Links Amplified by dpham5

Is it the right time to unionize

2026-04-02T00:00:00Z

Noam Scheiber and Adam Conover discuss the tech layoffs in the past 3 years are untenable. The call for organizing and unionize has increased in places that were really resistant to it. The best time to organize was yesterday. The right time is now.

She can't lose

2026-03-07T00:00:00Z

It's a Saturday night. Hearts are going to shine her eyes. She can make it. She's got it. She can't lose.

Hope is Not Neutral. Hope is a Warrior Emotion

2026-02-24T00:00:00Z

Making Fascism Legible

2026-02-24T00:00:00Z

Zack Beauchamp, coming back from months of looking how autocrats lose, writes a really fascinating piece in stopping fascism before it usurps democracy. Places like Brazil, South Korea, and Poland identified threats to their self-governance and democracy. They all defeated would be autocrats. But how? Autocrats deeply care about democratic facade and work very hard to appear to be democratic, including popular support.

This argument for strategic moderation raises a question: Why do would-be dictators care so much about having a pretext? If Chávez wanted to seize power, why didn’t he just do it?

Because when they do, Gamboa notes, the backlash is overwhelming. She cites, as one example, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo’s 2022 declaration of a state of emergency. The move was so obviously authoritarian that it galvanized Peruvians, and the international community, to act — leading to Castillo’s impeachment and arrest on the very same day as his attempted power grab.

Smart authoritarians, Gamboa notes, “have learned that they can avoid this kind of backlash and maintain a democratic facade by undermining democracy gradually instead.”

But if enough people see through the facade, the fact the regime is fascistic or authoritarian, making legible to mainstream, creates a weakness that an opposition party can go after.

Virtually every expert on backsliding has observed that would-be authoritarians value a democratic facade. But too few appreciate the implication: that autocrats have good reason to believe their project will fail if too many people see it as authoritarian, creating a point of vulnerability their opponents can exploit.

Beauchamp goes on to say that our modern day tyrants burn a lot calories and spend a lot time actively trying to convince their supporters that they are playing by the rules. This has important implications. If keeping up a facade is so important, that would mean that people really care about living under a democracy.

But I think the government’s success at building and maintaining a democratic facade is one of the most important factors, simply because many people genuinely care about preserving democracy.
...
But the legibility of the threat matters much more than most people give it credit for, and it has played a decisive role in some of the biggest cases of democratic resilience in recent memory.

This is a must read piece and we have a chance to cancel the fascist takeover of this 250 year old republic.

Unions are the driver to a middle class life

2026-02-03T00:00:00Z

Labor unions ‘challenge the oligarchy:’ Thom Hartmann on how unions ‘stand up for democracy’
by u/WhoIsJolyonWest in union

They are main vehicle to which people can achieve a middle class life. From the 1950's till the 1980's America saw the biggest expansion in the middle class. Nearly half of the population was in it. It had a lot to do with unions, the power unions brought to the workplace, and earning a fair wage.

How to defeat facsism

2026-01-25T00:00:00Z

Erik Hane describes her now normal routine in monitoring ICE's movements and frustrating them whenever they are making a stop. She remarks the extraordinary courage and collective solidarity of everyday people that has happened in the last few weeks as ICE reigns it's terror onto the public:

Here is something simple and beautiful: the vast majority of the residents of this city agree. In the days since ICE murdered Renee Good, something new has happened. Everyone is activated. Ordinary people—as in, people who don’t normally think that much about politics or where they fit on an ideological spectrum—have looked up and said, “No, what ICE is doing in my city is unacceptable, and I am going to be part of the opposition.” Networks for supplies, groceries, shelter, rides, medical care, and neighborhood patrols have burst forth on the sheer strength of everyone participating.

She ends her beautiful essay with this insight: there is no other choice but to stand up to these thugs:

ICE is feverishly looking for some top-down reason this is happening. They are trying to infiltrate, but you cannot infiltrate a city’s collective character. They want to find the “orchestrators,” the “paid activists,” the political professionals scheming up the city’s response to their crimes. They won’t find any, because there are none. It’s parents worried about the safety of their daycare and schools. It’s neighbors worried about the family down the street. It’s anyone with a conscience—which is to say, it is everyone. And we are going to win.

Saying I Don't Know

2026-01-18T00:00:00Z

Admitting what you don’t know creates more safety than pretending you do.

Senior engineers who say “I don’t know” aren’t showing weakness - they’re creating permission. When a leader admits uncertainty, it signals that the room is safe for others to do the same. The alternative is a culture where everyone pretends to understand and problems stay hidden until they explode.

I’ve seen teams where the most senior person never admitted confusion, and I’ve seen the damage. Questions don’t get asked. Assumptions don’t get challenged. Junior engineers stay silent because they assume everyone else gets it.

Model curiosity, and you get a team that actually learns.

The most difficult challenge in my career has been admitting, "I don't know". When your intelligence is the currency to which you succeed in school, and at a job, you work very hard to signal to a lot people how you're clever you are. "I don't know" meant weakness of the mind and a level of incompetency, to me.

What I've understand is that, "I don't know", is an invitation to learn, not just for myself, but as a team. I like to say to my colleagues, "we'll learn, together." It's really the best when we figure out something as a team.

ICE Murdered Good

2026-01-09T00:00:00Z

It's hard to put into words the level of sadness and disgust I feel. Wednesday Jan 8th, 2026, Renee Nicole Good, mother of 3 and poet died in what can be described as a murder.

Amanda Musa, Omar Jimenez, and Sarah Boxer of CNN had this to say regarding Good:

A mother of three, Good had two children, ages 15 and 12, from her first marriage, The Associated Press reported. Her 6-year-old child’s father died in 2023, according to the Star Tribune. “There’s nobody else in his life,” the child’s grandfather told the newspaper.

Good also was a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger, her ex-husband told the AP. She also loved to sing and participated in a chorus in high school before studying vocal performance in college, he said

ICE agent, Johnathan Ross murdered Renee Good in her vehicle. He drew his weapon and executed her as she tried to leave. She was shot in the face. The vehicle slammed into a pole and a car. The airbag covered in blood, held Good's remains. Mr. Ross, a monster of the State, he left the scene without any sense of remorse. His cruel and unjust actions should be prosecuted to the full extend of the law. I think the state of Minnesota should also reinstate the death penalty for Mr. Ross, if convicted and ultimately found guilty of 1st degree murder.

I had a conversation with my cousin before returning back to home when I went to see my family in Missouri. My sister was present during the discussion. I warned my cousin that she needs to secure her naturalization documents and bring them back to home. My sister rolled her eyes and dismissed my words. "David, ICE is not going to come to a sleepy suburb or a college town in the middle of Missouri."

I swallowed my anger and tried to say to my sister, "you are not paying attention."

This was in October 2025.

I hope Mr. Ross is never welcomed in civil society ever again. He deserves horrific nightmares and ghosts to haunt his every thought. May his life be characterized as only evil and shameful.

Lastly, abolish ICE. It is a gestapo that has no place in American democracy.

Wanton Killing of American Citizens

2026-01-09T00:00:00Z

Abolish ICE was some sort of radical demand...As it turns out, you can zero out their budget like USAID...we can get rid of ICE

ICE agents, by virtue of them hiding their faces are secret police. They stalk the streets of America, their identities unknown and secret, pretending to be law enforcement. Their goal is propaganda by violence and terror.

ABOLISH ICE.

When a real journalist asks questions to a basic youtuber

2026-01-02T00:00:00Z

"Brother, I showed up at a bank at 2am and nobody was there. Should I call the FBI because they're running a fake bank?"

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A post shared by whatsupcv (@whatsup_cv)

Below Average Work

2026-01-02T00:00:00Z

Companies flipping the expectations on its head will punish workers for doing code by hand or innovative original programming.

I was struck by how Gen AI is the villain multiple times.

On Krypton, Kal-El gets bad grades in school for writing original essays instead of using AI to generate them.

The evil corporation’s police talk to an AI when writing police reports and it rewrites them to sanitize police brutality.

[image or embed]
— Dare Obasanjo (@carnage4life.bsky.social) January 2, 2026 at 1:00 PM

I don't know. But as companies demand workers to use generative AI in the workplace, I can see a world where these managers start telling engineers to complete projects through generative AI or be evaluated as below average.

When the clock broke

2025-12-23T00:00:00Z

In the latest episode to Unclear and Present Danger (A Few Good Men), John Ganz plugged his book, When the Clock Broke as a good gift for a history buff, a political junkie or a sharp teenager. I made a mental note to buy the physical copy of the book. Throughout the year, I read some of Ganz's pieces on Unpopular Front substack and borrowed from my local library an ebook copy.

My wife, daughter and I shortly went over to a real great used bookstore. Lo and behold, on their 2025 recent publications, Ganz's book was there for $8. I was so thrilled to find a used copy of his book.

