The article Pakistan’s political crisis will deepen its economic misery by Julia Horowitz (CNN) writes,

“What’s known as a “balance of payments” crisis is eroding standards of living in a country still reeling from devastating flooding last year. It could “reverse the poverty gains achieved in the last two decades and further reduce the incomes of already poor households,” the World Bank warned last month.

“Pakistan’s ability to maintain payments on its debt has also been called into question. Ratings... [More]”

I recently purchased a Garmin Edge 530 biking computer to upgrade from my Edge 500. It had served me well for over ten years, but the battery was no longer holding a charge reliably and wouldn’t last longer than 3 or 4 hours maximum. I also wanted to be able to store routes so that I was no longer the only annoying guy in the group who had no idea where I was going when we left familiar territory.

I got the 530 because it’s compact and doesn’t have a touch-screen.

I’m still trying to figure... [More]

I watched a great video about image-manipulation using an AWS lambda function.

Working With Images Like a Pro in .NET by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

I was curious about the imaging library he was using and searched for ImageProcessingContext (because I saw it in his code). That led me to ImageSharp, after which I searched for comparisons to the cross-platform library used in Maui (MSDN).

That led me to the issue SkiaSharp vs ImageSharp (GitHub), which noted that,

“Note that JimBobSquarePants, the creator of ImageSharp, contributed some interesting discussion in #47.”

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

The joke does not continue; my apologies. Unless the joke is that we will soon be even less able to comprehend, make sense of, or otherwise act on hypotheses about the world because we are accelerating our already advanced pollution of our information environment. What does that mean?

Actually salient information drowns in a sea of utterly meaningless noise. It’s been this way for a while, if you’ve been paying attention. Social media was the first booster rocket taking us further away from... [More]

I watched the first round of the semifinals but didn’t take notes. I was inspired to take notes for the second semifinals. It was a dumpster fire.

The legend

• 👎 = Go Home
• 🫳 = Could be identified as music
• 👍 = Grudgingly granted to a couple of bands

Second semifinals

There were 16 contestants, but I’ve only reviewed fifteen below. Sue me.

Denmark 🇩🇰

Jesus fucking Christ go home. What was that? A 13-year-old waif with a stupid voice; just him on stage. Denmark is embarrassing... [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]

The article Found through Google, bought with Visa and Mastercard: Inside the deepfake porn economy by Kat Tenbarge (NBC News) described something I’d been only vaguely aware of.

“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.”

Customized porn of anyone is novel to me. I’d never read it hypothesized in any of the... [More]

Drag-Drop Image Conversion by Simon Willison is a gist that contains the conversation that Simon Willison had with Ghat-GPT to build a drag-&-drop image converter.

First of all, he started working on it on April 1st, but it’s hard to believe that he’s pranking—he doesn’t seem the type—so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Assuming that this is real, it’s impressive that it can turn those prompts into a working application.

Although … did it? If you copy/paste any of its examples into an HTML page,... [More]

Why Are Lithium Prices Collapsing? (Hacker News)

The comments are full of people heralding the growth of Lithium mining, as if there being more of it available has come at no cost to anyone. Of course, they don’t think about the destroyed environment or the destroyed communities—they think only of their privileged, 1% future because they know they only ever benefit from increased extraction—in the form of increased availability or lower prices or both—and they never suffer any of the ill effects. Then... [More]

Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon by Nerdwriter (YouTube)

Near the end, he shows a matrix of Nagel’s artwork, showing 25 skinny white women and then says

“They give the impression of real people—chic, fashionable, independent people—but still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them. For salons, Nagel-women served as aspirational images, though it has to be said that these women, all being of one complexion, it’s likely they were only aspirational for a certain segment of the population. This speaks to the warped priorities of 1980s... [More]”

DuoLingo is teaching my partner and I something about neoliberal capitalism.

She is in the Diamond League (very prestigious). It treats her like chattel. She has to do sooooo much work to stay in the league. I, on the other hand, am also in the Diamond League, but I have to do hardly any work at all to stay there. Sometimes I do one lesson a day for a couple, three days in a row. No biggie. No demotion. Nobody’s working too hard in my chapter of the Diamond League.

My partner, on the other... [More]

I don’t think I’m an especially fussy user of software. I just can’t help noticing when it keeps doing stuff that it wants to do rather than what I want it to do. I also can’t help noticing how so much software manages to utterly fail to adequately do even the simplest tasks that are directly related to the thing they were built for doing.

🤦‍♂️ Apple Maps 🤦‍♂️

Today, I had Apple Maps open in Schaffhausen. I searched for a route from Winterthur Bahnhof to a restaurant. I left... [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

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

1. Paddington 2 (2017) — 7/10
2. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — 8/10
3. Starship Troopers (1997) — 9/10
4. Jojo Rabbit (2019) — 9/10
5. Tour de Pharmacy (2017) — 9/10
6. Minamata (2020) — 9/10
7. The Day after Tomorrow (2004) — 6/10
8. Orbital Redux (2018) — 8/10
9. Blackadder (1982–1983) — 5/10
10. Blackadder II (1986) — 7/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings... [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]

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]

1. The Meg (2018) — 6/10
2. American Factory (2019) — 6/10
3. Oeconomia (2020) — 10/10
4. Kevin Can F**k Himself S01/S02 (2021) — 9/10
5. Blue Collar (1978) — 8/10
6. X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) — 7/10
7. The Matrix (1999) — 10/10
8. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets — 6/10
9. Free Guy — 8/10
10. Excalibur (1981) — 8/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly... [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]

Would you like to buy a used Mercedes with 558HP for only CHF130K?

This car was sitting on a tiny, used-car lot near our home. They usually have only 3-5 cars on offer, usually more high-end stuff. This was much, much higher-end than usual, but I’m sure it will be snatched up by some eager young man who needs 558HP to get around town.

I was watching a video today—Everything Is Going to Be Fine: Preparing for the end of the world by Aeon Video (YouTube)—which featured the narrator and his wife in their apartment, shown below.

Twee Folk in Brooklyn?

This is actually what they look like—like caricatures made up by conservative “comedians” making fun of hipsters. I know we shouldn’t make fun of people’s appearance—lord knows I have no idea what I’m doing—but this was just too good to pass up.

He has a pen in his pocket. What is that?

It was only later that I... [More]

I was looking for a great movie called Oeconomia on YouTube.

Wie entsteht Geld? − Macht. Herrschaft. Geld. Über Staatsverschuldung, EZB & riesige Privatvermögen by MrMarxismo (YouTube)

It is excellent, but it is a dry movie in German about macroeconomics.

What it is not, is a movie you would watch on the offhand chance of seeing some nudity. YouTube felt that it needed to correct this oversight and spice things up in the search results.

Oecomania Search on YouTube

The first link (included above) in the results is to the entire movie and is really the only result you need. If you’re not already sure you want to see it, then you can watch... [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]

I’ve taken a bunch of notes and read a bunch of essays and talked to a bunch of people since I wrote Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI, so let’s see where we stand on the day after April Fool’s day[1], which is the day on which we used to not trust anything we read on the Internet. It turned out to be a harbinger of times when we would not trust any sources on any day of the year from human sources. And, now, because we are going to always suspect that we’ve been fooled into reading a 19-page... [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]

Introduction

The intended audience of this document is people interested in knowing which commands to execute to update submodules. The initial analysis section is intended for people interested in knowing how the commands work and what their strengths/weaknesses are.

The inspiration for this documentation was that I was wondering whether submodules were always cloned with detached heads and if there were some way to avoid that. The short answers to these questions are, respectively, “yes”... [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]