This page shows the source for this entry, with WebCore formatting language tags and attributes highlighted.

Title

Links and Notes for September 16th, 2022

Description

<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#covid">COVID-19</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h>COVID-19</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/20/pers-s20.html" author="Joseph Scalice" source="WSWS">Biden on “60 Minutes”: American capitalism is at war with the world, at war with reality</a> <bq>Now, as 3,000 Americans die of COVID-19 every week, Biden declares the pandemic is over. He celebrates the fact, the direct result of his own criminal policies, that people are not wearing masks. The death and infection rate data can no longer be considered reliable. The dead and infected, those suffering the terrible consequences of Long COVID, are being shoved into the ranks of the countless uncounted, and the pandemic declared to be at an end.</bq> <bq>Washington’s entire geopolitical strategy is one of unrelenting recklessness. Biden told Putin before the entire world that he was committing the US to the defeat of Russian forces in Ukraine, recognizing that this pushed him into a corner. The use of nuclear weapons is being openly discussed as a real possibility, and yet Washington refuses to take a single step backwards.</bq> No compromise. No negotiation. No diplomacy. No reason. <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-14/ethereum-is-merging" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Ethereum Is Merging</a> <bq>Buying the computers, and paying for the electricity to run them to solve the math problems, demonstrates your commitment to Bitcoin: It would be crazy to spend all that money on computers and electricity to confirm fake transactions, which would undermine the value of Bitcoin and thus of your investment.</bq> <bq>This was a clever innovation and has some important benefits. It lets you have a ledger that is maintained by people with incentives to do the right thing — people you can trust — without knowing who they are. There is no pre-approved list of people who are allowed to maintain the Bitcoin ledger; anyone who buys enough computers and electricity can participate. It is permissionless . But because they have to buy all those computers and electricity, they have good incentives to maintain the ledger in a good way.</bq> The gatekeeper, as always, is capital. <bq>Instead of proving that you have an economic stake in the system by spending a lot of money on computers and electricity, you could prove that you have an economic stake in the system by spending a lot of money on Bitcoin. If you have a lot of Bitcoin, that proves that you care about Bitcoin, so you get to participate in confirming transactions.</bq> This is exactly how the existing system works. It centralizes to a handful of oligarchs. The more you invest, the more power you have. It seems superficially reasonable, but results in a societally harmful monopoly. <bq>If you have a lot of Ether, you can stake them and be a validator and confirm transactions and get rewarded with additional Ether. Or, if you have a smaller amount of Ether, you can delegate them to a validator: You hand them over to some validator that you trust, and that validator can stake them and confirm transactions and get rewarded with additional Ether and give you some of them.</bq> Like a bank. <bq>Crypto has rediscovered interest from entirely different principles. In traditional finance, you get interest on your money because you are lending it to someone else to build some productive business. In crypto, you get interest on your money because you are getting paid for maintaining the ledger.</bq> <bq>Ethereum should be in backwardation rather than contango: The forward price should decline over time, because owning Ether now (and getting interest) is more valuable than owning it later (and missing out).</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/16/let-us-now-praise-infamous-animals/" source="CounterPunch" author="Jeffrey St. Clair">Let Us Now Praise Infamous Animals</a> <bq>[...] as detailed in E. P. Evans’ remarkable book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), humans and animals were frequently tried together in the same courtroom as co-conspirators, especially in cases of bestiality. The animal defendants were appointed their own lawyers at public expense. Animals enjoyed appeal rights and there are several instances when convictions were overturned and sentences reduced or commuted entirely. Sometimes, particularly in cases involving pigs, the animal defendants were dressed in human clothes during court proceedings and at executions.</bq> <bq>Even colonial Brazil got in on the act. In 1713 a rectory at the Franciscan monastery in Piedade no Maranhāo collapsed, its foundation ravaged by termites. The friars lodged charges against the termites and an ecclesiastical inquest soon issued a summons demanding that the ravenous insects appear before the court to confront the allegations against their conduct. Often in such cases, the animals who failed to heed the warrant were summarily convicted in default judgments. But these termites had a crafty lawyer. He argued that the termites were industrious creatures, worked hard and enjoyed a God-given right to feed themselves. Moreover, the lawyer declared, the slothful habits of the friars had likely contributed to the disrepair of the monastery. The monks, the defense lawyer argued, were merely using the local termite community as an excuse for their own negligence. The judge returned to his chambers, contemplated the facts presented him and returned with a Solomonic ruling. The friars were compelled to provide a woodpile for the termites to dine at and the insects were commanded to leave the monastery and confine their eating to their new feedlot.</bq> <bq>Thus did the great sages of the Enlightenment assert humanity’s ruthless primacy over the Animal Kingdom. The materialistic view of history, and the fearsome economic and technological pistons driving it, left no room for either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow beings. They had been rendered philosophically and literally in resources for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor, entertainment and food.</bq> <bq>In 1668, Jean Racine, a playwright not known for his facility with farce, wrote a comedy satirizing the trials of animals. Written eighteen years after the death of Descartes, “Les Plaideurs” (The Litigants) tells the story of a senile old man obsessed with judging, who eventually places the family dog on trial for stealing a capon from the kitchen table. [...] According some accounts, the play has now become the most frequently performed French comedy, having been presented in more than 1,400 different productions.