<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</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="#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="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/21/on-the-eve-of-trump-iran-and-russia-launch-historical-deal/" source="Scheer Post" author="Pepe Escobar">On the Eve of Trump, Iran and Russia Launch Historical Deal</a> <bq>This energy deal is essential for Tehran because even if it holds the second-largest gas reserves on the planet – 34 trillion cubic meters, only behind Russia – it suffers from domestic shortages, especially in winter. <b>Most of the country’s vast gas reserves are not explored because of decades-old US sanctions.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znW8fQdIp2Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/znW8fQdIp2Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="BreakThrough News" caption="Division of Humanity: US Empire Hopes Brute Force Can Keep World in Line w/ Vijay Prashad"> An excellent interview with the always perspicacious, eminently learned, and deeply empathetic and sympathetic Vijay Prashad. <hr> In a democracy, where you have to earn people's votes to gain and hold power, you cannot afford to blame the voter for too long, as it's a losing tactic. It might work temporarily, if you can <i>shame</i> voters into regretting their decision to not vote for you, and if you can keep that shame fire alive long enough to get their vote in the next election. If you only blame the voter, though, then you're not doing <i>science</i> and, if you're not doing science, you're probably going to fail, in the long run, unless you just get really, really lucky. If you're not doing science then, when you make predictions about the world and none of them come true, then you never question whether your own principles and theories might be wrong---you just lash out. This is not a winning strategy. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/only-pathetic-bootlickers-spend-their" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Only Pathetic Bootlickers Spend Their Energy Criticizing China</a> <bq>China hasn’t spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. China isn’t circling the planet with hundreds of military bases while working to destroy any nation or group anywhere in the world who disobeys it. <b>China isn’t strangling nations around the globe with starvation sanctions for refusing to bow to its dictates. China didn’t just spend 15 months lighting the middle east on fire and backing a live-streamed genocide.</b> China hasn’t spent the last three years endangering the world in frequently terrifying acts of nuclear brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower.</bq> <bq>China absolutely is powerful enough to be a whole lot more abusive and murderous abroad, and it simply isn’t. <b>Westerners love to claim that China has secret agendas to conquer the world someday (hilariously implying that these hypothetical future abuses make China morally comparable to the US empire’s current known abuses)</b>, but if you actually dig into the evidence for these claims what you’ll find every time is that all they provide evidence for is China’s openly stated goal of a multi-polar world that isn’t ruled by Washington.</bq> <bq><b>They’re just a better civilization than ours — not because theirs is miraculous or perfect, but because ours is just that murderous and dystopian.</b> They simply do the normal thing while we do the freakish thing: they make the lives of their citizens better and better and avoid unnecessary wars, while western governments make the lives of their citizens worse and worse while plunging into new acts of mass military slaughter every few years.</bq> <bq><b>I find nothing more pathetic than a westerner who lives under the shadow of the US empire spending their time and energy criticizing the abuses of nations who lie outside that power structure.</b> It’s an embarrassing, bootlicking way to live. Focus on criticizing the far greater abuses of the far greater evil that you actually live under, loser.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/theyre-still-slaughtering-civilians" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">They're Still Slaughtering Civilians In Gaza</a> <bq>[...] <b>more than 80 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza</b> since what we’re calling a “ceasefire” went into effect on the 19th of January. [...] <b>Imagine if 80 Israelis had been killed by Hamas during that time instead.</b> Hell, imagine if 80 Israelis were killed in addition to the more than 80 Palestinians who’ve been killed by Israel. Does anyone believe anything resembling a “ceasefire” would continue to hold had that been the case?</bq> <bq>As an example of the kind of behavior I’m talking about, on Monday Israeli forces killed a five year-old girl in an airstrike on an animal-drawn cart near the Nuseirat refugee camp, apparently for no other reason than because <b>the cart was traveling on a road that had not been “authorized for passage”.</b> Those are the IDF’s own words, not mine. <b>That’s their own public justification for bombing a cart pulled by a donkey with a small child on it.</b></bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}ave_caesar_lucratori_te_salutant_.jpg" href="{att_link}ave_caesar_lucratori_te_salutant_.jpg" align="none" caption="AVE CAESAR LUCRATORI TE SALUTANT!" scale="75%"> Those of us who had the privilege of growing up with Asterix comics are somewhat surprised to see people claiming that there is absolutely no legitimacy to the claim that a raised-arm salute came from the Romans and did not originate with the Nazis. The Romans in those comics also weren't the good guys, but they weren't <i>Nazis</i>. <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> I don't often waste my time with mainstream press in any country but I just took a look at <a href="https://20min.ch">20min</a> to try to find out about the arrest of journalist Ali Abunimah in Switzerland. It doesn't mention him at all. The home page is, as usual, just filled with trash---the top headline is about a 30-year-old super-white Swiss lady who's opened an acai-juice shop in Dubai, despite oppression. Yeah, you slay, girl. There are news tabs at the top for "Wetter", "Good Vibes", "Nahostknflikt", "Schweiz", "Sport" ... and "Trump". I kid you not. Trump has his very own category on the top Swiss newspaper for young people. <img src="{att_link}front_wetter_trump_good_vibes_nahostkonflikt_schweiz_wirsindzukunft.jpg" href="{att_link}front_wetter_trump_good_vibes_nahostkonflikt_schweiz_wirsindzukunft.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> I selected "Nahostkonflikt" and was treated to an entire page full of news only about the Israeli hostages that had been freed. As one would expect, with names and flattering pictures. There is nothing about any Palestinians, other than perhaps Trump's proclamation that Gazans should be ethnically cleansed. This is the standard plan, as established by western media: a laser-like focus on Israeli victims, with names and Instagrammable faces, while utterly ignoring the hundreds of Palestinians who died that day. These are people who've been returned, in full health, from a region that their own country has bombed flat. There is no coverage of the destruction in Gaza to which the Gazans return. <img src="{att_link}20min_front_page_with_only_israeli_hostage_news.jpg" href="{att_link}20min_front_page_with_only_israeli_hostage_news.jpg" align="none" caption="20min front page with only Israeli-hostage news" scale="50%"> There is, as can be expected, no mention of Swiss police having arrested a Palestinian-American journalist. The only thing I could easily find in a wider search was <a href="https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/einreisesperre-wipkingen-955909192085" author="Simon Bordier" source="Tages Anzeiger">Kantonspolizei unterbindet Auftritt von Israel-Hasser</a> <bq>Bei dem Mann handelt es sich laut einem Bericht der NZZ um den amerikanisch-palästinensischen Blogger Ali Abunimah, der als Leiter der Plattform Electronic Intifada bekannt ist.</bq> As with the 20 minutes, they follow the established plan by calling journalists "bloggers" and then repeating established and context-free propaganda about enemies of the state: <bq>Abunimah hat sich in der Vergangenheit immer wieder gewaltverherrlichend-antisemitisch geäussert und etwa die Raketenangriffe Irans auf Israel als «humanitären Akt» bezeichnet.</bq> For good measure, you accuse him of being antisemitic and for calling for violence, none of which is true. <bq>«Einen islamistischen Judenhasser, der zu Gewalt aufruft, wollen wir nicht in der Schweiz», erklärte der zuständige Zürcher Regierungsrat Mario Fehr der NZZ. Daher sei bei der Bundespolizei Fedpol eine Einreisesperre gefordert worden, die diese dann tatsächlich aussprach.</bq> Good job, Switzerland. Your press is functioning perfectly. I'd just skimmed <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian" author="Scott Alexander" source="Astral Codex Ten">Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up</a>, but ultimately didn't end up reading in detail because it contained sentences like <iq>In case you’ve been under a rock recently, in the early 2010s, several organized child sexual assault rings got busted in Britain</iq> and <iq>I don’t think you have to strain or lie or tie yourself into moral knots to justify being angry at child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.</iq> These are the kind of lazy sentences that first check that you're in the right silo---I'd not heard of the grooming gangs this guy is so certain everyone should know about---and, if you're not, that you know that you're a terrible person for not <iq>being angry at child sexual exploitation</iq>, wherever it happens to be mentioned. It's not that we're against child-sexual exploitation, it's that we <i>don't believe it's happening like you say it is.</i> Why not, though? <i>Because you've presented no or flimsy evidence</i>. This guy would probably say the same thing about Russiagate, like "everyone knows that Russia bought the two Trump elections," and then just cheerily proceed from there. All of this slanted, one-side, and outright incorrect coverage makes it useless. It's all propaganda. You'll excuse me if I'm skeptical about the British actually having found Pakistani grooming gangs when stories exactly like that one have always been propaganda and lies meant to incite violence against outsiders. The 20min slant to Israel is appalling. Not a single article or picture about Gazans, about the return of their hostages. No names, of course, unless, you're talking about supposedly antisemitic journalists that have to be arrested to protect us from their hate speech. In-fucking-credible. I don't regret having ignored these stellar news sources. These sources have completely normalized the imperial narrative. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/27/hdas-j27.html" author="Kevin Reed" source="WSWS">Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah arrested and detained in Switzerland</a> <bq><b>Abunimah has been regularly and falsely accused of antisemitism.