Two weeks later and people are still talking about Mark Carney as if he were some sort of leftist hero. Don’t bother watching his speech. It’s self-serving trash that boils down to: We are only dissatisfied with a system once it starts being disadvantageous to us. The exploitation of others never bothered us in the least.

FULL SPEECH: PM Carney’s Most Inspiring Remarks at Davos — Greenland, Trump Tariff Threats | AQ1B by DRM News (YouTube)

He never names the U.S. or Trump. He just complains that things are hard for his poor country, which is accustomed to being one of the predators but is now scared that it... [More]

In the video Context is Everything by Andreas Fredriksson (Vimeo), the author pinpoints that a dependency in his app—a JSON-handling library—is sucking all the performance out of it.

So, he takes a look at it.

It’s a general-purpose library, with a lot of edge cases…edge cases that his input data doesn’t have. That is, if he can guarantee a certain context, then he can use an optimized version of the JSON library’s code. This isn’t always going to be the solution—it will, in fact, rarely be the solution for a LOB... [More]

The article John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) describes a very early experiment in natural-language processing from the late 1960s called SHRDLU (Wikipedia).

“SHRDLU could handle this too, although I think its mechanism was different: it would interact with the separate blocks world subsystem and ⸢actually⸣ try to put the block on the pyramid; the simulated physics would simulate the block falling off the pyramid, and SHRDLU would discover that its stacking attempt had been unsuccessful.... [More]”

The article macOS Tidbits by Jasper Lai has dozens of tips but I’ve only included the ones below that I had either never heard of or that I’d forgotten. There are still a lot of them.

1. “⌥ + ⌘-click an app in the Dock to switch to that app and hide all other apps at the same time. This is great when screen sharing.

   “Hold ⌘ to interact with background windows without bringing them into focus.”

2. “[…] double-click and drag to select word-by-word. Triple-click and drag to select paragraph-by-paragraph.”

3. “When... [More]”

This is an excellent summary of the economy as we experience it today.

How The Stock Market Made Money Even Faker by SOME MORE NEWS | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

“The thing I keep saying and will always say, money is fake.

“Money is fake. It’s a hallucination we all agreed upon. Now, it being fake doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary, but it’s fake and it’s never been more fake than right now.

“The first corporation that ever went public, the Dutch East India company raised money to support its colonization, that sucked.

“But today, when companies issue stocks, they don’t pour the profits... [More]”

Inside, The Valley Sings by Nathan Fagan & Natasza Cetner (Vimeo) is a fifteen-minute video of rotoscoped animations of prisoners and prisons, with a voiceover by multiple prisoners. They explain their lives inside. The first explains that he was sentenced to 34 years in prison at 16 years old. He lived in Angola prison in Louisiana. The film is also available on YouTube, as linked below.

Inside, The Valley Sings | Award-Winning Documentary Short Film by Short of the Week (YouTube)

Another “spent 22 years and 36 days total in solitary confinement.”.

Later, he said,

“When they came to take me out of the cell… My vocal cords... [More]”

I was mystified as to what the final four-letter word starting with “EN” might be, and finally landed on the four-letter combination “ENBY” and had to admit that I’d never heard of this short word before. This doesn’t happen a lot.

NY Times Spelling Bee thinks 'Enby' is a word

What the hell does it even mean? The Free Dictionary doesn’t know what it is. DuckDuckGo returns a link to Nichtbinäre Geschlechtsidentität (Wikipedia) (my settings prefer Swiss-German results), which is the Non-binary (Wikipedia) (which is much less obviously related to gender than... [More]

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

1. Christine (1983) — 8/10
2. The Boys S04 (2025) — 9/10
3. South Park S28 (2025) — 9/10
4. Stranger Things S05 (2025) — 8/10
5. Lee Camp at the Cobra Club (2025) — 7/10
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — 6/10
7. Liz Miele: Space Camp (2025) — 7/10
8. Dead Poets Society (1989) — 9/10
9. Spaceballs (1987) — 6/10
10. Hellboy (2004) — 8/10

Christine (1983) — 8/10

Christine was born in Detroit in 1957, She came off the assembly line... [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]

The video America deserved this… by HasanAbi (YouTube) discusses the “medical stupidity” of Nick Shirley. I have not embedded the video because no-one should have to suffer through watching that much footage of this dope talking. So why write about the video at all? Well, it illustrates an interesting point: even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, even when he doesn’t know it.

