Also that a lot of websites don’t work correctly if you don’t allow them to use their shitty custom fonts is un-fucking-believable. The days when I can no longer use the web at all are closer than I thought I guess.

It’s simply staggering how much I have to change to make Firefox, Google and other once-good services usable again.

Targeting everything to the stupid and clueless makes the whole world worse.

It’s sad that blogs are in decline, as they are the only truly interesting new cultural phenomenon to emerge from the internet. Twitter and similar services are useful, sometimes entertaining, but Twitter entire and anything like it could be thrown into the sun and nothing of value would be lost.

The same could be said for Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. I am not denying they are important to the people using them, but will they contribute anything truly new and valuable to the culture and the (hopefully) ongoing Enlightenment?

Doubt it; hasn’t happened yet and probably never will.

Blogs, though, are a place where you can interact and learn from the smartest people on the world on any topic, to glean insights that were impossible to get in any way before, by anyone.

Where else could you read in real time about Fukushima from a real nuclear scientist, in depth and detail? How in the past could you have learned about breakthroughs in science by the very researchers discovering them?

Not to mention how blogs reinvigorated and re-energized feminism.

And it was on a blog that I met the woman that I consider my closest friend, though she is far away (hello in Vancouver!).

Some of the best writing I’ve read in the past decade has not been in books or even in magazines, but in blogs.

And that’s all going away, slowly but inevitably.

I’m not sure why, really. Certainly blogs are disliked by our de facto rulers – corporations and their associated viziers – but there has been no direct censorship in the West for the most part.

Perhaps it’s that the smart (and in many cases affluent) people found the internet first, but are now being drowned out by the rabble.

Either way, I’ll miss blogging when it’s only something old women and men do, as Twitter II takes the fore and messages are restricted to emoji only.

Not a world I’ll care for at all, and much will be lost.

The health care enrollment forms at my job for some reason had a space for a nickname.

So my nickname is now “Dazzling Mike the Magnificent.”

I don’t know if anyone reads those things, but I am so terrible at filling out paperwork that I try to spice it up a bit in any “free” blanks that I come across. Or sometimes not even free ones, depending on what mood I am in.

One in the far but not unimaginably distant future, our descendants will wonder and marvel that we ever got by without genetic algorithms that lead to evolved AIs.

“How did they have time to do anything?” they will ask.

Much as we ask the same about a time before washing machines, vacuum cleaners and rapid forms of transportation.

I doubt it is possible to create an AI, but I think it is possible to create the conditions for one to evolve. That is inevitable, and not too far away I think.

My grandfather grew up in southern Georgia. He was old enough to remember when south Georgia and North Florida were much wilder places than they are now. Fishing in modern Florida is not bad, but he could recall when fish were so plentiful in the rivers and lakes that the moment you threw in a scrap of bait, multiple fish competed wildly for it.

Then, you could catch as many fish as many times as you cared to toss your line in.

Hearing stories about such abundance, I used to not believe them. I thought they were all “back in my day…” sort of tales, but turns out that ridiculous fecundity is supported by the academic research. In non-marginal areas wildlife was absolutely plentiful, such that those hunter-gatherers who lived there – assuming they lived past childhood – had relatively easy lives compared to what we have today.

Meaning, that is, they had a lot of leisure time. Leisure time is easy to obtain if catching your next meal is as simple as dipping a basket in the water and there are so many fish that a few just end up in there. That world seems insane today, but for hundreds of thousands of years of human history for most people, that is the world they experienced.

Not that I believe that being a hunter-gatherer was great. No. Personally I like my big-ass monitor and my GTO. I don’t want to be rid of those things. But with the trade-off that most people in the world I know spend most of their time working, with little hope of retirement coincident with decreasing living standards and climate change-induced environmental calamity on the way, the life of a hunter-gatherer doesn’t seem all that bad sometimes.

Is there ever a wrong time for Wild Flag? No, no there is not a wrong time.

Been dealing with a lot of people in my general field lately and have realized something rather startling. Most of them are very, very specialized. Capable, but limited in what they can just do without instruction.

For instance, I’ve asked some people to complete tasks that I do routinely, and they did not know how – these are things I just assumed every IT person knew.

The assumption of similarity bias in action, I guess.

I’ve always been a generalist, but it’s startling to find out that the average person in my career area is so restricted. Even in their specialty (and we are talking about a dozen people here), I can do 90% of their work and tasks, sometimes only 80%, but they can’t do any of the things that I do at all.

I really had no idea. I just assumed I was the baseline.

Unfortunately that leaves me running around doing everything, for the most part. Yes, I will configure that Solaris box, and write a Powershell script, and set up Exchange, and figure out how to automate printer installs by office while the other six people do…what? All they know is a small part of one product.

Training would be fine and good, but in a major deadline-constrained project, where is the time?

I don’t even think I am all that good, but I just have done nearly everything and it shows, but didn’t realize how much it showed until this past month or so.

Female students banned from speaking at Islam seminar at University of Leicester.

Yes, I realize it is The Daily Fail, but that nevertheless did occur.

Liberals for some reason are afraid to criticize Islam and its practices. But I have no respect at all for any culture or religion that does anything like this. Fuck Islam. Fuck Mohammed and his child-raping ways. Just because the US is wrong (very, very wrong) to go murder brown people doesn’t mean that if follows on logically to it being wrong to criticize a culture that harms millions and millions of women.

What, thought I was a milquetoast liberal? Think again. I’m a militant liberal, geared up for radical equality and I don’t really give a shit who I offend. I don’t care if I make things better or worse in the short term either, as some things are so wrong all you can do is raise your middle finger and spit in the face of those who oppose civilization.