I have some time off and I’ve been working through a backlog of writing that I’ve wanted to copy-edit and finish for a long time. I have hundreds of pages of book citations, half-written book reviews, nearly draft movie reviews, and hundreds of articles in varied fields all “mostly” ready to publish but lacking what I consider to be a final polish.

About five years ago, I partly addressed this by inaugurating my weekly notes, a place where the flurry of writing, notes, thoughts, responses, and... [More]

The article Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how? by Sam Rose (ngrok) included the following hypothesis,

“[…] what if we had a problem where we didn’t know the formula? What if we just had this mysterious table of inputs and outputs below?”

Table of inputs and outputs

The author wrote,

“I will say that ChatGPT figures it out straight away if you paste a screenshot into the app.”

Holy shit! Really?

I opened up https://chatgpt.com for probably the first time in my life and pasted the screenshot and asked, “What function produces... [More]”

I had never thought of an if statement as a type-check until a Smalltalk programmer explained it to me in this video. She explained how Smalltalk has six keywords—according to Wikipedia, they’re true, false, nil, self, and super, but her list had thisContext on it as well[1]—and you can get rid of conditions and turn them into message-passing instead, as God intended.

RailsConf 2015 − Nothing is Something by Sandi Metz on May 1, 2015 (YouTube)

From the official video description,

“Our code is full of hidden assumptions, things that seem like nothing, secrets that we... [More]”

I was recently allowed to observe as a team discussed the benefits and drawbacks of using an IOC container.[1]

I was asked not to directly participate because it was a team-building exercise; the team needed to convince itself based on the merits of its own arguments. If those for the technology were unable to articulate their convictions sufficiently, then it wouldn’t help for an outside authority to dictate the answer. I assisted in the background, with clarification and alternate explanations.... [More]

I very much enjoy the podcast TrueAnon, hosted by Brace Belden, Liz Frantzak, and produced by Yung Chomsky. They do very high-quality research, have an encyclopedic knowledge of trends, sports, history, culture, and politics, and are funny as hell. I’ve been listening to them for years. I very much enjoyed their last few shows of the year.

Episode 508: Southern Strategy (Patreon)

This show discusses “the new National Security Strategy, Machado, oil, and Trump’s attempts to instigate a war with Venezuela.... [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]

A friend forwarded me the page called Books I’ve read by Derek Sivers, which is a long, long list of books. I perused it with the default ordering, from highest-rated to lowest-rated.[1] I didn’t see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We’d read only one or two books in common—out of hundreds!—and almost none of his books are on my wishlist.

A cry for help

There were a what I would call a disturbing number of financial self-help books, like You Can Negotiate Anything, The Entrepreneur Roller... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is my second Murakami book. While the subject matter is very, very different—this one’s a love story whereas Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was a sci-fi, crime-novel, philosophical excursion—the coolness of the protagonist and the mood of the writing is the same. And I loved both the protagonist and the mood. This book relaxed me.

This is a book for people who read and people who listen to music. It is a book of its time, written and published a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Cover ArtThis was my first book by Murakami. I very much like the writing style that bleeds through the translation from the Japanese. The world, though Japanese, feels comfortable and familiar to me. It would, of course. Though it is set on the other side of the world geographically, in an ostensibly completely alien culture, it is temporally congruent with my upbringing, with my so-called formative years. Having been raised in the U.S. in the 80s, and Murakami seeming to be an... [More]

I watched/listened to 35 videos, each between 20 and 30 minutes long, and each listed below. I’ve grouped them but retained the order in which I watched them. I’ve left the notes mostly as I wrote them, which is kind of stream-of-consciousness, kind of snarky.

Some videos that I didn’t like got a lot of notes, some videos I liked got fewer notes. It might seem like I hated the video from my snarky notes but I still ended up rating some of them as 🆗, which means that I thought that either... [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]

I’ve sourced it to Lapham’s Quarterly but the original source was The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Wikipedia), which I read in 2005.

The title is a play on the expression, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Donald Trump pumps his fistThe following one-hour video is a serious, though entertaining and humorous, look at “[…] every way Trump is using the presidency to make him and his family billions.” It is historically exhaustive but not repetitive, despite the lack of imagination on Trump’s part.

