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Links and Notes for May 24th, 2024

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/25/three-strikes/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Three Strikes</a> <img src="{att_link}map_of_nations_recognizing_palestinian_statehood.jpeg" href="{att_link}map_of_nations_recognizing_palestinian_statehood.jpeg" align="none" caption="Map of nations recognizing Palestinian statehood." scale="40%"> Note the three lighter-green spots in Europe. Spain, Norway, and Ireland have joined the party. <bq>Bilal Hammoud, from the Intercultural Community Center in Dearborn, Michigan, said that when he and a group of Arab American leaders met with Antony Blinken last Friday, Blinken told them that if Palestine became a state, federal law would mandate the defunding of the UN, which could then defund the World Food Program, causing global starvation. Imagine threatening to hold Palestinians responsible for global starvation. Blinken may be the most malign Secretary of State since Dulles, including Kissinger.</bq> <bq>Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) and Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) have introduced a bill that would extend the same taxpayer benefits to Americans serving in the IDF as if they were serving in the US military According to a report in the Guardian, members of Israel’s security forces are tipping off settlers to the locations of humanitarian aid trucks delivering supplies to starving Palestinians in Gaza, enabling the groups to block and loot the convoys. Hardly surprising, since the Israeli security forces and the settlers have always operated symbiotically.</bq> <bq>Yanis Varoufakis: “I almost feel sorry for Germany’s political class. If Netanyahu is indicted by the ICC, they will have to arrest an Israeli PM if he steps on German soil. Will they then ban themselves from Germany on the grounds of antisemitism? [Yes, I confess to enjoying the delicious irony.]”</bq> <bq>In <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=1069">The March of Folly</a>, Barbara Tuchman quotes George Kennan’s profile of the men who managed the Vietnam War: “They were ‘like men in a dream,’ incapable of ‘any realistic assessment of their own acts.’” Seems like an apt description of the Biden/Blinken team.</bq> <bq>ICC prosecutor Karim Khan during a CNN interview Monday: “I had some elected leader speak to me and be very blunt, this court [ICC] was built for Africa and thugs like Putin.” Never dreamed I’d hear a careerist like Khan speak this openly about the pressure he was under to not seek indictments against “Western” leaders. I guess that letter from the 8 GOP senators threatening Khan, his staff and their families backfired…</bq> <bq>Frederich Mertz, leader of Germany’s rightwing Christian Democratic Union, said “The ICC is intended for despots and authoritarians not democratically elected governments.” In a rational world (not this one), nations that present themselves as democracies should be held to a higher standard of conduct than those that don’t. But in fact, they don’t want to be held to any standards at all.</bq> <bq>Why the youth movement isn’t being fooled by the mainstream media: The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 70 years old. Fox News is 69, and CNN is 67. (Even MTV is 51 years old.)</bq> <bq>Norman Finkelstein on the meaning of the ICC request for arrest warrants on Netanyahu and Gallant: “The ICC decision was a long time coming. Karim Khan is a complete tool of the West. A revolting human being. And he only did it because of the pressure being exerted by the whole human rights and legal community. And the fact that the entire UN system had documented that there was a man-made famine in Gaza. He didn’t know how to avoid it and he couldn’t avoid it. Article III of the Geneva Convention counts as an act of genocide to be complicit in genocide. It’s called complicity in genocide. If Israel is found guilty of genocide, then Biden is guilty of complicity in genocide.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/saudi-arabia-9-11-al-bayoumi-revelations/" source="Jacobin" author="Branko Marcetic">It Really, Really Looks Like Saudi Arabia Did 9/11</a> <bq>These are just some of the most eye-popping revelations contained in the filing that builds on previous disclosures , all making it more and more undeniable that the 9/11 attacks couldn’t have happened without the direct, deliberate efforts of the Saudi government and its officials. In short, they establish that a Saudi intelligence asset paid by the Saudi ambassador and with numerous official Saudi official contacts not only helped get two of the future 9/11 hijackers set up in the United States, but was apparently closely involved in the actual planning of the attacks — to the point of casing out one of their potential targets.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/21/chris-hedges-the-slow-motion-execution-of-julian-assange-continues/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">The Slow-Motion Execution of Julian Assange Continues</a> <bq>These slow-motion executioners have not yet completed their work. Toussaint L’Ouverture , who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner. He was locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.</bq> <bq>Prolonged imprisonment, which the granting of this appeal perpetuates, is the point. The 12 years Julian has been detained — seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and over five in high-security Belmarsh Prison — have been accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, as well as unrelenting threats, pressure, prolonged isolation, anxiety and constant stress. The goal is to destroy him.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/18/ray-mcgovern-russia-china-two-against-one/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ray McGovern">Russia & China — Two Against One</a> <bq>Putin has undoubtedly briefed Xi on the U.S. missile sites already in Romania and Poland that can launch what Russians call “offensive strike missiles” with flight time to Moscow of less than 10 minutes. Putin surely has told Xi about the inconsistencies in U.S. statements regarding intermediate-range nuclear missiles.</bq> <bq>If NATO country hotheads send “trainers” to Ukraine, the prospect of a military dust-up is ever present. What Biden needs to know is that, if it comes to open hostilities between Russia and the West, he is likely to face more than just saber rattling in the South China Sea — and the specter of a two-front war. The Chinese know they are next in line for the ministrations of NATO/East. Indeed, it is no secret that the Pentagon sees China as enemy No. 1. According to the DOD’s National Defense Strategy , “defense priorities are first, defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”</bq> <bq>Here is a snippet drawn from Xi’s remarks:<bq>We signed joint statements on enhancing the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation for a new era…. China and Russia have served as a role model by showing others ways of building state-to-state ties of a new kind and working together as two major neighboring powers … based on the principles of respect and equality.</bq>Xi spoke in this vein for several minutes. Here is a little of what Putin then contributed:<bq>Our talks have reaffirmed that Russia and China have similar or identical views on many international and regional issues. Both countries have an independent and sovereign foreign policy. We are working together to create a fairer and more democratic multipolar world order based on the central role of the U.N. and its Security Council, international law, cultural and civilizational diversity, as well as a calibrated balance of interests of all members of the international community.</bq></bq> <bq>Apart from what is in it, what is conspicuously absent? There is no mention of the West, is there? The tone is strikingly self-confident and entirely self-referential. In my read, the two leaders could not have more clearly if subtly demonstrated that the new world order of which they speak is to be an initiative the non–West will advance whether or not the Atlantic world approves or wishes to participate in its construction.</bq> <bq>Zhou’s Principles, which were adopted by the Non–Aligned Movement at the famous conference Sukarno hosted at Bandung in 1955, are simply stated: respect for the sovereignty of others, respect for territorial integrity, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, a commitment to acting for mutual benefit, and a commitment to peaceful coexistence. I have detected these as subtext in Sino–Russian communiqués since the two sides issued the “Joint Statement” two years ago.</bq> <bq>Can you find “competing agendas” in anything that has come out of the summit to date? I cannot. These are Western-centric fabrications intended to sustain the broadly held impression that Russia and China are malign adversaries, while obscuring the very salient fact that the only thing China and Russia oppose when they look Westward is hegemonic power.</bq> <bq>If Xi and Putin wanted to display the depth and intimacy of Sino–Russian relations—altogether their organic nature—they could not have done better than to stroll around Harbin like a couple of companionable, pose-for-the-cameras boulevardiers, as they did Friday.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/05/26/to-believe-to-belong/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">To Believe To Belong</a> <bq>[...] students who embraced the lie that Israel was the oppressor and the Palestinians were the oppressed. It was students who believed the deluge of propaganda pictures and videos that rarely showed what they claimed to show, rarely held up to scrutiny, all designed to play their shallow emotion and feigned claim to be on the side of morality.</bq> <bq>It was students whose twisted, childish grasp of facts turned terrorists into freedom fighters, who made excuses for why rape was, this time, justifiable.</bq> Oh, the irony. Greenfield is back on his little hill, banging his little drum, completely unaware that he's describing himself. He has no idea how the state of Israel works. He just sees "Jewish == Good" and picks a side, assuming that he has the moral high ground. