<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</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><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/22/urjl-m22.html" author="Barry Grey" source="WSWS">Biden proposes $1 trillion in social spending cuts after announcing $375 million more for war in Ukraine</a> <bq>In his remarks on Sunday, Biden provided a glimpse of the scale of parasitism and plunder of the economy by the financial aristocracy. He noted that 55 US corporations that made $400 billion last year paid zero in taxes. He added that billionaires in the US pay an average tax rate of 8 percent. He asserted that the hiring of IRS agents and enforcement of a 15 percent corporate minimum tax would generate $400 billion in additional federal revenue. In fact, <b>as Biden well knows, nothing will be done to rein in these swindlers. He raises the issue in an attempt to cover his attack on the working class with a fraudulent veneer of “equal sacrifice.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/17/ellen-brown-squeezed-by-the-shorts-time-to-ban-short-selling/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ellen Brown">Squeezed by the Shorts: Time to Ban Short Selling?</a> <bq><b>Short sellers “borrow” stock they don’t own and immediately sell it, driving the price down. Then they buy it back at the lower price, return the stock, and pocket the difference.</b> Bankers say the practice is threatening the stability of the banking system and are calling for a ban on short sales of bank stock. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to decline but is investigating whether the practice constitutes illegal market manipulation intended to deceive investors.</bq> <bq>[Y]our brokerage firm cannot lend out your stocks without your permission. However, you may have signed a customer agreement that explicitly allows your broker to lend out your securities. This clause is often tucked deep within the customer agreement, and few investors pay much attention to it.<b> In many cases, investors who have a margin account with their brokerage firm will be asked to sign a hypothecation agreement. This agreement generally gives the brokerage firm the right to lend shares of securities that you own.</b></bq> <bq>[...] if that were a necessary feature of functioning markets, short selling would also be happening in the markets for <b>cars, television sets and computers</b>, which it obviously isn’t. The reason it isn’t is that these goods <b>can’t be “hypothecated” or duplicated on a computer screen the way stock shares can.</b> Short selling is made possible because the brokers are not dealing with physical things but are simply <b>moving numbers around on a computer monitor.</b></bq> <bq>North Dakota has its own “mini-Fed,” the Bank of North Dakota (BND). <b>The bank is wholly owned by the state and is not publicly listed, so its shares cannot be shorted by speculators</b>; and the vast majority of its deposits are state revenues, so there is no fear of a run on the bank.</bq> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/19/us-national-security-experts-call-for-peace-in-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies">US National Security Experts Call for Peace in Ukraine</a> <bq>The statement calls the war an “unmitigated disaster,” and urges President Joe Biden and Congress “to <b>end the war speedily through diplomacy, especially given the dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of control.</b>”</bq> They're sending jets instead. <bq>On May 10, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that <b>he is delaying Ukraine’s long-awaited “spring offensive”</b> to avoid “ unacceptable ” losses to Ukrainian forces.</bq> <bq><b>How can a new offensive with mixed results and higher casualties put Ukraine in a stronger position at a currently non-existent negotiating table?</b> If the offensive reveals that even huge quantities of Western military aid have failed to give Ukraine military superiority or reduce its casualties to a sustainable level, it could very well leave Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position, instead of a stronger one.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/18/china-and-the-axis-of-the-sanctioned/" source="Scheer Post" author="Juan Cole">China and the Axis of the Sanctioned</a> <bq>Where two sides are tired of conflict, as was true with Saudi Arabia and Iran, <b>Beijing is clearly now ready to play the role of the honest broker.</b> Its remarkable diplomatic feat of restoring relations between those countries, however, reflects less its position as a rising Middle Eastern power than <b>the startling decline of American regional credibility after three decades of false promises</b> (Oslo), debacles (Iraq) and capricious policy-making that, in retrospect, appears to have relied on nothing more substantial than a set of cynical imperial divide-and-rule ploys that are now so been-there, done-that.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/17/patrick-lawrence-farewell-to-the-welfare-state-not-just-yet/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Farewell to the Welfare State? Not Just Yet.</a> <bq>[...] <b>this piece has a special message for Americans: There shall be no more daydreaming about how good the Danes or the French have it.</b> The military-industrial complex has crossed the Atlantic. <b>Neoliberalism has won.