This is a wide-ranging one-hour interview with Cornel West. West seems a bit more frazzled than he usually is, but he still provided some reasonably pithy commentary. It would have perhaps been better if Chris had spoken more.

Dismantling the American Empire (w/ Cornel West) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 20:45,

“That’s a sign of what it means to be obsessed with success out of careerism, opportunism. And it reflects the distinctive and dominant features of the political and professional class in the American Empire, which is conformity, complacency, and... [More]”

This is a six-minute video that presents its thesis at hyper-speed but really well. The thesis is in the title: Palestine must continue to be a football in order for capitalism—and empire—to convince itself that it is still in charge.

Jason Hickel: Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism by Transnational Institute (YouTube)

I’ve cleaned up a large part of the transcript below.

“What explains this incredible paradox? It’s ultimately our system of production, the social and ecological crisis that we face, which appears unresolvable, is ultimately a symptom of our system of... [More]”

This is a five-minute demonstration of a new feature in Adobe Illustrator that derives a 3D shape from a 2D vector. You kind of have to see it to believe it.

#ProjectTurntable | Adobe MAX Sneaks 2024 | Adobe by Adobe (YouTube)

Demonstrator Zhiqin Chen selected a vector, “generated views” for it (which took a few seconds), then was able to rotate it along both the horizontal and vertical axis to reveal that the tool had extrapolated a complete 3D shape from the vector. Wherever he left the shape, the tool continued to treat it as a 2D vector that the artist... [More]

Julian Assange: JournalistI had a conversation with a young friend, who’d admitted that he didn’t know who Julian Assange was. I wrote the following short bio for them.

Don’t feel bad that you don’t know who he is. He’d been incarcerated for over half of your life. Your media environment has been engineered to disappear him from the public eye. He’s not talked about in normal circles.

He is a journalist, the founder of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks grew famous for (A) publishing only true information that (B) shone an... [More]

I finally got around to verifying that the defining dependent async methods like the following one is wasteful.

public async Task<bool> N()
{
   return await M();
}

A less-contrived example looks like this:

using System.Threading.Tasks;
public class C {
    public Task<bool> M() 
    {
        return Task.FromResult(false);
    }
    
    public async Task<bool> N() 
    {
        return await M();
    }
    
    public async void RunIt()
    {
        var result = await N();
    }
}

This... [More]

Manim − linear transformation in 3dThis is a fun video that demonstrates an API, runtime, and IDE called Manim that lets you interactively build 3-D animations. It’s like a game-engine editor[1] in which you build your scenes by calling APIs in Python. There’s an interactive Python terminal, a rendering area, and a text editor.

It’s quite nicely done and he’s put it to good use over the years, building hundreds, if not thousands, of videos with it.

How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks by 3Blue1Brown (YouTube)

The API is quite high-level and robust but it’s so clear how limited the Python... [More]

There are just some notes I made for a recent documentation review.

• A shepherd named Shepard shepherds data parameters

• Use “said” when you’re referring back to one or more items that you don’t want to list again. It’s a sort of fancy neutral pronoun to refer to the subject. E.g., say you have the sentence

  “The parameters A, B, C, and D are shown to the user; after the user has chosen values for them, the application submits them.”

  Here, we’ve used “them” twice, which feels a touch awkward.... [More]

Leveling a whole village in LebanonEthnic Cleansing in Jabalia 2024

Photo by Onur Burak Akın − Lebanon

Imagine if that were your neighborhood.

Imagine if those were you and your neighbors, herded into the streets, made to stand in the sun with all of your worldly belongings in a torn bag, held in one hand, while, in the other, you brandish an ID issued by your oppressor, because the oppressor demands it.

You stand for hours.

Can you imagine it?

Of course not. Because things like that don’t happen to good people.

It only happens to those who deserve it, who aren’t even really people, when... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

William Gibson 'The Peripheral' by Politics and Prose (YouTube)

The PeripheralAt about 38:40 or so, someone asked about his process,

“Lady: Do you know where you’re going when you set out?

“Gibson: No, I don’t. And it’s when you ask me now, you’re asking somebody who’s been doing it for like 30 years or a little bit more, and I no longer know how I’m doing it. I just don’t. I don’t think of it. It’s like the story of the the old fiddle-maker and people said, ‘how do you make those fiddles?’ and he said, ‘I start with this block of wood and I take off everything that’s... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Chris Hedges: The American Ruling Class Explained by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

A partial transcript from the 2-minute video.

“Our political class does not govern; it entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The squad and the progressive caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers rights, or defying the war machine than the freedom caucus fights for freedom.

“These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry cynically... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

I was sent this article by my vast network of correspondents: Chicago gangs clash with Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members: ‘Blacks against migrants’ by Michael Lee (FOX News).

Let’s do some fun and quick and pretty easy analysis here.

The title slug is pretty provocative: “GANGS CLASH”.

Did they, though? Clash?

Let’s see what the article has to say! They spent time writing it, so let’s do them the honor of reading it.

Don’t worry, we don’t have to read far.

The very first paragraph writes,

“Venezuelan migrants... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

The final document of What’s new in C# 13 (Microsoft Learn) is available. There are no major changes for most end users; the changes listed are interested for library and framework developers—especially those interested in writing highly performant code, e.g., Microsoft in its BCL and ASP.NET.

1. Completely unsurprisingly, the params keyword now also applies to IEnumerable<T> (as well as many descendants) as well as Span<T> and ReadOnlySpan<T>.
2. There’s now an official Lock object that, when used instead of the... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

“[…] ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.[1]”

“[…] a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

For the last couple of years, I have been keeping track of books that were potentially written by AI that my Kindle saw fit to advertise to me on the lock-screen page. As I wrote at the top of each installment of Kindle Books Written by AIs,

“[…] This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog.”

Until recently, it was kind of interesting because the provenance of the content could have gone either way:... [More]