Links and Notes for January 19th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

AfD-Verbotsdebatte – kontraproduktiv und gefährlich by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Das nun immer wieder von diesen Parteien ins Spiel gebrachte Verbot der AfD ist eine Fortsetzung dieses kontraproduktiven Kurses. Man kann – und muss – die AfD scharf kritisieren. Sie verbieten zu wollen, ist jedoch nicht nur aussichtslos, sondern zeugt auch von einer antidemokratischen Einstellung. Dadurch wird die Spaltung der Gesellschaft forciert und letzten Endes die AfD sogar gestärkt.”

“Was soll ein Sachse denken, wenn er hört, die SPD-Vorsitzende Saskia Esken will die AfD verbieten ? Hier eine Partei, die in den jüngsten Umfragen auf sechs Prozent kommt und um ihren Einzug in den Landtag bangen muss – dort eine Partei, die in den Umfragen bei 34 Prozent steht. Jeder dritte wahlberechtigte Sachse muss sich also nun von einer Partei, die zumindest in Sachsen selbst keine Relevanz hat, anhören, dass ihm seine demokratische Willenserklärung verboten werden soll? Mit Verlaub, das ist anmaßend und antidemokratisch.”

Die verstehen nur plunder. Das zu nehmen was nicht freiwillig gegeben oder mit geringem aufwand verdient werden kann.

“Dabei ließe sich die AfD doch so einfach „bekämpfen“. Die derzeitige politische Einfalt müsste nur durch eine politische Vielfalt abgewechselt werden. Erst wenn der Eispanzer der Konformität aufgebrochen wird und der Mainstream der Mitte einer offenen und ehrlichen politischen Debatte weicht, wird man vielleicht die derzeitige Spaltung der Gesellschaft überwinden können.”

The Strange and Lonesome Death of Artsakh is a Warning to Palestine by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“A single road was left open connecting Artsakh to the Armenian mainland. In late 2022 that road was closed, and a crippling ten-month long blockade followed, barring the already impoverished and shellshocked people of the NKR from all food and medicine. In September of last year, Azerbaijan struck again, easily routing the cornered nation’s last remaining military positions within 24 hours and forcing its besieged government to concede to its own erasure. It was a strange and lonesome ending to a long and storied resistance movement. An ending that felt almost unfathomably anticlimactic to anyone actually familiar with Armenian history.”

“[…] the Bolsheviks arbitrarily incorporated the Armenian region of Artsakh into the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in spite of the vehement protests of the Armenian partisans who had helped them dethrone the Czar. Repeated requests for sovereignty nearly broke out into open warfare before the Kremlin finally caved and established the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.”

“[…] if Azerbaijan had the right to independence from the Russian Federation, then why shouldn’t Artsakh have the right to their own independence from Azerbaijan? And so, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic boldly declared its independence with a popular referendum in 1991 without the recognition of a single UN member state, including Armenia, and I believe that it is this silent betrayal, the betrayal of nation states against nation states, that ultimately dammed Artsakh to its tragic fate over thirty years later.”

“[…] representative democracy only truly represents the will of the highest bidder and in Armenia that bidder has become the United States who have sickeningly played both sides of the trenches in this conflict for the same reasons that they turned Ukraine into a geopolitical boobytrap, to sow discord amongst the ranks of its rivals.”

“Thousands of years of pride and resistance down the shitter, all so a few thugs in Yerevan can have a whisper of a chance at joining the same military alliance that arms their old chums in Turkey. Not that Sultan Erdogan gives a flying fuck about any empire but his own. His expressed goal in this whole sorry [sordid] affair is actually just to pave over Artsakh in order to turn it into an off-ramp for China’s Belt and Road Initiative known as the Middle Corridor.”

“Artsakh was a great nation destroyed by a state and that state wasn’t Turkey or Azerbaijan or even the United States of America, it was Armenia, with its corrupt elites and its globalist neoliberal ambitions. This tragedy is a warning in the shape of a self-inflicted genocide. Artsakh thrived for centuries before the poisoned invention of the Westphalian Nation State redefined its existence as mere geographical collateral. So, did Palestine. Every nation should think twice before they consider any state to be a solution because in an age of collapsing empires any state can easily become a nation’s final solution.”

The End of Global Leadership by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“It was a long time coming, but the pathological savagery of the Israelis as they exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza announces the end of any claim America and the West altogether have to global leadership on any kind of moral basis, legal basis, or any assumption that the West possesses superior ideals, principles of government, or what have you. Israel’s genocide, we had better acknowledge, has many antecedents. In this way the apartheid state, as it exposes its own grotesquerie, also exposes the West’s centuries of sins.”

Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis by Alec MacGillis (Scheer Post)

“Johnson is part of an increasingly popular approach to combating truancy: She makes home visits to learn why children are missing school and then works with families and schools to get them back on track.”

Like, how else were you doing it? Punishment and fines? Was that effective?

“Families faced other hurdles as well. One student’s father had died a month earlier, and in the previous six months two of his grandparents had also died; his mother was suffering from heart disease that prevented her from working, and she could no longer afford school clothes. Johnson alerted the student’s principal, who had a special fund for such needs.”

“A high school boy had moved in with his grandmother, but he was sleeping on the porch for lack of a bed; Concentric bought him one. A superintendent purchased a washer and dryer after hearing from Concentric that some students weren’t coming to school because they didn’t have any clean clothes. “Once you have these conversations, you know that there are real-life events that happen, there are real-life circumstances, where they’re just not able,” Johnson said.”

This is great and all, but this shouldn’t be handled by an ad-hoc patchwork of for-profit companies..

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prison by Norman Finkelstein (CounterPunch)

“He himself notes that “many of the prisoners” in Ketziot were “so-called administrative detainees. They had been put in jail without charge and without trial, by military order, for six-month terms, renewable at the discretion of a military judge, who did what the Shabak [Israel’s internal security police] told him to do. The administrative detainees included many of the intellectuals and lawyers of the Palestinian national movement”. Human rights organizations reported that the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons during each of the first years of the intifada hovered around 25,000 of whom 4-5,000 were administrative detainees.”

“[…] in its interrogations, to “break” a certain number of young men, the Shin Bet delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of the friends of the young men.[Then] the soldiers go out almost every night to the city and come back with children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already been beaten. And soldiers crowd together in the “reception room” to look at them when they undress. To look at them in their underwear, to look at them as they tremble with fear.”

“In Gaza our General Security Services [Shabak] therefore amount to a Secret Police, our internment facilities are cleanly run Gulags. Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators torturers. In Gaza it’s all straightforward and clear. There’s no place to hide.”

