When you're brand new, how do you select your first marketing channel?

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics. Let's start with his points on free speech, because they're the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand "free speech" as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary. It's quite like how every dictator around the world pretends to believe in democracy. Sure, they may repress the opposition and rig their elections, but they still crave the imprimatur of the concept. So too "free speech" and the Europeans. Vance illustrated his point with several examples from the UK. A country that pursues thousands of yearly wrong-speech cases, threatens foreigners with repercussions should they dare say too much online, and has no qualms about handing down draconian sentences for online utterances. It's completely totalitarian and completely nuts. Germany is not much better. It's illegal to insult elected officials, and if you say the wrong thing, or post the wrong meme, you may well find yourself the subject of a raid at dawn. Just crazy stuff. I'd love to say that Denmark is different, but sadly it is not. You can be put in prison for up to two years for mocking or degrading someone on the basis on their race. It recently become illegal to burn the Quran (which sadly only serves to legitimize crazy Muslims killing or stabbing those who do). And you may face up to three years in prison for posting online in a way that can be construed as morally supporting terrorism. But despite all of these examples and laws, I'm constantly arguing with Europeans who cling to the idea that they do have free speech like Americans. Many of them mistakenly think that "hate speech" is illegal in the US, for example. It is not. America really takes the first amendment quite seriously. Even when it comes to hate speech. Famously, the Jewish lawyers of the (now unrecognizable) ACLU defended the right of literal, actual Nazis to march for their hateful ideology in the streets of Skokie, Illinois in 1979 and won. Another common misconception is that "misinformation" is illegal over there too. It also is not. That's why the Twitter Files proved to be so scandalous. Because it showed the US government under Biden laundering an illegal censorship regime -- in grave violation of the first amendment -- through private parties, like the social media networks. In America, your speech is free to be wrong, free to be hateful, free to insult religions and celebrities alike. All because the founding fathers correctly saw that asserting the power to determine otherwise leads to a totalitarian darkness. We've seen vivid illustrations of both in recent years. At the height of the trans mania, questioning whether men who said they were women should be allowed in women's sports or bathrooms or prisons was frequently labeled "hate speech". During the pandemic, questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab instead of a wet market got labeled "misinformation". So too did any questions about the vaccine's inability to stop spread or infection. Or whether surgical masks or lock downs were effective interventions. Now we know that having a public debate about all of these topics was of course completely legitimate. Covid escaping from a lab is currently the most likely explanation, according to American intelligence services, and many European countries, including the UK, have stopped allowing puberty blockers for children. Which brings us to that last bugaboo: Mass immigration. Vance identified it as one of the key threats to Europe at the moment, and I have to agree. So should anyone who've been paying attention to the statistics showing the abject failure of this thirty-year policy utopia of a multi-cultural Europe. The fast changing winds in European politics suggest that's exactly what's happening. These are not separate issues. It's the lack of free speech, and a catastrophically narrow Overton window, which has led Europe into such a mess with mass immigration in the first place. In Denmark, the first popular political party that dared to question the wisdom of importing massive numbers of culturally-incompatible foreigners were frequently charged with claims of racism back in the 90s. The same "that's racist!" playbook is now being run on political parties across Europe who dare challenge the mass immigration taboo. But making plain observations that some groups of immigrants really do commit vastly more crime and contribute vastly less economically to society is not racist. It wasn't racist when the Danish Folkparty did it in Denmark in the 1990s, and it isn't racist now when the mainstream center-left parties have followed suit. I've drawn the contrast to Sweden many times, and I'll do it again here. Unlike Denmark, Sweden kept its Overton window shut on the consequences of mass immigration all the way up through the 90s, 00s, and 10s. As a prize, it now has bombs going off daily, the European record in gun homicides, and a government that admits that the immigrant violence is out of control. The state of Sweden today is a direct consequence of suppressing any talk of the downsides to mass immigration for decades. And while that taboo has recently been broken, it may well be decades more before the problems are tackled at their root. It's tragic beyond belief. The rest of Europe should look to Sweden as a cautionary tale, and the Danish alternative as a precautionary one. It's never too late to fix tomorrow. You can't fix today, but you can always fix tomorrow. So Vance was right to wag his finger at all this nonsense. The lack of free speech and the problems with mass immigration. He was right to assert that America and Europe has a shared civilization to advance and protect. Whether the current politicians of Europe wants to hear it or not, I'm convinced that average Europeans actually are listening.

