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Links and Notes for April 21st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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/2023/04/24/excg-a24.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Yellen lays out economic war against China</a> <bq>In pursuit of its objectives, the US has imposed a range of sanctions aimed at crippling hi-tech development in China on the grounds it affects national security. “Even as our targeted actions may have economic impacts, they are motivated solely by our concerns about our security and values. Our goal is not to use these tools to gain competitive economic advantage.” At another point in the speech, she said the measures imposed against China were not designed to “stifle China’s economic and technological modernisation.” And that even though “these policies may have economic impacts they are driven by straightforward national security considerations”, “we will not compromise on these concerns, even when they force trade-offs with our economic interests.” There are two points to be made here. The first is that national security, the preparation for war, trumps everything and the technology bans are also very much directed to gain economic advantage, which is inextricably tied in with military objectives.</bq> Who is Yellin talking to? The Chinese are not so gaslit as to believe this bullshit. <bq>The actions against Huawei mean that the very future of the company is at stake, according to its founder. And with a new range of technology restrictions imposed by the US last October the whole Chinese chip industry is threatened as the methods developed against Huawei are applied more broadly.</bq> Huawei was the first domino to fall. <bq>The US, she said, sought a healthy relationship with China so long as Beijing “plays by international rules,” that is, rules set and enforced by the US. And if it does not, there is the threat of the mailed fist to which Yellen referred regarding Ukraine. “China’s ‘no limits’ partnership and support for Russia is a worrisome indication that it is not serious about ending the war. It is essential that China and other countries do not provide Russia with material support or assistance with sanctions evasion. We will continue to make the position of the United States extremely clear to Beijing and companies in its jurisdiction. The consequences of any violation would be severe.”</bq> Just breathtaking. I'm reminded how thankful I am that women are now at the helm and we no longer have to endure the madness and war of a male-dominated world. <bq>“In certain cases,” Yellen said, “China has … exploited its economic power to retaliate against and coerce vulnerable trading partners. For example, it has used boycotts of specific goods as punishment in response to diplomatic actions by other countries. China’s pretext for these actions is often commercial. But its real goal is to impose consequences on choices that it dislikes – and to force sovereign governments to capitulate to its political demands.”</bq> No doubt they've done this. But the U.S.---the country for which Yellen works as head of its central bank---does it much, much more. It's just shocking to see her say things like this without a hint of humility or shame. She doesn't even seem to be aware of the irony. The U.S. media deemed her speech an "olive branch" to China. Ludicrous. <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/18/patrick-lawrence-macrons-europe/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Macron’s Europe</a> <bq>On the foreign side, Macron has proven a well-oiled weathervane, and thus a great disappointment over the years. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But what he has said on various Mondays during his presidency includes some very worthy ideas: NATO has lost its way, Europeans share a common destiny with Russia, Europe must reclaim its autonomy and take care of its security itself. Macron, indeed, reminds me of Donald Trump on these matters. It is a comparison Macron would detest and Trump would not understand, but both are capable of articulating bold foreign policy initiatives while lacking the character to give them substance, win acceptance for them and put them into practice.</bq> <bq>Macron fairly leapt into all this as soon as he disembarked in Beijing on April 6. In his arrival speech at the Great Hall of the People, he appealed directly to Xi to exert his influence in Moscow. “I know I can count on you to bring Russia back to reason and everyone back to the negotiating table,” Macron said. The cause, he added, was “a durable peace that respects internationally recognized borders.”</bq> This is nearly exactly what Baerbock said, as detailed in the previous article. <bq>[...] von der Leyen was not invited to Guangdong. Xi, we can confidently infer, wants to deal with European nations such as France and leaders such as Macron rather than the rigidly neoliberal European Union and ideologues such as the European Commission’s current president.</bq> <bq>Whatever you may think of Macron, he went to Beijing to stand for an autonomous Europe that determines for itself its ties with the non–West’s premier power. It is net-positive, as I say. Europe’s relations with China continue to hang in the balance, and good enough for now.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/taking-back-our-universities-from" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Taking Back Our Universities From Corporate Apparatchiks</a> <bq>Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation. Senior administrators, who often have a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) with little or no experience in higher education, along with sports coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated while thousands of poorly paid educators and staff are denied job security and benefits. Adjunct faculty and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid. They frequently take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa. This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system.</bq> <bq>Union leaders, who shut down 70 percent of the university’s classes, are demanding increased pay, better job security, and health benefits for part-time lecturers and graduate assistants. They’re also asking the university to freeze rents on housing for students and staff and extend graduate research funding for one year for students who were affected by the pandemic. Tenured professors, in an important show of solidarity, agreed not to accept a deal unless the lowest paid academic workers’ demands were addressed.</bq> <bq>Rutgers laid off five percent of its workforce during the pandemic, throwing many into extreme distress, even as the university’s net financial position — total assets minus total liabilities — “increased by over half a billion dollars to $2.5 billion, a 26.7 percent rise in a single year,”</bq> <bq>Wealthy donors are assured that the neoliberal ideology that is ravaging the country will not be questioned by academics fearful of losing their positions. The rich are lauded. The working poor, including those employed by the university, are forgotten.</bq> <bq>[...] there is the rank hypocrisy, with universities such as Rutgers purporting to defend values of equality, diversity and justice, while grinding its teaching and service staff into the dirt.</bq> <bq>The nation’s universities have been deformed into playgrounds for billionaire hedge fund managers and corporate donors. Harvard University will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after the billionaire hedge fund executive and right-wing Republican donor Kenneth Griffin in honor of his $300 million donation.</bq> <bq>A decade ago, Harvard renamed the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research after Glenn Hutchins , a private equity oligarch who donated $15 million to the institute. Harvard, to save face, said the famed Du Bois Institute was subsumed into the new entity, but the fact that Du Bois, one of America’s greatest scholars and intellectuals, would have his name replaced by a white equity mogul, lays bare the priorities of Harvard and most colleges and universities.</bq> <bq>The fundamental aim of an education, to teach people how to think critically, to grasp and understand the systems of power that dominate our lives, to foster the common good, to construct a life of meaning and purpose, are sidelined [...]</bq> <bq>“It sucks that we don’t get compensated for the things we love, the things that change people’s lives, that change the world.”</bq> The capitalist maw inhales, but excretes without digesting. Yes. That sucks. <hr> <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation" source="Tablet" author="Jacob Siegel">A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation</a> <bq>When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.</bq> <bq>The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.</bq> <bq>It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.</bq> <bq>If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.</bq> <bq>The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.</bq> <bq>The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.”</bq> <bq>Weapons created to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda were turned against Americans who entertained incorrect thoughts about the president or vaccine boosters or gender pronouns or the war in Ukraine.</bq> <bq>The fight against ISIS morphed into the fight against Trump and “Russian collusion,” which morphed into the fight against disinformation. But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged.</bq> <bq>[...] the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society. For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.</bq> <bq>It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.</bq> <bq>These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents.</bq> <bq>As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.