“On a couple of occasions Goldberg mentions that the punishment for even minor infractions at Ketziot was: 24, 48, or even 72 hours in solitary confinement, zinzana, in Arabic. The zinzana was the size of a refrigerator box, into which three, four, five or six prisoners were shoveled. The prisoners were seated on a cold and hard plastic floor, limbs draped over limbs, and they shat in a bucket that was emptied once a day. After a few days in the box, prisoners could no longer stand unaided. (p. 109; cf. p. 114, where he describes four Palestinians locked “in a space fit, at most, for two small dogs”)”

“When the guards needed “someone to go solitary” for a minor infraction of prison rules, Goldberg recalls at one point , “twenty Arabs immediately volunteered.” He processes this not as a demonstration of their solidarity and courage but rather as vindication that the “Arabs want to be our victim” and “the Geneva Convention said nothing about prisoners who asked to be punished.””

“The administrative detainees held in Ketziot included “Palestinian leaders who openly support the peace talks with Israel and dialogue to promote Palestinian-Israeli understanding” (B’Tselem), while those convicted in military courts fell victim to draconian Israeli military orders that criminalized and made punishable “by up to 10 years’ imprisonment every form of political expression in the Occupied Territories, including nonviolent forms of political activity” (Amnesty).”

“One reason Goldberg didn’t see any nonviolent resistance is perhaps that he suffered an optical impairment. “She had joined a group of foreigners, advocates of the Palestinian cause, who stood one day against a line of Israeli bulldozers,” he writes of the death of Rachel Corrie during the second intifada. “She came too close to one and she was plowed under” (pp. 300-1). Just as the Twin Towers came too close to the airplanes and got plowed under.”

“Each year of the intifada thousands of Palestinians were “beaten by Israeli forces” and “many were punitively kicked or struck with clubs or rifle butts,” according to human rights organizations. “The victims included people who refused to clear road-blocks or delete graffiti, or who were suspected of having thrown stones. Many suffered severe injuries, particularly fractures” (Amnesty). More than 50,000 Palestinian children required medical attention in the first years of the intifada due to “indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting” (Save the Children).”

“None of these ruminations, however, prevents Goldberg from expressing revulsion at the teachings of Muslim fanatics, who “build self-esteem” through bloody vengeance and for whom the virtue of Islam was its being a “warrior religion” that rejected the Christian value of “passive surrender” because “Muhammad would never have allowed himself to be humiliated”. It is hard to make out the difference between this warrior religion and the one Goldberg worshipped after discovering Israel.”

“[…] it is the undoing of Palestinians, according to Goldberg, that that they “see violence as a panacea” and have “let violence into every corner of their lives”. If they would only emulate Israel.”

“[…] the first Hamas suicide bombing during the second intifada didn’t occur until five months into Israel’s relentless bloodletting (Israeli forces fired one million rounds of ammunition just during the first few days, while the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed during the first weeks was 20:1); and that four times as many Palestinians as Israelis, overwhelmingly civilians on both sides, were killed during the second intifada (4046 as compared to 1017 persons)? In 2006 Israel restored its, as it were, cult of life ratio of killing 30 Palestinians for each Israeli killed (660 as compared to 23 persons).”

“Goldberg is shocked at any imputation of similarity between the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children: “For God’s sake, we don’t try to kill children”. Fully 811 Palestinian children were killed during the second intifada, which was more than the total number of Israeli civilians killed (711, of whom 109 were children); in 2006, 141 Palestinian children were killed as compared to 17 Israeli civilians of whom one was a child. For the want of trying to kill Palestinian children, it would seem that Israelis were awfully good at it.”

“Israel’s leading authority on international law, Yoram Dinstein, observes
in that “the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population”: the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of “no concern to the attacker.” From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden.”

“This is the upshot of Goldberg’s account as well: if Palestinians resort to violence against Israel, it is not due to Israeli actions but to an irrational hatred of Jews; and if the conflict is finally to be settled, it is not Israelis who must cease the occupation but Palestinians who must cease to be anti-Semitic.”

“The disastrous second climax in the peace process came at Camp David in 2000 when “the misanthrope Yasser Arafat with a superficial largeness of spirit” and “the gallant general Ehud Barak, who put peace at the forefront of his capacious mind” met to negotiate a final settlement. Barak made Arafat the famous generous offer of “90 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza,” was even “willing to sacrifice a piece of our holiest city in order to gain peace,” whereas “Arafat left Camp David without even making Barak a counteroffer.””

“Goldberg neglects to mention that, by right and by consensus, Palestinians were entitled to the whole of the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem. The generous Israeli offer was actually a land grab which would also have fragmented the West Bank. In fact judged against the standard of international law, all the concessions at Camp David–on borders, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees–came from the Palestinian side. The impasse at Camp David was due not to Palestinian but Israeli recalcitrance. “If I were a Palestinian,” Ben-Ami, one of Israel’s chief negotiators at Camp David, later observed, “I would have rejected Camp David as well,” while Maoz concludes that the “substantial concessions” Israel demanded of Palestinians at Camp David “were not acceptable and could not be acceptable.” Goldberg also neglects to mention that negotiations between Israel and the PLO resumed after the collapse of the Camp David summit but, although a final settlement was apparently within reach, the “gallant” Barak abruptly terminated them.”

“[…] according to Meron Benvenisti, a leading Israeli authority on the Occupied Territories, “most Palestinians” support a two-state settlement on the June 1967 borders “as long as [the Palestinian state] enjoys all the trappings of sovereignty and is free of settlers,” whereas “the majority of Israelis who ostensibly support a Palestinian state are vehemently opposed” to such a Palestinian state but instead “support an entity that will have partial control over about half the West Bank, with no control over the border crossings, immigration policies, water resources, coastal waters, and airspace.””

Roaming Charges: It’s in the Bag by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Israel has dropped eight times more bombs (most Made in the USA) on Gaza in the span of 100 days than the US army did during six years in Iraq.”

“You scour the headlines for little rays of hope and, instead, just keep finding shit like the bracing results from this recent AP survey on American attitudes about climate change: “Americans are less convinced that climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans compared to data from recent years, declining from 60% in 2018 to 49% this year…This increased doubt was just as significant for someone who graduated from college as someone who has a high school diploma or less (11 percentage point drop) and was more pronounced for younger Americans (17 percentage point drop for those ages 18-29 vs. 9 percentage point drop for the 60+ age group)…Democrats and independents are becoming less convinced that climate change is caused mostly by humans, while Republican attitudes remain stable.””