John Ganz is a real clear thinker to our age of propaganda, neofascism and nativist vibe. Books like his offer history as a teacher and help make sense of our time. At the heart of the book is who gets to be American. Do yourself a favor and buy a copy.

Jamelle Bouie did a video exploring Vance nativist pivot and illustrated Vance as no different from David Duke's own white supremacy views.

To tie it back to Ganz's book, Patrick Buchanan ran on a nativist platform and gained a significant minority support in the Republican party to only be taken up by Trump and now Vance. These ideas don't come from nowhere. They are part of a long stretch of men claiming who gets to be American, and who gets to be prosperous in this nation is one of blood and soil and not one of credo. Vance as a pig man who eats slop and fucks couches for fun is not to be underestimated in his political project to be the successor of Trumpism. He believes he can ride like a klansman, a George Wallace, and a Buchanan and win. He is a David Duke of our time but without the charm and likability.

Oh did I forget to say that him fucking couches is just an internet rumor?

The Frontline is everywhere

2025-11-28T00:00:00Z

When people tell me that there’s been no resistance to the Trump administration, I wonder if they’re expecting something that looks like a guerrilla revolution pushing out the government in one fell swoop or just aren’t paying attention, because there has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremendously.

Reminds me an awful a lot of Karis Nemik manifesto. Remember, try.

Boss Battle FFIV Keytar Cover

2025-11-28T00:00:00Z

I found rush coil doing keytar cover on Sonic Green Hill Meadows. I loved his improvisation in the middle of the song. And generally I love when people are into their talents.

The Power to Take Down a President

2025-11-15T00:00:00Z

I am closely watching the panic that setting in at the White House, the MAGA Movement, and right wing media ecosystem. Megyn Kelly, as a vile person herself, stacked rank rape by noting rape of a 15 of year is not as bad as to an 5 year old. Kelly, a mother herself has a 14 year old daughter.

Trump attempted to pressure Representative Boebart to rescind her vote in the petition to discharge in the Situation Room at the White House. She did not and with 218 votes, the House is set to vote next Wednesday on releasing the files.

It is quite fascinating Attorney General Pam Bondi become a human pretzels when testifying in front of Congress about Esptein Files. There is rumors that the photos of Trump with half naked girls ( presumably underage ) among many others in the Esptein files. Bondi notably did not answer if she saw photos in Epstein's safe when she testified before the Senate.

The key to the power behind the Epstein files is that the MAGA movement has been fed a lot propaganda involving a secret cabal of powerful and wealthy elites who sexually abuse children and young women. Esptein as the main central character in this story is thought to had a list of people involved in his decades of sexual assault and rape. MAGA thought Trump will find and expose the secret ring of abusers. They did not expect Trump to be so central to Esptein's communication nor are they ready to face how much of a monster he truly is.

Even his true believers are having a real hard time reconciling their idea of who he is and who he is truly. Watergate, Bill Clinton's scandal, 9/11, Iraq War, and War on Terror, impeachments for Ukraine/Russia, and Jan 6th insurrection all feel as if they are smaller in comparison to the Esptein and Trump. Could the sitting President of the United States be a pedophile -- a man who committed heinous crimes for decades?

The power to take down a President resides in the very root of his power: his base. The base for President Trump is rotted to the core and weak in it's support for him. We might witness something enormous very soon.

Mandani Spanberger Sherrill Win

2025-11-04T00:00:00Z

The billionaire class were too greedy in their play. They thought they can rule without any pushback from the public. The American people are incredibly angry and tonight demonstrates a real weakness of the Republican party and Trump. It appears a clean sweep for the Democrats.

I mean this is so far pretty close to a 10 out of 10 night for Democrats. Winning everywhere! Statewide in PA and GA, huge margin in VA gov race. Sherrill tracking double digits as well! Mamdani above 50% in a the highest turnout in NYC since 1969. Big pick ups in VA House of Delegates.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) November 4, 2025 at 10:05 PM

This is just wild. The next four years, the Republicans in VA are shut out of state politics. If this is a preview for the midterms in 2026, expect a real panic from the Republicans. There is no amount of nonsense that Trump can do to avoid the mounting of a landslide.

Looks like the Dems will pick up 12 seats in the VA House of Delegates, which will go from 51-49 to 63-37 D-R. That's an honestly shocking result.
— Matthew Wilson (@mttwls.bsky.social) November 4, 2025 at 8:45 PM

Jamelle Bouie and me are thinking the same.

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A post shared by Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie)

Our time is now. If I can do it again, I'd would wake up earlier and fight these empire bastards.

Every worker deserves a union in the age of AI

2025-10-15T00:00:00Z

I helped organize my workplace. We started around when COVID vaccines were starting to circulate. We had about a few people in a slack channel at first, but we grew over time. After 4 years of underground organizing, we went public and won our election. Today I am an elected official for my union.

There is no work I am more proud of -- no app I've built -- than building a worker-led union. I feel that in my bones.

The working class deserves unions. It's the basis of power for everyday people. Moreover, its a way to rein in the excesses of the billionaire class. Here we stand at the abyss, where they tell us to use AI in everything such that they can make more money. Do we see a dollar more in our salaries if we are 5x more productive? Do we have more affordable healthcare if we get those prompts in? Or how about working from home instead commuting to the office while national guard and ICE agents patrol in the city? No we don't.

If there is a path to fighting back and claiming our power, it's organizing, collective action, and unionizing.

Obama is doing more

2025-10-14T00:00:00Z

I listened to Kara Swisher talked to Trevor Noah. She said she bullied Obama in doing more and getting out there more. These are emergency times and you can't be on the sidelines, just chatting with celebrity friends.

What are laws when the president can simply not follow them

2025-10-07T00:00:00Z

Garrett Graff's excellent essay is on the shutdown and Democrats last chance at using whatever little power they do have. The Democrats must ask themselves an important question: what are laws when they are not enforced?

If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You're voting to provide money for lawlessness.

Currently the Democrats are winning public opinion, but not in terms of the above problem. Instead the Democrats went back to their safe topic: healthcare. However, this is one senator that is calling what it is, and that is Chris Murphy.

Meanwhile the media and Republicans are treating this is as politics as usual. Graff is arguing that we are not even remotely in that space.

We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.

Actors include not just Senator Schumer and Representative Jeffries, but I'd argue Tim Cook who has been bending into a pretzel to avoid taxes on iPhones. Tim Cook is set to retire soon. He should push Apple's weight around and push the Trump administration.

How you may ask? What would Steve Jobs say and do? Maybe taking out one page ads in Wall Street Journal or flooding the social media market with ads demanding tariffs to lowered. I will go further: leak Esptein's iCloud account, with all the text messages from him. If corporate power is largest it hasn't been since the second gilded age, then let's encourage Mr. Cook to join the rebellion.

What can be said when facing such an extreme political climate? What is the point of laws when the President can just not follow them and the Republican Congress doesn’t do anything about it. We've blown passed constitutional crisis. We are instead in a constitutional nadir, flatlining as we argue extending ACA healthcare subsidies.

The Spoils is the Past

2025-10-07T00:00:00Z

"Want to know the future?", the man stops Arnold Schwarzenegger's character on his way to Last Resorts.

"What about the past?", Schwarzenegger counters.

Can't help but to think we are currently battling for the past in 2025.

Bad Pedophile

2025-10-07T00:00:00Z

Look what you made the Onion do.

Selling out Steve Jobs

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

Anil Dash on Tim Cook selling out Steve Jobs:

Many people have the quisling impulse to insist that Apple had to kiss Trump’s ass. “They’ll be stuck with really high tariffs!" “They might lose government contracts!" This is foolishness, of course, because all of this will still happen.

You can't give an inch to these fascists. You can say they are not reasonable like you and me. Adam Serwer of the Atlantic did a recent piece that argues American elites have failed the country deeply. They have surrendered like little bitches.

The sheer number of American elites willing to acquiesce to the destruction of democratic institutions is demoralizing. But it’s worth noting that many ordinary people seem to be made of sterner stuff. ICE detainees such as the Palestinian-rights activist Mahmoud Khalil, for example, have continued to speak publicly about the administration’s abuses.

Most certainly, Jobs would of shown much more fight had he be alive now. He might even tell Tim Cook to go fuck off if he tried to gesture sympathies to shareholders value. I can imagine Jobs pointing to Meta's campus, and saying to Cook, "if you care about money so much, go work for a cigarette company."

Anil Dash again with the clarity of the moment:

There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"! ... Here is an idea: Apple could, rather than creating golden bribes for child sexual predators, actually send a message to its users explaining that it would like to continue providing value to its customers, and ask those customers for help making that case to their elected officials.

