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Links and Notes for July 7th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#covid">COVID-19</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>COVID-19</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/05/chin-j05.html" source="WSWS" author="Aaron Edwards">New study finds that lifting Zero-COVID in China caused 1.4 billion infections and up to 2.6 million deaths</a> <bq>Our results suggest that on Dec. 7, the day when full exit from zero-COVID was announced, there were ~1 million new infections. Because of the extremely high rate of spread afterwards, the outbreak ballooned such that 97% [95%, 99%] of the population (i.e., 1.37 billion people) became infected in December. As a result of the exponential nature of the spread, the vast majority of people (88% [83%, 93%] of the population) became infected during the short window of time between Dec. 15 and 31, 2022….</bq> <bq>At the behest of global finance capital, capitalist world governments have demanded that there be no interruptions in the process of wealth accumulation regardless of the cost in human life. The Western media, after continuously demanding the end of Zero-COVID in China, has now dropped the subject of the pandemic altogether.</bq> <bq>The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that world capitalism is unwilling and unable to implement the necessary public health measures globally in order to stop the spread of this preventable illness, as well as future pandemics that may appear. The capitalist system is incompatible with sustaining life on this planet,</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-one-child-policy-economic-slowdown-us-trade-imbalance-by-yi-fuxian-2023-07" source="Project Syndicate" author="Yi Fuxian">The Long Reach of China’s Demographic Destiny</a> <bq>The deterioration in US-China relations is ultimately due to the bilateral trade imbalance and to US frustration with Chinese politics. Both can be traced back to China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2016.</bq> That's the topic sentence? Frustration? Not "belligerences"? <bq>When Western leaders welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, most assumed that they were creating the conditions for eventual democratization.</bq> They absolutely were fucking not expecting that. They were slobbering over the quasi-legal slave labor they were going to be able to exploit once their plans to completely subjugate Russia went out the door with Yeltsin. This is pretty much a matter of public record. "Uncontroversial", as Chomsky would say. <bq>This political fantasy underpinned the Sino-American relationship for decades.</bq> <bq>Chinese household disposable income fell from 62% of GDP in 1983 to 40 - 44% in 2005-2022, compared to 60 - 70% internationally.</bq> 60% disposable income internationally? Presumably OECD countries or some.other specially chosen group toward whose membership China is assumed to aspire. Why is so much disposable.income good? Ah, yes, because it can be hoovered up by multinationals. The underlying assumption, as always, is.that everyone should.want to be like the U.S. <bq>But the grassroots mobilization lasted for only half a month. Once the government capitulated and rescinded the zero-COVID policy, there was little left to sustain political protests. This is what one would expect in a country with a median age of 42 and where the proportion of youth has fallen to 17%</bq> The protest movement got what it wanted. "government capitulated" is a phrase I don't read about in the U.S. Protest; get what you want; keep protesting? How do you expect this to work? <bq>Still, Western and Chinese leaders long shared a belief in the prospect of China’s democratization, with one major difference: while Western leaders sought to promote it, Chinese leaders anxiously resisted it. Now, the game is up. The West is increasingly abandoning its unrealistic illusions, and many Chinese people – having accepted three years of harsh COVID controls – are counting on a powerful central government to provide social security, health care, and safety in the future.</bq> How is the last part juxtaposed to democracy? Only in the neoliberal mindset is it bad for government to provide the basics of society. They think those things should be open to obscene profits instead. <bq>Its economic and political conditions today are a preview of the rest of the country tomorrow. Although aging will produce plenty of minor forms of social unrest, there will be no major upheavals. Even if China experiences the kind of turmoil that swept Russia in the 1990s, its huge elderly population would inevitably look to a Vladimir Putin-style strongman to stabilize the social order through tough top-down measures.</bq> Turmoil == plunder. Anyone who calls what happened to Russia in the 90s <iq>turmoil</iq> is an unqualified unempathetic asshole. <bq>Because Chinese parents have long worried that their only child will be unable to support them later in life, they have tended to consume less and save more for their own retirement. At the same time, Chinese governments, corporations, and the rich have also maintained high savings rates. As a result, China’s average savings rate over the 2005-2020 period was 47%, compared with 24% in the rest of the world, and 18% in the US.</bq> And this bad how? Not enough circulation? No chance for money to flow upward? Again, the author compares China to the neoliberal OECD countries and finds it lacking. <bq>Unlike other countries whose economies are driven primarily by consumption, China’s has run on exports and investment in real estate and infrastructure (such as high-speed rail). From 2005 to 2020, it had an average investment rate of 44%, compared with 23% in the rest of the world, and 21% in the US.</bq> <bq>America’s share of world manufacturing exports had stabilized at 13% between 1971 and 2001, but then fell to 7% by 2018, owing to China’s accession to the WTO. We’ve now seen where this led: Rust Belt counties that were hollowed out after 2001 propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. Arguably, the US is the second-biggest victim of China’s one-child policy.</bq> Blame China! wow! Poor helpless billionaires in the U.S.---put over a barrel by the dastardly Chinese. The oblivious self-pity is shocking, even to a cynic like me. This author blames America's predation of its own working class on the Chinese. All with a straight face. That is an achievement. <bq>US efforts to restore manufacturing have yet to bear fruit: America’s share of world manufacturing exports continued to decline, to 6% in 2022. The US has faced difficulties partly because the decoupling from China’s industrial chain has increased costs and created supply shortages, but also because it lacks sufficient vocational education and has failed to stem the erosion of manufacturing wage premiums.