What does a herpetologist do with a lizard once she's caught it? | The Kid Should See This
Herpetologist Earyn McGee is a graduate student studying natural resources with an emphasis on wildlife conservation and management. She also leads a popular #FindThatLizard photo activity on Twitter and Instagram. In the video above, she answers the question, “What does a herpetologist do with a lizard once she’s caught it?”
What's the Loudest Possible Sound? | The Kid Should See This
“What is the loudest possible sound? What about the quietest thing we can hear? And what do decibels measure, anyway?” This video from Joe Hanson and It’s Okay to Be Smart dives into the wide ranging and incredibly sensitive world of sound waves.
Lin-Manuel Miranda gives Kingkiller Chronicle update: His Dark Materials gave new perspective | EW.com
If Miranda is learning how to make a series out of a trilogy from His Dark Materials then color me excited for whatever he ends up doing with Kingkiller.
"I've gained new perspective on it, having been able to be a part of this other fantasy franchise and seeing how, 'Oh man, we did eight hours of story and we still didn't get all of the first book in there. What hope does a movie have?!' The answer is none," Miranda explains in an interview ahead of the U.S. premiere of His Dark Materials season 2 on HBO and HBO Max. "The real answer is a director and a script with a vision, that is a different thing [than the book] because you can't get all of Pat's incredible book into one movie, and I don't know if you can get it into one series. But it is an incredible world worth exploring, but it hasn't been cracked yet."
Was Trump ever as unpopular as we thought?
Chief among them is this: Was Trump more popular than public opinion polling suggested throughout his presidency? Is there in fact a reservoir of Americans that pollsters just can't reach who supported Trump the whole time, mostly sat out the 2018 midterm elections (when polls were more accurate than in 2016 or 2020), and then turned out in droves for him in 2020? And if so, what does it mean?
This isn't random chance. The voters who unexpectedly turned out for President Trump on election day existed for the entirety of his term, even if survey researchers never got ahold of them. One explanation that analysts are converging on is the idea that, as Sean Trende argues, what links these voters together is “low social trust” and that this variable can divide otherwise demographically similar groups like non-college educated whites. This kind of voter isn't lying to pollsters as much as they are hanging up on them. And because those voters are already extremely difficult to find and talk to, when pollsters weight their samples based on the ones they do reach, they will still be wrong.
There is almost no other credible explanation for what happened here, because it seems extraordinarily unlikely that these voters disapproved of the president all along, told pollsters as much, but then at the very last moment changed their minds in a way that no reputable organization could pick up. They were there all along, and their absence from public opinion research – not just Trump's approval but every issue survey researchers have been asking about over the past four years (or possibly longer!) – probably skewed our overall understanding of the politics of this era.
To be clear: less unpopular than we thought does not mean ‘popular.' A president overseeing a booming peacetime economy should not have struggled to break the surface of 50 percent approval throughout his presidency. And President Trump did, after all, lose the election about as decisively as anyone has in the post-Reagan era of partisan polarization. The fact that more people might have lapped up his divisive rhetoric than we thought does not excuse it, nor should it invite Democratic leaders to behave similarly. It doesn't mean the progressive agenda — many parts of which have high levels of public support even if you shave off a few points here and there — should be treated like a syringe full of coronavirus by national Democrats.
The results do, however, call for reassessment. Democrats have a real advantage here because of what the GOP is doing. Rather than processing their loss and trying to figure out how they can better appeal to Americans who just rejected them for the 7th time in the last 8 presidential elections, Republicans are disappearing down a dark rabbit hole of conspiracies and denial. If Democrats can figure out how to reverse their losses with the voters who evaded pollsters without abandoning their core principles, they might be able to finally overcome the systematic obstacles our antiquated electoral system puts in their way and score decisive congressional majorities for the first time in a decade.
Google Photos is ending free unlimited storage in 2021 — so what are your options?
Google did it again. It is shutting down one of the most popular features across its product universe: Google Photo’s free unlimited storage. The company said that it’s ending this service from June 1, 2021.
After that date, all photos uploaded will count against your free data limit of 15GB. However, all photos uploaded before June 1 next year will still be available under the free unlimited storage option.
Why I Still Use Vim • Buttondown
There's no place for holy wars betwen Vim/Emacs/IDEs. There's really good reasons for using all 3. But the quintisential reason for Emacs and Vim are their maleability. If you want to truly understand why they've hung on for so long that's you don't have to go much further than that.
Posts about Vim vs Emacs vs IDEs are always awkward, usually condescending, more interested in picking a side than understanding being unbiased. Comparing communities is always a tricky thing. You have to be careful to represent their ideas in a deep and respectful way and not let your biases shine through.
I could tell you all of the reasons I prefer Vim, and such observations are eye-rollingly trite. Modal editing! Composibility! Keyboard macros! But you can emulate those in other environments. That’s why Vim extensions are so popular!
