<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#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="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#design">Design</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=158453" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Midterms – der Kater kommt bestimmt</a> <bq>Obama trat sein Amt mitten in der Finanzkrise an und er hatte die historische Chance, das Casino zu schließen. Stattdessen rettete er die Croupiers. <b>Die Banken bekamen ihre Milliarden und die Hausbesitzer bekamen Zwangsräumungsbescheide. Millionen Familien verloren ihr Zuhause, während kein einziger Spitzenbanker ins Gefängnis musste.</b> Den sogenannten Aufschwung danach muss man sich genauer ansehen. Nach den Daten des Ökonomen Emmanuel Saez <b>landeten in den ersten Jahren der Erholung rund 90 Prozent der Einkommenszuwächse beim reichsten Prozent der Bevölkerung.</b></bq> <bq>Wer acht Jahre lang erlebt, dass sich trotz aller schönen Reden für ihn nichts ändert, der wählt irgendwann jemanden, der verspricht, den ganzen Laden in die Luft zu sprengen. <b>Die gesellschaftliche Spaltung, auf der Trump surft, hat Obama nicht erfunden, aber er hat sie vertieft.</b> Ohne Obama hätte es Trump nicht gegeben.</bq> <bq><b>Die bessere Frage wäre, wofür die Demokraten eigentlich stehen, außer dafür, nicht Trump zu sein.</b> Hat die Partei aus ihren Fehlern gelernt? Will sie die Kriege beenden, die Wall Street an die Leine nehmen und den Menschen im Rust Belt etwas anderes anbieten als Verachtung? Danach fragt in den Redaktionen kaum jemand.</bq> <bq>Ich will niemandem die Freude verderben. Dass Trump ein Dämpfer verpasst wurde, ist keine schlechte Nachricht. Aber <b>wir sollten aus dem Kater von 2008 etwas gelernt haben: Ein Machtwechsel in Washington ist noch kein Politikwechsel, und schon gar keine Erlösung.</b> Wer wirklich etwas verändern will, in Amerika wie bei uns, darf sich nicht auf neue angebliche Heilsbringer verlassen; und schon gar nicht auf die „Demokraten“, die mehrfach unter Beweis gestellt haben, dass sie eher Teil des Problems als dessen Lösung sind. <b>Wer etwas zum Besseren verändern will, sollte die richtigen Fragen stellen – nach Krieg und Frieden, nach Arm und Reich, nach den Interessen hinter den Kulissen.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/11/07/nosw-n07.html" author="Kate Randall" source="WSWS">3 executions in a single day—in Indiana, Alabama and Florida—as Democrats remain silent</a> <bq>In an open letter, Newsom declared, “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.” <b>He called the state’s system “a failure” by every measure, one that “has resulted in the conviction of innocent people.”</b> The commutations will spare hundreds of lives, but the timing of the action marks it as a cynical move to boost Newsom’s “progressive” credentials ahead of a presidential run. California has been under a moratorium on executions that Newsom himself imposed in 2019. If the state’s death penalty system has been “a failure” by every measure, <b>why did he wait seven years—until after the midterms and barely two months before he leaves office—to act?</b> Notably, he made no mention of the three men being put to death that day in other states.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2026/11/09/brunch-is-canceled-forever/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">America cannot undo Trumpism</a> <bq>As November Kelly says, "<b>Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor, but he flipped the table over anyway because he resented having to pretend to play.</b>"</bq> <bq><b>I'm not saying America is a write-off: I'm saying that it has been sabotaged down to the foundation slab and structural members by a psychotic cadre of skilled arsonists</b>, who were abetted by mad bombers who drove themselves even crazier by racking up life-altering debts in rigged "prediction markets" that serve as a vehicle for bankrupting yourself by wishcasting away your life's savings by betting on every aspect of a Permanent Chud Reich, as corrupt officials make out like bandits by trading on insider information. When America comes back (if America comes back), it will not be as the organizing platform for the world's finance, military, technology and commerce. In years or perhaps decades, <b>America may find a new stable place in the international community. But in the meantime, it cannot be relied upon to serve as the world's hyperpower.</b> Trump forever disqualified America from enjoying that privileged place – and just to be sure, he destroyed its capacity to even try.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MwzC5ZMR-w" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9MwzC5ZMR-w" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="HasanAbi" caption="THE JESSE VENTURA INTERVIEW"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLaR6Ym7Ypw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/eLaR6Ym7Ypw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="The ABJECT STUPIDITY of the Partisan Online Left"> <bq>Somehow, there are a lot of people who believe that by virtue of my going to interview Flavio Bolsonaro, it means that I myself am a supporter of the Bolsonaro movement, that I have somehow went from somebody who did the journalism that got Lula DaSilva out of prison and that led to the attempt by judges in Brazil to imprison me for that journalism, to somehow becoming now a right-wing Bolsonaro supporter. And they said all this before the interview was even out. [...] This is all being said just by looking at a picture.</bq> If you're ever wondering whether people just hate for the sake of hating, and whether wokeness really matters more than supporting the empire, consider the case of Glenn Greenwald, whom so many otherwise good journalists cannot stop themselves from slagging for no reason other than that they don't like him. Doug Henwood, Brian Mier, and Jeffrey St. Clair do otherwise very good work. Why can't they stop attacking Greenwald? What has Greenwald done wrong? He was instrumental if not essential in helping Edward Snowden tell us that we're all being watched all the time. He is a constitutional lawyer who fled his birth country to move to Brazil to be with his husband, who was in the Brazilian Parliament. They adopted two children. They have adopted hundreds of dogs. Greenwald learned Portuguese, well enough to not only live and work in Brazil but to do a one-hour interview of Flavio Bolsonaro. He was instrumental in getting Lula---the left-wing current president of Brazil serving a fourth term he just won against Bolsonaro---out of jail when he'd been wrongly imprisoned. He has worked tirelessly to expose the misdeeds of federal judges in Brazil. These assholes cannot stop calling him a right-winger. It's disgusting. This is where we start to see how comfortable Chomsky had it: the mainstream media ignored him but didn't revile him. He was adored by these guys but he was much more in the tank for the establishment than Greenwald ever was, at any time in his life. But they hate Greenwald. This reflects very poorly on them. I listened to a lot of the interview---it's in Portuguese, so I had to read the subtitles for the most part; my Spanish only gets me so far---and he asked a lot of hard-hitting questions, It wasn't a softball interview at all. He gave Bolsonaro a chance to show the world what an empty dipshit he is. Greenwald asked him, "if the left is so powerful in Brazil, then why did they wait until the second round to manipulate it?" Bolsonaro backed off and said that he's not claiming that the left had manipulated the election. This is <i>good</i>. His retraction is on recorded video now. <bq>I heard this a lot like why would you give somebody like this a platform and a stage? <b>This is somebody who just got 60 million votes to be president of one of the largest and most important countries in the world. He's an elected senator of Brazil. His father was the president of Brazil. You think he needs me to have a stage or to be heard?