</b> He has repeatedly drawn the parallel between the Holocaust and Israel’s murderous and genocidal attack on Palestinians. In 2010, he posted on Twitter, “Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.” On January 6 of this year, <b>Abunimah authored an article on Electronic Intifada entitle, “Israel still can’t find any 7 October rape victims, prosecutor admits,”</b> which details the lack of evidence and “zero complainants in alleged cases of rapes committed by Palestinians” on the day Israel began its genocidal rampage in Gaza [...]</bq> <bq>The NZZ report continued, “<b>Government Councilor and Head of the Department of Security Mario Fehr</b> told NZZ that Abunimah is forbidden to travel to Zurich, adding, <b>‘We do not want an Islamist Jew-hater, who calls for violence, in Switzerland.’”</b></bq> Mario Fehr is a filthy liar and a disgrace. Why not just call the guy a pedophile, too, while you're lying about him? He is not a Jew-hater, he is not an Islamist, and he is does not call for violence. Fehr is an idiot who would be out of a job in a country that wasn't bent over and oiled up for Israel. <bq>An online petition is being circulated at change.org to demand the Swiss government release Ali Abunimah from administrative detention. The petition says the journalist was, <b>“violently and forcibly taken by unidentified individuals in civilian clothing while walking on the streets of Zurich on Saturday 25th January 2025.”</b> The petition also states that Abunimah was “on his way to give a lecture on the history of Palestine, after another event he was going to deliver the following day was cancelled due to external pressure, following <b>a defamatory article in a local newspaper baselessly accusing him of radical Islamism and antisemitism.”</b></bq> Good job, Switzerland. Well-done. Off to the pub for a celebratory beer. <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-land-of-greater-fools" source="How Things Work" author="Hamilton Nolan">The Land of Greater Fools</a> <bq>You almost have to laugh. The way that I know that people have not quite internalized how outrageous this is is that everyone is not still talking about it, right this minute.</bq> Or maybe you're being hyperbolic about the sea change here. I've seen this in several places. People are appalled at what Trump is doing but at-least kind-of pretending that the U.S. went off the rails just 10 days ago. <bq>It is not a good sign, for America, that the slimeball pastor who gave an invocation at Trump’s inauguration yesterday followed up that appearance by immediately launching his own crytpo coin as well. I don’t mean that it’s a bad sign because it is hilariously crooked—it is, obviously, but slimeball pastors have been doing crooked things since religion was invented. <b>What really troubles me is that the assumption that scams are the way to get ahead has gotten so big that it now envelops something approaching the majority of this country.</b></bq> This. Is. Not. New. Please stop pretending that it is. You're perfectly happy to ignore it while it's benefitting you or people you like. <bq>[...] <b>operates in a way that is geared toward ripping off the suckers, towards cultivating a crowd that can be exploited, towards building a cheap facade that can be sold for a bundle right before it collapses.</b> That is the operating principle of not just the Republican Party, but—with Trump’s ascent into the White House again—of the entire political and economic power structure of the richest country on earth.</bq> It always has been. At least for my whole life, which covers over half a century. This is not up for debate. It is proveable. These are the types of people that society chooses as winners. The more shamelessness they exhibit, the more they win. <bq>The American myths, the fairy tales that are supposed to prod us to be better versions of ourselves, are getting meaner and more hollow. <b>We’re not even telling ourselves righteous lies any more. We’re using all our ingenuity to pick one another’s pockets and come up with creative new minorities to blame it on.</b></bq> <bq>The arc of these things—from rational analysis, to foolish speculation, to the faster scramble for greater fools to con—always ends in disaster for someone. The idea is just that the someone is not you. <b>This is the ethic of con men: They valorize those who can successfully rip off others without being ripped off themselves.</b></bq> <bq>If you think that you are a savvy politician because you got Trump on your side regarding congestion pricing and <b>meanwhile he is stripping thousands of your citizens of their birthright citizenship</b>, you are wrong.</bq> This is why these people are so annoying: they are unreliable allies because they say stupid things like "stripping citizenship," which no-one has proposed. There has been no talk of retroactivity as far as I can tell. Nolan's statement is, at best, misguided, unnecessarily hyperbolic, and counterproductive. At worst, it's a deliberate lie. I give him the benefit of the doubt, but it's sloppy language that makes him sound just like other people to whom I would not extend the same benefit. <bq><b>The bad guys are in charge right now.</b> You can’t triangulate your way out of this. All you can do is fight.</bq> Of course we should fight. But the bad guys were in charge before, you utter simp. <hr> <a href="https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ticking-toks-and-expertise" source="The Daily WTF" author="Remy Porter">Ticking Toks and Expertise</a> <bq>[...] for the record, <b>TikTok mostly uses Oracle's cloud</b> [...]</bq> Huh. I did not know that. <bq>[...] hearing all this conspiracy mongering nonsense reminds me of an important truth: <b>everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.</b> If you don't know how cloud deployments work, TikTok's downtime can look like a conspiracy. If you don't know how election systems are designed, any electoral result you don't like can look a lot like a conspiracy. If you don't know how the immune system works, vaccines can look like a conspiracy. <b>If you don't know how anything works, a flat Earth starts making sense.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://x.com/tuckercarlson/status/1883939641499258998?s=42" author="Tucker Carlson" source="X / Twitter">90-minute Interview with Matt Taibbi</a> This was probably the most relaxed I've seen Taibbi in an interview. It was quite informative and wide-ranging. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/they-dont-just-tell-us-what-to-think" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">They Don't Just Tell Us What To Think, They Train Us HOW To Think</a> <bq>Ferocious disagreement is permitted, but before the debate even begins everyone involved needs to adhere to the founding assumptions of the official framework. After that <b>you can argue as passionately as you like with the other side of this manufactured divide, because your ideas cannot pose any serious threat to your rulers.</b> And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Our minds are inundated with propaganda telling us <i>what</i> to think, but more importantly <b>they are shaped and programmed <i>how</i> to think about any new information they might come across.</b> Most of us are psychologically bent to the will of the powerful before we would ever even be in a position to begin thinking about opposing the status quo. <b>We are herded like livestock away from thoughts of revolution and change, led by tightly controlled minds the way a bull is led by the ring on its nose.</b> Once you see how pervasive the conditioning is, you understand why getting real revolutionary movements going faces so much inertia. <b>We won’t be able to free ourselves until we find a way to free our minds.</b></bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxv9S2V5WVs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Dxv9S2V5WVs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Jawad Mian / LoM" caption="The Ever-shifting Zeitgeist, or To Err is Human, to Forgive Divine" date="October 16, 2024"> Interesting talk about the economy; the question-and-answer was a bit more about how people might take advantage of the horribly slanted nature of it to predict their way to personal success than I like, but it was still pretty interesting. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/27/bidens-pernicious-presidential-legacies/" author="Jack Rasmus" source="CounterPunch">Biden’s Pernicious Presidential Legacies</a> <bq>When interest inflation is properly accounted for—along with increases in local government property and other taxes, fees, and other charges not considered by the government’s Consumer Price Index—<b>the true inflation experienced by US households since January 2021 is easily 35%-40% and therefore much higher than the official CPI number of 24%.</b></bq> <bq>According to the Federal Reserve bank’s ‘FRED’ database, Median Usual Weekly Earnings adjusted for inflation actually declined during the Biden years. <b>After rising slightly under Obama and then from $351 per week to $378 per week during Trump’s first term, during the Biden years real median weekly earnings actually declined from $378 to $373 per week.</b></bq> <bq>The $3.6 trillion mountain of fiscal stimulus produced a molehill of real GDP growth! GDP recovered in the second half of 2022 after its first half recession, but recorded a meager 1.9% growth rate for 2022. That was followed in 2023 and 2024 with still tepid GDP growth of 2.5% and 2.3% (the latter estimated by the CBO), respectively. <b>The $3.6 trillion total stimulus, in other words, did not result in GDP growth in 2022-24 beyond the typical long run average GDP gain for the US economy or around 2-2.5%. Where did the stimulus go if it didn’t move the dial on the growth of the economy beyond its historical average?</b></bq> Into the same pockets that stimuluses have gone for the past 20 years. <bq><b>It’s not by accident the US economy created a record number of new billionaires under Biden</b>, whose wealth is largely associated with rising financial asset prices from stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other. Record asset wealth surge is thus also a legacy of Biden’s regime. The combination of record asset wealth amidst tepid real GDP growth, chronic inflation, and declining real earnings for a majority of Americans <b>suggests the failure of the massive $10.7 trillion fiscal-monetary stimulus of 2020-22 might be due to the mis-allocation of that stimulus</b> to financial markets at the expense of real growth.</bq> It's only a failure for 90% of the population. <bq>Under Biden record annual budget deficits ranging from $2.7 trillion in 2021 to $1.8 trillion in 2024 for a total $7.65 trillion cumulative deficits over the past four years. From a level of $5.5 trillion in 2000, the National Debt in turn is now $36.2 trillion—having <b>risen from$26.9 trillion at the end of 2020 just before Biden took office to the more than $36 trillion by today.</b></bq> They literally borrowed $10T against the state and poured it into the coffers of 0.1% of the population. This is probably the greatest train robbery of all time. <bq>The average cost of private health insurance for a typical family of four is now more than $25,000 per year, according to Kaiser Family research. And that’s just monthly premiums. It doesn’t count additional copays or deductibles now averaging $1 to $5k per year. Nor do those costs include dental, hearing or vision services. Hearing aids cost $4-$5k and the cost of a single tooth implant is $10,000 or more. Then there’s the ever-accelerating cost of prescription drugs, often hundreds of dollars per pill (costing less than $10 if purchased from the same company in Canada or abroad). <b>A consequence has been millions of Americans are forced to forego use of health care services even if they are formally covered by bare bones insurance with unaffordable deductibles and copays.