I've never used any other AI "assistant," although I've talked with those who have, most of whom are not very positive. My experience using Xcode's AI is that it occasionally offers a line of code that works, but you mostly get junk

Hey all, quick post today to mention that I added tracing support to the . If the support library for is available when Whippet is compiled, Whippet embedders can visualize the GC process. Like this!Whippet GC libraryLTTng Click above for a full-scale screenshot of the trace explorer processing the with the on a 2.5x heap. Of course no image will have all the information; the nice thing about trace visualizers like is that you can zoom in to sub-microsecond spans to see exactly what is happening, have nice mouseovers and clicky-clickies. Fun times!Perfetto microbenchmarknboyerparallel copying collector Adding tracepoints to a library is not too hard in the end. You need to , which has a file. You need to . Then you have a that includes the header, to generate the code needed to emit tracepoints.pull in the librarylttng-ustdeclare your tracepoints in one of your header filesminimal C filepkg-config Annoyingly, this header file you write needs to be in one of the directories; it can’t be just in the the source directory, because includes it seven times (!!) using (!!!) and because the LTTng file header that does all the computed including isn’t in your directory, GCC won’t find it. It’s pretty ugly. Ugliest part, I would say. But, grit your teeth, because it’s worth it.-Ilttngcomputed includes Finally you pepper your source with tracepoints, which probably you so that you don’t have to require LTTng, and so you can switch to other tracepoint libraries, and so on.wrap in some macro I wrote up a little . It’s not as easy as , which I think is an error. Another ugly point. Buck up, though, you are so close to graphs!guide for Whippet users about how to actually get tracesperf record By which I mean, so close to having to write a Python script to make graphs! Because LTTng writes its logs in so-called Common Trace Format, which as you might guess is not very common. I have a colleague who swears by it, that for him it is the lowest-overhead system, and indeed in my case it has no measurable overhead when trace data is not being collected, but his group uses custom scripts to convert the CTF data that he collects to... (?!?!?!!).GTKWave In my case I wanted to use Perfetto’s UI, so I found a to convert from CTF to the . But, it uses an old version of Babeltrace that wasn’t available on my system, so I had to write a (!!?!?!?!!), probably the most Python I have written in the last 20 years.scriptJSON-based tracing format that Chrome profiling used to usenew script Yes. God I love blinkenlights. As long as it’s low-maintenance going forward, I am satisfied with the tradeoffs. Even the fact that I had to write a script to process the logs isn’t so bad, because it let me get nice nested events, which most stock tracing tools don’t allow you to do. I fixed a small performance bug because of it – a . A win, and one that never would have shown up on a sampling profiler too. I suspect that as I add more tracepoints, more bugs will be found and fixed.worker thread was spinning waiting for a pool to terminate instead of helping out I think the only thing that would be better is if tracepoints were a part of Linux system ABIs – that there would be header files to emit tracepoint metadata in all binaries, that you wouldn’t have to link to any library, and the actual tracing tools would be intermediated by that ABI in such a way that you wouldn’t depend on those tools at build-time or distribution-time. But until then, I will take what I can get. Happy tracing! on adding tracepoints using the thing is it worth it? fin

I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it. There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility overlay. By this I mean that they seem a little less predatory, and a little more grounded in terms of the promises they make. Some of these products are widgets. Some are browser extensions. Some are apps. Some are an odd fourth thing. Sometimes it’s a case of a solutioneering disability dongle grift, sometimes its a case of good intentions executed in a less-than-optimal way, and sometimes it’s something legitimately helpful. Oftentimes it’s something that lies in the middle area of all of this. Many of them also have some sort of “AI” integration, which is the unfortunate upsell du jour we have to collectively endure for the time being. The rubric I use to evaluate these products remains very similar to how I scrutinize overlays. Hopefully it’s something that can be helpful for your own efforts. Should the product’s functionality be patented? I’m not very happy with the idea that the mechanism to operate something in an accessible way is inhibited by way of legal restriction. This artificially limits who can use it, which is in opposition to the overall mission of digital accessibility. Ideally the technology is the free bit, and the service that facilitates it is what generates the profit. Do I need to