| Name | Marco von Ballmoos |
|---|---|
| Member since | |
| [hidden] | |
| Home page | https://earthli.com/users/marco |
| Description |
The (only) developer at earthli.com. |
| 3736 | Articles |
|---|---|
| 113 | Comments |
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.
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.
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.
Published on in Design
A friend had told me that they’d been to a concert on the previous Tuesday. At the time, I forgot to follow up during the conversation because we were distracted by other topics.
A couple of days later, I realized that I still didn’t know who they’d seen in concert. All I knew was the date. And, I realized I knew approximately where it was because I saw their walk to the venue on Strava. 🙌🏼
The purpose of today’s Internet is to facilitate commerce, not knowledge.
Even with the venue and... [More]
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.
Published on in Movies
Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]
Published on in Design
The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (Wikipedia) was built in 1996. I don’t have much more to say about it, other than I just learned about it and I think it looks amazing. I dug up a few pictures from DuckDuckGo’ image search.
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.
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.
Published on in Quotes
“Propaganda is the art of moving people’s thoughts and opinions in a desired direction for reasons they believe to be entirely their own.”
Published on in Programming
I published a very similar version of the following article in the DevOps Wiki at Uster Technologies AG. Since nearly all of that post is general knowledge that I would have been happy to find before I started my investigations, I’m sharing it here.
When we think about navigating or debugging our code, we usually focus on the code we’ve written ourselves—local sources in our file system. IDEs have classically focused on being able to debug and navigate this code.
More and more,... [More]
Published on in Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
I’d never heard of Peter Sloterdijk and, if I’m honest, I won’t jump on the next video starring him. He has a great voice, but I wasn’t too overwhelmed by his philosophical elan. Žižek, on the other hand, was his typical self, full of fire and tangents and interest connections.
He also told a few jokes: one was about about being in a gulag, where the food is terrible, but on Sundays, you get a special treat: a second plate! It’s kind of a riff on the old saw of “I have two complaints: the... [More]
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.
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.
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.
Published on in Miscellaneous
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentators are still MIA on November 6, 2023, Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023, and Strawman battles: rape is never OK! on December 30, 2023. Just in case you think I’m picking on him, here’s part of his last post of 2023 Inflection Point 2023 by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice).
“[…] the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and its ensuing war in Gaza has bubbled up the fundamental differences between a liberal democratic nation... [More]”
Published on in Programming
The article Exploring Generative AI by Birgitta Böckeler (MartinFowler.com) is chock-full of helpful tips from eight newsletters totaling 25 pages that she wrote throughout 2023. I include some of my own thoughts, but most of this article consists of citations.
A lot of my analysis and notes boils down to: you need to know what you’re doing to use these tools. They can help you build things that you don’t understand, but it’s not for medium- or long-term solutions. I’ve written a lot more about the need for expertise in How... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Similar to the article Cheerleading for the … what’s the opposite of underdog?, the content below appeared in my Links and Notes for October 13th, 2023, which I managed to publish on October 23rd. I’ve edited things lightly, but I’m publishing these reactions again to have them in a separate article and because I think my initial take has aged relatively well.
The article The Spiral of Violence that Led to Hamas by Peter Singer (Project Syndicate) writes,
“Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages, and has said that it... [More]”
Published on in Technology & Engineering
Simon Willison continues to plug along, examining every LLM-related announcement and trying it out on his own machine wherever possible. The following video is a presentation he gave in early August. It’s quite interesting and worth the ~40 minutes.
'Catching up on the weird world of LLMs' − Simon Willison (North Bay Python 2023) by Simon Willison (YouTube)
At some point, he says:
“This is Vicuna 7b. It is a large language model. It is a 4.2GB file on my computer right now. […] If you open up that file, it’s just numbers. These things are giant, binary blobs of numbers—and anything you do with... [More]”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
The content below appeared in my Links and Notes for October 6th, 2023, which I managed to publish on October 21st. I’ve edited things lightly, but I’m publishing these reactions again to have them in a separate article and because I think my initial take has aged relatively well—especially as compared with that of European leaders like Frau Baerbock of Germany.
The article Netanyahu regime staggered by Palestinian uprising by Alex Lantier (WSWS) was published on October 8th and writes,
“The World Socialist Web... [More]”
Published on in Finance & Economy
The article Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) writes,
“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”
I like me some Dean Baker. I disagree with him occasionally. This is one of those times because I wonder whether he’s not painting with... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
The article The Rot On His Own Side by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) writes,
“There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.”
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentator are still MIA on November 6, 2023, and Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023.
At the beginning of December, Greenfield was still... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
The article No ‘End of History’ in Ukraine by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post) mentions Francis Fukuyama, citing him at length on what he meant by “the end of history”.
““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.” “A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial... [More]”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
This kind of thing happens with awful regularity in the U.S. the Florida executes man after US Supreme Court denies his intellectual disability claim by Kate Randall (WSWS) is about a guy who is very obviously intellectually disabled. He is not ready for the world as she is. He had the kind of life that no-one would want to have, not in a million years.
“Zack suffered a litany of horrors in his childhood. His lawyers wrote in a court filing that his mother drank heavily throughout her pregnancy. He was hospitalized... [More]”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
This video is from a while back and I included in my weekly notes, but it was an interesting enough example of the kind of person that Glenn Greenwald is willing to interview—even though there’s not a lot of overlap between Glenn’s principles and whatever passes for Max Abrahms’s principles. The guy is pretty popular in some circles—he writes for the Atlantic, surprise, surprise—so it’s good to hear what he’s got to say instead of just dismissing it out of hand.
Glenn Greenwald & Max Abrahms Debate Israel-Gaza, Free Speech, & More by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)
I think this is pretty... [More]
Published on in Sports
I learned about an exercise called a “Wall Angel” today from a programmer who’d struggled with back, shoulder, and arm pain. I suffer from none of those, but I do have a quick morning stretching routine that I try to stick to. I’m always curious if there’s something I can add to the mix.
What’s a wall angel?
Technically, yes.
The exercise, though, is like a snow angel, but performed up against a wall.
It took me a few search links to find something that would just tell me that, instead of... [More]
Published on in Technology & Engineering
I use the JetBrains Toolbox to manage my handful of JetBrains apps. On Windows, it has to keep track of ReSharper, Rider, DotMemory, DotTrace, and DotPeek. There are various settings to check automatically, to download automatically, to install automatically, etc.
%LocalAppData%\JetBrains\Toolbox\cache... [More]Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist because no state has any rights, least of the right to exist. What a silly concept! Can you imagine if the Russian Tsars had taken the Bolsheviks to the ICC[1] because their right to exist had been violated? What a concept.
People have rights. International law regulates various aspects of how states may interact, but does not grant any rights to them. There is no “no takebacks” clause in international law. Any state can disappear or change shape if the people... [More]
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.
Published on in Quotes
“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others.
“Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression.
“Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people.
“Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”
This was three months after Israel’s six-day war.