I have not used any of these AIs, not even once. I’ve just been following how other people are using them and kind of just observing, at a meta level, what’s going on so far. Some very clever and otherwise focused people who used to publish other content have been completely derailed by their obsession with AI (I’m looking at you, Simon Willison), so there must be something to it. But what?

I think a good place to start is with the article Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker), which... [More]

Lately, I’m seeing a lot of otherwise solid news sources start sniping at each other for no other reason that they disagree on some issues—or agree on issues, but disagree on how to address them. It’s really sad to see, but there it is. I know that this is how standard media works, but it’s starting to bleed more and more into the world of my more esoteric newsfeeds.

For example, Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch will not stop sniping at Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore as... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Opera has for a very long time had a nice feature that lets you share tabs between browser instances. Since I have a private desktop, a private notebook, and a work notebook, I use this feature quite a bit to transfer tabs between machines.

Unfortunately, a given Opera instance isn’t very good at forgetting older devices. E.g., my machine from my previous place of employment is still listed. Also, devices are sometimes listed multiple times, which is confusing and irritating.

There is no... [More]

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.

Iron Man (2008) — 8/10... [More]

Introduction

Testing is any form of validation that verifies a product. That includes not only structured validation using checklists, test plans, etc. but also informal testing, as when engineers click their way through a UI, emit values in debugging output to a console, or perform operations on hardware.

Automated testing is common for software, as regression-style tests that execute both locally and in CI. This includes unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.

The following discussion... [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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Garmin Venu 2I’ve been noticing for a while that our so-called technological overlords are trying to sell us a vision of meticulously tracked health data that will help us all move toward a fitter, healthier lifestyle—and, hopefully, alert us when things are starting to go awry in these delicate biological machines we inhabit.

Insurance companies are starting to incorporate this data into their decisions on how much to charge you for the pleasure of not losing everything you own should you become ill.
... [More]

I had found a quote from a play called “Radio Golf” by August Wilson, but it was missing a word.

The quote is from Woke Imperialism by Chris Hedges (SubStack),

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know... [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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

This was a pretty good game, unless you like defense. I will leave most of the political commentary in the capable hands of others.[1]

• Zelensky 🇺🇦 video call, of course
• Marine Corps 🎖
• Military Color Guard 🪖
• Jets flying over the stadium 🛩
• Three or four songs to start it off? ✅
• The National Anthem was a very nice rendition by Chris Stapleton 🎸
• Coaches and players crying like bitches? 😭 Oh, yeah.
• Giant American flag? 🇺🇸 Yup.
• Soldiers and wars mentioned all the time in... [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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

I read through the Full transcript of Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address by Biden Administration (CNN). Since I read it, it’s now been annotated to death. When I read it, it was just a transcript.

It’s quite a piece of work. I had to check a few times to see whether I was reading the state of the union of the U.S.A.

Joe Biden describes a country with policies that I don’t recognize. He describes a functioning democracy that is surging with greatness and getting amazing things done for everyone. And, at the same... [More]

1. Feels Good Man (2020) — 6/10
2. Дом дураков / House of Fools (2002) — 9/10
3. Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) — 10/10
4. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — 7/10
5. Bad Sisters S01 (2022) — 9/10
6. Spirited (2022) — 6/10
7. Archer S13 (2022) — 8/10
8. Inside Job S01–S02 (2021–2022) — 9/10
9. Letterkenny S01–S03 (2022) — 8/10
10. The Assistant (2019) — 8/10

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... [More]

I just saw the following meme, What the hell even is a dream job? by PrecisionAcc (Reddit), which highlighted the picture shown below.

What even is a dream job?

Wait. I know that this was picture was just to snark about the term “dream job”, but it also highlights an interesting divergence of opinion about what work is.

I thought antiwork was about being against the drone-job work culture, not against being useful at all.

I understand that it’s hard to even conceive of a world where jobs don’t suck when you have a shitty job. But isn’t... [More]

As I started doing in the previous year, I’ve included a partial, “teaser” review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes a full review with all notes, as well as citations and rough notes.

I only hit 20 titles this year, but some of them were pretty hefty tomes, though none in German and only one in French. A couple of public-policy books this year, with the accompanying analysis.

