Links and Notes for March 14th, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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 & Finance
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Communism in theory vs in practice (Reddit)

Communism is good in theory…

“Communism is good in theory, but in practice it usually just ends up being destroyed in a military coup financed by the CIA.”

The Oval Office, Kyiv and the Kremlin by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)

“Few Americans can have an idea of the current militarist build-up in Germany, based on the mass media’s constant attempts to spread fear. Test alarms, talk of air-raid cellars, growing pressure for conscription, male and female, and a military expense account zooming down like a typhoon, more and more hundreds of billions, to the joy of giants like Rheinmetall and the fears of those low on the economic ladder, for it is they who will pay for it.”

“As for freedom, its defense always seemed to require a diabolic Beelzebub to arouse popular rage, if possible an easy target for media caricaturists. No matter whether he was truly evil, truly good, or some mixture, for anyone in the way the spiked tail and horns were ready at hand: Stalin, Fidel, Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Assad – and since about 2000 “Vlad.””

“How many know that Putin and his diplomats had warned since 2008 that, in spite of US and German promises that “if Germany is united NATO will not move an one inch eastward” NATO did advance more than inches; it was country by country right up to the Russian borders. Disarmament agreements were abandoned (always blaming Russia), Russian pleas for negotiations to avoid confrontation were rejected in December 2021 as “no-starters.” As for the promising peace agreement at Minsk, ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel later revealed (in “Die Zeit”) that it had been a NATO ruse, “an attempt to buy time for the Ukraine to build up military strength.” In Istanbul, a cease-fire and agreement to negotiate were almost ready for signing when UK’s Boris Johnson flew in to stymie them.”

From a 2008 State Department memo:

“NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

“These facts do not exculpate Putin from the tank invasion of February 2022, nor of the shelling and bombing in the terrible months since then. But they might balance the picture presented by US and German media and politicians.”

“For me the demand to protect freedom and democracy, so often repeated when alluding to Ukraine, seems pure hypocrisy when I think of US and German support for apartheid, for Saudi boss Mohammed bin Salman, for 32 years with kleptomaniac dictator Mobutu in Congo, Papa and Baby Doc in Haiti, Scheich Hamad in Bahrein, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Pinochet in Chile and so many others.”

“Is it possible that Putin recalled the fates of any leaders who rejected US hegemony? Allende, in his bombed residential palace, Lumumba, tortured, dismembered and dissolved in acid, Saddam Hussein hanged, Ghaddafi, sodomized with a bayonet, Mohammad Najibullah, castrated and dragged by a truck through the streets of Kabul, Osama bin Laden, shot down in his home and thrown into the ocean. (But despite countless attempts, Fidel escaped such a fate.)”

“Aside from all questions as to who bears the most blame, those who did the provoking or the side which felt provoked and sent in the tanks – like a cornered bear, surrounded by a narrowing circle of snarling dogs, being the first to slash out first a heavy-clawed paw. I see a continuation of the war as only bringing misery to all those affected and a course which can lead only to more deaths – and explosion.”

“Why has Trump opened a door to peace? I don’t know. Maybe to get at those mineral riches. Maybe to clear things with Russia so as to move on to China, after splitting the two adversaries. Maybe this guy, in his twisted thinking (and seemingly total ignorance of the world outside his golden towers), actually prefers peace to war. Anything is possible with him.”

“At least one thing was clear. The prospect of possible peace scared the daylights out of war-lovers on both sides of the Atlantic, especially the bosses of Rheinmetall, Lockheed Martin and their like, who rejoice at shoveling in billions but salivate for more!”

“[…] it is vitally necessary to fight back against Trump’s terrible threats in every field: union rights, defense of immigrants, schools, environment, science, racism, LGBTQ rights, even Greenland and Panama. But with one exception, at least for now. Any potential move to achieve peace, no matter how motivated, must not be attacked – but supported! War or peace; this remains, by far, the most crucial question of all in today’s threatened world.”

For a Rapprochement with Russia… by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“With the retreat of the Turks from Vienna in 1686, the “Atlantic” model of what Europe is thought to be in its deepest essence finally gained ascendancy, so that today it is the only one most of us are even able to conceptualize.”

“So the Germans are Huns, but so are the French, if you look deeply enough. The only properly indigenous Western Europeans are the Basques, a last vestige of the Paleolithic settlement of this quasi-continent by anatomically modern humans.”

“In the early years of the St. Petersburg Academy only about 10% of the members were ethnically Russian; the great majority were German, a good number of whom had been trained at the Lutheran University of Halle. Some decades later Catherine adorned herself in Voltairean bons mots practically as if they were Hermès scarves, all while surrounded by a population still ground down by a form of serfdom scarcely more comfortable than life in the silver mines of Potosí.”

“In my early adulthood the only people I had ever met who could sit down at a piano and play a Beethoven sonata, who took it for granted that a man should always help a woman to put on her coat, who found it normal to dress their little boys in sailor suits — all of them came from the Eastern Bloc.”

“In spite of appearances, I am inclined to say, the internet is in fact in the process of destroying the Westphalian order, for better or worse, built as it was on the presumption of absolute and irreducible differences of essence from one sovereign national territory to another. This sounds paradoxical or ill-informed, I know, since the internet is also feverishly stoking geopolitical conflict for the moment. But increasingly I’m inclined to think that’s not the real story of what’s happening in the present moment. Even the recent land grabs, real and threatened (Ukraine, Greenland, Taiwan), […]”

C’mon dude. Man up and say Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. FFS, how can you be so ideologically blind and devoted to not losing subscribers as not to mention the land grabs that Israel has already made when you’re included land grabs that are currently purely imaginary (Greenland, Taiwan). I cannot at all imagine that you’re not at least minimally aware of the Israeli land grabs. If you are not, then shame on you for having stayed within the imperial information funnel on this one thing and if you are, then shame on you for ignoring the utterly immorality of the “land grab” (as we will generously call it, unlike the UN, which calls it a genocide) and pretending not to have an opinion on it.

“[…] the occasional surviving Neocon, who have convinced themselves to talk in practically sacral terms about the inviolability of the lines on the political map of the world — even when those lines were only recently redrawn, indeed within what is for many of us living memory.”

“[…] am I wrong for thinking it’s a start? For entertaining some small hope that out of this chaos the arrow of history might be redirected somewhere other than down the path of ever-sharpening antagonism, which was the only path the Democrats had convinced us it was legitimate so much as to consider?”

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get there, but I suspect that if we do, it will be because more people learn to value human life over soil, and to be more creative in devising strategies for avoiding war than the terrible piety of American liberal hawkism permitted us to be, when, even at risk of cataclysmic escalation, so much as to suggest that all this death is just not worth it was to risk being mocked and denounced as capitulating to the aggressor.”

Should we, for example, risk our subscriber count by making any mention whatsoever of Israel’s transgressions in an article lamenting an inability to “value human life over soil”. Or is that oblique mention as close as we’re going to get?