What you can’t emulate is the flexibility. The power to choose where you are in the design space, not through settings or extensions, but through direct end-user scripting.
Next up: Emacs Rocks! Live at WebRebels - YouTube
Opinion | The Dying Art of Disagreement - The New York Times
This article hits so many high points for me, not least of which citing my hero Mortimer J. Adler. :)
I still maintain that the best hope for a positive future lies in a robust public square built on the foundation of a shared reality. Boy does that seem a long shot at this point.
So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.
Julia Even's has a new CSS zine coming and it sounds awesome
so that's what this zine is about – it's some basic CSS facts for people who already thought that they "knew" basic CSS (like me) but still find themselves perplexed a lot of the time. Actually learning these basics for the first time REALLY helped me.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."
The Recount on Twitter: "@Yamiche Yep, he said that. https://t.co/rw4rDmXO98" / Twitter
The next few months will literally decide whether the United States is a democracy. I've expected this was going to be the case all along—but damn—they really are going to try to steal America.
"Make boring plans" sounds awesome
Screw "choose boring technology," today's mantra is "make boring plans." AKA, if you can break a problem down well enough that the plans look to an outsider like they are mostly boring and rote, you are probably a damn fine platform engineer.
FROM ONE SINGLE SHEET OF PAPER - YouTube
Masayo Fukuda, contemporary master of kirie, or Japanese paper-cutting, crafting hyper detailed creatures from single sheets of paper, an art that has been around since 700 AD
via #WOMENSART on Twitter: "Masayo Fukuda, contemporary master of kirie, or Japanese paper-cutting, crafting hyper detailed creatures from single sheets of paper, an art that has been around since 700 AD #womensart https://t.co/g8z1rXnLe5" / Twitter
Called to mind Gravity Glue | Stone Balance by Michael Grab
(Remote) Pairing 101 | ThoughtWorks
Even to those who are used to pairing in physical proximity, doing it remotely can sound counterintuitive and unnatural, but it doesn’t have to be. This article will go over three main effective remote pairing techniques. While it will not explain in detail what each technique entails, it will provide some scenarios for when best to practice it and what tools are best suited for it in the context of remote working.
The acceptance and transmission of Conspiracy Theories is Slander
The fact that few in our churches are being confronted—much less receiving church discipline—for engaging in slander is scandalous.
Christians Are Not Immune to Conspiracy Theories
Remember Poe's law - Wikipedia
We need more wisdom to counterbalance the staggering information overload we live in
Should we still value science, data, and information? Of course. But 2020 has made clear that the solution to complex problems is not simply more science, data, and information. What we need is more wisdom to know how to sift through and synthesize it, understand complexity, and make better decisions.
I’m increasingly convinced that media habits are a discipleship matter that must be foregrounded in church ministry.
2020 Proves We Don’t Need More Information. (We Need Something Else.)
The 17th-century Canons of Dort describe the price we pay for especially serious sins. By our sin we “greatly offend God, deserve the sentence of death, grieve the Holy Spirit, suspend the exercise of faith, severely wound the conscience, and sometimes lose the awareness of grace for a time” (5.5).
Sin Is Expensive. Here Are 6 Costs.
The Remarkable Way We Eat Pizza - Numberphile | The Kid Should See This
Cut an orange in half, eat the insides (yum), then place the dome-shaped peel on the ground and stomp on it. The peel will never flatten out into a circle. Instead, it’ll tear itself apart. That’s because a sphere and a flat surface have different Gaussian curvatures, so there’s no way to flatten a sphere without distorting or tearing it. Ever tried gift wrapping a basketball? Same problem. No matter how you bend a sheet of paper, it’ll always retain a trace of its original flatness, so you end up with a crinkled mess.
Watching Stoll hop in excitement talking about a theorem is the essence of Geek/Nerd culture and why I still firmly consider myself a Nerd. :)
Also, Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg is one of my all time favorite non-fiction narratives.
Emmanuelle Moureaux's gridded rainbow installations | The Kid Should See This
More than 60,000 pieces of suspended numeral figures from 0 to 9 were regularly aligned in three dimensional grids. A section was removed, created a path that cut through the installation, invited visitors to wonder inside the colorful forest filled with numbers. The installation was composed of 10 layers which is the representation of 10 years time. Each layer employed 4 digits to express the relevant year such as 2, 0, 1, and 7 for 2017, which were randomly positioned on the grids. As part of Emmanuelle’s “100 colors” installation series, the layers of time were colored in 100 shades of colors, created a colorful time travel through the forest.
Beautiful. One day when I'm older and have free time again I will make a point to visit these sorts of things.
Dropping ice chunks down a borehole in Antarctica: What does it sound like? | The Kid Should See This
This is what 'basic research' is all about. Pew Pew!
Japan's 72 Micro-Seasons of Impermanence | The Kid Should See This
I'm persistently trying to connect my experience of time with my local world rather than with calendars. This is amazing.