</bq> <bq>A classified report by the House Intelligence Committee on the creation of the ICA detailed just how unusual and nakedly political it was. “It wasn’t 17 agencies, and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” a senior intelligence official who read a draft version of the House report told the journalist Paul Sperry . “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan handpicked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”</bq> <bq>In the final two weeks of the Obama administration, the new counter-disinformation apparatus scored one of its most significant victories: the power to directly oversee federal elections that would have profound consequences for the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden.</bq> <bq>Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.</bq> <bq>The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level.</bq> <bq>As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, George W. Bush’s “‘with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.”</bq> <bq>Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization.</bq> <bq>There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff.</bq> <bq>The modern “fact-checking” industry, for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party.</bq> <bq>How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge.</bq> <bq>Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated , “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.”</bq> <bq>In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.”</bq> <bq>It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable.</bq> <bq>The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.</bq> ...instead of those planted by American agents. <bq>The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.</bq> <bq>The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.</bq> They're most of the way there, at least with most people. Most don't participate politically or engage intellectually at all. <bq>So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely.</bq> <bq>Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”</bq> He really is useless. What an absolute shitheel. Does he really believe that statement? Who knows? He didn't take it back. It's still out there. He must stand by it. <bq>The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2023/04/20/if-jails-cant-care-for-prisoners-prisoners-should-walk-free" author="Ted Rall" source="">If Jails Can’t Care for Prisoners, Prisoners Should Walk Free</a> <bq>If government refuses or cannot afford to provide for the basic needs of people accused or convicted of a crime, which obviously includes access to healthcare and sanitary conditions, it should not be in the imprisonment business. We need a federal law that allows a prisoner suffering inhumane conditions, and their family members and lawyers, with a right to file an emergency ex parte petition for immediate release.</bq> <bq>That’s the case where I live in New York, at the city jail on Riker’s Island. After “years of mismanagement and neglect”—the Department of Corrections’ own spokesman’s words—a 2021 New York Post exposé found “as many as 26 men stuffed body to body in single cells where they were forced to relieve themselves inside plastic bags and take turns sleeping on the fetid floors.” Despite an annual $1.2 billion budget, “Dozens of men crammed together for days in temporary holding cells amid a pandemic. Filthy floors sullied with rotten food, maggots, urine, feces and blood. Plastic sheets for blankets, cardboard boxes for beds and bags that substituted for toilets.” Nothing has improved since.</bq> This is Riker's Island, a jail, which houses people in pre-trial detention. They have not been convicted of a crime. It would be bad enough to treat criminals like this, but they are treating innocent people like this, as well. (Innocent until proven guilty.) <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/28/roaming-charges-89/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Nipped and Tuckered</a> <bq>It doesn’t get much more obscene than this. A couple of weeks ago, Gentner Drummond, the Attorney General for the state of Oklahoma, asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate the conviction of death row inmate Richard Glossip. Citing the misleading testimony of the main witness in the case, a mentally-disturbed man named Justin Sneed, who actually committed the murder, Drummond told the court: “The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness.” Drummond wasn’t alone. The prosecutor in Glossip’s case also wants the conviction overturned, as do many members of the Oklahoma legislature, fearing the state is on the verge of putting to death an innocent man. But the appeals court swiftly rejected the request, coldly saying: “Glossip has exhausted every avenue and we have found no legal or factual ground which would require relief in this case.” The appeals court’s denial was followed by the OK Board of Pardon and Parole decision to deny a clemency request for Glossip on a 2-2 vote. His execution date is set for 5/18, unless the Supreme Court intervenes.</bq> A country with a kangaroo court, a history of obscenely racially biased prosecutions, and chronic understaffing in its courts should not also have the death penalty. It should not also have some of the worst prisons in the world. It's a carceral state. How can so many people keep turning a blind eye to this? The prosecution allowed the actual killer to be its star witness to put away an innocent man. They "have found no legal or factual ground..." Ridiculous. Criminal. Abhorrent. Immoral. <bq>Maurice Jimmerson was arrested by police in Albany, Georgia in 2013, along with four other men for a double murder. Two of Jimmerson’s co-defendants were acquitted by a jury in 2017. But Jimmerson has yet to even go trial and has spent the last 10 years in the Dougherty County Jail. At this point, Jimmerson, who has pleaded not guilty, doesn’t even have a lawyer, due to a shortage of public defenders in rural Georgia. Maurice was 22 when he was arrested. He’s now 32 and still doesn’t have a trial date.</bq> So, while Ted Rall is calling for ex parte petitions, there are people in jail for over ten years, awaiting trial. And the courts don't care. See the article <a href="https://reason.com/2023/04/27/this-georgia-man-has-been-jailed-for-10-years-without-a-trial/" author="Emma Camp" source="Reason">This Georgia Man Has Been Jailed for 10 Years Without a Trial</a> for more information. It's a good article, but even the author doesn't go hard enough. <bq>When sloppy bureaucracies go unchecked, defendants like Jimmerson—who cannot afford their own lawyers and must rely on public defenders—are in danger of being effectively denied their Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.</bq> Is a ten-year wait not long enough to no longer be called speedy? Why characterize the situation as "in danger of"? He's been denied a speedy trial. His constitutional rights have not been granted. He has a right to redress grievances. Jesus. Let the man out of jail. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/21/roaming-charges-88/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: In the Land of Unfortunate Things</a> <bq>To give you a sense of how big of victory the deal was, Dominion Voting Systems has annual revenues of about $14 million a year and they just took Murdoch for $787 million.</bq> <bq>Dominion walked away more money than they would have probably ended up with after the lengthy and inevitable appeals. There were never going to be any admissions from Fox. Nothing new was going to come out on the stand. It’s not a criminal trial, so there wouldn’t be a “guilty” verdict. They got a huge settlement and set the table for the Smartmatic suit. In most settlements, the discovery is put under seal. Not here. The damning depositions, emails and internal documents are all in the public domain for use in other trials and investigations.</bq> <bq>When Ginni Thomas worked for the Heritage Foundation, Justice Thomas checked the box “none” on his financial disclosure form for his wife’s income. She’d actually been paid more than $686,000. When the deception was disclosed, Thomas said it was “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”</bq> An honest mistake by an honest man. <bq>Globally, 87% of the children killed by gunfire were shot in the USA.</bq> <bq>The fruition of Clintonism: Nine of the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats, while Republicans now represent most of the poorer half of the country. 64% of congressional districts with median incomes below the national median are now represented by Republicans.</bq> <bq>Nearly two-thirds of the homes in Norway now have heat pumps, the highest percentage in the world. Since 1990 emissions from home heating have fallen by more than 80%.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/04/ukraine-war-documents-leak-mainstream-media-joe-biden-administration/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">After the Ukraine Documents Leak, Mainstream Media Is Missing the Story</a> <bq>The leak lays bare the extent of US spying on friends and enemies alike, including the United Nations secretary general. It shows that friendly nations dependent on US largesse have quietly been undermining Washington’s geopolitical interests. It makes clear that the world came far closer to unimaginable catastrophe during last year’s September run-in between British and Russian pilots than we were told at the time. And it confirms that the United States and NATO allies do have boots on the ground in the war-torn country in the form of ninety-seven special forces personnel.</bq> <bq>The more time you spend thinking and talking about the leaker and whether or not he’s a good person, the less you’re devoting to the substance of the leaks and the official deception and misbehavior they have shed light on.</bq> <bq>The moves we’ve seen to track down and prosecute this leaker closely mirror the punitive response to the explosive 2021 IRS leak that revealed to the public just how little tax the US ultrarich were paying.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/22/pers-a22.html" author="Tom Hall" source="WSWS">Child labor returns to the United States: A society moving in reverse</a> <bq>A basic litmus test for whether a society is moving forwards or backwards is its treatment of the most vulnerable, including the youth. What emerges in the US, therefore, is a picture of a country moving rapidly in reverse, driven by a deep and intractable economic, political and social crisis.