| Name | Marco von Ballmoos |
|---|---|
| Member since | |
| [hidden] | |
| Home page | https://earthli.com/users/marco |
| Description |
The (only) developer at earthli.com. |
| 3443 | Articles |
|---|---|
| 112 | Comments |
Published on in Programming
James MickensI recently stumbled upon some Essays from the funniest man in Microsoft Research by Raymond (Old New Thing). He is such a funny writer that this article, against convention and like the one before it (Brilliant articles by the funniest guy at Microsoft), will consist mostly of citations rather than an even mix of citations and paraphrasing that I naturally consider to be much more lucid and pithy. I quote at length to do the material justice, for documentation and to ensure that you all download the PDFs to see if there... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
This was a great conversation that is absolutely worth the ~100-minute running time. Catherine eloquently and brashly discusses a lot of the topics and themes that she presents in her broadside against the PMC (Professional Managerial Class). I’ve included a bunch of cleaned-up transcription from the video.
Catherine Liu: Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites by Doomscroll /
Joshua Citarella (YouTube)
At about 12:00, Catherine says,
“I was like what are you doing girl? Like, how are you like assimilating your sexual assault, which is really bad a private thing—you haven’t even told... [More]”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
US military and CIA interventions since WW2There are people who used to write quite well and have gotten incredibly lazy, repetitive, and just plain non-constructive and useless as information sources in just the last month. The drop in quality is noticeable because they’re once again cruising on their TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
They are being lazy and stupid, acting as if the U.S. used to be good until one month ago, when Trump came back into power. They are acting as if things have gotten markedly and provably worse for... [More]
Published on in Design
The documentation page Stories of Web Users / How People with Disabilities Use the Web by W3C (WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)) describes nine users, each of whom describes how they work with the Internet, as well as which assistive technologies they use to access text, audio, and video content. Each of them also has a list of use cases (“Barrier examples”), accompanied by solutions that would work for them and their particular restrictions.
The people range widely in capability.
Published on in Programming
I recently wrote Real quick on MVVM and now I see that a good colleague and friend has written his own MVVM understandings by Austin Jones (Austin's Journey for Meaning). His piece got me thinking again about how the concept is a good start but isn’t really sufficient.
Somewhere near the beginning, he writes,
“The View Model’s function is separate from the Model. Abstraction requires discipline to not let two pieces of code that do the same thing become the same thing, purely out of convenience. Things that... [More]”
Published on in Philosophy
A very good friend is riding in Utah right now.[1] They’ve gotten a lot of snow—70" in a few days—and the sun is finally out again. He’s been doing some “farming”, where you pick a clean field of powder and you lay down a track, using as little of the snow as you can. You go back up. You lay down another track, just like the first, but shifted. You’re making furrows; you’re farming the field.
I was telling other friends about this recently, when skiing in Klosters/Davos, I was explaining... [More]
Published on in Programming
The relatively short post My Washing Machine Refreshed My Thinking on Software Effort Estimation by Chris Horsley (Cosive) is kind of interesting, in that it’s a cautionary tale about being overconfident about your estimates. As the title suggests, his was a real-world task where he’d assumed that a tenth iteration would go just as smoothly. He draws some good conclusions but for what I think might be the wrong reasons.
“[…] while 90% of the project will be the same, there’s going to be one critical difference between... [More]”
Published on in Fun
For its 50th anniversary, Saturday Night Live released its first episode, in full. It was initially aired in 1975. It was quite interesting to contrast the form and style with the SNL that we know today and that has been established for a couple of decades.
The biggest difference is that SNL started out with much shorter skits. They got to the point, delivered the punchline and…basta. They had a lot more skits; the host delivered several monologues; there were two musical guests and they... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
This was a sane and sober discussion of what is actually happening in the U.S. empire. Katie Halper and Aaron Maté have a long discussion with Brian Berletic about what USAID actually does, with its arms like the NED.
Extended episode: Former Marine DEBUNKS USAID Rumors by Useful Idiots (YouTube)
Former U.S. Marine Brian Berletic, who focuses on geopolitics in Eurasia and hosts the informative Youtube show The New Atlas, joins Useful Idiots this week as Elon Musk and the Trump administration are gutting USAID and attempting to move it under the control of Marco... [More]
Published on in Finance & Economy
First up is a one-minute video by Slavoj Žižek about how capitalism is a lie.
Slavoj Žižek Explains How Capitalism Tricks Us (YouTube)
“Each of us is now a small capitalist. Let’s say you have €5,000. You can freely decide how to invest them: buy health care, go to a nice holiday, pay special studium. […] What is actually a new form of anxiety—permanent stress—is sold to you as a new form of freedom.”
Next up is a great interview by Ben Norton with Michael Hudson. The discussion is much more wide-ranging than the title of the video... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Chris Hedges has some of the most interesting, and unique, interviews you can find. I’d never heard of Farah before but she was a great interview.
Arab Regimes and the Betrayal of Palestine (w/ Farah El-Sharif) | The Chris Hedges Report by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)
The first 15 minutes were an absolute tour-de-force of history and erudition by Farah El-Sharif. She is extremely well-spoken and brilliant, works at Stanford, and “served as Stanford’s Abbasi Program’s Associate Director from 2021-2023”.