“In the last 50 years, the North American bird population has lost 3 billion breeding adults, nearly 30 percent of the population. Lark buntings are down 56%, canyon wrens by 23%, roadrunners and lesser scaups by 27%, tufted titmouse by 22%, bobolinks by 20%, Carolina chickadees down 22%, redwings blackbirds down 15%, American goldfinches down 12% and even seemingly ubiquitous crows, down 14%.”

“Most tea bags are made from plastic, either nylon or polyethylene terephthalate (PET). According to research from McGill University, a single plastic tea bag can release 11.6 billion microplastics into a cup of tea.”

Are they really made of plastic? I thought they were some sort of woven cloth, non-plastic. That seems … bad.

Today, we’re saying “remember fish?”

In twenty years, we’ll be saying “remember birds?”

At least there will still be plenty of billionaires.

NATO plots escalation of Ukraine war against Russia into all out war across Europe by Johannes Stern, Alex Lantier (WSWS)

““Exercise Steadfast Defender 2024 will be the largest NATO exercise in decades, with participation from approximately 90,000 forces from all 31 Allies and our good partner Sweden,” Cavoli said. “The Alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via trans-Atlantic movement of forces from North America. This reinforcement will occur during a simulated emerging conflict scenario against a near-peer adversary.””

Translation: U.S. troops are coming to Europe to practice an assault on Russia.

Who exactly do you think you’re fooling? Assholes.

“In Brussels, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of the NATO military committee, demanded “a war fighting transformation of NATO.”

““It’s not a given that we are in peace,” Bauer said. In case of war, he added, “it is the whole of society that will get involved, whether we like it or not.”

“Bauer praised recent statements by Swedish Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin, who called on the Swedish people to prepare for war. “There could be war in Sweden”, Bohlin said. “Are you a private individual? Have you considered whether you have time to join a voluntary defence organisation? If not: get moving!”

“Bauer commented: “The fact that people find [the possibility of war] a surprise and as a result buy radios and batteries, that is great … It starts [with] the realization that not everything is plannable, not everything is going to be hunky-dory in the next 20 years.””

They are absolutely f@#king loving this. Just positively delighted. Just huge erections. The “Dutch admiral” FFS. They terrify everyone into relying on them for their defense against the threat that they are manufacturing. Assholes.

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“Ever since the Biden administration began bombing Yemen, its official spinmeisters have been babbling about commerce and global container shipping to justify it. The unspoken premise behind this justification is that an active genocide should be permitted to continue with zero economic repercussions of any kind, for Israel or anyone else.”

“[…] The premise that there shouldn’t even be a slight economic downturn as a result of this madness, and that it’s fine to start a war to make sure there isn’t, deserves to be dismissed with extreme disdain.

“We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.”

Aaron Maté : Biden Boxed In. by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice.”

“If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.”

“Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.”

“Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated.”

“Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state.”

Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds They Are by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.”

Economy & Finance

The super-rich got that way through monopolies by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“They didn’t do this for ideological reasons – they were chasing material goals. Monopolies produce vast profits, and those profits produce vast wealth. The rise and rise of the super rich cannot be decoupled from the rise and rise of monopolies.”

“Economists who talk about monopolies mean companies that “can act independently without needing to consider the responses of competitors, customers, workers, or even governments.””

“From 2017-22, the 20 largest companies in the world had average markups of 50%. The 100 largest companies average 43%. The smallest half of companies get average markups of 25%.”

“Monopolists have the power “to extract wealth from, to restrict the freedoms of, and to manipulate or steer the vastly larger numbers of losers.” They establish themselves as gatekeepers and create chokepoints that they can use to raise prices paid by their customers and lower the payout to their suppliers:”

“When people talk about the climate impact of billionaires, they tend to focus on the carbon footprints of their mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.”

World’s First Trillionaire Just 10 Years Away as Richest Men Double Their Wealth by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)

““We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation, and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom,” Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s interim executive director, said in a statement . “This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else.””

“Oxfam’s report spotlights the “sustained and highly effective war on taxation” that powerful corporations have been waging over the past several decades—a war that has yielded a significantly lower corporate income tax rate that has allowed companies to amass vast riches and entrench their political influence.”

““Runaway corporate and monopoly power is an inequality-generating machine: Through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state, and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are funneling endless wealth to their ultra-rich owners,” said Behar. “But they’re also funneling power, undermining our democracies and our rights. No corporation or individual should have this much power over our economies and our lives—to be clear, nobody should have a billion dollars.””

Neo-Liberalism is Not Dead, It Never Lived by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The basic point that both sides miss here is that no one was actually committed to a free market without government intervention. The difference was that the so-called neo-liberals liked to claim that their policies were about the unfettered free market, whereas their opponents liked to claim that that they were attacking the free market. In reality, the neo-liberals were simply trying to structure the market in ways that redistributed income upward, while claiming that it was all the invisible hand of the market. Their opponents bizarrely chose to attack the market instead of the way the neo-liberals were shaping it.”

“In fairness to the Biden administration, it has tried to couple its protectionist measures with efforts to promote unionization of the jobs that are created. But it is not clear how successful these efforts will be. And, if it can succeed in promoting unionization in manufacturing then it may also be successful in promoting unionization in sectors like healthcare and retail.”

I’m mystified because the Biden administration smashed the rail-worker strike and intervened to ensure the UPS and Stellantis strikes ended up with the absolute minimum they would accept. Cut it right to the bone like workers are the enemy. But here’s Dean talking about Biden like a big ol’ swinging dick of union-loving presidents.

“We could not suddenly produce hundreds of millions of masks or tens of thousands of ventilators even if these items were all produced in Ohio. We should have had substantial stockpiles on hand for the sort of emergency that Covid created. It was a major failing of the Trump administration that we had grossly inadequate stockpiles of these items.”

Sure. Only Trump. Everything is only Trump’s fault. It’s a one-note song. If only we could return to the competence of all the other administrations during my lifetime. What do Biden’s stockpiles look like? Yes, Trump and his administration were incompetent at administering anything, but have there really been any competent ones? Has there been one that didn’t push 98% of the money upwards while doing the bare minimum to keep things running? Like, if Biden does 2% to Trump’s 1%, he’s twice as good but he’s still shitty. Stop lying with numbers.

“The key to having resilient supply chains is having diverse sources, both domestic and international. There is a good argument for not relying on a potentially hostile country like China for a key manufacturing input like semiconductors. But apart from a relatively small number of strategically important materials and manufactured inputs, there is little reason to equate a reliance on domestic production with resiliency.”

