Ricky JayThere has never been and will never be anyone like Ricky Jay. He was a polymath. He was erudite. He spoke in clipped tones, with words like “disapprobation”. He cited 15th-century poetry from memory, as part of his show. He cites George Bernard Shaw, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”

He was the most brilliant playing-card prestidigitator the world has ever seen. He knew more about tricks and magicians and the history thereof than anyone else before or since.

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants − Magic show (YouTube)

A large part... [More]

This is an excellent video essay about art, punk, edginess, featuring many of my favorite directors, musicians, and comedians. I can’t remember everyone but man, there’s Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Frank Zappa, Marilyn Manson, Patrice O’Neal, John Waters, Lars von Trier, Bill Hicks (“an anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian dark poet”), Paul Mooney, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky…the list goes on.

Nothing is punk anymore… by The Cinema Cartography (YouTube)

Bill Hicks, at 33:35 (cited from Rants in E-Minor),

“Bill HicksLet me tell you something right now... [More]”

A while ago, I listened to all 3½ hours of Hinternet Production Labs — An Audio Launch Event! by Justin Smith-Ruiu. It is pretty cool. I’m glad I listened to it. I was working on a jigsaw puzzle the whole time.

Listening to this feels like having a Wikipedia binge that leads from Yakut to rock music, the etymology of the epithet “Willard”, the application of the definition of said epithet to bands after a lengthy discussion achieves consensus, an immediately ensuing discussion debating to which musical acts... [More]

Are You Racist? by George Galloway | Oxford Union (YouTube)

I’d never seen this, so it’s new to me. Eleven years ago, George Galloway refused to debate an Israeli about apartheid. He claims that he was misled and would never have agreed to it. Of course, people claimed that he was being racist. He clarified in a manner that only a handful of people could, off the cuff and magisterially.

“[…] George Gallowaybecause of my time in South Africa, because of the decades that I worked against apartheid in South Africa, do you imagine that I would turn up at a university... [More]”

This was another great discussion with Catherine Liu. I’d just written about another interview of hers in Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites. Chris was effusive about Catherine’s book (which I’ve purchased and is in my queue) as well as her engaging writing style, which is a far sight from the dry, academic and often-impenetrable style that has established itself as the standard.

Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (w/ Catherine Liu) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

For fun, I used a service I’d learned about recently that lets you summarize a video. It’s called tl;dw (too long;... [More]

This is a wide-ranging, occasionally delightfully foul-mouthed, and brutally honest interview with PM Maddy Mondaquila of Microsoft. Kudos to them for letting their best people do these kinds of informative and insightful interviews.

MAUI Lead Leaves to Work on .NET Aspire (and interview with Maddy Mondaquila) by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

At 45:57,

“[…] yesterday Dave [Fowler] and I were fighting about if the Visual Studio .gitignore is getting dumber and he was like, ‘who cares about that? Why would anyone care about that?’ And I was, like, it’s 400 lines, dude. Like, we’re ignoring things... [More]”

The article Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) describes what it says on the tin. As several others confirmed in the comments, the memes all suck, whether generated by an AI, a human, or a combination.

Here is a sheet of the “winners.”

Top memes from study

They are uniformly terrible, at best confusing. None are funny.

For example, this is apparently a meme written by an actual human being.

“Threw something into the trash can.. Hit it first try.”

WTF. That is not even... [More]

I saw a badge in my Amazon interface when I was cleaning up some lists. I thought it might have been a notification that something on my wishlist was available as a good price. That would have been helpful!

Instead, I saw the screenshot below.

Buy this book again!

For a second, I was excited to see that Sapkowski might have published another Witcher book but that’s not what was happening. What was happening was that Amazon was trying to fool me into buying a book that I already owned again. Either they are... [More]

From Quote Origin: Don’t Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass (Quote Investigator)

“Антон ЧеховIn May, 1886, Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander, who had literary ambitions: “In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from... [More]”

I started my recent journey of Bill Burr videos with an interview on none other than NPR. Below the video are stream-of-consciousness notes in which I waver on Terry Gross but eventually admit that Burr badgered a decent interview out of her. I wouldn’t make a habit of listening to her interviews, though. It’s a testament to anti-intellectualism that she’s considered a leading light of liberal thought.

Bill Burr on NPR

Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)

I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her... [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
• Economy... [More]

Another great book interview by Chris Hedges, again with an extremely erudite author who’s written a book about Gaza. Their discussion ranges to places that most are unwilling to go, like: why should the rest of the world grant primacy to the Jewish holocaust as a historical occurrence? Why should they even know about it when they’ve suffered their own holocausts, at the hands of the same empire that is browbeating them to bow in obeisance to the memory of the horror of the last holocaust it... [More]

This is a brilliant 52-minute interview with the author of a book whose title is already being misinterpreted by misguided liberals as being about Trump. More’s the pity. The author is young and brilliant. May he have a long and illustrious life and career.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

At about 09:42,

“All of this sort of stuff, I think, makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options: you are either wearing the boot or you’re having your neck stepped on. And, so, to speak up on behalf of... [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]

About a month ago, my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) crashed very hard. It would no longer restart into anything but the recovery console. It seemed pretty clear that something was very corrupt and I found myself facing a system reinstall, at the very least.

Time Machine to the rescue

Since it’s a desktop, I have a backup drive attached to it at all times. Time Machine runs several times per day. My latest backup was from about ten minutes before the system crashed. I cannot stress how... [More]

A friend recently asked me to review their UI/UX design in a private app they’d written. I responded with the following in an e-mail, reproduced and lightly edited/extended here for limited posterity.

