<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#climate">Climate Change</a> <a href="#covid">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/22/the-education-department-is-a-loan-sharking-operation/" source="CounterPunch" author="Eve Ottenberg">The Education Department is a Loan Sharking Operation</a> <bq>If you doubt that usurious education lending is the respectable version of loan sharking, you have your head in the sand. The Debt Collective cites <b>a librarian “who originally borrowed $60,000, has paid back $40,000, but still owes $110,000.” Under the November proposal, she would have received $70,000 of cancellation. “But under the new December plan, Kat would get only $10,000 of cancellation and President Biden would expect her to repay another $100,000.”</b></bq> <bq>His chief GOP rival for the presidency wants concentration, ahem…detention camps for the homeless, to remove this unsightly human blight from city centers so they can serve their proper purpose as playgrounds for the rich, and <b>Biden, ever tacking to the right of his opponents, will want to outdo this idea of concentration camps for the destitute. I’m sure he could weave workhouses nicely into his 2024 campaign tapestry of promised deceptions.</b></bq> <bq>Many of its borrowers, up to their eyeballs in debt, would have done better taking out a Pay Day loan or patronizing an underworld shark. <b>That a borrower can end up owing so much more than the original sum due to shamelessly eye-popping interest should be a scandal. That it isn’t just proves how comfy we Americans are with the tidier, media-approved whitewashing of crime families running our government.</b></bq> <bq><b>The fact that the Ed Department supervises loan sharking doesn’t bother them.</b> That education has become the hunting ground for such predation strikes nobody in power as bizarre and outrageous.</bq> <bq>[...] the Democrats have succeeded in wrapping the proles in a bind. <b>The only way to join the middle or upper middle management class over which Dems gush ecstatically is through education. Yet the confiscatory cost lies way beyond the means of the average worker’s child. Enter White House loan sharks</b>, offering these helpless students debt servitude until they retire on social security – good luck with that – only to have those government checks garnished by the, dum da dum dum, government! Thus the Dems, with GOP approval of course, created a new class of serfs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/22/scott-ritter-on-speaking-plain-putin-part-two/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">On Speaking Plain ‘Putin,’ Part Two</a> <bq>We in Russia have to a large extent rid ourselves of what is related to the Cold War. <b>Regrettably, it appears that our partners in the West are all too often still in the grip of old notions and tend to picture Russia as a potential aggressor.</b> That is a completely wrong conception of our country. It gets in the way of developing normal relations in Europe and in the world.”</bq> <bq>In his discussion with Frost, when the BBC interviewer asked if he viewed NATO as an enemy, Putin answered: “Russia is part of the European culture. And <b>I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy.</b> I think even posing the question this way will not do any good to Russia or the world. <b>The very question is capable of causing damage.</b> Russia strives for equitable and candid relations with its partners.”</bq> <bq>Putin said: “<b>Such a large country by European standards, with the largest territory in the world and a fairly large population compared to other European countries, is generally not needed. It is better — as the famous U.S. politician Brzezinski proposed — to divide it into five parts</b>, and these parts are separately subordinated to oneself and use resources, but based on the fact that everything separately will not have independent weight, independent voice, and will not have the opportunity to defend their national interests the way a united Russian state does. Only later did this realization come to me. And the initial approach was quite naive.”</bq> This is what Russia understand the explicit aims of NATO to be. <bq><b>Victory is only possible when every citizen of this country feels that the values we promote yield positive changes in their day-to-day lives.</b> That they’re beginning to live better, eat better, feel safer and so on.</bq> This might be just as empty and placative as Biden, had he said it. <hr> <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/the-rooster-and-the-watermelon/" source="Sydney Review of Books" author="Yumna Kassab">The Rooster and the Watermelon</a> <bq>When exactly does one become an Arab? Perhaps it is when they are massacred freely and <b>we are told to take our medicine quietly because crying out is a disturbance to the peace.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/20/patrick-lawrence-what-ukraine-is-not-winning-the-war/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War?</a> <bq>[...] the Ukrainian president declared that <b>the counteroffensive “did not achieve the desired results.”</b> I loved that moment, to be honest. It reminded me of Emperor Hirohito’s famous declaration on August 15, 1945, when he announced the surrender on Japanese radio. <b>“The war,” he told his desperate subjects, “has not necessarily progressed to our advantage.”</b></bq> <bq><b>Biden may be the stupidest president of the postwar era on the foreign policy side: He exhibits no capacity whatsoever for nimble or imaginative thought.</b> He is a warmonger of long standing, an election year is upon us, and he is by now in obvious danger of being impeached. His mental incompetence, atop all this, is plain for all to see.</bq> <bq><b>The Biden regime has no idea what to do in the face of failure, but, as failure cannot be admitted, it must be dressed up as a new strategy.</b> Kyiv would dare not do anything without the Biden regime’s permission—stealing most of the aid and military equipment the U.S. sends being the exception—but it must look as if it is fighting the life-or-death fight because <b>the Zelensky regime is balancing on the head of a political pin at this point.</b></bq> <bq><b>Zelensky flopped during his most recent trip to Washington, the new aid package did not pass, Hungary just blocked the European Union’s proposed new assistance</b>, and Ukraine is altogether yesterday’s flavor as the reality of failure emerges from the mounds of, please excuse the language, bullshit that have propped up Western enthusiasm all these months.</bq> <bq><b>Until recently the orthodoxy required that “Putin’s Russia,” meaning the Russian Federation, was losing a war it waged with drunks, incompetent officers, and baby-snatchers.</b> All of a sudden we read that Putin’s Russia has made the most of the sanctions regime the West imposed upon it and has a large, clear advantage on the battlefield—more soldiers, more artillery, more everything.</bq> <bq>Now comes the bitter task of acceptance. It leaves us, for now, in a twilight zone. <b>We have to hope that Joe Biden, as his political fortunes crash, is indeed cut out of the West Wing conversation such that he cannot make some desperate move to salvage himself.</b> Go, Deep State, go, strange as the thought is.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=108590" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Ein Land blutet aus</a> <bq><b>Wenn der Ukraine schon jetzt Männer im klassisch wehrfähigen Alter ausgehen, kann man nur mit Sorge in die Zukunft schauen. Wer soll das Land wieder aufbauen? Kinder und Greise?</b> Wenn nun auch die Älteren an der Front verheizt werden – wer soll die kommende Generation ausbilden? Der Krieg ist nicht nur eine humanitäre, sondern auch eine demographische Katastrophe. Je länger er dauert, desto hoffnungsloser ist die langfristige Perspektive für das Land.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/us-congress-recommends-placing-assets-at-lagrange-points-to-counter-china/" source="Ars Technica" author="Eric Berger">US Congress recommends placing assets at Lagrange points to counter China</a> <bq>"<b>The Chinese Communist Party has pursued a multi-decade campaign of economic aggression against the United States and its allies</b> in the name of strategically decoupling the People’s Republic of China from the global economy, making the PRC less dependent on the United States in critical sectors, while making the United States more dependent on (China)," the report states.</bq> <bq>The specific language in the report is this: "Fund NASA’s and the Department of Defense’s programs that are critical to <b>countering the CCP’s malign ambitions in space</b>, including by <b>ensuring the United States is the first country to permanently station assets at all Lagrange Points.</b> The CCP understands well the need for space-based operations and is developing formidable space capabilities to challenge US dominance in this domain."</bq> <bq>Another reason why L1 and L2 are strategically valuable is that, due to the nature of orbital dynamics, they are excellent way stations. Assets positioned there, Duffy explained, require very little orbital energy—or delta V—to reach anywhere else in the Earth-Moon system. In other words, <b>if you wanted to rapidly respond to some type of activity in cislunar space, these would be good locations to preposition assets.</b></bq> What the f%&k are these military-besotted psychos talking about? God, Eric Berger is such a waste of space. (No pun intended.) <bq>“<b>We’re in another space race back to the Moon, and this time it’s with China</b>," Duffy said. "We want to be first because we want to set the norms."</bq> F*@k you for being so positively giddy. So much money to be made and funneled to anyone and everyone who doesn't need it. <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012350790" source="Antiwar.com" author="Ted Snider">Is Venezuela Going to War To Steal Territory from Guyana?</a> <bq>The need for the talks was triggered by Maduro’s territorial claim over the Essequibo region of Guyana following a national referendum. <b>The region is home to only 125,000 of Guyana’s 800,000 people, but the 62,000 square mile region makes up two thirds of its territory.</b> But the region is home, not only to people, but to one of the worlds richest oil reserves.</bq> <bq><b>The massive oil reserves were discovered off the coast of the region in 2015. But the dispute over the territory goes back nearly two centuries before that. In 1836</b>, Britain sneakily eased over the western borders of the Guyanese colony it had inherited from the Dutch and usurped a large portion of land that belonged to Venezuela. That is the foundation of Maduro’s claim.</bq> <bq>In 1899, the matter of the disputed territory came up before an international tribunal. <b>The tribunal ruled in favor of Britain and granted British Guyana control over the disputed territory. But the tribunal was stacked. Rather than being an impartial tribunal made up of Latin American countries as it should have been, the dispute was adjudicated by an international body dominated by the US and – of all countries – Britain.</b> Britain was hardly a disinterested party. Worst of all, Venezuela was not even permitted a delegate to the tribunal. <b>The Venezuelans were represented by former US President Benjamin Harris.</b></bq> Fascinating. And, yes, it sounds like it was stolen by the usual suspects, but there are at least four or five generations of residents who think they are Guyanan now, no? <bq>[...] <b>in 1966, citing the corruption that usurped the territory that was rightfully theirs, Venezuela claimed the territory at the United Nations. At that time, Venezuela, Guyana and Britain signed the Treaty of Geneva, agreeing to resolve the dispute</b> and promising that neither Venezuela nor Guyana would do anything on the disputed territory until a border settlement had been arrived at that was acceptable to all.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>it was Guyana who first broke the Treaty of Geneva requirement not to do anything in the region until the dispute had been resolved.</b> Guyana began extracting oil of the coast of Essequibo soon after its discovery in 2015. In partnership with the US oil company ExxonMobil, Guyana simply asserted that the oil was in Guyanese territory and began extraction. <b>ExxonMobil has been extracting and exporting the oil since at least December 2019.</b></bq> What a shock. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-death-of-israel" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Death of Israel</a> <bq><b>Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine.</b> Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.</bq> <bq><b>Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence.</b> Its religious bigots and fanatics , currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.</bq> <bq><b>Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7.</b> Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.</bq> <bq><b>Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving</b>, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/23/308656/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Made in the USA</a> <bq><b>The Houthis have now taken more concrete steps to fight climate change than COP28</b>: British Petroleum (BP), one of the world’s biggest oil corporations, announced it is temporarily halting all transit through the Red Sea due to the threat of attacks on their ships. The 10 Nation Red Sea coalition effort–called Operation Prosperity Guardian includes the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, and Spain. <b>Not one country on the Red Sea agreed to join and only one Arab country–Bahrain–is a member. How’s that for diplomacy?</b></bq> <bq><b>The US and Saudis have been “hitting them hard” enough to cause the deaths of 400,000 people (through bombs, drones, starvation and disease) since 2014.</b> The US “escalation dominance” in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban stronger than it was before the war. It’s one thing not to have learned lessons about the self-defeating arrogance of Imperial power from Tacitus. <b>It’s another level of stupidity altogether, for Atlantic Council gunslingers like Kroenig, to have elided the memory of the last 20 years of murderous futility, from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.</b></bq> But this is how every fucking moron thinks. This is how nearly everyone thinks. They split the world into "our side" and evil. Anything that gets in their way must be eradicated by military means, never economic ones. Everyone goes in a pigeonhole. With us or against us. What if you just stopped selling weapons to the Saudis? What if you paid to restore Yemen? The Houthis would knock it off immediately. That literally doesn't even offer itself as a solution. <bq>Arundhati Roy: ”<b>The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die.</b> The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods.”</bq> <bq>By the same logic–if this can be called logic–<b>Britain was using its civilian population as a human shield during the Blitz, since Churchill’s secret bunker and war rooms were beneath ground in the densely populated center of London.</b> If only he’d come out and presented himself as a target, the Nazis wouldn’t have had to kill 43,000 civilians to get his attention.</bq> <bq><b>After a week of delays to avoid a U.S. veto, during which US officials insisted the resolution refrain from mentioning a cease-fire and would not create an independent UN inspection mechanism for aid</b>, the UN Security Council finally passed a watered-down resolution calling to boost aid to Gaza and for urgent steps “to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities” Then <b>after all that, the U.S. abstained.