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Links and Notes for March 22nd, 2024

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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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <img src="{att_link}finland_vs._usa_homelessness.webp" href="{att_link}finland_vs._usa_homelessness.webp" align="none" caption="Finland vs. USA homelessness" scale="75%"> Damn, this hits deep. This is a master meme-creator at work. The doge memes that signify excellent and sub-par, the alternating-capital-and-lowercase letters. Perfect. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/22/patrick-lawrence-late-imperial-duplicities/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Late-Imperial Duplicities</a> <bq>In the Mar. 8 edition of Foreign Affairs, this headline: “Time is Running Out in Ukraine.” And this subhead, well-crafted to preserve the necessary degree of delusion: “Kyiv Cannot Capitalize on Russian Military Weakness Without U.S. Aid.” You can read the rest of Dara Massicot’s essay here if you insist, but the display language as just quoted is what Foreign Affairs wants you to know, or think you know: The $60.1 billion in additional support the Biden regime proposes will save the day and Congress must stop blocking it. This has become something like the running theme on Ukraine since the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, announced it a couple of weeks back. It is now O.K. to suggest the conflict that has literally destroyed yet another nation and another people in the U.S. imperium’s cause has reached “a stalemate,” but only if it quickly follows that more weaponry is necessary to keep the thieves and neo–Nazis in Kyiv going. Stalemates can be overcome, you see. You only get to lose once, at which point you don’t need more guns.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/03/free-gaza-and-free-donbas-too.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">Free Gaza and Free the Donbas Too!</a> <bq>[...] the same young Democrats who are threatening to ruin Genocide Joe’s reelection over the bloodbath in Gaza overwhelmingly support the bloodbath in Ukraine and the MAGA mob furious over being mugged to reignite the Cold War seem to have zero problem dumping their wallets out so Benjamin Netanyahu can drop bunker busters on maternity wards in Rafah. It’s total fucking madness and it has me ripping my pink hair out by the roots, screaming at both sides that it’s all the exact same goddamn thing.</bq> <bq>Palestine and the Donbas are both ethnically diverse but culturally distinct regions that have found themselves gift-wrapped and handed over to nations that they never asked to be a part of in the first place.</bq> <bq>While both Gaza and the Donbas have also had their movements for autonomy largely hijacked by imbeciles and monsters, none of that changes the fact that these are both illegally occupied territories fighting for popular autonomy and the crimes of Hamas and Putin do nothing to sanctify the barbarism that America and its heavily armed proxies have reigned down upon their heads.</bq> <bq>[...] most people on both the left and the right only seem to know one half of the story but most of them have also been lured into this bipolar ignorance by a corrupt partisan circus that has turned even actual fucking warfare into just another theater for the culture war.</bq> <bq>While the Jesus freaks on the right have been bamboozled by their Evangelical megachurches into believing that anything less than total capitulation to Zionist slaughter is antisemitism, the DNC’s cable intelligentsia has transformed Vladimir Putin from a corrupt neoliberal opportunist into the ringleader of some kind of international crypto-fascist conspiracy that has grown to include everyone from Donald Trump to Black Lives Matter.</bq> <bq>[...] it is wrong to rob entire regions of their popular autonomy, whether it be granted by God or Allah, and it is worse to slaughter them in mass just so sick fucking creatures on Capitol Hill can sell more bombs for their masters on Wall Street.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/21/patrick-lawrence-authorized-atrocities/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Authorized Atrocities</a> <bq>Torture of Palestinian prisoners — the beatings, the maiming, the waterboarding, the forced confessions: Is this so different from how the U.S. conducted the “war on terror?” Long-term detentions in dungeons with no charges and no recourse to attorneys: There is no echo in this of what goes on at Guantánamo as we speak?</bq> Most Americans are tone-deaf, especially on matters of their own empire, <bq>There is more, much more, that we can add to this list. Afghanistan merits a place on it. There is the West’s “back-to-the-Stone–Age” destruction of Libya in 2011. I confine myself to the postwar decades to allow us to take a good, clear look at that “edifice of global norms” of which Mishra writes.</bq> <bq>And so we discover — or remind ourselves, depending on how attentive we have been to events — that the post–1945 edifice has looked from the start roughly as it looks now. Israel is at bottom an outcome, not the prime cause of anything.</bq> The only thing Israel has changed is the perpetrator, so that the citizens of the usual suspect are better able to see crimes. The crimes of one's own country are always justified and are, therefore, invisible. <bq>[...] to assert that this rupture lies in Israel’s conduct is to sustain an insidious mythology of innocence for the West. No, the true rupture lies with those in the West who are sucked into Israel’s utter immorality and now come face-to-face with their amoral indifference or, for the best of them, discover the extent of their powerlessness despite their authentic efforts.</bq> Israel is no better than Hamas. Both believe fervently in the indifference to the humanity of and declared goal of the eradication of the other. Israel bears more responsibility as the constant oppressor and enslaver, as well as having many more weapons and being the overwhelming power. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/17/lqki-m17.html" source="WSWS" author="Jean Shaoul">Former US ambassador Ryan Crocker: Nearly every Arab state has long viewed the Palestinians with “fear and loathing”</a> <bq>He described the Palestinians’ experience as refugees in neighbouring Arab countries as “pure hell by and large.” Only in Jordan did they get citizenship. In Lebanon, they remain stateless, they cannot own property and face restrictions on the jobs they are allowed to do, leaving them subject to super exploitation.</bq> <bq>Not one of the Gulf Arab oil producers has seen fit to even suggest imposing an oil embargo on Israel’s backers, as they did after the 1973 Arab Israeli war. And neither Egypt nor Jordan, which signed treaties with Israel, have revoked their treaties. None of the states that signed normalisation agreements with Israel under the Abraham Accords—the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain (with the approval of its paymaster, Saudi Arabia), Morocco and Sudan—have sought to void the Accords. Only Jordan, more than half of whose population is of Palestinian origin, has withdrawn its ambassador from Israel.</bq> <bq>All the Arab regimes have continued trading with Israel, which has become their go-to source of surveillance and hacking technology used to control political activism and dissidents among their own restive populations. The Arab signatory states to the Abraham Accords are the third largest purchasers of Israeli arms.</bq> <bq>These tragic events provide a powerful confirmation of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, demonstrating that in the imperialist epoch the workers and oppressed masses in the less advanced countries cannot achieve any of their most basic needs—freedom from imperialist oppression, democratic rights, jobs, and social equality—under the leadership of any section of the national bourgeoisie.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/17/chris-hedges-joe-bidens-parting-gift-to-america-will-be-christian-fascism/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to America Will be Christian Fascism</a> <bq>If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.</bq> <bq>Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation.</bq> <bq>Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin , warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.</bq> <bq>The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.</bq> <bq>The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing.</bq> <bq>Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.