</b> It is indeed the end of history. It is “TINA” time: “There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher famously used to say. The future will be no different from the present.</bq> <bq>[...] the place of defense spending in America’s political economy. It has long been a way to finance various kinds of technological innovation and keep defense contractors and the thousands of satellite companies supplying them profitable. This has never been at all elastic. Remember, <b>by the Cold War’s end all 435 congressional districts—this by design—had an interest of one or another kind in keeping the money flowing to the defense sector.</b></bq> <bq><b>There were quite impressive peace dividends in two other places.</b> One was post–Soviet Russia, where defense spending collapsed. The other was Western Europe, where it did pretty much the same.</bq> <bq><b>Europeans—well, some Europeans, no, make that a lot of Europeans—have been grousing about the Americanization of their way of life for decades</b>, especially since America’s triumphalist 1990s: McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza parlors all over the place, that vulgar Disney World outside of Paris, Costco and the other “big box stores,” all those infantilizing films coming over from Hollywood, the slobification of the Continent as standards of dress declined.</bq> <bq><b>Behind all the demotic junk of America’s corporatized popular culture has been the creep of neoliberal austerity policies in finance ministries and among the technocrats in Brussels.</b> One of the remarkable features of America’s post–Cold War rendition of neoliberalism is that it can brook no deviation. <b>If America worships markets, everybody must worship markets.</b> If we let a lust for profit destroy everything that gets in its way—culture, community, human dignity—everyone else must do the same.</bq> <bq>How many times, I used to wonder in years gone by, do I have to read New York Times stories—the Times carried the spears on this front—telling me Sweden no longer works, or the French healthcare system—which the U.N. rates the world’s best, along with Japan’s—is falling apart? After a time, <b>this reader’s irritation gave way to sheer derision as the clerks who serve the reigning ideology, known euphemistically as correspondents, discredited themselves.</b></bq> <bq>It tells us that the “the peace dividend”—again it gets the quotation marks—was nothing more than an irresponsible holiday for the Europeans. The long war is over (because another one has begun). <b>Europe will no longer count as a worrisome alternative to America’s grim neoliberal realities, poisoning our minds with the thought that there are other ways to live.</b> The danger—that European social democracy, in all its various stripes, actually works—has passed.</bq> <bq><b>It is impossible to miss the triumphalist gloat coursing through Cohen and Alderman’s prose.</b> Read the piece. This caught my eye from the first paragraphs onward. It’s the military-industrial complex über alles —finally, thank goodness, etc.:</bq> <bq><b>The near term for Europeans is clear, set: They have been conscripted into Cold War II, like it or not.</b> Nothing beyond this seems so certain to me. Let us hope Europeans prove able to keep a certain flame alive, the flame of possibility, and the piece I parse here turns out to be nothing more than another Sweden-doesn’t-work story.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=97928" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Florian Warweg">Bundesregierung zum Einsatz von Uranmunition gegen Russland: „Keine signifikanten Strahlenexpositionen der Bevölkerung zu erwarten“</a> <bq><b>In Serbien steigen seit der NATO-Bombardierung 1999 nachweislich die Krebsraten</b>, insbesondere bei Lungenkrebs. Das Land belegt inzwischen seit Jahren den zweiten Platz weltweit bei der Verbreitung dieser Krebsart</bq> <bq>Wenn man weiß, wie umfassend und eindeutig diese Kausalität belegt werden muss, bevor Soldaten Anspruch auf Entschädigungen haben, bleibt wohl wenig Zweifel an den, von der Bundesregierung negierten, <b>direkten Auswirkungen von Uranmunition auf die menschliche Gesundheit.</b></bq> <bq>Der außenpolitische Sprecher der AfD-Bundestagsfraktion, Petr Bystron, erklärte in Bezug auf die Antwort der Bundesregierung: „Die Bundesregierung verurteilt die britische Lieferung von Uranmunition an die Ukraine nicht, obgleich <b>die Bundeswehr selbst diese Munition aufgrund der Gefährdung der eigenen Soldaten gar nicht einsetzt.</b> Auch bezeichnend: Über den angeblichen Einsatz von Uranmunition durch Russland liegen der Bundesregierung keine Erkenntnisse vor, womit klar ist, dass <b>es sich bei dieser Behauptung um reine Kriegspropaganda handelt.</b>“</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/17/patrick-lawrence-the-usas-soviet-style-president/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The USA’s Soviet-Style President</a> <bq>Get ready, readers. We are in for 19 months of relentless, insultingly transparent spin, propaganda, and lies of omission, by way of which <b>a senile, patently incompetent man will be offered to us as the president for another four years.</b></bq> <bq><b>You won’t see much of Biden during the coming campaign season. He will make the minimum of public appearances, and they will be brief.