Linkage

• DC Library holds taking forever? You're not alone. (51st News) Baker & Taylor, the largest book distributor to libraries in the United States, has gone bankrupt.
• Institutional Rot And The Death Rattle Of America (Off Message) Money quote, "Republican politics has become like Jackass, where degeneracy is a contest, and they applaud one another for new innovations in the field. They revel in vice. They go to the cameras, compete to tell the most outlandish lies, then pat each other on the back like players celebrating in the dugout." 
• No one wants a permanent gerontocracy (Cory Doctorow) The URL reads, "It's not OK, Boomer." :Public office should not be elder care.
• Real-life Snuffleupagus found swimming in the Great Barrier Reef  (Popular Science) The similarity is striking.
• CEO Receives Violent Threats After Kicking Off AI Layoffs (Futurism) Afflicting the comfortable is a good thing.
• Crypto Security Pioneer: 'I Now Consider All of DeFi Unsafe’ (Gizmodo) DeFi = decentralized finance, i.e. crypto and its bastard children.  There is a reason that it took over 1,000 years for our financial system to mature.  This is not easy stuff.
• Inference Is Unlikely to Ever Be a Low Marginal Cost Operational Node (Brad Delong) By, "Inference," Delong means large language model AI.
• github and the crime against software (Efron Licht) A good summary of the enshittification of Github as a result of Microsoft's neglect and efforts to add AI to everything.
• Elephant declines could trigger wider ecosystem losses in African savannas, 15-year test shows (Phys.org) much like beavers, they are a cornerstone to the ecologies of the areas where they live.
• If It Walks Like a Bubble and Quacks Like a Bubble, Then It’s Probably a Bubble (Barron's) On SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.  I think that they are wrong.  This is not a bubble, it is a bezzle, a yet unrecognized fraud.
• Free, Easy, Dead: The Difficult Birth And Predictable Death Of IRS Direct File (Defector) A good program that helped people, but the people that it helped did not have lobbyists.

Trump goes to game 3 of the NBA finals, gets booed: