How AI microsites reshape persuasion, urgency, and memory.

https://www.scrollthefuture.ai/

These AI microsites are not just web design trends. They are a new rhetorical genre: part research briefing, part activist playbook, part intellectual performance. They occupy an uneasy space between the slow caution of peer-reviewed science and the raw urgency of political campaigning. And because they are so visually polished, so editorially deliberate, they quietly shape what readers believe to be reasonable, probable, and inevitable.

In this essay, I want to trace the rise of the AI microsite. I will map its form and aesthetic. I will place it inside the wider patchwork of AI safety thinking where hard fact bleeds into forecasting, normative argument, and speculation. I will suggest that the microsite is not just how AI futures are explained: it is how AI futures are made plausible.

Finally, I will ask what it means for policy, for public discourse, and for memory itself when our most serious arguments are published not in journals or newspapers, but in artifacts as ephemeral, persuasive, and architected as these.

The Paperwork Reduction Act Created a Paperwork Explosion

https://reason.com/2025/04/16/the-paperwork-reduction-act-created-a-paperwork-explosion/

You might think that sharing stories about the positive, burden-reducing effects of user research would result in OIRA encouraging the practice. You might also think that demonstrating what's possible if burden reduction is really your goal—holistically considering and aligning all information collections, using wizards, thoughtfully reusing known information, ensuring systemwide address updates, and even better accounting for people's real names—would change how the PRA is implemented.

But it hasn't. A quiet attempt was made in 2014 to exempt "direct observation" from PRA authority, which changed no one's behavior. Ten years later, OIRA issued a memo, insisting it had been a fan of user research all along. But this memo is meaningless progress; you can see that agencies are still submitting user research plans for OIRA approval as of April 2025. This marks over a decade of internal battles for only one of the many improvements the PRA implementation desperately needs, with virtually no progress—and a great deal of harm—to show for it.

Changes from the inside didn't work. Chipping away at the margin didn't work. The PRA has to go.

Ultimately, Congress should repeal the PRA entirely. In the meantime, the current legislation includes pilot and delegated authority that would allow the OIRA administrator to declare that as long as agencies self-attest to testing their information collections with their end users, and streamlining information collection when possible—both of which the PRA's current implementation makes virtually impossible—then they are exempt from OIRA review.

There is tremendous danger right now that half the country views any activity in the current administration as something to fight against. This should not be one of them. The only proponent of the PRA is inertia.

On the faults of very online masculinity

https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1jzrtz7/both_sides_of_the_political_aisle/

The Town That Went Crazy for Crypto

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/business/rainbowex-crypto-ponzi-scheme.html

In San Pedro, Argentina, 16,000 people, a fifth of the population, signed up for a cryptocurrency exchange where everyone won. Until they didn’t.[...]

RainbowEx is a version of a scam that has popped up around the world, he said in a recent interview, using a nearly identical software platform each time. He’s found iterations in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America, where examples have surfaced in Alabama and Washington State. At least 200 versions are currently active, Mr. Eldritch said in a phone interview. Each has a different name and many have La China-like characters dispensing crypto instructions. In a now-expired variant in Italy, the La China persona was called Dolly.

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever#footnote-anchor-1-159719261

All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.

The Scammer’s Manual: How to Launder Money and Get Away With It

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/asia/cambodia-money-laundering-huione.html

Documents and insiders reveal how one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates.

How One Las Vegas ED Saved Hundreds of Lives After the Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History

https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-vegas-ed-saved-hundreds-lives-worst-mass-shooting-u-s-history/

The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local SWAT team, he’d thought ahead about how he might mobilize his department in the event of a mass casualty incident.

Ninety-five theses on AI

https://www.secondbest.ca/p/ninety-five-theses-on-ai

VII. Technological transitions cause regime changes

• Even under best case scenarios, an intelligence explosion is likely to induce state collapse / regime change and other severe collective action problems that will be hard to adapt to in real time.

• Government bureaucracies are themselves highly exposed to disruption by AI, and will need “firmware-level” reforms to adapt and keep-up, i.e. reforms to civil service, procurement, administrative procedure, and agency structure.

• Congress will need to have a degree of legislative productivity not seen since FDR.

