Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 09:48 on 18 March 2023
I feel like making a little easy money. As such, I will bet the first taker USD $100 (CAD $137 if you prefer to wager in Canadian funds) that Trump will not be indicted in the next 14 days (i.e. by 9:00 AM Pacific time, 1 April 2023). Any takers? This is an honest offer. Comment on this post if interested.
Published at 00:56 on 18 March 2023
The Rust programming language has been hyped to be the “most loved” one for several years now. I personally can’t feel the love.
Sure, Rust is fast. So what? Python, Java, and Kotlin are almost always fast enough for me.
Rust’s memory management is nowhere near as convenient as the memory management in a garbage collected language (like Python, Java, or Kotlin). There’s all sorts of confusing rules to remember. It took me rereading those rules three times to finally get it. By contrast, with garbage collection, I don’t have to worry about stack versus heap, borrowing, boxing, and all that crap. I just pass objects around as easily as Rust passes primitive types, and everything just works. The computer handles all the details behind the scenes, leaving me free to concentrate on other things.
Yes, yes: efficiency. Again: so what? Garbage-collected languages are fast enough for me. As Knuth once said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
Suppose for some reason I bump into a need to go faster than Python or the JVM allow. Then what? Still not sold on Rust. I’ve run into this sort of thing before: the problem was caused by one tiny bit of code, and rewriting that little bit of code in C (which both the JVM and Python can easily call) fixed the performance issue handily. Yes, C isn’t as nice as Rust for memory management, but it was only one little bit of code, and unlike Rust (for which such support is still in the early stages), it is super-easy to call C from within Java or Python.
And then we get to graphics. Some of my recent coding has involved making tools to modify graphics files. If one is modifying graphics files, a graphical user interface is almost always essential. Python supports Qt, and Java has Swing. Both are excellent cross-platform GUI libraries that, with care, can achieve results that look almost as good as a native application. Rust basically has only GTK, which is a poor second-class citizen for anything other than Linux.
Maybe if I was doing lots of embedded systems on resource-constrained platforms Rust would be more appealing to me. But I’m not, so it’s hard for me to feel the love.
Published at 23:10 on 16 March 2023
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
— Smedley Butler
The iCloud disk is Apple’s cloud storage service. They give away a basic amount of storage to all their users, and charge for extra.
The rub is, that just about every Apple program is configured to put just about everything it saves on iCloud by default. Even very, big bloated things. Especially very big, bloated things. It is possible to turn this off, but it is not easy or obvious, and as I said just about every Apple program is configured to use iCloud heavily, so you must fight with app after app to stop it from dumping megabytes of crap onto iCloud.
The biggest offender is iOS (the iPhone and iPad operating system itself), which is of course configured to back up everything to iCloud by default. How to turn this off (and how to back up an iPhone to a local disk) is described here. Note that you should definitely plan to back up your device to a local disk regularly if you turn iCloud backups off.
The natural consequence is that iCloud fills up quickly. At that point, every Apple device you own will breathlessly and ominously announce that your iCloud storage is about full and recommend purchasing additional storage. Actually the warnings come well before that point, at around the 80% mark. Since iCloud comes with 5 gigabytes for free, that amounts to getting warned about full storage when in fact you have a gig of free space still left.
It doesn’t recommend you investigate why iCloud is filling up, of course. That might result in the user not agreeing to spend money in perpetuity on iCloud. There are ways to investigate usage, but they are not obvious.
I did the work and it was astounding how much crap various Apple programs had stuck there. Most people won’t do that. They will just cough up the dough every month to make their devices shut up.
Published at 17:27 on 12 March 2023
To begin, three points:
So what I’m doing is giving Halide a try for a year, and using it in those situations where the limitations of the standard Apple camera app are really getting in the way. For situations where the standard app’s limitations don’t get in the way (and this is most photographs), I use the standard app, because it is simpler and easier to use. (Thankfully, it is easy enough to make the two store their photos in the same place, which makes managing them easier and simpler.)
Note that this is only for those situations where for some reason I do not have my interchangeable-lens camera, with my dedicated macro lens that I can focus with a focus ring and a proper viewfinder, along with me. It’s a fallback for macro photography, nothing more. The main reason I have an iPhone because it works better as a phone; performance as a camera is secondary to me.
Finally, it is still annoying, because Android does it significantly better. Much nicer to have just one camera app that once can use in all situations than having to bounce between a limited app and a feature-bloated one.