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrMkSN-N0mI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/QrMkSN-N0mI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Matt Orfalea" caption="Laws of War"> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/john-v-walsh/2024/05/26/the-danger-is-not-china-but-the-fake-china-threat/" author="John Walsh" source="Antiwar.com">The Danger Is Not China But the Fake China Threat</a> <bq author="Joseph Solis-Mullen">There is one element of truth to the fake China Threat, however; the existence of an independent China (or Russia) is a threat to Washington’s accustomed ability to do more or less whatever it wants, wherever it wants. But the existence of an independent China is already a fact. Refusal on the part of Washington to accept it will cause more than theoretical problems, and therein lies the real danger. </bq> <bq>[...] he proceeds to a view of how Beijing sees the world, in other words an attempt to see the world as our official enemies do, one of the main requisites for a peaceful world, all too often forgotten by would be champions of peace. </bq> <bq>Either China is very strong, he says, “in which case antagonizing China over issues directly in its backyard is stupid; or actually China is quite weak in which case antagonizing China in its backyard is unnecessary and counterproductive.” He continues, “In any event is hard to hard to imagine how the life of the average American would be improved by courting conflict with China, while it is quite easy to imagine countless ways in which it could be made worse.”</bq> <bq>One of the most powerful sections of the book is chapter 8, “Uyghurs, Genocides and Realities,” where the Uyghur “genocide” hoax is debunked. One need only visit Xinjiang, home of the Uyghurs, and compare it to Gaza, to see that the charge of genocide is wildly off the mark. It is easy to do this since China is encouraging tourism in Xinjiang. Most notably, Solis-Mullen points out, the UN has not charged China with genocide despite entreaties from the US. And the US State Department seems to have dropped the term, at least for now.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-us-is-discrediting-all-arguments" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The US Is Discrediting All Arguments For Why It Should Lead The World</a> <bq>The entire premise behind the empire’s containment strategies, military encirclement and cold war brinkmanship with China is that obviously the PRC needs to be stopped from rising and displacing the US as the global leader, and arguments about the need to control Russia and Iran by any means necessary arise from the same premise. These arguments are accepted as a given by many on the basis that the US is a free and democratic country which promotes liberal values and opposes authoritarianism, so of course it’s better to have the US in charge of world affairs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/conspiracies-do-happen" author="Norman Finkelstein" source="Substack">Conspiracies do happen</a> <bq>The British Guardian reported today that Israeli secret services were blackmailing former ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. Already four years ago I wrote a full book documenting Bensouda’s disgraceful record of whitewashing Israel.</bq> The first comment on the short and factual post by a user named Iqbal reads: <bq>You (and yer seed) will most certainly be under a gharqad umbrella when Yahweh carries out another Q17 clearout. So will the blumenthal, mate, greenwalds and Co. Many warners have come before you and they will not heed as usual, they have a track record.</bq> This comment is barely coherent, to be honest. But there is a certain menace to it, no? From singling out people of <iq>yer seed</iq> to mentioned <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gharqad" source="Wikipedia">Gharqad</a>, which is an Islamic eschatological concept in which some Jewish people follow a false prophet. <iq>Q17</iq> refers to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Isra%27" source="Wikipedia">Al-Isra'</a>, the 17th chapter of the Quran. I am unsure what relevance that has to the author. The other names refer to Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, and Glenn Greenwald, who are, presumably, all considered to be traitorous, self-hating Jews because they are outspoken truth-seeking journalists instead of mouthpieces for a Jewish regime. I honestly don't know what to make of this person's comment, but it's very difficult to imagine that it is filled with goodwill toward Norman. <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/05/29/dilettantes-at-war/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">Dilettantes At War</a> I know most people would have given up on him by now, but I've stuck with it. He's pushing it, though. I can't tell the difference between his line of argumentation here and that of any other war-hawk, armchair-general. If his side is done-to, it's the most horrible act of terror that has ever occurred in history (examples are 9--11, October 7 for Greenfield) whereas any terror for which his team is responsible is considered to be simply war, unavoidable and eternal. He's a buffoon. <bq>From the safety and comfort of a tent on a college quad, it’s easy to argue ad nauseam about the horrors of war and why they shouldn’t happen. And it’s similarly easy to do the same from the oval office and halls of Congress.</bq> One could easily argue that it's also very easy to argue about the inevitability of war from the comfort of an outrageously expensive leather chair in an office in NY, but I'm almost certain that Greenfield hadn't thought of that. As usual, Greenfield doesn't consider any of the history of how we've gotten to the point where wars are considered existential. His refusal to examine the reasons guarantees his continued support for the inevitability of war. There is nothing stopping him from supporting the next moves by empire that will provoke the next wars. Ukraine cannot be considered blameless here. Ukraine was not just wearing a short skirt to a bar. Ukraine was complicit in threatening Russia. It was illegal for Russia to invade, but it was not unforeseeable. It was not only foreseeable, it was the desired result. Someone, somewhere, made a decision that what Ukraine was doing was worth it. Someone decided that there was no other way, that Russia's warnings/threats were outweighed by the upside. I don't think that there was a moral upside; the only obvious upside would be for a small clique in Ukraine and in Bethesda. The rest of Ukraine has gotten a much rawer deal than if they'd managed to avoid war. In Gaza, it's also just given that there is no history older than eight months ago. The inevitability arises from the simple-mindedness of the viewpoint. <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2024/05/30/a-missouri-police-officer-shot-a-blind-and-deaf-dog-now-hes-being-sued/" author="C.J. Ciaramella " source="Reason">A Missouri Police Officer Shot a Blind and Deaf Dog. Now He's Being Sued.</a> <bq>Woodson killed Teddy, [a] 13-pound blind and deaf Shih Tzu, shortly after finding the dog wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19.</bq> <img src="{att_link}teddy.jpg" href="{att_link}teddy.jpg" align="none" caption="Teddy" scale="50%"> Why is shooting an animal that's barely moving such an obvious solution? What the actual fuck is wrong with people? Was it really exhibiting such strange behavior that you had to just execute it on the spot? Why couldn't he snare a 13-year-old blind dog? How fucking incompetent can you be and still have people supporting you? How can you not see that those eyes have cataracts on them? <bq>[...] it would have been embarrassing to admit the real reason that the officer resorted to using his gun: He was unable to snare a blind, deaf dog and was too poorly trained to come up with a solution besides shooting a harmless animal.</bq> Some people are trying to defend this man's actions, but that dog was sniffing around the edge of a giant field, doing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for an older, blind dog. Check out the badge-cam video at <a href="https://youtu.be/K_BRQKCmpCA?t=330">05:30</a>. As I said, you can see its cataracts. The officer just point-blank shot it and went on with his day. There were so many other solutions. He just shot it because that's what some people do. They solve everything with a gun. It's just sick. This happens to people all the time, too. Cops just shoot deaf and blind people for not responding to their commands or gestures properly. They shoot or tase people who don't acknowledge their orders as expected, even if they can hear them. These kind of cops are a menace and should not be doing that job. Why the fuck is an asshole cop who doesn't care about other people's dogs showing up anyway? Don't they have animal control in that town? Or was that cut out of the budget because the police needed more overtime? <bq>[...] last year in Missouri a police officer shot a family's dog and dumped it in a ditch. Similar to Hunter's case, the dog had gotten loose during a storm, and a neighbor called to report it missing. In another case last year, Detroit cops killed a woman's dog and dumped its body in a trash can. An Arkansas woman also filed a lawsuit after a cop accidentally shot her while trying to kill her Pomeranian—a toy breed that resembles a Koosh ball with legs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/30/axhe-m30.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Defending Rafah massacre, White House vows to defy “public opinion”</a> <bq><bq>The president does not make decisions or execute policy based on public opinion polling. He bases his decisions on our own national security interests.</bq>This statement is a public admission on the part of the government that it is consciously acting in defiance of the views of the vast majority of the population, which overwhelmingly opposes the US sponsorship of the Gaza genocide.</bq> <bq>Kishore added, “Someone could remind Mr. Kirby of the Declaration of Independence, which states, ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...’”</bq> <bq>The Gaza genocide marks a significant turning point in the embrace of naked criminality abroad and dictatorship at home. The massive crimes being carried out in Gaza are in preparation for even greater crimes to come, amid a frenzied drive to escalate war all over the world. Unrestrained militarism and imperialist barbarism are being promoted by all of the institutions of class rule, with the media playing its appointed role.</bq> <bq>[NY Times columnist Bret] Stephens wrote:<bq>Nations… tend to canonize leaders who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.</bq>Stephens’ statement virtually plagiarizes a 1939 speech by Adolf Hitler before the German high command, in which he urged the German military to commit war crimes and defy the internationally recognized laws of war. Hitler declared:<bq>Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/mass-slaughtering-civilians-to-stop" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Mass Slaughtering Civilians To Stop Terrorism</a> <bq>The thing about claiming Trump would be worse on Gaza is that you don’t even know that’s true. It’s a completely baseless and unfalsifiable assertion. Biden’s adamant refusal to put up any resistance at all to Israeli insanity is such a drastic deviation from the norm for US presidents that it’s entirely possible replacing him with almost anyone would be an improvement.