At one point, Shirley said that “we should crack down on all types of fraud.” This is the truffle. He just doesn’t know what he... [More]

The article China trade surplus hits historic record by Nick Beams (WSWS) writes that,

“In response to criticism of the surplus from the major economic powers, particularly the European Union, which has complained that it is being flooded with cheap Chinese imports, the Chinese government sought to turn the tables.

“The vice minister of the General Administration of Customs of China, Wang Jun, said the export controls of China’s partners were preventing China from importing more.

“And then directing remarks at... [More]”

The article NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica) describes something really neat[1] but the thing that drew my attention was a more politically oriented comment at the end of the article.

““It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund.... [More]”

I saw this in a YouTube comments section the other day. I consider it to be a minimally succinct summary—a microcosm, if you will—of where we are with language and technology right now.

All my motives are alterior

“All my motives are alterior.”

“Ulterior.”

“[Translate to English]”

“Translate to English” 👩‍🍳😘

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]

In 2023, I read a lot of longer, technical papers for which I took notes (as usual) but that don’t really qualify as books, as such. Some of them were of what some might call book-length, though. I present these with original—though very sparse—comments amid the citations I found interesting and relevant from those documents.

Programming

1. The Usability of Advanced Type Systems: Rust as a Case Study (January, 2023)
2. nato1968 − Software Engineering (October, 1968)
3. IEEE-Annals − A Brief... [More]

Tricking a vibe coder into learning to code by Alberta Tech (YouTube)

“Alberta: This is like the next level of vibe-coding. You just type out exactly what you want. It’s really like, ‘we just put the AI in your brain.’ Here, I’ll show you how to do it.. It’s like that … and it’s done.

“Varun: This is future of vibe-coding right here. Yes! We’re gonna write the code ourselves.

“Alberta: You are the AI.

“Varun: I am the AI.

“Alberta: Human intelligence.

“Alberta: There’s this crazy website called leetcode where you can just play around and pretend to the AI. And... [More]”

This is how Apple gets its users to update to newer versions of its operating systems. I checked whether there were any updates and saw that Sequoia—which I still have installed because I am not interested in a whole new, worse UI—had an update.

Select to update MacOS Sequoia

I select to see information about updating macOS Sequioa and got the following dialog, cheerfully ready to “upgrade”.

Apple tries to trick me into upgrading to Tahoe

Stick it in your ear, Apple. I’m not interested.

When I reboot in a few minutes, I 100% expect to see it ask me to enable... [More]

Here’s a Wordle for you: I guessed my lady’s favorite first guess to eliminate four vowels. My second wild stab—with two Rs; doubled letters also being a favorite of the lady—eliminated the “O” and showed me that the “Y” was not at the end of the word.

The only vowel is Y and it's not at the end

Where the hell is the Y then?

Hint: it was December 19th.

That’s a week out from Christmas day.

Think: Three Wise Men.

Think: Gifts.

Frankincense! Obvs.

The article CBS censors “60 Minutes” report on torture of immigrant detainees by Patrick Martin (WSWS) writes,

“The leaked version of the “60 Minutes” segment is devastating. The courage of the men who testified is remarkable, as is the compassion of the students and human rights advocates who helped them, and the determination of Alfonsi and her team of journalists to bring this information to the public. The segment exposes the blatant lying and inhuman callousness of the Trump administration, particularly... [More]”

The post The efficient allocation of capital (Reddit) writes,

The efficient allocation of capital

“To spell this out clearly, the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn’t been produced yet has been bought with money that doesn’t exist to populate GPUs that also haven’t been produced to go in datacenters that haven’t been built powered by infrastructure that may never exist to meet a demand that doesn’t exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can’t exist while economists talk about... [More]”

The EU, casting its eye about for more thought­crimeThis is an excellent interview with what is presumably the first of many Swiss people to be sanctioned by the EU for thinking unapproved thoughts and having unapproved opinions out loud. He’s been accused of supporting Russia, which, like, it’s a free country, right? Oh no. It is absolutely not a free country.

