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vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

For anyone already acquainted with emmylua/vscode-lua I'd recommend using my type declarations for mpv—need to push some commits for recent changes but it's completely functional

https://github.com/disco0/mpv-types-lua

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vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

The cookbook[0] has some good examples, I went with the state machine parser as a base for highlighting in mpv's console (mpv scripting has been the main focus of my fennel use, mostly rewriting existing code)

[0] https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel/wiki/Cookbook

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vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

iirc he had multiple accounts—I believe the Gislaine Maxwell trial tracker one that "blew up" was purchased from another user and was artificially boosted in some way causing the ban. I think he was also using them to gas his substack?

Someone feel free to correct me, was around of the related twitter drama but going off of memory here

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vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

"The End of the End of History"[0] is a thing, so it's only a matter of time now for his response /s

[0]: https://bungacast.com/book/

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vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

> Is there still a lot more stuff he's going to release, or has released, just without much fanfare?

According to the The Snowden Archive[0] about 400 documents were published through publications out of a total 50,000 documents Snowden collected. As for the rest—First Look Media (parent company of The Intercept) shut down access to its archive, as well as the team set up to handle them, in 2019:

"First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news outlets had “ceased reporting on it years ago,” The Intercept had decided to “focus on other editorial priorities” after expending five years combing through the archive.[1]"

Very cool! Poitras and Greenwald apparently retain full copies, as well as the outlets that received them in the first place I'd assume.

As a last note I'll leave a medium post by Barrett Brown[2], an excellent reporter whose series of columns in the Intercept received the National Magazine Award—incidentally he burned it on a livestream in protest against First Look Media's decision to shut down their Snowden archive (got to see it live, the YouTube video is private now though unfortunately)

[0]: https://www.cjfe.org/snowden

[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-intercept-shuts-down-acces...

[2]: https://barrettbrown.medium.com/why-the-intercept-really-clo...

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Some more recent academic work on the CCC recently started reading—The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War: Strange Bedfellows, Routledge [2016]

Partial summary from libgen description:

>This book calls into question the conventional wisdom about one of the most controversial episodes in the Cold War, and tells the story of the CIA's backing of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

>For nearly two decades of the early Cold War, the CIA secretly sponsored some of the world’s most feted writers, philosophers, and scientists as part of a campaign to stop Communism from regaining a foothold in western Europe and Asia. By backing the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA subsidized dozens of prominent magazines, global congresses, annual seminars, and artistic festivals. When this operation―QKOPERA―became public in 1967, it ignited one of the most damaging scandals in CIA history. Ever since, the prevailing assumption has been that the CIA, as the Congress’s paymaster, manipulated a generation of intellectuals into lending their names to pro-American, anti-Communist ideas in exchange for prestigious bylines and plentiful grants. Even today, a cloud hangs over the reputations of many of the intellectuals associated with the Congress.

>This book tells the story of how a small but determined group of anti-Communist intellectuals in America and Western Europe banded together to fight the Soviet Union’s cultural offensive. They enlisted one of the CIA’s earliest recruits to their cause―and they persuaded the CIA to foot their bill with virtually no strings attached. The CIA became a bureaucratic behemoth with an outsized influence on American foreign policy, but it began as a disorganized and unconventional outfit desperate to make inroads on all fronts against a foe many believed would ignite a nuclear war by 1954. When Michael Josselson, a recruit from the CIA’s Berlin office, pitched a proposal for what became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, senior officials were thus willing to gamble $50,000 on the venture. And when the Congress proved effective in enlisting some of the twentieth century’s most prominent intellectuals, senior CIA officials championed QKOPERA as the centerpiece of the Agency’s efforts to woo the non-Communist left.

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

zinit did wonders for my config, would highly recommend:

https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Both orgs have absolutely done what's right many, many times, but 100% is a little high.

I'd highly recommend checking out All EFF'd Up [0] in The Baffler—it's quite long, but below is a relevant bit for both orgs:

> Leading EFF’s invasion of Washington, D.C., was Jerry Berman, who had been a top ACLU attorney and founder of ACLU Projects on Privacy and Information Technology ... Berman was a Beltway insider who in the 1980s was at the center of a push to turn the ACLU into a big business lobby and an ally of intelligence agencies and right-wing political interests. Among other things, the Berman-era ACLU defended Big Tobacco from regulations on advertising and worked with the National Rifle Association to fight electronic collection of arrest data by the Department of Justice for background checks to deny firearms licenses. Among Berman’s personal achievements: working with the CIA on an early version of a bill that criminalized disclosing the names of CIA agents—a law that was later used to prosecute and jail CIA officer John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the Agency’s use of waterboarding as a torture and interrogation technique.

> ... Berman also helped craft the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a controversial law that gave the government power to grab electronic metadata from cellphone calls, email, and other digital communications without a warrant, which is now routinely used to collect user data from companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook...

> Freedom to Surveil

> ...His signature achievement had been collaborating with the FBI to draft and rubber-stamp a law that expanded FBI surveillance into the digital telecommunications infrastructure. Known as the “Communications Law Enforcement Assistance Act”—or CALEA—the 1994 law required that telecommunications companies install specialized equipment and design their digital facilities in a way that made it easy to wiretap.

> ...

> When EFF’s role in crafting this surveillance law came out, outraged members of its cyber-libertarian base cried foul. EFF, they’d been led to believe, was created to push back against government control of the internet...

> ...

