Recently, we’ve heard that Ukraine is getting a lot of weapons from all over the world, primarily from NATO. NATO weapons are industrial machines that have to be configured and maintained over time. They almost certainly leave some room for interpretation. They require training and experience to use efficiently and to be able to actually configure a working machine.

The instructions are in English.

If you don’t speak another language, then you probably assume, hey, sure, they speak English.... [More]

The DevOps AnalemmaI received an invitation to interview for a DevOps position at a large, well-known Swiss firm that was very well-written and also happened to describe what I do at Uster Technologies quite well. As a few colleagues with whom I’ve spoken about what I do have said: “that sounds like much more than standard DevOps.”

My job certainly is more than what most people would consider to be standard DevOps—but I think that might be because most people think of the implementors of DevOps rather than the... [More]

The following video is almost two hours long. I have not summarized it, but address the general tenor of Žižek’s argumentation and presentation.

An Evening with Slavoj Žižek: Why Do We Enjoy Feeling Ashamed? (YouTube)

I continue to be shocked at how terrible Žižek’s take on the Russian attack on Ukraine is. This video is very long and he spends most of the time fighting foolish strongmen, mostly people he calls his “friends”, who all seem to have the absolute worst reasons possible for not supporting Ukraine wholeheartedly.

I heard absolutely nothing about... [More]

The article Measurement, Dataism and Post-Truth Ideology: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly by Luca Mari; Dario Petri (IEEE) is quite an interesting description of the state of philosophy vis à vis data science.[1] You can find the original, in Italian, at Tutto_Misure n.4 − 2021 (Issuu) on pages 103 and 104. Or you can just download a PDF of that article here.

“Dataism, at least in its most radical position, sees the universe as a gigantic computation system, whose state transitions are in fact “embedded” computations, so that empirical... [More]”

It's not a bug, it's a featureThe issue report Can’t edit Wiki after default branch policy applied (Microsoft Developer Community: Azure DevOps) is about a nice feature in Azure DevOps called Branch Policies that allows you to protect the default branch in a given repository, or in all repositories. If you have a lot of repositories, it’s quite convenient to be able to set it once for all of them.

However.

However, Azure DevOps also has a nice feature called the Project Wiki, which includes an online editor that makes editing easy enough for any user with even the... [More]

As software developers, we are constantly making the decision between make or buy.

Deciding to make something carries with it the obligation to design, develop, test, document, and support it. You’ll have everything under your control, but you’ll also have to do everything yourself.

If a component is not part of your project’s core functionality, then it’s often a good idea to look around and see if you can find someone who’s already built that functionality. Optimally, the component you find... [More]

From Roaming Charges: Railroaded, Again by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch),

Whitey on the Moon: Gil Scott-HeronI don’t know when Gil-Scott Heron wrote this, but it was probably around the time he wrote Whitey on the Moon, The Revolution will not be Televised, or Home Is Where the Hatred Is. Whereas he wrote and spoke about his home country, I can’t help but think that what he said resonates for... [More]

Since at least July, I’ve been following the story of the railroad workers in the U.S. Their situation is awful. Their working conditions are extremely strict. They are not commensurate with those of a civilized society. It is only because of the extreme death of labor in the U.S. that there is even a discussion. But there is—because there is no support for labor in the U.S., only support for capital.

The U.S. is far from covering itself in glory, as we’ll learn from a spate of articles,... [More]

Or, perhaps better: let’s not allow the elites the luxury of thinking that we believe that they have principles. We have to make it perfectly clear to them that we do not believe the fairy tales that they tell about themselves.

The article The World Cup Should Make Us Rethink Our Understanding of Human Rights by Neil Vallelly (Jacobin) writes,

“Whether spectators care or not is a different question, of course. But the signs are that most football fans would prefer that the World Cup was not taking place in a country... [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

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

I think that one of the main things that sticks in my craw about the war in Ukraine is the absolute speed with which so many people capitulated to the idea of its inevitability. We acted like Liam Neeson in Taken, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, Mel Gibson in Payback, or, most recently, Keanu Reeves in John Wick .

Look, you could still enjoy the movies, but you must be aware of how manipulative the initial scene of massive injustice toward our hero or his family... [More]

The articles Twelve C# 11 Features by Oleg Kyrylchuk and Welcome to C# 11 by Mads Torgersen (Microsoft .NET Blog) provide an excellent overview with examples of new features in C# 11, available with .NET 7.0.

I include my own notes below.

Interesting and obviously useful

“Obvious” to me, at least. The terms link to examples in one of the articles linked above.

