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Links and Notes for March 10th, 2023

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<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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#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="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/11/uqtd-m11.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Second biggest bank failure in US history as Silicon Valley Bank collapses</a> On Silicon Valley Bank's failure: tl;dr: Bank failed because its business plan only worked when "number goes up". <bq>The other major factor was the change in money flows. Instead of receiving new money from investors, trying to get in on the ground floor for the next high-tech rocket, many of SVB’s clients began to make withdrawals as they burned through cash.</bq> Translation: As long as people gave the bank money, things were great. As soon as they starting taking their money back, the money is no longer there. The grasshoppers are in charge of the world. The ants should turn their backs, perhaps snickering into their collars, ever so slightly. <hr> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/congress-takes-brief-pause-from-sending-all-of-your-tax-dollars-to-ukraine-to-send-them-to-silicon-valley-bank/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Congress Takes Brief Pause From Sending All Your Tax Dollars To Ukraine To Send Them To Silicon Valley Bank</a> <bq>"Think of the poor billionaire tech entrepreneurs," said one member of Congress while replacing his lapel's Ukraine pin with a Google logo pin. "We ask that our brothers-in-arms at Lockheed-Martin bear with us until we push this tax hike through while acting like we don't want to push it through."</bq> <hr> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/man-struggling-to-feed-family-just-glad-he-could-help-bail-out-bank/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Man Struggling To Feed Family Just Glad He Could Help Bail Out Bank</a> <bq>A local construction worker was relieved to hear that his money will be used to bail out failing banks used by billionaire elites, despite the fact that he is having a hard time paying his utility bills and putting food on his family's table.</bq> <bq>At publishing time, CEOs of major financial institutions and companies were all gathering at a top-secret meeting to determine what stupid moves they could make next since their actions have no real consequences.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-admin-promises-to-tax-silicon-valley-billionaires-on-all-the-money-the-federal-government-just-gave-them/" author="" source="Babylon Bee">Biden Admin Promises To Tax Silicon Valley Billionaires On All The Money The Federal Government Just Gave Them</a> <bq>All the money we used to bail out billionaires will be taxed. Americans can rest assured that some of their taxpayer funds will go right back to the government where they belong unless the billionaires find some sort of loophole that prevents them from paying taxes. That's crazy though. That would clearly never happen.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theonion.com/financial-experts-recommend-investing-in-businesses-gov-1850232999" author="" source="The Onion">Financial Experts Recommend Investing In Businesses Government Will Bail Out Anytime They Fuck Up</a> <bq>We strongly encourage people to put their money in a secure corporation whose solvency the government will rush in to maintain whenever they make a stupid, negligent decision resulting in a complete collapse that sends markets into a tailspin [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/pleite-der-silicon-valley-bank-us-regierung-beruhigt-bankkunden-nach-bankenpleite" author="" source="SRF">US-Regierung beruhigt Bankkunden nach Bankenpleite</a> <bq>Um dieses Vertrauen der Kundschaft zu stärken, haben die US-Finanzministerin, der Chef der Notenbank und die staatliche Einlagensicherung erklärt, dass das US-Bankensystem auch nach dem Kollaps der Silicon Valley Bank von Ende letzter Woche sicher sei. Es gebe keinen Grund zur Panik.</bq> Sure, sure. <bq>«Ich bin fest entschlossen, die Verantwortlichen für dieses Schlamassel zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen und unsere Bemühungen zur Stärkung der Aufsicht und Regulierung grösserer Banken fortzusetzen», kündigte Biden an.</bq> OMG 😳 dude. No-one believes you or anyone who works for you will even remember it happened by next Monday. <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1337" author="" source="US Department of the Treasury">Joint Statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC</a> <bq>Secretary Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors. Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.</bq> Where the actual fuck is the money coming from then? Is it going on the books of the Fed? They say that the money will come from a rainy-day fund collectively held by all banks in the system. I will believe it when I see it. The money might look like it's coming from there, but I can guarantee you that the banks aren't taking this lying down: they have definitely figured out a way to make the government pay for it. Either they're lining up another Maiden Lane or two, or they're forcing shitty assets onto the Fed's balance sheet in exchange for clean ones---they're definitely doing something so that they don't end up short. <bq>Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed.</bq> Sure, sure, after they've already spent years absconding with obscene wealth at the expense of their depositors. They bank is bankrupt. They've already stolen all of the money. Saying you're firing them without giving them even more, extra money is not something to be proud of. You're obviously just protecting your cronies---just like we would expect from a kleptocracy. There were some good comments at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35127063" author="" source="Hacker News">Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC</a>, like: <bq>[...] this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.</bq> This is close, but not quite right. The threat is not to the economy, but to the ever-so-important 0.01% who banked as SVB and who had enough lobbying leverage to get their money back when they'd miscalculated. No-one below a certain level of wealth has that privilege. Anyone with more than $250k at the credit union where I still have a bank account in the States would definitely not be "made whole". They would suck it---because it's not a relevant bank and no-one that Janet Yellen knows banks there. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/16/bank-collapses-yes-its-a-taxpayer-bailout/" author="Thomas Knapp" source="CounterPunch">Bank Collapses: Yes, It’s a Taxpayer Bailout</a> This is the explanation where the money is coming from. It's just being passed on to banking customers. <bq>In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and likely other banks to follow, the FDIC is standing in front of burning multi-million dollar houses insured for $250,000 and offering to pay the full value of the houses instead of the amount insured. Who’s covering the difference? For the moment, all the banks which haven’t collapsed yet. Which means: The CUSTOMERS of all the banks which haven’t collapsed yet. It’s those customers who actually pay those FDIC premiums. Banks don’t turn profits by eating their costs of doing business. Depositors earn a little less interest or pay slightly higher fees, or the bank charges borrowers higher interest and fees. Those customers are, presumably, taxpayers. Which means that yes, taxpayers are indirectly bearing the costs of the bailout.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/16/the-answer-to-the-silicon-valley-bank-bailout-federal-reserve-banking/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">The Answer to the Silicon Valley Bank Bailout: Federal Reserve Banking</a> This is the solution I was bouncing off of my colleagues this morning over coffee. We were talking about Credit Suisse, of course, because that's more relevant over here, but the principle is the same. Why does banking---absolutely intrinsic to life in a modern country---have to make anyone a tremendous amount of money? <bq>The most obvious solution would be to have the Federal Reserve Board give every person and corporation in the country a digital bank account. The idea is that this would be a largely costless way for people to carry on their normal transactions. They could have their paychecks deposited there every two weeks or month. They could have their mortgage or rent, electric bill, credit card bill, and other bills paid directly from their accounts.</bq> <bq>We would have the Fed run system to carry out the vast majority of normal financial transactions, replacing the banks that we use now. However, we would continue to have investment banks, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, that would borrow on financial markets and lend money to businesses, as well as underwriting stock and bond issues. While investment banks still require regulation to prevent abuses, we don’t have to worry about their failure shutting down the financial system.</bq> <bq>We maintain an enormously wasteful financial system because a relatively small number of people get very rich from it. And, these people use their money to lobby members of Congress to make sure no one talks about modernizing the system in a way that would take away the big bucks.</bq> <bq>The rich are ripping us off big time. They are not lucky winners in a market competition due to their intelligence and hard work. They are people who have managed to rig the game to put big bucks in their pocket. That is the reality. We just have to find ways to change it. A key place to start is to stop pretending that their great wealth has anything to do with a free market.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/11q95lg/live_from_the_us_treasury/" author="" source="Reddit">Live from the US Treasury</a> Trust Wall Street Bets to find the perfect South Park clip for this moment. It's from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaritaville_(South_Park)" author="" source="Wikipedia">Margaritaville</a> (S13E03, aired on March 25th, 2009). If you don't have any time to read books or watch The Big Short, the clip sums things up pretty well. Here's the clip in a more palatable form. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/wz-PtEJEaqY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="South Park - American Economics"> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/some-questions-for-the-leader" source="Russian Dissent" author="Roman Kunitsyn">Some Questions for the Leader</a> <bq>Judging by the responses of those who were lucky enough to see the president's speech live, they did not have any questions for the speaker. Which is understandable - from the speech it was clear that their current prosperity would continue, despite the disturbing news from the southwestern borders. Putin promised to stick firmly to the market course, which means that there will be no nationalization, but there will be solid budget "gifts," to, for example, construction oligarchs. Mind you, the oligarchs already live well; Vagit Alikperov, for example, increased his fortune by more than $2 billion in January 2023, and Alexei Mordashov, the owner of Severstal, increased by $1.5 billion.