• Inhibiting the diffusion of AI in the public sector through additional layers of process and oversight (such as through Biden’s OMB directive) tangibly raises the risk of systemic government failure.

• The rapid diffusion of AI agents with approximately human-level reasoning and planning abilities is likely sufficient to destabilize most existing U.S. institutions.

• The reference class of prior technological transitions (agricultural revolution, printing press, industrialization) all feature regime changes to varying degrees.

• Seemingly minor technological developments can affect large scale social dynamics in equilibrium (see: Social media and the Arab Spring or the Stirrup Thesis).

I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney

I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations. They paid taxes and were waiting for their green cards. Every year, the mother had to undergo a background check, but this time, she was told to bring her whole family. When they arrived, they were taken into custody and told their status would now be processed from within the detention center.

Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?

One woman had a 10-year visa. When it expired, she moved back to her home country, Venezuela. She admitted she had overstayed by one month before leaving. Later, she returned for a vacation and entered the US without issue. But when she took a domestic flight from Miami to Los Angeles, she was picked up by Ice and detained. She couldn’t be deported because Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees. She didn’t know when she was getting out.

There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.

Dissertation/Thesis Anti-Acknowledgments

https://tacobelllabs.net/@marlies/114126905143977450

Given it’s international women’s day, I’d like to encourage you all, but especially Dutch men to read these ‘anti-acknowledgments’ in a PhD thesis. This is not from somewhere else, it’s from Delft. And it’s not from the 1950s, but from the present. Unfortunately what academic life and culture in The Netherlands is still like. The author is just one of the few who actually spoke up about it, but there are many stories like it.

Her research grant mentioned ‘hesitancy.’ Now her funding is gone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/03/15/vaccine-hesitancy-nih-grant-money-canceled-shingles/

A medical researcher may have erroneously lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money because she was swept up in Trump administration efforts to ban studies of vaccine hesitancy and uptake.

Jed Wagner on Being the Sole Maintainer of the Veterans Appeals System

https://logicmag.io/care/jed-wagner-on-being-the-sole-maintainer-of-the-veterans-appeals-system

The Veterans Appeals Control and Locator System, or VACOLS, starts and ends with Jed Wagner. In the late 1980s, Wagner was hired as a part-time contractor by the Department of Veterans Affairs. He started single-handedly building the system that he was ultimately hired to work on full-time. Now, thirty years later, VACOLS is processing its last appeals, and when the system is sunsetted, he will retire.

Originally, the system’s primary job was to know the locations of the physical files of the 30,000 or so veterans who appealed their benefits decisions. Over time, VACOLS grew and became more complex as Wagner iterated and added modules like courtroom scheduling and video hearings. He would gather requirements directly from judicial review officers, judges, and administrators, deploy a prototype, get feedback, and deploy again—years before Agile became a popular approach to software development.

The Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 created infrastructure and funding for a new appeals system that hopes to resolve appeals in six months as opposed to three to seven years. In a pivot away from the old paradigm where one long-term employee spends their career caring for the system they built themselves, the new appeals system will be overseen by a termed employee and then handed off to the next termed employee after that.

We sat down with Jed at the end of May 2020 to talk what he built, and what’s next.

Was “data journalism” a failure? What went wrong at FiveThirtyEight @ Disney?

https://www.natesilver.net/i/148340021/was-data-journalism-a-failure-what-went-wrong-at-fivethirtyeight-disney

Phil B asks:

I would like to hear more about how Nate’s ambitions for data journalism have evolved since he started 538. What did “conquering the world” mean back then? What changed? Also, with the rise of US sports betting and mainstream sports media coming to terms with that fact, what does Nate think about the prospects for a more data-oriented approach in sports journalism?

Thanks for the question, Phil. This is already a long newsletter, and I was tempted to break this response out into a separate post rather than burying it here. But having multiple threads for SBSQ wound up being confusing last time. I’m going to warn subscribers that I may adapt this response for a standalone post in the future, though — it will go on the Rainy Day List.

