I hate books on paper so, so much.
Not being able to change the font size is an absolute dealbreaker. I cannot believe I ever read books like that. But I did. A whole fucking lot of them.
Could not do it now, though.
Year: 2025
The Problem Is Not Cost
Yup. And it’d only cost around $100 billion to fill the desert1 with enough solar panels and batteries to power the entire United States year-round forever.
The problem is not cost. Nor even what is possible. The problem is will. We could do so much more than we have done. And we should. The future does not belong to faint-hearted, anemic degrowthers cowering before the god of lost causes and reveling in their prostrate servility. The degrowthers claim that tech will not allow us to survive what is coming. But that is completely wrong. In fact, it is the only thing that will.
We undertake insanely ambitious projects or we die. It’s as simple as that.
As I’ve said before, we must become the gods that we pretend to be.
Lose 11
Upgrading clients to Windows 11 is like trying to sell sand at a beach!
How to sell the Win 11 clowngrade to end users (who in reality have no choice anyway):
“With Windows 11, China, the NSA, Microsoft, random advertisers as well as Russian hackers have a complete backup of your system, adding resiliency and redundancy. Nothing will ever get lost.
And with the new built-in AI features, you too can spout fictional and outlandishly wrong information all over the internet and to your company’s management with merely a few clicks. With the added lack of configurability and customizability, you’ll never have to worry about having anything work as you like it or correctly. It’s a net Win (get it) for everyone who matters.”
What’s the Dyl?
Try as I might, I never have and still do not see what’s so special about Bob Dylan. His appeal is completely lost on me, both musically and as a celebrity apart from that.
I feel like Dylan about some people do about Taylor Swift, I guess.
Did Believe
Did the overlords of media outlets and Reddit (et al.) really believe that suppressing views critical of the health care industry would actually help? I mean, what is even the point of that?
This suppression just increases anger and causes people to hate the system even more. But I guess it temporarily makes the advertisers happy enough to spend another buck.
Domestic Theatrical Market Summary for 2024.
Species concepts in conservation biology.
It Was Never About Artificial Intelligence.
Bluesky Won’t Save Us. Like radiation, social media is invisible scientific effluence that leaves us both more knowledgeable and more ignorant of the causes of our own afflictions than ever. Social media is for most people a Level 1 cognitohazard.
We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is, and it always will be the economy, stupid.
Enough With the Land Acknowledgments. Yeah, that is some absolutely moronic bullshit.
Russia Targets West With Drones, Exploding Parcels and Sabotage. We are already at war with China and Russia, but only they realize it.
Tadate
Unless aliens kidnap my partner (or me1) there’s not a chance I’ll be in the dating scene soon, but if I were I’d definitely go somewhere overseas if I wanted to subject myself to that hell again.
There are a few advantages to that approach. It automatically makes you unusual and exotic, and depending on the country the women haven’t been as utterly poisoned by social media. I’d concentrate on somewhere with low social media use, low tattoo prevalence and low obesity.
Then I’d learn the language (relatively easy for me, if I want to do it2) and make it happen.
American women are basically undateable now due to social media-induced mental illness, tattoos, ridiculous levels of entitlement and obesity. It’s just about a crime to do that to yourself.
Back Hold
Indeed. And then I really piss ’em off by saying things like, “You’re only constrained by yourself. No one is actually holding you back.”
I make friends wherever I go.
Ad Del
Why I Switched to macOS After Using Windows for Nearly Two Decades.
Windows is a spyware-infested ad delivery system. Linux is ok but still not all that usable (and I use it daily in two different VMs, so yes I do know).
MacOS is the best of a bunch of bad choices. I also just bought an M4 Mac Mini and while it has less memory than my old system, it’s absurdly fast. Apple has really been killing it with their own chip design, which I did not expect when they initially announced their intent.
The M4 Mini is around twice as fast as my old system, and I had a high-end 2020 iMac previously. Pretty impressive. And unlike with Windows 11, I don’t see the first fucking ad anywhere in the OS.
Hide U
Re scams, I think Microsoft/Safari are doing users a disservice by hiding URL paths….
Of course it does. But the whole point of hiding the URL was so that it’s not clear when you’re on a scammy advertising site or area of a site or the address you intended to visit.
In other words, it was done to enable scamminess. Which is the dominant mode of the economy today — so hiding URLs fits right in.
China is currently experiencing ~1% deflation (official PPI) alongside 4% nominal growth.
Medicare Advantage Is Scamming You. That’s what it was designed to do, so mission accomplished?
Fast radio bursts originate near the surface of stars.
‘Battlestar Galactica’ Was Always About One Particular Kind Of Guy Failing Upwards. Yup.
Predistribution over Redistribution: Beyond the Windfall Clause.
Ukrainian Su-27 Flanker Pilot’s Rare Account Of The Changing Air War.
China’s EV Sales Set To Overtake Traditional Cars Years Ahead of West.
Advertisers Keep Avoiding News Sites and Publishers Have Had Enough of It. Clownish.
Washington Post Cartoonist Ann Telnaes Quits After Bezos-Owned Paper Kills Trump Satire Piece.
Disag
I’m not sure what it means, but I think it’s interesting that my very strong streak of disagreeableness made me much more attractive to women than if I’d been exactly like I am except for leaning agreeable.
People are strange.
The redpill dudes aren’t exactly right that it’s better to be a jerk. That is not in fact the optimum male config that most women find attractive. However, many women do (oddly) mistake jerks for the confident. I’m not a jerk, I think. But I am both confident and extremely disagreeable and that historically has allowed me to punch above my weight (and height) with women.
Not a Friend
Why do people think anyone at work is a friend? That’s almost never true. The CIO here definitely is not and absolutely 100% did know about the layoff in advance. I guarantee it.
That said, I’d be charging them like crazy for repairing this mess they left themselves in. A few years ago, a company I’d worked for a decade prior contacted me about fixing some complex scripts they had moved around and attempted to change and could not get to function any longer. I’d created those as something temporary a developer was supposed to consolidate into an actual fully-thought-out reporting application later on but never did (of course).
They’d brought in several consultants who could not duplicate what I’d done as it involved (among quite a few other things) complex manipulations of obscure Windows permissions in a very specific way to achieve what they wanted.
Anyway, they requested that I fix these scripts and add some related new features for free. I said no way and quoted $250 an hour, 10 hours minimum1, paid in advance. They wouldn’t agree to that so I told them good luck.
Fine. I heard it never got fixed.
Dele
Did you get used to the changes that comes with managing / directing?
I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’m still not accustomed to it. The very hardest part of management is willingly handing off something to someone junior that you know you can do in 15 minutes only to have it take them two entire weeks to implement. Even then, typically the task or project still inevitably has to be revised seven times before it’s ready to release to production.
Delegating like this is hard but necessary. Otherwise, the junior team members never learn anything and never advance in capability or project leadership competence.
But I still am not great at handing off. Not as much as I should.