Links and Notes for September 1st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

COVID-19

Economy & Finance

Labor Economist: AI May Bring a Boom in Horrible Jobs by Lynn Parramore (Scheer Post)

“For the previous generation of metalworkers, the numerical control machines were programmed directly by the worker operating them. Even the detection of minor problems and discrepancies was the responsibility of the operator, who intervened when he deemed it necessary. Today, machines are programmed by computer scientists and engineers who are often not even employees of the company, but of machine suppliers. In other words, workers enjoy an ever-decreasing degree of autonomy and feel deprived of the possibility of using their own intelligence in their daily tasks.”

“[…] many corporate functions are relocated outside the production unit, and even outside the company or the country. Workers can’t reconstruct the supply chain in which they are engaged, and so they are unable to organize themselves effectively as their horizon becomes increasingly narrow.”

“[…] cycle times are presented as the objective outcome of some machine learning/big data processes (whereas algorithms are informed by human beings according to parameters determined by human beings) and therefore out of the realm of bargaining.”

“What I fear is a world with millions of underpaid, ignorant, politically naive, isolated workers, stuck at home in front of their computers in both work and leisure time, producing goods and services they cannot afford to buy.”

“[…] there could be labor-consuming technical progress, aiming at preventing worker fatigue, energy-saving, pollution-minimizing, and so on. Of course, this kind of technical progress means that production costs increase, and hence it is not likely in the interest of big companies.”

“The prerequisite for technology not to be used against workers is that research cease to be controlled by the private sector, and returns fully under public control, directed toward the development of technologies that achieve social and environmental goals.”

Why aren’t millenials buying homes? by WinterPlanet (Reddit)

Buying a house is like:

Bank: “we have no way of knowing you’ll pay back this mortgage of £500 a month”
Me: “I’ve been paying my landlord £1000 a month”
Bank: “Why can’t you save up £25000 to reassure us you can afford £500”
Me: “Because I’ve been paying my landlord £1000 a month”

Mad props for the Jessica Jones meme. Kilgrave was the worst.

Public Policy & Politics

The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Neither the Chinese nor anyone else in Asia believes these silly explanations, and no one expects them to do so. Beijing knows very well there is a point to all these apparently pointless visits U.S. officials insist on making. The Biden regime is buying time as it remilitarizes the western end of the Pacific. The only people who are supposed to understand otherwise are Americans. We are not supposed to watch as Washington provokes and prosecutes Cold War II before our eyes. We are supposed to watch as American officials—reasonable, constructive, well-intended—make all efforts to talk to the Chinese in the face of their stubborn reluctance to cooperate.”

“[…] the Biden regime’s efforts to obscure what it is up to at the other end of the Pacific is a straight reprise of the first Cold War, which now resides in all but the most important history books as the responsibility of the Soviets. We have a responsibility to render and defend an accurate record so that this does not happen again.”

“The Chinese challenge could and should be understood as a chance to reinvent America by way of a Great Mobilization, cap “G,” cap “M,” of New Deal magnitude. There is, of course, no more than lip service to any such idea. We are instead sacrificing this historic opportunity to the military-industrial complex, the greed of corporations, and the ambitions of political leaders who lack all principle or any thought for the commonweal.”

Millions Sick and Untreated, Thanks to Medicaid ‘Unwinding’ by Eve Ottenberg (Scheer Post)

“They’ll probably join the statistics of the multitudes of Americans who die prematurely, while nincompoop right-wingers and our corporate overlords will no doubt rant against any public health moves to assist them, as part of a commie plot to steal our freedoms, since public health arrangements put, uh, health first. So there will be none. Because we are ruled by cruel, greedy people who also happen to be nitwits.”

Historian Explains That Pepe The Frog Was Originally A Hindu Symbol (The Onion)

The allusion is that Pepe the Frog is only to be considered a right-wing symbol, just like the swastika. Anyone who actually uses either symbol is to be considered a thought-criminal. This is deeply unfair to the creator of Pepe the Frog, whose life was documented in the film Feels Good Man. People who are tickled by the joke in the title are unfortunately uninformed.

