Sam's L33t Journal

Was really nice going home for Thanksgiving, though I was feeling under the weather for the first part of the trip. Melissa and her family were also home for the holiday. Simon is four now.

We went out to see the second part of the film adaptation of Wicked, and it was pretty good. Not as good as the first half, but it's stuck adapting the weaker half of the musical after too long an intermission. Worth seeing if you liked the first half.

I started watching Pluribus. Really good. Vince Gilligan's shows have more thought and creativity put into individual shots than many shows put into entire seasons.

It seems the government shutdown is heading to an end after eight members of the Democratic caucus have broken with their party, and the shutdown deal currently contains some pretty heinous provisions, including an attempt to allow $500k payouts to Senators who participated in Trump's 2020 scheme to replace entire states certified election results with fraudulent ones. Which is absolutely insane corruption the likes of which would be a world-ending scandal under any non-Trump administration but is just par for the course now.

To me, this raises some interesting questions about why and (this second point seems a bit neglected) why now. After all, these the defectors all held the line before. Maybe they were waiting for critical mass, but at least someone changed their mind and could have (but didn't) do so earlier. Well:

1. Being seen to "fight hard" encourages voter turnout among the base, whether or not it accomplishes legislative goals. But now the 2025 election is over, and the 2026 election is a long way off. Even the defectors held off until after the election. They could have coordinated to defect earlier with probably no electoral consequences for them personally (for one thing, most are retiring, and the rest aren't up in 2026), but they didn't.

2. Republicans are in favor of destroying the federal government (even if perma-shutdown isn't their first choice of how) and are willing to inflict unlimited pain on the American people. So they wouldn't necessarily have budged even as Thanksgiving (and so on) was ruined, the economy actually dealt a huge blow, and damage dealt to state capacity that will take decades to repair. (David Brin has a similar take.) The 2025 election results certainly look bad for Republicans, but 2026 was already looking pretty bad for them, and making it look slightly worse for them doesn't necessarily make them more inclined to compromise. They also have primary elections to consider and their own base that doesn't want them to budge.

3. Even if House and Senate Republicans blinked, Trump alone is sufficient to hold the "House CR or nothing" line, they wouldn't have a veto-proof majority. Trump was already pushing Senate to abolish the filibuster and push through the House bill. Of course, abolishing the filibuster is something that Conservadems would hate. It would remove any reason for Republicans to negotiate with them now, or for a slim majority of actual liberals (if that ever happens) to negotiate with them later.

4. On the other hand, as sort of a alternative to that first point, it's possible that the defectors saw Mamdani win and regretted holding out until the election in the first place.

Yeah, the White House probably does need more event space. But if Biden or Obama's approach to that problem was to bypass all process and demolish an entire wing during a government shutdown as quickly as possible so as to present it as a fait accompli? The Republican reaction to that would definitely not be calm. And it's incredibly naive to think either the ballroom will be paid for entirely by donations or that the all donations nominally for the ballroom will go to that project, given the history of how responsibly Trump-affiliated nonprofits manage their donations.

Trump is also trying to get the DOJ to pay him $230M in recompense for prosecuting him for his obvious and egregious crimes. This includes asking for actual damages for legal fees he never paid and punitive damages which the law bars paying. The decisions on all of this will be made by people who were Trump's personal lawyers, including those defending him in these specific cases. This by itself seems a wild scandal, but it's just another day in (what's left of) the Trump White House.

There's also been talk about the supposed necessity of a third Trump term, term limits be damned. Of course this is trolling, but this is an administration that governs through trolling, stupidity of the plan (as after the 2020 election) is no barrier to the existence or seriousness of the attempt. Personally, I'll bite the bullet on the (admittedly still too contingent) prediction: If Trump isn't dead or something, they'll try the straightforward plan of just running and winning the Republican primary. And in that case, I think SCOTUS would say on 1st Amendment grounds, political parties can put forward the candidates they want, however foolishly (after all, eligibility rules theoretically could be changed, no matter how much a constitutional amendment is definitely not actually happening). And if he wins, will they want to rule in a way that amounts to "the Republican can't win"? I'd guess it would come down to some combination of "whether he's 'obviously ineligible' is a non-justiciable political question", "that's the responsibility of the Electoral College", and "the mechanism is impeachment". Of course, that would also require Trump to actually win, or for one of his alternative slate of plans to actually succeed.