Check out the people in this video:
People mentioned in this video − including Muhammad
Farah was being interviewed, OK. Muhammad has no picture 😹. And I... [More]
Published on in Philosophy
The comic Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics) explains how the ideas of a philosopher who died over a century ago are not only applicable today, but are vital to understand if we want to come out the other side intact.
Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics
“Your entire business model is to take control of the free exchange of information, and manipulate it for your personal gain!
“See this chart? The red portion is what you created. The blue portion is what you built off pre-existing open source technology, science and stolen... [More]”
Published on in Technology
In a discussion, a friend had sent a list of naughty technologies that included “dotnet frame twerk”, “dotnet whore” and “azure debauchery operations” and we were musing on how LLMs were supposed to be good at coming up with names.
They are not good at that. LLMs are neutered and useless.
Below is a screenshot of an exchange I had with Copilot, where I ask it to “list ten technology names that are salacious puns of Azure, C#, and .NET”. It responded that “[c]reating salacious puns isn’t... [More]”
Published on in Programming
The tweet ”Programming” by Andrej Karpathy (Twitter) is what some people are calling the future of programming—with the loudest claiming that it’s already here and that you’re all missing the boat if you’re not programming like this.
“There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I... [More]”
Published on in Movies
This video is 136 minutes long and comprises 135 films. Thanks to YouTube user @BoPeep01 for their service is creating a list of all timestamps and films, which I’ve included below. If you click a timestamp, it jumps to the video at that location.
The Ultimate Film Studies Watchlist by The House of Tabula (YouTube)
Published on in Programming
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.
Pure CSS Scroll Spy Table of contents − No JavaScript Required! by Kevin Powell & Adam Argyle (YouTube)
Adam uses it all to build carousels, which is fine for demos and proving the power of the technologies, but … I’m not a fan. While our two hosts mention that Netflix comprises only carousels, they don’t really discuss that Netflix is... [More]
Published on in Finance & Economy
The article Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by Pam & Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade) describes how, once again, the treasury secretary comes from the financial sector. Like so many other Democrat-adjacent sources these days, the article’s tone suggests that this is somehow more horrible because the “giant orange baby” nominated him, and Orange Man Bad.
“Scott Bessent: U.S. Treasury SecretaryWhat did Bessent do previously to qualify for this powerful position? He... [More]”
Published on in Finance & Economy
This 13½-minute video taught me quite a few things about tipping in the U.S. It got me thinking about how tipping works in Europe and Switzerland, too.
The Dark Truth About Tipping in America by Evan Edinger (YouTube)
Published on in Technology
Although this eight-minute video’s title is a misnomer—NTP isn’t an obscure system, in that it is incredibly well-documented—it is still a reasonably informative and entertaining explainer.
The Obscure System That Syncs All The World’s Clocks by Half as Interesting (YouTube)
The system is called NTP—the Network Time Protocol—and comprises four tiers.
Published on in Programming
In November of 2024, Microsoft released a lot of videos about .NET to accompany the release of .NET 9. I watched/listened to a lot of these, with varying levels of attention paid. When something caught my attention, I took notes. These videos are roughly in the other than I watched them, although I reserved the right to shuffle them about a bit to improve grouping.
Published on in Movies
Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Finance & Economy
This is a six-minute video of Jonathan Pie going on a tear against the true criminals: the so-called ruling class that is making even people at the hearts of empires miserable.
The Corporate Con. by Jonathan Pie (YouTube)
“Most of our public services are now owned by private companies whose main purpose—and, in most cases, only purpose—is to make profit. They don’t work for you or the government or the council. They work for shareholders and nobody else. And it’s a pretty good system, if you own shares in that company.
... [More]”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
I don’t even know what to transcribe because, whenever Chris Hedges speaks, it’s worth citing, and he speaks for nearly the entire 30 minutes, as Hill allows him to speak at length. This is an excellent distillation of the situation in the American Empire as it is, rooted in the historical context of both its own past, as well as similar contexts in the Roman Empire as well as in Italy and Germany in the first half of the 20th century.
Yuck it up, assholesThey discuss the failures of so-called liberalism at... [More]
Published on in Sports
This video of the best moments in international table tennis in 2024 is nine minutes long and, if you’re a bit of a fan, it goes by in no time flat. Most of the segments are narrated in English and German.
Table Tennis Best Points Of 2024 by ttrio2016 (YouTube)
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 table that it winds its way back to your side of the table after briefly touching down on the other... [More]
Published on in Design
I recently turned on two-factor authentication for my relatively rarely but still occasionally used Google account.
In the screenshot below, at the very top of the page, Google sure makes it seem like I need to finally add that phone number that Google has been begging me for … for, gosh, it’s gotta be decades by now. Now, they’re not just begging me, but are outright lying to me that I will no longer be able to use my account unless I divulge my phone number.
Is a phone number required for two-step verification?
I don’t wanna add a phone... [More]
Published on in Design
There isn’t that much more to say than that it seems like a $4T company is incapable of making something as straightforward as music search work in anything approaching a comprehensible manner. The evidence is below.
I searched for the album Apple Cores by the James Brandon Lewis Trio. The top hit was Danny Elfman, for no discernible reason, followed by a smattering of completely random search results, like Greatest Love Story by LANCO, Sweet Child O’ Mine, a playlist called “Family Time”,... [More]
