The key takeaways in no particular order.

• Use <noscript>. If you are using it, use it a lot more.
• There is no guarantee that chunks will load after the main one does; the user’s location and/or network access might have changed! Think CalTrain.
• ISPs, Corporate VPNs, and Browser Plugins¹ can mess with the downloading and execution of JS.

I’m omitting CDN uptime (can’t do anything about this) and Browser compatibility (supporting 5+ year-old browsers is not something I care about doing given the work I do.)

Finally, not every fucking thing needs to be an App. For instance, your Terms of Service page can actually be a document on the Internet 😱

by Ned Gulley at Star Chamber from a long, long while ago.

I’d really hoped that this embarrassment would’ve been forgotten a few weeks after January 6th. But here we are.

“Should an attorney be sanctioned for his or her failure to withdraw allegations the attorney came to know were untrue?,” [U.S. Judge Linda Parker] said during a court hearing held by video conference. “Is that sanctionable behavior?”

She said she thought affidavits in the case had been submitted in “bad faith.”

[…] Parker dismissed the Michigan lawsuit last December, saying in a written decision that Powell’s voter fraud claims were “nothing but speculation and conjecture” and that, in any event, Powell waited too long to file her lawsuit.

[…] “What they filed was an embarrassment to the legal profession,” David Fink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit said during Monday’s hearing. “This was a sloppy and careless effort.”

During the hearing, Parker asked Powell and her co-counsel why they did not voluntarily dismiss their Michigan case on Dec. 14 when the Electoral College formally confirmed Biden’s election victory.

“Why did the plaintiffs not recognize this lawsuit as moot and dismiss it on that date?,” Parker asked.

Donald Campbell, the attorney representing Sidney Powell and the other lawyers, replied that the election was “fluid” and unpredictable and that the pro-Trump legal team believed its lawsuit was still viable after Dec. 14.

The Best People 👌

A simple-enough argument about a dangerous, toxic worldview.

[…] To highlight that contradiction let’s try to explain these facts with individualist logic. Women and non-white people, by sheer coincidence, all individually chose to be paid less for more demanding jobs. Also by coincidence, they chose to work those jobs and be paid less than women and non-white people in other similarly developed countries. Simultaneously, people born in the same zip codes all just happened to make choices that led them to similar incomes, similar lifespans, and similar rates of disease. Those born to poor families chose, with little or no outside influence, to work lower paying jobs. The rich also chose, of their own accord and without significant systemic advantages, to work higher paying jobs. The huge differences in the inequalities between America and other wealthy nations is also a coincidence caused by Americans choosing to be lazier.

Rather than consider that centuries of enslavement and systemic racism has sabotaged the quality of life for black americans, individualists insist that black individuals choose to live in poverty more frequently than non-black people. Rather than consider that society exists, individualists have created a web of absurdities and chosen to live there. They also insist that none of these absurdities are racist, sexist, or classist. We shouldn’t temper our language here: anyone who claims that individual choices rather than systems entirely determine how most people live should be dismissed outright. It’s an embarrassing and absurd worldview and even the tiniest bit of research should make that clear.

[…] Individualism is a worldview created not to explain the world but to control it. It’s designed to fragment strong communities, turn workers against each other, and diminish the power of solidarity among the people. When you see yourself as the morally upright hero and everyone else has competition, you’re turning your back on what it means to be human. There’s plenty to go around, or at least there would be if it weren’t all funneled straight to the top, to the people who manufactured the idea of individualism.

See also: “We Ought to Live in a Society, not an Economy”

By Michael Dearing. Couldn’t find any video and not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek (like the “48 Laws of Power”.) The distortions are:

1. Personal Exceptionalism
   “I am special.”
2. Dichotomous Thinking
   “X is sh*t. Y is genius.”
3. Correct Overgeneralization
   “I see two dots and draw the right line.”
4. Blank-Canvas Thinking
   “Painting by numbers isn’t art. And I want to make art.”
5. Schumpeterianism
   “I am a creative destruction machine.”

TL;DR be a ruthless, inflexible, self-absorbed dick so you can identify, refine, and deliver Value™.

Lovely stuff. Cached here.

Being a long and informative post that leads to “Use /dev/urandom” and features a quote by DJB and a list of computationally secure PRNGs. Cached here.

LaTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and ConTeXt. That’s a lot of TeX! This was most helpful, even though MacTeX solves all my problems.

Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to:

• Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet.
• Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it.
• Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.
• Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
• Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit.

Further,

We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

I don’t think there’s more critical a juncture than now for courses like these. Just wish more people took them.

A still-very-relevant 9-year old article. Pandas has gone from strength to strength since he wrote that.