</bq> <bq>The Democrats have foolishly written off these “ deplorables ” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/17/failed-icj-case-against-russia-backfires-paves-way-for-genocide-charges-against-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Kit Klarenberg">Failed ICJ Case Against Russia Backfires, Paves Way for Genocide Charges Against Ukraine</a> <bq>The ICJ has now effectively confirmed that the entire mainstream narrative of what happened in Crimea and Donbas over the previous decade was fraudulent. Some legal scholars have argued Ukraine’s acquittal on charges of genocide to be inevitable. Yet, many statements made by Ukrainian nationalists since Maidan unambiguously indicate such an intent.</bq> <bq>The Accords did not provide for secession or independence for the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics but for their full autonomy within Ukraine. Russia was named a mediator, not a party, to the conflict. Kiev was to resolve the dispute directly with rebel leaders. These were crucial legal distinctions about which Ukraine and its overseas backers were immensely displeased. They repeatedly attempted over subsequent years to compel Moscow to designate itself formally as a party to the conflict despite Russia’s minimal role in the conflict.</bq> <bq>The ICG [International Crisis Group] found that Russia’s position was consistent: the two breakaway republics remain autonomous subjects within Ukraine. This frequently put the Kremlin at significant odds with the rebel leadership, who acted in their own interests and rarely followed orders. The report concluded that Moscow was ultimately “beholden” to the breakaway republics, not vice versa. Rebel fighters wouldn’t put down their arms even if Vladimir Putin personally demanded them to.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/bougainville-mining-independence-revolution-papua-new-guinea/" source="Jacobin" author="Matt Schierz">Bougainville’s Independence Struggle Won Against the Odds</a> <bq>It is important not to completely romanticize the BRA, whose use of child soldiers garnered international condemnation. However, they were the only effective opposition to a world of exploitation rooted in the hell of suffocating mineshafts. Many of the soldiers had only known the violence of the mine and saw counterviolence as the only legitimate way of bringing it to an end.</bq> <bq>Whatever the future holds for Bougainville, the Me’ekamui Revolution was a spectacular achievement. At a time when revolutionary dreams were fading elsewhere, the people of Bougainville held firm against the combined power of Rio Tinto, Australia, and PNG, and are on a path toward securing their own country.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9t27bcodHY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Q9t27bcodHY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Reason TV: Andrew Heaton & Austin Bragg" caption="Partisan Post-Game (Episode 2)"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPUT492_c4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/bCPUT492_c4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Daniel Kahneman" caption="Human Nature - Israelis and Palestinians"> This is an 11-minute talk from about a decade ago. The inestimable Dr. Kahneman sums up the situation in terms of well-known, well-studied, well-established and incontrovertible psychological traps. They're not unavoidable, but they take effort to overcome. <bq>We know again from the psychology of decision-making that gains intrinsically---even if they are immediate---are less significant and less convincing than losses, less compelling than losses. Delayed gains are much less compelling than immediate gains and, therefore, than immediate losses. And uncertain gains are certainly less compelling than sure things.</bq> <bq>Our fear of betrayal is intense. We hate to be betrayed.</bq> <bq>I cannot really find a good psychological reason to be hopeful about the Israeli side, about the population being willing to---being eager, being very excited by the prospect of making peace. So where is the hope? And there is hope. But that we should not expect a change to arise from individuals. We should not expect a change to arise from mass politics. The change will occur---if and when it does occur---because of leadership. Leaders can change things. Leaders can induce confidence. Leaders can convince people that risks are worth taking. Leaders can convince people that the distant future is worth fighting for, even at the cost of immediate pain. And that's the only hope I see. But there is hope. Because I'm convinced that the population of Israel---the people of Israel and, I think, the Palestinian people---can be led to peace. But, without leadership, it will not happen by itself.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/29/congress-goes-berserk-over-tiktok/" author="Eve Ottenberg" source="CounterPunch">Congress Goes Berserk Over TikTok</a> <bq>Whatever you want to call it, it’s bad. It sets a lousy financial and business precedent at a moment jam-packed with lousy financial and business precedents – for instance, the west looting Russia’s frozen assets to the tune of $300 billion, or previously making off with Afghanistan’s money, or earlier Venezuela’s gold, or the U.S. blowing up the Nordstream pipeline to corner Europe’s energy market. So now we gonna just straight up steal a company because China owns one percent of it? Who in their right mind will do business with the United States if this nonsense becomes law? I’ll tell you who: Other bandits.</bq> The EU is also chirpily spending money that it stole from Russia, that had been stored in European banks. Just up and stole it. Happily discusses how to spend it, in public. Probably going to buy weapons for Ukraine with it, delightedly funneling the proceeds back to its own weapons manufacturers, who probably instigated the whole cash-grab in the first place. <bq>[...] a Chinese defense representative stated March 16 that Beijing is “ready to intervene,” should NATO or the U.S. attack Russia.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/28/whte-m28.html" author="Tom Mackaman" source="WSWS">New York Times’ Hannah-Jones demands affirmative action programs based on “lineage” from slavery</a> <bq>In the racialist worldview, other “marginalized groups” are mere competition for spoils. So, pointing her finger at “Asian immigrants and their children,” Hannah-Jones condemns “this idea that unique efforts to address the extraordinary conditions of people who were enslaved or descended from slavery [are] unfair to another group.” And she laments that affirmative action programs have “flattened all African-descended people into a single category, regardless of their particular lineage,” [emphasis added]. This, Hannah-Jones says, has unduly benefited unworthy African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants: “At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.”</bq> Yikes. <bq>Hannah-Jones’ essay is more than 11,000 words long. Yet the following words and phrases make no appearance: “capitalism,” “working class,” “poverty,” “union,” “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and “militarism.” These last omissions are most egregious. Hannah-Jones’ followers wish her to be taken as standing in the tradition of what has been called “the black freedom struggle.” But unlike King, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay and so many more, and unlike even radical black nationalist figures such as Malcolm X, Hannah-Jones offers not a peep of criticism of American imperialism, which is currently responsible for the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people. There is no mention in her essay of the fact that the American war machine devours more than half of the discretionary federal budget, while programs that benefit working class people of all races and nationalities—including public education, Medicare, and the pittance set aside for the arts—are left to starve. Hannah-Jones, instead, is concerned about seats at Yale University.</bq> <bq>[...] Hannah-Jones finds platforms for her work with the Times, Shell Oil, and Walt Disney; why she has been given her own center at Howard University; and why she has been showered with money from corporate foundations such as the Ford and MacArthur foundations. If her thought were at all “oppositional,” none of this would happen.