kuberbetes is just websphere for millennials. I shan't be reading any replies,
— Dross Whedon (@moonpolysoft) March 4, 2019
Ah, shit, I’d nearly forgotten all about Websphere! Dead on. We keep reinventing the wheel, somehow attempting to make it more wheel-like while not realizing more than wheels might be needed.
SpaceX successfully rockets Crew Dragon ship for astronauts into space.
I was there to view this launch from as close as you can get. Even with all the waiting in queues, the standing around and the security theater, it was worth every moment of inconvenience and annoyance to stand across the lagoon and watch that violent candle punch its way into the sky.
It’s easy to see why so many — liberals and conservatives alike — are opposed to projects like this, are offended in a deep sense by their very existence. Hearing the palpable excitement and the cheers of the SpaceX employees and NASA staff over the audio feed as the rocket flawlessly ascended into the exosphere, the moment of triumph had united all of us into a collective assemblage, a unit that could threaten existing orders, could take unified action, could become a common polity.
Instead of the reasons people profess to believe something, I attempt to discern the true rationale behind their ideological approach. And in this case, our current social acculturation simply demands that we disavow collective actions like these, that we disdain anyone or anything who wishes to transcend our individual limitations, who wants more than to have us as pawns hopping around a chessboard, doomed to be picked off the forces of economic “reality.”
No, SpaceX and NASA isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But the nitpicks and remonstrances of the apathetic naysayers reveal more than they know: that they want us to stay earthbound in reality and in philosophy, with no dreams, no aspirations, nothing but Jackson’s “conditions of absolute reality.”
This is not how humans live. This is not how I live or can live. I reject and deny these conditions, just as the launch did. Just as we all should.
This is how I was also nearly expelled from high school.
I published with some friends in ninth grade a satirical underground paper called Yo’ Mama that sent up the administration, teachers, world events and the like. It was, as the subtitle went, “Rude, Crude, and Socially Unacceptable.”
We sold each copy for fifty cents each and it became something of a hit for a few months. I was a good writer, and a few other people who had a real ear for comedy luckily agreed to work with me in its production.
Of course, the paper and everything in it incensed the administration and one day I was called into a meeting with two different principals (one from the so-called ninth grade center and one from the main high school) and several other very important muckity-mucks. I was told in no uncertain terms to halt publishing and distribution of Yo’ Mama immediately or be expelled.
Having no other real choice, I agreed to stop publication and then had to break the news to my collaborators that day. We were proud of ourselves, though. We’d put out a product that people wanted and were willing to pay for and that was true and good enough that it caused such a ruckus. We worked hard on it, too. Many late nights writing, collating, binding and all the other tasks that must be done when you need hundreds of copies of something.
What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the paper had spread to the main high school en masse somehow so when I started there the next year everyone already knew who I was. “Hey, hey, aren’t you Mike? The dude who published Yo’ Mama? Man, that shit was funny, had me laughing my ass off in class.” And similar things I’d get in the hallway or at lunch; dozens of kids coming up to tell me how hilarious they thought Yo’ Mama was and wishing I could still publish it.
That paper coincided with me attempting to improve myself in other ways, so it was very fortuitous timing. I hadn’t even started at the main high school and I was already a mini-legend when I walked in the door for publishing a paper that everyone had loved and that had nearly gotten me expelled.
Yo’ Mama wasn’t the only thing that changed my life right about then, but it certainly helped a great deal. Reputation is like capital. It builds on itself and walking into a brand new school already being known as a rebel publisher of an unjustly-banned paper certainly didn’t hurt matters.
How My Month-Long Diet to Save the Planet Collapsed Under a Mountain of Donuts and Pizza.
Diets that lack vital nutrients like that one will always lead to returning to more filling and nutritious foods, no matter what the excuses and justifications. Not that donuts are nutritious, but it’s a myth that your body knows what specific foods to consume if it’s not getting vital nutrients. What it does do is basically cue you to eat everything, after a while. Some people can resist this urge. Most can’t.
