From Pomp and Circumstance by Corey Robin, a short article about NYU’s craven response to NYU student denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza during his graduation speech to roaring applause. (YouTube)

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

The article OpenAI and start-ups race to generate code and transform software industry by Cristina Criddle, Melissa Heikkilä (FT) was written in April of 2025 but feels like it could have been written at any time in the last two years.

A high author/content ratio

First off, kudos to the FT for doubling down and having two authors massage an OpenAI press release into an “article” that has just under 700 words in it. No wait. I just saw that, at the very end of the article, they write that it includes “Additional reporting from George... [More]”

The article Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use” by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica) describes Meta’s defense of its having helped itself to about 82TB of copyrighted books from illegal torrents.

“Meta, like most AI companies, holds that training must be deemed fair use, or else the entire AI industry could face immense setbacks, wasting precious time negotiating data contracts while falling behind global rivals. Meta urged the court to rule that AI training is a transformative... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Amid all of the snark in this article Did you even notice 4chan’s gone? by Ryan Broderick & Adam Bumas (Garbage Day), which doesn’t even try to pretend to have an any objectivity about what the author very clearly considers an unsavory place, was at least an admission that 4Chan was,

“[…] a website that, effectively, invented the concept of the internet meme and was one of the last truly anonymous spaces left on the web.”

A plea for an NC-17 Internet

I never used 4Chan. I didn’t have an account there. I would occasionally see flashes... [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
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

A while back, I wrote Stop trying so hard to use pattern-matching. I stand by everything i wrote there. I was recently mentoring a very clever programmer who’s new to C# but has cut his teeth on Rust. We were discussing switch statements vs. switch expressions. Which pattern-matching features can you use where? Which features can you combine?

The article Tutorial: Use pattern matching to build type-driven and data-driven algorithms (Learn Microsoft) offers a good introduction. Pattern-matching on objects is... [More]

The poem in Tell me Something I don’t Know by Jim Culleny (3QuarksDaily) isn’t deeply thought-provoking or revelatory but it does what poetry does best: it seems to distill meaning from elegantly juxtaposed words.

“Tell me how to weave
tomorrow into yesterday
without tangling, without
strangling today”

You see? I love it but I don’t know what it means. Not yet.

A poetic friend wrote to tell me that,

“About the poets and their words. Can you ‘know’ what they mean? Nope! Like a good question maybe we can “die Fragen selbst... [More]”

I recently had a conversation about the pros and cons of using Angular and I found this year-old article that I’d prepared from my notes but never published. The article
Two-way binding between Signals and Query Params by Julio Castro (Software Engineering Corner by Zühlke Engineers) includes the following code snippet.

@Component({
  selector: "app-root",
  standalone: true,
  imports: [AsyncPipe],
  template: `
    <h1>Signals Demo</h1>
    <p>Your first name is: {{ firstName$ | async }}</p>
  `,
})
export class AppComponent {
  private activatedRoute =... [More]

This video is just under 30 minutes and provides a lot of useful tips about how to optimize web pages. It’s almost a year old, but a lot of the optimizations are good to know, even though they won’t apply to most pages out there. It’s good to know how the browser works and which heuristics it uses to determine what can be optimized. Knowing these things helps you avoid accidentally formulating your web pages in ways that slow things down unnecessarily. You’ll be less likely to suffer under... [More]

Extension syntax in C#14Since this feature is being touted for C# 14—this time it’s coming for real!—I thought it would be good to refresh what I’d already learned about it. The title is a bit hyperbolic but it’s quite an interesting feature. It’s basically protocol extension from Swift for C#. It’s .NET’s answer to extending extension methods to properties and, probably, operators. You can’t add state, as far as I can tell. But that isn’t so surprising.

The video below discuss the proposal as it looked for... [More]

This is another 46-minute, 10-month-old video from the last Build conference that I found extremely helpful in explaining what .NET Aspire is and what it’s good for.

Demystify cloud-native development with .NET Aspire | BRK181 by Microsoft Developer (YouTube)

Damian Edwards and David Fowler do a soup-to-nuts demonstration of Aspire. It basically lets you configure your multi-project, distributed projects with code rather than with YAML (e.g. dockercompose.yml). Instead, it writes the files for you and handles the deployment to Docker. This lets you much more easily create and... [More]

This 46-minute presentation by Scott Hanselman and Stephen Toub is ten months old but is still worth watching. I note below that one of the more significant things Toub shows is not any sort of programming wizardry, but column-selection in a text editor. Half of the things that people use AI for can be solved with column-select and judicious copy/paste.

'Highly Technical Talk' with Hanselman and Toub | BRK194 by Microsoft Developer (YouTube)

Another fantastic “deep dive” with these two: this time they’re optimizing the Humanizer library on-the-fly, on-stage, during a session.... [More]

I couldn’t call Docker from the command line. I had installed Docker a long time ago, but had just restored from a Time Machine backup, so my system was new but the applications had been restored. That meant that Docker had recorded that the executables had been sym-linked to the right folder (/usr/local/bin) but those links were part of the old, dead system.

