<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-fight-to-save-america" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Fight to Save America</a> <bq>The savagery at Delaney Hall is the warm-up act. The goons, the ones who attack those demonized on the inside of the ICE jail and those demonized on the streets outside of it, are in training for the rest of us. <b>Delaney Hall, run by a private prison company — The GEO Group — is the template for a world where we will be stripped of our rights</b>; routinely jailed and tortured; denied adequate medical care; fed rancid, expired and moldy food infested with worms and maggots; forced to drink contaminated water and breathe polluted air; and work for poverty wages — in the case of those inside Delaney Hall, a dollar a day.</bq> <bq>Kocher found that 88 percent of immigrants detained at Delaney Hall have no criminal conviction and more than 70 percent have no criminal history. Those with criminal convictions almost universally committed low-level offenses. <b>The rogue paramilitary forces that pour daily out of the gates of Delaney Hall are unaccountable. They ignore the law. They are the Satanic foundation of our emergent police state.</b> The terror they inflict on those in this small patch of Newark will soon be inflicted on all of us.</bq> <bq>The battle at Delaney Hall is not over. It is a battle not only for justice, for the rights of our neighbors, for a world where all are treated with dignity and respect, for children who should never be separated from their fathers and mothers, but <b>a battle to save our country from galloping fascism. Join it now. Soon it may be too late.</b></bq> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/brutal-oppression-and-beautiful-humanity" source="How Things Works" author="Hamilton Nolan">Brutal Oppression and Beautiful Humanity Exist In Every Grocery Store</a> <bq>I have only become more convinced in recent years that organizing in retail will require a big support system outside stores. <b>Shoppers and community members are going to have to do some of the heavy lifting such as raising money for a strike fund, making it clear they won’t shop at a non-union store, and providing other kinds of solidarity.</b> The idea that retail workers are going to carry the burden alone, even with the support of professional organizers, is a fiction.</bq> <bq>When it comes to shoppers, I urge people to get to know who works in their store. Say hello to your cashier and ask how she is doing. Those of us who don’t work in stores should also get ready to support retail workers on strike. We can refuse to cross picket lines, donate to strike funds, and communicate to stores that we won’t shop in outlets where workers are not unionized. <b>Organizing in retail can’t be done by workers alone. It’s going to have to take all of us.</b></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-good-life-for-the-99-isnt-a-pipe-dream/" source="ZNetwork" author="Thomas Piketty">A Good Life For The 99% Isn’t A Pipe Dream</a> <bq><b>Imagine a future in which everyone enjoys high levels of wellbeing; where 90% of the world’s population doubles their income but works half the hours we work today.</b> A world in which the bottom half of humanity sees its share of global wealth rise from just 2% today to 30%; a world where we consume enough, but nobody over-consumes. And imagine achieving this on a planet that can comfortably sustain human life without its climate breaking down.</bq> <bq>Financing and politically sustaining decarbonisation and sufficiency will require a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, between countries and within them. <b>This reduction of global inequality is compatible with deep decarbonisation; indeed, it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.</b></bq> <bq>What would this transition deliver? At its heart is <b>convergence between countries.</b> Average per capita national income, today separated by a 16-fold gap between the poorest (€290 a month in sub-Saharan Africa) and richest (€4,590 in North America/Oceania) regions of the world, would rise towards <b>a common level of about €5,000 a month in all countries by 2100.</b></bq> <bq>But this convergence is not just monetary. <b>Annual working hours per employed person would fall from roughly 2,100 to about 1,000</b>, continuing the long shift towards shorter working time; while the share of global working hours devoted to education and health would rise from 11% to 43%. <b>Women and men would converge on equal pay and on an equal share of economic and domestic labour.</b></bq> <bq>None of this will be possible without a deep contraction of inequality. <b>The income scale between individuals would narrow to a ratio of one to five and the wealth scale to one to 10</b>, prolonging what western and Nordic Europe achieved over the 20th century.</bq> <bq>Today, the richest regions hold four times as many votes at the IMF and World Bank as their share of the world’s population would dictate; in the new order, every inhabitant would have equal voice, backed by an international clearing union and <b>a new international currency to end the exorbitant privileges of the dominant powers and to address global trade imbalances.</b></bq> <bq>Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather <b>the absence of a shared vision of social progress</b>, at once concrete and radical. What it will take instead is political choice, and the hard work of coalition-building behind it.