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AFK Post March 2026



Tags: proseluddanonmovies

OSM

After several months, suddenly did a bunch of editing OSM :)
Also I submitted a PR to the Noto Arabic font repo.

Last year, someone added fields in Chicago's Lincoln Park as named picnic areas on OSM (example: "Lincoln Park - Grove 8"). I didn't notice because I am usually viewing the new vector tiles. These are popular sites for people to set out a blanket, but there are no facilities, beyond existing as open spaces. If I had to label Grove 9, I'd say it's an informal dog park? Also it's prone to flooding (it's inside the nature sanctuary, and a playground there was rebuilt more uphill in 2019).

Looking backward

Every now and then I remember that Annie Jacobsen, a journalist who had success with a serious nuclear war book, did a big book tour around the Roswell crash being a Soviet plane with mutant dwarf pilots.

A Hacker News comment dredged up "The Big Hack" report by Bloomberg in 2018, claiming that Apple and Amazon had discovered suspicious chips on their hardware (which they denied). Looking back, was none of this ever corroborated? https://daringfireball.net/2018/10/bloomberg_the_big_hack

On Columbia's Oral History project, 24 minutes in, some stories from Michael Steele about his Maryland days, being the only Black person in statewide elected office, and getting ignored by Barack Obama. Says Obama was elected too soon into his DC career, his chairmanship got off to a bad start for cancelling consultants' contracts from the 2008 election, proposing ideas like rotating the first primaries and election holidays. https://obamaoralhistory.columbia.edu/interviews/michael-steele

Movies

I've really liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind, aspects of The Fabelmans, and alien and space stories like Arrival, but dang I cannot get into the ads for Disclosure Day. Spielberg has a long history here (including theories that the alien diplomacy of Close Encounters is based on something real). From the trailer I feel like Spielberg provided these notes:

I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, which might be the first piece with a direct anti-LLM message (someone shouts: "bad prompt!") compared to Pluribus which is rather opaque. But it's challenging... the trailer frames it as an absurd cross between Terminator and Miracle Mile - strangers at a diner on the verge of AI apocalypse. But of a few flashbacks which are basically Black Mirror mini-sodes, two of them have school shootings scenes. The screenwriter has also put out in interviews that mentions of 47 throughout are "total accident".

I got to the end of the Netflix K-Drama Undercover Miss Hong, and despite dragging a bit in the first episode and in the middle, it is an interesting concept. Amid the 1997–1998 financial crisis, Hong infiltrates a corrupt financial firm looking for a whistleblower. I expected the ending to focus on office romance, but there was a surprising corporate plot involving the family at the top of the firm. Also this was good timing for me re-entering the corporate world.
I had to do some googling to follow the epilogue (for example, a tech guy tells dumbfounded colleagues that he's bought land in Pangyo district).

LuddAnon updates

About a year ago, I called the rush to blame AI for things happening on the news, "LuddAnon". I have been thinking about it a bit recently:

Both of these stories as-reported make it possible that AI will be blamed for something on social media, and this might bleed over into credible news reporting and then our collective consciousness. I am sure that there are engineers at Amazon who think that their failures are caused by "vibecoders". What I don't know is if that's from a real incident report or people baking with limited info.
Looking back at the post, what I haven't seen as much this year, is people claiming to be super-good at detecting or prompting AI in these stories.
In the same way that "Cambridge Analytica" continues to be invoked for superhuman analysis, information dragnets, and opinion manipulation, I have a feeling that Iran is going to be associated with Anthropic and possibly OpenAI for a long time. Contradicting this story is seen as taking a stand on the war or politics, and not just asking where TF you reading this stuff.