</bq> <bq>[...] what would Marx have made of the baboons of northern Africa, hunted down by animal traders, who slaughtered nursing mother baboons and stole their babies for American zoos and medical research labs. The baboon communities violently resisted this risible enterprise, chasing the captors through the wilderness all the way to the train station. Some of the baboons even followed the train for more than a hundred miles and at distant stations launched raids on the cars in an attempt to free the captives. How’s that for fearless solidarity?</bq> <bq>Singer demolished the Cartesian model that treated animals as mere machines. Blending science and ethics, Singer asserted that most animals are sentient beings, capable of feeling pain. The infliction of pain was both unethical and immoral. He argued that the progressive credo of providing “the greatest good for the greatest number” should be extended to animals and that animals should be liberated from their servitude in scientific labs, factory farms, circuses and zoos.</bq> <bq>We witness from the animals’ perspective the tyrannical trainers, creepy dealers in exotic species, arrogant zookeepers and sinister hunters, who slaughtered the parents of young elephants and apes in front of their young before they captured them. We are taken inside the cages, tents and tanks, where captive elephants, apes and sea mammals are confined in wretched conditions with little medical care. All of this is big business, naturally. Each performing dolphin can generate more than a million dollars a year in revenue, while orcas can produce twenty times that much.</bq> <bq>Hribal’s heroic profiles in animal courage show how most of these violent acts of resistance were motivated by their abusive treatment and the miserable conditions of their confinement. These animals are far from mindless. Their actions reveal memory not mere conditioning, contemplation not instinct, and, most compellingly, discrimination not blind rage. Again and again, the animals are shown to target only their abusers, often taking pains to avoid trampling bystanders. Animals, in other words, acting with a moral conscience.</bq> <bq>Speaking of Hollywood, let’s toast the memory of Buddha the Orangutan (aka Clyde), who co-starred with Clint Eastwood in the movie Every Which Way But Loose. On the set, Buddha simply stopped working one day. He refused to perform his silly routines any more and his trainer repeatedly clubbed him in the head with a hard cane in front of the crew. One day near the end of filming Buddha, like that dog in Racine’s play, snatched some doughnuts from a table on the set. The ape was seized by his irate keeper, taken back his cage and beaten to death with an ax handle. Buddha’s name was not listed in the film’s credits.</bq> <bq>Tilikum is the Nat Turner of the captives of Sea World. He has struck courageous blows against the enslavement of wild creatures. Now it is up to us to act on his thrust for liberation and build a global movement to smash forever these aquatic gulags from the face of the Earth.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/putins-wheel" source="Russian Dissent" author="">Putin's Wheel</a> <bq>The inhabitants of this building fought for about three years against the monument to Putin’s megalomania, which was erected right in their yard anyway. Now their struggle has been rewarded. Let this not be the final victory, but its harbinger. A little more time will pass and everything that Putin has touched will crumble to dust.</bq> <bq>[...] we must all together get off the crazy wheel that started spinning exactly 200 days ago, in February. Let us get down, back onto the ground, and stand against the hand that gave the first push. It is significant that the wheel incident occurred on the very day when the Ukrainian offensive occurred. Not only the Russian troops at the front received a heavy blow, but the virtual “Russian World” of ultra-right propagandists, and the couch-bound garrisons of nationalist shut-ins suffered even more. Not only did their front collapse, but the very foundations of their imaginary little world began to sag. Putin’s Russia is not at all so formidable, and the opera is not as grand as was promised.</bq> This reads like true-left critiques of America, but of Russia instead. Perhaps, just like Americans, Russians think that they are the indomitable empire. <bq>Professional Great Russians are rending their garments online: “The Fatherland is in danger! The elites and the people must unite in the face of the obvious threat to our very statehood!” The authorities, as if in mockery, answer them with a festive distraction on Moscow City Day. Putin opens the Ferris wheel, and Defense Ministry spokesman Konashenkov dutifully mumbles about the countless number of destroyed enemy soldiers. You think it sounds like a retreat? No, no, the authorities said it was a planned regrouping. Quit rocking the boat!</bq> An amazing similarity to U.S. elites. <bq>The problem is in the very social structure, on top of which this Putin of yours sits. This design is incompatible with mobilization. If you conscript and arm a couple of million men, you will get not a combat-ready army, but an armed opposition. In order to mobilize the economy, it is necessary to tighten the belts of the voracious bureaucracy and oligarchy. And they are the support of the throne, the feudal nobility, the masters of the Russian land. The thing is, for some reason you think that you are in the same boat with them. They still consider you just a servant.</bq> A nearly one-to-one correspondence to the elites in the U.S. <bq>So it will be. There will be more and more losses. The shells will run out. The army will freeze, die, and decay. Then the economy will collapse. The authorities will continue to pretend that everything is going according to plan. Putin’s aristocracy is driven to the abyss by its fate. And the ultra-right fellow travelers of this government are rushing to their own fate. Igor Strelkov and other “critical patriots” will sooner or later create a new “Progressive Bloc” and demand their piece of power, as was done in 1917. Kadyrov and Prigozhin will play Prince Yusupov with Purishkevich, trying to save the sovereign from the evil influence of another Rasputin. All this has already happened. The roles are scheduled, the wheel of history, unlike Putin’s Ferris wheel, is spinning.