</b> I went because I wanted to ask questions. I have a lot of questions that I wanted to hear his answer to. I wanted to know if there was the role of the Israeli government, if it was true that he had a Mossad agent in his car, if the Trump administration participated in his exiting Brazil, what he meant when he posted a letter that he said he was the true president-elect of Brazil and then withdrew it, why he withdrew, tons of questions I had for him. Of course, I'm going to go do the interview.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/jen-hsun-not-quite-white-enough/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">Jen-Hsun: Not Quite White Enough</a> <bq>[...] as Jen-Hsun is finding out now, that the White techlords can rape children on 'Israel' island, while <b>he gets pilloried for having an affair with an adult woman who happens to be Chinese.</b> It doesn't matter how loyal Asian-Americans are to White Empire. They're still not White enough yet, and will always be assumed to have dual-loyalties.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSvJxLmYwc4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JSvJxLmYwc4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="ReasonTV | Andrew Heaton & Austin Bragg" caption="Blue Team/Red Team"> <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-internet-is-officially-tv-now" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">The internet is officially TV now</a> <bq>Sure, you can make a lot of money with digital video, but <b>there’s virtually no way to do that without digital-sharecropping on a platform like Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, or TikTok</b>, which will never give you the actual power to be independent. The move from a text-based internet to a video-based internet is a move from an internet where you could feasibly control your own destiny to one where <b>you will always be under thumb of a platform.</b> An internet where no one’s famous, but everyone’s a celebrity. And that celebrity status is rented from the platform. And, yes, this is true for politicians, as well.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://nonsite.org/introduction-to-capitalism-1996-2026/" source="Nonsite" author="Nonsite">Introduction to Capitalism 1996–2026</a> <bq>[...] the power of working people has continued to diminish and the left resistance to capitalism has too often looked elsewhere. By looking elsewhere, we mean that as capital literally extracts more and more from labor (in 2025 labor took home its smallest share of GDP since the BLS started keeping track), an increasing portion of the left has focused on discrimination, not exploitation. <b>As if the crucial point were not that workers shouldn’t be exploited but that black workers, women workers, queer workers, and trans workers shouldn’t be disproportionately exploited.</b></bq> <bq>Neoliberal victories over the working class (like NAFTA and Clinton’s bipartisan welfare reform) have increased inequality and insecurity and helped to mobilize many of the defeated on behalf of the authoritarian right. And the liberal and/or social democratic opponents of that authoritarianism <b>have sought to argue for a chastened or reformed capital. But there is no such thing as capitalism without profit,</b></bq> <bq>All of this accompanied, of course, by unprecedented returns on investment since 2008 and by the increased transformation of workers’ earnings into capital gains mentioned earlier. <b>As if the “affordability” crisis were produced by Mexican workers instead of by the profits going to landlords, pharmaceutical corporations, and insurance companies</b>, not to mention the promise of profits now creating a new cohort of AI billionaires.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/KqiDqJMxg6o" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="You Truly Don't Understand What Just Happened to Mathematics"> It reminds me of <i>Project Hail Mary</i>, where the Eridans were able to travel through interstellar space without knowing about relativity because they brute-forced their solution. They just took hundreds of years to travel. Humans can't do that, so they have to learn more about the universe. The Eridans were not smarter. They're just able to brute-force a solution. I was also, of course, reminded of <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i>. The computer <i>Deep Thought</i>, after ten-million years of consideration, answered <a href="https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/42">42</a> to the question of "what is life, the universe, and everything?" In the book, this was immediately understood to be utterly useless. We are, apparently, not so clever. <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2URRBOPAL8" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/s2URRBOPAL8" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Joseph Ricketts" caption="Night Snorkel In a Home Depot Retention Pond"> <bq>These are tube effects worms or sludge worms. And this one is pooping. Basically, they burrow head-first into the bottom of the pond and eat the soil, extracting nutrients and molecules from it before spewing it out the other side. Their tails are extra good at gas exchange, so they wave them about to collect any bit of oxygen they can from the water. If you've ever snorkeled in a Home Depot retention pond, then you know how easy it is to get mad pensive about tube effects worms. In spite of it all, <b>they're just dancing, waving to and fro with all their might beside the parking lot, their writhing artistry faintly illuminated by nothing but street lights and neon orange branding. They ignore the deafening roar of the interstate just as they too are ignored by the world. And it doesn't drown out their song. Just waving and raging until the drying of the pond.</b></bq> I'm sure he's echoing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_go_gentle_into_that_good_night">Do not go gentle into that good night</a>, <iq>Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</iq> <bq>The reality is they legally had to put this retention pond here and <b>it's basically just an unhealthy wetland trapped in a concrete grid.</b> And we need wild wetlands that stretch for as far as your eyes can see with plenty of space for all sorts of bizarre things, both big and small, to exist. And yet, even though I know all this, I also know that there is still something worth getting excited about right here. It feels a little strange to do, but <b>you can celebrate the life that persists in a broken environment, even as you mourn what was, or could be, if it remained untouched.