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]”

A while ago, I listened to all 3½ hours of Hinternet Production Labs — An Audio Launch Event! by Justin Smith-Ruiu. It is pretty cool. I’m glad I listened to it. I was working on a jigsaw puzzle the whole time.

Listening to this feels like having a Wikipedia binge that leads from Yakut to rock music, the etymology of the epithet “Willard”, the application of the definition of said epithet to bands after a lengthy discussion achieves consensus, an immediately ensuing discussion debating to which musical acts... [More]

Are You Racist? by George Galloway | Oxford Union (YouTube)

I’d never seen this, so it’s new to me. Eleven years ago, George Galloway refused to debate an Israeli about apartheid. He claims that he was misled and would never have agreed to it. Of course, people claimed that he was being racist. He clarified in a manner that only a handful of people could, off the cuff and magisterially.

“[…] George Gallowaybecause of my time in South Africa, because of the decades that I worked against apartheid in South Africa, do you imagine that I would turn up at a university... [More]”

This was another great discussion with Catherine Liu. I’d just written about another interview of hers in Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites. Chris was effusive about Catherine’s book (which I’ve purchased and is in my queue) as well as her engaging writing style, which is a far sight from the dry, academic and often-impenetrable style that has established itself as the standard.

Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (w/ Catherine Liu) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

For fun, I used a service I’d learned about recently that lets you summarize a video. It’s called tl;dw (too long;... [More]

This is a wide-ranging, occasionally delightfully foul-mouthed, and brutally honest interview with PM Maddy Mondaquila of Microsoft. Kudos to them for letting their best people do these kinds of informative and insightful interviews.

MAUI Lead Leaves to Work on .NET Aspire (and interview with Maddy Mondaquila) by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

At 45:57,

“[…] yesterday Dave [Fowler] and I were fighting about if the Visual Studio .gitignore is getting dumber and he was like, ‘who cares about that? Why would anyone care about that?’ And I was, like, it’s 400 lines, dude. Like, we’re ignoring things... [More]”

The article Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) describes what it says on the tin. As several others confirmed in the comments, the memes all suck, whether generated by an AI, a human, or a combination.

Here is a sheet of the “winners.”

Top memes from study

They are uniformly terrible, at best confusing. Not one is funny.

For example, this is apparently a meme written by an actual human being.

“Threw something into the trash can.. Hit it first try.”

WTF. That is not even... [More]

I saw a badge in my Amazon interface when I was cleaning up some lists. I thought it might have been a notification that something on my wishlist was available as a good price. That would have been helpful!

Instead, I saw the screenshot below.

Buy this book again!

For a second, I was excited to see that Sapkowski might have published another Witcher book but that’s not what was happening. What was happening was that Amazon was trying to fool me into buying a book that I already owned again. Either they are... [More]

From Quote Origin: Don’t Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass (Quote Investigator)

“Антон ЧеховIn May, 1886, Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander, who had literary ambitions: “In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from... [More]”

I started my recent journey of Bill Burr videos with an interview on none other than NPR. Below the video are stream-of-consciousness notes in which I waver on Terry Gross but eventually admit that Burr badgered a decent interview out of her. I wouldn’t make a habit of listening to her interviews, though. It’s a testament to anti-intellectualism that she’s considered a leading light of liberal thought.

Bill Burr on NPR

Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)

I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her... [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]

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]

Another great book interview by Chris Hedges, again with an extremely erudite author who’s written a book about Gaza. Their discussion ranges to places that most are unwilling to go, like: why should the rest of the world grant primacy to the Jewish holocaust as a historical occurrence? Why should they even know about it when they’ve suffered their own holocausts, at the hands of the same empire that is browbeating them to bow in obeisance to the memory of the horror of the last holocaust it... [More]

This is a brilliant 52-minute interview with the author of a book whose title is already being misinterpreted by misguided liberals as being about Trump. More’s the pity. The author is young and brilliant. May he have a long and illustrious life and career.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

At about 09:42,

“All of this sort of stuff, I think, makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options: you are either wearing the boot or you’re having your neck stepped on. And, so, to speak up on behalf of... [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]

About a month ago, my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) crashed very hard. It would no longer restart into anything but the recovery console. It seemed pretty clear that something was very corrupt and I found myself facing a system reinstall, at the very least.

Time Machine to the rescue

Since it’s a desktop, I have a backup drive attached to it at all times. Time Machine runs several times per day. My latest backup was from about ten minutes before the system crashed. I cannot stress how... [More]

A friend recently asked me to review their UI/UX design in a private app they’d written. I responded with the following in an e-mail, reproduced and lightly edited/extended here for limited posterity.

The following factors strongly influence and/or limit the kind of review I’ll be able to provide.

• You dropped the app into my lap with no introduction whatsoever. I don’t even know what the app is supposed to do.
• I don’t know what experience you have in UI/UX. I’m assuming not a tremendous... [More]

Pretending cancel culture never existed

Let’s start with a terrible take from a terrible source: the article The big idea: what do we really mean by free speech? by Farrah Jarral (Guardian) writes,

“What the right calls cancel culture, philosopher Arianne Shahvisi writes, “is often just the supersized celebrity version of what the rest of us experience all the time: consequences for our mistakes and bigotries. You do something shitty and people distance themselves from you, especially if you refuse to acknowledge your... [More]”