NZNet Digest: Lawlessness as the New Normal
Plus: China gets OpenClawed; Should American Synagogues “Stand with Israel?" Are software companies doomed? Steven Pinker on Trump. And more!
Welcome to the third issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.
Yes, lots of Americans are finding fault with Trump’s war on Iran. But, laments Oxfam America’s Scott Paul to host Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast, their reasons tend to be disappointing:
It’s now the latest chapter in a series of events where either the US or Israel or Russia or some other state has announced that it’s going to do something internationally unlawful. And the arguments against it either haven’t materialized or have materialized along prudential lines. You know—“This is stupid” “This is costly” “This is going to not work out well for us”—as opposed to “This is wrong,” and “This undermines a pillar of world order that we all depend on to keep ourselves safe.”
…So we’re looking at a world where there really are—I know this is starting to sound cliché—but following this, following the Venezuela attack in January, the threats against Greenland, the blockade of Cuba, it’s starting to look more and more like a world that not only is less bound by rules but that doesn’t believe that it’s bound by rules anymore.
Derek Davison writes about Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council until his assassination by Israel this week:
Larijani was one of a small and shrinking cadre of civilian officials who could be said to have real authority in Tehran at present. I don’t think there’s much question that the IRGC is running Iran right now, but Larijani was probably the senior figure interfacing between it and the country’s political apparatus. He also likely would have been heavily involved in any attempt at ceasefire talks, which may be part of the reason why the Israelis targeted him. If one kills all the potential negotiators, it makes organizing negotiations more difficult.
Derek also notes that, while Israel is drawing headlines for its military strikes on Iran and Lebanon, less attention is paid to a recent surge of Israeli attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. He writes:
The IDF killed at least 13 people in multiple attacks across Gaza on Sunday, including two children and a pregnant woman. The previous day Israeli attacks killed at least five people in Gaza. The IDF seems to be targeting police officers in the territory, having killed at least 11 of them over the weekend, perhaps in an effort to prevent security forces connected to Hamas from becoming part of the police force that’s supposed to be established under the ceasefire. In the West Bank, Israeli forces gunned down a family (two parents and two children), then claimed that the parents attempted to ram a group of soldiers with their car. A settler mob attacked two Palestinian villages on Saturday and that violence is continuing on basically a daily basis at this point.
Andrew Methven writes the “Chinese phrase of the week” column for Sinica, and this week’s winner reflects an important trend in the world of AI. The Chinese, it seems, are experimenting prolifically with the same open source AI agent that many Americans are experimenting with: the famously pro-active OpenClaw. Methven’s etymological exegesis:
“Raising the lobster” (养龙虾 yǎng lóng xiā) is a newly coined expression which means training your OpenClaw AI assistant. Breaking it down: “to raise or keep” (养 yǎng), as in raising children, keeping pets, or nurturing habits; and “lobster” (龙虾 lóngxiā).
The lobster connection starts with the name and the logo. The project was originally called Clawd—deliberately similar to Anthropic’s AI, Claude. When Anthropic pushed back over the trademark, developer Peter Steinberger kept the lobster theme through a brief rename to Moltbot, before deciding on the name OpenClaw. The red cartoon lobster stayed as the logo throughout.
In China the lobster theme stuck, so the Chinese name became “crayfish”, or literally “small lobster” (小龙虾 xiǎo lóngxiā). Running your own OpenClaw became “raising a lobster” (养龙虾 yǎng lóngxiā).
The idea of “raising” implies how users need to feed their AI agents with tokens, train it with new skills, and monitor and improve performance. The AI requires ongoing attention like a pet which needs “feeding” (喂饲料) and “training” (调教), which are both essential phrases in the process of “raising the lobster”.
And this is exactly what so many people are doing in China right now — “raising their lobsters” (养龙虾)...
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker appears on the Glenn Show to talk about his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., which explores how the line between what is quietly known and what is publicly acknowledged can shape things ranging from small talk to revolutions. Asked by host Glenn Loury about whether the book is relevant to the rise of Donald Trump, Pinker offered this thought:
One of the things that Trump has done probably throughout his career, even as a business person, is that he sensed where there was a norm, a way of doing business—or politics, for that matter. It wasn’t literally enforced with punishment, but it was held in place by common knowledge. You don’t do it. Why don’t you do it? Well, because everyone knows you don’t do it. No one does it. And he would find that, like, if you’ve got a subcontractor who doesn’t have deep enough pockets to challenge you in court, if you refuse to pay him, then you don’t pay him. Decent people don’t work that way, but, knowing that he could get away with it, he did. He broke the norm. And likewise, when he switched to politics. … Every one of those things which was previously considered fatal to a politician, which existed, again, not because they were literally outlawed, just because common expectation—everyone knows you don’t do that—well, he did that. And by breaking the norm, he not only showed that it was nothing but a norm, but the norm then, since it existed as common knowledge, was or is in danger of unraveling.
