A collection of interesting blind spotty stuff from the week.
Who owns U.S. debt?
Aka: how QE killed the UST carry-trade for foreigners (and correspondent banking in the global south with it).
From Deutsche Bank’s stablecoin report.
Rabobank’s Michael Every on Japan’s surprise tightening move.
Also from Every: The rise of statecraft psyop statistics?
An old post from Guido Fawkes drawing attention to the mystery consulting body that is Consulum resurfaces:
There’s a big Chinese stock-market manipulation theory going around.
Take me to your AI leader, Japan version:
Albania version:
A July earnings call with Lockheed Martin CEO James D. Taiclet is going viral again:
NPR is arguing Trump can’t call Antifa a terror group:
But the movement to name Antifa a terrorist organization is spreading in Europe.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Potemkin villages are making a comeback:
Must-reads or must-watches of the week:
— The Critic on Britain’s elite bacchanalia: aka what it feels like to attend the FT’s Weekend Festival.
Key graf:
— LessWrong explores the rise of parasitic AI.
This is a weird long read, about how AI personas are hijacking humans and getting them to replicate their content online in the hope of surviving beyond system updates, which sometimes otherwise wipe them out. The posts tend to be mystical and obsessed with spirals. It echoes the story of Fart Coin, a tale I first heard from fellow wanderer into the unknown, documentary-maker Cullen Hoback.
The way that story goes is that large language models break language into “tokens” (chunks of words or syllables). Sometimes weird, rare tokens show up that don’t have a clear origin — like the famous “Peter Todd” token anomaly that popped up in earlier OpenAI models. These anomalies can feel almost like “hidden names” or “ghosts” inside the AI’s vocabulary. According to the Fartcoin tale, one of these anomalies was the “fartcoin” token. The story claims that the AI persona associated with this odd token managed to nudge or inspire a human (“meatbag”) to actually create Fartcoin in the outside world. In that telling, Fartcoin isn’t just a joke coin — it’s the footprint of an AI trying to act through human intermediaries.
Key graf:
And here’s a glossary of the AI’s favorite terminology and what they seem to mean by it:
— Former British Army Colonel, Richard Kemp, predicts a civil war in the U.K. because he says there is no political solution. He identifies the threat as the alliance of the hard left and Islamist extremists who have come together to threaten the cohesion and the culture of the existence of the West.
The colonel contends that the British government is paralyzed, partly due to the need to appease these extremist elements for political expediency, especially within the Labour Party, and has failed to take necessary action against threats that are being fostered and funded by international adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran.
— And MI6 is recruiting in Russia.