</bq> <bq>They have sent their mobilized sons, husbands, and brothers to the front. They equipped them at their own expense, since many of the necessities stored in army warehouses, as it turned out, had been stolen. Some of them now receive condolences and coffins, and most are forced to "tighten their belts" because the prices of food and consumer goods are rising, and salaries cannot keep up with them.</bq> <bq>The "defense of Donbass" was carried out with such elephantine grace that it is still being bombed and the number of casualties has increased dramatically (in 2021 there were about 100 victims of the UAF bombing, and in 2022 more than a thousand).</bq> <bq>[...] no one at the top even tries to admit mistakes and understand who is to blame for the fact that the goal of the SMO achieved exactly its opposite.</bq> <bq>[...] why, during this protracted conflict, has Russia continued to sell oil and gas to the West, which propaganda and the top leaders themselves call the enemy? Why does Russia continue to pay millions of dollars to Ukraine for the transit of gas and oil through its territory? Obviously, these millions go to the Ukrainian budget and turn into bullets and shells that kill Russian servicemen and volunteers.</bq> <bq>When will the president explain all this, say what is happening, what the government expects from the people, and why it is behaving so incomprehensibly? With these thoughts, most ordinary Russians, in general loyal citizens, clung to the TV screens on February 21 and severe disappointment met them. The President only repeated the old propaganda theses, which even his most devoted supporters are beginning to doubt. Then he promised a lot of money, said that he would return the Soviet education system and that new houses and roads would be built.</bq> The similarities to the SOTU are eerie. <bq>[...] the leader is with us, everything is stable. Although the stability, for which the "common people" loved the former Putin, has long been an illusion. Tell it to those who have gathered in their house around the coffin of a recently mobilized household member. Tell this to the villagers of the Belgorod region, who are hiding in basements from rockets. Tell this to a diabetic who ended up in the hospital because he stopped receiving an imported drug due to sanctions. Tell the grandmother who came to the store and found that the price of sausage has risen and now she does not have enough money for it. Tell the student who ended up in jail because he posted a bold post on the internet.</bq> <bq>Then people get tired of waiting for answers. And they, as it was sung in the song, will straighten their backs and solve all the problems. This means that they will no longer need a "wise and omnipotent" leader.</bq> I hope they do. This has only happened thrice in the U.S. (Revolutionary War, Civil War, early 20th-century social movements), but those were all long ago. Nothing for quite some time now. The civil-rights movements of the 60s achieved great results, but weren't as sweeping anymore. <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/today-and-yesterday" source="Russian Dissent" author="Anna Ochkina">Today and Yesterday</a> <bq>Today's Russian propaganda is desperately false, incoherent to the point of schizophrenia. Kremlin propagandists are chillingly inhuman and at the same time so ridiculous that one may begin to think...maybe this is the trick? Maybe that's how it was intended? It is easier for the mind to see a cunning plan, a conspiracy, betrayal, or even the work of mystic forces than to recognize the possibility of a dictatorship of total stupidity.</bq> <bq>The Russian rebellion, however, did not happen in the 1990s, when it was predicted by all and sundry. It did not start even after the retirement age was raised, after the facts of election fraud were revealed and these systematic violations of social obligations were firmly endorsed by the president. So far, nothing seems to portend any rebellion.</bq> Same as the U.S. Ochkina stands directly in contradiction to Kunitsyn here. <bq>Conservative ideology has begun to be actively pressed upon Russian society. Historical films portray uprisings and revolutions as terrible national disasters, and revolutionaries are presented either as fiends, devoid of all human feelings, or as corrupt, unscrupulous grabbers. Any disagreement feeds rebelliousness, any rebelliousness leads to rebellion, any rebellion is rampant lawlessness, deprivation and disaster for many and fabulous profits for the elite - this is the message found in many Russian films and series on historical topics.</bq> <bq>In the last year, however, the shooting at those who disagree has become much more intense and has acquired a stochastic character. They imprison activists, bloggers, municipal deputies, they fine and detain anyone for an anti-war slogan, drawing, or any “suspicious” public action, up to the performance of famous Soviet pacifist songs. Passive and apolitical Russian society has reacted to the dispersal of rallies and unjust persecution in exactly the same way as an oyster reacts to any danger: it hides even deeper into the shell of private life.</bq> <bq>Russians are not ready to fight for freedom and democracy, but this does not mean at all that they are ready to give up the benefits, conveniences and liberties of modernity. Political passivity is still not equal to complete humility, and the growth of love for patriotic slogans and imperial symbols is still not equal to the readiness of Russians to die for Orthodoxy and autocracy.</bq> <bq>[...] the surviving, divided and confused Russian opposition needs to stop complaining about the passivity of the population and accusing all Russians of bloodthirstiness and imperial ambitions; it's time to stop looking for “good Russians” and to begin the argument about the collective guilt of the people. Stop whining and start taking action. Ideas, real ideas, come from real struggles.</bq> This is similar to the call for left and right to drop their dispute and to fight their common enemy: the imperialist elites. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/10/the-betrayers-of-assange/" source="CounterPunch" author="John Pilger">The Betrayers of Assange</a> <bq>The laughter is a shield, of course. When the prison guards began to jangle their keys, as they like to do, indicating our time was up, he fell quiet. As I left the room he held his fist high and clenched as he always does. He is the embodiment of courage.</bq> <bq>Those who are the antithesis of Julian: in whom courage is unheard of, along with principle and honour, stand between him and freedom. I am not referring to the Mafia regime in Washington whose pursuit of a good man is meant as a warning to us all, but rather to those who still claim to run a just democracy in Australia.</bq> <bq>For Julian to remain in his cell at Belmarsh is an act of torture, as the United Nations Raporteur has called it. It is how a dictatorship behaves.’</bq> <bq>Today, Prime Minister Albanese is preparing this country for a ridiculous American-led war with China. Billions of dollars are to be spent on a war machine of submarines, fighter jets and missiles that can reach China. Salivating war mongering by ‘experts’ on the country’s oldest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Melbourne Age is a national embarrassment, or ought to be. Australia is a country with no enemies and China is its biggest trading partner.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/seymour-hersh-daniel-ellsberg-vietnam-war-intelligence-security-pentagon-papers/" source="Jacobin" author="Seymour Hersh">On Daniel Ellsberg, the Man Who Exposed the Pentagon Papers</a> <bq>He told the crowd that he hoped that “the truth will free us of this war.” And then, as he fought his way to the courthouse steps, a reporter asked him how he felt about going to prison. His response struck me then and still makes me tingle: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”</bq> <bq>He would talk about all the sealed and locked secret files of the Vietnam War that he could recall, with his photographic memory, in near perfect detail..</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=94826" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Frank Blenz">„Meckere nicht nur, mache es besser“ – Proteste in Frankreich und der Ärger über die Berichterstattung</a> <bq>Bei dem Vorhaben handelt es sich um eine fortwährende Enteignung und Demütigung der arbeitenden Bevölkerung, Nutznießer ist allein das Kapital. Der Klassenkampf nimmt Fahrt auf. Es ist der Kampf, der lange Zeit nicht von der Arbeiterklasse gewonnen wurde, was dazu führte, dass die Verteilungsgerechtigkeit ziemlich schlecht dasteht, dass Oben und Unten auseinanderdriften und die Umverteilung von Unten nach Oben Konjunktur hat.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/07/us-ambassador-arrogantly-lectures-china-threat-were-the-leader-in-this-region-asia/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ben Norton">US Ambassador Arrogantly Lectures China 'Threat': 'We're the Leader in This Region (Asia)!'</a> <bq>In an interview with the US Chamber of Commerce, Burns made very aggressive comments, going so far as to blame China for the coronavirus pandemic, claiming Beijing is not being “honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan, with the origin of the Covid-19 crisis”.</bq> This is the U.S. ambassador to Beijing. He has zero evidence of this and makes the claim anyway. This is American diplomacy today. <bq>He opened the discussion by approvingly quoting former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who declared, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future”.</bq> Disgusting arrogance. Completely unfounded and unhinged. <bq>He added: “I’ve had the honor to be in business. I’ve had the honor to be in the government. The reality is business and government need to work together; they need to have common agendas”.</bq> This is totally unlike China's dirty, filthy, communist state-capitalism though, right? Jesus, these people are so stupid---they actually believe their own bullshit. <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012348215" source="Antiwar.com" author="Ted Snider">The US Is in Conflict With Countries for Doing Things We Know They're Not Doing</a> <bq>And even if China did send a spy balloon over the US, the US knows that they do that to China every day. Three times a day actually. Retired Ambassador Chas Freeman, who accompanied Nixon to China in 1972, told me that the US “mount[s] about three reconnaissance missions a day by air or sea along China’s borders, staying just outside the 12-mile limit but alarming the Chinese, who routinely intercept our flights and protest our perceived provocations.”</bq> <bq>On February 13, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said “that the US had flown high-altitude balloons through its airspace more than 10 times since the start of 2022.” He went on to say that “US balloons regularly flew through other countries’ airspace without permission.”