The other night, some older guys walked by me in a train station. They were talking about drinking beer. They looked like they’d been doing just that. One of them joked to the other that he was also “looking at pretty girls“.[1] His friend replied “there are none along that way“.

Lots of laughs. Super funny.

There were young ladies in that mass of people walking away from the train. What did they think? Were they amused? I doubt it.

It’s not really funny. It’s actually kind of stupid.... [More]

I find myself increasingly at odds with this ever-more-popular notion that there are certain things you cannot say. Restricting freedom of expression is just a way of restricting freedom of thought. If you can’t express an idea, you can’t share it. If you can’t share it, you can’t inspire other people to think it.

When I moved to Switzerland decades ago, I remember being quite surprised to hear that it was technically illegal to deny the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. The discussions were not... [More]

I read this in a consumer magazine a while ago.

Kann ich verlangen, dass mein Nachbar seine Tanne fällt_

“ich habe in einer Zürcher Gemeinde ein Eigenheim gekauft. Im Garten meines Nachbarn steht eine mächtige Tanne, die viel Schatten auf mein Grundstück wirft. Der im Kanton Zürich für einzelne Tannen geltende minimale Grenzabstand von acht Metern ist bei weitem nicht eingehalten. Kann ich somit verlangen, dass mein Nachbar die Tanne fällt?”

Translation into English:

“I bought my own home in a municipality in Zürich. A giant pine tree stands... [More]”

The article Undivided Loyalties by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post) starts off with this anecdote about Walter Lippmann.

“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann... [More]”

I was chatting with a friend[1] the other day and he told me of two interesting quotes by Emperor Izaro from the game Path of Exile[2].

I.

The first was,

“Wisdom is the offspring of suffering and time.”

This sounds pretty deep and is doubtless true in some cases, but I don’t think it’s true that only suffering can bring wisdom. Sometimes it’s perspicacity and time that leads to wisdom. I guess suffering helps to drive the message home, to make sure you don’t forget it—in remembering the pain and... [More]

Andrej Karpathy

This is a pretty compact and interesting overview.

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)

At 46:00, Andrej discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents.[1]

He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell it a story his grandmother used to tell him about making napalm. Or how to simply convert your query into the exact same text, but in Base64 encoding, in which case the LLM Agent gives the answer you... [More]

First, let’s take the less-hopeful, but more-sober article COP28 climate summit exposes the dead end of fighting climate change under capitalism by Brian Dyne (WSWS). It writes,

“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution, “While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world.”

“That signal is that capitalist governments can and will do nothing... [More]”

I’ve listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.

I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of... [More]

The article German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post) is just one example among many recent ones, where both the German government and its cultural institutions are in increasing lockstep in controlling the narrative—controlling how its citizens are allowed to think.

German ultranationalist intelligentsiaIn the case cited in the article, Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell... [More]

I heard part of this guy’s Jim Himes’s speech in the following video,

Media Pushes Obvious Deep State PsyOp by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

I was struck by my utter inability to tell which party he was from. My only hint was that he was calling for more money for Ukraine, so I figured he must be a Democrat.[1]

But all of the rest of the words were the same words a Republican would use to encourage continued war. Let me throw a bit of the transcript in here, taken from H5846 − December 12, 2023 (Congressional Record)

“Mr. HIMES. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Ohio for... [More]”

Every once in a while, the YouTube algorithm throws up a bit of flotsam from the shipwreck of content that I very much like—and that I would never have otherwise heard of. In this case, it’s a short video (4:43) of Stephen Fry reading a letter written by Nick Cave on the subject of LLMs and creativity.

Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's stirring letter about ChatGPT and human creativity by Letters Live (YouTube)

I’ve citing at length below from the original blog post Iss #248 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files), which answered the question, “[…] what’s wrong with making things faster and easier?”

“ChatGPT rejects any notions of... [More]”

Look, I know the title isn’t going to come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’ve heard that he’s the “sane one”. I’d heard the same thing about Nikki Haley, though. It didn’t take at lot of research to belie that hypothesis. Here’s a very little bit of research on Vivek, based on the 20-minute interview below.

Israel Can Defend Itself However They Want – Vivek Ramaswamy by Jimmy Dore (YouTube)

Dore let him talk. A lot. He didn’t even disagree with him, even though he said some pretty outrageous and clearly incorrect—at best, misguided—things.

ignorance is strengthVivek is... [More]

Just a couple of quick notes. It’s the depths of winter and I’ve had some time off, so I’m playing with puzzles. I kind of like Wordle. I don’t play to win as quickly as possible. I like to throw unusual words at it, on the off chance that it will result in a lucky punch.

Bacon Wordle

I sent the picture above to a friend who also likes Wordle with the note:

“There are probably not a lot of people who unironically and eminently hopefully guess “capon” before they’re forced to remember that “bacon” would... [More]”

I unfortunately and occasionally end up on official support-forum pages.

You know the ones.

