From a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group this week, quoting group chair Helen Wakeham (emphasis added):

“We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices — such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails — also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”

To reaffirm that she did not misspeak, from a list of tips for conserving water at home, which includes legit tips like taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing your teeth (Sidenote: Who leaves the water running while brushing their teeth?):

Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

This is so profoundly stupid and wrong that I don’t even know how to make fun of it. But it sure speaks to how futile it might be to hope that the UK government understands the first thing about end-to-end encryption. (Via Jason Eccles.)

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:

President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.

Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.

To the commentary:

Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. [...]

Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”

That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.

#RoninWarriors

#Ryo #Cye #RoninWarriors

Color? You want color, talk to Ted Turner.

CAMROSE, AB – Speaking to a rally in the closing days of this summer’s by-election, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre assured voters that electing him would ensure that they would never risk running into him in their riding ever again. “Look, you voters and I both want the same thing: for me to be elected back […]

The post Poilievre promises Battle River-Crowfoot if elected they will never see him again appeared first on The Beaverton.

Cowboy Pat disappeared? #CowboyWho

Today's links

• LLMs are slot-machines: You only remember the jackpots.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Heinlein bio; Amazon bans Amazon-critical podcasts; How to Argue With a Racist.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

LLMs are slot-machines (permalink)

When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of users: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine – in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work) and "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into being an assistant to a machine – here, people whose bosses have fired their colleagues and ordered the survivors to oversee an LLM that badly approximates the work of those departed workers):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

But yesterday, I read "The Futzing Fraction," an essay by Glyph, that advances a compatible, but very different hypothesis that I find extremely compelling:

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html

Glyph proposes that many LLM-assisted programmers who speak highly of the reliability and value of AI tools are falling prey to two cognitive biases:

1. The "availability heuristic" (striking things are easier to remember, which is why we remember the very rare instances of kids being kidnapped and killed, but rarely think about the relatively common phenomenon of kids dying in boring car-crashes); and

2. The "salience heuristic" (big things are easier to remember, which is why we double-check that the oven is turned off and the smoke alarms are working after our neighbor's house burns down).

In the case of LLM coding assistants, this manifests as an unconscious overestimation of how often the LLM saves you time. That's because a coding program that produces a bug that you have to "futz with" for a while before it starts working is normal, and thus unmemorable, while a coding tool that turns a plain-language prompt into a working computer program is amazing, so it stands out in your memory.

Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.

Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohypnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling).

Glyph poses a hypothetical: if you have a coding project that you ask a chatbot to write, and the resulting code initially doesn't work, but does work after ten minutes of futzing, that feels amazing and you will remember it forever as the time you saved 3:50 by using a chatbot. But it's possible that you repeated the "well, I'll just futz with this for ten minutes" step to get to that final success so many times that the whole affair took six hours, two hours longer than it would have taken had you just written the program from scratch. It's like winning a $1000 jackpot after "just putting a dollar in," except that that was the one-thousand-and-first dollar that you fed to the machine.

Glyph says that in other business activities, the "let's just try this for 10 minutes more" strategy usually pays off, but that LLMs produce an "an emotionally variable, intermittent reward schedule" that subverts your ability to wisely deploy that tactic.

But that's not the only way in which an LLM coding assistant is like a slot machine. Reg Braithwaite proposed that AI companies' business model is also like a casino's, because they charge every time you re-prompt the AI. He writes:

When you are paying by the "pull of the handle," the vendor's incentive is not to solve your problem with a single pull, but to give the appearance of progress towards solving your problem.

https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/115033262770049100

Jpeck likens the use of an LLM coding assistant to "a dense intern" who has to be walked through each step and then have their work double-checked:

https://universeodon.com/@boscoandpeck/115033787721848290

But there's an important difference between an intern and an LLM. For a senior coder, helping an intern is an investment in nurturing a new generation of talented colleagues. For a reverse-centaur, refining an LLM is either an investment in fixing bugs in a product designed to put you on the breadline (if you believe AI companies' claims that their products will continue to improve until they don't need close supervision), or it's a wasted investment in a "dense intern" who is incapable of improving.

(Image: Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY 4.0Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How The Internet Died https://whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-the-internet-died

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago PC disguised as a set of encyclopedia volumes https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/encyclomedia/

#20yrago Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20060217023906/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

#15yrsago Heinlein biography: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-learning-curve-the-secret-history-of-science-fiction/

#5yrsago Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon #https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#nondisparagement

#5yrsago Combat Wheelchairs https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#combat-wheelchairs

#5yrsago How to Argue With a Racist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

#5yrsago Self-driving cars are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck

#1yrago MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
  https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
  https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Utopias Podcast
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124

• Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ

• ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 32968 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

In brief: Erin enters the record books as one of the quickest intensifying Atlantic hurricanes on record, now flirting with category 5 intensity. It remains unlikely to directly threaten any land, but fringe impacts will continue to impact the northeast Caribbean, possibly the Bahamas, and perhaps Bermuda. No threat to the U.S. or Canada.