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqRzfb2oMaM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/LqRzfb2oMaM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Grayzone" caption="'Kill them all': inside the Israeli blockade on Gaza aid"> This 17-minute video reminds me of the video by Abby Martin from 2016 that I recently covered in <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4866">From their mouths to God’s ear</a>. The people interviewed are very matter-of-fact about what they are doing and what their goals are. One young girl says to "kill them all". Another guy says that there is no famine in Gaza, then says that he is blocking the aid to accelerate the famine in Gaza. Another guy rejoices in the destruction. Another lady is planning her home in beachfront property. It's impossible to claim that these people don't know about the death and destruction. They approve of it because Palestinians are cockroaches. They are like prairie dogs to Midwesterners in the U.S. They are dangerous and must be eliminated. Happily, Israel will have more territory afterwards, including lots of beachfront. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/maintain-your-brain" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Maintain Your Brain</a> <bq>There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing.</bq> This is quite worrying, as it strongly suggests that the media-dissemination mechanism, which could be more democratic than ever, continues to be gate-kept by the corporate media and algorithms. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/violent-extremists-get-called-moderates" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">Violent Extremists Get Called "Moderates" By A Violent Extremist Empire</a> <bq>One of the worst mistakes you can make when formulating your understanding of the world is to begin with the assumption that the truest and most accurate position must lie somewhere near the center of the two major political perspectives you see laid out all around you. It’s a mistake not only because assuming that the center position must be the best one is a type of fallacious reasoning known as the middle ground fallacy (the correct position between “Drink a gallon of bleach daily for good health” and “Drink zero bleach daily for good health” is not “Drink half a gallon of bleach daily for good health”); it’s also a mistake because the entire framing arises from a situation that has been artificially engineered by the powerful.</bq> <bq>This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” People assume there must be truth in the mainstream worldview because so many others are invested in the mainstream worldview, when really the only reason that worldview is mainstream in the first place is because so much wealth and influence has gone into making it mainstream.</bq> <bq>Aaron Bushnell <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230317110400/https://www.reddit.com/user/acebush1/">posted the following</a> on Reddit:<bq>I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now. What I’m trying to say is, it’s so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like, and let the pain and anger at how it’s not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine. It’s not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/imagine-if-russia-or-china-did-the" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin's Newsletter">Imagine If Russia Or China Did The Things Israel Is Doing In Gaza</a> <bq>Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people. Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children. Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons. Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis. Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity. Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.</bq> Well, the story of China's so-called genocide of Uyghurs is taken as fact and was reported ad nauseam for years. It has since stopped. I suppose China's stopped? Or did it never happen? Is it still happening and we no longer care? Or has the west moved to the lever of Taiwan instead? What is interesting is that China and Russia have been very severely sanctioned economically, despite there being no sign of evidence for any crimes approaching those being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. That's why there is no moral basis or principle for what the western empire does: it's just about supporting useful friends and attacking enemies who dare to withhold resources, not about upholding a principle. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-21/pump-and-dumps-are-legal-now" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Pump and Dumps Are Legal Now</a> <bq>I love the idea of massively grossing up every company’s balance sheet just for carbon-accounting purposes: “You can borrow $100 from us to build an oil refinery, but only if you also set up a subsidiary that borrows $1 billion from a special-purpose vehicle and invests it in money-market funds, for pure accounting reasons.” Maybe you could make the economics work, but the accounting for the borrower sure would look weird.</bq> This is what happens when you let the market fix climate change. You think the incentive will be to make money, but everyone spends their energies gaming the system to figure out how to continue pumping out co2 without losing money. If something is not an explicitly stated goal, then it won't get done. The only goal is to make money. That's what will happen. Hoping that these greedy idiots save our planet as a happy accident is flat-out insane. <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-20/bitcoin-had-a-flash-crash" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Bitcoin Had a Flash Crash</a> <bq>If Apple was [sic] trading at $174 on Arca and at $175 on Nasdaq, those people would buy it on Arca and sell it on Nasdaq, making a risk-free instantaneous profit. And so many of them would do this so quickly that the prices would more or less instantly converge. Again, at a certain scale — for the arbitrageurs who make a career of this stuff — this is not true ; there are milliseconds when you can buy at $174.99 one place and sell at $175 another place and make a quick profit. But at human scales it is true enough; there are not hours when you can buy at $174 one place and sell at $175 another.</bq> <bq>If you are an arbitrageur looking to buy $100 million worth of stock, you don’t have to park $100 million at each of the 12 exchanges so you can trade on whichever one has the lowest price. You park $100 million at your one brokerage firm, and the broker handles settlement for you wherever you actually execute the trade.</bq> <bq>If you are short some Bitcoin derivatives contract that pays out based on the price of Bitcoin, and you sell Bitcoin to drive down the price, you will make money on your short derivative trade even as you lose money on your spot sales. If your derivative contract is very big, and your spot sales are very small — because it doesn’t take much to drive down the price in the spot market where you are trading — then this can be a good trade. If that was the idea, though, it didn’t work, in part because it’s not like BitMEX’s derivatives settle based on its spot market</bq> <bq>[...] the Bitcoin market is not knitted together the way the stock market is. If you want to sell all your Bitcoins all at once on the exchange they happen to be on, that can cost you.</bq> <bq>Ordinarily, when it is a going concern operating its business normally, a company has to pay its pension obligations. Those pension obligations are senior to the common stock; the shareholders only get the profits after the pension obligations are paid. But in bankruptcy, perhaps, that flips: Perhaps Yellow can walk away from its pension obligations for $0, leaving enough money to pay shareholders. On that model, buying the stock a week before the bankruptcy was a good trade: The stock was junior to the debt and pensions and so worth roughly nothing, but in bankruptcy it could ditch the pensions and become worth more.</bq> What a sleazy hack. People will see this as a glorious opportunity to make money without thinking once of the people the money is coming from. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1bp903j/corporate_trend/" author="" source="Reddit">Corporate Trend</a> <img src="{att_link}boeing_-_corporate_trend.webp" href="{att_link}boeing_-_corporate_trend.webp" align="none" caption="Boeing - Corporate Trend" scale="50%"> <bq>What is happening at Boeing is happening in every industry. A general trend toward financialisation & hedge fund culture that sees only numbers, not peoples lives or wellbeing. It's just that aviation has a way of making the corruption impossible to hide. It's the dead canary.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/27/frxp-m27.