Ioan Trifu

Une brève intervention dans la revue de presse internationale de France Culture à propos de ce récent papier que j’ai écrit pour The Conversation. Une occasion de faire un pas de côté à propos du fonctionnement des médias au Japon.

www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

bsky.app/profile/cesa...

Opinion | Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?

There's a lot to unpack, digest and consider here, though some of the solutions they suggest seem unworkable.

But it's striking to me that they dismiss @aoc.bsky.social as "AOC at the Met gala," when she is actually an example of a working-class candidate with great communication skills who wins.

Forum in Contemporanea on Tony Judt’s Postwar at Twenty www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1409/...

From Wikipedia: Buried machinery in a barn lot; Dallas, South Dakota, May 1936

From Wikipedia: Heavy black clouds of dust rising over the Texas Panhandle, Texas, c. 1936

Do people in the #envhist #envhum community know of especially good writing about the Dust Bowl using an ecocriticism lens? I'm thinking I should add a week on just that if I ever expand the ecocinema class to take up a full 15 week semester.

Dr. Nicholas Miller put together this edited volume and marvelous human being @nabibabi.bsky.social was sweet enough to want to write a chapter together, about #Seventeen (and specifically #손오공). The book is out early 2026, and it's available for pre-order now.

LDP and JIP agree on coalition, clearing path for Takaichi to become PM The tie-up is expected to see Japan Innovation Party lawmakers vote for LDP President Sanae Takaichi in Tuesday’s parliamentary vote for prime minister.

BREAKING: LDP and JIP agree on coalition, clearing path for Takaichi to become PM www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10...

Linking social infrastructure and social capital: Barangay halls and basketball courts as cornerstones of community resilience Social infrastructure – spaces where social relationships are formed and maintained – plays a vital role in shaping disaster resilience. This study ex…

Social infrastructure, a.k.a. the spaces where people relationships are formed & maintained play a vital role in shaping #disaster #resilience. Read how different types of social infra influence the creation & mobilisation of social capital in disaster contexts.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#SkyStorians, question: are there small pots of money out there for non-affiliated historians to apply to to support their research project? Most of what I can find are full postdocs or small grants for people in a post to buy them out a bit.

With jobs going, some more of those funds would be good?

Former PM Tomiichi Murayama dies at age 101 Murayama, who led a coalition government from June 1994 to January 1996 as the leader of the Japan Socialist Party, died on Friday in his native Oita. He was 101.

BREAKING: Former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, who led a coalition government from June 1994 to January 1996 as the leader of the Japan Socialist Party, died on Friday in Tokyo. He was 101.

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Excited to dig into Hannah Shepherd's new book, out in December from UC Press:

www.ucpress.edu/books/the-na...

Man I really love your economic takes but as someone who has invested a ton of time in understanding these things and came out of it thinking they suck, I'm surprised you're coming at it like this. Disappointing!

A handful of users abused the system so all are getting punished. This isn't about a few high-usage users. The reality is that approximately 22.5% of our users are consuming 20x what they're currently paying us. This isn't sustainable for us to continue delivering the quality service you expect. We have built some very powerful tools and we don’t want to impose artificial limits on what’s possible, but we do need to be able to charge in proportion to the use customers are getting from our platform. Developers are always going to push their tools to their limits, and we encourage that — and we need to be able to charge for it appropriately, too.

You only care about professional developers. Our core focus is on building the best AI coding agent for professional software engineers and their teams. If people outside of that group are finding value with Augment, they are very welcome to use the product, but we’re not prioritizing features or solutions that non-developers might need, and frankly, there are plenty of vibe coding/low code/no code solutions available on the market that will better serve those customers. You are just squeezing money out of us at 20x margin. 20x margin sounds great, but isn’t the reality for AI tools: the vast majority are running at a loss, including us, while we work to build sustainable, long-term businesses.

Jesus christ. AI coding platform Augment code had to jack up prices because 22.5% of their users were spending 20x of what they paid, and even after raising the prices, they're still running at a loss.
reddit.com/r/AugmentCod...

Sora is a paper machete. It is low-quality, impossible to make consistent or reliable, while also being incredibly expensive to run. Every single “good” video you’ve seen is cherrypicked from dozens of terrible ones to make you feel scared that this can create entire movies’ worth of content.

Noted militant left-wing rag, The Financial Times...

This single story is worth the cost of my year's subscription to
@wired.com

This video of reporters flooding out of the Pentagon after refusing to sign Hegseth’s authoritarian pledge that would force them to have the DOD review all their articles before publication is one of the most satisfying things I’ve seen in a while

Screenshot of a Facebook post featuring three of the Portland protesters wearing inflatable frog costumes with the following text: Episcopalians on Facebook Elizabeth Rose Elrod • 22h • Exodus 8:2-6 "But if you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs... The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your officials."

you fucked around and now the Episcopalians are doing memes. are you happy now. are you

Vintage black and white photo of a young girl holding a toy and standing next to a stuffed animal, set against a patterned backdrop.

