Links and Notes for January 26th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Pro-Palestinian rally in Austin, Texas in 2023: This little pig[gie] loves genocide

It May be Genocide, But it Won’t Be Stopped by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the United Nations. The entire population of Gaza by early February is projected to lack sufficient food, with half a million people suffering from starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, drawing on data from U.N. agencies and NGOs. The famine is engineered by Israel.”

“Israel has dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza — eight times more bombs than the U.S. dropped on Iraq during six years of war. It has used hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs to obliterate densely populated areas, including refugee camps. These “bunker buster” bombs have a kill radius of a thousand feet. The Israeli aerial assault is unlike anything seen since Vietnam. Gaza, only 20 miles long and five miles wide, is rapidly becoming, by design, uninhabitable.”

“Yemen, which was under siege for eight years by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Britain and the U.S., experienced over 400,000 deaths from starvation, lack of health care, infectious diseases and the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals, infrastructure, residential areas, markets, funerals and weddings. Yemenis know too well — since at least 2017 multiple U.N. agencies have described Yemen as experiencing “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world” — what the Palestinians are enduring.”

“The court acknowledged that “an unprecedented 93% of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with insufficient food and high levels of malnutrition. At least 1 in 4 households are facing ‘catastrophic conditions’: experiencing an extreme lack of food and starvation and having resorted to selling off their possessions and other extreme measures to afford a simple meal. Starvation, destitution and death are evident.””

“The ruling, quoting Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), continued:”

“Overcrowded and unsanitary UNRWA shelters have now become ‘home’ to more than 1.4 million people,” the ruling read. “They lack everything, from food to hygiene to privacy. People live in inhumane conditions, where diseases are spreading, including among children. They live through the unlivable, with the clock ticking fast towards famine. The plight of children in Gaza is especially heartbreaking. An entire generation of children is traumatized and will take years to heal. Thousands have been killed, maimed, and orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are deprived of education. Their future is in jeopardy, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”

This is in a technologically advanced and wealthy nation. Like the Warsaw ghetto.

The Entry of a New German Left Party Shakes up the Country by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“Wagenknecht told me. “If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium, while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe that you would stand up for the millions of employees whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of whole industries brought about by the rise in energy prices.””

“Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless his government is able to solve the pressing problems engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse this image.”

Holy shit. That’s half even of Biden, who’s at a near-historic low.

“Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration, but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says, must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD. “Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me, “we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone to that party out of frustration and in protest at the lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.””

“[…] her party will work with the communities to understand why they are frustrated and how their frustration against immigrants is often a wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said, “that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus to pro-working-class politics.”

Protest Sorrow Anger Split by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)

“[…] while gentrified housing blossoms alongside grand high-rise office buildings, nearly a million affordable new homes are desperately needed but only a pitiful fraction are being built. High taxes, interest problems, costly material, strict regulations and bureaucracy are blamed. Actually, affordable housing offers too little profit and thus lacks foxy, well-heeled lobbyists.”

Bingo.

“Somehow no-one dares mention the giant GDR housing programs, with no profit worries, and tenants paid less than 10% of their income and evictions were forbidden. No-one slept in the streets. And food pantries? Unknown.”

“Many saw Sahra Wagenknecht’s decision to break with the LINKE and form a new party as a fulfilment of such hopes. A wonderful orator and unbeatable debater, she was remarkably popular even in wide circles of conservative West Germany; the media often invited her (with 2-3-4 opponents) because she attracted viewers. And she held her own! Most important, she wanted no compromises with NATO, and while condemning Putin’s march into Ukraine (as required) she explained it as basically a defense against continuous, mounting USA-NATO advances. And she attacked the total economic break with Russia, which was causing Germany’s sharp downhill slide and largely represented a kowtow to US economic pressures, always aimed at preventing any German-Russian coexistence, seen in Washington (or Wall Street) as contrary to the goal of world hegemony. She also stressed the fight for German workers’ gains (while dismissing gender-debates as a distraction by professional or academic sectors of the LINKE). At last, said many; a party they could join with heart and soul!”

“The new party, Sahra stated, should have four basic principles: peace, social justice, economic reason and freedom. All her adherents supported a “foreign policy that once again relies on diplomacy instead of arms deliveries,” with a call for peace negotiations to end the Ukraine war and pursue peace and renewed trade with Russia.”

“As for me, I am still uncertain as to which strategy was wiser, and must recall Mark Twain’s response to a religious question: ”I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.””

“Does Russia really threaten Germany? Has it taken one step in that direction since it moved all its troops out of East Germany in 1994, expecting the other side to follow suit, as promised. That assumption proved very false as NATO, with its weaponry, moved closer and closer to Russia – aiming to surround it in Georgia and Ukraine, but always using those key words “defense” – “Russian expansion” – “Putin imperialism.” I have never heard a clear answer to the question: If China and Russia sent about 90,000 troops to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean for “exercises” with “more than 50 ships from aircraft carriers to destroyers, more than 80 fighter jets, helicopters and drones and at least 1,100 combat vehicles including 133 tanks and 533 infantry fighting vehicles” would American counter-measures be described as “imperialist aggression”?”

“I cannot refrain from quoting Joe Biden here. After the Uvalde tragedy in May 2022, when 19 children were killed, he said in moving tones: “There are parents who will never see their child again…To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away… It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind…Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up to the lobbies?””

This is the shit people point to when they talk about what a swell guy Joe Biden is. Nothing happened. He didn’t even try. It’s easy for a liar to give a speech. He’s a con man, just like they all are. He’s shown over five decades that he’s got his finger on the pulse of the U.S.—he’s very adept at conning Americans. He tells them what they want to hear, and then does whatever he wants. He’ll tell them he cares about children deeply, then debate whether the numbers are accurate when quibbling over whether it’s 12,000, 15,000, or 20,000 dead children is already a horrific argument. He implies that there is a just and fair and honorable number of children to kill, if they’re not American children, if they’re not really human children, if he doesn’t know who they are, if there is a political advantage to pretending that they don’t exist. There’s your lesser evil for you, you fools.

More Fog, More War by Séamus Malekafzali (The Baffler)

“In the American context, Palestine continues to go virtually unmentioned. Instead, the reports—culled from State Department briefings and White House statements—seem to delight in the language of piracy, threats to international commerce, threats to the free flow of trade, threats to freedom of navigation, and so on and so on. (As for Gaza’s utter lack of freedom of navigation under a seventeen-year naval blockade—well, that’s irrelevant.) The statement issued by President Biden after the wave of strikes on January 12 went so far as to claim that forcing Israel-linked cargo ships to go around the Cape of Good Hope would add “weeks of delays in product shipping times,” perhaps the first time maintaining delivery schedules have been used to justify deadly airstrikes against another country.”