The Great Reorganization of Sexuality and Gender by Hugh Ryan (This is Hell!)

This is an interesting discussion, which ranged over some absolutely terrible characterizations of what the concerns of so-called right-wingers are, as well as seemingly obstinately refusing to acknowledge the modern-day use of the world snowflake, instead clinging to a 19th-century definition, as well as completely misdefining the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and misusing “strawman argument” for good measure. Then he uses the phrase “fractaling forward”, which I don’t even understand what that even means.

However, at about 35:00. Hugh says,

“Suddenly we have to break apart the queer idea of the 19th century, which was generally called ‘the invert’, which was kind of like the idea of what we think of trans and intersex mixed together. Well, now we know that there are people who desire other people of the same sex who are not trans or intersex. So, sexologists freak out, and they start to define all of these different categories. We end up picking out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex as the ones we’ll move forward with, but these people are also defining things like ‘the identity of the woman who likes to be sexually aroused with hatpins.’ That was considered a standalone identity. Pickpockets in the nineteen-teens were considered a biological class the way we might think about homosexuals. Right?”

Now, your instinct might be to say, ‘yeah, but that was stupid. We know better now.“

Do we, though? Are we sure we’ve got it all right now? That we’ve accounted for all of the nuance of human experience with our handful of categories?

I’m not saying we put litterboxes into classrooms—because nobody shits in the classrom, you goddamned idiots, whether you identify as a cat or a human. No shitting in the classroom. A relatively easy rule to impose, I would say.

So, Hugh’s point is that this has all happened before, and that it was all bullshit based on prejudices and arbitrary choices before—and that’s all it is this time. Humans love to make arbitrary choices for no known rhyme or reason—or for spectacularly stupid, petty, or racist/discriminatory reasons—and then completely forget that they’ve done so. Stir, wait a few decades, and everyone is utterly convinced that it wouldn’t be the way that it is without good reason.

Which takes us to pronouns and identifies and sexual/gender identification. Look, science is screaming from its desk that there are only two genders as far as gametes are concerned. There are people who are both genders. There are people who don’t feel like either gender. There are people who are one biological gender, but absolutely feel like the other one.

Leave them all be.

Honestly, there are so many ways to be an awful human being and huge detriment to society—and absolutely none of those things listed above are any of those ways. If the worst thing you can find about a person is that they are acting like other than their biological gender, then you’ve found an incredibly good person. For Christ’s sake.

So, we have to clean up some terminology and we have to make sure the people do stay focused on solving actual societal problems—instead of focusing all of their energy on helping trans or intersex people and then calling it a day, which is also not cool because we really do have a list of things to do, in priority order, and it would be absolutely awesome if helping a handful of people and children feel more at home in their own skins were at the top of the list, but it’s just not. It’s just not even close.

Just in the same price range, there are children who are hungry every damned day and we’re not doing enough yet to make sure they’re fed, to say nothing of whether they feel OK in their own heads. They can’t think straight because they’re hungry. Let’s solve that one and see how they feel.

They’ll probably feel that they’d like fresh air and fresh water and less climate change and a fuckload fewer billionaires sucking all of the value out of humanity like an engorged tick. So, yeah, priorities.

But I’m getting off course again here. Even with cleaning up terminology: this is not the first time we’re dealing with pronouns, FFS. Most of the people complaining about pronouns barely even know what one is—and they’re not even close to mentally equipped to examine the linguistic environment that we already inhabit and notice that there already is a framework of pronouns and titles, some of which is based on biological gender, and some of which is just cultural baggage.

There are languages that don’t recognize gender as much as English—e.g., Turkish—and there are others that have a neutral form—e.g., German and Russian—and those are languages that are relatively close to the European family of languages. I have no idea what’s going on in Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the thousands of other languages used on this planet.

