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

1. Christine (1983) — 8/10
2. The Boys S04 (2025) — 9/10
3. South Park S28 (2025) — 9/10
4. Stranger Things S05 (2025) — 8/10
5. Lee Camp at the Cobra Club (2025) — 7/10
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — 6/10
7. Liz Miele: Space Camp (2025) — 7/10
8. Dead Poets Society (1989) — 9/10
9. Spaceballs (1987) — 6/10
10. Hellboy (2004) — 8/10

Christine (1983) — 8/10

Christine was born in Detroit in 1957, She came off the assembly line... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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]

The video America deserved this… by HasanAbi (YouTube) discusses the “medical stupidity” of Nick Shirley. I have not embedded the video because no-one should have to suffer through watching that much footage of this dope talking. So why write about the video at all? Well, it illustrates an interesting point: even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, even when he doesn’t know it.

At one point, Shirley said that “we should crack down on all types of fraud.” This is the truffle. He just doesn’t know what he... [More]

The article China trade surplus hits historic record by Nick Beams (WSWS) writes that,

“In response to criticism of the surplus from the major economic powers, particularly the European Union, which has complained that it is being flooded with cheap Chinese imports, the Chinese government sought to turn the tables.

“The vice minister of the General Administration of Customs of China, Wang Jun, said the export controls of China’s partners were preventing China from importing more.

“And then directing remarks at... [More]”

The article NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica) describes something really neat[1] but the thing that drew my attention was a more politically oriented comment at the end of the article.

““It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund.... [More]”

I saw this in a YouTube comments section the other day. I consider it to be a minimally succinct summary—a microcosm, if you will—of where we are with language and technology right now.

All my motives are alterior

“All my motives are alterior.”

“Ulterior.”

“[Translate to English]”

“Translate to English” 👩‍🍳😘

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]

In 2023, I read a lot of longer, technical papers for which I took notes (as usual) but that don’t really qualify as books, as such. Some of them were of what some might call book-length, though. I present these with original—though very sparse—comments amid the citations I found interesting and relevant from those documents.

Programming

1. The Usability of Advanced Type Systems: Rust as a Case Study (January, 2023)
2. nato1968 − Software Engineering (October, 1968)
3. IEEE-Annals − A Brief... [More]

Tricking a vibe coder into learning to code by Alberta Tech (YouTube)

“Alberta: This is like the next level of vibe-coding. You just type out exactly what you want. It’s really like, ‘we just put the AI in your brain.’ Here, I’ll show you how to do it.. It’s like that … and it’s done.

“Varun: This is future of vibe-coding right here. Yes! We’re gonna write the code ourselves.

“Alberta: You are the AI.

“Varun: I am the AI.

“Alberta: Human intelligence.

“Alberta: There’s this crazy website called leetcode where you can just play around and pretend to the AI. And... [More]”

This is how Apple gets its users to update to newer versions of its operating systems. I checked whether there were any updates and saw that Sequoia—which I still have installed because I am not interested in a whole new, worse UI—had an update.

Select to update MacOS Sequoia

I select to see information about updating macOS Sequioa and got the following dialog, cheerfully ready to “upgrade”.

Apple tries to trick me into upgrading to Tahoe

Stick it in your ear, Apple. I’m not interested.

When I reboot in a few minutes, I 100% expect to see it ask me to enable... [More]

Here’s a Wordle for you: I guessed my lady’s favorite first guess to eliminate four vowels. My second wild stab—with two Rs; doubled letters also being a favorite of the lady—eliminated the “O” and showed me that the “Y” was not at the end of the word.

The only vowel is Y and it's not at the end

Where the hell is the Y then?

Hint: it was December 19th.

That’s a week out from Christmas day.

Think: Three Wise Men.

Think: Gifts.

Frankincense! Obvs.

