Elf M. Sternberg

"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer, and the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind." — Hannah Arendt

The bottom line is Trump sacrificed 8 American lives (& counting) and more than 1,000 Iranian lives (& counting) for nothing. He hurt the US & global economies, destabilized the Middle East, & will pull out with the same Iranian regime in power. There's no silver lining.

A senseless, criminal waste

I have finished 400 stories and five novels. I haven't been able to finish anything since COVID tried to kill me. If it's a habit, it's one easily destroyed by circumstance.

Comic Books - TV Tropes Agent 327: This series started out as a parody of James Bond, but mostly the campy 1960s version. For many people unaware of these movies they may not notice the parody element anymore. Similarly the ...

How do you reference AFOB (Arm Falls Off Boy) from the Legion of Superheroes and NOT mention Pull Yourself Together Man from the Legion of Superfluous Heroes?
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwik...

These people think so illogically. Trans women were transed out of being the gay men they ‘really’ are, and, next they’re going to go prey on WOMEN in bathrooms??

“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

Every church needs one not wholly sanctified member to review their communications for missteps those innocent as doves may not notice.

Well, now you've pretty much guaranteed that they're going to attack us.

A 2023 Subaru Solterra EV and a 2019 Rad Citybike. "Behold my all-electric fleet!"

Remember: the Trump Administration has made it harder to buy or sell either of these. I'm lucky right now in that I don't have to care about the price of gasoline.

Nobody looks kindly on the murderous regimes of history. The Republicans will be branded with the same reputation as the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, the Cultural Revolution, or the Holodomor.

It takes an expression and value, and returns a tuple of the result of (the expression over the value, the value), which it sends to the receiving expression, and is exactly what the `printf` command needs.

I'm sure it's obvious to some small slice of smug Haskellers, but man did it confuse me.

Pointfree assumes a value will be passed in to be worked on. But it only gets the value once; here, it's needed twice, once to calculate the length, and once to append it to the result.

That `=<<` is the trick.

I encountered this excessively clever bit of Haskell this weekend. It takes a string and returns the string prefixed with its length:

pktLine = printf "%04s%s" =<< toHex . (4 +) . length

It's excessively clever because the variable it works on isn't specified. It's "pointfree". It's evil.

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-back-and-enjoy-c-1819576375/

BYD redraws global EV map, overtaking Tesla in 20 markets Chinese company has taken risk and acted fast in expanding beyond home market

The beginning of the end. BYD surpasses Tesla as the most-sold electric vehicle manufacturer in the world: asia.nikkei.com/business/aut...

LLM-Driven Large Code Rewrites With Relicensing Are The Latest AI Concern The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the 'developers...

AI Licensewashing. Every want to use some code, but don't like the license? Just have an AI re-write it for you; the code is now "plausibly deniably" whatever you want to license it as. www.phoronix.com/news/Chardet...

YouTube video by LightningOnDemand Firing the Tesla Tower as a Plasma Cannon

"Let's just start with the normal, unboosted one million volt discharge to establish a baseline." He goes on to show a lightning-resistant top won't save you as he melts the interior of a Ford Econoline van.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoGb...

If you assumed your AI chats couldn't be used against you in court, think again A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that prosecutors could access the Claude chat transcripts of a finance startup founder accused of fraud.

In a ruling that should surprise absolutely nobody, a federal judge has ruled that asking an AI for legal help does not qualify for client-attorney privilege, and the questions asked can subject to subpoena: www.businessinsider.com/claude-chat-...

Filesystems are having a moment a digital garden by daniel phiri

The majority of AI use is in the coding space, and coders need to maintain context. Suddenly, having your nerds know what "a file" is turns out to be really important:
madalitso.me/notes/why-ev...

This kicks ass. Want to learn Rust? You have four days: google.github.io/comprehensiv...

'Ridiculous': Kristi Noem's 28-year-old aide wasted millions on unusable ICE vehicles A former deputy to outgoing Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saddled the department with millions of dollars in wasted funding for vehicles that cannot be used.U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcem...

Grift: Noem's DHS awarded a crony with a $2.5 million contract to supply it with Chevy Tahoes wrapped in ICE logos. The problem is that ICE agents refuse to drive marked cars, so the agency has a small fleet it cannot use: www.rawstory.com/madison-shea...

I just learned Keanu Reeves has a band, so you have to learn that too Did you know Keanu Reeves has a band? Me neither, but I honestly think playing bass might be his true calling.

Well, now you have something fun to learn about.
boingboing.net/2026/03/09/i...

Study: SARS-CoV-2 RNA found in 39% of hospital air samples during outbreaks, despite good ventilation

Uh-oh: "During surges in COVID activity, not even 5ACH standards may be enough to protect patients and staff in hospital settings." www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/stu...

Right? Like how is this not "The Canadians Tax?"

The case of the disappearing secretary What the last big wave of automation tells us about the one that's on its way

This: "The computerization of office records turned everyone into a secretary, whether they were good at it or not. LLMs for coding will turn every programmer into a manager whether they want it or not." rowlandmanthorpe.substack.com/p/the-case-o...

Why the Hell Are Trump Officials Panic-Buying Armageddon Bunkers? Completely separately, we are on the tenth day of the ever-expanding Iran war.

I can think of at least one reason

If it's a "lie" that diverse groups can respectfully engage with each other, then every city is living a lie, and every Jew, every Hindu, every Shinto, every Buddhist is as much of a target of Ogle's bigotry as every Muslim.

This man is a danger to America.

The candidates list of priorities:
- OnlyFans creators in FL would have see a 50% income tax
- Uniforms for all public school students
- National Guard to forcibly eject all homeless people from the state
- $50K tax on out-of-state buyers looking for a home; calls it "The Mamdani Tax."

Ugh, this is gross. It lets men off the hook, says they're not responsible for their mistreatment of children... the children are!

Every time I read about men being the logical, task-oriented half of the human race, something like this comes along to make my skin crawl.

This is totally my entire body of work.

Putin's Turn to East Boosts Demand for Chinese Language Expertise and Fears of China - Jamestown Executive Summary: Booming demand for Russians who know Chinese, a product of Putin’s turn to the East, is exacerbating long-standing fears that Moscow will lose control over lands east of the Urals. ...

"In Putin's Russia, those who want to leave are learning English or German, and those who want to stay are learning Chinese." jamestown.org/putins-turn-...