</b></bq> This is another money-siphon from below to above. People are paying for services that they never receive. Another great robbery. The life expectancy in the U.S. continues to drop, even after COVID. It would be incredible if it weren't so easily explained. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/01/dell-risks-employee-retention-by-forcing-all-teams-back-into-offices-full-time/" author="Scharon Harding" source="Ars Technica">Dell risks employee retention by forcing all teams back into offices full-time</a> <bq>[...] an internal memo today from CEO and Chairman Michael Dell informing workers that if they live within an hour of a Dell office, they’ll have to go in five days a week. "<b>What we're finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction</b>,” Dell wrote, per Business Insider. "A thirty-second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days."</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U068p4RMgew" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/U068p4RMgew" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sabine Hossenfelder" caption="A New Ice Age For Europe Is Becoming More Likely"> <hr> <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/detroits-death-spiral/" author="Alfred McCoy" source="Tom Dispatch">Detroit’s Death Spiral?</a> <bq>In the upper Midwest where I live, a cold winter’s day can cut the 300-mile range of an electric car like a Tesla to just 150 miles. Although I could make the 250-mile drive in an electric vehicle from the state capital of Madison to hike or ski in Northwoods Wisconsin, there’s no public charger anywhere nearby. So there’s no way to get back. And cost? <b>While you can get a reliable gas-powered Honda Civic for $24,000, a comparable electric vehicle like the Hyundai Ioniq now costs $39,000.</b></bq> <bq>I was stunned to read that a car I’d never heard of, the <b>NIO ET7, comes with a standard 649-mile range and complimentary access to “3,000 battery swap stations across China.”</b></bq> <bq>Another cutting-edge Chinese car few in America have ever heard of, the <b>ZEEKR 001, can load a 300-mile charge in 11 minutes flat</b>, less time than it takes to pump an equivalent-mileage of gas. And a Chinese car unknown here, <b>the XPENG P7, has an innovative battery that “operates optimally” in temperatures ranging down to –22° Fahrenheit</b>, ending the cold weather battery loss that makes EV driving so frustrating in Midwest winters.</bq> <bq>Following Ford’s time-tested lead, China’s largest automaker, <b>BYD, is selling its Dolphin hatchback EV for a low-low $15,000</b>, complete with a 13-inch rotating screen, ventilated front seats, and a 260-mile range. Here in the U.S., you have to pay more than twice that price for the Tesla Model 3 EV ($39,000) with lower tech and only 10 more miles of driving range. In case $15K beats your budget, the <b>Dolphin has a plug-in hybrid version with an industry-leading 740-mile range on a single charge for only $11,000 and an upgrade with an unbeatable combined gas-electric range of 1,300 miles.</b> Not surprisingly, EVs surged to 52% of all auto sales in China last year. And with such a strong domestic springboard into the world market, <b>Chinese companies accounted for more than 70% of global EV sales.</b></bq> <bq>Realizing that an EV is just a steel box with a battery, and battery quality determines car quality, Beijing set about systematically creating a vertical monopoly for those batteries — from raw materials like lithium and cobalt from the Congo all the way to cutting-edge factories for the final product. With its chokehold on refining all the essential raw materials for EV batteries (cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel), <b>by 2023-2024 China accounted for well over 80% of global sales of battery components and nearly two-thirds of all finished EV batteries.</b></bq> <bq>After <b>robotic factories there assemble complete cars, hands-free, from metal stamping to spray painting for less than the cost of a top-end refrigerator in the U.S.</b>, Chinese companies pop in their low-cost batteries and head to one of the country’s fully automated shipping ports. There, instead of relying on commercial carriers, leading automaker BYD cut costs to the bone by launching its own fleet of eight enormous ocean-going freighters. It started in January 2024 with <b>the BYD Explorer No. 1, capable of carrying 7,000 vehicles anywhere in the world</b>, custom-designed for speedy drive-on, drive-off delivery. That same month, <b>another major Chinese company you’ve undoubtedly never heard of, SAIC Motor, launched an even larger freighter, which regularly transports 7,600 cars to global markets.</b></bq> <bq>With its robotic factories cranking out one complete car every 76 seconds, <b>China is ready to crush rival car companies and build 80% of all the world’s autos</b>, as it already does with solar panels.</bq> <bq>With investment help from Volkswagen, the U.S. firm QuantumScape has recently developed a prototype for a solid-state battery that can reach “80% state of charge in less than 15 minutes,” while ensuring “improved safety,” extended battery life, and a driving range of 500 miles. Already, <b>investment advisors are touting the company as the next Nvidia.</b></bq> I doubt this very much. I bet it's all just smoke to attract investment income, just like those supposedly "ready for prime time" SMR (Small Modular Reactors) that promise the world, then deliver nothing---at 4x the price. The next battery advances will come from Toyota with their salt batteries, not an unknown U.S. startup with a prototype that won't be production-ready for a decade, if ever. Nvidia's world isn't even as rosy as it once was, as the demand for its high-end chips will drop if AI algorithms and technologies become too efficient. For example, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/deepseek-spooks-american-tech-industry-as-it-tops-the-apple-app-store/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">DeepSeek panic triggers tech stock sell-off as Chinese AI tops App Store</a> reports that <iq>Nvidia stock dove 17 percent amid worries over the rise of Chinese AI company DeepSeek</iq> on 27. January. <bq>Back in that day, <b>QuantumScape</b>’s extended-range solid-state EV battery seemed so improbable it <b>was damned by stock-pickers as “a pump and dump… scam”</b>; now Volkswagen is taking that company’s prototype into mass production.</bq> I'll believe it when I see it. Volkswagen is in all kinds of trouble and I wouldn't put it past its C-Suite and shareholders to use Quantum in its own pump-and-dump scam to get out before the venerable German giant collapses for good. The article ends with what I consider to be an undeserved paean to Joe Biden---people never seem to tire of writing these---along with a terrified warning of how bad Trump will be for the auto industry. The U.S. auto industry has slept for too long. It's already too late. China has a 15-year head-start on manufacturing real cars for real people rather than overpriced toys for wannabes. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/31/roaming-charges-the-trick-of-disaster/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Trick of Disaster</a> <bq><b>The rate of ocean warming has more than quadrupled since 1985</b>, which is pretty clear evidence that global warming is rapidly accelerating. <b>Outside of China, the oil sheikhdoms of the Middle East are the world’s fastest-growing markets for solar power.</b> What do they know the USA doesn’t? Ominous. A new variant of H5N9 bird flu has been found in California. It shares the same clade (2.3.4.4b) with H5N1. <b>Both H5N9 and H5N1 were detected at a duck “farm” in Merced County, forcing nearly 119,000 birds to be killed.</b> <b>More than 3.8 million commercial chickens and over 86,000 commercial turkeys in southwestern Ohio’s Miami Valley tested positive for bird flu.</b> <b>Since March of last year, China’s CO2 emissions have stabilized</b>, a result of a record surge in clean energy production. While emissions grew by 0.8% overall, they were actually lower than in the 12 months prior to February 2024.</bq> Good news for the planet. <bq>Live births per woman…<pre>Australia 3 2 China 6 0.7 France 3 1.8 Germany 2 1.3 Italy 7 1.2 Japan 5 1 South Korea 6 0.5 Spain 5 1 UK 5 1.5 US 3 1.7</pre></bq> <bq>From Mike Davis’ last interview (Guardian):<bq><b>Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future.</b> A small group have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, & <b>they have no vision, no strategy, no plan.</b> The climate crisis, migration crisis and pandemic have shown us the truth about how supposedly democratic states react to globally threatening events: they pull up the drawbridge.</bq></bq> <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/die-gegenstuck-akte" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Die Gegenstück-Akte</a> <bq>Denn in meiner uneingeschränkten Akt entdeckte ich an der Epiphanie, dass nichts, aber auch gar nichts dich daran hindert, so weit herauszuzoomen, dass du nun nicht nur zahllose, sondern transfinit viele Gegenstücke von dir selbst siehst — und ich meine das <b>im vollen kantorschen Sinne der unendlichen Ordnungen der Unendlichkeit ohne Ende, wo ∞ nicht den Abschluss der Reihe bedeutet, sondern nur den bescheidenen ersten Schritt.</b></bq> <bq>Auf einem ausreichend herausgezoomten Level, das alle Teile einer gegebenen Karte berücksichtigt, einschließlich derjenigen, die normalerweise in unseren kommerziell verfügbaren Akten blockiert sind, sehen wir, dass jede Akt genau gleich ist. Was als „mein Akt“ oder „dein Akt“ bezeichnet wird, <b>vermute ich jetzt stark, ist in Wirklichkeit nur eine bestimmte Region, die aus dem Universum der Welten herausgeschnitten wurde, das jedermanns Akt ist. Es ist alles derselbe Akt.</b></bq> <bq><b>Die Deutschen sind inzwischen so entfremdet von ihrer eigenen Sprache, dass sie oft nicht einmal in der Lage sind, die Klassiker ihrer eigenen Tradition im Original zu lesen.</b> Als ich 2008 an einem Seminar über Kants Dritte Kritik an der Humboldt-Universität teilnahm, war ich erschrocken festzustellen, dass die Mehrheit meiner Kollegen die Übersetzung von Guyer der Originalfassung von Kant eindeutig vorzog. <b>Das ist meiner Ansicht nach skandalös.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-RzJYo5vJQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/x-RzJYo5vJQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="KrotchRaut" caption="KrotchRaut - Raüten Roots (Revised Full Album) [Explicit]"> This music is AI-generated but human-guided. I thought the instrumental was initial instrumental <i>Furto Ablata</i> was OK, if a bit musically incoherent. There are about five different styles in there. The structure doesn't match what I'm used to, so it feels ... off. Even the solos in the next song sound kinda cool but then it's ALL OF THE SOLOS you like ALL AT ONCE. To be fair, <i>Ode to the Light Bringer</i> was a better instrumental, and <i>The Devil Drives a Golf Cart</i> was decent, while <i>Death to the World</i> was actually pretty good. