The Defector. Disgusted by Putin's war, Lt. Lev Stupnikov became one of the deadliest saboteurs in recent military history feeding troop locations and battle plans to the enemy before making a daring escape. This text and photo/video essay describes Stupnikov's role in enabling devastating Ukrainian attacks on Russian forces; his hair-raising escape and the price he paid. (gift link).

"Lt. Lev Stupnikov pulled his truck up to the edge of a field in eastern Ukraine on a frigid February morning, followed by a convoy of senior Russian army officials coming to observe a training exercise near the front line. For several consecutive days, Russian infantrymen, medics and officers had been drilling on the frozen mud, preparing for an offensive on the nearby city of Vuhledar. The only cover was a line of bare trees. Stupnikov approached a group of waiting soldiers and snapped a photo, keeping his cellphone close to his chest to avoid drawing attention. Then he quickly tapped out a message: "There must be between 120 and 150 men here." Stupnikov, a recent graduate from a prestigious military academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, had a secret. Earlier that month, he had begun covertly sharing information with Ukrainian intelligence. He had already given his contact the exact coordinates of the field. Now, with scores of Russian soldiers and their commanding officers gathered there, Stupnikov would have only moments to move out of the line of fire. "Walk away," the Ukrainian contact replied, then: "I'm waiting for a message that you've left." Having received no answer, the contact sent a note in all caps a minute later: "LEAVE."" --- Additional background: Russian defectors face fatal consequences.

A College-by-College Guide to Which Majors Pay Off — or Don't. A detailed study of how students fared salary-wise four years after graduating from hundreds of American university programs in 2017 and 2018. (Recent developments in AI make extrapolation for math and CS difficult.) "History majors can out-earn English majors by more than $50,000 four years after graduation. A Juilliard graduate — trained at one of the country's most prestigious music schools — may not earn more than the median high school graduate. And the place to get the single most lucrative degree in America wasn't in the Ivy League, and it wasn't in a computer science program. It was in the mathematics department at Duke, where the median income among graduates was $297,029."

Ivy League schools give graduates an advantage, although if you are ambitious enough to even apply, that may be enough. --- The Most Versatile College Majors: Degrees That Help Graduates Succeed in a Shifting Job Market. "...hiring has fallen for all 20 majors since December 2019. Health professions and education majors held up best, with hiring down 16%, the smallest decreases of any major. But both rank near the bottom in versatility: Just 21% of health professions graduates and 34% of education graduates work outside their field's top two industries. English is the most versatile major: Nearly 70% of its graduates work outside the field's top two industries, the highest share of any major. Hiring for English majors has fallen 21% since December 2019, near the middle of the 20 majors." ---- Time to consider becoming a brick layer? "Young people are heeding the call or, more to the point, following the money. Enrollment at public two-year vocational-training colleges climbed nearly 20 percent from 2020 to 2025. Enrollment at public four-year colleges rose just 2.1 percent. But the country still needs thousands more high-school graduates and early-career workers to gravitate toward these professions. And it needs to create significantly more training capacity too."

Reframe is a poignant 5 minute short film made with AI tools by live-action cinematographer and DP Hiroki Shioya. "With REFRAME, I tried to approach AI filmmaking in almost the same way I would approach a live-action film — thinking carefully about framing, lenses, light, blocking, performance, and the rhythm between shots. The film took about three weeks to make, including a lot of testing, generation, editing, sound work, and color finishing. And no, making the AI actors feel realistic was definitely not easy! One of the hardest parts was getting very subtle human behavior — small things like eye movement, the timing of a reaction, breathing, and slight changes in expression can make a huge difference between something feeling human and something feeling obviously AI-generated. Character consistency was also a challenge. I'm happy with how the protagonist worked in this film overall, but it's definitely one of the areas I want to push much further in my next project."

Used ethically, AI can open doors for indie film creators.... (archive link) The low-costs of AI film production allowed the creation of Dreams of Violet, a docudrama based upon the January massacre in Iran. It was the first fully AI-generated film to premiere in the Tribeca Festival. For Reframe, Shioya used Cinema Studio 4.0. An advanced generation platform that allows 30+ camera movements, 4 camera types and 5 optically modeled lenses with adjustable aperture and focus. It comes with 50 color palettes. It generates shots that are up to 30-seconds long. Editing, color, sound design, subtitles, and final finishing were completed in post-production. Here is Shioya's Project Page for Reframe, showing all 523 shots that went into making this film.

The Prix Goncourt has removed a book from its longlist. This is another in a growing series of AI-writing scandals. Earlier in the year it was the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The Ai detection service used is Pangram, notable for its extremely low false positive rate. These awards required that the artistic works be human-generated. But what about outside the prize arenas? Should authors use Ai in their writing? Some have embraced it.

Annie Dillard has died, but she is not dead. This is a time to read This is the Life. In it she says...

"What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising." And then finally: "Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end? Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?"