The 72 milestones are smaller steps of change that reflect the rhythms of Japan’s ecosystems, but they also embrace the impermanence and constant change that can be applied to any ecosystem.
Trump is a demonic force in American politics
What makes Trump demonic? One thing above all: His willingness, even eagerness, to do serious, potentially fatal, damage to something beautiful, noble, fragile, and rare, purely to satisfy his own emotional needs. That something is American self-government. Trump can't accept losing, can't accept rejection, and savors provoking division. He wants to be a maestro conducting a cacophony of animosities at the center of our national stage because it feeds his insatiable craving for attention and power — and because, I suspect, he delights in pulling everybody else down to his own level.
That is a satanic impulse.
I still believe that the most likely outcome of this mess is that Trump eventually relents, allowing the process of presidential transition to move forward. But that doesn't mean it's anything close to guaranteed. And even if he does back down, it seems certain to be combined with the deliberate nurturing of a stabbed-in-the-back narrative that keeps alive the pernicious fiction that Trump didn't really lose, that the Democrats' win in 2020 is tainted, and that the Biden administration has been illegitimate from the start, founded in an act of treachery for which no one has yet paid a price.
That it is all a lie won't matter one bit. The demon infecting our democracy doesn't care, and neither will those whose enmity he has worked so tirelessly to inflame over the past four years.
President Trump and his administration are doing everything in their power to undermine our Republic
Barr endorses federal fraud investigations, lead Republicans fall in line
Well I guess the Republicans are beginning to fall in line. 😭
Senior members of the president's party have largely refused to pressure Mr Trump to concede.
On Monday Senate leader Mitch McConnell criticised Democrats over the matter.
"Let's not have any lectures, no lectures," the Kentucky senator said on the floor of the upper chamber, "about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election and who insinuated that this one would be illegitimate too if they lost again - only if they lost."
He added: "The president has every right to look into allegations and to request recounts under the law and notably the constitution gives no role in this process to wealthy media corporations."
Trump Administration's potential legal playbook
Is this good for our country?
What the corpos of historical self-governing societies has to say about the 2020 elections
It's good and bad. Self-governments are fraigel, but we're not the crisis point yet, we can see it coming, and we may have just elected a man who's agenda is perfectly aligned with a preservation of self-government in our society.
One thing that emerges quite clearly from a study of Greek and Roman antiquity is the intense fragility of self-government. That fragility is easy to miss in a modern context
And it is in observing that sample that it becomes clear that these systems of government can be very fragile internally. Patterns also emerge as to how such systems break down. The cycle of breakdown was sufficiently common that the Greeks had a nice, compact word for it: stasis (στάσις, pronounced STAH-sis, not STAY-sis. The nearest Latin equivalent is factio, but Roman authors – especially Cicero – also translate stasis as seditio). At its root, a stasis was ‘a standing’ (the ‘sto-‘ root to mean ‘stand’ is common in many Indo-European languages), but rather than our word stasis (from the same root) which meant a standing still, stasis came to mean a ‘standing together’ and from there a ‘faction’ or political party, and then ‘factionalism’ and finally from that meaning, ‘civil strife’ and even ‘revolution.’
In an effort to compromise on nothing, the Roman elite lost everything.
Elections don’t merely change politics; they can change the culture.
In short, Joe Biden is running on a platform of compromise and a constructive, inclusive redefinition of the polity which explicitly welcomes past opponents to join him at the table. To me, reasoning from historical example, that seems like the correct answer to the current moment.
On the other hand, we have a different candidate (and current President) who is running on a promise to ‘win’ the stasis by main force, to dominate and to win, indeed, until he (or we) get tired of winning, to escalate the tensions to the final victory of the faction. This is exactly the approach that I think a sober reading of historical examples warns us is likely doomed to failure, regardless of what one thinks of the underlying policy aims (which might well have been achieved without the rhetoric and practice of escalation). I cannot help but think that, as happened in the last decades of the Roman Republic, rewarding this sort of rhetoric and behavior will produce more of it from both parties and put our republic on a dangerous path.
President Trump paved the way for a skilled authoritarian to take power
It's not that President Trump wasn't his own kind of disaster. It's that the people coming after him who really know how to be a strongman now know they have a strong chance of winning.
The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024. A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf. An individual who does not irritate everyone who doesn’t already like him, and someone whose wife looks at him adoringly instead of slapping his hand away too many times in public. Someone who isn’t on tape boasting about assaulting women, and who says the right things about military veterans. Someone who can send appropriate condolences about senators who die, instead of angering their state’s voters, as Trump did, perhaps to his detriment, in Arizona. A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
At the moment, the Democratic Party risks celebrating Trump’s loss and moving on—an acute danger, especially because many of its constituencies, the ones that drove Trump’s loss, are understandably tired. A political nap for a few years probably looks appealing to many who opposed Trump, but the real message of this election is not that Trump lost and Democrats triumphed. It’s that a weak and untalented politician lost, while the rest of his party has completely entrenched its power over every other branch of government: the perfect setup for a talented right-wing populist to sweep into office in 2024. And make no mistake: They’re all thinking about it.
