Sam's L33t Journal

Went home with Julie and Erica for Thanksgiving. Quick trip this time, but was great to see the family. Melissa's family was in town, too.

This year I am thankful that of all the terrors at humanity's doorstep, some of them have been put off so far, and some could continue to.

Best reading from this weekend is Noah Smith's post No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land, a really cogent takedown of (including nominally-"decolonial") ethnonatialism.

The latest political news is Joe Biden's blanket pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. It is sad that we have come to this, and despicable that Biden is reneging on his promises. Unlike Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law who he pardoned for witness tampering and then nominated for an ambassadorship, Hunter Biden surely wouldn't have been prosecuted but for his association with the President in question. But say, maybe Biden should just go ahead and pardon the January 6 criminals himself at this point. Surely they are more worthy: After all, not only their prosecutions but also their crimes would not have happened but for Trump.

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.

This past weekend we took Erica to the Boston MFA. She didn't have as much patience for exploring the galleries as I would have liked, but was very interested in the possibility of art classes. Erica had her birthday party at the climbing gym the previous weekend, which was fun.

Other stuff has been a lot.

So instead of talking about any of that, I'd like to talk about Awesome Games Done Quick, which was a few weeks ago, but was a real highlight then and since. It was full of great stuff: A run of Tunic, a charming game where the speedrun glitches seem like just more of the game's secrets. Super Mario 64 on the drums. An NES game originally controlled with R.O.B. instead controlled with D.O.G. A run of Bluey: The Videogame (hooray!). An even faster Super Metroid TAS. A Mario Maker 2 glitch showcase featuring a favorite streamer. One quarter's worth of Arkanoid. It's a week long marathon so obviously that's not the half of it, there's a lot to enjoy in the full playlist.

Last weekend was warm, but by mid-week trick-or-treating it was getting chilly, to the point that I was getting out my winter jacket and putting on the longjohns (winter coziness tech that's a go-to for me from like November to May). But then this weekend was pretty warm again.

Saturday, I took Erica climbing while Julie went for a bike ride. Played some Mario Wonder in the morning. In the evening, went on a date with Julie to Oak Bistro in Inman while Erica spent some time with Mary at home.

Today, Julie took Erica to see the Frozen stage play, while I had a quiet day.

I tried to write a post for my essay blog, but things didn't really come together. But have some interesting links that have been rattling around my head for a few days:

• An interesting review of the book Going Infinite, about about-to-be-jailed fraudster SBF
• "The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism", about why all complex organisms spend so much effort to pass on only half of their genes, which goes beyond the first-take explanation about the downsides of cloning

I'm tired. Tomorrow we're going to Cleveland before Thanksgiving, assuming nothing last-minute derails our plan.

Last weekend I took kid to the ICA, which was fun. They have a youth membership now, where one adult gets in free.

It's been a quiet week at work with many people out. And I took off today because Erica has a half-day before Thanksgiving break.

I've joined the Better Boston Mastodon. Will see if that turns out to be fun. I don't know if more or less of a focus on a specific community-of-interest makes for a better Mastodon server (for me in particular or in general).

Twitter chaos continues. Not that the site will necessarily fall over immediately, but it sounds like the company is very much in trouble revenue-wise and it's hard for me to imagine just how bad the effect of ~75% attrition would be at a company doing large-scale software infrastructure. And this is with the context of just how bad much smaller levels of churn can be for complex software projects. It's possible that Musk is a good front-man (or maybe "con-"), but the sort of rocket-engine-like CEO where there needs to be a layer of middle-management bureaucracy very focused on directing that energy and shielding the rest of the company. And, in some cases, misdirecting the CEO into thinking that's not what's going on. Musk's Twitter doesn't have that, obviously.

Much other news remains terrible. I'm sure I had some coherent thoughts at some point.

The essays in the first edition of Asterisk are very interesting. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (and formerly Slate Star Codex) fame did one on the science and psychology of wine expertise. But I was most interested by this article on the history of nuclear (de)escalation.

The news this week has me tremendously stressed. Russia is attempting to conquer a country the US (and of course the Russians themselves, not to neglect that aspect) guaranteed security in exchange for giving up possession of Soviet nuclear weapons. This is a humanitarian crisis and a great crime in its immediate consequences, but it's also the end of the current post-Soviet order, maybe post-WWII-order. The paradox of mutually assured destruction seems to be that the more certain the thread of mutual destruction is to deter crossing some specific clear line, the more irrelevant it is to deterring anything before that point. (If it turns out later that the exact location of the line is actually ambiguous, that's even worse.)