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">“Unprecedented” growth of US debt could bring market shock</a> <bq>The CBO said that interest payments would account for around three quarters of the rise in the deficits between today and 2034. The deficit as a proportion of GDP would rise from 5.6 percent in 2024 to 6.1 percent in a decade’s time, well above the average of 3.7 percent over the past 50 years. The total government debt as a proportion of GDP would rise above 100 percent next year and would reach 116 percent by 2034. The CBO estimates that while interest costs on government debt are at present roughly equal to military spending, they could rise to one and half times larger in a decade’s time.</bq> <bq>The rise and rise and rise of government debt had seen a rapid expansion of the US Treasury market where it is bought and sold. This market, the foundation of the US and global financial system has expanded to around $27 trillion, a 60 percent increase over the past five years. It is now six times larger than it was before the global financial crisis of 2008.</bq> A beast that big is going to be much more susceptible to a liquidity crisis, as it needs a lot more liquidity than a smaller market would. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-mathematician-on-creativity-art-logic-and-language-20240313/" source="Quanta" author="Jordana Cepelewicz">A Mathematician On Creativity, Art, Logic and Language</a> This is a wonderfully poetic interview with Claire Voisin. <bq>As a child, I could already see this. And I enjoyed the concentration that mathematics requires. It’s something that, getting older, I find more and more central to the practice of mathematics. The rest of the world disappears. Your whole brain exists to study a problem. It’s an extraordinary experience, one that’s very important to me — to make yourself leave the world of practical things, to inhabit a different world.</bq> <bq>It’s not that hard, actually. The most abstract definition, once you are familiar with it, is not abstract anymore. It’s like a beautiful mountain that you see very well, because the air is very clear and there is light that lets you see all the details. To us, the mathematical objects we study look concrete, because we know them much better than anything else.</bq> <bq>[...] when you use a theory — because you understand the theorems — you in fact feel very close to the objects in question, even if they are abstract. By learning about the objects, by manipulating them and using them in mathematical arguments, they ultimately become your friend.</bq> <bq>It’s important to become familiar with the object you study, to the point that for you it’s like a native language. When a theory is beginning to form, it takes time to figure out the right definitions, and to simplify everything. Or maybe it is still very complicated, but we become much more familiar with the definitions and objects; it becomes more natural to use them. It’s a continuous evolution. We constantly have to rewrite and simplify, to theorize about what is important, about what tools to make available.</bq> <bq>You have a much better picture of what you don’t know, of open problems. You have a detailed view of your field and its borders. There have to be some good aspects of getting older. And there’s still so much to do.</bq> This interview reminded me a bit of an article I just forwarded to a colleague today: <a href="https://www.richard-towers.com/2023/03/11/typescripting-the-technical-interview.html" source="" author="Richard Towers">Typescripting the technical interview</a>. He describes the final flourish of his code thusly: <bq>“A pair of mutually recursive functions to find the solution.” Two lovers, they waltz. Not every step forwards, but backtracking, spinning, gently alighting on the answer at just the right moment.</bq> <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/21/tuberculosis-deadliest-curable-disease-tests-john-green/" source="Washington Post" author="John Green">The deadliest infectious disease isn’t a science problem. It’s a money problem.</a> <bq>Testing for XDR-TB is particularly important because drug-resistant TB is a huge threat to global health. Carole D. Mitnick, a professor of global health at Harvard Medical School, told me that for every person with a drug-resistant strain that goes undiagnosed, there are as many as 30 simmering cases of XDR-TB waiting to boil over. And so these GeneXpert testing machines are critical both for saving lives now and for reducing the future burden of TB. There’s just one problem, as a lab tech in Sierra Leone once succinctly explained to me: “The tests are great. If only we could afford them.”</bq> <bq>Danaher deserves to be rewarded for developing these tests — and I’m glad they have been rewarded. But there is plenty of profit to be made in high-income countries from the company’s GeneXpert machines, testing for a variety of illnesses, including TB (which still sickens around 8,000 people per year in the United States), without sapping the very limited resources of the poorest people on Earth.</bq> <bq>How can we tell people living with TB that they don’t deserve similarly conscientious care? The world’s deadliest disease is curable, and the first step toward treatment is making sure that the millions of people who would otherwise go undiagnosed have access to affordable TB tests.</bq> <bq>I share his faith in humanity, which is why I believe the humans who work at Danaher can be persuaded to lower their margins to increase sales and improve the overall quality of human life.</bq> Tiptoeing around the utterly immoral setup. A group of people own lifesaving materials. They determine access. Access is gated by ability to afford. It's utterly abhorrent, honestly. We are utterly handcuffed by ideology. Why are we begging these people for this life-saving tools that they have? How have we come to this point? Probably at least in part because people are afraid what happens when the state can seize certain means. What's to stop the state from declaring anything that it likes to be "essential to life"? That's the argument anyway. We have been so fearful of this happening that we end up leaving obviously and provably life-saving means and materials in private hands, for them to decide who lives and dies. This is not democracy, in any sensible definition of the term. <hr> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/two-retracted-studies-at-the-supreme" author="Katelyn Jetelina & Heidi Moseson" source="Your Local Epidemiologist">Two retracted studies at the Supreme Court this week</a> <bq>The codes used to define “abortion-related” emergency room visits were inaccurate. For example, the study used medical codes for ectopic pregnancies that naturally occurred, not caused by abortions. Findings were presented in a deceiving way, like using dual y-axes on one graph. The left panel on the figure below is what was published. It shows abortions are leading to a lot of emergency room visits. However, when the y-axis is displayed properly on the same scale, abortions lead to a very small number of ED visits.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/29/relitigating-the-pandemic-school-closings-and-vaccine-sharing/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Relitigating the Pandemic: School Closings and Vaccine Sharing</a> <bq>While the New York Times has ample space for the argument that we kept schools closed longer than necessary, it’s worth noting something that we don’t see widely being relitigated: the availability of vaccines, as well as tests and treatments. Given the extraordinary nature of the worldwide Covid pandemic, it would have been reasonable to suspend normal rules on patents and intellectual property and have worldwidesharing of technology related to vaccines, tests, and treatments.</bq> <bq>Vaccines were in short supply in much of the world in 2021 and into 2022. If all the vaccines were fully open-sourced, so that anyone could produce them, we almost certainly would have vaccinated the bulk of the world’s population much more quickly. This would have hugely slowed the spread, likely preventing the development of the omicron strain and possibly even the delta strain. Millions of lives could have been saved and tens of millions of infections prevented.</bq> <bq>We can spend as much time as we want beating up liberals for respecting teachers’ health concerns, at the cost of 0.2 years of lost learning. But maybe we can also spend a little time asking if there are not ways to do medical research that better serve society, even if they may perhaps not be as good for the pharmaceutical industry’s profits.