Why be inventive when just telling obvious lies to get people to give you money seems to work just fine? Trump’s motto is now and seems to have always been, “do no more work than you have to.” The picture to the right of Trump... [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
• Economy... [More]

The short Crutches by Amy X. Wang (The Baffler) was surprisingly good. There is no good way to cite it to give you a flavor of it. It is unique. It is raw. It is unflinching. It is kind of about love. There are dogs in it. There are misunderstood and psychotic friends. There is devotion. It’s weird but good.

B the three-legged Chihuahua

“At the animal shelter I said, Give me the worst dog available, which turned out to be an oafish, fecal-brown Vizsla missing a back leg. But of course B doted on him. She found endless excuses to come over. She took a... [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
• 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 article “Settler madness.” by Cara MariAnna (The Floutist) writes of how a society teaches its young to hate. The example comes from observing Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

“The following three images are screenshots from a video of another incident in which settlers harassed the same family. The boy with the side curls holds a stick. He’s the same boy who was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood in the previous video. I’m showing you these pictures because settlers use their boys as attack dogs. The armed man... [More]”

The book-length Performance Improvements in .NET 10 by Stephen Toub (Microsoft DevBlogs) arrived a couple of months ago.

He explains how the various compilers (AOT, JIT, etc.) have been optimized to eliminate allocations and just generally optimized for performance. A reduction in allocations is a multi-win: the performance is better because the allocator isn’t working, the memory usage has dropped, and the garbage collector also works less.

See previous coverage in:

• Toub’s 234-page tour-de-force on performance in .NET 9... [More]

The article Some Days There’s Just Too Much Israeli Psychopathy To Write About by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack) writes,

“If I had murdered people for trying to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones who I had also murdered, I’d definitely be asking myself a lot of questions, but “what was so important about that corpse?” would definitely not be among them.

“Gaza has become a hunting ground which is visited by psychopathic individuals who want to experience what it’s like to kill human beings, and it’s always open... [More]”

The US is famously and proudly anti-intellectual. It has been for most of my life. There are exceptions but those exceptions live at the edges of society. While their Wikipedia entries might laud them, they acquire neither wealth nor power.

Wealth and power are reserved for the largely self-anointed princelings of the Idiocracy. Europe held itself aloof from its ignorant progeny across the Atlantic for a reasonably long time. But that time is unquestionably past.

Knowledge? No thank you.Kaja Callas is a sad example... [More]

If you’re looking for a more optimistic take, read Hold strong: The cruelty increases with desperation. The video below is by the same guy—Hasan Piker—as in the other article but with a much less hopeful take this time. This video describes the current state of things: that we are cogs in a well-oiled, rent-extraction machine. We have to wake up to it, use our agency, and stop believing all of the bullshit.

you think you have rights? by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Every single American is being surveilled at every single moment of the day.

“How... [More]”

To be optimistic for once: It’s always darkest before dawn. That is, the reason that the elites are lashing out so cruelly is that they are getting more and more desperate as some of them can’t help but notice that the wheels are coming off of this whole rent-extraction contraption that they’ve built.

Sloppy Jenga TowerSome of the other are just yanking Jenga bricks out of the tower of the global economy as fast as they can, utterly oblivious to or uncaring about the degree to which they’re destabilizing their... [More]

This video of Donald Trump going off the rails is a couple of months old already but the content doesn’t really matter. He’s still doing the same song-and-dance, keeping the plates spinning and the plebes distracted while he makes himself richer.

Trump dancesHe’s benefitted less than a handful of other billionaires but he and his family have gained about $3B since he took office. Those are incredible numbers but no-one with any power really seems to care. There is no real uproar about it. He’s still... [More]

The article Smartphone Buyers Care Even Less About AI Than They Did Last Year, CNET Survey Finds by Abrar Al-Heeti (CNet) contains the following illuminating graphic.

Almost no-one cares about AI on their phone

“In 2024, the biggest motivation for US smartphone owners to upgrade their devices was longer battery life (61%), followed by more storage (46%) and better camera features (38%). Just 18% said their main motivator was AI integrations. This year, it appears that number is even lower, even as AI capabilities become more ubiquitous. ”

“Just 13% of people... [More]”

The article Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up by Mike Judge is an interesting read that makes the following argument, more or less,

“If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris... [More]”