Remember that Russia is irredeemable

The following citation illustrates what I consider to be one of the dumbest (simplest? Most ignorant?) but extremely popular interpretation of the changing alignment of the U.S., NATO, Europe, and Russia in early 2025,

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.” Because the US is a Russian ally (or satellite?) now I guess.”

It comes from a post... [More]

The pair of articles survivorship bias and the algorithmic gaze by The Etymology Nerd (Substack) and when everything becomes a fragment by The Etymology Nerd (Substack) expresses, for me, a good argument for caution about the tools that you’re using.[1]

AI is definitely a paradigm-shift for programming, but I think in a way that’s not discussed very much. We focus very much on how AI enables people who couldn’t program anything before to be able to program something. The scope of what it allows them to program grows with each version. Until it doesn’t. That is,... [More]

I follow Simon Willison for news about all things LLM and he’s generally quite balanced. Even though he has drifted farther and farther toward what might be optimistically called “unquestioning fanboy,” that’s probably an inevitable effect of actually enjoying something. He seems to get a lot of value out of using these tools. I think he might be spending too little time wondering what he would have been producing had he not been grabbing all of the low-hanging fruit that the LLM is delivering... [More]

The discussion Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino (Reddit) is about the article Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino by John Gruber (Daring Fireball), which was a much-longer post than usual, discussing the failure of Apple Intelligence features and the failure to focus on software-quality that it illustrates.

MacOS Apps are not great

Although Gruber focuses on Apple’s iOS, a decrease in quality in user experience has become endemic in their auxiliary products on MacOS as well. I added a few quick examples to my... [More]

The article Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection by Simon Willison includes the following snippet,

“I decided that the descriptions were too long, so I modified the script to add “Keep it to 2-3 sentences” to the end of the system prompt. These new, shorter descriptions are now live—here’s the diff. Total usage was 283,528 input tokens and 6,010 output tokens for a cost of 94 cents.”

First of all, I’m not surprised that he asked it to shorten its descriptions. The initial versions were... [More]

The article A 10x Faster TypeScript by Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft) includes the following text, as well as a link to the video below,

“[…] we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage. By porting the current code-base, we expect to be able to preview a native implementation of tsc capable of command-line type-checking by mid-2025, with a feature-complete... [More]”

How to Add files to a Large Repository? (Reddit)

Git has opt-in support for handling large files.

• Use the –depth option to control how much history to clone (good for pipelines, where you’re usually only interested in the tip, so depth 1)
• Whereas depth controls how much you clone (size of the .git folder), sparse-checkout controls the size of your working tree.
• git logoUse LFS (Large File Storage) to store files. This will not remove large files from existing commits. This feature is seamless to enable and... [More]

I wrote the following quip to a friend the other day, “Charisma is an underrated stat,” to which they replied quite pithily,

“Charisma is underrated in the engineering space. A charismatic engineer is often labeled as a “charlatan” or “all bark no bite” or “a sales guy”, but what the people who say that often gloss over is the fact that a charismatic engineer is often really labeled as a CEO.”

Charisma 20+Perhaps a better word than “underrated” is “unnoticed”. It’s the stat that hides itself. Part of the... [More]

This is a 40-minute discussion between Zain Raza and Professor Richard Wolff on a wide range of topics, but focusing on the effects of the U.S.‘s retreat from Europe on Germany, in particular.

Prof. Richard Wolff − The Decline of the US Empire & Germany's Economy by AcTVism Munich (YouTube)

At about 35:00,

“Zain Raza: We have seen the emergence of AI like China’s DeepSeek, which you mentioned, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And there’s a major transformation taking place across the global economy. Many industries are being affected. The world economic forum’s “future of jobs” report 2025... [More]”

Recently, I saw that the following error had been fixed in a code review.

Classic primitive obsession error

The error shown above is an example of a design smell called Primitive Obsession. This is where code is “obsessed” with primitives, in that it uses a much “wider” type than is actually acceptable.

Whereas C++ has a typedef, TypeScript and Delphi Pascal have a type, C# has … nothing simple. The linked article describes a hand-coded version for making “narrower” types (e.g., MeanLength or ShortFiber). Our go-to... [More]

This is a fantastic seven-minute refresher on what the first amendment means in the U.S.—specifically the right to free speech, The government is bound quite strongly to respect one’s right to say anything one wants, even if one is benefiting from a government program, like unemployment or a visa program. While the government is allowed to curtail benefits in the case of criminal prosecution—predicating them on being law-abiding—it cannot retract them based on one having expressed... [More]

This was an interesting 21-minute discussion about the importance of multi-polarity, multi-civilizational humanity. Dugin points out how the globalism that we’re seeing trying to take over everything has deemed itself the winner and chooses not to integrate anything from other, “conquered” civilizations. He cites the Chinese Confucian approach to law and philosophy, the Russian Orthodox Church, and so on, as deep and ancient influences on cultures and civilizations.

Alexander DuginHe calls out globalists for... [More]

This is an absolutely brilliant 45-minute video: as history lesson, as political analysis, as military analysis. Many, many more people should be watching this.

In particular, the two sections comprising about 18 minutes and starting at 15:35, called “EU’s militarisation & Russia’s plans” and “EU’s fiscal discipline” are brilliant and are well-worth listening to in their entirety.

