Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

The consequences of the 996 working hour system:
"On the Chinese internet, the country’s current predicament – slowing economic growth, a falling birthrate, a meagre social safety net, increasing isolation on the world stage – is often expressed through buzzwords. There is tangping, or “lying flat”, a term used to describe the young generation of Chinese who are choosing to chill out rather than hustle in China’s high-pressure economy. There is runxue, or “run philosophy”, which refers to the determination of large numbers of people to emigrate. Recently, “revenge against society” attacks – random incidents of violence that have claimed dozens of lives – have sparked particular concern. And there is also neijuan, or “involution”, a term used to describe the feeling of diminishing returns in China’s social contract."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/24/what-is-neijuan-china-viral-buzzword-laptop-bicycle

“If the market can keep the faith to persist, it buys the necessary time for the technology to mature, for the costs to come down, and for companies to figure out the business model,” Wu said. But US “companies can end up underwater if AI grows fast but less rapidly than they hope for,” he suggested.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/us-threatens-crackdown-on-eu-firms-as-clash-over-tech-regulations-intensifies/

"The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire."
https://www.vox.com/politics/472346/trump-democracy-2025-haphazard-authoritarian

What does it tell us that AI scrapers are ignoring the more intelligent way of scraping data despite all the indications towards it?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/stop-crawling-my-html-you-dickheads-use-the-api/
I don't think the answer is a statement about AI, but about the people behind it?

As for the article, not mentioning brexit along "Britain is the only advanced economy where economic inactivity has increased since the pandemic" feels exceptionally deceptive

Could someone understanding modern monetary theory please explain to me the link between issuing new money and people getting poorer due to dropping currency exchange rates? How is making your population less able to purchase imported goods a lesser problem than "expanding productive capacity" of the state?
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/greens/2025/12/the-case-for-zack-polanskis-economic-plan

Today at #CHR2025, I will be presenting our work on the evaluation of the historical adequacy of masked language models (MLMs) for #Latin. There are several models like this, and they represent the current state of the art for a number of downstream tasks, like semantic change and text reuse detection. However, a historical researcher, philologist or else would want to be sure that such models really represent the historical period of interest. For example, it would be an embarrasing hallucination if St. Augustine showed up in the context of the Roman senate.

Our evaluation confirms a known problem: LLMs and masked models in particular are trained on corpora without attention to historical periods. Unlike other research we've done on Early Modern English, this problem leads to models being barely distinguishable when it comes to their ability to generate based on a historical period. Even though history is a case where it is most obvious when models go wrong, this type of contamination is a known problem for LLM training overall, think of different legal jurisdictions using the same language, dialects in programming languages, etc.

This research was generously supported by AgileLab.

The full paper is available at:
https://anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0003/the-latin-language-evolved-over-time-masked-models/

"The results speak for themselves. Today, Uruguay produces nearly 99% of its electricity from renewable sources, with only a small fraction—roughly 1%–3%—coming from flexible thermal plants, such as those powered by natural gas. They are used only when hydroelectric power cannot fully cover periods when wind and solar energy are low. The energy mix is diverse: while hydropower accounts for 45%, wind can contribute up to 35% of total electricity, and biomass—once considered a waste problem—now makes up 15%. Solar fills the gaps.

The economic impact has been profound. The total cost of electricity production decreased by roughly half compared to fossil-fuel alternatives, and the country attracted $6 billion in renewable energy investments over a five-year period—equivalent to 12% of its GDP. About 50,000 new jobs were created in construction, engineering, and operations, roughly 3% of the labor force. Even more striking, Uruguay is no longer subject to the wild swings of global fossil fuel markets.

This transformation was not just technical; it was also regulatory and structural. Uruguay moved to long-term capacity markets, providing investors and utilities with predictability while removing the bias that favored fossil fuels. The government’s adaptive approach, maintained through five administrations, ensured consistency. Instead of making climate the primary focus, policymakers prioritized cost, reliability, and economic benefits; emissions reductions were a valuable bonus."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2025/10/19/uruguays-renewable-charge-a-small-nation-a-big-lesson-for-the-world/