</b> This time Team Biden sent UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield out to raise an ignominious hand, signaling the US’s abstention on a resolution it had spent a week frantically gutting…</bq> <bq>Where do we stand at the end of week 11? An AP assessment of the IDF’s Gaza campaign concluded that it is one of the most destructive and deadliest in modern history. <b>In a little more than two months, the IDF has inflicted more destruction on Gaza than the Syrian bombing of Aleppo, the Russian bombing of Mariupol, the US bombing of Raqqa and Mosul or, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.</b> It has already killed more Gazan civilians than more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against ISIS.</bq> Ok, ok, Israel really is better at this than the U.S. I'm surprised---because the U.S. tries really hard to kill a lot of people all over the world, but I guess they do it over too much territory, with not enough fish squeezed into their barrels. <bq>Let’s give the last word of the week to Laleh Khalili: “I’ve read about Israel/Palestine since I was yay high. I’ve written 2 books with Palestinians at their core. I’ve watched Israel be colonial for decades. But <b>what Israel is doing right now, not just the violence, but their cruel jouissance with it, blows me away. The videos celebrating destruction, death and starvation of Palestinians, the pictures taken atop ruins, the social media groups posting trophy images, soldiers proudly announcing what they have looted</b>…I have always wondered why people committing atrocities, even genocide, keep such meticulous records of their misdeeds. Now it is happening in real-time.”</bq> It's Abu Ghraib every day. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAgskd2iwdc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/eAgskd2iwdc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Jimmy Dore" caption="Israel Can Defend Itself However They Want – Vivek Ramaswamy"> Vivek is an idiot. He's not a serious person. He's utterly convinced of his own cleverness, but he knows even less than Jimmy Dore about how the presidency works. He says that he wouldn't get involved in Israeli politics because he wouldn't be the president of that country. When Jimmy says that he'd be de-facto involved because he'd be funding Israel to the tune of $4B per year and he'd be in charge of nominating the UN representative, he ignores the funding part and just says that he doesn't care about the UN. <iq>I don't think that the UN should be stopping Israel from doing what it's doing.</iq> He says a lot of other wildly misinformed things, but this one takes the cake. At <b>13:25</b>, he says, <bq>What does genocide refer to? The elimination of a race. Well, you know what? About 20% of the Israeli population is Palestinian. That's more than the black or hispanic population of the United States. And you know, probably, arguably, the best place on planet Earth where Palestinians live the highest quality of life, with actual civic respect, is in Israel. So I do take issue with flatly using the word genocide---which refers to the elimination of a race---when the people of that race live the best possible life in the country that you're calling the perpetrator of that genocide, and 20% of that population, more than the minority populations of this country, of Israel's population, are Palestinians, who are living with rights within that country. [Jimmy: mutters "wow" a few times under his breath.] I think that there's a lot of responsibility to go around for other Arab countries, for failed leadership, both of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas all the way to Hamas's failed leadership in Gaza, so I think that that's something that, yes, involves a long history. That is not the role that I'm running for, of history professor at Harvard. I'm running for President of the United States, which I have my moral clarity, why I'm focused on running this country, without intervening there.</bq> I painstakingly transcribed his highly redundant waterfall of bullshit, just so you can get the sense of how he just keeps talking and repeating himself, in the hopes that no-one can get a word in edgewise to call him on his bullshit. He says that Israel actually protects Palestinians better than anyone and literally everyone else in the world is more responsible for the Palestinian plight than Israel, which is literally doing everything it can to help them. That line of reasoning reminds me of Bill Hicks's joke, <a href="https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-officer-nigger-hater-annotated">Officer Nigger Hater</a> about the trial of the cops who beat the ever-loving shit out of Rodney King, the act that sparked the LA riots. <bq>Officer Coon looks in the camera and actually says, ‘Oh, that Rodney King beating tape? It’s all in how you look at it.’ [...] ‘All in how you look at it, Officer... Coon?’ ‘That’s right. It’s how you look at the tape.’ ‘Well, would you care to tell the court (incredulously) how... you’re lookin’ at that?’ ‘Yeah OK, sure. It’s how you look at it... the tape. For instance, well, if you play it backwards you see us help King up and send him on his way.’ ‘Hmmmm. Not guilty!’ (bang)</bq> He didn't stop there. He started repeating the myths of Chinese Uighur concentration camps, talking about how that's what we should concentrate on instead of Israel. He is like all the rest. He's an asshat, an assclown who knows nothing, has no empathy, and has no principles. He doesn't care about stopping crimes before they happen---especially when it's his friends that are doing them. Or countries that he knows he has to be friends with in order to get elected as president. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/at-this-point-we-have-to-always-assume" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix">At This Point We Have To Always Assume Israel Is Lying Until Proven Otherwise</a> <bq>When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen’s critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, <b>you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them.</b></bq> <bq>There’s a <b>single news story</b> about international conflicts which keeps repeating itself again and again in different iterations, and that story is this: “<b>US-centralized empire fights to secure domination of planet Earth, and some populations resist this.</b>”</bq> <bq><b>It’s a giant empire attacking nations who have the temerity to insist on their own national sovereignty rather than being absorbed into the imperial blob.</b> It uses full-scale wars, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and blockades, drone wars, CIA coups and deliberately fomented color revolutions to subvert any government which defies the US agenda of securing total planetary domination. <b>If you can understand this, you can understand pretty much any major international conflict in modern times.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxcrqkwQYmE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/wxcrqkwQYmE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Breaking Points" caption="Norm Finkelstein SHREDS Bill Maher's Israel Defense"> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/this-cant-be-another-instance-of" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin’s Newsletter">This Can't Be Another Instance Of Genocide — Israel Believes It's Right!</a> <bq>This isn’t like that at all. You see, <b>the Israelis sincerely feel that the population they are eliminating is very bad, and they believe removing that population will make the land a much better and safer place to live.