</b> He will not answer many questions — mine, yours, or any journalist’s. And those he does answer will be carefully vetted replies written on index cards, as is already the practice. Already we are advised the Democratic National Committee will hold no primary debates.</bq> <bq>Will we have to depend on the Post, a Murdoch property, for an undue proportion of genuine news about Biden, his corrupt family, and his past doings as the campaign season gets going? I will not be surprised if this turns out to be the case, given <b>our liberal media are absolutely bent on keeping all of the above from public view</b> so as to keep this log-roller in office.</bq> <bq>So far as I understand the matter, the No. 1 “non-law enforcement or non-intelligence use” of the F.B.I.’s file is political. It is to tell the public just what Biden got up to during his vice-presidency so that we can all decide if we like him or detest him and — among those who vote — if they will support him next year. No, the F.B.I. says: That would be an improper use of this information. <b>Do you ever get as sick of these bamboozlers, these cretins, as I do? Does your heart send faint signals it is breaking as we watch utterly unqualified people with too much power send our republic straight down the chute?</b></bq> <bq><b>Remote, unanswerable and unanswering, Biden seems to me the U.S.’s first fully Soviet-style president.</b> During his 2020 campaigns I compared him with Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the two dottering Soviet general-secretaries who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev.</bq> <bq>What gets my goat, sticks on my craw, gets up my nose — how uncomfortable it is to comment on these matters — is <b>the offensive confidence the Democratic machine displays as it presumes it can foist a senile old man on our republic.</b> The corrupt-to-the-core DNC gives every impression of thinking it can do whatever it wants and still get its man into the White House. These are the same bastards who prattle on about voters’ rights, the defense of democracy, and so on.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>there is the matter of comeuppance.</b> A party so complacent and contemptuous of democracy as to assume it can impose an incompetent geriatric on the nation to suit its purposes deserves some.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-a-simulacrum" source="Russian Dissent" author="Anna Ochkina">The Perils of a Simulacrum</a> <bq>[...] contrary to all historical facts, ideas are spreading in Russian society not only that the victory in World War II was exclusively an achievement of the USSR, but also ideas about the relationships of all the other European countries with Nazi Germany. <b>Allegedly, the Second World War was a battle between Soviet warriors of light against all the Western countries, who suddenly sided with evil.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/50/smith.php" source="Cabinet Magazine" author="Justin E.H. Smith">It's all dark</a> <bq>[...] <b>what remains constant is the belief that there must be some difference between the near side and the far side</b>, between two cosmic realms whose official boundary, so to speak, is the solstitial colure between the two hemispheres.</bq> <bq>Plutarch had wanted to know why it smiles so: why there is, or appears to be, a man in the moon. Is he a reflection of terrestrial features, or is his appearance due to the relief of the moon’s own surface? Is he in truth a man, or at least a telling indicator of the presence in the moon of some sort of conscious, perhaps rational, being? It might have helped Plutarch to know that <b>in Chinese and Indian astrology, the relief in the near surface of the moon is not a man at all, but a rabbit, banished there for some earthly malfeasance in some versions, sent as a sacrifice in others. Run, rabbit, run.</b></bq> <bq>It was the coup de grâce of the men behind the Soviet space program to go to the other side and see for themselves, and while they could not have said as much, <b>what they were in fact doing was checking to make sure that there was no atmosphere there, no vegetation, no seas or grottoes or beasts with legs like camels, no spirits.</b> Again, this final verification was meant to seal the coffin on a certain old way of thinking, to show that it’s all the same everywhere, and that <b>simply being hard to reach does not make a region of the cosmos special or peculiar</b>, nor charge it with any unusual powers, nor populate it with unusual beings.</bq> <hr> <a href="" source="" author=""></a> <bq>In The Changing Light at Sandover, another magnum opus of the 1970s, James Merrill sees the same rockets hailed by Riabchikov two decades earlier as the very congelations of reason, and warns that the <b>“Powers / We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake / Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath / And speak new formulae of megadeath.”</b> Here the heavy metal allusion is off by a vowel, yet not entirely coincidental. The poet, like the band whose name is derived from the technical term for one million fatalities by nuclear explosion, sees that <b>rockets are launched by unreason too. It’s all dark, said the Abbey Road doorman. The sun is eclipsed by the moon.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/i-wanted-to-be-a-teacher-but-they" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop</a> <bq><b>Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.