Because of you – because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny. That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right. There can be no fuller expression of America’s support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people. That says something about who we are.

From Remarks by the President and First Lady on the End of the War in Iraq.

…there is credible evidence from the same scholarly sources that articulate the unwillingness or inability of francophone sub-Saharan African nations to embrace these new forms of governance apparently because the status quo serves the interests of the political leaders of these countries and their external mentor-France. The various economic, cultural and security arrangements that France established with its former colonies in Africa in the 1960s have enabled the French to maintain unprecedented influence in the domestic and external affairs of nations such as Cameroon, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in over fifty years after independence. Sustained by institutions such as La Francophonie and France-Afrique, French leaders since De Gaulle have supported African leaders, even if those leaders were engaged in practices that stymied efforts at democratic transitions and transparent governance, as long as French strategic interests (political, economic and cultural) were advanced (Martin 1997). By contrast, the British have not sought to exert undue influence in the internal affairs of its former colonies in Africa and have largely left leaders and citizens of those nation to embrace the kinds of democratic transitions that are compatible with their values and historical experiences. It is against this background that this paper proposes a thorough re-examination of American support for democratic transitions in Africa in large part because it was American leadership (with the support of its western allies) that stimulated, energized and supported the movements for transitions across Africa in the early 1990s (Kpundeh 1992).

(Emphasis mine.)

From Ngwafu, Peter A. (2016) “U.S. Support for Democracy in Africa: Discrepant Orientations of Anglophone and Francophone Africa towards Democratic Practices, Good Governance & Human Rights,” African Social Science Review: Vol. 8: No. 1, Article 2. Available here.

… when reelected, McCarthy gained the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a position he used, according to biographer David Oshinksy, “to undermine government morale, damage numerous reputations, and make America look sinister in the eyes of the world.”

From The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers.

We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn’t we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective “marker” for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.

From Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

I was working on an Android app when the virtual device in the Android Emulator on macOS suddenly stopped being able to connect to the network. Using the in-device menus to restart network adapters didn’t help. Restarting the device also didn’t help.

I fixed it by using these commands to “cold boot” the emulator:

emulator -list-avds
# INFO    | Storing crashdata in: /tmp/android-jyc/emu-crash-34.2.14.db, detection is enabled for process: 30346
# Pixel_3a_API_34
emulator @Pixel_3a_API_34 -no-snapshot-load

This is very simple, but it doesn’t seem to come up when I search.

If you a have a component rendered with React.memo and are trying to figure out which prop is causing it to re-render:

export const Foo = React.memo((props: FooProps) => {
  // ...
});

… you can (ab)use React.memo’s second parameter, propsAreEqual.

/**
 * Lets you skip re-rendering a component when its props are unchanged.
 *
 * @param Component — The component to memoize.
 * @param propsAreEqual — A function that will be used to determine if the props have changed.
 */
function React.memo<(props: ArticleCardProps) => React.JSX.Element>(
  Component: (props: ArticleCardProps) => React.JSX.Element,
  propsAreEqual?: ((prevProps: Readonly<ArticleCardProps>, nextProps: Readonly<...>) => boolean) | undefined
): React.MemoExoticComponent<...> (+1 overload)

The default propsAreEqual argument compares each prop with Object.is. We’ll do the same but also log when a prop changes:

export const propsAreEqualWithLogging = <T>(prevProps: any, nextProps: any) => {
  const keys = new Set([...Object.keys(prevProps), ...Object.keys(nextProps)]);
  let out = true;
  for (const key of keys) {
    const equal = Object.is(prevProps[key as keyof T], nextProps[key as keyof T]);
    if (!equal) {
      console.log("Δ", key);
      out = false;
    }
  }
  return out;
};

export const Foo = React.memo((props: FooProps) => {
  // ...
}, propsAreEqualWithLogging);

Now we’ll get log messages when a prop changes:

Δ bar

Easy!

Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed “hedonistic” approaches to piano repertoire, performance, and music generally. For him, “hedonism” in this sense denoted a superficial theatricality, something to which he felt Mozart, for example, became increasingly susceptible later in his career. He associated this drift toward hedonism with the emergence of a cult of showmanship and gratuitous virtuosity on the concert platform in the 19th century and later. The institution of the public concert, he felt, degenerated into the “blood sport” with which he struggled, and which he ultimately rejected.

…

Gould believed that the institution of the public concert was an anachronism and a “force of evil”, leading to his early retirement from concert performance. He argued that public performance devolved into a sort of competition, with a non-empathetic audience mostly attendant to the possibility of the performer erring or failing critical expectation; and that such performances produced unexceptional interpretations because of the limitations of live music. He set forth this doctrine, half in jest, in “GPAADAK”, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds.

From the Wikipedia article on Glenn Gould.

I find that reading a document aloud is a great way to catch grammatical errors or awkward wordings. You can have macOS do this for you with a one-liner:

pbpaste | say --rate=250

This will read aloud whatever’s on your clipboard at 250 WPM.

Harmony is set in a world where technology makes it possible for everyone to be in perfect physical health. In such a world, Project Itoh (the pen name of author ITO Satoshi) thinks the only remaining source of suffering would be free will.

I enjoyed the book: the world is interesting and I was hooked on the plot. But I can’t recommend it.

First, a petty complaint that I need to get it out of the way: the book shares Golden Age of Science Fiction’s unfortunate fixation with writing like:

To prove that these tits, this ass, this belly, aren’t a book.

I’m no Andrea Dworkin but I just don’t think that’s good writing. A male main character who, transposing from the first chapter, had constant thoughts like “While my dick is growing longer… While my balls are still dropping…”, would be equally annoying.

🚨 Warning: spoilers follow!

The conceit that the XML-inspired “ETML” markup, e.g. <anger>, is for readers in the book’s world who no longer have the ability to experience inner emotions is cute. But the author conflates qualia with rational vs. emotional behavior in a way that doesn’t make sense to me.

For example:

People cried as though they were sad and raged as though they were angry. But these actions carried the same value as the mimicked emotional responses a robot would have had in the previous era. All people had lost their inward minds.

Mankind was in perfect harmony with its medical industrial society.

The instant the old folks had entered their codes and the Harmony program had begun to sing, suicide disappeared from human society.

… and:

“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit there all day in your chair, drooling?”

“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment–you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. … From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides…”

…

“When she came back, Miach said it had been pure ecstasy. … She only had the sensation that she had been in a wonderful, joyous place.”

…

“People with perfect judgement do not require a consciousness, so it does not exist.”

This sounds a lot like a description of philosophical zombies¹ (henceforth p-zombies) (“as though they were sad” and “had lost their inward minds”). Although the statement that “it’s nearly impossible to tell” (emphasis mine) implies that unlike p-zombies there is a change in behavior.

The author claims that “having to make choices” leads to consciousness, which leads to experienced emotions, which leads to e.g. suicide. But the characters without consciousness still display emotions even though they don’t experience them.

Surely there is a distinction between experiencing X and “acting as though” you experience X. But why do the people without consciousness cry as though they were sad and rage as though they were angry but not commit suicide as though they were depressed?

I don’t want to get hung up on qualia: the idea that people might try to reduce emotional behavior in order to create a more harmonious society is interesting. If the book were only about using WatchMe to involuntarily reduce everyone’s emotions rather than to totally eliminate their consciousnesses (“All people had lost their inward minds.”) I think I’d like it more.

I don’t think I can recommend the book, but I try to make sense of it in the context of the book’s creation: Project Itoh worked on Harmony in the final year of his life, dying from cancer. The thesis of the book is that in order to eliminate pain and the temptation to commit suicide we would have to give up subjective experience and the ability to choose at all. That says much about what he believed he stood to lose and what we enjoy for a little longer.

From the Wikipedia article on the Mosuo ethnic group in China:

In Mosuo culture, a myth describes that long ago, dogs had life spans of 60 years while humans had life spans of thirteen years. Humans felt their life span was too short, so they traded it with the dogs in exchange for paying homage to them.