“Putin is a nasty fucker, who seems slowly to be morphing into some sort of live-action version of Alice the Goon; Trump is a mafioso and a blowhard. And yet: friendship between the two multinational states these two men pretend to rule —a friendship of the sort US Democrats seem to have trained themselves to rule out a priori— will, if it ever works out, be a wonderful thing for the world, and something I will have been awaiting for most of my life.”

Ukraine Deserves Better Than Trump and Zelensky by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“It was supposed to be a photo-op, a press conference celebrating a supposedly agreed upon deal for Ukraine to fork over half of their embattled nation’s rare mineral rights as a thank you to the United States for talking them in and out of World War 3.”

“[Zelenskyy] came out swinging with a barely coherent diatribe about the evils of diplomacy that included the usual CNN approved revisionist history of Putin’s invasion that carefully deleted all the NATO provocations that inspired it.”

“[…] jumped from warning about the dangers of World War 3 to bragging about initiating it by sending Ukraine Javelin missiles at a time when even Barack Obama felt this was going too far.”

“Donald Trump may put on a big show of aping like Pat Buchanan with dick jokes, but his foul-mouthed isolationism usually amounts to little more than a hustle. The fucker is basically just against any war that he can’t personally profit from, and Trump’s ties aren’t made in sweatshops in Kharkiv.”

“What Trump really wants to do is to strip Ukraine of the copper wiring before he shifts the American Empire towards consolidating its flagging control over the Western Hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine on Drug-War steroids then launching his own world war against Russia’s sponsors in China.”

“If Donald Trump’s heavily televised flogging of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t convince the Ukrainian people that NATO is a glorified protection racket on a good day, then I don’t know what will. It’s also increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that regardless of his initial intentions, the longer Zelensky rules the more like Putin he becomes. So, how can peace be a solution when it’s being decided by such despicable despots?”

Scott Ritter : Ukraine’s Last Stand? The Truth About the War in 2025 by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

At 36:43, did Ritter really say, “in the late 1980s—throughout the 1990s—was a was a city in decay: prostitution, homosexuality—you name it they had it”

Equating homosexuality with decay sounds very much like something that Putin’s Russia would advocate but I’m honestly quite surprised to hear either Ritter say that, or the Judge let him get away with it. Was this an innocuous or nefarious slip?

He later says “degeneracy”, which doesn’t bode well.

Trump Is Bombing Yemen For Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The US is bombing Yemen again after Houthi leaders announced that their blockade on Israeli shipping would resume due to Israel’s siege on Gaza.

“Trump could have used Washington’s immense leverage over Israel to force Netanyahu to honor the ceasefire agreement and allow aid into Gaza. Instead he let the IDF lay siege to Gaza and started bombing Yemen for Israel, because he’s a warmongering Israel cuck.

“Trump is bombing Yemen for Israel, rushing weapons to Israel despite its flagrant ceasefire violations, and rolling out authoritarian measure after authoritarian measure to stop Americans from criticizing Israel. Because that’s what you get when you vote for America First.”

The Global North Has Nine Times More Voting Power at the IMF Than the Global South by Vijay Prashad (ZNetwork)

“The United States, for instance, has 16.49% of the votes on the IMF’s board despite representing only 4.22% of the world population. Since the IMF’s Articles of Agreement require 85% of the votes to make any changes, the US has veto power over the decisions of the IMF. As a result, the IMF senior staff defers to any policy made by the US government and, given the organisation’s location in Washington, DC, frequently consults with the US Treasury Department on its policy framework and individual policy decisions.”

“Speaking of the case of Argentina, Lula said, ‘No government can work with a knife to its throat because it is in debt. Banks must be patient and, if necessary, renew agreements. When the IMF or any other bank lends to a Third World country, people feel they have the right to give orders and manage the country’s finances – as if the countries had become hostages of those who lend them money’.”

“North America, with two members, has 943,085 votes, while Africa, with 54 members, has 326,033 votes.”

“[…] when a country went to the IMF for a bridge loan – which should have been seen as non-prejudicial – it ended up hurting that country in capital markets because seeking a loan held the stigma of poor performance. Money was then lent to the country at higher rates, which only deepened the crisis that had set in motion the request for a bridge loan in the first place.”

“If the Global North ignores such basic, sensible reforms, Batista argues, ‘Developed countries will then be the sole owners of an empty institution’. The Global South, he predicts, will exit the IMF and create new institutions under the aegis of new platforms such as BRICS. In fact, such institutions are already being built, such as the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which was set up in 2014 after the failed attempt to reform the IMF. But the CRA ‘has remained largely frozen’, writes Batista.

“Until a thaw, the IMF is the only institution that provides the kind of financing necessary for poorer nations. That is why even progressive governments, such as the one in Sri Lanka, where interest payments make up 41% of total expenditure in 2025, are forced to go to Washington. Hat in hand, they flash a smile at the White House on their way to the IMF headquarters.”

This Is Trump’s Genocide Now by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“I don’t know why Trump has done these things. Maybe it’s all for the Adelson cash. Maybe Epstein recorded him doing something unsavory with a minor during their long association and gave it to Israeli intelligence for blackmail purposes. Maybe he owed somebody a favor for bailing him out of his business failures in the past. Maybe he’s just a psychopath who enjoys murdering children. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he did it, and he is responsible for his actions.”

“You can still support Trump if you hate immigrants and LGBTQ people and want lower taxes for the obscenely wealthy, but there is no legitimate reason to support him on antiwar or anti-establishment grounds. He’s just another evil Republican mass murderer president.”

“The anti-imperialist left is what MAGA and right wing “populism” pretend to be. We ACTUALLY oppose the empire’s warmongering — not only when Democrats are in power. We ACTUALLY want to defeat the deep state — we don’t applaud billionaire Pentagon contractors like Elon Musk taking power. We ACTUALLY oppose the establishment order — because the establishment order is capitalist. We ACTUALLY stand up to the powerful — we don’t offload half the blame onto immigrants and marginalized groups.

“The anti-imperialist left is also what liberals pretend to be. We ACTUALLY support the working class. We ACTUALLY stand up for the little guy. We ACTUALLY want justice and equality. We ACTUALLY support civil rights. We ACTUALLY oppose tyranny.

“Everything the human heart longs for lies in the death of capitalism, militarism and empire, and yet both of the dominant western political factions of our day support continuing all of these things. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in power-serving propaganda which herds them into these two mainstream political factions to ensure that they will pose no meaningful challenges to our rulers.”

“[…] generations of imperial psyops have gone into stomping out the anti-imperialist left in the western world, and because only candidates which uphold the status quo are ever allowed to get close to winning an election. This doesn’t mean mainstream liberalism or right wing “populism” are the answer, it just means our prison warden isn’t going to hand us the keys to the exit door.”

