Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.
So if I invest my meager peasant earnings in Vanguard funds, my holdings are considered equally as important as the Rockefellers?
And it was the solving of this alignment problem that attracted all the Rockefellers, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, etc to Vanguard? So they're not insiders, just big customers with no relationship to the firm itself.
Most very wealthy individuals (not sure your examples fit this group) do not use Vanguard. They are more likely to use private wealth management. I feel like you actually have no idea what you are talking about?
So your conclusion is that very wealthy individuals do not own and control Vanguard--they have nothing to do with it at all--that it's collectively owned by the rabble--and all is well as we little people have everything in control via our company Vanguard (that we little people collectively own) and together we're heading into a bright shining new tomorrow? Definitely nothing sinister going on here involving big monied interests vacuuming up ownership of the entire economy through relentless consolidation.
Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about.
On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.
I can only second this. I personally got more out of “The Oldest View” than I did out of maybe half of all commercial shows I recently watched, and I consider myself pretty picky.
At a meta level, there’s something amazing about fiction that feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises you in execution.
I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.
For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.
Blu-ray version is definitely not perfect but I wouldn't call it mangled. It is presented in 4:3 which might be an issue for some viewers but it is absolutely the best this show has ever looked: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Babylon-5-The-Complete-Series...
Reading the review, it looks like they gave it the best treatment they could with what they had, definitely better than the DVD. Still a shame that WB didn't go the extra mile and redo the CGI, but maybe that will happen in time.
The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.
But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.
I watched a chunk of the version on Tubi which I believe was the same as the BluRay, and I thought it looked great. They just do the whole thing in 4:3 which is maybe not the ideal solution to the problem but is seamless. CGI shots are obviously upscaled but it looks good enough not to intrude.
Had to write a fairly substantial native extension to Python a couple years ago and one of the things I enjoyed was that the details were not easily "Googleable" because implementation results were swamped by language level results.
It took me back to the old days of source diving and accumulated knowledge that you carried around in your head.
I made some small contributions to cpython during the 3.14 cycle. The codebase is an interesting mix of modern and “90s style” C code.
I found that agentic coding tools were quite good at answering my architectural questions; even when their answers were only half correct, they usually pointed me in the right direction. (I didn’t use AI to write code and I wonder if agentic tools would struggle with certain aspects of the codebase like, for instance, the Cambrian explosion of utility macros used throughout.)
This was around 2021 so AI code tools had not yet eaten everyone. One of the most interesting challenges was finding the right value judgements when blending multiple type systems. I doubt any agentic coding tool could do it today.
I blended the python type system with a large low-level type system (STEP AIM low level types) and a smaller set of higher-level types (STEP ARM, similar to a database view). I already was familiar with STEP, so I needed to really grok what Python was doing under the covers because I needed to virtualize the STEP ARM and AIM access while making it look like "normal" Python.
Oh, that's very interesting work. And, yes, I'd also be surprised if (today's) agentic tools were at all helpful for that: it's way outside of distribution, and conceptual correctness truly matters.
There's a file on docs.python.org explaining the C api. The rest is pretty straightforward, at least until recently when free threading was introduced (IDK about now). Main hassle is manually having to track reference borrowing etc. Understandable in Python 2, but another tragedy in Python 3.
Great write up, thank you for sharing it! Quick question though, in your first code example (dynamic enum with a metaclass) what is "m" in this line towards the start?
That's a standard error clause. In the case PyImport_ImportModule threw a Python exception, you need to Py_DECREF any C local variables which are new references(not borrowed references) and return -1.
From the later call PyModule_AddObject, it's clear this code has come from the PyInit_ module initialisation function. This code is running on import of the C extension to initialise the "FruitEnum" module attribute. https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/extension-modules.html#c.PyI...
Exactly so. I didn't notice that missing def when I put together the blog post, but you are right to call it out. In this case that decref was copypasta from some other code -- I don't decref on the other error returns. I combined code that was in several places and omitted the decref for mod_enum too!
The module init function is where you would normally create the module object (PyModule_Create) and decref it if an error occurs. The blog example is utility code that you would call within the module init function to add an enum.
Someone should really create a blog post compiler to catch these sorts of things :-)
Happy to see this. Maybe I'll consider buying toner cartridges again. Every time I've tried in the past, what has shown up has been unusable, sketchy junk. I now go to a neighborhood Staples where I can put actual eyes on the box.
