Links and Notes for March 31st, 2023

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

You Strike the Women, You Strike the Rock, You Will Be Crushed by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 445 million people on the continent – 34% of the population – lived in extreme poverty, with 30 million more people being added to that number in 2020. The report estimates that, by 2030, the number of people in extreme poverty on the continent will reach 492 million. Not one alarm bell was rung for this ongoing disaster, much less the rapid apparition of billions of dollars to bail out the African people.”

“[…] the realisation that these women’s living conditions appear to be deteriorating have not provoked a crisis response in the world. There have been no urgent phone calls between the world’s capitals, no emergency Zoom meetings between central banks, no concern for people who are slipping deeper and deeper into poverty as their countries forge a path of austerity in light of a more and more permanent debt crisis.”

“On 9 August 1956, 20,000 women marched to South Africa’s capital of Pretoria and demanded the abolition of the apartheid pass laws. That date – 9 August – is now celebrated as Women’s Day in South Africa. As the women marched, they chanted: wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo, uzokufa (‘you strike the women, you strike the rock, you will be crushed’).”

What Just Happened in Moscow Is Big by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Putin has opened the door to China as a mediator should such a role make sense at some future point. Three, and this is implicit in the document, although Moscow has been clear enough on the point elsewhere: The U.S. and the other Western powers are not acceptable as mediators given the proxy war they are waging against the Russian Federation.”

Obvious to anyone not in the utter sway of the West.

“John Kirby, the National Security Council’s chief spokesman, put it this way on numerous occasions last week: “While a ceasefire sounds good, it actually ratifies Russia’s gains on the ground.” I have to say, Kirby has struck me as a dim bulb since he complained years ago that the problem on Europe’s eastern flank is Russia is too close to NATO. Once again, he has it upside down: A ceasefire sounds damn good to me and does not ratify an f’ing thing.”

“I loved a Twitter note some clever observer sent out to summarize Blinken’s position after the Ukraine conflict began: Help us attack Russia now so we’ll be free to attack you next.”

“One of the striking things about the Xi–Putin summit, their joint statement, and many other comments the two leaders made is how little of their time they devoted to the Ukraine question. Assessing the whole of the encounter, the war comes over as a subsidiary question in the context of the two sides’ focus on the larger relationship and their shared concern about the extraordinary disorder the Biden regime’s “rules-based order” has produced.”

“Did the two sides decide in the end against signing the document? Was the TASS report a trial balloon? Did they sign the statement but remain in no hurry to put it out in English? I have no answers to these questions. But this much appears to be clear: There is a joint statement on mutual defense, TASS saw it and acted responsibly by quoting from it, and, whatever the formal status of the agreement described, Russia and China are very close to advancing their ties in the direction of an alliance, if they have not already done so.”

“To put the point plainly, since American officials and journalists never do: Taiwan is part of China. There is ambiguity on this point only among those who wish this were not so.”

“The spiky, sparky Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, came out with a zinger the other day I have to share. “When will Macron start supplying weapons to French citizens to maintain the country’s democracy and sovereignty?” she wondered from her podium in the ministry’s press room.”

Roaming Charges: Broken Windows Theory of Political Crime by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In the months before the D-Day invasion, the US Air Force presented a plan to bomb the railroad infrastructure 0f occupied France in order to stall the reinforcement of German positions before the Allied forces had secured a foothold in Normandy. The plan came with a terrible caveat: the bombings might kill as many as 70,000 French civilians. Even Winston Churchill, whose record is as bloodstained as any 20th century leader’s, was aghast. But the prospect of killing so many thousands of people the US came to liberate didn’t faze the Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, who said simply: “It must be done.” For the US, the price has almost always been worth it.”

“It’s hard to think of Richard Nixon as the voice of reason, but in 1959 after meeting with Fidel Castro Nixon advised Eisenhower to maintain diplomatic ties with Havana. Ike refused. He wanted Castro killed, telling the CIA’s Col JC King Fidel‘s assassination would “accelerate the fall of his government.””

“During the 1960 presidential campaign when Robert McNamara invented the “missile gap” to make JFK seem more hawkish (which he was in many ways) than Nixon, the operational nuclear arsenal of the US outnumbered the Soviet arsenal by a ratio of 17 to 1.”

“Since the mid-1990s Norway has been taxing their oil and gas industry at 78%, building a public fund worth $1.9 trillion. That’s $350,000 for every adult and child in Norway.”

Yes, but? But they’re still extracting fossil fuels and probably expanding that extraction. It’s much better that the country itself benefits rather than individual shareholders, but they’re still benefitting from poisoning the planet.

Journalism & Media

Tablet’s Grand Opus on the Anti-Disinformation Complex by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“[…] our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership , might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just announced it was “ building a set of use cases ” to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.””

“To get them to abandon that is to get them to admit that they’ve been made fools of, that they themselves were involved in an enormous deception. And I think that that’s very difficult for people. I think that involving people in these things and having them go along with these conspiracies as their primary means of political identification, in a culture that increasingly doesn’t have more local, more rooted forms of reciprocal communal identification — it just makes it difficult to break that.”

Nostalgia curdles by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“I can’t think of anything more ugly and insane than combining American media’s desperate obsession with Trump and the era of politics he created in 2010s with American media’s toxic obsession with high-profile court cases. In fact, right-wing media is already pushing for Trump’s trial to be televised. So if you ever wondered what the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial would have been like if Depp became president at the end, well, now you might have a chance to find out.”

“[…] the idea of giving a tiny blue cartoon checkmark to 23-year-olds with open floor plan jobs that were paid salaries consisting entirely of granola bars, La Croix, and Sixpoint beer caused so much psychic damage to America’s ruling class that it would eventually cause the end of social media as we know it.”

America’s ruling class is composed of fabulously over-educated and stupid-to-the-bone people who can’t stop obsessing over Donald Trump because they’ve been ordered to obsess over him by the deep state. The deep state rejects anything and anyone that does not promulgate it. Donald Trump is an asshole and a liar and a con-man and a showman and a nearly pure creature of ego and vanity and narcissism.