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1iage33/ard/" author="" source="Reddit / Tumblr">ard</a> <img src="{att_link}types_of_stard.jpeg" href="{att_link}types_of_stard.jpeg" align="none" caption="Types of 'stard'" scale="50%"> <bq>ard' is a real suffix in the english language just like 'ly' or 'ify', it just isn't common enough for us to notice its usage. 'ard' means 'too much' or 'too easily' so 'mustard' is something that is 'too pungent, just as 'wizard' is someone who is too wise, 'coward' is someone too easily cowed, and 'drunkard' is someone too often drunk this implies that 'bastard' is someone who is too 'bast' and this needs experimentation and research [...] This is pretty much correct. According to the OED bastard is from Old French and the bast-part means "pack saddle" which was used as a bed by mule drivers, giving the phrase fils de bast, a child conceived on the pack saddle instead of the marriage bed. In English it becomes bastard, the -ard being a pejorative. It is the same one as wizard and coward and drunkard.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://amt.parsons.edu/files/2010/09/AlyoshathePot.pdf" author="Leo Tolstoy" source="">Alyosha the Pot</a> This is the story of the uncomplaining Alyosha, who worked selflessly for insufferable people until he died on the job. See also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyosha_the_Pot" author="" source="Wikipedia">Alyosha the Pot</a> (Алёша Горшок). <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/fathoms" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Fathoms</a> <bq><b>And the floorboards creak as something green and ancient moves below them</b> And the platypus with mirror eyes is gazing at you from the dawn of the universe And your consciousness is consumed with the words <b>“THERE ARE FATHOMS OF PEACE BENEATH THE WARS, AND A VAST WISDOM WINKS FROM BEHIND THE MADNESS”</b> And you come at long last to stillness And you turn and face the world, palms open.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/31/the-word-on-mary/" author="Desiree Hellegers" source="CounterPunch">The Word on Mary</a> <bq>Around Progreso, they know the Virgin’s pissed about those box car crossings, Jésus and Maria dying in the summer heat. The Virgin knows man doesn’t live by bread alone, that <b>it takes more than a prayer to cross the border. You have to crouch down, lay low, change your- self into a shadow. Around Progreso they know: the Virgin Mary’s seen some shit.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/o_4hdA11Z-Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The House of Tabula" caption="The Ultimate Film Studies Watchlist"> Thanks to YouTube user @BoPeep01 for their service is creating a list of all timestamps and films. <h level="3">Pre-1920s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=292s">4:52</a> The Films of the Edison Labs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=365s">6:05</a> The Films of Louis and Auguste Lumiére <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=417s">6:57</a> The Big Swallow (1901) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=476s">7:56</a> Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=544s">9:04</a> The Great Train Robbery (1903) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=607s">10:07</a> Fantasmagorie (1908) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=656s">10:56</a> Suspense (1913) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=701s">11:41</a> The Birth of a Nation (1915) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=828s">13:48</a> Intolerance (1916) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=896s">14:56</a> J'accuse (1919) <h level="3">The 1920s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=952s">15:52</a> The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1006s">16:46</a> The Phantom Carriage (1921) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1049s">17:29</a> Haxan (1922) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1087s">18:07</a> Sherlock Jr. (1924) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1131s">18:51</a> Greed (1924) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1173s">19:33</a> The Last Laugh (1924) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1225s">20:25</a> Battleship Potemkin (1925) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1345s">22:25</a> A Page of Madness (1926) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1390s">23:10</a> Metropolis (1927) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1431s">23:51</a> Napoleon (1927) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1502s">25:02</a> Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1543s">25:43</a> The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1617s">26:57</a> Un Chien Andalou (1929) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1642s">27:22</a> Man with a Movie Camera (1929) <h level="3">The 1930s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1730s">28:50</a> M (1931) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1775s">29:35</a> Freaks (1932) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1824s">30:24</a> The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1854s">30:54</a> Duck Soup (1933) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1924s">32:04</a> L'Atalante (1934) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=1981s">33:01</a> Modern Times (1936) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2016s">33:36</a> Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2145s">35:45</a> Stagecoach (1939) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2186s">36:26</a> The Rules of the Game (1939) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2268s">37:48</a> Gone with the Wind (1939) <h level="3">The 1940s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2358s">39:18</a> The Great Dictator (1940) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2399s">39:59</a> Fantasia (1941) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2480s">41:20</a> Citizen Kane (1941) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2595s">43:15</a> To Be or Not To Be (1942) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2696s">44:56</a> Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2749s">45:49</a> Casablanca (1943) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2816s">46:56</a> Double Indemnity (1944) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2898s">48:18</a> Ivan the Terrible (1944) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2931s">48:51</a> Beauty and the Beast (1946) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=2990s">49:50</a> Paisan (1946) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3039s">50:39</a> Brief Encounter (1946) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3085s">51:25</a> The Bicycle Thieves (1948) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3163s">52:43</a> Children of the Beehive (1948) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3195s">53:15</a> The Red Shoes (1948) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3257s">54:17</a> The Third Man (1949) <h level="3">The 1950s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3335s">55:35</a> Sunset Blvd. (1950) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3388s">56:28</a> Los Olvidados (1950) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3446s">57:26</a> Rashomon (1951) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3522s">58:42</a> Singin' in the Rain (1952) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3574s">59:34</a> Tokyo Story (1953) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3659s">1:00:59</a> Ugetsu (1954) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3695s">1:01:35</a> Rear Window (1954) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3762s">1:02:42</a> The Night of the Hunter (1955) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3822s">1:03:42</a> Ordet (1955) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3857s">1:04:17</a> Pather Panchali (1955) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3897s">1:04:57</a> Seven Samurai (1956) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=3985s">1:06:25</a> The Searchers (1956) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4045s">1:07:25</a> A Man Escaped (1957) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4107s">1:08:27</a> The Cranes are Flying (1957) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4148s">1:09:08</a> Touch of Evil (1957) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4191s">1:09:51</a> Vertigo (1958) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4282s">1:11:22</a> The 400 Blows (1959) <h level="3">The 1960s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4373s">1:12:53</a> Psycho (1960) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4422s">1:13:42</a> L'Avventura (1961) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4479s">1:14:39</a> Lawrence of Arabia (1962) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4535s">1:15:35</a> La Jetee (1962) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4570s">1:16:10</a> Vivre Sa Vie (1963) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4637s">1:17:17</a> 8 1/2 (1963) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4684s">1:18:04</a> It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4730s">1:18:50</a> The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4766s">1:19:26</a> Woman in the Dunes (1965) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4801s">1:20:01</a> Persona (1966) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4868s">1:21:08</a> The Battle of Algiers (1966) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4912s">1:21:52</a> Andrei Rublev (1966) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4962s">1:22:42</a> Playtime (1967) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=4998s">1:23:18</a> 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5068s">1:24:28</a> Kes (1969) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5123s">1:25:23</a> Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5185s">1:26:25</a> The Color of Pomegranates (1969) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5227s">1:27:07</a> Army of Shadows (1969) <h level="3">The 1970s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5305s">1:28:25</a> The Conformist (1970) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5333s">1:28:53</a> A Touch of Zen (1971) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5377s">1:29:37</a> The Godfather Part I & II (1972-1974) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5437s">1:30:37</a> Pink Flamingos (1972) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5505s">1:31:45</a> The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5559s">1:32:39</a> The Exorcist (1973) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5588s">1:33:08</a> La Maman et la Putain (1973) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5662s">1:34:22</a> Badlands (1973) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5693s">1:34:53</a> The Conversation (1974) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5732s">1:35:32</a> A Woman Under the Influence (1975) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5805s">1:36:45</a> Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelle (1975) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5872s">1:37:52</a> Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5945s">1:39:05</a> Nashville (1975) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=5980s">1:39:40</a> Jaws (1975) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6047s">1:40:47</a> Barry Lyndon (1975) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6077s">1:41:17</a> Taxi Driver (1976) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6148s">1:42:28</a> Eraserhead (1977) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6217s">1:43:37</a> Stars Wars (1977) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6281s">1:44:41</a> House (1977) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6309s">1:45:09</a> Alien (1979) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6382s">1:46:22</a> Apocalypse Now (1979) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6452s">1:47:32</a> Stalker (1979) <h level="3">The 1980s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6523s">1:48:43</a> Raging Bull (1980) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6573s">1:49:33</a> The Shining (1980) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6627s">1:50:27</a> Pixote (1980) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6670s">1:51:10</a> Koyaanisqatsi (1982) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6728s">1:52:08</a> Videodrome (1983) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6752s">1:52:32</a> Ran (1985) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6807s">1:53:27</a> Come and See (1985) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6863s">1:54:23</a> Tenshi no Tamago (1985) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6923s">1:55:23</a> A Short Film About Killing (1988) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=6980s">1:56:20</a> A City of Sadness (1989) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7044s">1:57:24</a> The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7111s">1:58:31</a> Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7182s">1:59:42</a> Do the Right Thing (1989) <h level="3">The 1990s</h> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7254s">2:00:54</a> Goodfellas (1990) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7308s">2:01:48</a> Close-Up (1990) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7369s">2:02:49</a> A Brighter Summer Day (1991) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7431s">2:03:51</a> Man Bites Dog (1992) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7482s">2:04:42</a> Hardboiled (1992) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7543s">2:05:43</a> Satantango (1994) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7632s">2:07:12</a> Pulp Fiction (1994) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7708s">2:08:28</a> Clerks (1994) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7774s">2:09:34</a> The Lion King (1994) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7821s">2:10:21</a> La Haine (1995) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7885s">2:11:25</a> Cure (1997) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7920s">2:12:00</a> Festen (1998) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=7974s">2:12:54</a> Beau Travail (1998) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=8007s">2:13:27</a> Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=8062s">2:14:22</a> The Matrix (1999) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4hdA11Z-Q&t=8110s">2:15:10</a> American Movie (1999) <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/the-suburbs" source="Weaponized Immigrant" author="Evgenia">The Suburbs</a> <bq>This made me think about another great David — <b>David Graeber. He was an anomaly for America, a real public intellectual</b>, who, like Todd Solondz, had almost a Soviet vibe about him. <b>He spoke in full sentences, read and wrote books, and spent time walking and thinking instead of driving and shopping.</b> I only recently realized that he grew up in Penn South, a somewhat Soviet-style apartment complex in Chelsea that was populated by working-class families. I think it explains why he came off as so peculiar, so un-American. <b>He never lived like an American and never accepted the American way of life as the best and only possible way.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-politics-of-violence-and-violence.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">The Politics of Violence and the Violence of the Political</a> <bq><b>When powerful people make peaceful change impossible</b> while spreading violent change across the world <b>it is only a matter of time before those chickens come home to roost.</b></bq> <bq><b>For a nation</b> actively stoking the flames of a full-blown holocaust in Gaza and a possible apocalypse in Ukraine <b>to expect anything less than violence is really nothing short of absurd.</b></bq> <bq>We can't pretend that any of this is shocking anymore without being complicit and I refuse to join the gasping class in their breathless chorus of virtue signaling awe, but <b>I won't advocate carnage either even if I do understand it. Not only is it gruesome and dehumanizing even for the perpetrator</b> who has reduced themself to fighting like a state, <b>but it isn't particularly affective either.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://ajone239.github.io/2025/01/15/draft-of-my-core-tenets.html" author="Austin Jones" source="">A tentative list of core tenets</a> <bq>You never know the situations that have brought a person to you so be kind</bq> This made me think of Chesterton’s Fence, which is that you’re not allowed to change anything until you know why it’s like that in the first place. Closer to the author's example, my partner has sometimes asked "Why didn’t that older person say hi when I said hi?" TSK TSK My answer is: Oh, because, as far as they’re concerned, we appeared OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE because they haven’t seen well out of that ol’ left eye since before the FIRST Trump presidency. They were so happy that they didn’t fall over that they forgot to formulate a reply. By the time they were ready, we were ALREADY GONE and they were left wondering whether they'd hallucinated the whole thing. This comes for all of us, if we're very lucky. I wonder, though, whether being kind on one level means being harsh and real on another. I had a pretty difficult and untalented crop of students in my JS course. At least two of them shouldn’t be programming because they have had nearly enough practice <i>learning to learn</i>. They barely know how to use the basics but they want to BUILD TOOLS. I’m kind, so I stay encouraging, but true kindness would be to be harsh enough to put them onto a path that would be more long-term fruitful for them. They are headed for a world of disappointment and my superficial kindness isn’t helping them, not really. <bq>I get what you are saying but you conflate kindness and being soft. For the people who need a reality check about their skill. They should get that. But it shouldn't come from a chiding punitive hand. It should come from someone who wants to help them. Sternness can be kind. You can tell them that they lack fundamentals without cutting them in half.</bq> That’s true, of course. What’s also true is that many people are going to feel cut in half no matter how you present it. I would still take the gentle route on the off chance that it works, though. My younger self would not have. I had a couple of good friends who would get out the popcorn when I would get into it with our project manager. They still talk about it to this day, the bastards. <bq>Another human talking to you is always trying to express something. It is why they are communicating. However challenging, it is worth trying to understand their communication.</bq> Lovely. Inconceivably difficult for many, if not most, but almost always worth it, if only to find out that you don’t have to pay as much attention the next time. Some people really are kinda crazy (as defined by "believing things that are at odds with reality so fervently that, were society not constantly buoying them up, they would be dead within weeks because they would either forget to eat or would get themselves killed. See <a href="https://ajone239.github.io/2025/01/15/draft-of-my-core-tenets.html#talk-shit-get-hit">talk shit, get hit</a>. <bq>If a person talks for hours on end, they could be using the conversation with you as escape.</bq> This is what people do instead of paying complete strangers for therapy. <bq>Don’t shirk the responsibility of making a mistake, grow from the event.</bq> I find it's a lot easier to own up to mistakes when I can reassure myself that I've banked a few times where I've been awesomely right, so I can afford the reputational damage. It's humanizing. A good corollary is to give credit where credit is due. Don't be chintzy with praise. You can dilute it if you're too effusive, of course, but I've seen so many more people go in the opposite direction that they don't have to worry about it. Instead, they end up being <a href="https://killbill.fandom.com/wiki/Pai_Mei">Pai Mei from Kill Bill</a>. <bq>No conditional apologies [...] a conditional apology doesn’t mean you feel bad for having done the action, it means that you feel bad for how the offended party’s reaction made you feel.</bq> Agreed but, man, sometimes, you don't think you need to apologize, in which case Bill Burr's "I'm sorry you feel that way," is <i>much</i> more appropriate. <bq>If you speaking your mind ends a relationship, the pair of you likely weren’t compatible.</bq> I would indicate in some way that this tenet comes to the fore only when all of the others have failed. The other tenets indicate that you might be steamrolled but that's not the point of them. You should be honest and think about what you think and admit when you were wrong and grow wiser and apologize when your having been wrong annoyed or hurt others. If you examine something you believe and <i>it holds up</i> and someone else isn't willing to live with that, then, yeah, ... it's over. This is for all sorts of relationships. In some cases, like work colleagues, you can just dial it back and agree that you're not going to have contact except as required by work. <bq>I edited this whole blog entry in <i>vim</i>; I haven’t touched my mouse once.</bq> Maybe time to get a spelling/grammar-checker. 😉 ❤️ <hr> I was raised in a world that taught me that it was a just world. I learned after a while that it was just, but not for everyone. Not even close. That is, I could expect justice but relatively few others could. <hr> Morally, we have to forgive all of the fascists eventually, but we don’t have to do it <i>first</i>. <hr> <a href="https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/seven-steps-to-creating-a-data-driven-decision-making-culture/" author="Avinash Kaushik" source="">Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture</a> TIL that HIPPO stands for "Highest Paid Person's Opinion." I didn't read most of the rest of the article, though. It's too long, even for me, and the amount of reward I expect to get out of it is slim. <h id="technology">Technology</h> I work in a department that includes not only front-end and back-end software developers, but also embedded software (more specialized hardware), electronics, and mechanical design. This situation is a good reminder for software developers that they wouldn't be able to get anything done if it weren't for the other disciplines. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that software development doesn't sit atop a pyramid of the other's achievements, but in a virtuous circle. This is not like the relatively straightforward hierarchy of Mathematics => Physics => Chemistry => Biology => Etc. If you try to set up an analogous hierarchy, like Mechanical Design => Electronics => Software Engineering, then you quickly end up back at Electronics/Mechanical Design. For example, nowadays, mechanical design only works with CAD, which bootstrapped with software, which bootstrapped to the point where one could write CAD programs only because mechanical design and electronics were able to be developed without it. <hr> Software is so terrible. Here are just a few things that have happened in the last hour. <ol> My late-2015 iMac had a <c>spotlightcored</c> process running at ~100% of one CPU. As soon as I killed it, a <c>Safari Web Plugin</c> process popped up for ~100% CPU for a couple of minutes. It went away by itself. Safari is in the background and isn't doing anything. Maybe it's because there's an Outlook tab open in it. The mid-2014 Apple MacBook Pro laptop I use for the indoor bike couldn't find the wireless that it always connects to. I rebooted it. It came up quickly, letting me log in, then went completely black for about a minute. I had to hard-boot it. It's not the newest laptop but WTH? It managed to find both the BlueTooth speaker and the wireless on the first try, though. My Apple iPhone 12 Mini battery was just cheerily draining very quickly. It wasn't the TacX training app. It was DuoLingo, doing something in the background, even after I'd killed it. I had barely 4% battery left by the end of my ride. My Garmin Venu 2 watch is connected to the phone, but the TacX app refused to show the heart-rate being broadcast by it. This stopped working the last time already, after having working dozens of times before. </ol> People are so hopeful that AI-developed software is going to make this all <i>better</i>. We have wonderful things that are all just about 1-2% broken enough to make them either unusable or very frustrating to work with. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://seldo.com/posts/what-ive-learned-about-writing-ai-apps-so-far" source="Seldo.com" author="Laurie Voss">What I've learned about writing AI apps so far</a> <bq><b>Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it.</b> If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. <b>If you're asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.</b> </bq> <bq>This is why Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is not going anywhere. RAG is basically the practice of telling the LLM what it needs to know and then immediately asking it for that information back in condensed form. LLMs are great at it, which is why RAG is so popular.</bq> <bq><b>There is no way to get an LLM to perform the thought necessary to write something for you.</b> You have to do the thinking. To get an LLM to write something good you have to give it a prompt so long you might as well have just written the thing yourself.</bq> <bq>[...] I can't emphasize enough what a good idea it is to give your LLM the chance to figure out if it fucked up, and a chance to try again. It adds complexity to your app but it will pay you back in reliability many times over. <b>LLMs are bad at one-shotting but if you give them a couple of swings they often get it.</b> It's both the curse and the magic of them being nondeterministic.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>you know what's really reliable? Regular programming. It takes inputs and turns them into outputs, the same way every time, according to extremely precise instructions.</b> If there is anything you are asking the LLM to do that could be accomplished by writing some regular code, write that code. It will be faster, cheaper, and way more reliable to run.</bq> <bq>I don't think you can reliably get an LLM to replace any human but especially not a doctor, do not trust your health to autocomplete that is just trying to be helpful. <b>Do not get sued into oblivion because you ChatGPTed your legal terms.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>taking text and turning it into less text is still an enormous field of endeavour, and a huge market.</b> It's still very exciting, all the more exciting because it's got clear boundaries and isn't hype-driven over-reaching, or dependent on LLMs overnight becoming way better than they currently are.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.dustinewers.com/ignore-the-grifters" source="" author="Dustin Ewers">Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry</a> <bq><b>AI tools create a significant productivity boost for developers.</b> Different folks report different gains, but most people who try AI code generation recognize its ability to increase velocity.</bq> I don't think this is quantifiably proven, not for anything outside of prototypes. Serious studies from places like Microsoft show a decrease in security and maintainability. <bq><b>There are many software projects that would help a business, but businesses aren’t going to do them because the return on investment doesn’t make sense.</b> When software development becomes more efficient, the ROI of any given software project increases, which unlocks more projects. That legacy modernization project that no one wants to tackle because it’s super costly. Now you can make AI do most of the work. That project now makes sense.</bq> C'mon bro.. Ai doesn't know how to do modernize a legacy project! That is absolutely not what AI is good at, unless you put it on a <i>very</i> short leash, in which case it's probably no longer cost-effective. <bq>The Solow model shows that economic growth is a product of capital (factories, data centers, corporate relationships, land, etc…), labor, and technological progress. <b>In the long run, the only reliable driver of economic growth is technological progress.</b> Our society gets richer by learning new ways to deploy scarce capital.</bq> Imagine a spherical cow...how do people look at the world and still think like this? Look! A programmer read a book on economics. <bq>Widespread adoption of artificial intelligence will greatly accelerate technological progress. This acceleration will create a massive increase in economic growth. <b>This rising tide will create more resources for everyone. If you’ve spent any time following the e/acc community on Twitter, this is what they’re banking on.</b></bq> Just shut-up. You are not part of any realistic solution. The e/acc community. You've got to be kidding me. <bq>It’s better to be a barista in Star Trek than a noble in Game of Thrones.</bq> That's largely because Star Trek is <i>communist</i>, you utter twat. <bq>AI has the potential to enable millions of small creators to build sustainable businesses.</bq> Like Amazon's drop-shippers, right? Doesn't it matter what <i>kind</i> of economic activity it is? And whom it benefits? <bq><b>AI code gen also tends to fall down in complex enterprise systems. You can crank out cute demo apps all day long, but most systems don’t resemble cute demo apps.</b> This isn’t much different than the Ruby on Rails 15 minute blog app scaffolding demos from back in the day. They looked cool, but it was only the first step.</bq> <bq>Maybe <b>get it to crank out some of that documentation</b> you don’t want to write anyway.</bq> Just fucking stop making slop that wastes everyone else's time. If you don't want to write documentation, then don't write any. Your product won't have documentation. You know what's worse than no documentation? Long-ass documentation that looks good but was never proofread because the team was either too lazy or too greedy, so it's <i>wrong</i>. That's worse. Worse is you leveraging AI to use a very little bit of your time to waste huge amount of mine. <hr> <a href="https://aider.chat/docs/troubleshooting/edit-errors.html#dont-add-too-many-files" author="" source="Aider Documentation">Don’t add too many files</a> <bq><ul>Don’t add too many files to the chat, just add the files you think need to be edited. Aider also sends the LLM a map of your entire git repo, so other relevant code will be included automatically. Use <c>/drop</c> to remove files from the chat session which aren’t needed for the task at hand. This will reduce distractions and may help the LLM produce properly formatted edits. Use <c>/clear</c> to remove the conversation history, again to help the LLM focus. Use <c>/tokens</c> to see how many tokens you are using for each message.</ul></bq> This has been my experience too: using these tools well involves a lot more black magic than the sophisticated and complex analysis-based tools we've had up until now. Can you imagine a programmer asking for a proper answer massaging the context and re-posting the question again and again and again? Can you imagine how much processing power that uses? Can you imagine how much that costs? Is it worth it? Is it worth the $200/month for the "pro" versions of these LLM subscriptions? When you're paying that much, you kind of expect the tool to be <i>better</i> rather than blaming you when it returns unusable responses. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/deepseek-spooks-american-tech-industry-as-it-tops-the-apple-app-store/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">DeepSeek panic triggers tech stock sell-off as Chinese AI tops App Store</a> <bq>On Monday, Nvidia stock dove 17 percent amid worries over the rise of Chinese AI company DeepSeek, whose R1 reasoning model stunned industry observers last week by challenging American AI supremacy with a low-cost, freely available AI model, and whose AI assistant app jumped to the top of the iPhone App Store's "Free Apps" category over the weekend, overtaking ChatGPT.</bq> <bq>There are three elements of DeepSeek R1 that really shocked experts. First, the Chinese startup appears to have <b>trained the model for only $6 million</b> (reportedly about 3% of the cost of training o1) as a so-called "side project" while using less powerful Nvidia H800 AI-acceleration chips due to US export restrictions on cutting-edge GPUs. Secondly, it <b>appeared just four months after OpenAI announced o1 in September 2024</b>. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, DeepSeek <b>released the model weights for free with an open MIT license</b>, meaning anyone can download it, run it, and fine-tune (modify) it.</bq> <bq>On LinkedIn, Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who frequently champions open-weights AI models and open source AI research, wrote, "To people who see the performance of DeepSeek and think: 'China is surpassing the US in AI.' You are reading this wrong. <b>The correct reading is: 'Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones.'"