This proverb didn’t really make a lot of sense to Young Andrew. Of course you can have and then eat your cake! You have to possess something to be able to eat it, right?

So: have your cake and eat it. Enjoy every bite. It’s your cake, and you have every right to eat it.

In fact, don’t eat other people’s cakes unless they give you permission, in which case the slice that you eat is your cake.

Of course, there’s more to the idiom or figure of speech or proverb. It ends with the word too:

Can you have your cake and eat it, too?

I mean, yes. You can certainly possess a cake and then also eat it.

I think what’s badly needed here is an update from have to keep. It isn’t that you never get to possess the cake you’re about to eat; it’s that you don’t get to keep the cake once you’ve eaten it.

Technically, though, you do get to keep it, or else you have to tell me when a cake stops being a cake. This is another Ship of Theseus.

Not every version of this proverb is this ambiguous.

Some time around 1610, John Davies of Hereford included this version in his collection of proverbs (with snarky commentary):

A man cannot eat his cake and have it still;
That may he, unless his retention be ill.

I love that Davies made the same joke as me, but 416 years earlier. He at least includes the word still there, though… but once you eat it, you technically still have it. If you puke it back up, though, it doesn’t count as having still your cake.

While have your cake and eat it is far more common today, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, Ted Kaczynski’s preference to use the less common eat your cake and have it too was one clue that ultimately led to the identification and capture of the Unabomber in 1996.

Now, pardon me while I have my coffee and drink it.

Sure, it was pronounced and written a little differently during Old English, circa 800-1100 CE. The word was written as treow, pronounced something like treh-oh.

Eventually, that -oh had to go. By Middle English, scribes were already spelling it t-r-e-e, although there were rival variants like tre and trew.

By the time of Shakespeare, it was out of fashion to end English words with an -eh sound, so -ee won out, and the rest is histor-tree.

Go back much further and you can see that truth and tree are really the same word. That is, they come from the same Proto-Indo-European root word.

The PIE root deru seems to have meant firm or solid, like a well-built house or the trunk of a tree. In the same way that Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French diverged from Latin, PIE roots diverged into multiple languages, and the word deru is a great example of this.

The divergence in meaning (the branching, if you will) took place some time before Germanic languages took hold in northern central Europe. One branch now clearly meant tree or wood, while another branch meant firm or sturdy… or true.

There’s truth in trees in another way, too.

Count the rings of a tree, and you can tell how many years it has been alive. This is because the tree grows outward, adding a new layer each year. The seasons change in predictable ways, so spring makes a lighter band and fall makes a darker one.

These tree rings tell more than just the amount of time that has passed, though. Wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and even cosmic events can be read by looking at tree rings. There are truths hidden in there that we could never know otherwise.

It’s tree, I swear!

These are good tricks to help you develop classic social skills, like not saying the words you know you’ll come to regret. Or: maybe you don’t know you’ll regret the words until after you say them.

What I’m touching on is often called emotional intelligence.

Interesting choice of phrasing there. From a certain perspective, emotions and intelligence seem unrelated, so calling someone emotionally intelligent seems like a strange way to put it. Yet, it’s obvious that you can’t get any real thinking done if your emotions are in the driver’s seat all the time.

What psychologists mean by emotional intelligence isn’t trying to suppress those emotions, though. It’s much more about not allowing the emotions to control your behavior, so you act rationally most of the time instead.

You need to feel the things you feel, and you need to understand that those feelings belong inside you! They’re useful signals telling you things about your situation, not dire anxiety-needles trying to kill you with cortisol.

Feeling those things is fine. Acting on a feeling before you think about what you’re about to do is the thing to avoid. This is where emotional intelligence steps in.

So, it’s being intelligent about your emotions. It’s having a productive relationship between your reasoning and your intuition.

I think it’s about even more, too.

Emotional intelligence means actually allowing yourself to experience that full range of emotions, even when things are a little dark. This means playing depression judo from time to time:

You need to ride with those dark emotions for a moment before trying to redirect your mindset. You almost have to be sneaky. Getting from the darker stuff to the more positive stuff can take some time, but I’ve learned not to rush the process, or it won’t work.

People aren’t intelligent about their emotions if they hide from them. These can be sad or dark feelings, or they can be knee-jerk emotions that make you respond to a situation foolishly.

