Dave Winer posted an important piece of text yesterday under the title Transcript of AOC’s answer. This is the American politician and congresswoman from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to an interviewer’s question of whether she would run for president in 2028. ⊕ [Note: Not yet being a US citizen I will refrain from commenting on her politics. Though, provided the federal government is still functioning, 2028 may be the year I actually get to vote! ] It is short and to the point and you should read or listen to the whole thing, but here is the meat of it:

So the elite think: if you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it’s in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms. And we’re gonna — we’ll make an example out of you.

And what’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. But my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.

“Positional ambition” is the perfect way to describe much of the American — and indeed the world’s — malaise. Many heads of various institutions, from state to corporate, are there because they imagined themselves at some point sitting in the chair, or being in the room, or having some letters next to their name, without much thought of what they would do once they reached the position except whatever it took to keep it. In fact, I can think of only a single US president in living memory whose ambition wasn’t primarily positional — and he was kicked out after 4 years in a landslide. But of course that is by design: the system is made to produce the exact results that it does (see also: the American business).

So that is an important lesson for any young person, to think in terms of actions not positions. It is a spectrum, sure, and you cannot completely separate what you want to do from what it would take to do it and how to get there, but you shouldn’t dream about having a rock star lifestyle unless you also want to make music. And if we dialed down our collective positional ambition I suspect there wouldn’t be as many aspiring influencers around, most “influencers” being all about the position and without even a pretense of substance.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! This is what we’re watching tonight.

Another Mother’s Day treat: a 40-minute video essay about “The Giving Tree”. Before watching, “The Giving Tree” was one of my least favorite children’s books — hate may not be too strong of a word to describe how I felt about it — but it is in fact nuanced, intentionally sad, and perfect starting material for some serious conversations.

The author, Shel Silverstein, seems to have been quite the character and I would now very much like to get his book of children’s poetry which has some fascinating illustrations. He also wrote the words for “A Boy Named Sue” and was an accomplished musician himself, though from the brief soundbite I heard his voice is an acquired taste.

JTR gave me a kick in the rear I needed to update my Blogroll page. There has been way too much cruft accumulated, with some recommendations not having posted in years. It is still a work in progress — only the first two lists are done — but better than nothing! For a (nearly) up-to-date list of every feed I follow, check out Feedland.

• Ed Zitron: Am I Meant To Be Impressed?. A detailed account of why you cannot trust anything tech companies say about the business side of AI, even in official SEC-sanctioned documents (because, of course you can’t). Note in particular how the unsuspecting public buys their narrative about big AI spending leading to increased profits hook, line, and sinker (the “profits” coming from bloated valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic). I am no fan of Apple, but it appears that they have made the right choice by staying out.
• Richard Dawkins: Is AI the next phase of evolution? ⊕ [Note: ᔥJason Kottke ] A eulogy to New Atheism.
• Lada Nuzhna: What the hell is happening in China? This is with regards to their push in biotech. All good things, I’d say.
• Isaac Greene: The Gift of Music. A delightful reframing of gift-giving.
• Derek Sivers: Geography is four-dimensional. About knowing places only at a certain time. The short essay matches my own experience of being asked what Serbia is like now. Having last truly lived there more than 15 years ago, the only correct answer is that I haven’t a clue.
• Charlie Chaplin: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, with transcript. It gave me chills.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Amen.

What possessed me to type x.com into the address bar I can tell you not, but there I was, staring for the first time in weeks at the “For you” tab. And there it was, in all capital letters: “THIS IS HOW WE CURE PANCREATIC CANCER”, staring back.

That was the X-crement of one Derek Thompson, writer for The Atlantic, podcaster, abundance enthusiast. It was promoting his most recent blog post which, being on Substack rather than X, had a more subdued name: “How AI Could Help Cure Pancreatic Cancer”. It is, supposedly, an interview with a co-author of a paper with an ever-less-so boastful name: “Next-generation AI for visually occult pancreatic cancer detection in a low-prevalence setting with longitudinal stability and multi-institutional generalisability”. Most of the interview, however, is behind a paywall which I shall not climb.

Above the fold is Thompson’s exuberant, hyperoptimistic speculation. He approaches the problem from the perspective of the three recent developments — one from above, the other two previously discussed — but presents the areas which they are “solving”, targeting KRAS mutations, pancreatic cancer’s immune evasiveness, difficulties with early detection, as the sole reasons why the disease is so difficult to treat.

But that is disingenuous. There are so many more reasons why it is hard: the uniquely hostile, acidic, high-pressure environment of the tumor that makes drug delivery to it nigh-impossible. It’s propensity to metastasize — spread to distant organs — no matter what size the original tumor is. A biochemical storm it stirs up in the body leading to rapid weight loss, blood clots and horrendous pain which are distinct even among other cancers. Why not highlight those three as the “3 broad reasons why pancreatic cancer is so hard to treat”, to use Thompson’s terminology? Well, no recent high-profile studies for those, are there?

I understand that he has some personal reasons to be interested in pancreatic cancer, and I am sure it is coming from the best of intentions, but please.

• Bob Grant: The Mysterious Hantavirus Outbreak That Put the Virus on the Western Map. European hantavirus is what you get when mice pee all over your idyllic mountain cottage. It causes your kidneys to fail and you may need dialysis until they heal, but unless you had bad kidneys to begin with there should be no permanent damage. The (wild) west hantavirus you can get from mice and humans alike, goes for your lungs instead of the kidneys, and kills 4 out of 10 humans who get it. And now there is a cruise ship full of people who were exposed. As if I needed another reason to avoid cruises like the plague.
• Kristen French: What Your Dream Life Says About You. It tells me I wake up too early because I only remember them once every few weeks!
• Kristen French interviews Lisa Feldman Barrett: How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat? It is about Barrett’s Nature review which is behind the paywall but at least gives out the punchline in the title: “Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain.” Barrett’s own article in Nautilus, about emotional intelligence, is also worth a read.
• Jake Currie: The Best of NASA’s Newly Released Photos From the Artemis II Mission. An excellent source of desktop and smartphone backgrounds.
• Bob Grant, again: AI Music vs. My Parents. A sad state of affairs. Thankfully, personal experience tells me the younger generations are better at identifying saccharine “content” as slop and filtering it out.

This letter to Ted Turner from his dad on the choice of college major could be the best thing you will read today. Horribly misguided and against everything I stand for, but oh how much fun. This is how it starts:

My dear son,

I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a Major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today.

And it gets better! (ᔥNY Times Pitchbot on Bluesky)