What I’m saying is that there is no God-given way of addressing someone. There is only the way that that person prefers to be addressed. In programming circles that don’t suck, people are incredibly concerned with making forms that stop asking for “first name” and “last name” because it’s incredibly culturally myopic. It barely even works in Europe anymore, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Instead, you should just ask for a person’s “official name”—where they fill out as many names as they want—and their “preferred name”—where they, again, fill out as many names as they want.

In fact, we still have so many forms that ask for gender—MALE or FEMALE PLEASE—or that ask for title, chosen from a dropdown list—Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.—because everyone has one of those, right? What about Dr.? What about someone who doesn’t want to reveal their marital status with their name? Oh, then use “Ms.”. What if you’re a guy? Oh, then just … use “Mr.” What about if you’re a woman who identifies as a guy? Oh, FUCK IT, just stop asking for that information.

'Mrs.' is my preferred way of being addressed

Hell, we still have standardized tests that ask for “race”. Yikes. When I took the SAT, I told them I was a “Pacific Islander” because I knew, even then, that it absolutely does not matter.

Honestly, we’re past it and it never mattered in the first place. It only mattered as long as we had laws that discriminated against certain genders, skin colors, races, countries of origin, marital statuses, etc.. Now that we’ve cleared out a bunch of that juristic detritus, we’re faced with the possibility of just building a set of rules that make sense, rather than whatever bullshit we’ve cargo-culted from our more overtly colonial age.[3]

Victoria Nuland BEGGING For Help After Africa Trip (w/ Anya Parampil) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

The first half-an-hour of this video included a lot of clips of Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, MSNBC, and Fox News commentators. They’re all certifiably insane. They don’t have any grip on reality, choosing instead to live in a world where Israel is the most important possible ally on the planet, where China can be economically attacked endlessly and then told that we’re going to be friends (Ramaswamy) once we’ve gotten everything we want, that an overarching goal is to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon (Ramaswamy)—or nuclear capability, where Ukraine is the most important ally (other than Israel, I guess?) because it’s how we crush Russia (Haley). Incredible.

Honest Government Ad | Canada 🇨🇦 by thejuicemedia (YouTube)

This is an incredibly densely packed, 4-minute video about what Canada’s up to with its militarization and its fossil-fuel extraction.

tl;dw: Support the Wet’suwet’en First Nations people at:

• https://www.yintahaccess.com
• http://unistoten.camp

Journalism & Media

Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of “Deep State” and “Working Class” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Everyone from ABC News to the European Union (which describes “QAnon deep state conspiracies” as a product of “right-wing extremism”) to academics writing about how “Fake news promotes conspiracy theories such as Deep State” have accepted the core idea that suspicions of unelected institutional power are, like disdain for “elites,” fictional products of “misinformation” and rightist resentment. Criticism of “deep state” in fact is often used by Internet censors as a way to identify dangerous or foreign-aligned groups.”

“Class-not-race became code for an increasingly infamous form of racism encapsulated by other terms likely to find their way on this list, “color blind” and “color blindness.” Once considered an aspirational positive, a would-be “color blind” pol like Sanders who focused on “class-not-race” was understood to be denying the realities of discrimination, probably out of secret racism.”

“Through this switcheroo from one term to another, a phrase that was coined to express a specific political idea — that connections between people of a certain economic class are meaningful — once again came to mean more or less the exact opposite, i.e. that the only “working class” that really exists is fractious and separated by ethinicity. (really!), and so on. Workers of the world, split up!”

Science & Nature

I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“if you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn’t you care a lot about which ones? Why didn’t my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper’s supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn’t think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn’t even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!”

“Another way that paradigms die is people simply lose interest in them, so our best ally against these zombie paradigms is boredom . And we’ve got plenty. Psychologists already barely care about the findings in their own field; that’s why, when we hear about another replication massacre, we don’t even bother to ID the bodies.”