Trump's also ordered the military to restart nuclear weapons testing. Don't know where to begin with that. Seems insane.

I wish the US didn't have so many factors of the political system involve the government threatening to blow itself (along with the US and maybe global economy) up every few months: The budget, the debt ceiling, "temporary" measures as key parts of various policy frameworks.

Meanwhile, Trump's demolished an entire wing of the White House to turn it into Mar-a-Lago 2. Apparently there's a really pressing need for event space, so it's a shame that Trump's inevitably going to fill that niche with tacky garbage. And it's insane to unilaterally demolish a WH wing during a government shutdown. Imagine the reaction if Obama did anything even remotely like that.

Still feeling like I'm not keeping up with what's going on. I'm doing some good cooking, though.

There was a second community meeting about the apartment building that's going to replace a falling-down ruin of a house in my neighborhood. The revised designs look pretty great.

There is an ongoing government shutdown because Republicans can neither compromise nor achieve unanimity within their own governing coalition. They've pasted "radical Democrat shutdown" across every government email and website, though. The shutdown hasn't prevented them from going on about which part of the US the government is allegedly at war with this week. Meanwhile, Trump's tasked a lawyer who has yet to prosecute a criminal case with making James Comey rue the day that he ever crossed Hillary Clinton. And Trump is rumbling about how he'll talk to the DOJ about a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell (who he doesn't remember and probably hasn't even heard about before, to take it from him).

Basically the last week it's been highs in the 80s, though it's early October.

I started reading The Magician's Nephew to Erica.

Some new people are joining my team at work. Looking forward to the organizational rebuilding.

My mom will be visiting town next weekend, for her high school reunion.

Erica seems to have entered an absurd questions phase, and her preferred question is "what if there was a [type of object] as big as the sun?" I do not understand her new obsession with solar-scale constructs. (What brand of toothpaste does the sun use? Solgate!)

The Somerville primary election was yesterday, so we have the pretty exciting news that we're going to get a new mayor. The current mayor got absolutely wrecked in the primary and didn't manage to make the cut to top-two. The general will be between two challengers who are both current city councilors. It will be really interesting to see how they present their ideas as they campaign head-to-head, much more interesting than if the general were mostly a referendum on the incumbent.

I finished (the first season; apparently it's renewed for a second and I can't wait, but the first season also feels like it stands on its own) watching Common Side Effects, that show is spectacularly great. It's an animated sci-fi story centering around a mushroom that can cure anything. Reminds me a hair of King of the Hill (no coincidence, Mike Judge is a producer and one of the voice actors) and Scavengers Reign (Joseph Bennett is also one of the creators), but also reminds me a lot of Pulp Fiction and Paranoia Agent. It's not a comedy, but it is quite funny in addition to dramatic. It has a somewhat caricature-esque sketch-artist style for the character designs, in addition to some lush scenery and creative psychedelia and a bit of surreal horror. Apparently a good way to do comedy drama is just have all of the characters be huge weirdos in one way or another. There are lots of interesting ways to be weird, and no one is really normal, after all.

Last weekend, went back to Cleveland with Julie to pick up Erica and meet some of my extended family for a family reunion. Was pretty great. Melissa was there, but Elliott and Simon were absent, since Simon's been traveling a bit rough lately and he was due to start a new preschool soon after.

On Wednesday, Erica started fourth grade, the two intro days followed by a four-day weekend.

On Saturday, I did a bunch of activities with Erica, including going to the Farmers Market and doing some cooking. We went on the tour of the Taza chocolate factory, which has been on my activity to-do list for a while, since that's very close to our house. I made cucumber salad, for which for some reason my mind kept trying to substitute a more nonsensical phrase.

Today, I baked ginger-lemon scones from the Flour cookbook with Erica, which she picked out as a cooking project. Turned out well.

We had an appointment this weekend to get our seasonal vaccines, but it was abruptly cancelled. I'm hoping that things will get sorted out. But the CDC seems to be in an insane state right now, and the government's vaccine policy seems to be at root straight-up in favor of more people getting sick.