The article CBS censors “60 Minutes” report on torture of immigrant detainees by Patrick Martin (WSWS) writes,

“The leaked version of the “60 Minutes” segment is devastating. The courage of the men who testified is remarkable, as is the compassion of the students and human rights advocates who helped them, and the determination of Alfonsi and her team of journalists to bring this information to the public. The segment exposes the blatant lying and inhuman callousness of the Trump administration, particularly... [More]”

The post The efficient allocation of capital (Reddit) writes,

The efficient allocation of capital

“To spell this out clearly, the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn’t been produced yet has been bought with money that doesn’t exist to populate GPUs that also haven’t been produced to go in datacenters that haven’t been built powered by infrastructure that may never exist to meet a demand that doesn’t exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can’t exist while economists talk about... [More]”

The EU, casting its eye about for more thought­crimeThis is an excellent interview with what is presumably the first of many Swiss people to be sanctioned by the EU for thinking unapproved thoughts and having unapproved opinions out loud. He’s been accused of supporting Russia, which, like, it’s a free country, right? Oh no. It is absolutely not a free country.

I wrote recently at more length about this in Hung out to dry by Switzerland, in which I reported on an interview with Nathalie Yamb, who is another Swiss citizen upon whom the fiery eye... [More]

This is a great discussion. At 26.5 minutes, it’s relatively compact. They discuss, among other things, Vivek Ramaswamy’s having come down to Earth to realize that his party will not accept him as a real person.

Millennial White Men DISCRIMINATED Against? (w/ Vijay Prashad) by Briahna Joy Gray (YouTube)

At about 18:00,

“I mean, there’s real racism but also for political reasons. It’s very useful to believe that groups rise or fall because of their kinds of intrinsic ability, because then they don’t have to spend money on any policies to try to create any kind of equality. Right?... [More]”

Unraveling the Rot: Doug Henwood on America’s Economic Elites and the Fight for a Just Future (Scheer Post) was a fantastic interview. Highly, highly recommended. The summary from the show writes,

“[…] discuss the deep decay—“the rot”—within America’s ruling class. Henwood argues today’s political and economic elites are short-sighted, unimaginative, and corrupted by money. While Trump is an obvious symptom, Henwood stresses that the Democratic establishment, Ivy League elite, and corporate... [More]”

This isn’t exactly my musical style—metal is great but scream/growl metal has yet to grow on me—but I love the commitment in this video. Like, imagine they’re spitballing what the video’s going to be like and someone says,

“Let’s dub our song to what looks like an earnest but kinda lame, four-piece, mariachi-looking band.”

“Is that us? Is the band us?”

“Yeah, of course. Who else is gonna do it?”

“OK. Cool. But what if, and bear with me, aliens start abducting and replacing band... [More]

Avatar: Fire and AshI don’t trust the Critical Drinker (link below) that much, but his review for the second Avatar movie rings absolutely true, so I can imagine that there’s a good chance that it applies to this one as well. I can’t remember anything about Avatar 2. I can’t remember a single character’s name.

I would fail a quiz on the Avatar films with a 0/10. I’ve seen both Avatars. I might have seen the first one twice. I honestly can’t remember. My notes reveal that, even for the first one, which I saw in 2012... [More]

This documentary was originally released as Das Netz in German. The narration is in German, with hard-coded English subtitles. Many of the interviews are in English.

The Net − the Unabomber, LSD and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck in 2003 (YouTube)

In a way, the people interviewed in this documentary are similar to the ones I’d just seen in Cybertopia. They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their own capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The... [More]

Not a single person in this video is self-aware. They are completely unaware of how ironically terrible everything that they say is. Even the producers of the video thought that this was a good thing, a world of rich people deciding for everyone else how the world was going to look.

But they’re all morons, shallow—so shallow!—and so convinced that they’re right, that there’s nothing more to discuss, that they’ve missed nothing. They are incurious because they’ve got it all figured out.
... [More]

The article Walz Pulls Out: Score Another Another One for Racism, Coupled with Democratic Party and Media Ineptitude by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) is yet another well-written lament in a long list of laments about the utter lack of resistance to the grinding propaganda machine buoying the Trump administration.