In terms of expressing your computations, Hadoop is strictly inferior to SQL. There is no computation you can write in Hadoop which you cannot write more easily in either SQL, or with a simple Python script that scans your files.

SQL is a straightforward query language with minimal leakage of abstractions, commonly used by business analysts as well as programmers. Queries in SQL are generally pretty simple. They are also usually very fast - if your database is properly indexed, multi-second queries will be uncommon.

Hadoop does not have any conception of indexing. Hadoop has only full table scans. Hadoop is full of leaky abstractions - at my last job I spent more time fighting with java memory errors, file fragmentation and cluster contention than I spent actually worrying about the mostly straightforward analysis I wanted to perform.

If your data is not structured like a SQL table (e.g., plain text, json blobs, binary blobs), it’s generally speaking straightforward to write a small python or ruby script to process each row of your data. Store it in files, process each file, and move on. Under circumstances where SQL is a poor fit, Hadoop will be less annoying from a programming perspective. But it still provides no advantage over simply writing a Python script to read your data, process it, and dump it to disk.

In addition to being more difficult to code for, Hadoop will also nearly always be slower than the simpler alternatives. SQL queries can be made very fast by the judicious use of indexes - to compute a join, PostgreSQL will simply look at an index (if present) and look up the exact key that is needed. Hadoop requires a full table scan, followed by re-sorting the entire table. The sorting can be made faster by sharding across multiple machines, but on the other hand you are still required to stream data across multiple machines. In the case of processing binary blobs, Hadoop will require repeated trips to the namenode in order to find and process data. A simple python script will require repeated trips to the filesystem.

From over 10 years ago (I’m sorting through my old bookmarks). A single object looks like this:

{
    "ACCTOUNT_NUMBER":"1234567890",
    "CUSTOMER_NAME":"ACME Products and Services, Inc.",
    "ADDRESS":"123 Main Street",
    "CITY":"Albuquerque",
    "STATE":"NM",
    "ZIP":"87101-1234"
}

He tested the usability of a given browser while it loaded between 1 and 1,000,000 such records.

From this test, I am considering the sweet spot to be around 10,000 records at (1.55MB). The maximum number of usable records I would push to a browser would be around 25,000 records (3.87MB). Keep in mind there are numerous factors to keep in mind when determining how many records you should return to your JavaScript application. The purpose of this test was to help identify a general maximum number for conversations around large record sets with JSON.

Would love to see an updated version of the tests.

I loved how the author imagined persistence 💗

This led him to miss a court hearing where his own lawyer sought to dismiss a billion-dollar defamation case against him. This is because the Strike-Force Honcho made “false and misleading” claims about the equipment used in the 2020 election on behalf of his Stable Genius client.

I wonder how much alcoholism this saga of shit has induced in folks who write political satire for a living. It just never ends.

No. It’s just a fucking operating system¹. A giant program on a computer. What weird, disconnected, embarrassing bullshit ‘spiritual’ techbro nonsense.

“We made a website full of memes you can search through, powered by Bitcoin and Machine-Learning (of course), and are changing the world.” No. Stop it.

I think I’m cranky because I’m hungry 🍕

I wonder if our hero has any vacation plans he’d care to share with a judge who might acquit him and his lol-dad. (Cached)

I still remember Giuliani’s stature and gravitas 20 years ago, when I arrived in this country. How the mighty have fallen. It’s almost as if The Orange Sphere of Shit corrupts all those who enter it. And comically so in the case of America’s Mayor.

Value™ must be delivered to stakeholders at any and all cost 🏏

This is for children under 13. Because children over 13 engage with Social Media in very healthy and fruitful ways.

“They are also simply too young to navigate the complexities of what they encounter online, including inappropriate content and online relationships where other users, including predators, can cloak their identities using the anonymity of the internet,” the letter reads.

[…] “Without a doubt, this is a dangerous idea that risks the safety of our children and puts them directly in harm’s way,” New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, said in a statement Monday. “There are too many concerns to let Facebook move forward with this ill-conceived idea, which is why we are calling on the company to abandon its launch of Instagram Kids. We must continue to ensure the health and wellness of our next generation and beyond.”

What AG James fails to understand is that cradle-to-grave engagement greatly enhances Shareholder Value. This is the only thing in the world that matters. Here’s the Plastic Shithead Overlord who runs the sordid business:

“I think helping people stay connected with friends and learn about different content online is broadly positive,” Zuckerberg said. “There are clearly issues that need to be thought through and worked out, including how parents can control the experience of kids, especially of kids under the age of 13 but I think that something like this could be quite helpful for a lot of people.”

And why should Value be affected by the few tens of thousands of children who may not enjoy the the “broadly positive” effects of our product which has issues to be worked out?