“The president of the Houthi government’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee Muhammad Ali al-Houthi, when he was asked by a BBC Arabic reporter about why Gaza had any relevance, despite the distance between them, responded in turn, “So, Biden is Netanyahu’s neighbor? They live in one apartment? The French president also lives on the same floor, and the British prime minister lives with them in the same building?””

“The State Department talks of dealing with a “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza without mentioning who has caused it. In American papers of record, Palestinians almost always seem to die from mysterious bombs that theoretically could have come from anywhere. CNN will report on the spread of disease and the treating of innocent children with deep wounds, but the initiators of their suffering are downplayed. NPR will play audio diaries of doctors working in emergency rooms without adequate staffing, equipment, or medicine, but fail to mention how Israel’s systematic targeting of hospitals brought about these horrors, in direct violation of international law no less.”

“To the American, war, when abetted by Americans, must always be draped in some sort of impenetrable fog. Bullets fly from unknown places, infections and starvation spread just because, and suffering is abstract and inevitable—up until an ally might be blamed. The only motives to be given prime time coverage are America’s: always moral, always undertaken to protect the international rules-based order.”

“In the ideal world, Palestine would not exist, as is the stated goal of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and all the Palestinians would leave for different countries, as is also the goal of Prime Minister Netanyahu. They are a festering sore: always demanding rights, always putting themselves at the forefront of the news with their suffering, with their death. The thought of actually having to pay attention to Gaza, especially after this war, makes Israel furious. Why can’t these people just go away, leave their homes forever, and let this colonial project proceed.”

“On January 14, during a days-long telecommunications blackout, video emerged of thousands of Palestinians, stretching out onto the horizon, crowding along the coast, surrounded by the ruins of Gaza City. They are trying to reach what is rumored to be an aid truck, one of the few that has been allowed to enter the Strip. There will not be enough for all of them. Another video emerges, showing those same Palestinians running across rubble, now in the opposite direction. The Israeli military has begun firing on the crowd searching for food. It was the one hundredth day of Israel’s war against Gaza.”

Nursing home and senior living residents exposed to freezing temperatures during the Arctic blast by Liz Cabrera (WSWS)

“Once again, the extremely cold weather has exposed the fragile conditions of the electricity and heating infrastructure across the U.S. particularly in nursing homes, senior living facilities and senior apartments. The elderly residents and patients in these facilities and apartments are one of the most vulnerable sections of society. The ruling class sees them not as people, but as a drain on society, no longer churning out profits for the corporate oligarchy.”

Cultural Strip-Mining for an Exhausted Age by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“In the waning years of the twentieth century, there was a felt need to take stock of post-war history, especially in view of the way mass media had imposed it on us, in litanic form, in a never-ending series of events we had been taught it was our civic duty to follow, and made to believe that in doing so we would be able to discern an order and chart a path into the future. By 2023, the purpose of the litany had changed, for reasons vastly larger than anything under Fall Out Boy’s creative control. It was no longer a matter of orienting the historical subject, but only of unctuously congratulating the content-consumer for his passing familiarity with the mostly contextless flotsam drifting in our information-oceans.”

“To return to an example I have used before, take Todd Phillip’s execrably stupid Joker (2019), which for a while had its almost totally culturally illiterate admirers proudly signaling, mostly on social media, their ability to recognize the film’s many references to its ancestral inspirations. It provided them an opportunity to display their bona-fides as Scorsese-heads simply by being able to respond as anticipated to the unsubtle visual Easter eggs that had been laid for them in obvious allusion to Taxi Driver (1976). “Duh, this looks like that”, they could all say now, evidently unaware that in doing so they were not so much establishing themselves as cinephiles or as media-archeologists, as they were offering up free labor in service of the movie’s promotional campaign , precisely as intended by its makers.”

In defining the quality of the movie by the shallowness of its proponents, Justin really stoops quite low. I think he’s still never actually seen the film. I think his opprobrium is based completely on his negative experiences with fans of the film. It’s pretty stupid to hate something just because people you think are stupid like it.

The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.”

“[Biden] is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.”

This is why I don’t know how Dean Baker can support him. Because of his great economy? Bullshit.

“The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s.”

He’s missing a comma and wrong verb tense, so I was waiting for the second half of the sentence. It should be “The year before COMMA Biden HAD GIVEN …”

This Is Not Another ‘Phoney War’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“America, mindlessly loyal to the frothing dog known as Israel, has wandered into another war the way our president wanders away from podiums and off television news programs while the cameras are still rolling. This is a 21st century war, replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration. But we may as well declare it ourselves so we understand our moment properly. America is once more at war.”

I think that this formulation gives the U.S. too much credit. It’s not just Israel that is a frothing dog. It takes after its master, which is just as rabid. The U.S. doesn’t just “wander” into wars—it actively seeks them out. It doesn’t seek conflict, it seeks resistance-free domination.

Not only that, but a war that is “replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration” is not in any way uniquely a 21st-century one. That describes pretty much every U.S. war of the 20th century as well.

“U.S. attacks on Houthi targets are now something close to routine. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that Navy SEAL commandos had raided an Iranian vessel bound for Yemen and seized missile components from its cargo.”

That’s piracy. Even worse than that carried out by Somalis or Houthis since the U.S. has overwhelming firepower and might to back up their plunder.

“I do not think there is any longer any stepping back from the reality that the U.S. is now in a regional war involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.”

“The Netanyahu regime professes almost daily its determination to exterminate as many Palestinians as it can and scatter the survivors to the winds.”

“As reported and ably analyzed Monday in The Cradle, published in Beirut by the estimable Sharmine Narwani, “The West Bank is a ticking time bomb.” Indeed. What will Biden and his people do if it detonates? There are Israel’s other obsessions to consider. It is spoiling for a provocation to justify an attack on Lebanon. It has hankered after an excuse to attack the Islamic Republic for decades. You start to think Israel took October 7 as the beginning of a once-for-all devastation of its periphery. Is Tel Aviv now hoping to recruit Zionist Biden into a campaign against Iran, or at least obtain the White House’s acquiescence as Israel goes it alone, tactical nukes and all?”