It drives me bananas to see Baker knee-jerk call China “potentially hostile”, when its his own country that is actively hostile and waging economic war on China. Baker’s a potential rapist or pedophile by the same logic. Or an alleged potential rapist.

“The point of the trade policy pursued by the country over the last forty years was to redistribute income from the bottom half of the wage distribution to those in the top 10 or 20 percent. That is the result predicted by economic theory and that was the reality.”

“There is nothing about the market that tells us to subject manufacturing workers to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world and to protect the most highly paid professionals from the same sort of competition. That was a conscious policy with the predictable effect of increasing inequality.”

“It is almost Trumpian that anyone can look at an economy where government-granted monopolies play such a massive role in distribution and then pronounce it to be a free market without government intervention. It is even more absurd when we consider that the government plays a large role in creating the intellectual products subject to these monopolies, most notably with prescription drugs where it spends over $50 billion a year on biomedical research.”

“But Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects Internet platforms from liability for third-party content. This means that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk can profit from spreading lies that would cost the New York Times or CNN millions in defamation suits.”

Holy crap, Dean! The New York Times and CNN profit from lies at least as much as Twitter and Facebook do. What in the actual hell are you talking about? Is it because you read the Times and watch CNN that you can’t bring yourself to admit the sheer amount of libel involved? The incredible outright lies, lies of omission, etc.?

“We can also structure a repeal in a way that is likely to favor smaller platforms, for example by allowing platforms that don’t sell ads or personal information to continue to enjoy Section 230 protection. In any case, it should be pretty obvious that Section 230 protection is not the free market. It was a decision by Congress to benefit Internet platforms relative to print and broadcast outlets. And it hugely facilitated the growth of giant Internet platforms.”

“The Biden administration has adopted many progressive economic policies. Its ambitious recovery package quickly got the economy back to full employment, which also led to large wage gains for the lowest-paid workers. It has also pushed forward with a major infrastructure program, and the Inflation Reduction Act is by far the most aggressive climate legislation ever passed in the U.S. It also has taken steps to rein in patent monopoly pricing for prescription drugs. And for the first time in decades, we have an administration that takes anti-trust policy seriously. In addition, it has made the terms for buying into the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act far more generous, and crafted an income-driven student loan repayment plan that should mean that this debt is not a major burden.”

Do these things exist in this unalloyed form? I feel like he’s gaslighting me. What’s the catch? After reading that he thinks that the Times and CNN don’t lie, I fear he may have gotten all of his news about these magical policies from them.

I’ve seen him go on and on about the wage-gains for the lowest-paid workers, but I have to wonder how magical that is for them. I just read that rents are at their most unaffordable level for the largest number of people ever. Is it possible that wages have risen, but have been eaten up by inflation? No, says Dean. Wage gains at the bottom have outstripped inflation. Official inflation. Which leaves out energy and food. And probably rent. You really have to thread the needle sometimes to be able to tell the good-news story that will get Count Biden elected again. I saw a lot of this in the run-up to the 2020 election as well. People with their heads screwed on straight because so pants-shittingly terrified of Trump getting elected that they just joined the liar’s brigade for Biden. Chomsky will probably reappear to trot out his “lesser evil” horseshot, like he does every four years.

“All of these are positive developments, which can be built upon in a second Biden administration.”

There it is. What did I tell you? Unless he actually likes Biden…

“The problem is not the market, but rather a set of policies that the right has used to structure the market to redistribute income upward.”

Just the right? Does he mean that Democrats and Republicans are both economically liberal parties, to the right of anything approaching a redistributive policy? Or does he mean that the poor Democrats seem to funnel money upward despite themselves? Like, how does this last part jibe with his statements about both parties at the top?

The Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism − Boston Review by Charmaine Chua (Boston Review)

“Running through the pictures, historian Mohamed Gamal-Eldin discovered , was a striking pattern. For the technological sublime to work its wonder on the awed spectator, the photos had to be evacuated of the laboring subjects who made the feat possible: the many tens of thousands of dispossessed fellahin—peasants—who dug the monumental canal by hand.”

“Its capacity was 8,100 TEU—the standard unit of cargo size, based on the volume of a standard twenty-foot container box. That is only some 40 percent of the Ever Given’s capacity, but still the ship was as long as two Eiffel towers are tall. The crew comprised twenty-three, all men.”

“[…] even as the world got bigger, workers got shortchanged. Containers ushered in the mechanization of ports, just as states, acting with and like corporations, sought to repress the power of organized longshore labor. Jobs that had once required multiple gangs of stevedores to load and unload goods from ships were almost entirely wiped out. Unloading became the lonely work of pushing levers atop behemoth gantry cranes that lift and drop steel boxes into an endless grid of squares.”

“Between the 1950s and 1980s, the total capacity of oil tankers grew tenfold.”

“Although Egypt had helped fund the canal’s construction and initially held claim to 15 percent of the Canal’s future profits, by 1875, under mounting extortionate debt, the viceroy of Egypt, Ismāʿīl Pasha, was forced to sell Egypt’s shares to the British Government. The French and British thereafter controlled the Canal for more than eighty years. All this changed in 1956, when Egyptian Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser, in an effort to resist colonial domination, announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company.”

“With Israel occupying one side of the Suez Canal and Egypt and its Arab allies encamped on the other, the canal closed for a full eight years. The flames of gargantuanization were stoked, and a building boom of very and ultra-large crude carriers (VLCCs and ULCCs) commenced. By 1971, Khalili notes, 80 percent of all new tanker orders were for supersized vessels. When it reopened in 1975 under the control of Egyptian authorities after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the canal was able to regain much of the freight it had lost, except for the VLCCs and ULCCs that were now too large to pass through.”

“The largest oil tanker ever built (indeed, the longest and heaviest self-propelled ship of any kind), just over 1,500 feet in length and some 564,000 deadweight tons when fully laden, finished construction in 1979. It has since been scrapped, proving too large for applications beyond at-sea storage, and since then tanker sizes have since shrunken and stabilized.”

“Campling and Colás note that despite the common economic contention that the growth of the shipping sector arose in response to growing demand in international trade, the reality is the opposite: innovations in shipping made the movement of goods so cheap that it prompted new strategies of profit-making, in a process that scholars and supply chain managers have identified as the “ logistics revolution.” Containerization enabled manufacturers to perform what Campling and Colás call a “geographical conjuring trick” at a time when industrial profit rates were beginning to fall.”