“So yes, it’s a shame when we find out that esteemed members of our community might have made up data. That’s bad, and they shouldn’t do it. But catching the cheaters won’t bring our field back to life. Only new ideas can do that.”

Why is quantum mechanics non-local? (I wish someone had told me this 20 years ago.) by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

“Last year, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three physicists who allegedly found that the universe is not locally real. But what does this mean? What are the two types of non-locality? And what did Einstein’s have to do with it? That’s what we’ll talk about today.”

Extended interview: Oliver Stone Goes Nuclear by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

Art & Literature

Myth, Mystery, and Contradiction by Piotr Florczyk (The American Scholar)

“In A Kidnapped West: A Tragedy of Central Europe, Kundera reminded his readers that Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were historically and culturally closer to the West than to the Soviet East, and should therefore be thought of as central rather than eastern European. Alas, his appeal fell on deaf ears, and the region remains “eastern,” shorthand for a place where, rumor has it, nobody smiles and the smell of burned cabbage wafts through the corridors of charmless, concrete apartment blocks.”

Apparently Personal: On Sharon Olds by Gunnhild Øyehaug (The Paris Review)

“She says herself, in interviews, that she prefers the description “apparently personal.”

““I have never said that the poems don’t draw on personal experience,” she says. “But I’ve never said that they do.”

“It’s a paradox: the words apparently and personal are obviously contradictory: personal indicates that we are being drawn into someone’s intimate sphere, having secrets whispered in our ear; apparently in this context suggests “false, not genuine, pretend”—something looks personal, but do we have proof?”

Do you need proof? If a poem rings true for you, what do you care if the poet was faking it? If the story’s amusing, who cares if it happened, or happened to that person? Authors lie. Comedians tell jokes, not autobiographies. This overarching need for authenticity in order to enjoy anything is ruining everything.

Indeed by deluxetrashqueen & ginerofsuburbia (Tumblr/Reddit)

“Ugh! Stupid sci fi movies that are like what if you had to pay to be alive?. Um that’s just being disabled! Selling literal minutes of your life as currency? That’s just living under capitalism, idiot!”

My love. My dear. My precious baby bird. I am kissing you so gently on the forehead, Please listen to my words.

That is the point.

For the love of god, everyone, please learn the meaning of allegory,
I’m dying here.

Dystopia does not predict the future, it criticizes the present.

Philosophy & Sociology

For Zerco by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Over time I find myself increasingly amazed at this rather little-discussed feature of not-very-well-documented non-Western languages, that they seem to float freely, that there exists no clear and simple system of correspondence between their words and the words you can more or less be confident you’ll find, in one-to-one mappings, in any bilingual dictionary of English, on the one hand, and French, German, Latin, or Greek on the other. All of Western Europe, or perhaps the part of the world that has shaped its literary traditions in reference to Greek and Latin antiquity, has in effect evolved into a sort of Sprachbund”

“Spinoza’s idea that there is only one thing or substance, and every thing we ordinarily call a “thing” is in fact only a modification of it. Thus strictly speaking the only subject of a sentence, on this view, should be “it”, while all of our nouns get converted to verbs, and our verbs get converted to adverbs (along with indirect objects, dative clauses, etc.). So, instead of “The dog is barking at me”, we might have something like “It dogs, barkingly and me-wardly”.”

Technology

ReiserFS is now “obsolete” in the Linux kernel and should be gone by 2025 [Updated] by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)

“It’s an ignoble end for a filesystem that, at one time, could have been the next big thing for Linux file systems.”

“ReiserFS addressed ext2's lack of journaling, added B-tree indexing, and worked much faster when dealing with huge numbers of small files. Others had praised the system’s stability under power or system failure, able to recover and restore data faster than other systems at the time. ReiserFS “garnered much praise and even major industry support,” wrote Jeremy Reimer in a history of file systems from 2008, but “the wheels started to come off for reasons that were primarily non-technical.””

It’s utterly fascinating that a piece of technology would be ignored and thrown away because the person who wrote it turned out to be a murderer.