</bq> Also because the don't know how to invest long-term. Just funnel money upward is all they know. To term the drastically decreasing wages in the U.S. as a phenomenon that the U.S. has <iq>failed to stem</iq> is a deliberate ignorance of everything that is U.S. domestic policy. The U.S. actively encouraged the flow of money toward capital and away from labor. To characterize that policy as anything more or less than that is a lie. Or the U.S. <iq>lack[ing] sufficient vocational education</iq>, as if it magically disappeared instead of having been neglected to death by a country that fails to see any value in education---that, in fact, fears it as it would rather have a dulled, heavily propagandized service-level populace rather than anyone capable of doing anything, including thinking for themselves. <bq>[...] the CPC may finally have to contend with a powerful middle class – just as Western strategists once hoped.</bq> The author can conceive only of a world in which the only possible goal in a relationship with China is regime change, hopefully to a Western-compliant Yeltsin-style crook. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/07/seymour-hersh-gitmos-permanent-chains/" source="Scheer Post" author="Seymour Hersh">Gitmo's Permanent Chains</a> <bq>The Biden administration, obviously aware that Americans by and large care little about Guantánamo and the souls who have been wrongfully imprisoned there, left the response to UN Ambassador Michèle Taylor. Her reply to the report essentially said Ní Aoláin had it all wrong. “We are committed to providing safe and humane treatment for detainees … in full accordance with international and US domestic law. Detainees live communally and prepare meals together; receive specialized medical and psychiatric care; are given full access to legal counsel; and communicate regularly with family members.”</bq> Let. Them. Go. No discussion. Buncha fucking monsters. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden---all monsters who do not care that the U.S. has imprisoned random people without even charging them, to say nothing of sentencing them. But why would we expect any different? The U.S. does the same to its own citizens, picking them up for bullshit, then letting them languish in jail, uncharged, for years before either finally bringing them before a court or just letting them go without so much as an apology. <bq>All in all, as the UN’s special rapporteur did not say, it could not be worse for those souls if they were found not guilty of wrongdoing and cast into hell for the rest of their days.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/07/the-u-s-is-a-nation-of-savage-inequality/" source="CounterPunch" author="Eve Ottenberg">The U.S. is a Nation of Savage Inequality</a> <bq>When confronted with not having recused himself from a case involving his benefactor and not having reported his swanky vacation, judge Samuel Alito essentially proclaimed, according to The New Republic June 21, “I didn’t know I had to.” Alito had ruled in favor of his patron and justified it thus: “I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites. First, even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate.” He argued that he and the fabulously wealthy financier Paul Singer were not personally close, so clearly, he was unbiased.</bq> <bq>[...] these financial moguls have bought the supreme court of the United States. They own it, and it does their bidding. Does anyone care? Do ordinary people have any redress? No and no. We are invited instead to spend our time despising destitute people for supposedly destroying our cities’ “quality of life.”</bq> <bq>Who crushed our quality of life? Corporate oligarchs, who dismantled our manufacturing base, shipped all the jobs to Mexico then China for the cheap labor and who thus hollowed out a productive, well-functioning U.S. economy. But we’re not invited to detest them. Oh no. They are glamorized, their wealth is everyone’s aspiration.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/06/patrick-lawrence-we-need-to-talk-about-nahel/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">We Need to Talk About Nahel</a> <bq>[...] the social and political confrontations occurring regularly in France these days are visible manifestations of social and political confrontations that are suppressed or sublimated elsewhere all over the West. This is why we ought to pay attention. The French happen to have the good sense to say what they mean more readily than the rest of us.</bq> <bq>On display in France is a shared refusal or inability among Western societies to accept non–Westerners as equals in their midst and, by extension, to accept that half a millennium of presumed Western superiority is ending as we speak and that new understandings of what it means to be human press themselves urgently upon us.</bq> <bq>To an extent few care to acknowledge, it is fair to say the nation’s various police organizations effectively stand on the front line that divides the two Frances noted above. The officer who shot Nahel is now identified as Florian M. and faces charges of voluntary manslaughter. As of Monday, 52,000 French had donated €1.1 million, about the same amount in U.S. dollars, to his legal defense fund.</bq> <bq>If you arrive in Britain on a flight from an Asian or otherwise non–Western nation, you are likely to see among the immigration officials those of the race or ethnicity of the country from which you are traveling. They will speak the prevalent language among the passengers, to whom they will be solicitous. Their uniform insignia will be in this language. These arrivals will then be able to go to neighborhoods in London or elsewhere populated by their ethnic group or nationality. The street signs will be in their language. The shopkeepers will speak it. Identity is honored. It is diametrically the opposite for immigrant arrivals in France. Everything will be in French, and there will be no accommodation of any kind of separate identity. If an immigrant proposes to become French, he or she must speak French and become French in ways well beyond what any passport or piece of paper confers.</bq> I gotta be honest with you, buddy. You're running the risk of making it more accommodating to foreigners than local residents. What is a local culture, anyway? A set of rules. How do you communicate them? Language. Which ones? All of them? Who pays for that? Who writes it? Who makes sure it's correct? How do you vote or elect without a common language? Which language is the one of law? Is it precise enough for the task? Do people speak it? What about people who don't? Enclave? Separate country? Which land? Which resources? <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/07/france-riots-nahel-m-police-brutality/" source="Jacobin" author="Tomek Skomski, Marion Beauvalet">The French Riots Are a Result of Miserable Conditions in French Society</a> <bq>Last Friday, the UN called for France to “seriously tackle the profound problems of racism among law enforcement.” France answered that “any accusation of systemic racism or discrimination by law enforcement in France” was “totally unfounded.” No political announcement or political solution to end these revolts has been proposed by the government.