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]”

The title is clickbait but the content is nonetheless interesting. It discusses how to move processing from “system 2” (logical reasoning) to “system 1” (intuition). It’s how you get to a point where you understand a language without thinking about it. Or how you can just read music, or code, or vast swaths of text on economics or philosophy. Or how your body has learned to move in any sport or activity.

There is no way around using familiarity and repetition to get to highly accurate and... [More]

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

1. Doubt (2008) — 8/10
2. Mission Impossible − Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — 7/10
3. Der Morgen Stirbt Nie (Tomorrow Never Dies) (1997) — 7/10
4. Puss in Boots (2011) — 7/10
5. Independence Day (1995) — 9/10
6. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) — 6/10
7. Happy S01 (2017) — 9/10
8. Chronicles of Riddick (2004) — 8/10
9. Shane (1953) — 5/10
10. Pitch Black (2000) — 7/10

Doubt (2008) — 8/10

This movie combines two great things:... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Dungeon Crawler Carl CoverThis is my first book in a genre that a very good friend of mine said was quite popular in Japan—Isekai (Wikipedia)—which is “[…] a sub-genre of fiction. […] that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe”. Closely related is a sub-group with a more western-sounding name LitRPG (Wikipedia), which is “short for literary role-playing game, is a literary genre combining the... [More]”

I was forwarded the article Major Warning Issued for Apple, Facebook, PayPal, and Google Users by Kevin Harrish, (Newsbreak / Men's Journal), which made me think about how you can keep yourself more safe online.

What happened?

The article is not very good, in that it makes a lot of extra noise to sound alarming but that doesn’t actually contribute to the conversation. For example, “database of 184,162,718 records across more than 47 GB of data” is good. Writing “massive trove” and “massive” in two consequent paragraphs, or writing “Apple,... [More]”

Real Fit Life (RFL) was a training program invented by a high-school friend that Kath and I did for years. I had forgotten the exact steps and exercises but then found that my past self had written everything down in a text file.

Warm-up Exercises

The warmup phase is timed. You should do each set of exercises above the same amount of time. You can also adjust the amount of time you pause between sets. If you’re just starting out or aren’t so fit, you should probably do: Sets of 30 seconds... [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]

This is a nice ~13-minute 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.

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

Generally the properties position and display properties determine which layout algorithm is used for a given element. The layouts are,

Kevin Powell

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

The article Liberals Believe In Nothing And Remember Even Less by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack) writes about how most people don’t actually stand for anything. They don’t have principles; they root for a team. She writes,

“I saw a post on Twitter where a leftist responded to a liberal who was acting like ICE just suddenly transformed into a modern gestapo under Trump, saying, “Liberals believe in nothing and remember even less.”

“And it’s just so true. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t stand for anything.... [More]”

I snipped the following citation from the article “When The Banality Of Evil Becomes Normalized, It Grows Unchecked.” by Francesca Albanese (ZNetwork) about a month ago.

“[…] the situation in the West Bank is not fundamentally different from what is happening to the Palestinian people as a whole. In Gaza, the attack has been genocidal in its intensity, but the same logic of destruction is being applied in the West Bank — though in a way that garners less attention, with fewer visible explosions. Palestinian communities... [More]”

Standard disclaimer[1]

This book is a 200-page, tightly edited, tour-de-force summary of many of Noam Chomsky’s writings, liberally sprinkled with Vijay Prashad’s interpretations and some of his own writings. It is structured as a conversation between the two authors, with some parts of Noam’s conversation being new and other parts being citations from his incredibly voluminous past work.

Despite a deep familiarity with the material, I very much enjoyed this book and just couldn’t stop... [More]

This is a 210-minute video about LLMs are built and trained. What works? What doesn’t? The whole thing is well-worth your time if you’re at-all interested in learning about what the inherent limitations are, so you can better leverage these tools. For example, “models need tokens to think” was great.

Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT by Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)

• 00:00:00 introduction
• 00:01:00 pretraining data (internet)
• 00:07:47 tokenization
• 00:14:27 neural network I/O
• 00:20:11 neural network internals
• 00:26:01 inference
• 00:31:09 GPT-2: training and... [More]

A friend sent me The Insidious Libertarian-to-Alt-Right Pipeline by Matt Lewis (The Daily Beast). It’s OK. He said it was 2/5 but was interested in my opinion on it.

I wrote him something like the following (it’s lightly edited for clarity):

LarpingLibertarianism is a superficial dead-end that has a deeply unempathetic core. While its proponents will tell you all day long that communism could never work because people suck, they never acknowledge that, by that logic, libertarianism is doomed to the same Hobbesian nightmare for the... [More]

A friend asked me recently for ideas for a career talk they were giving at a university (or for university students). I wrote the following (more or less).

I’m sure you’ll not be able to use any of them because I am uniquely unsuited for our world but what the hell: I can’t resist the challenge.

Be valuable

If you’re lucky, then you’ll only spend ½ of your waking life during your prime years on your career.

That’s a lot of time. That time passes more quickly when you do something... [More]

The article Lean Prinzip (LinkedIn) is in German and discusses how the need for speed endangers innovation. It is written very much from a “leave me alone to be brilliant” style of engineering that argues that innovation can only happen if the engineers are allowed to ignore prosaic concerns like profitability. Something good will come of their work, trust them. It disparages the notion of “efficiency” espoused by managerial layers. It’s not necessarily wrong but it’s also not really interested in a... [More]

Jane Fonda cites him in her commencement address in 2025, which was quite good actually, and well-worth the 17:30.