Erin exploded overnight into a category 4 hurricane. As of the 11 AM AST advisory it has 155 mph maximum sustained winds, just a sneeze away from category 5 intensity.

Why? Well, it always was expected to strengthen quickly. But Erin was able to close itself off from external dry air and shear and basically insulate itself, contract in size, and explode.

Erin’s small size works to its benefit, as hurricane-force winds extend out a mere 30 miles from the center. This is good news for the islands, as they’ll be a comfortable distance from the powerful winds. Erin should intensify a little further today. After today, the storm will likely become prone to fluctuations and internal processes that impact intensity (things like eyewall replacement cycles, etc.). So it may wax and wane a bit after today or tonight.

Let’s talk real quick about Erin’s intensification rate. Erin is the quickest intensifying Atlantic hurricane by a significant margin (before Sept 1) that we have data on, according to Sam Lillo. A 70 mb drop in 24 hours is incredible. The warming oceans are certainly one factor playing a role in this. By every metric, Erin will go down as a historic Atlantic hurricane.

Heading into next week, Erin will begin to feel some wind shear and start advancing toward cooler water, so we’ll see a slow decline in intensity for Erin, with most modeling bringing it back below major hurricane intensity by Tuesday or Wednesday.

How about track? Well, we’ve got good agreement today. At present, we’re seeing some wobbles and subtle shifts southward, so there could be some additional adjustments to the track forecast above, but in general, modeling agrees that this will slow down and turn northward by early next week, pass well off the East Coast and west of Bermuda and south of Atlantic Canada while heading out to sea.

Erin is going to grow in size, so for folks in Bermuda, it will be important to recognize that even though Erin is likely to weaken on its way out, it will be larger in size, which means a close pass, even west of Bermuda could bring some direct or fringe impacts. The biggest questions right now are on the exact timing of various turns.

I don’t want folks to pay too much attention to the wobbling or even track shifting we see north of the islands right now. I see this with every strong storm that occurs. While that stuff does matter in the near term, it should not have a major impact on things in the long term. Powerful storms like Erin tend to wobble and meander a little on the general heading they’re moving in, and it’s not at all uncommon for a storm to deviate from the forecast track by a good bit in the short term before correcting back in time.

For folks in the islands right now, experiencing heavy rain and gusty winds, yes, continue to monitor Erin, but again, the worst of this will stay north of those islands.

On the East Coast of the U.S. and in Atlantic Canada, get ready for rough surf and strong rip currents. That will be increasing in the days ahead. Folks planning a late summer vacation next week to the Jersey Shore or Outer Banks or wherever just want to keep in mind that swimming conditions may be suboptimal or even unsafe at times.

So, bottom line on Erin:

• Should become a category 5 storm, as it is one of the fastest intensifying Atlantic storms known in the historical record.
• Track will wobble and meander off course at times; this is normal for elite hurricanes and it doesn’t portend a significant forecast track change.
• Currently not expected to directly impact any land.
• Locally heavy rain and gusty winds in the northeast Caribbean today and tomorrow from outer bands and squalls.
• Rough surf and rip currents likely to become an issue on the East Coast next week.
• Bermuda should continue to monitor Erin’s progress closely.

Going up, Mr. Tyler?

I deduction-ed that.

Weapons, a new horror film from the director of Barbarian, topped the box office on its opening weekend. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the movie. 

Q. Why is the film called Weapons?

A. The title Where Did The Kids Go? Find Out, Josh Brolin! didn’t test well. 

Q: Is it scary?

A: It’s less “ghost scary” and more “going to the bad CVS at two in the morning scary.”

Q: What is it about?

A: Two hours.

Q. Who is the villain of the film?

A. The AMC employee that keeps telling you vaping isn’t allowed in the theater

Q: Is there a cliffhanger?

A: It’s still unclear whether the students have to complete any make-up work. 

Q: What is the film’s message?

A: If 17 kids can disappear overnight, then losing a couple in the Poconos Mountains doesn’t make you a bad mom.

The post What To Know About ‘Weapons’ appeared first on The Onion.

MONTREAL – Air Canada’s flight attendants have issued a strike notice, prompting the airline to swiftly embrace a new and exciting reason to cancel flights. “I’ve blamed flight cancellations on mechanical issues, staffing issues, supply issues, bad weather, good weather, insect swarms, feral bat colonies, onboard knife fights, and existential malaise, but it’s always good […]

The post As strike looms, Air Canada thrilled to have new excuse to cancel flights appeared first on The Beaverton.