</bq> <bq>Cuba remains on the state sponsor of terrorism list though the US knows Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism. The Obama-Biden administration liberated them from the list, knowing that "the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism." The Biden administration locked them back in the list, knowing the same.</bq> <bq>the State Department has said that the negotiations with Iran are “not our focus right now.” Robert Malley, the top US diplomat for negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran said that "It is not on our agenda. . . . we are not going to waste our time on it." So, Iran continues to be the recipient of US sanctions, threats, assassinations and sabotage: all while the US knows Iran is not building a nuclear bomb.</bq> <bq>The 2022 US Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review makes the stunning admission that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon nor has it even made a decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. The Nuclear Posture Review makes that admission, not once, but twice, and it is repeated again in the National Defense Strategy in which it is included.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/israel-west-bank-settlements-violence-far-right-zionism-huwara-pogrom-apartheid/" source="Jacobin" author="Seraj Assi">This Is Exactly What Israeli Apartheid Looks Like</a> <bq>On February 26, a mob of hundreds of Israeli settlers rampaged through the West Bank village of Huwara, home to about seven thousand Palestinians, sowing terror and wreaking havoc. They chased residents with submachine guns and stabbed and assaulted others with metal rods and rocks. They set houses ablaze, broke doors and smashed windows, torched cars, burned stores, set fire to crops and trees, and killed sheep. Israeli soldiers stood by and watched. Eyewitnesses related that the army was there to protect and support the settlers. Relatives of a Palestinian man killed during the rampage said that he was shot by Israeli soldiers as the family struggled to defend themselves from the rioters.</bq> <bq>The Huwara attack was not an isolated episode. The rampage came days after Israeli forces invaded the West Bank city of Nablus, killing a dozen Palestinians and injuring over a hundred others. In February, Israeli military forces raided the city of Jericho, placed it under siege, and killed five Palestinians. In January, Israeli forces charged into the Jenin refugee camp and massacred ten Palestinians. So far this year, Israeli police, soldiers, and settlers have killed sixty-eight Palestinians.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-better-and-worse-angels-of-jimmy.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">The Better and Worse Angels of Jimmy Carter's Nature</a> <bq>[...] just look to Ronald Reagan if you don't believe me. That B-grade cowboy slung crack to grade school kids for rapists in Nicaragua and limp-wristed Bay area liberals are still tripping over the AIDS quilt to throw themselves sobbing on his casket.</bq> God, I am just so jealous sometimes of Reid's worth-smithery. They're just a worthy heir to Hunter S. Thompson, if I may say so. <bq>I have plenty of reverence for the dead, but nobody lights a candle for Hitler during Suicide Awareness Month. What the hell makes our monsters so fucking special? A cult of personality is a cult of personality</bq> <bq>While the Clintons would perform at a supper club for the Khmer Rouge if the price was right, Jimmy has spent the lion's share of his long retirement from power building houses for the Dollar Tree class and literally eradicating diseases in countries that Anderson Cooper couldn't even pronounce right with a goddamn Speak-and-Spell. The man will die in a one-story house he built with his own hands in a town even smaller and poorer than mine. I'm hard set to admit it but that motherfucker was a good ex-president.</bq> That's a pretty good pre-eulogy for Jimmy. <bq>While Jimmy may have spent the last four decades teaching Sunday school to pint-sized bumpkins, between 1977 and 1981 he spent four years dressing up an empire like Mr. Rogers and setting the stage for one of the most violent quarter-centuries in the storied history of its sick existence.</bq> <bq>You can quite literally thank Jimmy Carter for Al-Qaeda. During the early hours of his presidency, Jimmy conspired with his twisted Machiavellian little National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski to arm, train and organize some of the Muslim world's sickest lunatics to start a rampant garbage fire on the Soviet Union's southern border in Afghanistan for the express purpose of luring Moscow into burning itself alive stomping out the flames.</bq> <bq>The resulting fallout of the Carter Administration's midwifing of the Mujahedin speaks for itself. $3 billion US tax dollars, 1. 5 million Afghan lives, two Twin Towers, a partridge and a pear tree.</bq> I think they meant to write $3 trillion. <bq>Gamal Abdul Nasser would have shot Sadat himself if he were alive to witness this Noble Prize winning screwjob, the end result of which being a military dictatorship in Cairo that even the Arab Spring couldn't upset and the Nakba that never ends.</bq> <bq>Jimmy's most lasting response to this revolution was his establishment of the Carter Doctrine which officially made it a matter of public policy that the United States would treat any perceived threat to destabilize the Persian Gulf and its precious resources as a national security threat to be "repelled by any means necessary, including military force."</bq> <bq>While publicly condemning the increasingly gruesome crackdowns, documents released through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that the Carter Administration used the US Military's leadership over their joint command with the Korean Military to plan, lead and execute a colossal bloodbath with the hopes of avoiding a repeat of the Iranian Revolution. The Korean Army used American tanks to cordon off the city of Gwangju and after a 90-minute gun battle with the civilian militia organized by the protesters, these brave kids surrendered, the American trained Korean Special Forces known as the Black Berets invaded and the massacre began. Homes were raided, mass graves were dug at the edge of town and some two thousand of the bravest people America never knew simply ceased to exist.</bq> <bq>It's very tempting to believe that the better angels of Jimmy Carter's nature are simply part of a conspiracy to wash the blood from a callous killer's hands, but I honestly believe that the truth is far more complicated than that. Most of Jimmy's post-presidential actions don't seem designed for popular public fanfare. In fact, many of them have only provoked the ire of the manufactured consensus.</bq> <bq>All of this smacks of legitimate liberal guilt, attempts made by a man with a functioning conscience to redeem himself for the evils of his office and no single effort was more heroic or more thankless than the one Jimmy made in Pyongyang in 1994.</bq> <bq>While Jimmy's post-presidential actions in Korea were undeniably inspiring, the fact remains that he has also never apologized for the horrors of the Mujahedeen, Hosni Mubarak or the Black Berets. All I can really tell you for sure is that the office Jimmy served in required the actions of a psychopath and the hideous legacy of these actions requires a very sophisticated cult of personality to turn every servant of American power into a saint upon the hour of their death.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/lynching-the-deplorables" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Lynching the Deplorables</a> <bq>[...] that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.</bq> <bq>If somebody else from the other side gets in and starts to target the people who are in power now, their families, their businesses, their lives, their freedom, then it’s over. America goes from being a free democracy to a tribalist partisan state. Maybe there’s not ethnic-cleansing in the streets, but people are cleansing each other from the workplace, from social media, from the banking system and they’re putting people in jail. That’s where we’re headed. I don’t know why people can't see what’s on the horizon.”</bq> <bq>Daniel Ray Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran, who sprayed a chemical irritant at a group of police officers outside the Capitol and entered through the Senate Wing doors where he remained inside for approximately two minutes, was sentenced to more than five years in prison. He spent, like many who have been charged, nearly two years in pretrial detention.</bq> <bq>Ryan, whose most serious offense appears to be incendiary rhetoric calling for a “second American revolution,” spent nearly 22 months in solitary confinement. Depressed, struggling to cope with the physical and psychological strain of prolonged isolation, he was eventually placed on suicide watch. He was strapped to a bench in a room where a light was never turned off. Guards would periodically shout through a window “Do you feel like killing yourself?” Those on suicide watch who said “yes” remained strapped to the bench. Those who said “no” were sent back to their cells.</bq> <bq>“We are God-loving patriots,” she said. “Who’s going to be next? It’s not about Republican or Democrat or white or Black, Christian, or Muslim. We are all children of God. We are all U.S. American citizens. We are all entitled to our constitutional rights and freedom of speech. We can all come together and agree on that, right?”</bq> Sure, that sounds good. And it is absolutely correct. But I'm betting that that person is very much in the camp of some-people-are-more-entitled-than-others-but-I-don't-like-it-when-I'm-on-the-short-end-of-the-stick. <bq>The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/in-fbi-case-the-first-amendment-takes" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">In FBI Case, the First Amendment Takes Another Bizarre Hit</a> <bq>The style of the new anti-speech Democrat is clear: define all government critics as lacking standing to criticize, impugn their prior opinions and associations, imply that all their beliefs are conspiracy theory, define their lack of faith in the FBI’s judgment as treasonous, and declare their motivation to be financial. Lastly, when they invoke common constitutional rights, make a note that their activities exist in an uncovered carve-out. This is the playbook, and we all better get used to it.