[SPECIAL] − Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov − w/ Judge Napolitano, Larry Johnson, & Mario Nawfal by Judge Napolitano – Judging Freedom (YouTube)

Journalism & Media

survivorship bias and the algorithmic gaze by Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd)

“[…] there are also the “unknown unknowns”: social media content that we don’t even know is hidden , because it’s unable to reach us in any capacity. This is an issue on any algorithmic social media platform, because all content in your feed has to pass through a rigorous selection process before it ever reaches you.”

“Since more polarized perspectives survive online, and we construct our worldviews based on what we see, we therefore think society is more split than it really is, which can unfortunately lead to genuine polarization as we build identity in opposition to a perceived “other.””

If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is Screwed by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The worst thing is what a tremendous self-own this is. After Britain passed its hideous Online Safety Act and began railing against “illegal content,” American speech advocates laughed out loud at the Orwellian absurdity of that term. Now Trump is threatening to cut school funding over “illegal protest”? Did he get the idea from Starmer?”

How the “Democratic Resistance” Would Have Fought the Nazis by Ted Rall

This cartoon writes,

“By the time the slow-as-molasses courts take action in this country, anyone who is still seeking justice is already screwed.”

If you’ve grabbed a gun instead of a lawyer at the first sign of trouble, then you’ve expressed the same fealty and confidence in the system of laws as your supposedly lawless opponents.

Economy & Finance

The Great Interest Rate Heist by David Sirota (Jacobin)

“One of many examples the lawmakers document: the Fed pays JPMorgan Chase 4.4 percent interest on its deposits, but “customers continue to earn a negligible .01 [percent] on their savings” at JPMorgan Chase. In all, banks have used this scheme to reap more than $1 trillion in new revenue over a two-and-a-half-year period, according to the Financial Times — and new federal data show net interest income is rising.”

“When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year finalized a rule to simplify switching banks, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon vowed a “knife fight” against regulators and deployed his lobbying group to file a lawsuit against the rule.”

“Donald Trump’s administration stalled that rule, tried to dismantle the CFPB, and dropped the agency’s lawsuit alleging that Capital One cheated depositors out of $2 billion in interest payments. Trump’s regulators also repealed guidelines aiming to slow bank mergers (like Capital One’s ), which tend to reduce competition to offer better interest rates. One recent study found “a 35 percent reduction in deposit interest rates” in counties that experienced such mergers.”

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a “growth story” – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It’s hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it’s actually very dangerous.

“Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet.

“But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the “sell” button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

“For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn’t an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It’s a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

“That’s where “AI” comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there’s plenty of growth in their future.”

Sports Betting by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (YouTube)

This was a solid overview of yet another way that neoliberalist capitalism has found to funnel money from the poor to the rich.

Art, Literature, & Cinema

John Brown’s Body (Wikipedia)

“He captured Harper’s Ferry with his nineteen men so true
He frightened old Virginia till she trembled through and through
They hanged him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew
His soul goes marching on!

“Mine eyes hath seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath is stored
He’th loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on!”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Against Nihilism by Evgenia (Nefarious Russians)

“There was the widespread belief that anything that sounded like a “do gooder” slogan had a hidden agenda behind it…that any politics that even vaguely tried to help people was a scam. Everyone is for themselves — that’s just how the world works. That’s how people thought. Meanwhile, the country was looted by top Soviet apparatchiks and industrious upstarts who became billionaires almost overnight, privatizing the natural resources of the 1/6th of the earth.”

“The Red Scare women, along with other media figures in their circle, are rebranding this cynical vibe shift as cool and avant garde…as rebellion against the establishment, despite the fact that Trump and the Republican Party is very much the establishment. You can’t be transgressive and be an apparatchik for the ruling party at the same time. I mean…it’s about as transgressive as Lean In feminists rooting for Kamala Harris. How is this not obvious?”

“But the surprising thing is that a lot of people buy this act. They really think that being cynical and nihilistic and being on the side of powerful corporations is some sort of transgressive act. That’s how warped the culture is here.”

“It’s very unsettling for young Americans to take this path. It’s like they want to come back to a 19th century America — with railroad barons and child labor and diseased city slums…a time when society was segregated by race and women had no power. And what’s shocking is that they’re trying to rebrand this regression as transgressive and fun, unlike the boring progressive lib woke world that shames you for saying faggot and retard.”

“And there is another reason why all these media people pushing the “cynicism as realism” line remind me of Russia. Back where I grew up, journalism was mostly a joke. Outside a few heroes and martyrs, the profession had no morals — it was about getting to hobnob with powerful people, to suck up to them, and to do propaganda for the moneyed class. The end goal for most journalists was to jump ship — to transition from being a poor media whore to a very rich media whore — to become a capitalist, someone with property and dividends from an oil/gas conglomerate.”

Slowly, Imperceptibly, the Hegemony of the Cult of Smart Loosens by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“[…] if there is in fact such a thing as an inherent or intrinsic or natural tendency to be good at school, then this whole setup has cursed a lot of people to hard lives based on factors they can’t control. But with the American vision of success having evolved to add college success to the life plan of job, marriage, kids, and with the neoliberal consensus going utterly without challenge in our political system, there’s been no room for broad public debate on the basic sense of this whole operation. Of course, many millions of students failed to succeed in school, seeming to undermine the system. So the school “reform” movement stepped up to blame those lazy teachers and their greedy unions for failure, against all evidence.”

“[…] the consensus has started to slip in part because it’s simply become too obvious that differences in individual talent are real and thus the system cannot actually push everyone through “the college pipeline,” unless standards are reduced to a ludicrous degree.”

“[…] there was another obvious reason why the movement to blame teachers and replace public schools with charter ran out of steam: they kept failing to live up to their incredibly outsized rhetoric. The reform movement had bipartisan (though not uncomplicated) support, and they scored many policy victories. And, conspicuously, this did not correspond with any educational gains commensurate with the resources involved and the political capital expended. Because the problem was never schools. The problem was a) vast differences in structural social conditions between races produced racial achievement gaps that prompted a great deal of angst and b) academic talented [sic] is unequally distributed among individuals in our population and so some students would always be in the bottom 50%/25%/10% of the performance distribution.”

“[…] in the 2010s has for the most part done little to erode our national attachment to the Cult of Smart, to the notion that intellectual and academic abilities are the most important in all of human life and correspondingly that we must produce a nation of child geniuses for the sake of social justice.”

“KIPP schools are attrition factories and have been subject to accusations of student body-pruning for decades, which of course is the norm rather than the exception in charter schools. (I’ve aggregated a lot of information about just how common admissions fraud is in charter schools before − in many contexts the lotteries that determine admission are run by the schools themselves, an absurd conflict of interest − and you can pull lots of examples, such as when an ACLU investigation found more than 250 schools committing admissions fraud just in California.)”

“KIPP graduates only graduate from college within five years at a rate of 40 percent. No amount of saying “no excuses” can obscure the fact that this represents a whole lot of failure at our supposed success factories.”