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://archive.is/6fBh3" source="Archive.is / The Atlantic" author="Sara Clemence">Take Antarctica Off Your Travel Bucket List</a> <bq>Perversely, the climate change that imperils Antarctica is making the continent easier to visit; melting sea ice has extended the cruising season. Travel companies are scrambling to add capacity. Cruise lines have launched several new ships over the past couple of years. Silversea’s ultra-luxurious Silver Endeavour is being used for “fast-track” trips—time-crunched travelers can save a few days by flying directly to Antarctica in business class.</bq> <bq>[...] as tourism gets more popular, companies are competing to offer high-contact experiences that are more exciting than gazing at glaciers from the deck of a ship. Last year, for instance, a company named White Desert opened its latest luxury camp in Antarctica. Its sleeping domes, roughly 60 miles from the coast, are perched near an emperor-penguin colony and can be reached only by private jet. Guests, who pay at least $65,000 a stay, are encouraged to explore the continent by plane, Ski-Doos, and Arctic truck before enjoying a gourmet meal whose ingredients are flown in from South Africa.</bq> Everyone involved with this should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Christ on a crutch. <bq>Some argue that tourists become ambassadors for the continent—that is, for its protection and for environmental change. That’s laudable, but unsupported by research, which has shown that in many cases Antarctic tourists become ambassadors for more tourism.</bq> Duh. <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-29/self-driving-car-video-from-waymo-cruise-give-police-crime-evidence" source="Bloomberg" author="Julia Love">Police Are Requesting Self-Driving Car Footage for Video Evidence</a> <bq>“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We're supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/they-lied-about-afghanistan-they" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.</a> <bq>But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant. “First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.</bq> Citing Mitch Mcconnell: <bq>[...] most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American service-members.”</bq> <bq>Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services.</bq> <bq>Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale , poor generalship , outdated weapons , desertions , a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago ? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy?</bq> <bq>And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia's invasion took place last year?</bq> <bq>Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/07/john-bolton-accidentally-explains-why-us-policy-on-russia-and-china-is-wrong/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">John Bolton Accidentally Explains Why US Policy On Russia And China Is Wrong</a> <bq>If what you really want is for the US to dominate every inch of this planet completely uncontested, don’t try and tell me that your actual concern is for the people of Ukraine or Taiwan or anywhere else. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Just be honest about what you are and where you stand.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0id1suFMAGU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0id1suFMAGU" caption="Vijay Prashad - Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations" author="acTVism Munich" width="560px" source="YouTube"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rphBWk15_h4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/rphBWk15_h4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Empire Files" caption="EARTH'S GREATEST ENEMY | OFFICIAL TRAILER"> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-algorithmic-anti-culture-of-scale" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">The algorithmic anti-culture of scale</a> <bq>Comparing Meta to the Borg from Star Trek implies a level of sophistication I don’t think they deserve. Comedy writer Jason O. Gilbert came closer to nailing it, writing this week that, “Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.”</bq> <bq>They have millions of “followers,” and yet nothing they create goes anywhere or matters in any tangible sense. It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up. And these creators all operate with a nervous intensity that feels almost biblical, constantly jumping to and from recycled trends, hoping to please a finicky and vengeful god that treats them like an invasive species. And, save only a few, most of the Meta creators I’ve met seem to, in return, deeply loathe the content they make, the people who like it, and Meta, itself.</bq> <bq>As Rest Of World’s Caiwei Chen pointed out this week, TikTok’s Threads-like Twitter alternative Lemon8 launched in the US in February and quickly rocketed to the top of the App store. It has since devolved into a wasteland in the ensuing months. (Have you even heard of it?) Which makes me think that there’s little reason for users from a TikTok-like app to ever need a Twitter-like app.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/paying-to-use-a-site-you-cant-use" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Paying to use a site you can’t use anymore</a> <bq>I subscribe to the belief that internet trends are defined by a ratio of laziness to social reward. Users will always do the laziest possible thing to achieve the maximum amount clout. So, if every platform becomes either a Twitter alternative or a short-form video feed, but all with their own unique requirements for virality, users won’t make individual posts for each. They will instead shotgun blast all of them with the same posts and bet on the odds that something will breakthrough eventually. Which means everything eventually just becomes a reuploaded video or a screenshot from somewhere else.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/09/today-in-war-propaganda/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">Today In War Propaganda</a> <bq>Reporting that John Bolton likes cluster bombs is like reporting that Snoop Dogg likes weed, or that Flava Flav is fond of clock necklaces. Obviously he’s going to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of children being killed by military explosives as a cartoon mascot for children’s breakfast cereal is for its company’s brand of sweetened starch. He’s cuckoo for war crimes.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-enormous-gravity-hum-moves-through-the-universe-20230628/" source="Quanta" author="Jonathan O'Callaghan">An Enormous Gravity ‘Hum’ Moves Through the Universe</a> <bq>Astronomers have found a background din of exceptionally long-wavelength gravitational waves pervading the cosmos. The cause? Probably supermassive black hole collisions, but more exotic options can’t be ruled out.