BASIC on an Apple ][+
Cause I'm old. https://t.co/i9zp1fhOT5

— Dogs Don't Have Thumbs (@MorlockP) October 8, 2019

Mine was Level I Basic, a Tiny Basic derivative, on the TRS-80, approximately 1981. The first program I wrote was something like:

10 PRINT MY NAME IS MIKE
20 GOTO 10

To be fair, I was five years old.

You have never seen a system that swapped eth0 and eth1 because of a kernel upgrade. On a router.

There are very good reasons for the new naming, the most basic one is hardware replacements.https://t.co/qa1CLxQ545

— rtreffer (@bashlog) October 8, 2019

But I have been on a systemd system where just turning it off and powering it up again caused it to swap NICs — no kernel upgrade required. This had never happened to me under the old init system.

I will never understand the moronic geek urge to make computers more difficult to use for humans with only very nebulous benefits for marginal use cases that no one really even cares about, and that most of the time don’t work correctly anyway.

And the funny thing is, this naming scheme actually isn’t consistent at all. Systemd calls it a consistent naming scheme, but it’s only consistent relative to devices in your system. If you add a NIC, or any other device, it’ll change the name of all the fucking devices in the system. Really, it should be called an “inconsistent” naming scheme as it does exactly the opposite of what is claimed.

I already have thousands of plastic straws, but looks like I need to buy more as this insanity shows no signs of stopping.

It’s hard to find information about how long the plastic in the straws will last. It’s pointless buying them if they’ll just decay in 10 years to unusability.

Scones are fucking terrible. Just why, why do they exist? Every few years, I try a scone, thinking, Maybe I’ve just gotten bad ones, people must eat these for a reason.

But NOPE. They are always Sahara-dry lumps of tasteless cardboard. Why do people eat those?

Likewise, people who say "you're generalizing" when talking about non-math ideas.

Pattern recognition seems like discrimination to idiots.

— LifeMathMoney (@LifeMathMoney) October 7, 2019

Scientists are particularly bad about this. Many of them seem to think that because a distribution overlaps somewhat, that two populations are identical.

Yeah, that’s not how it works. I know it’s a reaction to racist pseudoscience, but hating reality is not the way to go there. It’s bad science and just false. Overlapping distributions does not mean populations are identical.

There’s a bit in an sf novel I’m reading where a woman has a terminal disease that can be cured/removed by sending her through some sort of duplication device that will make a copy of her, but healed. The problem is that the terminally-diseased original will still be around.

The solution to me seems obvious: go into the duplicator unconscious, emerge, and then use something to revive the cured version. The cured one then kills the terminal original.

Can you be charged with murdering yourself? Good luck bringing that to a court and proving it. After all, you’re obviously still very much alive.

This seems to preserve or at least short-circuit the necessary continuance of consciousness that most people use as the standard of selfhood.

Could a person kill their original self? Seems an obvious solution to me but not sure how most people would reason about it.

As I've been removing ableist slurs – stupid, idiot, moron – from my vocabulary, I've been realizing how much more difficult it's become for me to demean other people.

And then I'm like

Oh

That's the point.

— Leah (@9BillionTigers) October 2, 2019

Removing any force and substance from language helps no one. Some people and ideas deserve to be demeaned. It’s the only thing that combats them. Anyway, the euphemism treadmill guarantees other “slurs” will soon take the place of the ones stricken from the record.

The problem with the left — one of them, anyway — is that they don’t know how to fight, and will gladly take the punches with no desire to strike back at all. It’s sad and pathetic and fucking stupid.

The left’s list of forbidden words is typical of the left’s approach to anything: ban something, call it a day. Great.

I want a feature-length magazine article on the behind-the-scenes PR campaign that's been generating all the 'hey guys you should eat insects' headlines across many different outlets.

— Jonah Bennett 🌐 (@BennettJonah) September 29, 2019

Me too. That’s been so ubiquitous lately that it has to be some PR push — but in the service of what? I can understand the drive for plant-based poison food. Those items are actually widely available on the market and can be bought in many places today.

But the insect propaganda has fascinated me lately because I can’t tell where it’s being pushed from and why it’s so pervasive.

My best guess so far is that it’s to offer a false dichotomy between the desired choice of people eating plant-based poison food (fake burgers and the like) or the insect alternative, which no one will choose. It’s a method of getting people to make the choice you want them to make to avoid the “progressives” forcing a truly worse choice, which is slurping insect slurry out of glass bottles in your pod.