Every Black Boy Needs A Little Love

2025-09-14T00:00:00Z

DJSHU-G · Doechii "What It Is" (DJ SHU-G Mash Up Remix)

Shutdown the Fascist Coup

2025-09-09T00:00:00Z

The message is simple. Shut down the consolidation of power and end the funding of an autocrat takeover. There is no second chance after this round of government funding. If Senator Schumer finds his spine in time, we have a chance to save our country. If he doesn't, may God have mercy on our Republic.

"I want to be very clear. Donald Trump is corrupting the government," warns Ezra Klein. Schumer heed this alarm.

Stop sending us money

2025-09-06T00:00:00Z

What a generational political talent. This political ad does more in conveying his message (we are doing very well in raising money that we met the cap) and his call to action (give us your time instead) than the Trump campaign could ever muster.

Democrats of the last war are lost with a finger up their nose. But Zohran Mamdani aint.

AI energy hungry data centers not a problem in China

2025-08-18T00:00:00Z

Eva Roytburg reports for Fortune, the astonishing leaps and bounds of the Chinese in clean energy abundance:

“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.

For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.

In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”

AI bubble may pop as a result of running into a wall head first. Asking a chatbot for a simple search might not be clear at first to the level of electrical demand, but a hard limit on scaling AI is feeding electrons to the GPUs in data centers and cooling them with air conditioned rooms. This requires a lot electricity. We are still coasting on 80 year old infrastructure from last century and we gutted the next generation in clean energy production. The grid is just as old, and we have not passed permit reform to make it easier to build transmission lines across states.

Compared to the infinite source of power of the sun and the boundless force of the wind, it seems pretty dumb to pump oil, and dig coal out of mines given how capital intensive. The years it takes to survey, permit, extract, refine, and sell fossil fuels is extensive, requiring billions of dollars. Meanwhile solar and wind on a KwH per dollar basis, it's cheaper to produce a solar farm than to extract coal.

The Chinese Century started in 2025. We gave up when Trump passed his big bad bill.

I am that guy into what Tyler the Creator is doing.

2025-08-13T00:00:00Z

Hip hop is the music of the freed black man. Tyler the Creator is sharing a freedom that is beautiful and joyous. The video is NSFW. Watch it though.

The Sound of AI Bubble Pop Will Be Enormous

2025-08-05T00:00:00Z

Brian Merchant makes a convincing case the US has a AI bubble on it's hands and it is staggeringly massive. Quoting a WSJ column by Paul Kedrosky, Merchant sets up just how big this AI bubble is:

spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing… one explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength, despite tariffs, is that spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program.

Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Merchant, underlines just how jaw-dropping the size of the bubble is:

I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.

The private sector is under going a government size stimulus program. These companies are so big that they in the aggregate outsize growth in consumer spending!

To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable.

These companies, openAI, perplexity, anthropic, etc, are all unprofitable. They are burning billions in venture capital and have little to show for. There has not been one company out there, in the 3 years chatGPT released 3.0, that has been able to build a successful genAI product.

Ed Zitron in his piece AI is a money trap argues,"fundamentally, generative AI does not let companies build something new." I think thats true and it reflects the monocultural malaise and stagnation that we are currently in.

The Chinese Century

2025-07-21T00:00:00Z

I read some of How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. A basic premise he introduces in the book is that GDP or the prosperity of a country is deeply related to its energy consumption. There are only a handful of countries that can produce abundant cheap fossil fuels, the US as one of them. The United States in the 20th century witness unparalleled growth as a consequence of securing said cheap fossil fuels. Some have referred the 20th Century as the American Century because the US dominated in just about everything.

Trump Presidency marks the end of the American Century. With the recent law passed gutting clean energy production (solar and wind), we have ceded to China in the clean energy revolution. From cheap electric vehicles, batteries, PVs, and wind turbines, China is responsible for half of all global renewable deployment. Half. It is setting up the infrastructure necessary to build the next generation of technology and living standards. No longer are the Chinese copying American IP, but instead truly innovating and creating a future, a Chinese future.

The Atlantic shares some astonishing pictures in the sheer scale of what China is doing. Ana Taylor writes:

As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.

These few pictures are incredible:

I am glad the clean energy revolution is still speeding ahead, but we gave up this century when Trump signed said bill into law.

Stop Playing With Me

2025-07-21T00:00:00Z

Thump the bass.

I just love album cover here. The exaggerated fists reminds me of Ludacris albums.

Hot Shit

2025-07-18T00:00:00Z

The energy in St. Louis circa 2000 was so electric. Nelly released his album Country Grammar when I was in high school. His album dropped in the backdrop of an ascended city. It reached echelons of bigger sports towns. The city saw Super Bowl Champs St. Louis Rams. The Cardinals' Mark McGwire shattered homerun records*. Wayne Gretzky, GOAT of NHL, for a couple of years played for the Blues. Then you had Nelly thumping beats, putting St. Louis on the map in mainstream radio.

* Allegedly on steroids.

They're Literally Angry at Superman for Being Nice

2025-07-10T00:00:00Z

Remember when they were mad about Little Mermaid being black? Well now, they are mad about Superman being nice. Parker Molloy gets right to it. The extreme nature of the right wing media means basic things like kindness is seen as a cultural attack.

But this isn't really about Superman. It's about how conservative media takes the most innocuous statements and transforms them into culture war ammunition. It's about how the right-wing ecosystem has become so reflexively oppositional that even "basic human kindness" reads as a partisan attack.

And perhaps most tellingly, it's about what happens when you've built an entire media apparatus that needs a constant supply of things to be mad about — even if that means getting upset that Superman, of all characters, stands for truth, justice, and helping people.

If they are mad at Superman for being nice, wait until they learn about Jesus.

What is stupid

2025-06-29T00:00:00Z

tarltontarlton of the Bulwark writes a really spicy take on stupid people and their relationship to President Trump. Essentially Trump is one of them who has made it. That mountaintop feels too damn good to give up. But what is stupid anyways? Emphasis is mine:

(Because “stupid” is a pretty stupid term, I should probably take a minute here to describe what I mean. It’s not really a matter of raw IQ, and educational achievement only partially captures it. Stupid people are those who don’t understand what is happening around them and have no interest in actually finding out. Active ignorance would be another way of putting it, but “stupid” just sounds better. Despite being very well informed about electrons and such, a competent chemical engineer with a master’s degree could be very stupid indeed if he/she still believes that trickle down economics is a real thing.)

I know plenty educated people who lack any curiosity to understanding what is happening around them. I hesitant to think they are stupid people. But a key characteristic is having no interest in finding out why things are happening to them.

Ai Steals Education

2025-06-22T00:00:00Z

I recently discussed AI in the workplace with my manager. I had a growing sense that he's feeling the pressured to get on the AI train or be left behind. I prodded him with question about education but it didn't go anywhere. He interpreted my question was about AI in school. But I was more interested learning as a means of growing as a software engineer. I think the struggle, confusion and frustration to not knowing how something works really does matters in learning and building craft. Its when I actually engage with code in this way that I build a mental model of an architecture.

AI presents itself as a shortcut by leapfrogging to a solution -- all without you understanding how any of the pieces of code works in relation to the rest of the codebase. It reminds me of a parent who is so very afraid of their child failing, that they will rescue any time their child is frustrated. In this instance, the developer is reaching for co-pilot as soon frustration sinks in. I think, this produces a weaker mind, a more ignorant knowledge worker, and a less resilient person. When they have to defend their decisions when things fail, they can't simply point to "ChatGPT sounded right".

Learning requires one to struggle. There's no shortcuts to be had. An essay by James of Agentultra, on why he won't use AI deeply resonated with me. James on the joy of the struggle:

It is during the struggle that I learn the most and improve the most as a programmer. It is this struggle I crave. It is what I enjoy about programming.

Especially the boring parts. Working on the boring, rote code is where you learn patterns and understand when and how to refactor.

Ezra Klein on How I Write shares the same belief:

You can only make connections through grappling and struggling with text. Curiosity is the driver in expanding one's mind, even done poorly it's worth the pain of frustration and dissatisfaction. In engaging in a codebase, or subject for hours, it changes you. You grow. You learn. You struggle.

AI advocates usually gesture to technological improvement displacing the jobs of old such as the horse shit collector with new jobs, like factory car worker. What's interesting is that whoever is originally saying this is usually the wealthy man who owned the factory. In this case, though, it's the ravenous information thieves in Silicon Valley, promising turbo charge your programming game. It's a lie. AI is a theft of the mind. Again here's James view on labor and the promise of new jobs:

The Luddite movement is an interesting piece of history. People often remember the part about breaking machines in factories. Today, people refer to those who refuse to use new productivity-enhancing technology as, Luddites. But the movement was not about sabotage. At least, it had a purpose and sabotage was only one strategy used by people to try and enact change and gain bargaining power.

