History, sort of
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Decline and fall
This is a different sort of essay. Instead of just writing and posting and that’s it, I’m adding to it daily as I find more and more evidence that the United States I grew up in is done, gone, and replaced by a thuggish, fractured, immoral and criminal rogue society. For most of my life, Continue reading
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This is what’s wrong with US business models
Chinese large language models like DeepSeek are smaller and more efficient than the centralized commercial behemoths from OpenAI and Anthropic, et al. They’re also open source, so you can use and implement them however you want. They’ve been released to the world and they’re free and open. The US response is to create a new Continue reading
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Bust the Rust Trust
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely accepted (especially by American boys whose dads had subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics that in the impossibly distant twenty-first century, we would no longer be limited to tooling along roads and highways in our Chevys and Fords. We would have flying cars! This morning, Continue reading
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The lost gatekeepers and the watchers
This is a followup to a previous post, where I complained that the internet information environment shifts a lot of work from the creation/dissemination side to the consumer/user side. Walter Benjamin offered another much richer analysis in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He lived long before the Continue reading
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Godwin’s Law 2026
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Republicans, MAGA, or Trump approaches one.” Even earlier is the Reduction ad Hitlerum fallacy, a Leo Strauss creation from 1953. It’s a description of an attempt to counter an argument by claiming the same notion can be attributed to Hitler or Nazis. As Continue reading
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The rat in the house
“January 6, 2021 was the most shameful day in American history. It should live in infamy, as should the traitor who refused to accept the election results and incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol — Donald J. Trump.“ Continue reading
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About prepping
“Prepping” is a trendy meme, and it seems to usually means preparing a backpack with stuff you’ll need when you leave the city or town and go live a life of brave, individual survivalism in the woods. That is delusional; a fantasy that comes from watching too many movies. A lot of aspects of our Continue reading
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To Anxious Friends
The editorial below was written by William Allen White on July 27, 1922. The disorder of the day, which he mentions, was a nationwide railroad strike. In 1922, railroads were critical infrastructure — they still are, but in 1922 there were no alternatives. White was the editor of the Emporia Gazette of Emporia, Kansas, where Continue reading
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Symiliptic Report Aigust 23
I was thinking this morning about how the fourth republic fell, and how the real world people finally decided to be done with the scum once and for all. And not a single shot was fired. it was all done with social media, which the scum have always been surprisingly compliant with. Suggest (or “influence,” Continue reading
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The fire next time
Eighty years ago today, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. More than most events in recent history, this must be remembered. One of the things that’s always said about terrible events is “it must never happen again.” But of course this did happen again, just three days later when the US dropped Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.