I not unexpectedly very much enjoyed this somewhat-rambling 59-minute course on controlling font features from CSS. It’s really quite amazing and wonderful what you can do declaratively these days.

CSS Typography Crash Course by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

To begin, Roel Nieskens takes a long look at variable fonts, which can be manipulated via both standard CSS properties, like font-weight, as well as using font-variation-settings, all of which can be animated. Variable fonts support a much more granular range of values for font-weight than... [More]

This is a 50-minute video of a guy who’s really good at using and teaching CSS asking three LLMs pointed and tricky questions about it.

It’s a bit long for what it is but I think there were some interesting things to learn. First of all, it’s very clear that Kevin hasn’t actually read very much about how LLMs work or how to prompt them. This is OK—because that means he’s just like most people trying to use these tools.

I gave three AI models a CSS quiz by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Overall, Kevin was frustrated with the answers he got from Gemini,... [More]

I do not recommend watching the video below. A friend of mine who thinks that I don’t appreciate Caitlin Clark enough sent me this video. It is pure clickbait. Caitlin Clark just finished up her rookie season in the WNBA. She put some of the best numbers the league has ever seen and has, nearly single-handedly, significantly boosted her not only her own team but the status of the WNBA, in general.

The video breathlessly speculates whether she will come back for another season.

I kid you not:... [More]

Scott Ritter has a very strong pedigree and background but has some odd verbal and facial tics that make him look disingenuous. Sometimes he makes broad statements that are backed up by information that he has on good authority, but that he hasn’t presented. He also talks very quickly in a decidedly non-beginner-friendly style. Those looking to disagree with him will be able to do so quite easily. However, if you listen to what he says, you will learn something. And his analyses have been... [More]

A good friend of mine sent this link to me. I hadn’t listened to an interview since Tim Dillon and Alex Jones and Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU way back in the spring of 2021. I’ve had fun with this friends links before (see Robert Edward Grant: King of Gobbledygook), so I gave it chance. I couldn’t recommend that anyone else listen to these three hours … but YMMV. It has 26M views and almost 500K likes on YouTube. Check out my notes below and decide for yourself.

Joe Rogan Experience #2111 − Katt Williams by Joe Rogan (YouTube)

I’m almost an hour... [More]

I published most of this article in my notes in the middle of October 2024. This video still marks the longest that I’ve listened to Kamala Harris speak. Trump is a nightmare to listen to, but Harris also feels like every second is wasted. Give it a listen and see how you feel about it. I don’t generally listen to presidents anymore—I stopped analyzing State of the Union addresses when Trump became president—but, if there’s a silver lining to Harris’s loss, it’s that this kind of insipid... [More]

I was pleasantly surprised at how cogent, well-reasoned, and calm Dore’s conversation with Hedges was. I’m used to his show, of which I usually only see 10–15-minute clips—and that only rarely—where he’s joined by a peanut gallery of yuk-yukkers and where he often plays videos in chopped-up snippets, analyzing and taking them apart, but it’s often a bit much.

The 52-minute interview below, though is very, very good. I’ve cited at length below the video.

The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore) | The Chris Hedges Report by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

At 05:58, Dore says

“The people... [More]”

This is an amazing if sobering interview. Thanks to Haim Bresheeth-Zabner for taking the time to tirelessly, quietly, and reasonably lay out his case. He spoke almost without interruption for over an hour about how Israel isn’t acting on its own, it’s working for Empire. But what is happening now doesn’t represent the interests of the country, “but not the leadership; the leadership is abandoning their humanity.” He talks at length about the very real danger of nuclear war. Every minute was... [More]

While investigating Charts.css, I learned that you can throw unrecognized special characters like square brackets or pipes into CSS class references and its just fine. So you can use them to separate longer lists of classes. For more information, see Cube CSS: grouping by Andy Bell (Piccalilli).

So, you can write:

<article 
class="[ card ] [ section box ] [ bg-base color-primary ]">
</article>

or

<article class="card | section box | bg-base color-primary">
…
</article>

and it works just fine, while being more... [More]

The elections are over and the Green Party did not even come close to getting 5% of the vote required to qualify for public funding in four years. Now that I’m writing it, it’s so stupid that it works this way. The parties that need money the most are the ones that can’t get it. The parties that need ballot access the most can’t get it. There is almost no hope of an electoral path to getting more than a single party with two heads in the U.S.