</b> Plus, instruction and evaluation compete for time: every minute I spend ranking students is a minute I’m not teaching them, and a minute they’re not learning.</bq> <bq>Nobody ever told me why I’m evaluating my students. In fact, in the final year of my PhD, I became the person who taught grad students how to teach, and I never told them why they were evaluating their students. We all just took it for granted: “Ah yes, the ancient, sacred tradition of <b>assigning people a number based on how many classes they attended and how many multiple-choice questions they answered correctly.</b>”</bq> It's an abstraction thats allows you to determine to what degree someone has learned something. It's a proxy that allows scaling up and, ostensibly, comparison across widely distributed cohorts. Where should we invest precious teaching resources? Where it makes the most utility. That's the reason. The author would eventually make this point as well, but it was kind of annoying to have to wade through pages of him shouting about how terrible evaluation is, when his point was actually that <i>teachers shouldn't be the ones making evaluations.</i> Fair enough, and an interesting point. <bq>The idea that people don’t care about learning is a dumb cousin of the even dumber idea that people are stupid.</bq> People don't necessarily care about learning stuff that they aren't convinced is immediately useful. Think martial arts. They also may not be stupid, but deliberate ignorance is prevalent. It's not always possible to tell the difference. <bq>Whenever I got an essay back in college, I would always flip to the final page to look for the grade, feel the appropriate emotions (“I’m the smartest guy who ever lived!!”/“I’m an idiot, destined to die in a hole!”), and <b>basically ignore the comments, because the grades counted and the comments didn’t.</b></bq> Funny. I did the exact opposite. <bq>I’m not actually interested in doing this. What am I going to do, send the good students to heaven and send the bad students to hell? Besides, what makes a student “good”? Some students make great comments in class but turn nothing in. Some students are getting divorced right now and can’t really focus on school. <b>I want to teach every kind of student the best that I can, and maintaining a “naughty” list and a “nice” list only gets in my way.</b></bq> Do you have no notion of societal utility? Just teaching for teaching's sake? Are you teaching for your students? Or for yourself? Sometimes hard things are worth doing. You have to figure out what sort of carrot will convince or compel someone to learn how to do them. <bq>Three things are happening here. One: <b>the gatekeepers who guard selective opportunities know that they can demand anything of applicants.</b> Why go to all the trouble of trying to figure out how smart someone is when you can make them spend four years and ~$150,000 proving it to you?</bq> <bq>There’s not much that can be done about #1, but #2 and #3 would change pretty quick if people had to see evaluation up close, really stick their noses in it and take a big whiff. Because then they’d realize that <b>evaluation, when taken to its logical end, smells a lot like prison.</b></bq> Scholastic evaluation is also mostly half-assed and absolutely not comparable across versions. It's why software companies have assessments. You need to just find out what the person can do. I also think the hiring side gets excited about their power and starts getting overly fussy, thinking they can control for minutiae that just isn't possible. <bq>But look, <b>we need some evaluation. People have different talents, and they should get opportunities that tap those talents, not just because it benefits them, but because it benefits everybody.</b> If I’m drowning (God forbid), I want to be saved by a lifeguard who’s good at swimming. If I get hit by a bus (God forbid), I want to be operated on by someone who's good at surgery. If I take a math class (God forbid), I want to learn from someone who’s good at math. For that world to exist, <b>someone, at some point, has to evaluate people on their swimming, surgery, and math.</b></bq> Finally! <bq><b>If getting evaluated means visiting a police state, it’s better to be a tourist than a resident</b>—spending a month studying for the SAT and an afternoon taking it is miserable, but spending a lifetime in classrooms that double as prisons is even worse.</bq> <bq>[...] we treat evaluation as its own beast, rather than something you can get for free from a transcript.</bq> <bq><b>Every time we rank one another, we lose a little humanity.</b> The people who end up on top become more arrogant, the people who end up at the bottom become more indignant, and the people doing the ranking become more callous. Evaluation is like X-rays: small doses are helpful, but large doses are lethal.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/sammy-goes-to-school" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Sammy Goes to School</a> <bq>The students I teach in prison have variations of the same story. <b>They are funneled into the maw of the prison-industrial-complex, the largest in the world, and spat out decades later</b>, even more lost and traumatized, to wander the streets like ghosts until most, unequipped to survive on the outside and without support, find themselves back in the old familiar cages.