, President Trump has very strong views of his place in it, which offer clues about his regime’s actual historical significance. That self-image is fully displayed on the wall of the West Colonnade of the White House, now dubbed (with a Hollywood touch) the Presidential Walk of Fame, in a series of newly installed bronze plaques that describe each American president… The plaques do not explicitly call Trump The Greatest President of All Time, although they could easily be mistaken for doing do. Collectively, though, they leave little doubt that he is right up there with Washington and Lincoln. More to the point, they present American history, or at least the history of the American presidency, as two and a half centuries of prologue that culminate in the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, the hero who not only made America great again but ushered in a golden age, making America greater than it ever was before.”
“Other projected Trump historical markers have less troubled American precedents. To greet George Washington on his journey from Mount Vernon to New York for his first inauguration in 1789, individual towns and cities built temporary arches, republicanized variants of décor for a royal procession. Into the nineteenth century, Americans designed permanent memorial arches, nowhere more often than in New York City. These monuments include my own favorite, the Soldiers and Sailors Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, honoring the Union victory over the slaveholders in 1865… Trump and his supporters have a bigger and, of course, much glitzier idea, driven by his unfathomable version of the status anxiety common among arriviste robber barons. Reportedly, Trump began musing about building a triumphal arch when he visited Paris in 2017 at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron and attended the Bastille Day parade at the Arc de Triomphe. Informal proposals for a Trump-themed arch in Washington began to surface later in his first term, more as a gesture of undying support or perhaps a provocation in anticipation of the 2020 election than a serious suggestion. More substantive plans appeared in the aftermath of Trump’s second inauguration… The design is unmistakably Trumpian, with gold rococo accents near the roof of the arch along with golden statues of two eagles in flight flanking the enormous statue up top. Gilded details evoke New York City not so much in imitation as to outdo Trump’s hometown, where the elite never quite accepted him: the resplendent gold statue is a replica of the green oxidized copper Statue of Liberty, this time sporting wings, while a pair of lions atop stone pedestals guards the arch on the DC side just as their originals guard at the New York Public Library — only these lions are gold, not pink marble… But the grandiosity as well as the flashy details make its provenance as unmistakable as that of any Trump real-estate project. In any case, Trump is clear about whose monument it really is. Asked by a reporter back in October who the monument is for, the ever-unguarded Trump replied, ‘Me. It’s going to be beautiful.’”
Why it matters: “Trump’s authoritarian second term — and even, for that matter, his more chaotic first term — has had a vertiginous effect that leads many to look for some historical precedent for this wild turn of events, to regain balance if not necessarily to find reassurance. Historians get asked the question all the time: has there been anything before in American history even remotely like the Trump regime? The answer, on the narrowest of grounds, is no: even down in the depths of James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, no American president or White House administration has shown such disregard, even open contempt, for the Constitution and the rule of law as we now witness nearly every day… Trump, of course, could not care less about the history of what paved his way to power. Our history-obsessed and legacy-addled president is phenomenally ignorant of our actual past. The ideologues around him will continue to push hard to impose an eviscerated version of our history that consigns the long and consequential career of American liberalism to history’s dustbin. For Trump, though, American history is just a lot of gold leaf, just more fodder for his self-glorification. And in that respect, certainly, he bears an indisputable resemblance to every caesar, generalissimo, caudillo, duce, führer, jefe, vozhd, Dear Leader, and Great Helmsman who ever walked the earth.”
5. Why Israel needs to crack down on settler violence in the West Bank
Why you should read it: Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens warns Israel to rein in violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers in the West Bank—for its own good if nothing else.
“Because Israel is routinely the victim of double standards — Will Zohran Mamdani ever make a personal cause of denouncing his native Uganda for criminalizing homosexuality? Or tell a human-rights malefactor like Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he, too, isn’t welcome in New York? — it’s tempting for the Jewish state’s stalwart defenders, including me, to downplay its failings… But anyone who cares about Israel’s well-being shouldn’t be silent about anti-Palestinian settler terrorism in the West Bank and the nothing-much-to-see-here policy of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things. It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
“Netanyahu’s answer to all this, as he told CNN’s Dana Bash, is that the violence is the work of about 150 ‘juvenile delinquents’ and that he doesn’t accept ‘vigilantism.’ But it’s preposterous to think that a government that can assassinate a Hamas leader in a Tehran guesthouse finds itself unable to contain a wave of Jewish thuggery… That’s largely because his Likud Party depends on the parliamentary support of extremist settlers led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Netanyahu has learned to stay atop Israeli politics by never letting go of his right flank.”