There’s a guy named Shishkin who’s working on ReiserFS 5. People probably won’t want to use that because he’s cis-gendered.

AI crap by Drew DeVault

“The biggest lasting changes from machine learning will be more like the following:”

• A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
• The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
• More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
• SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
• Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
• AI-generated content overwhelming social media
• Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising

“AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster.

“You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those AI-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with AI content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm.

“All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the AI epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math.”

“AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse.”

AI-generated child sex imagery has every US attorney general calling for action by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.”

I, with the rest of the world, look forward to hearing how the U.S. is absolutely the most sane, rational, non-prejudiced, and non-theological justice system in which to discuss this topic.

““As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions,” the letter reads. “And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult.””

Oh, goodie. It’s already starting off well. If CSAM exists, but it’s completely made-up, then how, exactly, is it victimizing individuals? There is no victim to victimize. The people depicted never existed. It’s like saying that a painting of a man having sex with a goal run afoul of bestiality laws. There was never a man. There was never a goat. It’s a painting.

“Additionally, even though CSAM is a very real and abhorrent problem, the universal appeal of protecting kids has also been used as a rhetorical shield by advocates of censorship.”

There was no link for the flat claim that the problem is “real” and “abhorrent”, both of which are true, but…how big of a problem is it? As Doug Stanhope said in his bit “The Funny Thing About Child Porn” from the album “ From Across the Street”: if it’s everywhere, why haven’t I ever seen any? I’ve stumbled across incredible things online and I’ve never, ever had to quickly back out of a tab because it contained CSAM.

An excellent comment on the article:

The comments on Apple Clarifies Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in iCloud Photos (Hacker News) are kind of hit or miss, but some of the better ones are included below.

“It’s an incredibly bad thing. It’s also an incredibly poor excuse to justify backdooring phones.

“Cops need to investigate the same way they always have, look for clues, go undercover, infiltrate, find where this stuff is actually being made, etc.

“Scanning everyone’s phones would make their jobs significantly easier, no doubt, but it simply isn’t worth the cost to us as a society and there is simply no good counter-argument to that.”

Programming

Why I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” by Jason Swett (Code with Jason)

“If developers are afraid to clean up poor code, then I don’t think the answer is to hold off on fixing duplication problems. I think the answer is to address the reasons why developers are reluctant to clean up existing code. Maybe that reason is a lack of automated tests and code review, or a lack of a culture of collective ownership. Whatever the underlying problem is, fixing that problem surely must be a better response than allowing duplication to live in your codebase.”

“When you find yourself adding if statements to a piece of code in order to get it to behave differently under different scenarios, you’re creating a confusion. Don’t try to make one thing act like two things. Instead, separate it into two things.”

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

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

“I don’t like unit tests.”

Yes. They’re 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” because, by their nature, they lock down a lot of the design and implementation. This is absolutely true.

What you need is discipline to realize when you need to write more unit tests in order to help pinpoint which component involved in a failing integration test is causing the problem. If you preemptively write all of the unit tests, you’re wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.

I have had no small amount of success with a large test suite that was mostly integration tests. It ran relatively quickly (10 minutes for 10,000 tests on a reasonably classed developer desktop) and helped me survive three major refactorings.

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

At 10:00, he talks about how the top-level architecture of an most applications reflects the framework used to implement the web-delivery mechanism rather than the purpose of the application itself. In his example, he shows how a Ruby-on-Rails application is immediately recognizable as such, but that you have literally no idea what the application does.

He urges us to consider what this implies about our priorities as architects and developers. It means that we are much more concerned with the technology than with the functionality. This is not good.

He contrasts it with a high-level. 2-d blueprint of the first floor of a church, where the intent is obvious: it’s a church (he says). Of course, inferring that it’s a church involves applying the appearance of the diagram to a given context—e.g., a very western one—but the point is clear: the standard, top-level view of the design of a church screams out that it’s a church. It says nothing about how the church is to be built—or has been built—it says what it is.