> In reality though, the outrage stemmed from a basic confusion about what EFF was created to do. EFF emerged as a lobby for the budding internet industry...

[0] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine (Ctrl/Cmd+F "Buying Silence" to skip the intro portion)

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I’d say section on the history of its creators/Silicon Valley is more important to understanding the problem, but here’s a couple of relevant paragraphs:

> One likely explanation, Glaser reasoned, was that most of these groups depended on funding from the very same corporations that they should be criticizing. Over the past years, EFF has taken millions in funds from Google and Facebook via straight donations and controversial court payouts that many see as under-the-radar contributions. Hell, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s foundation gave EFF at least $1.2 million.

> But the reason for EFF’s silence on the Facebook surveillance and influence scandal goes deeper—into the business model of the internet itself, which from the outset has framed user privacy as being threatened by ever-imminent government censorship, as opposed to the protection of users and their data from wanton commercial intrusion and exploitation. Put simply, the lords of the internet care very little about user privacy—what they want to preserve, at the end of the day, is their own commercial license against the specter of government regulation of any kind.

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

> But Wardle found that in some edge cases, a bug in the Taiwan-censorship code meant that instead of treating the Taiwan emoji as missing from the phone's library, it instead considered it an invalid input. That caused phones to crash altogether, resulting in what hackers call a denial-of-service attack that would let anyone crash a vulnerable device on command.

Which was also a bug—the conditions of which's existence are manifestly political (which I have zero desire/intent to defend here), but nonetheless an Apple-side bug that was patched eventually

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

> 90s games were more advanced than 80s by a lot but still immediately competitive, no long story to get into, quick play, simple menu, no config, just straight into the game, same settings for everyone and 100% ability comparison. The high score thing grew into profiles with badges now and no one cares anymore.

> The creativity put into the games made them a cult too, I mean we are talking about a 1995 game in 2021. I think it is unique to its time, games like these define that 90s futuristic grunge subculture that lingered to show up in The Matrix although a bit modernized.

We're in a different era, different technology and culture conditions, etc. agreed—however I'll say that there are games which hit on these points, they're just not going to be in the same sentence as Mario Kart or Smash

e.g. Cruelty Squad [1], released this year: experimental art game, excellent mechanics—behind somewhat intentionally deceiving (postinternet?) aesthetics—maybe best described as quake-hitman-immersive-sim, building cult fanbase, suprisingly high reviews from mainstream for what it is [2][3]. (goty for me so far, actually)

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/

[2] https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22596014/cruelty-squad-immer...

[3] https://www.nme.com/reviews/game-reviews/cruelty-squad-revie...

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

> But Albania can finance rigorous teaching of science

> USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former Eastern Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on inefficient solutions.

You're not wrong. Financialization of education continuing down from secondar to primary education, commodification of students—I think those are a bit better descriptions of the issue beyond "funding cuts" personally. Its incredibly easy to make things inefficient (or efficient at something else [0]) when quality/efficiency slowly fades from the conciousness of those in charge.

I'd say the more important thing is that there are large failures here, they were building before "Extreme progressive Liberals" (which depending on how I read that I can agree with, from the left even). Saying this as someone who was a STEM kid in high school, took AP Calc at 15, etc.—I'm more mixed on the more static curriculum as described earlier, its not as important here tho

[0] Like cranking out Amazon employees

<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-communit...>

"""

Writer Erika Hayasaki visited Cajon High. Here’s what she found:

A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS” were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words “Logistics Final Project,” and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s “14 Leadership Principles.” Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.

...

A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on their clothing as they memorize Amazon’s leadership principles (which, it is worth noting, also include “Ownership” and “Think Big,” injunctions that hold merit for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”

"""

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

> Is some of the funding tied to entities that are under the control of the CCP?

Per Sam Husseni's reporting[0]:

"""

Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”

Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000 (1). These two sources thus total over $103 million. (See Fig).

Another $20 million came from Health and Human Services ($13 million, which includes National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control), National Science Foundation ($2.6 million), Department of Homeland Security ($2.3 million), Department of Commerce ($1.2 million), Department of Agriculture ($0.6 million), and Department of Interior ($0.3 million). So, total U.S. government funding for EHA to-date stands at $123 million, approximately one third of which comes from the Pentagon directly. The full funding breakdown is available here and is summarized by year, source, and type, in a spreadsheet format.

"""

If this was a lab leak, it's an international issue caused by the hubris of at least two countries working together on a footgun (e.g. at Wuhan lab, and Ralph Baric's previous gain of function research on bat coronaviruses [1])

[0] https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ec...

[1] https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1361175723407527939

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

People (read: Twitter users)[0] have discussed the parallels between Maoist/Marxist theory and both Agile and extreme programming—albeit less fever-dreamy

[0] A couple of said theory tweets, from memory

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1352450003231506432

https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1323758677099270147

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

HN: You can skip the ad reads!

Cum Town Listener: Why?

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Coincedentally,

  The system distro is where all of the magic happens. The sytem distro is a containerized Linux environment where the WSLg XServer, Wayland server and Pulse Audio server are running.
  ...
  The system distro is based on the Microsoft CBL-Mariner Linux. This is a minimal Linux environment, just enough to run the various pieces of WSLg. For details on how to build and deploy a private system distro please see our build instructions. [0]

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg#wslg-system-distro

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vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

stuxnext.js

Submissions

I wrote a GameBoy game in TypeScript [video]

Writing a Mutation Engine and Breaking Aimware

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