Imperial Costs: Two Stories Summarize the Cost of Empire to Democracy by Matthew Hoh (Scheer Post)

“The other story relates to the authorization of production of the B21 Raider, which is set to replace the B1 and B2 bombers but not the 70-year-old B52s. That the youngest B52 was produced in 1962 and won’t be replaced, but the bombers built in modern times must be replaced, tells you a great deal about the strategy of the American weapons industry. This fleecing of the American taxpayers by the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is nothing new. Both political parties have hollowed out the American economy to the benefit of weapons makers. If any citizen has the gall to ask their members of Congress why our living standards are so far below those of the world’s other wealthy nations, the answers come back as some variation of “we can’t afford those things.””

“The roster of weapons that don’t work and have cost us trillions is seemingly infinite and, in a sanely functioning and non-corrupt democracy, Pentagon budgets would be decreasing, generals would be fired and defense industry share prices would be labeled as SELL.”

Genocide When You See It by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“This is the genocidal version of Catch-22: Genocide is taking place before our eyes, but let’s wait another month to see if it keeps happening. As a remedy, the Court asked Israel to refrain from doing what Israel says it isn’t doing, ie, violating the Genocide Convention. But the only concrete demand is for Israel to issue a report in a month on what measures it’s taken to make sure they’re no longer going to do what they say they aren’t doing.”

“China – one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – calls for full membership for Palestine at the UN. The question is: will the US, also one of the five, veto it?”

“According to a story in 972, Israeli intelligence monitored officials in Gaza’s Health Ministry to check if their data on the number of civilians killed in Gaza is ‘reliable’, concluded they were and now use them internally in intelligence briefings. ‘I don’t know how many people I killed as collateral damage. We only check that information for senior Hamas targets,’ an Israeli source told 972. ‘In other cases, I didn’t care. I immediately moved on to the next target. The focus was on creating as many targets as quickly as possible. That’s why I trust the Health Ministry in Gaza more than the IDF for these statistics. The army just doesn’t have the information.’”

“After WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus broke into tears speaking about the conditions in Gaza, (“I’m struggling to speak because… Because the situation is beyond words”), Israel’s permanent representative at the UN, Meirav Eilon Shahar, accused him of acting in “collusion” with Hamas.”

Journalism & Media

The Anti-Democratic Movement Targeted Ralph Nader First. We Should Have Paid More Attention by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“In 2004, a third party needed to collect 634,727 valid signatures in about six and a half months to get on the ballot. If you’ve ever wondered why so few third-party candidates run, it’s because this is an extraordinarily difficult logistical task, and expensive, requiring services of companies that even then charged between $1.00 and $1.50 per signature. (Ross Perot reportedly spent $18 million to get on the ballot in 1992.) The process gets more cumbersome when you’re forced to account for “spoilage,” i.e. how many signatures you’ll lose in the face of challenges from a determined opponent, in Nader’s case from Democrats and affiliated groups.”

“Amato’s Grand Illusion described the evolving hypocrisy, cynicism, and ruthlessness of the Democratic Party a dozen years before Trump. It’s a story to which we should have paid more attention, because the Sun Tzu tactics unveiled against Ralph Nader are now clearly the strategic model for the whole party. Had the Republicans not suffered a major intramural collapse in 2016, Grand Illusion today might read like a cautionary tale about the anti-democratic tendencies baked into the two-party system. The Republicans, after all, have their own history of ballot-pruning tactics, for example working behind the scenes to suppress the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2012.”

“[…] a permanent Washington-against-the-world war council, fueled by an aristocratic contempt whose intensity is almost beyond comprehension. These people reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline despite decades of promises to the contrary. Still, they feel sincere rage at the idea that they should have to earn votes.”

“In the age of Nader, the rage was directed at anyone who suggested the Democrats should have to face competition from more than one direction. The updated idea in the Trump era is that they should not have to face competition at all.”

“Back in 2016, when I disliked Trump enough to write Insane Clown President, I was still naive enough to puzzled by the stream of headlines describing his win as a “failure of democracy.” It was anything but. The presidency had long been stage-managed to absurdity, with candidates needing the backing of one of the two parties, the press, and corporate donors to gain the White House. The whole idea of this oligarchical ADT system was to guarantee the president arrived in the Oval Office a political debtor, while keeping anyone with aspirations to independence out.”

“If those efforts fail, even more extreme action is surely coming, and “protecting democracy” is the pitch they’ll use to sell it. All of this will be justified based on the idea that the Trump threat is so grave that taking so much as one vote from Democrats is criminal irresponsibility, not really morally different from marching for Hitler.”

“Of course no one goes into politics to lose, but if you don’t believe in letting voters decide, and winning becomes about something other than making the best argument or boasting the best record, you got lost somewhere along the line. We cheat when we think we deserve to win, no matter what, and our leaders have spent decades now talking themselves into this frame of mind. The entitlement disease was there all along. We should have seen the chaos of this year coming.”

✨ Liberal ✨ Feminism ✨ (Reddit)

We live in a world…

“We live in a world where “women using tents as pads during genocide” was less of a feminist issue than “white lady pretending to be doll not considered great actress this year.””

US Senate hearing uses child sexual exploitation as pretext for state control of social media content by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“Nothing in the hearing was more revolting than the comments of Lindsey Graham, far-right Republican senator from South Carolina: “Social media companies as they are currently designed and operate are dangerous products. They are destroying lives, threatening democracy itself. These companies must be reined in or the worst is yet to come.”

“Graham turned to Mark Zuckerberg and said, “You and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product that’s killing people.”

“This statement is the most grotesque hypocrisy, coming from a US senator who said the US should place “no limit” on the murder of civilians by the Israeli government in Gaza. Moreover, the “products” used to kill tens of thousands in Gaza, bombs, missiles and other weapons, are being supplied by the US arms industry with the approval of the US government.”

A man who has never seen a war he didn’t root for nor a weapon he didn’t want to sell is accusing tech-company CEOs of being murderers. They’re all deeply shitty people, but Lindsey Graham is far and away the shittiest in that group. He’s a senator and has been for decades. He’s voted for every military action and budget-increase he could get his hands on. Talk about blood on his hands.