Head-Stabilized Champion Hurdler
This is as close to a real life expression of a slasher horror film as I've ever seen. He just 👏 keeps 👏 coming 👏.
In this view, you can clearly see how expert hurdlers don’t jump their whole bodies over the hurdle (like Super Mario or something) — it’s more that they just bring their lower bodies up over the hurdles while their heads & shoulders remain more or less the same height from the ground. There’s hardly any lateral motion either — very little wasted energy here.
Former Ballerina with Alzheimer’s Recreates Her Swan Lake Choreography
In the video above, you can see how, as she starts to listen to Swan Lake in a pair of headphones, she reanimates and begins performing the dance choreography in her wheelchair.
Mushrooms grow and shrivel in this 10,000 shot time-lapse | The Kid Should See This 3 min
An eight-month-long lockdown project, this 10,000 shot time-lapse video captures mushrooms growing and shriveling in an Illinois forest.
Robert Wyatt - I'm a believer - Top Of The Pops - 1974 - YouTube
One of the best covers ever, of one of the best songs ever written. Robert Wyatt performing "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees
Four Organs: Phase Patterns by Steve Reich
Any time I listen to Steve Reich I feel like my perception of reality is under assault.
How to spot a pyramid scheme | The Kid Should See This 5 min
In the end, if you remember anything I hope it is this: if the offer asks you to pay and recruit, reject and report! Remember, pyramid schemes require recruitment within networks so they can’t catch fire if we know how to detect and reject.
Life, death, and discovery of a plesiosaur | The Kid Should See This 3 min
Today, finding plesiosaur bones in a quarry in Cambridgeshire is not uncommon, but finding a close-to-complete skeleton and its skull is very rare. “I’d never seen so much bone in one spot in a quarry,” explained Oxford Clay Working Group member Carl Harrington of the long-necked specimen when it was discovered in 2016.
No, not all Trump voters are racist
The controlling narrative that it is only The Wicked who are not Progressive is doing great harm to doing actual good on the ground.
Blow unironically blames these facts on "the Power of White Patriarchy," which somehow causes oppressed people to align with the oppressor. But that's basically a progressive version of blaming Satan: the specific mechanisms by which the unseen evil influence works remains unclear.
A far more plausible explanation is that most Americans who voted for Trump for a wide range of reasons don't consider him racist or bigoted.
To be clear: None of these things are harmless. Even Trump's nonracial taunts and slanders are profoundly demeaning to our public life. His race-baiting and immigrant-baiting are far worse; they not only make many members of minority groups feel diminished but embolden bigots who do take the hateful message seriously. Those people — the racists, the xenophobes, the misogynists, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists — are a part of his "base."
But if those were the only people supporting Trump, Biden would have won by a much larger margin than he did.
There are plenty of others — including people who are not white. A Wall Street Journal report on pro-Trump Latinos in South Texas offers a glimpse at their reasons. Some credit Trump with a good economy. Others see him as someone who speaks up for religion. Still others worry that Biden may hurt the oil industry, where many locals work. Some feel that the Democrats are anti-law enforcement — or even blame them for the past summer's riots linked to anti-racism protests.
We can ask why so many people are willing to give Trump a pass on his 50 shades of awful, or to believe things that seem self-evidently absurd (for instance, that Trump cares about working people). Nevertheless, Trump voters are also expressing concerns that cannot be dismissed. Moral grandstanding may be satisfying — but Biden's message of healing and dialogue is a far better way forward. In fact, I'd say it's the only way forward.
Short Trip - Alexander Perrin
This is such a calming experience. I love getting to stop to let the little bird people in.
The comedy genius of James Veitch
I'm not a fan of comedy generally speaking but if I could find more comedians like James Veitch I think that would change. Between his epic trolling of spammers to his call for whimsy in the face of frustration I could laugh at this man's jokes for many hours.
Related and decidely more blue: It's like Twitter. Except we charge people to use it.
Contract Testing for Node.js Microservices with Pact | Coder Society
I really like the idea of using something like this to vastly tighten up what we're currently using UI automation tests for.
Contract testing is a technique for checking and ensuring the interoperability of software applications in isolation and enables teams to deploy their microservices independently of one another. Contracts are used to define the interactions between API consumers and providers. The two participants must meet the requirements set out in these contracts, such as endpoint definitions and request and response structures.
Rust vs Go — Bitfield Consulting
This feels like a very even handed and thorough comparison between these two languages. The summation is that they're both great, serve very similar purposes, and make some subtle tradeoffs.
First, it's really important to say that both Go and Rust are absolutely excellent programming languages. They're modern, powerful, widely-adopted, and offer excellent performance. You may have read articles and blog posts aiming to convince you that Go is better than Rust, or vice versa. But that really makes no sense; every programming language represents a set of trade-offs. Each language is optimised for different things, so your choice of language should be determined by what suits you and the problems you want to solve with it.