Still, here are a couple of good interviews with... [More]

This is an excellent interview in which Hedges discusses Monbiot’s new book The Invisible Doctrine. As a result of this interview, I read the book and found it likewise excellent.[1]

The Secret History of Neoliberalism (w/ George Monbiot) | The Chris Hedges Report by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

At 05:00

“The three pillars of capitalism—commodified labor, commodified land, and commodified money—all came together simultaneously. And they came together to create this extremely effective and virulent new colonial frontier, which burnt through resources, burnt through human labor, with unprecedented speed,... [More]”

In this otherwise excellent video, I found myself very much wishing that Toub had written at least a single test for the ArrayPool implementation that he built in this video. Still, check out the selected citation below to get a feeling for how they consider performance implications—there are no easy answers, there is only testing and benchmarking.

Deep .NET: Let's Build Our Own ArrayPool with Stephen Toub and Scott Hanselman by dotnet (YouTube)

At 34:45,

“Hanselmann: For folks that may not know what NUMA is: so NUMA is this non-uniform memory access that the computer knows that, like,... [More]”

I watched The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for years. I stopped watching when Stewart and Colbert retired. John Oliver used to report for the Daily Show. Although I’ve long since stopped watching the Daily Show, I still watch John Oliver, although he’s often a bit frustrating. He has what seems like the right attitude, the right politics, a whole lot of empathy, a huge audience, and a global platform. But he still sticks to the extremely narrow channel of approved opinion.

The election is... [More]

This 23-minute video from early October, 2024 reports on the recent revelation from a Danish harbor master that—brace yourselves—there were several U.S. navy vessels in the vicinity of the attack on the day of the attack, with their transponders off. He’d been prevented from speaking out until now, when, presumably, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Germany’s over it, even though it has turned out to be the final nail in its coffin.

Nord Stream 'Mystery' SOLVED? by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

At 01:15,

“Let’s remember that the US, even before the... [More]”

The article Possible Future CSS: Tree-Counting Functions and Random Values by Roman Komarov (Kizu.Dev) is another mathematical master class in using CSS variables and calculations to get at values like “sibling count” and “sibling index”, two values that are in a future proposal for CSS Values and Units Module Level 5 (w3C).

The final demo looks like this, with randomly laid out items squared up into equal columns and rows where possible, all done with only CSS.

Stacking and squaring up grid items

Here’s a taste of the code for getting a random value in CSS,

... [More]

This isn’t a terrible video on IAsyncEnumerable but it’s also not nearly as high-level and fast-paced as I’m come to expect from the .NET Deep Dive series, which is no-muss/no-fuss with Stephen Toub. Those are much better than this one but, if you’re not grokking what IAsyncEnumerable is good for from the documentation or examples, maybe this one-hour video will help. If you’re lucky, it will make you feel better about your own skills as a programmer.

On .NET Live: Supercharge .NET with IAsyncEnumerables: Efficient Data Streams by dotnet / Chase Aucoin (YouTube)

Maybe I’m just super-smart but I can’t... [More]

.NET Aspire is a newly introduced tool for building distributed solutions that run just as easily locally as they do in the cloud. This video explains how this is a boon for integration testing.

End-to-end integration testing with .NET Aspire by dotnet / Aaron Powell (YouTube)

The concept is very nice and seems to greatly simplify building integration tests. Kudos and thanks for the introduction.

Still, my hair was standing on end with some of the “fast and loose” programming in this video, though. I know that people will argue that you have to take a direct path to get... [More]

The video was posted 17 years ago, so it’s most likely from around that time. Rollins is in Israel. He spends the first ¾ of the segment discusses his visits with wounded, American veterans. He segues, at the end, to giving the Israeli audience a noble mission.

Ember of Rage by Henry Rollins (YouTube)

A good friend sent me this link recently, with the comment, “I don’t think they listened.” The video already had my thumbs-up on it, but I can’t remember when I’d already watched it.

Yeah, I don’t think they listened. They weren’t... [More]

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]