He has committed war crimes. He has ordered the deaths of innocents. None of that is why he is going down. He is going down because he doesn’t fit. He is not chummy with the right people.

You know how Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Joe Biden can sometimes all get along? Trump is not like that. He’s not in that club. He doesn’t understand which side his bread is buttered on because his number-one priority is getting attention for himself, no matter what. He has found that promising people stuff that they want gets their attention.

Donald Trump is outside the circle. That’s why they’re charging him with 34 felony counts—all stemming from a single payment. They’re stacking charges like they do against poor minorities because this is how the justice system deals with people that are going to get punished no matter what it can be proved that they’ve done. George Bush? Bill Clinton? Nancy Pelosi? All inside the circle. Donald Trump is outside the circle.

Anyway, the people cheering loudest for Trump to go down are the most highly educated people in America. And they’re all stupid. They allow themselves to be distracted by bullshit while ignoring a million other things that they could expend their effort and attention on.

Science & Nature

Surprise Computer Science Proof Stuns Mathematicians by Leila Sloman (Quanta)

“The tools historically used to study the size of a progression-free set have become widely used in the computer science subfield of complexity theory. The problem of narrowing down the size of such a set is well-known to complexity theorists as a quintessential example of applying techniques that probe the inner structure of sets.”

“In their proof, Kelley and Meka imagined that A had few or no arithmetic progressions, and they attempted to trace out the consequences. If A was dense enough, they showed that an absence of progressions necessitated a level of structure within A that would inevitably result in a contradiction, meaning that A must, after all, contain at least one progression.”

“The density increment strategy first appeared in Roth’s paper 70 years ago and has been used in most papers on arithmetic progressions since. Green was surprised that the framework could be used to prove a bound as low as Kelley and Meka’s. “I thought something completely, radically different would be needed,” he said.”

Like better programmers looking at existing or old code. Fresh pair of eyes. No prejudices. A lot of times you can just see where 40% of the code could easily be elided, leaving a cleaner, more elegant, and far simpler solution.

The Club of Rome’s New Malthusianism-Lite Report by Ronald Bailey (Reason)

“What Malthus did not foresee was how modern science coupled with the dynamism of increasingly free markets would produce over the next two centuries what economist Deidre McCloskey has called the Great Enrichment. Entrepreneurial human ingenuity makes it possible to produce food at an exponential rate that outstrips population growth, resulting in more calories per person.”

The article starts out with “Malthusianism is just so damned tiresome.” This line of reasoning that we’re not using things up faster is also tiresome. This is extremely short-term thinking. The humus layer is being used up so quickly that the next generation won’t be able to use it anymore. The massive boom was also enabled by hydrocarbon-based (read: fossil fuel-based) fertilizers to which we and our awesome process are nearly hopelessly addicted.

But, sure, Malthus was wrong. Just like peak oil was wrong, right? We found more fossil fuels, so fuck you. Of course, we’re getting them with fracking and they’re even more short-lived than previous sources and we’re pouring more CO₂ into the air than we ever have before, but sure, Malthus was wrong.

All of these seers that predict that humanity won’t be able to fool itself into doing something medium- and long-term that is shockingly destructive just because it works in the short term—and only incidentally helps people eat while further enriching a relative handful of people—are … wrong.

All of this reasoning is based on Plato’s Philosopher Kings argument where a handful of people know better than anyone else how to run things. We just have to trust that their plan—which is to enrich themselves massively while executing an undemocratic plan to “help humanity” as a side-effect to their wealth—will actually work. It never does. Now, we’re left to watch as Antarctica slides into the ocean even faster than we’d thought it could. These people (like the author of this piece) are the embodiment of the “this is fine” dog.

This is fine

But I shouldn’t be surprised. Ronald Bailey has proven, again and again, to be a dogmatic ideologue at a magazine that thankfully hosts more reasoned opinions and writing. It’s hard not to escape the conclusion that his ethics amount to: “as long as he and his known cohort are doing fine, then everyone else is a whiner and trying to be killjoy about how awesome everything is.”

In the same vein, Roaming Charges: Broken Windows Theory of Political Crime by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“[…] globally new oil and gas projects either approved in 2022 or slated to be approved between 2023 and 2025 “could cause 70 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions,” an amount that is more than 30 times the United States’ total carbon dioxide emissions in 2021.”

Yeah, no problem. Humanity will tech their way out of this one. Look at all the beautiful technology! We have the most beautiful technology.

Art & Literature

John Wick: Chapter 4 Is the Bloody Finale We’ve Been Waiting For by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“The logic of John Wick’s world is one that we recognize, in that “they” — the wealthy, all-powerful yet unknown people who rule our lives — are always in the act of taking away from us what little we have left. If the dog is all that’s remaining of a once-vibrant and complete household, they kill the dog. If we have only a few friends, they eradicate them. If we’ve found a safe place to stay somewhere in the world, they blow it up. That’s the way of things in John Wick films, and we recognize it as a highly dramatized version of the brutal Big Squeeze we’re feeling in our own lives. We’re not quite picked clean yet, but anything of value we still have, they’re coming for it. Stable jobs? Pensions? Health care? Social Security? Decent affordable housing? Any thriving community? Even if you’ve got any of those things, by some amazing good fortune, do you think they will let you keep any of it? For how long?”

“[…] his crusade to wipe out the High Table members one by one should have expired with such a whimper, with even his friends telling him there’ll always be another weasel-faced rich criminal bastard to take the dead one’s place, seems quietly topical.”

About Town by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“[…] and I, without fail, like fine clockwork, gently put up my hand and proceeded, so Mitch claimed, to ask a question that revealed what appeared to others like a vast fount of background knowledge on the day’s topic, no matter what it happened to be: the geological strata beneath Manahatta, cults in California in the 1970s, whatever.

““It’s a parlor trick,” I try to explain. “Nothing but a cheap parlor trick.”

“Another former fellow, watching this routine and likewise laughing, insists that if that’s what it in fact is, I ought to be able to teach the secret.

““It’s easy. You just survey all the things you know and you try to find a hook.”

““But you actually have to know stuff, right?”

““It helps, I guess.””