</bq> <bq>There’s no way to know, since both Biden and Trump constantly lie about what their actual positions are.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://x.com/caitoz/status/1795589096712405066" author="Sam Sokol" source="Twitter">Tweet</a> <bq>Nikki Haley in Sderot claims without proof that Oct. 7 was “helped with Russian intelligence. And it was fueled by money from China...China’s been funding Iran the entire time. Russia’s intelligence helped them know where everything was. Iran helped get them trained."</bq> Nikki Haley is absolutely batshit. She's also a depraved monster. She is the norm, though. Remember that. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/why-celebrities-arent-speaking-up" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Why Celebrities Aren't Speaking Up About Gaza</a> <bq>Nobody becomes a superstar all on their own; it requires an extensively collaborative relationship with many individuals, and many of the most important of these are in positions of great wealth and power and have no desire to see socialism or anti-imperialism threaten their kingdoms by gaining a foothold in the political realities of their nation. This creates an impressively thorough gatekeeping system which filters out any clear-eyed rebels who might otherwise shine their way to the top. Of course the filtration system isn’t perfect; sometimes someone sneaks through, or, more likely, is waved through and then has a political awakening after achieving stardom. But for every Susan Sarandon and Roger Waters there are a hundred enthusiastic celebrity supporters of the status quo, and a thousand others who just stay silent on all matters of real importance.</bq> <bq>Just making someone a multimillionaire and giving them a cushy lifestyle is enough to make them loyal to the political status quo of the land. The mere fact that the empire is capitalist and allows the wealthy to live like gods ensures that most people who ascend to stardom will be heavily biased in favor of the system which allows for that lifestyle, and everything they say publicly will reflect this. This gives the empire a massive propaganda bullhorn which creates an information landscape where all the biggest voices speak as though the system is working perfectly, and the voices of all the ordinary people whose experience tells them otherwise are drowned out.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/26/war-surgery-is-not-peace-surgery-an-american-doctor-in-gaza/" author="Catherine Mullaly" source="Scheer Post">War Surgery Is Not Peace Surgery: An American Doctor in Gaza</a> <bq>Scanning the beds and the CT images, Dr. Sidhwa quickly realized there were three tracks of ICU patients. First, the “bullet wound” patients, most often to the head, who were often intubated and unresponsive. Second, the “post-explosive” patients, with exposed and broken bones and external rods poking out from under the sheets. Third were the “DKA” patients, Type 1 diabetics in coma-hovering states. In wartime, the Gaza European Hospital was filled with civilian post-explosive trauma patients and insulin-dependent diabetics.</bq> <bq>Dr. Sidhwa described the scene on one of his many walks to and from the Medan: “It’s just squalor everywhere. Everything is disgusting. Tents on both sides, densely lined, 7, 8, 9, 10, people living in each one. Some of them are made out of tarp. Some of them are actual camping tents. A lot of them have, you know, a lot of those are sewn together from sacks of flour.”</bq> <bq>I’m told there’s 20,000 people on this, on the hospital grounds. And they share four latrines. You can imagine the smell. And it’s literally right in front of the hospital main entrance, which is also a giant tent city.”</bq> There's a horrifying picture of a girl who survived a bomb blast. The damage to her body is nearly inconceivable. Both of her buttocks are torn open in giant gashes. One of those gashes extends all the way through her hamstring and past the knee. There is no much necrotic skin still waiting to be debrided. She is four years old. Anesthesia and painkillers are scarce. <bq>“We found a young girl, four years old, on the ward today,” he texted on March 30. “There’s an acronym here. She’s a WCNSF. It means ‘wounded child, no surviving family.’ “ “This girl’s legs were so severely injured that there’s about a three-inch portion of her femur [long leg bone] missing, giant necrotic [dead tissue] wounds on both of her buttocks and the back of her left thigh. Maggots growing, and it is terrible,” he added. She was taken to the operating room and worked on for three hours. She survived.</bq> <bq>War surgery is not peace surgery. And broken bones in war, from blasts or penetrating missiles are “dirty,” as surgeons call it. They require repeated cleaning out of the dead tissue as well as metal rod scaffolding outside the body to secure the bones until the muscles and soft tissues heal. After surviving death or amputation, broken bones in war require grafting, reconstruction and rehabilitation: a grueling road.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/ding-dong-the-witch-still-leads-the" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Ding, Dong, the Witch Still Leads the Polls</a> <bq>[...] how many Americans who don’t even like Trump might now be tempted to vote for the guy, given how obvious a snow job the case was. The New York indictment was a bespoke prosecution designed specifically for Trump, a Falsifying Records in the First Degree charge that required the “intent to commit another crime.” According to prosecutor Joshua Steinglass, the other offense was New York Election Law Section 17-152, “Conspiracy to promote or prevent election,” defined as “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” Even Maddow’s MSNBC called this legal theory of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “eyebrow-raising” and “novel,” which should tell you a lot. The notion that paying hush money to a porn star (which you are legally allowed to do, irrespective of whether your spouse should let you get away with it) constitutes “conspiring” to “prevent the election of any person” is the Mother of All Stretches.</bq> But they got it done. Ten hours of deliberation and the jury was able to easily decide on what every lawyer I've read called a highly convoluted and "novel" application of what are, originally, misdemeanors, but which have somehow, magically, been promoted to 34 felonies. This is the stuff of authoritarian dreams. Stalin is smiling indeed. This is how it's done. Trump was railroaded and it's not surprising that his increases his appeal among poor Americans, who very much know what it's like to have to plea out to a yard-long list of bullshit, trumped-up and made-up charges. Is he guilty of bookkeeping fraud? Probably! Are those felonies? Nope. Should they be? Maybe! It's just very, very fishy when the person that the ruling party very desperately wants to convict is somehow also the first person to be rich and also magically convicted with more crime than he actually committed. <bq>Hillary Clinton got mere fines for a far more serious records offense in an almost exactly similar context: calling the funding of the infamous Steele dossier “legal and compliance consulting.” That’s hiding a role in an electorally significant public fraud, and though I’m not sure that offense warranted jail, it’s certain Trump’s “crime” didn’t, if Hillary’s doesn’t even go to court. This was one non-crime, serving as the predicate for conspiracy to commit another non-crime, which incidentally was artificially split in pieces to add years and penalties. The 34 counts are another absurdity [...]</bq> But Hillary's probably going to go right back out on the interview circuit after Trump's conviction, instead of being worried about anything at all. <bq>Washington pols always see elections through a rearview mirror, imagining candidates create supporters, not vice versa. It comes from the belief that voters are sheep and have no beliefs beyond what their political betters instruct them to feel.</bq> <bq>I’ve long made the mistake of believing there’s a 4-D chess angle to all this I’m not seeing, that somehow it isn’t what it looks like on the surface: a political effort to jail an opponent for a technicality, done to influence voters they don’t understand. I’ve refused to believe anyone could be stupid enough to think that would work. But it doesn’t seem like it can be anything else but what it looks like. They really are that dumb, and God help us.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2024/05/31/the-prosecutions-story-about-trump-featured-several-logically-impossible-claims/" author="Jacob Sullum" source="Reason">The Prosecution's Story About Trump Featured Several Logically Impossible Claims</a> <bq>A New York Times editorial concedes that "many experts" have "expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor." Yet the Times also claims the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." How did records created in 2017 "prevent voters from learning" about the Daniels tryst before they cast their ballots the previous year?</bq> <bq>"A payoff like this is not illegal by itself," the Times concedes. "What makes it illegal is doctoring business records to mask its true purpose, which prosecutors said was to hide the story from the American people to help Mr. Trump get elected." Again, the "doctoring" of business records happened in 2017.</bq> <bq>According to one theory of "unlawful means," Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. But since Cohen filed those allegedly fraudulent tax returns in 2018, after Trump had been president for more than a year, his misrepresentation could not possibly have helped Trump win the election.</bq> <bq>[...] instead of zeroing in on those weaknesses, Trump's lawyers, presumably at his behest, were determined to deny everything, starting with Daniels' story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.</bq> <bq>If Trump had been willing to concede some of the prosecution's allegations, his lawyers could have focused on the shaky legal argument for charging him with felonies. They not only failed to do that in a cogent way; insisted on jury instructions that ruled out convicting Trump of misdemeanors rather than felonies.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlQy6Hw-VYA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JlQy6Hw-VYA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Trump Trial Guilty Verdict: The Legal and Political Implications Ahead of the 2024 Election"> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2024/06/01/president-donald-trumps-manhattan-convictions-are-unconstitutional/" author="Steven Calabresi" source="Reason">President Donald Trump's Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional</a> <bq>[...] altering business records under New York State law is only a crime if it is done in violation of some other law. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged that the documents were allegedly falsely altered to conceal an expenditure of money in violation of federal campaign finance laws or in pursuance of winning the 2016 election by defrauding the voters of information they had a right to know.</bq> According to the citations above, the expenditures were concealed in 2017 and 2018, after Trump had already been president for a year. How would those have influenced the election? <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/like-so-much-else-the-fuss-over-international" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Like So Much Else, The Fuss Over 'International Law' Is Really About Narrative Control</a> <bq>The actions of the ICC and ICJ are useful only insofar as they help disabuse people of the delusional belief that western powers care one iota about international law, and in that they make it clear to the whole world that Israel and its powerful western allies are openly violating the rules they pretend to stand by. It’s useful as a counter-narrative against the official imperial narrative about what’s happening, but it’s not useful as a legal construct or means of ending Israeli atrocities in and of itself. That’s why you see US and Israeli officials raging and fuming about the actions of the ICJ and the ICC. It’s not because they’re worried those courts will be able to enforce the rulings they make, it’s because it weakens their control of the narrative. These rulings are being made in front of the entire world, and they say very bad things about what Israel and its allies have been doing in Gaza.</bq> <bq>Anything that causes the empire managers to lose their grip on the dominant stories people are telling about what’s happening in the world is a direct threat to imperial power, because it shakes people out of the propaganda-induced stupor which causes them to consent to the imperial status quo.</bq> <bq>[...] while Gaza will not be saved by any actions by international courts, it just might be saved by enough people waking up from the narrative control of our rulers to force real change.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx15nL1KUJc" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/fx15nL1KUJc" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Glenn Greenwald" caption="Ari Shaffir Confronts Howie Mandel About Jewish Victimhood: Glenn Greenwald Reacts"> <bq>I'm not saying it never happens---everything happens. You know, there're actually massacres of black people by white nationalists. Those are things that happen. One went to Buffalo and killed 10 people on a supermarket. Another went into a church in South Carolina and gunned down, I believe, nine or 10 people because they were black. There was recently a similar hate crime in Jacksonville. But no conservative says, 'oh if there's an incident that you can point to where black people are being slaughtered from being black, that must mean that we have a racism epidemic in the United States, and we have to rearrange our laws.' No. They'll mock you if you say that. But where are those---obviously nothing like that has happened since October 7th---but where is any of this? These are completely fabricated claims. And he's right that it all comes from social media, just people repeating it over and over and over.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/red-lobster-bankruptcy-private-equity/" source="Jacobin" author="David Moscrop">Red Lobster Had to Close So That Rich People Could Get Paid</a> <bq>Red Lobster was a target because, as Doctorow notes, “the people who patronize them have little power in our society.” It’s a rotten deal for anyone who loved a nice meal at a decent price, and a great bargain for corporate raiders who couldn’t care less about anything or anyone beyond dividends and bonuses.</bq> <bq>The more heft you have to throw around, the more capital you have access to, the easier it is to direct the market in ways favorable to those who already hold most of the marbles. Once you reach a certain scale, it’s easy to decide which companies live, which ones die, who wins, and who loses. Of course, working-class folks are the ones who tend to lose.</bq> <bq>Whether it’s Walmart or Amazon or Ticketmaster or whomever, the concentration of power under capitalism is the rule, not the exception, as Karl Marx clearly explained more than 150 years ago. Private equity, with its ability to shape and dismantle markets, is merely another manifestation of this fundamental dynamic.</bq> <bq>[...] the trajectory of private equity leads to conditions reminiscent of Soviet-style bread lines, albeit without even the pretense of universal health care, free higher education, subsidized housing, or job guarantees.</bq> <bq>These firms exist not to serve businesses or consumers, and certainly not to serve workers, but to make a quick buck for investors who tend to be many times removed from the communities and realities their decisions affect.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/23/patrick-lawrence-the-price-of-bidens-new-china-tariffs/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Price of Biden’s New China Tariffs</a> <bq>With all those union chiefs around him, Biden went long, very long, on how this sprawl of import taxes will be to the benefit of American workers. That is not what this radical turn in policy is about, and I wish those labor leaders understood this better than they appear to have done. I wish they had thought better of standing behind a president whose mind is on things far distant from the welfare of their memberships. The Chinese will not pay these tariffs, as various economists point out. Those union leaders’ dues-paying constituents will.</bq> <bq>Closely related to this is a now-declared effort to protect the backsides and profits of American corporations no longer capable of dominating the globalized economy they so eagerly insisted upon but a couple of decades ago.</bq> <bq>One, the policy cliques in Washington and the corporations they serve are nearly frantic as the consequences of decades’ worth of careless economic policy, driven by greed and misapprehension, return to haunt them. Keeping a competitor out by erecting walls made of import tariffs, when viewed from this perspective, is the desperate choice of people who simply cannot measure up to a moment that requires more intellect, imagination and courage than they can summon. Two, the working and middle classes in America were sacrificed to those decades of corporate greed, as anyone paying attention at the time could discern without difficulty. They will be sacrificed a second time now, as Washington blunders on, this time in an effort to bring back what it decided 40 years ago it was all right to give away.</bq> <bq>It seems almost too naïve to believe anyone took this stuff seriously, and maybe it was all along simply political cover for the greedfest it was used to justify.</bq> <bq>Autor and his two co-authors calculate that the wholesale migration of manufacturing to China had, by the time they wrote, destroyed a million manufacturing jobs and two and a half times that many when they counted jobs dependent on manufacturing. It is a mystery to me why what American corporations and those in government serving them have done in the service of sheer profit lust came as a shock to anyone.</bq> <bq>[...] those who shape opinion in the U.S. have an old habit of casting America as the done-to, and those they do not like as the unjust doers.</bq> Ever the victim. Like their allies. <bq>Beware when The Times slips into the passive voice, readers: Subtly, subliminally, very effectively, you are about to be misled.</bq> <bq>Luttwak answered this way. (The hammer is my example, not his.) The Wal–Mart hammer is “cheaply expensive,” he would say: You get a $3 hammer, but the hardware store doesn’t survive, and with enough of these sorts of decisions your downtown doesn’t either. In time things go to shabby. The $14 hammer, on the other hand, is “expensively cheap:” You pay more, yes, but in return you also get a town with a working commercial district, a Main Street to stroll, and altogether a sturdier community. The good people of Tennessee are better off, too.</bq> <bq>A manufacturing base, as any good economic history will tell you, arises out of a sort of unified, societal thrust involving culture, social organization, shared identity, shared aspiration. It cannot be declared in the Rose Garden and put immediately in place: It is accreted over generations of development. It requires an educational base that the U.S. has also done well ruining.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2024/05/30/argentina-teams-up-with-el-salvador-to-boost-crypto-adoption/" author="Christian Britschgi" source="Reason">Argentina Teams Up With El Salvador To Boost Crypto Adoption</a> <bq>El Salvador has embarked on several ambitious projects to promote bitcoin use, including creating a bitcoin city powered by geothermal energy, issuing bitcoin bonds, and offering expedited citizenship to bitcoin investors. To date, the country has mined 474 bitcoin and holds 5,756 bitcoin, valued at just under $400 million, according to a website that tracks El Salvador's bitcoin portfolio. Bukele has said he plans to keep growing El Salvador's holdings by buying one bitcoin every day.</bq> A bitcoin city! Imagine! The wonders of the modern age. What's next? A bat-boy? Step 1: buy BitCoin Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit! A can't-fail, people-first approach to running a country for its citizens. <bq>Argentina has also seen a surge in cryptocurrency adoption as its citizens seek refuge from the peso's depreciation and soaring inflation. And since Javier Milei became president of Argentina last year, the crypto sector has seen positive developments. Just a month after Milei took office, Minister of Foreign Affairs Diana Mondino legalized the use of bitcoin for settling contracts.</bq> Milei takes office, tanks the economy, then offers BitCoin as a rescue. This is going to turn out really, really well for the majority of Argentinian citizens. Be on the lookout for Argentina and El Salvador to be major economic powerhouses in the next decade or so, riding the powerful wave of Bitcoin. <bq>News of this collaboration between the two countries sent ripples through the crypto market, pushing bitcoin's value past the $70,000 mark. A formal partnership between Argentina and El Salvador could signal a major shift in Latin America's approach to digital assets, paving the way for broader crypto adoption.</bq> And remember kids, if it makes money for the right people, then it's a good thing. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZVngnr8KN4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/pZVngnr8KN4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sabine Hossenfelder" caption="Forget GPT-4o's voice -- the real problem with AI is us"> The video was fine but 05:05, she says, <bq>[...] the much more obvious first problem is not the AGI but the people who own it. They will suddenly have enormous power and influence because their AGI will tell them exactly what they need to say and do to be convincing. And humans are very predictable, especially because they believe they are not. Maybe the Chinese government will just convince us that democracy is for the weak. Or maybe Putin will convince us that we should all join the Soviet Empire. Or someone will convince us that he’s God’s son and we need to follow his ten commandments.</bq> This is after she started the video showing that about 90% of investment into AI comes from the U.S. It's always disappointing to see the host highly trained minds be so completely brain-dead on politics that they spit out stupidities that could come from talking heads on any American mainstream news channel. The Chinese government is anti-democracy? Have you looked around, Sabine? You live in fucking Germany, FFS. Could you maybe spend an iota of your brain power paying attention to what's going on in your own damned country, democracy- and free-speech-wise? And then there's the chestnut about the <iq>Soviet Empire</iq>. She doesn't even know that that's been gone for thirty years? Or does she think Putin's trying to bring it back? She's might be a brilliant physicist, but she's also as politically stupid as the average American. Congratulations. An interesting side-note is that she probably didn't even notice she was saying such stupid things because they are so self-evident to her. This is how she and everyone she knows thinks. The U.S. is their beleaguered ally. China is trying to extend its ruthless authoritarian grip on the world. Their ally Russia is trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire. This is their fantasy world. The last 90 seconds of this 07:18-minute video is a commercial, so there's that. <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense</a> <bq>Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification">boobytrapped IoT gadgets</a>, planet-destroying <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho">cryptocurrency scams</a>, <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/">NFT frauds</a>, or planet-destroying <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain">AI frauds</a>.</bq> <bq>I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel The Lost Cause and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency. I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do you think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.</bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/05/all-american-crack-up-hollywood-cinema/" source="Jacobin" author="Eileen Jones">The All-American Crack-Up in 1960s Hollywood Cinema</a> <bq>In the 1960s, more and more filmmakers were recognizing America as a place that seems designed to send its citizens right over the edge. The line-up of films includes cult favorites (Pretty Poison, Targets), interesting experiments by respected directors (Faces, Lilith, Uptight, The Chase), and very obscure but startling low-budget films (Pressure Point, The World’s Greatest Sinner) along with well-known studio productions (The Manchurian Candidate, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Shock Corridor, Seconds, Point Blank).</bq> <bq>I don’t know a single person who’s living a relaxed and secure life. Everybody I know is stressed out of their minds, terribly overworked and underpaid — or underemployed and underpaid — and desperately anxious about what the future holds. It’s ironic that, in these 1960s films, when Americans are represented as flailing in such a crisis state, their era seems to be relatively stable compared to ours.</bq> That sounds awful. I know a lot of people who are living relaxed and secure lives. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/24/323685/" source="CounterPunch" author="David Yearsley">Bach and the Beasts</a> <bq>The goal of baroque musicians—performers and composers; though they were almost always one in the same person—was to move the listener, sway their emotions, and curate their humors in real time.</bq> Is it "one in the same"? Or "one and the same"? According to <a href="https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6748/one-and-the-same-or-one-in-the-same" author="" source="English StackExchange: English Language and Usage" date="December 2010">"One and the same" or "One in the same"?</a>, it's the latter. I'm sure the Google N-Gram will show that the eggcorn is pulling ahead but there's no accounting for people who make no sense flooding the zone. <hr> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/05/24/what-a-goddamn-writer-she-was-remembering-alice-munro-1931-2024/" source="The Paris Review" author="Jamie Quatro">“What a Goddamn Writer She Was”: Remembering Alice Munro (1931–2024)</a> <bq>I reread “Family Furnishings” this morning because it is one of my favorite stories and because I will be discussing it soon with my students and because Alice Munro, possibly the greatest short-story writer there ever was and certainly the greatest in the English language, is dead.</bq> <bq>[...] it is also a story about how the narrator becomes a fiction writer, about the ways a person from a small town might become such a thing, the ways high art will come into your life and separate you from the people who don’t live for art—this is most of them—and the things you must give up in order to commit yourself to the discipline of writing, the ways you will almost certainly piss people off back home when you finally find a way to fork the lightning of the sentence.</bq> <bq>It is revealing that when I think about how good she is, I have to go to the peak on literary Olympus to find her equals. I must go to Proust to find someone with her emotional and relational intelligence; I must go to Flannery O’Connor to find someone who so understands the shame and wry humor and darkness and strangeness of rural life; and I must go to Chekhov to find someone whose stories turn as strangely and by their close leave me as stripped and ragged and human. What a goddamn writer she was. Goodbye, Miss Munro. I am grateful to you forever.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgKC_SDhOKk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/EgKC_SDhOKk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Alice Munro, In Her Own Words: 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature"> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/country-music-in-a-fractured-country" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Country Music in a Fractured Country</a> <bq>[...] the problem here is precisely that in these criticisms we have people who are positioned as intellectuals, and yet who are comfortable holding forth in public with a sphere of reference limited to the output of the entertainment industry circa 2024, rather than spanning over the whole arc of our shared history. This is the same model of the intellectual that presumes it’s enough, to fit that description, to talk about whatever is currently on Netflix or some other streaming service, rather than making the effort to understand what these media and their “content” evolved from, as if human culture just popped into existence three or four years ago, and as if human culture were coextensive with globalized American popular media.</bq> <bq>Do they know anything about the potential use of art for the exploration of moral ambiguity or for the healthy processing of our darker impulses? No. They only have gender counts, and weigh-ins, and grades to give out for compliance or non-compliance with HR-approved representations of diversity. In other words, they are mindless bureaucrats, wrongly held up as intellectuals, doing work that could be done by machines.</bq> <bq>The marketing machine that these people take for reality, whose productions they criticize piecemeal in total blindness to the apparatus that churns them out, was essentially perfected by the middle of the 20th century with the invention of “race music” as a classificatory label.</bq> <bq>None of this is the fault of the musicians themselves, nor a reflection of their self-perception. It is entirely the fault of the economic and political order through which musical creativity is warped and channeled, an order that intellectuals ideally would be spending their time critiquing, rather than taking at face-value while they waste their time focusing on the correctness of the lyrical content of this or that pop confection,</bq> <bq>[...] to be an intellectual is supposed to involve breaking out of this symbolic economy, to not take it for granted, to not assume that Netflix and the Country Music Awards and the Oscars constitute reality itself, but rather to see that these are all only the wizardry of an economic and ideological system that would very much like you to mistake these spectacles for reality, since as long as that is what you are doing, you are helping that regime to maintain its air of legitimacy.</bq> <bq>[...] you may have seen that NYU is now compelling student protesters against the Israeli brutality in Gaza, as a condition of their continued enrollment, to write coerced confessions of their political wrong-think. The language the administrators are using for their coercion is plainly directly borrowed from the last few years of precision-honed newspeak that had originally been crafted through the joint efforts of progressive activists and human-resources departments: it’s all about “safety” and the right to be free from “verbal violence” and so on. Any clear-headed person could have seen this coming. It is a stunning, well-timed illustration of what I’ve been arguing for a while now, that the progressive consensus that seemed to have triumphed in elite cultural institutions over the past few years may only have been the prodrome or gestation phase of a more overtly authoritarian period with a very different political valence.</bq> That's a pretty fancy way of saying "Blowback's a bitch. Left-wing authoritarianism will be used to justify its right-wing cousin." <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <img src="{att_link}respect_my_existence_or_expect_my_resistance.jpg" href="{att_link}respect_my_existence_or_expect_my_resistance.jpg" align="none" caption="Respect my existence or expect my resistance" scale="50%"> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/05/kids-these-days-ending-american.html" author="Nicky Reid" source="Exile in Happy Valley">"Kids These Days": Ending the American Tradition of Demonizing the Young</a> <bq>No matter how bitter, old, and jaded you may get, it is always of the utmost importance to maintain a functioning bullshit detector, so you know exactly when one of the myriad [...] morally broke power systems is trying to buffalo you, and the moment that anyone with any institutional gravitas begins to gripe about 'kids these days' that buffalo bullshit detector should go berserk because it usually means that said 'kids' have stumbled over some long concealed existential truth and now run the risk of using their collective energy for something dangerous for a change. And when pretty much everybody starts shouting 'kids these days' at the top of their lungs it usually means that the kids have taken the truth to the next level and that the status quo is likely preparing to cull their own young for the unforgivable sin of the calling adults out on their bullshit.