</bq> Same prediction as in America, but more poetic. This is the Chris Hedges of Russian journalism. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/13/liz-truss-a-precarious-prime-minister-for-a-precarious-country/" source="CounterPunch" author="Patrick Cockburn">Liz Truss: a Precarious Prime Minister for a Precarious Country</a> <bq>For all Boris Johnson’s boosterism, the British state is less powerful than it was 10 years ago. There have now been four prime ministers in six years, which is the sort of turnover once associated with political instability in Italy.</bq> <bq>[...] a calculation by Bloomberg showed that Britain has dropped behind India as an economic power with India displacing it as the fifth largest economy in the world. Britain may still have a respectable place in the rankings, but real wages are lower than in 2007 and foreign investment has stalled since 2016.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/09/european-union-parliament-democracy-history/" source="Jacobin" author="Christakis Georgiou">The Left Should Call for Europe to Become a Democratic Federation</a> <bq>When De Gaulle returned to power in Paris on the back of a coup by the French army in Algeria in May 1958, the Treaty of Rome had come into effect less than five months earlier. De Gaulle oversaw the adoption of a new French constitution that subordinated the legislature to the executive and concentrated power in the hands of a directly elected president, who also had the right to dissolve the National Assembly. With a few alterations, this remains the basic structure of the French Fifth Republic.</bq> <bq>Pompidou was right in this calculation. Over the space of nearly five decades, the UK government proved to be a determined opponent of attempts to broaden the scope of qualified majority voting in the Council and extend the European Parliament’s legislative powers. In 2003–4, for example, during the negotiations over what would become the Treaty of Lisbon, British prime minister Tony Blair opposed the abandonment of unanimity on fiscal policy.</bq> <bq>The clash of political visions in the construction of the EU between intergovernmental confederalism and parliamentary federalism has never yielded a decisive victory for one camp over the other. Over time, however, the federalist constitutional vision has gradually reasserted itself. The European Parliament has steadily gained more powers to legislate, approve, and discharge the EU budget, supervise the executive branch, and ratify international treaties.</bq> <bq>The power to raise revenue through taxation lies at the core of modern state sovereignty. The structures of the union lack this vital power. In that respect, the EU still displays features that are typical of international organizations or confederations rather than federations.</bq> <bq>[...] some of the East European member states — Poland and Hungary in particular — have picked up the baton discarded by the British political class. These right-wing nationalist governments are trying to reduce the powers of their own legislatures, and they have found the European Parliament to be among their toughest critics over breaches of the rule of law.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/09/chile-new-constitution-gabriel-boric-government-defeat/" source="" author="Frank Gaudichaud & Miguel Urrutia">Why Chileans Rejected the Proposed New Constitution</a> <bq>To those ends, Rechazo forces disseminated a range of shameless lies. Through a multimillion-dollar campaign on social media, and using their near monopoly of the media, they advanced nonsense along the following lines: “The citizen will be obligated to seek treatment in an overwhelmed public health system”; “Freedom of education will be suppressed”; “State benefits will drive workers to opt for unemployment”; “Housing will be expropriated and private property will be abolished”; “The principle of equality before the law will be erased to favor Indigenous and homosexual people, among other minorities”; “Religious freedom will be done away with and evangelical communities will be persecuted”; “Abortion will be allowed at whatever stage of pregnancy”; “All border controls will be lifted”; “The law will protect criminals over victims”; “The savings of workers will be confiscated and inheritances blocked”; “The name of the country and its national emblems will be changed”; to just name a few of the declarations that appeared on basic television.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/monarchs-belong-in-the-dustbin-of?utm_medium=email" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of History</a> <bq>In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. By the time India won independence in 1947 after two centuries of British colonialism, Her Majesty’s Government had looted $45 trillion from the country and violently crushed a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857.</bq> <bq>The royal household and its heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls “an apartheid system benefitting the Royal Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race and who contemplated suicide during her time as a working royal, said that an unnamed royal expressed concern about the skin color of her unborn son.</bq> <bq>When the British ruling class tried to arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the National Convention set up after the French Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”</bq> <bq>Even though Paine had done more than any single figure to rouse the country to overthrow the British monarchy, he was turned into a pariah, especially by the press, and forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were Black.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/09/in-moscows-local-elections-socialists-are-fighting-to-make-their-opposition-heard/" source="Jacobin" author="Kirill Medvedev">In Moscow’s Local Elections, Socialists Are Fighting to Make Their Opposition Heard</a> <bq>Today’s Moscow is marked by gentrified industrial zones, widened sidewalks, the “hipster oases” of the center, ever-encroaching skyscrapers, and sprawling suburbs. The construction business is the main driver of the city’s economy — and also the main source of corruption. The Moscow authorities are tightly linked to several development companies. Giant new buildings, often without any social infrastructure, are being constructed in place of Soviet-era neighborhoods with carefully planned green areas. Among the clients of the construction business are members of the regional elite who invest in Moscow real estate. Huge amounts of money — more than is devoted to education — are also pumped into so-called landscaping, including the annual replacement of sidewalks, profitable to business but a scandal for Muscovites.