The article The Cult of Mac by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic) goes hard on anyone who uses Apple hardware.

“It’s Apple customers who lose access to apps that can’t be viably offered because the app tax makes them money-losing propositions. It’s Apple customers who lose out on the ability to get apps that Apple decides are unsuitable for inclusion in its App Store.”

It’s never even occurred to me to have this on my radar because I don’t use the App Store for anything but finding a very specific app, usually one that I’m forced... [More]

There is an unalterable dynamic in which the establishment rejects all heresy if it is a challenge to its power. It continues to repeat itself. In Midnight Mass, one of the characters told a story about Ignaz Semmelweis (Wikipedia).

“[…] was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures […] Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect... [More]”

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Sherlock Holmes (2009) — 6/10
2. Hijack (2023) — 6/10
3. French Dispatch (2021) — 9/10
4. Exploding Kittens (2024) — 5/10
5. Tombstone (1993) — 8/10
6. Kiss of the Dragon (2001) — 6/10
7. Waterworld (1995) — 7/10
8. Godzilla Minus One (2023) — 8/10
9. I Canoni die Navarone (1961) — 8/10
10. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) — 8/10

Sherlock Holmes (2009) — 6/10

Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is like a superhero. He’s not only brilliant,... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Shrinking (2023) — 8/10
2. John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019) — 8/10
3. South Park: The End of Obesity (2024) — 8/10
4. South Park (Not Suitable for Children) (2023) — 8/10
5. South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023) — 8/10
6. The Terminator (1984) — 8/10
7. Glass (2022) — 8/10
8. Ghosts of Mars (2001) — 4/10
9. Five Days at Memorial (2022) — 4/10
10. The Sandman (2022) — 7/10

Shrinking (2023) — 8/10

Jimmy (Jason Segal) is a psychiatrist at a... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Lost City (2022) — 6/10
2. Mission to Mars (2000) — 6/10
3. Mission Impossible − Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — 8/10
4. Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019–2020) — 4/10
5. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) — 9/10
6. Independence Day (1996) — 9/10
7. Gorillas in the Mist (1988) — 8/10
8. Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (2009) — 7/10
9. (T)Raumschiff Surprise − Periode 1 (2004) — 5/10
10. American Assassin (2017) — 5/10

The Lost City (2022) — 6/10

Loretta Sage... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. American Gods S03 (2021) — 8/10
2. 47 Rōnin (2013) — 7/10
3. The Highwaymen (2019) — 8/10
4. World War Z (2013) — 7/10
5. Seven Pounds (2008) — 7/10
6. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) — 9/10
7. Star Wars: Le Réveil de la Force (2015) — 10/10
8. PBS American Experience S36E04 − Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal (2024) – 8/10
9. Living with Yourself (2019) — 7/10
10. 6 Balloons (2018) — 9/10

American Gods S03 (2021) — 8/10

Note... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Beasts of No Nation (2015) — 8/10
2. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) — 8/10
3. Cam (2021) — 4/10
4. Tribes of Europa (2021) — 5/10
5. Curb Your Enthusiasm S12 (2023) — 10/10
6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2008) — 7/10
7. Metal Lords (2022) — 8/10
8. Emily the Criminal (2022) — 8/10
9. Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) — 8/10
10. What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015) — 9/10
11. Stewart Lee: Tornado (2022) — 9/10
12. Stewart Lee: Snowflake (2022)... [More]

The re-review 25 Years Later, Alexander Payne’s Election Remains as Relevant as Ever by Daniel Joyaux (Roger Ebert.com) writes the following about the movie Election.

“The elephant in the room when talking about “Election” is Hillary Clinton, in that comparing her (and others) to Tracy Flick over the years has become a sort of code for calling a woman a robotic, success-obsessed ambition machine who needs to stay in her lane. Like Jim McCallister, people saw Clinton’s Flick-like ambition as almost an existential threat,... [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
• Environment & Climate Change... [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]

There is a form of protest where people glue themselves to roads and block traffic. If you’re serious at all about building a movement or awareness—i.e., you’re trying to enact positive change—you must consider the effects of your tactics. What will they make people think about your cause? What is the likelihood that you’ll get them on board?