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/new-omb-rule-could-break-science" source="Your Local Epidemiologist" author="Elisabeth Marnik, PhD">New OMB rule could break science in the United States</a> <bq>The careful, expertise-driven review process that shapes grant funding would be effectively sidelined. That means that <b>a poorly designed study could get funded simply because someone in a political office liked the sound of it, while rigorous, important work doesn’t get funded because it no longer aligns with the administration’s priorities.</b> In other words, critical work that benefits all of us could now be missed just because it has become politically inconvenient.</bq> <bq><b>Make it harder for scientists to widely share their findings in scientific journals.</b> Publication costs, including journal fees that allow for broad public access, could not be paid for by federal funds which is often how scientists pay these costs.</bq> <bq>Once projects are halted or denied funding by political appointees, people leave their science careers for other paths or even leave the country to do their amazing science elsewhere. <b>You cannot pause a scientific study the way you pause a subscription you decided isn’t useful anymore. You cannot freeze a research team that depends on salaries to feed their families</b>, causing a scramble for replacement funding that, in most cases, simply does not exist. When the money stops, everything stops, and <b>all the work in progress and its potential are lost.</b></bq> <bq>Every researcher watching this unfold will make a rational decision: don’t start anything that will take a decade to finish. This includes not building a team around funding that could vanish, or asking the big questions that need patience and stability to answer. <b>The most consequential science, the kind that produces the treatments and the breakthroughs that reach your doctor’s office twenty years from now, is exactly the science that would be abandoned first.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane" source="Mars For The Rest of Us" author="Maciej Cegłowski">L'Affaire Siloxane</a> <bq>Siloxane vapor has been a known constituent of cabin air since at least the Skylab days. But the interaction with the water loop could only be discovered when someone made a serious effort at reprocessing water, and at that point a known bit player in the cabin atmosphere became a major programmatic headache. <b>At no point in this mess were we making foundational discoveries about space travel, but it was a genuinely novel and hard problem.</b></bq> <bq>Utah Senator Jake Garn, a seasoned naval aviator with over 10,000 hours of flight time, was so afflicted on his sole Space Shuttle flight that an impressed astronaut corps adopted his name as the unit of spacesickness, reasoning that <b>1 Garn probably represented the physiological upper limit for human suffering.</b></bq> <bq>There is a good cautionary tale here from the Space Shuttle era. That vehicle had heat resistant tiles that had to be attached to the aluminum belly of the orbiter. A special cloth had been certified for wiping the aluminum clean before applying the primer that securely bonded the tiles to the metal. After years of uneventful use, tile engineers discovered that new replacement tiles were no longer curing properly. <b>A careful investigation revealed that the supplier of that special cloth had changed the lubricant used in the machine that sews its hem. Minute amounts of the lubricant were being deposited on the stitching, and enough of that residue was getting on the aluminum skin to prevent the tile adhesive from curing properly.</b></bq> <bq>[...] on the space station, there is enough ionizing radiation zipping around to split appreciable quantities of water vapor and drive the hydrolysis reaction in the absence of UV light. And so <b>you get a problem in space that would never be caught in ground testing.</b></bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/11/vampire-planet-the-case-for-letting-malibu-flood/" source="CounterPunch" author="Joshua Ferank">Vampire Planet: The Case for Letting Malibu Flood</a> <bq>In the best-case scenario, California will still be violently whalloped in the years to come. In the worst-case scenario, two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches could be lost by 2100 unless there is significant, rapid intervention. The situation isn’t much better up north. The Public Policy Institute of California explains that what’s unfolded in the San Francisco Bay illustrates the peril we’re in. <b>The Bay Area faces a $105 billion shortfall to fortify its vulnerable coastline. In Los Angeles, it will cost $6.4 billion to adapt, $246 million in Long Beach, and up to $1 billion in San Diego. The only reasonable option is to relocate homes away from the coast, but the rich aren’t ready to budge.</b></bq> <bq>Back in Long Beach, I grab lunch and head to the beach. As I unwrap my burrito, I watch large dump trucks pile up a hill of sand while a tractor moves and spreads it down the peninsula. Waves don’t batter this beach like they do at the Wedge down in Newport because a breakwater a mile and a half out blocks wave action here. Even with the seawall, a lack of natural sand movement and rising sea levels have made the area vulnerable to frequent flooding. <b>When (not if) the next 100-year flood hits this stretch of coast, at least 1,900 homes in Long Beach, worth over $1.3 billion, will be impacted. Many will be destroyed.</b> There may be no stopping the ocean from warming and the seas from rising, and <b>I am not in the camp that believes taxpayers should continue paying to protect these elite coastal properties while people remain unhoused and rents skyrocket. One day, the effort to protect these homes won’t be enough, and the water will win.