What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more. – Alan J. Perlis (1922–1990) book SICP

$ git clone https://github.com/quickjs-ng/quickjs $ cd quickjs $ make $ $./build/qjs tests/microbench.js TEST N TIME (ns) REF (ns) SCORE (%) empty_loop 500000 9.20 date_now 100000 37.00 prop_read 100000 7.28 prop_write 100000 5.73 prop_create 10000 69.25 prop_delete 50000 71.60 array_read 50000 8.62 array_write 20000 17.19 array_prop_create 100 26.30 array_length_decr 200 12.39 array_hole_length_decr 200 19.25 array_push 100 45.00 array_pop 100 66.40 typed_array_read 50000 8.36 typed_array_write 20000 17.20 global_read 200000 3.98 global_write 100000 9.20 global_write_strict 200000 3.90 local_destruct 1000 182.83 global_destruct 5000 63.20 global_destruct_strict 2000 170.00 func_call 50000 18.04 closure_var 50000 18.44 int_arith 200 10.00 float_arith 200 12.50 set_collection_add 100 252.50 array_for 2000 10.35 array_for_in 500 93.72 array_for_of 2000 17.61 math_min 100 34.20 regexp_ascii 1 669.80 regexp_utf16 1 677.40 string_build1 200 82.80 string_build2 200 85.20 sort_bench 1 1.55 int_to_string 50000 73.00 float_to_string 5000 570.00 string_to_int 50000 42.70 string_to_float 50000 55.40 bigint64_arith 10 316.00 bigint256_arith 10 306.00 total 4201.09 $

Come across two authors: William Dalrymple (1965-) and Michael Axworthy (1962-2019). Going to read their books about Iran and India. Dalrymple has a podcast, EmpirePodUK. It is super. A good chunk of the depression we are feeling comes not just from watching fellow human being massacred with impunity but also the realisation that those who tasked with ‘representing’ us only represent money & power, that the wishes of millions of us is of no consequence to them ...

Book: Crime and Punishment “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Book: Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop “<..> Reading makes you see with clearer eyes and understand the world better. When you do that , you become stronger - the feeling you associate with success. But at the same time with pain. Within the pages, there’s much suffering, beyond that we’ve gone through in our finite experience of life. You’ll read about suffering you didn’t know existed. Having experienced their pain through words, it becomes a lot harder to focus on pursuing individual happiness and success. Reading makes you deviate further from the textbook definition of success because books don’t make us go ahead of or above anyone else; they guide us to stand alongside others. <…> ...

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation."

Her story was told by her paintings.

“Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.” “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.” ...

The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Fiction, like all art, is primarily an emotional endeavour, and it succeeds or fails on the basis of its emotional sense. The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable. Of course structural powers and systemic forces matter, of course political systems and expediencies matter, but power is concentrated in individuals, and individuals have emotional histories. ...