Nothing Israel does could justify the actions of the gunman who opened fire on a synagogue in suburban Detroit last week, says Peter Beinart in a new video oped. “There’s a basic principle here. The principle is that Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or foreign organizations just because they share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race, with that state or foreign organization.” Beinart continues:
And—not but, but and—Synagogues in the United States should take down the signs that many have on their lawn that say, “We stand with Israel.” They should take them down, because those signs make the congregants less safe, and because they are immoral. ...They encourage exactly the same conflation between Israel and American Jews that we must resist…
Now, if it were morally correct for our synagogues to say in this moment, “We stand with Israel,” then I think you could make an argument that, even though those signs may make the congregants less safe, that it would be legitimate to do so. You could say that it’s even courageous for Jews in a synagogue to come together and say: We’re going to take a moral action that’s going to create some risk to our safety because it’s the right thing to do. But how could one possibly argue that this is the right thing to do in this moment? That it is morally right to put yourself at risk by conflating yourself with the Israeli government when the Israeli government is doing the things that it is doing now?
Some Wall Street analysts say that “vibe coding”—the AI-imparted superpower that allows even non-coders to build increasingly complicated software—could wipe out whole companies that now provide software services to other companies. These analysts may be wrong, according to a piece by Sachin Benny in the Substack Technically. Vibe coding reminds him of last decade’s Maker Movement, the burst of DIY hardware enthusiasm that promised to turn amateurs into manufacturers. He writes
The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.
You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping… accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.
Paul Bloom continues to have a pretty good excuse for the recent paucity of Small Potatoes posts. Namely: his small potato—the newborn daughter he’s caring for. This isn’t Paul’s first child, but—as he noted in an update we linked to last week—this time is different:
I’m not merely a dad; I’m an Old Dad. I won’t trouble you with my exact age (if you’re curious, look it up, you nosy perv), but I had my two sons when I was much younger. I loved being a father then, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to love it now, but this is plainly going to be different. Thinking about those differences—and what they tell us about aging, mortality, memory, and love—may make for a post or two down the line.
Noah Millman takes a close look at Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse’s much-discussed essay “Zionism For Everyone,” which argues that Israel offers a model of cohesion that could serve as a template for the renewal of societies all over the world. While Newhouse’s argument has drawn an enthusiastic response from many commenters on the right, Millman finds it unconvincing.
Millman suggests that maybe “plain old nationalism is all we’re talking about here, with the use of the word ‘Zionism’ being just a kind of rhetorical trapping.” He continues:
[T]he most obvious problem with advocating a nationalist revival is that the first round of nationalism was incredibly bloody, and continues to be so today; pay a visit to the Donbas if you doubt it. Contrary to the theory that the often violent birth of nations was a mere transition, nationalists have not generally been happy to tend their own gardens but often take a keen interest in those of their neighbors.
And then there’s this irony:
The whole point of the essay is that Newhouse thinks Zionism is a “technology” that is available to anyone. “Anyone” presumably would include the Palestinians. What might their version of Zionism—focused, necessarily, on the same land that Israeli Jews call home and that Jews around the world have prayed and yearned toward for millennia—be? And how might it be distinguished from the Palestinian nationalism that actually exists and that has motivated over sixty years of struggle against actually-existing Zionism?
On the NonZero podcast, British-Israeli analyst and commentator Daniel Levy tells Bob that the war on Iran will cause various nations, including longtime US allies, to consider investing their efforts in an alternative international order:
We no longer live in a unipolar world, and America has just demonstrated a degree of danger that it poses—unseriousness and unreliability—even to its closest allies that we need to construct a very different order. And part of that is you launched a war where, yet again, a lot of the backlash spillover effect is going to be felt by people who have no skin in this game. You know, in Vietnam they’re being told to go to work two days a week because they’re needing to conserve fuel. So you have the beginnings of, and the potential for, a much deeper food-fuel-fertilizer crisis that is going to hit people who are like, “Why the hell am I being hit because these crazies launch this war?”
Is vibe-coding over-hyped? Or, as those of us who abhor creeping redundancy in English usage would put it: Is vibe-coding hyped?
Not according to coder (and AI doomer, and host of the podcast Doom Debates) Liron Shapira. On an episode of the NonZero podcast he recounted his experience with Claude Code:
I’ve really just dived into this in the last few weeks, and just, long story short: I think I’m pretty much hanging up my title as a software engineer. My relationship to the software is very much like senior software engineering manager, where I have an army of roughly four software engineers. It’s as if I just got a budget of a million dollars a year to spend on four full-time software engineers who work for me, and check and code very quickly, doing exactly what I tell them to do. And [they] have excellent judgment, excellent speed, excellent breadth of knowledge. And it’s, like, better than hiring four humans…
I’ll write one sentence, like, ‘Hey, if you look at this file of code, I wrote it in 2023, some libraries have changed, can you rethink how to do it better?’ … And they’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, give me two minutes. Okay, here’s a plan.’ And it’s a full-page plan, and I’m like, ‘Oh, good plan,’ and then they’ll do it. And I’ll be like, ‘Well, good execution… One small question,’ and they’ll fix it, and then boom, Git commit, like, 500 lines of code change, looks perfect. That’s the experience of being a programmer today. It’s just truly insane.
The conversation will show up Thursday evening in the NonZero Podcast feed. But paid subscribers can watch or listen now (including the overtime segment, which will remain exclusive to paid subscribers after the rest of the conversation has gone public). Here’s the link: