• 6 Posts
  • 354 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I’m glad someone else is calling this out. He seemed so thoughtful and methodical previously.

    So for the guy to get busted because he eats in a public place, while a huge manhunt is ongoing, and he happens to have on his person: the gun, the fake id previously used, and a manifesto expressing his motive? It’s ridiculous! He could have tossed the gun into a body of water anywhere on his route outside NYC and it would never be found. And why reuse the same ID if you had several? Why not burn the associated IDs after they’ve been compromised?

    It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve seen suggestions that this could have been a state hit, maybe to destabilize the country further? Would our spooks make up a lazy narrative to cover up for their spooks?





  • I first heard of it from Joel Spolsky’s blog and wikipedia also credits that article with popularizing the concept. In it’s original formulation, it was based on remote procedure calls being hidden in APIs. Because a remote computer call has all these limits of latency, packet/info loss, and possible connection loss, it is impossible to make a perfect abstraction that allows the programmer to treat the remote call as though it were local. The reality the abstraction tries to hide “leaks” in those fundamental limits.

    All of contemporary global society is such an abstraction; that’s one of the principles of post-modernism. When you buy clothes online an entire invisible work force of shippers, manufacturers, resource procurerers, and more lies beind each article of fabric.

    Pressure from climate change, tariffs, global war, and more are straining the foundations of society and the comfortable abstraction is starting to crack.




  • The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.

    Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn’t tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I’ve been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!

    Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn’t running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.

    Unfortunately I’m still deep in MS land for work, but there’s almost a comedic quality to it. Everything’s very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it’s tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft’s inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.

    Like yes, it’s my problem to fix, but I’m just glad it’s not my car.


  • I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.

    So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.

    They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that’s probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one’s race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.







  • As a tall man who likes to walk at night, I have long understood that women alone at night do not wish to encounter me. So when I happen to find myself following a woman down the street, I will either slow down, cross the street, or stop and look at a sign or something for a minute to give her some space.

    In a dangerous and shitty world, a person has to find subtle and quiet ways to express care, compassion, and solidarity. It costs me nothing to make a woman feel safer.