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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

I was sent this article by my vast network of correspondents: Chicago gangs clash with Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members: ‘Blacks against migrants’ by Michael Lee (FOX News).

Let’s do some fun and quick and pretty easy analysis here.

The title slug is pretty provocative: “GANGS CLASH”.

Did they, though? Clash?

Let’s see what the article has to say! They spent time writing it, so let’s do them the honor of reading it.

Don’t worry, we don’t have to read far.

The very first paragraph writes,

“Venezuelan migrants... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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]

The final document of What’s new in C# 13 (Microsoft Learn) is available. There are no major changes for most end users; the changes listed are interested for library and framework developers—especially those interested in writing highly performant code, e.g., Microsoft in its BCL and ASP.NET.

1. Completely unsurprisingly, the params keyword now also applies to IEnumerable<T> (as well as many descendants) as well as Span<T> and ReadOnlySpan<T>.
2. There’s now an official Lock object that, when used instead of the... [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
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

“[…] ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.[1]”

“[…] a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

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
• Labor
• 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
• Science... [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
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

For the last couple of years, I have been keeping track of books that were potentially written by AI that my Kindle saw fit to advertise to me on the lock-screen page. As I wrote at the top of each installment of Kindle Books Written by AIs,

“[…] This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog.”

Until recently, it was kind of interesting because the provenance of the content could have gone either way:... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

Access... [More]

The article Bang-and-Whimper by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) from a few months ago outlined the mindless and morally unhinged argument promulgated by people all across the political spectrum in the U.S. and Europe.

“The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza — as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to... [More]”

Lina KhanI’ve heard the argument that Lina Khan at the FTC is really good and making good guidelines. Fair enough. She’s not an elected official. She could work for any administration. The argument is, of course, that Trump wouldn’t hire her, so we therefore need to get Biden or Harris back in there, so that she can continue her good work. This is ridiculous. We have to put up with Biden or Harris so we can have a working FTC? That’s the argument?

That’s getting toward the bottom of the barrel of the... [More]

The following Slavoj Žižek video is only one minute long. In it, he explains that we need another system simply because the one we have is so utterly inadequate to the tasks before it.

…on why he is a communist, but not a socialist by Slavoj Žižek (YouTube)

“I remain a communist. In what sense? My good friend told me he was there, as part of some delegation, two days after Fukushima. He told me that, for a couple of hours, the Japanese government was in total panic. It looked that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area: 30 million people. Then, maybe,... [More]”

The work journal 2024-03-27T16:03:51 conversation: 01ht0afgwryks5fepkvvm0kn28 by Simon Willison (GitHub) describes the author’s process of using AI prompting to write a console text-wrapping algorithm.

He prompted with “JavaScript that takes a big string of text and word wraps it at the specified width, adding newlines where necessary.” The answers meandered around a solution space that seemed over-engineered and not particularly fruitful—the answers all used regular expressions, which seems kind of like overkill, when... [More]

The video linked below is a great 1-hour documentary[1] about one guy—Karel Sabbe—who finished the Barkley Marathon (Wikipedia), which is,

“[…] an ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee, United States. The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five loops of the 20+ mile, off-trail course for a total of 100 miles.”

The video is named #17 because he’s only the 17th person to have finished the race in its 40-year history. And people... [More]

The article Prefer test-doubles over mocking frameworks by Steve Dunn writes,

“This is testing implementation and not behaviour. Your SUT called something and there is likely an observable side-effect of that. Test the side-effect and not that a particular method was called. If the code is refactored (e.g. you change the implementation but not the behaviour), then your test that checked that a method was called will likely break, but your test that tested the behaviour should remain unchanged and should... [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
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

The Talk − Bringing C# nullability into existing code by Maarten Balliauw is a 66-slide deck that I summarize as follows:

• The C# nullability feature is for build- and design-time. It does not enforce anything at runtime. That means that you still have to check parameters for null.
• The C# nullability feature is available to solutions working with .NET Framework and .NET.
• For .NET Framework, you have to explicitly set the <LanguageVersion> to 8.0 (however, there are a bunch of cons associated with doing this, as... [More]

The article Bidenomics and Its Discontents by James Galbraith (Scheer Post) is from April but discusses several structural issues with the economy that persist today and many of which have become even more severe, despite simultaneously being desperately papered over by the song-and-dance of the markets and an administration interested in the economy sinking only after November 5th.