</bq> <bq>Alexei Gorinov, a municipal deputy who criticized the “special operation” in the council of deputies, got seven years in prison. Sergei Tsukasov, a municipal deputy who is another face of the democratic socialist opposition in Moscow, was withdrawn from the election and arrested on charges of “extremism.” Zamyatin was also withdrawn from the election on these same charges (for posting a video by oppositionist Alexei Navalny back in 2020). Other Vidvizheniye candidates are being withdrawn on various pretexts, fired by their employers and enduring various other kinds of pressure.</bq> Russia is even coarser than the U.S. The U.S. would have come up with a better reason? <bq>Putin, once promoted to power by the liberal-oligarchic lobby, still trusts the so-called system liberals to ensure the economic sustainability of his regime. At the same time, Putin offers a certain pro-Soviet sensibility, the image of a strong, paternalistic, “internationally respected” state standing up to the West. The case of democratic socialists seems like the opposite: they share with the liberals the idea of civil rights and freedoms, and with the supporters of Soviet socialism the idea of grassroots self-organization against a state unwilling or unable to redistribute wealth.</bq> <bq>For his part, KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov demands a continuation of the war and a march on Kyiv. Party MPs lobby for odious conservative laws, such as the “ban on LGBT propaganda” (currently such “propaganda” is prohibited only among minors). Indeed, in many ways, the KPRF is even more right-wing than pro-Putin party United Russia. This is unsurprising, considering how much it counts on the votes of those who feel that the “special operation” is too soft.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/11/patrick-lawrence-the-narrative-is-coming-apart/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">“The Narrative Is Coming Apart”</a> <bq>The implications of this turn—psychological, political, and so on—are yet to be determined. But the long arc of this conflict has not changed. Russian forces still retain overwhelming superiority—ground, air, artillery, matériel, supply. The AFU’s losses have been heavy by Kyiv’s admission. Ukraine is still a corrupt basket-case economy with unstable institutions. These are “facts on the ground.”</bq> <bq>The same day as Burns spoke and the same day Zelensky spoke, Ben Hodges, a retired general who once commanded U.S. forces in Europe, gave Newsweek his opinion of the AFU: “They’ve set the conditions where they can restore full sovereignty, to include Crimea, I think, within the next year.”</bq> Which involves throwing the Russians out of Sebastopol. <bq>“The essay in The National Interest is 10,000 words and is a comprehensive critique of the narrative. I make the case that without challenging this narrative, a pivot to diplomacy is not possible. It is the narrative that is obstructing the West re-evaluating toward Ukraine.”</bq> <bq>“In effect, the American public has been bamboozled into supporting a costly and risky proxy war against Russia. Then, it was actively led to believe that Ukraine was winning the fight, despite later reports that the U.S. intelligence community has lacked an accurate portrayal of the war on the ground from its very onset.”</bq> <bq>It was under Obama that a merciless campaign was waged against whistleblowers and the few journalists left who dared to publish them. By weaponizing the</bq> <hr> <a href="http://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2022/09/you-cant-fight-maga-fascism-without.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">You Can't Fight MAGA Fascism Without Smashing Biden's Republic</a> <bq>It was under Obama that a merciless campaign was waged against whistleblowers and the few journalists left who dared to publish them. By weaponizing the century old Espionage Act and sicking it on more dissidents than every other previous president combined, Mr. Hope-and-Change sent a brutal message to critics of empire across the planet that the price of the truth won't just be your freedom, it will be your sanity. Julian Assange, quite possibly the greatest journalist of his generation, continues to physically and emotionally disintegrate in a cement box at Belmarsh as we speak while awaiting his live burial at Florence Supermax. All part of an international campaign spearheaded seamlessly by the regimes of Obama, Trump and Biden to destroy a man for telling the truth about unchecked power.</bq> <bq>This lethal liberal tag-team still holds the world record for wrangling desperate people like alligators for crossing an invisible line in the fucking desert before shipping them back to the swamps we turned their shithole countries into with our imperial foreign policy. They also built the concentration camps which remain open and designed for the primary purpose of traumatizing migrants into never returning to the land we stole from their ancestors.</bq> <bq>We throw more parades and holidays glorifying warfare than North Korea.</bq> <bq>Fascism isn't some kind of satanic aberration built from black magic; it is a desperate attempt by a dying state to revive itself with the overt use of the kind of mass violence that was used covertly to build it.</bq> <bq>My biggest problem with the Never-Trumpers in both parties has always been their hysterical insistence that Donald Trump is special. Fascism isn't even special. It's the inevitable blowback of late-stage imperialism and if you really want to fight it you should forget about Joe Biden's fucking tote bag of empty rhetoric and save your money for a hammer to smash the state that birthed that rough beast slouching towards Washington to be born.</bq> Golf clap. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_FY87Se1d8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/r_FY87Se1d8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Grayzone" caption="Scott Ritter on Ukraine's counter-offensive, Russia's next move"> At o1:35:00, Ritter says, <bq>[...] His leadership knew about it. And they continue to conspire with Ukraine and the Unites States and Great Britain and France to try and get this international peacekeeping force put into Zaporizhzhia. And why is this critical? Because this is nuclear blackmail. This is the United States, Ukraine, and Europe holding the world hostage, not from nuclear safety, but to score political points for the Zelensky regime. To score a political victory, to insert a reality on the battlefield that otherwise would never exist. And this undermines the credibility of the IAEA in every way, shape, and form, similar to how the OPCW's credibility [was] undermined in Syria and how the United Nations' credibility was undermined in Iraq. This is the United States, the West, undermining international institutions that are critical for international peace and security.