Previous Reads

The source of Unicode lightning angle/arrow symbol ⍼ was found last year https://ionathan.ch/2026/02/16/angzarr.html

Mixed feelings after watching the recent documentary "The Track" about the Olympic dreams of Bosnians practicing on Sarajevo's old luge track. It's a sweet documentary ending with one athlete going to the Olympics, and his teammates exploring other futures. Unfortunately Nikolajev did not qualify for the 2026 Olympics.
The funding to reopen the luge track is in the ballpark for EU grants, but in the same way that I would oppose Illinois buying a new stadium for the Chicago Bears or the Olympics, it's not practical. This year Bosnia participated in ski events (alpine and cross-country). I understand that these are athletes with expensive equipment, but a ski facility can have multiple functions, including some for casual skiers and families.

Interesting updates on CZI consolidating around science to avoid battles on the local (schools + housing) and national (politics + race) levels. https://sfstandard.com/2025/06/09/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-politics-pr/

Korean students at Howard in 1896 - this story has resurfaced because of a BTS music video.

The video properly acknowledges Howard's role in educating the students who would make history. However, there are some inaccuracies. The video prominently features the iconic Founders Library […] which had yet to be constructed. In addition, most of the people depicted in the audience on The Yard are not Black, which belies the institution's history as one of the country's foremost colleges with a predominantly Black student body.

The New York Times Cesar Chavez story might win the Pulitzer Prize? As a white guy from New England I didn't know much of anything about Cesar Chavez or know his importance until going to the west coast, so I am coming to this as a total outsider. It looks like there were journalists investigating this since 2021, everything deeply corroborated (multiple references to internal emails and schedules, 23andMe), statements from Governor Newsom, etc. After the UFW cancelled events and peripheral people got quoted by Mediaite and the LA Times, the NYT went to press the next day. In comments on the LA Times story, Reddit had a few comments saying that rumors have floated around.
I decided to look at Wikipedia in case there were any hints. Chavez's Wikipedia article had only one text edit in the three months before the story broke: changing two sentences equivocating about whether Chavez was unfaithful to his wife and whether that was known within UFW. I thought that I might have found something, but the user profile has no insider-y flags (they're a theology student in Louisiana). Years earlier they had made edits to the Chavez article to emphasize his faith was Roman Catholic.

As someone who's come around to FDR being a radical transformation of what federalism is, an October New Yorker article on the Department of Education was interesting… federal investment in research and foreign scholars was more established during the Eisenhower administration (Sputnik happening about halfway through), and then Carter established the DoE. Also - I'd guess that Eisenhower is the 20th-century president who I know the least about, to the point it's surprising he had two terms? And that his library is in Kansas? He was the first president to fly a plane.

Since I've previously mentioned mass hysteria in Southeast Asian schools, here's a suspected / mysterious case in Iran from 2022–2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_schoolgirls_mass_poisoning

A part-scientific, part-anecdotal collection of papers on sensing when someone is staring. https://www.sheldrake.org/research/sense-of-being-stared-at

Bio LLMs and safety https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy-oyODkTuY

In the Kouri Richins trial, a witness remembered Kouri saying that it would be easier if her husband were dead, but she didn't mention this in initial conversations with police or the private investigator, and was on tape debating whether it happened. This seems like another case of damning statements appearing much later.

AI psychosis posts on /r/MachineLearning tend to have weird claims about "geometry". I recently noticed a lot of Zenodo uploads, I guess so they can upload files and get a DOI number, without an Arxiv endorsement?

The Air Force announced that a STEM school will be built on their base in Dayton.

Islamic China: An Asian History was published in late 2025, and recently was the focus of an episode of Asian Review of Books. The episode does a good job of explaining the Hui, Chinese Muslims who are otherwise ethnically Han. They had an uprising overlapping with the Taiping Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_Revolt_(1862%E2%80%931877)

Jason Mantzoukas asks some good / silly questions here. Random note -  I have been listening to "How Did This Get Made" movie podcast with Jason for years, and I just heard about his egg allergy in recent interviews, where he was talking about therapy revelations around that. But people have mentioned it online as early as 2015, so maybe I missed it.