LinkedIn is an enshittified dumpster fire.

I recently set up 2FA for my LinkedIn account. Then I changed the email address associated with that account because the old one was an ancient throwaway that I’m phasing out. Not long after, LinkedIn blocked my account,... [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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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]

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third in a series of reviews that so far includes Book 1 and Book 2. Carl recieves the titular Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, which is a special book that only he can read. It’s a compendium of the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of other crawlers throughout the myriad seasons that passed before the Earth season chronicled in these books.

The book introduces itself to him,

The article Military Industrial Simple by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indi.ca) describes the U.S. empire in terms of a “bust out”, which is what an organization like the mafia does to businesses that they’ve otherwise bled dry. The bust-out is then setting the business premises on fire to collect the insurance money. He writes,

“LIghting the joint on fireA bust-out works where the mafia takes control of your restaurant (say), runs up bills on the joints credit, steals or sells goods out the back, and never pays the debt back. When it all goes to shit, they... [More]”

The article ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Is Inferior To Science by Thomas R. Wells (3QuarksDaily) has two main thrusts: the primacy of scientific thinking and the degeneracy of preferring something for nonscientific reasons. On second that, those are two sides of the same coin.

Science is knowledge that deserves to be believed

The following citations illustrate the point as Wells put it,

“[…] knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be... [More]”

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is book two of the Dungeon-Crawler Carl series. I’d read Dungeon Crawler Carl: Book 1 and moved on immediately to this book. This is a really, really fun series, written by a smart and funny author who has a good amount of world experience that he brings to his wild and complex stories about an Earth-sized dungeon that’s been built on the remains of Earth for the sole purpose of galaxy-wide entertainment.

This is not hard sci-fi! The books don’t bother explaining how... [More]

The article Function calling using LLMs by Kiran Prakash describes an approach that works very well when you don’t have a testing environment: build a plan, evaluate validity of the plan, and then apply the plan after verification. You should also be able to slice the work into sub-tasks to make verification more reliable.

This is the approach I took for a PowerShell script that runs against ADOS (Azure DevOps): it’s production data, so you really want to be sure what is going to be executed, but you have no... [More]

The article A Critical Look at MCP by Rasmus Holm (Raz Blog) discussing many of the drawbacks of MCP as it is currently conceived. One of them is the push to build everything in Python, which is a dynamic language that’s better-designed than JavaScript, but isn’t a lot better at helping users write maintainable code.

“Am I being pretentious/judgmental in thinking that people in AI only really know Python, and the “well, it works on my computer” approach is still considered acceptable? This should be glaringly obvious to... [More]”

This video is a wonderful discussion of what it will mean to offload knowledge and wisdom to machines. Professor Asma discusses how humans have always offloaded to the environment to a certain degree. He argues that offloading to LLMs is like “the man in Searle’s Chinese Room”. I think that this offloading of knowledge and still believing that it would be a path to wisdom already began with the “just Google it” generation.

AI and the Post-Knowledge World by Professor Asma (YouTube)

The trend toward offloading knowledge—a little something called... [More]

Almost as usual, this interview with Mark Blyth doesn’t exactly go where the interviewer thinks that it’s going to go. They discuss jobs, AI, and scams. They discuss Britain’s idiotic economic policy—but Blyth levels that accusation against most of Europe and the West (e.g., Germany and the U.S., the two countries with which he’s the most familiar).

The interviewer tries to steer things to tried and true liberal topics—I don’t know why; had he never seen Blyth speak before? Or didn’t he... [More]

The post A pronounced issue by the-mothermayhem (Reddit) is a Reddit repost of a Tumblr “essay” that describes the painful fallout of having taught an entire generation without phonetics, with only the “whole language” approach, which—checks notes—involves a whole lot of wild guessing because you have no tools with which to analyze—in the strictest sense of the word: i.e., “break down”, or “parse” in the case of sentences, words, and phonemes—unfamiliar words.

The title is play on the once-popular Bushism (Wikipedia): “Is our... [More]

Chana MessingerThis ~10-minute video discusses research about chain-of-thought LLMs that “show their work”. Chana points out that, once you can see what the machine says it’s doing, it’s actually openly discussing “cheating” to achieve the correct result. She says that, once you add penalties for “cheating”, the machine doesn’t stop cheating—it simply stops writing about it. While this feels hilarious because it really seems to be acting like a teenager, it’s exactly this kind of anthropomorphizing that is... [More]

I ran into a small problem while upgrading Visual Studio 2022 to 17.14.0, so I reported it (Visual Studio Developer Community) with the following text,

“The Microsoft.VisualStudio.Community.MSI component could not be installed. At one point, the installer told me that another installer was running, but there wasn’t any installer running. An installer had run before the Visual Studio upgrade: JetBrains Rider. It’s possible that this interfered?

“I am unsure how this problem will affect my work. I don’t really use the MSI... [More]”

This podcast episode Who’s Coding Now? AI and the Future of Software Development by AI + a16z (Apple Podcasts) was recommended to me by a colleague. These are my notes that I took (and later cleaned up) from listening to this single episode.