Also, fatty foods are not unhealthy. That’s a myth promulgated by the food consortiums in the 1960s-1980s.
“Save the earth, eat stuff that tastes like your cat’s litterbox” is never going to be an effective strategy, even if it actually would save the earth (it won’t).
I now support Jay Inslee, if he is being honest. Climate change is the only thing that really matters. Everything else is details.
I’d pay to avoid having to use Facebook. Not sure how much, though. Maybe up to $500 a month if it became mandatory under some authoritarian regime but you could opt out via a fee.
To force me to use Facebook? It’d be a lot. Maybe $10,000 a month, if I were to use it every day and as most people use it, with relatively honest information. I am not sure $10,000 a month would be enough. Maybe more. I’d definitely use it if someone paid me $50,000 a month. So somewhere between $10K and $50K a month would be my required Facebook usage payment.
This is so true, and all of the Mozilla/Firefox people should watch this:
This is what users do when you create an intuitive UI. pic.twitter.com/qL7ppQ6KaD
— Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) February 26, 2019
In Defense of the Gerontocracy. Maybe older is better. Just look at Nancy Pelosi.
Just look at her. Blocking Medicare for all, a climate change denier in effect, will be responsible more directly than most for the deaths of tens of millions to billions.
Surely something to admire, am I right?
This also seems to be babbling, mostly, as far as I can tell.
Among many other mistakes, she is somehow analogizing the scarcity of attention and the need to parcel it out judiciously with the problem of students writing papers. Do professors not realize that in most cases that students must regurgitate in the simplest forms possible what professors “teach” them to have any hope of a good grade? You know, I’ve done the opposite and my grades were not good. In school, you are penalized for thinking for yourself or attempting novel ideas or interpretations. So exactly what did she think those papers would contain, exactly?
I’ve interviewed job applicants, and perceived them all as “bright and impressive”, but found that the vast majority of them could not solve a simple math problem. The ones who could solve the problem didn’t appear any “brighter” in conversation than the ones who couldn’t.
I guarantee that I could not solve that math problem, but I’d also be better at the job assuming I had any training for it than any of the other applicants, and if not I’d be better at it in a few months. Like Ice Cube, in most areas I can mess around and get a triple-double. All except math.
If one prizes writing over math, I bet I could summarize this person’s own work better — more cogently and with more clarity — than they themselves could. And faster, too.
But sure, math is all that matters. Unless the job directly involves teaching math or a lot of high-level math, why does she thinks this matters at all? Academia’s math obsession is completely bizarre. I guess it is because quantification is easy; you can solve the math problem or not. It might not tell you a goddamn thing, but, recursively enough, you can quantify if someone can quantify something.
The main problem with this whole post is that she conflates the ability to detect BS in GPT-2 results with performance on garbage, worthless essays and math problems that the person might not — probably does not — have any training to solve.
It doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s yet more babbling. Where’s the evidence that these ideas have any relation at all?
This is the kind of shit I mean when I say that smart people are just not very smart, in general. Sure, I am certain she is good at her job and all that. But like most people she has the systems thinking capability of a desiccated tadpole — and from reading the rest of her blog, she’s trying! But she’s just not very good at it (as most STEM types are not). She has good intentions, but the end result is no insight. Just babbling.
Here's Obama *bragging* about how he saw the transformation of America into the number one oil producer. This was four months ago. The climate change denial is coming from… inside the house. https://t.co/PtSoj6JctN
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 26, 2019
Nearly everyone, as I’ve noted before, is a climate change denier de facto. If we weren’t, we’d be running around with our hair on fire attempting to avert the coming catastrophe. Why anyone would have kids given what’s coming I haven’t a clue. People just have no idea the severity and scope of what’s ahead.
Obama was a terrible president who made the world much worse. The evidence is everywhere. People are as delusional about Obama as they are about climate change.