by Barry Goldman

Meijer

I was in line to buy dog food at the local big box store. Ahead of me was an old woman, nearly bent double, fumbling around in her purse. I didn’t pay any attention. It was none of my business and I don’t want to be rude. After a while I looked over to see what was taking so long. The old woman was counting out money from a stack $100 bills. My first thought was she shouldn’t be flashing all that cash. Then I saw she was buying gift cards. “Put $500 on this one,” I heard her say.

Slowly it dawned on me I was witnessing a crime. Someone had convinced this poor woman to go to the ATM, withdraw a pile of cash, and buy gift cards with it. Scammers like gift cards. They are virtually untraceable. And there is no need to meet the victim in real life to take delivery. As soon as they read the card number over the phone the money is gone. The old woman said, “Put $300 on this one,” and I spoke up. I said, “Something is very wrong here. Don’t do this.” The cashier agreed with me. It turned out she was trying to talk the woman out of the transaction too. The cashier asked the woman what she was buying the gift cards for. She said they were a gift. She said her neighbors fed her cat when she was in the hospital and she wanted to do something nice for them. I said, “This smells very bad. We need to get a supervisor.” The cashier said she was a supervisor. I said we need to call the cops. She said they weren’t allowed to call the cops, but I could if I wanted to.

I called 911. I described where I was and what was happening. The dispatcher said she’d send a cruiser. In the meantime, the old woman was getting more and more irritated. She wanted to leave. We were trying to get her to stay. She said she knew what she was doing and everything was fine.

When we couldn’t stall her anymore, I followed her out to the parking lot. She yelled at me to stop following her and leave her alone. I still had police dispatch on the phone. I gave them a description of her car and the license plate number. Then she drove away.

I went back in the store to get my dog food. When I got out I saw the cruiser and flagged him down. He asked if I saw which way she went. I didn’t. I said, you have her plate number, right? You can go to her house. The cop said they probably didn’t have her going home. They most likely told her to go someplace else. Read more »

by Richard Farr

It’s a typical moment in 2026, rich with contradiction: up late one evening at the keyboard, your shallow irritation with unnervingly backward current tech is interrupted by deep panic about unnervingly advanced coming tech. 

The official story is that Anthropic’s Mythos, latest brainchild of our fast-moving thing-breakers, is an AI so terrifyingly brilliant at hacking that on the very day it falls into the wrong hands (the “government” of Myanmar; a single teenage nose-picker with a laptop and a smirk in a basement in Chelyabinsk; the “government” of the United States in the person of one of The Don’s criminal besties) your bank account will vaporize, to be followed shortly by most of the world financial system. 

You stare out of the window, distracted further from the quotidian task you were engaged in by the soothing thought that the Mythos “news” was nothing more than a brilliant piece of deathbed melodrama by an over-hyped company that’s going to exsanguinate unless it gets an infusion of billions, stat. 

Then you stare some more, mulling the fact that the “marketing ploy theory” can only be a temporary comfort: next week, or next year, something like Mythos is going to make our current digital security systems, including our personal financial security systems, look even more heart-breakingly antique than — oh yes.

They already do.

What was the name of your first stuffed animal? 

I have no idea.

All right, what is your maternal grandmother’s maiden name?

I don’t remember, but someone else could probably find out.

So what hospital were you born in?

I wasn’t. Read more »

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The Hours Behind You, 2011.

More here and here.

Current show.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Malcolm Murray

In a recent study we conducted on AI risk estimation, something potentially interesting about the nature of LLMs emerged as a side effect. In the risk assessment studies we typically run, a group of experts are asked to provide estimates of various parameters and how they vary with different levels of use of AI. These parameters can then be stitched together to form a risk model that estimates how much risk increases when AI is introduced into the picture. A classic example is LLM-enabled cyber risk, i.e. how much AI is helping cybercriminals to conduct more sophisticated and successful attacks. This has received additional attention recently given the announcement of Mythos.

In this recent study, we experimented with also using LLMs as experts, given the paucity of human experts with expertise at the intersection of AI and specific risk domains. This worked very well for creating more risk models at greater scale, and the risk models appeared to be of similar quality to the human-created models. However, interestingly, as a side-effect, this also yielded some potential insights into how LLMs function differently from humans. In creating their estimates, LLMs seem to have their own biases, distinct from human ones. This is something that should be studied further.