</bq> <bq>But I tell this story because it needs to be told. I tell it because this time the end will be different. This time the system will not win. I tell it because <b>neglected and abused children, no matter what crime they commit, should not be imprisoned as if they were adults.</b> I tell it because we are complicit. I tell it because until we stop investing in systems of control and start investing in people, especially children, nothing will change. It will only get worse.</bq> <bq>“Decisions were made early on in my life that I would serve the service sector of society,” he says. “I wasn’t taught innovative curriculums. <b>They sent me to woodshop or auto mechanic schools.</b>”</bq> Those are not fallbacks; they are alternatives. The system that considers this menial work is diseased. I learned it all. I knew instinctively, early on, that there were no bad courses. I took everything I could, disappointing teachers right and left, who thought that it was beneath me. <bq>He was housed in Trenton State Prison’s Vroom wing for those with mental and behavioral issues. Prisoners called it “the terror dome.” “It had the biggest overzealous guards,” he says. “Twenty-three and one lockdown,” meaning he was only out of his cell for one hour each day. “They came around with a little book cart,” he says. <b>“You could get a book if you wanted. You’d be let out into the yard every few days. You’d get a shower every few days, other than that you’re in your cell.”</b></bq> Other than the cold and no spoon, this sounds like the story of Denisovic in his gulag. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/19/seymour-hersh-the-ukraine-refugee-question/" source="Scheer Post" author="Seymour Hersh">The Ukraine Refugee Question</a> <bq><b>One of the driving forces for the quiet European talks with Zelensky has been the more than five million Ukrainians fleeing from the war</b> who have crossed the country’s borders and have registered with its neighbors under an EU agreement for temporary protection that includes residency rights, access to the labor market, housing, social welfare assistance, and medical care.</bq> This is a huge shock to labor markets and social safety nets that is, purely coincidentally, felt not one bit by the U.S. <bq>“Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the American official said. The <b>European leaders have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got”—a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts—“if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.”</b></bq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/name-the-kook" author="Ted Rall" source="">Name the Kook</a> <img src="{att_link}ted_rall_5-26-23.jpg" href="{att_link}ted_rall_5-26-23.jpg" align="none" caption="Ted Rall 5-26-23" scale="50%"> <bq>Two parties, two frontrunners, one a president, the other one a former president. Both at the same exact place in primary polls. Both face challengers. But <b>only one gets taken seriously. Could the reason be media spin?</b></bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6" author="Timothy M. Lenton, Chi Xu, Jesse F. Abrams, Ashish Ghadiali, Sina Loriani, Boris Sakschewski, Caroline Zimm, Kristie L. Ebi, Robert R. Dunn, Jens-Christian Svenning & Marten Scheffer" source="Nature">Quantifying the human cost of global warming</a> <bq>Here we express them <b>in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’</b>—defined as the historically highly conserved distribution of relative human population density with respect to mean annual temperature. We show that <b>climate change has already put ~9% of people (>600 million) outside this niche.</b> By end-of-century (2080–2100), current policies leading to around 2.7 °C global warming could leave one-third (22–39%) of people outside the niche. <b>Reducing global warming from 2.7 to 1.5 °C results in a ~5-fold decrease in the population exposed to unprecedented heat (mean annual temperature ≥29 °C).</b> The lifetime emissions of ~3.5 global average citizens today (or ~1.2 average US citizens) <b>expose one future person to unprecedented heat by end-of-century. That person comes from a place where emissions today are around half of the global average.</b></bq> So the people causing the warming are not the ones experiencing the worst of it. That's essentially means that people are not going to stop warming the planet. It's literally "if you had a box with a button that, when you pushed it, it gave you a million dollars but also killed a person you don't know." <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-in-your-hands" source="SubStack" author="Freddie deBoer">It's All in Your Hands</a> <bq>I’m not one who struggles to just keep going, as so many people do, but I come closest when I think of this: that <b>there are gentle people to whom the world is not gentle.</b> It hits me like a does of Haldol, every time - a slap to the face that clarifies and makes you feel worse. I’ll be in the supermarket minding my own business, <b>wondering who exactly names the varieties of apple</b>, when suddenly it occurs to me that many exist who walk around the world undefended, <b>reaching out unthinkingly to others without cool or irony or aggression</b>, those without savvy or a plan, and <b>they’re treated with cold and harsh behavior that they receive with hurt and, worse, surprise.