“We all huddled together and groaned at the stories people took turns telling about the ways they have been pigeon-holed in their identities by the institutions they move through, or the ways they have been pressured to pigeon-hole other people, or the ways the HR drones are continually nudging us back into our shitty little identitarian Bantustans every time we attempt to wander away from them without a pass.”

“[…] the core talking-points of what had in the 2010s been mostly online adolescent experimentation — trying out, as kids always do, untenable positions and temporary phantasmic identities. And once these manners had leaked out of the internet and into the mouths of essentially complacent and thoughtless adults with masters degrees and desk-jobs, it was only a matter of time before they became the bullet-pointed langue-de-bois of all the mandatory training sessions in American universities and corporate boardrooms. But by the time things had come this far, it seems to me now, conviction was no longer required for perpetuation of the relevant ideas; in fact mentation of any sort does not seem to have been necessary any longer.”

“One comes away from interaction with the people who are most regularly subjected to this automation, and who are theoretically the same people whose rights and well-being are being secured by this new system, with the strong impression that the system that emerged in their defense has forgotten all about them; and so, quite naturally, one detects among them a strong cast of cynicism.”

“To hell with “the profession”! I anyhow am certainly not out here speaking for “the profession”! I’m out here for myself! Philosophy is not the Army, it is not the Elks’ Lodge, it is not the Worshipful Company of Grocers, and it sure as hell does not have any claim on my public identity outside of the limited context of the classroom, the letter of recommendation, the scholarly article, and so on.”

“I encourage you, reader, to roll your eyes at everything I say, even to feel deep contempt for me. But if you ever find yourself thinking that I am “embarrassing to the profession”, then please, please just stop reading. Forget about me. You haven’t understood a thing.”

“[…] the arrival of analytic philosophy occurred within a larger context of increasing codification of norms and practices, of increasing professionalization, and within a few generations would make the sort of liberality of spirit on display in an Emerson, a James, a Peirce —bonkers, curious, fun— completely unrecognizable to us, and totally discontinuous with our own understanding of what philosophy is.”

“Philosophy is necessarily exclusionary, and everyone who is out there advocating inclusionary gestures is simultaneously upholding countless forms of exclusion so pervasive they don’t even notice them. Things would indeed get messy if we started indulging all the species of Schwärmerei that the cold and rigorous analysts have sought to cordon off over the past few centuries.”

“(At the gym one fellow who had been exercising, all dreadlocks and Under Armor, retreats into the locker room and comes out minutes later wearing the full uniform of a sworn employee of the US Postal Service. He’s representing “the profession” now, and you can see he’s proud, though in his case it’s a noble profession and he has every right to be. “Hey yo it’s the mail-MAN !” the other lunks proclaim when he appears, launching into a routine of complicated hand-claspings and slappings of the sort that always trip me up when I’m included in them.)”

“I could picture Nick opening that e-mail from me with all the questions, and groaning, just as I groan whenever a new request to do yet another thing lands in my inbox — a groan that is never softened in the least by the recognition that what I am being asked to do is worthy of being done.”

“I trip on the sidewalk in front of the Roxy Bar. My knee is now all smashed and my shoulder is darting in pain. A bunch of young people gather around and start calling me “sir”. I do everything I can to demonstrate to them, still supine, that I am physically agile, that I am sober, lucid, and compos mentis. But the more I protest the more I appear to be in need of assistance, and so they lift me up and gently pat me, like little angels.”

“We laugh about things we’re not supposed to laugh about, like that time in 1984 when Jesse Jackson referred to New York as “Hymietown”, or that time Leona Helmsley did whatever it is she did, and Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita”, shot Mrs. Joey Buttafuoco in the fucking face. Jesus Christ. What memories, what a life, what a world!”

Philosophy & Sociology

GPT-4 Is Really Quite Stupid by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“[…] you might say it’s “not fair” to command the machine to work in an obscure Siberian idiom. But honestly, if there are enough materials on the internet for me to learn Sakha, there is absolutely no reason in principle why a machine should not also be able to draw on these. The only reason in practice as to why it does not do so is that our current idea of what would count as passing some variant of the Turing test is basically that the machine that passes need only be conversant in the sort of matters that the corporate interests shaping our use of the internet would prefer to keep us focused on: the Academy Awards and other such presentist illusions, always in English, always limited to the sort of information you might expect to find in your search engine’s top hits.”

“It just doesn’t sound like Justin E. H. Smith. At all. It sounds like a middling undergraduate trying to sound like a capable essay writer, but who only knows how to follow rules, rehash clichés, etc., without really having any feeling for the art of writing.”

“This is just obviously not even a plausible simulacrum of a conversation. It is, rather, something more like a VoiceOver option for the top hits of a search engine. Wikipedia can tell you all about Cugat and Charo’s marriage, and Bing can read you what it finds there. So what? That’s a mighty flimsy structure for holding up the house of Being. I feel confident in saying we human beings will uniquely “dwell in language” for at least another generation.”

“Nothing was accomplished. My day was stolen from me. It is nearly certain that I will be compelled to do something just as degrading and dehumanizing again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. This is just the shape of our life from here on out.”

“It seems to me that part of the answer has to do with our confusion about what the AI apocalypse is going to look like. We keep imagining that it will come when the machines have their essentially science-fictional “a-ha” moment, like HAL when it determines that it cannot follow Dave’s request onboard the spaceship. HAL is supposed to be coming into consciousness in that moment, of the sort GPT-4 still attempts to reassure us it cannot have. For the past half-century the Singularitarians have clouded our understanding of the real threat from AI by making us believe, either through their explicit arguments or their muddled implicit assumptions, that it is only at such a moment that we may be said to be in a relationship of antagonism, or of fundamental enmity, with the machines. But in fact we’re already there, and it’s precisely because our freedom is being curtailed by technologies with which one can have no relationship at all, that the danger is so great, and the enmity so absolute. The California Franchise Tax Board’s phone-tree seems to me about as intelligent as Bing’s GPT-4. I’m not impressed with either. But I’m furious, and demoralized, when I am reminded of how casually we have invited these brute technologies into our daily lives, to warp them and to impoverish them, under the implausible pretense of “help”.”