In the future, many, if not most, professions will likely have some kind of combination of human and LLMs in the mix. Some might become fully automated and handed over to LLMs, and some might remain the province of humans exclusively. The vast majority of jobs, however, will likely see some combination of the two. As Noah Smith has argued, there will likely be room for humans to continue to be competitive in the labor market given our comparative advantages. As Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage suggests, even an actor that is worse at everything can still specialize productively if constraints and opportunity costs exist. Humans may therefore remain economically relevant even if AI surpasses us across most dimensions, as long as there are opportunity costs to allocating the next incremental piece of compute to AI instead of humans, and the marginal cost of compute is non-zero. Read more »

by Derek Neal

My first experience with the shared bikes that are now ubiquitous in cities around the world was in Nice, France in 2013. We were out late one night early in the semester, I and the other foreign exchange students, wondering how to get back to our dorm from the city center. It was an hour on foot; no busses were running. One student, an Italian who had been there longer than the rest of us, suggested the “Vélos Bleus.” There were not enough bikes for everyone, so we rode two persons to a bike, seven or eight of us spread out along the Promenade des Anglais, the dark Mediterranean Sea to our left, the beach dotted with a few remaining late-night revelers, and palm trees and ornamental streetlights to our right. When I recall this scene in my mind’s eye, what I visualize is something properly cinematic, a group of young people who are open to the world, to experience, who have not yet rooted themselves to a place or an identity, symbolized in the image of bikes gliding smoothly across the pavement, with us, the cyclists, laughing and shouting, intoxicated both by the alcohol we’d drunk and the feeling of speed, the wind in our hair and the physical intimacy of two people on a single bike, the natural high that results from movement.

There is an affinity between cinema and bicycling in the same way that there is an affinity between cinema and trains, or cinema and automobiles. If the purpose, at the most basic level of cinema, is to show moving images, or motion pictures, then it’s evident why the first film to captivate the public imagination was the Lumière Brothers’ 50 second short of a moving train, why the first “phantom ride” (when the camera is attached to a moving object) was shot from a train, and why, in later cinema, car chases became a fixture. We might mock a movie franchise like The Fast and the Furious, but seen another way, storytelling through moving automobiles is pure cinema, and we could also think of artistically celebrated films, like those of William Friedkin, which feature extensive car chases (The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A.), and one film, Sorcerer, whose entire plot is built around the premise of a truck carrying explosives through the jungle, meaning that it must move steadily, with any stop or start risking death. Cinema wants to show movement, and while the link to trains and automobiles is clear and well developed, bicycles also belong as a quintessential cinematic subject, and here we might note the Italian neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves (1948), at one time considered the greatest film ever made. Read more »

Until the Night Drops

.. ,,,,,,,—written as a song (link below)

Song Link here: CLICK

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Eric Feigenbaum

How do you square the following the statements?

I will be very unhappy if I went around Singapore and in spite of our prosperity, I saw a few hundred people living on the streets, begging, playing a violin, or pretending to play a violin to collect money. That means something has gone wrong with the society. They have not been given the proper chance.

And

Welfares and subsidies destroy the motivation to perform and succeed. Where we must help, give cash or assets and leave it to the individual to decide how he will spend it. When people become dependent on subsidies, and the government can no longer afford and has to cut subsidies, people riot.

In the United States and Europe, these two quotes may well be made by politicians from rival political parties. We generally think of them as a liberal versus conservative view and for some, perhaps a compassionate versus callous perspective.

Both were said by Singapore’s founding and long-time Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. They do not represent a change in perspective over his tenure – they are two sentiments he held simultaneously throughout his long career.

He put his convictions to the test. No country has been so successful as Singapore in eliminating homelessness and abject poverty while avoiding public welfare programs.

The western model for dealing with social ills is for government to step in and create systems reliant on some variety of wealth redistribution – with countries like Sweden and Norway achieving some of the best results and Britain and America experiencing lesser ones.

In fact, Americans have been notoriously wary of anything that smacks of socialism – which is why there was so much initial resistance to many New Deal programs including Social Security. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society introduced food stamps and Medicare to create additional social safety nets. Today, these programs are entitlements Republican and Democrat retirees alike support. Social Security has become the “third rail” of American politics.

Singapore, on the other hand, is extremely wary of anything that presents as wealth redistribution. Lee Kuan Yew proudly proclaimed it the “No Beggar Bowl Society.” Yet, Singapore has socialistic goals on par with Europe.

Only, instead of giving money, Singapore aims to make life more affordable for its poorer citizens. Read more »

Dear Reader, there are no algorithms at 3QD—just six human editors trying to keep a human-curated corner of the internet alive. But recent changes in Google search and other AI-driven shifts have cut our already modest advertising revenue to less than half of what it was just a bit over a year ago. 3QD remains a labor of love but we do need enough income to cover basic costs.

If you value what we do, please consider supporting 3QD with a contribution by clicking here. Thank you in advance!

NEW POSTS BELOW

by Paweł Skała-Piękoś

On method

This essay was extracted from roughly two months of work in collaboration with multiple AI systems. The methodology is not a disclosure I add reluctantly — it is the condition under which an essay of this kind could exist at all.

