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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Stephen Miller is an advisor to Trump and is probably a psychopath. I don’t use that label lightly either.

    When a normal person gets genuinely angry, their facial expressions and body language convey the anger too. It’s a natural reaction humans have when experiencing emotions and it’s tough to hide or fake.

    Stephen Miller raises his voice, he uses an indignant tone, he makes aggressive motions with his body, but his face shows no change in expression at all. It’s not just this clip either, he’s like this all the time. He’s generally good at lying and changing topics during normal interviews, but he was cornered here and fell back to “pretend to be angry and change the topic.” Clearly this reporter was having none of it.


  • The role of a district court judge is to do two things:

    1. Apply existing precedent to individual cases to the greatest extent possible.
    2. Set new precedent only when absolutely necessary because the facts of the case don’t align well to existing precedent.

    Cannon has basically decided to do the exact opposite of these two rules by pretending that the facts of this case are so incredibly unprecedented that she has to throw out the rulebook and set new precedents on everything.

    Literally the only unusual thing about this case is that the defendant, a private citizen who currently gets free government security protection for the rest of his life, used to be a president. That’s it. Everything else about this case is straightforward obstruction of justice and willful retention of national security information.




  • We’re not in a recession. Economic growth last quarter was almost 5% (which is massive) and growth has been positive for the last 4 quarters. The average quarterly growth over the last several decades has been closer to 2%.

    The economy is doing just fine. Frankly, most people hear their neighbors complain about the economy, so they think the economy is bad, so they complain about the economy, and the result is everyone thinking the economy is terrible when it objectively isn’t.

    Inflation is relatively high by recent historical standards, but it’s really not that high anymore and hasn’t been for most of 2023. People got sticker shock during the height of it last year and haven’t forgotten. But the labor market is still tight, people who gave up trying to find work a long time ago are entering the market and getting jobs again, wages continue to rise, business investment is up, and small businesses are being created at a historically rapid pace.

    When pollsters ask people, “how is your personal financial situation?”, most people are answering “good.” When those same people are asked, “how do you think everyone else’s financial situation is?”, they scream “TERRIBLE!” That doesn’t mean there aren’t people suffering, but things aren’t nearly as gloomy as everyone insists they are.


  • But that’s not what TypeScript does. The joke in the meme doesn’t really even make sense.

    A better analogy would be you have a basket that’s explicitly labeled “Fruit” and TypeScript complains if you try to put laundry detergent in it because you said it’s supposed to be a basket of fruit.

    This meme was clearly made by someone who doesn’t use or understand TypeScript.




  • That and the fact that there’s a not insignificant number of people who are center-right politically and identify as Republican but don’t like Trump or the recent direction of the party. It’s not a majority or even a plurality of Republicans, but it’s enough to have an impact in close races.

    Biden attacking “MAGA Republicans” instead of “Republicans” gives the center-right voters a permission structure to support Democrats because the choice gets reframed from “us (Democrats) vs. you (Republicans)” to “us (the sane ones) vs. them (the crazies)”.





  • The thing to remember about most Republicans (and Republican politicians especially) is that any arguments they throw out in pursuit of a particular goal only apply to that goal.

    Impeachment of Trump was bad, so they said the Speaker didn’t have the power, that impeachment should be only for extreme situations, that high crimes and misdemeanors means you have to break the law to be impeached, that Democrats were on a mission to impeach Trump since he was elected.

    But now, impeachment of Biden is good, so the Speaker clearly has the power to initiate an inquiry, that vague, shady insinuations with no hard evidence is sufficient to impeach, that they’re definitely not on a witch-hunt to impeach Biden despite investigating him from the moment they got their majority and moving forward to impeach with zero actual evidence.

    You can point out their hypocrisy and they won’t defend themselves. Some of them might even try to convince you the situation is somehow different, but most don’t care. They set their sights on a goal and backfill an argument to justify it.


  • Just to reinforce your point, the difference between a cheap running shoe and an expensive running shoe is incredible. When I first started running a few years ago, I was using a very old pair of running shoes I’ve had for a long time. I’ve since been sticking with the New Balance Fresh Foam X 880s (because I have very wide feet and NB seems like the only brand that actually makes their best running shoes in 4E) and it’s like running on a cloud.

    And then there’s also the Garmin watch that cost $300 (that I’m now stupidly considering upgrading to the new $600 Forerunner 965), the $120 HRM Pro chest strap, the $3000 Nordic Track x22i for indoor runs I got lightly used on Craigslist for a steal at $900, etc.

    And then there’s the races where you’re spending $40, $50, $100+ depending on whether it’s a 5K or 10K or half-marathon. And good running clothes are pricey too.


  • That’s not really a solid argument. Blocking is likely implemented as a very tiny piece of what is already very likely a massive table join operation. Computationally, it’s likely to have as much an impact on their compute costs as the floor mats in your car have on fuel efficiency.

    Everyone already sees different content. It’s an inherent part of Twitter. It’s not a static site where everyone sees the same thing. You see the tweets of who you’re following, and don’t see tweets of those you’ve muted. All that filtering is happening at the server level. Any new tweets or edited tweets or deleted tweets change that content too, which is happening potentially hundreds of times a second for some users.

    Anyway, caching would be implemented after a query for what tweets the user sees is performed to reduce network traffic between a browser and the Twitter servers. There’s some memoization that can be done at the server level, but the blocking feature is likely to have almost no impact on that given the fundamental functionality of Twitter.




  • I had the Samsung Note 2 back in the day. I installed a custom bootloader and OS that worked fantastically. I had GPS issues, and all the guides I read said I have to reinstall Samsung’s OS, get a GPS fix, then reinstall my custom OS.

    I made the mistake of installing a newer version of the Samsung OS which installed Knox and locked down my bootloader. I was now locked into an old, insecure Android version with no possibility of ever upgrading because Samsung abandoned it.

    From that day on, I vowed never to buy another Samsung product again. Screw them and their anti-choice bullshit.


  • I spent 15 minutes looking at all the links and clicking on a few.

    North Korea is apparently a functioning democracy that gives its civilians everything they need. They’re all extraordinary happy and love their fairly elected leader. The ones who defect only do it because they’re filthy, selfish capitalists.

    Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors, but the site of a skirmish between capitalist pig armed provocateurs who assaulted and killed soldiers in cold blood and acted surprised when the soldiers (with extraordinary restraint) defended themselves against their attacks, leading to just 200 deaths (including those poor innocent soldiers).

    The Uighurs are apparently all happy. The Chinese government forcibly took thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and placed them in camps, all out of a selfless desire to help those poor, misguided souls. There’s definitely no cultural oppression, no forced labor, and no human rights abuses. They’re just all-inclusive resorts with free “cultural lessons” to help them understand both Uighur and Chinese culture. The CCP loves their Muslim citizens and definitely doesn’t consider them terrorists in need of forced reeducation. All the horror stories we’ve heard from people whose family members were captured, or about forced organ harvesting, or rape and torture, they’re all just unproven lies. The Chinese government even offers tours of their Uighur “resorts” to prove to the world that it’s a diligent effort to support their Uighur brothers!