In this article, I'll try to give a brief overview of where I think Go is the ideal choice, and where I think Rust is a better alternative. Ideally, though, you should have a working familiarity with both languages. While they're very different in syntax and style, both Rust and Go are first-class tools for building software. With that said, let's take a closer look at the two languages.
Configuration security is a developer problem - Speaker Deck
This is a good overview of the methods we have available to us to shift security and compliance left and empower application engineers to manage their infrastructure safely.
Infrastructure is increasingly part of the app. Your configuration is in the same repo as your code, maintained by the same developers and going through CI.
Infrastructure as code leads to its own security challenges. But static analysis is surprisingly useful when applied to declarative languages.
Shift security left. Automatically catching security issues during development means less issues in production, and more time to focus on finding and fixing them.
Keeping Netflix Reliable Using Prioritized Load Shedding | by Netflix Technology Blog | Nov, 2020 | Netflix TechBlog
There are a couple of amazing ideas in this article:
Progressive load shedding based on priority of incoming request. This allows them to keep their most important functionality up (playing content) while progressively degrading all other services.
Smart configuration of clients during an outage by sending them detailed directions for how to retry. This allows them to send responses to smart clients that directly configure how things like a retry-storm will or won't happen.
Continuous Experimentation. I love the idea that once an experiment has been run it should just be run continuously to be constantly validated.
A traffic router that understands the downstream health of its services and sheds load accordingly. The idea of a router smart enough to understand that any of its backend services is degraded or that itself is degraded and responds accordingly sounds like a super power for relability.
via SRE Weekly Issue #243 – SRE WEEKLY
Docker Hub rate limiting FAQ – CircleCI Support Center
Exceptions: Remote Docker and Machine Executors will be impacted by the rate limiting unless pulling CircleCI-published images.
Remote docker and machine executors continue to be risky.
Building Netflix’s Distributed Tracing Infrastructure | by Netflix Technology Blog | Oct, 2020 | Netflix TechBlog
Prior to Edgar, our engineers had to sift through a mountain of metadata and logs pulled from various Netflix microservices in order to understand a specific streaming failure experienced by any of our members. Reconstructing a streaming session was a tedious and time consuming process that involved tracing all interactions (requests) between the Netflix app, our Content Delivery Network (CDN), and backend microservices. The process started with manual pull of member account information that was part of the session. The next step was to put all puzzle pieces together and hope the resulting picture would help resolve the member issue. We needed to increase engineering productivity via distributed request tracing.
Distributed Tracing isn't new but Edgar sounds awesome. I would love to get here one day as at companies I help lead.
AWS Publishes Best Practices Guide for Operational Dashboards
One principal is to work backwards from the expected end user in order to ensure that the dashboard can meet their needs. As O'Shea notes, "It’s easy to build a dashboard that makes total sense to its creator. However, this dashboard might not provide value to users." As they have found that users tend to interpret the graphs that render first as most important, the convention states that the most important graphs are placed at the top. The most important for web services tend to be aggregate or summary availability graphs and end-to-end latency percentile graphs.
Some of the other design principles include:
Ensure a consistent time zone for display (and display it on the dashboard)
Lay out graphs for the expected minimum display resolution
Enable the ability to adjust the time interval and metric period
Annotate the graphs with alarm thresholds and goals
Use alarm status, simple numbers, or time series graph widgets where appropriate
Maintaining and updating dashboards is ingrained in our development process. Before completing changes, and during code reviews, our developers ask, "Do I need to update any dashboards?" They are empowered to make changes to dashboards before the underlying changes are deployed.
This is a really good article on the principles of effective Dashboard design.
I also really like the idea of having a team discuss their systems health using their dashboards as a way to review and validate their usefulness.
Making GitHub CI workflow 3x faster - The GitHub Blog
At this moment the monumental Ruby monolith that powers millions of developers on GitHub.com, has over 7,000 test suites and over 5,000 test files. Every commit to a pull request triggers 25 CI jobs and requires 15 of those CI jobs to complete before merging a pull request. This meant that a developer at GitHub spent approximately 45 minutes and 600 cores of computing resources for every commit. That’s a lot of developer-hours and machine-hours that could be spent creating value for our customers.
Analyzing the types of CI jobs, we identified four categories: unit testing, linting/performance, integration testing, builds/deployments. All jobs except two of the integration testing jobs took less than 13 minutes to run. The two integration testing jobs were the bottleneck in our Lead Time for Changes. As it is true for most DevOps cycles, several test suites were also flaky. Although this blog post isn’t going to share how we solved for the flakiness of our tests, spoiler alert, a future post in this series will explain that process. Apart from being flaky, the two integration testing jobs increased developer friction and reduced productivity at GitHub.