“By regularizing and cheapening the cost of transoceanic movement, container ships allowed firms to relocate factories to the global South, cheaply deliver raw materials to assembly lines, keep low inventories, speed the delivery of finished products to debt-fueled consumer markets in the North, and reinvest profits back into the cycle.”

Good for profits and long-term bad for everyone. People end up with too much shit, too much debt, and little patience.

“In the hinterland, highways and railroad corridors must support the concentration of cargo entering the city. These infrastructural modifications, made repeatedly as megaships have continued to grow, require the massive dispossession and manipulation of environments and ecologies.”

“The ecological effects of such human hubris have been devastating. When the Suez Canal joined the Red Sea to the Mediterranean in 1869, marine species migrated along the waterway, allowing invasive species from venomous jellyfish to rabbitfish to make their way north, causing untold damage to biodiverse eco-systems. So significant were these effects that they have been termed “Lessepsian” after the developer of the canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps.”

“If the sideways grounding of the Ever Given should teach us anything, perhaps it is that something monstrous has always been at work in the operations of global capitalism. In our fascination with the bigness of these behemoths, we should not forget that capitalism itself—in its vampiric looting of life from land and people, in its transmogrification of work and matter into commodity value—is a monster all its own, whose catastrophes pile up within but also far beyond the canal that briefly transfixed us in March.”

Ford announces 1,400 layoffs at Dearborn plant, as job cuts accelerate across the US by Tom Hall (WSWS)

“The same day that Ford announced layoffs, the S&P 500 stock market index reached the highest level in its history. The surge in stock prices was driven by optimism that the Fed would cut rates over the next year—in other words, that the job cuts underway are so severe that the Fed can afford to return to its usual free money policies. The stock surge was powered in particular by a continuing rise in tech stocks, as investors salivate over the use of AI and other emerging technologies to cut costs and drive up profits.”

The surge is powered by people all jumping on for short-term gain. No-one really believes that AI will make everything more productive and efficient and better—but many people believe that other people believe it. That’s what powers the bubble: investing in something because you know that other idiots will invest in it, too, driving up the price temporarily. AI is enshittifying even faster than many other similar technical marvels. This is mostly because the capital-extraction machine has gotten much better at killing the host.

The article goes on to discover many other store closures and layoffs, but his one caught my eye:

“CVS will close certain locations inside Target department stores. Last year, the pharmacy chain closed hundreds of stores.”

With several Walmarts also closing, that made me think of so-called food deserts. I guess there are also “pharmacy deserts” and “toilet-paper deserts” (as stand-in for non-medical and non-food necessities). The economy we have is driven purely by profit. Stores with “poor performance” will be closed. Those stores servicing poorer people—most likely the people who would work for stores like that—will close first, as they perform poorly. Food deserts are a class thing. Well-off people have never experienced a “goods desert” of any kind, as they will always be serviced.

Milliardär zeigt sich flexibel, ob Regierung fehlende Milliarden bei Bauern oder Bürgergeldempfängern einspart (Der Postillion)

““Ich weiß gar nicht, warum jetzt aktuell alle in Deutschland streiten, ob man lieber bei den Landwirten kürzen soll oder bei Bürgergeldempfängern oder sogar bei beiden”, so der 35-jährige Self-Made-Erbe. “Wichtig ist doch nur, dass am Ende das Geld zusammenkommt. Jetzt müssen eben alle Opfer bringen.””

China’s stock market fall sounds alarm bells by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“ it illustrates the bankruptcy of the schema promoted in some pseudo-left circles that China, along with others, could form a counterbalance to the depredations and power of US imperialism and lead to the development of a so-called “multi-polar” world.”

I mean, OK, but Jesus that’s bleak. Is Beams here saying that China is…what? Secretly interested in empire? Hegemony? That China can’t form a counterbalance to the U.S.? That no-one can? Or … what? That’s a bit more hopeless than even I usually am, because Beams is here just throwing in the towel, saying that “boot stamping a human face forever” is the best we can hope for, I guess.

“Since they reached a peak in February 2021, stocks in mainland China and Hong Kong have lost $6 trillion. That is roughly equivalent to the entire market capitalisation of Japan. In another measure of the extent of the fall, the Chinese market has never been as far behind Wall Street as it is at present.”

Christ, dude, that previous paragraph unnerved me so much that I don’t know whether to celebrate this or not. Is it good that China’s evil markets run by evil people have fallen so far? Or should we be upset that American hegemony seems to be winning? Or are we to think that the U.S. market is an even bigger bubble, but better capable of ignoring reality for longer?

Science & Nature

Scientific Misconduct and Fraud: The Final Nail in Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin by Bruce E. Levine (CounterPunch)

“Among the few journalists in the world who have recognized the implications of STAR*D for the treatment of millions of people is Robert Whitaker, and in his September 2023 report, “ The STAR*D Scandal: Scientific Misconduct on a Grand Scale ,” he stated: “The protocol violations and publication of a fabricated ‘principal outcome’—the 67% cumulative remission rate—are evidence of scientific misconduct that rises to the level of fraud.””

“[…] by the 1990s, researchers had already discarded the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, with the invalidity of this theory finally reported by the mainstream media in 2022.”

“Receiving little attention by the mainstream media in 2002, the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ) published a study aimed at discrediting the herb St. John’s wort as an antidepressant. However, in this randomized controlled trial (RCT), in addition to one group receiving a placebo and a second group receiving St. John’s wort, there was a third group that received the standard dose of the SSRI Zoloft. The results? The placebo worked better than both St. John’s wort and Zoloft. Specifically, a positive “full response” occurred in 32 percent of the placebo-treated patients, 25 percent of the Zoloft-treated patients, and 24 percent of the St. John’s wort-treated patients.”

“A leading researcher of the placebo effect, Irving Kirsch, examined forty-seven drug company studies on various antidepressants. These studies included published and unpublished trials, but all had been submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so Kirsch used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to all data. He reported that “all antidepressants, including the well-known SSRIs . . . had no clinically significant benefit over a placebo.””

“This study, “The Naturalistic Course of Major Depression in the Absence of Somatic Therapy,” examined depressed patients who had recovered from an initial episode of depression, then relapsed but did not take any medication following their relapse. The recovery rate of these non-medicated depressed patients was tracked, and after one year, 85% of them recovered. The study authors concluded: “If as many as 85% of depressed individuals who go without somatic treatments spontaneously recover within 1 year, it would be extremely difficult for any intervention to demonstrate a superior result to this.””