I wonder about this whole Section 230 thing—because Dean Baker wants to get rid of it, too. This puts him in bed with Graham and Durbin, which is uncomfortable company. What are their goals? Dean thinks we should get rid of it because it favors online news providers—which X, Facebook, and TikTok are, at least in part—over so-called traditional media. This is correct, of course, but how would you get these companies to police only their news content while leaving user content alone? Or would they also be responsible for user content? For user conversations? Would every site that hosts comments be liable for anything anyone said on those sites? Can you not see exactly where this would lead, Dean? It would lead directly to online terrorists leaving prosecutable comments on their most-hated web sites to see if they can keep them up there long enough, unmoderated, that they get fined. Either that, or this will just kill any form of online discourse. Everything would be gone. Only the self-hosted would be OK, I guess? Until the government decides that publishing a blog critical of Israel is also not OK and prosecutable under whatever replaces Section 230?

I mean, listen to the people that agree with you, Dean:

“Graham then got to a major purpose of the hearing, demonizing China. “TikTok is being used in a way to basically destroy the Jewish state,” he claimed. “I worry that in 2024, our democracy will be attacked again through these platforms by foreign actors.””

Are you sure you’re fighting for the same thing? I think they think they’re fighting for increased prosecutorial and governmental control over the Internet in the U.S. and perhaps just in general. If Section 230 falls, then web sites will have to relocate outside of America and there will probably be a Great American Firewall to match China’s. Everything will end up being hosted in Russia, which will be condemned for hosting all of the so-called right-wing content—whatever flees the overly restrictive censorious so-called liberal platforms is, by their definition, all right-wing content—on its servers, “seeding hate all over the world.”

“Other senators—such as Democrat Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota and fascist Republican Josh Hawley from Missouri—spoke with a similar degree of hysteria. […] Hawley’s anticommunist diatribe was outdone by another fascist Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas […]”

Three more amazing bedfellows. Look, Dean, I don’t mean to say that you can’t hold your opinion about Section 230. I’d just like to hear a bit more about how you think things will go down once it’s repealed. I’m not sure why you think the poor New York Times needs so much defending. It is a platform of mensonges. It sows the most disinformation of all. For example, it’s gotten a bunch of senators to believe that there’s some sort of CSAM crime wave. Apparently, police departments that are desperate to get into encrypted information told them so. It’s horseshit, but there you have it. So, would a Section 230-free Internet in the U.S. be allowed to publish that kind of crap or not? Of course it would. Because nobody’s talking about banning a single thing that the NY Times would ever want to write—because all of its information is pre-approved. It is protected more by privilege than by Section 230.

And while you’re all on a jihad against Section 230, the U.S. government doesn’t give a shit about any laws and just spies on Americans all day every day all the damned live-long day.

“These claims, which were supported by every member of the Judiciary Committee, were being made just as a recent reports have shown that the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies are purchasing and scanning through information from commercial data brokers related to the domestic internet activity of American citizens, without a warrant to do so. These violations of the fundamental democratic rights of the public by the American government were not a subject of the hearing.”

The NSA said “yup, we’re doing that. It’s legal. Go fuck yourselves.” All of these assholes will. not. shut. up. about China and Russia and Iran and North Korea when they are the absolute worst spies of all. The NSA probably shared every scrap of that data with the Mossad, as well, because we’re all so buddy-buddy. Why not? They’re the good guys, fighting the good fight.

Labor

Just an absolutely awesome strike/unionist-power picture

Economy & Finance

The long sleep of capitalism’s watchdogs by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“This is the period in which both the criminal and the victim feel like they’re better off. The crook has the victim’s money, and the victim doesn’t know it. The Bezzle is that interval when you’re still assuming that FTX isn’t lying to you about the crazy returns they’re generating for your crypto. It’s the period between you getting the shrinkwrapped box with a 90% discounted PS5 in it from a guy in an alley, and getting home and discovering that it’s full of bricks and styrofoam.”

“Big Accounting is a factory for producing bezzles at scale. The game is rigged, and they are the riggers. When banks fail and need a public bailout, chances are those banks were recently certified as healthy by one of the Big Four, whose audited bank financials failed 800 re-audits between 2009-17:”

“For the first two decades of the PCAOB’s existence, the SEC insisted that conflicts be resolved in ways that let the auditing firms commit fraud, because the alternative would be bad for the market. So: rather than cultivating an adversarial relationship to the Big Four, the PCAOB effectively merged with them. Two of its board seats are reserved for accountants, and those two seats have been occupied by Big Four veterans almost without exception.”

“This corrupt arrangement reached a crescendo in 2019, with the appointment of William Duhnke – formerly of Senator Richard Shelby’s [R-AL] staff – took over as Chief Accountant. Under Duhnke’s leadership, the already-toothless watchdog was first neutered, then euthanized. Duhnke fired all four heads of the PCAOB’s main division and then left their seats vacant for 18 months. He slashed the agency’s budget, “weakened inspection requirements and auditor independence policies, and disregarded obligations to hold Board meetings and publicize its agenda.””

“Williams is no fire-breathing leftist. She’s an alum of the SEC and a BigLaw firm, creating modest, obvious technical improvements to a key system that capitalism requires for its orderly functioning. Moreover, she is competent, able to craft regulations that are effective and enforceable. This has been a motif within the Biden administration:”

Sports Illustrated’s Strange Merger by Matt Levine (Bloomberg )

“There is a well-known strategy, in financial markets, of trading ahead of index rebalances. The idea is: You know that on Date X, Stock Y will join Index Z. You know that a lot of index funds are indexed to Index Z, and they will have no choice but to buy Stock Y on Date X. So you buy Stock Y before Date X, knowing that you will have someone to sell it to on Date X. Joining the index will bring in a whole new source of demand for the stock: not just people who have looked at the stock and decided they like it, but a new class of fundamentals-insensitive passive investor who will buy it just because it is in the index. So you buy it first, to sell to them. There are ways for this to go wrong. You could get the stocks or weightings wrong, for one thing, or the trade could just get too crowded: If index funds will need to buy $100 million of Stock Y on Date X, and 10 different hedge funds each say “ah I know that there’ll be $100 million of demand for Stock Y, so I’ll buy $50 million of it now,” then there’s $500 million of supply for $100 million of demand and the price will go down on Date X.”