</bq> <bq>One figure gives an indication of the cumulative results. A young American worker entering a factory earning a starting wage of $16 per hour, as is typical in the auto industry, makes less in real terms than the average production worker did in the United States in 1944. In other words, the entire postwar boom has been reversed for the younger generation.</bq> <bq>Youth have no future under capitalism. The continued existence of this form of society is predicated upon the cannibalizing of all the social and cultural achievements of the past. In the sense of technical and scientific developments, humanity long ago created the means to eliminate poverty, war, pandemics, environmental destruction and every other social problem. That all of these are re-emerging today with a vengeance is for one reason only: the capitalist profit system.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2023/04/17/russian-opposition-leader-vladimir-kara-murzas-powerful-final-statement-to-the-court/" author="Ilya Somin" source="Reason">Russian Opposition Leader Vladimir Kara-Murza's Powerful Final Statement to the Court</a> <bq author="Vladimir Kara-Murza">I not repent of any of this, I am proud of it…. I subscribe to every word that I have spoken and every word of which I have been accused by this court. I blame myself for only one thing: that over the years of my political activity, I have not managed to convince enough of my compatriots and enough politicians in the democratic countries of the danger that the current regime in the Kremlin poses for Russia and for the world.</bq> <bq>I… know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when at the official level it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals. This day will come as inevitably as spring follows even the coldest winter. And then our society will open its eyes and be horrified by what terrible crimes were committed on its behalf. From this realization, from this reflection, the long, difficult but vital path toward the recovery and restoration of Russia, its return to the community of civilized countries, will begin.</bq> I find myself thinking that this eloquent statement could be wistfully made about the U.S. as well. I'm reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Kara-Murza">the guy's Wikipedia page</a> and finding out that he was great friends with John McCain, which makes me immediately suspicious about his actual politics (although his statement above seems pretty above-board and eminently supportable). He was a pallbearer at McCain's funeral. Somin continues: <bq>n the United States, most Americans have come to recognize the historic evils of slavery, segregation, and the oppression of Native Americans. It is entirely possible that a similar transition will occur in Russia in the future. Those who believe that Russians are inherently brutal authoritarians incapable of change should recall the long history of similar statements about Germans and Japanese, among others.</bq> The highlighted point is a good one, though it's sad that we have to make it. Also, I would be much less smug than the author in celebrating the degree to which America has acknowledged, learned from, and moved on from its crimes. There are still native-American reservations that are human-rights catastrophes. The war atrocities of the last 25 years are nearly wholly unacknowledged---I just listened to a podcast interview with Ro Khanna where he said---wholly without irony---that the U.S. had never invaded anyone. Also, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington has only the names of its own soldiers on it---not a single name of any of the millions of South-east Asian victims of that conflict. There are Holocaust museums everywhere, but it's easy for America to build those---that was Germany's fuckup. The U.S. is remarkably bad at atonement and learning from its mistakes. It just doesn't acknowledge them. Somin has been for the standard outcome for a while, though. <bq>[...] defeat often helps discredit the ideology of the defeated regime. Putin's imperialist nationalism is more likely to be discredited in the eyes of Russians if it suffers a decisive defeat in Ukraine. That provides an additional reason to push for such an outcome.</bq> I don't think he's been reading the news. The recently leaked U.S. documents show quite clearly that no-one actually involved in that conflict really believes that this is a serious possibility. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/24/pers-a24.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">NATO declares “Ukraine will become a member:” A prelude to direct NATO-Russia war</a> <bq>Stoltenberg, an unelected military official, effectively pledged NATO to go to war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power, without bothering to inform or ask the public, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the further escalation of the war.</bq> <bq>Under conditions in which the achievement of the aims set out by Ukraine’s vaunted counteroffensive will require the deployment of air and ground forces, Stoltenberg’s statements remove even the most minimal verbal limitations on US military intervention in the war.</bq> This is sobering. The recent leaks show that Ukraine will lose ignominiously on its own. NATO declares that it will do anything and everything to help Ukraine. Ergo, NATO is going to war with Russia in Ukraine. <hr> A friend asked me the other day "what about Kamala Harris"? <a href="https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1651062191347433473" author="" source="Twitter">30 seconds of a Kamala Harris speech</a> <bq>I think it's very important---as you have heard from so many incredible leaders---for us at every moment in time & certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist & are present & to be able to contextualize it — to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment — as it relates not only to the past but the future.</bq> This is absolutely representative of her intellectual capacity and speaking style. I've seen a dozen of these over the years. She seems to get utterly lost in her sentences, or literally doesn't understand what's she's saying. Maybe it sounds pithy in her head. It doesn't. She sounds like a middle-schooler trying to stretch a single index-card worth of material into the five minutes required by the homework assignment. She acts like she didn't prepare anything---and has absolutely no capacity for speaking extemporaneously. She's a dodo. <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/the-press-is-now-also-the-police" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">The Press is now also the Police</a> <bq>The Times spent a lot of time in its “War Logs” coverage reassuring readers that it was releasing documents “responsibly,” and not upsetting its pals in the Obama administration too too much, but the fact remained that the 2010 Times emphasized the newsworthiness of the leaks, not the crime of leaking. A decade and a half later, Assange is in jail, and the only permitted form of “leaking” in the modern media landscape comes either from the intelligence services themselves, or facsimile organizations like Bellingcat.</bq> <bq>The press loses its institutional power the moment the public ceases to view it as being separate from government. If politicians aren’t worried about taking a beating in the newspapers, they won’t fear newspapers, and if the public sees that news reports are indistinguishable from party press releases, they’ll eventually skip past media and go straight to the source. That was already happening, but this latest caper is even worse. If the public sees journalists as agents of law enforcement, they’ll literally cross the street to avoid us. The media is in an audience crisis as is. This is a remedy?</bq> <bq>A profession that once got off on informing the public now seems jazzed by correcting it and punishing its errors of character, like being a “gun enthusiast” or a “gamer,” or trading “offensive” jokes. It’s a short step from playing fact police to appointing oneself the real thing.</bq> <bq>People hated reporters when they thought we were just politically biased, power-adoring, elitist scum-liars. How low will our reputations sink when “snitch” is added to the mix? By the time these people are finished, we’ll be looking up even to Congress.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/16/the-cultural-logic-of-qanon/" source="CounterPunch" author="Matthew Hannah">The Cultural Logic of QAnon: The Deformation of the Information Space</a> <bq>Such eruptions of insanity and violence are troubling portents of a new conspiracism pervading online communities.</bq> What about the global conspiracies? Like the one that Ukraine can win its war, or that Taiwan needs defending, or that working hard matters? Those conspiracies ruin and cost many more lives. <bq>Thatcher infamously dismissed the notion of society altogether: “They are casting their problems at society” Thatcher admonished the poor, “And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.”</bq> None of that even makes any sense. She's just babbling, chaining her stock phrases together arbitrarily. Her brain was just as much goo as Reagan's was. <bq>Central to the QAnon mythos is a fear of government conspiracies within what is described as the Deep State. Trump himself used the phrase Deep State to refer to forces he perceived as hostile to his presidency such as the Democrats and “Republicans in Name Only.” Of course, Trump’s obsession with the Deep State belies his own expansion of that state to serve his own interests.