You see, there were no social policies or reforms in place to protect the rights of labourers during the industrial revolution in which the Luddite movement had formed. The people involved in the movement were skilled workers who used the machines they were destroying. They weren’t destroying the machines because they wanted everyone to make textiles by hand: they were protesting the fact that capital owners were extracting the wealth from their labour with this new technology and weren’t reinvesting it to protect the labourers displaced by it.

Today, AI technology is being used to replace labour power with capital. The knowledge work we do is being replaced with machines and algorithms by capital holders who want to own and rent out access to that knowledge. It’s cheaper, produces more value, and that new wealth is not turning into shorter working hours or supplementing any labourer’s income. That wealth is going into the hands of the ultra wealthy.

And there's the rub. Let's say the co-pilot tools do actually increase productivity. It isn't like workers see shorter hours or bigger paychecks. Folks like Mr. Bezos get richer with a smaller workforce doing more. What do we as workers get in return? Lesser benefits and 2% raise and another year maybe of employment.

We might trading something more than our time and efficiency. Our minds might get weaker as we rely on these AI tools to do the heavy lifting of thinking.

The Scale of No Kings Protests Mattered

2025-06-18T00:00:00Z

The No Kings Protests coincide with Trump's sad military parade. An estimated 5 million people (according to organizers) showed up and protested. G. Elliot Morris estimates 2.6 million attendees, representing 1.2 - 1.8% of the U.S. population.

Moreover, these weren't just progressive liberals or left wing people of the Coastal Elite variety showing up. Even in crimson red states saw people showing up. Look at Boise Idaho! The important thing is to recognize the extent to which Trump's public support has deteriorated.

Why does public support matter? It matters in so far how much resistance Trump sees. In a world where, like he imagines, people are non-playable characters (NPC), without agency, free will and opinions. This is a view of a sociopath, but this world view expects no resistance for only from a few pesky left wingers. This is not the world we live in. People are responding in horror and are outraged by plain cruelty of Trump's Gestapo, kidnapping people off the streets, courthouse, and schools.

Protests matter in proportion to an unpopular weak president. Even Putin, a man who has rigged every election and thrown every popular dissenter off the balcony of a hotel, needs public support. There is a reason why the use of the military is the last thing an autocrat does. They require a public that is not terribly too resistant to their policies and would-be popular leaders stay silent. It's why places like China crack skulls early on before protest reach critical mass or develop a charismatic popular leader. By the time you need the military to suppress protests, its often too late.

Strength as autocrat requires shutting down dissent, like from a popular young charismatic leader saying you're bad, wrong, and dumb. You as a autocrat look weak and have no ability to control the populace or sway popular opinion. One could argue, Trump sending the National Guard and Marines to LA was a sign of weakness and Governor Newsom looked strong standing up to a pretend king. In WWE parlance, an organic popular leader draws heat from the public. They are energized in a way that saps strength from the Heel.

Much of the power of tyrants comes from people anticipating what is expected of them and doing so before they are targeted. Mass protests demonstrate people dissenting at scale, despite the fear they may have of being singled-out themselves.

For now, Trump and his ghoul, Stephen Miller, are doubling down on state kidnappings and workplace site raids. They believe they can get away with it and not have people notice. Jamelle Bouie gets at their fundamental miscalculation:

Here we see Trump’s fundamental problem. He and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies — the fallout from their effort to mold the country to fit their nativist and mercantilist obsessions — are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles, or even a few million undocumented immigrants, out of the more than 340 million people in the United States? But the reality is that to harden the border and more tightly police immigration — to remove as many unauthorized people as possible — is to necessarily subject American citizens to the scrutiny and violence of the state. External control requires internal suppression
...
Both Trump and Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the administration’s immigration policies, may have imagined that their crackdown would isolate a relatively small group of people and be met with indifference by most Americans, giving Trump and Miller free rein to do as they pleased.

No doubt they will continue to dig in their position and continue to cry out for public to join them in their cruelty. If these massive protests are any indication, its a matter of time when normal conservatives who don't like radical rapid change join in these protests in large numbers.

A Weak Tyrant

2025-06-12T00:00:00Z

Even in authoritarian regimes don't set the military this early in squashing dissent. It's a too high of risk in losing public support. Trump's move to send 1700 national guard and now the marines to handle peaceful protests is a sign of a weak tyrant on the verge of an early collapse in public support.

Making art is suppose to hurt your brain

2025-06-01T00:00:00Z

I think writing is suppose to be somewhat uncomfortable, confusing and painful. But I did not considered it might be unnatural thing to do. I suppose it can be argued that written word as a recent invention to our existence means that reading and writing is not a built-in human instinct but rather a deliberately taught thing. Adam Mastroianni shares 28 slightly rude notes on writing Number 10 is one that resonates with me:

Maybe it’s because writing is inherently lonely, or maybe it’s because the only people who would try to make a living from writing are messed up in the head.

Personally, I think the reason is far more sinister: making art is painful because it forces the mind to do something it’s not meant to do. If you really want to get that sentence right, if you want that perfect brush stroke or that exquisite shot, then you have to squeeze your neurons until they scream. That level of precision is simply unnatural.

I Don't Belong Here

2025-05-03T00:00:00Z

My god. If you are not moved, I don't know what to tell ya.

Futile Dancing

2025-04-27T00:00:00Z

@RaymondCool's comment captures the moment well:

Can you imagine the assignment? "your privilege is dying, your friends are enemies, you lost your daughter, everything you love, this is the point of no return, rage" dance to hide it all behind a couple extra drinks.

I've been there. Sometimes you gotta get lost in dance to find your way out.

Needlessly complicated

2025-04-22T00:00:00Z

I had a correspondence with Alex Petros, a core engineer on HTMX. We had some overlap when he was an engineer at the Washington Post. He said something that has stuck with me for several months. Building websites is needlessly complicated.

Most of what is on a page is largely static, but we insist on cutting edge frameworks that can scale to unicorn level performance. We are still just building HTML, CSS. The JavaScript is too much, in my view, to justify picking frameworks such as NextJS, Remix, etc.

I am exploring Astro and so far it has struck a great balance in it's partial hydration or architectural islands. In a sea of static contents, a section is marked for dynamic updates. It can sometimes feel like, it can't be this simple -- we must prove our value at work by abstracting further these tools.

It's a little bit of bullshit, and fooling ourselves.

Larry David wrote "dinner with Hitler" so much better than I did

2025-04-22T00:00:00Z

Larry David for the New York Times Opinion, wrote a piece satirizing Bill Mahar's dinner with a dictator at the invitation of Kid Rock.

Larry David on Hitler is so charming:

I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.

Subversive and cunning, the whole thing is brilliant. See?! Bill Mahar, this is the difference of being funny versus being played.

The clarity is the message

2025-04-16T00:00:00Z

The clarity Te'Nehisi Coates brings to his writing and thinking is why he is so effective in driving uncomfortable truths. I keep revisiting his writing because it so closely resembles James Baldwin. It strikes like a hammer and cuts like knife. His words haunts me like a night of regrets and embarrassments.

What if Charlie Chaplin had dinner with Adolf Hitler after watching the Great Dictator together?

2025-04-15T00:00:00Z

Bill Maher had dinner with President Trump over the weekend. He had a fine time with him. Maher went on his show to tell his audience he is going to be bring the hard truth: President Trump is a fun hang at a private dinner.

In an opinion piece, Leon Krauze for the Washington Post lists examples of people visiting dictators and strongmen, and coming away charmed:

Herbert Matthews of the New York Times traveled to the Cuban mountains to interview Fidel Castro, then a little-known guerrilla leader. The reporter came back enthralled. “The personality of the man is overpowering,” Matthews wrote.

Joseph Stalin was remembered by close comrades such as Nikita Khrushchev as a man who could be jovial in private settings, telling jokes and singing Georgian folk songs late into the night — just before ordering purges that would cost thousands of lives.

Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger were both startled during their historic 1972 visit to China: Mao joked with them, played with words and made them feel at ease — a deliberate mask concealing one of history’s most devastating authoritarian records.

Maher was charmed by him. I can't imagine Charlie Chaplin having dinner with Adolf Hitler and then being over the moon because Hitler autographed a movie poster of The Great Dictator

Stomach Flopping Into the Abyss

2025-04-14T00:00:00Z

The brilliant and always direct, Adam Serwer of the Atlantic makes it very clear: we are in a constitutional crisis right now. Trump is openly shrugging at ¯_(ツ)/¯ a decision from the Supreme Court, but in the most unserious and contemptful way:

Last week, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administrationto follow a lower court’s directive to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return...the Trump administration has chosen a third way: pretending it is complying while refusing to do so.

