5 days Ago
Links and Notes for April 19th, 2024
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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.
Table of Contents
Freedom as a means of control
Published on in Quotes
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
1 week Ago
It’s 2024. How’s it going, JavaScript?
Published on in Programming
This video is from a great channel, which published a lot of great videos a while back. They covered pretty much everything already, but circled back to JavaScript for 2024.
Some choice quotes from the video.
“We push on save.”
“2024 is the year of the serverlesslessness.”
“They say that every year, but this year they’re out of VC funding.”
“Don’t write this down, next week all of this is gonna change.”
This guy just keeps knocking it out of the park. Pretty much everything he mentioned... [More]
The Cosmic Call
Published on in Fun
The article Try it and see by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) discusses the graphic below, which is part of the “Cosmic Call”, a message to extraterrestrials.
The author says that he told his 11-year-old niece,
““I bet you could figure it out if you tried.” She didn’t believe me and she didn’t want to try. It seemed insurmountable.”
I sent this to a few people in my family.
Hint #1
After a little while, I provided some context. The Cosmic Call is:
“In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and Yvan Dutil,... [More]”
2 weeks Ago
Links and Notes for April 12th, 2024
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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.
Table of Contents
A society without oppression is an illusion…
Published on in Quotes
“Around the mid-1800s humanity began to notice it doesn’t make sense for a small group of rich people to own everything and for everyone else to continually give that group labor, rent and expenses just to stay alive, and ever since then the media, the mainstream culture and the foreign policy of the ruling class have been intensely devoted to aggressively erasing this realization from humanity’s memory.”
Avoid primary constructors in C# (for now)
Published on in Programming
record
instead.The following video discusses the downsides of the current implementation of primary constructors:
To sum up:
- Primary constructors don’t have a
readonly
backing field; you can still assign to it within the type. - You can’t control the visibility of the generated property or backing field.
- You can’t throw exceptions, except in a... [More]
Links and Notes for April 5th, 2024
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.
Table of Contents
3 weeks Ago
Gore Vidal’s Storm Warning in 1961
Published on in Quotes
“Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.[1]”
1 month Ago
Links and Notes for March 29th, 2024
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.
Table of Contents
Links and Notes for March 22nd, 2024
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.