“[…] some people just aren’t college material, just aren’t built for a life in certain professions that depend heavily on education. This would have been an utterly banal thing to say for most of American history but has become fighting words in the twenty-first century. Well, if you think it’s a harsh thing for me to say, remember that the whole point of my book was to argue that a society that only sees value in one kind of flourishing, that rewards only one kind of human success, is a cruel and impractical one, and a better world is possible.”

“[…] the returns from the school reform movement have been paltry compared to the investment and the hype, […]”

This is where you realize that increasing societal value was never the point. The point was to run a scam that is fueled by outrage and that skims tons of money for the usual, awful suspects. That is, the kind of people that always seems to bubble up to the top, like dross, in this tide pool of neoliberal opportunism that we naively call an economy.

“I think you can talk tough about accountability all you want, but it won’t matter if the people you’re getting tough with fundamentally don’t control the relevant variables. But a gradual shift towards understanding that schools cannot close gaps that schools did not create, however partial, is a good development and something I’d like to see more of from our commentators.”

“I have to find a little optimism in these rare green shoots of people slowly, maybe kinda sorta coming around to the idea that there will always be good students and bad, that schools can’t force untalented and unmotivated students to become stars, that a school system that sorts good from bad can’t also be an engine of equality, and that a society that has no capacity to recognize various forms of human accomplishment is one that’s doomed to declare many of them losers, no matter what we do in school.”

“The entire notion that education is a tool to increase socioeconomic mobility or equality, to reduce poverty, to close racial gaps in standards of living − all of this depends upon the economic and professional advantages of improved relative performance. People who go to college and put together an impressive resume see economic benefit from doing so because doing so differentiates them from peers.”

Trump’s War on Education by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Tuitions, once low, if not free, have soared, and with them tremendous student debt. State legislators and the federal government have slashed funding to public universities, forcing them to seek support from corporations and reduce most faculty to the status of poorly paid adjuncts, often lacking benefits, as well as job security. Nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of adjuncts, part-time lecturers, and non-tenure-track full-time faculty, who have no hope of being granted tenure, according to the American Federation of Teachers.”

“Totalitarian societies do not teach students how to think but what to think. They churn out students who are historically and politically illiterate, blinded by an enforced historical amnesia. They seek to produce servants and apologists who conform, not critics and rebels. Liberal arts colleges, for this reason, do not exist in totalitarian states.”

“The most important human activity, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it.”

And we cannot know whether we want or need to change the world—or could change the world to be “better”—until we understand it.

“Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.””

“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in the ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

“Students, rather than being educated, will be taught by rote and fed the familiar tropes of authoritarian playbooks — paeans to white supremacy, national purity, patriarchy and the nation’s duty to impose its “virtues” on others by force. This mass indoctrination will not only ensure ignorance, but obedience. And that is the point.”

This is pretty clearly what has happened in Israel, as well as the U.S. (and, honestly, many European countries). In all of these places, people exhibit an unquestioning and knee-jerk viciousness that is deeply indoctrinated. Polls in Israel that show nearly unanimous support for ethnic cleansing are particularly shocking. The U.S. isn’t far behind in being utterly devoid of empathy in its slavish devotion to the official narrative.

“The Trump administration, despite the draconian measures imposed by Columbia’s administrators, canceled approximately $400 million in federal grants to the university due to what it calls the “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.””

Is it OK to ask why a private university with an endowment of many, many billions is getting government subsidies? Like, at what level of wealth does an organization stop taking free public money? Never? This setup is so normalized that you’re probably thinking that questioning the grant system is stupid and small-minded because of course it has to work this way. Well, yes, it would be nice if you had organizations with a focus on education that were mostly funded by government grants that emphasized research into topics that society found useful But that’s not what we have. Instead, we have enormously wealthy private institutions taking enormous government subsidies.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

At about 09:42,

“All of this sort of stuff, I think, makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options: you are either wearing the boot or you’re having your neck stepped on. And, so, to speak up on behalf of anybody who’s having their neck stepped on is immediately assumed to mean, ‘oh you want to step on my neck.’ Those are the only sort of world views that are acceptable under that ordering of the world.

“And it’s disastrous […] because the obligations put on somebody who’s trying to imagine a better world are unlimited. If you and I both want something better than this, I guarantee you, within 5 minutes of talking about it, we will have some kind of disagreement as to what ‘better’ looks like, because the imaginative obligations placed on us are infinite.

“Somebody who is served by the system doesn’t have to imagine anything else and so can safely live within the confines of this fantasy where, yes, either these people be killed or those people will be killed; either this genocide happens this way, or an even worse genocide is going to happen. And it is such imaginative poverty. And it’s applicable to virtually every facet of life under an empire. It has to be this way because somebody has to do the killing and it may as well be us.”

At about 20:00,

“[…] when I wrote the the title of this book—when I was first thinking about it—I wasn’t thinking in terms of weeks, or even years. I was thinking, if I’m fortunate enough to live the average lifespan in this part of the world, by the end of my life, I’ll be watching a poetry reading in Tel Aviv that begins with a land acknowledgement.”

The World After Gaza (w/ Pankaj Mishra) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

At 12:53,

“Pankaj: There is an accusation, which is often leveled against many people in Asian countries and African countries that they are indulging in holocaust-denial. And, often, there are people in Asia and Africa who are either really ignorant about this monstrous act of violence—which is the holocaust—and often there are people who are very extremely underinformed.

“And I think what is much less remarked upon, is the extraordinary level of a version of holocaust-denial in western countries. The fact that there is this long past of imperialism, of slavery, of enormous violence inflicted on many different parts of the world, many different populations across the world. If you today try to bring this up, or try to talk about it, you’d be denounced as a member of some woke conspiracy and dismissed or stigmatized or denounced. But this is something that’s been going on for an extremely long time, and I think among the other consequences, this has had an effect of seriously crippling any attempt at understanding the world as it exists today.

“The fact that large parts of the world have a cultural memory, a historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by western powers. And that that has actually gone into the making of their collective identity. And that that is how they see themselves in the world. That’s how they position themselves in the world. And of course that narrative—that they believe in—is now much, much more antagonistic, much more, in-a-way assertive, especially when it comes into contact with these western self-flattering narratives about how the west beat down two major totalitarian regimes, how it liberated the sort of Jews of Auschwitz, just very recently…

“Chris: which—I just want to interrupt—which, you as you point out in the book, isn’t true historically. The Soviets liberated almost all them [the concentration and death camps]

“Pankaj: Of course. […] There are ways in which you can spin all this, spin D-Day as far more important than all the contributions of the Red Army. The way in which history is taught in large parts of Western Europe and the United States, the fact that you still had as late as the early 2000s, the BBC broadcasting a documentary about the British Empire that made the British seem a globally benevolent force. It’s not at all surprising that there would be, today, amplifying propaganda about what is happening in Gaza today. These have been propagandist outfits for some time, sort of indoctrinating, brainwashing large populations. And so, I think this is a really serious problem that has to be addressed.”

