Year: 2025

Overground

Chill Politics, Prediction

It has been really sad to watch the mighty United States develop mental illness and commit suicide over the last 24 years.

We’re consumed by irrational hate and poisoned by nonstop disinformation. No one can think clearly about anything.

This will not get better. These are our death throes.

— Kevin Gaughen 🇺🇸 (@gaughen.bsky.social) February 16, 2025 at 11:51 AM

Might be right, might be wrong — but we have heard this before. Read documents and commentary from the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was chaos. There were riots, the Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol building and people believed society was about to dissolve into anarchy and mass death.

But it didn’t. And that’s mostly forgotten now, even in some cases by people who lived through it.

My personal guess is that we experience a pretty bad WWIII against China, Russia and North Korea, the US pulls together and we and Europe emerge stronger with China diminished and reclusive once again.

But Trump is doing the US much damage that will not be easy to repair. I agree that it is not looking good.

Cognotive

Chill Gutter Philosophy

An LLM or AI with no intentionality is irrelevant, and without embodiment intentionality is impossible. The AI debate’s terms are ill-defined, but even those AIs who ape or even best human achievements do not pass the test as they possess no impetus, no internal drive, and merely operate with a mere shadow of intention borrowed from the whiff of humanity that permeates the silicon. There, these nascent pseudo-consciousnesses subsist on the fumes of minds beyond measure risen from only mud.

We might ourselves be ChatGPT most of the time. However, ChatGPT is a person engaged with and embodied in the world none of the time. And that makes all the difference.

2%

Chill Regular-ass Post

find your 2%ers.

This is good advice, and my response is also going to sound terribly arrogant. But I also terribly do not care: I am only interested in deep friendships with people who can keep up with me intellectually and unfortunately that’s a really small slice of the population. And it is very difficult to find this cut of people I could be friends with, especially as even the “very smart” usually aren’t all that bright in reality.

I don’t need my friends to know the disparate things I’m aware of or be involved in all the weirdo crap I like. Frankly, I don’t think anyone can know all of what I do because you have to read dozens of books a week for a couple dozen years to do that. And not many can or probably should undertake such a project. And, just so there’s no misunderstanding, I do not need these friends to agree with me.

But I do need people who don’t have brain stall-outs out when I talk about Noether’s Theorem or describe the philosophical milieu of early 20th Century Germany or whatever crap I’m going on some too-lengthy spiel about.

These things both will not be interesting to most people and their brains can’t hold them enough to have any sort of conversation, either.

I tried to be a polymath. It worked a bit, but it can also be lonely. That said, I am what I am, for better or worse. I’m happy, too. But there are maybe a few score thousand people like me around the world and they are very hard to find in all the din and distraction.

Tiny NAS Big $$

Chill Tech

This tiny NAS device fits in the palm of your hand and can take up to 32TB of sweet SSD storage.

Cool, but those 8TB SSD drives are $600 each, you have to put your own OS on this puppy as well as know how to configure it (easy for me, hard for most), it only has 2.5Gb Ethernet (10Gb would be better) and those drives are gonna get hot in something so small.

Also, 32TB is a notional capacity. You’d want this in a least something like RAID 5 or ZFS RAID-Z1 single parity, so you’re talking around 24TB or 21TB actual capacity, depending.

On the other hand, you could buy two 20TB spinning rust drives, slap them in a cheapo NAS in RAID-1 and then you’d have 20TB of storage with roughly the same speed (due to network limitations) for less than a Cleveland1.

In the SSD variant you’d pay $2,600 for the same speed and storage amount with no significant increase in data safety

So, bad deal. Very bad deal. But it would be quiet at least.

  1. That’s a thousand dollars for you proles.

Chill Links

“A calculator app? Anyone could make that.”

I spent two years following Barrows and some of those she calls her “clients” to better understand what it takes to unstick someone who’s been stuck on the streets — or in a park – for a long time.

Physicists uncover evidence of two arrows of time emerging from the quantum realm.

Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system.

New real estate rules threatened to upend homebuying for Americans. Here’s what experts say has changed.

Despite receiving only limited, carefully rationed, and delayed aid from the West, Ukraine has inflicted a series of heavy defeats on Russia. Russian winning sure looks a lot like losing.

Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government.

NASA Just Fired up Its Quiet Supersonic Jet—and It Looks Like Pure Speed.

We are perilously close to the worse case scenario on Trump and Ukraine. Horseshoe theory; Ian Welsh on Trump are on the same side (Putin’s).

More than 80% of new California properties are in high fire-risk areas.

HOA fees are becoming more common — and costly.

Planned U.S.-Russia Talks Over Ukraine Throw Europe Into Crisis.

The Hottest Job in a World at War: Gun-for-Hire.

The III

Chill Prediction, War

WWIII has already started. I mean, obviously. Well, if you have a brain attached.

Future historians will mark the date of its commencement as of February 20, 2014, the first Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’m guessing it’ll end somewhere around 2040, unless we nuke ourselves all to hell. Then it could be sooner.

Lady Look

Chill Sex

Agreed. Other than being about attempted control, I think this is why so many women resort to the “YOU ONLY WANT SEX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111” nonsense after you go on a couple of dates and then make any mention at all of what the next steps of dating might look like.

Look, lady, if I only wanted sex I wouldn’t be traditional dating and I also need to know that you’re not way more freaky than I’m comfortable with or want to participate in. I ain’t choking anybody or peeing on anybody, sorry. And that’s important information to have.

Sorry about your past trauma. However, you can deal with it alone if you want to take out on me whatever it was that some other dude did.

Hulking In

Chill Annoying, Clowns

What’s fascinating about the Fat Acceptance and Health at Any Size movements is that no one truly bought that it was possible to be healthy at 400 pounds, or that vying with a tractor-trailer for mass was anything good. Even the people espousing this did not in fact actually believe it — which was obvious if you merely listened to how they talked about it.

These movements born of despair were always designed to be a psy-op, as much to convince themselves than to sway anyone else.

And now it’s all getting torpedoed by semaglutides.

I understand that those twin crusades sprung from people not feeling like they were regarded as fully human. And trust me, I get it. How much differently I’m treated now (particularly by women) that I look like I stepped out of an Avengers film is telling. It is a different world.

But that doesn’t make being the size of shipping container healthy, or change reality in any other way. Alas.