This is exactly the kind of analysis I need to be able to do to my CD pipelines in order to be able to improve them.
n-gate.com. we can't both be right. [2021-10-31 Sun]
The RIAA causes outrage and fury worldwide by listing Icona Pop in the same set as Justin Timberlake and Taylor Swift. Hackernews wrestles with their value judgments; their firm stance as bootlickers for megacorporations has finally crashed headlong into their equally firm belief that programmers should never be held to any legal or moral standards. What results is a wide-ranging display of profound confusion, as Hackernews realizes they don't have clear definitions of literally any of the words involved in internet video, copyright law, the American legal process, or website hosting.
One Man, Two Guvnors | Great Performances | PBS
Featuring a Tony Award-winning performance by CBS Late Late Show host James Corden, the hilarious West End and Broadway hit One Man, Two Guvnors by playwright Richard Bean delighted critics and audiences alike during its West End and Broadway productions in 2011 and 2012.
The Northman Viking Film: The World's Never Seen a Movie Like It – /Film
Ummm…. What!? This sounds amazing. Like maybe Valhalla Rising.
Ten Years of Pair Programming · deliberate software
We have seen promiscuous pairing completely change our organization. As a team, we accomplish far more than we would otherwise. We are able to tackle new systems, languages, and tools with ease. When someone learns a new valuable technique, it spreads organically through the team.
Promiscuous Pairing, to this day, is still the most effective I've ever seen a small team be by many orders of magnitude. This is an absolutely excellent and honest account of what it can look like.
Compared to What? | City Journal
The most important question in politics is Henny Youngman’s: compared to what? If progressives were given to rigorous self-examination, they might think hard about the possibility that Trump and Republicans in general surpass electoral expectations because the alternative to the GOP is . . . progressivism. Standing next to a twenty-first-century progressive turns out to be a good way for conservatives to get asked out onto the dance floor. Strange to relate, many voters do not respond gratefully to being execrated as bigots, fascists, and idiots.
What Divides Us Is Class, Not Race - Quillette
But most middle-aged white American men aren’t named Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Musk. On average, like all North American workers, regardless of race, that vast majority hasn’t seen a real wage increase in almost fifty years. The middle class, once the dominant majority in American society and the steady flywheel of its economy, is now beleaguered, shrinking, and downwardly mobile. Like everyone else, they’re expressing their fear and insecurity in a political language that is often unhealthy, and sometimes hateful. None of this excuses acts of racism. But the problem isn’t going to be solved with hashtags. As the gilded one percent takes up more economic space, the competition for what remains becomes more bitter. In a way, the message I bring is one of racial harmony: You’re all getting screwed together…
… it’s no surprise that many upper middle-class progressive voters, who see no threat from newcomers whatsoever, are perfectly happy to dismiss concerns about immigration as presumptive racism…
I’m not supposed to say this, but I will: Taking a knee to Black Lives Matter, or hauling down monuments, isn’t going to change any of this. Nor will corporate diversity policies, many of which are trumpeted on social media by the same conglomerates that are hiring low-cost labor in droves. What we need are policies—including trade and immigration policies—that help us carve up the economic pie in a way that sees all workers get their fair share, no matter what their ethnicity.
File this in my growing "No War but the Class War" folder, please.
Also see VIDEO: Robert Reich: How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap? - UCTV - University of California Television
The Failing Business Model of American Universities - Quillette
Given the continual capitalization of students in the pursuit of profit, something must be done before the system reaches a precipice from which a fall would cause catastrophic failure. While the university business model surely has its place in society, I do not believe that higher education should utilize it to exploit our future generations. Academic institutions should have their priorities in education, for the good of its students and our society as a whole.
This bubble needs to pop.
For Five Months, BLM Protestors Trashed America's Cities. After the Election, Things May Only Get Worse - Quillette
And when it comes to these organizations, including Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the newer splinter groups that mimic their tactics, the media often seems to take their social-justice posturing at face value. In the current media environment, left-of-center actors who claim to represent the cause of the oppressed are granted more moral license to use violence as a political tool…
In September, two reports were published—one shedding light on the methods and beliefs of Black Lives Matter activists, and the other analyzing the possibility that such violence will not only be sustained in coming months, but get worse.
Neither report has received much in the way of media attention, which is unfortunate, because the information they contain shows that the threat of violence won’t end with the election of a new president. In fact, all of the leading left-wing groups calling for disruptive street protests (or worse) have made demands in which they explicitly reject one or more basic elements of the American social contract that are supported by both mainstream Democrats and Republicans—including capitalism, race-neutrality, the right of a society to police itself, and even democracy itself…
Most Americans, whether Republicans or Democrats, don’t want violence. BLM’s Marxist roots and violent methods don’t reflect mainstream progressives (or Black Americans, for that matter) any more than extreme right-wing groups reflect mainstream conservatives. But one would not know this based on the skewed way that these groups are reported on. Surely, it is no slur on social justice or racial equality to point out that radical, often violent anti-capitalist, anti-democratic groups inspired by communist dictators do not have America’s best interests at heart.
