November 21, 2020
"Move slowly, and mend things."
Over in the Fleets thread, Nelson mentioned the erstwhile Facebook, and general techbro, motto of "move fast and break things", and it reminded me of this terrific 2013 speech (annoying Issuu link) by high school teacher Rebecca Hong I stumbled upon earlier this year. [more inside]
On Not Meeting Nazis Half way
"There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to." [more inside]
it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life
The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt by Richard Hofstadter (1954) These considerations suggest that the pseudo-conservative political style, while it may already have passed the peak of its influence, is one of the long waves of twentieth-century American history and not a momentary mood. I do not share the widespread foreboding among liberals that this form of dissent will grow until it overwhelms our liberties altogether and plunges us into a totalitarian nightmare. Indeed, the idea that it is purely and simply fascist or totalitarian, as we have known these things in recent European history, is to my mind a false conception, based upon the failure to read American developments in terms of our peculiar American constellation of political realities. [more inside]
Did a Human Write It?
A popular Obama book was published this week – no, not that one, but Barack Obama Book: The Biography, a 61-page title probably composed by an A.I. “I don’t think [it] was written by a human being, but I do think the A.I. that excreted it made some decent points about Barack Obama.”
TikTok Mansions Are Publicly Traded Now
A business trying to make money off mansions full of TikTok influencers has gone public on the stock market through an unusual deal. It involves a former Chinese health care company, and if that sounds confusing, well, we can explain ... The deal was a reverse takeover, in which a private company (in this case, West of Hudson) is acquired by an already-public one (Tongji Healthcare) but ends up in control. The deal closed on Wednesday ... Before the reverse merger, Tongji itself was acquired by the investors who control West of Hudson, a New Jersey real estate operator named Amir Ben-Yohanan and his business partners.
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Lomuto's Comeback
Yet a very practical--and very surprising--argument does exist, and is the punchline of this article: implemented in a branch-free manner, Lomuto partition is a lot faster than Hoare partition on random data. Given that quicksort spends most of its time partitioning, it follows that we are looking at a hefty improvement of quicksort (yes, I am talking about industrial strength implementations for C++ and D) by replacing its partitioning algorithm with one that literally does more work. [more inside]
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