</bq> <bq>These are the same kids who were manipulated by the Democratic Party into believing that you can buy hope and change at the ballot box from a career white supremacist as long as his running mate is the first intersex Samoan to prosecute minors on the moon. The ones who were sucked dry of any kind of a future by the debt-lords of the corporate campus industrial complex who sent their tuition checks directly to fucking Israel and Ukraine while they burned holes in the ozone layer with their private jets. And for all this shit and more, these kids are done. They are done with voting for the lesser of two rapists. They are done working dead-end jobs for shit pay. They are done being imprisoned by gender norms and sexual mores that are somehow both coldly modern and completely outdated. They are done with all of it and, naturally, the adults are pissed.</bq> <bq>But whatever happened to those crazy kids? Kids crazy enough to believe that they could save the world just by refusing to play by its rules. Kids just crazy enough to make it possible. Where did all those beautiful flower children go to? They went to Washington and Wall Street and became the adults who spit on their own children for not standing in a straight line. The hippies of the sixties and seventies were carefully lured into the clutches of the Democratic Party where they were coaxed into selling out their individuality for totems of 'equity and inclusion' [...] I would dearly love to tell you dearest motherfuckers that this cruel fate was merely a case of twisted irony but it's not. This is how the system works and if we don't do something drastic it's just going to keep working this way until this planet can't even support another generation to piss its parents off.</bq> <bq>We are all born free, screaming bloody naked for freedom. It is the system, a tight network of corporate conglomerates and federal institutions, that transforms unruly kids into compliant citizens with their schools and their churches and their pharmaceuticals and their network television propaganda. We are all told as teenagers that our youthful rebellion is merely a phase not worthy of careful consideration but this rebellion is in fact a natural reaction to human beings maturing to the point of no longer being able to deny that they are essentially slaves to the system before it can finish brainwashing them.</bq> <bq>As wild as it may sound, these 'kids these days' may be our only hope and the only way we are going to save them from being assimilated by those goddamn smartphones is to fucking listen to them, give them a seat at the table, and consider the very real possibility that they may actually be wiser than us for the simple fact that they are less indoctrinated. This doesn't mean that they're always right. They really should knock it off with the iPhones and political correctness. But every generation should be encouraged to challenge the last one, to piss us off and question what we think we know. This is how we raise anarchists instead of citizens and this is how we raise the high-water mark just above the Pentagon's throat.</bq> Let 'em cook. Nicky on a roll is just formidable. <hr> I was talking to a friend the other night and he wondered---not for the first time---why I was so against BitCoin and other crypto currencies. He could understand why I was against the other cryptocurrencies because those are obviously scams but why be against BitCoin, which is a non-fiat, people's currency that will free us of the oppression of state-based influence on the economy? The question seems kind of ridiculous. There is nothing egalitarian about BitCoin. The reason it's more popular is because there's money in it---and vice versa. That's already my first reason but perhaps the more easily understood reason is: I haven't seen anyone benefit from Bitcoin who I respect. There is no-one I can point to who I think to myself "that person deserves to have moved up in our society because of their obviously positive contributions." Or, as Neal Brennan put it in his special Crazy Good: <bq>My issue with crypto is everyone who told me about crypto had never spoken about finances before, ever. It’s like, “Weren’t you a DJ three weeks ago?”</bq> It is just another mechanism for allowing ego-driven and already-privileged people to catapult themselves higher in an already corrupt social hierarchy. It promises riches that rarely, if ever, arrive to others. Just like the lottery. Just like any other scam. There's no difference. It's another way of funneling money to the top. There might be a side-benefit, but it's not intrinsic It's just like AI. There might be a side-benefit, but the primary purpose is to funnel money upward. If money funnels upward, they stop improving the product. If Bitcoin makes more money for its holders as a largely non-distributed "currency" that is firmly locked in to the existing financialized economy, then its holders will do that. There are no principles. You'll have a few true believers who think that there are---but those are the useful idiots. They confuse profitability with usefulness or quality. Probably deliberately, for their own perceived benefit. I mean, it's not like it was impossible to tell that my friend had recently invested in Bitcoin, simply by how his arguments about it had changed. It's just how we are. <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/why-today-empty-gestures-matter-more" author="Slavoj Žižek" source="Substack">Why today empty gestures matter more than ever</a> <bq>On May 20 2024 Salman Rushdie has said that if a Palestinian state were established today, it would be a "Taliban-like state" governed by Hamas. He also criticized the anti-Israel student protests, saying that it was "strange" that the progressive youth would support Hamas, which he called a "fascist terrorist group."[1] I fully understand his bitter stance after what he went through with the fatwa by Khomeini and then the knife attack that almost killed him;</bq> You can sympathize with him but it doesn't mean that you have to listen to him on this topic. What is Rushdie saying? Even the Taliban didn't appear out of nowhere. They were formed by the dead hand of western empire. You would think someone like Rushdie would be sensitive to such nuances. He's written about them a lot. What is the argument, though? Don't bother giving Palestine sovereignty because they'll just waste it? From there, you can just say that you might as well kill them all because they were going to die anyway. It's like killing an alcoholic hobo and then arguing that you shouldn't be punished because he would have just drunk himself to death anyway. <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/552" author="Corey Mohler" source="Existential Comics">Epicurean Fine Dining</a> <bq>A lot of words come to us from ancient Greek schools of philosophy (stoic, cynic, skeptic, etc). None of them are is far off from their original definition as "epicurean", which seems to sort of mean rich people who indulge in luxury and pleasure. Epicurus believed the road to happiness was more about restricting your desires, living in simple moderation, and having good friendships.</bq> This would make me think I might be an Epicurean but then there's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism" author="" source="Wikipedia"> Epicureanism</a> <bq>Epicurus and his followers generally withdrew from politics because it could lead to frustrations and ambitions that would conflict with their pursuit of virtue and peace of mind.</bq> Oh. I guess not then. <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/lattice-based-cryptosystems-and-quantum-cryptanalysis.html" author="Bruce Schneier" source="">Lattice-Based Cryptosystems and Quantum Cryptanalysis</a> <bq>Breaking lattice-based cryptography with a quantum computer seems to require orders of magnitude more qubits than breaking RSA, because the key size is much larger and processing it requires more quantum storage. Consequently, testing an algorithm like Chen’s is completely infeasible with current technology. However, the error was mathematical in nature and did not require any experimentation. Chen’s algorithm consisted of nine different steps; the first eight prepared a particular quantum state, and the ninth step was supposed to exploit it. The mistake was in step nine; Chen believed that his wave function was periodic when in fact it was not.</bq> <bq>[...] hooray for peer review. A researcher proposed a new result, and reviewers quickly found a fatal flaw in the work. Efforts to repair the flaw are ongoing. We complain about peer review a lot, but here it worked exactly the way it was supposed to.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/" author="Rachel" source="Rachel by the Bay">So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors</a> <bq>The idea is basically this: I get some kind of commitment and support from the people who do feed reader stuff, and in turn, I build a new kind of web site which amounts to a "feed reader correctness score". It would probably work like this: you load up a page and it hands you a special (fake) feed URL that is keyed to you and you alone. You plug it into your feed reader program through whatever flow and it will keep track of every single request to that keyed URL. Then, after it had collected data for a while, a report would eventually become available.</bq> <hr> I started watching a few minutes of a movie on RAI in Italian and had no idea what the movie was called. It was attached to the end of another movie I'd recorded, so the channel wasn't going to identify it. I had no idea when I'd recorded the movie, so it made no sense to try to dig back in the TV guide. So, I searched "movie starts with man and woman on beach, then gunmen attack rhode island and kill everyone" on <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=movie+starts+with+man+and+woman+on+beach%2C+then+gunmen+attack+rhode+island+and+kill+everyone&t=opera&ia=web">DuckDuckGo</a>. I didn't even put the words in the right order because it basically doesn't really matter. My top result was this: <img src="{att_link}american_assassin_top_search_result.jpg" href="{att_link}american_assassin_top_search_result.jpg" align="none" caption="American Assassin top search result" scale="75%"> It even had a more-detailed summary on the side: <img src="{att_link}american_assassin_search_result.jpg" href="{att_link}american_assassin_search_result.jpg" align="none" caption="American Assassin search result" scale="50%"> The summary in the top search result reads: <bq>After the death of his girlfriend at the hands of terrorists, Mitch Rapp is drawn into the world of counterterrorism, mentored by tough-as-nails former U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. Stan Hurley.