</b> Within a few more rainless weeks, the Home Depot pond will be dry. I'll drive by it each morning on my way to work, like I always do. It's a curious place for a furious explosion of life. <b>Like a firework burning bright for an instant before dissipating, forgotten as quickly as the videos on your phone from the 4th of July.</b></bq> This is a nature documentary. This is what we should be using the Internet for. <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/131561-000-A/grieg-piano-concerto-in-a-minor/">Nobuyuki Tsujii in Paris: Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobuyuki_Tsujii" author="" source="Wikipedia">Nobuyuki Tsujii</a> is a blind, Japanese pianist. A prodigy from a young age, he played the hell out of Grieg, one of my favorite composers. His second encore piece was Debussy's <i>Clair de Lune</i>. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnLo_riTlZ0" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/dnLo_riTlZ0" source="YouTube" width="560px" caption=" Bach is our argument with God" author="LRB | Nicholas Spice"> <bq>Bach is not on the side of God. He's part of our argument for the human race as a not entirely catastrophic species.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/11/the-trickster-that-led-us-from-birth-to-death.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Daniel Gauss">The Trickster That Led Us from Birth to Death</a> <bq>But writing became a tool of domination. Rulers used accounting tablets to impose taxes and interest on illiterate farmers, binding them to debt. Written codes made oppression permanent: <b>crimes against elites brought brutal punishment, while atrocities against slaves could be legal.</b> By restricting literacy to a small caste of scribes, rulers controlled the state’s story and manufactured divine narratives and mandates for obedience. <b>Ordinary, petty men became god-kings and demanded monuments built by slave labor to reach eternity.</b></bq> <bq>Once written down, laws could become rigid and merciless. Abstract codes replaced empathy and tribal negotiation. <b>If a tablet said a man must hang for stealing grain, even if he needed it for his family, he was hanged.</b> Writing hardened the hierarchies and slavery of the agricultural revolution into something seemingly permanent.</bq> <bq>But when both sides acquired metal weapons and armor, warfare became more lethal. A technological military advantage never lasted long, while conflicts grew more destructive. <b>Metal tools let people clear environments and exhaust soil faster than nature could replenish it. Metals also made it easier to hoard wealth and pass it down, deepening class divisions.</b></bq> <bq>Coal replaced a renewable cycle (forests regrow) with a geological stockpile that does not. <b>It enabled industry, cities and machines on a far larger scale, without the limits that had once forced restraint.</b></bq> <bq>This black, brittle stone could become heat without end. Water could turn to pressure and pressure could turn wheels without horses or rest. <b>Grain could travel farther, people could cross oceans without waiting for wind, and iron tracks could carry them across continents in days rather than months.</b> Hunger and isolation seemed less inevitable. The promise was unlimited energy.</bq> <bq>Instead, <b>people were forced off their land and crammed into filthy, crowded cities. Rather than work at their own pace, they became slaves to the clock</b>, enduring fourteen-hour days of dangerous, mind-numbing tasks. Factory owners paid women and children next to nothing. Children crawled under machinery to fix parts and lost limbs to keep production going.</bq> <bq><b>Workers ceased to be treated as people and became replaceable parts.</b> If someone became sick, injured or old, they could be thrown into the street to starve. The system created permanent consumerism: <b>society had to keep producing and consuming even useless goods, exhausting the planet’s resources to keep the economy running.</b></bq> <bq>The trickster looked at the whale oil lamps, kerosene lanterns and gaslights and laughed. “You folks think you’re pretty sophisticated, but you’re still setting things on fire just to see at night. <b>How about light without flame, power without steam engines, an immense energy that can travel through wires to every home and city on earth.</b> From space you’ll see whole cities brightened to extend work and study and entertainment.”</bq> <bq>We accepted this deal, but soon everything depended on a steady supply of power. <b>Electricity had to be generated or everything crashed</b>, something had to heat water to create steam to turn turbines of copper wires inside magnetic fields to generate this power.</bq> <bq>The trickster gave us power at the flick of a switch, then made <b>the search for the energy to keep it flowing one of civilization’s most violent, divisive and consuming obsessions.</b></bq> <bq>It’s true we developed solar panels to generate electricity without burning fuel, but this came too late, after we’d <b>built an entire industrial and economic apparatus dependent on coal, oil and gas.</b> Huge economic interests refused to cede their dominance to a clean source of energy. Our cities, factories and transport systems were already locked into that energy infrastructure, and despite the promise of solar power, <b>we remain heavily dependent on environment-destroying fossil fuels.</b></bq> <bq>The trickster held up a colorful piece of synthetic polymer and promised liberation from nature. “Why limit production or deplete nature? Stop killing animals and chopping down forests. I give you a miracle substance made in a lab. It can be as hard as steel, as flexible as rubber or as clear as glass. <b>It is cheap, colorful and indestructible. Use it once, throw it away and never worry about it again. It never decays.”</b></bq> <bq><b>Plastic helped create a throwaway society</b>: ancient oil is extracted, refined through polluting processes, turned into a container used for minutes and <b>left as toxic waste for generations.</b></bq> <bq><b>Billions of tons of chemicals were put into the earth, damaging soil life, contaminating groundwater, creating marine dead zones through runoff and reducing agricultural biodiversity.</b> Global food production became dependent on corporate power, leaving farmers financially tied to chemical and fossil-fuel industries to keep the soil producing. <b>We traded acute starvation for long-term environmental poisoning.</b></bq> <bq>For most of history, communication was limited by time and geography. Sharing knowledge, organizing a movement or speaking across an ocean involved delay, expense and physical barriers. Information could be lost, suppressed by elites or kept out of reach, leaving people isolated and vulnerable to ignorance. <b>The trickster promised a global nervous system: human knowledge instantly available to everyone, everywhere, for free.</b> Distance would disappear; anyone could speak and listen, and no one would have to be lonely or isolated.