Are your tactics likely to work? Will they perhaps backfire in the near-term, but have positive long-term effect? When you protest, what is 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
• 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
• Art &... [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]

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]

Introduction

This article defines concepts like repository and working tree and then discusses how you can use .gitignore files to determine the files and folders that Git considers during operations.

Concepts

From a command line, you can run git init in any folder to make any folder a Git repository. Doing so creates a .git folder with a database and configuration files for the local repository. Git considers any folder that contains a .git folder with these configuration and database files... [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]

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]

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]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Straight Story (1999) — 8/10
2. Shaolin Soccer (2001) — 8/10
3. What We Do in the Shadows (2014) — 6/10
4. The Unforgivable (2021) — 8/10
5. Predestination (2014) — 8/10
6. Fury (2014) — 9/10
7. Neal Brennan: Crazy Good (2024) — 8/10
8. Black Mass (2015) — 8/10
9. Batman: The Animated Series (1992) — 5/10
10. Masters of the Universe: Revolution (2024) — 2/10

The Straight Story (1999) — 8/10

This movie was directed by David Lynch and is... [More]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Big Fish (2003) — 8/10
2. Barbie (2023) — 5/10
3. Simon Romang: Charrette! (2022) — 8/10
4. Darkman (1990) — 6/10
5. Bullet Train (1990) — 6/10
6. Last of the Mohicans (1992) — 8/10
7. Mission Impossible II (2000) — 8/10
8. Father Figures (2017) — 5/10
9. Athena (2022) — 5/10
10. Archer: Series Finale (2024) — 9/10

Big Fish (2003) — 8/10

Tim Burton directs this offbeat story (I know, it almost goes without saying) of a couple of generations... [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]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. How it Ends (2018) — 5/10
2. Castlevania S04 (2021) — 8/10
3. Paddleton (2019) — 8/10
4. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) — 7/10
5. The Curse S01 (2023) — 5/10
6. Death Note (2017) — 5/10
7. Licorice Pizza (2021) — 5/10
8. A Series of Unfortunate Events S01–S03 (2017–2019) — 7/10
9. Long Shot (2019) — 9/10
10. Dune (2021) — 8/10

How it Ends (2018) — 5/10

Will Younger (Theo James) and Samantha Sutherland (Kat Graham) are expecting. Her parents... [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 is another excellent 1-hour tour of another complex corner of .NET. Toub describes and shows how the source-generated RegEx engine works.

Deep Dive into RegEx with Stephen Toub by dotnet / Scott Hanselmann (YouTube)

• The generated source is human-readable and debuggable.
• It is well-commented.
• It updates in real-time as you change the expression.
• It includes XML documentation that describes the regular expression in plain English.
• They rewrote the compiler in .NET 7 to not only better support source generators, but also to be able to emit not only IL, but source... [More]

This is another video from Stephen Toub that is just chock/full of useful information.

Writing async/await from scratch in C# with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

At 27:30, they start to discuss about the nomenclature of Task and how it differs from an Action. It’s funny that neither of them mentioned that tasks in .NET are called promises pretty much everywhere else (JavaScript, Java, etc.). Some libraries also use the word future. For more information, see Futures and promises (Wikipedia).

As he’s building everything, it is really astonishing to note that Hanselmann has to... [More]

This is a great interview with the master of performance-optimization in .NET Stephen Toub. If you’re relatively well-versed in C#, .NET, and Linq, then you can just jump to the second video (linked below). I actually watched the second one first. I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

Deep Dive on LINQ with Stephen Toub by dotnet (YouTube)

Stephen Toub’s the guy who writes the 100+-page release notes on performance. See the following links.

• Performance Improvements in .NET 5 (46 pages)
• Performance Improvements in .NET 6 (109 pages)
• Performance... [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]