The work began not with AI as a topic, but with a political manifesto on what I call “the liberalism of subjectivity,” addressed to specific challenges in Poland. I used AI cross-model (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini) as editorial sparring — searching for counterarguments, logical gaps, unearned generalizations. An early reader, Magdalena Kamińska, a professor of cultural studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, diagnosed that the manifesto, against my own de-escalating intention, was in fact escalating. I needed a method that would discipline me against my own affect, in the same way one disciplines AI against its hallucinations.

Out of that practice I developed what I call the “Kołakowski prompt” — an epistemic discipline modeled on Leszek Kołakowski’s anti-dogmatism: empathetic acceptance of the thesis, then skeptical examination, then identification of what survives, closed with self-irony against both narcissism and self-abasement. I paired it with a “destabilizer” modeled on Jerzy Urban, the Polish columnist who defended the late communist regime as a polemical exercise and then, from 1989 until his death in 2022, turned the same instinct against the post-communist elites. The technique borrowed from him is structural — calibrated to keep prose honest rather than ornamental. The political position is not.

I tested the resulting materials with Dawid Szombierski, a philosopher; Piotr Napierała, a historian whose books I publish; and two programmers experienced with AI. This essay was shaped from a longer shared human-AI framework I have been developing — at the suggestion of an AI instance itself, after I asked what in the broader project might be ready for outside readers. Read more »

by David Winner

I’ve heard older generations of white Americans refer to Black people as “the Black,” and I will take that on myself. I am “the white,” and the prejudice discussed here will be my own, white on white.

“Fucking whites, motherfucking whites,” I mutter all too audibly not exactly under my breath as I walk Ava, our Great Pyrenees mix puppy around my block, which lies in the far eastern corner of a neighborhood called Kensington in a city once known as Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York. I’m mad about the trash all over the street, which distracts Ava from her sacred duty to relieve her bladder and vacate her bowels. Many delicious distractions from rubber bands to chicken bones end up scooped into her snout (and sometimes out her rear end) before I can do anything to prevent them.

Why do I imagine the white is responsible? I don’t know that I’ve actually witnessed trash being tossed onto the sidewalk, and, anyway, why can’t I just be annoyed by this minor inconvenience? Why do I need to specify the race of the perpetrators?

It’s the primal nature of prejudice. We, the white, don’t have to deal with racism. I’ve never been deprived of opportunities because of my race, and while I may have occasionally looked sketchy enough to get followed around a store, all I would have needed to do was change my clothes, shave and get a haircut. But the white along with the Black and the just about everyone else has experienced prejudice whether it’s because of our height or build or accent or our education or lack thereof.

Concerning the white, there are two types of us on the block. Thirty-five odd years have passed since I made my way from Charlottesville, Virginia to Brooklyn, but I am still a transplant, a Johnny come lately, what I will call the white white. Decades ago, Angela, my wife, interviewed teenage Italian American girls working at the Court Street Bakery in Carrol Gardens for a webpage called Brooklyn Profiles. The bakery girls complained about the “whites” moving into the neighborhood: outsiders, yuppies, homegrown immigrants. Their skin may have been white, but that was not how they defined themselves. Read more »

Airplane wing (and winglet) while flying through clouds somewhere over Germany.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Charles Siegel

Last week the Supreme Court temporarily restored access to mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used in combination to terminate pregnancy. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative circuit court of appeals in the country, had halted shipments of mifepristone while weighing a suit by the state of Louisiana. For now, at least, shipments will resume while the case proceeds in the Fifth Circuit, and possibly in the Supreme Court as well.

The case is another in the endless series of battles over abortion access that have played out in the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. The point of Dobbs, as Justice Alito so solemnly intoned, was to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But that is not what the implacable foes of women’s reproductive rights want at all.

In the four years since Dobbs, they have tried, in every way imaginable, to subvert the will of the people. They have poured billions of dollars worth of lobbying and litigation into this effort, and will never stop.

Take Missouri, for example. Two years after Dobbs, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution, enshrining the right to abortion. Yet Republican legislators immediately sued to invalidate it, and have sought to place a contradictory referendum on the ballot soon too. Similar fights have occurred in Kansas, Arizona and elsewhere.

And they’re not content with trying to undo the actual votes of the people in state after state. Read more »

by William Benzon

The term was coined by interior designer David Hicks back in the 1960s, but I didn’t know that when I coined the term earlier this year.

I’ve been taking photos of my meals for several years now. Every now and then I’d sit the camera on the table and take a shot. The shot below appears to be my oldest tablescape. It’s from Hoboken’s Malibu Diner back in July of 2029.