In the chapter “The fundamental truths of the Holocaust”, they talk about how even renowned critics like Primo Levi noted that a terrible side-effect of the Holocaust was the “unleashing of evil”, as if the centuries of colonialism wrought upon the Global South (called the “Third World” at t the time) weren’t evil. This institutional elision of evil perpetrated by the west against others is a real problem for being able to process current events and for choosing a way forward for the world. The Vietnamese are not, in any way, obligated to remember or to even know about the Holocaust (capitalized to emphasize its unique evil), as they have dedicated their institutional memory to the holocaust perpetrated against them by France, the United States, and a complacent west.

The Unloved − Hollow Man by Scout Tafoya (Vimeo)

“Verhoeven having completely upended the American blockbuster machine like a dinner table in a crowded restaurant. What else was there to do? Turns out the answer was: stage a love affair with Christ himself, turning our Lord and Savior into the villain in a Euro-sleaze potboiler. But then, and even with the minor protests his film Benedetta kicked up upon its release in America, it was true that were in a world where the punk-rock bonafides of such a gesture went largely unappreciated. We live in Verhoeven’s world now. What on Earth cold a movie hope to do to us?”

I have a few times heard people say that we have to help the Palestinians “because they might come for us next.” That is not a moral case; that is a selfish case. We should help the Palestinians because it’s the just thing to do. No-one has any rights if anyone does not have rights.

Technology & Engineering

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino by John Gruber (Daring Fireball)

““Onscreen awareness” — Giving Siri awareness of whatever is displayed on your screen. Apple’s own example usage : “If a friend texts you their new address, you can say ‘Add this address to their contact card,’ and Siri will take care of it.””

C’mon man. This is a stupid use for this kind of technology. How hard is it to select the address and add to contact? You’re already touching the screen. How do you even know what you want Siri to do if you’re not looking at the screen? Doesn’t that already work today? We are solving imaginary problems while ignoring very real one. Par for the course.

“But a feature or product that Apple is unwilling to demonstrate, at all, is unknowable. Is it mostly working, and close to, but not quite, demonstratable? [sic] Is it only kinda sorta working — partially functional, but far from being complete? Fully functional but prone to crashing — or in the case of AI, prone to hallucinations and falsehoods? Or is it complete fiction, just an idea at this point? What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.”

“[…] now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.”

Netflix wants me to play Civilization VI

I subscribe to Netflix, which means that I pay them a certain amount of money per month for a service. That service is to be able to stream their videos—films and TV shows—as well as to find and manage the content I’d like to watch and that I’m currently watching. If this service were built to serve my needs, then it would almost certainly prominently suggest that I continue watching the content that I’ve already begun (Continue Watching). Failing that, it would suggest for me to watch content that I’ve already selected for watching (My List).

As you can see in the screenshot, the “Continue Watching” isn’t even displayed, whereas “My List” is confined to about 15% of the screen, all the way at the bottom.

Instead, a giant advertisement for a game I’ve never asked Netflix to show me dominates 85% of the screen. It has been like this for months. I neither knew nor do I care that Netflix is also in the business of selling access to video games. There is no way for me to express this preference. Netflix chooses what the home page looks like, and its choices reflect its own needs and desires, not mine. Reminder: I am a paying customer.

LLMs & AI

AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go? by Fred Hebert (My bad opinions)

“AI is everywhere, and its impressive claims are leading to rapid adoption. At this stage, I’d qualify it as charismatic technology—something that under-delivers on what it promises, but promises so much that the industry still leverages it because we believe it will eventually deliver on these claims.”

“As it turns out, there are lots of studies about ergonomics, tool design, collaborative design, where semi-autonomous components fit into sociotechnical systems, and how they tend to fail.

“Additionally, I’ll borrow from the framing used by people who study joint cognitive systems: rather than looking only at the abilities of what a single person or tool can do, we’re going to look at the overall performance of the joint system.”

“[…] it’s been known for decades that when automation handles standard challenges, the operators expected to take over when they reach their limits end up worse off and generally require more training to keep the overall system performant.

“While people can feel like they’re getting better and more productive with tool assistance, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are learning or improving. Over time, there’s a serious risk that your overall system’s performance will be limited to what the automation can do—because without proper design, people keeping the automation in check will gradually lose the skills they had developed prior.”

“Traditionally successful tools tend to work on the principle that they improve the physical or mental abilities of their operator: search tools let you go through more data than you could on your own and shift demands to external memory, a bicycle more effectively transmits force for locomotion, a blind spot alert on your car can extend your ability to pay attention to your surroundings, and so on.”

“Augmenting the user implies that they can tackle a broader variety of challenges effectively. Augmenting the computers tends to mean that when the component reaches its limits, the challenges are worse for the operator.”

“It has long been known that people adapt to their tools, and automation can create complacency.”

“[…] having AI that supports people or adds perspectives to the work an operator is already doing tends to yield better long-term results than patterns where the human learns to mostly delegate and focus elsewhere.”

“As the tool becomes a source of assertions or constraints (rather than a source of information and options), the operator becomes someone who interacts with the world from inside the tool rather than someone who interacts with the world with the tool’s help.”

“In roles that are inherently about pulling context from many disconnected sources, how on earth is automation going to make the right decisions? And moreover, who’s accountable for when it makes a poor decision on incomplete data?”

“A common trope in incident response is heroes—the few people who know everything inside and out, and who end up being necessary bottlenecks to all emergencies. They can’t go away for vacation, they’re too busy to train others, they develop blind spots that nobody can fix, and they can’t be replaced. To avoid this, you have to maintain a continuous awareness of who knows what, and crosstrain each other to always have enough redundancy.”

“Be wary of acquiring a solution that solves what you think the problem is rather than what it actually is. We routinely show we don’t accurately know the latter.”

“In a nutshell, if the expectation is that your engineers are going to be doing the learning and tweaking, your AI isn’t an independent agent—it’s a tool that cosplays as an independent agent.”

Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code by Simon Willison

“Using LLMs to write code is difficult and unintuitive . It takes significant effort to figure out the sharp and soft edges of using them in this way, and there’s precious little guidance to help people figure out how best to apply them. If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are (probably unintentionally) misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone.”

“Ignore the “AGI” hype—LLMs are still fancy autocomplete. All they do is predict a sequence of tokens—but it turns out writing code is mostly about stringing tokens together in the right order, so they can be extremely useful for this provided you point them in the right direction.”

“[…] use them to augment your abilities. My current favorite mental model is to think of them as an over-confident pair programming assistant who’s lightning fast at looking things up, can churn out relevant examples at a moment’s notice and can execute on tedious tasks without complaint.”