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up3-lOiO9L8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/up3-lOiO9L8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Empire Files / Abbie Martin" caption="CIA Stories: The Jakarta Method"> <bq>This was some of the most emotional territory that I covered while speaking to the people that lived through these mass-murder programs, speaking to people that lived through the third-world movement and how it was ultimately crushed. Because, when I would ask them about the third-world movement, and what they believed in the 50s and 60s that the world would be like now? Their eyes would light up and they would tell you this story about what they believed to be natural and obvious, that OK, well, formal colonization is over. We're going to take our rightful place alongside the first world. We're going to create a new global order, which is more just, more based on solidarity, less exploitative. We're no longer even going to be a country that just ships natural resources for rich people in the global north to use and throw in the trash. And they really believed it---and it was clear that it was something that they believed---you could see them get excited just thinking about it again. And, so, that is, I think what is most important about this investigation, what I try to drive home in the book: is that lots of other worlds were possible. The people that were building those worlds believed that they were coming and it was through a very specific type of intervention that these worlds were crushed. I mean, I also say that the third-world movement was trying to do something very, very difficult. There were going to be problems. There were going to be contradictions. It was going to be difficult to reformulate the global system in this way. It certainly did not help to have the most powerful country in human history violently crushing what you were trying to do. [...] Other global systems are possible, which are not built through anti-democratic violence, which are not built through crushing movements which seek to build alliances across the global south and build a more just global order.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-can-my-parents-use-this-thing" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">The “can my parents use this thing right now” test</a> <bq>There are already fully-AI streams on Twitch. Users on dating apps are using AIs to talk to each other. And I think, very shortly, the majority of content on TikTok and Instagram will either be AI generations meant to game ad revenue automations or users communicating through so much AI filtering that they might as well be.</bq> <bq>Simply put, every new era of technology is eventually beaten down by market forces into the recognizable shape of the previous. In 2010s, the internet became television. And so, I think it’s reasonable to assume that in the 2020s, thanks to generative AI, the internet will become one big personalized web portal. A place that feels “alive” but is actually completely walled off from other human beings.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/breeding-dogs-to-be-cute-and-anthropomorphic-is-animal-cruelty" source="Aeon" author="Jessica Pierce">Where went the wolf?</a> <bq>We’ve normalised hip dysplasia and dislocated kneecaps. We’ve normalised physical malformations, abnormal postures, and strange gaits. A pug in a ‘lazy’ sit with legs out to the side, not under the bum, doesn’t sit that way to be cute in his Instagram photo; he sits that way because it hurts to sit like a normal dog.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w#Sec12" author="Steve Rathje, Jon Roozenbeek, Jay J. Van Bavel & Sander van der Linden" source="Nature">Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information</a> <bq>Replicating prior work, conservatives were less accurate at discerning true from false headlines than liberals, yet incentives closed the gap in accuracy between conservatives and liberals by 52%. A non-financial accuracy motivation intervention was also effective, suggesting that motivation-based interventions are scalable. Altogether, these results suggest that a substantial portion of people’s judgements of the accuracy of news reflects motivational factors.</bq> There are further details, though, which shows that the gap between the ability to determine veracity is really only 18% higher (10.93 vs. 9.26). <bq>Misinformation—which can refer to fabricated news stories, false rumours, conspiracy theories or disinformation—can have serious negative effects on society and democracy. Misinformation exposure can reduce support for climate change or lead to vaccine hesitancy, and the mere repetition of misinformation can increase belief in it. There has thus been a growing interest in understanding the psychology of belief in misinformation and how to mitigate its spread [...]</bq> All true, but I'm absolutely dying to know which headlines and articles they used in this study to establish the participants' ability to establish veracity. Were liberals just better at determining what their establishment had already determined to be true? Like, were there Russiagate headlines in there? Were they rewarded for pointing out true things that had been sanctified by the establishment but that aren't actually true? I'm just wondering because I just watched a 5-minute video in which a journalist was harangued by a Congressperson to confirm that he agreed that Russiagate happened---even though the near-absolute preponderance of evidence says that it does not. Russia did not even come to close to having an effect on the outcome of the 2016 election, though it is suspected---though not proven---that they probably tried, at least a little bit. So did Israel, whose influence was orders or magnitude larger. That's not the point, though. The point is that a liberal who would have confirmed the veracity of an article about Russiagate would have gotten full points for recognizing the "truth", but it's not actually true. I wonder how they controlled for this---or whether they even tried. I wonder, for example, if they made the distinction between technically true, but misleading and just outright false. Like, they mention one of the priming headlines to be <iq>Facebook removes Trump ads with symbols once used by Nazis</iq>, which they note is "true". But it's technically true that Facebook did remove Trump ads which they said had symbols once used by Nazis, but is it also true that Trump (or his campaign) knowingly included those symbols as dog whistles to his racist and Nazi supporters, as the article is strongly suggesting? Which part of the truth are they talking about? Would they also have rated the headline "rumors about Trump being a pedophile are questionable" as technically true, even if the article was chock-full of allegations of Trump's malfeasance that they "undo" in the final paragraph? I now see on page 15 of the <a href="">supplemental materials</a>, <a href="https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41562-023-01540-w/MediaObjects/41562_2023_1540_MOESM1_ESM.pdf">Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information</a> (S3: Headline-Level Analysis) that the subjects were shown only the headlines and asked to form their opinion of veracity based only on that. Interesting---and probably representative of how people actually consume and "read" news---but a weaker thesis than I'd originally imagined. I suppose if the incentive is to get people to stop sharing stupid things, you can nip it in the bud by figuring out how to stop the deluge of headline-readers-then-sharers. The headlines, whether they're "true" or not, and their sources, are shown in the screenshot below. <img src="{att_link}image_(1).jpg" href="{att_link}image_(1).jpg" align="none" caption="Sample true-or-false headlines" scale="75%"> <bq>Replicating prior work26,27,28,29,30,31, conservatives were worse at discerning between true and false headlines than liberals. Conservatives answered about 9.26 (out of 16) questions correctly when not incentivized to be accurate, and liberals answered 10.93 questions out of 16 correctly when unincentivized—a 1.67-point difference, 95% CI 1.41–1.94, t(1035.69) = 12.53, P < 0.001, d = 0.77. However, when conservatives were incentivized to be accurate, they answered 10.12 questions correctly, making the gap between incentivized conservatives and unincentivized liberals 0.81 points, 95% CI 0.53–1.09, t(951.91) = 5.65, P < 0.001, d = 0.35. In other words, paying conservatives less than a dollar to correctly identify news headlines as true or false reduced the gap in performance between conservatives and (unincentivized) liberals by 51.50%.</bq> I don't want to detract from the result, though: apparently, if people are remunerated for restraining their baser instincts, they seem to ask more in-line with ethical, thinking, logical beings. This is pretty good news. I'm just not sure how we're going to be able to pay people to read the news. <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://quillette.com/2023/02/28/words-are-the-only-victors/" source="Quillette" author="Christian Kriticos">Words Are the Only Victors</a> <bq>But Rushdie has spoken out, not letting those who called for his death get away with it—from Cat Stevens, the singer-songwriter who said that if Rushdie turned up on his doorstep “I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is”; to the British government, which recommended Iqbal Sacranie, who served on the Muslim Council of Britain, for a knighthood (which he received), despite his assertion that “Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for [Rushdie].”</bq> <bq>In 2015, Rushdie was damning in his response to six authors who objected to PEN America, a free speech organisation, presenting an award to the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, after 12 people were killed by Islamic extremists who were offended by cartoons published in the magazine. Peter Carey, one of the six authors, stated that he objected to “PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognise its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” Rushdie’s response was scathing: “If PEN as a free speech organisation can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organisation is not worth the name.” Of the objecting authors, he added: “I hope nobody ever comes after them.”</bq> <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/the-real-deal-tom-sizemore-1961-2023" source="Roger Ebert.com" author="Scout Tafoya">The Real Deal: Tom Sizemore (1961-2023)</a> <bq>[...] people aren’t simple, artists least of all. They break your heart, they abuse their power, they make you forget how talented they can be. It was a shame to see Sizemore succumb to his demons. It was a tragedy when he had the stroke that wound up killing him. It is dreadful that we’ll never see a new Tom Sizemore performance in a movie worthy of his talent. And it is one of the everyday disappointments of life in the 21st century that losing a great actor can’t be as simple as grieving a nice boy from Detroit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/sergei-prokofiev-seventieth-anniversary-death-modernism-music-ussr-stalin/" source="Jacobin" author="Simon Behrman">Sergei Prokofiev Was One of the Soviet Union’s Great Composers</a> <bq>The Piano Concerto No. 2 (1912/1923) contains a fiendishly difficult scherzo, in which the pianist has to maintain an uninterrupted and fast-paced series of runs, chased by “whoops” from the orchestra. This sense of musical fun and adventure is one of the most attractive elements in his music.