Nothing says hilarious superhero parody like giving one of your characters a Dickensian past.

A crowdsourced and free website that helps you find alternative software, apps and services.

Added by @helenchong in Internet › Directories.

A free, open-source command line software suite used for editing and manipulating digital images.

Added by @helenchong in Computers › Command Line Tools.

A free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing video and audio files.

Added by @helenchong in Computers › Command Line Tools.

Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia's plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.

Starlink is poised to benefit from the Trump administration rewriting rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. While the Biden administration decided that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future-proof networks, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a "tech-neutral approach" and lower the average cost of serving each location.

With the Trump administration backing its attempt to obtain more federal funding for Starlink, SpaceX is likely to object to state plans that still include significant fiber builds. That's what happened yesterday when SpaceX filed comments on Virginia's final proposal, which will be reviewed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Read full article

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Oh when the saints
Come marching in
Oh when the saints come marching in
Well I sure wouldn't want to be a bad guy
When the phantom marches in! #CowboyWho

In brief: Tropical Storm Erin will pass north of the islands this weekend before likely beginning to turn north off the East Coast. Questions on the exact track remain that could influence impacts in various spots, so continued monitoring is recommended for the East Coast, Atlantic Canada, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the northeast Caribbean. Invest 98L in the Gulf will probably produce mostly positive rainfall over South Texas tomorrow and Saturday.

Tropical Storm Erin

If we look at satellite this morning, it’s certainly the healthiest look Erin has had this week.

It’s clearly not the healthiest storm we’ve ever seen, but it’s doing enough to give the impression of slow intensification. As a result, Erin’s intensity is nudged up to 60 mph as of the 11 AM AST advisory. Using the latest map from Tomer Burg’s excellent site, it’s actually instructive to see what Erin has ahead of itself.

Erin is moving into an environment with very warm water temperatures, and it’s not going to exit that environment for at least 5 or 6 days. Erin should begin to tap into this environment over the next couple days, and it’s possible that we see a burst of rapid intensification at some point. Erin has not completely rid itself of dry air yet, so that may limit just how out of hand intensification can get. Whatever the case, given a favorable upper environment and warm water temps, one would expect Erin to start tapping the accelerator a bit today and tomorrow. After Friday and into this weekend, the storm may begin to “feel” some added wind shear to the west. This could slow the intensification rate a good bit. The models love this storm, and they’re quite aggressive with intensification over the next 3 to 4 days, with most pinning Erin at Cat 3 or above.

In terms of how close it gets to the islands, which is the first hurdle in terms of Erin’s track, there is strong agreement that it will pass comfortably north to avoid serious direct impacts. The Euro ensemble below shows this well.

What can we expect? Probably just a graze. As Erin passes north, it’s likely that some outer bands will graze Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the northeast Leeward Islands. Below is a forecast map for Saturday morning from the European operational model. Often, we tell you to ignore operational model guidance, but 2 to 3 days out, these deterministic models have value, particularly with established storms like Erin.

Mostly, however, the impacts will be marine-driven: Rough seas, high tides, rip currents.

Certainly something to monitor and keep track of, particularly if you have any marine interests or will be visiting the area this weekend. But this is mostly from a safety and awareness standpoint. No direct or major impacts are expected.

Beyond the Caribbean islands, what happens next? Well, there’s always some inherent uncertainty in tropical systems, but it’s not always equal. In other words, some 5 to 7 days forecasts have higher confidence than others. In this one, there is fairly high confidence that Erin is what we thought it was. Erin will turn northwest, then likely north and northeast rather quickly off the East Coast.

The questions I still have involve how close to the Bahamas and eventually Bermuda Erin gets. Additionally, how far offshore the storm will pass from the East Coast and Atlantic Canada. There has certainly been some “creep” to the west in the last couple days, which has undoubtedly made some folks on the East Coast a little uneasy. But at this point, all we can say is to keep an eye on things. We do not expect a track, plowing Erin into the Carolinas or New England. But it could always pass close enough for some impacts. We’ll keep you posted. Bermuda needs to watch Erin very closely. Hopefully we see some clarity on that in the next couple days.

One thing we can say for sure? Rough surf and rip currents will begin to increase by later this weekend or early next week on the East Coast. Please use caution in the water, particularly if you’re taking a late summer vacation next week.

We’ll keep you posted through the weekend.

Invest 98L

Meanwhile, in the Bay of Campeche, the tropical wave that we started watching a little more closely on Tuesday evening has now been designated Invest 98L. It actually looks okay this morning, though it lacks any sort of defined circulation center. So at this point, it’s just a coherent area of thunderstorms.

Invest 98L is going to track almost straight northwest over the next 24 to 30 hours. This should come ashore in Texas by Friday evening. Any development will be lower-end and rather disjointed. In other words, we could see a sloppy tropical depression come out of this, but we probably won’t see a named storm.

