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Name Marco von Ballmoos
Member since
Email [hidden]
Home page https://earthli.com/users/marco
Description

The (only) developer at earthli.com.

Contents

3222 Articles
111 Comments

1 year Ago

YouTube thinks Oecomania isn’t spicy enough

Published on in Technology

I was looking for a great movie called Oeconomia on YouTube.

Wie entsteht Geld? − Macht. Herrschaft. Geld. Über Staatsverschuldung, EZB & riesige Privatvermögen by MrMarxismo (YouTube)

It is excellent, but it is a dry movie in German about macroeconomics.

What it is not, is a movie you would watch on the offhand chance of seeing some nudity. YouTube felt that it needed to correct this oversight and spice things up in the search results.

 Oecomania Search on YouTube

The first link (included above) in the results is to the entire movie and is really the only result you need. If you’re not already sure you want to see it, then you can watch... [More]

Links and Notes for March 31st, 2023

Published on in Notes

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Sure, let’s talk about AI again

Published on in Technology

I’ve taken a bunch of notes and read a bunch of essays and talked to a bunch of people since I wrote Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI, so let’s see where we stand on the day after April Fool’s day[1], which is the day on which we used to not trust anything we read on the Internet. It turned out to be a harbinger of times when we would not trust any sources on any day of the year from human sources. And, now, because we are going to always suspect that we’ve been fooled into reading a 19-page... [More]

Links and Notes for March 24th, 2023

Published on in Notes

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Working with Git Submodules

Published on in Programming

Introduction

The intended audience of this document is people interested in knowing which commands to execute to update submodules. The initial analysis section is intended for people interested in knowing how the commands work and what their strengths/weaknesses are.

The inspiration for this documentation was that I was wondering whether submodules were always cloned with detached heads and if there were some way to avoid that. The short answers to these questions are, respectively, “yes”... [More]

Links and Notes for Marco 17th, 2023

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Extracting subtitles from an mkv with ffmpeg

Published on in Programming

I’d watched an excellent movie[1] that was primarily in German but had some English parts, with hard-coded English subtitles and soft German subtitles plastered on top of that. I wanted to cite a bunch of interesting sections, so I looked for the subtitles online. Only the English subtitles are available, which I didn’t want. I liked the German formulation and wanted to cite that.

Well, I have the subtitles: they’re just trapped in the mkv file. I figured that there was some way of extracting... [More]

Links and Notes for March 10th, 2023

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

The Catch-22 of the mind

Published on in Quotes

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
Emerson Pugh

On the nature of journalism

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

I’ve been following and reading Matt Taibbi’s journalism for quite some time. The first reference to an article of his I can find is from Lies, Damned Lies and The Media, in which I cited an article of his called Punish the Right-Wing Liars, published on AlterNet. He’s been on right side of justice for a long time. He’s been chastising the press for lying and forsaking its journalistic duties for just as long.

Whereas he used to hammer exclusively on the more right-wing press during the Bush... [More]

Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI

Published on in Technology

I have not used any of these AIs, not even once. I’ve just been following how other people are using them and kind of just observing, at a meta level, what’s going on so far. Some very clever and otherwise focused people who used to publish other content have been completely derailed by their obsession with AI (I’m looking at you, Simon Willison), so there must be something to it. But what?

I think a good place to start is with the article Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker), which... [More]

Left-wing infighting: same as it ever was

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

 Lately, I’m seeing a lot of otherwise solid news sources start sniping at each other for no other reason that they disagree on some issues—or agree on issues, but disagree on how to address them. It’s really sad to see, but there it is. I know that this is how standard media works, but it’s starting to bleed more and more into the world of my more esoteric newsfeeds.

For example, Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch will not stop sniping at Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore as... [More]

Links and Notes for March 3rd, 2023

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Extra devices in Opera Tabs

Published on in Technology

 Opera has for a very long time had a nice feature that lets you share tabs between browser instances. Since I have a private desktop, a private notebook, and a work notebook, I use this feature quite a bit to transfer tabs between machines.

Unfortunately, a given Opera instance isn’t very good at forgetting older devices. E.g., my machine from my previous place of employment is still listed. Also, devices are sometimes listed multiple times, which is confusing and irritating.

There is no... [More]

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.03

Published on in Movies

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Iron Man (2008) — 8/10... [More]

You’re already testing; now automate it.

Published on in Programming

Introduction

Testing is any form of validation that verifies a product. That includes not only structured validation using checklists, test plans, etc. but also informal testing, as when engineers click their way through a UI, emit values in debugging output to a console, or perform operations on hardware.