“If you are a crypto enthusiast, though, you might guess “everybody will buy tons of Bitcoins once that becomes convenient, so I should buy tons of Bitcoins to sell to them.” A lot of people apparently had that thought process, and Bitcoin soared from about $27,000 in mid-October to about $47,000 on Jan. 8. But the actual answer seems to have been “meh, some people, but not in huge size,” and Bitcoin has gone back down. The Financial Times reports : Bitcoin has lost 16 per cent of its value over the past two weeks, as some investors use the much-hyped launch of bitcoin exchange traded funds earlier this month to take profits and exit their holdings of the volatile cryptocurrency. The price of bitcoin sank as much as 3 per cent on Tuesday, falling below $39,000 for the first time since early December.”

“When Bitcoin futures were introduced — products that trade on traditional regulated exchanges and that allow big investors to bet on or against Bitcoin without touching actual Bitcoins — there was some anticipation that they would lead to a lot of shorting by crypto skeptics, but those futures are not really a retail product. Now if you want to bet against Bitcoin you can do it in your brokerage account, by shorting Bitcoin ETFs, which is a lot easier for a crypto skeptic than actually shorting Bitcoin.”

Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“US aviation has been consumed by monopoly, hollowed out to the point of near collapse, thanks to neoliberal policies at every part of the aviation supply-chain. For one thing, there’s just not enough pilots, nor enough air-traffic controllers (recall that Reagan’s first major act in office was to destroy the air traffic controller’s union). But even more importantly, there are no more planes. Boeing’s waitlist for airplane delivery stretches to 2029 . And Boeing is about to deliver a lot fewer planes, thanks to its disastrous corner-cutting, which grounded a vast global fleet of 737 Max aircraft”

“As Matt Stoller says, America has an airline that the public bails out, protects, and subsidizes but has no say over. Boeing has all the costs of public ownership and none of the advantages. It’s the epitome of privatized gains and socialized losses.”

“The religious belief in deregulation – especially deregulation of antitrust enforcement – leads to a deregulated market. It leads to a market that is regulated by monopolists who secretly deliberate, behind closed board-room doors, and are accountable only to their shareholders. These private regulators are unlike government regulators, who are at least nominally bound by obligations to transparency and public accountability.”

“This is why – as Dayen notes – smaller US airlines are so horny for intermarriage. They can’t grow by adding routes, because there are no pilots. Even if they could get pilots, there’d be no slots because there are no air traffic controllers. But even if they could get pilots and slots, there are no planes, because Boeing sucks and Airbus can’t make planes fast enough to supply the airlines that don’t trust Boeing. And even if they could get aircraft, there are no engines because the Big Four aviation cartel cornered the market on working jet engines.”

Wealth of Musk Compared to the Income of Shohei Ohtani and a Tesla Assembly Line Worker by Rick Baum (CounterPunch)

“At the end of 2019, Bloomberg placed his wealth at $28 billion. In a mere four years, despite declining $133 billion in 2022, it had increased more than 800%.”

He’s worth about $229B now.

“If Ohtani could make his $70 million/year tax free and save all of it, he would have to play baseball for over 3,200 years to reach the level of Musk’s current wealth.”

“On an average day in 2023, Musk’s wealth increased over $252 million and in an average three days, it grew over $50 million more than the value of Ohtani’s 10-year contract of $700 million.”

“Working an average work week of 42 hours (36 hours one week and 48 the next), yearly pay for that worker will range from $50,232 to $67,704/year (assuming no extra pay for overtime). If the additional value of benefits, etc. come to $12/hour, a Tesla Production Associate paid the highest hourly rate of $31 would be making a yearly pay package valued at $93,912.

“To make as much as Ohtani is paid in one year, that worker would have to work more than 745 years. For the worker to make as much as Musk’s wealth increased in 2023, $92 billion, the worker would have to work over 979,600 years.”

This all just goes to show that billionaires shouldn’t exist. Musk was interviewed at the end of last year. He was asked about advertisers that were threatening to leave if he didn’t change moderation policies. “Fuck ‘em” The interviewer was shocked! Why?!? Musk turned to the camera and told advertisers that were trying to blackmail him with money could go fuck themselves. The interviewer didn’t understand the world anymore. You can’t do that! He probably was watching his hero be a dick and couldn’t understand it. That was the consensus online as well: Musk has gone crazy or he’s on drugs or whatever.

But what the hell are you talking about? He has the most “fuck you” money of anyone in history. He’s a dick. No-one should have that much money, least of all someone like him, but he’s 100% right. You can’t blackmail him with money. He can bleed money out of Twitter until the end of time. He doesn’t have to care. That’s what “fuck you” money means. This is not a difficult concept, but people just can’t grasp what’s going on.

Science & Nature

Incredible Footage Of A Deep-Sea Squid Brooding Thousands Of Eggs by Eleanor Higgs (IFL Science)

“In 2005, a study was released showing how female black-eyed squid care for their eggs. The claws on their arms help them hold on to up to 3,000 eggs; as they swim, the females pump water through the egg clusters to keep them supplied with oxygen. […]

“[…] the team suspect that the mother will carry the eggs for 6-9 months, during which time it will not feed as the egg sac is blocking its mouth. Brad Seibel, the lead author of the 2005 study, thinks the mothers likely die soon after the eggs hatch […]”

Climate Change

Air pollution from Canada’s tar sands is much worse than we thought by Nicholas Kusnetz (Ars Technica)

“The study found that tar sands operations were releasing as much of these pollutants as all other human-made sources in Canada combined. For certain classes of heavy organic compounds, which are more likely to form particulates downwind, the concentrations were higher than what’s generally found in large metropolises like Los Angeles.”

“The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds and refinery-like “upgraders.” The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region.”

“The paper also raised questions about methods for disposing of the toxic “tailings” that are left over after extracting bitumen from the mines. This solid waste has been accumulating in water-filled lagoons, which by 2020 had swelled to cover an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan. Remediating these pits has proven to be extremely difficult, and laboratory tests conducted by Liggio and the researchers suggest that some novel efforts for separating solids from liquids could release even more pollution-forming compounds into the air.”

Medicine & Disease

Massive wave of COVID infections throughout Europe by Tamino Dreisam (WSWS)

“The necessary fight against the pandemic must therefore come from below and be linked to the fight against capitalism and the reorganisation of society on a socialist basis. The only way to stop the pandemic is “a globally-coordinated elimination strategy, in which the entire world’s population acts in solidarity and with a collective determination to enforce a broad-based public health program,” writes the WSWS in its New Year’s perspective.”

“The very idea that an illness should be eliminated or eradicated, a central concept in public health, has been abandoned.”