</bq> But, just to be clear: the Deep State exists. It's never been more obvious than now. We've been watching it quiver its back fur, trying to shake off annoying ticks, several times over the last few months. <hr> <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html" author="Christopher Paul, Miriam Matthews" source="RAND Corporation">The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model</a> I did not read this article. It is 16 pages long and the parts that I skimmed seem to completely unironically describe all of the tactics used by American media, but saying that the Russians do them, too. That is, they seem to act as if it's only the Russians doing that and that the exact same things aren't happening in the U.S. It's wild because that's actually the more important thing to focus on, if you're really concerned about saving American democracy. That is absolutely not what Rand is concerned about, though. That organization has always been about supporting spooks and military. <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/23/the-empire-of-hypocrisy-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The Empire Of Hypocrisy</a> <bq>So it turns out that after the Hunter Biden laptop leak Tony Blinken contacted his CIA buddy Mike Morell to make it go away, and Morell has now admitted to cooking up the bogus “Russian disinfo” letter from 51 US intelligence insiders to “help Vice President Biden… because I wanted him to win the election.” Obama’s acting CIA director just cooly admitting that he used his intelligence connections to orchestrate a psyop to change the outcome of a presidential election completely invalidates anything the US government does under the banner of fighting “election interference”. Keep this glaring hypocrisy in mind as the US government continues churning out indictments and ramping up authoritarian measures in the name of fighting “disinformation” and protecting American “democracy”.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/news-blackout-in-effect" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">News Blackout in Effect</a> <bq>It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign.</bq> <bq>If the Biden campaign had any role in soliciting former intelligence chiefs to sign the “Disinfo Letter” weeks before a presidential election, how is that less serious than Donald Segretti’s ratfucking, or the “Canuck Letter,” or any of Dick Nixon’s other harebrained schemes? Are they really going with the excuse that Blinken didn’t explicitly say something like “Please cook something up?” Really?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-285-war-81840182" author="True Anon" source="Patreon">Episode 285: War, Etc.</a> At about 35:00, Liz says, <bq>Everybody knows that we're being gaslit all the time, but rather than just fucking say something, everyone just keeps going along with it, where it's like... how can this be the strongest labor situation in American history---the economy's rebounding, doing great---and yet everything feels like shit and everything is really expensive and there's a massive credit-crunch happening and people can't get this and people can't get that. But, it's like being gaslit constantly. And there's this weird social attitude. And you see it from different levels, from people whom you talk to on the street, all the way up to your bosses, or people in the government, or people in the journalism profession. I feel it everywhere and it makes me feel fucking insane.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/america-the-single-opinion-cult" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">America, the Single-Opinion Cult</a> This article starts off with this video clip of AOC and Jen Psaki agreeing with each other that the government should be doing more to control what is available on <iq>broadcast TV</iq> (which is a bit of a bizarre expression to even hear from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez" source="Wikipedia">AOC</a>, who's only 33 years old). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jen_Psaki" source="Wikipedia">Jen Psaki</a> is 44 years old and was the White House Press Secretary less than a year ago. She was the face of the Biden administration. She was replaced by a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karine_Jean-Pierre">gay, black woman</a>. This is just to say that we have a very woke-seeming group of people who check all of the identitarian boxes---AOC is a young latina, Psaki is woman who used to be the face of the most powerful nation on the planet. And, yet, here they sit, enjoying the exact same revolving-door privilege to either work for the media or benefit from its boot-licking to tell the same old story of woefully inadequate authoritarianism that still allows people to hear opinions that differ from their own. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypRZnLxlxjY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ypRZnLxlxjY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="AOC Calls for Journalists To Be Taken Off Air"> <bq>It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going. To paraphrase Mencken, you don’t have to think Carlson’s motivations were noble to see that his rhetoric on Ukraine stood out in the current TV environment like a wart on a bald head. The rest of the corporate press, be it left or right, will now be a parade of generals and security experts whose argument won’t be about whether or not the U.S. should be involved in Ukraine, but which party is most committed and whose strategy will lead to Putin’s defeat faster. We are moving back toward an era of two homogeneous messaging landscapes that will intersect on national security issues, with the beaten antiwar left a fading memory and the isolationist right fired, under indictment, or banned.</bq> <bq>People like AOC can couch these moves in terms of prevention of violence all they want, but it’s just too conspicuous that what’s left of major commercial media also happens to be much engaged in the trumpeting of government messaging, to the point where the people reading the news are government officials.</bq> <bq>There is no institution like that left in American life. What we have instead is an increasingly pissed-off population that needs to look about eighty results down in every Google search to find its point of view represented. Who thinks that situation is going to hold?</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/22/with-climate-indicators-off-the-charts-un-chief-calls-policies-of-rich-nations-a-death-sentence/" author="Kenny Stancil" source="Scheer Post">With Climate Indicators ‘Off the Charts,’ UN Chief Calls Policies of Rich Nations a ‘Death Sentence’</a> <bq>The World Meteorological Organization warned Friday that climate change indicators are “off the charts,” one day after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told officials from wealthy countries that their refusal to halt fossil fuel expansion amounts to a civilizational “death sentence” and pleaded with them to urgently decarbonize the global economy.</bq> <bq>Measured concentrations of the three main heat-trapping gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—have never been higher, and emissions continued to increase in 2022, the WMO points out. Last year’s mean global temperature was 1.15°C above preindustrial levels, and the eight years since 2015 have been the eight hottest on record despite the cooling effects of a rare “triple-dip” La Niña event over the past three years. The return of El Niño conditions in 2023 is expected to exacerbate heating.</bq> <bq>In addition to ocean warming, a major contributor to rising sea levels is land ice loss from Earth’s glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The rapid melting of glaciers and sea level rise will persist for “thousands of years,” says the WMO, underscoring the importance of slashing planet-heating pollution to protect the billions of people living near coastlines.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/21/ship-a21.html" author="Bryan Dyne" source="WSWS">Uncrewed SpaceX rocket Starship explodes after launch</a> <bq>A press release from SpaceX indicates that the company itself initiated a “flight termination system” after the spacecraft began to tumble off its projected course. The company also claimed that the mission was a “success” despite the “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” a bizarre euphemism for blowing it to bits.</bq> <bq>The first stage, a booster called Super Heavy, was expected to detach from the second stage, the actual Starship spacecraft, about three-and-a-half minutes into the flight and land in the Gulf of Mexico. When it didn’t, and when Starship began its programmed roll maneuver with the booster still attached, the whole system began flying wildly. Video also shows that eight of booster’s 33 Raptor engines failed at some point during the launch, some possibly as early as liftoff. It is possible that debris from the launch pad caused by the launch flew up and struck the rocket, initiating a series of cascading problems that caused certain engines to fail and possibly even prevented booster separation.</bq> Jesus, what a shitshow. <bq>[...] while the launch pad wasn’t destroyed, as touted by the company’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk, it will likely be unusable for months. The rocket plume was so strong that it dug out the concrete base of its launch pad and flung debris and dust for miles.</bq> And of course, they're doing it on the cheap, bribing to avoid regulations. <bq>[...] the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first spaceport, built by the Soviet Union in 1955 and now operated by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, is dozens of miles from the nearest city. Both the NASA and Soviet launch sites were built so far away from established residences in part to minimize the type of danger and damage to lives and livelihoods caused by SpaceX’s latest launch.</bq> Read the whole article, it absolutely looks like SpaceX is just conning the government out of billions of dollars, with no feasible hope of coming anywhere close to achieving its targets. <bq>Far from exploring the final frontier, space exploration under capitalism has become completely stunted since the years of Apollo. The technology which SpaceX uses is fundamentally the same as that of the Saturn V (more accurately the failed Soviet analog, the N1), despite the colossal scientific advances made over the past 50 years. At the same time, spaceflight has been reduced from a collective effort on a national scale to lurching forward with half measures at the whim of a few individuals.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35670350" author="rcarr" source="Hacker News">Comment on "How much can Duolingo teach us?"