</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/kill-the-ai-in-your-head" author="Yasha Levine" source="Weaponized Immigrant">Kill the AI in your head</a> <bq>This tech, which ingests the entirety of human knowledge and cultural output, and concentrates into the hands of a tiny elite that owns these machines, is meant to break society apart…to shake out all the wealth that’s trapped in decentralized pockets and to plunder it without giving anything back. <b>This technology will no doubt reconfigure life to a new normal that will be worse than what it is today, there is no doubt about it.</b> <b>Underneath it all, this AI tech rush is just another speculative bubble. It’s being pumped to feed the stock market casino — the true engine of the American oligarchic economy.</b> That’s why a lot of people are freaking out right now. The Chinese AI success has deflated this NATO-aligned AI bubble so quickly that some are worried it might pop permanently. They’re panicking out there. If you kill a companies on the stock market, it’ll die a real physical death, too! <b>All this panicking will no doubt lead to the U.S. government — the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA — to pump some money into the sector.</b> So everything will be ok for the AI boosters. I wouldn’t worry too much.</bq> <bq>I had hoped that with China, being based on a supposedly different cultural and economic model, might look at America and the dead-end capitalism and industrial civilization that it represents, attempt to follow a different path for development…to come up with a different measure of what it means to create a society worth living in. But it doesn’t seem to be the case. <b>China seems to be plunging headlong into a hyper-industrial, hyper-cybernetic, hyper-consumerist way of life — obsessed with efficiency, obsessed with computers, obsessed with robotic life, AIs.</b></bq> <bq>[...] plow all its efforts into <b>engineering a society that slows things down — a society that uses less energy, stops producing so much garbage and toxic waste, and uses existing technology to give people time…time with their family and friends, time with their children, time to pursue interests outside the narrow confines of an economy</b> that gives people no leash to live at all. Our lords and saviors would aim to build a world of fewer bullshit jobs, a world where people aren’t alienated from the processes that sustain them, a world that isn’t based on eradicating all living life on this planet… But we know that this is not gonna happen. I’d say the people in power are as stuck in this system as the rest of us. In fact, they’re more stuck. <b>Think about how many truly wealthy people there are in America. And think about how uncreative they are with their wealth — outside of conspicuous consumption, innovative tax evasion schemes, and the funding of an odd museum or whatever…they are doing absolutely nothing interesting with it.</b> It’s all very conservative…very cautious…meant to keep the status quo.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email" author="Dario Amodei" source="">On DeepSeek and Export Controls</a> <bq>I won’t focus on whether DeepSeek is or isn’t a threat to US AI companies like Anthropic (although I do believe many of the claims about their threat to US AI leadership are greatly overstated). Instead, I’ll focus on whether DeepSeek’s releases undermine the case for those export control policies on chips. I don’t think they do. In fact, I think they make export control policies even more existentially important than they were a week ago. Export controls serve a vital purpose: keeping democratic nations at the forefront of AI development. To be clear, they’re not a way to duck the competition between the US and China. <b>In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail.</b></bq> These are the words of the CEO of Anthropic, pretending that he's not asking the U.S. government to continue to provide his company with a competitive advantage against "the enemy". These are the so-called thought leaders. This is what happens when you build a society where people who've earned money are considered people worth listening to. <iq>Prevail?</iq> What the fuck are you talking about? You sound like an idiot. You sound like a cold warrior. You sound like someone inver sted in empire and plunder. That means that I don't have to listen to you because you're speaking for yourself and <i>your class</i>, not for me and pretty much everyone else. What do I care whether a beneficial technology---be it solar power, wind power, nuclear power, electric vehicles, cleaner, better batteries, or lighter-weight LLMs---comes from China or anywhere else? Why should I have to pretend along with you that China is somehow the bad guy and the U.S. is the good guy? Are a fucking mental infant? Jesus Christ. These are the people running the whole show in our countries, with just a shockingly infantile and simplistic mentality and philosophy. They probably think Marvel movies are philosophical treatises. They probably believe that the Westphalian nation-state system is the only way of organizing humanity. They will be the death of us all, as we chase after them, hoping that they drop a few crumbs from their table for us. <hr> <a href="https://addyo.substack.com/p/why-i-use-cline-for-ai-engineering" author="Addy Osmani" source="">Why I use Cline for AI Engineering</a> Cline is a VSC plugin that adds LLM tools to your programming environment. OK. It sounds pretty interesting but the <i>hype</i>. I want to say that these people lie like they breathe but I don't even think that they realize they're doing it. Everyone around them also talks and writes like this, so they have no reference point. No-one calls them on their bullshit when they write something like this, <bq>Recent benchmarks and user experiences have shown that combining DeepSeek-R1 for planning with Claude 3.5 Sonnet for implementation can reduce costs by up to 97% while improving overall output quality.</bq> DeepSeek has been available for under a month. There are no useful benchmarks or studies worth citing. There are just claims from DeepSeek themselves. Quit your bullshit. 97%. C'mon. Compared to what? Notepad? Like, if you need a 40-hour week to build something before, now it takes just an hour. Sure, OK. That's possibly true, for a very limited scope of prototype projects. A little further down, he's citing statistics again, <bq>Engineers report being able to rely on DeepSeek-R1 for approximately 70% of tasks that previously required more expensive models.</bq> 70%! Just pulled right out of his ass. Most engineers have barely heard of DeepSeek, to say nothing of actually used it. And no-one one has had enough time with it to make serious estimates of how much time they're saving vis á vis other techniques. But these aren't serious estimates. Like the first percentage, it doesn't mention <i>relative to what</i>. Like I said, the tools looks interesting, even though the more interesting bits have "computer use," which I feel might be a bit early but what do I know? Not much. <bq>The author has no affiliation with Cline beyond being a user. This assessment is based on personal experience in production environments.</bq> Thank goodness he included this. I was beginning to worry that I'd been reading a well-written advertisement. <h id="programming">Programming</h> I feel like there are two separate strands of programming these days. There are the people who are trying to build optimized and scalable applications by hand, using well-designed -documented APIs. Their software are like tuned and <i>engineered</i> machines that form the core of what keeps the (developed) world turning. They deeply understand at least the layer of software that they call home and either deeply understand other layers or have enough of a familiarity with them that they can optimize their own code to best take advantage of those systems. Some know how the Linux file-system API shovels bytes around, and some know how to avoid unwanted cache-ejection in the processor, and others at least know how to use APIs that were written by people who <i>do know</i> how this works. And then there are the people who are trying to figure out how much code they can <i>generate</i> without necessarily understanding the minutiae of even their own layer of code. If it "works", then that's good enough. It gets a bit murky in that the definition of "works" generally entails an understanding of, if not the code, then at least the concept. It means that the developer must grasp the complexity of the task at hand in order to judge whether the machine that they've built solves their "problem." If they're generating code, then they must understand their tools well enough that each step takes them closer to the goal, or will eventually do so. Even if there are setbacks, there has to be some signs of progress. They are using tools to create what are mostly prototypes, but which, when pressed, they will pretend are not prototypes. They start to fool themselves and their teams and their project leads into believing that what they have built is in the same category as that which is built by the set of engineers described above, in the first paragraph. They are not. What they are doing is trying to massage a prototype into a production-scale application, something that has never been easy, and is often fraught, even for skilled engineers who understand the problem. <hr> I have issues with Tailwind because I can't recall having ever seen someone write or say, "I know CSS well and I prefer Tailwind." It's usually people who don't want to learn CSS who decide to learn Tailwind instead. CSS today has more than enough tools for encapsulating the cascade where it's unwanted while still benefitting from it that Tailwind's time has come and gone. The deficit in CSS that Tailwind addresses no longer exists. Now there's just inertia and the myth that CSS is "too hard to learn." It may very well be, of course. Software-engineering is littered with people who are here for the money and just hope that they can earn enough before someone finds out that they don't know what they're doing. They will add their voices to the chorus declaring Tailwind the perfect solution to all styling problems, so that no-one will try to force them to learn CSS instead. <hr> <a href="https://csswizardry.com/2025/01/build-for-the-web-build-on-the-web-build-with-the-web/" author="Harry Roberts" source="">Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web</a> <bq>In the last year alone, I have seen two completely different clients in two completely different industries sink months and months into framework upgrades. Collectively, <b>they’ve spent tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars rewriting entire projects just to maintain feature parity with the previous iteration. This is not meaningful or productive work</b>—it is time sunk into merely keeping themselves at square one. <b>It’s a form of open-source vendor lock-in</b>, and adding even the most trivial of performance improvements becomes impossible as frameworks obscure or sometimes remove the ability to fiddle with the nuts and bolts. The worst thing? <b>You get to do it all again in 18 months! The stack owns you</b>, and you have an entire development team who might be paid one or two quarters every two or three years just to tread water.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>customers</b> don’t want smooth page transitions—they <b>want a website that works.</b></bq> <bq><b>If you’re going to go all-in on a framework or, heaven forbid, an SPA, give the long term some serious consideration</b>, and make sure you do a really, really good job.