We used to be able to do things: we closed the ozone hole, we got rid of diseases, we got rid of lead in paint and gasoline. Now, we’re helpless before micro-plastics, we can’t control measles, and we get sick from everything all the time.

Philosophy & Sociology

Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash by Kyra Dempsey (Asterisk)

“How the authorities choose to handle such a mistake says a lot about our society’s conceptions of justice, culpability, agency, empathy, and even vengeance, because the moral dilemma of what to do about Robin Wascher exists as a struggle between diverging values and, in fact, diverging value systems , rooted in the relative prioritization of individual and systemic responsibility. Cutting straight to the case [sic], Wascher was not punished in any way. At first, after being escorted, inconsolable, from the tower premises, her colleagues took her to a hotel and stood guard outside her room to keep the media at bay. Months later, Wascher testified before the NTSB hearings, providing a faithful and earnest recounting of the events as she recalled them. She was even given the opportunity to return to the control tower, but she declined. No one was ever charged with a crime.”

“It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. In the mid-20th century, when technical investigations of aircraft accidents were first being standardized, an understanding emerged that many crashes were not the result of any particular person’s actions.”

“[…] the primary purpose of an aircraft accident investigation is to prevent future accidents — a decision that implicitly privileged prevention above the search for liability. Conducting a police-style investigation that faults a deceased pilot does nothing to affect the probability of future accidents. To follow the spirit of Annex 13, investigators must ask how others could be prevented from making the same mistakes in the future.”

“[…] as a result of these findings, genuine safety improvements have been made, including more reliable ground radar at more airports, automated ground collision alerting technologies, and a national ban on clearing planes to hold on the runway in low visibility. None of these improvements would have been made if the inquiry stopped at who instead of asking why.”

“Although it can be hard to accept that a mistake that led to loss of life might go unpunished, just culture doesn’t permit us to discriminate based on the magnitude of the consequences — only on the attitude of the person who committed the error. If they were acting in good faith when the mistake occurred, then a harsh reaction would undermine the trust between employees and management that facilitates the just culture. But even more importantly, it would undermine the blameless investigative process that makes modern aviation so safe. Investigative agencies like the NTSB rely on truthful statements from those involved in an accident in order to determine what happened and why, and the truth can’t be acquired when individuals fear punishment for speaking it.”

“Recognizing that mistakes are inevitable has made us all safer by directing our collective energy toward the cause, rather than the symptoms — because the cause of the Los Angeles disaster was not Robin Wascher forgetting about an airplane, but rather an unforgiving system that required her to act with inhuman consistency. Our own humanity compels us to withhold judgment because it makes flying safer, because justice demands it, and because empathy is rewarded in kind.”

The Silicon-Tongued Devil by Leif Weatherby (Jacobin)

“As author Chuck Klosterman has recently argued, the ’90s was the last time anyone really thought that “selling out” was bad or controversial. From an aesthetic standpoint, we’ve all fallen into what I call a “streamhole,” in which algorithms exploit mass popularity, promising us individualized results while actually homogenizing our content. Those hanging on to their faith in the avant-garde are like the humans who have escaped the Matrix, gathering in Zion to plan the revolution that only a god can offer. (It’s no accident that The Matrix depicts raves as a cherished freedom for the enlightened.)”

“Every purchase we make and every hour we work, Marx thinks, are shrouded by a trick that papers over the value added to commodities by labor. Consciousness — and language — are not innocent of the mode of production. As he and Engels put it in The German Ideology , human “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other humans . . . . Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as humans exist at all. What Marx is saying in his high-flying style here is that language is the medium of production — of our very material existence in the world. We don’t just randomly move things around in the physical world; we create things intentionally, for our use. And we do this in concert with others, not as lone individuals.”

“Most of the New Left came to terms with the fact that affluent (or at least semi-stable) boomer adulthood was pretty groovy. Plus, it made sense for self-preservation: it’s pretty shortsighted to set an end date for your own social and political superiority. Logan’s Run with flower power — but an assured death at thirty — was a pretty raw deal compared to stable work, security, and the square, bourgeois family life they discovered could actually be loving, restorative, rewarding, creative, and even adventurous. As for the “abolish the family” left, when something desirable is unobtainable, you might as well call for its abolition and insist you never wanted it in the first place.”

It’s easier when you have no principles or can’t imagine the impact your lifestyle has.

Adulting in Middle Age by Amber A’Lee Frost (Jacobin)

“Millennials went to college because everyone older and wiser told them that higher education was a pro forma bribe they had to fork over in order to reproduce their class position: pay to play. You grease the palms of the PMC, study hard (or don’t), get a degree, and you’ll have a mortgage, health care, job security, a spouse, and some kids — the whole shebang, just like your parents.”

“If you’re approaching middle age right now, adulting is harder than it has been for generations. You can’t do your taxes because they’re intentionally byzantine, so you doomscroll and rage post about Taylor Swift. You enjoy the most juvenile and lowest effort entertainment because you don’t have the brain or the stomach for anything with teeth, and you take your little naps because you’re exhausted, anxious, and depressed (which is also why you can’t get out of your pajamas, cook a whole meal, or clean your room).”

Living Inside a Psyop by Walter Johnson (n+1)

“[…] indeed, one of the university’s billionaire donors later explained to the New York Times, proudly, that he had called the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation to complain about the administration’s first statement and been reassured that his doubts were being addressed. This striking acknowledgment of a formerly unspoken fact—that when billionaires insisted, Harvard acquiesced—would come to seem fairly ordinary over the coming weeks.”

“It was, for the most part, a resolutely liberal defense of civil discourse. It predictably left unanswered the question of whether “civil discourse” within a university whose endowment is invested in companies tied to illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank can ever be considered truly neutral or even civil.”

“As Israel tightened the siege on Gaza and a million people were presented with the choice of leaving their homes or being bombed within them, the doxing trucks began to patrol the perimeter of the campus. They carried signs emblazoned with the photographs of individual students beneath the words “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” Billionaire hedge fund mogul William Ackman called for the creation of a blacklist to ensure that members of the campus organizations that had supported the statement would be unable to infiltrate their firms. The names of students belonging to the offending groups (and of some who did not) were circulated online, so that they might be isolated, shamed, and punished.”

Harvard University, ladies and gentlemen. So like Germany.