Native UTF-8 Strings

You can now append u8 to the end of a literal string to make it UTF-8 instead of the system-standard UTF-16. For example, “Test string”u8 will be encoded by the... [More]

White-collar crime that sucks billions from millions of poor people is exactly the kind of violence that our societies tend to ignore. The guy stealing $40 from a 7–11 is where the focus lies. People are trained to care about the latter—increase the police!—and trained to ignore the former. Crime continues to be a huge concern—and there is crime, don’t get me wrong. There were just shots fired in a central parking lot in the small village where my family lives. Weird things are... [More]

A friend of mine quoted Bill Burr from a recent podcast,

“I read a lot of unsavory things have been coming out about that organization and about all the money that has been going into some new tiling for their olympic-sized pool rather than into their breast-cancer research. And by a lot of things, I mean the one article I read on one website online.”

“Something i overheard in a bar and have taken as a fact for the past 20 years.”

To which I responded,

“Something my Dad told me ONE TIME 35... [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 was telling a friend about the article How To Be on Time in Estonia by Alex Bellos (Atlas Obscura) and its accompanying solution (PDF).

“[…] in Estonian, a “quarter past the hour” is instead described as “a quarter of an hour on the way to the next hour,” “half past the hour” is described as “half an hour on the way to the next hour,” and “three quarters past the hour” is described as “three quarters of an hour on the way to the next hour.””

Our conversation was as follows:

Me: Estonians say “one... [More]

I was just reading The Greatest Evil is War and read Chris Hedges’s statement that bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima were war crimes. They certainly were, especially in light of the admitted history and reasoning behind it.

Anyone who’s read the actual history pretty much accepts that the U.S. bombed these cities because (A) there was nothing else left to bomb because cities like Tokyo had already been firebombed beyond recognition, but also that the U.S. was (B) already gearing up for its next... [More]

The following are examples of alliterative sentences from What are sentences called where all the words start with the same letter?

• She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore
• Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers
• The Baker Betty Botter Bought some Butter, But she said “this Butter is Bitter, Bitter Butter is Bad for Batter.”

I looked with nearly exactly the query in the link title after I’d written the following doodle in my notes:

“Which witch will win well when witches wend ways... [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]

Garmin Tacx Flux S SmartIt is November, my friends, which means it’s time to complain about Garmin’s TacX software.

I dragged my trainer out of the basement on Sunday. I test-connected it with BlueTooth to the phone and it looked good. I even have a mount for the phone this year. The bike is, once again, pointing toward my iMac, so it’s perfectly positioned for watching series or movies.

I set up The Boys S03, climbed up and started pedaling. The software wanted to calibrate again.

I figured, what the hell, it only... [More]

The article The European Union Is Deliberately Leaving Migrants Abandoned at Sea recounts some horrifying behavior on the part of the people tasked with patrolling the EU borders, especially the southern maritime border in the Mediterranean. According to a surviving witness,

“[…] the waves were generated deliberately, thrown up by the maneuvering wake of a Greek coast guard boat at the borders of the European Union (EU). “They intended to kill us,” says Jeancy. Even in the most generous... [More]”

The video One of the most effective ads to air in TV history (Twitter) is of a child misbehaving in a grocery store, with the father looking on in horror as the child escalates a desire to get what it wants into a full-blown tantrum involving destruction of property. The boy yells “je veux les bon-bons”[1] a couple of times, then goes apeshit.

Je veux les bonbons (YouTube)

The fun police showed up almost immediately and settled in to the top of the comment thread.

Kathryn Sucks

Corey Sucks, too

JFC, shut the f#%k up, Kathryn and Corey. It’s a joke. Relax.

It’s... [More]

A friend of mine recommended a book he’d read called The Plot. I didn’t really know what it was about, but his recommendation was enough for me to add it to my list and check it out when it became available.

Pretty soon after I saw the following collection of books at the bottom of my page at the public library.

Recommendations after 'The Plot'

Reckless Hearts, Five Dares, and Love in Play looked quite a bit more overtly racy than I’d expected. I was starting to wonder what he’d recommended. Maybe he was just messing with... [More]

The U.S. mid-term elections are coming up next Tuesday, on November 8th. Of course it’s being called the most important election. The U.S. is more poorly run and broken each time there’s an election, but I’m not sure whether that makes each one more important because there’s more to fix or less important because it’s obvious that it doesn’t really matter who gets elected.

I’m not even going to bother naming any of the issues because this article is not about that. Instead, it was inspired by... [More]

A couple of weekends ago, Zürich Insurance Group wanted to celebrate its 15o^th anniversary by buying a train ticket for anyone in the canton who wanted one.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to get a day ticket (Nünipass), but were unable to purchase it through the ZVV app, the app for the Zürcher Verkehrsverbund, which runs the trains in canton Zürich. In order to get the deal from Zürich Versicherung, you had to use this special app instead of the SBB app (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen... [More]