New poll has Sanders support at 31% nationally, up 9 points since December, the last time the poll asked about Democratic voters' preferences. Next closest contender has 19%.

Rachel Maddow on the resignation of the four prosecutors in the Roger Stone sentencing case.

There's no line that this President will not cross. Tell me if you can imagine one. Tell me the thing that would be bad for America but good for him - he wouldn't do it because it'd be bad for the country. What's beyond the pale for him?

Michael Render (aka Killer Mike) gave a rousing speech in support of Senator Bernie Sanders. This is the most powerful ad I have seen this election season. The Sanders champaign should blanket the airwaves with this.

Look to your neighbor and say:
Neighbor, the time is now.
There are more of us.
We're stronger.
We will wait no longer.
The time is now.
When you go to the that booth next year,
I need you to carry in that booth the memory of this room
Black.
White.
Straight.
Gay.
Men.
Female.
We are together.
We are united.
Our time is right now.
We will not wait four more years.
We will not wait 20 more years.
We will not wait two more Presidents.
We will not wait three more Presidents.
The time is now.
The time is not in the future.
The time is not some abstract time.
The time is not something that might be.
The time ain't something that could be.
The time ain't nothing that should be.
That would be.
It ain't tomorrow.
It ain't the day after.
It ain't coming next week.
The time is
Now!
The time is
Now!
The time is
Now!
The time is
Now!

Revolution indeed. The time is now!

No one has been to the moon since 1972, even though, back in 2004, then-President George W. Bush laid out several goals for NASA, including a "return to the moon by 2020 as the launching point for missions beyond."

Moonshot in 2024? Thas 4 years from now! No chance.

This isn’t the 1950s. We don’t just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024.

Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven’t done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to be analyzed before the next test flight. The turnaround for a single test will be many months, even a year. Getting all the bits and pieces together would then take many more years of integration work.

Look at the F-35. Look at the 737-max. These are complicated systems with layers of dependencies. Our society today simply does not accept the cowboy approach to safety that was the original moon race. The next moon landing will only happen after a decade-long deliberative, iterative, campaign requiring the support of many subsequent governments.

It is good to have a goal. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Anders Hejlsberg gives a talk on compiler construction. For those who don’t know, Hejlsberg is the one who gave us Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and most recently TypeScript. An excellent intro to modern compiler construction by one of the true masters of the field.

A mechanical keyboard is a keyboard built with high quality, typically spring activated, key switches. These key switches vary based on the keyboard’s application or user preference.

While some of the first widely sold keyboards such as IBM’s Model M in the 1980’s utilized mechanical switches, the 1990’s brought on a wave of inexpensive rubber dome keyboards that flooded the keyboard market. Rubber dome keyboards represent over 90% of keyboards in use today and provide an inexpensive but dissatisfying feel and typing experience.

Mechanical keyboards raise the bar in every way. A mechanical keyboard’s switches, framing, functionality, type print methods, key construction, PCB board, LED lighting (sharpness, brightness, adjustability), and a slew of other features are far superior compared to traditional rubber dome keyboards. Most of these improvements boil down to one thing - feel. Mechanical keyboards simply feel better than rubber dome keyboards.

Over the last few years, mechanical keyboards have become extremely popular. And as a developer I prefer the force feed back and the reassuring click and tactile feed back that they provide. However there is a huge variety of keyboards available with different layouts, key types and price points. How do you pick one that is right for you?

After trying many of mechanical keyboards, I can honestly recommend the Logitech G Pro Gaming keyboard. Don’t let the gaming part fool you. This is a serious keyboard that gives one of the best performances at a very reasonable price.

What is in the box

The Logitech G Pro Gaming keyboard comes with a just the essentials - the keyboard itself, a braided micro-USB cable and a small leaflet that tells you how to plug in the keyboard. Thats about it. You’ll either want to hold on to the box or invest in a separate case as one is not included.

The G Pro’s braided micro-USB cable deserves mention. With hooks on either side, it provides for a secure fit. This is good for securing the cable so you don’t accidentally remove it while in use. And the braided cable looks to be strong - no fraying or cutting problems here.