You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now. by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)

“Someone has to tell these kids, “wherever you go, you’ll find yourself there, and you have to start to do the work of accepting who you are, as much as you may not like yourself.” The stakes are high. I don’t mean to get dark here, but a kid who fantasizes about the ability to mute himself in real life is a kid I worry about someday muting himself permanently in real life. I stress that I’m not mad about something these kids have done. I’m mad about something that’s being done to them. For profit. For profit. For profit. For profit.”

“Giant teams of engineers educated at Stanford and CalTech while away the hours to make the urge to keep on scrolling that much harder to fight. What I run up against when I try to be as sympathetic to these apps as I can is a simple reality: the poison’s in the dose. Too much of anything is bad for you. Moderation in all things. Etc. If I felt people could use these apps responsibly and sparingly, I wouldn’t worry. But the apps are designed to compel people to use them irresponsibly.”

And like I heard in the podcast episode Keep the Dream Alive: One Year Later w/ John Vanderslice (TrueAnon) today, people have to use their phones for life. You can avoid crack and live a normal life. You can’t avoid a phone. You can uninstall apps, though.

“I don’t know or care if these apps are literally addictive in the same sense as various drugs. What I do know and care about is that many people have a deeply unhealthy relationship with them, use them to avoid real life, and feel that they can’t stop.”

“[…] you are you, and you will always be you; we live here, on this planet, in this culture, as this species; you live in the times you live in, and you will never live anywhere else. There’s no escape, for any of us. The world gets better and it gets worse. Your life gets easier and it gets harder. Progress happens. Happiness is possible. But the world is an irredeemably broken place,”

“The only sensible path forward is to learn to accept the brokenness of human life, to develop resilience in the face of its petty cruelties, and to learn to live with yourself. Not to love yourself; I mean, if you can love yourself, great, but in general I find the commandment to love yourself paternalistic and annoying.”

“Forget snowflakes. Forget participation trophies. Forget conservative mockery. I’m asking, sincerely and from a place of empathy: isn’t there a chance that the only real way to defend your kids from harm is to show them how constant a companion pain is and teach them how to overcome it?”

“The people who talk about AI as this all-transforming technology − they’re telling you that our next step as a species is to build an army of Tyler Durdens and to give up on real love, real feeling, real people. And I’m asking you to refuse. I’m asking you to choose the other thing, in whatever way you can. That’s the existential question for humanity in the 21st century. That’s the challenge in front of all of us. Will you shoulder the risk of pursuing real human connection, as hard and intimidating and discouraging as that can be? Or will you hide in your room forever, comforted by fast food and porn and opiates and therapy and TikTok, risking nothing?”

The Age of Average by Alex Murrell

“This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”

““I called this style “AirSpace”. It’s marked by an easily recognisable mix of symbols – like reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and refurbished industrial lighting – that’s meant to provide familiar, comforting surroundings for a wealthy, mobile elite, who want to feel like they’re visiting somewhere “authentic” while they travel, but who actually just crave more of the same: more rustic interiors and sans-serif logos and splashes of cliche accent colours on rugs and walls.””

“Though they’re not part of a chain and don’t have their interior design directed by a single corporate overlord, these coffee shops have a way of mimicking the same tired style, a hipster reduction obsessed with a superficial sense of history and the remnants of industrial machinery that once occupied the neighbourhoods they take over.””

“The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term “non-place” to describe built environments that are defined by their transience and anonymity. Non-places, such as airports, service stations and hotels, tend towards utilitarian sterility. They prioritise function and efficiency over a softer sense of human expression and social connection.”

““It would be disappointing enough to fail in gracing a land as physically beautiful as the US with the built companions it deserves. But it’s downright shameful that we deprive ourselves of living in interesting, meaningful, and wonderful places, given the thousands of precedents for inspiration worldwide, and many hundreds within our borders. Instead, we’ve copied and pasted our society from the most anodyne, the most boring, and the most bleh. We’ve all seen them. Covered with fiber cement, stucco, and bricks or brick-like material. They’ve shown up all over the country, indifferent to their surroundings. Spreading like a non-native species.””

“In Carroll’s opinion, because all vehicles underwent the same wind tunnel tests, manufacturers were independently converging on the same optimal set of forms, proportions and dimensions. And as a result, homogeneity in car design was increasing.”

“Cars are now designed for the broadest possible audience, across the broadest number of countries, to be manufactured in the most efficient possible way.””

“[…] the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella.””

“We are so conformist, nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff, we have been trained to be consumers and we are all consuming far too much. I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know? But I’m talking about all this disposable crap.””

“In every corner of pop culture, a smaller number of “blockbusters” is claiming a larger share of the market. What were once creative powerhouses have become factories of the familiar.”

“[…] while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram feeds of a major beverage syndicate and an indie skincare brand alike.””

Oh, man, I am of a generation that got its pictures taken at Sears. Those were the family photos for years. We had one shot at a picture. It was what it was. They developed them, you paid for them, and you were happy with it. Of course it’s nice to have more choice, to have instant feedback, but there is definitely something lost in modesty, in simply living with what the universe had to offer, in learning to love the picture that was so bad it’s good, in appreciating the unforeseen and unforeseeable twists offered up by a universe with a bit of a perverse sense of humor, of being forced to learn the lesson that not everything is that important, that you can’t expect perfection everywhere, and that, no matter how much money you had, we were all in the same boat, taking group portraits with our fingers crossed.

It was a time of modesty and simplicity that kept us humble. We should think whether that might not be a better balance of time spent to imbue a moment with value. Or perhaps those are just nostalgic goggles that those who came before us wore, who had to sit for painted portraits, and thought our ability to pick up pictures the next day was remarkably snooty and utterly too modern. There was no salient difference in choice, though, between a painted portrait and a photograph whose output you could not immediately see. You took the photo and you lived with the results. If you thought you’d closed your eyes, you could ask for another one, but your ability to tweak was incredibly limited. Relative to today’s ability to see the result immediately and to apply filters in real time, a Sears photo and a portrait were very much in the same category.