Regardless, there’s a tightrope to walk, and a tug-of-war of opposing forces trying to mess you up all the time. One side pulls you toward burying or hiding from your emotions, while the other side yanks you toward acting instantly and rashly.

How do you, dear reader, balance these two forces?

Here’s John Adams:

John, I like your confidence here, even if it is badly misplaced.

July 5th is yet another great candidate for Independence Day in the Americas, though not the United States of America.

On July 5, 1811, seven provinces of Venezuela declared their independence from Spain. This wasn’t like the clean break from July 4, 1776, where all 13 colonies ultimately agreed unanimously on independence. Instead, three provinces would continue to exist as a part of the Spanish empire.

This was… messy.

It was the same battle of patriots vs royalists that had taken place in North America, but disunity made this much more like a civil war than a war for independence. Those loyal to the Spanish crown included many military leaders and local politicians and elites.

Just a year after declaring independence, the movement began to collapse. This was exacerbated by a massive earthquake in Caracas, the capital city, and the hub of the independence movement. The royalists really piled on the propaganda here, insisting it was God’s will that the royal crown be preserved—after all, it was God who had decreed that kings should rule, right?

The First Republic of Venezuela had officially fallen by August 1812, when royalists took control of Caracas. It had lasted just about a year.

This might seem like an inauspicious beginning, but I think it compares somewhat favorably to the struggle for US independence from Britain. For the first full year, it seemed utterly hopeless on the battlefields, where Washington ran from fight after fight, just trying to keep his troops alive and his army intact.

Although the initial wave of rebellion was crushed, the resistance movement kept coming back in waves. Over the next decade, the civil war reignited, ultimately leading to the creation of Gran Colombia, an even larger republic with Venezuela and other regions joining in something roughly akin to the United States of Northern South America.

Independence Day in the US is celebrated on the 4th, but declaring and having independence were two different things. Similarly, July 5th is when Venezuela’s Independence Day is celebrated, but it would take a decade before independence was won.

The truth is that resolve comes from Latin, where solvere means something like to loosen or to untie. Re- in this sense means going back, so resolving something would be loosening a knot (say) back to its unbound state.

I’m thinking about resolve because I’m thinking about Texas Hold ‘Em Poker.

If you’re playing with a group and you get a good hand, there’s a temptation to fold at the first sign of a significant raise. You won’t get a chance to take everyone’s money if you chicken out, and the other players know this.

Don’t get me wrong: there is certainly a time to fold when you’re sittin’ at the table. If you have a bad hand, doubling down and bluffing may well backfire. You’ve got to know when to fold ‘em, as the old song goes.

The more common mistake is when people don’t use their resolve. They never get to go back and untie their anxiety, so they become subordinate to it.

People are good at avoiding peril, and that’s a good thing! But there are times when it makes sense to stay in and take that risk with those pocket aces. There are times when it’s worth risking your life to try to kill that bison, since you might not see another bison for weeks and your family is hungry right now.

You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, too.

The thinnest of land bridges connects Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland. This geography has made Crimea both commercially valuable and strategically important, keeping it at the center of geopolitical struggles in the region for thousands of years.

The longest river is called the Salhyr. It has provided water to Simferopol, Crimea’s administrative center, for decades. The Salhyr provides a modicum of water for farming, but the river can shrink under dry conditions, and parts of it can even run dry.

Unlike the Nile or Mississippi rivers, the Salhyr has never served as a major trade route, nor has it been much of a natural defense or border for Crimea.

Empires haven’t fought over the fresh water that runs through Crimea, though. They’ve fought over the salty water that surrounds the peninsula. Powerful fleets and armies have fought over access to the Black Sea, including through the Turkish Straits—a vital waterway that opens up into the Mediterranean, where even more trade awaits.

Surely you can’t be serious, Striker quips.

I am serious, Dr R responds, and don’t call me Shirley.

Shirley Temple didn’t mind being called Shirley, but surely she didn’t appreciate the drink named in her honor. The Shirley Temple is ginger ale with grenadine and a cherry added in, so it’s incredibly sweet.