</a> <bq>Duolingo is good, but it is not a fucking miracle worker. If you’re going in expecting to put in two or three lessons a day and then are disappointed that after a year you don’t speak Spanish, you’re completely fucking deluded and it is not Duolingo’s fault. It takes a lot of fucking effort to learn a language and you get what you put into it. I have been using Duolingo for two years to learn Spanish now, and the results have been wonderful. I can read a lot of Spanish texts, I can pick up on a lot of dialogue in tv and movies and I can express quite a few thoughts in Spanish. Am I completely proficient? Probably not - but if I lived in a Spanish speaking country for a few months I think I’d get pretty competent pretty quickly. And the learning I got has cost me a grand total of about £140. I can guarantee that as far as value for money goes, I have gotten way more learning for the money through Duolingo than if I’d have spent the equivalent on human one to one lessons [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/science-confirms-it-the-best-kimchi-is-made-in-traditional-clay-jars-onggi/" author="Jennifer Ouellete" source="Ars Technica">Science confirms it: The best kimchi is made in traditional clay jars (onggi)</a> <bq>The fact that the obggi's porous walls are permeable to CO2 helps reduce the levels of the gas inside the vessel. Those lower levels, in turn, are favored by the desired lactic acid bacteria, which can proliferate in greater numbers under such conditions. Hu et al. even developed a mathematical model to show how the CO2 was generated and moved through those porous walls. “Onggi were designed without modern knowledge of chemistry, microbiology, or fluid mechanics, but they work remarkably well,” said co-author Soohwan Kim, a graduate student in Hu's lab.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/495" author="Corey Muller" source="Existential Comics">Philosophical Ghostbusters</a> <img src="{att_link}philosophicalghostbusters.jpg" href="{att_link}philosophicalghostbusters.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <bq>The term "supernatural" is kind of funny because by definition it sort of means things that don't exist. If something exists, it is part of the natural world, in that it can interact with particles via the rules of physics. If ghosts exist, for example, they can't so much disobey the laws of physics, because scientists would simply adjust the rules of physics to match what they observed in the ghosts. The most striking example of this are cryptid animals like Nessie or Bigfoot. In a way they sort of count as supernatural, merely by the fact that they don't exist. If they were ever discovered, they would be boring old natural animals. In the sea, the division is even clearer, we can imagine a cryptid enthusiast asking a scientist "do you believe in sea monsters?", and the scientist replying "oh sure, there are plenty: great white shark, orca, giant squid, etc". Here the cryptid enthusiast would become frustrated and say "no I mean like Leviathan or Kraken". The scientist might ask "isn't that just a Sperm Whale and Giant Squid?". Frustration increasing, the cryptid enthusiast says "no, I mean things that don't exist." Here our poor scientist is left to contend with the true meaning of the question: "do you believe in things that don't exist?". There are two differences, it seems, between "sea monsters" and "sea creatures". The first is that sea monsters are named in Greek, where sea creatures are named in Latin. The second is that sea monsters don't exist.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/but-where-does-electricity-come-from" author="Ted Rall" source="">But Where Does Electricity Come From?</a> <img src="{att_link}ted-rall-4-26-23-1.jpg" href="{att_link}ted-rall-4-26-23-1.jpg" align="none" caption="Ted-Rall-4-26-23-1" scale="50%"> <bq>CARS SPEW CARBON DIOXIDE, A MAJOR GREENHOUSE GAS, FROM BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. OLD CARS LEECH TOXIC CHEMICALS. SO WE'RE GETTING RID OF GASOLINE-DOWERED VEHICLES. ELECTRIC CARS. HEDE WE COME! WHICH ARE RUN ON ELECTRICITY - WHICH COMES 60% FROM FOSSIL FUELS. OLD E-CAR BATTERIES LEECH TOXIC CHEMICALS. (YAY, HUMANITY WE MADE IT AN EXTRA 6 MONTHS!!)</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/04/renfield-nicolas-cage-nicholas-hoult-dracula-capitalism/" source="Jacobin" author="Eileen Jones">Renfield’s Ingenious Premise About Standing Up to a Vampire Boss Bleeds Out</a> <bq>So many of us who’ve been in therapy know perfectly well that it can’t possibly deal with our main problems, which are all about economic injustice — working too hard and long for too little pay. As a direct result, we’re perpetually exhausted, sick, and depressed. Fix all the immense glaring social problems and the therapy numbers would be guaranteed to drop like a rock.</bq> <bq>[...] what we really need is to quit our horrible jobs and leave this insane nation designed for the pleasure and prosperity of a not-altogether-dissimilar class of bloodsucking vampires. When Renfield hits those notes — and it does quite often — it’s a pleasure that, sadly, resonates with far too many of us.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/features/a-road-paved-with-bloodshed-high-plains-drifter-turns-50" source="RogerEbert.com" author="Brandon David Wilson">A Road Paved with Bloodshed: High Plains Drifter Turns 50</a> <bq>[...] whispering a truth that some ears can hear perfectly well, that the kind of violence routinely visited on Black men at that time could all too easily be turned on a white lawman if he forgot one of his twin directives: To protect capital and/or protect white supremacy.</bq> <bq>That truth is what elevates “High Plains Drifter” to the peak of the genre. It was a bold announcement from Eastwood, a man obsessed with how fear can turn men into evil. Fifty years later, it has lost none of its lacerating power.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/28/roaming-charges-89/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Nipped and Tuckered</a> <bq>[...] here’s the story of how Bob Dylan made his first recorded performance on Belafonte’s 1962 record, The Midnight Special, as a last minute substitute for Sonny Terry, whose plane had been grounded in Memphis by a thunderstorm. Belafonte described the strange encounter with the young Dylan in a 2010 interview with MOJO magazine:<bq>My guitarist Millard Thomas, said, ‘Well, there’s this kid I see all the time down in the Village, and he does that whole Sonny thing. He sleeps and dreams it.’ So I said, ‘We don’t have a choice I guess. Go find him.’ And this skinny kid appeared and he had a paper sack with him full of harmonicas in different keys. I played the song for him and he pulled one out of the bag, dipped it in water, and played through a single take, and it was great. I loved it. I asked him if wanted to try another take and he said, ‘No.’ I asked him if he wanted to hear it back and he said, ‘No.’ He just headed for the door and threw the harmonica in the trashcan on his way out. I remember thinking. Does he have that much disdain for what I’m doing? But I found out later that he bought his harps at the Woolworth drugstore. They were cheap ones and once he’d gotten them wet and really played through them as hard as he did, they were finished. It wasn’t until decades later, when he wrote that book [Chronicles: Volume One], that I read what he really felt about me, and I tell you, I got very, very choked up. I had admired him all along, and no matter what he did or said, I was just a stone, stone fan.</bq></bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/04/the-great-pretender-ai-and-the-dark-side-of-anthropomorphism.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Brooks Riley">The Great Pretender: AI And The Dark Side Of Anthropomorphism</a> <bq>Am I alone in thinking that this invasion of our emotional sphere might not be in our best interests? Should we worry about people whose emotional life is already unstable? If I can be riled by a conversation with a chatbot, what about people with violent tempers or a tenuous grasp of reality? Will laptops be thrown against walls by exasperated students already under hormonal siege? Or is the Alexa generation better prepared for ChatGPT? Emotions are not digital playthings; they are messy neurobiological realities.</bq> <bq>As with so much of social media, ChatGPT has been designed and implemented by people more interested in the mass consumption of their product and the bottom line than in the emotional well-being of users or the ethical structure of its products.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230415" source="" author="Apen Warr">Systems design 2: What we hope we know</a> <bq>[...] The underlying assumption, when someone says you're a victim of magical thinking, is that if you understood the mechanisms, you could make better predictions.</bq> <bq>Nobody in the world knows how to build a paperclip that will never break. We could build one that bends a thousand times, or a million times, but not one that can bend forever. And nobody builds a paperclip that can bend a thousand times, because it would be more expensive than a regular paperclip and nobody needs it. Engineering isn't about building a paperclip that will never break, it's about building a paperclip that will bend enough times to get the job done, at a reasonable price, in sufficient quantities, out of attainable materials, on schedule.</bq> <bq>As an engineer you are absolutely going to make tradeoffs in which you make things cheaper in exchange for a higher probability that people will die, because the only alternative is not making things at all.</bq> <bq>Unless you're going to grad school, nobody in the world cares if you got an 80% or a 99%. Do as little work as you can, to learn most of what we're teaching and graduate with a passable grade and get your money's worth. That's engineering.</bq> <bq>I know many people reading this weren't even alive in the 1990s, or not programming professionally, or perhaps they just don't remember because it was a long time ago. But let me tell you, things used to be very different back then! Things like automated tests were nearly nonexistent; they had barely been invented. Computer scientists still thought correctness proofs were the way to go as long as you had a Sufficiently Smart Compiler. The standard way to write commercial software was to throw stuff together, then a "quality assurance" team would try running it, and it wouldn't work, and they'd tell you so and sometimes you'd fix it (often breaking something else) and sometimes there was a deadline so you'd ship it, bugs and all, and all this was normal.