That said, given the thunderstorm organization here, we could see some locally heavy rainfall in South Texas as this comes in. I think as we saw last month, it does not take a well organized tropical system to cause problems in Texas. As this moves from the coastal bend into interior Texas, we will keep an eye on flooding risks that may emerge from this, although right now those risks are on the low to very low side.

Overall, the thinking is that this will be more beneficial with increased rain chances over drier South Texas than anything else.

Elsewhere, no other specific waves are of serious concern right now, but we’ll keep an eye on that over the next few days and see if new areas of interest are introduced. We’ll stop there for now. Keep tabs on our Notes for any intermittent updates.

GoodBYE, Joe.

ANCHORAGE, AK – International political observers are stunned today after U.S. President Donald Trump made the controversial move of asking Russian President Vladimir Putin for a 20% gratuity, “as a suggested minimum”, after selling him the country of Ukraine. Following the two leaders’ highly-anticipated meeting in Alaska, where Trump made the wholly expected move of […]

The post Trump demands 20% gratuity for selling Ukraine to Putin appeared first on The Beaverton.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Of course it's more impressive if you do it yourself.

Get your copy of A City on Mars signed in person in Charlottesville, VA on August 23rd!

Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"?

The answer is countries.

Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai-Shek," and the number "13."

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Marie-Christophe de Menil died on Tuesday, August 5 at age 92 in New York. Ms. de Menil, the ​​firstborn daughter and heiress of the Menil Collection’s founders John and Dominique de Menil, continued the family legacy of significant arts patronage in Houston and beyond.

As reported in ARTnews, Ms. de Menil ranked three times on the outlet’s Top 200 Collectors list between 1990–1992. Included in the personal collection she assembled over her lifetime were works by René Magritte, Barnett Newman, Michael Heizer, Gedi Sibony, Daniel Arsham, and many others. As reported in the New York Times, she was an important patron of painter Willem de Kooning, avant-garde composers Philip Glass and La Monte Young, and choreographers Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp, among others.

For two decades beginning in 1980, she worked for experimental playwright and Waco native Robert Wilson as a costume designer. One of her creations is in the Costume Institute collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Wilson died July 31 at age 83.

Ms. de Menil is said to have introduced Port Arthur native Robert Rauschenberg to her parents, according to the Houston Chronicle, and counted among her friends Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, the University of Houston-educated Julian Schnabel, and other prominent artists.

William Middleton, author of the John and Dominique de Menil biography Double Vision, told Glasstire “Christophe de Menil had a host of qualities that she shared with her parents: a sincere passion for great art and artists, a fearlessness, and a great sense of flair.”

Max Ernst, “Surrealism and Painting (Le Surréalisme et la peinture),” 1942, oil on canvas, 77 × 92 inches. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Mr. Middleton noted that many major works in the Menil Collection can be credited to Christophe, including Max Ernst’s Surrealism and Painting (1942). As Mr. Middleton explained, Dominique de Menil had a chance to buy the monumental painting in the 1950s, but found it intimidating, “too tough to stomach.” When it came on the market again in 1979, he said Dominique explained that Christophe pressed her, telling her she must buy it. Dominique had so much confidence in Christophe’s judgment that she purchased the piece, now “a pivotal work in the Menil’s collection of Surrealists, and it is there thanks to Christophe. There are dozens of similar stories, from key canvases by Barnett Newman to sculptures by Michael Heizer,” Mr. Middleton said.

Works by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko in the Menil’s early 20th century galleries

He also credited her “great sense of style,” mentioning that while a teenager, Christophe de Menil worked with her mother and the designer Charles James on the interiors of the family house in Houston, soon after making her debut in an extravagant evening gown by Mr. James. And when the Menil Collection opened in June 1987, “Dominique’s wardrobe for the entire weekend of festivities was [designed] by Christophe,” Mr. Middleton said.

Charles James’ Four-Leaf Clover Dress on Christophe de Menil. Photo courtesy of Menil Collection

That she intimately knew artists who tended to defy limits of specific media might account for the surprising advice she gave to young artists in a 2014 interview for the Nowness website: “Close your eyes,” she said. “Meaning, open your whole body.”

Ms. de Menil also told Nowness that her late grandson Dash Snow, an avid photographer and artist who died in 2009 at age 28, had inspired her to try photography.

As reported in multiple news outlets, Ms. de Menil married Robert Thurman in 1959. Within two years, Mr. Thurman left Ms. de Menil and their infant daughter, Taya. Ms. de Menil later married Chilean artist Enrique Castro-Cid, a marriage that also ended in divorce.

Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s is set to open at the Menil Collection on Saturday, September 19, celebrating the artist’s centenary.

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