Alex Wellerstein

The Most Awful Responsibility – Alex Wellerstein

One of the things I came across while researching and writing my new book (obligatory plug!!!) is that LeMay did not even tell his USAAF superiors about Operation Meetinghouse before it happened, much less have it "run up the chain" to the President.

alexwellerstein.com/writing/book...

If I were writing that today I would note that a major difference between the two is that there was basically no deliberation and comment on Tokyo and considerable deliberation and comment on Hiroshima. Which makes them different in several ways.

Reflections on Truman’s Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age One advantage of retirement is having more time to read books.

For aficionados of nuclear history and nuclear policy, I highly recommend @wellerstein.bsky.social's compelling account of Truman's decisions at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. My reflections at the link. open.substack.com/pub/markwgoo...

It's just such a weird way to put it. Saying the quiet part out loud? I am not 100% against the idea of deterrence but to phrase it about hypothetical unthought thoughts is just very precarious. Usually they are not so explicit about its counterfactual nature...

I find this kind of counterfactual argument strange in the best of times, bizarre when offered up as some kind of reason to spend billions of dollars. "Do you know how hard they might be thinking about thing that they aren't right now if the world was different from the way it is?"

I have to say I find the last sentence the strangest logical construction — "prevents adversaries from contemplating attacks they would otherwise consider."

I mean, how would one prove that anything prevented someone from contemplating something they'd otherwise consider?

R.I.P. Frederick Wiseman. He had quite a career! His fly-on-the-wall documentaries are amazing and important ethnographic examinations of different kinds of American institutions, from ICBM officer training to primate research labs to hospitals and discussions about the end of life.

Impressively calm! And they really don't spend a lot of time thinking about the president, do they?

Occasionally one must do horrible things in this modern age

Imagine if Microsoft spent like 1% of the money and talent and labor that it is currently burning on AI on making Powerpoint easier to use, look better, etc. (I say this as someone who just spent an hour trying to get two graphs to transition between themselves in a half-way decent way...)

This is not even one of the bad ideas he is famous for. It is an obscure one! A whole new bad idea to lay at his feet. Guy was an all-star. Incredible.

I was trying to trace the origins of an obscure but briefly-influential but extremely wrong technical idea in the early 1950s relating to H-bombs and WOULDN'T YOU KNOW IT it seems like it was originated by... Edward Teller. I mean, really. This guy. THIS GUY. How does he do it. Amazing.

My sense is that most frameworks are just trying to solve much bigger and complicated problems. Or are trying to make it easy for people to make websites that all look basically the same so the developer doesn't have to worry about making a good UI. Neither of which really align with my goals...!

In his defense, this was on the USS Augusta, en route to the USA from the Potsdam Conference. I am not sure if it is even his office or not, or just a room they were using to record his statement.

(Also, having looked a lot of frameworks, I am convinced that anytime someone describes their framework as "powerful" what they really mean is, "it is shockingly easy to do certain specific things but to do whatever you need it to do will feel like trying to learn a new language entirely")

(But at least psychologically I find the problem of "how do I make this thing do what I want it to?" more interesting when I'm solving it my way, rather than grasping to figure out how some other person imagines I ought to solve it, esp. since their needs are never quite identical to my needs...)

(This is both a joke and not a joke. I concluded that what I really wanted was not a serious framework, just a quick way to create modular DOM element templates on the fly, and I might as well just do that with a few simple classes. Am I a fool? Perhaps, perhaps... time shall tell...)

Where I once had one problem, now I have O(c^n) problems.

Having spent a few days looking for an ideal Javascript framework for my purposes, I have done the sane, obvious, and unfortunately totally predictable thing and concluded that I ought to just write my own.

YouTube video by KateBushMusic Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights - Official Music Video - Version 2

This explains it pretty clearly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk-4...

Hitting the jackpot William Gibson's disturbingly plausible 21st-century slow disaster

I’ve been wanting to write about William Gibson’s “Jackpot” books, and the concept of "slow disasters" in general, for a while… and now I have, for DOOMSDAY MACHINES: doomsdaymachines.net/p/hitting-th...

I'm not sure who took this footage. They did document the operation both formally and informally.

ah, but you see, I am not trying to avoid conspiracy theorists when I shitpost about bad AI images of Truman

to everything, as they say, there is a season

Doesn't have to be a negative — could be a positive! But yeah, an original print goes a long way. They can degrade with time, however. Kuran does a lot of restorative work — he is an old-school SFX guy and knows what he is doing. The colors of his for example are heavily and carefully restored.

Peter Kuran (AtomCental on YouTube) definitely had access to better footage. Here's the clip from his HD version of Trinity and Beyond — still pretty low-res but you can make out the text, tell Ramsey is at far left, even make out Robert Serber at far right. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXV2...

Resharpening/remastering doesn't work if you don't have information to go off of. That's the issue with the "AI" tools — they are inventing information wholesale. The more they have to invent, the more the outcome is going to diverge from reality.

With this kind of thing you just need to have better source materials. These look like digitizations of VHS versions of original 16mm footage. Just inherently lacking.

The labs have been re-scanning a lot of old shot footage. No clue if they have versions of this to rescan, but perhaps....

oh, I did

somewhere in the nebulous space between Goldeneye for the N64 and the strange faces in Fallout 3

is joke, you see