</bq> More exotic than black-hole collisions? 😇 <bq>While LIGO’s arms are each four kilometers long, pulsar timing arrays effectively use the distance from Earth to each pulsar as a much larger arm — one hundreds or thousands of light-years in length. “What we’ve essentially done is hack the entire galaxy to make a giant gravitational wave antenna,” Taylor said.</bq> Oh FFS. "Hacked the galaxy"? ... <bq>NANOGrav can’t yet make out individual gravitational wave sources. Instead, the team has found evidence for the background hum of all low-frequency gravitational waves. It’s like a buoy bouncing up and down in a busy harbor — it can’t distinguish the wake of a single boat, but its motion can reveal that there are some big objects slicing through the water.</bq> <bq>Just the existence of such a population has broad implications for our understanding of galactic evolution in the universe. “It would mean that at the center of some galaxies, there are massive black holes that are not just alone,” Caprini said. “We can probe, through the history of the universe, how galaxies collide and the rate of collisions.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/04/zxwd-j04.html" source="WSWS" author="Don Barrett">The detection of the Universe’s background gravitational wave radiation: a scientific triumph</a> <bq>A common summary of General Relativity is that matter tells space how to bend and bent space tells matter how to move. But behind this simple explanation lies fiendishly difficult mathematics and predictions once thought so exotic that some felt they would forever remain an exercise in pure thought.</bq> <bq>[...] physicist Thomas Gold would make a compelling case that these were in fact Zwicky’s neutron stars, but with a twist: the magnetic fields which had once threaded their parent star had been compressed by the same factor as the neutron star itself, intensifying them billionfold or more (in some cases more than a quadrillion) over the magnetic field that orients compasses on the Earth. These magnetic fields, locked into the rapidly spun up neutron stars (whose spin also increases during their compression), would generally lie at some offset from the rotation axis, creating the effect of a lighthouse whose rotating beam periodically announced itself as the neutron star.</bq> <bq>[...] the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, working on the German front with Russia in World War I in 1916, would produce the first exact mathematical solution to Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, and die only months later at age 42 from illness exacerbated by his time in the trenches.</bq> <bq>The strongest likely waves that were forecast to routinely occur, lasting only seconds, would be expected to move matter by an almost inconceivably small amount: by a thousandth the width of an individual proton over a path length of a few kilometers. The precision inherent in such a measure is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star to a fineness smaller than the width of a human hair.</bq> <bq>Analysis of the system showed that both neutron stars weigh about half again more than our Sun, yet the two, each the size of a small city, orbit one another in a volume that would itself fit inside our Sun.</bq> <bq>The observational precision possible for some measurements when you have a high-precision clock orbiting another object is astonishing. Within a short period of time, it was seen that the orbit was varying in precisely the way expected by General Relativity, another triumph for its predictive power, and that the system was shrinking from the loss of energy through gravitational wave radiation by about 3.5 meters a year (in an orbit with a close approach of about half a million miles), predicting a final inspiral and merger in about 300 million years.</bq> <bq>[...] nearly a hundred detections have been made, with a new and even more sensitive version of the LIGO detectors entering service on May 24 of this year. What was once thought far beyond human capability is now, thanks to achievements across the sciences and the organized labor of thousands, a routine measurement.</bq> <bq>[...] plus the drumbeat of orbiting supermassive binary black holes, would create an overall “sloshing” of space-time just as distant storms on an ocean leave their imprint on waves crashing onto a shore. And it is possible that the detection and ultimate characterization of such long-wavelength gravitational radiation in detail may reveal yet-unknown astrophysical processes at work, or a signature of the early Universe.</bq> <bq>This technique, adopted by NANOGrav, uses the sightlines to dozens (now 68 and growing) of the most rapidly spinning and stable pulsars as yardsticks across cosmic distances. A passing gravitational wave would distort, over months and years, the timebase recorded from each.</bq> <bq>From the correspondence of experiment with theory, confidence is gained in theory. And where experiment and theory differ, signposts to the refinement of theory are provided, which themselves feed back into refinements in technique.</bq> Amen. That's the way it's supposed to work. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ipRvjS7q1DI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Richard Feynman" caption="Can Machines Think?"> <bq>If you want to make an intelligent machine, you're going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor. By saying, 'don't pay any attention to the problem' or sneakily evolving some kind of a psychological distortion where you 'always do the same thing; don't worry about anything else.' So I think that we're getting close to intelligent machines, but they're showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligence.</bq> There is nothing new under the sun. Most things we know already. The trick is to figure out which things do most people not know that we already know so that you can sell them a simple scam pretending that you have learned something new and that they need it. <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now" source="London Review of Books" author="Patricia Lockwood">Where be your jibes now?</a> <bq>He did see a future (or shaped it) when all of us simultaneously forgot how to read. It is hard to mark a moment. In the US, it might have been when Go Set a Watchman came out, and so much criticism seemed to proceed from the consensus that Atticus Finch was a real guy and we just found out something bad he had done. Whole books seemed to blink in and out with the cursor of some highlighted line. We seemed less a collective intelligence than a guy holding a mosquito clicker, and what we were doing had less to do with reading than a kind of quick, scanning surveillance – for what, what danger? Not to have seen it coming.