You see, Value cannot (and should not) be shackled by the kind of careful research and measured approach that considers a target audience’s well-being. If such research by the so-called-experts establishes that our venture is, indeed, harmful to children, it will (and ought to be) brushed aside against their remonstrations. All Facebook does is “hold a mirror up to society”¹ and extract Value from whatever it finds ♥️

A shithouse company run by terrible human beings. But I hear the compensation is… *chef’s kiss*.

I have accepted that Shitkraken won’t end for a while.

Giuliani’s attorney, son, and allies like convicted former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik have urged Trump aides to dip into his massive war chest to help cover the former New York City mayor’s mounting lawyer bills after Giuliani’s home was raided by the FBI last week […]

The pleas from Giuliani’s supporters come after Trump refused to pay his former lawyer for his work on his election legal challenges. Trump “balked” at paying Giuliani after his associate sent a bill for $20,000 for a day of his work and told aides he did not want Giuliani to receive “any payment,” according to the report. Trump ultimately agreed to reimburse Giuliani $200,000 for expenses but has “stridently refused to pay” Giuliani’s fees.

The notoriously stingy former president bombarded supporters with fundraising appeals after his election loss, raising some $250 million to ostensibly fund his legal battle. But Trump spent a tiny fraction on actual legal costs as his many court challenges were quickly rejected by dozens of federal judges, including ones he appointed. Now, Giuliani’s allies are asking Trump to use the quarter-billion he raised with the Republican National Committee to help pay Giuliani’s costs in the federal probe and defamation lawsuits.

In the Yam’s defense, I wouldn’t want to pay for a 1.5% success rate either. In the Strike-Force Leader’s defense, I don’t think he could’ve seen this coming.

Because the only thing that matters is delivering Value to shareholders. (cached)

Incidentally, and to the “huh” of many Value-illiterate people, defending totalitarian governments is exactly how one gives “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

And as a staunch Free Market Conservative, I don’t really worry about sales (cached). May the market do its thing (cached), just like St. Reagan said it would.

by Josh Comeau. Saving here to refer to later. Here’s another by Manuel Matuzovic. It features a lot more OG tags and a most clever way to cut the mustard apropos modern browsers. Saved here.

A most dangerous Easter Egg by Microsoft, known only to the most elite of hackers.

The Supreme Court disposed of the last of former President Donald Trump’s challenges to state election procedures Monday, rejecting his appeal of lower court rulings that upheld Wisconsin’s handling of mail-in ballots.

The court announced the rejection without comment in a one-line order, which is its normal practice.

Trump and his allies had a uniformly unsuccessful record before the Supreme Court in their effort to overturn the presidential election results in states won by Joe Biden.

This was a wild ride. I really hope the “Elite Strike Force” team got paid to be the winners they are 🥇 You know, from $8 million of the $250 million that was raised for the purpose.

Standing on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, Richard Michetti allegedly took a break from the rioting to argue with his ex-girlfriend over text message. After sending photos and videos of the mob and boasting how he had avoided tear gas, Michetti parroted Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

“If you can’t see the election was stolen you’re a moron,” Michetti wrote in a text to the woman, according to court documents.

The next day, the woman he had insulted promptly told the FBI that her ex was at the Capitol, handing over to law enforcement the string of texts, photos and videos he had sent to her.

[…] The Trump supporter told his former partner that while his eyes were burning, he and the thousands there were doing the right thing to “stop the vote it’s fraud this is our country.”

[…] “This is tyranny,” he texted her later that evening. “They … told us ‘we rigged the election and there’s nuthin you can do about it’ what do you think should be done?”

And who bears any responsibility for this man’s delusion? It certainly isn’t the person who incited the riots. Or any of the Media czars who made gobs of money fomenting discord for those almighty engagement metrics.

Letters won’t do anything. Regulation is necessary (thanks again, St. Reagan.)

It’s very simple and clever. This is an example of what’s rendered from this giant Markdown file 💙

I love this more than I can describe.

The argument here being that, since the ‘general form’ of the conjecture is undecidable, TypeScript’s type system is undecidable. How does one even think of doing these things?

I love Typescript, but it isn’t nearly ambitious enough. It would be vastly improved with an --extremelyStrict flag enforcing that your Typescript code is free of side-effects; that is – no Javascript code is generated at all. Real programmers do all of their computation within the type system. Otherwise, they can’t be sure their program will work in production and should be duly fired.

Mad Lad. Via HN. (Cached)

A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen.

The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day of the week, until any time that works for you. I’m rich. Buy this watch.”

I’m mostly mad at myself for finishing it.

About as ‘essential’ as it gets if you want to appreciate a tool you work with every day. (Cached)

No macOS love though 😔

See also. He was 73 years old, she was 17, and this was in 2019, when nobody had given a shit about Time’s Person of the Year for a while.