“[…] while researchers had discarded the serotonin chemical imbalance theory of depression by the 1990s, the first unequivocal declaration by an establishment psychiatry publication of the jettisoning of this theory was in the Psychiatric Times in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.””

“Historically, establishment psychiatry and Big Pharma have routinely made declarations about mental illness causes and treatments that are, soon after being declared, disproven by research; this followed by psychiatry taking 10 to 20 years to acknowledge such false claims; which is then followed by the mainstream media taking another 10 to 20 years to report that psychiatry has moved on to other theories and treatments. Always psychiatry repeats some version of its slogan: “We are a young science that is making great progress.””

“Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus . Camus argues that the realization of the absurd does not justify suicide, and instead compels rebellion that can be vitalizing. Camus concludes, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.””

Climate Change

The social costs of greenhouse gas emissions in health care are astounding — and we’ve been ignoring them completely by Alex Gangitano (The Hill)

“A 2020 calculation by academic researchers estimated health care’s GHG emissions equaled 553 million metric tons of CO2e in 2018. (CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent, is the term used to express how much a particular GHG would contribute to global warming if it were carbon.) Per the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this amount equaled 12 percent of total U.S. emissions in 2018. For perspective, U.S. health care emissions are nearly five times that of the U.S. military — the world’s single largest institutional fossil fuel consumer.”

“The largest industry in the world’s largest economy, U.S. health care accounts for roughly half — or $4.7 trillion — of total annual global health care spending. Long known for wasteful spending , U.S. health care is remarkably energy inefficient. For example, out of 6,129 hospitals, the industry’s largest GHG emitting sector, only 37, or 0.6 percent, were EPA Energy Star certified for energy efficiency in 2023. This number is even more trivial when you realize Energy Star measures only Scope 1 and 2 energy use intensity, which account for as little as 25 percent of hospitals’ total GHG footprint.”

“[…] the EPA does not calculate the social cost of anesthetic gasses beyond nitrous oxide — this is especially problematic because commonly used desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane have much higher GWP scores. Desflurane, for example, has a GWP of 2,540 compared to nitrous oxide’s 289. Worldwide, emissions of these gases have been estimated at 3 million metric tons of CO2e , of which roughly 80 percent stems from desflurane.”

“The highly anticipated Securities and Exchange Commission final rule requiring for-profits to publicly disclose climate-related financial risks will substantially disrupt the health care industry. (Health care nonprofits cannot reasonably expect to avoid similar scrutiny and pressure.) This is largely because health care has significantly lagged all other major industries in publicly reporting environmental impact data. As a capital-intensive industry, health care is heavily dependent on financial investment. This means access to and the cost of capital for industries highly dependent on fossil fuels like health care will increasingly become more limited and expensive.”

Medicine & Disease

How to (and not to) boost your immune system by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

What works?

• Eat right: “produce, fiber, whole grains, lean proteins, and vegetable oils”
• Sleep
• Hydration

What hasn’t ever been shown to have a positive effect greater than placebo?

• Re-infection doesn’t make you stronger.

  “Everything in our life—our house, pets, our own body—is filled with microbes. Although these microbes aren’t harmful, they share enough structural similarities with dangerous microbes to keep our immune systems active and ready to defend against dangerous foreign invaders. Infection doesn’t aid in that.”

• Dietary supplements: “Ingesting one nutrient only benefits those with a substantial deficiency or in a specific subpopulation”
• Cold plunges
• Nasal breathing
• Saunas

Art & Literature

Literature in a Time of Conglomeration by Adam Fleming Petty (The Bulwark)

“The example of Infinite Jest demonstrates the limits of authorial agency in the conglomerate era. Wallace’s error was to put too much faith in the ability of his writing to transcend its conditions of production. He overestimated the power of his message and underestimated that of his medium.”

I just read the sentence “[t]hese poisons are even found in the umbilical cords of newborn children.”, which made me wonder what’s happened to editing or writing ability. Who else but newborn children have umbilical cords? I know you’re desperate to write “newborn children” in an article about cancer-causing chemicals, but that sentence should have read, “[t]hese poisons are even found in umbilical cords.” If you want to be super-precise to avoid people thinking that you’re writing about the umbilical cords of other mammals, you could write, “[t]hese poisons are even found in human umbilical cords.”.

Welcome to the empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“The empire loves you with a heart made of dollars and oil

“The empire watches over you through your smartphone and your computer

“The empire is your only friend

“The empire is the only one who will ever love you

“You can’t leave

“You can’t get rid of the empire

“If you get rid of the empire, this world could be taken over by tyrants.”

Master Tones Burmese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao All Use the Same Tone System|ဗမာ 中 ไทย ລາວ Việt by
Stuart Jay Raj (YouTube)

I was fascinated by this video. I like how he showed that we use tone and pitch in English as well.

• What do you want?
• What do you want?
• What do you want?
• What do you want?

Sure, we call it “emphasis”, but it’s also said in a different tone.

His facility with all of these languages and his ability to see the similarities is impressive—but it’s also because I don’t know any of them. I can explain similarities in the same way in the languages with which I’m familiar, like similarities in certain areas between Italian, French, Spanish, German, English, or Russian. He’s impressive because each of the languages he’s looking at have tonal and phonetic similarities, but they’re written differently. Although some of the differences in the scripts are also like the difference between reading block and cursive script.

Philosophy & Sociology

Why I Left Harvard by Carole Hooven (The Free Press)

“This insane narrative of my work is being created that has no basis in reality and it is being perpetuated by university administration. And this is appalling.”

“As a sign of the political polarization that characterizes the U.S. today, my supporters have tended to come from the right—although I am a lifelong Democrat. I was happy to accept a position as a senior fellow at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, where lively debate reigns.”

“A few brave, compassionate faculty members reached out with support, and I’m indebted to them. I am especially thankful to psychology professor Steven Pinker, who has made it possible for me to have an (unpaid) associate position in his department. And my case was an impetus for the formation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard . Our focus is to promote “free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse at America’s oldest university.” I’m an active member.”

“The Harvard motto is Veritas —truth. But the truth is that the message that members of the Harvard community receive every day—in emails, trainings, posters, pamphlets, and meetings—concerns DEI. The message is that what matters most, certainly above the search for truth, is how people’s words affect groups deemed “marginalized.””

Against Learning From Dramatic Events by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“Even if you opportunistically use the time just after a lab leak pandemic or a sex scandal to push the biosecurity agenda or feminist agenda you had all along, don’t be the kind of person who doesn’t care about biosecurity or feminism except in the few-week period around a pandemic or sex scandal, but demands an immediate and overwhelming response as soon as some extremely predictable dramatic thing happens. Dramatic events are a good time to agitate for a coalition, but this is a necessary evil. In a perfect world, people would predict distributions beforehand, update a few percent on a dramatic event, but otherwise continue pursuing the policy they had agreed upon long before.”

