Sam's L33t Journal

DEI seems to be getting a lot of attention as the current administration's stalking horse, including in the aftermath of a deadly plane crash. It seems the usual pattern goes something like this:

1. "Racism and sexism are non-issues now, we need to get rid of this DEI stuff and replace it with hiring on pure merit!"
2. "Every time you see someone who's not a white man in basically any job, you call them a DEI hire and assume they're not qualified, doesn't that sort of undermine that premise?"
3. "But I wouldn't assume that if it weren't for all this DEI lowering standards."
4. The fact that people other than white men are hired for basically any job is used as evidence that DEI hasn't been rooted out hard enough, return to step 1.

(In the meantime, the current administration is working hard to restore their favored system of getting their preferred people into key jobs, nepotism.)

It's been a week where I've been too late to write before I'm really tired.

Once of Trump's criminal cases came to (technically) an actual close this week, with a sentence of him getting told that he's been a very naughty boy and they hope that gives him something to think about while he's President. So the only thing that Trump gets epsilon more than zero consequences for is the least serious crime for which he's been criminally indicted: Committing petty frauds to be slightly more effective in covering up a scandal that would have sunk any previous Presidential candidate, in the immediate aftermath of another scandal that would have sunk any previous Presidential candidate. It's too crazy to contemplate.

I've been playing a lot of The Outer Wilds this week. Definitely a great game, I recommend it and recommend people play it as spoiler-free as possible. It's an exploration-focused game, and one of the interesting things about it is just how dedicated it is to knowledge being the thing that progresses you through the game: Not items, not ability upgrades, just knowledge. Fascinating setting and a great sci-fi yarn. (And a musical motif that is now perpetually running through my head.)

I've been watching some of the runs from AGDQ this week, and that's been a lot of fun, too.

After many years of playing the game really slowly, I advanced to the final level of the usual progression in Ingress. Leaving nothing to do but start again. It has been interesting to revisit the progression through the first few levels with the game's latest mechanics. Also, it plays the spooky chimes in the background when you start again.

I just finished reading Matt Yglesias's One Billion Americans. Very good book, but a bit depressing in the current political context. American politics around immigration have long since been a messed-up bundle of incoherent compromises. And the state of it now is beyond bad. Seems the Republicans want us to enjoy a shrinking population as soon as possible, and squander one of America's greatest national strengths. Will there ever be a billion Americans, or an America with national infrastructure far better than it is currently? Seems very uncertain.

It seems that Erica already has a Halloween costume in mind for next year.

I've been working on planning spring travel already. And need to get the dates for the summer filled in. Trying to have a somewhat more relaxing travel schedule this year and bank a little vacation time for next.

Started working with Erica on cleaning out some of the toy bins, but there are still more to do.

Finished reading Charmed Life to Erica. She wants to get the next in the series. In the meanwhile, reading The Marvelous Land of Oz, aka the book where L. Frank Baum tries to have a different main character before getting roped into writing about Dorothy again.

Back in the "I don't know what to write", but I said maybe I'd write more about Magic: the Gathering, so that's a thing I can write about.

I play Magic these days mostly on MTG Arena, almost entirely Standard (with cards from a rotating cast of the most-recent sets). Fairly recently, Standard rotation was extended to a three-year cycle from two. This year, two new things are happening to Standard.

First, there's a new core set out, released last week. Core sets in Magic are meant as an introduction and retrospective, they tend to feature a lot of reprints and have a greater breadth of theme and setting instead of focusing on one particular setting and story. The latest set, Foundations, will get special treatment in the rotation, with a current plan that it will stay in Standard for at least five years. Foundations seems like a great core set, but I wonder if it will start to overstay its welcome before the time is up. I haven't been the biggest fan of the extended Standard rotation, the changes don't seem to shake things up as much as I like. (Speaking of core sets, the superb Magic video essay channel Rhystic Studies took the occasion to do a retrospective on 7th Edition, the 2001 Magic core set that was also a turning point for the role that sort of set plays in the game.)

Second, the other-IP-as-Magic sets "Universes Beyond", are coming to Standard. Wizards has been doing a lot more of that recently. Alternative card art aside, unique cards based around existing media franchises have been coming into various Magic formats. They did a Lord of the Rings set that went straight into Modern (a non-rotating format of cards from mainline sets starting in 2003, plus some newer sets added directly to Modern and older non-rotating formats), and a Warhammer 40,000 set for Commander (a popular non-rotating format with a multiplayer focus and a few twists to the rules). But this year, Standard will include sets based on Final Fantasy (which fits well enough, I guess), Marvel: Spider Man (??!), and something TBA (who knows).