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://the-easel.com/essays/between-machine-and-eye/" source="The Easel" author="Morgan Meis">Art journalism</a> <bq>The camera shows us something. But what it shows is that the images we observe during our daily confrontations with the world are, when interrogated with any rigor, fraught with contradictory and overlapping visual messages. Surfaces are more than surface. A simple glance at the world can be baffling and extraordinary. It isn’t that the world makes no sense, exactly, but more like the world makes too much sense. Most of the time, we’re forced to block much of this complexity out just to get around in the world. Friedlander’s photographs force us to go back and face the convoluted multiplicity of visual experience, especially in the richness of the urban landscape.</bq> <bq>We all go about our daily business confident in the fact that one side of the street is continuous with the other side, that people don’t materialize directly out of poles and lampposts, that what we are seeing corresponds to some coherent reality. And we also receive constant information reminding us that this is not the case, that our brains are, in some sense, constructing a reality that isn’t really there. Or at least, not ‘there’ in exactly the way we present it to ourselves. And our constructed reality constantly reveals the seams and gaps and glitches of this false narrative. Friedlander’s pictures, especially the ones Coen was drawn to, are deeply attentive to this double reality.</bq> <bq>In the end, the question of photography as an art or a technical skill, of what makes one person’s snapshot worthy of a show in a gallery or museum and another’s ‘just’ a snapshot is impossible to answer with any rule or criterion.</bq> <bq>The photograph we opened up with, the giant eye and the face half-obscured behind a metal bar, is a picture that the camera ‘decided’ to take just as much as Lee Friendlander. Sorting out exactly how much it was an accident or not misses the point. It was, more interestingly, a kind of collaboration. Friedlander trusted the camera enough to let it show him things he might not otherwise have been able to see, something perhaps like what the less-organized flood of data coming into the eye looks like before the brain organizes this data into a more coherent picture. Seeing this image just at the cusp between chaos and coherence is inherently compelling. But it takes the machine-eye of the camera to make this magic happen.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-reeds-and-the-silt" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Reeds and the Silt</a> <bq>The video was released by Настоящее Время [The Current Time], an online media operation owned and managed by what used to be called Radio Free Europe.</bq> Really. Is it possible that Smith-Ruiu is unaware of the national-security-state affiliation and funding of organizations like Radio Free Europe? They are ideologically constrained, to say the least. These are basically CIA fronts, to say much more. <bq>[...] there is an idea in Russia that the defeat of the Nazis in a narrow sense, in 1945, which among other things converted Königsberg into Kaliningrad, was only half the battle, and that Hitler’s regime was in the end only the extremest pathology of a military, economic, and political system that had begun to take shape in Western Europe some centuries earlier, and of which key Enlightenment figures, notably Kant, are but the relatively more moderate mouthpieces. Pace Jason Stanley, if “fascism” is a useful analytic category for understanding the Ukraine war at all, then we have to take into consideration the sincere belief of many Russians, including Putin, that they are the ones fighting against it, not for it. I don’t believe this myself. I also don’t dismiss it without making a serious effort to understand how one might come to believe it. I wish more westerners would join me in this effort.</bq> <bq>The past few centuries of efforts at extending this civilization as far as possible across the planet, in accordance with Kant’s vision, have mostly left us with significant swathes of the world that are neither the one nor the other, that are out of balance with what they had been, but unable to benefit from the promises of Enlightenment that had once been made to them. Indigenous people mostly get lumpenproletarianized or shifted straight into urban slums, with few new opportunities, and a significant reduction of former ones. The “entry level” of civilization is set very low indeed.</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}adrien_henri_tanoux,_thai_s,_1920.jpg" href="{att_link}adrien_henri_tanoux,_thai_s,_1920.jpg" align="none" caption="Adrien Henri Tanoux, Thaïs, 1920" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/shogun-colonization-japan-tv-series/" author="Joe Mayall" source="Jacobin">On Shōgun</a> <bq>James Connolly, the leader of the Irish Easter Rising against British rule, perfectly detailed the nature of economic colonization:<bq>If you remove the English Army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.</bq>Whether the colonial method is coins or cannons, it relies on the suppression and dehumanization [of] the native population. Dehumanization is the heart of colonization.</bq> <bq>As Shōgun, and the harrowing images coming out of Gaza show, the colonizers try to dehumanize their victims to the point they can comfortably tell themselves the colonized are unworthy of humanity. It is the responsibility of decent people to reject this premise entirely.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/post-2" author="Zack Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Post 2</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_-_post_2.jpg" href="{att_link}smbc_-_post_2.jpg" align="none" caption="SMBC - Post 2" scale="75%"> <bq>Agh, why do you listen to this podcast!? The guy acts like he has secret knowledge or insight, but he's just making it up! if you want to know things, read a book by someone who knows what they're talking about! Look, i'm not after fundamental truth. Or truth in general. I'm just an ape in a post-religion, post-authority, post-trust society looking for a large man to organize my community and tell me who the enemies are. If that requires his followers to believe absurdities that make us look stupid to outsiders well then hey, that simply increases the salience of my in-group identity. Huh. You're remarkably self-aware for such a fucking moron.</bq> The red-button message is: <iq>I'll listen ironically until I've lost all my epistemological bearings.</iq> <hr> <a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/law-4" author="Zack Weinersmith" source="SMBC">Law 4</a> <img src="{att_link}smbc_-_law_4.jpg" href="{att_link}smbc_-_law_4.jpg" align="none" caption="SMBC - Law 4" scale="75%"> <bq>Think about it - most actions don't require a law. Nobody has to vote that you can eat pancakes or enjoy a sunset. Likewise, there's no law against chewing rocks or sticking a fork in your ass. Laws are everything that's borderline: all the stuff humans ought to do but won't, and all the stuff that humans shouldn't do but will. Look at any passage of a constitution and it can naturally begin with "for God's sake, everyone..." So laws are a kind of litany of human shames. If aliens come, they're the first thing we should hide.</bq> The red-button message is: <iq>You ever imagine explaining to an alien why laws against murder are needed?</iq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">The antitrust case against Apple</a> <bq>Every iPhone browser is just a reskinned version of Apple's Safari, running on the same antiquated, insecure Webkit browser engine. The fact that Webkit is incomplete and outdated is a feature, not a bug, because it lets Apple block web apps – apps delivered via browsers, rather than app stores:</bq> This is laughably and wildly untrue, shameful for a so-called tech writer to write in this way. If you want push notifications, say that. If you think they're the crux of apps, say that. But the browser is capable and good and continually improved. I find it odd that he disparages a browser that doesn't provide full support for the notifications that enshittify everything. Doctorow is damaging his argument by being to obviously and incorrectly hyperbolic about stuff he doesn't know enough about. <bq>If your friend, family member or customer declines to change mobile operating systems, Tim Cook insists that you must communicate without any privacy or security.</bq> WTF is wrong with Doctorow? Is he defending apple's monopoly of messaging? Why not at least mention other services? Signal, Whatsapp, and even Facebook Messenger are encrypted. They are free. Network effects prevent use? I guess? Why not just tell people to stop using the built-in messenger? The only place where it's beneficial is with other Apple phones. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/these-swiss-scientists-taught-their-four-legged-robot-to-do-parkour/" author="Jennifer Ouellette" source="Ars Technica">This four-legged robot learned parkour to better navigate obstacles</a> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REvNnUzVDAA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/REvNnUzVDAA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="ETH Zürich" caption="ANYmal can do parkour and walk across rubble"> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/the-two-apps-i-use-when-i-need-airdrop-on-non-apple-devices/" author="Kevin Purdy" source="Ars Technica">I use these 2 apps for universal AirDrop rather than pushing people to Apple</a> <bq>[...] two apps to send files between operating systems on the same Wi-Fi, whether they're systems from Cupertino, Redmond, Mountain View, or elsewhere. One is LocalSend, a cross-platform app with an open source client and protocol that I install wherever I can. The other lower-friction tool that's especially handy for guests and rarely used devices is SnapDrop, a website or web app you open on both devices and then send files through, entirely on your local network. It, too, has its code out there for anybody to view.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/03/ai-and-the-evolution-of-social-media.html" source="" author="Bruce Schneier">AI and the Evolution of Social Media</a> <bq>Just as Google and Meta embed ads in your search results and feeds, AI companies will be pressured to embed ads in conversations. And because those conversations will be relational and human-like, they could be more damaging. While many of us have gotten pretty good at scrolling past the ads in Amazon and Google results pages, it will be much harder to determine whether an AI chatbot is mentioning a product because it’s a good answer to your question or because the AI developer got a kickback from the manufacturer.</bq> I agree with all of this except that he writes that AI companies will be <iq>pressured</iq> to advertise, which does not adequately describe how enthusiastically they will embrace advertising because of the monetary upside. That is all that they are interested in, until they prove otherwise. Just saying that they're trying to benefit humanity---which all being deca-millionaires---doesn't cut it. Fool me once... <bq>AI-powered platforms that are supported by advertisers will face all the same perverse and powerful market incentives that social platforms do. It’s easy to imagine that a chatbot operator could charge a premium if it were able to claim that its chatbot could target users on the basis of their location, preference data, or past chat history and persuade them to buy products.</bq> <bq>Lock-in is an important concern because it results in products and services that are less responsive to customer demand. The harder it is for you to switch to a competitor, the more poorly a company can treat you. Absent any way to force interoperability, AI companies have less incentive to innovate in features or compete on price, and fewer qualms about engaging in surveillance or other bad behaviors.</bq> <bq>The incentives in the tech sector are so spectacularly, blindingly powerful that they have enabled six megacorporations (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia) to command a trillion dollars each of market value—or more. These firms use their wealth to block any meaningful legislation that would curtail their power. And they sometimes collude with each other to grow yet fatter.</bq> <bq>Even after society has wrestled with their ill effects for years, the monopolistic social networks have virtually no incentive to control their products’ environmental impact, tendency to spread misinformation, or pernicious effects on mental health. And the government has applied virtually no regulation toward those ends.</bq> <bq>The harm social media can do stems from how it affects our communication. AI will affect us in the same ways and many more besides. If Big Tech’s trajectory is any signal, AI tools will increasingly be involved in how we learn and how we express our thoughts. But these tools will also influence how we schedule our daily activities, how we design products, how we write laws, and even how we diagnose diseases. The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.</bq> <bq>It is not inevitable for OpenAI to become another Meta, an 800-pound gorilla whose user base and reach are several times those of its competitors. In addition to strengthening and enforcing antitrust law, we can introduce regulation that supports competition-enabling standards specific to the technology sector, such as data portability and device interoperability. This is another core strategy for resisting monopoly and corporate control.</bq> <bq>[...] with a looming presidential election, conflict spreading alarmingly across Asia and Europe, and a global climate crisis, it’s easy to imagine that we won’t get our arms around AI any faster than we have (not) with social media. But it’s not too late. These are still the early years for practical consumer AI applications. We must and can do better.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/26/binary-vector-search/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Binary vector search</a> <bq>Binary vector search is a trick where you take that sequence of floating point numbers and turn it into a binary vector—just a list of 1s and 0s, where you store a 1 if the corresponding float was greater than 0 and a 0 otherwise. For the above example, this would start [1, 1, 0, 0, 0...] Incredibly, it looks like the cosine distance between these 0 and 1 vectors captures much of the semantic relevant meaning present in the distance between the much more accurate vectors. This means you can use 1/32nd of the space and still get useful results!</bq> From the cited article <a href="https://blog.pgvecto.rs/my-binary-vector-search-is-better-than-your-fp32-vectors" author="Ce Gao" source="pgvecto.rs">My binary vector search is better than your FP32 vectors</a> <bq>By utilizing adaptive retrieval techniques, binary vectors can maintain a high level of accuracy while significantly reducing memory usage by 30 times. We have presented benchmark metrics in a table to showcase the results. It is important to note that these outcomes are specific to the openai text-embedding-3-large model, which possesses this particular property.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/540" author="Corey Mohler" source="Existential Comics">The Wealth of Dragons</a> <img src="{att_link}existential_comics_-_thewealthofdragons.jpg" href="{att_link}existential_comics_-_thewealthofdragons.jpg" align="none" caption="Existential Comics - The Wealth of Dragons" scale="50%"> <bq>The Cotton Looms get all the press in the early industrial revolution, but the Threshing Machine really might be the biggest jump in productive capacity in the history of the world. It cut out so much manual labor (people used to have to bash flails against the grain for hours and hours to separate the seeds) that there were riots all over because it caused so much unemployment and social upheaval. The famous Luddites, who people think of as being opposed to all technology, were mostly mad about automated cotton looms, and their consequences on society. They even went so far as destroying the looms (and other similar movements destroyed threshing machines). They weren't just backwards thinking technology haters though, but rational people who noticed that there was something deeply wrong with how society was organized that a machine which improved efficiency so much was causing poverty and even starvation among the very workers who it should have benefited. It wasn't the Luddites who were irrational, but the structure of society itself. After all it should be the people doing back breaking work who are most happy about a machine replacing them, but because all efficiency gains go to the owners, those people are simply out of a job. We've seen this time and time again under capitalism, and is even going on right now with AI.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/openai-shows-off-sora-ai-video-generator-to-hollywood-execs/" author="Cristina Criddle, Madhumita Murgia, Christopher Grimes, and Anna Nicolaou" source="Ars Technica / Financial Times">OpenAI shows off Sora AI video generator to Hollywood execs</a> <bq>“Sora is causing enormous excitement,” said media analyst Claire Enders. “There is a sense it is going to revolutionize the making of movies and bring down the cost of production and reduce the demand for [computer-generated imagery] very strongly.”