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/roger_waters/2022/09/17/kiev-must-lead-the-charge-for-peace/" author="Roger Waters" source="Antiwar.com">Kiev Must Lead the Charge for Peace</a> <bq>So where was I Mrs Zelenska, I’m sorry I got a bit side tracked, oh yes, why don’t you prevail upon your husband to ‘do the right thing’, and ‘We the People’ in the USA will try to prevail upon poor old Uncle Joe Biden to do the right thing, and the Russian people will prevail upon the ‘stripped to the waist’ Vladimir Putin to do the right thing, and maybe, together, ‘We the People can prevail upon all our leaders to do the right thing, and maybe we can save the world from the imminent destruction upon which they seem hellbent. Maybe we can prevent The Powers that Be from sacrificing this, our beautiful planet home, on the altar of their deadly unipolar warmongering.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/no-one-is-actually-boiling-chicken" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">No one is actually boiling chicken in NyQuil</a> <bq>On 4chan, sleepytime chicken is a funny story about a weird thing a weird guy did once. On TikTok, it has become a moral panic two separate times in the same year, eventually prompting the FDA to step in. Obviously, part of this has to do with scale. 4chan is just a much smaller, and far less active platform, but also, it’s a site that isn’t easy to search, doesn’t have hashtags or a sharing functionality and barely works on mobile. Meanwhile, TikTok is laser-focused on turning any outrageous thing into a trending challenge or conversation topic, prompting its users to participate or react to it in semi-real-time. idk man, say what you will about 4chan — its users are, at best, unhinged, and at worst, violent lunatics — but even they haven’t attempted to make sleepytime chicken again for internet clout.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-concept-of-entropy-quantifies-information-20220906/" source="Quanta" author="Kevin Hartnett">How Shannon Entropy Imposes Fundamental Limits on Communication</a> <bq>That you can zip a large movie file, for example, owes to the fact that pixel colors have a statistical pattern, the way English words do. Engineers can build probabilistic models for patterns of pixel colors from one frame to the next. The models make it possible to calculate the Shannon entropy by assigning weights to patterns and then taking the logarithm of the weight for all the possible ways pixels could appear. That value tells you the limit of “lossless” compression — the absolute most the movie can be compressed before you start to lose information about its contents.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-talk-about-the-carbon-footprints-of-the-rich/" source="Noēma" author="Genevieve Guenther">We Need To Talk About The Carbon Footprints Of The Rich</a> <bq>What can you do, as a single individual, to help halt global heating? Social science research suggests that one of the most powerful things you can do is talk about the climate crisis in your networks. But according to many climate activists, the one thing you should not do is discuss people’s personal carbon footprints.</bq> <bq>Only governmental institutions have the capacity to meet the systemic challenges of decarbonization. Even if every individual person on the planet reduced their discretionary carbon footprint to zero, the electrical, industrial and agricultural systems of our economies would continue to emit greenhouse gases and make global heating worse.</bq> <bq>They would argue, for instance, that flying multiple times per year to give talks on the climate crisis is offset by the political effects of those talks themselves — their putative power to inspire other people to join the climate movement, pass climate policy or even reduce their own carbon footprints.</bq> Which is also kind of bunk because you need people to act accordingly at least a little bit. Otherwise it's a joke. Flying to a conference is an elite thing to do. There's no way around that. If you want to get everyone on board, you can't ignore the class divide. <bq>“Driving” signifies something very different for the American worker at a big-box store who is forced to commute in her car to the mall versus the private equity manager speeding a gleaming Lamborghini around the cliffs of the Italian Riviera. One act is the expression of entanglement in an exploitative economic system that makes it impossible not to emit carbon; the other is the expression of the injustice of that very system.</bq> <bq>Researchers estimate that more than half of the emissions generated by humanity since our emergence on this planet have been emitted since 1990. But in these past 30 years, the emissions of the poorest 50% of people have grown hardly at all: They represented a little under 7% of global emissions in 1990, and they remain a little over 7% of global emissions today. By contrast, the richest 10% of people are responsible for 52% of cumulative global emissions — and the 1% for a full 15%.</bq> But is that because they own all of the means of production and, therefore, get "blamed" for the CO2? Even though don't actually use the products…we do? They say that seventy percent of the CO2 comes from 100 companies. But if just stopped all of that, life as we know it would end. Do they mean the global poor? I guess that makes me, careful and aware as I am, part of the problem, simply due to where and how I'm able to live. <bq>This means that the richest 63 million are producing fully double the dangerous greenhouse gases that half of all humanity, or nearly four billion people, emit.</bq> <bq>The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows that, from 1991 to 2010, climate change lowered African countries’ per capita GDP by around 13.6%. Declining rainfall due to climate change between 1960 and 2000 alone caused a GDP gap between 15-40% in affected countries, compared to the rest of the world.