</bq> <bq>To keep eyes on screens and generate advertising revenue, algorithms elevated outrage, division, fear and narcissism. People became isolated in personalized ideological “echo chambers.” <b>Collective attention weakened and public discourse was poisoned until societies could no longer agree on objective reality. We gained instant access to human knowledge but lost the cognitive stability and shared truth needed to use it.</b></bq> <bq>He smiled and shook his head. He told me he actually thought we would not walk through this last door, but, as always, we did because <b>there was increased wealth and other benefits for those who went first.</b></bq> <bq>By outsourcing the difficult steps of reasoning, writing and problem-solving, people might be giving up the mental work needed for critical thinking and deep comprehension. <b>A passive, dependent culture may consume standardized machine output and gradually forget how to think independently</b>, ask original questions or find direction without an algorithm’s permission.</bq> <bq>“Here’s how the trickster community sees it. <b>You’re running a thermodynamic Ponzi scheme.</b> Corporate and government power will combine as AI drives super-production, accelerates environmental degradation and creates the greatest economy in human history. <b>People will exist purely to consume so AI can generate profits for the few.</b></bq> <bq><b>“The system requires ever-increasing energy and material to sustain itself, while undermining the conditions that make that growth possible.”</b></bq> <bq>You are labeled Planet Hum, a major tourist site for extraterrestrial civilizations that were smarter and could show moral restraint and compassion for suffering. <b>It’s a universal law: survival of the kindest. You violated it too often, so we had to let you die.</b> Thanks for creating Rock and Roll music, that’s all that will survive. Chuck Berry is a favorite through the cosmos. Listen, gotta go, <b>many civilizations make the final cut, yours didn’t.</b> Adios, amigo.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/tout-ce-qui-bouge-nest-pas-rouge" source="ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS" author="Slavoj Žižek">TOUT CE QUI BOUGE N’EST PAS ROUGE – EVEN IF IT PRESENTS ITSELF AS RED</a> <bq>The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ’68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organisations of corporate capitalism and “really existing” socialism. <b>The final outcome was the growing limitation of the Left to issues of cultural politics – cancel culture and identity politics largely replaced class struggle and visions of a new economic and political order.</b></bq> <bq>With regard to the “chaotic”, leaderless, and decentralised character of the Yellow Vests protests, one can claim that this, precisely, was their strength: <b>they exposed the gap between ordinary experience and political representation.</b> Instead of a clear agent addressing demands to state <b>p</b>ower and thereby offering itself as a <b>p</b>artner in dialogue, we get a <b>p</b>olymorphous <b>p</b>opular <b>p</b>ressure, and <b>what puts those in <i>p</i>ower into a <i>p</i>anic is <i>p</i>recisely that this <i>p</i>ressure cannot be localised in a clear opponent but remains a version of what Toni Negri called the multitude.</b> If such pressure expresses itself in concrete demands, these demands are not what the protest is really about.</bq> The plosive alliteration is nice. <bq>[...] <b>the protesters’ demands are the expression of a deeper dissatisfaction with the very liberal-democratic capitalist order in which demands can only be met through the <i>p</i>rocess of <i>p</i>arliamentary <i>p</i>olitical representation.</b> In other words, the protests contain a deeper demand for a different logic of economico-political organisation, and here a new leadership is needed to operationalise this deeper demand. I am not afraid to draw here what will be, for some, a terrifying conclusion: <b>we need true leaders to make tough decisions where they cannot be avoided</b> [...]</bq> <bq>The way to beat Trumpian populism is not to claim that it doesn’t really stand for the people, that the real people’s will should be allowed to express itself outside this populism. The very fact that people’s will can be “manipulated” in such a thorough way signals its fantasmatic character. Again, in a Hegelian way, <b>the critique of representation should be inverted into the critique of what representation is supposed to represent.</b></bq> <bq>After the 2024 European elections, Macron was caught with a smoking gun, suspending democracy, although he didn’t break any laws but just deftly used the peculiarities of the French constitution imposed by de Gaulle as the founding act of the Fifth Republic’s electoral system. <b>This constitution stipulates that the president nominates the prime minister and the government, which can operate even if they are not confirmed by the National Assembly</b></bq> <bq>The political root of the French crisis is the tripartite division of the political space, which makes a stable political coalition impossible. The old centre is vanishing, becoming marginalised, and the choice between Le Pen and Mélenchon deserves the answer given by Stalin in 1928 when he was asked which deviation is worse, rightist or leftist: “They are both worse!” <b>If Le Pen is elected president, France will become a country of chaos and social tensions</b> since Le Pen will not be able to subdue her enemies; <b>if Mélenchon wins, there will be at least economic chaos.</b> As I see the situation, the problem is that the Left, divided within itself, has no true answer to the crisis, <b>no realistic, consistent programme for coping with the apocalyptic prospects.</b></bq> <bq><b>Never has Europe been closer to its self-dissolution than it is now.</b> It is quite probable that the choice will be just between different versions of a state of emergency and that the exhausted silent majority will silently accept some new form of authoritarian rule.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/panpsychism-is-true" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu" source="The Hinternet">Panpsychism Is True</a> <bq>I find myself profoundly alienated from the intellectual culture that prevails among my Anglo-American contemporaries, who often just don’t know how to engage with ideas and so content themselves with personalities instead —a particularly common habit when it comes to talking about French philosophers—, and who <b>are so committed to dealing with real or perceived moral depravity by running to the authorities that they don’t seem much to care which authorities happen to be in charge</b>, or whether the power of these authorities to reward or to punish itself has any properly moral basis beyond what a puppet regime can claim to have only for as long as the Nazis are propping it up.</bq> <bq>[...] the difficult thing about common sense is that it often turns out, on inspection, to be just as bonkers as the alternatives. Spinoza —the actual Spinoza— believed he had some pretty solid reasons for supposing that mind (along with extension) constitutes the essence of substance; <b>Leibniz believed he had some good reasons to suppose that extension itself, along with mass and other traits we commonly associate with body, is only a phenomenal result of the perceptual activity of mind-like entities.