In fact, it was way too sweet for Shirley Temple herself, who took a company to court over the issue in 1988—not because it was too sweet, but because of the name. Soda Pop Kids had a new cherry-flavored bottled soda called Shirley T, marketing it as The Shirley Temple SoftDrink. Soda Pop Kids tried to defend the claim by saying it was like Xerox or Kleenex, and had become a generic term over the last 50 years or so.

Shirley Temple (the person, not the drink) won the court case, and now no drink sold in bars or restaurants is ever called a Shirley Temple! The end.

She really did win, though, and she sued others for trying to name things after her without her permission.

Shirley Temple wasn’t the only Shirley where the name was significant. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley, a husband and wife are trying to have a child, and they badly want a boy. When they end up with a daughter instead, they keep the original name they wanted: Shirley.

Prior to this 1849 publication, Shirley was actually considered masculine. It was generally a last name, but whenever it was used for a first name, it was usually masculine.

Don’t call me Shirley takes on an entirely different meaning.

Then, Herman Hollerith came up with a punch-card based machine—let’s call it a proto-computer—that was able to keep up with the increasing demand, and improvements in process and better machines kept up. By 1930, the population of the US had doubled and the census bureau was asking more questions, but the work was completed within three years instead of seven.

In other words, America now understood how to count its people, and it was becoming routine. Boring, even.

People wanted to know what those folks thought, not just whether they were men or what age they were. But how could you ask every American detailed questions? You really couldn’t—it just wasn’t practical.

What you needed was an ample sample. George Gallup set out to collect a calibrated set of answers that would give you an idea of what the huddled and not-so-huddled masses really thought of America, its politicians and policies, and life in general.

In 1935, he founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, where he began to publish some of his results. Then, in 1936, Gallup made headlines by correctly predicting the winner of the Presidential election, in spite of Literary Digest picking Landon as the winner (spoiler: it was FDR).

This was really significant. Literary Digest had a huge following, and an even huger mailing list. It sent out about ten million sample Presidential ballots and received millions of them back, and Landon was the clear winner. Gallup, by contrast, used a much smaller sample set that was much more carefully selected to represent the voting population in the US, not just subscribers to a magazine.

People really began to pay attention to Gallup, and they started to understand and believe in his methods. Gradually, they improved and became standardized and even institutionalized.

Asking a small group of the right people the right questions turned out to be more effective than asking a group of ten million people the wrong questions.

This is all and everything a token is to me. You put it into the machine and you get to play a video game.

This is me describing Aladdin’s Castle, my digital playground as an 80s kid. This arcade used tokens instead of quarters, and those tokens represented a quarter for the purposes of playing a single game.

A token is simply a symbol for something else. It can look like the thing it’s supposed to represent, or it can appear totally different—the important thing is that it stands in for another thing.

This was an ultra-simple stand-in for a quarter, but you can have stand-ins for just about anything. When we’re talking about generative AI, tokens represent bits of words, or even very common words themselves.

By assigning a preset value for specific combinations of letters, AI is able to do its thing. This tokenization process is crucial to getting a good outcome and having a powerful and effective large language model. Instead of looking at all possible combinations of letters and deciding which individual letter makes sense next, the model just picks the next word or word fragment.

Thank you, tokenization.

Have you noticed that there are two types of tokenization here? One is a stand-in for ownership or value, and the other is a stand-in for a combination of letters.

Both use a simpler or cheaper trinket (token) to represent the real thing. And, their worlds are about to intersect in a big way.

That Aladdin’s Castle-style token is a representation of value, while the computer/LLM token represents language. At their core, both are just representations of information, packaged in a more useful way. Are all language tokens the same, though? In other words, are they fungible?

This turns out to have a complicated answer. A two-letter bit of text that shows up all the time is a lot more useful than one that doesn’t. Still, the thing to do if you’re an AI company is to keep track of all the tokens a particular model uses, and charge you on that basis.

The tokens aren’t really apples to apples, but if you add them all up, it makes perfect sense in aggregate. If we each use 100 million tokens, they are very likely to use roughly the same amount of compute—assuming we are using the same model, mind you.

The individual word fragments start out like morsels of food in a stew, but once they’ve cooked for a bit, you just sell the soup by the ladleful. Similarly, you have a certain accounting fungibility now that your LLM model is a stew.

So now, tokens are being created to buy…. tokens.