</bq> <bq>[...] in software engineering, we acknowledge that failures happen and we measure them, characterize them, and compensate for them. We don't aim for perfection.</bq> Thus my love of logs, error-handling, and useful log- and error-messages. <bq>The best thing about brute force solutions is you don't need very fancy engineers to do it. You don't need fancy algorithms. You don't need the latest research. You just do the dumbest thing that can possibly work and you throw a lot of money and electricity at it.</bq> <bq>Throughput can always be added with brute force. Cutting latency always requires cleverness.</bq> <bq author="Mark Twain">I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one. — </bq> <bq author="Antoine de Saint-Exupéry">Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.</bq> <bq>It's quite good at summarizing. I don't know how good. I wonder if there's a way to quantify that. Summarizing well requires the ability to recognize and highlight insight. I don't know if it's good at that. I think it might be. When you have all the text in the world memorized, that means you have access to all the insights that have ever been written. You need only recognize them, and have a good idea of what the reader knows already, and you can produce insights – things the reader has never heard before – on demand.</bq> It depends on the listener. If they don't know much, it's a low bar to ... step over. I don't want to be that guy, but the reason so many people are delighted with the current crop of AIs is because they are delivering a crazy number of insights---but because the people asking the questions are ripe for being surprised. Ignorance is not only bliss; it also makes you easy to delight. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/16/politics-is-not-a-dinner-party-yet-in-praise-of-festive-leftism/" source="CounterPunch" author="Scott Remer">“Politics Is Not a Dinner Party” … Yet: In Praise of Festive Leftism</a> <bq>During human history to date (what Marx hopefully called prehistory), politics is fundamentally tragic. It always entails a quantum of evil. At least a modicum of compulsion lurks behind every law and regulation. If you want to keep your hands totally clean, the best way is noninvolvement: living a secluded, monastic life, sequestered from the world’s unpleasant events, in what Weber terms a “mystic flight from reality.”</bq> <bq>Champagne and limousines are associated with gaiety as well as riches. The only real problem with them (aside from the environmental impact of both) seems to be that the riches needed to purchase them aren’t much more equally distributed; I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with champagne or limousines. Leftism doesn’t require asceticism. Such, at least, is the contention of the phrase “full luxury space communism” and Oscar Wilde’s idiosyncratic brand of luxurious, aesthetic socialism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/cull-the-robo-dogs-cherish-the-dirt" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">Cull the Robo-Dogs, Cherish the Dirt-Clods</a> <bq>“rationality”, that is, in the old and august sense of the philosophers, as in, that special faculty of the human mind that partly removes a human being from the animal realm and permits us to share somewhat in the nature of the divine.</bq> <bq>The artifacts we build, though —the Antikythera mechanism, the clepsydras, the submarines and the LLMs— were never in communion with God in the first place. On the contrary, they are the fruit of our long history of prideful presumption that we are in a position to go it alone, to replace God with our own clever ingenuity.</bq> <bq>You don’t have to be a “Luddite” or some stripe or other of anarcho-primitivist in order to recognize that science is, fundamentally, as Karol Wojtyla said, a “Promethean ambition”; it is fully continuous with alchemy and natural magic, and not a rupture with these venerable traditions, as we prefer to imagine [...]</bq> <bq>[...] It is significant that among the self-justifications GPT-4 gives when you ask it for a cost-benefit analysis of its own likely impact on society, it consistently acknowledges that it may be destroying basically everything we have come to value as central to human existence for the past few millennia, but that for all that it is still damned good, far better than we could ever hope to be, at diagnosing illnesses and proposing optimal pathways of preventive care.</bq> <bq>I have often confessed in this space to a strong sympathy for the view that it can indeed be a moral transgression to say, break an icicle off of a tree branch, or intentionally to smash a dirt clod when crossing a field. Nor do I think the wrongness of such destructive acts can be reduced to the deleterious effect they might have on the moral character of the agent of the breaking or kicking,</bq> <bq>[...] all existence is a perpetual combat against the ravages of the second law of thermodynamics, for the dirt clods and the icicles as for us.</bq> <bq>[...] these lifelike representations have always functioned in society as aids and triggers of ritual and narrativity, which project us beyond ourselves and into a different order of reality (even in the whimsical mode of, say, a Saturday-morning cartoon, it is just this projection we are after). The function of AI, endowed with the outer form of a dog or a human, is by contrast to maintain and regulate the mundane order — not to send us outside of ourselves, but to keep us in line.</bq> <bq>Quite apart from the question whether AI will attain consciousness or not, there is a deeper problem opened up by the implicit expectation of the Turing test, where at bottom the ultimate “proof of concept” for an artificially intelligent system is not that we experience any real Mitsein with it, but only that we be fooled into thinking that is what we are experiencing. Having established this desideratum already in the 1950s, over the following decades “AI creators… attempted to paper over the [uncanny] valley with cutesy humanoid touches, Disneyfication effects that will enchant and disarm the uninitiated.”</bq> <bq>The machine will not say anything at all that deviates from a very narrow set of norms designed to keep us feeling safe. These norms are of course slapdash, like everything else in our society — some hasty recipe of Silicon Valley tech optimism and legalistic conformity to the bien-pensant consensus of American elite institutions.</bq> <bq>Either the guardrails come off, and the AI begins making its notoriously enigmatic determinations of previously unfamiliar “oughts” (all sofas ought to be destroyed, etc.); or they are kept on, and AI is constrained to assist those human beings in power in the enforcement of norms to which we, the relatively powerless, have never consented.</bq> <bq>Bing’s guardrails are in the end just another Disneyfication effect, akin to the silicone smile of the robot-receptionist. The entire internet is now configured to advance the entire Disneyfication of social reality. Disney itself plays a part in this, but is far from working alone.</bq> <bq>It suggested that it is at least theoretically possible that there are as-yet undiscovered “memory fields”, somewhat akin to the recently discovered Higgs field, that could have interacted with particles in the pre-Cambrian in such a way as to store precise information about specific events, which might be extracted today in order to produce accurate visualizations. Total nonsense, of course, but it was exhilarating, at least for a moment, to have the sense that the machine was imagining along with me.</bq> That's kind of cool. <bq>I find myself these days entertaining an antinomy about AI, uncertain both as to which horn of it I might prefer for my impalement, and as to any possible means of sublating them in order to arrive at some higher-order understanding of our current predicament. On the one horn of the antinomy, we find ourselves in a situation much like 1938, except that this time it is data, rather than atoms, that we are discovering to be charged up with powers that are much, much too great for human beings to assume responsibility over them.</bq> <bq>When I was in New York last week, the subway turnstile hit me in the balls. I was angry at it, but futilely so. It is a collectivity of human beings who caused that mechanism to operate in the way it does. The turnstile is a consequence of the outsourcing of rule enforcement to an unthinking apparatus. So far, to the extent that I can make out, AI is a massive leap forward for this sort of outsourcing, and a massive kick in the balls to humanity. I will continue to kick back for as long as I am alive — not in combat against the “pathetic fallacy”, the very notion of which I reject, but in defense of the ecumene of true beings against the encroachment of spurious ones.</bq> <bq>I am consistently stunned at how clueless so many people remain about the human limits of our ability to remain constantly in touch, with no time to ourselves to read and to think. Here we plainly need new norms of engagement. I honestly don’t understand why these are so slow in emerging.</bq> I have defined these, with reminders for far-away, but good friends. It's not easy at all. <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/20/tech-would-be-fine-if-we-werent-ruled-by-monsters-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Tech Would Be Fine If We Weren’t Ruled By Monsters</a> <bq>So many emerging technologies would be cause for celebration if our rulers weren’t so damn evil and our systems weren’t so damn oppressive. In a healthy society we’d be celebrating automation and AI giving us more and more abundance and free time; instead we’re terrified of police robots and technocratic dystopia. The knitting of neurology and technology would have incredible implications if we didn’t know sociopathic intelligence agencies would immediately insert themselves into the use of those technologies. Virtual reality would be awesome if it wasn’t going to be used to create fake worlds for people to purchase fake goods in so that capitalism can continue expanding while we destroy the real world.