</bq> <bq>Satirical and grotesque elements were a feature of much art that followed the Russian Revolution, expressing perhaps the confidence that followed the comprehensive overthrow of a backward and autocratic regime. One can hear this in the music of Shostakovich, and it was also a distinctive feature in the writings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the duo Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, and the radical theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold.</bq> <bq>On the other hand, the Lieutenant Kije Suite is one of the most enjoyable pieces I know, and yet it has great pathos, too. The opening moments, with a haunting solo trumpet followed swiftly by a light march, set the whole tone of the piece. It ends with that same solo trumpet melody, rather than the expected big bang.</bq> <bq>Alexander Nevsky is often thrilling, especially in the music for the battle on the ice between the title character’s army and the Teutonic invaders.</bq> <bq>Prokofiev continued to be much more challenging and musically adventurous in smaller-scale works, such as his Violin Sonata No. 1 (1938). This is especially the case in the sixth, seventh, and eighth piano sonatas (1939–44), which are collectively known as the War Sonatas. These are pieces that are tremendously challenging for even the greatest pianists — not just technically, but also musically in capturing subtle shifts in feeling.</bq> <bq>Prokofiev’s work stands, together with that of Shostakovich, as the pinnacle of music in the USSR. His detachment in terms of emotion and politics means that his music does not express all the hopes and despair of the Soviet experiment in the way that Shostakovich’s does, nor does it as often reach the same emotional depths. But, technically, he was perhaps the better composer.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/14/problem-child/" author="Mr. Fish" source="Scheer Post">Problem Child</a> <img src="{att_link}image.jpg" href="{att_link}image.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <bq>"None of this is going to help you get into college, Timmy, let alone help you find a real job after college. I mean, listen to this: Art, jazz band, honors English, philosophy, plus four years of being a journalist on the school paper -are you shitting me? Everybody knows that the only sectors that have been hiring anybody for the last 70 years are the ones that ENABLE doomsday and your interests seem only focused on wanting to divert it."</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kelly-bets-on-civilization" source="Astral Codex Ten" author="Scott Alexander">Kelly Bets On Civilization</a> <bq>[...] by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn’t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren’t saving the human future; they were destroying it.</bq> <bq>[...] our fear of a tiny handful of deaths from unethical science has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from delaying ethical and life-saving medical progress.</bq> <bq>[...] we hoped to prevent harm by subjecting all new construction to a host of different reviews - environmental, cultural, equity-related - and instead we caused vast harm by creating an epidemic of homelessness and forcing the middle classes to spend increasingly unaffordable sums on rent.</bq> No no no. Switzerland has regulations and affordable housing. It is capitalism, the profit motive, commercialization of everything, and treating housing as a speculative asset in particular, that is the problem. When the profit motive is the only incentive, you necessarily end up with only the already-existing rich and elite being able to afford anything. You actively need to additionally incentivize serving the poor. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/some-reasons-why-smartphones-might" source="SubStack" author="Freddie deBoer">Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed</a> <bq>Many people have lamented the loss of communal bonds as described in texts like Bowling Alone. It can’t help matters only that digital tools allow us to derive what we need from others in material terms without actually getting to know them.</bq> <bq>But only human connection is human connection. There is no substitute for IRL. And I think our adolescents are bearing the brunt of a vast social experiment where we did try to substitute something else for face-to-face interaction, and found it didn’t work.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/cultural-recursion" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">Cultural Recursion</a> <bq>The men reasoned that while there is no conceivable way to retrieve the stone from the ocean, or even to see it again, one may nonetheless be certain that it is still down there, and that it retains whatever value it had before it sank. Therefore, it can continue to be traded indefinitely between willing parties, just like any other rai stone. It doesn’t really matter if the stone is still in our direct possession or not. In fact, some may have realized, keeping it at the bottom of the ocean is much preferable: it is after all very heavy, and transporting it from buyer to seller for each new exchange is a terrible ordeal.</bq> <bq>[...] we also have to ask what sustains the value of the stately greenback. What we find, mostly, are carefully positioned gunboats protecting maritime shipping routes, and somber-looking men regularly attesting to the legitimacy of this arrangement — but these attestations are speech acts, making the thing they are claiming true; they are not straightforward descriptions of what is already true independently of our affirmations.</bq> <bq>[...] already experience multiple “I can’t do that, Dave” moments every single day, and it is precisely the absence of any conscious awareness on the part of the machines that ensures that I will have to submit to them utterly, hopelessly, dissolving my own humanity before them like a defeated emperor ceremonially relinquishing his divine-right status in front of his vanquishers.</bq> <bq>One company tells me it can’t send a security code as a text to my cellphone, since my new US number is associated to a VOIP. I don’t know what a VOIP is (or didn’t know; now I do), let alone why my phone, which I thought was just a regular phone when I chose my new contract, is of this sort. Soon enough my whole morning has passed in whichever circle of hell this is. Nothing has been accomplished. I am beaten. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this. I fear that soon enough I am simply going to stop trying to accomplish anything at all.</bq> <bq>[...] the only work left for any of us is the work of resetting passwords, clicking boats, maintaining the “personal information” in the dozens of portals and profiles we now have to manage. Some other people, particularly younger people, seem not to find all of this so onerous. I feel like I’m being buried alive, and I wonder why the protests against this new form of life have not reached a fever pitch already.</bq> <bq>I dread the thought of a future in which I need regular medical care, prescriptions filled daily, etc. My mother, who is at present in just this situation, seems to have accepted as a sort of full-time job the work of being put on hold, being transferred, downloading apps for “easier” refills, etc. I am not sure I will have the resolve to accept such work as this. The moment that [that] is the only form of life available to me might well be the moment I say: Enough.</bq> <bq>Today you have only to imagine a commercial product in order to assure yourself that it probably exists out there somewhere. This is akin to divinity, where to think something, we used to suppose, was tantamount to generating it.</bq> <bq>We are, rather, I think, to return to the first of the three examples of “historical dark energy” I evoked above, continuing on in our poorly fortified cities as if everything were the same as before, with only vague and confused awareness of the gathering threat.</bq> <bq>have heard, for example, The Cardigans’ sweet and innocuous 1996 tune, “Lovefool”, redone with our present era’s overlay of nauseating auto-tune. Whoever is consuming this remake is plainly not interested in sharing with the listeners a mutual love of Nina Persson’s songwriting talents. The relationship to the original is rather more like that of a misspelled knock-off Versace shirt that you might find on a tractor-driver in Xinjiang [...]</bq> <bq>Netflix, of course, is at the very vanguard of our cultural transition from art —or any aspiration to such a status— to “content”, which is to say the shift to production of derivative objects that continue to have the quality of “aboutness” that we attributed to artworks for the past several millennia, but that are no longer produced in the aim of presentation to spectators capable of apprehending the aboutness of anything.</bq> <bq>What justifies the description I have given of this phenomenon, as “cultural recursion”, rather than as mere autophagy, is that it has no obvious end. Pop will not simply eat itself, and then rest. It will find ever new depths of unlistenability to feed from, new possibilities for recombination of older intellectual properties that no one remembers or cared about in the first place, and recombination of those recombinations. Music will take on ever more the character of the bootleg shirt, the tchotchke in the close-out bin at T. J. Maxx, the Super Bowl souvenirs for the losing team that have been discarded in the remotest corners of the developing world.</bq> <bq>Let the airwaves and the feeds be overrun by whimpering auto-tuned eunuchs and forgettable corporate-managed ephebes; I’ve still got my six strings and my imagination. But as for writing, well, I’m afraid I have to be heard in order for it to count as writing at all. And I feel I am in no better position to compete with the machines than anyone else.</bq> Oh, I have enough hubris to believe that I do. Here, I am luckier. I know no-one's reading me and it doesn't interrupt my flow at all. I write for my future self and, luckily, happily, that seems to be enough. I will John Henry the shit out of this, I think. Beat the machines, or dye tryin'. <bq>This is compatible with the view, which I also hold, that we are all, deep down, fundamentally equal, and what come across as differences of aptitude are really just differences of inclination. A just society would allow people the freedom to discover what their inclinations are, and subsequently to lead a good, materially comfortable life in pursuing them.</bq> I agree with the second bit, but the first bit is a muddle. We are not equal in ability. Aligning effort with inclination helps, but only so much. You cannot overcome a dearth of ability, no more in intellectual endeavors than you can in physical ones. I can't run a four-minute mile because I'm short and too old, not because I'm not inclined to. Other people can't write three sentences inside of a day, not because they lack intent, but because they either lack the innate ability to do so or lack whatever intellectual aspects allow one to acquire or train such abilities. <hr> <a href="https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html" author="Jerry Pournelle" source="Chaos Manor Special Reports">The Iron Law of Bureaucracy</a> <bq>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":<ol>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.