Design

The G Pro looks like what would happen if we were to take a standard full mechanical keyboard and simply chop off the numpad with some kind of high-tech paper cutter. It has a full selection of keys (minus the numpad), in addition to a key that controls the lighting and one that activates a Game Mode. The Game Mode is useless for programmers. It prevents you from clicking keys such as Alt-Tab or the Windows button, so that you won’t accidentally shut down your game midway. I wish this key was programmable to something else - but alas, you can’t.

That’s most of what there is to say about the keyboard’s looks. It’s small (14.2 x 6.0 x 1.4 inches), attractive and streamlined. Instead of employing discrete media controls, you can use the Fn key and the top row of Function buttons. Discrete controls would have been nice, but the advantage here is that they don’t clutter the keyboard.

Keys

The keyboard makes use of the company’s ubiquitous Romer-G mechanical switches. If you’ve never tried them before, they feel like Cherry MX Browns: tactile and fairly quiet. While Cherries are the standard to beat, Romer-Gs are supposed to be a hair faster, more responsive and more durable, so you could do much worse. Taken on their own merits, they’re pretty comfortable.

The Romer-G switches are great for typing. With the G Pro, I typed 115 words per minute with nine errors. Thats pretty good - at least for me.

Features

The Logitech G Pro runs on the Logitech Gaming Software, which is excellent. You can program the F1 through F12 keys, as well as adjust the backlighting and keep track of your stats (where your fingers spend the most time, how often you press buttons, and so forth).

There’s one onboard profile for the G Pro keyboard. This profile stores one lighting profile, which means that you can hook up the keyboard to any computer and have it retain any key colors that you care to program.

I’m not sure if this constitutes a bona fide “Big Deal,” but it’s a helpful feature, particularly because the keyboard’s default color wave can be somewhat distracting, and turning off lighting entirely makes the peripheral feel a little plain. My only complaint is that it took me a little while to figure out how to save the onboard profile. Hardly a deal breaker.

Performance

I put the G Pro through its paces, with both e-sports and narrative-driven titles, and it worked well in both cases. I had no trouble gliding around the battlefield as Mercy in Overwatch or commanding Jaina Proudmoore to encase enemies in ice in Heroes of the Storm. Likewise, the keyboard was competent and responsive when I was adventuring through the realm of Eorzea in Final Fantasy XIV or taking down bandit camps in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The keyboard’s compact size is a boon. It was easy to play Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm with the keyboard straight in front of me, or off to the side at an angle; such maneuverability is sometimes necessary, depending on how much space you have at a tournament. Otherwise, it’s just as responsive as Logitech Orion keyboards, which have already proved their worth as e-sports peripherals.

Conclusion

The Logitech G Pro is a great keyboard. If you want a small mechanical keyboard that’s suitable for long stints of daily typing or coding and you don’t want to sacrifice comfort or performance, the Logitech G Pro is the one you should get. Just ignore the gaming keyboard part. And at $79 dollars - you aren’t going to get a better deal. The only downsides - and I am nitpicking here - is the lack of a case and being able to program the gaming button. Get yours here.

Adam Schiff’s summary argument in the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s impeachment. It sums up the state of the world today.

Looks like we have the successor to the iPhone SE - which in my opinion, was the greatest iPhone form factor ever made - scheduled for release in March. With the price expected to be at $399 - Apple is going to sell a ton of these. I just might be on the buy list for one of these.

The spec run-down form phoneArena.com:

If you’ve somehow missed the constant bombardment of iPhone 9 leaks, here’s a quick rundown of what we’re expecting right now.

Design-wise, the phone should look almost identical to the iPhone 8, with a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display and a home button with Touch ID. Unlike the iPhone 8, however, inside there will be Apple’s latest A13 system chip with all of its benchmark-topping power.

On the back, a single wide-angle camera will have to fill all the photography needs, just like in the good old days. If the iPhone 9 gets the lens from the iPhone 11 series alongside Night Mode, we doubt there will be anyone complaining.

The Washington Post has a great 20 question quiz to see which 2020 Democratic candidate you most closely align with.