Published at 08:16 on 10 March 2023
By which I mean, either the government of Ukraine, or the some of the governments of its Western allies, were involved in some fashion in blowing up the pipeline. The involvement might be as direct as agents on the staff payolls of one or more governments doing the job themselves, or as indirect as knowing about a plot by some non-government group and deciding to sit on that knowledge and let it happen. Or just about anything in between.
Firstly, this makes a lot more sense that Russia blowing up its own pipeline, a piece of infrastructure important to its largest economic sector, and part of the ties between Russia and Western Europe that complicate the ability of the latter to confront the former.
Secondly, the invasion of Ukraine provides a motive.
Thirdly, we have Seymour Hersh’s claims. Now, Hersh is not a reliable source, many of his past claims have gone nowhere, and his particular story has some major holes in it. But that merely means that if Hersh claims something, it is not necessarily true. It says nothing about it being definitively false. And in fact, some of Hersh’s previous claims have turned out to be true. When Hersh’s claims came out, my reaction was not to believe them, but not to completely disbelieve them either, and to be alert for future evidence that might corroborate or refute them.
Fourthly, such evidence is now starting to emerge. Now, the story in the Post is still just someone speaking off the record, but the fact the Post thought it newsworthy indicates it comes from a reliable source in a position to know. This is especially the case given how the existence of this story conflicts with the Post’s (and my own) bias in favour of the Ukranian side in this conflict.
The takeaway is still rather vague, however. Revisit the leading paragraph: it simply means that Ukraine or some of its Western allies were involved in some way. It says nothing about the details of the involvement. As reliable as the Post judged their source, there is no way to know how much of the details that source accurately knows. Secrets within government organizations are shared on a strictly need to know basis, and if this source did not need to know many details, he could be in the dark (or even have been fed misinformation) about them.
More details, however, are likely to continue leaking out. This is how actual government conspiracies work: they don’t stay secret for long. The world that conspiracy kooks live in, where all-powerful governments prevent all leaks of consequence, the kook and his friends somehow know it all, and those all-powerful governments at the same time sit on their hands and do nothing to stop the kooks from running their mouths off, simply does not exist.
And the reaction of Ukraine and its supporters to this newfound knowledge also fits the pattern perfectly. Note that the truth is leaking out. Note also how it is rapidly getting buried by other stories. It is not considered important enough to be given feature coverage. (If equivalent evidence in favour of Russia being behind it all had come out, you had better believe we would all be hearing about it nonstop.) This is the way bias works in our media.
None of this means that Russia is in the right and Ukraine deserved to get invaded. The world is not composed solely of angels and devils; a refutation of Ukraine’s angel status does not prove it a devil. The world is a messy place where all actors are a mix of good and evil in various degrees. (If you think Russia does not support terrorism, think again.)
It is still far better for the world if Russia loses this war. As such, I still support helping Ukraine so as to maximize the chance of Russia losing. I would have rather have Russia lose to a Ukraine that does not back ecologically-destructive acts of terrorism than to have it lose to one that does, but I would also rather have Russia lose than win.
Published at 21:39 on 4 March 2023
It’s a compelling story, but it has a hard time horrifying me because it is so fake. This is the consequence of a) the film being engineered to horrify and b) my knowledge of basic mycology.
First off, Cordyceps is no threat. This might make some of those reading stay up at night, but Cordyceps species are found over much of the Earth, including, yes, much of North America. Odds are it is where you live.
And yet, despite mammals living in close proximity to Cordyceps for literally millions of years, no fungus in this genus has crossed over into infecting mammals. It just hasn’t happened. And this includes periods when the climate was much warmer than today (so there goes the movie’s premise that climate change could push Cordyceps to cross not just a species barrier, but a class barrier). Trust me, it’s not happening.
But set that aside for a moment and suppose it would? Then what? It would probably be barely capable of infecting a human. It would cause a minor, localized infection, something like a case of athlete’s foot or jock itch, which the patient would eventually fight off and recover from. It would fail to complete its life cycle and fruit.
But again, suppose it would, then what? The infected would go insane and then die. After they were dead, the fungus would sprout from their bodies and fruit. End of life cycle. No decades-long zombie stage, sorry.
And by “insane” above, I just mean randomly berserk and increasingly deranged. Remember, it took eons for Cordyceps to evolve to instill in an insect a very rudimentary desire to climb into a bush and bite a leaf vein. It would take eons more just to properly instill in a mammal the desire to do climb high up in its last hours of life. Forget about the complex desire to pursue prey that happens in The Last of Us. Just not happening. And don’t get me started on how preposterous the whole hive mind thing in the infected is.