(I'm reading A Wind in the Door to Eria and it's uh interesting timing in the context of Sec. Brain-Worm's comments about "mitochondrial challenges".)

I finished reading Watership Down to Erica, reading to her over video call in the evenings while she was on her trip. Great book, I'm very glad that I got around to reading it. It is simultaneously:

• A fantasy story where the main fantastical conceit is "what if rabbits had mythology?"
• A war story centering around the Battle of Arnhem with the twist that the protagonists are rabbits.
• A Tolkein-esque story told in the style of something translated from another language, pieced together and recorded from an oral tradition. (And that in large part as an extremely elaborate setup for a climactic bit where one of the protagonists gets the last-minute "you could give up and join me" speech from the big bad and rejects the offer in a way that otherwise would not be getting past the censors in a book intended for children.)
• A book where prose description of flowers is a surprisingly high percentage by volume.

Definitely understand why it's a classic.

On a possibly-related (but definitely a pretty big jump of a tangent) note, one of the thing that's been bouncing around in my head is some of the discourse around wild-animal welfare, centering around this recent post arguing against beekeeping and responses like this. It's interesting, but personally I think that post has intuitions that are wildly off from mine. Bees' lives seem like they'd be full of stimuli that would be particularly pleasant and non-aversive for bees. They routinely store surpluses, which gives them flexibility about when they gather food. Kept bees lose some of that surplus, but seem to gain quite a lot in exchange for that, and compared to most domesticated animals they're uniquely able to just leave if conditions are bad. There was also some discussion arguing the post was emblematic of the pitfalls of negative utilitarianism. Seems like there are a lot of contexts where it's easy to add (or multiply) up pains and sorrows and decide it would be preferable to succumb to the call of the void. I was also reminded of this good but really odd sci-fi short story, which took me a while to re-find based on my vague recollection and I link to without further context.

Also, it is really pleasant to stop and watch bees harvest. I've definitely spent a lot of time doing that this year.

Sandy Island Camp was nice this year, though Melissa and Simon unfortunately had to punt mid-week after kid got an ear infection and had some spectacularly rough nights. Erica was very independent-minded about getting to activities by herself. I really enjoyed dancing with her at the camp dances. The weather was pretty good. Saw some interesting wildlife, including a pileated woodpecker and some extremely successful spiders.

I didn't get as much reading done as usual. Too much distraction. I did read two books:

Polostan by Neal Stephenson - It was all right, but felt much less substantial than a lot of Stephenson's other books, in part but not just because it's much shorter. It's meant to be the start of a series, so maybe the publishers persuaded him to split up what would've been a much longer book. If so, I think it probably suffers for it.

Connectome by Sebastian Seung - Pretty good popular science introduction to the study of neural connectivity. Though the book might be a bit out of date, as it is from 2012. I wonder if there's a good more recent take on the subject, and I wonder whether any light will be shed on that by analogy from some of the more recent AI neural net stuff (especially the work on AI interpretability).

On a related note to that second book, I also finished the animated TV series Pantheon. Really good, probably one of the best sci-fi shows in recent years (and it's in really good company, even among animated shows specifically). If you have a hard time with time-skips in stories, you'll have to hold onto your butts at the end of this one. But I think it justifies it, it's a story about the singularity and it's fitting that the epilogue feels like taking a gravitational assist past a black hole. The ending is poignant and hopeful and tragic, and the choice that the protagonist, Maddie, considers at the end is fascinating. (Also David is best dad.)

On another related subject, this essay, The Void, contemplating what's really at the center, conceptually, of these new AI chatbot models has been sticking with me. (Also worth reading the follow-up here.)

SGDQ is this week, so that's fun! Erica is heading out for grandparent time with Julie's parents for the next two weeks, starting tomorrow. A lot is going on.

I finished reading Erica the rest of the Princess Academy series by Shannon Hale. There's definitely a whole lot to like about the series. I'm always looking for good stuff to read to Erica, so grateful to Melissa for recommending that one.

For our next book, we've started on Watership Down, which has been on my "I should read this sometime" list for a long time.

Speaking of rabbits, it seems to be a good time for them this year. I've never seen so many about in the neighborhood, especially near the Knox bike path out back of Kendall Square.