“When you start a new conversation you reset that context back to zero. This is important to know, as often the fix for a conversation that has stopped being useful is to wipe the slate clean and start again.”

“I’ll use prompts like “what are options for HTTP libraries in Rust? Include usage examples”—or “what are some useful drag-and-drop libraries in JavaScript? Build me an artifact demonstrating each one” (to Claude).”

But that’s a regular web search too, except for the needless generation of examples that were probably more accurate on the first page of the respective libraries’ docs. And if it weren’t, then would you want to use such a library? You’re kind of skipping the evaluation step, allowing the LLM to absorb the vibes of the original library. And do you really want a hallucinated example to make libraries with bad vibes more attractive?

“The good coding LLMs are excellent at filling in the gaps. They’re also much less lazy than me—they’ll remember to catch likely exceptions, add accurate docstrings, and annotate code with the relevant types.”

“You need to invest in strengthening those manual QA habits.”

Why manual? Hmmmm … are you not writing automated tests? I guess Willison wouldn’t be writing those, as he very clearly says that he mostly builds prototypes and tools for himself—not production code.

“I often wonder if this is one of the key tricks that people are missing—a bad initial result isn’t a failure, it’s a starting point for pushing the model in the direction of the thing you actually want.”

This has been my experience as well. However, when I know where I want to go, I’m looking for something that can get me there faster—and LLMs have often failed to do that. I don’t have that much “fun” trying to coax them in the right direction, though; I’d rather be writing code. I usually know what I want to write; I’m just looking for tools to help me write it faster. Often, the advanced refactoring tools in a modern IDE are faster and more reliable than working with Copilot (which is the LLM I’m using for work).

“This is why I care so much about the productivity boost I get from LLMs so much: it’s not about getting work done faster, it’s about being able to ship projects that I wouldn’t have been able to justify spending time on at all.”

“The trick here is to dump the code into a long context model and start asking questions. My current favorite for this is the catchily titled gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 , a preview of Google’s Gemini 2.0 Pro which is currently free to use via their API.”

Content Slop by David Gerrells

“ I am just so disappointed that with a tool like LLMs and gen AI the best examples people have are “an xyz thing which already exists” I cannot tell if it is because AI is just so bad it cannot do anything more interesting or if these idea people with VC money really do have so little creative juice.”

“I am being cheeky here, but everything in the dev space these days is all about shoveling out as much slop as possible. People brag about pushing work out so fast they forget to update the favicon for their web app. They say you are a bad “builder” if you decided that having a unique favicon a priority before shipping.”

“Here is a little succinct nugget, AI used by uninspired people will always result in uninspired output. The entire “builder” space today has less creativity in it than it had back when crypto was in vogue…”

AI can’t do your job by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“The commercial market for automated email summaries is likewise infinitesimal.

“The fact that CEOs overestimate the size of this market is easy to understand, since “CEO” is the most laptop job of all laptop jobs. Having a chatbot summarize the boss’s email is the 2025 equivalent of the 2000s gag about the boss whose secretary printed out the boss’s email and put it in his in-tray so he could go over it with a red pen and then dictate his reply.”

“[…] it’s even worse in government contexts, where the bots are deciding who gets Medicare, who gets food stamps, who gets VA benefits, who gets a visa, who gets indicted, who gets bail, and who gets parole.

“That’s because statistical inference is intrinsically conservative: an AI predicts the future by looking at its data about the past, and when that prediction is also an automated decision, fed to a Chaplinesque reverse-centaur trying to keep pace with a torrent of machine judgments, the prediction becomes a directive, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias.”

“[…] transforming key government functions into high-speed error-generating machines whose human minders are only the payroll to take the fall for the coming tsunami of robot fuckups.”

I saw a badge in my Amazon interface when I was cleaning up some lists. I thought it might have been a notification that something on my wishlist was available as a good price. That would have been helpful!

Instead, I saw the screenshot below.

Buy this book again!

For a second, I was excited to see that Sapkowski might have published another Witcher book but that’s not what happened. What happened is that Amazon was trying to fool me into buying a book that I already owned again. Either they are deliberately trying to scam me, or the AI systems that they have—three years into what is supposed to have been an earth-shattering revolution—are incapable or determine when it makes sense to “buy again” (paper towels, butter, etc.) and when it makes absolutely no sense to “buy again” (an E-book).

This is just another example that illustrates that the argument against AI is not against the technology or its current abilities. It is against how it is likely to be used. We are told that it, like so many technological revolutions before it, will make everyone’s lives better. That cannot be its purpose in our system. It will make a few people’s lives better. It will make Jeff Bezos richer because he can now have AIs come up with schemes for tricking me into buying something I literally don’t need—all without paying anything to anyone.

I know that there are those who don’t understand the previous two paragraphs because they can’t understand how anyone could be upset about this behavior on a web page. They will think that this is just how the world works. They are incapable of even imagining a world in which you’re not just constantly fighting scams that seek to claw away your value without returning any of its own. This is legalized theft, a war of attrition against an entire population that will eventually make a mistake, yielding to human fatigue, a weakness to which its attacker is incapable of succumbing.

Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

As several others confirmed in the comments, the memes all suck, whether generated by an AI, a human, or a combination.

Top memes from study

This is apparently a meme written by an actual human being.

“threw something into the trash can. hit it first try.”

WTF. That is not even cringe-worthy.

Here’s a robot one, with the same fist-pumping baby.

“Fridge was empty…found ice cream hidden in the back!”

That makes no sense. It’s fucking terrible.

The rest are just as bad. They would be terrible T-shirts, terrible postcards, … they are objectively terrible and unfunny memes. This entire study is garbage.

People will read the headline and tell all of their co-workers that AIs are funnier than humans now—all without having looked at a single meme to see if any of them are actually funny.

Leading Effective Engineering Teams in the Age of GenAI by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“Using AI in software development is not about writing more code faster; it’s about building better software. It’s up to you as a leader to define what “better” means and help your team navigate how to achieve it. Treat AI as a junior team member that needs guidance. Train folks to not over-rely on AI; this can lead to skill erosion. Emphasize “trust but verify” as your mantra for AI-generated code. Leaders should upskill themselves and their teams to navigate this moment.

“While AI offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance productivity and streamline workflows, it’s crucial to recognize its limitations and the evolving role of human expertise. The hard parts of software development − understanding requirements, designing maintainable systems, handling edge cases, ensuring security and performance − remain firmly in the realm of human judgment.”

“AI tools often excel at the initial stages of a task, handling approximately 70% effectively (e.g., generating boilerplate code). However, the remaining 30% − addressing edge cases, optimizing performance, and incorporating domain-specific logic − still demands human expertise.”

Look, some of this stuff is interesting but it’s also obvious from the length and the “everything but the kitchen sink” breadth that this dude wrote most of this article with an LLM. It’s 43 printed pages, with product descriptions for dozens of things that run to nearly a page apiece. There’s almost no way that he wrote this or vetted all of these tools. Not since last week, when he wrote his last giant screed about LLM-based tools. Scroll through it, see how much repetition there is. You’ll see 70% highlighted in bold a few times.