“Architecture is about intent.”

Just to be clear: this presentation is from 12 years ago, and we’re still confronted with the same concepts—still confronted with the same failure to remember these precepts. Our frameworks still push themselves to the fore.

This is, in a way, the problem with LLM-generated code: we are already terrible at expressing the intent of our software in a way that makes it maintainable and qualitative. We are already mostly terrible at designing and building things in a way that satisfy the nearly-always-implicit non-functional requirements, like maintainability, usability, performance, etc.

And now we’re asking another piece of software, whose workings we can’t yet fathom, but which we know we’ve built by feeding it all of these terrible versions of software, and asking it to write software for us. All of the theory that we’ve developed about how to build software will not be respected, except by luck, if the neural net is feeling like that’s a high-probability next token.

On the one hand, I have to admit that this doesn’t sound much different from how software is built today, except that the human builders are potentially capable of following rules, whereas the software builders are less trainable. Again, though, we have decades of experience showing that, while people are ostensibly trainable, they are not necessarily practically trainable, at least in the general case for the general type of person who takes part in this field of endeavor we call programming.

Which leaves us with the question: have we achieved the maximum potential in software development? We already knew everything we needed to know about how to do it decades ago. What is missing is the will to do it that way. It’s definitely possible to train people to do it that way. The hangup is, as always, the cost, specifically, the cost-benefit ratio. The perceived benefit of better software is usually far less than the perceived (initial) cost.

And we always perceive only the initial cost because we are super-bad at long-term thinking about complex problems like building software.

At 34:00, he says

“There’s gotta be some better way to do this. […] This is just 3270 programming poisoned with all sorts of crud. How many languages do you have to do know to write a web application? Well, there’s some programming language, but that’s incidental! You’ve gotta know HTML and CSS and JS and Zazzle and Dazzle and … and, you know, the guy over here’s going: ‘let’s build communities by leveling people up. Leveling them up! I mean, what we’re going to do is hand them a … OK, now, hold this hammer. Ok? Good. You got that hammer? Now, here’s another one. Hold that hammer too. Now I’ve got a big barrel you’ve got to hold on your head. We are not helping our cause with this truly terrible mechanism that we have adopted.”

At 41:00, he says

“The database is a detail.”

This reminds me of The UI is an afterthought, a detail, an article I wrote recently[4] about a 7-year-old video I watched that expressed the same sentiments about external systems that Martin is expressing in his 12-year-old video.

“That’s what architecture is: find some place to draw a line and then make sure every dependency that crosses that line goes in the same direction.”

At 55:45, he says,

“There’s an interesting case of the database—the thing that’s so incredibly important—and yet, we took that decision and we just deferred it off the end of the world and then, when somebody needed it, we shimmed it in in a day. Because our architecture had done something right. What is the hallmark of a really good architecture. A good architecture allows major decisions to be deferred.”

“A good architecture maximizes the number of decisions not made.”

At 1:00:50, he says,

“How do you keep the beast under control? You need a quite of tests you trust with your life. You must never look at that suite of tests and think ‘you know? I don’t think I really tested everything?’ As soon as you think that, you’ve lost it. Because now you’re afraid of your code. The reason we write our tests first is so that we know, that every single line of code we wrote was because of a failing test that we wrote. So that we know that every single decision that we made is tested. So that then, we can pull up that code on our screen and say ‘Oh my God, that looks like a mess’—and clean it!…without any fear.”

Fun

Superman 2 − Lois shoots a gun at Clark (YouTube)

Margot Kidder FTW 🙌 .

Diplo has successfully escaped the arena by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“If you want to see what the next 25 years are going to be like, Burning Man is it. Millionaires and managers ignoring huge structural problems until it starts to impact their libertarian freak fests and then escaping to somewhere safe when they get the chance. Well, until there aren’t any safe places to escape to, I guess…”

Poltergeist − You only moved the headstones! by Waitomo (YouTube)

This is going to be my new metaphor for people who only fix the superficial problem: “Moving headstones, but leaving the bodies.”

