Mark Cromwell

Star Trek: Discovery initially had 10 million viewers, a magnitude beyond anything Trek gets now. It's clear there's fans who are hungry for Star Trek and will give it a chance initially. What went wrong?

The distinction between engineering and magic is entirely a modern linguistic conceit. To the ancients, a wizard, a magus, a sorceror, was not a man who commanded forces outside the laws of nature. He was a man who commanded the forces of nature, by manipulating them through his understanding of natural law. But the modern word for a man who commands the universe by understanding its laws is "engineer". Yes, the ancient sorceror would try to commune with the spirits of the dead, or read the destiny of kings in the stars, or perform fertility rites to make the crops grow, but this wasn't some special supernatural discipline to him. This was simply his model of how the natural world worked. He would not have made a distinction between understanding heat and phase changes, and thereby distilling alcohol, and cutting out the intestines of a bird to predict the fortunes of a business venture. Both, to him, were philosophy and natural law. But as our understanding of the laws of physics grew more sophisticated, we gradually exiled the term "magic" to that which had not been proven to work, and to that which had been proven not to work. Were we given the opportunity to take an ancient Egyptian king on a tour of modern society, riding in an electric car, he would remark that we are a rich people, because we have many powerful magicians. Some of us might hasten to correct him, telling him that there is no magic used here. But he would not, in fact, be wrong.

The demand for Elon Musk to surrender 30% of his business to operate in South Africa is absurd. Bringing infrastructure, creating high-skill jobs, and expanding the national tax base should be more than enough contribution from any global entity. The South African government claims this is about compliance, but in reality, it's a system of state sanctioned theft. While other corporations have quietly paid for political patronage to bypass these rules, Musk is calling out the corruption. This 30% norm hasn't empowered the people, it has simply enriched a circle of political elites. Most businesses take the easy way out and pay the bribe, but Musk has the integrity to stand his ground and expose the rot.

DEVELOPING: Tomorrow I'm told almost 400 pages of long-secret documents newly declassified by DNI Tulsi Gabbard will be released that will reveal evidence of an Intelligence Community conspiracy to dirty-up President Trump ... developing ...

Anthropic: “We don’t degrade our models, we just reduce the amount of thinking effort they use without telling you and update logging to make it hard to notice”

The US social mood is turning dramatically negative on AI

Want to know why negotiations did not succeed? JD Vance: "they have chosen not to accept our terms." Bingo. No negotiations – at least with Iran – will succeed based on "our/your terms." The US must learn: you can't dictate terms to Iran. It's not too late to learn. Yet.

Within 10 days, parts of the global economy will start running short of critical goods After 30 years studying economic sanctions and blockades, I don’t say this lightly: --Not just higher prices --Shortages. Markets are not ready for this

Hot take: Anthropic is deliberately distilling Opus 4.6 (lowering its quality) to build hype and anticipation for Mythos which might drop in q3 It’s a marketing stunt IMO. Make the current model feel a bit weaker so the next one hits harder with a bigger perceived jump.

SECOND ROUND OF TALKS COULD BE HELD WITHIN DAYS: WSJ