Yesterday[1] Luke asked me to have lunch with him, which I almost never eat upstairs because I prefer the lake but the weather was not great and I haven’t chatted with him in a while and kind of missed him so we had lunch and were joined by Jack and this new embedded SW engineer Karl so, once they sat down and Karl’s German not being so solid yet and his Swiss German being nonexistent and with Jack smiling to himself as he eavesdropped on our conversation, we switched to English and I’m just... [More]

A little story I wrote to one of my thesis advisees. I wrote it in German and leave it up to your browser to translate it for you. You all have the tools now.

Lustiges Story: Mir werden die Möglichkeiten Word Dokumenten zu verarbeiten immer weiter eingeschränkt. Ich musste folgendes machen:

1. Doppelklick aufs Dokument auf dem Mac.
2. Das Editieren auf dem Mac ist mit meiner HFU-Lizenz nicht erlaubt.
3. Dokument im Office/Word für Web hochladen.
4. Dokument ist (anscheinend) in einem sehr alten... [More]

The United States and Israel murdered the supreme leader of Islam.[1]

How is that OK? How is it so OK that people can casually mention that they approve of murder in otherwise polite conversation? I guess some people just need killing? What the hell kind of a morality is that?

If you were to accept this, then you’d have to at least have intimate knowledge of the person whom you’ve condemned, no? But people don’t know the first thing about the Ayatollah; they know only that they’ve been ordered... [More]

These are three interviews I’ve watched with Scott Ritter, who is entirely in his element.

Israelis will begin to leave on their own

There is a lot of great military analysis in this video but an interesting point that Ritter and Alkhorshid make is that many, many Israelis are quite well-off and quite privileged. Many of them have options outside of Israel. These people will not long suffer the deprivation of a country at war with a real enemy, and will begin to leave. These demographic... [More]

Introducing Stanislav Krapivnik

This is a good analysis by someone I’d never heard before. His take is mostly the same as other analysts, though his point of view is unique, in that he’s a former U.S. Army officer with Russian roots. He moved to Russia from the U.S. over 20 years ago and is fluent in Russian.

Iran War Spreading: Russia Gets Involved by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz | Stanislav Krapivnik (YouTube)

Stas pointed out that,

• The U.S. has started a holy war by killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s akin to killing the Pope. And they’re celebrating it, practically parading his head... [More]

This is an informative and darkly humorous 1-hour video about the insidious psychological effects of chatbot usage amongst the most mentally vulnerable members of society.

A.I. Is Messing With Our Mental Health by Some More News | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

I’ve cited some of the video below.

Manipulation through obeisance

“A.I. chatbots have been connected to other deaths and suicides of people who were just looking for companionship, advice, or both. The big problem is that this isn’t a bug of ChatGPT, but an actual feature of it in order to retain users by appealing to a... [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]

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]

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Bruno Manser − Die Stimme des Regenwaldes (2019) — 8/10
2. Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) — 8/10
3. The Birdcage (1996) — 6/10
4. Doug Stanhope: Discount Meat (2024) — 8/10
5. Blue Velvet (1986) — 8/10
6. Good Will Hunting (1997) — 10/10
7. Speed (1994) — 7/10
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — 10/10
9. A History of Violence (2005) — 7/10
10. Carrie (1976) — 8/10

Bruno Manser − Die Stimme des Regenwaldes (2019) — 8/10

This is a fictional... [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
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science... [More]

Jon Voight as Milo Minderbinder

I don’t remember who said the line above. It was very probably Yossarian. But he could only have been talking about people like Milo Minderbinder.

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 The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else (Hacker News) includes the following comment that attempts to not only put the capital expenditure in AI technology into context but also describes the immense opportunity cost.

“It’s hard to comprehend the scale of these investments. Comparing them to notable industrial projects, it’s almost unbelievable. Every week in 2026 Google will pay for the cost of a Burj Khalifa. Amazon for a Wembley Stadium.

“Facebook will spend a France-England tunnel... [More]”

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Addams Family (1991) — 7/10
2. Addams Family Values (1993) — 6/10
3. Die göttliche Ordnung (2017) — 9/10
4. Silverado (1985) — 7/10
5. Achtung Fertig Charlie (2003) — 7/10
6. Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) — 5/10
7. Moon (2009) — 8/10
8. Gotthard (2016) — 8/10
9. Platzspitzbaby (2020) — 8/10
10. Die Schwarze Spinne (2022) — 5/10

The Addams Family (1991) — 7/10

Gomez (Raúl Julia) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) Addams live with their... [More]

The article AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It by Simon Willison demonstrates the Overton Window of addiction pretty well. The author writes,

“This captures an effect I’ve been observing in my own work with LLMs: the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting.

“[…] I’m frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted.”

Is it marketing?

If I... [More]

The article jj init — Sympolymathesy by Chris Krycho explains what Jujutsu is and what it does. I was reminded of these notes that I wrote over a year ago when I read Evolving Git for the next decade by Joe Brockmeier (LWM.Net), which briefly mentioned it as a command-line UX toward which Git itself is working.[1]

Git is not worse than all the others

“Jujutsu is two things: It is a new front-end to Git. This is by far the less interesting of the two things, but in practice it is a substantial part of the experience of using the tool... [More]”

This is an excellent movie-length discussion of how inefficient it is to continue to subsidize fossil fuels, which are disposable fuels. He discusses “opex” (operational expenditures) vs. “capex” (capital expenditures). Over the medium- to long-run, an energy infrastructure with lower “opex” will win out.

“We should stop growing corn to feed to cars.”

