Month: February 2025

Chill Links

Art and music are not mere diversions or entertainments. They are profound expressions of human experience, written and interpreted in the language of emotion. They speak to truths that logic alone cannot fully capture or convey.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Has Completely Departed From Reality.

U.S. conditionally approves vaccine to protect poultry from avian flu.

Scientific institutions have a long history of anticipatory obedience.

RFK Jr’s confirmation begins America’s Dark Ages.

Europe’s impossible choice: Which industries should survive the green transition?

What the new German government means for Ukraine.

Helium in the Earth’s core.

The ivory tower’s drift: how academia’s preference for theory over empiricism fuels scientific stagnation.

Last night Republicans voted to gut Medicaid and SNAP to give more tax breaks to the wealthy. This will be disastrous for the country and for many people. Evil.

The US is now the enemy of the west.

Germany can turbocharge Europe’s renewal – if it will only seize this moment. Doubtful, but shit — somebody should try.

Jeff Bezos is muzzling the Washington Post’s opinion section. That’s a death knell. Was already muzzled. Now just being murdered outright.

The findings reveal that 10- to 11-year-olds who engage heavily with social media, video games, texting, and videos show a greater risk of symptoms such as inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, rapid speech, racing thoughts, and impulsivity — behaviors characteristic of manic episodes.

Poison Apple

Chill Trynabe Funny

What Happens When You Remove Someone From Apple Family Sharing?

A drone is immediately dispatched bearing a single M67 fragmentation grenade. The disfavored family member is then hunted relentlessly and eliminated by the drone.

If the first drone is unsuccessful, a second is dispatched free of charge. If that fails, a space laser strike is undertaken as a last resort. This will result in an additional $200 fee on your Apple account.

Be aware of what will occur when you shame a family member so.

Sold Out

Chill Prediction, War

Now that America is in the hands of enemies, those same enemies will have free rein: Invasion of Taiwan by China is likely in October of 2026 when the weather is favorable and Trump is at his weakest.

I suspect Europe will not organize itself to help Ukraine with needed materiel and thus it too will be defeated in 2026. After that, Russia will regroup for a few years and then invade the Baltics in 2030, then Poland and Germany in 2032.

Isn’t the future fun? Told you that you’d miss Pax Americana when it was gone. Those of you who survive it, that is.

Graphic Disturbance

Chill Clowns, Tech

Microsoft retiring yet another useful tool for one that’s pants 🙁 .

That Microsoft Graph stuff deeply sucks. All of the things I could do in PowerShell in 2 lines of code now takes dozens to hundreds of lines in the terrible Graph way of doing things.

All to make it more “developer friendly,” for whatever reason. And developers love complexity. Sysadmin types do not — and I think that’s a fundamental split between us. Devs dominate now, though, so they get what they want.

So now I can waste two hours doing what I used to be able to achieve in 10 minutes. Fuckin’ great.

Not Proc

Chill Clowns

This was not a process failure. The pilot of the private jet was instructed not to cross the runway three times by ATC but ignored this for unknown reasons.

He deserves to have his pilot’s license revoked since it was almost revoked the hard way (instant death).

Quad

Chill Annoying

I think I could’ve been a good to great scientist, but my inability to handle most practical math kept me out of that field.

It was for the better. I doubt I would’ve been happy in academia, especially now. But there must be a lot of people like me — kept out of fields in which they’d prosper because they can’t figure out the quadratic equation.

Pants Chance

Chill Amusing, Sex

Woman Friend of mine: I like that you’re my friend and visit me even though there’s no chance we’d ever have sex.

Me: No chance?

Friend: Why, are you interested?

Me: No. Sex is a lot of work at the best of times and I’m tired. I just wanna chill, really.

Friend: Then why do you care if there’s a chance or not?

Me: I like optionality! I don’t want to rule anything out.

Woman: Ok. There’s a trillionth of a trillionth percent chance.

Me: Ok, much better!

(This wasn’t confrontational. We’ve known each other quite a while and we were both joking around in a much longer conversation about how men and women relate and misunderstand one another.)

Chill Links

This Executive Order Reveals the Trump-Musk Endgame.

It’s the Health Care, Stupid. Forget DOGE. Republicans are playing with political fire as they move to gut Medicaid.

Putin’s Three Years of Humiliation. The Russian president can’t win his war against Ukraine unless he persuades its allies to betray it.

Taiwan Watches Trump Undercut Ukraine, Hoping It Won’t Be Next. Oh it will be.

My truck plunged into a ravine – and for six days I was trapped, alone and afraid.

Taiwan Detains Ship and Chinese Crew After Undersea Cable Severed.

America — and to be clear, that also means our economy and markets — are now headed into the ravine that is the great unwinding of “America” into “American Oligarchy.”

Why Gen Xers and Millennials Are Giving More Money to Their Kids Than Baby Boomers. Boomers really are in general terrible.

The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer. From India to the Amazon to Israel, bulldozers have left a path of destruction that offers a cautionary tale for how technology without safeguards can be misused.

The UK Government Just Made Everyone Less Safe As Apple Shuts Down iCloud Encryption.

Brain Embiggener

Chill Killin' It

I get asked the same question. I did it by reading nearly every book in a medium-sized library over the course of a decade-and-a-half, and any other book anyone would give me or let me borrow. And then kept on reading after that.

I’ve probably read 15,000-20,000 books. At one point, I was reading 20-30 (full, adult) books a week. I did this for years. I’ve read seven books in a day.

It’s not possible for most, I know, but I did it.

Police Call

Chill Annoying

What is the male perspective/counterpoint to the female “mental load” or “emotional labour”?

Men don’t do emotional labor because to many women, any man showing any emotion (other than perhaps anger) is a huge and immediate turn-off that dooms you forever in her eyes.

Women police men’s emotions very heavily, more than other men do (after high school anyway). And men react to this logically enough by not showing any.

Influence

Chill Evil, Lying Liars

I’m sad for my country. We have so much potential here; so much we could do. We’ve never met even a fraction of what we could be and could achieve, but we’re further away now than at any other point in recent history.

And the nation is effectively controlled by China and Russia at the moment. I knew Trump was corrupt and dishonorable but I had no idea the extent to which he and Musk would sell us all out for a bit of money and power. It is not an exaggeration to say that we’re now substantially a satellite state of those two countries.

What do you do exactly when your nation is in the hands of enemies?