Chill Links

Sundance Picks Its New Home: Boulder, Colo.

The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War.

We’re In a New Age of Techno-Spiritualism.

The Oxford English Dictionary added 42 new words borrowed from other languages, including gigil, a Tagalog expression for witnessing something adorable.

Coyote, Roadrunner Loitering Drone Interceptors To Arm U.S. Navy Destroyers.

Trump admin moves to end federal HIV prevention programs. ‘Catastrophic’ consequences, experts say.

Why Did the Government Declare War on My Adorable Tiny Truck?

Poland gears up for war.

Hunt for Red October’s English Switch Is Still the Best Way to Handle Languages in Movies. Agreed.

Elon Musk’s war on Social Security unmasks the GOP’s true disdain for retirees.

The Plot Against America.

Chamath Palihapitiya Agrees You Should No Longer Learn To Code, Says Parents Should Advise Their Kids To Focus On These Subjects Instead.

Beam Me Down

Chill Annoying

I can’t understand it either. One of the reasons I like watching UK TV shows is that they have more normal-looking people in them. I don’t need or want every single person in a TV show to look like a damn supermodel. It’s distracting and it’s nothing at all like real life.

I was glad Bella Ramsey got cast in The Last of Us for instance as she looks just like a regular person, not one out of a million beautiful.

We overvalue beauty and undervalue character.

Judge Bent

Chill Annoying, Trynabe Funny

Do you judge people based on the car they drive?

No. But if they have a recumbent bicycle, I can guarantee they are slimy subhumans who subsist on a diet of donkey butts and octopus eyeballs. They abuse kittens and travel to faraway destinations for the explicit purpose of starving orphans.

They all somehow assassinated JFK and canceled Firefly. They are the ones who abscond with a single sock from the dryer, so you end up with no match.

The recumbent bicycle losers sneak in in the middle of the night and put mold on your bread and dust on your knickknacks.

There is no greater force of evil than recumbent bicycle riders. None.

Chill Links

Poland suspends right of migrants to apply for asylum.

Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds. There’s a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.

Promising efforts at disentangling the effects of genes and the environment on complicated traits may have been confounded by statistical problems.

Fossilized fish up to 16 million years old found in Australia, with last meal still intact.

AI models miss disease in Black and female patients.

Russia May Already Have Accessed Group Chat, Ex-Official Warns. Oh, I am sure they were given access right away.

Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post.”

Despite Musk’s claims, the Trump administration’s spending is on pace to surpass Biden levels.

Despite claims that women are dramatically better at empathizing with men’s experiences than the inverse, the bar is quite literally in hell. Most women have zero empathy for men and do not understand anything about them at all.

Not Content With Its Billions Of Web Scrapings, Clearview Tried To Buy Millions Of Mugshots And SSNs.

Mark Cuban Says a ‘Red Rural Recession’ Is Coming Soon. Cuts, Firings, and Grant Cancellations Are Set to Wreck Small Town Economies. FAFO.

Music Mac

Chill Cool, Killin' It

Today, I wrote a little application that when I hit a button I’ve placed on the Mac Finder’s toolbar, it opens all the directories where I’ve stored music, sets the volume to my preferred level and opens Strawberry music player.

Pretty slick and didn’t take long.

Handled

Chill Movies

I liked the cinematography of Companion in general, but I really thought this shot of Sophie Thatcher’s Iris showering and looking at her burned robot hand was nicely done:

The sterile but slightly-glowy off-white combined with almost-amniotic wetness nods towards a rebirth, an emergence. Remember, everything in a (good) film is deliberate.

SQL Heavy

Chill Annoying, Clowns

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.

Chase Down

Chill Political Economy

Startup founder convicted of defrauding JPMorgan Chase of $175M by faking firm’s success.

I see no problem here. Many more people should defraud JPMorgan Chase.

Apart from any law broken, it’s the buying firm’s responsibility to conduct adequate due diligence. JPMorgan’s audit of the books seems to have been, “Welp, looks good to me.” That wouldn’t mitigate the actual fraud in the eyes of the law, but were I the judge I’d just laugh at JPM and sentence Charlie to time served and let her keep the money1.

  1. Yes, I realize the judge cannot do that in reality.

Companion

Chill Movies, Review

Wow, Companion is much better than I expected! Good film. A dark comedy take on what the world would look like if tech like in Ex Machina were to be commercialized.

Best line:

“I am not robo-shaming you!”

Spoilers below.

Such a clever, clever film. There’s a cute part in the beginning. If you go in cold you don’t know the protag, Iris, is a machine. Of course, she does not know either. When the two main characters are exiting their self-driving car, she says “thank you” to the car and won’t let them get out of the vehicle until her human partner does the same thing. This implies that she somehow intuits that she shares more with the car than she consciously knows. Great little detail.

Second favorite line that one of the robots says of his implanted, artificial memories in a more serious moment: “I mean, it may have never happened but my memory of it’s real.”

The movie is actually a better and more incisive critique of “nice guys” and the incel phenomenon than any feminist has managed to come up with. Sophie Thatcher as Iris is perfect, too. Without her, the film would’ve been not nearly as good. The scene where she realizes she’s artificial is particularly affecting.

Recommended.