A character that nobody thought would become a central villain in the descend to madness, is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As a senator he often was the most miserable person in the chamber. He never looked like he enjoyed the job. And when running for president, he was constantly humiliated by President Trump. Adam Serwer again:

During the Oval Office meeting, Rubio chimed in to say that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

I hope when we are the other side of this, these folks face justice at the Hague. Secretary Rubio does not have any place in history besides standing next to Castro and Pinochet.

Trump is definitely planning on rounding up citizens on fake criminal charges, with no trial or legal recourse. He has found his secret police and gulag in ICE and El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The Supreme Court is acutely aware of the dangers of such a plan:

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson accompanying the Supreme Court’s order last week, which was issued with no public dissents, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” More broadly, this matter is no longer just about deportations or undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court order is a new step into presidential lawlessness, in that it suggests that the administration will not abide by any court orders it does not feel like complying with.

The Supreme Court is now faced with a real decision.

The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will. This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.

I don't believe Chief Justice Roberts can save the nation from stomach flopping into the abyss. The fall is infinite. Looking up is to bare witness to the light shrinking into darkness. There is no going back.

You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool

2025-04-13T00:00:00Z

As the great physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Fundamentally my worldview, to a frustrating extend in my self-confidence, is does what I know is in fact true. I have a little voice in my head that says, "you're fooling yourself."

Bungie's Marathon looks really good

2025-04-13T00:00:00Z

Very haunting. I can't wait to play it.

The teaser was pretty hot too:

Punching Back

2025-04-02T00:00:00Z

Judge Susan Crawford wins Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and solidifying a 4-3 liberal majority. Mr. Musk spent $25 million dollars in attempt to buy the seat. He lost and lost big. Judge Crawford won 55% to Judge Schimel's 45%. In a state that Mr. Trump won narrowly and for a state that goes one way or the other in the tiniest slivers of margins, Judge Crawford's win is a punch right at the nose of the tyrants.

NPR Tiny Desk: Ca7riel & Poco Amoroso

2025-04-02T00:00:00Z

I've been listening to this NPR Tiny Desk over and over again. I really like the Latin jazz, funk, hip-hop they're doing. I can't help but eye the shirts the band is wearing, especially the exaggerated faces of Ca7riel and Poco Amoroso.

When I studied aboard in Mexico, I came back to the States with an appreciation for Latin jazz. I had a whole phase of it for a couple years.

Send your comments and letters to the Coup's AI chatbot

2025-03-16T00:00:00Z

The excellent reporting in this Wired piece is so god damn killer, its gotten me mad -- it's so incredibly good in telling what the chaos means and how to understand it. The end game here is for Musk to plunder the government so completely that to rebuild it, he'll say AI must take over all of it to restore it. That AI of course would be his xAI. Like many things Musk has personally built, Boring Company, Telsa's Cybertruck, or SpaceX last two rockets, it's going to be shit.

On March 7, DOGE got one of the things it seemed to want most from GSA: a chatbot that could automate work previously done by federal employees. The tool rolled out to some 1,500 employees at GSA, with an agency wide launch planned a week later. An internal memo about the tool touted the “endless” tasks it could help with: “draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.” The memo hinted at the dangers of deploying chatbots at the federal level, warning workers not to “type or paste” internal or personally identifiable information as inputs.

People who used it weren’t impressed. “It’s about as good as an intern,” one GSA employee told WIRED. “Generic and guessable answers.” This version of GSAi almost certainly couldn’t interact with the EDS discovery layer first proposed by engineers. More likely it was just the first step in an iterative approach. As one official said in the February meeting about the project, the first goal could be to “deliver this sort of janky, doesn’t-work-all-the-time chatbot” to pave the way for a “turbo-charged” version down the line.

That turbo-charged AI bot is never going to come to be. The so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" Musk installed is really a criminal organization with Musk as a paper thug. They think of themselves as pirates of the 1980's Apple days. But they're simply a bunch of criminals with laptops doing utterly brazenly corrupt and illegal things. Notably when the Coup was underway, they used their new hijacked comms via GSA seizure to lock out employees:

As would happen at agencies across the government, the GSA seizure took place in the shadows—a matter not of announcements but of calendar invitations from unknown people, of unfamiliar names appearing in internal directories. The sixth and seventh floors, which had offices and suites used by the administrator, the “A-suite,” were restricted and largely locked down. No longer could employees simply badge in through the turnstile. Now they had to pass through metal detectors and have their belongings x-rayed

And the Republicans! They are so busy trying to find ways to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the tax cuts they promised to their wealthy friends and favorite big companies. It's no surprise they are all kind of shocked how angry their constituents are. As it turns out, a lot federal workers and offices and jobs are in Republican districts and states.

Yet, I must highlight, they are letting an insider threat thrive inside the very government they swore to run. None of them seem to care what is happening. They are responsible for ushering in the end of American democracy.

Lastly, what's maddening is Senator Schumer decided to throw his hands up and allow the Republicans to cede power to the Musk and Trump through giving the Republicans votes on the Continuing Resolution.

Go read the great piece at Wired. It so good.

Hostile American Takeover

2025-02-27T00:00:00Z

This shit is so hot.

This Shit is Hot

2025-02-27T00:00:00Z

Can you run Doom purely in Typescript

2025-02-27T00:00:00Z

Yes, you can. Only Hardcore mode.

The Thirst to Be Seen

2025-02-26T00:00:00Z

I am reading Chris Hayes book, The Sirens' Call, and there is a passage that encapsulates a feeling I have being a fan to someone:

The Star and the Fan. The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, bu the fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. Because the Star cannot recognize the Fan, the Fan's recognition of the Star doesn't satisfy the core existential desire. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of. the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale. And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention

At the very heart of celebrity's relationship to a fan is this lopsided, one way street: the fan knows a lot about the celebrity but the celebrity doesn't know much about the fan. This need to be recognized, to be understood, and to be seen is deep. It's why ultimately the relationship can be characterized as artificial, unsatisfying, shallow, and ephemeral.

I'm personally deeply uncomfortable with meeting any of the people I admire. I am keenly aware of the power asymmetry. Whenever I meet a new person, I try really hard to get to know a person at their core. I can't stand shallow small talk. I get bored very quickly and move on.

What is a fan's small interaction with a famous person but a version of shallow small talk.

Forgotten Things Like Freedom

2025-02-14T00:00:00Z

That's an old one. Old and true. And sturdy. One of the best navigational tools ever built. Can't be jammed or intercepted. Something breaks, you can fix it yourself. Hard to learn. Yes, but once you've mastered it, you're free. We've grown reliant on Imperial tech, and we've made ourselves vulnerable. There's a growing list of things we've known and forgotten, things they've pushed us to forget. Things like freedom.

They have herded us like cattle on the way to slaughter. To pacify any loud scared ones, they pull something over our eyes, their slot machine. Traced and dazzled, they whispered wonders and lies. While we forget what freedom was like, they plunder our Republic.

It's so confusing, isn't it? So much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. But they have a fight on their hands, don't they? Our elemental rights are such a simple thing to hold, they will have to shake the galaxy hard to loosen our grip.

They aim to exhaust us. We must endure, together.

The Arrogance is Remarkable Isn't It

2025-02-12T00:00:00Z

What do you need? A uniform, some dirty hands and an Imperial tool kit. They’re so proud of themselves, they don’t even care. They’re so fat and satisfied, they can’t imagine it.
...
"The arrogance is remarkable isn't it, they don't even think about us." "These days will end, Cassian Andor. The way they laugh. The way they push through a crowd." "The sound of that voice telling you to stop, to go, to move. Telling you to die. Rings in the ear doesn't it?"

Replicated under Fair Use from Star Wars: Andor by Andor, Season 01, Episode 03.

Fat and Satisfied

2025-02-12T00:00:00Z

Mr. Musk is he is just some guy, with no authority to do what is doing. He's hijacked the Federal Government, breached sensitive systems including the Treasury's Direct Payment System. Let me put it this way: a foreigner who's loyalty is not to the Republic, infiltrated and plundered the people's money and laws. It looks to me an inside job as half of Congress are silent to the very thing they swore to protect. And his arrogance, fat and satisfied, is only matched by the depth of his loneliness and hatred. Aren't we tired of his hubris.

We must hit him where it hurts: telsa, spacex, and twitter. Maybe Diablo/Path of Exile 2, to which is an average player. Governor Newsom should send state inspectors to Telsa. Governor DeSantis of Florida should think about his ambitions to be president requires a republic to exist. Go find waste and fraud at spacex. Senator Cruz, the biggest troll in the Senate, is smarter than Musk. He should put Maximum Effort in securing his 2028 presidential ambitions too. Go fuck in the Senate with investigations on starlinks. Has Musk been working with the Russians? the Chinese? Cruz should make a big fuss about it.

