The following video makes the point of the title of this article quite concisely; I’ve included a transcript underneath the video.

'You're just scum' — Haley blasts Ramaswamy over his attack on her daughter's TikTok by CNBC Television (YouTube)

If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a faithful transcription of that train-wreck of human interaction and elocution.

Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki Haley didn’t answer your question, which is about looking families in the eye. [sic] In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok. Well, her own daughter was actually using the... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Art &... [More]

The interview Adam Curtis Talks to Jacobin About Russia, Oligarchs, and the Fall of the USSR by Taylor C. Noakes (Jacobin) is interesting and thought-provoking—as Adam Curtis often is. Of course, I had notes, which I’ve interspersed with citations from the article.

“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a bit like Moscow in 1988. My primary goal was to tell the story, but I also wanted to convey that disenchantment with democracy can have its roots in corruption. And there’s quite a lot of... [More]”

The article Israel Has Permanently Lost The Argument by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix) writes,

“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find it pretty intense; you’re having much harder arguments with family, with friends, with people you’ve known your whole lives, about something that probably feels a lot more personal for you.... [More]”

Amira Hass is a leading journalist (with Gideon Levy) at Ha’aretz. “Amira Hass is the only Israeli journalist who has lived in the West Bank for 30 years and has a deep understanding of the Palestinian experience.” The article Amira Hass Speaks on Gaza Slaughter by Jewish Voice for Labour (Scheer Post) includes an embedded video that is age-restricted.[1]

I hadn’t seen the video, but I found it highly unlikely that there was really age-restricted content there. It seemed much more likely that YouTube’s algorithms saw Amira’s name... [More]

After years of lying quietly in his Brooklyn apartment, having given up on his 40-year career of tilting at the windmills of the Israeli occupation, the anger is back. He’s back on the scene, providing valuable insight as the world’s leading expert on the occupation.

The following interview was excellent (but the podcast linked below is even better).

Gaza Update with Norman Finkelstein by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

As for the first hospital bombing of this latest round of war, Finkelstein says that

1. Israel always bombs hospitals (he directed us to his... [More]

The post Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 by Simon Willison is a story about someone gaslighting himself into believing that LLMs work better than they do.

Case study: pelicans and walruses

Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.

So far, so good. It’s really wonderful that you can get something that’s not completely random garbage. However, the bird is only watching the race in the top-right picture. In the first and fourth,... [More]

The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue wrong can be permanently dismissed without any real loss.”

This is mostly true—except that you have to realize and accept that there are good, rescuable people out there who do not accept the... [More]

If someone claims to have seen a nude of you, but no-one can find it, does it exist? The article Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica) should be addressing the question, but doesn’t.[1]

“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.”

But it also sounds like the school “believed” that the images even existed in... [More]

The YouTube recommendation algorithm is slowly starting to get better for me. For example, it showed me this video:

Yngwie Malmsteen − Live with Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra (YouTube)

Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.

It’s 2017, Yngwie’s gotten chubby, he looks maybe a bit ridiculous in all of his stretched leather, gold rings, and gold watch—but he sounds amazing. You can really hear how appropriate most of his compositions... [More]

The post there was an attempt at not getting caught lying (Reddit) shows a video of a Joe Biden campaign event from 1987. Joe Biden is and has always been an arrogant, lying asshole without an ounce of empathy. His personality is such that he will lie four times just to make himself look better than whomever he happens to be arguing with, not at all concerned that he will be caught out later. This is not only sociopathic, but deeply stupid. It’s the kind of recklessness you absolutely don’t want in a... [More]

I’d sent the post Somewhere in America there is an absolute legend who writes ‘SLUTS’ on box cars in various styles (Reddit) to a friend. He wrote back that they were “majestic sluts indeed”. I realized that I’d finally found a prompt to throw an LLM’s way. So I headed over to Stable Diffusion and prompted it with “Majestic sluts in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta” and chose a style of sai-fantasy art not because I knew what I was doing, but because I figured I’d give it the best shot I... [More]

This is a brilliant interview, in that Oren Eini just talks for about 40 minutes, answering pretty much just one or two questions.

Oren Eini on Building Projects that Endure by Technology and Friends (YouTube)

At one point (I forget where), he says,

“I don’t like unit tests.”