</bq> Is the answer, though, to bring everyone down to the level of a member of the Global South? It should be to make more efficient use of energy to get a modern lifestyle. And to drag down the outliers because those are also low-hanging fruit. <bq>The idea that even one metric ton of that budget should be used for yachts, private jets, new wardrobes every three months (fashion brands usually produce four “collections” a year) or even unnecessary commercial flights relies on the dehumanization of the people — generally people of color — who live in the places where the planet is unravelling first.</bq> Hard to disagree but that's exactly how it's going to go down. <bq>Oxfam has defined the world’s 1% as the 60 million people earning over $109,000 a year. They defined the 10% as the 770 million people earning over $38,000.</bq> <bq>The vast majority of Americans, even those of us who are rich by global standards, are entrapped by our current economic system and quite literally unable to make transformative changes in our lifestyles.</bq> You could stop voting for complete idiots, in fairness. The first few generations were perhaps not responsible, but they've been electing idiots for a long, long time. <bq>As Bloomberg News recently reported, the personal emissions of the top 0.001% — those with at least $ 129.2 million in wealth — are so large that these people’s individual consumption decisions “can have the same impact as nationwide policy interventions.” And the super-rich are not reducing their individual carbon footprints voluntarily. On the contrary. In 2021, sales of superyachts, by far the most polluting luxury asset, surged by 77%.</bq> <bq>We would need a second Earth if everyone on the planet ate the way Americans do.</bq> <bq>Resolving the climate crisis will require more than innovation. It will require remaking our systems — including our class system, or at least the unequal levels of consumption that our class system justifies. Ultimately, this transformation will be delivered by government policies in the context of international negotiations. But it requires a revolution in values, too. We’ll know that we’re on our way when Instagram posts about jet-setting vacations inspire disgust rather than excitement and aspiration.</bq> <bq>If climate communicators talk about our burning world and the need for climate justice without at least trying to embody and perform carbon equality, they will end up sending a mixed message that reinforces people’s cognitive dissonance.</bq> <bq>Reducing your own discretionary consumption will also enable you to talk about how to have pleasure, take a break, find joy, discover new places and celebrate success without using fossil fuels.</bq> <bq>Do you want a world in which everyone is guaranteed six weeks of paid vacation, enough time to travel overseas in elegant solar- and wind-powered clipper ships?</bq> This would be awesome. Planes aren't even close to the main problem, though. <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/09/uncle-jims-proverbs-3.html" author="Jim Britell" source="3 Quarks Daily">Uncle Jim’s Proverbs #3</a> Communication: <bq><ul>To grasp email’s limitations, inflect sequentially the words; “Her, you should marry?” Never hand in anything until someone else reads it. </ul></bq> Management: <bq><ul>You can’t manage anything well if you hate it. The average manager can generally subdue an above-average professional.</ul></bq> Organization: <bq><ul>To understand an organization, learn how employees turn bad performance into good numbers. Regardless of the effort, people seldom give credit for work turned in late.</ul></bq> Hiring (both sides): <bq><ul>Never hire anyone until you check references back to their pediatrician. Never hire anyone until you know their hobbies Between two job offers, take the one with the smartest boss.</ul></bq> Analysts: <bq><ul>An experienced analyst only needs one point to spot a trend. Good analysts can produce trend lines in any required direction.</ul></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Author-Q-As/2022/0909/The-Case-Against-the-Sexual-Revolution-How-feminism-let-women-down" source="Christian Science Monitor" author="Stephen Humphries">‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’: How feminism let women down</a> <bq>And I don’t think that’s a generational thing. I think that’s a life-cycle thing. I think that’s because many of these older women actually used to share that same view, used to really buy in to the sex-positive myth. But they’ve let go of it because of their own life experiences and because of life experiences of people that they know.</bq> That applies to so much. The young think the old are idiots, incompetent rather than experienced. Some are, of course. But painting all with a broad brush opens you up to repeating mistakes. Perhaps unavoidable in a culture that denigrates age and values change over improvement. <bq>There is a real squeamishness among liberals to recognize differences between men and women. Definitely psychological differences no one wants to talk about. But even increasingly, physical differences have become weirdly taboo. ... A big part of the reason why a lot of liberals don’t want to acknowledge those differences is because, if you do, it becomes much, much harder to imagine a world in which men and women are perfectly equal and in which the differences between us are erased. There has been a utopian streak running through second-wave feminism, which has fallen very hard on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate and has really pushed for the idea of the differences between the sexes really being quite trivial.</bq> <bq>Women are significantly more agreeable than men are on average. ... It’s clearly trivially easy to persuade women, particularly young women, to put their own interest second in sexual relationships and to be astonishingly tolerant of the most terrible behavior from their sexual partners and to really not protect their own interests. It’s amazing how often women will do this, and I think the younger they are, the more likely they are to do that. And I think that that’s the thing that I really resent about feminist ideology, is that it encourages that process in quite a subtle way, but because of that resistance to moral intuition. It trains young women to not listen to their gut instincts in a way that is actually really not self-protective.</bq> <bq>I have a chapter making the feminist case for marriage. I think it’s an institution that helps to rein in male sexual misbehavior. Not perfectly by any means, but it seems to work better than pretty much anything else we’ve come up with.