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.

Men in Black (1997)... [More]

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]”

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]

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]”

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]”

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]”

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]

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]

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]”

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.

Michael Duane Zack III

“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]”

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

This was three months after Israel’s six-day war.

I recently wrote about how good the Best of This is Hell! 2023 end-of-hear series has been. The episode Best of 2023: Living and Reliving the U.S. Invasion of Iraq / Rasha Al Aqeedi (This is Hell!) was a counterexample. I thought Rasha’s analysis was more superficial than the standard set by the other episodes.

• She says no-one should cheerlead a war, especially when they’re not involved, that any war is a tragedy, a diplomatic failure … but then she says that she’s totally pro-Ukraine. ARRRRGGGGHHHH.... [More]

So I’ve been listening to this podcast called Blowback by Brendan James and Noah Kulwin. It’s an American history podcast, but with a focus on foreign policy. I started listening to the fourth season, which is about Afghanistan. It’s in progress and up to episode 8 of 10 as of yesterday.

When I’d caught up to episode 7, I started in immediately on their inaugural podcast, S01, which is about Iraq. It’s not just about the invasion of in 2003. It starts in the early 20th century, explaining how British machinations kicked off... [More]

I have a lot of questions about the rush to replacing human expertise with machine-based expertise.

The Expertise Pipeline

Do we still need expertise? If so, how do obtain it? What do we do when we saw off the branch we’re sitting on by getting rid of the first half of the pipeline that leads to the second half containing expertise?

The pipeline looks roughly like this right now:

1. Prime the pump with self-starters/geniuses
2. Add people who learn from those pioneers/initial experts
3. Those... [More]

Over the last several months, I’ve been asked for advice on password managers. I am not a security researcher. I can only tell you what I do, and why. My experience and context are that I primarily use MacOS and iOS, as well as one Windows laptop. I was a LastPass user for a decade, but switched this year to ProtonPass.

• I’ve made my peace with cloud-storage for my passwords because I think the convenience outweighs the risk.
• Browser integration with a plugin is very convenient, for both... [More]

I was in the U.S. over the summer and had purchased the U.S. map from Garmin. There wasn’t enough room to store the U.S. map on the device. This article assumes that you’ve tried to sync your maps to your device with Garmin Express, but it failed to copy because you don’t have enough space.

If you have enough space on your device, then why how did you even end up here?

There are a ton of comedians that everyone talks about, like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and so on. I was talking to some friends in Switzerland who are very much into stand-up comedy and they asked for some suggestions.

We talked about a few comedians—Bill Hicks, Bill Burr, and Doug Stanhope—that they might want to try. They all have good insight into the human condition and don’t shy away from describing humanity as it actually is, rather than how we wish it were.

I started off more... [More]

I read an article somewhere—I can no longer find the link that inspired this note—that said that you need an app in order to charge your electric car to make sure you pay for the electricity. If you don’t have cell service or wireless, then you can’t charge. The author was somewhere in Tennessee—I believe outside Knoxville, near the Smokies—where there was no reception. He couldn’t charge his vehicle with the standard chargers. The article went on to explain how to use the emergency kit... [More]

People like to call providers/platforms like Substack and Rumble “right wing”, when what they really are is that they are “unbiased”. These platforms don’t ban casters for having the wrong views or for saying the wrong things. They therefore end up having the casters that other platforms have banned. Since those platforms constantly designate themselves as “left wing”, the people who they ban are, de facto, “right wing”, even if they are self-evidently not.

Look, some of them are, but almost... [More]

The article Brickbat: Ideological Impurity by Charles Oliver (Reason) writes,

“According to a social worker’s report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn’t kick the child out, and wouldn’t subject the child to conversion therapy. But both opposed sex change treatments for those under 18 and expressed a reluctance to use pronouns that don’t reflect someone’s biological sex, and Catherine said it would be important for the... [More]”

Swica is my private health-care provider in Switzerland. By all polls and evaluations, they have some of the best customer-care available. They also have a mobile app called Benevita for tracking some personal information.

Attempt #1: Registering via mobile app

Benevita offers to let me register an account. I chose an email that identifies the sender—it has a +-sign in it—and a generated password. The page told me that an error had occurred without telling me what I could do to correct... [More]

It’s pretty tedious to watch so many people trying as hard as they can to censor expression of which they don’t approve, all the while screaming at the top of their lungs that they are being censored by others. They see censorship of their own speech as beyond the pale because their opinions are correct whereas those they are trying to censor should of course not be able to speak out because they are promulgating hate speech.

It’s all so very tiresome. Good people end up fooling... [More]

The article The forbidden topics by Drew DeVault writes,

“Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.

“The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would... [More]”

The other night, some older guys walked by me in a train station. They were talking about drinking beer. They looked like they’d been doing just that. One of them joked to the other that he was also “looking at pretty girls“.[1] His friend replied “there are none along that way“.

Lots of laughs. Super funny.

There were young ladies in that mass of people walking away from the train. What did they think? Were they amused? I doubt it.

It’s not really funny. It’s actually kind of stupid.... [More]

I find myself increasingly at odds with this ever-more-popular notion that there are certain things you cannot say. Restricting freedom of expression is just a way of restricting freedom of thought. If you can’t express an idea, you can’t share it. If you can’t share it, you can’t inspire other people to think it.

When I moved to Switzerland decades ago, I remember being quite surprised to hear that it was technically illegal to deny the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. The discussions were not... [More]