Some asked is there a js library that animates the text word by word like shown? by DemDavors (Reddit).

A bunch of people answered “just do it with CSS!” and one or two recommend using GSAP (Green Sock Animation Platform). I’d just heard about that library in the following instructive video and had had a chance to investigate how it works.

FLIP animations | HTTP 203 by Google Chrome Developers

I’d like to expand on the comments recommending to use the “rule of least power”. They are absolutely correct, but you have to consider the entire task:

• Learning how to use... [More]

I recently answered the question What features from other languages would you like to see in C#? by BatteriVolttas (Reddit)

I think Anchored Declarations and Qualified Anchored Declarations from Eiffel would be very useful.

I like the name “anchored” because you’re anchoring the type of one thing to another. Instead of using int throughout a class, you can just make e.g. a field named _id be an int and then make all other types (e.g. for the parameter passed to a method) refer to the anchor with like _id or typeof _id.... [More]

Overheard in the excellent video essay,

Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now by Like Stories of Old (YouTube)

At 21:30,

“The point is to reflect on the way we generally regard the cosmos and the fundamental forces that are at play there. And to question that, which we so often deem to be the realistic or the rational view of our universe. Because when the void at the end of all things is no longer a given, when the nature of our cosmos is vastly more complicated than we assumed, the supposedly... [More]”

Apple’s Calendar has gotten worse and worse in the last two or three operating-system releases.

I had three reminders/appointments this morning at 09:00. They all popped up five minutes before nine, as desired.

I told them all to go away for an hour.

They all popped up again, at nine. One of them popped up twice.

I then told them all to go away forever, in a fit of rage.

Now, I just changed the reminder for one of these appointments to “Alert at time of event”.

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

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.

The French Dispatch... [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]

What’s the biggest source of CO₂ in the world? I was with a friend who argued that it was personal passenger vehicles. I was pretty sure that industry and agriculture produced the lion’s share of CO₂, but she was adamant. I thought it sounded like her source was conveniently placing the blame for a warming planet on individuals’ inability to conserve when I thought that our individual contributions, while not inconsequential, were not the place that we needed to start, necessarily.

When I had... [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
• Programming... [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
• 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

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

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.

Terminator: Dark Fate... [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’m going to be there soon for the first time in almost four years.

I was thinking today what I’m going to say when someone in my family asks me what I think of America.

Maybe something like:

I think that you’re lost control of your country. And I think you need to stop worshiping the people who’ve taken it from you.

I think you’re all fighting over what amount to minor differences relative to the actually major issues on which you mostly agree. You get lost in the weeds on issues like... [More]

The article First impressions of DALL-E, generating images from text by Simon Willison shows some examples from the author’s attempts at generating images with the AI. If you’re interested in learning more about how these AIs/algorithms work, see How Imagen Actually Works by Ryan O'Connor, which is Google’s equivalent to DALL-E.

Citing the first article, Willison writes,

“DALL-E only allows you to generate up to 50 images a day. I found this out only when I tried to generate image number 51. So there’s a budget to watch out... [More]”

Zelenkskyy’s wardrobe of 100% T-Shirts is pretty clearly a power move.

Casual Meeting with Zelenskyy

Everybody else shows up in the classic garb of the European upper-class. Zelenskyy shows that he’s got them by the balls by showing up in a grotty, old, army-olive T-Shirt. He’s at war, you see.

In this next picture, we see him thinking about what he’ll ask for next.

Zelenskyy Thinking Hard

Apparently, it was for them to not only let Ukraine into NATO, to have Sweden and Finland give up their neutrality for Ukraine, but also to fast-track... [More]

I skimmed through a recent article called Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine by Slavoj Žižek (The Guardian). I’ve read a lot of Žižek. I’ve heard a lot of interviews with him. This article doesn’t “sound” like him at all.

There are no contrarian positions, there are no mentions of Hegel or Lacan, no mentions of psychiatry. He made absolutely no pop-culture references. He told no jokes. He usually talks of being a realist communist—nothing of the sort here. No mention of Ukraine’s absolute war on... [More]

I think most people’s experience of propaganda is best defined as,

“Information that one has not yet heard enough times to believe.”

As long as one doesn’t believe it, information remains propaganda. After that crucial repetition, it crosses the threshold into established fact and deeply held belief.

This, all without any change in evidence, believability, deniability or plausibility.

We have arrived at a point where “making money” has become completely unmoored from “performing a societally useful task”—so much so that the previous sentence will make no sense to most people.

The will ask: What does doing something useful have to do with making money? You need money to live; ergo, you come by it any old way. Whether you “deserve” it doesn’t enter into it.

An obvious and egregious example is the exponentially increasing “hustle economy”, featuring “influencers” whose... [More]

I think I’m a good person relative to what society expects of individuals, but I’m not a very good person on an absolute scale.

I understand what is required for me and mine to live out a comfortable life within the bounds of the system we have—and I work within the bounds of that system to obtain it, as ethically as possible.

Everyone else tries to do the same, with varying levels of success—and varying ethics.

I understand that most people’s rate of success will not match either their... [More]

The way of our world is this.

Suppose we have, on the one hand, someone who watches a couple of hours of Pentagon propaganda and comes to their deeply held convictions that way, slapping a bunch of Support Ukraine stickers on their car (for example).

On the other hand, we have someone who spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over several months, collecting information and ideas from dozens of authors and forming a more nuanced and historically “true” opinion and ideas about how to end... [More]

I cannot emphasize enough how little respect I have for any soccer player who does not stop whining and complaining about calls, even long after the referee has indicated that there will be a VAR.

They are a bunch of puling brats.

No pride. No honor.

They are a whole team full of idiotic children following the referee around like stupid ducklings, all with the most tragic looks on their faces, as if the gravest injustice to ever befall mankind had been perpetrated and they need to prosecute... [More]