</bq> Nailed it. Just perfect. No notes. What do I need AI for? The search engines are already good enough. Stop messing with them. <hr> That is, unless you're trying to find something that the world has deemed "naughty". You cannot find the word that Pope Francis used for "faggotry", but in Italian. I tried and tried and was unable to find it via regular means. I only remembered that I'd seen someone with a user named after that word having been cited on Reddit in a screenshot from Tumblr. I searched the "CuratedTumblr" sub-reddit and sorted by most-recent posts. There it is: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1d32620/your_holiness_did_you_perchance_say_fggotry/" author="" source="Reddit">your holiness did you perchance say F*GGOTRY</a> The word is "frociaggine". <bq>ok but we're all missing the important question here... WHO in the vatican has taught the spanish-speaking pope how to say faggotry in italian. how on earth did it come up. was it a prank. was it political sabotage. is there homosexual tomfoolery afoot in santa marta. I need to know more your holiness did you perchance say FAGGOTRY I can't stress enough how much in my decades living gayly in Italy I have never ever heard a straight person say frociaggine. Only the gays say it. WHO TAUGHT HIM</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/privacy-implications-of-tracking-wireless-access-points.html" author="Bruce Schneier" source="">Privacy Implications of Tracking Wireless Access Points</a> Bruce reports on the paper <a href="https://www.cs.umd.edu/~dml/papers/wifi-surveillance-sp24.pdf" author="Erik Rye & Dave Levin" source="">Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems</a> <bq>Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPSes) are used by modern mobile devices to learn their position using nearby Wi-Fi access points as landmarks. In this work, we show that Apple’s WPS can be abused to create a privacy threat on a global scale. We present an attack that allows an unprivileged attacker to amass a worldwide snapshot of Wi-Fi BSSID geolocations in only a matter of days. Our attack makes few assumptions, merely exploiting the fact that there are relatively few dense regions of allocated MAC address space. Applying this technique over the course of a year, we learned the precise locations of over 2 billion BSSIDs around the world.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/googles-ai-overview-can-give-false-misleading-and-dangerous-answers/" author="Kyle Orland" source="Ars Technica">Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers</a> <bq>While seeing a bunch of AI search errors like this can be striking, it's worth remembering that social media posters are less likely to call attention to the frequent examples where Google's AI Overview worked as intended by providing concise and accurate information culled from the web. Still, when a new system threatens to alter something as fundamental to the Internet as Google search, it's worth examining just where that system seems to be failing.</bq> Respect, but suspect. Respect the power of the tool, but suspect its output. There is no other way. Though the article focuses on the more sensational errors, it also includes a couple of subtle mistakes that some people might term "nit-picking." It absolutely is not. As with any other tool, we want to get to a point where we can unquestioningly rely on the result---even when we don't know the result ourselves. If I type 2 + 2 into a calculator and it returns 4, I can verify the result. If I type in 3,452,874 x 4,392,283 and it returns 4, then I know that it's wrong. If it returns 10,001, it's still wrong. If it returns 5,334,343,566,321, then I might still be able to tell that it's wrong---because 3 x 4 at the end has to yield 2 in the last place, and 3 x 4 in the first place should probably yield a result starting with 1. However, if it yields 12,334,343,566,322, I'm going to have to trust that it got it right. Either that, or I'm going to have to calculate it manually and forgo the efficiency gain from having used the tool in the first place. If you can't learn to trust your tools, then you will end up not using that tool. What does trust mean for LLMs? We've already seen what trust means with search engines. They've already historically manipulated results, restricting the potential result set with censorship and arbitrary rules that are focused laser-like on the company's bottom line. We already have a problem with certain authoritative-seeming articles in Wikipedia. What we're doing now is using a hype campaign to put lipstick on the information pig with AI. <hr> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ai-chatbots-are-intruding-into-online-communities-where-people-are-trying-to-connect-with-other-humans-229473" author="Casey Fiesler" source="The Conversation">AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humans</a> <bq>On a Facebook group for swapping unwanted items near Boston, a user looking for specific items received an offer of a “gently used” Canon camera and an “almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never ended up using.” [...] the camera or air conditioner [do not exist]. The answer[...] came from an artificial intelligence chatbot.</bq> What is the utility of this botshit? There is none. There isn't even a conceivable future utility to this. A bunch of very rich people decided that they needed to make their investments in AI bear fruit. They don't know how to produce actual value, so they went with their usual method of generating revenue: hype and scams. They generate a tremendous amount of hype in order to elevate their stock value. They cash out and move on. The hype remains. The dozens of millions of people convinced by the hype are still in the cult long after the circus has left town. They continue launching their bots and botshit into our spaces on the Internet, trying to cargo-cult their way to riches. They have no idea what they're doing, they have no idea what they're destroying, they have no idea how many people they're annoying, and they do not care. They might care even less than the original obscenely wealthy hype-creators. It doesn't matter. Their botshit is everywhere now. There is no stopping it because, like with everything else, we have no mechanisms for doing so. <hr> This is how the genius AI works. I have GitHub Copilot enabled to determine whether it is useful for work. The screenshot below shows the text I was just about to delete from a configuration file. <img src="{att_link}about_to_delete_some_arguments.png" href="{att_link}about_to_delete_some_arguments.png" align="none" caption="About to delete some arguments" scale="75%"> What does Copilot suggest? Put it back. <img src="{att_link}copilot_offers_to_replace_what_i_had.png" href="{att_link}copilot_offers_to_replace_what_i_had.png" align="none" caption="Copilot offers to replace what I had" scale="75%"> This is stupid, useless churn. This is not pair-programming. This is a child poking your keyboard and making inane suggestions. I wonder if other people don't notice because they're accustomed to being constantly distracted? <hr> <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/21160" author="Christian Olear" source="Adactio">Trust</a> <bq>Google is acting as though its greatest asset is its search engine. Same with Bing. Mozilla Developer Network is acting as though its greatest asset is its documentation. Same with Stack Overflow. But their greatest asset is actually trust. [...] Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it. I am honestly astonished that so many companies don’t seem to realise what they’re destroying.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/29/training-not-chatting/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Training is not the same as chatting: ChatGPT and other LLMs don’t remember everything you say</a> <bq>From a computer science point of view, it’s best to think of LLMs as stateless function calls. Given this input text, what should come next? In the case of a “conversation” with a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini, that function input consists of the current conversation (everything said by both the human and the bot) up to that point, plus the user’s new prompt. Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users. Understanding this is key to working effectively with these models. Every time you hit “new chat” you are effectively wiping the short-term memory of the model, starting again from scratch.</bq> I suppose, but there is absolutely nothing guaranteeing that, other than trust, or knowing how the software works right now. There is no technical reason that this couldn't change. <bq>When we talk about model training, we are talking about the process that was used to build these models in the first place. As a big simplification, there are two phases to this. The first is to pile in several TBs of text—think all of Wikipedia, a scrape of a large portion of the web, books, newspapers, academic papers and more—and spend months of time and potentially millions of dollars in electricity crunching through that “pre-training” data identifying patterns in how the words relate to each other. This gives you a model that can complete sentences, but not necessarily in a way that will delight and impress a human conversational partner. The second phase aims to fix that—this can incorporate instruction tuning or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) which has the goal of teaching the model to pick the best possible sequences of words to have productive conversations. The end result of these phases is the model itself—an enormous (many GB) blob of floating point numbers that capture both the statistical relationships between the words and some version of “taste” in terms of how best to assemble new words to reply to a user’s prompts. Once trained, the model remains static and unchanged—sometimes for months or even years.</bq> This is the part that makes skeptical that it's possible to make a model that respects permissions boundaries in, e.g., a SharePoint site. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/05/20/fundamentals/" source="Ploeh Blog" author="Mark Seemann">Fundamentals</a> <bq>If, for example, you already know what a monad is when learning F#, picking up the idea behind computation expressions is easy once you realize that it's just a compiler-specific way to enable syntactic sugaring of monadic expressions. You can learn how computation expressions work without that knowledge, too; it's just harder.