Surprise - I am most agreeable to Elizabeth Warren with Bernie Sanders a close second. Which of these 2020 Democrats agrees with you most? Take the quiz here.

That moment when a fan film feels more like star wars than the huge Disney productions. You don’t need 1000s of starships or hundreds of Jedi. You just need big stories – saving a little boy can have more then enough drama for a movie.

Nancy Pelosi made an appearance on Bill Maher’s season opening episode - needling President Trump:

If I knew that the president is listening, I would want him to know that he is impeached forever, and he is impeached forever because he used the office of the president to try to influence a foreign country for his personal and political benefit. In doing so, he undermined our national security, he was disloyal to his oath of office to protect the Constitution and he placed in jeopardy the integrity of our election. He gave us no choice.

Nothing would please me more then if this women would run against President Trump. When asked about how Democrats often fall victim through their own purity tests - Speaker Pelosi:

I don’t worry about that … And in the recent elections we won. And we showed in the house we know how to win. Disciplined, focused, cold-blooded in terms of just winning.

I agree with Bill Maher - Speaker Pelosi is our Iron Lady.

Tesla is now by far the most valuable car company in America. Tesla’s market capitalization is $93 billion, compared to $50 billion for General Motors and $37 billion for Ford. Remarkable considering GM sold around 20 times as many cars as Tesla in 2019, while Ford sold more than six times as many.

Tesla is the Apple of the automobile industry. If I were a car manufacturer right now, I would be loosing a lot of sleep.

Timoth B. Lee in Wired sums it up the best:

I’m not the first person to compare Tesla to Apple, but I think the comparison makes sense. Apple has only 15 to 20 percent of the global smartphone market, well below Google’s Android. But the distinctiveness of the iPhone platform, combined with the loyalty of the Apple customer base, means that Apple can charge a premium for the iPhone. As a result, Apple’s share of smartphone industry profits is much larger than its share of unit shipments or revenue.

We don’t know what the electric car marketplace will look like a decade from now. But it’s not hard to imagine it evolving in a similar direction, with Tesla becoming the Apple of transportation. People will be willing to pay a few thousand dollars extra for the prestige and unique features of a Tesla—just as they’re willing to pay a few hundred extra dollars for an iPhone. And in the ruthlessly competitive car industry, even a small difference in price can translate into a big difference in profits.

Yet another industry is being eaten by software- looks like Wall Street is the latest casualty.

Roosevelt Bowman, who traded bonds at Lehman Brothers back in 2008, learned to code as the firm collapsed. More than a decade later and now senior investment strategist at AllianceBernstein Holdings LP’s private wealth-management division, he uses programming languages such as R and Python regularly in his job in New York.

At UBS, Purves is spearheading an effort to digitize the investment bank’s trading of fixed income and equities and as part of that he went on a course with Silicon Valley’s Singularity University to learn how experienced bankers can evolve and stay relevant. When it comes to new hires, Purves says, the best candidates are those that have the least to “unlearn.” They are team players with computer science skills who are often new to banking, he said.

Jack Miller, head of trading for Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee, agrees. For the first time last year, he included proficiency in coding as a requirement for a junior trader job, but hasn’t found anyone yet with the right mix of technical and people skills.

Froma Harrop argues that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) should leave the Democratic Party because she is not playing nice and stepping in line.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not entirely wrong when she said, "In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party," in an interview with New York magazine.
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Ocasio-Cortez most likely doesn't have the guts to leave the Democratic Party probably for the same reason that Bernie Sanders ensures he has the "D" after his name whenever he runs for office. In the 2006 and 2012 Senate races, Sanders ran as a Democrat in the primary, then refused the nomination when he won so he could run as in Independent without facing a Democratic challenger.

AOC might also want to also have it both ways, using the Democratic designation to get elected in her liberal district while bashing the party that gave her power.

If AOC identified as a Democratic Socialist in 2020, she could conceivably win reelection to Congress, given her celebrity and her genius on social media. And she wouldn't have to be in the same party as Joe Biden. Why doesn't she try it?

To answer her question, that’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not “a 30-year project”. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. If AOC can use the Democratic party and mold the party for a new electorate - in my opinion that’s a good thing.