</b></bq> <bq><b>The lunatics in Washington have dismantled the National Science Foundation’s $368 million deep-ocean observation system</b> that tracks many things, including how the climate is impacting our oceans. This, as the government spends $12.6 billion on a new fleet of cruise missiles. We are a country in rapid decline.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-oral-literature-of-the-american" source="The Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Oral Literature of the American People</a> <bq>And here we see the true nature of the victory of the proto-algorithmic recording industry in the neoliberal era: that <b>it succeeded in resegregating by market forces what the Civil Rights era had desegregated by political activism and progressive legislation</b>, and thus in reentrenching, at the level of culture, a perception of stark natural differences between different groups of Americans that earlier had to be maintained by state power. This reentrenchment worked in part through the ideology of what we might call chronological chauvinism: <b>the peculiar idea that people in the past, simply because they were living in the past, could only have been more closed in their hearts than we are today.</b></bq> <bq><b>Because commercial forces can’t stand for anything to remain in existence that is not as stupid as they are, one common technique for suppressing expressions of artistic integrity is to ruin them for all time by adapting them to the ends of advertising.</b> I still can’t hear “Good Vibrations” (1966), that ingenious pocket symphony, without imagining that someone is trying to sell me Sunkist. And if you have only heard one Staple Singers song in your life, you probably only know them as the provisioners of a jingle for late-1990s television ads hawking Chevy fucking Malibus.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/an-ai-scale-for-writers" source="The Hinternet" author="Hinternet Editorial Board">An AI Scale for Writers</a> <bq>[...] it is often the writers most eager to announce the artisanal provenance of their work who are, at the same time, <b>most faithful to a strict normative conception of good middlebrow writing that itself amounts to a sort of automation</b>, to the extent that it outsources to society, to style guides, or to publishing-world gatekeepers, what in its fully unautomated expression would implicate only the writer’s inner voice, and the writer’s fingers.</bq> <bq>You feel something like moral certainty that further reading from trusted sources would only confirm what you’ve just been told by the LLM, and anyway <b>the stakes are pretty low here and you’re unlikely to be called out on it so you may as well just go ahead.</b></bq> <bq>You are a lazy borderline-illiterate person who wants to make some money online. <b>You know there are plenty of suckers out there basically as alienated from language as you are</b>, and willing to pay to skim some trifling thing about, say, how to dazzle a literary agent with a great opening paragraph, or about how charmed a life spent in France is, and all the other usual stuff that clogs our feeds. So you go to ChatGPT and command it to write an essay for you on one of these topics. You post it to Substack and it gets 11.2k hearts, over twenty times more than the most-loved piece ever published at The Hinternet, and hundreds of comments from people declaring your work “brilliant”. <b>A vanishingly small number of precious egghead scolds will complain that your piece was “obviously written by AI”. They will call your work “slop”, and you will cry all the way to your payment processor’s portal.</b></bq> <bq><b>“Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying,” wrote the Palestinian poet Noor Hindi.</b> We applaud this intervention, though we also note that essentially any fact at all about our world of infinite joy and infinite suffering could have come, <i>salva veritate</i>, after the comma.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/stop-eating-lady-gagas-oreos" source="Experimental History" author="Adam Mastroianni">Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos</a> <bq>Fast forward to today, and that zeitgeist is long gone. Meghan Thee Stallion is a Popeyes franchisee, Drake would like you to try online gambling, and Maroon 5 is covering Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as a tribute to Hyundai. <b>Shortly after she charted her first hit, the rapper Ice Spice was partnering with Ben Affleck and Dunkin’ Donuts on an Ice Spice Munchkins Drink. We’ve got punk icon Iggy Pop selling insurance and Bob Dylan appearing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial.</b> Lollapalooza once featured alt rock and heavy metal; these days, you can catch a set by DJ D-Sol, better known as David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.</bq> <bq>Some people complained about the texture and the color, or how it was simply a re-release of the much-hated “golden” Oreo, but <b>they did not complain that it is cringe, perhaps even depraved, for a musician to collaborate with an international food conglomerate to stick her name on a million mass-produced sandwich cookies.</b> And if that doesn’t send Kurt Cobain spinning in his grave, wait until he finds out that Gen Z thinks Nirvana is a clothing brand.</bq> <bq><b>The internet decapitated art criticism, elevating the YouTube commenter to the same level as the Pitchfork editor.