16 October 1938 | A Hungarian Jewish girl, Klára Boda, was born.

In July 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.
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A short video showing the ruins of gas chamber and crematorium III: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ipQmBPAlJQ8

BBC headline - Titan submersible inked sure to poor engineering, say US officials - above an image of the submersible in happier times, eg when it hadn't yet imploded and turned its occupants into a seawater-flavoured paste.

"Titan submersible imploded due to poor engineering, say US officials."

Also experts, amateurs, people consigned to asylums for congenital lunacy, people who've never heard of submersibles before, a tortoise called Alan and literally anyone else hearing the vaguest description of it.

A meme with a character from Watchmen whose name I can’t remember, saying: It is 1982. I am one year old. Tron bombs at the box office It is 2010. I am twenty-nine years old. Tron bombs at the box office It is 2025. I am fourty-four years old. Tron bombs at the box office

This meme made me laugh.

自民と維新、基本政策の一致確認 消費減税、企業献金は継続 　自民党と日本維新の会は16日、連立政権樹立に向けた政策協議の初会合を国会内で開いた。維新が提示した12項目の柱からなる政策要求のうち、憲法改正や外交・安全保障、エネルギーなど基本政策の一致を確認し ...

自民と維新、基本政策の一致確認 消費減税、企業献金は継続

Jeremiah Garsha - The Skull in the Versailles Treaty

Chief Mkwawa, Human Remains and the Violence of Empire

À paraître en août chez Hurst

"MINUTEMEN" P. O. BOX 68 NORBORNE, MISSOURI AdditiónAl INFORMAtIÓN: AND I hAVE BEEN ACTiVE IN Pohitics AND the ANTi-COMMUNiST MOVEMENT SiNCE I WAS 14 pEnAS oF AGE, How did my iNtEREst StrAt? My FAthER is violeNthy ANti-Jaw, NEGRo, AND Communist, I KNEW At thAt timE whAt A NEG-Ro, WAS AND WhAt A NEW WAS, but the CommUNisT puzzlEd mE, My FAthER RAVE ME MARI AND LENiN TO READ... I JOINED (AtI4) the yoUnG REpuBlicANs than YouNG AmERiChNs FOR Freedom, thAN the PitRick HenRy Group, there the John BikcH Society, And Finally the Minuterson, My HisH School yongs found me totally. ShandeRed by othER pupils (2700 iN M.S.) DECAuSE oF my ANti-cOmmuNist LECtURES AND MY VIEWS dURiNE dEBAtES. my psycholosy And Sociohony chnsses left. mE discusted, AND WhAt I didNe dEsm "KosHER"I usuAlly dEt my tenchERs know, ABOUT. THE dEbRE OF INFiLtRAtIoN by COmm- WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER OVER,

A testimonial of a Young Republican from the 1960s who quickly found his way into a heavily armed, right wing domestic terror group called The Minutemen.

"The Anonymous Animal: (Not) Naming and (Not) Knowing in the Anthropocene" by Whitney Barlow Robles, in our Special Issue: 'Animals and the History of Natural History'
online.ucpress.edu/ah/issue/1/3

There is no conceivable argument that these ships, even if we assume they were carrying narcotics, could not be dealt with in some other way. I think we can just drop the caveats and say: This is mass murder.

Ministry of Unification Restores Inter-Korean Dialogue Units Ministry of Unification Restores Inter-Korean Dialogue Units Human Rights Office, Abduction Team Dissolved; Workforce Expands to 600

I'm not sure why anybody should take the Unification Ministry seriously if Korean politicians won't. Its absurd that the Yoon administration dissolved bodies for inter-Korean dialogue. Its absurd that the Lee administration is dissolving bodies for human rights.

www.chosun.com/english/nati...

Vintage black and white photo of a young child seated on a wicker chair, holding a stuffed toy lamb.

14 October 1938 | A French Jewish boy, Serge Max Borstcher, was born in Paris.

In August 1942 he was deported to #Auschwitz and after the selection murdered in a gas chamber.
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A short video about the first two gas chambers created near Auschwitz II-Birkenau: https://youtu.be/Rr6lF75fDmU

Texas State upholds the firing of associate history professor Thomas Alter Alter’s termination occurred on Sept. 10, stemming from his remarks at the Revolutionary Socialism Conference on Sept. 7.

I just learned, Thomas Alter, tenured professor, has been terminated effective immediately. Shame on Texas State! We mst build support for Tom. spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-tex...

"But the rejections remain hidden, forming a shadow CV of declined manuscripts, unfunded proposals, and invitations that never came. Rejection, however, isn’t the exception in this profession. It’s the norm." 👇👇👇