Why it matters: “There is an immediate danger in that the spiraling West Bank violence could easily produce a third intifada that an exhausted Israel can ill afford militarily or diplomatically, to say nothing of the human cost in both Israeli and Palestinian lives… I’ve written before that the purpose of Zionism — for which I’m a lifelong advocate — is Jewish self-rule: ‘Neither rule by others nor rule over others.’ It’s why I still believe in a Palestinian state, even if the conditions for it are probably far off. It’s why I more fervently believe in a Jewish state, governed by law and recognizing limits. Under this Israeli government, that’s slipping away.”
6. How Ukraine’s air war has changed
Why you should read it: RUSI airpower analyst Justin Bronk gives an update on Ukraine’s air war as it continues into its fourth summer.
“In summer 2026, the nature of the air war is radically different. Western fighters now form the core of the Ukrainian Air Force in the shape of the 107th Wing, equipped with F-16, and a smaller force of Mirage 2000-5s. The F-16s are by some margin the most flexible and effective fighters available, across all mission types. Ukraine also still operates some MiG-29s and a few Su-27s for air defence missions, firing AGM-88 HARM missiles to suppress Russian [ground-based air defense] systems and conducting glide bomb attacks. Air defence sorties make up the most common mission type, which is understandable given that throughout most of 2025 and 2026, Russia has launched several massed long-range strike waves per week. These strikes generally begin with waves of many hundreds of one-way attack (OWA) drones such as the propellor powered Geran-2 and jet-powered Geran-3, as well as decoy drones such as the Gerbera to probe and saturate Ukrainian air defences. The drones are followed closely by tens of cruise missiles such as the Kh-101 launched from Russian bombers and 9M728 from the ground-based Iskander-K; and around half-to-one-third that number of ballistic missiles… The development of these deep and widely deployed [short-range air] defences has been critical in helping Ukraine offset serious shortages of surface-to-air missile (SAM) and air-to-air missile ammunition, which are desperately needed for intercepting the Russian cruise and ballistic missiles that the SHORAD systems cannot reliably shoot down.”
“Ukraine’s F-16 and Mirage 2000-5 fighters have had significant successes in shooting down Russian cruise missile salvos since early 2025, and the F-16s alone have destroyed well over 2,500 Geran and Gerbera OWA drones. However, the use of fighters against such drones has consumed an unsustainable number of airframe flying hours and air-to-air missiles such as AIM-9M/L Sidewinder and Magic 2 since mid-2024 when the Ukrainian Air Force received its first Western aircraft and trained crews. With unmatched combat experience against OWA drones, Ukrainian Air Force F-16 pilots now use the 20-mm cannon and US-supplied AGR-20 rockets (also known as APKWS II) to save missiles for more valuable targets like cruise missiles wherever possible. However, Ukraine’s belts of SHORAD systems near the border/frontline areas, and helicopters and volunteer-flown fixed-wing gunships with machine guns are much more efficient ways to intercept the Geran-2 and Gerberas than fighters… Alongside their primary air defence duties, Ukrainian F-16s, Mirage-2000s and MiG-29s routinely launch precision stand-off attacks against battlefield targets with glide bombs like the American GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, GBU-62 JDAMs with glide kits, and French AASM Hammer. These theoretically allow the Ukrainian Air Force to strike a wide range of battlefield, logistics and industrial targets out to around 60 km behind Russian lines. Unfortunately, land-centric targeting and mission allocation processes have so far limited the effectiveness of Ukrainian fighters against time-sensitive targets in this role. However, there is a great deal of potential for improved results if the F-16 Wing is allowed to plan and execute missions in a more flexible way by the wider Ukrainian Air Force and Armed Forces of Ukraine command structure.”