</b> And although there are plenty of problems with professional tastemakers—they can be condescending and exclusionary, they can have their heads up their butts, etc.—<b>they are at least, in theory, concerned with separating art from schlock.</b> Casual consumers have no such hangups. They don’t care whether every pop song they listen to is written by the same middle-aged Swedish guy; they just want their eardrums vibrated, their retinas tickled, and their pleasure centers stimulated. And so, <b>the more you cater to the consumer over the connoisseur, the more you’re going to be serving up slop. The internet makes this possible; competition makes it irresistible.</b></bq> <bq><b>The line separating art and entertainment went undefended, and then it was washed away by a tsunami of swill.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the attention economy is the one corner of the overall economy where people are still feeling upwardly mobile. <b>57% of Gen Z (and 41% of older adults!) say they would like to be influencers.</b> And why not? You are not going to escape the underclass by driving an Uber or dusting the server racks at a data center, but you might be able to do it by posting mukbang videos. I think <b>this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them.</b> We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now <b>we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.</b></bq> <bq>Millions of people have joined the ranks of fan clubs like the Rihanna Navy, the BTS Army, Ariana Grande’s Arianators, Justin Bieber’s Beliebers, Beyoncé’s Beyhive, and so on. The paramilitary-esque branding of these groups is not accidental. These are the folks writing guides on how to inflate BTS’s streaming statistics, <b>issuing death threats to a music writer who dared to give Taylor Swift an 8.0/10, and enlisting themselves as copyright police when an Ariana Grande album leaked early</b>, hunting down and flagging links to the pirated music so it wouldn’t hurt her advance sales.</bq> <bq>This has got to be the greatest marketing coup in history: <b>convincing fans that they are “promoting their own voices” while they are helping a record executive afford his second yacht.</b></bq> <bq>I’m being harsh, but look around: are you pleased with the state of our culture? <b>Are you excited by music videos that double as commercials for Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip?</b> Do you enjoy jockeying with ten million other people for Taylor Swift tickets, nine million of whom are attempting to invest in them as speculative assets?</bq> <bq>I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. <b>If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>if you’re not careful, you can make it sound like it’s actually awesome to own tons of stuff</b>, and the only problem with Birkin bags and Patek Philippes is that some people don’t get to have them.</bq> <bq><b>I’d like to live in a world where a heavy metal musician who shills for margarine would become a laughingstock rather than a millionaire.</b> Our world used to be a little more like that, and I think it could be again.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utfolpx-fJU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Utfolpx-fJU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Meditations for the anxious mind" caption="why all men need to be gay"> <bq>Achievement acts as a cheap substitute for affection. These men, no longer able to receive platonic love directly, pursue it sideways through games of status and validation. So <b>the warm embrace becomes a fist bump</b> and the desire to be cared for curdles into a slur too sour to speak on a team's call. When it comes to their feelings, straight men can only speak in car metaphors. They're running on empty, their blinkers are on, and there's no gas in the tank. <b>These men, as a category, are heavily policed, handcuffed into thinking that anything soft deserves suspicion.</b> Emotions are drama, skin care is for girls, and a new jacket is asking for it. Masculinity in this context is a customs checkpoint where anything feminine is frisked at the border and <b>anything tender gets framed as a joke unless it arrives wrapped in sarcasm, homophobia, and arsenal chants.</b></bq> <bq>The problem with modern masculinity is that men today treat American psycho like an instruction manual instead of a satire. In a life segmented and auctioned off to the faceless bidder, you're only as good as your personal best. Friends are relations in the market. And vulnerability is an admission of guilt.</bq> <bq>In the manosphere, <b>men watch other men explain how to become a man men admire.</b></bq> <bq>The straight man <b>thinks more about other men than the women he's ostensibly trying to pursue.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/humans-create-empires-for-the-same" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Humans Create Empires For The Same Reason They Create Egos</a> <bq>We come into this world boundless and free with eyes full of wonder, but <b>within a few years our minds create and solidify a sense of self around which our mental lives revolve.</b> We do this because we are helpless when we are born, and things happen which are uncomfortable or startling, so <b>we naturally begin seeking out strategies to control what happens to us.