Long story short, go to the settings, as shown below. If you’re in the situation that I was in, in which the app was out of sync with... [More]

The articlebook Performance Improvements in .NET 9 by Stephen Toub (.NET Blog) was published about six months ago. It contains a tremendous amount of interesting information, which I’ve attempted to summarize below, following the document structure in the original.

Tier 0

“Another tier 0 boxing example is dotnet/runtime#90496. There’s a hot path method in the async/await machinery: AsyncTaskMethodBuilder<TResult>.AwaitUnsafeOnCompleted (see How Async/Await Really Works in C# for all the details). It’s really... [More]”

The article Enumerated Science by Remy Porter (Daily WTF) describes a train wreck of a code example. It suitably illustrates why we really have to question whether scientists/juniors/etc. should really be writing code with so little training. If they wrote text this poorly, they’d be laughed out of their profession. Somehow, it’s perfectly fine to write code like this.

index = 0
for index, fname in enumerate(img_list):
    data = np.load(img_list[index])
    img = data[0][:,:]
    img_title... [More]

This is a nearly 50-minute video about certain optimizations that used to be useful but which, in modern browsers, often get in the way of heuristic optimizations that browsers apply automatically.

How browsers REALLY load Web pages by We Love Speed / Robin Marx (YouTube)

“Preload should be applied with surgical precision”

• Specific edge cases (you really know what you’re doing)
• If the resource isn’t in the HTML

  • Fonts
  • Dynamic LCP images
  • JS imports

Basically, he said if you’re using preload, you’re almost certainly doing it wrong. For example, you can use fetchpriority=high... [More]

The article The Best Programmers I Know by Matthias Endler seems almost too good to be true. NGL I feel seen. I have cited heavily from it, highlighting the parts I find especially interesting. At the end are a few pallid notes from me, but the meat of this article is the quote.

• Read the Reference
• Know Your Tools Really Well
• Read The Error Message

• Break Down Problems

  If you work as a professional developer, that is the bulk of the work you get paid to do: breaking down problems. If you do it right, it will... [More]

A little while ago, OpenAI released a tool that is much better at copying styles from other artists than previous models had been. This one was particularly good at copying the Studio Ghibli style.

So, people are generating all sorts of moments in history with ChatGPT in Studio Ghibli style. The tweet no fucking way dude, this studio ghibli thing has gone way too far (Twitter) provides a provocative example.

9 11 in Studio Ghibli style

It’s pretty good, bro.

Be me.

Wanna try it.

So I went to Copilot and asked it to render... [More]

As usual, Natalie Wynn puts together an interesting analysis of a difficult issue. As usual, in a giant video; this one is 160 minutes long. It’s not a well-balanced analysis—as you can tell from my article’s title—but entertaining enough and honestly about the best we can hope for, at this point. I don’t think anyone who’s researching conspiracy theories is likely to ever notice the conspiracy theories that “their own side” believed in or continues to believe in.

CONSPIRACY by Contrapoints (YouTube)

At 20:00,

I’m... [More]

Lenin on Manufacturing Consent

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
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

The article Is it Possible to Read Walden When You Own a Smartphone? by Rebecca Baumgartner (3 Quarks Daily) writes of reading Thoreau in the 21st century,

“[…] is it the content that’s boring, or are we simply less capable of appreciating it? I propose that we’re the boring ones. Or more precisely, our thinking is too small and frantic to follow where Thoreau’s mind goes. It’s the same reason we find meditation so hard and boring. It’s the same reason most of us haven’t stared off into space at all in the past 15... [More]”

Stewart LeeI very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don’t really know any other comedian like him. It’s impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you’d end up citing half the show. You can see full transcripts of very similar shows for Tornado and Snowflake.

Stewart Lee: Tornado/Snowflake − 17th March 2022 − Harrogate by John Hodgson (YouTube)

Perhaps he sums it up best in the second... [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
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Ricky JayThere has never been and will never be anyone like Ricky Jay. He was a polymath. He was erudite. He spoke in clipped tones, with words like “disapprobation”. He cited 15th-century poetry from memory, as part of his show. He cites George Bernard Shaw, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”

He was the most brilliant playing-card prestidigitator the world has ever seen. He knew more about tricks and magicians and the history thereof than anyone else before or since.

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants − Magic show (YouTube)

A large part... [More]

This is an excellent video essay about art, punk, edginess, featuring many of my favorite directors, musicians, and comedians. I can’t remember everyone but man, there’s Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Frank Zappa, Marilyn Manson, Patrice O’Neal, John Waters, Lars von Trier, Bill Hicks (“an anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian dark poet”), Paul Mooney, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky…the list goes on.

Nothing is punk anymore… by The Cinema Cartography (YouTube)

Bill Hicks, at 33:35 (cited from Rants in E-Minor),

“Bill HicksLet me tell you something right now... [More]”