</b> They see the Palestinians as a major problem, and, unlike a proper genocide, they are simply trying to find a solution to that problem which will be permanent and final. So when you see Israel apologists defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, please try to keep in mind that they’re just helpfully explaining that <b>the Israeli government has reasons and motives for doing what it’s doing, and that it believes what it is doing is correct. If this were a proper genocide, that wouldn’t be the case.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/sam-harris-savant-idiot" author="Norman Finkelstein" source="SubStack">Sam Harris: Savant Idiot</a> <bq>[...] as a pop secular prophet, indiscriminate mass killing only outrages Mr. Harris’s moral sensibility if it springs from religion. But the protagonists on all sides in the unprecedented bloodlettings of WW1 and WW2—and for that matter the Vietnam War, presided over by “the best and the brightest”—were secular or in thrall to secular ideologies. Was that really better? <b>Indeed, it’s gone over Mr. Harris’s bigoted skull that the most lethal ideologies in the modern epoch have sprung not from religious but secular fanaticism. Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger: they can rightly be accused of many things but pathological religiosity is not one of them.</b> In any event, the animating ideology in Israel is a heady brew of terrestrial calculation and super-terrestrial frenzy.</bq> <bq><b>Mr. Harris doesn’t just extenuate the genocide. He implicitly endows it with a positive content. Every Muslim—including every Muslim child—he enlightens listeners, is an actual or potential suicide bomber imperiling Western civilization.</b> Isn’t it only a flea’s hop to infer that Israel is doing the (secular) Lord’s work in Gaza as it wages a civilizational war against “deranged” Muslim culture and even if one million children—pardon me: children who have been “rigged to explode”—might die? <b>Mr. Harris somehow construes that it takes enormous moral courage to expose this Muslim peril on Piers Morgan’s program. Indeed, it takes as much courage as the German professor in the midst of the Nazi holocaust who sounded the alarm that “parasitic” Jewish culture was imperiling Aryan civilization.</b> Mr Harris proclaims that “This is the issue: we are dealing with a suicidal death cult.” I’m afraid, however, that the real issue is this: <b>We are dealing with a Ziontology murder cult; and Mr. Harris is one of its gurus.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/how-the-hell-did-we-get-here" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin’s Newsletter">How The Hell Did We Get Here?</a> <bq>We have the technology to let every scientist on earth share ideas and information with each other around the world in real time in any language, and <b>instead we’ve fractured scientific development into atomized little echo chambers of closely-guarded secrets in the name of profit generation and “national security”.</b></bq> <bq>We develop egos in early childhood to help us feel safe and secure in a confusing world full of giants, which most of us go on to use in highly maladaptive ways throughout the remainder of our lives. <b>Our psychology is riddled with cognitive biases, which the clever manipulators among us can use to dupe us into mass-scale behavior which benefits them</b> rather than behaving in a way which benefits each other and our ecosystem. The most clever of these manipulators are able to use their cleverness to rise to the top of our political, governmental, commercial and financial systems around the world, and they use increasingly sophisticated methods of propaganda to dupe the rest of us into moving in alignment with their will. And <b>their will is not wise or intelligent; it’s driven by the same primitive fear-based impulses that the rest of the humans trapped in egoic consciousness are driven by.</b> So here we are. That’s why <b>we now find ourselves in this profoundly dysfunctional civilization where the biosphere is treated like an enemy and human beings are treated like fuel and minds are being marinated in an increasingly vapid mainstream culture where everything is fake and stupid.</b></bq> <hr> <bq author="Shimon Tzabar" source="Ha'aretz" date="September 22, 1967">Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression. Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEQNbCKs_E" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/gFEQNbCKs_E" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Useful Idiots" caption="*Extended episode* Former UN official: Biden is inciting genocide"> This is, once again, a brilliant interview. I listened to it on a long hike, so I don't have a transcript. Craig Mokhiber is extremely well-spoken and has a devastating, inexorable logic. The following is from the video notes: <bq>International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber served as the director for the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, but resigned over the UN’s failure to stop what he, and others, calls a "textbook case of genocide" in Gaza. He describes the politicalization of the organization and the West’s refusal to follow international law. “If you have a message coming from the United States and their western allies that says these rules do not apply to us or to our western friends, or in short-hand, they do not apply to white people, but they do apply to the rest of the world, that is maybe the last nail in the coffin of these international laws.” “The security council belongs in a Cold War museum,” he says. “It is an entity that empowers five permanent members with a veto that is usually used to prevent any action to the benefit of normal human beings. The US in this case used its veto to prevent ceasefire, and after each veto, thousands of more Palestinians are being massacred in Gaza. It’s an act of complicity.” So when Israel commits war crimes that are empowered by the US, it is no longer only their crime: “Just to put it simply, this assault on Gaza is being perpetrated by Israel and the United States. The US is a party to this.” And given that Biden has repeatedly claimed that he saw photos of beheaded babies (even after his staff urged him not to and the White House walked it back), we asked Craig: Can the argument be made that Joe Biden is inciting genocide? His response: “Absolutely.”</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpyKQBC15jg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/NpyKQBC15jg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chapo Trap House" caption="Tank Girls feat. Brace Belden | Chapo Trap House"> This was a pretty good discussion. Brace Belden (of the excellent podcast <i>True Anon</i>) was the most knowledgable, insightful, and incisive. Again, I listened to it while hiking, so no transcript. I do remember one of them referring the history that's unfolding in the Middle East right now as <iq>the Israeli-U.S. murder-suicide pact.