It’s a straightforward shot of a cup of coffee, though obviously the coffee is not visible from this angle. You can see the shadows of the coffee saucer, the cup’s handle, and a spoon cast on the tabletop by the overhead lighting, some light glinting off the cup, and some very faint coffee stains a bit left of center. To the right you can see a booth next to a window and, through the window, some building. Light from the window reflects off the tabletop to the right of the cup. By the nature of the shot, the tabletop itself tends to play a big role in such shots, as does the ground in landscapes.

As for David Hicks, and his meaning for the term, as I said, he’s an interior designer. He coined the term to characterize the selection of objects for, and arrangement on a table in a decorative way. That is, his usage refers to the table and the objects on it. In contrast, my usage refers to a photograph taken from a certain vantage point. The act of coining the term signaled my intention to explore tablescapes in a systematic way.

Given that I am by inclination a street photographer I have little interest in tabletops composed for their visual appeal. I take my tabletops like a find them. In the rough, and in front of me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Rafaël Newman

Amid the present surfeit of geopolitical obscenities, one incident is distinguished—by the absurdity of its moral aesthetics. On April 20 this year, the New York Times reported that the Israeli military was investigating an IDF soldier who had allegedly sledgehammered a statue of the crucified Jesus in a village in southern Lebanon. Local Lebanese authorities and Christians in Israel expressed their dismay; the Israeli army condemned the soldier’s actions as “wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops” and noted that it was assisting the affected community with the restoration of the statue; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “appropriately harsh disciplinary action against the offender.”

Setting aside for a moment the grotesquery of solemn protests at vandalism perpetrated on a depiction of the putative son of God while the IDF has been murdering with impunity actual children of God in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran, the soldier’s alleged actions might be considered under two opposed aspects. One could understand, even empathize with his (presumed) rage at the image of a suffering Jew serving as the central symbol of a religion whose central tenets are love and forgiveness. At the same time, however, it seems that the soldier will have thus misunderstood the more crucial (and more sinister) theological message of the crucifixion, which is that human sacrifice is not to be renounced, as promulgated by the Old Testament parable of the Binding of Isaac and by the consequent Jewish rejection of Christ as the Messiah, but rather that such sacrifice may, in fact, be necessary for redemption: and that such a message is one of profound and important significance for Israel’s current campaigns in the territories that surround it, where the lives of civilians are being treated as necessary collateral damage in the pursuit of Israel’s (and, as it happens, Netanyahu’s own) larger aims. And that it thus serves as a ready justification of that same soldier’s other, more lethal actions in Lebanon.

As for the Israeli administration’s severe condemnation of the soldier’s alleged action, that likely has a different, more cynical motivation: namely, the fear of offending, and thus alienating, the vital American lobby of Christian Zionists. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

“When asked about a ‘major cyberattack’ from China, the president shrugged with indifference. ‘It is what it is.’ … Three days earlier, the president described China’s support for Iran as just ‘one of those things’” —Steve Brown

A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism (2019), an “examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.” It’s a really short book, but it took a while to wade through it all. Here it all is even more briefly assembled to highlight the salient points. 

We typically think of nihilism as very simply meaning, “we believe in nothing” (4), but he takes us through Western philosophy to get to a view that, “Nihilism is about evading reality rather than confronting it, about believing in other worlds rather than accepting this one, and about trying to make ourselves feel powerful rather than admitting our own weaknesses” (73).

THE HISTORY OF NIHILISM

Gertz explains the trajectory along lines similar to the move from pre-modernism to meta-modernism. We once trusted God, then flipped that trust on to science; then we questioned the possibility of knowing anything at all, and now we’re just starting to recognize the need for a few core Truths. Gertz goes back further to Socrates’ provocation to question everything: “From a Socratic perspective, nihilism can be overcome by enlightenment. From a Cartesian perspective, nihilism can be overcome by self-restraint. But from a Humean perspective, nihilism cannot be overcome. It is simply a product of human psychology” (28).

Then he gets to Kant who shifts us from the idea that we can’t know things to the idea that our values are contrary to genuine freedom. Freedom means obeying the self, and, since our desires aren’t within our control (we discover our tastes rather than choose them), our desires aren’t within our freedom but are “forced upon us.” So, true freedom (and morality) can only be understood as obedience to reason. 

Then Nietzsche argued that there isn’t one universal morality, but “the end result of a war between rival moralities” (41), and the morality of the Christian church was against life itself. We’ve been conditioned to renounce strength in favour of group safety, but “repressing an instinct is not the same as removing that instinct . . . Since it was ‘immoral’ to be cruel to others, members of society could only maintain their morality by redirecting their cruelty at themselves. This self-cruelty is what became known as ‘guilt’” (46).

What’s all this got to do with nihilism? Read more »

David Hammons. Untitled, Ca. 1990.

Metal coat rack, rubber, plastic bags, tin can and found hat

More here and here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.