I though I’d already heard everything that Cornel West had to say, but this interview was chock-full of many interesting clarifications. Norman Finkelstein doesn’t say much in this one.

DR. CORNEL WEST — The Marathon Interview, Part One: Race by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

At 26:00, they discuss the difference between racism, generalization, and recognition of cultural difference.

“Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just... [More]”

The latest video by Nick Chapsas has a more-than-usually clickbait-y headline. The “big” problem that NativeAOT has, is that it’s 4% slower during runtime than the JIT-compiled version.

NativeAOT in .NET 8 Has One Big Problem by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for applications launched on-demand. For that use-case, AOT shines. It’s over 4x faster on startup than the JIT-compiled version. It’s incredibly impressive that JIT-compilation takes less than 1/10 of a... [More]

A build started started failing after a commit. However, the errors had nothing to do with the changes in the commit. A little investigation revealed that the cloud agent had started using a newer version of the build tool that included an expanded set of default warnings. These warnings started appearing first on CI because developers hadn’t had the chance to update their tools yet.

The “warnings as errors” setting turned what would have been a build with a few extra warnings into a failing... [More]

I read through the article Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down (Graphite.Dev) with great interest because I, too, am not thrilled about how PRs work. While I agree with the problems Graphite see with PRs, I think they miss other problems—and I don’t like their solution very much.

PRs are, apparently, HUGE

“The single most important bottleneck is PR size − large PRs can make code reviews frustrating and ineffective. The average PR on GitHub has 900+ lines of code changes. For speed... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Science &... [More]

For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.

The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over... [More]

The next in my ongoing series of people on tears, following Gideon Levy is on a tear, Amira Hass is on a tear, and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.

Extended episode: Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on Genocide of Palestinians by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

Ilan Pappé's couture inspirationI don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked like a prisoner’s uniform.

0:00	Intro
o1:10	The Four Food Groups of News
16:21	Ilan Pappé interview
16:53	Becoming and anti-Zionist
21:41	Israel is a plan of ethnic cleansing
34:04	Historical context... [More]

With LLM-produced materials, we are currently forced to rely on belief that what we ask for is what we will get. We don’t know. We can’t prove it.

For example, image generators have been given billions and billions of images and pictures of people and still they generate material with people that have three arms and eight fingers. There are guardrails in place in most image generators, but the LLM at the core of the machine doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know that people don’t have three... [More]

Back at the end of August, I read the article Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison. I have since being doing much more research about integrating LLM-based assistants into the development workflow for work. It’s quite interesting, and I’m going through some older content to see what’s worth mining for that effort.

In particular, the article has this description of expertise, and linked it to ChatGPT—obviously, it’s Simon Willison.

“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider... [More]”

I was going to name this article a more serious-sounding “The situation in Israel according to Gideon Levy”, but then realized that I’d already written Amira Hass is on a tear and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.

Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just 100% gold. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but it’s really more of a lecture on Israel, as she is in 2023.

Extended episode: Israel’s Nazi Proposals w/ Gideon Levy by Useful Idiots: Katie Halper & Aaron Maté (YouTube)

00:00	Intro
01:43	The Four Food Groups of News
19:52	An Ode to Henry Kissinger
24:00... [More]

I’d never heard of Saul Williams before, but I very much like Abby Martin’s work. I recently published an article called From their mouths to God’s ear, about a video of hers from 2016, where she interviews Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem.

In this video, there was some interesting stuff, but I felt that they accompanied each other down the rabbit hole a bit too much.

Saul Williams & Abby Martin: Israel's High-Tech Barbarism by Empire Files (YouTube)

They formed their own little echo chamber. It was a fine discussion, but no progress made to figure out how to reach... [More]

I’ve watched Mo Gawdat before (see Mo Gawdat discusses AI). He is an acquired taste, at least for me. There is good in what he says, but it is interspersed with a lot of wild and unsubstantiated statements that he hopes you’ll believe because he’s so smart. The listener is left wondering whether they don’t see the through-line on what he’s saying because he’s skipped a bunch of steps that his unparalleled genius didn’t see as necessary or wether he’s just pulling a fast one.[1]

This is the video:... [More]

The article New Survey Showing Public Ignorance About the Holocaust Among Young Americans wrote the following about a survey about the Holocaust.