</iq> I also found myself thinking that Israel has a different understanding of "prisoner exchange" than the standard one of exchanging some of their prisoners for some of yours. They seem to think that it's about exchanging the prisoners that you have in prison for others that you find on the street. <hr> I also listened to the latest series on TrueAnon, about Israel's history of obtaining nuclear weapons over the 20th century and the open secret of "ambiguity" where everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, but it's forbidden to talk about it. The following are only the trailers because they've not been released to the public yet. If you want to hear the whole thing, then you have to subscribe. <ul> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/israels-bomb-1-trailer" author="TrueAnon" source="SoundCloud">Episode 342: ROGUE STATE: Israel's Bomb (Part 1)</a> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/israels-bomb-part-2-trailer" author="True Anon" source="SoundCloud">Episode 343: ROGUE STATE: Israel's Bomb (Part 2)</a> </ul> <hr> <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1679-rasha-al-aqeedi" author="" source="This is Hell!">Best of 2023: Living and Reliving the U.S. Invasion of Iraq / Rasha Al Aqeedi</a> I recently wrote about how good the <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4913" author="" source="">Best of This is Hell! 2023</a> end-of-hear series has been. This episode was a counterexample. I thought Rasha's analysis was more superficial than the standard set by the other episodes. <ul> She says no-one should cheerlead a war, especially when they’re not involved, that any war is a tragedy, a diplomatic failure … but then she says that she’s totally pro-Ukraine. ARRRRGGGGHHHH. Don’t be pro-anything. Be pro-peace in Ukraine. God, why can’t people stay ideologically pure for one goddamned second? I also can’t tell if she’s kidding that Iran and Syria are in the "Axis of Evil" — I think she might believe it. Chuck, of course, calls her on none of these inconsistencies. Because I don't think he even sees them as such. In fairness, he almost never pushes back on his guests, so this is not an exception. Now she’s jabbering about "terrorist attacks in the U.S.". Did I miss something? She linked those directly to Trumpism … holy crap! Is she angling for a job at CNN? This is one of Chuck’s personal selection for best interviews of the year. C’mon Chuck. You’re as bad as Jeffrey, who's pretty much gone around the bend these days. Now she’s saying that the U.S. was just hoodwinked by duplicitous Iraqis! Wow! The poor U.S. was thwarted in its good intentions. Just overwhelmed by the vagaries of a war they never wanted, but were forced to fight. This is incredible. She’s full of shit. And Chuck loves it. </ul> <bq><b>Chuck:</b> Was it a combination of incompetence and arrogance? <b>Rasha:</b> Absolutely. That’s a perfect way of describing it.</bq> Ah, so nice to be able to remove agency. The U.S. was just floating helplessly down the stream of history, just like the rest of us. OK OK OK. Now, they’re vibeing about privilege. She talks about her having been privileged to have grown up as a Sunni in a country with an oppressed Shia majority. But neither of them talks about how the problem that most people have with discussions of "privilege" is that it doesn’t explain <i>everything</i> like people wish it did. She didn’t mention the sanctions regime once. She’s a bit like a lot of people of that generation and class—she can recognize that her class separates her from most of the other citizens of her country, but she still kind of judges them for wanting to go back to the old days, when there was a dictatorship. Look, middle-aged and older people in Iraq might very well remember that their country had one of the highest overall living standards in the Middle East and Africa. You have to deal with that, without telling them that they can now vote every four years. She doesn’t quite get around to saying that they don’t really have a democracy. She just says it’s a failure of democracy. It’s not a language barrier. She’s totally fluent. She now lives in Fairfax, Virginia, which is, quite frankly, the heart of the empire. She says very explicitly that she's never going back or moving back to Iraq. Maybe I'm completely misinterpreting her, but she doesn’t seem to place much blame on America, even for the continuing muddle that is Iraqi domestic politics. The U.S. is still heavily involved there, but gets no mention. I understand that we want to focus on the people of Iraq taking responsibility for their own country, but the reality is that there is only so much room to maneuver that they're going to be allowed by the U.S. If Iraq wanted to establish an Islamic state, that ... would not be allowed to happen. I don’t expect her to be ululating "Death to America", but she barely even acknowledged the U.S. influence. Maybe it’s because I just finished season 1 of Blowback, which recounted a lot of Iraqi history, with a preponderance of American influence in the last 50 years. <h><span id="labor">Labor</span></h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/cio-committee-industrial-organization-mass-production-workers-us-labor-movement-afl/" source="Jacobin" author="Melvyn Dubofsky">The CIO’s Heyday Was the High Tide of the American Labor Movement</a> <bq>Without their skills in construction in other sectors of the economy, production could not function. Power came from their position in the labor market. In the mass production sector, <b>the vast majority of employees had no labor market power. They were all readily replaceable.</b> Their power came not in the labor market but at the point of production.</bq> So we think of labor union as necessary only because we've accepted that most people's livelihoods should be reduced to easily replaced and inherently leverage-free cogs in a machine owned and profited from by someone else. What about just making all worthwhile jobs actually be respected and properly remunerated positions? Can we really only envision a world in which we have to fight tooth and nail to get that? A different goal would to make useful jobs for everyone and not make most of humanity fight against the profit motive of someone more powerful. Don't limit your options within the constraints of the existing system. <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/29/xato-d29.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">2023: A year of financial turbulence</a> <bq>“According to one set of estimates,” Tooze wrote, “in December 2022 the hedge funds owed $553 billion on basis trade borrowing and were leveraged at a ratio of 56 to 1. This creates the potential either for widespread losses in the credit system or major hedge fund failure.” The numbers involved have almost certainly gone up this year, creating the risk that the failure of even one fund can set off a “dash for cash” and the kind of “doom loop” that developed in the UK in October 2022 when falling bond prices forced pension funds to sell bonds to raise cash, sending prices even lower.</bq> <bq>As military spending continues to rise this has led to heightened calls for cuts in key areas of social spending. In other words, the attacks on the social position of the working class must be deepened so the ever-increasing war expenditure is financed, and the holders of Treasury debt are paid.</bq> Hey, what do you need social services for, when everyone’s getting rich? <bq>[…] the market is now dominated by the so-called “magnificent seven.” These comprise the big tech names, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Amazon, Telsa, Meta (the owner of Facebook) and Nvidia. So top heavy has the market become that at the midpoint of the year the price of these stocks had risen by between 40 percent and 180 percent and were responsible for all the increase in the S&P 500 index in the year to that point as all the others remained flat. Since then, others have joined the “everything rally” but the Mag7 continue to dominate and account for 64 percent of the rise in the S&P. As the FT recently noted: “Their size is now so pronounced that they do not dominate just US stocks, but a large slice of the performance of global equity markets too.”</bq> <bq>This high degree of concentration of financial power, which has accelerated this year, is reflected in the banking sector as well. In the first nine months of the year, according to analysis carried out by the FT, based on figures compiled by an industry tracker, JPMorgan Chase took in almost 20 percent of US bank profits. This was up from around 12 percent a year earlier. Its earnings have exceeded those of its rivals Bank of America and Citigroup combined and in the words of one Wells Fargo analyst “JPMorgan is the Goliath of Goliaths.”