They Try To Rig the Game, but You Can't Fake Influence

2025-02-10T00:00:00Z

Also:

Insightful, Half time show review...

[image or embed]
— Tara Walker (@taraew.bsky.social) February 10, 2025 at 11:56 AM

Boring innovations are the most helpful

2025-02-09T00:00:00Z

Amaya Edwards reports on a net on storm drains helps solves for plastic pollution:

The nets collect the rubbish that comes out of the drainage pipe, so the water is clean when it goes into the rivers and streams. The nets get changed periodically and the rubbish is taken to the local waste removal area for sorting. Anything that can be recycled gets put in the recycling.

The Dumbest

2025-02-02T00:00:00Z

The editorial board at WSJ thinks President Trump is imposing tariffs for no reason. Here, WSJ and me agree:

Tariffs are taxes, and when you tax something you get less of it. Who pays the tariff depends on the elasticity of supply and demand for the specific goods.

We also agree Trump is stupid to pursue these tariffs. We all lose.

Instant Coffee Can Be Stored Indefinitely

2025-02-02T00:00:00Z

While emergency planning with my wife, I read this FEMA doc on food and water emergency. There's a section for shelf life for food, and instant coffee can be stored indefinitely. Pretty neat.

So it got me thinking, can you DYI instant coffee? You can but it takes a bit of effort and a contraption that freeze-dries it. The trick is freezing things ahead of time and then rapidly cooling brewed coffee in under 30 minutes.

One Good Thing

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Costco is going to raise pay for most of their hourly workers to more than $30 bucks. Costco and Apple are two major corporations who said no to ending their anti-discrimination policies. Also both share another thing in common: highest dollar per square foot retail.

It ain't no a coincidence they are two of the most beloved brands and companies in the country.

Impeach the Son of a Bitch

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Tariffs are taxes by another name. Trump is about to raise taxes on everyone by a significant margin. Mia Sato of the Verge succinctly puts it:

Trump has called tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” but he either doesn’t understand how they work or regularly lies about it. For years, he has claimed that the exporting country or company would foot the bill. Despite what the president and subjects of viral videos seem to believe, however, the exporting country’s government does not pay the tariff — the importer (like a retailer or other entity) pays it, and generally that additional cost is passed on to the consumer by charging them more for the item. If a company imports T-shirts from Mexico and sells them for $10, for example, a 25 percent tariff would add $2.50 to their costs, and they’re likely to jack up the price of your shirt to cover it.

Paul Krugman, who god love him is more profane since leaving the Times titles his latest piece, The End of North America. He argues we've built a continental-scale machine that moves, assembles, and builds over $1.8 trillion of stuff. Tariffs are about to bust that all to pieces, hurting business, workers, and consumers. We as consumers are going to witness the highest taxes in decades, at a time when inflation is a major driver to voter discontent.

What are we going to do about it? Well, I think a better question is what are the Republicans going to do about it. They're in charge. Democrats should not prop a corrupt regime. Will they stop the president from deploying illegal tariffs -- excuse me -- illegal taxes?

Illegal, you may ask? The president has a wide aperture in respects to the kinds of tariffs he can impose, but he cannot scream in all caps, something like drug trafficking as the reason. Krugman:

U.S. trade law gives the president huge discretion to impose tariffs, but only for a specific set of reasons: economic injury from import surges (Section 201), national security (Section 232), unfair foreign competition (Section 301), dumping — sales below costs. Drug smuggling, especially imaginary drug smuggling, isn’t on the list.

Trump is saying its about fentanyl coming over the border. Last time I checked, Canada is not a major source fentanyl.

"This is stupid"! Yupe, you're right. The very states, the entire midwest, overwhelmingly voted for him will see higher natural gas and oil prices (Canada sends a good amount of oil to refineries in the States). Car parts will be in shorter supply, and cost more. In a word, inflationary. He's only move is to blame immigrants and DEI. So expect that.

Will Republicans impeach him for fucking up their easy slick path to unfettered corruption? Their base are awfully populous and care about business more than pronouns, so I am told. Politics didn't end when he got elected, argues Jamelle Bouie. Maybe the backlash is nigh.

Big brother in 2025

2025-01-28T00:00:00Z

In the book 1984, the main character's whole job was to replace documents's content with approved facts by the State. The country was in a permanent war against Eurasia and no one knew why the war started, nor why it continued on. The book demonstrates what a totalitarian regime will do to stay in power and what it must do to keep it's populace soaked in propaganda.

The Verge's Jay Peters reports, Google is replacing the Gulf of Mexico for Gulf of America:

Google announced yesterday that Maps in the US will show Gulf of America and Mount McKinley, and CNBC today reports that the company’s maps division has added the US to its list of “sensitive” countries.

This is just the beginning.

Still a profoundly amazing band, Blues Travaler

2025-01-27T00:00:00Z

Emma Stone is the only person who can match the mouth energy necessary to pull off "Hook" rap section.

The Backlash

2025-01-26T00:00:00Z

Chris Hayes believes there will be a giant backlash to Trump administration's cruel actions.

Feel deep in my bones that the backlash to all of this is going to be enormous. Not sure how it will manifest and when it will explode into view, but confident it’s coming.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) January 25, 2025 at 5:00 PM

Today I had a thought regarding the Progressive Era of American politics. Wealth inequality hasn't been this significant since the gilded age. It wasn't till Teddy Roosevelt went around, yelling that busting the trust was a very good thing to do. His platform, the Square Deal, centered fairness as it's key message. He essentially ran on anti-corruption anti-monopoly platform. It was hugely popular as well.

AOC and Bernie seem to be the last politicians with any fight in them. Democrats should really learn from them and get it together. Cruel and horrible things are happening now. Trump fired (illegally) 15 Inspector Generals across many departments and agencies. Unfettered corruption will happen in board daylight. A politician like AOC is the right kind of leader now. At least she got spine of steel:

One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 8:24 PM

Practicing Nazi aesthetics makes you a Nazi

2025-01-23T00:00:00Z

While I was in school, my history class on the Imagery, Media, and Symbols of Fascism described the design language around Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. The class made the particular insightful point that the branding in itself, including body language such as the Nazi Salute, carried a powerful a message of domination, superiority and brutal violence. The Nazi Salute communicated an aesthetic that embodied those characteristics, but importantly it told to audiences that membership is exclusive to a strict hierarchy of people. It said who gets to be German in the most violent way possible. Aram Zucker-Scharff wrote the plain truth about about practicing the aesthetic around Nazism:

Practicing Nazi aesthetics is just being a Nazi. The impact these things make is the execution of Nazism. 4chn making this a systematic part of its culture is indoctrination. "The point of the system is what it does"

This bit by Keenan and Peele perfectly encapsulates a tension between a person you thought you knew and showing the person they really are.

This is just too good not to share. 🤷‍♀️🤣
Bluesky only lets you upload 1 minute so I cut this in two posts! #elonmusk

[image or embed]
— Shira Lazar (@shiralazar.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 9:14 PM

[image or embed]
— Shira Lazar (@shiralazar.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 9:14 PM

There should not be any equivocation about it. Elon Musk saluted in the most Nazi way. It's important to acknowledge to what we saw is what we saw. To say otherwise is a lie -- a lie to comfort oneself of a reality: the person that built spaceships and electric cars is gone. He's a Nazi, Scott and Kara.

When Scott Galloway said on Pivot, that he is giving Mr. Musk the benefit of doubt, I say to Scott Galloway get the fuck out of here.

Oh fun fact about Scott Galloway: he's a professor at NYU School of Business and teaches marketing and wait for it -- branding.

For more on the aesthetics of Fascism, the GOAT, Rick Steves has an hour long episode on just that:

Background Music to Enshitification

2025-01-18T00:00:00Z

I forget who may of said this, but often, the DNA of a company is rooted in how they were founded. Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are deeply uninspiring utilitarian chaos apps. Meta is not a creative company nor innovative. All of Mr. Zuckerberg's success was through acquisitions and building one of the most successful ad businesses ever.

Spotify's use of good-enough AI generated background music or Ghost Artists(Liz Pelly's book, Mood Machine, references it as such) is undercutting real artists through playlists, which people put on not to listen but as white noise. Elizebeth Lopatto of the Verge wrote a go-read-this-now piece:

⁠⁠Spotify was initially designed as an advertising company⁠⁠; its paid tier was the result of a concession to major labels in early negotiations over streaming rights.

No surprise this kind of move was done by an advertising company, dressed up as a music streaming service. Spotify original draw was that it's playlists were so much better than Apple's iTunes later Music. Discovery in new music while rotating through your own playlist of favorites was fantastic way to curate songs as background music. But that changed the relationship of listeners had with their music. Ms. Lopatto again:

The playlist model meant listeners didn’t have a relationship with artists — they had a relationship with playlists.