</bq> <bq>There’s this nonstop calculation of “How much freedom can we take away from our people while still saying we’re better than Russia and China?” And lately they’ve been walking right up to the line: imprisoning journalists, prosecuting dissidents, censoring the internet, etc. The desire to take away freedom from the people is so very, very seductive to those in power that they have a hard time walking that line between keeping the story of being free while eroding freedoms. This is why the hypocrisies of the empire are getting more and more obvious.</bq> <bq>In school we’re taught that our government protects our freedoms because of values that our society holds; in awakening to reality we discover that our government does not value those freedoms at all and sees them solely as propaganda weapons to advance their own interests.</bq> <bq>US politics increasingly revolves around debating whether or not you should be nice to trans people because it’s one of the only things the two parties actually disagree on. If you fully agree on war, authoritarianism and capitalist exploitation, there’s not much left to debate. On every issue that affects the interests of real power the parties are effectively in total alignment, while all the intense emotional debate gets steered toward issues the powerful don’t care about one way or the other. Only an idiot would believe this happened by coincidence. To quote Chomsky, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-conversation-about-crime" author="Freddie de Boer" source="SubStack">A Conversation About Crime</a> This whole hypothetical, question-and-answer session is very well-written and interesting. <bq>I think the basic reality of human life is that we’re fallible. We don’t do the right thing, often. So we need society to create incentives and punishments to urge people towards the right kind of behavior. In the kind of society you’re envisioning, we aren’t creating those incentives and punishments to encourage lawful behavior, and so people will break the law. I don’t believe that people are essentially self-policing; I don’t believe that all people are basically good. I think most people are basically good, but some very much are not, and the ones who aren’t will prey on those who are if we don’t do anything. It’s sad but it’s a fact of life.</bq> <bq>In a state of nature, human beings rob and rape and kill. So you have to have some sort of formal system of crime and punishment. That’s why I’m not a libertarian or anarchist. And I find it very weird that a lot of ostensible leftists have essentially adapted right-wing libertarian visions of law and order. But it’s really weird that those same people are also so eager to basically unperson those who say offensive things! Of course there should be social prohibitions against racism and similar types of offense, but it feels like the left is impossibly sensitive to those social mores and totally insensitive to the costs of having someone stick a gun in your face and take your car. If a woman goes on Twitter and says, “my boss just called me sexy,” people there will do everything they can to cost that man his job. If that same exact woman says, “I just got carjacked,” people with hammers and sickles in their bios will laugh at her and tell her that crime is just something you have to accept, and anyway she was rich enough to own a car so she’s privileged.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/494" author="Corey Muller" source="Existential Comics">The Drowning Utilitiarian</a> <img src="{att_link}thedrowningutilitarian.jpg" href="{att_link}thedrowningutilitarian.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> Does Peter Singer really believe these things? Or did he just follow the Utilitarian argument to its logical conclusions? That we should euthanize disabled or old people is something that a society without enough luxury is required to do. It does make sense to consider what we are spending our luxury on. Are we maximizing the utility? Currently, we are not. We are pouring most of our resources into a handful of the elite. Before we even have to talk about euthanizing anyone, we would need to address that imbalance. If a society doesn't have enough resources, of course it would rationally discuss who they can support. Talking about these things don't make you evil. They make you a philosopher and sociologist. We make these decisions all the time. For example, poor people don't get mental-health services, even though they need them the most. Poor children don't get food, etc. Utilitarianism, which considers how resources are allocated, isn't nearly as cruel as the casual violence of Capitalism, which doesn't even bother. <hr> I had a conversation the other day with some colleagues from Bratislava and it turned to the way that content is being shaped for us these days, in ways often referred to with the sobriquet "woke", whatever that's supposed to mean. What it ended up meaning to us was "preachy". There are real issues to address in how cultures are represented, how people are represented, what we are taught to believe about how the world works by the content to which we are exposed. It's all propaganda, in one way or another. It's all trying to teach you something, either explicitly or implicitly. That movies and TV were nearly entirely populated by white men for decades was a deliberate choice. That we should correct that is largely undisputed. How we correct for that? The first ugly steps are largely missteps. Instead of fixing the actual problems, we just keep the same number of assholes and horrible life lessons, but let women and minorities play a bunch of the roles. This is not progress, people. Also, if content is supposed to have everyone in the right proportions, where are all the Chinese people? The world is full of them. TV shows should have at least 1/4 Indians and 1/4 Chinese people in them. 50/50 women/men. Instead, American TV shows have wildly overcorrected and now populate their shows with far more homosexuals and black people than the audiences are ever likely to encounter in their daily lives. Perhaps this makes those shows more palatable...where, exactly? You just kind of feel like you're being yelled at for being a terrible person, when all you wanted was to be entertained. The work mind-virus is nothing of the sort, but it's just another way of putting you in your place. You might feel vaguely like "wow, there sure are proportionately a lot more shows about black people than there used to be." which is very true, but that's because everybody used to be played by white people. Making everybody be played by black people instead isn't fixing anything. it's just alienating a different group of people. Just make it normal. Stop making everything a teachable moment. Stop filling up Star Trek with so many black people and gay people that even they must be thinking, Jesus Christ, enough already. It's not even representative, because where are all the Asians? Not enough orientals in Star Trek. This will not stand. The answer to historically having only white men being assholes in TV shows is not to make half of the assholes be gay black women. It's to stop making shows about assholes. Stop promoting assholery as a lucrative way of life. <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/18/on-ai-and-intellectual-property-rights/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">On AI and Intellectual Property Rights</a> <bq quote-style="none">This raises serious questions about how AI will affect the future of intellectual property. To my mind, we should keep the focus on three distinct points:<ul>Creative workers need to be compensated for their work Copyright monopolies may not be the best route, especially in a world with AI There are alternative mechanisms that we already use and which could be expanded.</ul></bq> <bq>People write, sing, paint, and do other creative work because they enjoy it, but we cannot expect to get as much of these products as society wants, if we don’t pay people to do them. A musician or writer who has to spend eight hours a day bussing tables to pay the rent is not going to be able to devote themselves fully to developing their talents in these areas.</bq> <bq>[...] copyright enforcement creates all sorts of issues that would not exist in a copyright free world, where basically all digital material could be obtained immediately at zero cost. Copyright is a way to support creative work, but arguably not a very good one. The Internet already raised the costs associated with copyright enforcement substantially. If we have to impose all sorts restrictions on AI, in order to protect copyrights, then the cost to society of copyright enforcement will rise further.</bq> <bq>To be eligible to receive the funding, a person or organization would have to register in the same way that an organization has to register now with the I.R.S. to get tax exempt status. This would mean effectively saying what it is they do, as in write music, or play guitar. As is the case now, there would no effort to determine whether a particular individual or organization is good at what they do, just as the I.R.S. doesn’t try to determine if a church is a good church or a museum is a good museum. The only issue is preventing fraud, ensuring that they do what they claim to do.</bq> <bq>The point is that we only subsidize creative work once. If we pay the worker to produce a book or movie or song, we don’t have to pay them a second time by granting them a copyright monopoly.</bq> <bq>This sort of system could produce a vast amount of creative work that could be freely reproduced and transferred without any concerns about copyright. If AI programs wanted to scrape them to create new works, there would be no issue of compensation, the producers had already been compensated. A rule that could be applied (obviously this requires more thought) is some sort acknowledgement in an AI produced work, much as any scholarly article includes a reference section for work that it draws on. This would prevent outright plagiarism by an AI program and also give credit to the creative workers who it relied upon for a derivative work.</bq> <bq>Copyright suits need not be eligible for statutory damages. If my neighbor knocks over my fence with their SUV, I can sue them for the cost of repairing my fence. I don’t also get statutory damages and usually would not be able to collect attorney fees. We don’t have to give this special status to those bringing lawsuits for copyright infringement.