Why it matters: “Ukraine’s own long-range and mid-range strike UAVs such as the FP-2 are causing increasingly serious and politically embarrassing damage inside Russia. Ukrainian attacks – much like Russia’s own salvos of Geran-2 and Gerbera drones – consist of hundreds of OWA drones per wave and are launched several times per week… The result has been an increasing degree of strain on the Russian air defence system, as finite GBAD systems are redeployed ever deeper inside Russia to try to protect potential targets coming within range of Ukrainian drone strikes, and ammunition stocks are strained by constant attacks… With fewer Russian GBAD assets near the front and fewer fighter patrols, far more Ukrainian loitering munitions are getting through to harass resupply routes and battlefield logistics in the ‘deep’, especially in and around Crimea.”
7. Why Elbridge Colby amounts to a national security sophist
Why you should read it: Political scientist Joseph Stieb takes down Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby in The Bulwark.
“It’s one of the worst jobs in Washington: Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, is tasked with explaining Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy to the public. But you could just as easily say he volunteered to launder Trump’s bellicose, bizarre acts by finding an intellectual coherence that isn’t there… He fits comfortably within many of the America First precepts and performs a valuable function for the administration: crafting intellectual scaffolding for Trump’s instinct-driven approach to the world. Colby represents the America First foreign policy impulse gone legit. But however you gussy it up, that impulse remains unilateralist, nationalistic, militaristic, and utterly shortsighted.”
“Colby’s main move is dress up hostility to allies in the guise of common sense. ‘Is it cruel to ask the Germans or the Japanese or the French to spend as much as the Americans spend?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think that’s cruel, I think that’s fair.’ (Denmark, for its part, spent a slightly higher percentage of its GDP on defense than the United States did last year.) He claims merely to be trying to ‘price the partnership and relationship with the United States’ in a more transactional way on the assumption that allies have been free-riding on U.S. power for decades… Military spending aside, Colby’s thinking on alliances is myopic and counterproductive. The worst of all worlds, he combines a bean-counter’s stinginess (likening U.S. alliances to ‘an accounting firm’ in his interview with Douthat), populist resentment about getting ‘ripped off,’ and a nationalistic hostility to cooperation… Trump, Colby, and Vice President JD Vance are all obsessed with the idea that America’s allies are ‘ripping us off.’ If anything, the opposite is often true. While the United States has taken the lead in crises like the Gulf War and Bosnia, it has also pulled NATO allies into ill-considered wars. This includes over a thousand soldiers from allied countries who died in Afghanistan. These dead included forty-three soldiers from Denmark, a country that Trump has repeatedly threatened and denigrated since retaking office.”
Why it matters: “It’s tempting to look at Colby with his pedigree and education and treat him as someone who ‘knows better.’ But this is a comforting illusion. Colby has glommed onto Trump because he is pathologically resentful of U.S. allies, indifferent to the fate of democracy, and eager to dismantle the pillars of U.S. global influence that were painstakingly erected by bipartisan leaders over eight decades. He and Trump deserve each other.”
8. How Zohran Mamdani’s “antizionism” makes Jewish New Yorkers unsafe
Why you should read it: Seth Mandel writes in The Dispatch about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s seeming inability to condemn antisemitism as he seeks to use his office as a megaphone to propagandize against Israel.
“Mamdani’s rhetoric about Israel has long been extreme, and its implications for Jews in America have grown more alarming. One of his more infamous statements came in 2023 during a gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America, a far-left organization that was floundering before refocusing its energy on anti-Zionist agitation immediately after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and that would then play a key role in Mamdani’s campaign for mayor… ‘I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local,’ Mamdani said of anti-Israel activism. ‘We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF…’ The idea that anti-Zionism should be integrated into every political grievance creates a clear domestic enemy: American Jews. Since Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their homeland, and most Jews (as would be expected) believe this, most Jews are thus portrayed as a threat to the rights and freedoms of the public.”
