Recognizance

I have trouble recognizing male programmers because they all dress the same, are all overweight to obese, all have the same scruffy poorly-trimmed beard, and all wear glasses 1.

This is a real problem at in-person work functions.

  1. Obviously, not every single one. But this is accurate to my experience.

Roam

That’s how I grew up, but I was part of the last gen (Gen X) to do so. Often I would go outside at 8AM and not see another adult till 6-9PM. I’d roam miles from home on my own or, more rarely, with friends. This was completely normal back then. Now it’d get parents arrested.

Knife

The free world teeters on the edge of a knife. If Trump is elected, there will be no liberal great powers left in the world.

I agree with Noah Smith here.

Although itโ€™s not possible to know for certain what the consequences of a second Trump presidency would be, itโ€™s very possible that it would result in the U.S. essentially surrendering its European allies to Russia and its Asian allies to China โ€” thus dramatically weakening Americaโ€™s own ability to resist those enemies in the future.

This is an extremely likely outcome of a Trump victory. And that, therefore, will make WWIII far more likely as well. Either that, or the below — followed by WWIII.

If the U.S. abandons resistance to China and Russia, it will go very badly for Americaโ€™s allies. Europe will probably fracture again, with some states (probably including Germany) falling all over themselves to appease the Russians. Russia will then become a sort of de facto hegemon in Europe. In Asia, China would probably conquer Taiwan, cutting off U.S. semiconductor supplies and establishing Chinese hegemony in East Asia. Japan and South Korea would then be forced to choose between either becoming nuclear powers or becoming de facto satrapies of the new Chinese empire. Essentially, Americaโ€™s major allies would fall to Americaโ€™s enemies.

It is indeed, as Noah observes, a very dangerous time.

Emoted

Emotional intelligence is worth nearly nothing. Women are 100x more interested in me now that I got way fitter and hotter. I could be a complete asshole and this would still be the case. Perhaps even more the case as many, many women use assholery as a proxy for dominance, which is hugely appealing to many women.

Emotional intelligence helps some in a relationship. But it helps 0.0% in getting you one. In fact, it probably hurts on net.

SNATural

It’s not hard to do that by accident if you have a complex network. Say you have SNAT set up and a pool (or, more likely, various pools) of IP addresses that are allowed to do SNAT. Oops, you don’t have MAC filtering and some help desk mook with too much access but not enough knowledge changes the IP address of a device and boom, now you have a potentially-fatality-causing medical device on the open internet.

Just as with lab escapes, that kinda shit happens all the time.

Ad ID

The future is terrible. One of the reasons we’ve been holding on to all our older and/or unused monitors is that we knew this was coming. And now it’s here. I wish I could personally kneecap anyone who had anything to do with this.