Language tokens are bought with stablecoin tokens, which are themselves tokens for dollars… which are tokens for value.

During the 1980s and well on into the 90s, a certain word took on a like of its own. I didn’t grow up listening to Frank Zappa, so I missed out on the hit song Valley Girl, where his 14-year-old daughter Moon uses the words like, totally, and even bitchin’ as a part of her casual vernacular.

While Valley Girl lit the fuse, Jeff Spicoli was probably my first experience with a surfer bro motif, the sibling to the Valley Girl dialect. Spicoli only uses the word like as a placeholder a few times in the movie, but the pairing with his stoner mindset and way of life is important and iconic.

…so, like, when Jefferson went before the people what he was saying was, ‘Hey, we left this place in England because it was bogus…

Incidentally, I had access to Fast Times on LaserDisc during the mid-80s. I may have picked up more than my share of dialectal quirks from this film.

Still, this was nothing as compared to Wayne’s World. The natural anchor point here is 1992 when the movie was released—Bohemian Rhapsody, anyone?—but the real origin for me is their first SNL skit from 1989. Garth opens:

Okay, like, welcome to ‘Wayne’s World’!

Wayne and Garth aren’t from California, so that’s notable too. The dialect had spread far and wide by the early 90s, well outside of the West Coast and into middle and high schools, like, all over the US. Wayne’s World was both a symptom and a vector.

Many linguists point to Clueless as the capstone of this saga. Up until 1995, it felt like you didn’t really have permission to, like, use like like that. This film showed what appeared to be a typical, flat valley-girl trope who defies expectations to ultimately reveal a highly intelligent and empathetic person we come to appreciate and admire by the end of the film. Her rise and the rise of the word like in popular conversation seem somehow tied together.

This is, like, only one part of the story, of course. Like as a placeholder goes way, way back—anyone in the comments want to take it from here?

If your employer really likes you, you’ll get paid. If not, you’ll probably turn to a life of crime, but there’s a good chance you’ll get caught since Big Brother is watching and listening all the time.

This was no sci-fi novel, but instead a part of my job as a paperboy.

My mentor was a local kid who had something I did not: a modicum of street smarts. I listened and learned:

Carrie taught me not only how to deliver the papers throughout the neighborhood (they went on the edge of the porch, never into the mailbox) in a thoughtful manner, street by street so the route was efficient; she also taught me how to walk up to houses, one at a time, and ask for money.

We had a script, too:

Hi! It’s voluntary pay week for the Richland Northeast Newspaper, and I’d like to know if you’d like to give a dollar.

I was tenacious enough at this to win a major award from the newspaper, and I made more money by asking for it than I did by assembling and delivering newspapers to houses. This was reinforcement of the idea that I might be able to earn more if I did uncomfortable things (like asking for money), or if I worked much harder.

Still, this euphemism really sticks with me, but I get it: beg-for-your-pay week doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

You have some kind of crime somewhere that’s hard to police with traditional means of law enforcement, so you put up some kind of 24/7 camera there on the street corner. One camera is able to deter some crime, but what about a dozen cameras? How about hundreds?

Why not monitor everyone’s social media feeds to see if they’re doing anything dangerous, like speaking out against the government? Heck, why not see if you can hack into their emails and texts, and read everything they’ve ever typed to another person?

We’ve got to keep society safe, you see. There’s no cost that’s too high, and this is all inevitable if we put that one security camera up.

This represents two different types of slippery slope arguments. There’s the rational chain-based idea that implies that one camera may well lead to others, and that could lead to government overreach and privacy violations.

Then, there’s the slippery slope argument that thinks it has the football and runs all the way down to the end zone before realizing it does not have the ball.

Thinking in possible outcomes is a lot better than visualizing one certain outcome and fixating on it. A good slippery slope argument can open minds to possibilities that hadn’t been considered. A bad slippery slope argument can close minds to all possible outcomes but one.

Burp.

The words index and indicate share a common Latin root: indicare, meaning to indicate or point out something. That in- prefix doesn’t mean inward or inside, but instead more like toward. Dicare means to declare something. Put them together and you get a word that means to verbally point at something.