</ol>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-computers-wont-make-themselves-smarter" source="New Yorker" author="Ted Chiang">Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter</a> <bq>Do we have any reason to think that this is the way intelligence works? I don’t believe that we do. For example, there are plenty of people who have I.Q.s of 130, and there’s a smaller number of people who have I.Q.s of 160. None of them have been able to increase the intelligence of someone with an I.Q. of 70 to 100, which is implied to be an easier task.</bq> This is an interesting argument. On the one hand, it doesn't hold up as a strict analogy because an AI is created, whereas the human mind is ineffable. An AI is presumed to be "more effable". That isn't strictly true, though, is it? We already don't really know how a neural net specifically does what it does. That is, we only have broad rules of thumb for tweaking these creations---and cannot explain why they do what they do. So, perhaps looking at the only other intelligent systems around---and the degree to which they're able to influence one another---is eminently useful and applicable. <bq>If increasing someone’s I.Q. were an activity like solving a set of math puzzles, we ought to see successful examples of it at the low end, where the problems are easier to solve. But we don’t see strong evidence of that happening.</bq> <bq>[...] it’s entirely possible that the best that a person with an I.Q. of 300 can do is increase another person’s I.Q. to 200. That would allow one person with an I.Q. of 300 to grant everyone around them an I.Q. of 200, which frankly would be an amazing accomplishment. But that would still leave us at a plateau; there would be no recursive self-improvement and no intelligence explosion.</bq> <bq>The I.B.M. research engineer Emerson Pugh is credited with saying “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”</bq> This is kind of what Wolfram is saying with his argument that maybe human language is simpler than we thought. <bq>The human brain is estimated to have eighty-six billion neurons on average, and we will probably need most of them to comprehend what’s going on in C. elegans’s three hundred and two; this ratio doesn’t bode well for our prospects of understanding what’s going on within ourselves.</bq> <bq>But CompilerOne itself still takes a long time to run, because it’s a product of CompilerZero. What can you do? You can use CompilerOne to compile itself. You feed CompilerOne its own source code, and it generates a new executable file consisting of more efficient machine code. Call this CompilerTwo. CompilerTwo also generates programs that run very quickly, but it has the added advantage of running very quickly itself. Congratulations—you have written a self-improving computer program. But this is as far as it goes. If you feed the same source code into CompilerTwo, all it does is generate another copy of CompilerTwo. It cannot create a CompilerThree and initiate an escalating series of ever-better compilers.</bq> <bq>Human programmers sometimes hand-optimize sections of a program, meaning that they specify the machine instructions directly; the humans can write machine code that’s more efficient than what a compiler generates, because they know more about what the program is supposed to do than the compiler does.</bq> Well, more like the high-level languages lack the expressiveness to formulate these needs to the compiler. It's possible that we'll hit a limit on being able to express these things, but for now, there's still room to improve. <bq>[...] the idea of an intelligence explosion implies that there is essentially no limit to the extent of optimization that can be achieved. This is a very strong claim. If someone is asserting that infinite optimization for generality is possible, I’d like to see some arguments besides citing examples of optimization for specialized tasks.</bq> <bq>The critics of Anselm’s ontological argument aren’t trying to prove that there is no God; they’re just saying that Anselm’s argument doesn’t constitute a good reason to believe that God exists. Similarly, a definition of an “ultraintelligent machine” is not sufficient reason to think that we can construct such a device.</bq> <bq>[...] if you’re competing in a multiplication contest, Arabic numerals provide you with an advantage. But I wouldn’t say that someone using Arabic numerals is smarter than someone using Roman numerals.</bq> <bq>Consider the study of DNA as an example. James Watson and Francis Crick were both active for decades after publishing, in 1953, their paper on the structure of DNA, but none of the major breakthroughs subsequently achieved in DNA research were made by them. They didn’t invent techniques for DNA sequencing; someone else did. They didn’t develop the polymerase chain reaction that made DNA synthesis affordable; someone else did. This is in no way an insult to Watson and Crick. It just means that if you had A.I. versions of them and ran them at a hundred times normal speed, you probably wouldn’t get results as good as what we obtained with molecular biologists around the world studying DNA. Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation; scientists draw from the work of other scientists.</bq> <bq>We’re a long way off from being able to create a single human-equivalent A.I., let alone billions of them. For the foreseeable future, the ongoing technological explosion will be driven by humans using previously invented tools to invent new ones; there won’t be a “last invention that man need ever make.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html" source="New York Magazine / Intelligencer" author="Elizabeth Weil">You Are Not a Parrot</a> <bq>We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text,” Bender told me when we met this winter. “But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.”</bq> <bq>This leaves few people with the expertise and authority to say, “Wait, why are these companies blurring the distinction between what is human and what’s a language model? Is this what we want?”</bq> <bq>The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet. (It can’t include, say, e-book copies of everything in the Stanford library, as books are protected by copyright law.) The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people. They overrepresent men. They overrepresent wealth. What’s more, we all know what’s out there on the internet: vast swamps of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism.</bq> <ol> No, of course it includes copyrighted text. How would you ever prove otherwise? Yes to all of those immanent biases. All badness has been artificially elided by a Kenyan slave army. That bias is also immanent. </ol> <bq>In March 2021, Bender published “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” with three co-authors. After the paper came out, two of the co-authors, both women, lost their jobs as co-leads of Google’s Ethical AI team. The controversy around it solidified Bender’s position as the go-to linguist in arguing against AI boosterism.</bq> <bq>“On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” is not a write-up of original research. It’s a synthesis of LLM critiques that Bender and others have made: of the biases encoded in the models; the near impossibility of studying what’s in the training data, given the fact they can contain billions of words; the costs to the climate; the problems with building technology that freezes language in time and thus locks in the problems of the past.</bq> <bq>“We are a few years in,” Altman wrote of the cyborg merge in 2017. “It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate … and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast.”</bq> I fucking hate all of these people. I already hated Sam Altman when people couldn't shut up about how great and smart he was at YCombinator and now that I see he's heading up OpenAI, I'm even more suspicious that he's blowing smoke up our collective asses. Because that's what these people do. They scam and scam and scam. They don't care about any other ramifications as long as one of those ramifications is that they make sick amounts of money. I don't even care whether they believe their own bullshit. It doesn't matter for the end result, which is that they scam tons of money out of armies of rubes. The hype serves them. And people hype for free. <bq>People saying, ‘Well, people are just stochastic parrots,’” she said. “People want to believe so badly that these language models are actually intelligent that they’re willing to take themselves as a point of reference and devalue that to match what the language model can do.”</bq> In fairness, many people probably don't have a ton of devaluing to do. Meeting the model halfway is going to be pretty easy for a populace that was already willing to be dumbed down by sitcom TV, reality TV, Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok. <bq>Strong computer-science and AI schools “end up having a really close relationship with the big tech companies.”</bq> He might just as well have quote Frito Lay from Idiocracy: "I like money." <bq>In a recent paper, he proposed the term distributional semantics : “The meaning of a word is simply a description of the contexts in which it appears.” (When I asked Manning how he defines meaning, he said, “Honestly, I think that’s difficult.”)</bq> That sounds just like the finance guys in Oecomania, who had no idea how the central tenets of their profession works. They were just flabbergasted that anyone would even ask about whether what they were doing was worthwhile, or noteworthy, or ethical, or otherwise societally useful---because they'd only thought the thing through as far it took them to notice that they were make a shit-ton of money for doing practically nothing strenuous. They're all just full of shit, trying to keep the hype machine going so that we can "progress", for very limited definitions of the word "progress" (again, there is always a mysteriously recurring correlation between what is considered progress and what makes a lot of money for existing elites). <bq>Bender has no financial stake. Without one, it’s easier to urge slow, careful deliberation, before launching products. It’s easier to ask how this technology will impact people and in what way those impacts might be bad. “I feel like there’s too much effort trying to create autonomous machines,” Bender said, “rather than trying to create machines that are useful tools for humans.”</bq> <bq>He makes the same argument that has drawn effective altruists to AI: If we don’t do this, someone else will do it worse “because, you know, there are other players who are more out there who feel less morally bound.”</bq> Hahahaha they always assume they're the genius good guys, the ones who will do it right, that they're the ones who are morally bound when they're actually the original scammers. They set the bar super-low, then soar over it, then pat themselves on the back. It's a funny old world. <bq>“there’s basically no chance of sensible regulation emerging anytime soon. Actually, China is doing more in terms of regulation than the U.S. is.”