“On November 25, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Foreign and Diaspora Affairs ministries of the Israeli government were launching a campaign targeting “antisemitic students” at American universities. The campaign worked across several “axes.” One might be termed “lawfare,” or in the words of summary on Ynet: “Taking legal action outside the law [sic] against activities and organizations that pose a threat to Jewish and Israeli students on campuses, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Israel will hold discussions with elements from the U.S. Department of Justice to map out legal tools that can be used to deal with factors that pose a threat on campuses.””

The arrogance. The chutzpah.

“This interlocked campaign of financial, political, and reputational attacks on dissidents in American universities is seemingly designed to secure the intergenerational transfer of unquestioned support for Israel by producing object lessons illustrating the costs of speaking out.”

Well, they’d neglected their propaganda duties long enough. They had to make up for lost time.

“As Herzog explained, “Harvard is considered one of the most important campuses in the world, and we are truly concerned from what we see, that instead of growing and educating the next leaders of the United States or the world, it has become the hotbed of terrorist supporters.””

Gobsmacking.

“It was the culmination of the ongoing propaganda campaign in the United States, and possibly a subject of concerted state action in Israel, ruthlessly effective from beginning to end. Faculty and students were forced to choose between defending their universities or trying to keep the focus on Gaza. On December 3, I joined seven hundred other members of the Harvard faculty in signing a two-sentence letter to the Harvard Corporation urging them to resist obvious and unconstitutional federal regulation of expression on university campuses.”

“I struggled for a while to understand the uncanny resonance between the image of little Palestinian kids in Gaza being killed by 2,000-pound bombs and little Jewish kids in Cambridge being terrified by a message in the sky advancing a propaganda campaign against Harvard. Whether intended or not, the collateral harm done to those little Jewish kids in Cambridge was an acceptable cost of making certain that people in the United States did not think about those little Palestinian kids dying by the thousands in Gaza. There was the two-step maneuver again: look here, not there.”

“Rabbi Zarchi hoped that Rufo’s campaign would help abate the torrent of antisemitism on campus, which he characterized as becoming “more and more brazen with each passing day,” even during a period in which classes were not in session and the students were not on campus.”

These people are so influential and so blatantly demented.

“Ackman wrote a long self-serving piece stating that he had “concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem” at Harvard. Rather it was “DEI” and “anti-white racism.” From support for terrorism on campus to antisemitism to plagiarism and then, finally, to the inherent anti-Americanism of diversity, equity, and inclusion: Ackman declared that he had finally dug down through the levels of corruption and conspiracy to a place where he’d found solid rock.”

“[…] we are being offered a bargain. Its terms are essentially to return to status quo ante: to set aside the dizzying and divisive question of Palestine and return to the familiar ground of the ongoing culture war. To take up our old positions, promising never to say the word “Palestine” again.”

Technology

Brinklump Linkdump by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard. Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to “secure” projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into “Digital Cinema Prints” for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.”

LLMs & AI

Chatbots and Human Conversation by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)

“Studies indicate that autocomplete on websites and in word processors can dramatically reorganize our writing. Generally, these recommendations result in blander, more predictable prose. And where autocomplete systems give biased prompts, they result in biased writing. In one benign experiment, positive autocomplete suggestions led to more positive restaurant reviews, and negative autocomplete suggestions led to the reverse.”

“Such a shift is unlikely to transform human conversations into cartoonishly robotic recitations overnight, but it could subtly and meaningfully reshape colloquial conversation over the course of years, just as the character limits of text messages affected so much of colloquial writing, turning terms such as LOL, IMO, and TMI into everyday vernacular.”

Hollywood Welcomes Its Silicon Valley Overlords by Eileen Jones

“I have no trouble believing that in a few years AI-generated films will be able to fool us with a convincing simulated reality — but I’m appalled by the prospect. This is a fairly conventional reaction among cinephiles, who have been filled with dread […]”

Programming

How to win at CORS by Jake Archibald

“Vary can list many headers to use as conditions, so if you’re adding Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * depending on the presence of the Origin and Cookie headers, then use: Vary: Origin, Cookie If a resource never contains private data, then it’s totally safe to put Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * on it. Do it! Do it now! If a resource sometimes contains private data depending on cookies, it’s safe to add Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * as long as you also include a Vary: Cookie header.”

“The status code restriction creates a bit of a gotcha. If you have an API like /artists/Pip-Blom, you might want to return a 404 if ‘Pip Blom’ isn’t in the database. You want the 404 code (and the response body) to be visible, so the client knows they requested something that was ‘not found’, rather than some other kind of server error. But if the request requires a preflight, the preflight must return a 200-299 code, even if the eventual response is going to be 404.”

inside .git by Julie Evans (Wizard Zines)

Inside Git

Portable EPUBs by Will Crichton

“PDF commands are unstructured because a document’s organization is only clear to a person looking at the rendered document, and not clear from the commands themselves. Reflowing, accessibility, data extraction, and interaction all rely on programmatically understanding the structure of a document. Hence, these aspects are not easy to integrate with PDFs.”

“[…] we already have a structured document format which can be flexibly and interactively rendered: HTML (and CSS and Javascript, but here just collectively referred to as HTML). The HTML format provides almost exactly the inverse advantages and disadvantages of PDF.”

“There is a fundamental tension between consistency and flexibility in document rendering. A PDF is consistent because it is designed to render in one way: one layout, one choice of fonts, one choice of colors, one pagination, and so on. Consistency is desirable because an author can be confident that their document will look good for a reader (or at least, not look bad). Consistency has subtler benefits — because a PDF is chunked into a consistent set of pages, a passage can be cited by referring to the page containing the passage.

“On the other hand, flexibility is desirable because people want to read documents under different conditions. Device conditions include screen size (from phone to monitor) and screen capabilities (E-ink vs. LCD). Some readers may prefer larger fonts or higher contrasts for visibility, alternative color schemes for color blindness, or alternative font faces for dyslexia. Sufficiently flexible documents can even permit readers to select a level of detail appropriate for their background […]”

You could address this by having the “print” media render the same on all devices. I think you could have it render differently in the standard mode, but if someone selects the “print” medium, then it should look as the author intended. He gets at this a bit later when he writes “an EPUB could in theory provide multiple renditions, offering users the choice of whichever best suits their reading conditions and aesthetic preferences.”

“Reading systems need to guarantee that a document within the subset will always look reasonable under all reading conditions. If a document uses features outside this subset, then the document author is responsible for ensuring the readability of the document.”

