| Name | Marco von Ballmoos |
|---|---|
| Member since | |
| [hidden] | |
| Home page | https://earthli.com/users/marco |
| Description |
The (only) developer at earthli.com. |
| 3752 | Articles |
|---|---|
| 113 | Comments |
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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 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 Public Policy & Politics
I’m going to be there soon for the first time in almost four years.
I was thinking today what I’m going to say when someone in my family asks me what I think of America.
Maybe something like:
I think that you’re lost control of your country. And I think you need to stop worshiping the people who’ve taken it from you.
I think you’re all fighting over what amount to minor differences relative to the actually major issues on which you mostly agree. You get lost in the weeds on issues like... [More]
Published on in Technology & Engineering
The article First impressions of DALL-E, generating images from text by Simon Willison shows some examples from the author’s attempts at generating images with the AI. If you’re interested in learning more about how these AIs/algorithms work, see How Imagen Actually Works by Ryan O'Connor, which is Google’s equivalent to DALL-E.
Citing the first article, Willison writes,
“DALL-E only allows you to generate up to 50 images a day. I found this out only when I tried to generate image number 51. So there’s a budget to watch out... [More]”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Zelenkskyy’s wardrobe of 100% T-Shirts is pretty clearly a power move.
Everybody else shows up in the classic garb of the European upper-class. Zelenskyy shows that he’s got them by the balls by showing up in a grotty, old, army-olive T-Shirt. He’s at war, you see.
In this next picture, we see him thinking about what he’ll ask for next.
Apparently, it was for them to not only let Ukraine into NATO, to have Sweden and Finland give up their neutrality for Ukraine, but also to fast-track... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
I skimmed through a recent article called Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine by Slavoj Žižek (The Guardian). I’ve read a lot of Žižek. I’ve heard a lot of interviews with him. This article doesn’t “sound” like him at all.
There are no contrarian positions, there are no mentions of Hegel or Lacan, no mentions of psychiatry. He made absolutely no pop-culture references. He told no jokes. He usually talks of being a realist communist—nothing of the sort here. No mention of Ukraine’s absolute war on... [More]
Published on in Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
I think most people’s experience of propaganda is best defined as,
“Information that one has not yet heard enough times to believe.”
As long as one doesn’t believe it, information remains propaganda. After that crucial repetition, it crosses the threshold into established fact and deeply held belief.
This, all without any change in evidence, believability, deniability or plausibility.
Published on in Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
We have arrived at a point where “making money” has become completely unmoored from “performing a societally useful task”—so much so that the previous sentence will make no sense to most people.
The will ask: What does doing something useful have to do with making money? You need money to live; ergo, you come by it any old way. Whether you “deserve” it doesn’t enter into it.
An obvious and egregious example is the exponentially increasing “hustle economy”, featuring “influencers” whose... [More]
Published on in Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
I think I’m a good person relative to what society expects of individuals, but I’m not a very good person on an absolute scale.
I understand what is required for me and mine to live out a comfortable life within the bounds of the system we have—and I work within the bounds of that system to obtain it, as ethically as possible.
Everyone else tries to do the same, with varying levels of success—and varying ethics.
I understand that most people’s rate of success will not match either their... [More]
Published on in Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
The way of our world is this.
Suppose we have, on the one hand, someone who watches a couple of hours of Pentagon propaganda and comes to their deeply held convictions that way, slapping a bunch of Support Ukraine stickers on their car (for example).
On the other hand, we have someone who spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over several months, collecting information and ideas from dozens of authors and forming a more nuanced and historically “true” opinion and ideas about how to end... [More]
Published on in Sports
I cannot emphasize enough how little respect I have for any soccer player who does not stop whining and complaining about calls, even long after the referee has indicated that there will be a VAR.
They are a bunch of puling brats.
No pride. No honor.
They are a whole team full of idiotic children following the referee around like stupid ducklings, all with the most tragic looks on their faces, as if the gravest injustice to ever befall mankind had been perpetrated and they need to prosecute... [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... [More]
Published on in Design
For years, programmers have been searching for the one, true, perfect font for code. They keep making changes and coming up with dozens, if not hundreds of new fonts. Most of these are fixed-size, but some are proportional. Some have extra ligatures for common combinations, like ≠or ≥. Some look cursive, which I suppose is a matter of taste.
I saw one recently in a video presentation that seems like a big step backwards.
What is the point of making parentheses look so similar to square... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Earlier this year, seemingly inside of a day, the normally deadlocked U.S. government approved an $800B+ budget for the U.S. military. That’s the base price, not including money for actual wars and not including “black budgets” for spy agencies.
The Congress even threw in more than the Pentagon had asked for, just for shits and giggles.[1]
A few weeks ago, the ruling classes of the United States decided to spend an additional $40B on the Ukraine conflict, over ¾ of it for weapons and military... [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... [More]
Published on in Quotes
“God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.”
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 Books
Standard disclaimer[1]
This is the last of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. It picks up where the first two books left off: the rescue of Jimmy and Amanda from the clutches of the two Painballers. Ren and Toby lead everyone home, back to the compound where they’ve set up camp with the Crakers. Soon, they are joined by Zeb, who takes up with Toby, despite her misgivings that he will take up with the slutty Swift Fox.
Despite the high level of education for most of the members of this last... [More]
Published on in Miscellaneous
The video Intentionally knocking over water to impress friends shows a group of tween or teen girls assaulting a mascot at a theme park by dousing them with water. A friend sent it to me in a group chat. I wrote back:
I would have to work much harder than I’m willing to do right now to express my disdain for nearly everyone in that video. Those girls with their stupid phones in the air, each starring in their own movie, are just older versions of the 8- or 9-year-old kid I saw on the train... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
The cartoon We Come in Peace by Ted Rall writes,
“After mass shootings, liberal opponents of gun rights love to say that violence is never the answer. But their messaging on war, violence, militarism, even assassinations, sends a completely different message about their hypocrisy.”
This one got me thinking that America’s refusal to pass gun-control/background-check measures to stem the violence is one place where we’re not hypocritical! We are the world’s largest arms merchant, flooding one... [More]
Published on in Miscellaneous
I sent the following quote to a friend:
“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be... [More]”
Published on in Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
We seem to be doomed to ride a pendulum of
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 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 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.
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