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ayende.com/blog/201960-A/configuration-values-escape-hatches?Key=bb28a6cb-dfae-4fd2-b36c-4aad16a07e7c" author="Oren Eini" source="Ayende">Configuration values & Escape hatches</a> <bq>[...] deploying a database engine is a Big Deal, and as such, something that users are quite reluctant to do. <b>When we hit a problem and a support call is raised, we need to provide some mechanism for the user to fix things until we can ensure that this behavior is accounted for in the default manner of RavenDB.</b> I treat the configuration options more as escape hatches that allow me to muddle through stuff than explicit options that an administrator is expected to monitor and manage. Some of those configuration options control whether RavenDB will utilize vectored instructions or the compression algorithm to use over the wire. <b>If you need to touch them, it is amazing that they exist. If you have to deal with them on a regular basis, we need to go back to the drawing board.</b></bq> I had the same philosophy when designing Quino: it was highly customizable because we covered a lot of use-cases from various customers, but the idea was that it should mostly just work out of the box. A lot of This led to complexity if you looked at the system as a whole but also allowed individual applications to adjust only the <i>one thing</i> that that they wanted to change, while retaining the reasonable defaults for everything else. This was achieved with a lot of composed and nested components and what ended up being a nearly total adherence to the single-responsibility principle. It really got to the point where <c>virtual</c> was a code-smell if it appeared more than once in a class because that meant that there were <i>at least two</i> configuration points, which might confuse developers on the consumer side. it was far easier to write documentation and examples when you just created your own implementation of an interface and registered that in the IOC because you could be guaranteed that every customer could use it---they wouldn't have to decide whether or how to adjust their own implementation to accommodate the change in the example. They could just drop it in. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOwLG3Nc5eM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/kOwLG3Nc5eM" width="560px" source="YouTube" author="Kevin Powell & Adam Argyle" caption="Pure CSS Scroll Spy Table of contents - No JavaScript Required!"> This is a 40-minute discussion about the combining the latest technologies, like scroll-snapping, scroll-driven animations, anchoring, etc. to produce responsive, progressive, animated, modern, and very fast sites without any JavaScript at all. Adam uses it all to build carousels, which is fine for demos and proving the power of the technologies, but ... just stop. They mention that Netflix comprises <i>only</i> carousels but Netflix is also a deeply unsatisfying experience for finding content. They finish up with an interesting discussion of how quickly changes are introduced and the absolutely legitimate reasons why adoption of some features is so slow. It's often difficult for developers to be both aware that a feature exists and also be aware that it would be a solution for the problem that they're having. There's also the fact that most developers and product owners will limit their vision of what is possible to what they know. You really need people who stay on top of these things and can say that yes, it is possible to animate this now, or it is possible to eliminate a ton of cruft here, and also to be aware of whether that feature is available on all target platforms, or whether it can be made optional with progressive enhancement, or ... it's a very complicated, complex thing to handle. It takes years before a feature is just known and accepted. Often, it takes a new generation of programmers who've grown up with that feature to know how to use it. Just think: today, you can build responsive, progressive, fast, pretty, and accessible web sites with no layout hacks and no JavaScript. Everything just works. But you haven't always been able to do that, so there is a large percentage of the web-developer community that is not aware that this is the case because they stopped paying attention a while ago and are stuck on the feature set that they know. At best, they're aware that a feature exists but wasn't ready for primetime when they last checked, even though they've not checked in a while. Even if they're aware of it, they might not have the time or budget to use it in existing projects, where everything has already been tested. Who's going to risk ripping out a ton of custom code to replace it with two lines of CSS, when you have to test everything all over again? <hr> <a href="https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2025/01/31/faster-debugging-in-rider/" author="Sasha Korepanov, Sasha Ivanova" source="JetBrains">Faster Debugging for Massive C++ Projects in Rider</a> <bq><b>The improvements deliver up to 50x faster stepping times, with most operations now completing in under 100ms.</b> While these extreme test cases may not reflect every project, developers working with large C++ codebases, particularly Unreal Engine projects, should notice significantly smoother debugging sessions.</bq> This is a very interesting read about a pathological case in very, very, very large projects in what was already a highly optimized IDE. It turns out that the problem lay with LLDB, <bq><b>Although LLDB was already caching successful lookups internally, we discovered that it was ignoring failed lookups</b>, which turned out to be surprisingly expensive operations. Our implementation of caching for these failed results gave us an immediate performance boost.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.meziantou.net/misconceptions-about-date-and-time.htm" author="Gérald Barré" source="Meziantou's blog">39 Misconceptions about date and time</a> <bq>Some calendars use leap months, so a year can have 13 months. In the .NET BCL, <c>DateTimeFormat.GetMonthName</c> accepts a value between 1 and 13. It's to accommodate calendar systems that have leap months, such as those implemented by <c>HebrewCalendar</c> and <c>EastAsianLunisolarCalendar</c> classes. For instance, <b>Hebrew calendar has Adar as its 6th month in a common year, which becomes Adar 1 and Adar 2 (months 6 and 7) in a Hebrew leap year.</b> <b>The Ethopian calendar has 13 months.</b> <b>The Wondrous calendar has 19 months and 4-5 intercalary days</b> (which are not part of any of the 19 months). [...] <b>The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar.</b> Lunar months are shorter than solar months. So, every few years they add an extra month. <b>Thus, you end up with years shorter than 365 days by a bit, and then a year with an extra month pushing it up to 380-something.</b></bq> <bq><b>Historically, the day started at noon. The switch to midnight occurred between 1920 and 1930.</b> This was useful for astronomers, who could record their observations on the same day. For example, if you observe a star at 11:59 PM, you can record it as the same day as the observation at 12:01 AM. A day, in the rabbinic Hebrew calendar, runs from sunset (the start of "the evening") to the next sunset.</bq> How did I never know that the day started at noon during WWI? Is that true? <bq><b>A time zone is not only an offset. It has a name and provides a way to convert a UTC date to a civil date in that time zone.</b> This means it needs to provide the calendar to use, a base offset from UTC and a set of rules to define when the offset changes (daylight savings time). A time zone is associated with a region of the world. <b>Note that names such as "PST" or "EST" are not time zones. They are abbreviations for half time zone. Indeed, these time zones only apply half of the year.</b> Also, some abbreviations are confusing. For instance, BST is used for both British Summer Time, British Standard Time (used between 1968 and 1971), and Bangladesh Standard Time. So, <b>it is recommended to use IANA time zone names to avoid any confusion (e.g. Europe/London, Asia/Dhaka).</b></bq> <bq>If you want to schedule <b>a meeting next year at 10AM in New York</b>, you should not compute the UTC date and store it. Indeed, <b>you cannot be sure that the rules for DST will not change before the meeting.</b></bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHwcjEG-juE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/VHwcjEG-juE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="ttrio2016" caption="Table Tennis Best Points Of 2024"> I learned that a behind-the-back shot is sometimes called a "Strawberry Shot". I have no idea why. There's also a "Snake Shot", which is putting so much backspin on the shot from below the take that it <i>winds its way back</i> to your side of the table after briefly touching down on the other side. I used to play a ton of table tennis when I was younger. My then-girlfriend and still-wife still likes to tell people, when they ask, that I would not have a lot of time for her because I was always playing ping pong at my house with my friends. We would organize for six to eight of us to hang out and play singles, doubles, ... just for hours. We played right through the winter, with mini electric heaters to warm up your hands. We'd leave them blasting on high, to try to get it warm enough, despite sub-zero temperatures. I had friends who were much better than I at smash rallies. Just incredibly consistent with low, flat smashes. Another guy was the most incredible defensive player, never smashing, but so much spin with long, looping shots that it was almost impossible to control. In my senior year of high school, I had advanced math courses at a local college, so my schedule had a <i>lot</i> of free time in it---time that I spent playing table tennis for hours each day. I got so good that I could beat almost everyone handily, so I started training my left hand, with which I also got quite good. I would use that against the worse players, so they would feel like they had a fighting chance, and it was more interesting for me. Sometimes I lost, but I wouldn't switch back. Fair's fair. I've done the behind-the-back shot before. It's not as hard as it looks, but <i>in competition</i>...that's ballsy. No-look shots and no-look serves were also very popular. Most of the clips are in English and German. <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis" author="Henry Farrell" source="Programmable Mutter">We're getting the social media crisis wrong</a> This article was OK but it included the following joke: <bq>Adam Przeworski describes the following Polish joke from the period of authoritarian rule.<bq>Comrade Secretary delivers a speech on 'The Dangers of American Imperialism.' Then all the comrades in the room express their opinions. All, but Comrade Kowalski. It is late Friday night, and everyone wants to go home, yet Comrade Kowalski remains silent. Finally, Comrade Secretary turns to Comrade Kowalski, 'Comrade Kowalski, I delivered my speech, all the comrades expressed their opinions, and you, you say nothing. Don’t you have an opinion?' To which Comrade Kowalski sheepishly replies, 'Oh, Comrade Secretary, the opinion, I do have it. But I do not know if I agree with it.'</bq></bq>