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-lives-beyond-the-life-sentences/" source="JStor" author="Jessica Pishko">The Lives Beyond the Life Sentences</a> <bq>In 1994, the problem of prison sentences that constituted life or de facto life (50 years or more) felt dire to theI writers of The Angolite article. They counted 2,099 “long-timers” compared to the then 775,624 total number of incarcerated people, or 0.3%. But those statistics pale in comparison to today’s. Now, that number is over 200,000 out of the 1.4 million total people in prison.</bq> <bq>When people commit violence, society condemns them to prison, where unfathomable violence is often committed against them. As those sentenced to die of old age behind bars become frail and feeble, their minds and bodies bear the scars of being entrapped within the “vortex of violence” that is prison. Their situation begs the perennial question: what is the point of prison?</bq> <bq>In 2019, a judge ruled that Robinson had forfeited all of his appeals. Robinson died in 2020, still incarcerated. He was 83 years old. The original charge that sent him to prison was proven invalid, yet he could never escape the sheer violence of the place to which he was confined.</bq> <bq>The general practice throughout much of the 20th century provided clemency to lifers after 10 years and 6 months (called the 10/6 rule ). A former Angola warden at the time said “almost 99% of all the lifers” were released through clemency. More than a legal mechanism for potential release, it was a bringer of hope. Criminal defendants, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys all relied on the 10/6 rule as a way to encourage people to accept life sentences as plea agreements.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://scale.com/blog/text-universal-interface" source="Scale" author="Roon">Text Is the Universal Interface</a> <bq>In a previous iteration of the machine learning paradigm, researchers were obsessed with cleaning their datasets and ensuring that every data point seen by their models is pristine, gold-standard, and does not disturb the fragile learning process of billions of parameters finding their home in model space. Many began to realize that data scale trumps most other priorities in the deep learning world; utilizing general methods that allow models to scale in tandem with the complexity of the data is a superior approach. Now, in the era of LLMs, researchers tend to dump whole mountains of barely filtered, mostly unedited scrapes of the internet into the eager maw of a hungry model.</bq> So much better. What could possibly go wrong? No-one knows how it works, but people and governments will soon consider its proclamations oracular and unimpeachable, basing life-changing and -ruining decisions on the whims of an inscrutable but somehow de-facto infallible piece of software. I, for one, welcome our dystopian future. Let's rip off that band-aid and get it over with. <bq>For anyone who works closely with these models, it becomes clear that the vast and comprehensive training gauntlet that creates these technological leviathans embeds some difficult behaviors. While the breadth of example material spawns broadly intelligent digital creatures capable of working on a vast range of text tasks, it can require significant prodding, cajoling, and pleading to get these models into the right mood for the particular task at hand.</bq> <bq>Every prompt a user feeds to a large foundation model instantiates a new model, one more limited in scope: it enters into a different conditional probability distribution, or in other words, a different mood. A language model’s mood gives birth to a new piece of composable modular software that takes in a text token stream and leaves another as output.</bq> <bq>It is simple to play around with a large language model for a bit, watch it make some very discouraging errors, and throw in the towel on the LLM paradigm. But the inexorable scaling laws of deep learning models work in its favor. Language models become more intelligent like clockwork due to the tireless work of the brilliant AI researchers and engineers concentrated in a few Silicon Valley companies to make both the model and the dataset larger.</bq> <bq>OpenAI’s new model available in beta (codename: davinci2) is dramatically smarter than the old one unveiled just two years ago. Like a precocious child, a more intelligent model requires less prompting to do the same job better. Prompt engineers can do more with less effort over time. Soon, prompting may not look like “engineering” at all but a simple dialogue with the machine. We see that the gradient points in the right direction: prompting becomes easier, language models become smarter, and the new universal computing interface begins to look inevitable.</bq> <bq>Perhaps we notice that the person in charge of the corporate Twitter account is painstakingly transforming GitHub changelogs into tweet threads every week. There’s a prompt somewhere that solves this business challenge and a language model mood corresponding to it. With a smart enough model and a good enough prompt, this may be true of every business challenge.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Secure-Mode/" source="Microsoft Edge Github" author="Johnathan Norman">Super Duper Secure Mode</a> <bq>The above chart is just one phase of the entire V8 processing pipeline. This does not include the parsers, interpreter, the recently-added second JIT called Sparkplug, or many other components. This is a remarkably complex process that very few people understand and it has a small margin for error.</bq> <bq>Due to how the V8 JIT works, several impactful mitigation technologies cannot be brought to bear in the renderer process. For example, Controlflow-Enforcement Technology (CET), a new hardware-based exploit mitigation from Intel, was disabled. Similarly, Arbitrary Code Guard (ACG) was not enabled due to the use of RWX memory pages in the process. This is unfortunate because the renderer process handles untrusted content and should be locked down as much as possible. By disabling JIT, we can enable both mitigations and make exploitation of security bugs in any renderer process component more difficult.</bq> <bq>Over the next few months, we will try to answer these questions with our Super Duper Secure Mode (SDSM) experiment. It will take some time, but we hope to have CET, ACG, and CFG protection in the renderer process. Once that is complete, we hope to find a way to enable these mitigations intelligently based on risk and empower users to balance the tradeoffs.