subscribe to use it? A subscription-based model is a great way to run a business, but you don’t need to pay a recurring fee to use an accessible website. The nature of the web’s technology means it can be operated via keyboard, voice control, and other assistive technology if constructed properly. Workarounds and community support also exist for some things where it’s not built well. Here I’d also like you to consider the disability tax, and how that factors into a rental model. It’s not great. Does the browser or operating system already have this functionality? A lot of the time this boils down to an issue of discovery, digital literacy, or identity. As touched on in the previous section, browsers and operating systems offer a lot to help you self-serve. Notable examples are reading mode, on-screen narration, color filters, interface and text zoom, and forced color inversion. Can it be used across multiple experiences, or just one website? Stability and predictability of operation and output are vital for technology like this. It’s why I am so bullish on utilizing existing browser and operating system features. Products built to “enhance” the accessibility of a single website or app can’t contribute towards this. Ironically, their presence may actually contribute friction towards someone’s existing method of using things. A tricky little twist here is products that target a single website are often advertised towards the website owner, and not the people who will be using said website. Can I use the keyboard to operate it? I’ve gotten in the habit of pressing Tab a few times when I first check out the product’s website and see if anything happens. It’s a quick and easy test to see if the company walks the walk in addition to talking the talk. Here, I regrettably encounter missing focus indicators and non-semantic interactive controls more often than not. I might also sometimes run the homepage through axe DevTools, to see if there are other egregious errors. I then try to use the product itself with a keyboard if a demo is offered. I am usually found wanting here. How reliable is the AI? There are two broad considerations here: How reliable is the output? How can bias affect someone’s interpretation of things? While I am a skeptic, I can also acknowledge that there are some good use cases for LLMs and related technology when it comes to disability. I think about reliability in terms of the output in terms of the “assistive” part of assistive technology. By this, I mean it actually helps you do what you need to get done. Here, I’d point to Salma Alam-Naylor’s experience with newer startups in this space versus established, community supported solutions. Then consider LLM-based image description products. Here we want to make sure the content is accurate and relevant. Remember that image descriptions are the mechanism that some people rely on to help them understand the world. If that description is not accurate, it impacts how they form an understanding of their environment. A step past that thought is the biases inherent in, and perpetuated by LLM-based technology. I recall Ben Myers’ thoughts on implicit, hegemonic normalization, as well as the sobering truth that this technology can exert influence over its users worldview at scale. Can the company be trusted with your data? A lot of assistive technology is purposely designed to not announce the fact that it is being used. This is to stave off things like discrimination or ineffective, separate-yet-equal “accessibility only” sites. There’s also the murky world of data brokerage, and if the company is selling off this information or not. AccessiBe comes to mind here, and not in a good way. Also consider if the product has access to everything you visit and interact with, and who has access to that information. As a companion concern, it is also worth considering the product’s data security practices—or lack thereof. Here, I would like to point out that startups tend to deprioritize this boring kind of infrastructure work in favor of feature creation. Not having any personal information present in a system is the best way to guard against its theft. Also know that there is no way to undo a data breach once it occurs. Leaked information stays leaked. Will the company last? Speaking of startups, know that more fail than succeed. Are you prepared for an outcome where the product you rely on is is no longer updated or supported because the company that made it went out of business? It could also be a case where the company still exists, but ceases to support the product you use. Here, know that sometimes these companies will actively squash attempts for community-based resurrection and support of the service because it represents potential liability. This concern is another reason why I’m bullish on operating system and browser functionality. They have a lot more resiliency and focus on the long view in this particular area. But also I’m not the arbiter of who can use what. In the spirit of “the best camera is the one you have on you:” if something works for your specific access needs, by all means use it.