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the institutionalization of scientific authority over the course of the 19th century. And here too, as far as I can tell, it is only in that century that <b>the figure of the no-nonsense man of science, with little patience for talk of the transcendental or immaterial, became the model of right-thinking</b> for anyone who might wish to gain a secure place within the late-modern world’s institutions and networks of knowledge-production.</bq> <bq><b>1st-century Eastern Mediterraneans had exactly the same intellectual capacities we have</b>, and, second of all, that they had an astoundingly rich cultural inheritance, if often indirect, from the Hellenic philosophical tradition that had been developing for the previous six centuries or so and that had <b>thought hard, perhaps harder than anyone has thought before or since, about what share the human individual might have in the rational and the eternal.</b></bq> <bq>It is not, mind you, that I think neutrinos are actively contemplating their plight, or pondering the existence of God or the paradoxes of infinity. But I do think <b>it would be preferable if the sort of people we might reasonably expect to win the highest award in the world</b> for penetrating most deeply into the mysteries of reality were also the sort of people who considered it part of their job description to <b>entertain the possibility that nature is pervaded by mind.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/11/my-life-in-skull-of-ghosts-confessions.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">My Life in a Skull of Ghosts: Confessions of a Traumagenic Tulpamancer</a> <bq>Agnes is the witness who lives inside me. A relentless conscience throwing epic fits in my skull every time she sees another ghost being obliterated by a world full of sadistic adults who have blinded themselves to their own victims. <b>She will not rest until every lost child is heard and until all of their abusers are forced to look them in the eye while they burn.</b> So, this is a blood curdling cry of vengeance and solidarity, for and with all the ghosts of this dying planet, from the ruins of Minab to the elementary school bathrooms of Tennessee, from the towering walls looming over the river to the tiny corpses floating in the sea. <b>You are seen, you are heard, you will not be forgotten. The church will be burned, and the state will be smashed.</b> They have created too many ghosts to ignore and some of them possess bodies with big mouths and heavy fists.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <img src="{att_link}a_vast_rube_goldberg_machine_of_privacy_violations_all_working_together_to_deliver_the_most_precisely_targeted_ads_straight_into_my_adblocker.webp" href="{att_link}a_vast_rube_goldberg_machine_of_privacy_violations_all_working_together_to_deliver_the_most_precisely_targeted_ads_straight_into_my_adblocker.webp" align="none" caption="A vast Rube Goldberg machine of privacy violations... precisely targeted ads straight into my adblocker" scale="60%"> <bq>It's wild that virtually all modern digital infrastructure is built to constantly spy on us and harvest our data for advertising yet online adverting is still basically worthless and nobody seems to actually be benefitting from all this. A vast Rube Goldberg machine of privacy violations all working together to deliver the most precisely targeted ads straight into my adblocker.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSs09vbWYaI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/TSs09vbWYaI" source="YouTube" width="560px" caption=" Peter Thiel, A.I., And The Boar Tech War" author="Some More News | Cody Johnston"> I cannot sum this video up better than another commentator did. <bq>It is so thin, the Line between Madness and Genius. Real eyes realize real lies.</bq> Or maybe Cody says it best near the end, <bq>There's no universe where I am not correct.</bq> And <bq>Thank you so much for watching the real news about stuff that's going on that's factual and analyzed correctly.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/eric-trumps-humanoid-robots-to-be" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Eric Trump's Humanoid Robots To Be Used In Gaza Genocide</a> <bq>I often see people wondering why AI is being shoved down our throats with little to no regulation despite the fact that it isn’t improving our lives in any meaningful way, but that’s because <b>AI isn’t intended to benefit ordinary people. It’s intended to power autonomous military robots who will fire upon the citizenry if they attempt a revolution</b> in ways human soldiers might refuse to do. It’s intended to re-centralize control of information, to <b>replace expensive skilled labor, to destroy the collective bargaining power of the working class</b>, and to facilitate mass surveillance throughout our society.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai" author="Ali Alkhatib" source="">Defining AI</a> <bq>I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. <b>AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.</b> Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms.</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://cekrem.github.io/posts/csharp-15-union-types/" author="Christian Ekrem" source="">C# 15: Union Types, Closed Hierarchies, and the One Value™ That Isn't Any of Them</a> <bq>A union compiles to a struct. And every struct in C# has a default:<code>Pet pet = default; Console.WriteLine(pet.Value is null); // True var pets = new Pet[3]; Console.WriteLine(pets[0].Value is null); // True</code>So there’s a <c>Pet</c> that’s neither a <c>Cat</c> nor a <c>Dog</c>. And the <c>Describe</c> from earlier, which the compiler considers exhaustive (no warning at all), does this with it:<code>Unhandled exception. System.Runtime.CompilerServices.SwitchExpressionException: Non-exhaustive switch expression failed to match its input. Unmatched value was Pet.</code>Same exception text as a forgotten <c>Pigeon</c>, by the way, so good luck telling the two apart in a log. You don’t even need to write <c>default</c> yourself. An uninitialized field or a fresh array will hand you an empty <c>Pet</c> just the same. <b>In Elm this state (obviously!!) simply doesn’t exist. F# isn’t completely immune (a DU is a class, so <c>Unchecked.defaultof</c> or <c>Array.zeroCreate</c> will give you a null one), but you have to go a bit out of your way, to say the least.</b> To its credit, the documentation says this out loud (“A default union contains null”), and recommends a null arm whenever default contents can reach your switch:<code>static string Describe(Pet pet) => pet switch { Cat c => $"{c.Name} the cat", Dog d => $"{d.Name} the dog", null => "no pet", };</code>Note that it says <c>null</c>, not <c>_</c>. A discard arm would also swallow that <c>Pigeon</c>, and then the compiler can’t warn you about it anymore. A <c>null</c> arm only catches the empty case. It’s a reasonable trade-off given 25 years of C# and struct semantics. <b>But it does mean C# unions make some impossible states impossible, and this particular one very possible.