It's interesting because Magic is a game that invests pretty heavily in its aesthetic elements. Obviously, those elements function in a mnemonic role as well: "Deal three damage to any target" is easier as "Lightning Bolt" than "spell 261". But I do get the impression that Magic-but-bland would be a much less memorable and enjoyable game. So how about Magic-but-whatever-the-heck-this-is? Magic has always drawn all sorts of influences from all sorts of media franchises and tropes, but "pop-culture mashup" is still not its primary aesthetic. But at some point, it might be. The Universes Beyond stuff has been a commercial success for Wizards so far, and these "what ifs" have an appeal, so it's natural for them to give the goose a squeeze. I still get the sense it's different when that becomes the thing the game is. Unsurprisingly, in addition to excitement, this trend in the development of the game has also caused a lot of at least apprehension in the player-base. I don't know how it will play out.

The second Trump administration sure is getting crazy real fast. Huckabee for Ambassador to Israel and Rubio for Secretary of State seems a pretty clear signal that the Trump administration policy on the Israel/Palestine conflict will be the one they were obviously going to have. (But maybe for the American Muslims who supported him, that outcome is (at least) their second choice?) Gaetz for Attorney General and Gabbard for DNI are truly insane picks. There's a reason why Trump is demanding that potential Senate Majority Leaders allow him to sidestep the confirmation process. Musk and Ramaswamy will be heading up a "department" that I expect will be a Presidential commission and not an actual executive branch department despite the name. I can only assume be in charge of posting the dumbest memes about doing maximum-chaos layoffs government edition and cutting social security.

Trump definitely has a dramatic vision to put forward, though. Scratch-built charter cities (at the same time as broad-based tariffs), flying cars (not joking), Hoovervilles (putting it charitably) for the homeless, institutionalization for the mentally ill (this post seems relevant), stealing the (e.g.) Harvard endowment and giving it to white people who didn't get into Harvard. Half of it's nonsense or self-contradictory, a lot of it's firmly in the "won't happen and would be a disaster if it did" category, but it does make me wish Dems could articulate a vision of change that's not so damn knob-twiddling.

Now that more of the election numbers are in, it looks like Harris did better than she could have, and far outran what one could reasonably expect Biden would have. Harris outperformed her national result in swing states, plausibly saved the Dems multiple Senate seats, did better than most other incumbents globally in recent elections. Also, Biden was sitting on internal polling numbers that were just catastrophic, it really takes Biden's decision to stay in from "bad in hindsight" to "what was he even thinking?!"

It really does seem like there were a lot of voters splitting tickets for bizarre or incoherent reasons. AOC did an interesting thread about the reasoning of AOC/Trump voters. A lot of people really want a firebrand and aren't that interested in the specifics.

Trump also seems to have a unique ability to turn out voters so disinterested that they won't even bother to check a box downballot when they've already shown up to vote for him. No wonder pollsters have had an impossible time calibrating those likely voter models.

Biden is of course shaking hands with Trump and planning an orderly transition instead of drone striking Mar-a-Lago or something, concluding (correctly) that you can't save America's democratic institutions by preemptively destroying them first. If America recognizably survives the first term of the Party of Trump, it will be because its institutions are more robust (or at least more complicated) than that, and also because Trump is not that competent and will probably continue to never take the job seriously while being a spectacularly bad manager. And also because of a lot of individual decisions made along the way. We are all, of course, in for it.

Americans have voted and it seems our President will once again be this guy. A lot of it seems to come down to "when there's inflation, some Americans will just flip the lever". (People hate unemployment, too, when it happens to them, but inflation happens to everyone.) But lot of it comes down to (however little it conforms to my taste) "Trump is liked, and Harris is not". There was a lot of ticket-splitting this election in Trump's favor: North Carolina is most notable for Dems winning five of six state-wide races while Harris lost, Dem Senators won Michigan and Wisconsin while Harris lost. It seems like Casey will lose Pennsylvania, but that remains as of yet too close to call long after the Presidential race in the state was called for Trump. Arizona hasn't been called, but Trump is likely to win and Lake likely to lose.

Harris 2024 did worse than Biden 2020 among virtually every cross-section. It was broad-based. Gen X have taken their place on the Boomer-throne as the generation that utterly prevents America from having anything nice. (Seniors have actually cooled a hair on Republicans because they might actually gut Social Security and Medicare this time and also tried to kill them all for the sake of the economy during COVID.) But Gen Z men in particular are also taking a hard-right turn. With luck like this America's going to end up with SK-level gender politics, which is real, real worrying.

Not doing a "reasons why Harris lost" breakdown (or even a "why the polls underestimated Trump"; they did by a little, but it doesn't seem that interesting, likely voter models just continually struggle with the guy's unique appeal). Nate Silver does a good enough job with that. Some of it's real "what can you possibly do about that?" stuff. Biden certainly should have stepped away from running for reelection much earlier. (And maybe he should've made a different choice for VP.) I'm hearing second-hand that some people cited the lack of a competitive Dem primary as a cause for them voting Trump over Harris, and that seems an insane (and probably dishonest) reason to prefer Trump over Harris. But people hate having the establishment govern their choices, and there are clearly no sly sophisticates trying to arm-twist anyone into thinking that voting for Trump is a good idea. Biden saved America from the disaster that was Trump, only to deliver America right back into the disaster that is Trump.

Harris should have gone on Rogan, I guess. In hindsight, seems like it couldn't have made matters worse.

2025 seems poised to be worse than 2017. And the years of the first Trump administration were a mess, despite starting in relatively sunny circumstances. This isn't the first Trump administration, but it is the first Presidential administration of the Party of Trump. This Trump administration won't (sometimes repeatedly) stock State, Defense, and Nat Sec posts with inveterate Trump-haters (apparently) who resist his (allegedly) brilliant ideas. Also, this Trump is really not holding it together physically or mentally and 2016 Trump didn't really have it together in the first place.

Moloch has seen its shadow and we're slated for four more years of chaos. Unfortunately, we will see how it goes.

It was a warm day today, but windy, and it seems all the trees in Cambridge that were late to the party decided to shed all their leaves at once. Pretty, but seemed like enough sharp, swirling edges to be downright perilous.

I had a dentist appointment today, which went all right.

I have so many things to ramp up on at work. Emscripten is confusing. WebGPU is fun but graphics programming is always confusing. Another of my more senior teammates is leaving the team, moving on to another thing at Google that's a great fit for him, but I'll miss working with him. So much churn this year.

Other links:

My brother now has an Etsy store for his wildlife photography.

Bop Spotter (h/t SMTM)

Cargo airships might be a big deal soon. Nifty if it pans out.

The Halloween events continue. Friday, there was the Character Day parade at Erica's school (a K-3 event, so her last time participating). This evening, Julie took Erica to a haunted house at Harvard, which apparently Erica found more than a bit scary.

This afternoon, we all went to see The Wild Robot, which was pretty fun.

Work has been pretty busy, as my team has been ramping up on phase two of a big project. Speaking of which (belatedly, I missed mentioning this here earlier), the end of the first phase of that means a good chunk of our work has been publicly released, it's out in alpha on Android Jetpack (announcement blog post), the cross-platform C++ core is on GitHub here. I'm doing a lot more web graphics studying at work, spent some of my time last week on the WebGPU codelab here, which was pretty interesting, it's a powerful API.

The quotes attributed to Trump in that Atlantic piece are just insane: "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had", "You guys [American soldiers] are all just killers", "It doesn't cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!" [arguing why he should stiff the family of a murdered soldier whose funeral he'd offered to pay for]. It's all just lies, they'll say. People who say these things about Trump (people like his former chief of staff, other chief of staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, other Defense Secretary, Vice President, Secretary of State, other Secretary of State, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Education, communications director, other communications director, other other communications director, various advisors, personal lawyer, White House lawyer, etc.) are just disloyal, deranged, and bad. (And Trump staffing his administration with so many such people reflects badly on anyone other than Trump himself.)

The whole thing is insane. It's insane this election even seems so close. And seems on pace to get even crazier. And for all I know it's just a lead-in to another nightmare Trump administration. (Looking back through my old posts a bit reminds me of just how chaotic it was, and also how much more I had to say in my writing.)