Project Hail Mary (2021)

by Andy Weir

Andy Weir manages to comes up... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third Witcher book, but the first book in what is called the Witcher Saga. Geralt is still the same. The world is worse.

The kingdom of Cintra has fallen to Nilfgard. Queen Calanthe is dead, Ciri is on the run. Nilfgard seeks her with all of its power, bending its will to finding the heiress who could try to take back the throne... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a play about prison and prisoners. Chris Hedges worked on this play with his friend Boris Franklin. They met when Boris was one of Chris’s students in a writing course in prison in New Jersey. They are still friends today. There were 28 students in all, all of whom contributed to the story. Chris and Boris hammered a play out of their over two dozen stories, with the assistance of Chris’s wife, actress Eunice Wong.

This is a story about prison, and prisoners, but... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

I read this seven-volume, ~500-page treatise on spinning and yarn-production for work. The first four volumes were published in 2008, while the fifth and sixth—rotor-spinning and alternative spinning (primarily air-jet spinning)—were written in 2009, and the seventh volume—on man-made fibers—arrived five years later, in 2014.

• Volume 1 – Technology of Short-Staple Spinning
• Volume 2 – Blowroom & Carding
• Volume 3 – Spinning Preparation
• Volume 4 – Ring Spinning
• Volume... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first book featuring the Witcher, a magically gifted, preternaturally physically gifted, and potion-enhanced monster-hunter. He wields a silver sword, pulled quickly from a sheath on his back. His hair is long and silver, his eyes jet black. His eyes match his head-to-toe leather armor, studded with spikes along the shoulders. The ladies love him; his enemies fear him. He knows lore; he is good with animals. He is wise and bides his time. He is a bad-ass, an... [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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is an excellent book. Everyone should read it, but especially every American should read it. It’s not an easy read, but neither is it easy to confront the fact that you’re part of a monstrous machine that chews up poor people and spits out yachts.

This machine runs on war. It runs on conquest, pillage, and piracy and all that war entails. It not only doesn’t care about the overwhelming number of victims of all kinds—those directly killed, those grievously injured,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a kind of a meta-plot-twist book: it’s a book with multiple pretty inventive plot twists about an author who becomes famous for having written a book with a nearly shockingly inventive and unique plot twist.

Jacob Finch Bonner is an author who stormed out of the gate, more or less, with a highly critically acclaimed first novel that never landed on the NYT best-seller list, but garnered a few industry awards that left everyone waiting for his next book. He takes a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a sequel to The Peripheral that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the “Jackpot”, which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we’re being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

As usual in a Neal Stephenson book, there’s a lot going on. As usual in a Stephenson book of late, every single last character is possessed of a unique and ostensibly fascinating background, is confident, self-sufficient and self-reliant, interesting, eloquent, funny, smart, skilled, and almost invariably independently wealthy. Does that take a wee bit of the tension out of the book? You betcha.

There is the constant undertone that people who are not like the characters... [More]

The article Ukraine Expects to Get All the Western Weapons It Wants by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post) quotes Yury Sak, an advisor to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, who is

“[…] confident Ukraine will get everything it wants. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he said.”

Hiroshima Mushroom CloudBut why stop... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a wonderfully written and incredibly honest and sobering look at how America treats what it clearly considers to be detritus—the dead and the wounded from its wars. On the one hand, there is an incredible respect and attention to detail for the dead and wounded. The wounded are offered incredible levels of care—right up until they are no longer in danger of dying, but can no longer be of any conceivable use to the military, at which point they are dropped like... [More]

What happens when you hate scrollbars so much that you forget what they were for in the first place?

You end up making a dropdown chooser that looks like this:

SmartVote Menu

The drop-down is for “level of education” and, for a few seconds there, I couldn’t figure out why the highest level of education available was Anlehre (“Apprenticeship” in German). If I hadn’t been familiar with the content, I wouldn’t have suspected that there were more entries.

Yes, you can see that there’s a bit more whitespace... [More]

This time chooser is obviously dumb—because it puts the hours in the wrong place.

A bad time chooser

But what about if it had two concentric sets of hours, with 1-12 on the inside and 13-24 on the outside? You could spin the “hand” to the right position, then adjust the radius to the inner or outer ring, depending on whether you were selecting e.g., 2 or 14.

You could even make a “little” hand that you could spin to the right position, like you were setting a cuckoo clock.