“They’re ads, sure, but they’re so well designed. In this era, you come to understand, design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same.””

“In today’s extremely-online world, the vast availability of reference imagery has, perhaps counterintuitively, led to narrower thinking and shallower visual ideation. It’s a product of what I like to call the “moodboard effect.””

AI will only vastly accelerate this trend to homogeneity. The world will be built of PowerPoint templates.

Reproductive Realities in Modern China: A Conversation with Sarah Mellors Rodriguez by Shui-Yin Sharon Yam And Sarah Mellors Rodriguez (Made In China Journal)

“[…] ethnic minorities were included in the One-Child Policy, which was enacted in 1979 and restricted all couples regardless of ethnicity or place of residence to one child each. Yet, it is worth noting that when the original policy was relaxed in 1984, ethnic minorities were subsequently permitted to have multiple children—two in urban areas and three in rural ones. Unfortunately, some Han people felt that by adopting this new policy the government was giving ethnic minorities preferential treatment—a sentiment I encountered among my undergraduate students while teaching in China in 2011.”

“In 2009, I started teaching English at a suburban middle school in Guangdong Province. I had heard about the harsh enforcement of the One-Child Policy and that transgressors were sometimes forced to undergo abortion and sterilisation surgeries. Yet, to my surprise, I had a number of students in my classes with as many as eight siblings. My pupils often teased each other, joking that one student had cost his parents an additional 1,000 yuan in fees or that another had managed to evade the policy altogether.”

“Arguments that population policies governing ethnic minorities exhibit favouritism not only ignore the fact that in some rural areas Han people have long been able to have multiple children, but also fail to recognise the other ways in which ethnic minorities face limits on their autonomy. One need only look at the example of forced abortions and sterilisations among Uyghur women in Xinjiang to debunk the myth of preferential reproductive treatment for ethnic minorities (Wieting 2021).”

“In some cases, these efforts to circumvent state control were successful in that couples were able to have the additional children they desired. This would have been particularly important for rural couples who did not already have a son but sought one to assist with farm labour and carry on the family line. Sympathetic local cadres might even give couples an extended period to pay off the ‘excess child fees’ [多子女费] they had incurred or might not force them to pay at all. Despite these successes on the part of parents seeking additional children, widespread policy evasion and lax policy enforcement could also trigger violent crackdowns on unauthorised births.”

“[…] when census results revealed that certain rural areas still had comparatively high levels of fertility, authorities enacted ‘crash drives’ of forced abortion and sterilisation to radically lower the birthrate in a short period.”

“For the time being, though, it seems like access to reproductive health care and the extent to which people can exercise their own reproductive agency will continue to vary significantly across China with rural women shouldering more than their share of the burden of raising the birthrate.”

Before Politics, There’s the World by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“In that year I think I probably had to physically restrain a kid less than a half-dozen times, but it did happen. Nobody liked it. Everyone would have rather done anything else. But sometimes there was just no choice; the idea of verbally de-escalating a kid who’s genuinely trying to kill another kid is not a serious response to an immediate problem. But there’s been a number of arguments in the media that insist that physical restraint is 100% unacceptable at all times. I wrote about this frustrating tendency here.”

“My perspective was informed by the understanding that children, including children who were typically harmless and sweet, could be capable of acts of unprovoked and sudden violence. That understanding was the product of experience. But my experience was no match for her sunny, uncompromising, willfully ignorant commitment to the idea that children could always be talked down, could always be relied on to be subject to rational appeal.”

“Because MacFarquhar is dedicated to framing her story as the kind of simplistic victim narrative that has so much presence in contemporary magazine writing, reflecting on the fact that adoption is inevitable and necessary would get in the way. To the degree that adoptive parents are represented in the piece at all they’re implied to be clueless at best, indifferent and ignorant colonizers who snatch up children who aren’t theirs without caring about the consequences. Almost entirely undiscussed is the fact that the world houses both children who need homes and loving and nurturing adults with homes to share. That’s why adoption exists.”

“There’s a profound, obviously-motivated incuriosity in MacFarquhar’s piece about what the alternatives are for most children who end up adopted. The general options are childhoods spent in orphanages, in foster care, or in some cases back with birth parents who have various problems like drug addiction or a tendency to violence. There are of course dedicated and compassionate people working in orphanages and foster care. But is MacFarquhar really under the impression that those options are systematically superior to adoption?”

“The dream is for all kids to end up back with their birth parents, who are without exception stable, financially secure, and kind. But that’s only a dream. Some birth parents are too violent, some are too addicted, some are too mentally ill, and some are too dead. Meanwhile the essay is casually insulting to adoptive parents everywhere, barely deigning to consider their point of view at all. Some people are infertile, thanks to genetics or illness or happenstance. Should they really be barred forever from raising children?”

“The left has never stood for pleasant fantasy or cheap idealism that occludes basic apprehension of the world as it actually exists. The socialist mantra is that a better world is possible, not that a perfect world is possible. And as time goes on my weariness with all of the various pleasant-and-false visions of our affairs grows and grows. I have no time for it anymore, no patience. The world is broken. We are obligated to cobble together the best life we can for everyone. Make material security wherever you can and comfort from there if you’re able.”

“[…] in this era of Twitter leftists who think you should never call the police, ever, under any circumstances, I’m not at all sorry that someone made the call that sent that guy to jail. Not at all. Because he needed to go away for awhile. He had broken the social contract too many times. He was a constant danger to her and her family. So he needed to go away. Not get arrested and put right back on the street so that he could come back and fuck her life up again, but to go away long enough that she could start to heal and move on. You see, some people aren’t good people, and sometimes people who aren’t good people need to go away for awhile. That’s just the way the world is. It isn’t perfect. But perfect was never in the cards.”

Technology

These angry Dutch farmers really hate Microsoft by Morgan Meaker (Ars Technica)

“[…] since 2015, the country has also witnessed the arrival of enormous “hyperscalers,” buildings that generally span at least 10,000 square feet and are set up to service a single (usually American) tech giant. Lured here by the convergence of European Internet cables, temperate climates, and an abundance of green energy, Microsoft and Google have built hyperscalers; Meta has tried and failed”

“[…] it is a double standard to let Microsoft keep building while other construction work has been put on hold. “When farmers don’t have the permission to build a farm, they will not build the farm. Microsoft doesn’t have the right permission to build a data center, but they already got started building the data center.””