Open up a nonfiction book and you’ll see an index near the end. Indexes help you find things. In this case, you can locate important concepts or names discussed in a book by scrolling down alphabetically, so if you know what you’re looking for, you can find it in the text of the book quickly. This is way better than guessing based on the table of contents.

If you’re indexing, you might be making the index of a book, but that’s probably the way you’re least likely to hear the verb form. Instead of trying to figure out which stocks to buy, an index fund will just buy all of the stocks that are in a particular index like the S&P 500, usually with the same proportions (weighting). This activity is often called indexing in financial markets.

Similarly, wages can be indexed to inflation. This means you would get a cost of living raise when prices rise, at least according to some periodic schedule like once a year.

Whether someone is indexing by organizing a list so you can find things quickly or weighting a fund according to the S&P 500, that verbal index finger is pointing underneath the surface.

Old Yeller is a beloved family dog who gets bitten by a rabid wolf while protecting the family. Yeller gets rabies himself. Travis, the young son who has fallen in love with the dog, has to shoot him at the tragic end of the book.

Like I said, maybe it’s okay that you never read this one.

Anyway, after learning the basics from Old Yeller about 40 years ago, I figured it’s time to advance my knowledge a bit with some rapid rabies research.

The word rabies comes from the Latin word rabere, and so does the word rage. That makes sense, since the symptoms of rabies include… well, rage.

You don’t instantly turn into a zombie, though. First, nothing at all happens for weeks, and sometimes even months. Rabies quietly does its work under the surface, making its way through your nervous system and into your brain.

At some point, your bite wound may begin tingling or itching, even though it seems to have healed. This is when the flu-like symptoms begin, like a fairly typical illness you’ve already seen or experienced yourself.

Here’s where the old name for rabies, hydrophobia, becomes obvious. You don’t want to drink any water, and when you force yourself to try, your throat painfully spasms. Your brain is now in a state of confusion and agitation. This is when hallucinations begin, and your sense of reality begins to break.

Zombie time!

Here’s the good news: getting rabies hasn’t been a death sentence like this since Louis Pasteur successfully treated a child who had been bitten by a rabid dog and would almost certainly eventually turn into a zombie. This was 1885, and access to Pasteur’s life-saving treatment has expanded ever since then.

Even still, if the clinical signs of rabies I’ve described above show up, you’re probably going to die of rabies. The other side of that coin is that simple wound cleaning and vaccine doses before any symptoms begin are almost always effective. The key is speed, supervision, and follow up.

It was the 16-bit Super Nintendo era, and I was exploring various video game titles during whatever free time I had available. There was a pro wrestling game that had announcers commenting on the match, and one of their comments was: It’s a total debacle! Research tells me this was probably the voice of Vince McMahon.

I was playing the game and was curious about a word, but smartphones hadn’t yet been invented, so I couldn’t just ask Google what that meant. I pretty much forgot about it until the next time I heard it, and context took care of the rest.

This will not shock you, but we need to go back to the time of the Romans to examine the etymology. In Latin, baculum means something like a staff or a rod. Old French made it into a verb, bacler, which meant to bar something like a door. Think of the staff, now being used as a door bar.

If you want to undo something in French, you put dé- in front of the word. Dé-bâcler would then mean to unbar or unlock something, or to let something flow in or out. By the late 1600s, débâcle finds itself on frozen rivers in France, where ice would sometimes suddenly break and give way to rapidly, unexpectedly flowing water.

This idea of unbarring or moving an obstacle out of the way is part of the modern meaning of debacle, but it’s not just that the proverbial water starts to flow once you move the ice out of the way. It’s that there is a sudden release of pressure that has built up for a long time, now being released into the wider world.

Suddenly, all the chaos of the mosh pit is spilling out all over onto the ballroom dance floor.

It’s a total debacle!

Billed as the American answer to the Eiffel Tower, this giant steel wheel had been designed by George Ferris, a serious steel engineer. Ferris had almost certainly seen 50-foot wooden roundabout wheels like the ones installed at Coney Island and Atlantic City, but what he envisioned would not merely entertain. It would cause the whole world to stop and take a look.

We’re talking 264 feet tall, with 36 cars, and up to 60 riders in each car.

Was this really a spinning, rotating Eiffel Tower?