</b> That’s the part I can’t bear - thinking of <b>someone expecting the world to be soft the way that they’re soft, and finding that it isn’t.</b></bq> <bq>The sun was barely up and I was alone in the most popular park in the most populated borough in the city. <b>At the boathouse a heron stood on the tile next to the dock. He stalked around, alien, prehistoric</b>, and though I couldn’t really, from the distance of the bridge, I told myself I could <b>hear the clatter of ancient claws on weathered tile.</b> The sight of him terrified me.</bq> <bq>[...] where I am now: fat, rapidly aging, a joke to many, but financially secure, <b>slowly chipping away, loved and in love, four walls and a roof.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the train moves, shaking just as the train shakes. And around you pass the busy <b>people, not unkind, just mute and useless, those who would do nothing to harm you but who can’t imagine a world in which they might save people like you.</b> I would think that the image of your corpse would be arresting, but <b>the people on the subway had somewhere to get to, and so did the subway, and the city did too.</b></bq> <bq><b>Mother, be with me now, the world belongs to the stupid and cruel</b>, I have grown ugly with time, my words are weak, every building I pass looks like a crumbling and underfunded hospital, <b>I write and write and no one cares.</b> Let me remember the plant growing from a coconut shell in the surf, <b>the white city at the end of an immaculate beam.</b></bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic" source="New Atlantis" author="Tara Isabella Burton">How “post-rationalism” is reshaping tech culture</a> <bq>Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are <b>showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life.</b> The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/stanford-law-students-are-your-class" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Stanford Law Students Are Your Class Enemy</a> <bq>[...] becoming functionally a tool of the status quo doesn’t require ideological transformation. I don’t think people become conservatives en masse as they age. I do think that people get busy with life and find themselves increasingly deepening inequality and supporting unjust structures as they just try to get ahead. I’m sure that will happen with a lot of these Stanford law grads. But I’m also sure <b>a lot of them are going to wave the black flag right up until they get a cush $350K/year entry-level job at a major firm and then get busy helping cigarette manufacturers avoid lawsuits. And I’m also sure they’ll never feel bad about any of it.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/05/24/escaping-the-prison-of-mainstream-culture-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Escaping The Prison Of Mainstream Culture</a> <bq>Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It’s a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can’t ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it’s sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. <b>Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it’s self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.</b> <b>This isn’t something the left can just dismiss.</b> There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.</bq> <bq><b>If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology.</b> Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.</bq> <bq>This is the only reason those who talk about <b>western propaganda and Silicon Valley information manipulation</b> get branded conspiracy theorists. It’s not because the evidence for our position on those issues isn’t abundant, <b>it’s because it’s not officially acknowledged and studied.</b> Domestic propaganda is the most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our civilization, because it causes people to think, speak, work, shop and vote in ways that perpetuate the status quo. <b>You should be able to get a PhD in its study, but you can’t even write a thesis on it.</b> The most important thing you need to know about our society is that all our means of understanding our world are being aggressively and continuously interfered with by powerful people who benefit from the status quo. <b>They’re actively meddling in our perception of reality.</b></bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/05/the-ghost-in-the-machine-part-ii-simplifying-the-ghost-of-ai.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Ali Minai">The Ghost in the Machine (Part II): Simplifying the Ghost of AI</a> <bq>[...] the fact that LLMs almost always use words in meaningful ways indicates that they have an implicit model of meanings too. What is the nature of that? <b>The answer lies almost certainly in a linguistic idea called the distributional hypothesis of meaning, which says that the meaning of a word can be inferred from the statistics of its use in the context of other words.</b> As described above, LLMs based on transformers are pre-disposed to the statistical learning of structural relationships in text, and their representations of meaning must be derived implicitly from this because of the tight linkage between word usage and meaning per the distributional hypothesis. <b>Given enough data, the statistics can become very accurate – hence the meaningful output of GPT-4 et al.