Honestly, this is just a sad waste of everyone’s time. Even I don’t have time to read this thing. I don’t feel bad because I don’t think the author has, either. Now that LLMs exist, there seems to be less of a focus on brevity. That’s really a shame.

Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)

“Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.”

“The technique represents an interesting defensive application of AI, protecting website owners and creators rather than threatening their intellectual property. However, it’s unclear how quickly AI crawlers might adapt to detect and avoid such traps, potentially forcing Cloudflare to increase the complexity of its deception tactics. Also, wasting AI company resources might not please people who are critical of the perceived energy and environmental costs of running AI models.”

Programming

From Speculation to Facts – Mastering Vertical Slicing in Software Engineering by Niko Heikkilä

“[…] many agile experts recommend changing the direction of slicing from horizontal to vertical.

“Reflecting on the example above, the team must work together on the entire technology stack to make the vertical slicing work. This exposes the team to two inevitable and hard-to-swallow facts:”

• You cannot deliver quality outcomes as promised when working in isolation.
• You must be comfortable working with the entire technology stack.

“Yes, this requires investment in both technical and soft skills. Learning to satisfy the two rules above takes time and creates short-term productivity dips. However, the long-term acceleration in throughput and quality from eliminating cross-team handoffs and speculation far outweighs this initial cost.

“Becoming a T-shaped (deep in one area but competent across many) professional is worth the effort. Yet, it doesn’t mean everyone becomes an expert in everything, which is an impossible and counterproductive goal. Instead, it means building enough shared knowledge that handoffs and specialists don’t block the work and aren’t isolated from the consequences of their decisions.”

“Note how I advise deploying to production since, in my experience, it’s the best way to gain honest feedback from actual users. Sometimes, you cannot do this for reasons, and you must set up a staging environment displaying fake user data and gain feedback from an internal “user” group. While this can work for you in many contexts, it is an inferior approach to genuine user feedback in a real production environment.”

The author seems to think that users are testers and that they have infinite goodwill. This is not true. Many will be scared away from further use by your half-baked implementation.

“Whatever your industry constraints, shorten the distance between building and learning.”

“Delivering incremental value creates multiple opportunities for the business to change direction without wasting development effort. After delivering the second slice, market research shows users care more about a different feature entirely.”

Beta users though. I want to use finished products.

“Vertical slicing may require touching the same code areas multiple times, but each touch improves the system based on facts rather than speculation.”

“[…] the root cause of our problems with late delivery often points to the fallacy of parallelising work to be carried out in isolation, failing to communicate by succumbing to speculation, and ultimately missing essential learning opportunities uncovered by facing the facts.”

“Pick your next feature and ask your team what the smallest vertical slice that delivers value is. Deliver it end-to-end, gather feedback, and observe how your understanding evolves. The compounding effect of this approach, from faster delivery to better products to happier teams, will make speculative communication feel just as outdated as the waterfall model. Your future self will thank you for making the switch.”

MAUI Lead Leaves to Work on .NET Aspire (and interview with Maddy Mondaquila) by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

At 45:57,

“[…] yesterday Dave [Fowler] and I were fighting about if the Visual Studio .gitignore is getting dumber and he was like, ‘who cares about that? Why would anyone care about that?’ And I was, like, it’s 400 lines, dude. Like, we’re ignoring things from […] code-coverage tools that were deprecated five years ago. And then, finally, I start sending him screenshots, and he’s, like, wait, why is that in there? Why is that in there?”

At 49:00,

“I absolutely loved the shout-out to “A Year without Santa Claus”. The plot summary was both accurate and possibly better than the actual movie (except for the musical number, which is worth the price of admission). I’m going to remember that Heat Miser vs. Cold Miser analogy. Working in a company where most people didn’t grow up in the U.S. will make it an uphill battle to use it effectively, but I will not be discouraged.”

At 51:49,

“The more I’ve gotten to like understand what customers are doing and talk to people and seeing the convoluted things that people do to develop an app, the more … I think I probably say once a week. I don’t know how anyone ships software. I don’t know how any of this stuff runs. This is all crazy to me, because everything is duct-taped together. Like, it is terrifying and you onboard someone and it takes like two weeks to get them to be able to run the app on their device.

“Like, what are we doing? What are we doing as a society? This is embarrassing.

“We should be able to do more than this and so that’s the thing about Aspire that excites me. We’re not trying to blackbox anything, right? We’re not trying to say, ‘oh, you use this and then your vendor-locked into this thing.’ It’s very much, like, we’re just trying to help you get off the ground and then you can grow out of it.

“I had done a lot with App Center […] and my fundamental issue with it […] was that you couldn’t grow up into a big-girl zure service, is what I used to say. Like, once you hit the limits of apps, you had to start over and I was like, with Firebase or something, everything’s actually just gcp and when you’re ready you go into a big-girl [service], Google’s like, you’re ready, you move on.

“And so, Aspire was built with that in mind. Like, if you use Aspire for orchestration and then you use the client Integrations to do your databases, then at some point you’re, like, you know what? I actually don’t like the way that they’re setting this up. I’m going to do it my own way. You don’t rip anything out. You just keep going.

“And so that was like a really really big sell for me early. And then deployment was a whole other world that I did not understand and the more I’ve looked at it, I don’t, … again, I don’t know how anyone gets anything done. Devops is insane. […] trying to bring that theory of, like, grow-out-able-ness instead of just replacing into deployment has been a very, very fun challenge to try and like tease apart.”

At 1:11:26,

“[…] we were talking to the Dutch police force and they like a completely polyglot shop so they have people running every language and there was one Java guy that came and and he was, like, so, like .NET’s, like, open-source and stuff now? And I was, like, yeah. And he was, like, but, like, really, like, it doesn’t have any ecosystem around it? And I was like what? YES and, like. there are real, like, expert, smart developers out there who just have no idea.”

This nearly deliberate ignorance about other programming languages, about tooling, about technique—it’s pervasive. There are people who care, and really want to find better combinations of tools and techniques to do their jobs better, to do what they love better. But there are just as many who just can’t even begin to imagine that there are other languages out there, that there are never versions of the language you use available, with features that would actually be useful to you. These features are provably useful. They make your code more resilient, readable, and maintainable. They do not care. They don’t even know that they don’t care. They stopped learning a long time ago. Their curiosity is stunted.

It’s a pleasure watching people like Maddy and Nick discussing something that they’re passionate about. I’m passionate about that thing too, but it’s mostly because I understand that there is a good way of doing something—writing tests with MSTest and their bog-standard assertion library and no test-case-generation infrastruction—and a better way of doing something—writing tests with NUnit and their elegant assertion library, excellent error messages, and myriad ways of producing test cases.