Jane Fonda’s 2025 USC Annenberg Commencement Address (YouTube)

I just saw a neat code example from a Dutch government project (function starting at line 182). The commentator who posted it at Reddit wrote,

“Some people laughed at it and suggested all kind of clever one liners to replace it, but to me, that if statement is perfect. The intent is immediately clear and bugs are easy to spot. This is the kind of code you want in critical apps.”

Here’s the code.

private static string GetPercentageRounds(double percentage)
{
    if (percentage == 0)
       ... [More]

C-suite reading stuffI had the dubious pleasure of reading through MASTERING R&D COMPETITIVENESS IN 2030+ by Lea Thomas Smith, Denis Trost, Moritz Krogmann, Janina Pohl, Felix Prem (3dSE Management Consultants), which is a document about how to chart the roiling waters of the business climate of 2025. The following are some stream-of-consciousness notes I took while reading through it.

Being a bit obvious

The presentation is fast out of the gate: The executive summary screams at you to PANIC because YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

No. Stop doing that. FOMO is be resisted and coolly evaluated. You only need to “rethink... [More]”

I really like Chris Hedges as a writer, as a journalist, and as a person. He has impeccable instincts and principles. I don’t think that there is any way that he doesn’t know who Jason Stanley actually is. He interviewed him anyway, so that we could all have a look at how someone can sound like they’re on your side when they’re really falling far short.

Erasing History: How Fascism Works (w/ Jason Stanley) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

I waited long minutes to see if Stanley would discuss which current genocide is leading to the crackdown on universities, and realized that... [More]

Make sure you know whether you’re acting from experience and are just holding a grudge.

It’s perfectly legitimate to avoid toxicity but be keenly aware of whether you’re the one bringing it to the party.

A while back, I spotted the follow cross-post Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks by Azra Raza (3 Quarks Daily). The screenshot below shows what this article looked like. This is an article that the main editor of 3QuarksDaily felt a burning interest to share. Before him, though, Maureen Dowd of the vaunted gray lady, The New York Times, felt a burning desire to shared with the world just how hard it is to be George Clooney.

Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks

This is, of course, mind-boggling if you’re not part of this world.

• Did this article... [More]

The article Function calling using LLMs by Kiran Prakash writes,

“It’s important to emphasize that when using function calling, the LLM itself does not execute the function. Instead, it identifies the appropriate function, gathers all required parameters, and provides the information in a structured JSON format. This JSON output can then be easily deserialized into a function call in Python (or any other programming language) and executed within the program’s runtime environment.”

This is an approach that... [More]

I am a more-than-occasional critic of John Oliver’s “criticism lite,” which takes aim only at pre-approved targets, perhaps most recently in John Oliver and SNL don’t cause enough offense. I do not expect him to say a word about Israel, for example, until the entire rest of the establishment media has indicated that the coast is clear.

Still, this video about the odious ADF is a good and funny entry in the war against stupid and disingenuous.

Alliance Defending Freedom: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by LastWeekTonight (YouTube)

At about 07:40,

“One of its key founders was James... [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]

From Roaming... [More] by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

The article The null check that didn’t check for nulls by Oren Eini (Ayende) points out an interesting and subtle difference in code-generation, depending on whether you use the var keyword. Using var in pattern-matching might lead to a pattern that looks like it checks for null but doesn’t. You can see and play with a live example (SharpLab.IO) but I’ve replicated the examples below.

This is the problematic example:

string Test1(List<string> strs)
{
    if(strs is [var s])
    {
        return s;
    }
    return... [More]

The article Zed: The Fastest AI Code Editor by Richard Feldman (Zed) includes a great description and video that shows off the behavior of their new “agent” feature.

“The entire Zed code editor is open source under GPL version 3, and scratch-built in Rust all the way down to handcrafted GPU shaders and OS graphics API calls. Zed’s new AI capabilities are also open-source, just like the rest of the editor, so you can see exactly what the new Agent Panel is doing under the hood.”

This editor is very, very smooth and more... [More]

The article What people get wrong about the leading Chinese open models: Adoption and censorship by Nathan Lambert (Interconnects) discusses the politics behind AI models but only from the perspective of the western empire. It makes a good point but can’t see that it applies all ways.

“People vastly underestimate the number of companies that cannot use Qwen and DeepSeek open models because they come from China. This includes on-premise solutions built by people who know the fact that model weights alone cannot reveal anything... [More]”

The article AI hallucinations lead to a new cyber threat: Slopsquatting by Shweta Sharma (CSO Online) writes,

“If a single hallucinated package becomes widely recommended by AI tools, and an attacker has registered that name, the potential for widespread compromise is real,” according to a Socket analysis of the research. “And given that many developers trust the output of AI tools without rigorous validation, the window of opportunity is wide open.”

“A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000... [More]”

Eurovision Song Contest 2025It is that time of year again and this time the whole shebang is happening in Switzerland, right up the road in Basel.

I wrote these notes for fun, so don’t expect me to write about each group, and don’t expect any sort of fair evaluation of each group’s talent. I started writing somewhere after a couple of groups into the first semifinals. I filled those in during the finals. My partner insists on watching this thing, so let’s get right to it. I wanted to watch it in Italian for fun and... [More]