It’s now an epic battle to get your computer to do what you want it to do. I remember when it used to be easy, relatively. It’s dispiriting when I think about how much worse the computing experience has gotten in the last decade.
Dec
30
Dec
30
Good Enough
In too many realms, people are willing to accept “good enough” when all they’ve ever used is absolutely atrocious, so their concept of what is good enough is refracted through that. Their “good enough” is no basis for judgment. You can see this by what average Americans think is good health care, quality food, etc., where even the bottom of the barrel in most of the rest of the world is of a significantly higher caliber than even “good” options in the US.
Dec
29
Overlording Ain’t Easy
My love language is gifts of solar systems and planets with useful, interesting ecologies and technologies.
Dec
29
Not Sighted
Something I’ve been thinking a lot is how much of the pre-2010 internet has been totally obliterated during this decade. Photos deleted, social profiles gone forever, old sites and blogs just wiped out. https://t.co/oUTceC05fW
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) December 28, 2019
I think about this a lot, too. There are dozens of sites that I used to visit regularly that almost no trace of can now be found. They are not anywhere. Not in the Internet Archive. Barely mentioned on any other site, and of course Google only cares about what happened in the last five minutes these days.
Of course most of what happened is lost to history. But we could do better and did not.
Dec
29
BHC
I’m at urgent care because i may have broken my leg. While I’m in extreme pain, i am forced to fill out 10 pages of forms and discuss in detail my insurance before i can be seen. There is a loop of an ad for a Botox knock off playing on the tv. This is not a normal system.
— lil babushka (@cowgirl_beebop) December 28, 2019
But it’s the best health care in the world!
(Note to the propaganda department: this one needs some more attention.)
Dec
29
Bach Down Here
I am glad the book Gödel, Escher, Bach exists. It’s an excellent way to identify complete dumbasses quickly and reliably so that I never have to take anything they say seriously. It saves a great deal of time.
Dec
29
Speedy
I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here are the Facts.
Exactly. Speed-reading with any degree of comprehension is basically not possible. If I am very alert, am reading something not that complex, and have no distractions, I can read about a thousand words per minute.
This is very fast — in the top 1/10 of one percent or above of readers — but nothing near the speed-reading rate claimed by any of those bogus programs.
Most of the time, though, I read about 500wpm or so. Still fast but nothing that amazing. I guarantee you that no one can read with any comprehension at 5,000wpm, and that very few people even with speed reading training can read that much faster than I can with full comprehension.
It is just not physiologically possible.
Dec
28
New Calc
Something I learned today that I didn’t know in PowerShell! You can do math there:
That’s about a million gazillion times faster than the now absurdly slow built-in Windows calculator.
Dec
28
Neoliberalie
You know an ideology is hegemonic and utterly dominant when scads of people squirm like worms from the woodwork to insist that it does not exist.
Dec
28
Disinterests
The urban yuppie demographic that is pro-Buttigieg/Biden/etc is just as, if not more, guilty of voting against their own self interests as the *poor* Republicans they believe embody that behaviour.
— Chad Vigorous (@PrettyBadLefty) December 26, 2019
That is true, especially when you consider climate change or look at what happens when they start aging, can’t sell their house as the housing market will be devastated, can’t get anywhere anymore because they can no longer drive and anything they need is miles away — and they voted consistently against mass transit or anything that betters a community.