Jean Tessier > Recent Status Updates

Symbols, as opposed to strings. Strings represent data and have many methods for their manipulation and transformation. Symbols represent concepts and the only thing they really need is comparison. It makes no sense to take a substring of a symbol; that would be another, different symbol.

Regular expressions. I didn't know that ^ matches the beginning of any line in multiline strings (with the m suffix), and that $ matches the end of any line. I didn't know about the x suffix to insert spaces, newlines, and comments in regular expressions either.

Strings. The author recommends using double quotes most of the time. I have been using double quotes only when I need interpolation. Am I doing a bad?

Ruby's control structure discourage the use of the NOT operator. They try to keep things simple for humans to read and understand.

Syntax is not enough. Language communities adopt a common style over time. Basic formatting has broad rules, with guidelines on when to break them.

Over 30 pages of concrete advice on how to resist the Far Right. Most of it is immediately actionable. "Acts of valor within their measure," as Tolkien would say. (LOTR, book 5, chapter 10)

The Far Right in France has slowly acquired media empires to get its message out. The Atlas Network has helped, as part of its international objectives. They manipulate the public discourse to move the Overton Window ever more to the right. And discredit any and all opposition. These include television, radio, the press, and the Internet. It overlaps heavily with the manosphere and tradwives movements.

The French far right is on the verge of power. It will be able to use exception mechanisms in the Constitution to circumvent checks and balances to its exercise of this power. There is a long history of how fascism gets to power, promising it won't be like before, only to entrench and radicalize itself once it gets elected. Italy, Poland, and Hungary are good showcases. Women and LGBT rights are being curtailed.

The CCRU in Northern England promotes its own brand of techofascism. The leaders of tech want necropolitics: the power to decide who lives and who dies. The last pages try to be optimistic my pointing out some successful revolutions of the past, but there is no fleshed out way to resist against the deep pockets and intellectual ascendant of Thiel and Musk and their ilk.

The techno-elite is planning to defeat death with the Don't Die movement, but only for rich white people. They rely on eugenics to defend their opinion and promote baby making for their social class. And sterilization for those they deem undeserving.

The transhumanism of Ray Kurzweil draws heavily from science-fiction and is just the latest expression of (rich) people trying to break through the limitations of human existence. This latest instantiation specifically targets the elites, with eugenics undertones. Medtech advocates find lots of rich old people afraid of death and who are easy to part from their money.

"l'idéal politique cyberlibertarien est saturé d'angles morts, d'impensés et de raccourcis. Le rôle de la technologies est ainsi surinvesti. Véritable fétiche, celle-ci est dotée d'un pouvoir quasi-surnaturel, à l'image de la "main invisible du marché" chère aux néolibéraux." (p. 94)

Seasteading, Prospera in Honduras, experiments in Nigeria, California Forever. All projects so far cannot survive contact with local populations. Poor countries can take years to come around, but attempts in developed nations cannot get off the ground. Cybertechnologists want to recreate the partitioned landscape of the Middle Ages.

The Network State is a collection of people, connected by online media. They can pool their resources to buy enclaves in host countries. Citizenship is buying shares and managed by contact. Cyberlibertarians are the new neoliberals, with technology playing the role of market forces under Adam Smith. They want to exploit immigrants, but keep them away from citizenship.

Some of the software metaphors are stretched pretty thin. There is a chilling account of the soft coup, the show and methodic weakening of institutions so technofascists can take over society. They immediately neutralize anyone and anything that could get in their way. They aim to destroy the Cathedral, the institutions and stewards of modern, liberal society.

Trumpism is amorphous and that is its strength. Its adversaries cannot get a hold. It can play one part against another (e.g., Musk vs. Miller) without weakening itself. TESCREAL. It has multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideologies at its disposal that it can deploy piecemeal, when needed.

Peter Thiel has wanted to dismantle democracy since before he founded Paypal. Over the years, he has put in place the structures to achieve his goal. He wants a new world order ruled by an elite and where the masses are complacent. He continues Leland Stanford's vision of replacing slow, indecisive, and heavy democratic institutions grounded in the will of the people with more rational ones based in logic.

The narrator gives up. We won't know how the story ends: fire or de-escalation. He warns the reader that the future ruled by machines is getting closer. But Armageddon won't be unleashed by machines, but by people and their corridors of power they've created for themselves.

Alexander is really a spy for some secret society. He gets caught by missing a tax payment. A government agent manipulates the Referee into incriminating himself by casting aspersions on his team and his leadership. The Referee threatens the agent, the robot voice tells him RedMath is in open armed rebellion and BluePhys set herself on fire in protest. Fingers on triggers to mutually assured destruction.

First moment of humanity: BluePhys has a crisis of conscience and confides in RedMath. She wants to do a public act of protestation against Project Gamma, but RedMath wont follow.

Parallel between the Redhead disclosing secrets of Project Gamma and its surveillance agenda (1976), and Snowden's revelations of Project PRISM (2013). The author overestimated the public's reaction to these revelations. The Referee begs the automated listening system for privacy, which BluePhys finds dehumanizing. The Referee admits they've already ceded control to the machines.

RedLingo directs a new play where Faust makes a new bargain with the Devil for intellectual power and love. The Devil promises A.I. The Devil shows holograms of various grotesque characters from Hell. BlueMath thinks he's insulting the Referee, others think he's mocking Project Gamma. Alexander wants to produce it at the Electric Circus.

Brainwave meditation. Alexander comes again with a new operations research problem. Teams discuss digital storage solutions and the "latest" improvements. Arguments around the reliability of voice recordings and their impact on the criminality predictor model. Linguistic discussion on passwords vs. coded phrases. The Referee gets angry anytime someone doubts the merits of the Gamma Project.

The Referee and Bluephys have a lovers' quarrel. The author tries to make it sound intellectual, but it is only pretentious. Bluephys is uncomfortable with the human cost of Project Gamma. Everyone is considered a potential criminal.

Alexander works at the circus and the Referee helps him optimize his quick change number. He reduces it to a graph traversal exercise, using the Foulkes Algorithm. Alexander gets a promotion as Super Frégoli, beating the record time of the current performer. This nice bit shows off operations research and linear algebra. I would not have understood before my degree in computing.

Can the surveillance state be automated? Of course it can. But it will have the biases of those who built the system. The computers return a hi-res image of ourselves, not better or worse. I feel the author is out of his depths. Dunning Kruger on full display.

We meet the other team members. Everyone is so pretentious! We get an overview of Project Gamma: listen to phone conversations, do threat assessment based on contents and paralinguistic criteria, and classify as active or virtual delinquents. Tensions are high for no reason. Everyone explodes at the slightest perceived (imagined) slight.

The Arbiter used to be a socialite, before losing his one great love to an epidemic. One morning, while on a walk, he witnessed a fight between a wolf and an eagle. The description is completely besides the natural behavior of these animals. The (omniscient) narrator tries to describe the tie between two predators, infusing it with his own ideas. Reality is not the goal, here.

Meet the characters: the Arbiter, Phyblue, Mathred. There are two teams, red and blue, of three people: a physicist, a linguist, and a mathematician. The Arbiter is somewhat full of himself. They work in a former lodge in the mountain, built on top of a cliff. They have a supercomputer that impresses Mathred, but sounds quaint to us in 2025.

Sara has an expedited assessment. They are digging deep to try and build a case against her. In the end, the CRO comes out and pulls rank to get her released. She's causing too much trouble for him to keep her. She signs a disclaimer and is free, at the cost of betraying her friends at Madison. Toya is also free. Readjusting to civilian life will take some time. How can she help those she's left behind?