Automated testing is common for software, as regression-style tests that execute both locally and in CI. This includes unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

The following discussion... [More]

Links and Notes for February 24th, 2022

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Links and Notes for February 17th, 2023

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Garmin VO2 Max, Fitness age, and Intensity minutes

Published on in Sports

 Garmin Venu 2I’ve been noticing for a while that our so-called technological overlords are trying to sell us a vision of meticulously tracked health data that will help us all move toward a fitter, healthier lifestyle—and, hopefully, alert us when things are starting to go awry in these delicate biological machines we inhabit.

Insurance companies are starting to incorporate this data into their decisions on how much to charge you for the pleasure of not losing everything you own should you become ill.
... [More]

AIs will be dumb because we are dumb

Published on in Technology

I had found a quote from a play called “Radio Golf” by August Wilson, but it was missing a word.

The quote is from Woke Imperialism by Chris Hedges (SubStack),

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know... [More]”

Links and Notes for February 10th, 2023

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

Super Bowl LVII

Published on in Sports

This was a pretty good game, unless you like defense. I will leave most of the political commentary in the capable hands of others.[1]

  • Zelensky 🇺🇦 video call, of course
  • Marine Corps 🎖
  • Military Color Guard 🪖
  • Jets flying over the stadium 🛩
  • Three or four songs to start it off? ✅
  • The National Anthem was a very nice rendition by Chris Stapleton 🎸
  • Coaches and players crying like bitches? 😭 Oh, yeah.
  • Giant American flag? 🇺🇸 Yup.
  • Soldiers and wars mentioned all the time in... [More]

Links and Notes for February 3rd, 2022

Published on in Notes

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.

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.

Table of Contents

SOTU 2023

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

I read through the Full transcript of Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address by Biden Administration (CNN). Since I read it, it’s now been annotated to death. When I read it, it was just a transcript.

It’s quite a piece of work. I had to check a few times to see whether I was reading the state of the union of the U.S.A.

Joe Biden describes a country with policies that I don’t recognize. He describes a functioning democracy that is surging with greatness and getting amazing things done for everyone. And, at the same... [More]

Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.02

Published on in Movies

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Feels Good Man (2020)... [More]

Antiwork != Mooching, is it?

Published on in Philosophy

I just saw the following meme, What the hell even is a dream job? by PrecisionAcc (Reddit), which highlighted the picture shown below.

 What even is a dream job?

Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term “dream job”, but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is.

I thought antiwork was about being against the drone-job work culture, not against being useful at all.

I understand that it’s hard to even conceive of a world where jobs don’t suck when you have a shitty job. But isn’t... [More]

Books read in 2022

Published on in Books

As I started doing in the previous year, I’ve included a partial, “teaser” review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes a full review with all notes, as well as citations and rough notes.

I only hit 20 titles this year, but some of them were pretty hefty tomes, though none in German and only one in French. A couple of public-policy books this year, with the accompanying analysis.

Project Hail Mary (2021)

by Andy Weir

Andy Weir manages to comes up... [More]

Blood of Elves (The Witcher Book 3 / T...i (1994, pl; 2008, en) (read in 2022)

Published on in Books

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third Witcher book, but the first book in what is called the Witcher Saga. Geralt is still the same. The world is worse.

“[…] in his day the world was a better place. Duplicity was a character flaw to be ashamed of. Sincerity did not bring shame.”
Page 73

 The kingdom of Cintra has fallen to Nilfgard. Queen Calanthe is dead, Ciri is on the run. Nilfgard seeks her with all of its power, bending its will to finding the heiress who could try to take back the throne... [More]

Caged by New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative (2020) (read in 2022)

Published on in Books

Standard disclaimer[1]

 This is a play about prison and prisoners. Chris Hedges worked on this play with his friend Boris Franklin. They met when Boris was one of Chris’s students in a writing course in prison in New Jersey. They are still friends today. There were 28 students in all, all of whom contributed to the story. Chris and Boris hammered a play out of their over two dozen stories, with the assistance of Chris’s wife, actress Eunice Wong.

This is a story about prison, and prisoners, but... [More]

The Rieter Manual of Spinning by Werne...ein (2008--2009, 2014) (read in 2022)

Published on in Books

Standard disclaimer[1]

I read this seven-volume, ~500-page treatise on spinning and yarn-production for work. The first four volumes were published in 2008, while the fifth and sixth—rotor-spinning and alternative spinning (primarily air-jet spinning)—were written in 2009, and the seventh volume—on man-made fibers—arrived five years later, in 2014.