</bq> <h>Programming</h> We’ve chatted a bunch about "less JS is better". I’m sure you’ve heard of the :has() CSS operator. If you haven’t, then perhaps the whole video is useful. If you have, then start at 11:30 for the final segment (~2min) to see how you can use it, combined with grid, scaling, opacity, and transitions, to make a very nice gallery with no JS at all. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGJvhpoE8b4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/OGJvhpoE8b4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kevin Powell" caption="I never thought this would be possible with CSS"> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM" source="Wikipedia">LLVM</a> <bq>[...] as of 2011 LLVM was "officially no longer an acronym". Since 2011, LLVM is a brand that applies to the LLVM umbrella project, encompassing the LLVM intermediate representation (IR), the LLVM debugger, the LLVM implementation of the C++ Standard Library (with full support of C++11 and C++14), etc. LLVM is administered by the LLVM Foundation. Its president is compiler engineer Tanya Lattner.</bq> <bq>Widespread interest in LLVM has led to several efforts to develop new front ends for a variety of languages. The one that has received the most attention is Clang, a new compiler supporting C, C++, and Objective-C. Primarily supported by Apple, Clang is aimed at replacing the C/Objective-C compiler in the GCC system with a system that is more easily integrated with integrated development environments (IDEs) and has wider support for multithreading. Support for OpenMP directives has been included in Clang since release 3.8</bq> <hr> <a href="https://marmelab.com/blog/2022/09/20/react-i-love-you.html" author="François Zaninotto" source="Marmelab">React I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down</a> <bq>Finally, using <c>useEffect</c> wisely requires reading a 53 pages dissertation. I must say, that is a terrific piece of documentation. But if a library requires me to go through dozens of pages to use it properly, isn't it a sign that it's not well designed?</bq> <bq>To put it otherwise: you have no other solution than to grow the core API more and more over time. For people like me, who have to maintain huge codebases, this constant API inflation is a nightmare. Seeing you wear more and more makeup everyday is a constant reminder of what you're trying to hide.</bq> <bq>As for your official docs, they still recommend using <c>componentDidMount</c> and <c>componentWillUnmount</c> instead of <c>useEffect</c>. The core team has been working on a new version, called Beta docs, for the last two years. They're still not ready for prime time. All in all, the loooong migration to hooks is still not finished, and it has produced a notable fragmentation in the community.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.html" source="" author="Martin Kleppmann">Please stop calling databases CP or AP</a> <bq>Consistency in CAP actually means linearizability, which is a very specific (and very strong) notion of consistency. In particular it has got nothing to do with the C in ACID, even though that C also stands for “consistency”.</bq> <bq>Also, the CAP theorem says nothing about latency, which people tend to care about more than availability. In fact, CAP-available systems are allowed to be arbitrarily slow to respond, and can still be called “available”. Going out on a limb, I’d guess that your users wouldn’t call your system “available” if it takes 2 minutes to load a page.</bq> <bq>Partition Tolerance (terribly mis-named) basically means that you’re communicating over an asynchronous network that may delay or drop messages. The internet and all our datacenters have this property , so you don’t really have any choice in this matter.</bq> <bq>Bob knows that he hit the reload button (initiated his query) after he heard Alice exclaim the final score, and therefore he expects his query result to be at least as recent as Alice’s. The fact that he got a stale query result is a violation of linearizability.</bq> <bq>If you’re building a database, you don’t know what kinds of backchannel your clients may have. Thus, if you want to provide linearizable semantics (CAP-consistency) in your database, you need to make it appear as though there is only a single copy of the data, even though there may be copies (replicas, caches) of the data in multiple places.</bq> <bq>Even the CPU in your computer doesn’t provide linearizable access to your local RAM ! On modern CPUs, you need to use an explicit memory barrier instruction in order to get linearizability.</bq> Fences. <bq>Moreover, databases with snapshot isolation /MVCC are intentionally non-linearizable, because enforcing linearizability would reduce the level of concurrency that the database can offer. For example, PostgreSQL’s SSI provides serializability but not linearizability , and Oracle provides neither. Just because a database is branded “ACID” doesn’t mean it meets the CAP theorem’s definition of consistency.</bq> <bq>You sometimes see people claiming that quorum reads and writes guarantee linearizability, but I think it would be unwise to rely on it – subtle combinations of features such as sloppy quorums and read repair can lead to tricky edge cases in which deleted data is resurrected, or the number of replicas of a value falls below the original W (violating the quorum condition), or the number of replica nodes increases above the original N (again violating the quorum condition). All of these lead to non-linearizable outcomes.</bq> <bq>Calling ZooKeeper “not consistent”, just because it’s not linearizable by default, really badly misrepresents its features. It actually provides an excellent level of consistency! It provides atomic broadcast (which is reducible to consensus ) combined with the session guarantee of causal consistency – which is stronger than read your writes, monotonic reads and consistent prefix reads combined.</bq> <bq>Even though most software doesn’t neatly fit one of those two buckets, people try to shoehorn software into one of the two buckets anyway, thereby inevitably changing the meaning of “consistency” or “availability” to whatever definition suits them. Unfortunately, if the meaning of the words is changed, the CAP theorem no longer applies, and thus the CP/AP distinction is rendered completely meaningless.</bq> <bq>A huge amount of subtlety is lost by putting a system in one of two buckets. There are many considerations of fault-tolerance, latency, simplicity of programming model, operability, etc. that feed into the design of a distributed systems. It is simply not possible to encode this subtlety in one bit of information.</bq>