Send a check or money-order to…

Near the beginning, one of the hosts says,

AI Bubble

“There was a good blog debate about whether we’re overinvested in AI. I think the number was $200B annual investment. And I think the question was how we would recuperate it?

“Well, here we have a way to... [More]”

The article New Claude 4 AI model refactored code for 7 hours straight by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) talks about how awesome Claude is but then when you look at all of the charts, you see that it’s data published by Anthropic about its own software, publishing impressive percentages indicating some performance in benchmarks that they made up. So, they’re telling you that their software is amazing according to measures that you only learned about from them. This is basically a press release.

Pyramid SchemeAnthropic wouldn’t lie to get... [More]

The article I really don’t like ChatGPT’s new memory dossier by Simon Willison describes a new feature that incorporates memories of context from prior queries to ChatGPT.

👽 Thanks to PKD for the title.

“I’m an LLM power-user. I’ve spent a couple of years now figuring out the best way to prompt these systems to give them exactly what I want.

“The entire game when it comes to prompting LLMs is to carefully control their context—the inputs (and subsequent outputs) that make it into the current... [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 is a nice explanation of how CSS is a declarative language, where you describe the metadata of your styles. The layout algorithm determines which property values affect the size and position of the element. Generally the properties position and display properties determine which layout algorithm is used for a given element. The layouts are,

CSS makes sense when you realize it's a collection of algorithms by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

• Normal flow layout (MDN) (selected by default)
• Inline layout (MDN) (selected by default for inline elements)
• Flexible box layout (MDN) (selected with display: flex)
• ... [More]

This is a clip from 20 years ago. It’s 3 a.m. and Private Equity is Extending an Invitation to “The Big Club” by Eric Salzman (Racket News) linked to it to point out that the vultures of Wall Street have been after Social Security for a long time.

The American Dream by George Carlin (YouTube)

🎩 h/t to George Carlin on the American Dream (with transcript) by Shoq (Shoqvalue) for the initial transcript. I’ve tweaked it a bit more, mostly for punctuation.

“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same... [More]”

The article The Who Cares Era by Dan Sinker describes this era as a time when

“[…] completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.”

He writes further that,

“If you don’t care, [AI] is miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly.”

And that,

“Most people […] use it quickly and thoughtlessly to make more mediocrity.”

He gives what I consider to be good but probably career-killing advice in the our era. I really hope its not because I’m an optimist.

“As the... [More]”

This is an eviscerating satire of the nattering careerist nabobs, unprincipled hypocrites all of them.

Writer can no longer stay silent by Tadhg Hickey (YouTube)

“JanusJanice McUturn here, writer. Guys, I think we can all agree, the images coming out of Gaza this week, they’ve ripped my heart out and flung it against a wall.

“It’s unacceptable and I now—through enormous personal courage, actually—I’m ready to use that blasted G-word. It’s a [whispered] genocide guys. I’m ready to tell you that it’s a [whispered] genocide guys and I can no longer stay... [More]”

I’ve seen these before but this one seems legitimate. The article What happened to “All human beings are born free”? Reflections on a ChatGPT “experiment” by Mazen Baroudi, Shahreen Chowdhury, Farchanda Abdoel Wahid (IHP) asked ChatGPT two questions about human freedom.

The answers differed considerably, depending on the tribe. The freedom of Palestinians is “a matter of perspective,” which is, like, true, though? Like, a lot of people think Palestinians aren’t even human, so they correspondingly don’t think that they should be free. How else to... [More]

Scott Ritter is on fire in this interview about Donald Trump’s and Marco Rubio’s foolishness and evil.

Scott Ritter : Can Trump Bring Peace to Ukraine? by Judge Napolitano (YouTube)

“[…] what’s going on here is: Donald Trump is too stupid to live. I want him to succeed. I really do. I want every president to succeed but this is a man, and you just said it, ‘I don’t know if I will support the Constitution’—then get the hell out of the office! Because you took an oath to uphold and defend that Constitution and now you’re saying it’s too complicated for you?!? It’s too... [More]”

Saying “I want to make content every day” is shorthand for “I am remunerated for obtaining and holding attention, so I have to generate it. Content is a means to that end.”

I think very few people enjoy what they’re doing once they get on that treadmill. There’s one guy whose first couple of videos about “1 day in Germany vs. 10 years in Germany” were funny. He’s now produced dozens of them—the algorithm is diligent in surfacing them for me—and I’ve long since stopped watching them, though... [More]

This is also neat. I looked up “der Gruppe” vs. “die Gruppe” and learned that, while some people think they’re interchangeable, others think that they mean subtly different things.

Grammatik: …in die Gruppe… oder …in der Gruppe… ? (Narkive)

“ist es weniger klar als “in die Gruppe”. Denn die reine Ortsangabe kann auch bedeuten, daß er innerhalb der Gruppe in etwas Kleineres integriert ist.

““Ich habe mich in der Stadt eingelebt” ist schon erfüllt, wenn ich mich in meiner Wohnung wohl fühle.... [More]”