“In the past, progressive politicians insisted, implausibly, they were only talking about Israelis, not all Jews. Mamdani’s innovation in this regard has been to jettison such gaslighting… AIPAC may typify the term ‘the Israel lobby’ in many minds, but it is an organization of Americans. Mamdani here is demonizing American Jews who participate in the political process through their constitutionally protected speech. The comments were so over-the-top that even Jewish progressives recoiled from the mayor… Mamdani has erased distinctions between Israelis and American Jews. In the process, he is eroding some of the traditional divisions within organized American Jewry. He is not criticizing Israeli government policies; he is flagrantly Jew-baiting, and he is doing so with a passion and an enthusiasm that unsettles even left-of-center Jews who wear their own distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu on their sleeve.”
Why it matters: “America has been a ‘golden land’ for the Jews, and no place has made them more at home than New York City, where nearly a million Jews live. Jews are woven into the fabric of the city’s culture; Gotham’s history cannot accurately be told without them… That story contains plenty of antisemitism, as does the wider story of American history. It has its own blood libels and pogroms, though fewer in number than in most other Diasporic lands. But the Jews have not as yet given up on New York… New York has never had a mayor so committed to making Jews feel unwelcome. New Yorkers will have to be equally committed to thwarting him.”
9. Why generative AI is inefficient engineering
Why you should read it: The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner argues that generative artificial intelligence programs remain incredibly inefficient engineering disasters, consuming an enormous amount of resources for comparatively meager output.
“As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may ‘disappear by 2028’ according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years… With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). The large in large language model should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in ‘scaling laws’ that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger… Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.”
“Today’s approach to AI doesn’t try to describe the rules of human thought; instead, it gives a computer millions of examples to imitate. The huge quantity of examples is one reason that large models can perform better than small ones when generating language, images, and music—they have more material to draw from… Yet we seem stuck with LLMs, perhaps because they have been so aggressively marketed. They are now being added to everything, whether you want them or not. In 2024 and 2025, they were integrated into both Windows and MacOS, which means that more computing power is now needed to run a basic personal computer. Smartphones are also being sold with upgraded hardware as companies anticipate new AI features… This is all especially bad because computers are no longer improving at the rate they used to. Since the 1950s, manufacturers have learned to make microchips steadily faster, smaller, and cheaper, a trend known colloquially as Moore’s Law. But in the past few years, components have gotten so small that manufacturers have run into molecular-level limitations on shrinking them any further, which has slowed progress significantly.”
Why it matters: “Instead of shrinking components, manufacturers have been focused on developing new hardware that is tailored to AI… Ultimately, inefficiency may be of little concern to the people within the tech industry who believe that they are replicating intelligence itself. There is an almost-religious conviction among many in Silicon Valley that something mindlike could arise from LLMs, which are ultimately just statistical language-generating software—this, despite the software’s inability to recall basic facts, its lack of common sense, and its complete dissimilarity to a biological brain. Even Yann LeCun, one of AI’s ‘godfathers,’ told The New York Times recently that ‘LLMs are not a path to superintelligence or even human-level intelligence.’ But the mythological lure of AI is so strong that many engineers believe that nothing should stand in their way. Not even the basic task of writing efficient software.”
Odds and Ends
How the National Archaeological Museum of Naples stores and protects artifacts unearthed from Pompeii…
Why some new southern right whale mothers float upside down to get a break form their hungry calves…
How scientists researching marmots aim to raise funds through an “OnlyMarms” campaign…
What archaeologists dug up when recently excavating a fourth century CE Byzantine settlement in Egypt…
How global elites see the sights in Rome…
What I’m Listening To and Watching
Your friendly neighborhood wall-crawler’s latest Marvel Cinematic Universe adventure in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Director Christopher Nolan’s take on the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey—and a The Rest Is History podcast where host Tom Holland the historian interviews Tom Holland the actor about the film.
Catching up on some movies I missed in theaters: the whimsical and surprisingly existential The Sheep Detectives, the horror-comedy sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, and Project Hail Mary.
Anya Taylor-Joy stars as a con woman on the run from both the law and the mob in the streaming series Lucky.
The second season of X-Men ‘97, the revival of the 1990s animated series featuring Marvel’s mutant superheroes.
Image of the Month