Winners Take All is Anand Giridharadas’ 2018 book about how “the global elite’s efforts to ‘change the world’ preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve”.

Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? His groundbreaking investigation has already forced a great, sorely needed reckoning among the world’s wealthiest and those they hover above, and it points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world — a call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.

The RSA made an animated video of a talk by Giridharadas that provides a graet summary of the central theme in five minutes — it’s a good watch/listen. Full talk is available here.

Michael Byrne in a Vice article:

When techno-human civilization has finally collapsed, perhaps the result of a nuclear war programmed in C or the result of a bacterial superstrain isolated by software implemented in C, and we have been returned to our caves to gnaw bones and fight over rotten meat, there will still be a program written in C executing somewhere.

All of this isn't just because a lot of people really like coding in C, though it's been estimated that almost 20 percent of all coders use the language (see below). C is far deeper than what we normally think of when we think of "programming language." There are languages that we consider to be more or less foundational—Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, etc.—which are the very general-purpose languages. C is also general-purpose programming language, but the difference is that C has become the de facto language of machines themselves, whether it's a five dollar microcontroller or a deep-space probe.

My argument is that I like coding in C. For all its faults, I love C for its simplicity, stability - and for the most part staying virtually unchanged for over a little over half a century. It is in complete opposite to the current trendy fad - JavaScript - where developers are constantly creating new languages to avoid using it.

It is the closest thing we have to a defacto standard in the computer world.

Well, here we are at the end of all things. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the movie billed as the conclusion to the saga/mythology/lifestyle choice that George Lucas launched some 42 years ago with an unassuming little $9 million space opera called Star Wars. That of course was back in those innocent days when not every film carried a subtitle, and not every story choice was fraught with meaning for films yet to even be conceived.

Following the divisive, and at times toxic, debate over the previous installment, 2017’s The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker has been tasked with the unenviable challenge of not just providing a satisfying finale to the current trilogy, but also to the entire nine-film storyline that encompasses the Skywalker family melodrama and a galactic battle between good and evil. It also needs to please a plethora of fans with many different ideas of what this thing is supposed to be.

Does The Rise of Skywalker succeed? Did director/co-writer J.J. Abrams (encoring after setting the whole thing in motion with 2015’s The Force Awakens) make something that managed to answer all the questions and deliver an exciting story while simultaneously honoring and burying the past?

Nah. Not really.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a master class in ticking off boxes, a movie that lumbers to a shaky start but eventually delivers a certain level of surface excitement and rapid-fire pacing that obscures just how flimsily constructed its narrative is. The movie is less a story than a compendium of things that need to happen just to create the superficial sensations certain Star Wars fans want to experience–and those things often work well as they happen, only for the viewer to chuckle afterward over how he or she has been played again.

In other words, this is very much a J.J. Abrams movie: expertly made and well-acted (perhaps the best-acted of the entire new trilogy), but with no distinct point-of-view. It’s lots of callbacks and “surprise” cameos, and a narrative that’s very loosely remixed from a previous installment in the franchise. It throws a couple of bones to people who liked The Last Jedi’s deliberate subversion and deconstruction of Star Wars tropes, but make no mistake, it also explicitly and aggressively rejects that film’s concerns, applying a certain amount of retconning to the saga that may try even the hardiest series originalist.

The first half hour of the movie almost derails it entirely, as it bounces from one environment to another setting up both the new plot and reconnecting us with the characters in a clunky, almost random fashion. It is absolutely no spoiler to say that Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is reintroduced within the opening moments of the film, but we will leave it for another time (and probably another writer, to be honest) to discuss the whys and hows of his presence here after 30 years. A whole lot of exposition and action follows haphazardly until we finally settle into the bulk of the main narrative.

That narrative follows our core returning heroes–Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac), plus C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels) and Chewie (Joonas Suotamo)–as they embark on a quest to find the kind of MacGuffin that usually ends up being the result of lazy screenwriting more than any Hitchcockian misdirection. While the search itself is needlessly elongated and convoluted, it does contain some of the movie’s best moments–at last we get to see our heroes mostly together, bickering affectionately and working toward a shared goal.