Agreed. I likelove automated tests. They’re indispensable. But I think unit tests are only useful when you want to focus on a failing integration test. David rightly points out that they’re really good for pinpointing where a problem actually happens, but Eini says that they also “hinder change”... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

I’ve... [More]

The ~23-minute video below isn’t that long, but it packs a lot of information. The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature, and Frances Haugen is very good, as well.

The Futurist Summit: Lessons of the Last Decade by Washington Post Live (YouTube)

At 08:00, Whittaker talks about the recent strikes in Hollywood,

“[…r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move—withholding their labor—and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI... [More]”

I was looking up something[1] about my account in Microsoft Teams (Teams) the other day.

As I was looking at that, Teams showed me the following tip on the dropdown menu.

Update work hours?

Does it look like that? Does it really, Teams?

How could it possibly look like that if you’ve been paying attention at all?

Teams is on all day on my machine. When I log in at 07:00 every day, Teams is active. When I log out around 16:00 on a workday, Teams knows about it.

I work 07:00–16:00 on about 90% of my workdays.... [More]

A few days back, I wrote Losing the plot completely, describing several previously useful commentators who’d gone completely off the script after October 7th. As of November 3rd, the article Is “Humanitarian Pause” A Real Thing? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) reveals the current state of mind for at least one of the authors. It ends with this incoherent and clearly unedited babble.

“The newly-beloved phrase, “humanitarian pause,” seems so ripe for the moment to “do something” (remember the syllogism?) to help the... [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
• Journalism... [More]

The article Hamas Clarifies They Meant To Start The Type Of War Where They Get To Do Whatever They Want And No One Fights Back (Babylon Bee) is just one in a large set of really tone-deaf and unfortunately unsurprisingly one-sided headlines from this supposedly satirical online newspaper. A good satirist would somehow note that that headline may reflect how Hamas currently feels, but also how Israel was acting a few weeks ago.

There are many more irony-free and completely non-self-aware headlines from the... [More]

Suppose you have a problem with a person at work. Your office is right next to theirs. Your own office is nice, but theirs is also nice.

You both have grievances and you’ve kind of tried to get along, but it’s not working, and you’ve managed to win people to your side. The other person has grievances against you, but no-one really believes or acknowledges them. You insist that they’re made-up. People agree not to think too much about it because they like you so much.

Just recently there... [More]

What’s New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1 by Keith Broni (Emojipedia)

'Family' Emojis

Am I the only one that thinks bad thoughts when he sees, for example, the third emoji in this list? I know that they think it’s a parent with a child, but does that not look like a gender-neutral blowjob to you? You won’t be able to unsee it, either. In fact, I can’t look at any of the four pictures and see “family”. Look at the second one! That’s two people “sharing”! How does the emoji committee not see this? Or maybe they do! Maybe they’re making... [More]

I recently read the headline Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica). What an incredible crash blossom. The author used one hyphen but more punctuation would have been better.

How about:

Original

Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety

Add punctuation

Vacuum-suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines off faulty walls to safety.

Remove redundancy

Vacuum-Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines off faulty walls to safety.

Restore phrase... [More]

What is it with performative condemnation? The push for it? Is it a control thing? I think very much that it’s a psychological trick to get the upper hand in an interaction.

If I don’t officially and performatively condemn acts of murder or war crimes, is the assumption that I condone them? Are you kidding me? I have to defend myself against people thinking I’m a monster, by default? And a performative declaration of “I am not a monster” would fix that?

Or would it just put me in a cycle of... [More]

“What calls itself modern civilization is obsessed with convincing people that they should try to live forever and no-one demands to know why it doesn’t care about making those lives worth living.”

The following video is a talk by Robert Martin “Uncle Bob”, one of the graybeards worth listening to. This video from 2011 is wide-ranging and contains a lot of brilliant advice. It’s stuff that we’ve known for a long time now, but every generation of programmers needs to re-learn these things about every 5-10 years. You usually can’t stop people from just reinventing the wheel because who wants to watch videos of or read blog posts written by old dudes, ammirite?

Ruby Midwest 2011 − Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years by Robert Martin by Robert C. Martin in 2011 (YouTube)

At 10:00, he talks about... [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 noticed the Apple Music search acting quite wonky over the last couple of years. It seems utterly incapable of finding certain songs, even when you enter the exact title and artist.

I’ve had cases where Apple Music has dozens of albums from that artist, so that I’m almost certain that the song is available. It just will not show it to me. In those cases, I’ve instead searched with DuckDuckGo using the same title and artist to find out the name of the album. With the album name in hand, 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]