/r/Amish (Reddit)

This subreddit has almost 200,000 subscribers and no-one has posted on it. It’s probably the moderator who’s suppressing any jackass who would try to post anyway, but it’s still a nice dedication to the joke that the Amish wouldn’t be able to post to Reddit.

Bill Burr: Live at the Troubadour 3 | the Monday Morning Podcast by Bill Burr (YouTube)

This is two hours of what seems like a Bill Burr stand-up routine, but is just an on-stage and lightly prepared version of his weekly podcast. He has a little piece of paper to remind him of topics he wanted to cover—probably the same as he does every week. He just throws out a pretty good set—just like that.

“Offstage: [reading listener chats] …well, you’ve already talked about the Fed, Fatties, and Botox, so that’s good…
Bill: So what? Is Skynyrd not going to play Freebird?”

“I’ll tell you this: the day American black people care about soccer, that is the end of all of you.”

At 80:00, he goes on a glorious run about women’s volleyball and the booty shorts.

“Can I be honest with you? That’s why, you know, like, when they started doing that thing where they were going to have trans people going to school? […] Like, that’s why I was against that shit. Like, wait a minute…you haven’t even figured out how to do the right version heterosexually. You know what I mean? […] All they did was just tell you what happened physically. […]

“There should have been a guy there going YOUR FUCKING LIFE WILL BE OVER. AS YOU KNOW IT. DO YOU KNOW WHY PUSSY FEELS SO GOOD? BECAUSE IF IT ONLY FELT OK, WE WOULD JUST JERK OFF BECAUSE IT WOULDN’T BE WORTH IT.

“Finding a woman can be the greatest thing of your fucking life. OR END IT. That’s what they should have been screaming at people.”

Bill Burr being a savage for 10 minutes straight (cued up to 'No reason to hit a woman') (YouTube)

Lori Lightfoot Teaches Harvard Course On How To Catch Raw, Wriggly, Delicious Fishes So Tasty Sweet, Yes Good Precious (Babylon Bee)

This is just another example of something that’s funny, despite being disrespectful in the extreme, and ugly-shaming, to boot. However,

• Lori Lightfoot is the former mayor of Chicago. She’s a powerful, influential person.
• She was kind of a dick during most of her term(s).
• She’s black
• She’s female
• But, man, you can’t deny that she kind of looks like Gollum.

Video Games

Impressions: Starfield’s sheer scale is already giving me vertigo by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)

“Within a few hours of starting the game, I found myself engaged as a pilot in the Vanguard Navy, working as a (semi-unwilling) undercover agent for a System Defense group and taking on freelance bounty-hunting jobs. And that’s all in between answering distress calls, doing cargo runs, tracking down an electrical drain in a subterranean community, and countless other odd jobs. The bigness of Starfield (and of space in general) isn’t up for debate. The key question, as it is in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, is how to go about finding something interesting to do in all that space. And on that score, thus far, Starfield has been more of a mixed bag.”

“There’s a staggering level of detail put into the major cities, settlements, and colonies of these carefully crafted hub worlds. That’s especially apparent in the architecture, from sprawling retro-futuristic walkable cities to bustling commercial trade hubs to subterranean mines crowded with the dregs of society, and everything in between.”

30 years after Descent, developer Volition is suddenly no more by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)

“Volition—the development studio behind franchises from Descent and Freespace to Red Faction and Saints Row—has been abruptly shut down after a 30-year run. Parent company Embracer Group said the studio will be closed “effective immediately” as part of a massive restructuring program that began in June, according to a farewell notice posted on Volition’s website and on LinkedIn.”

Oh man, I loved Descent! I remember playing with Kavorka and Joker after work at the old Logical headquarters on 16th street. We’d set up a network game on the LAN and just play for hours.

I also played Red Faction, which was one of the first games to have semi-realistic environment destruction.