Texas is threatening to split up families as part of a monstrous attempt to disappear trans children. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health who worked tirelessly to help some of the world's poorest people, died suddenly at the age of 62.

The CDC today changed their mask guidelines, moving the emphasis further from containing COVID and limiting the suggestion for indoor mask mandates to the highest of three categories. Cambridge mask mandate is scheduled to end March 12. Somerville's is set to be reconsidered starting March 3 if test positive rate is lower than 1%, but it has not gotten that low yet (and has been moving up a hair).

I wish I had a better idea of the properties of the omicron BA.2 subvariant (given my assumption that we didn't get that one).

It seems like we're heading into the world where lots of people get COVID every year, and it's "only" about twice as bad as the flu in terms of immediate consequences. Except that's really horrifically bad for quite a lot of people, and we don't yet know the long-term consequences of COVID infection in general and repeated reinfection in particular, given that COVID seems to sometimes cause long-term neurological and cardiovascular damage.

I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write...

So here comes a flood of unrelated things.

Thanksgiving came and went. I made ~seven meals worth of food for the occasion. Bought gravy, green bean casserole, a stuffed turkey breast roast (to cook at home), small pies (pumpkin, apple, and pecan from Mariposa), and ice cream (cinnamon and maple walnut from Gracie's). My parents sent some cranberry chutney (my Thanksgiving fave). I made mashed potatoes (with buttermilk and celeriac puree), sweet potato casserole (with chopped dates and pecans and cultured butter and egg, topped with brown sugar and more pecans and marshmallows), buttermilk biscuits, honey-butter, cranberry sauce, and maple whipped cream. I did most of the food prep in advance so that the day of was just cooking the turkey and making sure things were ready at approximately the same time. Start cooking after breakfast, have a relaxing midday dinner, put off dessert until the late afternoon to the point where you're basically having a full dinner's worth of pie, that's the way to go! Then 3-5 days of leftovers, adding items as necessary to round things out (no soup this year, but I did make leftovers sandwiches and a sort of turkey stroganoff).

I spent some time this week watching various bits of testimony and the prosecution's closing statements from the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial, and the thing that struck me was what a relatively straightforward application of the law to the facts the verdict seemed to be. The felony assault statute in question didn't require intent or injury, just action that would reasonably cause someone to fear serious injury. The self-defense law and jurisprudence in question didn't allow someone to claim self-defensive in the midst of committing a felony. And the citizen's arrest statute that was in place at the time required "immediate knowledge" of someone committing a crime (not just vague suspicion that they'd maybe done something at some point) to justify detaining them by force (and even then only reasonable force).

Striking to compare that to what a convoluted process it was to actually get the law to be applied. (The first of three prosecutors to look at the case has now been criminally indicted for obstructing it, which is really unusual!)

And then in the news this week there's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the case that's going to overturn Roe, catapulting the country into a new political era that's going to be weirder than people expect (even given the expectation that it's going to be weirder etc.). I guess I can't rule out the whole range of outcomes, but I don't think "approximately uphold the central etc. of Roe/Casey etc." has the votes. "Zygotes have the same suite of constitutional rights as human adults" probably doesn't either (maybe three). But I think there's a really broad set of plausible outcomes in between. History in the making. :-/

Kid got her second COVID vaccine. Was much more crowded at the vaccine center than for the first one, we had to wait in line for about 90 minutes. The new variant will surely be here soon. We're looking forward to traveling for the holidays for the first time in a long time. We'll see we'll see we'll see.

On my mind today: This video essay about MrBeast's latest large-scale YouTube production. The guy is an entertainer of note for sure, a bit of a marketing genius.

Eristic improvements: Recognizing more words by sight, improved arithmetic skills, sounding out words some (in both directions).

Pretty dead this week. Eris has apparently been under more stress than usual for reasons I don't fully understand, but it's meant a lot of late nights in the past week and a few nights where I didn't get a four-hour block and was consequently wrecked. She's been extra particular and tempestuous. My parents, having heard of my plight, are sending me parenting books, which I expected I'd read a lot of before I became a parent.

I'm worried about the COVID numbers. Estimated infection rate is rising, and hasn't been this high on the way up since March 2020. It could be that vaccination means that speed of outbreak is not a crisis any more, but I'm worried that delta variant won't be the worst that we see. Would be nice if there isn't a high prevalence when Eris starts kindergarten in the fall. Pediatric vaccines this fall seem unlikely. The Tokyo Olympics look like they'll be interesting.

Europe is dealing with historic floods.