The early days of FiveThirtyEight @ Disney, circa 2014-2016 and originally under the auspices of ESPN, was a period I consider unsuccessful despite being presented with a very generous opportunity. I think I made a lot of mistakes and I frequently think about what went wrong. FiveThirtyEight, in my biased opinion, developed into an excellent site by ~2018 (until Disney basically let us stop re-hiring open positions by ~2021, a sign of trouble to come). But those early years were rough, and I was unhappy, so here’s an inventory of Mistakes That Were Made — or really Mistakes That I Made — should any of you find yourself in a similar position

Lessons in Freedom From the Puritans

https://www.persuasion.community/p/lessons-in-freedom-from-the-puritans

The Puritans offer a cautionary tale of what we should and should not do in our own attempts to secure a more robust freedom. John Winthrop was completely correct that the freedom to do whatever we want does nothing to differentiate man from beast, and can cause society to degenerate into a war of self interest. In our contemporary moment, we have perhaps forgotten this important reality—veering heavily into a culture where everyone is submerged in an ocean of their own selfishness. If you walk up to the average person on the street and ask them what freedom is, they will likely say some variation of “doing whatever you want.” This understanding of freedom as license is appealing for obvious reasons, but it has led to a selfish, unhappy, and restless generation.

At the same time, the Puritans also warn us to be careful about how we correct the individualism of the modern age. Many who understand society’s ills move in the opposite direction—they see a listless civilization and argue that the only cure is harsh moral prescription. In truth, neither laissez-faire liberty nor reactionary morals are the solution to the ills that plague our society. We have to find a middle ground. After all, there would be no greater tragedy than vanquishing the despotism of the self only to plunge into the despotism of the collective.

Do tech workers have a reason to love monopolies?

https://alexgaynor.net/2025/feb/19/tech-workers-monopoly-and-monopsony/

This provides the possibility that for tech workers, their employers being monopolists may in fact be a best of both worlds situation.5 Tech workers benefit from their employers' monopolies because those monopolies produce excess profits from which tech workers can be paid substantial salaries, while also reducing the necessary quality of their work.6 At the same time, tech workers face effectively no risk of monopsony, and thus benefit from typical competitive dynamics with respect to their employment, while also not being significantly impacted by output reduction. A market with many buyers, where all of them have lots of cash, is a great market in which to be a seller.

Which means we may have an entire class of employees who have a structural incentive to want their employers to be monopolists.

DOGE Understands Something the US Policy Establishment Does Not: Technology is the Spinal Cord of Government

https://www.techpolicy.press/doge-understands-something-the-us-policy-establishment-does-not-technology-is-the-spinal-cord-of-government/

For the US Digital Service, broken websites or applications were often the tip of the spear that would enable us to go beyond the visible problem, and both understand and address the real problems that were in the invisible layers below it. Those problems might be the technical system itself—or more likely procurement, hiring issues, outdated or misinterpreted policies, convoluted business processes, or some combination of all of these things.

Technology (and implementation more broadly) has long been dismissed as an afterthought by policy experts both inside and outside of the government. Over decades, the US government systematically outsourced technology to the private sector through multi-billion dollar contracts. Today, government employees largely do not design or build products or systems, they “manage” implementation of systems developed by contractors or consultants.

In this formulation, technology is subordinate to the policy work, when the truth is that policy is inextricably entangled with technology. Separating policy from the technology it depends on has been a root cause of much of the dysfunction we have grappled with across government for decades.

Technology is not an extra thing that you add onto government programs and services—it IS the service. It’s not an extra thing that you add into the institution—it is the spinal cord of the institution. Sort of like how cars are no longer mechanical, they are now computers wrapped in metal. People working in tech understand this implicitly.

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rifling-through-archives-legendary-historian-robert-caro-180985956/

Caro laughs. “It’s not going to happen,” he says. “Because I’ll tell you why. Because it’s all outlined. It’s one book. His presidency is Vietnam and the Great Society. They’re not two different things. He’s doing Vietnam and doing the Great Society simultaneously. So the book is definitely one book. In this book, there’s an ending. I have my ending, and I have all the things leading up to it. It’s not just Medicare. In ’65, he passes Medicare, Medicaid, seven different education bills. Everything we think of: student loans, college construction, reforms the immigration bill and does other stuff. At the same time, he’s escalating the Vietnam War. It’s one story.” [...]

