Last commit was a little over 11 months. There do seem to be a couple of signifiant security issues opened since then, with no response. Someone created a fork: https://github.com/brycehans/monica

Affordable housing tax credits are contingent on a tremendous amount of regulations and stipulations, including who ends up holding equity in the property (it's not easy to use these as passthrough vehicles to get personally rich), so the private lenders tend to be repeat players, often banks, who understand how to navigate the process. Among other things, I guess it's a way to outsource oversight, so that the government doesn't need to maintain a huge bureaucracy to police each and every development project. OTOH, the financing complexity comes at a cost; a significant fraction of the value of the tax credits pays for lawyers and accountants, rather than to actual construction.

I don't know if filmmaking subsidies are more lax or easier to game.

Also, I think using tax credit schemes, instead of direct payments, might be a way to obfuscate the cost of these programs from a legislative and political perspective; not unlike the Earned Income tax credit. Nominally speaking, tax credits reduce government revenues rather contribute to expenditures; the latter draws far more attention.

I don't remember if I read this advice or just intuited it myself (perhaps after some hard lessons), but it's a programming habit I've kept for as long as I can remember (I started coding in the 90s). If I feel rushed, e.g. someone looking over my shoulder, and I copy+paste something, it always leaves me with a sense of unease. It creates a memory & comprehension hole that sticks out like a sore thumb, even for seemingly simple snippets. You can't really be sure it's simple without stepping through it carefully, and simple can be deceptive because it's usually the interactions and assumptions wrt surrounding code that lead to surprises. Typing out code manually gives you time and space to consider the broader picture.

> Why, then, does his work not give me the ultimate frisson I get when I feel I am in the presence of creative greatness, and which constantly moves me as I read the pages of Leo Tolstoy? I think it is because in Tolstoy I know I am confronting fundamental truths, expressed in fiction that has grown organically out of human life, out of history, and out of the author's heart. In O'Brian, on the contrary, I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar.

From https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/03/biography (link posted elsewhere, though not before I had to resort to using ChatGPT to dredge it up).

For a full desktop session, X11 over TCP should be much faster just because each X11 client app has it's own TCP connection, whereas for SSH X11 forwarding every app is tunneled over a single TCP connection.

> I was reminded of a conversation I had with an American military intelligence officer who was having a supper of Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola at a Kigali bar.

> "I hear you're interested in genocide," the American said. "Do you know what genocide is?"

> I asked him to tell me.

> "A cheese sandwich," he said. "Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich."

> I asked him how he figured that.

> "What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?" he said. "Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where's humanity? Who's humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention?"

> I said I had.

> "That convention," the American at the bar said, "makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich."

From "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch.

Nail houses always lose. They have their services and access cut-off by private developers without any recourse to the courts. The nail houses exist only for the duration of arbitration proceedings over compensation for the property. FMV value is usually determined by prices before the area was considered for development, which in poor areas is a pittance. But in arbitration the villagers are merely postponing the inevitable.

Also, IIRC, nail houses are rare as outside cities private ownership of property was not common, at least into the early 2000s. (Not sure how common it is now.) And they only became a thing circa 2004 when China amended their constitution to require legal process for expropriation, but that process provides much fewer protections than it does in, e.g., the US.

At least until the 11th century, Muslim empires considered themselves inheritors of Greek intellectual culture. This at a time when Europeans had lost Greek literature and even the Greek language (Rome literally started to have trouble conversing with Constantinople centuries earlier). Europeans seem to consider Islamic civilization as a mere temporary steward of Greek culture, conveniently keeping its literature extant until it could be rightly restored to Europeans.

Yes, the shared western cultural heritage in Mongolia itself is now extremely attenuated. But that's much less true in Persia or other areas closer to the epicenter of western civilization--i.e. the Levant--some of which are closer, geographically and otherwise, than most of continental Europe, especially Western Europe.

Europeans have a bias when it comes to their inheritance--they only see the historical paths that lead to themselves. (This is a universal truism that applies to every culture.) But there were many other branches from the same origins, and other cultures only see the paths that led to their selves. Until recently North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia had their own memories of a Greek cultural heritage, albeit intermixed with other influences (as is the case with Europeans). But unfortunately the predominance of modern European culture and historical narratives, and tacit internationalization of a unique European claim, seems to have erased that memory. But the heritage exists nonetheless and can be reclaimed, the same way Europeans reclaimed their Greek cultural heritage in the late Middle Ages.

All of which is to say, a huge portion of the old world can claim "western civilization" as an inheritance, unless we narrowly define "western civilization" as being rooted sometime in the past millennia (and then ignore the the effect of European colonialism in bringing many other areas into the fold, some for the second time). And that's before delving into pre-history and the influence of Central Asian steppe culture, from which we get Western civilization's shared Indo-European linguistic and, arguably, even religious history (see, e.g., links between Judeo-Christian and Dharmic religions via Zoroastrianism).

Which isn't to say modern European culture has the same relationship as everywhere else touched by Mediterranean culture, or that Renaissance and Enlightenment ideals aren't important, pivotal contributions to modern "western" culture. History has attenuated, obscured, and partially erased the historical interconnectedness. But relative to, e.g., East Asian or Mesomerican culture, there's a strong argument that everybody from the Hindu Kush to Portugal, from Ethiopia to Moscow, have a deeply shared cultural history and inheritance and are rightly called "Western" in a meaningful sense.

I don't object to the existence of a western civilization, I just object to Europeans claiming it as a unique, or even uniquely formative, inheritance. When I read about Hindu nationalist claims to a third emergence of writing in the Old World, it seems they're so passionate only because there's the tacit belief that they don't have the same stake in western civilization as Europeans; that they're not otherwise equal heirs to a rich western culture. But they are, IMO.

Some sort of payment scheme is really the best, most durable option. The problem of mailing-lists and personal correspondence could be solved by an exclusion mechanism where the recipient effectively whitelists senders, explicitly or implicitly (e.g. whitelist a replying-sender automatically if a recipient initiates a conversation).

Many of those researchers, particularly the primary researchers and the individual(s) driving the prompts behind these big stories, have very advanced math degrees and experience. What this shows more than anything is how ML can augment expertise, the searching of solution spaces, and the connecting of dots between existing almost-there research.

But also what's left out is all the time wasted pursuing dead-ends. There's an obvious publication bias at play here, though we can't know how extreme without transparency.

Michael Bay is much more an action filmmaker than Nolan, and yet he also arguably has a much better feel for satiating people emotionally than Nolan. For the most part both make movies with greater appeal to men, but Nolan's more intellectual approach comes closer to being of cross-gender interest, IMO.

I wouldn't call Nolan's movies fantasy at all. At their core they're pure sci-fi, more than most sci-fi films. He starts with some curious bit of science (biology, physics, etc), rigorously maps out a story that sticks close to the science except for a single conceit, and builds a blockbuster around it with a dramatic structure that serves the exploration of the technical details more than the human drama. But Nolan has a unique style, and he's also clearly pursuing some very technical interests wrt movie making at least as much as the details of the story. So his movies are difficult to categorize beyond being, for most of his career, blockbuster-scale action flicks, for which he also has an excellent aptitude, which is still a skill, notwithstanding that it's considered crass.

Without having seen Odyssey, I assume it follows his same formula, except the core technical theme follows some obscure question (even to scholars) of culture or storytelling, a thread much more difficult to identify and follow because it more easily blends into the background (and foreground?), both for average viewers and Odyssey buffs alike.

The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.

I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.

musl libc specifically recommends using external feature detection a la autoconf, and is so opinionated about this that it refuses to add any identifying macros, like __GLIBC__.