What Keeps a Self-Organizing Team From Falling Apart · deliberate software
The author of Reinventing Organizations talks about the concept of “self-correction” that allows self-organizing teams to adapt without writing a thick rule-book of policies. Healthy, self-organizing teams build a simple system that self-corrects instead of adding new policies when trust is abused. Rather than trying to design the perfect rule-book, they let individuals grow into trusted, intelligent agents who are expected to learn and improve.
The author suggests that three things are needed for self-correcting teams:
A shared understanding of what’s healthy
A forum for conversation to trigger self-corrective action
Self-correcting practices allow individuals to perform at their best with fewer rule books, fewer meetings, fewer bottlenecks, and less oversight. Individuals are trusted to perform their best, and the team is provided with a way to discuss improvements. A self-correcting team will find individuals empowered to improve the business in incredible ways.
Good Bones Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children.
I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Politics Is More Than Abortion vs Character - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture
So much Christian analysis of the election implicitly frames the contest as, more or less, the evils of Trump’s character against the evils of abortion. American politics is reduced to a contest between “Trump is mean,” against “abortion is murder,” the only difference being how different commentators weigh the relative evils. Piper twisted himself into knots to say that Trump’s character is as destructive to the body politic as murdering babies, while Mohler goes through the same convolution in reverse to say that the evils of abortion outweigh racism, separating families at the border, the destruction of the earth’s environment, and the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic that has killed over a million people worldwide (which Mohler somehow does not even mention)…
Let’s start with the right. The root problem is not that Trump is mean. The problem is that he is a nationalist, a problem that infects much of the right and thus will outlast Trump himself. Much of his meanness is not a character flaw so much as an ideological choice. Trump is mean because of what he believes about the world, about American identity, and about his fellow citizens…
Sexual promiscuity probably tells us nothing at all about how well someone would look after the common good…
But the problem with the left is not simply abortion. It is progressivism. Progressivism, like nationalism, is a totalistic political religion that is fundamentally inconsistent with the ideals of a free and open society…
Progressivism is a demeaning view of human personhood, trapped between essentialism and rebellion, forever. We are fundamentally defined by the unchosen categories of our race, class, and gender, which means we must be empowered to explore, define, and express these identities even as we rebel against any external effort to tell us what they mean and rebel against the felt limitations they impose—and simultaneously we are encouraged to approach the world primarily as a never-ending fight against an irredeemable system of racial, sexual, or economic oppression…
The most urgent and most moral necessity in American politics is to dismantle the two-party system that artificially forces us into an impossible choice between two immoral options, neither of which represents a majority of Americans, embodies the aspirations of the American experiment, or articulates a vision of ordered liberty and human dignity. The American experiment is a miracle of political order, a miracle that is increasingly fragile and has no champions, no defenders, and no partisans in our contemporary political landscape except for the large and growing number of voters who reject the two parties who claim to govern in their name.
My God I think this is an important article. I am shook. I feel like this has summarized everything I feel and expressed it in such an articulate manner.
Citizen Strangers and the Cost of Compromise - Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture
Vice President Pence’s speech is a classic example of what Robert Bellah terms “civil religion.” Civil religion is a shared national religious consciousness that, while not clearly defined, significantly interweaves and binds American political life together. Listen to just about any inauguration speech and you will hear it. While many believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation, Bellah is explicit: “[civil] religion is clearly not itself Christianity.” The god of American civil religion is “much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love.”[2] Its genius is in its accessible, relatable generality. The moment it becomes too specific, it alienates religious others, and slouches toward state religion.
However, the Vice President’s speech went beyond standard civil religious rhetoric, leaning toward specificity. His climactic conclusion evoked powerful associations with an unnamed (yet entirely understood) figure. The suggestive rhetoric deftly merged the crucified Christ with courageous patriots; blood-bought spiritual freedom with a star spangled one.
Religious rhetoric deployed for political gain is no recent innovation. It is baked into our collective identity as far back as our founding. This speech, however, was intended for a particular audience: American evangelicals committed to the Republican cause, the Religious Right, and Christian Nationalists.[3] And it is an effective strategy because of a deep confusion—a fusion, really—that has taken place between Christian theology and American ideology. This is not a neutral matter. In merging the two, American evangelicalism has diminished its prophetic distance from culture, and in doing so, has impaired its capacity for witness as citizen-strangers…
But witness is ineffective when critical distance is removed. Our displacement does more than make us social oddballs; it produces the detachment necessary to proclaim the supremacy of Christ, and to both critique culture where it opposes him, and affirm it where it manifests goodness. Intimate identification with a particular culture (or subculture) binds us to the very thing we seek to appraise, pegging us to a compromised and biased vantage point. It is hard enough to criticize our heroes; how can we expect to speak out against the culture shaping our identity? In fact, one could argue that this kind of witness is suicidal. If it is imprudent to saw away at the legs of the stool you sit on, it is lethal to critique the grounding reality on which your identity rests.