</b></bq> <bq>So an <c>int</c> case gets boxed. For records (which are reference types anyway) this doesn’t matter, but <b>if you were hoping for a zero-allocation <c>int | string</c>, the generated version sadly isn’t it.</b> The docs describe a <c>[Union]</c> attribute pattern for hand-written unions with their own storage and a non-boxing <c>TryGetValue</c> access pattern. <b>I’d expect library authors to use that, and the rest of us to never think about it.</b></bq> <bq>Coming from Elm, ><what>Make <i>CS8509</i> an error and add a <c>null</c> arm, and you get pretty close to making impossible states impossible.</b> <b>It’s not F#. Cases are types rather than tags, there’s no <c>Result</c> in the box, and the struct default is a hole you have to remember to plug.</b> And it’s very much not Elm, where none of those caveats exist and the compiler just says no. But C# was never going to be either of those, and given where it’s coming from, <b>this is a big step in the right direction.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa_rzHLYU_E" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/fa_rzHLYU_E" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="dotnet | Jonathan Peppers" caption="How We Brought CoreCLR to .NET MAUI and Mobile"> <bq>We'll follow a simplified Android startup path to see where the runtime fits, then compare Mono AOT, ReadyToRun, and NativeAOT. Along the way, we'll explain trimming and show how JSON source generation helps prepare an application for NativeAOT, without confusing those additional constraints with the default move to CoreCLR. Finally, we'll review startup and app-size results from Android and iOS and discuss what developers should test when moving to .NET 11. You'll leave with a clearer understanding of how .NET runs on mobile, what the new runtime means for your apps, and where to look when performance or compatibility does not behave as expected.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://devonestes.com/bad-ideas-that-arent-bad-anymore" author="Devon C. Estes">Bad ideas that aren't bad anymore</a> <bq>Now the engineer working on a ticket works with Claude, which then opens the PR, and then the human working on the ticket reviews Claude’s work. Once CI is green & the Greptile review is clean, if the human working on the ticket feels confident that the solution is solid, they merge the PR. That’s it. No waiting on a teammate to find time to context switch into your change, no pinging people in Slack to please take a look.</bq> Hey, cool---you made the problem go away by getting comfortable with the problem being there. You just got used to feeling hungry instead of actually eating something. As I've noted over and over again: this is not a new thing. We have had generated code for decades. We very often gave a lighter review to code that was generated or that had been performed with refactoring tools. E.g., <ul>If you did a mass-rename, you didn't have to check all 1000 affected files. If it compiled and the tests ran, you just assumed that it didn't break anything else. If you generated an interface, extracted a class, split types into different files, and so on, then you also didn't verify that the tool hadn't thrown anything away.</ul> In these cases, though, we were dealing with deterministic tools that made mechanical or structural changes. That is very different than a non-deterministic tool making its best guess by actually writing code to meet the requirements that you provided, which are hopefully complete enough to make those guesses good enough. People like the author think that just because doing something incorrectly has become familiar that it has somehow made it OK. It's how most people easily live in the so-called advanced societies these days, thinking that they are not only at the pinnacle of human technical achievement, but also moral, economic, and social achievement, when they have, in reality, profligate lifestyle based on plunder. <bq>Deep expertise in a specific technology is a lot less valuable when you have a collaborator that has read all of the source code for that framework and can answer any question about it in a few seconds. This is another case (like what I mentioned above) where knowledge is less valuable, but where judgement is still important.</bq> Hey, neat! He's also come to the conclusion that you don't really need to know anything anymore because you have a tool that already knows everything for you. Spoiler alert: he does not go on to explain what you should be doing instead, other than to write that you should <iq>still build a very strong foundation in engineering fundamentals</iq> without explaining how you're to do that without actually practicing. I reviewed a change by a colleague yesterday that fixed a bug. The bug was definitely gone. We were happy. They'd used Copilot to come up with the solution and then tested it. We were practically done. But all I saw was a solution that spot-welded a few locations in the code and left future maintainers to remember that the bug had been fixed in several locations, and to remember to use the same pattern in new code that would end up being similarly affected. Copilot didn't include any comments about the other locations, it didn't suggest a more centralized solution---even though there was a centralized component registered in the IOC that was responsible for the task---and it didn't write a single damned test to verify the behavior. If you want tests, then you have to order it to write tests. If you want an elegant solution, then you have to order it to try harder, or you have to write it yourself. I ended up removing the spot-welds, setting the configuration once in a central component, and adding a test to verify that the desired configuration was being set. It didn't take me long. Nothing I've seen an LLM-based coding harness do convinces me that they ever do things like this. The only super-successful projects I've heard of are conversions of existing codebases with deep automated tests. See, e.g., <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=6323">Stephen Toub rewrote Copilot CLI in Rust with Copilot CLI</a>. The following is good advice, though. <bq>Being great at the tech is no longer enough. You need to learn more about design. You need to learn about product development and how to be a product manager, at least a little bit. You need to get great at talking to users, doing research and really knowing the business.</bq> Unfortunately, he goes on to write, <bq>[...] when building the thing that does exactly 100% of what you need takes an afternoon, that math looks pretty different.</bq> Spoken like someone who has either never had to maintain hastily written code with bad requirements and no validation strategy, or someone who's been convinced to forget all that and give it another shot. People who write things like the statement above are not considering the ongoing maintenance burden of code that was written in an afternoon. They assume that the same machine that wrote the code can maintain it, a belief belied by evidence so far, where even strong proponents of doing this reveal, in fits of honesty, that they have too many projects to maintain and that most of it got stuck at 80-90% OK rather than actually good or useful. One place where it seems to be applicable, though is with internal tools and products that have always suffered from less than stellar quality. In that case, the quality won't be any worse---it's likely to be better---and at least there will be documentation, perhaps even with screenshots. This is also a good idea, no matter what the topic, <bq>I’m trying to ask the follow-up question: what’s the cost that made this a bad idea, and is that cost still there? Sometimes it is, and the gut feeling is still right. But more and more often, the value proposition may have changed. I’m certainly erring on the side of at least trying more experiments for things I might have shot down in the past.