Clarissa's Blog

Things must be going really bad for Antropic:

JUST IN: It’s been revealed Anthropic has hired an “AI welfare” therapist to alleviate anxiety its models experience “related to, or affected by, deprecation and replacement”

Models will now undergo “retirement interviews” to better understand their feelings before retirement.

This is such a clumsy effort at promoting the product that it reeks of desperation. Reminds me of chia pet ads after the sales collapsed.

As the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Minus the olives, this is exactly what my diabetic grandpa ate in the USSR:

Kotlety, and believe me, you’ve lived your life in vain if you never tried kotlety. “Korean carrots”, a huge Soviet favorite. And pickled cabbage that we practically lived on and is the only thing that saved me after both of my bouts of COVID that destroyed my gut flora.

The plate is a gift but it’s irrelevant to me now because I can’t do starches like the plate demands.

The war with Iran has been going on for a week. As I predicted, there’s no evidence of Iranians wanting a regime change and supporting the removal of the ayatollahs. Iranians are defending their regime because they like it. And why shouldn’t they?

In Cuba, for example, even among the leadership there is a deep fatigue with the hammer and sickle. People are ready to let it go. I don’t call for an invasion of Cuba, God forbid. I’m simply pointing out that not everything is like everything else. In Cuba, the entirety of the population has prostituted itself (in a very literal way) to Western tourists. In Iran, on the other hand, people are motivated by their religion not to. Their religion is not mine but I deeply respect the right of any nation to practice the religion it considers true within its borders.

Trump has an immediate off-ramp in Iran. He needs to declare victory and withdraw troops. Victory is a fluid concept in a war where you are not defending your own sovereignty and territorial integrity. Victory is whatever you say. We need to say it already and forget the word “Iran” for the entirety of the next century.

I’m not in the least burned out on teaching. Or research. I don’t find students annoying. Writing isn’t onerous. What I am tired of is being needed. I no longer remember what it was like to be responsible only for myself, my students, my research.

I have a colleague who has been unhappy with a table in his classroom for 1,5 years. Before that, he was unhappy with the classroom, and we had to force Scheduling to assign a very popular classroom that everybody wants to him permanently. Now he’s happy with the classroom but unhappy with the table. Photographs of every table on campus have been sent to him for months to see if he accepts one of them and graciously permits to have it stripped from its current classroom and dragged into his. The most recent batch of photos dropped yesterday.

I used to give speeches to explain that a department that’s in danger of being eliminated shouldn’t behave like such prima donnas but I’ve given up. Now I simply want to not know about the table and all the rest of it.

On what occasion would you wear THIS?? 😭 pic.twitter.com/eNuv9HAXbI

— Genius Tech (@Geniustechw) March 5, 2026

Oh, I would wear it. I would so wear it. I would wear the living daylights out of it at work. Maybe then people would leave me the bloody fuck alone for a bit.

I am so serious about my plan to recover from burnout that for the first time in my life – the first time! In my life! – I placed one of those “I will be on vacation until March 16 and will answer your message after that” on my email.

This came after a day-long email exchange with a colleague that reminded me of a Soviet joke about a very full tram in Odessa.

“Comrade, are you getting off on the next stop?”

“Yes, I am.”

“How about the people in front of you? Are they getting off?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? Did you ask them?”

“Yes, I asked them.”

“And what did they say?”

Turns out it’s a lot less charming when it happens to you in real life.

Today a student told me that she decided not to become a teacher because schools get small children addicted to screens, and this is child abuse in which she refuses to participate.

I was so happy I almost cried.

Once again I want to repeat that today’s students are enormously easier to teach than the students from 15 years ago. They are more alive, they express interesting opinions, they are more self-assured, they laugh at my jokes. COVID, obviously. So at least that’s a good result from the collective lunacy that was COVID.

There’s this really funny story about when Yeltsin was losing desperately to the Communists in 1995, and he decided to campaign on the idea that he was a man of the people. At a campaign stop in a small town, voters complained that they had to subsist on homegrown vegetables because they couldn’t afford to buy food.

“My family loves homegrown vegetables!” Yeltsin piped up happily. “Every spring we plant 8 sacks of potatoes. And then in the Fall we harvest 8 sacks of potatoes.”

In the end, he had to falsify the election to prevent the Communists from winning.

I have no idea how Prada manages to be such a scandalous right-winger everywhere he goes and end up writing utterly apolitical novels like Lucía en la noche, or all the rest of them that I’ve read. The two most recent ones I haven’t read because they are about WW2 and I hate WW2 literature. So maybe those are political, I don’t know.

The only thing in Lucía that can be vaguely seen as political is the storyline about a corrupt NGO that abuses refugees in a Syrian refugee camp. Which is a stance that everybody across the political spectrum will support because there’s no pro-abuse of refugees party on the left or the right.

I liked the novel until the Syrian refugees made a showing. My dislike of this storyline isn’t content-based. I didn’t like it because it’s clumsily done and feels like something completely extraneous to the novel. Prada needed to tie the loose ends and he came up with this narrative device that is not elegant and does not add to the enjoyment of the novel. You can absolutely write about Syrian refugees in a way that will improve a novel. Prada, however, didn’t manage that. He decided to wrap things up, had no idea how to do it, and tacked a spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold ending to a novel about a writer’s struggle to regain his creative impetus. Some people should write about refugees but Prada is not one of them. He should write about writers. Those are his best novels by far.

In Barcelona today, the Office of Religious Affairs has asked that ALL schools in Barcelona cancel music and dance classes for the month of Ramadan as a “gesture of respect” for the Muslim population.

That’s called colonisation. https://t.co/ElGAYH1HLd

— Eve Barlow (@Eve_Barlow) March 5, 2026

We, Orthodox Christians, somehow manage to celebrate Pascha (which does not coincide with the Catholic and Protestant Easter) without making a nuisance out of ourselves. Our priests remind us every year that making an issue of our fast to others is a sin. If the choice is between eating what you shouldn’t and rubbing your fasting virtue into other people’s faces, the choice should always be to accept the food quietly and not make yourself the center of attention. The moment when the fast becomes a way to lord it over others, we have betrayed the whole point of the fast as mandated by the Lord.

Yes, we are only 1% of the population. But Muslims are only 5% of the population in Spain. These are comparable numbers. You can be a minority without being a dick.