Please listen, oh my heart.
The New Colonialism | Francis X. Maier | First Things
So here’s the point: Hostility toward the Electoral College seems like a small thing. Maybe it is. But it hints at a deeper impatience with our political process. And that strikes me as part of a still deeper, and still largely unarticulated, current of social change. As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued, liberal political institutions depend on belief in equality, individual free will, and human agency. But these are increasingly challenged by emerging science and transformative technologies. Over time, Harari claims, the result will be a new kind of social reality that requires new political expressions. The old institutions may survive and have the same appearance, but their content will be empty or vestigial, or change altogether. Think it can’t happen here? Laugh while you can. There’s a reason Big Tech follows Harari with intense interest.
What may be coming our way is an odd kind of “new colonialism,” with flyover country—that Dark Continent formerly known as places like Kansas, Alabama, and Tennessee, largely inhabited by reactionary troglodytes—reduced in effective power to mission territory for our enlightened coastal elites; who, after all, are much smarter than the rest of us and have the expert skills to run our complex technocracy.
And of course, they’ll do all this unselfishly, heroically really, for the benefit of us natives. I’ve seen how well that works.
The rabid desire that we progressives have to enforce our will on everyone is some of the stuff authoritarianism is made out of.
Identity Politics and the Election | Joshua Mitchell | First Things
Postmodernism still lingers in the corridors of academia, but the great threat now facing America is identity politics, the third leftist wave since the 1960s. Identity politics, unlike postmodernism, does propose that history has a meaning. That meaning can be stated in a simple phrase, which is the cornerstone of the current Democratic party: “the purpose of politics is to redeem the innocent victims, and to scapegoat those who were their transgressors.” Hence #MeToo, and BLM, and Save The Planet, and a host of other hysterical cries to redeem the world from stain, but which always seem to give us, instead, an ever-expanding state apparatus that wants to control the innocents by “protecting” them and to cure the deplorables of their irredeemable ideas—or scapegoat and purge them if they do not recant. History marches in the direction of protecting the pure and cancelling the impure. That is identity politics.
Marxism could never take hold in America because Americans believed in private property. Because property is the cornerstone of our republic, and cannot be removed, Marxism failed. Postmodernism could never really take hold in America because Americans believe that history has a meaning—and even that America has a special place in history. The reason identity politics has taken hold is because Americans suffer deep and abiding guilt, from two main sources: Christianity itself, and the legacy of slavery in this country. What the left could not do through Marxism or postmodernism, it now is doing through identity politics—namely, undermining every institution and every venerable historical memory in America.
Many readers of First Things, myself included, voted for Donald Trump in 2020—with varying degrees of internal doubt about his character and fitness for the presidency. We did so because we have watched identity politics scapegoat anyone who opposed it, and because we see it as the greatest threat yet to the future of our country, precisely because it uses guilt to destroy America. Arguments do not matter to identity politics; all that matters is whether you have a right to speak—which is to say, whether you are a member of an identity group of “innocent victims.”
Progressivism in America needs to grapple with the reality that we are a radicalizing force if we're ever going to do anything but purge our opponents.
Is Federalism the Solution? | Peter J. Leithart | First Things
… there is no single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart…
Trump can’t heal these divisions. If he wins, we’ll face another four years of anti-Trump hysteria from Democratic politicians and the media. Biden can’t do it either. His plan to unite America comes down to putting the “good people” back in charge…
Renewed federalism could produce a genuinely pluralist America. Each state will run its own moral-political experiment, without direct interference from other states or from a moralistic federal government, as states currently do with drug laws. Such pluralism will be sturdier than our current enforced tolerance, because each experiment will be backed by the institutionalized power of a state…
Under the federalism French proposes, no one will be pleased. Many Americans will be outraged at the prospect of reversing abortion rights or outlawing same-sex marriage anywhere in America. I will be horrified that any American states allow killing unborn babies or protect sexual perversions. Renewed federalism will require colossal acts of self-restraint; it will be the work of federal officials who recognize that releasing power is the only alternative to the dissolution of America. Is it an improvement to replace one big culture war with thirty or forty smaller ones? If we’re as close to civil war or secession as some think, the answer is “yes.”
This is an interesting take as a way to try to dodge the problem of an increasingly divided America. At the same time I think it wrongly places the dividing lines along state borders. Our divide is expressed along population density lines, and those population density centers are in every state. Just look at PA. Without being able to get Federalism all the way down to the population center level I'm not sure that this could be a solution.
GitOps Ebook: What You Need to Know Now (free ebook)
This is a quick read (25 minutes or less) that provides an excellent overview of GitOps in general. If GitOps didn't do it for you, maybe this will.
Introduction: The GitOps Movement
What Are The Problems GitOps Addresses?
Implementation Challenges
Explain why GitOps was invented
Compare the principal GitOps tools
Discuss implementation challenges
Discuss where GitOps is going