Meanwhile, back at whatever planet the rebel/Resistance base is now located on, General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) and her tattered, dwindling troops are trying to put on a brave front in light of the news of Palpatine’s re-emergence on the scene. And of course there’s her son, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who still grapples with his loyalties in the First Order’s new role.

Getting any further into the plot would be spoilery, but suffice to say that there are revelations afoot which will do nothing to alleviate the divisions among Star Wars fans–divisions that have sadly been fueled in many ways by pre-existing prejudices that have nothing to do with the story at hand. Some old friends, such as Lando Calrissian (a delighted-to-be-there Billy Dee Williams), are trotted out along with a handful of new characters, but one gets the sense that they don’t contribute much to the narrative overall and are merely there as glorified walk-ons.

As for our main heroes, all of them do their best work in the series to date. Driver’s Kylo Ren is still this trilogy’s most interesting creation, a truly conflicted character whose leanings and motivations are always in question. His final arc, while not entirely unforeseen, is still the most unpredictable of the bunch and Driver can do a lot with steely glares and silent gestures.

As for our central trio of Rey, Finn and Poe, they’ve always felt like a three-way redistribution of Luke, Leia and Han’s characteristics more than three-dimensional beings, but they get to add a bit more nuance here that makes them seem more alive than they have in the two previous adventures. Rey and Kylo also get to share some of their most intense exchanges of all three films, their relationship given a new resonance here, and also engage in one hell of a lightsaber duel atop the ruins of the old Death Star that is as much of a showstopper as the brief clips we’ve seen beforehand suggest.

Carrie Fisher’s much-documented appearance in the movie is, with perhaps one exception toward the end, handled about as seamlessly as it probably could be. Created from eight minutes of existing but excised The Force Awakens footage (and a different plotline entirely), it’s integrated well enough into this story to allow Leia a proper, if diminished, role in these concluding proceedings without simply having to write her out of the movie entirely.

That’s one of those boxes that the movie at least checks off somewhat successfully. A lot of other moments in The Rise of Skywalker play out as curtain calls or “greatest hits” without doing much to serve the larger story. That story itself leads to a very familiar third act: one which doesn’t have the same stakes or emotional pull because we’ve seen so much of it before. A parade of beloved characters walking through and waving as well-remembered scenes are re-enacted around them is not a story, but a pantomime.

And that, in the end, is the biggest problem with The Rise of Skywalker and this entire new trio of Star Wars entries: we’ve seen so much of it before, in slightly different form. That issue itself stems from the very origins of this chapter: a desire on the part of a corporate parent (Disney) to put more Star Wars movies on the screen but a lack of a strong central vision of what story to tell going forward. The result has been a franchise at war with itself, even as its fans go to war against each other: a literal, real-life embodiment of the entire brand’s title–with no clear victor in sight.

With the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. We will collaborate with our commercial and international partners and establish sustainable exploration by 2028. Then, we will use what we learn on and around the Moon to take the next giant leap — sending astronauts to Mars.

You can find out the full details on NASA’s Artemis site

A group of Stanford engineers has built an electric self-driving DeLorean that they’ve taught how to drift through a fairly complicated kilometer-long course “with the agility and precision of a human driver”. The car only needed to “see” a GPS course in order to successfully complete it.

As Doc Brown would say “The way I see it, if you’re gonna teach an autonomous car to drift, why not do it with some style?”

Finland built a 6-week online course for its citizens to learn the basics of AI. Now it’s open to the rest of the world.

There are already quite a few sites for people looking to learn the basics of AI, but Finland’s offering seems worth your time if you’re interested in such a thing. It’s nicely designed, offers short tests at the end of each section, and covers a range of topics from the philosophical implications of AI to technical subjects like Bayesian probability. It’s supposed to take about six weeks to finish, with each section taking between five and 10 hours.

The Finnish government said it originally designed the course to give its citizen an advantage in AI. Finland has always punched above its weight in the tech and education, so it seems sensible to marry the two strengths. Megan Schaible of the tech consultancy Reaktor, which helped design the course, said the motivation was “to prove that AI should not be left in the hands of a few elite coders.”

You can start your course here