This is powerful way in understanding Spotify's success. Playlists were the beachhead to listeners moving away from iPods/iPhones Apple iTunes/Music. Sure you can do it on your own on Apple Music. But you didn't quite have the same access of every song or album imaginable like you did on Spotify. It was a la carte by song or album on Apple. Shuffling through 10,000 songs was the best an iPod could do at the time.

I find the move Spotify did in using Ghost Artists as a means to decreasing royalty payments to real artists indicative of enshitification. It's a predictable development if the original DNA of a place is in advertisement.

Go read the article. It's chuck full of very interesting insights on Spotify. You may come away with it feeling a little less excited about Spotify. If so, may I suggest rediscovering your iPod.

The Power to Make Your Enemy Miserable

2025-01-13T00:00:00Z

Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993. In many ways she was a prophet in describing a profoundly prescient future. The book took place in the mid-2020's. There is a powerful passage that in my view, captures something about the 2024 election. Emphasis is mine.

People are setting more fires to cover crimes although why they would bother these days, I don't know. The police are no threat to criminals. People are setting fires to do what our arsonist did last night —- to get the neighbors of the arson victim to leave their own homes unguarded. People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they're frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it. - page 143

Some people just want to watch the world burn. Trump created a permission structure to easily blame immigrants, trans people, and liberals for their plight. He plainly and repeatedly said he exact revenge and retribution upon everyone who doesn't support him. "They have the power to make others even more miserable," is one hell of a way to describe it.

As an aside, Octavia Butler was raised in and buried in Altadena, CA in a cemetery surrounded by blocks of burnt out rubble. The fire in Altadena and Los Angelos is the largest in LA's history.

Her book takes place in Altadena, CA. There are many references of people overtaken by a fictional drug that makes them set fire to things for the high of it.

It's quite a coincidence I picked up this book at the right time. I didn't know I needed it until I did.

What caused Palisades fire?

2025-01-12T00:00:00Z

The Washington Post's Brianna Sacks, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Imogen Piper and Aaron C. Davis dive deep in what could of caused the recent historic fires in LA. The Post built some powerful tools for journalists in recent years, one of which is designed to help sift through mounds of visual data. The work of engineers, data scientist, and of course our reporters really shows in this piece.

One passage stood out to me, I'd like to share:

The Post identified the burn scar of the New Year’s Eve fire using false-color satellite imagery taken before and after the blaze. The technique tracks changes to vegetation in satellite imagery. Healthy plant cover appears red, while the scorched ground appears blue to brown.

The staff at the Post rise to the occasion; always will.

Yeah Right

2025-01-11T00:00:00Z

Reuters interviewed Mr. Bezos on Sunday evening, January 11th, 2025. Mr. Bezos believes Mr. Musk is not acting out of self-interest but in the the interest of public in respects to SpaceX:

"Elon has been very clear that he's doing this for the public interest and not for his personal gain. And I take him at face value," said Bezos, founder of Blue Origin which rivals SpaceX in the space industry.

Yeah Right

Hello 👋 Mr. Musk is lying. It's not as if Mr. Bezos is acting out of self-interest too!

Linear Search

2025-01-11T00:00:00Z

Re-reading Data Structures and Algorithms by Jay Wengrow. A key comparative advantage to ordered arrays over classic arrays is that searching in them can end a loop early if certain conditions are met. Whereas classic arrays, a value can be anywhere in the array. You must inspect each element and hope that the best case is finding the value on the first element. Here's an example in Ruby from Wengrow:

# write a linear search algorithm that searches for a value in an array.
# stop searching when the value is a) found or b) the end of comparisons are reached or c) value is not founded

def linear_search(arr, value)
  arr.each_with_index do |element, index|
    # found the element we are looking for. give index
    if element == value
      return index
    # reached the end of comparisons, e.g. 45 > 56. Will always be false. exit out of loop.
    elseif element > value
      break
    end
  end
  # no dice
  return nil
end


# test cases
arr = [3, 13, 45, 56, 86, 170, 1000]
puts linear_search(arr, 45) # 2
puts linear_search(arr, 170) # 5
puts linear_search(arr, 1) # nil

During the loop, the first check is if you find the value matches the element, tell me where it is (index). If the element is not greater than the value, e.g. 45 > 56 -- always false, then break the loop. If you don't find anything, give me back nil.

An ordered array has an important benefit over classic arrays, in that it can end a search early.

The unbearable weight of immense wealth turns men into babies

2025-01-10T00:00:00Z

What is it that turns seemingly grown men into babies. Does having billions of dollars do something to their brains?

Chance Miller of 9to5 Mac listened to Mark Zuckerberg air his grievances to Joe Rogan without acknowledging his only invention (Facebook) was 20 years ago (2005) as well:

“[Apple has] used the [iPhone] to put in place a lot of rules that I think it feel arbitrary. I feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later.

Mr. Zuckerberg had one good idea and it ran it's course. Even the Ray-Ban smart glasses are not his invention. It's an extension of the Oculus Rift technology, which he acquired.

He goes on. While Meta doesn't provide third-party access to Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, or Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to gesture with his other hand, Apple does not give it's special private protocol (Airpods use to pair with iPhones) to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.

They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way.

There were a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it.

It’s just much more seamless because they’ve enabled that, but they don’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.

Mr. Zuckerberg does not tell Mr. Rogan here that Android and Android devices exist. With his billions and billions of dollars, Mr. Zuckerberg could create a special protocol to pair with Ray-Ban smart glasses on Android devices. After all, he did drop out of school as a mildly above average programmer.

Mr. Zuckerberg's immense wealth is so utterly unbearable, it breaks any comfort of his achievements. Like a fat cat, weak and soft from eating endless catnip, he can't stand his own success. Mr. Zuckerberg built a chaos machine that he himself no longer can control. But hey, at least he has that molly dealer from Chechnya look going for him.

Exercise is really good for you. Now we know how good it is

2025-01-07T00:00:00Z

A little known fact about me is that I ran cross country and track in high school. It was the best thing for me that I didn't know I needed. It was a refuge, a space where I'd run and run and not think about my boring life. In may ways it helped me get through tough years.

Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University in a PBS interview shares some really cool insights on how exercise benefit us. First, exercise behaving like a drug treatment in repairing or restoring health:

An example would be the mitochondria, the little battery-like organelles inside each cells. When we looked at the changes with exercise, we often saw mirror image changes to the ones we see with disease. So, exercise was quite literally kind of reversing in a mirror-image-like way the changes that happen with disease and explaining a little bit about how exercise manages to protect from those diseases.

Pretty neat! Also I found this to be very true: I slept better. I was more resilient in day to day stressors. I can handle my kids screaming and being chaotic better.

People sleep better. They have better mood. They're able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps. And I think the key is, is just stressing you just enough so that your body then in recovery builds these mechanisms that help you deal with the stress of life in other ways.

I've picked up kettlebell workouts in the back half of 2024 and read up on the kettlebell swings have the benefit of increasing heart rate up to fat burning zone while not depleting you entirely. Part of my avoidance in working out is my training long distance running as a teenager was to give 110% of yourself to the sport. I am 40 and I have kids, a job, and chores to do. I need enough in the tank to do stuff after working out. Kettlebell swings has that special perk.

And, of course, if you want to do more, there's added benefit. One of the things I regularly tell my patients — I'm a cardiologist — is that one minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life, which means you definitely have time to exercise, because, even if you exercise even a little bit higher intensity, you get seven or eight minutes of extra life.

Hotdogs take three seconds away from your life, so I'm told. A minute of exercise for 5 minutes of extra life? I believe it.

Astro as a do everything framework

2025-01-07T00:00:00Z

Client-side routing like in NextJS is something not done in Astro and instead routing is handled by the server.
function components are treated as static html and attributes on those components are like AngularJS directives. Those directives tells the component when to render
Component can hydrate (render the html partial) based on 3 states:
1. client:load === render immediately
2. client:idle === chill until ready
3. client:visible === render when in viewport

Technique is called island architecture, where you selectively swap out/hydrate html without render cycles.

Can do dynamic routing like NextJS via getStaticProps or full Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in nodeJS.

Link blogging is back, baby

2025-01-03T00:00:00Z

Simon Willison offers informal guidelines to link blogging. Let me share with you some of them:

Back in November 2022 I wrote What to blog about, which started with this:

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!
I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to,

Ah I knew I read Simon Willison before. That piece helped me over come a bit of imposter syndrome with blogging. Who is going to read me? I am a nobody! But also I am a nobody :0). What a beautiful freedom.

I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past.

Coming from the liberal arts, school drilled that copying someone else's words is plagiarism. Attribution is important. Back in my day, backlinks were a way to credit someone.

I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you’ll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself.

I often don't have much to add when I read something, even if I read the whole thing. I think now it's because I am trying to pass the time or the author did a perfect job in articulating a thing.