“[…] the Netherlands is not the only country with hyperscalers. Ireland has five, while Germany and Denmark both have four, according to research by the Dutch Data Center Association.”

Just layers of abstraction. Our hyper-fast response times come at the expense of the view in other countries’ meadows.

“Germany has proposed a law that would force tech companies to reuse the heat generated by their data centers. And this week, one of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers, Norway’s Nammo, said the company was struggling to meet demand from the Ukraine war because a new TikTok data center was using up the region’s spare electricity.”

“Ruiter says he’s continued to talk about data centers because he wants to remind people that “the cloud” they’ve come to rely on isn’t just an ethereal concept—it’s something that has a physical manifestation, here in the farmland of North Holland. He worries that growing demand for data storage from people, and also, increasingly, AI, will just mean more and more hyperscale facilities.”

AI and hyperscaling uses a ton of power. One of my students’ senior projects would just spin up thousands of AWS lambda instances and then get rid of them seconds later. He was charged pennies for it, but that kind of power must be subsidized somewhere.

When innovation goes south: The tech that never quite worked out by Diana Gitig (Ars Technica)

“Smil tells of promises undermined by enormous but unforeseen—or completely foreseen but downplayed and ignored—downsides. Next, he describes promises that didn’t materialize quite as hoped and hyped. Then come promises whose fulfillment we are still awaiting. And lastly, he derides currently overtouted but ridiculously infeasible promises (and those who make them). This last part is the crux; he hopes we will learn from all of the history he relates to assess these claims so we won’t get taken in by them.”

“Some of Smil’s bitterness and frustration come out as snark in the final chapter, which is called “Techno-optimism, Exaggerations, and Realistic Expectations” but which could be called “Why Moore’s Law is the Worst Thing that Could Have Happened to Our Sense of Perspective.” This is where Smil writes things like “the acknowledgments of reality and the willingness to learn, even modestly, from past failures and cautionary experience seem to find less and less acceptance in modern societies” and “questions, reminders, and objections—referring to basic physical realities, known constants, available rates, and capacities—are now seen as almost irrelevant, nothing but challenges to be vanquished by ever-accelerating innovation. But there are no signs of such a sweeping acceleration.””

“Smartphones are cool and all, but innovations in areas that could meaningfully improve many people’s lives—agriculture, transportation, energy use and storage, drug discovery—have mostly seen incremental progress. Not only that, but we don’t even actually need radical new inventions to get clean water, micronutrients, and a decent education to kids in the developing world, which would radically improve their quality of life. We can mitigate extant inequalities by tweaking the tech we have, if we would only choose to do so. Instead, we wax poetic about, and spend gazillions on, trying to achieve the Singularity.”

Because making life pleasant for everyone is not the goal. It’s winning the game. It’s winning the billionaire’s game. Smil bitches about how useless communism was, but capitalism is just as useless and, honestly, much more destructive.

Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words” by Simon Willison

“Ted Chiang’s classic essay ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web helps explain why […]”

Willison is getting a bit warped in the way he experiences time. Chiang’s essay came out on February 9th of this year—less than two months ago. “Classic.”

“To get the most value out of them—and to avoid the many traps that they set for the unwary user—you need to spend time with them, and work to build an accurate mental model of how they work, what they are capable of and where they are most likely to go wrong.

“I hope this “calculator for words” framing can help.”

A research tool, at best. People aren’t going to stick to that, of course. They’re already making friends with it.

Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’ by Simon Hattenstone (Guardian)

“There’s a lot of cool stuff on the internet. I think TikTok is dangerous and should be banned yet I love dance culture on TikTok and it should be cherished.” Why should it be banned? “Because it’s controlled by the Chinese, and should there be difficult circumstances there are lots of horrible tactical uses it could be put to. I don’t think it’s an acceptable risk. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of kids love it for perfectly good reasons.””

This is the well-informed opinion of hyper-genius Jaron Lanier. Seriously. How can these supposedly hyper-intelligent people live with knowing so little about the world that they live in that they end up sounding like the stupidest hyper-jingoistic state senator when they’re asked about anything approaching public policy? “Because it’s controlled by the Chinese.” Jesus H. Christ, what a knee-jerk, dumb-fuck, American answer. And then “should there be difficult circumstances”. Jesus jumped up, just be a man about it and say “should the U.S. start a war with China.” But, no, he can’t do that. Because he might be a hyper-genius, but he’s an American first, steeped in that miasma of dogmatism, patriotism and vileness that passes for a culture there. It makes everyone stupid.

“The way to ensure that we are sufficiently sane to survive is to remember it’s our humanness that makes us unique, he says. “A lot of modern enlightenment thinkers and technical people feel that there is something old-fashioned about believing that people are special – for instance that consciousness is a thing. They tend to think there is an equivalence between what a computer could be and what a human brain could be.” Lanier has no truck with this. “We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?””

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide by Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing)

“You often need to have a lot of ideas to have good ideas. Not everyone is good at generating lots of ideas, but AI is very good at volume. Will all these ideas be good or even sane? Of course not. But they can spark further thinking on your part.”

I suppose this beats having friends or coworkers. Apparently the film “Her” was utopic, not dystopic.

“Summarize texts. I have pasted in numerous complex academic articles and asked it to summarize the results, and it does a good job!”

How the hell are you in a position to judge? You said before that it lies all the time, that it has no mechanism for admitting defeat because that doesn’t exist. It’s building text. It’s always successful. There’s no meaning to get wrong. It’s like reading tea leaves. The cup doesn’t know how to set up the leaves. The meaning is inferred solely by the reader.

If you don’t know what the paper is about, and you know the reputation of your tool to just make shit up, how can you possibly even think you can judge whether the summary it produced is reprentative?