I don’t really care about Tim Walz. He’s an empty suit. For God’s sake, he was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate to the even emptier suite of Kamala Harris. That he’s bowing out of a re-election campaign... [More]

OCaml LogoI don’t program with OCaml. I never have. I have a good colleague who does, occasionally, write stuff in OCaml, and he sent me a bunch of links about OCaml Effects, starting with a discussion asking Are we rational? About exceptions and effects by olleharstedt (OCaml Community).

The author writes,

“I was thinking about the fact that there’s no consensus about exceptions and whether to include them or not in a programming language. Think about Go. They decided to not add support for exceptions. Did they cite any study to... [More]”

I recently had some time off at the end of the year. What to do?

I decided I wanted to catch up on my movie and series reviews and notes.

I (briefly) considered whether to “declare bankruptcy”—just give up on the unfinished drafts and start fresh, or maybe just make quick, short notes, or maybe just publish whatever I had, in whatever form it happened to be in.

But then I remembered how happy it makes me when I search for and find my notes for a show or movie I look up. They remind me of... [More]

A good reminder:

1. Remember what you’ve learned and what you know.

   • Carry your own context into battle.
   • Do not accept the illegitimate, mendacious, and bad-faith framing of the enemy.
2. Do not let them run the conversation.

   • Waste as little time as possible refuting lies that it’s obvious even they don’t believe.
   • Stay focused on important topics; do not be distracted by their chaff.

Be the white cat

This video of a discussion between Anand Giridharadas and Chris Hedges is worth the hour you’ll invest in it.

The segment starting around 40:00 was fantastic. It’s about how we don’t appreciate the heroic amount of work required to keep civilization going—work done by states, despite corporations—so that many of us don’t have to think about survival at all, and can focus on thriving.

We are being encouraged to dismantle these things because those who have benefitted greatly —and... [More]

The post this poster at work (reddit) included an alphabet poster, presumably generated by an LLM.

The longer you look at it, the worse it gets. The letters H, J, P, and Y are missing. V and N appear twice. Several letters are out of order.

Imagine a kid who’s trying to learn the alphabet, though. How would they know that it’s wrong? How confused would they be?

O is penguin

1. A is for ak
2. B is for
3. C is foreah (picture of a cheetah?)
4. D is foer
5. E is elephant (got one!)
6. F is fox (got two!)
7. G is gorilla (three in a... [More]

Lee Camp’s show Unredacted Tonight is getting better and better with each episode. This was a brilliant report, tightly reported, chock-full of excellent information, hilarious. No notes.

UNREDACTED: The Crazy Truth of US Coups in Latin America / US Police Kill More People Than You Think by Unredacted Tonight | Lee Camp (YouTube)

From the show description:

“In this episode of Unredacted Tonight, Lee Camp traces a modern history of U.S. intervention in Latin America—covering major regime-change operations, covert actions, and military interventions from the 1950s onward. With sharp political comedy and rapid-fire historical... [More]”

The article We’re all just content for ICE by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) writes[1],

“They are tightening the noose and there is very little room left for any kind of meaningful protest. Minnesotans over the weekend organized massive demonstrations, with thousands of people marching through the south side of Minneapolis several days in a row. But there was no law enforcement there, nor were there any ICE officers (at least in uniform). No one to whom they could direct their anger at. As for local leaders, Rep. Ilhan Omar spoke... [More]”

Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good is nearly 30 minutes and it’s all 100% worth watching. It’s a very well-thought-through and well-presented analysis of the culture of violence in the U.S.[1]

Minneapolis ICE Shooting: Glenn Shares His Thoughts by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

Glenn discusses the sickness of a society that cheers violence, that celebrates death. He begins by talking about Renee Nicole Good’s utterly senseless death, which, for the sake of argument, we won’t even call an alleged murder, because nothing has been officially alleged... [More]