</bq> <h><span id="politics">Climate Change</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/19/false-transitions-and-global-stocktales-the-failure-of-cop28/" source="CounterPunch" author="Binoy Kampmark">False Transitions and Global Stocktakes: The Failure of COP28</a> <bq><b>COP28, which featured 97,000 participants, including the weighty presence of 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists</b>, was even more of a shambles than its predecessor. Its location – in an oil rich state – was head scratching. Its chairman Sultan Al Jaber, taking advantage of the various parties who would attend, had sought to cultivate some side business for the United Arab Emirates, notably for the state oil company ADNOC.</bq> <bq>It was such tinkering that led to the call for a “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable way with developed countries continuing to take the lead.” <b>The emphasis here is on a “transition away” from their use, not their “phase out”, which is what 130 of the 198 participating parties were willing to accept.</b></bq> <bq>The agreement had an eager audience desperate to identify signs of progress. Prof. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization called the COP28 agreement “historic in that – for the first time – it recognizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels for the first time.” <b>Even the Scientific American made the observation that none of the previous 27 climate change conferences had even mentioned fossil fuels and its link to a rise in global temperatures.</b></bq> <bq>To use such an expression as “‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. <b>It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”</b></bq> <hr> OK. This one needs a bit of explanation. First, you need to know about the <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/david-beckhams-be-honest-thank-you">Posh and Becks meme</a>. It is a 28-second video. Better with sound. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btdjLLXtvZA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/btdjLLXtvZA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="David Beckham Tells Victoria Beckham To 'Be Honest' After She Claims Of Growing Up 'Working Class'"> Now you’re ready for these follow-up memes. <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/18rdwec/be_honest/" author="" source="Reddit">Be Honest</a> <h><span id="covid">Medicine & Disease</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/29/pers-d29.html" author="Evan Blake" source="WSWS">2023: The year of the total COVID cover-up</a> <bq>The ruling elites’ policy of simply ignoring the pandemic and forcing everyone to fend for themselves is untenable and will inevitably collide with reality. <b>The basic functioning of society cannot sustain unending body blows of mass infection and debilitation with Long COVID.</b> The refusal of the ruling elites to address or even acknowledge the pandemic is a glaring sign of the dead-end of the capitalist system. <b>The past four years of the pandemic have inured the ruling class to mass death</b> […]</bq> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/a-year-of-ordinary-time" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">A Year of Ordinary Time</a> <bq>As far as I can see <b>it is not Nazis who threaten to run this site into the ground, but rather all the people who</b>, in endless search for more opportunities to speak “ statementese ”, <b>are using this site for the same endless adjudication of verbal disputes as we see in every other online venue.</b></bq> <bq>Substack were to extend its content-moderation policy beyond the porn and spam accounts, <b>I would recommend starting not with the cornball basement-dwellers with swastikas in their banners, but with the pseudo-writers who don’t understand how completely incompatible statementese is with the writerly vocation</b>, and who attempt to sneak on here using that debased artificial language.</bq> <bq>I also watched <i>Everything, Everywhere, All at Once</i> (2022). It was dumb as shit. <b>As if the most interesting thing about the discovery of interdimensional travel through the “infinite multiverse” were the opportunity it affords to come to terms with your daughter’s rejection of heteronormativity!</b></bq> <bq>I began to experience a deep, warm, slow-rising sense of gratefulness these past several months, at having been fated to meet my wife in particular, and at <b>having been given the opportunity to learn from my life with her what it is truly to love someone. And what a miracle, too, that the person in question just happens to be able to tolerate this raving and vicissitudinous fool!</b></bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/18/todays-most-dangerous-drug/" source="Scheer Post" author="Mattea Kramer and Sean Fogler">Today’s Most Dangerous Drug</a> <bq><b>Both of us were raised to believe that our accomplishments were the measure of our worth and that something out there — status, money, accolades — would make us whole.</b> Both of us bagged various degrees and have admirable résumés, but neither of us found that such achievements brought any sense of wholeness. In fact, it’s often seemed as if the more impressive we appeared, the emptier we felt.</bq> Smart, but not smart enough to be independent, to be anti-authoritarian---to be free. <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/ants-in-the-server-racks-21st-century" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">Ants in the Server Racks: 21st-Century Anti-Tech Terrorism in Theory & Practice</a> <bq><b>The essential and eternal facts of human life - we exist for no reason, want and don’t get, suffer needlessly, experience the horrors of aging, and then die, which is the end of our story.</b></bq> <bq>When people complain that this is a uniquely difficult time in which to live, I sometimes gently remind them that those born in the first decade of the 20th century endured the Spanish Flu, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. But of course, <b>suffering is impressionistic and subjective; it is neither kind nor sensible to tell a person with diabetes that they should look on the bright side because they could have cancer.</b></bq> <bq><b>Many people feel that the status quo is so rotten, so deadening, so corrupt, that mass violence could not help but shake us into a better state. But this is fantasy, a fantasy of the type perpetuated by people who cannot bear to live in the real fallen world in which we reside.</b> (And that fantasy itself is among our enemies.) Belief in regeneration through violence is as old as human culture, as old as death. I’m here to tell you, though, that violence cannot regenerate, not really. And even if it could, <b>no terrorist movement of the scope necessary to actually, meaningfully shut down online life for large masses of people will emerge. Whatever action of this sort takes place would merely nibble at the edges of a decaying culture.</b> Not enough people would want to participate, those who did would mostly be marginal types who lack the discipline or composure to operate effectively in violent action, the FBI would eventually jail enough of them to dissuade even the passionate converts, and most importantly, <b>capitalism would rebuild whatever was destroyed, as that is the last vital part of our rheumatic culture, the deployment of money to protect the systems that make money for the people who already have money.</b></bq> <bq>[...] despite our relentless effort to stuff other people into facile categories to reduce and manage them,</bq> <bq>The only way out of this mess is to rediscover the visceral meatsack reality of being human, that we are embedded in a world made of mud and rocks. (“The greatest poverty is not to live/in a physical world.”) And <b>we must learn to occupy our own minds again, free from the influence of other people’s attention, which is paradoxically necessary to return to each other.