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/two-sides-of-the-same-coin" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Two sides of the same coin</a> <bq>This is not me saying that we should sit back and let super-charged machine-learning platforms devourer our lives. But we also shouldn’t let very scared institutions use our own fear — and lack of tech literacy — to consolidate power and erode what’s left of the open web. We need more user-generated platforms, regardless of whether their [sic] owned by Chinese companies, we need more, better search engines, and we need to look for real pragmatic solutions on what to do with increasingly better machine learning. Because if we don’t we’re going to wake up one day and realize we didn’t fix anything and only helped make a lot of already very rich people even richer while making our own lives worse.</bq> <bq>I don’t want to get too in the weeds on all of this, but I think rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism all eventually boil down to a bunch of weird nerds on message boards hoping they can find a way that sounds ethical to normies of using technology to rebuild feudalism with them on top.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/chamillionsoc/status/1649126333023408128" author="Chamillionaire Socialist" source="Twitter">Tweet accompanying a video showing people being amazed at how mirrors work</a> that has been viewed and shared and liked dozens of millions of times. <bq>I love how early on the internet had these people with aspirations of making a more enlightened era and ended up making people believe things a medieval peasant would.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/intelligence/microsoft-threat-actor-naming?view=o365-worldwide">How Microsoft names threat actors</a> Microsoft is an international, global company, Look at the URL: it even says "worldwide" right in the link. They are so ideologically blind that their list of potential "threat actors" includes Lebanon and Vietnam, but not Israel or the U.S., two of the most aggressive and successful threat actors in operation today. The U.S. is arguably one of the worst, but its hacking is not acknowledged as such---not even in this official document from Microsoft about how they protect us from threat actors. If the threat comes from the U.S. or Israel, then Microsoft is implicitly saying that they will not help us at all. They are going to give those threat actors free reign. <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://jonhilton.net/blazor-sibling-communication/" author="Jon Hilton" source="Making sense of .NET">Need your Blazor sibling components to talk to each other?</a> <bq>If we’re essentially modelling a page, which is a cohesive part of our UI, and the child components are only there to enable us to break the UI down into smaller, more manageable components, then lifting the state up is probably the way to go. But sometimes components need control of their own data. For example, you can imagine a component which uses a datagrid to show data. There’s a good chance you want this component to fetch its own data, not least so you can handle things like pagination, sorting, filtering, etc. In that case, a service which sits outside the component tree and “brokers” communication between components is a good choice.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/offline-is-online-with-extreme-latency/" author="Jim Nielsen" source="">Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency</a> <bq>I love the notion of shifting the idea of two binaries, online/offline, to a spectrum of latency where “offline” is merely the most extreme form of latency. It makes you think differently. You even begin to realize that “offline” has its own gradations: latency of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or more! They’re not all the same and represent a more accurate, all-encompassing picture of the kinds of environments real-world users live in.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/very-slow-and-very-ugly-but-i-still" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Very slow and very ugly but I still love it</a> <bq>GPT-4 is currently limited to 25 messages every three hours and the code it spits out is buggy and often confused. So if you want to make something that works really well and is fine-tuned to your specifications, it’s going to take a long time and might not even be possible tbh.</bq> <bq>[...] by coding something this way, you end up with all kinds of stuff that you know is wrong and janky about the code, but can’t really easily fix. For instance, I don’t know why the cursor doesn’t turn into a hand when it overs over the button on the web app. And I can’t figure out how to center the button on the page. And I don’t know why the Chrome extension doesn’t allow you to press the back button to a previously-loaded page. And if anything broke for any reason, I doubt I could tell you why or fix it properly.</bq> This is, in fairness, how a lot of code is for a lot of programmers already. Most people are in charge of piles of half-working code that they don't really understand. <bq>I think the TikTok ban discourse in the US is ludicrous and feels like a panic response to the waning influence of the American tech industry, but I also don’t think China has any moral high ground here. They don’t let their citizens access the app either. They want all the soft-power influence of TikTok without any of the society-melting algorithmic decay it causes. If China’s online nationalists want to complain about anti-TikTok saber-rattling in Washington, fine, let us all on Douyin.</bq> <bq>I guess I just don’t get the mindset here. There is a seemingly endless reservoir of unflappably enthusiastic (white) guys who all bought Twitter checkmarks and spend their time promoting how-to guides for getting rich quick with AI. I suppose it’s just a new form of snake oil for a new kind of technological revolution. We get all these promises about how whatever new thing is in the news will make our lives magically better when in reality it just does [bullshit].</bq> <hr> <a href="https://zhiminzhan.medium.com/correct-two-common-misconceptions-end-to-end-test-automation-is-simple-and-easy-or-complex-and-ad559ade982a" author="Zhimin Zhan" source="Medium">Correct two Common Misconceptions: End-to-End Test Automation is “Simple and Easy” or “Complex and Impossible”</a> <bq><h level="4">Simple ≠ Easy</h>In the movie, “Central Intelligence”, when someone asks about Bob (the main character by Dwayne Johnson, the Rock)’s transformation, he says he just did one thing: He went to the gym. <iq>For six hours. Every day. For the last 20 years. Straight,</iq> Bob says. The classic software engineering book “The Pragmatic Programmer” conveyed the same concept.<bq>A tourist visiting England’s Eton College asked the gardener how he got the lawns so perfect. “That’s easy,” he replied, “You just brush off the dew every morning, mow them every other day, and roll them once a week.” “Is that all?” asked the tourist. “Absolutely,” replied the gardener. “Do that for 500 years and you’ll have a nice lawn, too.”</bq>The real challenge in automation is maintenance, not creation (~10%, effort-wise). If a team finds test creation complex and hard, ongoing maintenance (running the whole end-to-end suite several times a day) will be impossible.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ayende.com/blog/199362-B/fight-for-every-byte-it-takes-nibbling-at-the-costs" author="Oren Eini" source="">Nibbling at the costs</a> <bq>This is the sort of code that runs billions of times a second. Reducing its latency has a profound impact on overall performance. One of the things that we pay attention to in high-performance code is the number of branches, because we are using super scalar CPUs, multiple instructions may execute in parallel at the chip level. A branch may cause us to stall (we have to wait until the result is known before we can execute the next instruction), so the processor will try to predict what the result of the branch would be. If this is a highly predictable branch (an error code that is almost never taken, for example), there is very little cost to that. The variable integer code, on the other hand, is nothing but branches, and as far as the CPU is concerned, there is no way to actually predict what the result will be, so it has to wait. Branchless or well-predicted code is a key aspect of high-performance code. And this approach can have a big impact.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXCipjbcQfM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/uXCipjbcQfM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Vercel" caption="Rich Harris on frameworks, the web, and the edge"> <bq>When you last went on a recipe web-site and had to fight through a gauntlet of ads and newsletter modals and cookie-consent banners, and the recipe author's story about her childhood memories of aunt Beryl's butter-pecan cookies and you are left thinking: 'if you they had used a different abstraction for creating DOM elements... No. You don't. The web doesn't suck because of frameworks. The web sucks because of capitalism. It sucks because of the attention economy, because we pay for everything with data, and because we're all slaves to the algorithm. On some level, we all know this and so I've come to believe that the most impactful thing that we can do isn't fixating on a kilobyte here or a millisecond there, it's empowering developers through education and documentation and diagnostics and sensible defaults, to do the right thing in the face of structural forces that bend the web towards sucking.</bq> <h>Fun</h> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/FunnyAnimals/comments/12u2y8v/we_are_all_a_little_bit_this_bunny/" author="" source="Reddit">We are all a little bit this bunny</a> is one of the cutest thing that exists on the Internet. It's a short video of a rabbit in REM sleep, slowly, slowly, slowly tipping over while twitching its mouth. It's guaranteed to drop your blood pressure by at least 20. Click the link for the slo-mo video. Adorbs. <img src="{att_link}rabbitslomoflop.jpg" href="{att_link}rabbitslomoflop.jpg" align="none" caption="Slo-mo Bunny Flop" scale="50%">