You are being misled about renewable energy technology. by Technology Connections (YouTube)

The author discusses how modern solar panels no longer use hazardous materials, being composed primarily of materials derived from quartz.
... [More]

The following video is an excellent analysis of the state of AI-generated content as used to generate false narratives that are politically advantageous to the elites. Evan focuses on accounts and influencers that promote the narrative of an increasingly lawless and violent London that use completely fictitious, AI-generated content and which benefit personally tremendously from the advertisements shown on their “engaging” content.

Something Very Strange Is Happening To London by Evan Edinger (YouTube)

The locations in these extremely popular videos that he... [More]

I couldn’t help but notice when the article Malignant Dawn by Bill Murray (3QuarksDaily) started out with the following rather naive and incredible statement,

“How would the United States handle the rise of the rest? The debate was usually about what the US would do to keep things steady – to maintain equilibrium. No one saw the US as the disruptor. But as it turns out, it’s the chief enforcer who is changing the script.”

It is flabbergasting to read something like this from an author I’d thought to be somewhat... [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]

Super Bowl LX, as a football game, was underwhelming. At 36 of 60 minutes played, Seattle had three field goals and the German moderators were wondering out loud whether a kicker had ever been MVP. “Naja, wenn er der einzige ist, der Punkte gezielt hat? [Yeah, but if he’s the only one who’s scored points?]” At this point, the Patriots had 4 first downs and had punted 7 times. That is either pathetic or a testament to the Seahawks’s defense.

The half-time show

Bad Bunny’s half-time show was... [More]

Wie ähnlich ist uns der Affe, dieses äußerst scheußliche Tier! by Quintus Ennius (zitiert bei Cicero, De Natura Deorum I, 97) (How like us the ape, this utterly hideous animal!)

This video that starts off talking about how dumb Joe Rogan is—a relatively easy target—was fine but it contained an absolute banger of a revolutionary call from Hasan.

JOE IS SO GONE… by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“What has stopped you from giving up? Not only am I an unimaginably stubborn person, but I also have a firm belief in my fellow man. I believe in you guys in this community. I believe in people that I haven’t met yet. I believe in the kindness of strangers. I know that we can overcome this. I can’t just give up. And I know... [More]”

Two weeks later and people are still talking about Mark Carney as if he were some sort of leftist hero. Don’t bother watching his speech. It’s self-serving trash that boils down to: We are only dissatisfied with a system once it starts being disadvantageous to us. The exploitation of others never bothered us in the least.

FULL SPEECH: PM Carney’s Most Inspiring Remarks at Davos — Greenland, Trump Tariff Threats | AQ1B by DRM News (YouTube)

He never names the U.S. or Trump. He just complains that things are hard for his poor country, which is accustomed to being one of the predators but is now scared that it... [More]

In the video Context is Everything by Andreas Fredriksson (Vimeo), the author pinpoints that a dependency in his app—a JSON-handling library—is sucking all the performance out of it.

So, he takes a look at it.

It’s a general-purpose library, with a lot of edge cases…edge cases that his input data doesn’t have. That is, if he can guarantee a certain context, then he can use an optimized version of the JSON library’s code. This isn’t always going to be the solution—it will, in fact, rarely be the solution for a LOB... [More]

The article John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) describes a very early experiment in natural-language processing from the late 1960s called SHRDLU (Wikipedia).

“SHRDLU could handle this too, although I think its mechanism was different: it would interact with the separate blocks world subsystem and ⸢actually⸣ try to put the block on the pyramid; the simulated physics would simulate the block falling off the pyramid, and SHRDLU would discover that its stacking attempt had been unsuccessful.... [More]”

The article macOS Tidbits by Jasper Lai has dozens of tips but I’ve only included the ones below that I had either never heard of or that I’d forgotten. There are still a lot of them.

1. “⌥ + ⌘-click an app in the Dock to switch to that app and hide all other apps at the same time. This is great when screen sharing.

   “Hold ⌘ to interact with background windows without bringing them into focus.”

2. “[…] double-click and drag to select word-by-word. Triple-click and drag to select paragraph-by-paragraph.”

3. “When... [More]”

This is an excellent summary of the economy as we experience it today.

How The Stock Market Made Money Even Faker by SOME MORE NEWS | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

“The thing I keep saying and will always say, money is fake.

“Money is fake. It’s a hallucination we all agreed upon. Now, it being fake doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary, but it’s fake and it’s never been more fake than right now.

“The first corporation that ever went public, the Dutch East India company raised money to support its colonization, that sucked.

“But today, when companies issue stocks, they don’t pour the profits... [More]”

Inside, The Valley Sings by Nathan Fagan & Natasza Cetner (Vimeo) is a fifteen-minute video of rotoscoped animations of prisoners and prisons, with a voiceover by multiple prisoners. They explain their lives inside. The first explains that he was sentenced to 34 years in prison at 16 years old. He lived in Angola prison in Louisiana. The film is also available on YouTube, as linked below.

Inside, The Valley Sings | Award-Winning Documentary Short Film by Short of the Week (YouTube)

Another “spent 22 years and 36 days total in solitary confinement.”.

Later, he said,

“When they came to take me out of the cell… My vocal cords... [More]”

I was mystified as to what the final four-letter word starting with “EN” might be, and finally landed on the four-letter combination “ENBY” and had to admit that I’d never heard of this short word before. This doesn’t happen a lot.

NY Times Spelling Bee thinks 'Enby' is a word

What the hell does it even mean? The Free Dictionary doesn’t know what it is. DuckDuckGo returns a link to Nichtbinäre Geschlechtsidentität (Wikipedia) (my settings prefer Swiss-German results), which is the Non-binary (Wikipedia) (which is much less obviously related to gender than... [More]