And the long-term infected are just so unrealistic. Cordyceps is an ascomycete fungus, yet the infected sprout characteristic basidiomycete fruiting bodies.* That’s a difference at the division level of biology — a step above the class level! And to put the icing on the cake, they are a mix of fungal fruiting bodies from many different genera of basidiomycetes.
* In fairness, I will note that Cordyceps fruiting bodies do appear growing out of the skin of some relatively recently-infected individuals. But that doesn’t diminish the nonsensical premise of all the other unrelated ones erupting later.
It’s like some Hollywood type with little or no knowledge of mycology was tasked with making people look like ghoulishly infected corpses full of fungus. Because, no doubt, one was.
Published at 20:08 on 1 March 2023
Well, now, isn’t this interesting. An official investigation has concluded… basically what was obvious five years ago.
As for the supposed discrepancy between that study and earlier ones that “concluded” otherwise… they didn’t! All they said is that the syndrome could have been caused by hostile action. They didn’t say they were caused by hostile action. Exactly zero evidence was presented for the contention that hostile action was the cause.
Finding such evidence was the purpose of the new study, and when they looked, (surprise, surprise) there was none to be found.
It all goes to show just how deranged US politics is when it comes to Cuba, which is all in all a relatively garden variety third world dictatorship (the USA has propped up worse ones). It’s just one that humiliated the US empire a few times, and the Establishment still hasn’t gotten over it.
Published at 10:49 on 20 February 2023
It seems to have been an amateur science project.
Why is this not a surprise?
Published at 10:46 on 20 February 2023
… and it is not a viable political strategy. For those unfamiliar with this three-letter acronym, I am talking about oppositional defiant disorder.
Of course, any instance of behaviour classified as “a disorder” is subject to abuse by power structures, particularly one characterized as “arguing and defiance toward parents and other authority figures.”
The way to distinguish healthy skepticism of authority from pathological behaviour towards same is, I think, best epitomized by the old anarchist slogan: “Question authority.”
One is being advised to question authority. Not to reject outright, but merely to question. The answer to a question can be in the affirmative as well as the negative. It is entirely possible to question authority and come away with the conclusion that authority figures are being at least partially correct about something.
Consider the COVID-19 pandemic. Heading into it, there was already a large body of evidence and work by researchers in infectious diseases all pointing to the conclusion that a pandemic of some new disease was all but inevitable. Governments had long been planning for such a pandemic, and those plans had long advocated restrictions that would amount to a huge overnight change in daily life.
It was, in fact, obvious that COVID-19 was a pandemic before the authorities admitted it was so. In the earliest stages of the pandemic, questioning authority led me to conclude… that the pandemic was real and authority figures were refusing to acknowledge it was going on! It was also obvious that there would be various restrictions and disruptions to everyday life coming soon, once the crisis became too big to ignore.
Did it stop being a pandemic when the authorities bent to the inevitable? Having ODD leads one to one answer. Having an intelligent and healthy skepticism of authority leads one to quite another.
Published at 12:13 on 13 February 2023
Obviously, something’s changed. We virtually never heard of spy balloons, then we hear about one, it gets shot down after being tracked across North America, and now suspected spy balloons are getting discovered and being shot down all over the map.
What has changed is unlikely to be the mere presence of spy balloons. We know this because it has already come out that what are now known to be, or strongly suspected to be, spy balloons flew over the USA under the Trump Administration.
The mere existence of spying is no great surprise. Nations have been spying on each other since literally forever, and aerial surveillance by superpowers against each other has been a thing at least since the USA got caught with its hand in the cookie jar by the USSR.
I suspect paranoia or at least some measure of it. There are a lot of reasons to launch unmanned balloons. Collecting upper atmosphere weather observations is one of them. It is not hard to come up with other ideas for research involving unmanned balloons. More than likely, some of those balloons which have now been downed (or will be downed in the near future) will be discovered to be innocent. More ominously is the possibility that some manned aircraft might get accidentally shot down.
Some probably are spy balloons after all. All I am saying above is that it is very likely that not all of the suspicious flying objects are there for espionage or other nefarious purposes.
Beau’s theory is probably a good one. Beau of the Fifth Column recently released a YouTube video where he speculated about the origins of the suspicious flying objects, and concluded that:
China has no grounds to complain about their balloons being shot down. Suppose for sake of argument it was just an innocent scientific research project. Well, why didn’t China then tell the USA and Canada that it had gone off course and was about to enter their airspaces? What did they think was likely to happen were such an unannounced balloon to be discovered? That an unannounced balloon would get shot down is just about the least surprising bit of news since the sun rising this morning.