That’s just one example but it sets the tone. People can’t explain why they don’t think they need ReSharper. They can’t explain why they use VSC instead of WebStorm. They have no idea that the latter actually supports a useful multi-file renaming refactoring whereas VSC still struggles to do a useful rename within a single file. Everyone should be appalled and bitterly disappointed but, instead, they don’t even notice. They have no idea what they’re missing. So they don’t miss it.

Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different (Hacker News)

From the comments,

“[…cited from the original paper Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different by Andrew Gordon Wilson (Arxiv)] rather than restricting the hypothesis space to avoid overfitting, embrace a flexible hypothesis space, with a soft preference for simpler solutions that are consistent with the data. This principle can be encoded in many model classes, and thus deep learning is not as mysterious or different from other model classes as it might seem.”

“How does deep learning do this? The last time I was deeply involved in machine learning, we used a penalized likelihood approach. To find a good model for data, you would optimize a cost function over model space, and the cost function was the sum of two terms: one quantifying the difference between model predictions and data, and the other quantifying the model’s complexity. This framework encodes exactly a “soft preference for simpler solutions that are consistent with the data”, but is that how deep learning works? I had the impression that the way complexity is penalized in deep learning was more complex, less straightforward.”

Honestly, the explanation from the paper sounds suspiciously like “look for the right solution to avoid choosing an incorrect one,” but what do I know?

“The implication that any software is “mysterious” is problematic − there is no “woo” here − the exact state of the machine running the software may be determined at every cycle. The exact instruction and the data it executed with may be precisely determined, as can the next instruction. The entire mythos of any software being a “black box” is just so much advertising jargon, perpetuated by tech bros who want to believe they are part of some Mr. Robot self-styled priestly class.”

“You’re misunderstanding. A level of abstraction is necessary for operation of modern systems. There is no human alive who, given an intermediate step in the middle of some running learning algorithm, is able to understand and mentally model the full system at full man-made resolution, that is, down to the transistor level, on a modern CPU. Someone wishing to understand a piece of software in 2025 is forced to, at some point, accept that something somewhere “does what it says on the tin” and model it thusly rather than having a full understanding.”

Fun

Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)

At 13;57,

“This is why I hate liberals. It’s like liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, ‘oh my God. Can you believe? I’m getting out of the country.‘ I’m just like, ‘you’re going to leave the country cuz of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face? Who runs a bad car and has an obsolete social-media platform? You’re going to leave this country? Why doesn’t he leave? Why isn’t he stopped? What are we so afraid of? This guy who can’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag?”

I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her “move on” from talking about cancel culture and the complete bastardization of the “MeToo” movement into something that just rounded up so many people with unwelcome opinions to the same thing as Harvey Weinstein.

Gross is so fucking condescending, saying that the discussion would be worthwhile if it were “nuanced,” implying that Burr is not capable of having the discussion the right way. Burr says, “nuanced conversation is not my strong suit,” which is utterly belied by the relatively nuanced argument that he’d just delivered. But Gross happily agrees—because she’s a classic liberal and is only interested in having conversations with conclusions that she already holds.

Burr is so very in-control of this conversation, even revisiting his tirade and relating it to his character in Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that he’s currently starring in, who also tends to express himself as he intends but in a manner that is more offputting than he wanted.

He is not only one of the funniest people to have ever graced this planet, he is also quite insightful and empathetic and disarmingly intelligent, in the sense that he’s able to root out hypocrisy like a truffle-hunting pig.

He gets angry because he’s so frustrated with how people like Terry Gross seem to be so smugly satisfied with living in a giant stew of hypocrisy, with views that just happen to not only make them feel terrific about what wonderful people they are, they also coincidentally lead to themselves never feeling an financial or emotional discomfort.

They never ask “why me and not all of these other people?” They don’t really think about the answer, but if they would, they would say it’s because they deserve it for being so smart and amazing and useful. Bill knows that the answer is “luck”.

At 50:30,

“It’s funny to me, because I just thought it was hilarious that when that me-too thing came out, right? All of these guys, all of a sudden, were walking around and they had on these male-feminist buttons, right? And that was absolutely hysterical to me. And it was hysterical to me that women didn’t call out the BS of that. Because it’s like where was that button before this happened? You had your whole life to wear that button and you didn’t wear it until guys were getting thrown off the bridge…then all of a sudden, I’m a male-feminist—females first—and you fell for it! I … that’s a red flag. Let’s just take it out of men and women. I remember when I first got a manager, and an agent, and I thought oh boy oh boy now I don’t have to make the calls! Someone’s going to be making calls for me. It’s like no-one’s going to care about what you want more than you, so you got to empower yourself to do this.”

At 54:00

“ I will tell you, you know, if you want feminism in the real world, in the job world, you should also want it in a marriage—and divorce settlements. But I don’t see a lot of feminists sticking up for guys in those things. They don’t want to have equality when it comes to that.”

Terry was silent and moved back to the joke they were discussing but it’s an important point. I know a guy—let’s just call him a very good friend—whose wife got bored of his single-income and well-earning ass and cheated on him with a few people before finally telling him it was time to break up. She has custody, the house, the bigger car, and more than half of his salary for the next ten years. There was never going to a be a different outcome to that divorce. It’s just taken for granted.

At 55:00,

“You and I are very fortunate that we actually have jobs that we like cuz most people don’t. The toughest job in the world is going to a job you don’t want to do. The easiest thing is going to a job that you want to go to.”

Terry Gross eventually broke down and was a good sparring partner for Bill.

Conan O'Brien Needs a Doctor While Eating Spicy Wings by First We Feast / Hot Ones (YouTube)

He controls the show from start to finish. He invited his own fake doctor and set up fake bits to do throughout. He was obviously suffering and he did not stop, nor miss a step. He improved through the pain, to the point where I thought he might be faking it—but the show doesn’t let guests fake it.

At 15:00,

“I’d have […] said there’s no way there’s ever going to be a Charlie Rose show where you eat hot wings but I’ve […] I would have been wrong.”

At 23:30,

“Read. Read widely and read well. There’s comedy in the Old Testament. There’s comedy in the New Testament. You can read all kinds of stuff; just don’t lock yourself in to ‘it’s got to be some comedy from the last 10 years.‘ No. There’s great comedy out there, that was written a long time ago. What’s funnier than Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, you know? This is good stuff. The classics are funny, you know? You can read Chaucer’s Tales. They’re funny. There’s funny everywhere. Don’t be a snob. Look high and look low. A Mad Magazine is funny. There’s funny stuff online all the time. There’s no reason for us to try and exclude one category over another.

“These aren’t the rantings of someone who’s had some bad chemicals and overdid it to be funny and relevant to people who were at least 50 years younger than him.”

Israel Ranked 8th Happiest Country (The Onion)

“When you love what you do, joy follows.”

“I’d hate to know the atrocities the happier countries are committing.”