I enjoyed watching some of the end of SGDQ last weekend. The best part, I thought, was this blindfolded run of Mario 64. This one was a 70-star run, that is, a normal completion of the game as opposed to finding tricky ways of circumventing barriers to allow skipping huge chunks. Eris was also fascinated.

My friend kihou has launched a Kickstarter for their surreal-art-card TTRPG, Dreampunk. Check it out if you like improv storytelling, visually-inspired narrative games like Dixit, indie TTRPGS, and surrealism. Looks sweet!

Last weekend, I was in Cleveland for PyCon, so Erica got to spend the weekend with grandparents. The conference was really good this year. I very much enjoyed talking to people at the Google booth in the expo hall. The keynotes were phenomenal. Russel Keith-Magee gave the opening keynote on Python's "black swans", a fascinating look at the future of Python, how strategic research and development might be supported in open-source, and the history of Perth, Australia. And on Saturday (unfortunately not posted, at least not yet) Shadeed Wallace-Stepter shared his life story as a reformed criminal turned Python programmer and entrepreneur, then Python luminary Jessica McKellar gave a talk about the intersection between the tech industry and community and criminal justice reform, describing her work with The Last Mile and urging the audience to "hire people with records".

We had Shabbat dinner with my family that Friday, and Anne and Isaac joined us as well (Dan was unfortunately out of town). Was very nice to catch up. I had a great dinner with my colleagues on Saturday, and went to the conference dinner at the Great Lakes Science Center on Sunday night.

We returned to town Monday. Erica must have had an exciting weekend because she slept on the plane, took another nap at daycare Monday afternoon, then fell asleep on her own at about 8:30. Though after that she was back to her usual schedule of never going to bed.

Not much else going on.

We got in a little Ingress on Wednesday evening in Quincy Center. Been a while since I was down there, the new Quincy Center plaza is gorgeous. We're going to the Ingress Anomaly in Chicago in two weeks, which hopefully will be fun.

And I've been playing a bit of Magic. The prerelease tournament for the new Magic set, War of the Spark, was two weekends ago, and after a slow draw in the first match, I was just barely able to squeak by with a winning record overall. Thinking the office tournament for the set will be fun, too.

I am tired, busy, etc. I miss winter already.

It seems that the primary election season, more brutal than 2008, is finally (all but) over. (At least, I hope that e.g the weekend of July 18 isn't too interesting.) Sanders supporters, so full of predictions that Sanders would definitely win California but maybe not by enough, proved too full of wishful thinking even at that. Now we are in the extreme bitterness phase, with talk of stolen elections and pointed unimaginativeness about what obstacles their favored candidate might have faced in the general election had he prevailed. There's nothing more painful than a narrow loss. But I hope Sanders supporters will not forget that there are more elected positions than President. If they can still succeed in getting the sort of Congress that would pass the sort of policy they favor, what's Hillary Clinton going to do, veto it?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, there's lots of (albeit sometimes very reluctant) falling in line behind perspective nominee Donald Trump. There's still some rumbling about replacing Trump at convention. But with the "contested convention" option out of that way, this only leaves "blatant shenanigans". I see how that might be technically possible if Trump's delegate selection was so poor that there's a majority of Cruz delegates once you count Trump delegates that are secret Cruz supporters. If you have a majority of the delegates (most especially a majority of the rules committee), you can do whatever you want. But Trump's had a few uncontested primaries with nothing to focus on but delegate selection, so his collection of delegates can't be that bad at this point, can they? Plus that route would be even more suicidal for the GOP than the other available alternatives.

Not to say that the DNC is in any better shape. This election we'll find out whether it's worse for an American political party to have an outsider populist candidate win their presidential primary or almost win.

The recent massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando seems to have pushed all sorts of politics into overdrive, with Trump really, really doubling down on his anti-Muslim rhetoric. (The immediate aftermath of some terrible crime is really not the best time for making good political decisions, but I see why people who feel they are politically thwarted feel that they need to capitalize on the moment. It should go without saying that people whose politics I agree with are right to put political pragmatism ahead of concerns about propriety or rash action, and people whose politics I disagree with are "politicizing tragedy" out of sheer bloody-minded opportunism.) Obama's cogent response to this of course did not get as much media attention as Trump's trumpery, but he's right to point out that mere repetition of the phrase "radical Islamic terror" 1) doesn't really help fight terrorists 2) plays into the ISIS narrative that this is a war against Islam in general and that they represent Islam in general 3) makes Muslims worry that it's prelude to a government crackdown on Muslims in general, especially when a major party's presidential candidate is overtly in support of just that.