Technology

Mourning Google by Tim Bray

“[…] around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.”

A few years later and Bufferbloat is still a problem. The article Unbloating the buffers describes a way of configuring your network to fix this:

“I traded about 10% of bandwidth (263Mbit down/41Mbit up per iperf3) for:”

• constant average bandwidth on both upload and download
• no impact of download on upload
• network load has no visible impact on latency
• effective traffic prioritisation

The solution isn’t so straightforward, though. You have to have control over your routing endpoint at home in order to set up AQM with a tool like CAKE.

LLMs & AI

Sympathy for the spammer by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“A “bezzle” is John Kenneth Galbraith’s term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” In every scam, there’s a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.”

“The “courses” were the precursors to the current era’s rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the “students” finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who’d given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:”

“The people who were drowning me in spam weren’t the scammers – they were the scammees”

“The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn’t even make them any money.”

Ruined for nothing.

“The people submitting these “stories” weren’t frustrated sf writers who’d discovered a “life hack” that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale. They were scammers who’d been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-powered self-licking ice-cream cone.”

“This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. “I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings.” It’s MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.”

“[…] the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn’t their honesty – it’s their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they’re all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.”

“The quest for passive income is really the quest for a “greater fool,” the economist’s term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism.”

“That’s the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we’re nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we’re certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.”

“The manic “entrepreneurs” who’ve been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI […]”

“An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they’ve missed – but that’s not how AI will turn a profit. There’s no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs.”

4,000 of my closest friends (Cat and Girl)

“On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem de Kooning.”

Cat and Girl 2024-01-09

“Maybe I think small-time was the right path after all – in that way that only middle-aged people can think that small-time was the right path, after all.

“But I can’t even get cartoons for free, now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most-used channels of communication.

“And now, even that nominal opt-in option is gone.

“They just take it.

“I’m small-time. I’ve never wanted to promote myself. I’ve never wanted to argue with people on the Internet. I’ve never wanted to sue anyone. I want to make my little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else.

“Without exploiting anyone.

“Without being exploited.

“If that’s possible.”

That’s how I feel about this site right here, the one I publish on…earthli.com. I recently read Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten), which writes:

“I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I already make a lot of money with this blog. […] make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog, but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% of subscribers every year indefinitely. So even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I will be holding subscription drives yearly instead of waiting until I’m actually needy. Please don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it − again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large.”

That got me thinking, of course. I publish on this web site a lot. I do it voluntarily. I used to be more sporadic, but I’ve been on quite a tear for the last year or two—and especially within the last couple of months. It’s natural to think whether I, too, could be making an “embarassingly large” amount of money blogging. Maybe I could, in theory. But do I want to? And why would I do that? Do I need the money? Not really, no. If I made an “embarassingly large” amount of money blogging, in addition to my salary at my day job, well, my life wouldn’t change one bit. So what would be the point?

How would I run a substack? I would just publish the same way I do now, with all articles for free and letting people subscribe and donate if they wanted to. What would be the drawback? It’s free money, no? Well, no. There’s my time. There’s the degree to which my posts might become very public or “go viral”. There are comments and moderation. I suppose I could turn off comments. I wonder how successful that would even be? Astral Codex Ten is a very high-profile site, often designated one of the best science blogs around. It used to be Slate Star Codex (yeah, the author likes to make anagrams of his name).

Torvalds Speaks: Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Programming by Mastery Learning (YouTube)

Programming

This way of using margin is often overlooked by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

This 1-minute video shows how to use auto-margins to center, right-align, or left-align individual items within a grid. It’s a nice technique.

A custom element base class by Mayank

“[Web components with n]o constructor or connectedCallback in sight. No need to even get references to the buttons that respond to clicks.”

Proxy is what’s in store by James Stuckey Weber (Oddbird)

“This isn’t a universal solution. If you have an existing library, use it. If you find yourself abstracting out things like watch or computed for your proxy state, you are starting down the road to developing your own framework, and it might be a good time to pause and see if your application has grown complex enough to bring in something more robust.”

How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x by Nathan Marz on August, 2023 (Red Planet Labs)

“At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions for expressing backends end-to-end. All the intricacies of an application backend can be expressed in code that’s much closer to how you describe the application at a high level. Rama’s abstractions allow you to sidestep the mountains of complexity that blow up the cost of existing applications so much. So not only is Rama inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, it’s also far less work to build a backend with Rama than any other technology.”

“A PState is an arbitrary combination of data structures, and every PState you create can have a different combination. With the “subindexing” feature of PStates, nested data structures can efficiently contain hundreds of millions of elements. For example, a “map of maps” is equivalent to a “document database”, and a “map of subindexed sorted maps” is equivalent to a “column-oriented database”. Any combination of data structures and any amount of nesting is valid – e.g. you can have a “map of lists of subindexed maps of lists of subindexed sets”. I cannot emphasize enough how much interacting with indexes as regular data structures instead of magical “data models” liberates backend programming.”

“The last concept in Rama is “query”. Queries in Rama take advantage of the data structure orientation of PStates with a “path-based” API that allows you to concisely fetch and aggregate data from a single partition. In addition to this, Rama has a feature called “query topologies” which can efficiently do real-time distributed querying and aggregation over an arbitrary collection of PStates. These are the analogue of “predefined queries” in traditional databases, except programmed via the same Java API as used to program ETLs and far more capable.”

“You may be tempted to dismiss Rama’s programming model as just a combination of event sourcing and materialized views. But what Rama does is integrate and generalize these concepts to such an extent that you can build entire backends end-to-end without any of the impedance mismatches or complexity that characterize and overwhelm existing systems.”

“The last step is writing the ETL topologies that convert source data from your depots into your PStates. When deployed, the ETLs run continuously keeping your PStates up to date. Rama’s ETL API, though just Java, is like a “distributed programming language” with the computational capabilities of any Turing-complete language along with facilities to easily control on which partition computation happens at any given point.”

“The logic here is trivial, which is why the implementation is only 11 lines of code. You don’t need to worry about things like setting up a database, establishing database connections, handling serialization/deserialization on each database read/write, writing deploys just to handle this one task, or any of the other tasks that pile up when building backend systems. Because Rama is so integrated and so comprehensive, a trivial feature like this has a correspondingly trivial implementation.”