This article should be at the core of any discussion about media concentration. The vast consolidation of radio stations is well known, but the same thing has been happening to small local newspapers. In both cases, you end up with a voice speaking to the public from afar, not local people talking to your community about issues that are important to your neighbors.
At that point, most people just go to the gossip corner of social media and spend the rest of their day being fed six hours of outrage.
Social media groups should have a role to play in local journalism, or at least debate of local issues. Would love to see the passion and information sharing of a gaming Discord server, but focused on my county.
I have a digital archive of photos going back to the 1930s, and have physical archives of negatives and slides preserved properly. Not everything is scanned, but it will probably remain on my "to do" list permanently. B/W 114 negs from my grandfather contain many unidentified and unidentifiable people, but there are also views of where I grew up 90 years ago.
I agree with you that a certain portion of images are no longer meaningful, but it's tough to say a-priori what those are. So keep them all. The real problem is that photos often have notes on the back, but digital images rarely have any metadata.
I foresaw this problem back in 2002 and have been using a time-oriented naming convention and keeping little XML files with notes. I posted a little rant about it back in the day and made some simple tooling, which has been good enough to keep some basic notes with my photos.
I believe that HD (and Lowes) massively subsidizes their delivery ops simply because they don't want to cede the space to Amazon. It allows them to under-stock the stores but still maintain a reasonable range of products. However each time I have ordered, they have delivered a ~$2 part via Fedex, at no extra cost to me.
They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.
Reading these two comments is bizarre from my perspective. How is Amazon competitive with anything? They tend to have higher prices than other online retailers and the intransparent market place system tries to protect shady sellers with product focused reviews instead of seller based reviews. The moment you get even a single fake product or wrong delivery all the perceived savings evaporate at once.
The idea of paying a subscription for the privilege of being scammed sounds ridiculous. The cost of deliveries doesn't magically go down because you're paying a subscription. You're paying for it either way. Either you're overpaying on the subscription because you're not ordering enough or you're overpaying in the form of higher prices that contain the remaining delivery fee.
> The moment you get even a single fake product or wrong delivery all the perceived savings evaporate at once.
I’ve been buying on Amazon for 20 years, and I just avoid high value items. It’s great as an AliExpress with an easy return policy. If I get a fake or whatever, I return it or I toss it.
For higher value items, I go to other retailers, such as Costco.
I don't order from amazon enough to justify prime, but a few times a year I sign up for a free subscription for a couple weeks or so.
The prices on amazon are comparable to what I see elsewhere for everything I've ordered. The thing that sets amazon apart is that their delivery is blazing fast compared to everyone else. Yes, the reviews are always a little suspect, if I see tons of empty 5 star reviews, I suspect the product, but in general, I've been satisfied with my purchases.
For most everything I'm giving as Christmas gifts this year, Amazon has the best (often tied for the best) price. Things from Apple are cheaper on Amazon than from Apple (Airpods Pro 3, M4 Air, etc.)
Predictable delivery, easy/generous customer service, best/tied-for-best price, excellent selection. I'm not sure which part of that is uncompetitive...
(If you know a better price on Airpods 3 Pro or a base M4 Air, do let me know as I'm always happy to save money.)
It's the all you can eat buffet effect. Pay the price and don't have to worry about shipping, can watch (some) streaming without having to worry about paying, and whatever else they decide to roll into their monopoly black hole today.
Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.
edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.
1) When I really need it within a couple of days and can't quickly find it locally
2) When it isn't carried locally (the local retail stock is a lot thinner than 20 years ago)
3) If there is a BIG price difference -- used to be common but now much rarer. As you say, Amazon's prices are often worse than buying locally.
4) When I need it shipped somewhere else. I usually spend Christmas, for example in another city, and it is impractical to bring a bunch of presents. Amazon is good for situations like that.
I dislike Amazon, but they are now so dominant it is hard to avoid them.
I've been scolded online for buying from Amazon. "Oh, if you look around enough you can get anything locally." I live in the Seattle area, and I certainly cannot get everything I want locally, unless by "locally" you mean taking an hour or two to drive a 40 mile round-trip to a suburb to the north. I know, of course, that Amazon is partly responsible for being unable to find some things locally, but if I want or need something and I can't get it here in town, yeah, I'm using Amazon.
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