Nov 29

Fly or Die

Oh fuck no:

I’m kicking the co-pilot out the plane without a damn parachute. The tech future I’d imagined as a kid was pretty great, and eminently possible; the actual future is dreadful and anti-human. The glorious solarpunk visions were actively quashed, while the “unrealistic” dismal thanatopsistic future of unrelenting surveillance and control ended up being the actual reality — the reality we made and that all too many people are perfectly content with.

It didn’t have to be this way. But it is.

Nov 28

Buff Ain’t What

Fat Acceptance dingbats be like, She’s not hefty enough to stop a charging water buffalo dead in its tracks, must have an eating disorder. Now get me three more Big Macs and a couple milkshakes, I’m going into starvation mode!

Nov 28

Don’t Aren’t

Really, fuck smartphones and fuck cloud everything.

If we lived in a better world they’d both be great. But we don’t and they aren’t.

Nov 28

Desp

I failed the salary number guessing game.

Bullet dodged. They were looking for someone desperate. That is the only reason to pull something like that. As someone in the comments points out 60 hours a week for $60K a year is about $20 per hour. Here in California (as the person also observes), you can start out at In ‘n Out Burger for that wage. At the wage they actually wanted to scam him ($50K) with you’d make a good bit more at the burger place.

Amazing companies still try this shit when salary info is comparatively easy to find.

Nov 28

Turnt

I agree with this person that most of the RTO push is about this, and not the oft-proffered excuses of commercial real estate or productivity:

A whole class of sociopathic extroverts lost their way to power and are desperately attempting to get it back. That, in the main, is what is going on here.

Nov 27

Aware

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.

Nov 27

White This Down

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.