Not literally, no—the wheel was only about a quarter as tall, and the Eiffel Tower was made of iron, not steel. Still, this was truly impressive: Ferris had created a monumental machine. This was not like some giant castle with a drawbridge attached, but instead the entire thing was a machine itself.

It simply wouldn’t do to call these new steel contraptions pleasure wheels—they needed a new first name. George Ferris’s last name was the logical choice.

There have been a handful of times when someone’s name became attached to an existing invention or product, and that name has become famous around the world. Teddy Roosevelt lent his name to the teddy bear, even though he didn’t invent stuffed animals. John Mason didn’t invent glass jars with lids, but mason jars bear his name for good reason.

Likewise, George Ferris didn’t exactly invent anything new, but he did something that caused the world to stop what it was doing and take a look.

Michelle, ma belle
These are words that go together well
My Michelle

With this Beatles’ song, it’s all about language. The singer wants to tell Michelle that he loves her, but he only knows a few words in French, so he keeps saying them over and over again to her.

The minor chord tonality really amplifies this feeling of discomfort. You know this feeling well if you’ve ever been desperate to say something to someone else in another language, but you can’t.

The phrase “My Michelle” features prominently in this song, but the song itself is called Michelle.

Guns N Roses have a song centered around someone named Michelle, but their song is called My Michelle.

Your daddy works in porno
Now that mommy’s not around
She used to love her heroin
But now she’s underground

Okay, we’ve clearly moved on from middle to high school thinking here. Paul McCartney’s narrator simply attempts to tell his girlfriend that he loves her, and that suddenly seems quaint by comparison.

Axl Rose wrote the lyrics about Slash’s school friend, Michelle Young. Michelle had become close with the band over the years, and had joke-complained to Axl that nobody had ever written a song about her. What ultimately resulted was gritty, raw, and real.

Fortunately, there’s a remedy that fixes the entire situation: gesturing at them with your middle finger up.

Okay, maybe it only feels satisfying for a few seconds, and then you’re still stuck in that same situation—only now, the other driver is utterly infuriated.

This potent symbol of utter contempt for someone or something has been around for a long time, although the meaning through various cultures has changed. Take the ancient Romans, who called the gesture digitus impudicus (“shameless finger”). This was tantamount to an erect penis, so you can get a sense of how quickly things might escalate if you flipped someone off in the Colosseum.

Does the gesture go back further than Rome? Certainly to at least the ancient Greeks, where Diogenes pointed at Demosthenes by extending his middle finger, and people pointed out how aggressive it already seemed to them.

Why the middle finger, though?

Well, for most people, it’s the longest of all your fingers. It’s an incredibly important digit: you can probably write something legible if you have your thumb and index finger, but the middle finger provides very deliberate support.

It’s kind of like the central finger, with two others on each side. It’s sort of like the king of fingers, at least if your hand was the chessboard. If you want to feel really cool when swing music starts to play, you typically allow the friction between your thumb and middle finger to begin to give way, forcing your middle finger to smack against the palm of your hand and ring finger—and making a snap.

Even physics has a good middle finger story. When Galileo had been buried in 1642, his corpse was placed in a modest grave in Florence. This is because he had been judged vehemently suspected of heresy after claiming that the Earth went around the Sun in space, and not the other way around. The Church wasn’t particularly interested in the overwhelming evidence, so Galileo was confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

By 1737, things had changed. A much better climate for science vis-a-vis the Church had coalesced, and it was finally clear that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. It was time to give Galileo a final, proper resting place inside of a monumental tomb built just for the occasion.

Unfortunately, moving a century-dead corpse meant that things might break off—or be broken off. Galileo lost three fingers and a tooth during the transfer, and wouldn’t you know it, one of the fingers was his middle finger. One opportunistic relic hunter was Anton Francesco Gori, who was something of a historian in Florence. He’s the one who ended up with Galileo’s bird, though it was ultimately displayed at a museum when Gori died.

I have read a lot of breathless headlines like these over the years, but usually the AI story goes away before the national security story does. Mythos was the first time this wasn’t the case.

Suddenly, it seemed like every system in the world was now vulnerable to hacking. Unlike previous AI models that had become good at exploiting specific vulnerabilities, this model went about discovering openings relentlessly—and cleverly.

