Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61B.

And this is the de facto death of VMWare. Their ESXi (and related tooling) is probably the best computing product created in the modern era and far superior in management and capabilities to laughably-inferior products and ideas such as Docker, Kubernetes and container/microservices practices that succeeded VMWare’s stack in many organizations.

I spent a vast number of hours at various VMWare admin consoles gettin’ shit done over the years. Their core product, ESXi, was logically-organized and rarely had issues, and had great observability too. None of this is true of what followed where you often have to build as much infrastructure to monitor what’s running as is actually operating a real workload — a huge and stupefying regression.

VMWare was the last of the products that did not attempt to turn everyone into a developer, and allowed real system administration to be done on it — and where it was in some definite state at all times. Now, there is the shoddy practice of writing crappy code and hoping it does what you want it to do, but with no real way to determine what it’ll do in production or to test it accurately in advance or even to revert it if something goes wrong.

VMWare did not make the cloud companies any money though, and they are largely the ones pushing behind the scenes for financially- and computationally-expensive micrososervices and containerization. (For instance, Amazon makes around an 80% profit on their non-VM-based container products as opposed to around 20% on virtual machines.)

VMWare was the last gasp of the old style of computing, transmuted as far as possible into the modern era. Its inevitable slow strangulation at the hands of Broadcom signals the de facto end of the computer as something that holds any notion of unrestrained capability in it, rather than just a utility to be consumed with little freedom or control over any of it.

First I’ve ever seen this band. She’s a really great guitarist. And love her sparkly Ibanez.

Why is it racist when people from the US want to close the borders, but not racist when other countries want to close their borders to immigrants?

Many leftists around the world think something is only bad when the US does it but when any other country or group does it, it’s perfectly fine — especially if the dominant ethnicity of that other country is non-white.

Of course this makes no sense. The particularly funny thing about this is they do this to “combat US exceptionalism.” However, it actually reinforces this exceptionalism because it frames the United States as the most important, influential and dominant country on the planet. Which is, you know, kinda the opposite of their stated goal.

Whether they are on the left or the right, too many people go full-on clown too easily.

Google Drive files suddenly disappeared. The Drive literally went back to condition in May 2023.

But I was told the magical Cloud (cue angels hosannaing) was the place where your data never got lost and was the solution to all problems. Nothing bad could ever happen there.

Meanwhile, in my home infrastructure, I’ve never lost a single damn bit of data unrecoverably. Ever.

That all y’all bought into the cloud propaganda and that smartphones are more convenient really blows my fucking mind. Y’all stupid.

The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think.

This is from 2016, and it’s only gotten more dismal since then. Gen Z often is worse than the most addled Boomer, and is even more incapable of learning as they just have no basis for using a real computer.

But at least they will be no competition in the workplace.

It’s very damn odd how “I’m not good with computers” has become a ubiquitous excuse to be insanely incompetent with anything that plugs into a wall.

That’s not a computer, Karen, that’s an electric stapler. JFC.

How mind-blowing do you find superposition?

Comics like this are clownish because the author also does not understand superposition but because he (or she?) has reduced it to math, thinks they understand more than they do.

But…the addition and existence of waves has consequences, real-world ones. One is that you cannot just treat those waves as any less than real though it doesn’t make sense classically. It’s certainly not true — in the sense that most people mean it — that a superpositioned particle is “in two places at once” or the usual facile lay explanations. However, the reason the idea and mathematics of superposition exists is that it is 100% true that what is happening is not the classical version of what a particle would do, or would effect.

In other words, those “waves” have real-world consequences and those wave additions — while actually a really simple equation and operation — are concomitant with causal effects on the universe that differ from a model and actuality where superposition does not exist.

STEM people are fucking idiots, mostly. They can do math but often understand little even in the mathematical context in which they operate. And in philosophy they are utter laughable dunces. “Water is just hydrogen and oxygen, man.” Sure, buddy.

If you listen to the modern pseudo-feminists and Twitter doofs, etc., it seems they believe an age gap is all that matters in a relationship — i.e, that if two people are not born on the exact same day, year, hour and minute, they can’t possibly have a single thing in common.

So fucking weird!

I think this became an obsession because age is eminently quantifiable and easy to understand, while characteristics and desires that actually make people compatible are far harder to conceptualize and observe. I’ve dated people much older than me and quite a bit younger (all above the age of majority) and it made no difference — other factors mattered far, far, far, far more.

In fact, the woman I dated who was closest in age to me was by far the worst relationship I’ve ever been in by a damn long shot. She was a horrible narcissist who, among other things, attempted to incite me into physically abusing her.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Whoever thought it was a good idea to force desktop OSes to have mobile phone UI/UX conventions so they are “unified” should be slapped so fucking hard they go into orbit around their home planet, Clowndia.

These things are not the same. Very much not! Why is it so extremely difficult to convince “design” doofshits of this?