code viber.

Checking in on the status of Wokeism, and it turns out Leftist academics are unironically saying that society needs to intentionally “marginalize men” even more to supposedly solve the birth rate. History shows us that what’s normalized in academia becomes publicly mainstream within a generation, and there is no sign the ship is turning or even slowing down.

Self-hosting a database is better than buying a managed one on nearly every dimension except for operational burden. We way over-indexed on that, and I think we're about to witness a renaissance of self-hosted databases.

Tekrar söylüyorum! Türkiye'yi NATO'dan atın!

While the surviving IRGC Leaders are trapped like drowning rats in a sewage pipe, Iran’s creaking oil industry is starting to shut in production thanks to the U.S. BLOCKADE. Pumping will soon collapse. GASOLINE SHORTAGES IN IRAN NEXT!

23 years ago today, American activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza.

BREAKING: Canada is launching an $18.4 billion sovereign wealth fund to "bankroll major projects of national interest," per FT. Details include: 1. This marks the first ever sovereign wealth fund for Canada and is is part of Carney’s drive to turn Canada into the “strongest economy of the G7” 2. The “Canada Strong Fund” will work alongside the private sector to finance 15 infrastructure proposals 3. This comes as Canada’s deficit jumped to C$78 billion in 2025, up from $42 billion the previous year 4. Carney looks to catalyze $1 trillion in total investment in Canada over the next 5 years The move comes Canada has dealt with US tariffs for over one year.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking to schoolchildren today, warned that the U.S. does not have an exit strategy for the Iran war and “an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership." -Reuters

If you don't understand this, you will not understand why LLM-based agents are irreparably failing for a general-purpose problem solving. An agent (by the way it was the topic of my PhD 20 years ago) to be useful, must be rational. Being rational means to always prefer an outcome that results in the maximal expected utility to its master/user. Let’s say an agent has two actions they can execute in an environment: a_1 and a_2. If the agent can predict that a_1 gives its user an expected utility of 10, and a_2 gives an expected utility of -100, then a rational agent must choose a_1 even if choosing a_2 seems like a better option when explained in words. The numbers 10 and -100 can be obtained by summing the products of all possible outcomes for each action and their likelihoods. Now here is the problem with LLM-based agents. The LLM is not optimizing expected utility in the environment. It is optimizing the next token, conditioned on a prompt, a context window, and a training distribution full of examples of what helpful answers are supposed to look like. Those are not the same objective. So when we wrap an LLM in a loop and call it an “agent,” we have not created a rational decision-maker. We have created a text generator that can imitate the surface form of deliberation. It may say things like: “I should compare the expected outcomes.” “The best action is probably a_1.” “I will now execute the optimal plan.” But the internal mechanism is not selecting actions by maximizing the user’s expected utility. It is generating a continuation that is statistically appropriate given the prompt and prior context. This distinction matters enormously. For narrow tasks, the imitation can be good enough. If the environment is constrained, the actions are simple, and the success criteria are close to patterns seen in training, the system can appear agentic. But for general-purpose problem solving, the gap becomes fatal. A rational agent needs stable preferences, calibrated beliefs, causal models of the world, the ability to evaluate consequences, and the discipline to choose the action with maximal expected utility even when that action is boring, non-linguistic, or unlike the examples in its training data. An LLM-based agent has none of that by default. It has fluency. It has pattern completion. It has a remarkable ability to compress and recombine human text. But fluency is not rationality, and a plausible plan is not an expected-utility calculation. This is why these systems so often fail in strange, brittle, and irreparable ways when given open-ended responsibility. They are not failing because the prompts are insufficiently clever. They are failing because we are asking a simulator of rational agency to be a rational agent.

Mark Levin says it’s time to ban “Nazis” and “Jihadis” from social media, saying free speech has gone too far and is “overprotected.” He wants them immediately removed from all platforms because they are “inciting” violence. Levin is trying to put people who disagree with his politics in the same category as an assassin. “Get off our platform.”

But instead of arguing for a return of social norms around marriage, the authors say that the solution to the fertility crisis lies in "further marginalization of men" (yes, that's in the title!) and getting single women to have more kids. Does that seem likely to work? 5/5

You should expect to see a lot of this as Zoomers turn 30 and up the ante on the LARP that they're the first generation to get screwed by their elders. It makes no sense for Millennials and Zoomers to be at odds because we have all the same problems, caused by the same people.

The problem is not that Turkey stands outside Europe. The problem is that Ankara learned to live inside Europe’s rooms while cutting holes in its walls. Cyprus was not an exception. The Aegean is not a quarrel. Migration is not a bargaining chip. Hamas, Libya, Syria, Russian energy and the Black Sea are not separate files. They are one perimeter. Turkey does not seek a place in Europe. It seeks leverage over Europe. Europe does not need another seminar on Turkish identity. It needs the courage to call the pattern by its name.

Rubio admits Iran controls the Strait: “If what they mean by opening the straits is, yes, the straits are opened as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission or we’ll blow you up, and you pay us. That’s not opening the straits. Those are international waterways. They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway, and how much you have to pay them to use it.”