“Encapsulated scripts principle: interactive components should be implemented as web components when possible, or otherwise be carefully designed to avoid conflicting with the base document or other components.

“Components fallback requirement: interactive components must provide a fallback mechanism for rendering a reasonable substitute if Javascript is disabled.”

Hyrum’s Law by Hyrum Wright

““The Law of Implicit Interfaces”: Given enough use, there is no such thing as a private implementation. That is, if an interface has enough consumers, they will collectively depend on every aspect of the implementation, intentionally or not. This effect serves to constrain changes to the implementation, which must now conform to both the explicitly documented interface, as well as the implicit interface captured by usage. We often refer to this phenomenon as “bug-for-bug compatibility.””

“For example, an interface may make no guarantees about performance, yet consumers often come to expect a certain level of performance from its implementation. Those expectations become part of the implicit interface to a system, and changes to the system must maintain these performance characteristics to continue functioning for its consumers.”

We keep making the same mistakes with spreadsheets, despite bad consequences by Simon Thorne (Ars Technica)

“No testing or validation was apparently applied to the crucial spreadsheet, a simple step that could have prevented this critical error.”

Because it doesn’t lend itself to testing or validation. The format isn’t very easy to test in an automated manner, which means it doesn’t get done.

“Industry studies show that 90 percent of spreadsheets containing more than 150 rows have at least one major mistake.

“This is understandable because spreadsheet errors are easy to make but difficult to spot. My own research has shown that inspecting the spreadsheet’s code is the most effective way of debugging them, but this approach still only catches between 60 and 80 percent of all errors.”

Spreadsheets are often written by non-programmers. The software is notoriously lax in enforcement and generous in interpretation. There is no clear way to test or verify the software contained in it. It generally doesn’t even occur to the people who maintain the spreadsheets that they would need to verify them. One can see that it’s right, no?

A Call for Consensus on HTML Semantics by Stephanie Eckles

“WHO HAS THESE ANSWERS? WE’RE ALL JUST DOING OUR BEST! AND NOW WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH AI PRETENDING TO BE OMNISCIENT AND DELIVERING CONFIDENTLY WRONG ANSWERS TO MILLIONS OF DEVS OF ALL SKILL LEVELS HOW WILL WE EVER GET IT RIGHT IS HUMANITY DOOMED TO BECOME AN ABLEIST HELLSCAPE WHAT EVEN IS THE WEB.

“All this to say… HTML markup is a skill that is honed in the fires of experience that may be learned but never mastered, but it is an honorable and worthy battle.

“Please help.

“(Also, you should hire front-of-the-front-end specialists who actually care about these nuances and accessibility specialists to help jump these hurdles and ux researchers to put in the work and find out about your real users and and and… don’t rely on AI, please. Pretty pretty please.)”

Yeah, AI has really only a giant pile of terrible, user-unfriendly and accessibility-unfriendly web sites from which to recommend. It doesn’t know any better and it can’t know any better.

From wiseMan (Reddit)

Linus Torvalds tells the truth

The original comment was relatively recent: Re: [PATCH] eventfs: Have inodes have unique inode numbers by Linus Torvalds on January 26, 2024. I’ve quoted the reply in full both because it provides enough context to understand Linus’s anger as well as some extra zingers.

“Steven,
stop making things more complicated than they need to be.

“And dammit, STOP COPYING VFS LAYER FUNCTIONS.

“It was a bad idea last time, it’s a horribly bad idea this time too.

“I’m not taking this kind of crap.

“The whole “get_next_ino()” should be “atomic64_add_return()”. End of story.

“You arent’ special. If the VFS functions don’t work for you, you don’t
use them, but dammit, you also don’t then steal them without
understanding what they do, and why they were necessary.

“The reason get_next_ino() is critical is because it’s used by things
like pipes and sockets etc that get created at high rates, the
inode numbers most definitely do not get cached.

“You copied that function without understanding why it does what it
does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE.

“AGAIN.

“Honestly, kill this thing with fire. It was a bad idea. I’m putting my
foot down, and you are *NOT* doing unique regular file inode numbers
uintil somebody points to a real problem.

“Because this whole “I make up problems, and then I write overly
complicated crap code to solve them” has to stop,.

“No more. This stops here.

“I don’t want to see a single eventfs patch that doesn’t have a real
bug report associated with it. And the next time I see you copying VFS
functions (or any other core functions) without udnerstanding what the
f*ck they do, and why they do it, I’m going to put you in my
spam-filter for a week.

“I’m done. I’m really *really* tired of having to look at eventfs garbage.

“Linus”

Getting Started With CUDA for Python Programmers by Jeremy Howard (YouTube)

Look, Jeremy Howard is exceedingly clever. He says a few things that make me wonder how seriously most people take engineering, though. He demonstrated how to grayscale an image (1 dimension, but three facets) and how to do a matrix transformation (2 dimensions, but one facet). He said things like “CUDA C” is basically the same as the Python version, so I’ll just ask ChatGPT for the answer. It got it mostly right, then proceeded to make fine adjustments because what came back would totally not have worked. It wouldn’t even have compiled. He hand-waves unsigned char* and float*. He doesn’t seem to notice that his approach offers a novice no way of verifying the CUDA code. His process also doesn’t have any way of testing it. He says “I just go step by step in Python and make sure it’s right.”

Grand.

No tests. No talk of how to test. No automation. No CI. No nothing. No way of even verifying that the damned thing did what he wanted! He just looked at the picture and said “it looks grayscale to me.” AND THAT’S IT! Can we do that with our own data? I don’t think so.

The Matrix manipulation, too, he just took for granted that it worked, even though he says he doesn’t really understand C or C++ code. I’m not saying he should understand the code, necessarily, but someone needs to come up with a way of—a process for—verifying this kind of stuff. Show us how you copy/paste it into a sample project in Rider or CLion and compile it first, to see if it’s OK. Show us how you write a quick test to sanity-check a few inputs. Nope. Not necessary. Doesn’t even consider it.

Fun

True Facts: The Crazy Defenses of Butterflies and Moths by Ze Frank (YouTube)

This was a great video. I learned a lot. At the very end, in the credits, I saw this:

Deimatic display in the European swallowtail butte… secondary defence against attacks from great tits

“Deimatic display in the European swallowtail butterfly as a secondary defence against attacks from great tits.”

Are they defending against birds? Or breasts? Or did they forget to write what they’re defending from because they were dictating the title and a well-endowed woman walked by? We’ll never know.