nikhil.io

Staying Out of It

And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

– Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1986

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

– Desmond Tutu (quoted in Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes, 1984)

I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal1.

– Martin Luther King, Jr., Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, April 30, 1967

  1. Found out this doesn’t really appear in Inferno.↩︎

What Did Jack Do?

What Did Jack Do? (2017)

IMDb

Rating: B

Stars David Lynch, his spouse Emily Stofle, a monkey, and a chicken. The oddest and most hypnotic thing I’ve seen this year (and twice.) A mere 17 minutes in length and like if film-school students used GPT-3 to generate a script an hour before the assignment was due.

Toototabon 🐓

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

IMDb

Rating: C

Saw with CK. Excited because Charlie Kaufman. Mostly self-indulgent tripe. The conversations in the car were interminably tedious1 and missing PBR hats and gauloises. The weirdness in the first third-to-a-half of the movie was excellent. Top-notch performances and camerawork.

  1. No, this is neither clever nor the point.↩︎

“The Fountain” by Darren Aronofsky and Kent Williams

I love the movie and was surprised to find out that there was a graphic novel that preceded it. A work of original and breathtaking beauty like the movie and its soundtrack. Kent Williams’ style and vision took a bit to get used to. Wonderful stuff.

Aronofsky notes in the book that the movie almost didn’t happen due to budgetary concerns, and that he reworked it to make it a “lean, mean indie film.” I wonder if that explains the beautiful macrophotography they used for SFX.

Here it is on ThriftBooks.

Cover of "The Fountain" by Aronofsky and Kent Williams

Should I Be Worried

is a simple and aptly-named COVID tracker that uses data from Johns Hopkins. As of September 1st 2020, my state of Iowa is #1 (woohoo!) with a 7-day infection rate of 261/100,000 people (“there might be 2 to 6 times as many recent infections”) and an R0 rate of 1.7. “Over the past 30 days, 246 people in Iowa have died of Covid-19. If Iowa remains on its current trajectory, expect to see more than three times as many deaths from Covid-19 over the next 30 days.” That’ll show 'em.

Every “safety plan” I’ve seen that would allow public schools to reopen requires that kids behave in ways that no child has ever behaved in the history of children.

Yep. And the tweet was in the context of school openings, but college towns like Ames and Iowa City, are no exceptions (like she continues.) I say we continue to doubt the science, exercise absolutely no discipline in the interest of the economy (because the Communist Kiwis maintain zero interest in restoring theirs as quickly as possible), yell at people who wear masks, fight Big Government telling us what to do, expect maturity and restraint from children and teenagers, have no bloody plan, defend our effete leaders who institute weak policies that are too little and too late, control the numbers and the narrative, and just continue to be awesome ♥️ That’ll show 'em. We’re only beginning to get tired of winning folks.

Ottoman Food

I found out I am to thank the Ottomans for a lot of my favorite things to eat and drink:

  • Baklava (which dates back two thousand years, to the Assyrian Empire)
  • Coffee made the Right Way™
  • The modern kebab
  • Shawarma
  • Sherbet
  • Dolma (stuffed food) and Sarma (wrapped food)
  • An ancestor of the hummus: a chickpea spread flavored with cinnamon, pine nuts, and currants. Consumed with bread and popular in the 15th century
  • Ayran: My absolute favorite thing to drink on a hot day. Couldn’t find many differences between ayran and the laban I grew up drinking.

Generative Pre-trained Deepak

Headed over to “Wisdom of Chopra” to get myself a slice of Deepak’s #cosmiconscious insight.

Deepak Chopra Generator

Took that and had GPT-2 use it as a seed for more wisdom. Behold:

The invisible is the foundation of total belongingness: When we feel like we belong and are at home, we are happy, healthy and in good spirits. Without our sense of belonging, we feel anxious, sad, depressed, disengaged, and negative.

In the struggle to locate our identity, we can limit our awareness of who we are. We become prisoners of our own identities, which is usually the result of trying to fulfill our parents’ or society’s expectations of us.

It takes wisdom and intelligence to become an invisible expert, and this is not only to create a safe space for self-knowledge, but also to create safe spaces for others to be able to be themselves.

Imagine all the different spiritual and emotional benefits when we do not see or know about another’s stories, feelings, anxieties or challenges.

Imagine how freeing it would be for a Buddhist monk or a leader to have all their body, thoughts and speech remain invisible to everyone, including themselves.