</b></bq> <bq>I hope that we witness the renewal of the human, not through violence but through the human itself. I confess that I’m not optimistic. But for those who simply resent humanity’s chauvinism, don’t worry. <b>In time, this all goes. We will not live forever; we will not colonize Alpha Centauri. In a very brief time all memory of humanity will fade from the Earth, and the Earth will care not at all for the difference between before us and after us.</b> Long after the last human machine ceases to function, little animal feet will skitter lightly over its chassis.</bq> <h><span id="llms">LLMs & AI</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJcF4bLKd4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/iGJcF4bLKd4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Letters Live" caption="Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's stirring letter about ChatGPT and human creativity"> I've citing at length below from the original blog post <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/" author="Nick Cave" source="The Red Hand Files">Iss #248</a>, which answered the question, <iq>[...] what’s wrong with making things faster and easier?</iq> <bq><b>ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle</b>, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving. <b>ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination.</b> It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is <b>participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself</b> and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter. <b>ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself.</b> Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? [...] <b>even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence.</b> There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT. [...] <b>It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning.</b> This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.</bq> Another post from January <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/" author="Nick Cave" source="The Red Hand Files">Issue #218</a> first addressed LLMs, in what would eventually become the tour de force above, but which also had some wonderfully written prose about the difference between human creations versus those produced by imitation machines. <bq>What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. <b>It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.</b> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, <b>algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing</b>, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. <b>ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.</b></bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://lea.verou.me/blog/2023/eigensolutions/" source="" author="Lea Verou">Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit</a> <bq><b>Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently</b> and is a hallmark of poor design. <b>Eigensolutions</b> are the opposite: solutions that <b>generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases.</b> Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability</bq> <bq>In end-user programming we talk about the floor and the ceiling of a tool: <b>The floor is the minimum level of knowledge users need to create something useful. The ceiling refers to the extent of what can be created.</b> Some people also talk about wide walls: the range of things that can be made (i.e. how domain specific the tool is).</bq> <bq><b>Programming languages tend to have high ceiling, but also a high floor: You make anything, but it requires months or years of training</b>, whereas domain specific GUI builders like Google Forms have a low floor, but also a low ceiling: Anyone can start using them with no training, but you can also only make very specific kinds of things with them.</bq> <bq>[...] most product work in creator tools centers around either reducing the floor (making things easier ), or increasing the ceiling (making things possible ).</bq> <bq><b>Overfitting</b> is one of the worst things that can happen during the design process. It is a hallmark of poor design that leads to feature creep and poor user experiences. It forces product teams to keep adding more features to address the use cases that were not initially addressed. <b>The result is UI clutter and user confusion, as from the user’s perspective, there are now multiple distinct features that solve subtly different problems.</b></bq> <bq>Rather than designing a solution to address only our driving use cases, step back and ask yourself: <b>can we design a solution as a composition of smaller, more general features, that could be used together to address a broader set of use cases?</b></bq> <bq><b>Due to their generality, they often require significantly higher engineering effort to implement.</b> Quick-wins are easier to sell: they ship faster and add value sooner. In my 11 years designing web technologies, I have seen many beautiful, elegant eigensolutions be vetoed due to implementation difficulties in favor of far more specific solutions — and often this was the right decision, it’s all about the cost-benefit.</bq> <bq><b>Eigensolutions tend to be lower level primitives, which are more flexible, but can also involve higher friction to use than a solution that is tailored to a specific use case.</b></bq> At least for APIs, you can have both, in what I always called the <i>Zwiebelschallenprinzip</i> or "onion-skin principle" because of how you could peel the layers of the onion of your APIs until you got to the level that struck the right balance of power, maintainability, and flexibility. <bq><b>Eigensolutions</b> tend to be lower level primitives. They <b>enable a broad set of use cases, but may not be the most learnable or efficient way to implement all of them, compared to a tailored solution.</b> In other words, <b>they make complex things possible, but do not necessarily make common things easy.</b> Some do both, in which case congratulations, you’ve got an even bigger unicorn! You can skip this section. :)</bq> <bq>Done well, <b>shortcuts</b> provide dual benefit: not only do they reduce friction for common cases, they also <b>serve as teaching aids for the underlying lower level feature.</b> This offers a very smooth ease-of-use to power curve: if users need to go further than what the shortcut provides, <b>they can always fall back on the lower level primitive to do so.</b></bq> <bq>Shortcuts to make common cases easy can ship at a later stage, and demos and documentation to showcase common “recipes” can be used as a stopgap meanwhile. <b>This prioritizes use case coverage over optimal UX, but it also allows collecting more data, which can inform the design of the shortcuts implemented.</b> Higher level abstraction first , as an independent, ostensibly ad hoc feature. Then later, once the lower level primitive ships, it is used to “explain” the shortcut, and make it more powerful. <b>This prioritizes optimal UX over use case coverage: we’re not covering all use cases, but for the ones we are covering, we’re offering a frictionless user experience.</b></bq> <bq><b>Do we have extensibility mechanisms in place for users to create and share their own higher level abstractions over the lower level feature?</b></bq> Again, this is much easier with APIs, simply because of the work involved in implementing this type of layered approach in a UI. Arguably, it's a lot of work for APIs to get it right, as well, but it just seems like it'd be faster. <bq>[...] it’s also good to have a design principle in place about which way is generally favored, which is part of the product philosophy (the answer to the eigenquestion: <b>“Are we optimizing for flexibility or learnability?”</b> ) and can be used to fall back on if weighing tradeoffs ends up inconclusive.