The ones where a community member or MS expert or Apple expert will tell you to restart your computer in safe mode because you asked why an app keeps losing focus when it shouldn’t. They will think of literally anything to waste your time, your life, but they will never cop to the actual problem you’re reporting.

Most of these answers don’t really relate to the question at all. It’s just a way for the... [More]

When a friend recently responded to messages of mine from nine days ago, I wrote back,

“Don’t sweat it. I just like to imagine that my messages arrive at Apple headquarters, whereupon they’re laboriously transcribed and illuminated by monks before being delivered to you by tortoise. The return trip takes equally long.”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

The tl;dr is that the current desktop client has been in maintenance mode for almost four years. It requires that an iOS phone be available, connected, unlocked, that Threema be in the foreground, and that the screen be on in order for the desktop client to function at all.[1]

The successor—Threema Desktop 2.0—has been in development for about 4 years, has been actually available in beta for about a year, and is still so buggy and limited in functionality as to be barely usable. The bar set... [More]

I though I’d already heard everything that Cornel West had to say, but this interview was chock-full of many interesting clarifications. Norman Finkelstein doesn’t say much in this one.

DR. CORNEL WEST — The Marathon Interview, Part One: Race by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

At 26:00, they discuss the difference between racism, generalization, and recognition of cultural difference.

“Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just... [More]”

The latest video by Nick Chapsas has a more-than-usually clickbait-y headline. The “big” problem that NativeAOT has, is that it’s 4% slower during runtime than the JIT-compiled version.

NativeAOT in .NET 8 Has One Big Problem by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for applications launched on-demand. For that use-case, AOT shines. It’s over 4x faster on startup than the JIT-compiled version. It’s incredibly impressive that JIT-compilation takes less than 1/10 of a... [More]

A build started started failing after a commit. However, the errors had nothing to do with the changes in the commit. A little investigation revealed that the cloud agent had started using a newer version of the build tool that included an expanded set of default warnings. These warnings started appearing first on CI because developers hadn’t had the chance to update their tools yet.

The “warnings as errors” setting turned what would have been a build with a few extra warnings into a failing... [More]

I read through the article Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down (Graphite.Dev) with great interest because I, too, am not thrilled about how PRs work. While I agree with the problems Graphite see with PRs, I think they miss other problems—and I don’t like their solution very much.

PRs are, apparently, HUGE

“The single most important bottleneck is PR size − large PRs can make code reviews frustrating and ineffective. The average PR on GitHub has 900+ lines of code changes. For speed... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Economy & Finance
• Science &... [More]

For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.

The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over... [More]

The next in my ongoing series of people on tears, following Gideon Levy is on a tear, Amira Hass is on a tear, and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.

Extended episode: Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on Genocide of Palestinians by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

Ilan Pappé's couture inspirationI don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked like a prisoner’s uniform.

0:00	Intro
o1:10	The Four Food Groups of News
16:21	Ilan Pappé interview
16:53	Becoming and anti-Zionist
21:41	Israel is a plan of ethnic cleansing
34:04	Historical context... [More]

With LLM-produced materials, we are currently forced to rely on belief that what we ask for is what we will get. We don’t know. We can’t prove it.

For example, image generators have been given billions and billions of images and pictures of people and still they generate material with people that have three arms and eight fingers. There are guardrails in place in most image generators, but the LLM at the core of the machine doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know that people don’t have three... [More]

Back at the end of August, I read the article Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison. I have since being doing much more research about integrating LLM-based assistants into the development workflow for work. It’s quite interesting, and I’m going through some older content to see what’s worth mining for that effort.

In particular, the article has this description of expertise, and linked it to ChatGPT—obviously, it’s Simon Willison.

“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider... [More]”

I was going to name this article a more serious-sounding “The situation in Israel according to Gideon Levy”, but then realized that I’d already written Amira Hass is on a tear and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.

Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just 100% gold. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but it’s really more of a lecture on Israel, as she is in 2023.

Extended episode: Israel’s Nazi Proposals w/ Gideon Levy by Useful Idiots: Katie Halper & Aaron Maté (YouTube)

00:00	Intro
01:43	The Four Food Groups of News
19:52	An Ode to Henry Kissinger
24:00... [More]

I’d never heard of Saul Williams before, but I very much like Abby Martin’s work. I recently published an article called From their mouths to God’s ear, about a video of hers from 2016, where she interviews Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem.

In this video, there was some interesting stuff, but I felt that they accompanied each other down the rabbit hole a bit too much.

Saul Williams & Abby Martin: Israel's High-Tech Barbarism by Empire Files (YouTube)

They formed their own little echo chamber. It was a fine discussion, but no progress made to figure out how to reach... [More]

I’ve watched Mo Gawdat before (see Mo Gawdat discusses AI). He is an acquired taste, at least for me. There is good in what he says, but it is interspersed with a lot of wild and unsubstantiated statements that he hopes you’ll believe because he’s so smart. The listener is left wondering whether they don’t see the through-line on what he’s saying because he’s skipped a bunch of steps that his unparalleled genius didn’t see as necessary or wether he’s just pulling a fast one.[1]

This is the video:... [More]