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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

I’d watched an excellent movie[1] that was primarily in German but had some English parts, with hard-coded English subtitles and soft German subtitles plastered on top of that. I wanted to cite a bunch of interesting sections, so I looked for the subtitles online. Only the English subtitles are available, which I didn’t want. I liked the German formulation and wanted to cite that.

Well, I have the subtitles: they’re just trapped in the mkv file. I figured that there was some way of extracting... [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]

I’ve been following and reading Matt Taibbi’s journalism for quite some time. The first reference to an article of his I can find is from Lies, Damned Lies and The Media, in which I cited an article of his called Punish the Right-Wing Liars, published on AlterNet. He’s been on right side of justice for a long time. He’s been chastising the press for lying and forsaking its journalistic duties for just as long.

Whereas he used to hammer exclusively on the more right-wing press during the Bush... [More]

I have not used any of these AIs, not even once. I’ve just been following how other people are using them and kind of just observing, at a meta level, what’s going on so far. Some very clever and otherwise focused people who used to publish other content have been completely derailed by their obsession with AI (I’m looking at you, Simon Willison), so there must be something to it. But what?

I think a good place to start is with the article Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker), which... [More]

Lately, I’m seeing a lot of otherwise solid news sources start sniping at each other for no other reason that they disagree on some issues—or agree on issues, but disagree on how to address them. It’s really sad to see, but there it is. I know that this is how standard media works, but it’s starting to bleed more and more into the world of my more esoteric newsfeeds.

For example, Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch will not stop sniping at Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore as... [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]

Opera has for a very long time had a nice feature that lets you share tabs between browser instances. Since I have a private desktop, a private notebook, and a work notebook, I use this feature quite a bit to transfer tabs between machines.

Unfortunately, a given Opera instance isn’t very good at forgetting older devices. E.g., my machine from my previous place of employment is still listed. Also, devices are sometimes listed multiple times, which is confusing and irritating.

There is no... [More]

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 available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Iron Man (2008) — 8/10... [More]

Introduction

Testing is any form of validation that verifies a product. That includes not only structured validation using checklists, test plans, etc. but also informal testing, as when engineers click their way through a UI, emit values in debugging output to a console, or perform operations on hardware.

Automated testing is common for software, as regression-style tests that execute both locally and in CI. This includes unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

The following discussion... [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]

Garmin Venu 2I’ve been noticing for a while that our so-called technological overlords are trying to sell us a vision of meticulously tracked health data that will help us all move toward a fitter, healthier lifestyle—and, hopefully, alert us when things are starting to go awry in these delicate biological machines we inhabit.

Insurance companies are starting to incorporate this data into their decisions on how much to charge you for the pleasure of not losing everything you own should you become ill.
... [More]

I had found a quote from a play called “Radio Golf” by August Wilson, but it was missing a word.

The quote is from Woke Imperialism by Chris Hedges (SubStack),

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know... [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]

This was a pretty good game, unless you like defense. I will leave most of the political commentary in the capable hands of others.[1]

• Zelensky 🇺🇦 video call, of course
• Marine Corps 🎖
• Military Color Guard 🪖
• Jets flying over the stadium 🛩
• Three or four songs to start it off? ✅
• The National Anthem was a very nice rendition by Chris Stapleton 🎸
• Coaches and players crying like bitches? 😭 Oh, yeah.
• Giant American flag? 🇺🇸 Yup.
• Soldiers and wars mentioned all the time in... [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]

I read through the Full transcript of Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address by Biden Administration (CNN). Since I read it, it’s now been annotated to death. When I read it, it was just a transcript.

It’s quite a piece of work. I had to check a few times to see whether I was reading the state of the union of the U.S.A.

Joe Biden describes a country with policies that I don’t recognize. He describes a functioning democracy that is surging with greatness and getting amazing things done for everyone. And, at the same... [More]

1. Feels Good Man (2020) — 6/10
2. Дом дураков / House of Fools (2002) — 9/10
3. Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) — 10/10
4. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — 7/10
5. Bad Sisters S01 (2022) — 9/10
6. Spirited (2022) — 6/10
7. Archer S13 (2022) — 8/10
8. Inside Job S01–S02 (2021–2022) — 9/10
9. Letterkenny S01–S03 (2022) — 8/10
10. The Assistant (2019) — 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... [More]

I just saw the following meme, What the hell even is a dream job? by PrecisionAcc (Reddit), which highlighted the picture shown below.

What even is a dream job?

Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term “dream job”, but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is.

I thought antiwork was about being against the drone-job work culture, not against being useful at all.

I understand that it’s hard to even conceive of a world where jobs don’t suck when you have a shitty job. But isn’t... [More]