</b></bq> <bq>This deeply and inherently intelligent “machine” takes in all its sensory input across all modalities, integrates it with its own state, and generates new states of thought, feeling, emotion, action, memory, and action continuously in real-time, just as a rotation is generated in a pinwheel by a breeze. Only a minuscule fraction of these states rise to the level of consciousness; even fewer are the result of deliberation (which, from a non-dualist viewpoint, must itself be seen just a more complex, slower-changing trajectory in the state space.) The key point here is that, even System 2 behavior – thought or action – is built on a deep substrate of System 1 behavior: <b>The key we learn to press when first learning to play a piece of music may be chosen deliberately, but the coordination of intention and movement that allows us to press it at all is all automatic. System 1 is the soil in which System 2 grows.</b></bq> <bq>This is why producing extremely smart chatbots or Go champions is inherently more feasible than putting safe fully self-driving cars on the road. It is also why <b>AI programmers, lawyers and physicians will likely become a reality sooner than useful household robots.</b> You can learn all of medicine from text and data, but you can’t learn to fold laundry – actually fold it, not just the steps – without doing it.</bq> <bq>The difference lies in the multiscale organization of coordination modes discussed earlier. Evolution and development preconfigure a repertoire of useful coordination modes as primitives of behavior , and reinforcement learning simply needs to learn how to trigger the right combinations. <b>The instantiation of these coordination modes through a gradual process of development ensures that they are learned efficiently by each stage building only on the successful modes learned in earlier stages, e.g., toddling on standing, walking on toddling, running on walking, etc.</b></bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://kobzol.github.io/rust/python/2023/05/20/writing-python-like-its-rust.html" author="" source="Kobzol's blog">Writing Python like it's Rust</a> <bq>The first and foremost thing is using type hints where possible, particularly in function signatures and class attributes.</bq> A great first step. I'm fascinated to read these posts by Python programmers, writing as if they're discovering new territory. <bq>Using type hints is one thing, but that merely describes what is the interface of your functions. <b>The second step is actually making these interfaces as exact and “locked down” as possible.</b> A typical example is returning multiple values (or a single complex value) from a function. The lazy and quick approach is to return a tuple [...] Great, we know that we’re returning three values. What are they? Is the first string the first name of the person? The second string the surname? What’s the number? Is it age? Position in some list? Social security number? <b>This kind of typing is opaque and unless you look into the function body, you don’t know what happens here.</b></bq> Congratulations, you've discovered what people knew when they invented Ada and Algol about 50 or 60 years ago. <bq>The proper solution is to return a strongly typed object with named parameters that have an attached type. In Python, this means we have to create a class. I suspect that tuples and dicts are used so often in these situations because it’s just so much easier than to define a class (and think of a name for it), create a constructor with parameters, store the parameters into fields etc. <b>Since Python 3.7 (and sooner with a package polyfill), there is a much faster solution - dataclasses.</b> [...] <b>You still have to think of a name for the created class</b>, but other than that, it’s pretty much as concise as it can get, and you get type annotations for all attributes.</bq> I cite at length because I'm fascinated to watch the Python coding world "discover" programming as engineering. There are also sections on avoiding <i>primitive obsession</i>, avoiding a ton of mutable state in a single object, and so on. This is <i>not</i> to say that I've never done any of this. I've definitely created a client for a custom protocol that had a <c>Connect()</c> method that you had to ensure wasn't going to be called at the wrong time. It's just kind of funny to watch them discover this kind of stuff as if it were all brand new. At least when I was re-learning stuff, I had no Internet from which I could have learned it better, and I was only ignoring a couple of decades of computer science rather than five decades worth of it, at least three of which were accompanied by an Internet utterly rich in tutorials and information about how to write clean code. And yet---Python was born and everyone with no programming experience---or inclination to learn from anyone who had any---started using it. <hr> <a href="https://nikoheikkila.fi/blog/clean-frontend-architecture-with-sveltekit/discovering-the-use-cases/" author="Niko Heikkilä" source="">Clean Frontend Architecture with SvelteKit: Discovering the Use Cases</a> <bq>Do note that with a real-world product, you should define user stories by discussing with stakeholders instead of inspecting existing behaviour from an external service. <b>Technical people defining the features they want to deliver without conversing with the right people is a great way to waste money.