Wages rising; hours sinking

“Today’s typical American working household has several earners, sometimes in multiple jobs. If one earner loses a... [More]”

After several years of being virus-free, I’ve been sick several times in the last eight months. I was telling a friend that I was sick of being sick and he told me that’s how your body gets stronger; it builds up immunity by being sick. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps we are incapable of mastering these unseen enemies. But I can’t help feeling that this is a capitulatory attitude, the attitude of someone stuck in the Dark Ages, a time when people had no hope of beating disease. We used to be... [More]

Way back in mid-February, on the night before the Super Bowl, I opened the SunriseTV web page in Opera to set up the recording. That worked just fine.

I left the page open on the recordings, so I wouldn’t forget about it in the morning, when I started working in home office. The next morning, I refreshed the page and was confronted with the following dialog box.

Sunrise TV: login not possible

I tried logging in again, but was denied again.

Had my account broken overnight? Had my subscription expired? No, of course not.... [More]

Deepfakes are fake. It’s right in the name. So why are we getting our panties in a bunch about them?

The article There’s Probably Nothing We Can Do About This Awful Deepfake Porn Problem by Freddie deBoer (Substack) was surprisingly superficial. It deals only with the question of whether we should do a “war on drugs” style campaign against deep fakes—a hopeless and utterly ineffective crusade that causes misery for the innocent and pours money into the coffers of the usual suspects—or whether it’s completely hopeless... [More]

If you think the current barrage of pro-Democrat propaganda is bad, remember that this has been going on all year. They started very early. For example, the article How Bad It Was by Richard Farr (3 Quarks Daily) writes about the Bush years. It’s essentially an essay that is a campaign ad for choosing the lesser evil, which is clearly the Democrats in the author’s eyes. They exhorted readers to choose now, and to start donating at least $25 regularly, even thought that’s a “pathetic” amount. How much money do these dopes need... [More]

The article Israel Raids Hospital by Liz Wolfe (Reason) is from February but the incident it describes has been repeated at least a dozen—if not dozens—of times since. It illustrates quite concisely how you should write about war crimes when you wholeheartedly support them. It hits all the standard notes:

• Attacking a hospital is a normal thing.
• It’s perfectly reasonable to tell everyone in a hospital to evacuate.
• The hospital is a enemy headquarters (this time it’s true!).
• The enemy uses human shields.
• The... [More]

There is an article in Microsoft’s documentation called How Microsoft names threat actors by diannegali & Dansimp (Microsoft). That sounds interesting. How does Microsoft determine and label threat actors?

“Microsoft shifted to a new naming taxonomy for threat actors aligned with the theme of weather. We intend to bring better clarity to customers and other security researchers with the nex taxonomy. We offer a more organized, articulate, and easy way to reference threat actors so that organizations can better prioritize and... [More]”

I really hope that, if we continue to apply pressure to get what we want, that it will bear fruit. Although it’s easier to retreat into the reassuring hopelessness of cynicism, I do wonder whether something might be categorically different this time. The rulers have lost control of the narrative, at least to some degree. They’re making a lot of unforced errors that they haven’t made before. Consider the stink of desperation in the coverage of the Olympics—we are a powerful sports... [More]

The article Why the US Is Reimposing Sanctions on Venezuela? by Roger D. Harris (Antiwar.com) came out in February, so about six months ago. I took some notes on it before the U.S. decided to completely ignore the Venezuelan election results a few weeks ago.

So, how was it going in Venezuela before the election?

“Even with limited sanctions relief, Venezuela anticipated a 27% increase in revenues for its state-run oil company. Experts predicted a “moderate economic expansion” after having experienced the greatest economic... [More]”