“The question in the survey asks respond[ant]s whether they “strongly agree,” “tend to agree,” “tend to disagree,” “strongly disagree,” or “neither agree nor disagree” with the statement that “the Holocaust is a myth.” In the sample as a whole, only 7% picked “strongly agree” (2%) or “tend to agree” (5%). But among young people (age 18-29), the figure... [More]”

Most of this discussion was stuff I’d heard before—even in more recent videos—but I almost always enjoy listening to him.[1]

Slavoj Zizek − Israel, Palestine & the Future by How To Academy Mindset (YouTube)

He said something at the end that I found to be, if not new, at last well-formulated. I’ve transcribed it below. At 01:24:20, he says,

“What’s the problem today? I will point to this paradox. You know that, on the one hand, we perceive our situation as powerless, totally manipulated—you don’t control anything. But, at the same time, the hegemonic ideology today is... [More]”

Kath and I rode home from Fehraltorf to Kempten at 12:30 at night. We boarded in the car that is ¾ first-class. Instead of walking to the second-class cabin, I just sat down in the first-class cabin, which was otherwise completely empty of passengers. I sat down alone. We hadn’t purchased first-class tickets, so Kath was not going to sit there.[1]

But why not sit there? The car was otherwise empty. We weren’t taking seats from anyone with a first-class ticket. There was no physical reason... [More]

I heard Slavj Žižek use this phrase in a recent interview. It translates in English to “Even if it is not true, it is very well-invented,” or, perhaps a bit more colloquially, “Even if it ain’t true, it’s a good story.”

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

• Climate Change
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism &... [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]

This interview is from September 28th, a little over a week before Norman Finkelstein burst onto the scene for his commentary on October 7th and the aftermath. The interview is on a completely different topic. It is excellent.

Is Ibram X Kendi's 'Anti-Racism' a SCAM? (w/ Norm Finkelstein) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

I’ve included a partial transcript with the parts I found particularly interesting below.

At 00:02:00, he discusses the drift in capability of students over the last few decades.

“Norm: If you go back as far as I do, the fact of the matter is, that what they teach now... [More]”

The article Some notes on Local-First Development by Kyle Matthews (Bricolage) focuses on a very good trend in app development, but focuses a bit too much on what he calls DX, or developer experience.

“I see “local-first” as shifting reads and writes to an embedded database in each client via“sync engines” that facilitate data exchange between clients and servers. […] The benefits are multiple:”

• Simplified state management for developers.
• Built-in support for real-time sync, offline usage, and multiplayer... [More]

A while back, I read the article Colorado Lawsuit’s Strategy for Keeping Trump Off Ballot Is Starting to Spread by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post), which is about subverting democracy in exactly the ways that the author fears that Trump would.

These people are rudderless, adrift. They have no sense or irony, no morality, and no self-awareness. It makes them so stupid. This mess is just embarrassing for everyone involved.

This gleeful horseshit where people are delighted that they’ve found some old clause of some document... [More]

Today was not a great day for the SBB.

I took three trains to get where I was going and each of them was 3-4 minutes late. The Swiss pack their schedules pretty tightly, so 4 minutes late at the end meant that the SBB had eaten up the two-minute buffer between the train’s arrival in Dietikon and the departure of the 301 bus I was meant to catch.

It was only a 1km walk, so no big deal, but it might have sucked more had it been raining even harder than it was—or had it been as windy as it has... [More]

A while back, I took the following notes from the article ‘Innocent Israelis’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post). These comments are from an ordinarily lucid reporter writing on October 11th. We didn’t know then what we know now, but we did know that collective punishment is wrong, and that there is most certainly such a thing as the concept of a innocence. Lawrence in this article seems to be arguing for a pretty strict restriction of the definition of that word, as illustrated below.

“To assume the responsibilities that... [More]”

The post What’s a picture of a celebrity that lives rent free in your mind? I’ll start…. by N_Ywasneverthesame (Reddit) gives us this image of Mads Mikkelsen.

A young Mads Mikkelsson

The foreground objects make this a bit of an odd photo, but he looks cool.

Bernadette Peters

I think this is from The Jerk. I was a big fan growing up. She’s hilarious.

Daniel Radcliffe with like 26 dogs

Big DILLIGAF energy.

Captain America Truckstop Hooker

This was an actual photo shoot that Chris Evans did. No-one should let him forget it.

Jude Law and Ewan McGregor

These two fools also did a photo shoot.

Keanu Reeves has always been dedicated to the craft

So did John Wick, way back in his Private Idaho days.... [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

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

Blade Runner − Final scene, 'Tears in Rain' Monologue (HD) (YouTube)

The Wikipedia article describes the origin of these few, sparse lines.

“[…] the original script, before Hauer’s rewrite, was:”

“I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as... [More]”

Normal Finkelstein has woken from a slumber, finally being interviewed and questioned about his deep knowledge of Palestine, Israel and their shared history. I’ve written relatively extensively about him recently, in Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, but also in many Links & Notes stretching back over 10 years (with several from the last six weeks), from when I reviewed the film Lemon Tree in 2016 or when I reviewed the film Defamation in 2013.

He’s usually absolutely strictly no-nonsense, but... [More]