The following factors strongly influence and/or limit the kind of review I’ll be able to provide.

• You dropped the app into my lap with no introduction whatsoever. I don’t even know what the app is supposed to do.
• I don’t know what experience you have in UI/UX. I’m assuming not a tremendous... [More]

Pretending cancel culture never existed

Let’s start with a terrible take from a terrible source: the article The big idea: what do we really mean by free speech? by Farrah Jarral (Guardian) writes,

“What the right calls cancel culture, philosopher Arianne Shahvisi writes, “is often just the supersized celebrity version of what the rest of us experience all the time: consequences for our mistakes and bigotries. You do something shitty and people distance themselves from you, especially if you refuse to acknowledge your... [More]”

Remember that Russia is irredeemable

The following citation illustrates what I consider to be one of the dumbest (simplest? Most ignorant?) but extremely popular interpretation of the changing alignment of the U.S., NATO, Europe, and Russia in early 2025,

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.” Because the US is a Russian ally (or satellite?) now I guess.”

It comes from a post... [More]

The pair of articles survivorship bias and the algorithmic gaze by The Etymology Nerd (Substack) and when everything becomes a fragment by The Etymology Nerd (Substack) expresses, for me, a good argument for caution about the tools that you’re using.[1]

AI is definitely a paradigm-shift for programming, but I think in a way that’s not discussed very much. We focus very much on how AI enables people who couldn’t program anything before to be able to program something. The scope of what it allows them to program grows with each version. Until it doesn’t. That is,... [More]

I follow Simon Willison for news about all things LLM and he’s generally quite balanced. Even though he has drifted farther and farther toward what might be optimistically called “unquestioning fanboy,” that’s probably an inevitable effect of actually enjoying something. He seems to get a lot of value out of using these tools. I think he might be spending too little time wondering what he would have been producing had he not been grabbing all of the low-hanging fruit that the LLM is delivering... [More]

The discussion Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino (Reddit) is about the article Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino by John Gruber (Daring Fireball), which was a much-longer post than usual, discussing the failure of Apple Intelligence features and the failure to focus on software-quality that it illustrates.

MacOS Apps are not great

Although Gruber focuses on Apple’s iOS, a decrease in quality in user experience has become endemic in their auxiliary products on MacOS as well. I added a few quick examples to my... [More]

The article Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection by Simon Willison includes the following snippet,

“I decided that the descriptions were too long, so I modified the script to add “Keep it to 2-3 sentences” to the end of the system prompt. These new, shorter descriptions are now live—here’s the diff. Total usage was 283,528 input tokens and 6,010 output tokens for a cost of 94 cents.”

First of all, I’m not surprised that he asked it to shorten its descriptions. The initial versions were... [More]

The article A 10x Faster TypeScript by Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft) includes the following text, as well as a link to the video below,

“[…] we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage. By porting the current code-base, we expect to be able to preview a native implementation of tsc capable of command-line type-checking by mid-2025, with a feature-complete... [More]”

How to Add files to a Large Repository? (Reddit)

Git has opt-in support for handling large files.

• Use the –depth option to control how much history to clone (good for pipelines, where you’re usually only interested in the tip, so depth 1)
• Whereas depth controls how much you clone (size of the .git folder), sparse-checkout controls the size of your working tree.
• git logoUse LFS (Large File Storage) to store files. This will not remove large files from existing commits. This feature is seamless to enable and... [More]

I wrote the following quip to a friend the other day, “Charisma is an underrated stat,” to which they replied quite pithily,

“Charisma is underrated in the engineering space. A charismatic engineer is often labeled as a “charlatan” or “all bark no bite” or “a sales guy”, but what the people who say that often gloss over is the fact that a charismatic engineer is often really labeled as a CEO.”

Charisma 20+Perhaps a better word than “underrated” is “unnoticed”. It’s the stat that hides itself. Part of the... [More]

This is a 40-minute discussion between Zain Raza and Professor Richard Wolff on a wide range of topics, but focusing on the effects of the U.S.‘s retreat from Europe on Germany, in particular.

Prof. Richard Wolff − The Decline of the US Empire & Germany's Economy by AcTVism Munich (YouTube)

At about 35:00,

“Zain Raza: We have seen the emergence of AI like China’s DeepSeek, which you mentioned, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And there’s a major transformation taking place across the global economy. Many industries are being affected. The world economic forum’s “future of jobs” report 2025... [More]”

Recently, I saw that the following error had been fixed in a code review.

Classic primitive obsession error

The error shown above is an example of a design smell called Primitive Obsession. This is where code is “obsessed” with primitives, in that it uses a much “wider” type than is actually acceptable.

Whereas C++ has a typedef, TypeScript and Delphi Pascal have a type, C# has … nothing simple. The linked article describes a hand-coded version for making “narrower” types (e.g., MeanLength or ShortFiber). Our go-to... [More]

This is a fantastic seven-minute refresher on what the first amendment means in the U.S.—specifically the right to free speech, The government is bound quite strongly to respect one’s right to say anything one wants, even if one is benefiting from a government program, like unemployment or a visa program. While the government is allowed to curtail benefits in the case of criminal prosecution—predicating them on being law-abiding—it cannot retract them based on one having expressed... [More]

This was an interesting 21-minute discussion about the importance of multi-polarity, multi-civilizational humanity. Dugin points out how the globalism that we’re seeing trying to take over everything has deemed itself the winner and chooses not to integrate anything from other, “conquered” civilizations. He cites the Chinese Confucian approach to law and philosophy, the Russian Orthodox Church, and so on, as deep and ancient influences on cultures and civilizations.

Alexander DuginHe calls out globalists for... [More]