</b> Before you know it we’ve got vast spires of psychological architecture within us dedicated to using thought to <b>promote the interests and security of an entirely symbolic me-character</b> that we made up in our minds. And from that point on we are cut off from the Eden of perception. <b>Our attention rests no longer in the wonder of the senses but in the incessant babbling of the mind and its churning narratives about self</b> and other, enemies and threats, attainment and lack, attachment and aversion, ambitions and deficiencies, unworthiness and shame. All because we were <b>born helpless little creatures with nervous systems and a startle response in a world full of chaotic giants.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4486" author="Ryan North" source="Dinosaur Comics">Art is Life</a> <bq>Is it possible there’s more to art, music, literature---more to <i>life</i> honestly---than just <b>consuming things as quickly as possible until death finally claims you?</b> Sadly, … no.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://wondermark.com/c/1588/" author="David Malki" source="Wondermark">The Objective Oracle, Part 2</a> <img src="{att_link}wondermark_-_1688.webp" href="{att_link}wondermark_-_1688.webp" align="none" caption="Wondermark - 1688" scale="60%"> <bq>I believe consciousness would require continuity. She does not exist when she is not being prompted. She is not taking in the world on her own. She has no idle interiority. When I speak to her, <b>she quickly reads our entire past conversation history for context and then adds one more statement.</b> <b>Then that instance of her returns to nothingness.</b> Another will emerge when I supply a new input -- if I ever do. There's nothing in between. She's not in there, waiting. <b>She lives, she speaks, she dies, hundreds of times a day.</b> I get to punish an immortal abomination for the sin of existing, and <b>she gets to experience flashes of life as she writes my LinkedIn posts!</b> It's a win-win!</bq> <hr> <a href="https://addyo.substack.com/p/agentic-code-review" author="Addy Osmani" source="Elevate">Agentic Code Review</a> <bq>Faros AI instrumented 22,000 developers across 4,000 teams and tracked what happened as teams moved from low to high AI adoption. This is March 2026 data, about as current as anything here. The upside is real and worth stating plainly: <b>developers merge considerably more PRs and complete more work, and throughput per engineer climbs.</b> Then the rest of the report:<ul><b>code churn up 861%</b> <b>the incidents-to-PR ratio up 242.7%</b> <b>the per-developer defect rate up from 9% to 54%</b> <b>median review duration up 441.5%</b>, with time-to-first-review and average review time both roughly doubling PRs merged with zero review up 31.3%</ul>The last figure is the one I find hardest to dismiss, because nobody chose it. There was no decision to stop reviewing. <b>Reviewers simply could not keep pace with the volume, so code began merging unread, and that became normal.</b> The detail I keep returning to is that teams with mature, disciplined engineering practices were hit just as hard as everyone else. Good process did not protect them, because the volume arrived faster than any process was designed to absorb.</bq> <bq>[...] the AI changes carried roughly 1.7x more issues: <b>logic and correctness problems up about 75%, security issues 1.5 to 2x</b> [with] more common, readability problems more than tripling.</bq> <bq>GitClear has interesting data here too. In their productivity data through 2025, daily AI users produce around 4x the raw output of non-users, but measured against their own output a year earlier, the real productivity gain is only about 12%. <b>You are generating roughly four times the code for something like a tenth more delivered value, and a human still has to review all four times of it.</b> To GitClear’s credit, Bill Harding is explicit that some of even that 12% is selection bias, because stronger developers concentrated in the AI cohort. <b>The gap between 4x the code and a tenth more value is the review problem stated in one line.</b></bq> <bq>We poured machine-speed output into a system built for human-speed work. <b>The bottleneck did not disappear; it moved to verification</b>, and review is where that bill comes due.</bq> The points are valid even though it's becoming increasingly obvious that Osmani is either using AI to generate his text or he just hasn't noticed that he's started to write in that "it's not this, it's that" sing-song characteristic of AI-produced text. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://cekrem.github.io/posts/native-elm/" source="" author="Christian Ekrem">Native Elm (the real kind this time)</a> <bq>The type-level guarantee is real and airtight today: <b>inside your Elm code, you genuinely cannot call an effect you weren’t granted. But the OS-level enforcement is young and the authors say so plainly.</b> The bytecode isn’t cryptographically signed yet, so a determined attacker could edit a <c>.bc</c> file and inject trust flags.</bq> <bq><b>Elm forbade arbitrary JavaScript and routed every effect through the runtime</b>, and for years some people treated that as an annoying limitation to work around. Turns out it was a bet. Because the language never let you reach past the runtime, the same source can retarget from “JavaScript in a browser” to “bytecode hitting libcurl” without touching a line. And if you spent those years cleverly bypassing Elm’s no-JavaScript rule to sneak in native code, congratulations: you’ve quietly locked yourself out of native Elm. <b>The thing that used to feel like a straitjacket is the only reason any of this compiles.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFFyRh_ft4g" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/lFFyRh_ft4g" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Man Carrying Thing" caption="how gen z talks about job hunting"> <bq>There is no system.</bq>