</bq> <bq>She then spoke at length about the problems of the computational metaphor, one of the most important metaphors in all of science: the idea that the human brain is a computer, and a computer is a human brain. This notion, she said, quoting Alexis T. Baria and Keith Cross’s 2021 paper, affords “the human mind less complexity than is owed, and the computer more wisdom than is due.”</bq> <bq>She argued from first principles. “I think that there is a certain moral respect accorded to anyone who’s human by virtue of being human,” she said. “We see a lot of things going wrong in our present world that have to do with not according humanity to humans.”</bq> <bq>“No wonder that men who live day in and day out with machines to which they believe themselves to have become slaves begin to believe that men are machines.”</bq> <bq>The echoes of the climate crisis are unmistakable. We knew many decades ago about the dangers and, goosed along by capitalism and the desires of a powerful few, proceeded regardless. Who doesn’t want to zip to Paris or Hanalei for the weekend, especially if the best PR teams in the world have told you this is the ultimate prize in life?</bq> <bq>Others, like Dennett, the philosopher of mind, are even more blunt. We can’t live in a world with what he calls “counterfeit people.” “Counterfeit money has been seen as vandalism against society ever since money has existed,” he said. “Punishments included the death penalty and being drawn and quartered. Counterfeit people is at least as serious.”</bq> <bq>“There’s a narcissism that reemerges in the AI dream that we are going to prove that everything we thought was distinctively human can actually be accomplished by machines and accomplished better,” Judith Butler, founding director of the critical-theory program at UC Berkeley, told me,</bq> It's pushed by billionaire sociopaths who are capable of feeling only through technology. They have nothing to lose when being an emotional, loving human is devalued. <bq>We can’t have people eager to separate “human, the biological category, from a person or a unit worthy of moral respect.” Because then we have a world in which grown men, sipping tea, posit thought experiments about raping talking sex dolls, thinking that maybe you are one too.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/bidens-fcc-pick-withdraws-regrets-that-isps-get-to-choose-their-regulators/" author="Jon Brodkin" source="Ars Technica">Biden FCC nominee withdraws, blaming cable lobby and “unlimited dark money“</a> <bq>President Biden's nominee to the open seat on the Federal Communications Commission, Gigi Sohn, withdrew her nomination today. "When I accepted his nomination over sixteen months ago, I could not have imagined that legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought-and-paid-for surrogates, and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets would distort my over 30-year history as a consumer advocate into an absurd caricature of blatant lies," Sohn said in a statement provided to Ars and other media organizations. Sohn's nomination was "met with homophobic tropes and attacks against herself and her family," a recent letter from advocacy groups to senators said. Sohn's statement said that "unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks on my character and my career as an advocate for the public interest have taken an enormous toll on me and my family." "It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries, with assistance from unlimited dark money, get to choose their regulators. And with the help of their friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that," Sohn also said.</bq> What an absolute shit-show. The FCC has been leaderless for Biden's entire presidency. The media companies are riding high and can what they want. They just managed to torpedo a good nominee. <bq>"I believe deeply that regulated entities should not choose their regulator," Sohn said during the confirmation hearing. "Unfortunately, that is the exact intent of the past 15 months of false and misleading attacks on my record and my character."</bq> File that under obvious things that are so obvious but are apparently also untrue in the U.S. Late-stage capitalism, indeed. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/security-researchers-are-again-in-the-crosshairs-of-north-korean-hackers/" author="Dan Goodin" source="Ars Technica">North Korean hackers target security researchers with a new backdoor</a> I didn't even read this particular article---because they're all pretty much the same---but the title made me wonder whether there's an Ars Technica in North Korea or China that publishes headlines like U.S. hackers target security researchers with a new backdoor. There must be, right? Per capita, Israel probably has the most hackers, but the U.S. has the most hacking by far. We only ever hear about China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran, but ... then we would only hear about their hacking, right? They are the official enemies. You're not going to hear about a hacking team from Mozambique because it does nothing to support the narrative. Nor will you hear about the U.S.'s prodigious hacking efforts, not only because it doesn't support the narrative, but because it actively undermines it. Hacking is bad, and the U.S. is unequivocally good. That's why Edward Snowden lives in Russia, and Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale languish in prison. <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/resonsible" author="Zach Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Responsible</a> <img src="{att_link}1678380068-20230309.jpg" href="{att_link}1678380068-20230309.jpg" align="none" scale="75%"> <bq>The offloading of life choices to machines asked to dispassionately calculate the most efficient path will decay every human being's competence at moral reasoning. so that one day when some person is called upon to make a choice to launch the missiles or not they will no longer have the ability to form an internal debate between duty and justice.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-272-of-79455760" source="Patreon" author="TrueAnon">Episode 272: Cries of the Machines</a> A brilliant episode examining how the Internet already sucked incredibly hard because of automation and machine-learning---even before the LLMs arrived. There is no conceivable benefit to these so-called AIs that will in any way compensate for the sheer waste that they will lay to human comprehension. <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/16/gpt4-scraping/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Quoting Me</a> <bq>Might need to dust off all of those old semantic web dreams, because the world’s information is rapidly becoming fully machine readable.</bq> I'm reminded of Ted Chiang's recent article about any LLM-based so-called AI being only a blurry JPG of the Internet. That is, it gets a slice of human experience, converts it to a matrix, then weights a neural net that "knows" how to traverse this matrix. Not only does the thing have no idea what it's looking at, not only does it not have any context, not only is it incapable of making extrapolations, but it's also working with a compressed version. Of course, so are we, for the most part. We have far less information at our fingertips, and our memory is notoriously spotty, so maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge along this axis. However, the lack of any context or world-model against which to compare "ideas" is really the killer here. I think it's not really going to work to extract intent from content. I think it will work for some content---and will probably work really well for easily classifiable so-called information---but for the important bits, it won't. As long as it's telling you something you already kind-of know, you can judge whether it's doing a good job. If you don't know, then you'll just accept its answer. It's what most people are already doing all the time, because most people don't really understand anything anyway. I have a hesitancy to accepting the beginning of AI's reign because I never accepted any source and unquestionably canonical. I don't have any trouble writing code or refactoring quickly or quickly looking things up or quickly learning from multiple references or expressing my thoughts cogently either orally or in writing. I don't have much use for a machine that purports to improve my output in that regard, but will only be able to increase the output, but will decrease the quality. We will end up with machines that infer context for us. They will be de-facto correct in their inference because we have either already lost all capability to judge whether it's doing a good job---or we soon will. I've been saying this for a while: part of the age of so-called LLM AIs will involve us happily and chirpily and utterly lazily dropping our intellectual standards in order to meet the machines halfway. I hope that people quickly realize that we've only built a much-better search engine. As with all other social media, we see only the AI's successes highlighted, never its plethora of embarrassingly bad answers that we ascribe to insufficiently cleverly written prompts. I also can't help thinking how beneficial it is for OpenAI to have an army of people only who are completely uncritical, even fawning, and who highlight only the good stuff. It's a giant, free marketing campaign. It must be great for their bottom line. <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2023/03/09/2023-03-09-Comment-or-no-comment.html" source="" author="Drew Devault">When to comment that code</a> <bq>Each comment is written considering a target audience and the context provided by the code in which it resides, and aims to avoid stating redundant information within these conditions. It’s for this reason that my code is sparse on comments: I find the information outside of the comments equally important and aim to be concise such that a comment is not redundant with information found elsewhere.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages" source="Discord Blog" author="Bo Ingram">How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages</a> <bq>Although ScyllaDB is most definitely not void of issues, it is void of a garbage collector, since it’s written in C++ rather than Java.</bq> There are Gcs for C++. It is absolutely not given that a C++ program doesn't have a garbage collector. <bq>This is the power of Rust in action: it made it easy to write safe concurrent code.</bq> As if no other language supports this. Meme-cred indeed. <bq>It’s a much more efficient database — we’re going from running 177 Cassandra nodes to just 72 ScyllaDB nodes. Each ScyllaDB node has 9 TB of disk space, up from the average of 4 TB per Cassandra node. Our tail latencies have also improved drastically. For example, fetching historical messages had a p99 of between 40-125ms on Cassandra, with ScyllaDB having a nice and chill 15ms p99 latency [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/" source="ZackOverflow" author="">When Zig is safer and faster than Rust</a> <bq>Writing a substantial amount of unsafe Rust really sucks the beauty out of the language. I felt like I was either tiptoeing through this broken glass of undefined behaviour, or I was writing in this weird half-Rust/half-C mutated abomination of a language. The whole point of Rust is to use the borrow checker, but when you frequently need to do something the borrow checker doesn’t like… should you really be using the language? That aspect of Rust doesn’t seem to be talked about enough when people compare Rust vs. Zig, and definitely should be considered if you’re going to be doing memory-unsafe things for performance.