“This use case is a great example of how to think about building data-intensive systems not just with Rama, but in general. For any backend feature you want to implement, you have to balance what gets precomputed versus what gets computed on the fly at query-time. The more you can precompute, the less work you’ll have to do at query-time and the lower latencies your users will experience.”

“[…] a big part of designing Rama applications is determining what computation goes in the ETL portion versus what goes in the query portion. Because both the ETL and query portions can be arbitrary distributed computations, and since PStates can be any structure you want, you have total flexibility when it comes to choosing what gets precomputed versus what gets computed on the fly.”

“[…] we reconstruct the timeline on read if it’s missing or incomplete by querying the recent statuses of all follows. This provides the same fault-tolerance as replication, but in a different way.

“Implementing fault-tolerance this way is a tradeoff. For the benefit of massively reduced cost on timeline write, sometimes reads will be much more expensive due to the cost of reconstructing lost timelines. This tradeoff is overwhelmingly worth it because timeline writes are way, way more frequent than timeline reads and lost partitions are rare.”

“[…] everyone’s follow suggestions are recomputed on a regular basis. The ETL for follow suggestions recomputes the suggestions for 1,280 accounts every 30 seconds. Since there are 100M accounts, this means each account has its suggestions updated every 27 days.”

Interesting how long that is, even with a highly efficient implementation. That means that someone you just started following might stay in your “suggested people” list for weeks afterwards. You might consider skipping recalculation for accounts that haven’t changed their followed accounts, but you’d still need to recalculate them at some point to account for popularity changes among existing and the introduction of new accounts, which presumably affect your follower-suggestion algorithm.

“Every type of status, including boosts, replies, and statuses with polls is represented by this definition. Being able to represent your data using normal programming practices, as opposed to restrictive database environments where you can’t have nested definitions like this, goes a long way in avoiding impedance mismatches and keeping code clean and comprehensible.”

“Before the PState query, there’s a bloom filter check to minimize the amount of PState queries done here. This is another optimization that we didn’t mention in the earlier discussion of fanout, and we’ll discuss it more in a future post. In short, a bloom filter is materialized and cached in-memory on this module for each account with all follows for the account. If the bloom filter returns false, the follow relationship definitely does not exist and no PState query is necessary. If it returns true, the PState query is done to weed out false positives. The bloom filter reduces PState queries for replies by 99%.”

“[…] “fine-grained reactivity”, a new capability provided by Rama that’s never existed before. It allows for true incremental reactivity from the backend up through the frontend. Among other things it will enable UI frameworks to be fully incremental instead of doing expensive diffs to find out what changed. We use reactivity in our Mastodon implementation to power much of Mastodon’s streaming API.”

Introducing the MSTest Runner – CLI, Visual Studio, & More by Amaury Levé, Marco Rossignoli, Jakub Jareš (.NET Blog)

“MSTest runner uses one less process, and one less process-hop to run tests (when compared to dotnet test), to save resources on your build server.

“It also avoids the need for inter-process serialized communication and relies on modern .NET APIs to increase parallelism and reduce footprint.

“In the internal Microsoft projects that switched to use the new MSTest runner, we saw massive savings in both CPU and memory. Some projects seen were able to complete their tests 3 times as fast, while using 4 times less memory when running with dotnet test.

“Even though those numbers might be impressive, there are much bigger gains to get when you enable parallel test runs in your test project. To help with this, we added a new set of analyzers for MSTest code analysis that promote good practice and correct setup of your tests.”

“The runner is designed to be async and parallelizable all the way, preventing some of the hangs or deadlocks that can be noticed when using VSTest.

“The runner does not detect the target framework or the platform, or any other .NET configuration. It fully relies on the .NET platform to do that. This avoids duplication of logic, and avoids many edge cases that would break your tests when the rules suddenly change.”

SerilogTracing by Nicholas Blumhardt

“A trace is made up of one or more spans, which are generally represented using activities in .NET.

“You wrap an activity around some meaninful piece of work using Serilog.ILogger.StartActivity() and a using statement:”

using var activity = _log.StartActivity("Fulfill order {OrderId}", order.Id);
// … some application logic …

“When the activity is disposed or Complete() is called, a span will be written through the logger.”

Oh. Neat. I’ve always wanted standard support for this. My own logging systems always included start/end groups in logs, so you could see messages in hierarchies. This was always especially useful for startup logging and could be represented nicely in graphical displays of the log with a tree control. I remember having this in my logging in the Test Engine (written in C++ in the late 80s), as well as having built it into Atlas when I started working on that existing framework in 2002, and finally including it in Quino, starting in 2007, written in C#.

Five Essential Pointers for Improving Your Product and Process Quality by Niko Heikkilä

“Refrain from placing too much trust in asynchronous code review. […] Reviewing code after it has been written is often too late to enable building quality. […] The optimal size of a pull request is one line of code reviewed immediately as it’s being written.”

“Work in the smallest feasible batches.”

Feasible is the operative word here. Be extremely careful not to be seduced into wasting time merging and integrating too often. I don’t understand how no-one thinks it’s a bad idea to spend too much time integrating all the time. It costs time. Different types of software and different processes are variously sensitive to this. Some software is much harder to test automatically. That is, it takes a lot more effort to set up for automated testing…and a lot more skill.

“Consider how to have an exact or as-exact-as-possible replica of production data in the staging environment so you can verify new changes confidently. It’s embarrassing to find a defect in production that could have been fixed earlier in the process had there been more realistic data.”

“Only fix a bug after first reproducing it with a test. […] It’s very tempting in a high-pressure hotfix situation to analyse the root cause of a bug, fire up a debugger, fix the leak, and ship it. However, the most crucial step of the process is defining proper reproduction steps as an automated test.”

Why not do both? Fix the bug in production, then write the test afterward. Hey, sometimes you have to take a risk, especially when everything’s already on fire. If you’re damned sure what the fix is, then you don’t have to wait for the test and automation to roll out the fix. I have never had a customer who was happy to have a fix a day later just because i was sticking to the process. “Oh, I knew I just needed to add a minus sign, but it took quite a while to figure out how to write an automated test to verify it. You’re welcome.”

Fun

This is a very nice meme template. It is such an apt depiction of how so many endeavors go. I’ve seen overlays like,

• “When your client asks if you can do it cheaper.”
• “When there are five minutes left on the test.”
• “When your team successfully hits the deadline.”
• “The tutorial. How you do it.”
• “When you’re really a back-end developer, but market yourself as full-stack.”

Starting off strongly, finishing weakly horse meme