</bq> <bq>Contrary to certain infamous interview practices, you don't need to know these algorithms by heart. It's usually enough to know that they exist. I can't remember Dijkstra's algorithm off the top of my head, but if I encounter a problem where I need to find the shortest path, I can look it up.</bq> <bq>When are you done, you ask? Never. There's more stuff than you can learn in a lifetime. I've met a lot of programmers who finally give up on the grind to keep up, and instead become managers.</bq> <bq author="Torben Ægidius Mogensen" source="Introduction to Compiler Design (from the introduction)"><ol>It is considered a topic that you should know in order to be "well-cultured" in computer science. A good craftsman should know his tools, and compilers are important tools for programmers and computer scientists. The techniques used for constructing a compiler are useful for other purposes as well. There is a good chance that a programmer or computer scientist will need to write a compiler or interpreter for a domain-specific language.</ol></bq> <hr> <a href="https://ardalis.com/clean-architecture-sucks/" author="Steve Ardalis" source="Ardalis">Clean Architecture Sucks</a> <bq>Clean architecture sucks. No architecture sucks. Microservices architecture sucks. Programming sucks. It all sucks if you don't know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're (probably) going to produce a mess. Why? Because you just don't know any better, yet. And that's exactly what happened with the original poster's project/team that he inherited. The team had zero experience. They didn't know how to write good software, much less apply a particular style of architecture, and the result was (in at least some ways) a mess. And it's not even the team's fault! They were hired with no experience and no mentorship. They were set up to fail. And they did.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/thechrisperry/status/1795661635602059664" author="Chris Perry" source="Twitter">Tweet</a> The first problem is already evident in the fact that there is no title for this "blog post". What is this article about? It's not an article. It's a dozen or so tweets that include a couple of interesting thoughts, but no coherent progress toward a theme. <img src="{att_link}chris_perry_s_idea_of_a_blog.jpg" href="{att_link}chris_perry_s_idea_of_a_blog.jpg" align="none" caption="Chris Perry's idea of a blog" scale="65%"> I jumped to the highlighted tweet because it was linked from an actual blog post. I thought this sounded interesting, <bq>Design is the process of prioritizing tradeoffs in a high dimensional space.</bq> Above it in the tweet is another tweet that writes, <bq>Start with problems not solutions. Too many times we artificially constrain ourselves by settling on a specific approach too early. "Fix this button" becomes "what goal does the user have?"</bq> This is also interesting and something I strongly agree with. However, this whole page feels like I'm sorting through tablet fragments in an archeological dig. Scanning through the rest of the fragments, there are scattered koans that might have been plucked from AI-generated botshit. E.g., <iq>Words are great. Use them.</iq> and <iq>Beauty is only skin deep and won't take you very far.</iq> Look, some of this is good advice---e.g., <iq>never blame the user.</iq>---but it's incoherently presented. It's a shame that someone who's writing about design chooses to publish his writing this way. I would say it's ironic, but what I really mean is that it's paradoxical. So many products are unusable garbage that constantly get in the way of the user accomplishing the main task. So many corporate sites make getting to your billing details a matter of 10 clicks. Sites like BikeToWork look like they're made for mentally handicapped children instead of serious business people who are riding their bikes to work. You have to work extra-hard to even figure out how to get back to the data-entry screen. Even there, it looks like a child's toy instead of a spreadsheet, like it should. Sites like 26 summits are similar. The whole home page is a giant poster, as if finding out what the actual hikes are were incidental. You have to click to get to a second page to see the hikes. But you can't. You can only see a map of markers in Switzerland, with filters on the right. This is for a list of 26 hikes. Just show them in a table and be done with it. Let me filter at the top of the table, like a spreadsheet. Let me sort by clicking the column header. Why are you animating everything and making it so difficult to find out any information? Who are these views for? When you click a hike, you're taken to another poster. Is that it? It looks like it. But no! You can scroll down, even though there's absolutely no indication that this is possible. The actual details and map are below the giant, useless poster. If you log in, you're treated to a great home page. It looks like a child made it. At the bottom-right corner, you can click another multi-colored blob that is, apparently, a "zoom" to larger map that takes you to another utterly mysterious poster that purports to show you all of the hikes. Madness. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRFfTdzpk-M" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/TRFfTdzpk-M" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Microsoft Developer" caption="'Highly Technical Talk' with Hanselman and Toub | BRK194"> Another fantastic "deep dive" with these two: this time they're optimizing the Humanizer library on-the-fly, on-stage, during a session. This feels nearly completely improvised. Kudos to these two gen-Xers, doing an old-school presentation of just plain programming bravura with no frills. At 38:20, Toub shows how to use column-select to make changes, which wows the audience. I guess it's really not such a well-known feature, but it's an incredible productivity booster. Toub uses the mouse to select when he could have just used the keyboard to select the lines with <kbd>Alt</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>down</kbd> or by selecting the space and starting double-quote, then <kbd>Alt</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>.</kbd> to select subsequent matches. After that, he used the mouse again to select the end of the lines, but he could have just left the lines selected from before and hit <kbd>End</kbd> to jump to the end of all the lines. It's good that he showed it but, as in previous videos, he's a bit more of a "mouser" than I am. <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploetzli.ch/2024/should-i-use-jwt-for-authentication/" author="Henryk Plötz" source="">Should I Use jwts For Authentication Tokens?</a> <bq>JWT as authentication tokens are constructed for Google/Facebook scale environments, and absolutely no one who is not Google/Facebook needs to put up with the ensuing tradeoffs. If you process less than 10k requests per second, you’re not Google nor are you Facebook.</bq> <bq>[...] In this setup the refresh token, not the authentication token, is the real session token. The refresh token represents the session with the authentication service (which can be revoked), while the authentication tokens are just derived credentials to be used for a few requests at most. The beauty, from Google’s point of view, is that this delegates keeping the session alive to the client, i.e. not Google’s servers. Oh and by the way, the refresh token can be, and usually is, opaque, since it’s only ever consumed by the same service that creates it. That reduces a lot of complexity, by just using an opaque identifier stored in a database.</bq> <bq>[...] if you confirmed any of the items above, you don’t need JWTs. You’re hitting the database anyway, and I’m pretty sure that you only have one database which stores both your user profiles and your application data. By just using a “normal” opaque session token and storing it in the database, the same way Google does with the refresh token, and dropping all JWT authentication token nonsense, [...] Just use the normal session mechanism that comes with your web framework and that you were using before someone told you that Google uses jwt. It has stood the test of time and is probably fine.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://speakinginswift.substack.com/p/swift-tooling-windows-edition" author="" source="The Browser Company">Swift Tooling: Windows Edition</a> <bq>Visual Studio Code (hereafter “VS Code”) is the development environment of choice for writing Swift code on Windows. The Swift Server Workgroup publishes an official Swift extension for VS Code, which serves as the primary integration point for a great deal of Swift tooling. All the IDE features you would expect are available: building and debugging with breakpoints; running and debugging tests; code navigation, autocomplete, and hover documentation; inline error reporting</bq> <hr> <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Conditional_requests" author="" source="MDN">HTTP conditional requests</a> <bq>As long as the cache is not stale, no requests are issued at all. But once it has become stale, this is mostly controlled by the Cache-Control header, the client doesn't use the cached value directly but issues a conditional request. The value of the validator is used as a parameter of the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers. If the resource has not changed, the server sends back a 304 Not Modified response. This makes the cache fresh again, and the client uses the cached resource. Although there is a response/request round-trip that consumes some resources, this is more efficient than to transmit the whole resource over the wire again. If the resource has changed, the server just sends back a 200 OK response, with the new version of the resource (as though the request wasn't conditional). The client uses this new resource (and caches it).</bq> <h id="games">Video Games</h> <a href="https://blog.danielschroeder.me/2024/05/voxel-displacement-modernizing-retro-3d/" source="" author="Daniel Schroeder">Voxel Displacement Renderer — Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic</a> <bq>For my purposes, I wanted to use conventional low-poly meshes to model environments like those of classic 3D games, apply displacement maps to define voxel-scale surface details, and render a result that truly looks like it was built from voxels. These environments are full of sharp edges, like the corner of a building. Conventional displacement mapping already struggles with these regions; in my case, I also wanted the results to look like voxels.</bq> <bq>Large changes in displacement become voxel-scale geometry; subtler changes, like the ridges on the surface of each stone, may not become voxels but do affect how the surface is lit.</bq>