</b></bq> This should go without saying, but it bears repeating. It happens all the time that technical people end up defining the features because no-one else in the project is trained to think logically about how to design features. Even though it can be a good guess, it's still not even close to the same thing as finding out what customers actually need. Although a lot of popular products are "giving customers stuff they didn't know they wanted or needed", most industry software is for customers who are very well-versed in their domains and can say what they need. You can't disrupt everything. <bq>One of the reasons for writing this guide is that I have seen <b>too many frontend applications where application and networking logic is tightly coupled with the view layer.</b> Typically, user interface components fetch data in the browser via AJAX requests, applying formatting on top of it and displaying it to the user.</bq> I've done this as well, but it's wrong, unless you're just prototyping or playing around. Unless you are prototyping directly for a customer---who is likely to be more receptive to a visual approach---you should always just start with defining services, as described in this article. <bq>Components should primarily see the data passed to them via properties, commonly known as props. It helps you by creating a natural anti-corruption layer between your views and the application keeping it maintainable, scalable and effortless to test. <b>Push the logic as far to the backend as possible, whether it's the frontend's backend or the actual backend.</b></bq> <bq>Your application must be reachable from a command-line interface. Therefore, in most projects, your command-line interface is your test runner. This knowledge makes it easy to validate if your design is clean enough. For example, <b>do you need to test the user interface to validate your core business logic? If you do, your design is painfully coupled with the user interface.</b></bq> There are certain interactions or facets of use cases that can only realistically be tested directly in the UI. You should be a bit careful about spending too much time abstracting and extracting everything so that it can be tested from the command line/test harness. For example, if you expect a chart to show red dots for data points below a certain threshold, you can test that offline---but you still can't verify that the color is <i>actually red</i> until you <i>actually see it</i> in the browser. That is, you can verify that a certain CSS class is being applied to an element, but how can you verify that this class actually applies a red foreground color? The only realistic way is to actually display the page in the browser, take a screenshot and compare it to an expectation. Or, how would you test drag-&-drop behavior? For example, suppose you want to verify that certain drop zones are valid and others are not? You can probably determine that from state. Can you verify that those drop zones are actually colored differently? Or that they indicate that they are drop-zones somehow? Of course you can---but is it always worth automating? These kinds of verifications can quite time-intensive---and most developers will simply be incapable of writing this kind of code. This kind of code is often very touchy and highly dependent on operating-system events that are not so easy to fake. Even if you can fake them, you're generally faking up an ideal system that may or may not correspond to what actually happens in real systems. The amount of effort you invest in verifying your drag-&-drop behavior outside of a UI context may be quite high relative to just testing that behavior manually. You should be aware of the cost of automation and plan accordingly. <hr> <a href="https://nikoheikkila.fi/blog/clean-frontend-architecture-with-sveltekit/handling-the-external-dependencies-with-gateway/" author="Niko Heikkilä" source="">Clean Frontend Architecture with SvelteKit: Handling the External Dependencies with Gateway</a> <bq>You can test against a real filesystem, API, and an actual database to your heart's content. However, you will realize the importance of test doubles when your previously so fast tests start to take longer and longer to run, and as a consequence, <b>you run them less frequently, increasing the feedback loop and causing defects to arise.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FFYefcx4Bg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/4FFYefcx4Bg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Nick Chapsas" caption="Build Clean Messaging in .NET with MassTransit"> This is a great video, introducing an interesting concept. <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <a href="https://files.wegewerk.com/index.php/s/Mr8WX7WMT5gd66a" author="" source="">Sleeping across Europe. Night Train Network; Destinations 2023</a> <img src="{att_link}night-train-map.jpg" href="{att_link}night-train-map.jpg" align="none" caption="Night-train map" scale="75%"> <hr> The route from Longarone, IT (at 436m) to Tre Cime di Lavaredo, IT (at 2304m) covered 5400m of climbing over 183km. The winner averaged 33.5kmh. <img src="{att_link}ixqgaw8ifxh0u9nkjhob_190423-092002.jpg" href="{att_link}ixqgaw8ifxh0u9nkjhob_190423-092002.jpg" align="none" caption="Giro d'Italia 2023 - final mountain stage" scale="50%"> On an earlier segment, they showed the stats for one of the riders on a climb of 10km with 8.8% average incline. He averaged 22.3kmh at 440w and 85 cadence. Absolutely insane.