A lot of stuff I link to involves programming. I’ll often include a direct link to relevant code, using the GitHub feature where I can link to a snippet as-of a particular commit. One example is the fetch-rss.py link in this post.

Note to self: he has good examples in writing about programming. Audience is you, not them.

read several of his pieces on programming and write a piece on programming project

Go do some blogging.

Is the demise of console gaming nigh? Maybe that's fine.

2025-01-03T00:00:00Z

The solution is to pass on old gaming hardware to our children

Jim Trinca of Eurogamer argues persuasively that game console exclusives are nearing an end and that trend might be part of a bigger phenomenon.

I haven't really considered genZ and genAlpha consumers as an impending challenge to the console business. They are not buying TVs, game consoles and gaming like older consumers (like me). Their attention is very much on their smartphones. It doesn't seem they are all that impressed by higher and higher end graphics. The big three consoles are still selling games from the 80's and 90's. I mean Final Fantasy 7 Remake was pretty darn fun.

I, for one, am introducing my daughter to gaming. She's 7 years old and for the couple years, she has played my wife's restored Gameboy Advance (over 20 years old!) and my Nintendo 3ds. She recently played lots of Pokemon Red and Super Mario World Advance. She's gotten pretty good at Mario 64 on my Nintendo Switch.

A bare gameboy advance logic board. Beautiful

Nintendo would do well to sell restoration kits

Will there be a console business in the next two cycles? I don't know, but there is plenty of games I own, consoles sitting in my basement, waiting to be played.

Sludge by Greenhouse Ghost

2025-01-03T00:00:00Z

My old manager, pryan back at Symplicity is one talented person. Don't know how I ran into his music, but I like it a lot. I can hear a little bit of Bush in his guitar play.

Saving golden era technology

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

Wes Davis of the Verge: Go watch this caper about salvaging an extremely rare 400-plus pound CRT TV.

What a profound tale. I love every minute of it.

All the levers of power against the free press

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

ABC news settled out of court a defamation suit. George Stephanopoulo was pissed that ABC decided not to fight and instead folded like a bag of leaves. This bodes poorly for the free press and the Republic. I don't know of many places that are ready for what is to come. Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr for the Post:

“Settlement decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Each major decision to settle sends a signal about the broader climate for the press. It can spur other public figures to sue over perceived slights and pressure other media outlets to self-censor.”...legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.

Obeying in advance like Mr. Bezos is a hop skip away from Fascism.

Abundance Agenda Starts Here in Montgomery County, MD

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. It makes me incredibly proud that we are a leader in housing, in a blue state nontheless. Abdallah Fayyad of Vox writes:

Montgomery County has long prioritized affordable housing...But the county got creative with how it could provide public housing: It set aside a fund to finance and develop housing projects. And while the county partners with private developers, its investment makes it a majority owner of a given project. As the New York Times put it, the county, as an owner, becomes “a kind of benevolent investor that trades profits for lower rents

Branding around public housing is riddled with ideas around limited section 8 housing, poverty, underfunded neglected neighborhoods, and vouchers that have a wait time 20+ years.

leaders have coalesced around calling the mixed-income idea ‘social housing’ produced by ‘public developers,’” Cohen wrote. But in effect, the model is still publicly owned units being rented to residents at subsidized rates.

We have all the tools to address housing and do it in a smart effective way. What's more, notice this is a local county program -- not federal. Exciting indeed.

DeepHeist

2024-12-21T00:00:00Z

Really great use of deepfake technology in a short film.

Bezos should sell the Post

2024-12-21T00:00:00Z

Kara Swisher is putting together a consortium of wealthy investors to fund a bid for the Post. It's a long shot, namely because Mr. Bezos has not shown any interest in selling it.

However, there is nobody more attune to the media business nor knows more about technology as an industry than Ms. Swisher. "Her entire career has been focused on sharp, smart, good journalism," writes John Gruber of Daring Fireball. The Washington Post has a talented and incredible Engineering and Product department. The newsroom is world class and continuously produces courageous and incredible journalism. All is needed is the right kind of leadership and owner -- a person who's attention and focus would be the business of the Washington Post. And Ms. Swisher is the right leader to own and lead the Washington Post. If there one thing to know about Ms. Swisher, she is committed to journalism through and through.

Bezos should sell the Post to Swisher. He should continue to follow his passion, Blue Origin and Amazon. He cares for the Post, but not nearly enough to be committed to the level that is needed. Just looking at his recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of DealBook, he clearly is excited about space exploration, and not so much news and media. Shedding the Post would free him up and discharge him of any criticism around conflicts of interest.

A malicious storm is coming very soon. I know the Post will be ready for it. I don't think Bezos has the stomach for the stormy seas. But Ms. Swisher certainly does.

Return to the office (RTO) will backfire

2024-12-18T00:00:00Z

When companies decide to follow through with RTO, hiring and retaining talent becomes much harder to do. The companies reduce headcount (backdoor layoff to be clear), losing some of their best workers while also smelling like dead skunk when trying to hire new people (come work for us -- five days a week in the office!). Taylor Telford for the Washington Post reports:

Research from the University of Pittsburgh published last month highlights the challenges companies face in hiring and retention following RTO mandates. Such firms experienced “abnormally high turnover,” which was “more pronounced for female employees, more senior employees, and more skilled employees.” Furthermore, they took “significantly longer” to fill vacancies and saw their hire rates “significantly decrease,” researchers noted.

In other words, RTO backfires. Many offices are not even ready to handle the increased demand for office space. When pressed as to why pursue a boneheaded decision, knowing some top performers will leave, leaders such as AWS CEO, Matt Garman, throws jazz hands and industry jargon such as "synergy" or "to facilitate innovation and collaboration" is said with a straight face. Don't take my word, 500 AWS workers signed a letter to their CEO asking to reconsider:

"In the letter, which was first reported by Reuters, workers argued the policy is “not data-driven” and that it’s “breaking the trust” of hardworking employees who have benefited from flexible arrangements."

Notably, unions are pushing back.

Union employees of the video game publisher [Activision] held rallies in late October, alleging that Activision and its parent company Microsoft have denied remote work accommodations to workers who are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Once again, I'd like to remind people, corporations and billionaires are so poor, all they have is money.

Young Men and the Need for Mentorships

2024-12-17T00:00:00Z

Loneliness of men is a very serious thing. Scott Galloway and Sean Illing talked about what's going on with young men. I have a son too, and I can see myself in these men: falling into usual traps, feeling like a loser, and not knowing what to do. What saved me was a single male role model, my history teacher. I wanted to be just as smart, handsome, and ambitious as him. Made two of the three of them. I'll let you decide which ones.

They're just making it up as they go

2024-12-16T22:27:00Z

Amazon didn't plan for more office space when workers retun back to the office (RTO) five days of the week.

The company had originally planned to bring all employees back to the office five days a week starting Jan. 2, 2025, but certain locations are not yet prepared to accommodate the full workforce, according to Business Insider, which cites internal notifications.

Other workplaces that recently announced RTO have described similar situations: leadership did not think through that they could succeed in making workers come back to the office and what that would mean in terms of limited office space. It's as if they're making it up as they go along.

When nothing is true and everything is possible

2024-12-16T00:00:00Z

@jamellebouie
life does seem more exciting if you think the iranians are specifically interested in the everyday activities of new jerseyans.
♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse

Bored people find conspiracies very exciting, such that they'll believe just about anything if they entertained.

News companies gave up on distribution and ceded to giant platforms, Google and Facebook

2024-12-16T00:00:00Z

Nilay Patel interviews with Matt Pearce, formerly of the LA Times, for Decoder. Patel writes:

Without question, our medium — and our messages — are dominated by big platforms, which distribute the vast majority of information to the public. Over the past decade, publishers of journalism have mostly ceded all of their distribution to Facebook, Google Search, and now, short-form video platforms like TikTok.

Kara Swisher has been known to refer to platforms such as Facebook and Google as "ravenous information thieves". I think thats being too generous to them.

The IndieWeb is for everyone

2024-05-14T00:00:00Z

For them, owning their own website has regained its importance, together with building unique experiences that help differentiate them, and allow them to publish stories on their own terms. These are truly indieweb principles, and serve as validation (if validation were needed) of the indieweb movement’s foundational assumptions.

Ben Werdmuller

Facebook news referrals: no sign of the slow-down stopping

2024-05-13T15:45:01Z

As a share of total page views coming from external, search and social, Facebook referrals are now less than a quarter of their 2018 level, down from 30% in March 2018 to 7% in March 2024. ... Smaller sites have particularly hard hit by Facebook changes

Aisha Majid writes for the Press Gazette.

NASA Visualization of Flying into a Supermassive Black Hole

2024-05-01T00:00:00Z

Remarkable visualization.