</bq> Is it though? The <a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/sora-1.mp4?_=1">eight-second video of a cat waking a woman</a> is fine, but it's got uncanny valley vibes all over it. This is the video they chose to share and the cat has three front legs (the left leg is repeated when it swats). <img src="{att_link}cat_with_three_legs.jpg" href="{att_link}cat_with_three_legs.jpg" align="none" caption="Cat with three front legs" scale="50%"> The other videos have bizarre shadows (the dog passing from one window to another) and reflections (the mishmash of shapes in the puddle that the main character is walking over. Her reflection is more of a shadow and also seems quite unrealistic and jarring. <hr> <a href="https://gist.github.com/simonw/dfb7e53c2737a069c5782401c6999ad5" author="Simon Willison" source="GitHub">2024-03-27T16:03:51 conversation: 01ht0afgwryks5fepkvvm0kn28</a> He prompted with <iq>JavaScript that takes a big string of text and word wraps it at the specified width, adding newlines where necessary.</iq> The answers meandered around a solution space that seemed over-engineered and not particularly fruitful---the answers all used regular expressions, which seems kind of like overkill, when you're really only trying to detect a single character. A simple parser would be more effective, easier to understand, easier to debug, and more likely to be performant. The original wrapping code was: <code>function wordWrap(text, width) { const regex = new RegExp(`(?![^\\n]{1,${width}}$)([^\\n]{1,${width}})\\s`, 'g'); return text.replace(regex, '$1\n'); }</code> Things got hairy when Willison asked for a solution that includes an indent before each wrapped line. It's honestly hard to tell whether the example will actually do that, largely because of the non-obvious regular expressions (which make use of negative lookahead assertions). <code>function wordWrap(text, width, indent = '') { const regex = new RegExp(`(?![^\\n]{1,${width}}$)([^\\n]{1,${width}})\\s`, 'g'); return text.replace(regex, `$1\n${indent}`).replace(/^/gm, indent); }</code> When Willison noted that the indent appears everywhere but at the front of the text, the proposed code was: <code>function wordWrap(text, width, indent = '') { const regex = new RegExp(`(?![^\\n]{1,${width}}$)([^\\n]{1,${width}})\\s`, 'g'); return indent + text.replace(regex, `$1\n${indent}`); }</code> This looks promising, as the eye is drawn to the <c>indent +</c> at the beginning of the answer. If you look carefully, though, you'll see that the second call to <c>replace()</c> has gone missing. This is dangerous, right? Imagine if you didn't have sufficient tests for this code? You can't really understand it, it looks vaguely right, and pieces that used to work are randomly dropped in responses to "refinement prompts". He tried a few more times, but kept losing rather than gaining fidelity in the response, with one or more corner-cases no longer being supported. When he told it to stop using regular expressions, it responded with: <code>function wordWrap(text, width, indent = '') { const lines = []; let currentLine = ''; text.split('\n').forEach(line => { if (line === '') { lines.push(''); } else { line.split(' ').forEach(word => { if (currentLine.length + word.length <= width) { currentLine += (currentLine ? ' ' : '') + word; } else { lines.push(indent + currentLine); currentLine = word; } }); lines.push(indent + currentLine); currentLine = ''; } }); return lines.join('\n'); }</code> This actually seems better---and Willison claims it works---but it still seems only OK. There is a lot of allocation in this response, as well as a failure to separate concerns. There are a few pieces to this request: <ol>Split the string into paragraphs Wrap each paragraph to lines of a given width, including an optional prefix on each line </ol> You can play with his version at <a href="https://observablehq.com/@simonw/wrap-text-at-specified-width" author="Simon Willison" source="Observable">Wrap text at specified width</a> When I threw the code into WebStorm and added a test, I discovered that it doesn't wrap at the desired width. <ul> It fails to take the length of the indent into account when wrapping the text. It doesn't sanity-check that the indent isn't bigger than the desired wrap length. </ul> At least the algorithm doesn't fall into the pathological trap when a word is too long on it's own to fit within the desired width, which would result in an infinite loop. <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/26/llm-cmd/" author="Simon Willison" source="">llm cmd undo last git commit—a new plugin for LLM</a> This guy has an <c>llm</c> command-line tool that runs under python. It uses an llm in the background. He uses it to ask how to: <code>llm cmd show the first three lines of every file in this directory</code> The tool writes back: <code>head -n 3 *</code> Lovely. His favorite example is <iq>undo last git commit</iq>. The tool's answer is <c>git reset --soft HEAD~1</c>. Lovely. You know how I do it? <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>K</kbd> in SmartGit. It's in muscle memory. I don't have to have several runtimes on my machine for it (well, the Java runtime for the app, I guess). It's fast. I don't have to waste time on the command line. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://ferd.ca/a-commentary-on-defining-observability.html" source="" author="Fred Hebert">A Commentary on Defining Observability</a> <bq>[...] an insight can be obtained without asking questions. In fact, a lot of anomaly detection is done passively, by the observer having a sort of mental construct of what normal is that lets them figure out what should happen next—what the future trajectory of the system is—and to then start asking questions when these expectations are not met. The insights, therefore, can come before the question is asked. Observability can be described as a mechanism behind this.</bq> <bq>The first one is an outline, and the second is a jigsaw puzzle version (with all the pieces are right side up with the correct orientation, at least). The jigsaw puzzle has 100% data availability. All of the information is there and you can fully reconstruct the initial painting. The outlined version has a lot less data available, but if you’ve never seen the painting before, you will get a better understanding from it in absolutely no time compared to the jigsaw.</bq> <bq>The adaptation is not done purely on a technical level, by fixing and changing the software and hardware, but also by reconfiguring the organization, by people learning new things, by getting new or different people in the room, by reframing the situation, and by steering things in a new direction. There is a constant gap to bridge between a solution and its context, and the ability to anticipate these challenges, prepare for them, and react to them can be informed by observability.</bq> <bq>If you reframe your system as properly socio-technical, then yes you will need technical observability interpreted at the social level. But you may also need social observability handled at the social level: are employees burning out? Do we have the psychological safety required to learn from events? Do I have silos of knowledge that render my organization brittle? What are people working on? Where is the market at right now? Are our users leaving us for competition? Are our employees leaving us for competitions? How do we deal with a fast-moving space with limited resources ?</bq> <bq>Basically, the point here is that not everything is observable via data availability and search. Some questions you have can only be answered by changing the system, either through adding new data, or by extracting the data through probing of the system. Try a bunch of things and look at the consequences.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://github.com/chearon/dropflow" author="" source="GitHub">Dropflow</a> <bq>Dropflow is a CSS layout engine created to explore the reaches of the foundational CSS standards (that is: inlines, blocks, floats, positioning and eventually tables, but not flexbox or grid). It has a high quality text layout implementation and is capable of displaying many of the languages of the world. You can use it to generate PDFs or images on the backend with Node and node-canvas or render rich, wrapped text to a canvas in the browser.