I just asked a user to log in using the password she chose less than 5 minutes ago. (She couldn’t remember it.)
Not that unusual for the average user. I’ve had many users over the years who would forget their passwords every 2-3 days.
Self-service password resets are a godsend.
A lot of people’s terrible behavior is related to them realizing one day as they were growing up that they were not in fact God’s specialest one and never getting over that trauma.
I have a big ego, but never fell prey to this as nearly everyone around me when I was young went out of their way to tell me how horrible and shitty I was. So I definitely never felt that I was God’s specialest anything.
Who knew that a movement who literally killed themselves to prove they didn't need modern vaccines would literally kill the economy to prove they didn't need modern standards of living
— Noah Smith
(@Noahpinion) April 4, 2025
The stupidity, it burns.
Loser.
Any vehicle that I drive becomes a “real man’s” vehicle, even a pink convertible VW Golf. My scintillating aura spreads awesomeness over the entire vicinity.
It’s a thing.
I expect recession in 3-4 months, depression in 6-9 months.
All because of the current administration.
Price of laptops already up $300-400 per device.
Indeed. The same laptops I ordered for work in March for $2,000 each are now $2,600. That wasn’t even a month ago.
I expect they’ll go up more soon. Glad I bought all the stuff I did in my personal life when I did because I knew this was going to happen. Clowns often do the clownery they claim they will.
We’ve allowed some of the most clueless morons in existence to destroy everything. In that sense, I guess we deserve what we get. We did it to ourselves.
Recession, Great Recession and depression chance are all 90% now. That’s as high as I go for any systemic prediction more than a month out.
All that remains to be seen now is how bad it’ll get and if the American economy survives in any recognizable form. Now is the time to be saving money, buying some extra food and other resources, and having backup plans in place if you can.
We’re on a runaway train that is gonna run out of track. All because dumbasses elected an actual idiot. Fun.
I like Ada Palmer, but here she is completely wrong.
It’s vogueish now in the world of history to claim there were (and can definitionally never be) dark ages or renaissances, and that the Renaissance did not exist. Too much to go into here, but this is the au courant belief for a variety of reasons, among them that these historians are attempting to push back as a political project against the idea that society can be improved as that implies some eugenicist goals.
People like Palmer misrepresent both the causes and the advent of the Renaissance. They portray the people like me who believe the Renaissance is a useful way to divide up history as believing that one morning people woke up and were like, “Hey, it’s the Renaissance! Awesome!” No one, of course, believes that. It was a gradual transition from the Middle Ages, which used to be (for very good reason) referred to as the Dark Ages.
But the reality is that the Dark Ages occurred, and so did the Renaissance, no matter how much clownish historians deny them. For instance:
And no handy-dandy chart, but after the fall of Rome people forgot to how to bake fucking bread. And pottery quality reverted back about two thousand years. Among many, many other apocalyptic changes.
You can actually read writing from the time of people saying, “This is the end of the world and nothing will be good again.” And they were right — for about 800 years.
I hate this modern trend of denying very clear, very obvious occurrences and historical changes for political reasons. Come on, Ada, ain’t nobody gonna CRISPR your baby to have blond hair because you think the Renaissance and the Enlightenment happened.
Basically, the right is ruled by people who don't read books and are proud of it, while the left is ruled by people who say "read a book" in response to everything without reading any books themselves. https://t.co/lz0yIP3rOQ
— Noah Smith
Largely true, alas. The Right wants to be appear dumb while actually being the dumbasses they valorize, while the Left pretends to be intelligent intellectuals while also being the dumbasses they make fun of and disparage.
None of it is any good.
I’ve become an expert at hacking, whacking and cracking Mozilla’s anti-user features. Just spent part of the afternoon manually editing a Firefox sqlite database to get around another anti-user feature they claim is for “security” but is really there just because they like being petty authoritarians.
Ain’t no Mozilla clown can hold me down.
Something like 80% of all commercial products are the result of government research. Which Trump, working for China and Russia, is currently trashing.
They really do work for the Russians, huh. https://t.co/lP78n25D6F
— Noah Smith
Indeed. That’s been pretty clear. And the Chinese, too.
Mom?
It does actually look a whole lot like my mom when she was 35 or so. Weird. And she was definitely a white trash psychotic chick.