</bq> These people do not represent me. They do impinge the world I get to experience, but that's always been the way, perhaps less now than at any other time, if we're being honest. We're living in a brief window where the cheapness and ease of dissemination outweighs the powers of censorship, but those times are waning, at first slowly and now, increasingly quickly. <bq>What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/samuel-r-delany-profile" source="New Yorker" author="Julian Lucas">How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City</a> <bq>He won his first Nebula Award for “Babel-17,” the story of a poet-linguist’s race to decipher a consciousness-scrambling language virus aboard a starship called the Rimbaud. He won a second for “The Einstein Intersection” (1967), a retelling of the Orpheus legend set on a future Earth where alien settlers who venerate the Beatles strive to “template” themselves on their vanished human predecessors. Delany’s precise language and iridescent imagery—flying motorbikes called “pteracycles,” space currents cast as “red and silver sequins flung in handfuls”—distinguished him in a genre whose authors still often boasted about never revising their work. Major critics soon recognized him as one of the most talented science-fiction writers of his generation.</bq> <bq>The culmination of Delany’s early period was “Nova,” a straightforwardly thrilling narrative by a writer who would soon demand much more of his audience. It’s a race between playboys from powerful galactic dynasties, who are intent on seizing a strategically important mineral from the core of a collapsing star. (The protagonist, Lorq von Ray, is one of science fiction’s most memorable heroes, a Senegalese-Norwegian spaceship captain who is equal parts Ahab, Mario Andretti, and Aristotle Onassis.)</bq> <bq>The story is movingly recounted in Delany’s “Bread & Wine” (1997), a graphic memoir illustrated by the couple’s friend Mia Wolff. She made them strip naked to draw the fantastically stylized sex scenes; not since Isis raised Osiris from the dead has there been anything quite like the sequence that starts with Delany giving Rickett his first hot shower in months. Nothing was off limits, Wolff told me, except for one sketch of a kiss, which Delany found sentimental. “He fools people with all the blatant sexuality,” she said, comparing Delany to the openly libidinous but privately sensitive French novelist Colette. “He’s protective of his heart—he doesn’t care about his genitals.” The kiss stayed.</bq> <bq>In 1975, Delany published “Dhalgren,” an eight-hundred-page trip through the smoldering carcass of an American city called Bellona.</bq> <bq>Genre, in his view, was a mode of reading, and science fiction’s allowed words to express more meanings than any other genre yet devised. He elegantly illustrated the argument by close-reading a single sentence: “The red sun is high, the blue low”—nonsensical in a naturalist novel, but for “s.f.” readers an exoplanet in eight words.</bq> <bq>Delany’s next far-future novel, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” (1984),</bq> <bq>“The Motion of Light in Water” was, on the one hand, a beautifully wrought literary origin story, laced with reflections on the chancy enterprise of autobiography. At the same time, Delany recounted his coming of age in a vanishing world, where sex with thousands of men at theatres, bathhouses, piers, and public rest rooms had awakened him to the infinite breadth not only of desire but of social possibility.</bq> <bq>He retorted with a pornographic tome called “The Mad Man” (1994), an academic mystery novel whose orgiastic escapades violate countless taboos but exclude acts that present a significant risk of H.I.V. transmission. The book culminates in a scene of consensual erotic degradation that results not in madness but in communion, as the narrator, a Black graduate student in philosophy, puts his home and his body at the disposal of a group of homeless men.</bq> <bq>“Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders” (2012), his sprawling career capstone, is, among other things, a meditation on aging as part of a gay couple. The novel began as a response to Vladimir Nabokov’s observation that one “utterly taboo” theme in American literature was a “Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success.” Delany queered the conceit, imagining two teens from early-twenty-first-century Georgia who fall in love, establish a multiracial “pornotopia” in a rural town called Diamond Harbor, and live long enough to support each other through the ravages of senility in a transformed future.</bq> <bq>Bellona, Tethys, Morgre, Kolhari—beneath their doubled moons and artificial gravity, amid ancient markets and interspecies cruising grounds, the metropolises of Delany’s fiction are all faces of New York.</bq> <bq>As we said our goodbyes, it felt like we’d just emerged from one of Delany’s late novels. Their pastoral pornotopias, conjured as though from the homoerotic subtext of “Huckleberry Finn,” had more of a basis in reality than I’d suspected, one hidden by the shopworn map that divides the country into poor rural traditionalists and libertine city folk. Delany hadn’t abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contended; he’d stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mission-impossible---dead-reckoning-part-one-2023" source="Roger Ebert.com" author="Brian Tallerico">Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One</a> <bq>Runaway trains will always have more inherent visceral power than waves of animated bad guys, and McQuarrie knows how to use it sparingly to make an action film that both feels modern and old-fashioned at the same time. These films don’t over-rely on CGI, ensuring we know that it’s really Mr. Cruise jumping off that motorcycle. When punches connect, bodies fly, and cars crash into each other—we feel it instead of just passively observing it. The action here is so wonderfully choreographed that only “ John Wick: Chapter 4 ” compares for the best in the genre this year.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.annas-archive.org/md5/9d07e219bff9ef4b35de5973be437413" source="Anna's Archive" author="Ted Chiang">Understand</a> <bq>Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and -self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.</bq> That's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)" source="Wikipedia">Forth</a>, bro. <bq>What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.</bq> <bq>Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven't filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It's become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthesic knowledge.</bq> <bq>Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I'm closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos.</bq> <bq>My mind is taxing the resources of my brain. A biological structure of this size and complexity can just barely sustain a self-knowing psyche. But the self-knowing psyche is also self-regulating, to an extent. I give my mind full use of what's available, and restrain it from expanding beyond that. But it's difficult: I'm cramped inside a bamboo cage that doesn't let me sit down or stand up. If I try to relax, or try to extend myself fully, then agony, madness.</bq> <bq>I must keep a tighter rein over my self. When I'm in control at the metaprogramming level, my mind is perfectly self-repairing; I could restore myself from states that resemble delusion or amnesia. But if I drift too far on the metaprogramming level, my mind might become an unstable structure, and then I would slide into a state beyond mere insanity. I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/07/the-self-made-man-is-a-myth-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix" author="Caitlin Johnstone">The Self-Made Man Is A Myth</a> <bq>Anyone who is capable of honest self-reflection and critical thinking understands that the “self-made man” is a myth of our culture; that anyone who amasses a fortune does so on the backs of many other people whose work made it possible, and found the opportunity to do so because of the circumstances they happened upon by chance of birth, conditioning and sheer dumb luck.</bq> <bq>One doesn’t for example become aware of the manipulations of the powerful and the deceptions of the media because they are particularly smart and virtuous, they do so because they were lucky enough to find information from others which helped them form this understanding, and because their personal conditioning allowed them to take that information in and let it inform their worldview.</bq> <bq>Obviously we must all try to do our very best with the hand that we were dealt in life, but it’s probably a good idea to harbor some compassion for those who don’t get it as right as we do in our eyes. We were all born into a world saturated with propaganda and dominated by abusive systems, and ultimately the degree to which we are able to see our way around in that world says as much about how good or bad we are as a seed landing on rich or sandy earth says about the quality of the seed.</bq> <bq>Conservatives are everything they used to make fun of liberals for being: whiny, easily offended crybabies who run around looking for nonsense excuses to feel offended and act like victims. They’re a bunch of ridiculous, permanently triggered culture warriors and drama queens.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT3sHxeB8eU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/sT3sHxeB8eU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Next Level Soul Podcast" caption="Robert Edward Grant: NEW EVIDENCE! Mysterious Inscriptions & Encodings INSIDE the Pyramids!"> (A) Um, OK. Some interesting stuff, but WHOA. (B) You're right; just let it flow over you. (C) Terrified that this is how I sound to other people. <bq>The Great Pyramid is 11/7, which is the base to the height. So 117 and 11.7 squared is 137 and that's the number of times the sarcophagus will fit in the King's chamber.</bq> OMG BWAHAHAHAHAHA. That was a really good one. He had me going for a bit, but that numerology just went way off the deep end. Good times! Loving it. 🤯🤯🤯 And then you have the guys in the video you sent yesterday, who are intelligent, but believe the most fantastical things. Or have a weird idea of how physics works. <iq>100 years ago, put light through celluloid, you got an image. And sound.</iq> Wait. What? I was with him up to the <iq>And sound</iq> part. The sound is not encoded into celluloid AFAIK. It's a great thing to discuss, though! How to preserve culture/knowledge/information in a format that the future can read? This Grant guy, though! Goddamn I can't imagine how many people who are stoned out of their minds think that he is a GOD. <bq>If you're a mountain climber, then you're not going to want to climb the hill behind your house. You're going to climb Everest, or Kilimanjaro, something significant.</bq> No. This is exactly wrong. This is how we *think* we should act, but it's destructive and counter-productive and psychological poison. Stop thinking that the hill behind your house isn't good enough. No-one cares. No-one is paying attention to you. Just be happy. Walk in the woods. Climb a big hill. It's enough. You'll be tired. Forget Everest. <bq>Grant: [...] every action must have an equal opposite reaction. Interlocutor: Yeah. Grant: So, for some people who are expanding into the fifth dimension, one over five is two, so some people are gonna go into the flat dimension. Interlocutor: Mmhmm. Grant: Like, literally, there is an expansion of consciousness happening concomitant to a contraction of it. You cannot have it any other way! Look at any any movie. LORD OF THE RINGS.</bq> This guy is hilarious. I pray that he's just putting us on, because it would be lovely. But, I fear that he believes that he is spitting truth, hard as nails. Still, <bq>Just love and be loved and relax. Don't take the journey too seriously. Have fun with it. You know, I think that's the biggest thing. I don't think the world is a difficult place because people hate each other. I think it can be a difficult place because we hate ourselves. But it is through the process of learning to accept and love ourselves, that we will learn to accept and love the world around us, and then your entire experience and world around you, will totally transform. And this is what it means to be the change you want to see in the world.</bq> Once again, a smart guy who believes that individual agency can conquer any sort of external influences. No food? No clean water? Be the change you want to see in the world. This kind of philosophy only works for people who in a post-Communist utopia where material needs are satisfied to a degree and reliability that you can focus exclusively on your mind and your feelings. It's great for selling books and seminars, but it's just not applicable for 90% of the world's population. People in other parts of the world can't even think about stuff like this because they are either malnourished now or were malnourished during their formative years. They haven't been able to live in nine countries and learn eight languages and sail on their father's boat. This is, in a nutshell, a horseshit philosophy that is extremely dangerous to sell to people to whom it cannot possibly apply. They will use it as a hammer and see everything as a nail. They will not blame the philosophy, but will double down, and blame themselves. The blame is baked in. If the approach doesn't work, it's because you weren't trying hard enough. If your boat already floats, this might help keep you on course. If your boat is sinking or halfway underwater, it's worse than useless---because you will expend energy on "thinking your way to success" instead of investing it somewhere that might actually help you. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk-nQ7HF6k4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bk-nQ7HF6k4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption=""> These people are all fools or shysters. The young guy (Stephen Bartlett?) interviewing offers as proof that AI is amazing is that his miniscule mind is already satisfied with it. *applause* The older guy seems like the kind of guy who's been smart his whole life and has developed an incredible inability to conceive of a world in which he could ever be wrong. He flatters the host by calling him one of the most intelligent people he's ever met. What in God's name? They will convince the world that two geniuses agree that ChatGPT is the way to go. Gawdat says at 33:15 that he could have ChatGPT write a book for him. <bq>The only reason why I might not want to follow that path is because, you know what? I'm not interested. I'm not interested to continue to compete in this capitalist world. As a human, I've made up my mind a long time ago that I will want less and less and less in my life.</bq> It's a nice sentiment, but it's also spoken by someone who's rich beyond all of his desires. He doesn't need to compete anymore because he's already won. This is two multimillionaires having a two-hour conversation, massaging each other's egos and not really saying anything new or interesting. If AI can ruin our culture and society, it just means that we built a dumpster fire in the first place. It means that we have a system that values people and humans so little that it prefers whatever happens to be the first feasible simulacrum of a human. It will be like letting the prokaryotes take back over. Gawdat at 41:00, expressing his anger. <bq>We fucked up. We always said 'don't put them on the open Internet. Don't teach them to code. And don't have agents working with them. Until we know what we're putting out in the world. Until we find a way to make sure that they have our best interests in mind. Humanity's stupidity is affecting people who've done nothing wrong. Our greed is affecting the innocent ones. The reality of the matter, Stephen, is that this is an arms race. It has no interest in what the average human gets out of it. Every line of code being written in AI today is to beat the other guy. It's not to improve the life of the third party.</bq> Not "Humanity", but the "self-selected elites". Once again, capitalism ruins everything. And he would go on to basically say that the problem is not AI or LLMs or whatever: it's the system of capitalism we have, the system of society that we have, that is so zero-sum that we can't think in any terms other than to "win". Win what? No-one can really say. People just want to be feel secure, to see how they will not become insecure unfairly, that they are appreciated and rewarded for participating usefully, that they are given a chance to be useful, that they are entertained, that they can interact socially. That's it. There is nothing in there that says that everything must be "bigger, better, faster, more" All. The. Damned. Time. In fact, the faster things get, the less likely it is that most people will be fulfilled. People's fulfillment is almost completely out of their hands right now. They don't know what they want anymore. They are convinced to want things that require a tremendous machine to produce, a machine that, coincidentally, also transfers most of the world's wealth to a paltry few hands while convincing the rest of the world not to revolt by producing a few shiny baubles and trinkets. At 41:45, Gawdat again: <bq>And people will tell you that this is all for you. And look at the reactions of humans to AI. We're either ignorant: people who will tell you, oh no no, this is not happening. AI will never be creative, it will never compose music---where are you living? You have the "kids" (I call them): you have them all over the Internet, they say 'oh my God, it squeaks, look at it. It's orange in color! Amazing! I can't believe that AI can do this!' We have snake-oil salesman, who are simply saying, 'copy this. Put it in ChatGPT, then go to YouTube, knick that thingie, don't respect copyright or intellectual property of anyone, place it in a video, and now you're going to make $100 a day. Plus, we have these token evangelists: basically, people who say, 'this is it; the world is going to end'. I don't think that is going to happen. You have your token evangelists, who are saying, 'oh we're going to do this, we going to cure cancer.' Again, not a reality. And you have a very few people who are saying, 'what are we going to do about it?'</bq> In fairness, it is composing and painting and producing text, but the bar is so low that it's not really competing with human endeavors. What it is, though, is filling a massive gap that had traditionally been filled with mediocre human endeavor. That will be gone. In that sense---even though it is still not conscious and not intelligent---our shitty system will imbue it with enough importance that it will allow most of what is good about society to be eroded away over night before we can even think of stopping it. Our structures for living good lives will be gone. The only difference with this AI "revolution" is that it's not affecting important people. 90% of the world has already had this happen during the first 45 years of neoliberalism. <bq>What went wrong in the 20th century? Interestingly, we have given too much power to people who didn't assume the responsibility. [...] We have disconnected power and responsibility.</bq> <bq>I feel compassion for the rest of the world. I feel that this is wrong. I feel that for someone's life to be affected by the actions of others, without have a say in how those actions should be, is the ultimate, is the top-level of stupidity from humans.</bq> He's really just describing how the world works for 95% of the population, though. This isn't to say what he's saying is wrong, but that he's saying it now because there is finally a real danger that the elites will be swept up in the madness that they sow every day. There is a real danger that money cannot protect you. That is frightening to the powers-that-be. I think the more interesting things he has to say are about our underlying system, which makes the prospect of introducing something like even a half-functioning AI so much more ... difficulty to handle with grace. At 1:00:00, <bq>It is here. This is what drives me mad. It's already here. It's happening. We are all idiots, slaves to the Instagram recommendation engine.</bq> HAHAHAHAHA. Not all of us. Not even most of us. There are way too many people on this planet who are not dealing with this horseshit. Just as aside, though, he says that <iq>70 years later, we are still struggling with the possibility of a nuclear war, because of the Russian threat of saying, 'if you mess with me, I'm going to go nuclear.'</iq> This just goes to show how woefully brainwashed even intelligent people are about the real world, the stuff that really matters. He is an Egyptian. His first example of nuclear brinkmanship is Russia, not the U.S. It's incredible. As he's discussing how we're all slaves to an algorithm, he shows how even his big brain has been enslaved by America propaganda. