The Islamic Republic of Japan attacked us!

Yes, the OAFPOTUS that no one in the Republican Party will ever call stupid and demented went off the rails in Ankara, Turkey earlier today. “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft carrier,” he said at one point. Then, while sitting next to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine, he twice referred to him as "President Putin." Of course, things started somewhat shakily when the OAFPOTUS landed in Turkey, as Turkish president Recep Erdoğan had to physically guide the befuddled 80-year-old toward the microphones and away from, it appeared, the jet engine.

But don't ever say the OAFPOTUS has frontotemporal dementia on top of his malignant narcissism!

Meanwhile,

• The OAFPOTUS has plans to allow financial firms to play games with your retirement money, because clearly you're just letting all that money sit there earning paltry returns.
• Matt Yglesias observes that " 'You voted for Trump because of legitimate concerns about Biden’s failures on immigration and inflation, and I hear and acknowledge those concerns, but Trump has betrayed his affordability promises and I can help' is a plausible message for winning over disillusioned Trump voters. 'You and the majority of your friends and family voted for a racist, K.K.K.-like fascist movement and now you need to repent' is really not."
• Put another way, "the simplest explanation for Platner is that the Far Left has awful judgment:" "This tale of wine-track Gen Z consultants falling in love with Platner seconds after staring into his deep blue proletariat eyes might be the most embarrassing story I’ve ever heard that doesn’t involve someone getting diarrhea on a zipline."
• I'll see your idiotic leftie and raise you a corrupt right-winger, specifically the public-school-educated former City trader advised by a bunch of former Tory politicians now running against the "establishment," Mr Nigel Wanker¹ Farage. (Jonathan Pie is hysterical today.)
• Corrrupt? How about Christianist as well? NPR's Leila Fadel interviewed Ayatollah Pastor Doug Wilson, religious adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose views are so close to the Taliban's that he has to remind us he hates Muslims just so we draw the distinction.
• France is under another heat alert as temperatures hit 43°C in Hérault, with wildfires reported and 25% of high-speed trains cancelled throughout the country.
• Chicago's Deep Tunnel flood control system (actually called the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan) got scarily close to 100% capacity earlier this week, and we're expecting more rain tomorrow. (The system is about 90% full right now, with about 38 billion liters in the two biggest reservoirs).
• The Uptown Theater is struggling to get funding to complete its restoration, despite my representative announcing his run for mayor in the building not even a week ago.

Finally, UK software engineer Steve Mitchell, who gave me a huge leg up on AI, recently put Claud Fable 5 through its paces. Fable completed a complex task requiring judgment and nuance that the lesser models simply could not do. "The difference was not that Fable typed faster. It held the entire system in its head and pushed back when I was wrong or in many areas, and addressed issues I was not even aware of." Anthropic has extended its promotional deadline to July 12th. What happens when Anthropic ends the promotion? As Steve says,

The disciplines are unglamorous. Write specifications so precise that a cheaper model can build from them; my expensive model’s real output this week was not code, it was acceptance criteria. Define roles, not heroes: my pipeline’s reviewer is a role with a model name in a config variable, and on Saturday that variable changes from one model to another and nothing else moves. Write notes for the weakest reader who might pick them up, because the day you are priced out, the weakest reader is you plus whatever you can still afford. Route work deliberately: judgment to the strong model while you have it, mechanical work to the cheap one always, and measure the tokens like the money they are.

I'll give it a whirl tomorrow. Just one hit, you dig, man? I won't get addicted...

Apropos the odious Farage forcing a by-election to try to avoid scrutiny of his questionable financial dealings, all of the main political parties have declared that they will not take part in the farce. Farage's only serious opponent will be Count Binface, a comedian who often stands in by-elections as a peculiarly British protest candidate. Bookmakers have shortened the odds of the Count actually winning, and there is even semi-serious discussion about how the House of Commons rules may need to be changed to allow him to wear his helmet in the Commons chamber. What a time to be alive, eh?

I was actually thinking about Count Binface taking a seat in Commons. I doubt they'd change the rules; he'd probably have to wear the traditional robes of our ancestors (i.e., a suit and tie).