For when rants trigger RCU stall detection

and my patience buffer overflows into /dev/null. The rants are technically supposed to be brief. And let’s be real, some system bugs deserve a full kernel panic’s worth of fury.

Reading the envelope

Reading the Substrate argued that analysis of conflict tends to read a story first and the ground beneath it late, and that the ordering is often backwards in its emphasis: ideas set a conflict’s direction, conditions set its reach. That was a claim using looking backwards, about explaining wars that have already happened. A fair question is whether the same method survives being turned around to face forward. If conditions set reach, can a reading of conditions say anything useful about what comes next? ...

A stylised map of a contested border region shown above a cutaway cross-section of the ground beneath it. The upper map shows clean diplomatic borders and labels; the lower section reveals a dry riverbed, a retreating glacier, cracked farmland, and a crowded hillside, with a thin line dividing the two layers.

Reading the substrate

By the time a clash in the central Sahel reaches a wire service, it has already been given its name: a jihadist attack, or ethnic violence between Fulani herders and settled farmers, with the dead counted under one heading or the other. What rarely travels with the dispatch is the thing underneath it: a rainy season that arrived late or not at all, a grazing corridor quietly ploughed under for cropland, a herd pushed a hundred kilometres further south than the route it followed a decade ago, into country that was never its own. The label arrives first. The condition that produced it, if it arrives at all, arrives as background colour. Between the two sits a gap, and what falls into it. ...

Legible

There have been and are prominant figures whose conduct is usually filed under unpredictability. The word does a lot of work, and most of it is concealment. Unpredictable is what an observer says when a pattern is present but a frame that would catch it has not been picked up. It describes the watcher, not the watched. The interesting question is whether a frame exists that turns the noise into something legible, and what such a frame would have to leave out to manage it. ...

The nuclear delusion

The nuclear analogy is at the moment the most popular frame for thinking about advanced AI, and it is the most comfortable one for the people who built the bomb metaphor’s home institutions. It carries an implicit theory of control: states hold the technology, deterrence holds the states, and a small club of capable powers manages the rest of the world’s exposure. That theory has a long pedigree and a familiar cast. It also, for Europe, leads somewhere worth noticing before the door closes. ...

Whose shield

A law arrives in the language of protection, positioned as a boundary between harm and those exposed to it. What can happen in these moments is less interruption than conversion. The existing practice remains. Its surface becomes clean, its paperwork complete. The activity is now recognisable, regulated, and formally permitted. Once upon a time The practice had been in place for centuries. A worker who left before a contract ended, refused an instruction, or simply failed to appear could be fined, have wages withheld, or be imprisoned with hard labour. A master who broke the same contract, or failed to pay, faced at most a civil claim for damages. Labour was bound. Departure was criminal. ...

Neither side of the canal

A friend who was at HackIT 2026 in Firenze sent me a photograph of a printed handout. Two pages, a bit creased, a faint smear of something on the second one. It was the material for a workshop called Imagining collectivity under oppression, run on the Friday afternoon in Sala M by two people going by Alecs and webbie. I did not attend. So I am reviewing a piece of paper, which is worth saying out loud: a workshop is the room and the people in it, not the script. Most of what follows is about the script. By the end, that gap might be the whole point. ...

Een toets heeft een stabiel object nodig

Bestuurlijke instrumenten beoordelen toestanden. Een toets, accreditatie of kader stelt vast of iets op een bepaald moment in de juiste staat verkeert, en ontleent zijn waarde aan de aanname dat die toestand stabiel blijft tot het volgende toetsmoment. Dat werkt zolang de eigenschap waar het om gaat berust op een stabiel object: iets dat zich laat aanwijzen, vastleggen en opnieuw onderzoeken. Veel eigenschappen waar beslissingen uiteindelijk over gaan, gedragen zich anders. Ze liggen niet besloten in een object, maar ontstaan in een proces, verhouding of gebruik. En die houden niet stil voor de meting. Dan komt een instrument niet tot een verkeerde conclusie, maar meet het een ander soort eigenschap dan de relevante. Niet omdat het slecht ontworpen is, maar omdat het aangrijpt op iets anders dan waar de relevante eigenschap ontstaat. ...

The part that stays strange

Any lens explains something. That is the problem with them, not the recommendation. Point a strong enough frame at a situation, and it will find its own pattern there, because a frame is built to find that pattern, and the finding feels like discovery rather than like the frame doing what it was made to do. So the fact that a lens explains a thing is almost no evidence that the lens is the right one. Every lens clears that bar. The question worth asking is narrower and less flattering: what does the situation still leave unexplained after the usual reading has done its work, and which lens, if any, picks that up. ...

A world map in the muted, slightly aged style of an old commercial atlas, deep greys and warm parchment tones, no bright colours. The landmasses are plain and understated, deliberately unremarkable. The eye is drawn instead to the chokepoints: a handful of narrow sea passages marked with subtle bright constrictions, like a ribbon pinched between two fingers, at the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb and Suez, the Panama Canal, the Danish and Turkish straits. Thin flowing lines of shipping traffic stream across the oceans and visibly bunch and narrow as they squeeze through each pinch point, thick and tangled at the straits, thin elsewhere. At several of these pinch points sits a small, discreet military marker, a simple anchor or star symbol with a faint defensive ring around it, showing a base or fleet holding the passage: one at Hormuz, one in the middle of the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia, one at the mouth of Bab-el-Mandeb near the Horn of Africa where several such markers cluster together uneasily, one at Panama. Over the landmass of China, a different marker: not a passage but a cluster of small refinery and smelter symbols glowing faintly, with dispersed thin ore-lines from Africa, South America and Australia all converging into that single cluster, showing the scattered sources funnelling into one processing hub. Across the Arctic top of the map, a faint dotted route curves over the pole, bypassing the pinch points below, marked discreetly as the northern passage, with a single marker of its own. In one corner, almost incidental, a few small human figures rendered very small and plain, standing apart from the grand map, suggesting the people downstream of the passages who never appear on it.

The map is mostly bottlenecks

The usual way of reading the contest over resources is to look at where they are. Whose ground holds the oil, the gas, the rare earths, the cobalt. On that picture power follows the deposit, and the country sitting on the richest seam holds the strongest hand. It is the picture behind a great deal of the current talk about resource grabs, and it is wrong in a way that the talk mostly misses. ...

A lone figure seated on an ornate throne-like chair at the centre of a grand hall, gripping the armrests with the confident posture of someone who believes the room revolves around them. The chair stands on a circular dais, but the dais is wheeled and slightly tilted, beginning to roll away unnoticed. All around, smaller groups of figures have turned their chairs to face one another in tight conversational clusters, forming their own little circles, none of them looking at the central figure. A few have already drifted toward the open doors, where soft daylight spills in. The central figure holds a length of rope that once tethered the surrounding chairs, but the rope is slack and the knotted ends have quietly come loose on the floor.

The centre that depends on the room

The usual way of reading power treats it as a possession. Someone holds the leverage or they do not; the troops, the money, the umbrella, the seat at the head of the table. On that picture the strong actor is the one who can hurt the others more than they can hurt back, and the others arrange themselves accordingly because they have no better option. It is a tidy model, and it is wrong in a particular way that takes a while to show. ...