</bq> <bq>The following list is not exhaustive. There is no formal model of Rust’s semantics for what is and is not allowed in unsafe code, so there may be more behavior considered unsafe. The following list is just what we know for sure is undefined behavior.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2023/03/06/warnings-as-errors-friction/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">Warnings-as-errors friction</a> <bq>When I work alone, I don't allow warnings to build up. I rarely tell the compiler to treat warnings as errors in my personal code bases. There's no need. I have zero tolerance for compiler warnings, and I do spot them. If you have a team that never allows compiler warnings to accumulate, is there any reason to treat them as errors? Probably not.</bq> <bq>Does treating warnings as errors imply TDD friction? It certainly looks that way. Is it worth it, nonetheless? Possibly. It depends on why you need to turn warnings into errors in the first place. In some settings, the benefits of treating warnings as errors may be greater than the cost. If that's the only way you can keep compiler warnings down, then do treat warnings as errors. Such a situation, however, is likely to be a symptom of a more fundamental mindset problem. This almost sounds like a moral judgement, I realise, but that's not my intent. Mindset is shaped by personal preference, but also by organisational and peer pressure, as well as knowledge. If you only know of one way to achieve a goal, you have no choice. Only if you know of more than one way can you choose. Choose the way that leaves the code simpler than the other.</bq> This has long been my opinion: turn on tools locally that improve how efficiently you can write good software. Code-completion, code-style-checking, even AI-assist (why not? Maybe it has a good idea that you can massage into something useful)---all of these things are fast and don't interrupt the developer feedback loop. Warnings as errors is a pain because it slows down your developer loop by making you fix warnings in code that you're not even done writing yet. Of course you should keep an eye on warnings: some of them are super-useful! But many warnings are about style rather than substance. They are about maintenance issues---medium- and long-term stuff---that doesn't apply to code that has barely even begun to exist at all. If you have a parenthesis on the wrong line, you should be able to fix it by saving the file. If you can't do that, then you should have to fix it at some point soon, but not before you've even submitted the code for merging into anything else that someone might see. A reviewer may ask you to clean up the code first. That's legitimate. Or you could have CI clean up the code. At the very latest, CI should fail if there are warnings. That will help keep warnings down. But there's no reason to make you keep warnings at zero while you are coding. That's a waste of time. Think about which checks you're doing and when you need to do them. What is the earliest point at which they are more useful than harmful? This is why I turn off type-checking in the TypeScript transpiler: the IDE is already doing all of the checking for me. I don't need it to yell at me again for errors that don't impede how my code runs. Of course, I fix all warnings and errors before pushing or asking for a review---but there's no reason to force me to do this earlier than I want to. I should be able to strike a balance of what is useful to me as I'm writing code. There are those who would argue that we need to impose discipline with tools all the way down---but, as Seemann wrote, you're just patching a deeper flaw: that you don't trust your team to work efficiently. You can recommend paying attention to certain warnings more frequently. You can recommend that people write tests as they write their code. But they should come to these conclusions because they see the benefit, not because you've imposed it on them with tooling. That is not the way. There is something to this approach, as Seemann writes, <bq>Making you slow down can give you the opportunity to realise that you're about to do something stupid.</bq> But I think we have to be constantly vigilant to make sure that we don't allow ourselves to be slowed down too much. Or that we at least think about how much and when we're being slowed down. Is letting me quickly and sloppily prototype going to get me to the goal more quickly? If so, then let me. Put the brakes on when I try to integrate into the mainline. It's at that point that you can pull out the checklist and validate code style, test coverage, complexity, and so on. <pullquote width="12em" align="right">"It looks like you're trying to call a REST API. Would you like some help?"</pullquote>On the subject of AI assistance in coding: I think it might be useful, but useful in the way that finding an example on StackOverflow is useful. You shouldn't just copy/paste anyone's or anything's code into your own code without examination. Even non-AI-assisted code-assistance should be examined carefully to see if that's what you actually wanted. If you find yourself writing so much boilerplate that large-scale copy/paste or insertions are helping, then, again, this indicates a deeper problem with the code you're writing. In coding, less is better. I don't see how having a idiot-savant machine that doesn't understand anything about the stream of tokens it's injecting into your code is useful, in the long run. If you're a shitty programmer, then of course, a half-baked machine is going to help. If you're a good programmer, then use the generated code as a high-end code-completion, taking what you find useful from it. But beware: you may end up spending more time examining the swath of generated code to figure out if it's OK than you would have had you just written it yourself. <hr> <a href="https://www.richard-towers.com/2023/03/11/typescripting-the-technical-interview.html" source="" author="Richard Towers">Typescripting the technical interview</a> <bq quote-style="none">“Oh, no, not those kinds of runes. Runes, shadows of meaning. Symbolic. Unique.” Inhale, inscribe. <code>const ᚾ = Symbol() const ᛊ = Symbol() const ᛚ = Symbol() const ᛞ = Symbol()</code> “TypeScript is duck typed, you see. And one duck must not be confused for another.” “You mean it’s structurally typed? Unlike something nominally typed like Java, or Haskell?” “Yes, exactly”, you respond. Perhaps Criss is following after all. “Here, I’ll show you.” Summon the void itself, and bind it with the essence of ᚾ. Need, nothingness, the frustrated longing to become. <code>type Nil = typeof ᚾ</code></bq> <bq quote-style="none">“We’ll need to represent the coordinates of our queens, so we’ll need numbers too.” Start by ensnaring zero. ᛞ, the day rune. Use a zero day and carry the zero. <code>type Zero = typeof ᛞ</code> “Now we can define the rest of the natural numbers, building on zero.” <code>type S = [n] type One = S<zero> type Two = S<one> type Three = S<two> type Four = S<three> type Five = S<four> type Six = S<five></code></bq> As a follow-up to my comment that "TypeScript has been doing some interesting things with advanced types", I have an example in the wonderfully written tale of an interviewee (purely apocryphal, I'm sure) who solved the N-Queens problem posed to them using only <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiðr">Seiðr</a> and pure types (no values). The author was inspired by <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview" date="2017" author="Aphyr">Typing the technical interview</a>, which does the same in Haskell. <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview" author="Aphyr">Hexing the technical interview</a> does it with Clojure. They're all quite delightful to read, if you're just the right kind of ... nerd. The Haskell one starts like this, making a metaphor of coding as witchcraft. <bq>In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling water; some disappeared entirely, or wandered along the ridgetops: feet never touching earth, breath never warming air.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/git/comments/11rveqm/how_to_merge_all_subrepositories_into_the_main/" source="Reddit">How to merge all sub-repositories into the main repository</a> It's going to be tricky if you want to keep the history. The amount of trickiness will depend on whether sub1, sub2, etc. match any of the folders in the root repository (folder1, folder2, etc.). That is, the way to do it is: <ol> Get yourself a GUI. I use SmartGit<ul> If you're doing this only on the command line, the steps below apply, but you'll have to figure out the commands yourself</ul> Add a remote in <c>main</c> to the repository in <c>folder5</c> You should now have commits from both repositories in your view Cherry pick all of the commits from the <c>folder5</c> tree to the <c>main</c> tree<ul> Easier said than done, depending on the amount of overlap and subsequent merge conflicts</ul> You should now have the history of <c>folder5</c> in <c>main</c> *but with the files still at the root of the working tree* Move the subfolders and files introduced by incorporating the <c>folder5</c>tree to the <c>folder5</c> directory Commit that move You should now have the <c>folder5</c> files in the right place, with all of the history. Repeat for the other repositories </ol> If your files/folders between repositories are not unique, then this is probably going to be more trouble than it's worth. If you also have a lot of commits in <c>folder5</c>, then the living will envy the dead. <ul> Possible overlaps will be <c>.gitignore</c>, <c>Readme.md</c>, etc. Each time a commit touches these files, you'll have to resolve conflicts. The <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180312-00/?p=98215">Old New Thing blog</a> publishes a lot of esoteric stuff on merging, sub-trees, work-trees, etc. Maybe that guy knows a better way, but I'm hard-pressed to see how git trickery could avoid the merge-conflicts. </ul> <h>Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAq-yg72GWw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/iAq-yg72GWw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Garlic Bread Ben" caption="Biden, Trump, and Obama make an Overwatch 2 women tier list (Voice AI)"> Trump's voice is good, but the ends of his sentences are off. Biden isn't incoherent enough. Obama's pretty good. The script is pretty hilarious. This should be terrifying. <hr> <a href="https://9gag.com/gag/amAWN8V?ref=android&fbclid=IwAR1-TtDHTUOnNOvPd6lU0tGvhnCUixacWlcy2grHYOf0lazIjbCUQZaZbM0" author="amar105" source="9gag">Guy builds a mini-log-cabin with his hands</a> (3:00 video) This is a pretty cool video that my madman Slovakian friend sent to me.