“If you don’t check for hallucinations, it is possible that you could be taught something inaccurate. Use the AI as a jumping-off point for your own research, not as the final authority on anything. Also, if it isn’t connected to the internet, it will make stuff up.”

Hahahahaha sure. That’s exactly how a lazy, conspiracy-obsessed society treats technology and information. This guide actually applies to using the Internet in general, but almost nobody’s ever followed it. People just inhale information, with the only vetting process being “am I being entertained?”

Also, this is exactly the lesson he ignored above when he claimed that the AI did a good job of summarizing complex academic papers.

For the Love of God, AI Chatbots Can’t ‘Decide’ to Do Anything by Janus Rose (Motherboard − Vice)

“[…] the hype train seems to chug along faster with every passing week, leaving a trail of misinformation and magical thinking about the technology’s capabilities and limitations.”

“Galactica, a model designed by Facebook’s parent company Meta to answer science questions, was taken down after users found it was generating plausible but dangerously inaccurate answers, including citations linking to scientific papers that don’t exist. ChatGPT has also been known to give these fake scientific citations, and was banned from coding forums for its tendency to generate believable but dead-wrong answers to programming questions.”

“Large language models can produce believable (and sometimes accurate) text that often feels like it was written by humans. But in their current form, they are essentially advanced prediction engines that are really good at guessing the next word in a sentence.”

Which some people then equate to how humans process information and generate inferences. Sigh.

“This is a bit like being shocked that a computer can ace a test when it has the equivalent of an open textbook and the ability to process and recall information instantly.”

“[…] the idea of language models as a nascent superintelligent AI benefits the corporations creating them. If large swaths of the public believe that we are on the cusp of giving birth to advanced machine intelligence, the hype not only pads the bottom line of companies like Google and OpenAI, but helps them avoid taking responsibility for the bias and harm that result from those systems.”

Found through Google, bought with Visa and Mastercard: Inside the deepfake porn economy by Kat Tenbarge (NBC News)

“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.”

Customized porn of anyone is novel to me. I’d never read it hypothesized in any of the incredible multitude of stories .

Jesus, it’s one thing for a celebrity like Scarlett Johansson, but can you imagine if schoolteachers have to worry about their students viewing them through the lens of the hardcore pornography they’ve been faked into? The boys and girls pool their money and get Ms. Jenkins on her own highlight reel. An AI facilitates the whole operation.

Everyone knows that this can’t be stopped. They will try. They will shut down access for everyone, they will make up sweeping rules that are far too broad, that stifle reasonable expression and creativity. But they will try to stop this from happening—and it absolutely cannot, not without turning society into an authoritarian hellscape. And, even then, they will find a way, they will just have been criminalized for doing what they absolutely are going to find a way to do, which is to see Ms. Jenkins engaged in enthusiastic intercourse.

And you might say, well, Ms. Jenkins should have known what she was getting into because she’s a middle-school 8 or 9 and she became a teacher anyway. But this also means that anyone can make porn of anyone. Maybe if they have more video, it helps make it more convincing, but even if they only have a picture or two, have a look online to see how well they can make that picture match up to an animated face or the face in a video. People who don’t look too carefully will believe it. And someone will pay to make it because someone will think it’s hilarious.

““More and more people are targeted,” said Martin, who was targeted with deepfake sexual abuse herself. “We’ll actually hear a lot more victims of this who are ordinary people, everyday people, who are being targeted.””

Can you imagine a job interview where the interviewer has watched fake porn of the interviewee, but they would naturally have their opinion influenced despite knowing it’s fake. Porn is embarrassing, but can be explained away as too “ridiculous” to be true, but what about faking mugshots or arrests or trials? How long until there’s a service for people to torpedo rivals by generating FUD that HR will believe, or that HR AI will believe? Powerful tools. Completely irresponsible herd into which they’re being released.

““It’s not a porn site. It’s a predatory website that doesn’t rely on the consent of the people on the actual website,” Martin said about MrDeepFakes. “The fact that it’s even allowed to operate and is known is a complete indictment of every regulator in the space, of all law enforcement, of the entire system, that this is even allowed to exist.””

I understand the angry reaction, but I don’t think regulation can possibly stop this. I think people will have to get less sensitive and society has to be less trusting that all content is real. Maybe a Light of Other Days quantum leap is needed. We kind of have this already with ubiquitous public filming and facial recognition. We tried to avoid it, but the relentless march of authoritarianism coupled with purely-for-profit capitalism has created surveillance states everywhere that they can afford them.

Or maybe a de-pruding of society is needed, where nobody cares if you’ve done porn just like nobody cares if you’ve played softball.

“Martin successfully campaigned to outlaw nonconsensual deepfakes and image-based sexual abuse, but, she said, law enforcement and regulators are limited by jurisdiction, because the deepfakes can be made and published online from anywhere in the world.”

You won’t be able to stop this unfortunately. Only an ethical increase in the worldwide population would devalue this business model, whereby people would refuse to consume faked data, which obviously isn’t going to happen. Maybe we’ll get something like organic-content labels?

Schillace Laws of Semantic AI (Microsoft Learn)

“Don’t write code if the model can do it; the model will get better, but the code won’t.”

So treat the prompt like a high level language that targets a compiler that fabricates and whose workings we don’t understand. Interesting, so maybe just feed your requirements directly into the machine and hope for the best? At some point, it will come up with something that actually functions?

The code won’t get better on its own, but neither will it get worse. It will continue to do what it says on the tin. We may discover more negative ramifications, but what the code does will not change. The quality of the code produced by a prompt—or series of prompts—will change, but not necessarily only for the better, which is being strongly implied by this rule.

“Uncertainty is an exception throw. Because we are trading precision for leverage, we need to lean on interaction with the user when the model is uncertain about intent. Thus, when we have a nested set of prompts in a program, and one of them is uncertain in its result (“One possible way…”) the correct thing to do is the equivalent of an “exception throw” − propagate that uncertainty up the stack until a level that can either clarify or interact with the user.”

