I was at RustWeek in Utrecht this week and saw some interesting talks. Though traveling to and from Utrecht (and to Den Bosch over the weekend) took longer than normal because of repairs-in-progress on the rail network. Plenty of time for a healthy dose of pieces from the internet.
A few recommended sessions from RustWeek. In due time each of these will probably be uploaded as its own video on YouTube.
- Obsessive Optimization with String Interning by arya dradjica
- Knock, knock. Race condition! Who's there? — A refactoring story by Stefan Baumgartner
- Scaling up Rust development at the Dutch Electoral Council by Mark Janssen
- Untrusted data in Linux — How Rust is going to save us by Greg Kroah-Hartman
- Between Computer Code And Legal Code: Open Source's Influence by Æva Black
Will Donald Trump be allowed to destroy his records by Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker.
There's too much going on in the moment for me to meaningfully assess the exact stage of democratic deterioration the United States is in, maybe we'll only ever know in ten years time, but this attack on the Presidential Records Act is a clear indicator of the comprehensive contempt for democracy.
Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs by Vicki Boykis.
The same kind of hobby vibes I'm going for with my own pocket archive project I've been slowly chipping away at.
De koeien van de kolonist by Atef Abu Saif in De Groene Amsterdammer.
A touching personal account that shows how fucked up the Israeli-imposed prison is on the West Bank. It reminded me of the recent two-part series by The Guardian, In search of Palestine, that documents what daily life looks like under Israeli occupation. In the first episode, Matthew Cassel starts in Hebron and moves to Ramallah. In the second episode, he travels from Bethlehem to Nablus.
Digital autonomie: wat kunnen organisaties NU doen by Bert Hubert.
Some straightforward, practical tips by one of the leading voices in the Netherlands regarding digital sovereignty.
Vermogensaanwasbelasting is de juiste oplossing voor box 3 by Ruud van den Dool, Aart Gerritsen, Bas Jacobs in ESB.
Elon Musk ridiculed the unique tax on unrealized capital gains that has passed parliament in the Netherlands recently. And there have been many other outspoken critics too. The government seems to be giving in to all this pressure, but this group of economists makes a tight case in favor of the tax.
Only taxing gains when they're realized (i.e., when an asset is sold) comes with many economic disadvantages. It seems like the classic story where the general population feels like they're losing, while the status quo is actually a net worse situation for median wealth citizens. But it's much harder to communicate a policy-shifted balance of wealth distribution versus a simple "this is how your absolute tax amount changes" on societal scale.
Project Glasswing: an initual update by Anthropic.
They admit themselves as well that many currently available models are effective in finding large numbers of software vulnerabilities. Across all of these it comes down to harness engineering and the resources to burn lots of tokens.
Gewelddadig mensbeeld by Haroon Sheikh in De Groene Amsterdammer.
Are many of Silicon Valley's executives and thinkers mostly enamored with the philosophical ideas of humanity's inherent violence, technological fatalism, and the heroic individual? They sure do seem to cite a certain school of European philosophers more often. Though they also appear to only attain very incomplete interpretations, almost as if only selecting that which supports their own interests.
How to fight an economic war by Edward Fishman in Foreign Affairs.
If you try to understand the complex systems of the real world thoroughly enough, it starts to feel like elaborately world-built science fiction of its own.
I fear we're stuck in a local optimum when arguing for increased sovereignty and the de-risking of economic chokepoints. It's not difficult to see how, in a future situation where everyone is more self-sufficient, it also becomes less self-destructive to provoke conflict. Though it feels "against the geopolitical trend" to argue for increased interdependence. Almost like a fool's quest. It's the basic cooperation dilemma through and through.
Similar to how it's prohibitively expensive for European countries to try to catch up and substitute American hyperscalers and AI labs, the US finds itself in a situation where it's impossible to catch up to China's dominance in clean energy tech.
The end of this article acknowledges some of the implications beyond the ones right in front of our noses of the push for more economic sovereignty.
Policymakers routinely worry about the economic fragmentation that could result. In these pages in 2023, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the world economy could split into rival blocs, reversing decades of integration. But history suggests that blocs are hardly the worst possible outcome. The greater danger is chaotic fragmentation—the kind of every-nation-for-itself scramble that shattered the world economy in the 1930s and led to World War II. By contrast, during the Cold War, the dense economic ties of the Western bloc enabled the fastest economic expansion in American history.
Macron, the 'true pan-Africanist', really, really wants to come to the cookout in The Continent.
I came across The Continent, an African newspaper that's distributed as PDFs on WhatsApp. This recent issue has some analysis on France's continuing awkward involvement with many African countries that used to be colonies. I find it very hopeful to read fresh perspectives from smart African individuals on this weird situation.
The Firewall is a new journalist watchdog in the Netherlands that focuses entirely on Big Tech; investigating its power and influence on society. They're also running a legal activist wing, with the aim to force change via court cases. It's spark was the acquisition of DigiD (the Dutch identity system for citizens) by an American company.