I wrote recently at more length about this in Hung out to dry by Switzerland, in which I reported on an interview with Nathalie Yamb, who is another Swiss citizen upon whom the fiery eye... [More]

This is a great discussion. At 26.5 minutes, it’s relatively compact. They discuss, among other things, Vivek Ramaswamy’s having come down to Earth to realize that his party will not accept him as a real person.

Millennial White Men DISCRIMINATED Against? (w/ Vijay Prashad) by Briahna Joy Gray (YouTube)

At about 18:00,

“I mean, there’s real racism but also for political reasons. It’s very useful to believe that groups rise or fall because of their kinds of intrinsic ability, because then they don’t have to spend money on any policies to try to create any kind of equality. Right?... [More]”

Unraveling the Rot: Doug Henwood on America’s Economic Elites and the Fight for a Just Future (Scheer Post) was a fantastic interview. Highly, highly recommended. The summary from the show writes,

“[…] discuss the deep decay—“the rot”—within America’s ruling class. Henwood argues today’s political and economic elites are short-sighted, unimaginative, and corrupted by money. While Trump is an obvious symptom, Henwood stresses that the Democratic establishment, Ivy League elite, and corporate... [More]”

This isn’t exactly my musical style—metal is great but scream/growl metal has yet to grow on me—but I love the commitment in this video. Like, imagine they’re spitballing what the video’s going to be like and someone says,

“Let’s dub our song to what looks like an earnest but kinda lame, four-piece, mariachi-looking band.”

“Is that us? Is the band us?”

“Yeah, of course. Who else is gonna do it?”

“OK. Cool. But what if, and bear with me, aliens start abducting and replacing band... [More]

Avatar: Fire and AshI don’t trust the Critical Drinker (link below) that much, but his review for the second Avatar movie rings absolutely true, so I can imagine that there’s a good chance that it applies to this one as well. I can’t remember anything about Avatar 2. I can’t remember a single character’s name.

I would fail a quiz on the Avatar films with a 0/10. I’ve seen both Avatars. I might have seen the first one twice. I honestly can’t remember. My notes reveal that, even for the first one, which I saw in 2012... [More]

This documentary was originally released as Das Netz in German. The narration is in German, with hard-coded English subtitles. Many of the interviews are in English.

The Net − the Unabomber, LSD and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck in 2003 (YouTube)

In a way, the people interviewed in this documentary are similar to the ones I’d just seen in Cybertopia. They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their own capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The... [More]

Not a single person in this video is self-aware. They are completely unaware of how ironically terrible everything that they say is. Even the producers of the video thought that this was a good thing, a world of rich people deciding for everyone else how the world was going to look.

But they’re all morons, shallow—so shallow!—and so convinced that they’re right, that there’s nothing more to discuss, that they’ve missed nothing. They are incurious because they’ve got it all figured out.
... [More]

The article Walz Pulls Out: Score Another Another One for Racism, Coupled with Democratic Party and Media Ineptitude by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) is yet another well-written lament in a long list of laments about the utter lack of resistance to the grinding propaganda machine buoying the Trump administration.

I don’t really care about Tim Walz. He’s an empty suit. For God’s sake, he was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate to the even emptier suite of Kamala Harris. That he’s bowing out of a re-election campaign... [More]

OCaml LogoI don’t program with OCaml. I never have. I have a good colleague who does, occasionally, write stuff in OCaml, and he sent me a bunch of links about OCaml Effects, starting with a discussion asking Are we rational? About exceptions and effects by olleharstedt (OCaml Community).

The author writes,

“I was thinking about the fact that there’s no consensus about exceptions and whether to include them or not in a programming language. Think about Go. They decided to not add support for exceptions. Did they cite any study to... [More]”