</bq> Check out the <a href="https://chearon.github.io/dropflow/" author="" source="">Dropflow playground</a> to play with a running copy. <hr> <a href="https://css-tip.com/wavy-divider/" author="" source="CSS Tip">A CSS-Only Wavy Divider</a> For anyone who's not been paying much attention to what is possible with modern CSS, this is a great site to follow. It publishes several CSS tips per week. They're short, useful, and highly educational. The following code is declarative, performant, and can be controlled by a couple of variables. <code>.wavy { --s: 1.6em; /* the size of the wave */ --p: .8; /* the curvature of the wave [0 2] */ --R: calc(var(--s)*sqrt(var(--p)*var(--p) + 1)) at 50%; mask: radial-gradient(var(--R) calc(100% - var(--s)*(1 + var(--p))), #000 99%, #0000 101%) calc(50% - 2*var(--s)) 0/calc(4*var(--s)), radial-gradient(var(--R) calc(100% + var(--s)*var(--p)), #0000 99%, #000 101%) 50% calc(-1*var(--s))/calc(4*var(--s)) repeat-x; }</code> It draws this wavy border. <img src="{att_link}wavy_divider.avif" href="{att_link}wavy_divider.avif" width="500px" caption="Wavy Divider"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qGY28H2cY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/94qGY28H2cY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kevin Powell" caption="@scope is coming to CSS and it's *amazing* 🤯"> <hr> <a href="https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/" author="" source="">GCHQ's CyberChef</a> <bq>CyberChef is a simple, intuitive web app for carrying out all manner of "cyber" operations within a web browser. These operations include simple encoding like XOR and Base64, more complex encryption like AES, DES and Blowfish, creating binary and hexdumps, compression and decompression of data, calculating hashes and checksums, IPv6 and X.509 parsing, changing character encodings, and much more. The tool is designed to enable both technical and non-technical analysts to manipulate data in complex ways without having to deal with complex tools or algorithms. It was conceived, designed, built and incrementally improved by an analyst in their 10% innovation time over several years.</bq> Man, I don't know how I feel about this. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCHQ">GCHQ</a> is the British CIA. On the one hand, they probably know what they're doing; on the other: it's the GCHQ. <hr> <a href="https://lorenzofox.dev/posts/controllers/" author="Laurent Renard" source="LorenzoFox">Controllers on top of coroutine components</a> <bq>We have already implemented reactive attributes in the core function. This can sometimes feel limiting, and every framework provides a way to pass rich data through a component tree; while triggering the updates whenever that data changes.</bq> This was followed up by <a href="https://lorenzofox.dev/posts/lets-build-a-framework-part-1/" author="Laurent Renard" source="LorenzoFox">Let's build a UI framework - part 1/2</a>. <bq>We have now at our disposal a way to turn coroutines into web components. We also have a set of higher order functions to manage how a component updates. It is great time to put these small bricks together in an expressive yet simple new UI Framework.</bq> Finally, <a href="https://lorenzofox.dev/posts/lets-build-a-framework-part-2/" author="Laurent Renard" source="LorenzoFox">Let's build a UI framework - part 2/2</a> does the following: <bq>Our framework seems complete and well thought out. We went through the process of building on top of a solid foundation. This is how most software is written these days, but we suffered from the common bias and added unnecessary complexity. Here we will see how removing components can actually be better.</bq> I'm having a great time watching Laurent build this framework. You can play with an in-progress copy <a href="https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitejs-vite-ynjvdt?file=framework%2Findex.js" source="StackBlitz">here</a>. He built a single-page app with it, shown in the two-minute video below. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clpY08fA0qs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/clpY08fA0qs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Laurent Renard" caption="Single page app built with cofn library"> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Eyebleach/comments/1bncpx8/what_a_life/" author="" source="Reddit">What a life</a> <img src="{att_link}kitty_with_crocs.jpg" href="{att_link}kitty_with_crocs.jpg" align="none" caption="Kitty with crocs" scale="50%"> Check out the <a href="{att_link}relaxing_kitty_with_crocs.mp4" author="" source="">video</a> to see his little tail waving gently back and forth. <hr> <a href="https://www.der-postillon.com/2018/02/ach-mach-doch-was-du-willst.html" author="" source="Der Postillon">"Ach, mach doch, was du willst": Mann freut sich, dass seine Frau ihm Sauftour mit Freunden erlaubt</a> <bq>"Klar, das war nicht optimal von mir", so Kemmerich. "Deshalb hatten wir auch eine kleine Meinungsverschiedenheit – Streit würde ich es nicht nennen, denn meine Frau war nicht wütend sondern nur etwas 'enttäuscht und traurig'. Aber zum Glück hatte ich die perfekten Argumente, etwa dass man Kino super einfach verschieben kann und dass ich meine Kumpels nur ein paarmal pro Woche sehe, meine Frau aber jeden Tag. Da hat sie mir auch direkt zugestimmt nach zwei, drei Tränen."</bq> <hr> <a href="https://kottke.org/24/03/tiger-tail-and-tigers-blood" author="Aaron Cohen" source="Kottke.org">Tiger Tail and Tigers Blood</a> <bq>Tiger Tail ice cream is an orange ice cream with black licorice swirls generally only found in Canada [...]</bq> <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/tiger-tail-ice-cream-canada" author="" source="Atlas Obscura">Tiger Tail ice cream</a> <bq>moon mist [...] bubblegum, banana, and grape swirl.</bq> <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/moon-mist-ice-cream" author="" source="Atlas Obscura">Moon mist ice cream</a> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-oEFaqUQEQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/R-oEFaqUQEQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Karel Sabbe" caption="#17 - To finish the Barkley Marathons"> This is a great 1-hour documentary about one guy who finished the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkley_Marathons" author="" source="Wikipedia">Barkley Marathon</a>, which is, <bq>[...] an ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee, United States. The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five loops of the 20+ mile, off-trail course for a total of 100 miles.</bq> People swear that the loops are more like 25 miles long. You have to run all five loops in 60 hours or less. There are about 20,000m of incline/decline as well. Also, you run at night and day. Also, you have to run each lap in the opposite direction of the previous one. Also, you can't use a GPS (that's why no-one knows how long the loops are). Also, you have to collect 13 pages from 13 books along the way on each loop. Also, it's cold. Also, it's sometimes hot. Also, you only pay a $1.60 registration fee. If it's your first time, you have to bring a license plate from your home state and/or country. Only 40 people are invited to run each year. Doing only three loops is called the "fun run". There's a longer documentary called <a href="https://barkleymovie.com/" author="" source="">The Barkley Marathons: The race that eats its young</a>. It used to be on Netflix, but of course it's not anymore---because why should you be able to re-watch something on a service like Netflix? Anyway, in this year's race, the winner of the French version of the Barkley, the <a href="http://chartreuse-terminorum.fr/" author="" source="">Chartreuse Terminorum</a>, which is also 5 loops, but of 60km each, Sébastien Raichon didn't even make it four loops this year. The web site is hot garbage---probably deliberately so. <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_Terminorum" author="" source="Wikipedia">Chartreuse Terminorum</a> has more information, but only in French, <bq>La course se déroule du vendredi au lundi. Le parcours comporte cinq boucles de 60 km pour un total de 25 000 mètres de dénivelé.</bq> It also has books and, like the Barkley, is designed to have as few finishers as possible. It also costs only €3 (1 cent per kilometer). Each entrant must bring, instead of a license plate, a bottle of alcohol from their home region. For more Karel Sabbe, check out the following video, in which he runs the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) in 46.5 days, running an average of 2 marathons per day, with about 128km of elevation change in total. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeGFmm4Krho" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/IeGFmm4Krho" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Backcountry / Karel Sabbe" caption="Pacing The Pacific | Running The Fastest Known Time On The Pacific Crest Trail">