Exactly how big of a deal this was became clear when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called an urgent meeting with the CEOs of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup to Washington. Here in this closed-door meeting, the CEOs were told directly of the imminent danger now posed to their existing security systems.

Suddenly, worried readers thought, your 401(k) might not be so secure any more. Yikes!

It was soon after that the government took the unprecedented step of effectively banning the model from all use, at least temporarily. If the urgent meeting between the government and the banks didn’t get everyone's attention, this certainly did. No other AI model had been pulled from the shelves like this. Paying US customers who had previously had access were now denied.

The government hadn’t technically banned Mythos, but merely suspended foreign-national access to the model. However, since Anthropic claimed it couldn’t be sure it was complying with this user-by-user approach, the company simply disabled Mythos 5 and Fable 5 for all customers.

Many observers thought that Anthropic was paying an unfair price for its apparently principled stance on what their tools should be used for. CEO Dario Amodei had been a vocal critic of AI for surveillance, and Anthropic had consistently refused to remove safeguards on their models at the request of the government. This seemed to contrast other AI leaders who were more willing to comply with these types of requests.

Anthropic had already been designated a supply-chain risk, and now a model had been effectively banned from public use.

There is also the matter of the government ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic. Many argue that this was in response to the politics of Amodei and little else, so it looks like a punitive action by an overreaching government.

This is all eerily familiar to me.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, was on top of the world just a few years ago. Alibaba was a bit like the Amazon of China: tech heavy, automation centered, and with a strategically important cloud computing business. Ant Group was a finance spinoff from Alibaba, with Alipay as its crown jewel. It was now worth several hundred billion dollars in its own right.

On October 24, 2020, Ma was a keynote speaker at a major finance summit in Shanghai. He was scathing and unflinching in his criticism of what he saw as an old order, inhibiting innovation and growth with a “pawnshop mentality.”

Now, I wasn’t terribly surprised when Dario Amodei began criticizing the US government loudly. This was very much not the case when I first heard of Jack Ma voicing his discontent with the direction of the Chinese Communist Party.

It didn’t take long for them to act.

Less than two weeks later, Ant’s planned IPO—planned as one of the biggest IPOs in history—was halted by Chinese regulators. The valuation of Alibaba crashed rapidly.

Then, Jack Ma disappeared.

For months, there were no public reports of Ma anywhere. Rumor mills churned overnight, speculating that he had been killed in order to silence him, with online jokes reminiscent of Russia’s tall building problem.

Eventually, Ma resurfaced with a much humbler outlook, and a much poorer portfolio. Many thought he was lucky to walk away with his life.

In western Europe, there was really only one type of church, and they all ultimately answered to the Pope in Rome.

This was the scene when Martin Luther began his scathing criticism of the Church power structure, especially the way money was being used to reduce punishment for sin.

To Luther and his students at the university, this corruption was utterly unacceptable. This was their church, after all, and there was only one of them…. for now, anyway.

This famous schism wasn’t the first in Christian history, although it was arguably the widest fracture. Ultimately, Protestants today—Luther’s theological descendants—make up more than a third of all Christians worldwide.

Nevertheless, the Great Schism from nearly five centuries earlier rivals the Protestant-Catholic split in terms of importance. The year was 1054, and things were getting heated between the west and the east. Rome claimed authority over all of Christendom through the Pope, who was clearly God’s main representative on Earth… or was he?

This was a central argument behind the split, and it certainly didn’t help that people in the east spoke Greek while those in the west spoke Latin. Constantinople’s view was that the Pope was a really cool dude who deserved an elevated status—the first among equals, as later described—but obeying his commands without question? That wasn’t something those in the East could accept.

This also wasn’t the first division like this. In fact, division within religion has a long history.

Some 3000 or 3500 years ago, this idea that there was one supreme being above all others began to form. This coalesced and sharpened into the idea that there was only one god, not a multitude with one powerful god at the top.

Naturally, this idea did not remain unified forever. Monotheism was durably codified into Judaism, and eventually Christianity splintered off from Judaism. Islam drew from those same earlier Abrahamic traditions while arguing that the other two religions had strayed from the original message from God.

Eventually, these movements splintered into sects and denominations, and most of those denominations have gone on to split into sub-denominations and sub-sub-denominations.

This long division of religion is ongoing today.