We talk some more about perhaps his most enduring theme: power. He’s all too aware of the truisms. “I don’t believe that power always corrupts,” he says. “Power reveals.” His work has shown, over and over, that as people fight their way to power, they often hide what they really think, who they really are. But once they have power, the truth—good or bad, ugly or admirable—inevitably reveals itself.

u/turd_ferguson7111 on the death of HVAC

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/1ir2xvn/advise_from_an_hvac_technician_to_homeowners/

A lot of the smaller shops that provided the type of service I was taught as an apprentice have disappeared. When I started in the late 90’s a lot of the owners were baby boomers. These owners started to want to retire in the early 2000’s and that’s when private equity began to buy shops up because they were essentially recession proof. With all the influx of money more people jumped in purely to profit. Then the cycle of private equity turning smaller companies into giant regional companies began. They charged unreal amounts to the customers and mainly preyed off homeowners ignorance and lack of patience. It became more about getting into a service call purely for maximum profit without real intentions of looking out for the customers. This lead to record profits and a trend just about every owner in my industry regardless of size jumped on. It became a money grab. [...]

I truly mourn the death of the industry I knew. Now I’m on my way out since I’m basically a dinosaur in this industry with my ethics. My ask to anyone who can answer what is a good industry for a guy with mechanical skills and ethics?

James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/04/rupert-murdoch-family-succession-james-murdoch/681675/

Lachlan had by now spent years building the case to his father that James was plotting a coup. In the fall of 2022, an unauthorized biography of Lachlan had been published in Australia containing an incendiary quote from an anonymous source about James’s purported plans: “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies.” When the quote made international headlines, Lachlan told Rupert that James’s camp was responsible. A few months later, in January 2023, the Financial Times ran a story detailing “how the scions could battle for control” of the family trust after Rupert was gone. Once again, Lachlan pointed the finger at his brother.

As it turned out, according to evidence that would later surface at trial, James had no involvement in either story—but Lachlan did. It was McKenna who had, with Lachlan’s approval, spent more than 14 hours giving anonymous interviews to the biographer. And Brian Nick, an executive at Fox, had anonymously briefed the Financial Times. (Nick denied providing information to the Financial Times.) But to Rupert, the stories only confirmed that he needed to act decisively.

[...]

Isn’t it true that Fox is the top cable-news outlet because it respects its audience and gives them what they want? the lawyer asked him.

I would disagree with the idea that respect and giving people what they want are the same thing, James countered.

But the lawyer didn’t seem interested in the distinction. Are you aware that Fox News lost a significant part of its audience when it called Arizona for Biden in 2020? he asked. James said he was. And you know that Fox won back most of that audience through its election-denial coverage, right? the lawyer said.

Milchick and the Ethical Plight of the Decent Middle Manager

https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1ip8uc1/milchick_and_the_ethical_plight_of_the_decent/

Most of my personal career has been as a supervisor/manager in warehouses, which is a much more blue collar atmosphere than Severance is depicting, so the comparisons only go so far, but I had a brief (BRIEF) stint working for a chinese-owned company that had expanded into having a few locations in the states, and most of their upper management came from their facilities in China and Thailand, which were legitimately sweatshops. All things it would've been great to know going in, but they massaged that truth quite a bit going in. Their employee base was largely immigrant populations, and given that this was Arizona, well, you can do the math there. Anyway, about a month in I was already looking for a way out and had a one on one with my direct manager who "had some concerns" with the way I was handling my department, namely that I was being too nice with them (i.e. we were hitting all production goals, but I was treating them like human beings too frequently, vis-à-vis bathroom breaks when requested and so forth). We spent like half an hour going back and forth with me not understanding what he was actually trying to tell me to do because he wouldn't just come out and say it and finally he just got this insane fucking smile and said "I need you to tighten the leash." I realized that it wasn't about the numbers. I mean it was about the numbers, but it's not about the numbers TODAY. It's about sustained numbers, and their ethos was that the only way to do that was complete and utter control. Dehumanization. Management is HERE, you are THERE, and I wasn't getting with the program. I left shortly thereafter.