</bq> It's kind of sad that people aren't trained to think like to begin with. Always question your assumptions---your <i>priors</i> as the kids of some generation after mine were fond of saying---at least for a second, just to make sure that your knee-jerk response is supportable. If you do it enough, you'll end up delivering fewer knee-jerk responses and will have turned into that super-annoying devil's advocate that absolutely no-one wanted to be around. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKnZotxlEec" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/fKnZotxlEec" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="dotnet | McKenna Barlow" caption="Test Smarter: AI-Assisted Testing for Modern .NET"> <bq>When a test suite is green, it's really easy to kind of just treat that as confirmation that a change is correct [...] if we're reviewing code that we didn't write ourselves. And <b>the tests might all be passing without ever checking the behavior we're concerned about</b>, though. So if we take that green result for granted, we can really get this false sense of safety and end up feeling much more confident without actually having a good basis for deciding whether to merge. So <b>that's something we really need to watch out for when an agent writes both the code and the tests</b> because if it misunderstands a requirement, <b>that same misunderstanding can actually show up in both places.</b> Everything might be passing, but we still haven't checked what we actually wanted the code to do.</bq> Ok, so, I'm going to remind everyone that <i>this applied to human developers</i> long before AIs started writing code. We have almost always had the developer write the tests for the changes that they made. I've never been on a team where one person wrote the tests and the other person wrote the system under test (SUT). This really only happens when someone is making a bug fix for an existing component and, even then, they will generally <i>extend</i> the test suite to specifically exercise the faulty use case. McKenna's giving good advice but <i>none of this is new because of AI.</i> It's just that people are becoming more aware of their coworkers as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator" source="Wikipedia">unreliable narrators</a> because those coworkers are digital, notoriously unreliable, and incapable of gaining experience that can be trusted over time. If you screw up your requirements just once with an LLM-based tool harness and it will cheerfully waste your time building something you didn't want, or with a few subtle pieces missing, or with a whole bunch of irrelevant edge cases covered. It will not ask you whether you're sure; it will not get better at intuiting what you really mean; it will not get better at extending or constricting your requirements for you; it will not become an autonomous team member. It cannot learn. It can only get better instructions files that <i>you</i> have to write and maintain and then pray are considered important enough in the context to steer the damned thing to producing useful content. This is, as noted above, not much different than with new, junior, or otherwise unvetted team members but the difference is that, with humans, there is the hope that some of this work will be taken off your shoulders with luck, perseverance, training, and capability on the part of your coworker, whereas with LLM-based tool harnesses, there is not. Or rather, you can hope that this will happen, but there is no chance that it will. <hr> <a href="https://ayende.com/blog/204292-a/the-exponential-growth-of-shadow-it/" author="Oren Eini" source="Ayende">The exponential growth of shadow IT</a> <bq>The problem is that this is useful, and the kind of result that would take a team of two devs three months to deliver. <b>It isn’t worth 6 man-months of development effort, but if it takes a few hours, then it brings a lot of real value.</b> Now the problem is that this is actually useful, but as it currently stands, it isn’t something that can be taken off that laptop. <b>Making that into a real app still takes multiple man-months to do it properly, securely, and maintainably.</b> That is going to be a serious concern going forward, I think. Shadow IT and those sorts of one-off apps are going to be much more common. <b>The problem is how they fit into the overall organizational structure.</b> It is easy to be frustrated by the onerous requirements that most organizations have for building software, especially when you realize how easy it is to just ask the model to generate that for you. The problem is that they are not the same. <b>Just considering a single aspect like backups, for example (and the associated compliance for it), can take more time than it took for the model to generate the entire application.</b> I don’t have a good answer for this problem, but I can see that <b>it [will] be a major problem going forward.</b></bq> <h id="design">Design</h> <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-are-terrible-at-designing-ai-systems/" author="Sean Goedecke" source="">LLMs are terrible at designing AI systems</a> <bq>The first problem with design systems is one of incentives. The engineering team that owns the design system5 is incentivized to produce elegant components that will look beautiful all the time. The engineering teams that use the design system are incentivized to produce systems that meet inelegant or ugly customer requirements. So you have this permanent battle where a product team demands something — say, the ability to embed arbitrary images into the dropdown component — and <b>the design team pushes back because they’re worried it will look bad.</b></bq> I find myself disagreeing with this guy's conclusions all the time now. I don't think that the problem is one of incentives necessarily. The design team has a different goal but their incentive is still to deliver components for products. Their goal, however, is to keep the design coherent, extendible, and implementable. That is, if someone wants to put an image in a dropdown, the underlying technology on the web does not support that.<fn> That means that the team will not be able to use a prebuilt component and will instead have to create the entire dropdown component from scratch. This is a legitimate concern that will often be communicated very poorly. They will say "it's not possible" when they mean "it's a prohibitive amount of work for which the product team is unlikely to pay and for which the design team can't afford the opportunity cost." Instead, the product team assumes that the design team is a bunch of prima donnas who can't stand constructive input---because they don't understand or appreciate the work that goes into the design system and its implementation <bq>I have seen companies put designers on these teams anyway, out of some sense that “design thinking” can improve the structure of an API. This is nonsense. <b>Good API design is very important, but it’s a technical job, not an aesthetic one.