How liberating would it be to know your gifts and be free from the burden of being in constant search of knowledge or validation, simply knowing that you are a gift to yourself and the world, and you matter to you.

As the Torah tells us: “You have been born for such a time as this” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We have been given the gift of life to explore our true identities, free of expectations and limitations, to finally reach out into the unknown to create the power and joy of the divine within.

In a world that seems to be in constant change and evolution, it is easy to feel alone and afraid. Yet we are never alone, and it is always safe to be true to ourselves.

There is power in transforming into the master of our own universe. In the words of the Buddha: “The job of a bodhisattva is not to be a creator, but to create a creator.”

In the depths of our souls, the divine resonates with us, nudging us to release our inner monologue of fear and the unconscious power it holds over us. Each and every one of us has within us the potential to embody divine love and compassion for ourselves and all of creation, and in the embodiment of this divine potential, we ignite our own personal power.

Gather the courage to become the master of our own universe and to discover the true magic that dwells within.

Aum Shanti 🙏

The Blue Ringed Octopus

Some absolutely marvelous photos of a Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus by @SammyGlennDives

Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus 1

Like she’s dancing!

Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus 2
Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus 3

Would love to find out what kind of protective gear the photographer had on. But it seems like the octopuses are very shy and will attack only when provoked, which is when their rings become more intense 🐙 The salivary venom1, synthesized by bacteria and not the octopus itself, doesn’t have an antidote and is only used to hunt and defend. It’s either injected via the beak, or is sprayed as a mist, paralysing the prey in either case for the final kill (presumably involving more beak.)

Here’s a little more. Love the intro. They truly are so alien and so, so beautiful 😍

  1. Always have to look it up: Poison is passive, venom is active.↩︎

Disposable Software

The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 years ago? Black hole of fad frameworks and brittle dependencies. Computer Archaeology is going to become a full-time job.

– Source

On ‘Finding Someone’

There’s so much more to life than finding someone who will want you, or being sad over someone who doesn’t. There’s a lot of wonderful time to be spent discovering yourself without hoping someone will fall in love with you along the way, and it doesn’t need to be painful or empty. You need to fill yourself up with love. Not anyone else. Become a whole being on your own. Go on adventures, fall asleep in the woods with friends, wander around the city at night, sit in a coffee shop on your own, write on bathroom stalls, leave notes in library books, dress up for yourself, give to others, smile a lot. Do all things with love, but don’t romanticize life like you can’t survive without it. Live for yourself and be happy on your own. It isn’t any less beautiful, I promise.

Emery Allen

On Good Commit Messages

On the developer side, what I hope people are doing is trying to make, not just good code, but these days we’ve been very good about having explanations for the code. So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Sometimes the code change is so obvious that no message is really required, but that is very very rare. And so one of the things I hope developers are thinking about, the people who are actually writing code, is not just the code itself, but explaining why the code does something, and why some change was needed. Because that then in turn helps the managerial side of the equation, where if you can explain your code to me, I will trust the code.

A lot of open source in general is about communication. And part of it is the commit messages, part of it is just the email going back and forth. Communicating what you’re trying to do or communicating why something doesn’t work for you is really important.

– Linus Torvalds, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel (emphasis mine)

This is pretty much what mine look like. For my personal stuff, I get so lazy, I use a list of developer excuses to generate a commit log that looks like this 🤦‍♀️

My shitty, lazy commit log

I hereby swear to read this document and make writing good commit messages a habit ✋🚀

On Masks

Bill Burr on The Joe Rogan Experience:

BURR: I don’t want to start this bullshit. I’m not gonna sit here with no medical degree, listening to you with no medical degree, with an American flag behind you smoking a cigar, acting like we know what’s up, better than the CDC. All I do, is I watch the news once every two weeks - I’m like, “Mask or no mask? Still mask? Alright, mask!” That’s all I give a fuck about. I don’t care. I just love how wearing a mask became like this fucking like soft thing that you were doing… like being courteous…”

ROGAN: It’s for bitches1.

BURR: Why is it for bitches? That’s just so stupid.

ROGAN: (Fakes weak cough)

BURR: Oh God you’re so tough with your fucking open nose and throat and your five o’clock shadow. This is a man right here! A man doesn’t wear a mask.

Rogan’s immediate response somehow reminded me of the “infantile phallocentric Nietzscheanism that is destroying modern human culture” from one of my favorite articles.

  1. Here’s something of a guide to his podcasts.↩︎