Vijay Prashad – The Collapse of NATO and Europe's Dilemma by acTVism Munich (YouTube)

At 04:56,

“Vijay PrashadTrump interestingly said, ‘look, this is not a prestige issue for us in the United States. We don’t... [More]”

Danielle BrianThe following 22-minute video is an excellent interview by Lee Fang with Danielle Brian of POGO (Project on Government Oversight) about corruption, waste, and fraud. Whereas you may deem anything the government spends money on that you don’t like or approve of as “waste”, “fraud” has a legal definition. Somewhere in the middle is “corruption”, which is when you’re paying far too much for services that you actually want or need. The major sources of corruption are the Pentagon budget and... [More]

The article Trump bans transgender athletes from entering the United States by Isla Anderson, Evan Winters (WSWS) writes,

“SemenyaRubio justified the ban on international transgender athletes under the 1952 Immigration and Nationalities act, which authorizes a “permanent fraud bar” as punishment for “lying” on a visa application. The pretense is that a gender marker matching a transgender person’s gender identity, rather than one that aligns “with their sex assigned at birth,” amounts to “misrepresenting the purpose of... [More]”

The article European Leaders Voice Support for Zelensky Following Heated Exchange With Trump by Kyle Anzalone (Scheer Post) describes Trump’s feelings about where he and Zelenskyy differ.

“Following the presser, Trump expelled Zelensky from the White House, and posted on Truth Social that the deal was off. “I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE,” he wrote.”

... [More]

In the following seven-minute video, Glenn “responds” to a critique of the Trump administration, written by Chris Hedges and sent to him by a listener. I’m a bit confused by the response, though … it seems as if Glenn thinks that Chris Hedges supports the continuation of the empire. Chris’s admonition is not a lament for the end of the empire, it is more a warning to pay attention to and to influence what will replace it. I think Glenn should have Chris on his show to make himself more... [More]

I’ve seen that people in Europe and Switzerland are starting to proudly boycott U.S.-American products, as if they’re standing on a principle or something.

They are not anti-Empire. They are anti-Trump.

They are pissed at Trump for having “abandoned” Ukraine and Europe, which they think leaves them wide open to be invaded within weeks by what they call the U.S.‘s new ally Russia.

This is almost laughably stupid, if it weren’t such a prevalent view among otherwise intelligent and... [More]

The article Can You Get Better Doing a Bad Job? by Jim Neilsen cites Woody Harrelson as saying, “I think when you do your job badly you never really get better at your craft.”

Of course that’s true on the surface: If you manage to avoid learning anything else, then you will only ever get better at doing a bad job. The author expands on this point as follows,

“Experience is a hard teacher. Perhaps, from a technical standpoint, my skillset didn’t get any better. But from an experiential standpoint, my... [More]”

The upshot of the video linked below is that prompt injection has not really been addressed in any significant way because the LLM, by its nature, doesn’t give us a good way of doing so without neutering the main advantage of it.

Generative AI's Greatest Flaw by Computerphile / Mike Pound (YouTube)

The problem boils down to the inability to distinguish between query and parameters. The prompt is the prompt. It’s all just arranged in a way that will hopefully influence the result of pouring it all into the same funnel. There is no analogue in LLM prompts to... [More]

A while back, during the Super Bowl, I paused to see whether a player’s foot was really out of bounds when he caught the ball.

NOT ALLOWED. READ THIS ADVERT INSTEAD, PEASANT.

This is the state of German cable television

I managed to do something that got rid of the advert, but ended up showing a bunch of extra chrome on the screen instead, nearly but not entirely obscuring the thing that I wanted to see. #Enshittification

Next up, I was greeted a couple of weeks later with the message, “The order of your TV channels now matches your... [More]

The article Trump vs. the Deep State by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post) included the following passage as part of a longer discussion .

“I do not think, I mean to say, the deep state’s presence in America’s political life will ever be off the table now that Trump has put its insidious presence on it. This is a good thing.”

I wouldn’t be too sure of that. People are remarkably capable of going back to sleep, especially when their salaries depend on it, especially when their lifestyles depend on it, and especially with an... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

James MickensI recently stumbled upon some Essays from the funniest man in Microsoft Research by Raymond (Old New Thing). He is such a funny writer that this article, against convention and like the one before it (Brilliant articles by the funniest guy at Microsoft), will consist mostly of citations rather than an even mix of citations and paraphrasing that I naturally consider to be much more lucid and pithy. I quote at length to do the material justice, for documentation and to ensure that you all download the PDFs to see if there... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

This was a great conversation that is absolutely worth the ~100-minute running time. Catherine eloquently and brashly discusses a lot of the topics and themes that she presents in her broadside against the PMC (Professional Managerial Class). I’ve included a bunch of cleaned-up transcription from the video.

Catherine Liu: Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites by Doomscroll /
Joshua Citarella (YouTube)

At about 12:00, Catherine says,

“I was like what are you doing girl? Like, how are you like assimilating your sexual assault, which is really bad a private thing—you haven’t even told... [More]”

US military and CIA interventions since WW2There are people who used to write quite well and have gotten incredibly lazy, repetitive, and just plain non-constructive and useless as information sources in just the last month. The drop in quality is noticeable because they’re once again cruising on their TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

They are being lazy and stupid, acting as if the U.S. used to be good until one month ago, when Trump came back into power. They are acting as if things have gotten markedly and provably worse for... [More]

The documentation page Stories of Web Users / How People with Disabilities Use the Web by W3C (WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)) describes nine users, each of whom describes how they work with the Internet, as well as which assistive technologies they use to access text, audio, and video content. Each of them also has a list of use cases (“Barrier examples”), accompanied by solutions that would work for them and their particular restrictions.

Stories

The people range widely in capability.

There’s Marta, who is deaf and blind and who... [More]

I recently wrote Real quick on MVVM and now I see that a good colleague and friend has written his own MVVM understandings by Austin Jones (Austin's Journey for Meaning). His piece got me thinking again about how the concept is a good start but isn’t really sufficient.

Justifying the view model

Somewhere near the beginning, he writes,

“The View Model’s function is separate from the Model. Abstraction requires discipline to not let two pieces of code that do the same thing become the same thing, purely out of convenience. Things that... [More]”