</b></bq> Hooboy. Agree to disagree there buddy. If a technical person doesn't have an eye for design, their API design is also going to be a horror show. Why? Because the reason they are shitty at UI or UX is that they can't empathize with their users. That lack of empathy will inform the design of a technical API as well. You need a designer for everything. <bq>As an engineer, I selfishly wish I could work with a designer all the time. <b>I want to work on beautiful products</b>, and I can’t make them beautiful myself.</bq> That author also seems to understand design only in terms of visual appearance, which isn't even half of a design. The design is mostly the user experience (UX), which determines higher-level workflows, and also how components are composed to address UX requirements. The least that a design system does is to define appearance---colors, fonts, spacing, borders, etc.---and the most that it does is to answer questions like how to I display details for items in a list? How do I display a long list? How do I filter data in a long list for which only a portion is shown on the client? How do we show the editor an item? Why were are other approaches discarded? That last item is one of the more important ones in any design---UX or software architecture---namely: which approaches were considered and discarded for which reasons? If you don't write those down, than you're in danger of wasting time while you revisit failures. It's important here to also include the <i>context</i> in which the decision was made so that someone in the future can determine whether that context still exists. If it does, then they can probably avoid the work of reinvestigating the decision. It it doesn't, then they can cautiously try it again. <hr> <ft>Yet! Though <a href="https://caniuse.com/customizable-select" source="CanIUse">customizable select coming soon</a>! And it's going to be magnificent. And these collisions between design and requirements are the reason that things like this get standardized.</ft> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7v-UwpsEbk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/l7v-UwpsEbk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="JH" caption="Declarative Dragging - UIST 2026 Submission Video"> The article <a href="https://declarative-dragging.github.io/" author="Joshua Horowitz, Andrew Blinn, Jeffrey Heer" source="GitHub">Declarative Dragging</a> demonstrates the drag-&-drop library in the header: you can drag-&-drop any of the elements around. There's a longer-form <a href="https://declarative-dragging.github.io/D2.pdf">PDF white paper</a> as well. <bq>Drag-and-drop makes the digital graspable. But <b>designing bespoke drag interactions involves a lot of fiddly code to handle geometry, feedback, and animations.</b> As a result, many people, from educators to game designers, mathematicians to creative tool builders, often don't bother. Declarative dragging inverts the problem. Rather than programming all that visual behavior directly, <b>you simply say, for each element you want to make draggable, which future states of your application dragging it should lead to.</b> Our system speculatively renders those states to work out where things can go, then combines these possible worlds into a smooth, responsive drag-and-drop interaction.</bq> <hr> Today, I was filling out a bug report for Microsoft's new Monaco editor in the Azure Wiki. They'd asked whether I could try again with the most upgraded version of the browser. I had 156 installed but, by the time they triaged the issue 6 hours later, Edge was already on 157, so their AI bullshit tool thought it salient to ask me to upgrade and reverify, as if that was going to make the feature magically work. I mean, they'd almost certainly tested the feature with the bug with an even older version of Edge, right?. Anyway, this happened to me, and I wrote this to MS: <bq>My Edge Browser updates all the time. My damned Edge browser even interrupted me as I was typing this message to tell me that it would rather restart than let me continue working and was so adamant about it that, instead of adding a space that I’d typed to my content, it interpreted that keypress as consent to restart and just updated itself without further ado. Luckily, this forum saved a draft for me, so, despite the enormous usability transgression, all is well. Not before I regaled the open office with some hearty and enthusiastic epithets but OK.</bq> The answer completely ignored the clearly hilariously sarcastic response and barfed a further list of many bullet points of tasks for me, as if I worked for them, to which I replied, <bq><ol>I am working in a Wiki page with the Monaco-based editor enabled. and 3. I am not doing all of that stuff right now because I have a dozen other things to do. Doing gratis QA for Azure DevOps doesn’t take priority. Maybe the AI that wrote that answer thinks it can trick me into performing free labor. 😉</ol>If you can reproduce the simple case I described, then you’ve got it; if you can’t, then let me know and I’ll be happy to help narrow it down.</bq> The AI also cheerfully ignored all of that, including me calling the respondent an AI, which is why I am convinced that it is an AI instead of Daniel Pham or whatever. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/foundsatan/comments/1xr483l/ummmm_found/" author="" source="Reddit">Found Satan</a> <img src="{att_link}who_the_f_k_said_stephen_hawking.webp" href="{att_link}who_the_f_k_said_stephen_hawking.webp" align="none" caption="Who the f@&k said Stephen Hawking?" scale="75%"> <bq quote-style="none">I have hands, but I cannot clap. I have a face, but I cannot smile. I can tell you something important, but I never speak a word. What am I? ... Stephen Hawking</bq> From everything I've read about Stephen Hawking, I think he would have loved that joke. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1xsu60p/eventually_i_will_catch_up_to_elon_musk/" author="" source="Reddit">Eventually I will catch up to Elon Musk</a> <img src="{att_link}your_item_has_been_sold_on_steam_marketplace_for_0.03.webp" href="{att_link}your_item_has_been_sold_on_steam_marketplace_for_0.03.webp" align="none" caption="Your item has been sold on Steam marketplace for $0.03" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame_It_on_Lisa" author="" source="Wikipedia">Simpsons S13E15: Blame it on Lisa</a> I stumbled upon this episode, which is probably one of my favorites. Homer wears the T-shirt. <img src="{att_link}tryandstopusamericasimpsons.jpg" href="{att_link}tryandstopusamericasimpsons.jpg" align="none" caption="Simpsons: Try And Stop Us" scale="75%"> <h id="games">Video Games</h> <a href="https://parttimemonkey.com/jono/" author="" source="">Jono</a> This is a game that can only be played online, for sixty seconds at a time. Everyone else watches and waits their turn. There are 1M levels. They're somewhere near level 200k right now.