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn't exist. A little later, Mo and Stephen make a few jokes about the evil Chinese and the evil North Koreans and how there would be no possibility for cooperation because of how evil those countries are. Shake my head. They are so fucking in-the-tank ignorant about global politics and they think they can solve our problems for us? I shudder. At 01:04:00, <iq>They're 1B times smarter than you.</iq> Um, Ok. Sure. At 01:26:00, they discuss how to address this coming problem: their only solution is to work within the extremely restrictive incentive system offered by the current system: what makes more money? This is most likely the correct way to approach the problem; we don't have time to fix the system before we tackle the AIpocalypse, but, with the show clocking it at almost 2 hours, it would have been nice to acknowledge that the only reason their ensuing discussion is going to sound like a WSJ/conservative-think-tank/Silicon Valley startup round table is because we have to go to war with the army we have. At 01:28:30, they talk about how international competition will always lead to other countries "letting it rip" with AI research/development, even if a country were to tax AI research/revenues in order to deal with the damage it causes. It's the same as climate change. Stephen says, <bq>It's kind of like technology broadly; it's kind of like what's happened in Silicon Valley. There'll be these senators who think that tax-efficient founders get good capital gains [...] Portugal have said that there's no tax on crypt ... loads of my friends have got on a plane. And they're building their crypto companies where there's no tax.</bq> Hahahahaha. You should get better friends. Honestly. He then bitches about GDPR as a failure because it's <iq>annoying</iq>. Yeah, sure, if you just click away all of your data on every web site. The current implementation is a bit annoying, of course. But I'd rather have that than the alternative, which is that I don't get any control over my data. The next step is to have the browser fill in GDPR automatically with your preferences: just as restrictive as possible, every time. Problem solved. Again, the problem here is parasites making money off of the CO2 that you produce. At 01:43:00, Gawdat says, <bq>I don't think we'll be hiding from the machines; I think we'll be hiding from what humans are doing with the machines. [...] In the long term, when humans stop hurting humans because the machines are in charge, we're all going to be fine.</bq> Sure, sure, OK. A bit of post-Communist luxury fantasizing. I'll take it. <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare/" source="Café Lob-on" author="Bloonface">The fediverse is a privacy nightmare</a> <bq>It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable. To function, the network relies upon the good faith participation of thousands of independently owned and operated servers, but a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this. Worse, whatever legal protections are in place around personal data are either non-applicable or would be stunningly hard to enforce.</bq> <bq>How many other servers have been compromised or had the computers with their databases seized? And in what jurisdictions? How many servers hold your posts without you knowing about it? And what stupid clownish things are they doing with them? You simply have no way of knowing. But your posts are only as secure and private as the least secure and private server that has them.</bq> But this has always been the case: anyone can screenshot anything, even if it's otherwise inaccessible. <bq>To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of .</bq> <bq>GDPR does confer significant rights of deletion of information, and rights to direct how your data is processed, or whether it should be processed at all. But the problem with this is enforcement. How do you serve legal papers on a person who is potentially fictitious, in a jurisdiction halfway around the world?</bq> <bq>How does this even work in a GDPR context, anyway? Does a Mastodon server act as a “controller” that directs the other servers that process its posts, or is it just a “processor”… or both at once? If I post on Mastodon.social and my post gets syndicated to a different server, who is responsible for that? Am I a “user” of the other server and thus gain GDPR rights over it no matter where it’s located jurisdiction-wise, or is that server a “processor” directed by my server, the “controller”? Can I raise a subject access request against them to get my data? If they tell me “no, I won’t erase it”… what then?</bq> <bq>As far as I can tell there is no actual settled answer to all of this and nobody is particularly exercised about finding one. This is partially because the fediverse is so small fry in the scheme of things, and the infrastructure so atomised, that it’s deemed to “not really matter” in the same way that a local cupcake shop’s email marketing doesn’t really matter to national privacy regulators.</bq> <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://langdev.stackexchange.com/questions/2015/how-can-we-compare-expressive-power-between-two-turing-complete-languages" source="StackExchange" author="David Young">How can we compare expressive power between two Turing-complete languages?</a> <bq>[...] what if there is actually no way to tell 1 and 2 apart? Then we would actually say that are observationally equivalent! Observational equivalence captures the idea of what it means for two things to be indistinguishable inside a programming language.</bq> <bq>Say we have operator overloading and the ability to redefine existing function. If we overload * to do something weird, like return the first argument but we don't overload + . We can now distinguish between those two expressions! By adding that feature, we broke an observational equivalence. The expressions 2 * 3 and 3 + 3 used to be observationally equivalent. Then we added operator overloading and now they are observationally distinct.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/AdNJ3fydeao" author="Rich Harris" caption="Rethinking reactivity" source="YouTube" width="560px"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGfQu0bQTKc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/TGfQu0bQTKc" author="Jester Hartman / Programmers are also human" caption="Interview with Senior Rust Developer in 2023" source="YouTube" width="560px"> <h>Fun</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpefYPLH67A" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/DpefYPLH67A" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HIDARI" caption="HIDARI (Pilot Film) - The Stop-Motion Samurai Film"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/14spvui/hope/" author="ZMS" source="Reddit">Let your final thought be one of hope, old friend</a> <img src="{att_link}beard_hope.jpg" href="{att_link}beard_hope.jpg" align="none" scale="50%">