Understandable, but it sounds tedious and fraught. It’s getting farther from treating coding as an engineering discipline. Maybe something comes out of it—maybe it’s how everyone will be coding in ten years!—but it feels very wooey and very hypey right now. I can’t tell the difference between this technology and an actual scam, except that this technology kind of looks like it does something useful. It reminds me of a scam in some cities: you have people who pose as public-transportation workers who will sell you tickets. The tickets actually work. But they’re not valid for more than just the smallest zone. You’ll pay for five or six zones, but you can’t actually travel there. AI reminds me of that, so far.

The EV Transition Is Harder Than Anyone Thinks by Robert N. Charette (IEEE Spectrum)

“[…] in January 2023 the sales of EVs in the United States reached 7.83 percent of new light-duty vehicle sales, with 66,416 battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and 14,143 plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) sold. But consider that also in January, some 950,000 new ICE light-duty vehicles were sold, as well as approximately another 3 million used ICE vehicles.”

“As EVs and renewable energy scale up, the problems and the solutions will cover ever-expanding populations and geographies. Each proposed solution will probably create new difficulties. In addition, going to scale threatens people’s long-held beliefs, ways of life, and livelihoods, many of which will be altered, if not made obsolete. Technological change is hard, social change even harder.”

“The introduction of any new system spawns perturbations that create surprises, both wanted and unwanted. We can safely assume that quickly moving to EVs at scale will unleash its fair share of unpleasant surprises, as well as prove the adage of “haste makes waste.””

“Many things need to go exactly right, and very little can go wrong for the EV transition to transpire as planned. At times like these, I’m reminded of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman’s admonishment: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” There is a cacophony of foolishness being spouted by those advocating for the EV transition and by those denouncing it. It is time for the nonsense to stop, and some realistic political and systems thinking to begin.”

Theory of the World, Theory of Mind, and Media Incentives by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“ChatGPT might get the coindexing right for any given set of sentences, depending on what response its model finds more quantitatively probable. But it won’t do so consistently, and even if it does, it’s not doing so because it has a mechanistic, cause-and-effect model of the world the way that you and I do. Instead, it’s using its vast data sets and complex models to generate a statistical association between terms and produce a probabilistic response to a question. Fundamentally, it’s driven by the distributional hypothesis, the notion that understanding can be derived from the proximal relationships between words in use. It does so by taking advantage of unfathomably vast data sets and parameters and guardrails of immense complexity. But at its root, like all large language models ChatGPT is making educated inferences about what a correct answer might be based on its training data. It isn’t looking at how the world works and coming to a conclusion.”

“There is no consciousness that can notice anything at all, including that an answer completely violates the basic demands of a given question. I’m sure that ChatGPT has error-checking functions, but those error-checking functions are likely a) more application of distributional semantics and b) guardrails programmed in deliberately to avoid wrong (or more likely offensive) answers, which aren’t responsive to emergent conditions in the way that makes these systems impressive.”

“this, simply, is not intelligence, much less consciousness. Sometimes people who really really want general AI to be here will suggest that behind human thinking there’s just a probabilistic engine like ChatGPT. But there’s no evidence for this, it defies the lived experience of how we think, and people like David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, and Douglas Hofstadter have presented persuasive evidence against it.”

“all of this is perfectly fine if you just want a program that can produce impressive text-based responses that usually effectively mimic sensible human-produced language samples. There’s a lot of potential applications for such software. I personally think the consequences will be a lot smaller than many people are saying, but I could see how such programs could disrupt some industries in ways both good and bad.”

“All of this absurd serial overestimation of how the world is going to change because of incredibly sophisticated autocomplete is driven by self-interest and greed.

“People want attention; this is a way to get attention; they’re going to use this way to get attention until the moment fades and they move on to something else.”

Programming

Debunking Web Component Myths and Misconceptions by Rob Eisenberg (Eisenberg Effect)

“All you need to do is create a style sheet and add it to the adoptedStyleSheets collection of the Web Component. The sheet can be shared across any Web Component that needs its styles. With CSS Script Modules , this is incredibly easy.”

import sheet from './styles.css' assert { type: 'css' };
shadowRoot.adoptedStyleSheets = [sheet];

“If you aren’t using constructible styles, then you can also just create a style element, insert the CSS text, and then add the style element to your element’s Shadow DOM.”

“You should strongly consider whether you really need a Web Component to bring custom fonts along with it. Usually, you will want to leave the font selection up to the consumer of the component. If you want to designate certain parts of your component to receive a developer-selected font, then consider using a CSS Custom Property for font-family so that the developer can easily set that to the font they want.”

“To be blunt, React has always treated the DOM in an antagonistic way, quite different from the friendlier approaches that almost every other modern JavaScript framework uses. React’s system doesn’t recognize the difference between an HTML attribute, a property, and a boolean attribute. These are all core HTML implementation details that have been part of the basic programming model for 20+ years.”

“[…] we found that by moving MSN from React to FAST Web Components, MSN was able to improve startup time by 30–50%.”

“Other tests we performed on standard Shadow DOM scenarios showed that the use of Shadow DOM was critical for performance optimization of the browser in codebases with lots of components and large quantities of CSS. It turns out, if your app needs to scale, then you need Shadow DOM to make the browser perform. As mentioned previously, this is because Shadow DOM gives the browser more information about component boundaries, enabling it to optimize better.”

“core new HTML capabilities are being built on top of Web Components. For example, the upcoming selectmenu HTML element is implemented as a Web Component in Chromium. For years, the Chromium video tag has been implemented this way as well. NOTE: selectmenu and video aren’t implemented in JavaScript. They are implemented in C++, using the C++ side of the Web Component APIs.”

Git Workflow by Chris Staudinger (Twitter)

This is an excellent depiction of how the basic parts of Git work.

Git Workflow

Some notes:

• Staging is also known as the Index
• Working directory corresponds to your local changes
• Local repository comprises local commits

Fun

When God sings with his creations, will a turtle not be part of the choir?

An oldie, but a goodie, from ”Blame it on Lisa” (S13E15) (Wikipedia).

Try and Stop Us

The Simpsons − TRY AND STOP US (YouTube)

And this is just an old picture I found lying around from when Kath named all of the countries bordering Tanzania without getting a single one wrong. I was impressed.

Neighbors of Tanzania