What I'm reading 9/24-10/1

2023-10-01

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a closet right-winger

  • "However, I have also become more estranged from what you might call the progressive political class over the past several years. One reason is that this class has rapidly become more left and less liberal — compare the Democratic presidential platforms of 2020, which began with a land acknowledgment, with Obama’s in 2012, which began by talking about the American Dream. I also strongly disagree with the left’s elevation of “misinformation” as a category of concern over free speech. There may also be some personality-driven dimensions to why I tend not get along with a certain type of of progressive personalty on social media, though Twitter rarely brings out the best in any of us."

Tech debt metaphor maximalism

  • "Tech debt, in its simplest form, is the time you didn't spend making tasks more efficient. When you think of it that way, it's obvious that zero tech debt is a silly choice."

How did "Defund the police" stop meaning "Defund the police"? - Why mainstream progressives have a strong incentive to 'sanewash' hard leftist positions

  • "The social weight of the subcultures I was involved in just clamped down on me."

  • "But the key thing about this is it's a social dynamic - that is, there's a strong social incentive to do this, because the pressure of guilt if you don't believe the right thing, or some version of it, is very strong, so you invent arguments for what other people believe, to explain why they're right, even though they don't seem to hold those positions themselves."

Why do we need modules at all?

  • "I am thinking more and more that if would be nice to have all functions in a key_value database with unique names."

Yamagami Tetsuya's Revenge

  • "Japan's peculiar arrangement was that of a powerful state run by an organizationally weak party that was heavily restricted by the postwar legal system. That arrangement meant that other powers had to be tapped by the LDP to get certain things done."

  • "When Yamagami's actions finally raised questions about LDP-Unification Church relations in 2022, half of the LDP members sitting in the House of Representatives turned out to have connections to the group."

YAML config file? Pain? Try Lua

  • "Also, you don't even have to mention you are using Lua as a configuration file—most likely, no one will really notice anyway."

Make systemd better for Podman with Quadlet

  • "Quadlet hid the complexity of running containers under systemd from users, making writing unit files from scratch much easier to maintain."