</bq> <bq>[...] even when we don’t think the eigensolution is implementable, it can still be useful</bq> <bq>Note that our eigensolution is not the end for any of our use cases. It makes many things possible, but none of them are easy. Some of them are common enough to warrant a UI that generates the formula needed. For others, <b>our solution is more of a workaround than a primary solution, and the search for a primary solution continues, potentially with reduced prioritization.</b> And others don’t come up often enough to warrant anything further. But even if we still need to smoothen the ease-of-use to power curve, <b>making things possible bought us a lot more time to make them easy.</b></bq> <bq>Requiring all use cases to precede any design work can be unnecessarily restrictive, as <b>frequently solving a problem improves our understanding of the problem.</b></bq> <bq>[...] it’s only when you actually try to use the tool — hold the thing in your hands — that <b>there’s a hundred things you need it to do that it doesn’t.</b> It’s not flexible — it’s a series of menus and disappointed feature requirements.</bq> <bq><b>Joe argues for using use cases only at the end, to validate a design, as he believes that starting from use cases leads puts you in a mindset to overfit.</b> This is so much the polar opposite of current conventional wisdom, that many would consider it heresy.</bq> <bq>We can probably all agree that no proposal should be considered without being rigorously supported by use cases. It is not enough for use cases to exist; they need to be sufficiently diverse and correspond to real user pain points that are common enough to justify the cost of adding a new feature. But <b>whether use cases drove the design, were used to validate it, or a mix of both is irrelevant, and requiring one or the other imposes unnecessary constraints on the design process.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://belkadan.com/blog/2022/10/Swift-in-the-OS/" source="" author="Jordan Rose">Swift was always going to be part of the OS</a> <bq><b>Looming over us the whole time was “ABI stability”, the point at which code using two different versions of Swift could interoperate. Why was this important, when so many other languages didn’t seem to bother?</b> Because this was the very premise of Apple’s OS-based library distribution model: apps compiled for Swift 5 would work with an OS built on Swift 6; apps compiled with Swift 6 would still be able to “backwards-deploy” to an OS built on Swift 5. Without this, Apple couldn’t use Swift in its own public APIs.</bq> <bq>We ended up (ab)using a feature called “rpath”, or “runtime search path”, which allowed an executable to find its dynamic libraries not by hardcoded path but by searching a series of directories. <b>By making the search order start with /usr/lib/swift/ and following that with the app bundle, we could guarantee that apps would use the OS version of Swift if present and fall back to their embedded version otherwise.</b></bq> This is nothing more than DLL search path on Windows. <bq>Android actually does do this fairly often, at least with its Java APIs. It’s a bit easier to set up because its apps and libraries use an intermediate format rather than native code, and also because <b>Java doesn’t have extensions and therefore there are fewer ways to modify existing types.</b> They call this “desugaring".</bq> <bq><b>Apple wants to be able to update their libraries as part of OS releases, as well as security updates. It’s this capability that allows them to do system-wide UI adjustments and redesigns without forcing everyone to publish new versions of their app</b> ahead of time and with relatively minimal conditionalizing even after the fact. You can argue whether or not you think that’s a good thing, but it’s something Apple won’t ever give up.</bq> <bq>But then <b>Apple wouldn’t have been able to write system libraries in Swift, and that was never an option.</b></bq> Because objective C is too hard and there are fewer and fewer people around capable of understanding the complexities of system programming. Are we entering a dark age? Do you have to change your design to suit the people available to work.on it? <bq>Should Apple have changed course to match Linux here, knowing that changing their kernel interfaces would break existing programs? Hard to say. <b>“Not all change is progress, but all progress is change”, and compatibility restricts change pretty much by definition.</b></bq> <h><span id="fun">Fun</span></h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/18jvpn3/i_still_think_about_this_tweet/" author="Olly iConic" source="Reddit">I still think about this tweet.</a> <img src="{att_link}genie_questions.jpg" href="{att_link}genie_questions.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <bq><b>genie:</b> you have three wishes <b>me:</b> make firemen ugly <b>genie:</b> you got it <b>me:</b> instead of sliding down a pole make them climb out of a well <b>genie:</b> ok <b>me:</b> take the big ladder off their truck <b>genie:</b> dude what's your problem</bq> <hr> I was listening to this video (recommended by a friend). I listened to the last 45 minutes of it. When I started from the beginning, it wasn't as good, so <abbr title="Your Mileage May Vary">YMMV</abbr>. I know mine did. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPq7CyHqQ2I" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/LPq7CyHqQ2I" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Cult Of Black Phillip" caption="The Black Phillip Show Episode 1"> I love thinking about how many millions of people these people taught the wrong definition of pederast and pedophile. Just to clear things up. <dl dt_class="field"> Pedophile Someone attracted to pre-pubescent children. Ephebophile Someone attracted to post-pubescent, but underage people. Pederast A man who has anal sex with a boy. </dl> They said a "pedophile" was a "pedarast" and that an "ephebophile" was a "pedophile". They of course didn't mention "ephebophile" because no-one knows what that is, although it actually describes almost everyone who people usually call "pedophiles". That people don't distinguish between pedophiles and ephebophiles is a disgrace. It's like rounding up assault to murder. <hr> I learned of the company BRXLZ today. I can’t even link it because it is such a marketing/corporate/sales entity seemingly associated with the NFL that the first forty links are just variations of shops. I have no idea what’s going on, but it doesn’t seem good. It seems like they make lego-brick-style representation of sports-team stuff. I am already beginning to not understand this culture, this world. It’s funny that I’m becoming a grumpy old man, but feel justified in doing so because the world keeps getting stupider. It shouldn’t be just me who rejects anything named BRXLZ. This is not Poland. That company should never have grown, with a name like that. I realize that most grumpy old men are complaining about stupid shit that doesn’t exist (e.g., "takin’ our guns!) and seek to stay focused about stupid shit that does. The name of a sports-merchandising company is perhaps trivial, but I feels it’s very indicative of a wider trend, a self-satisfied and enthusiastic plummeting toward the Idiocracy. <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ie" author="Zack Weinersmith" source="SMBC">I.E.</a> <bq>Id est: which means now that I've made my argument in a confusing way to demonstrate intelligence, here's the same idea but with clarity.</bq> <hr> I was listening to a This Is Hell! and one of the fellas mentioned that something was between Cicero and Pulaski. They broadcast from Chicago, so they were almost certainly referring to Cicero, IL and the Pulaski station in Chicago. It takes about 30 minutes to travel between them on public transportation. My mind, though, as a Central New Yorker, thought immediately of the "unincorporated community" of Cicero and the village of Pulaski in western NY State. It takes about half an hour to travel between the two by car.