November 9, 2025, 12:42 AM Chill Links

November 8, 2025, 7:33 PM Chill Regular-ass Post

No, you can’t stop it. I think people get obnoxious tattoos for the same reason that they start doing hard drugs: they know it’ll destroy them and their lives and make things harder in the future, but they secretly crave that. They want the obliteration, the nullification of the self.

Maybe Troublemaker

November 8, 2025, 2:18 PM Chill First Ten

Flow Control

November 8, 2025, 1:03 PM Chill Evil

So…we’re importing people from the Third World to do jobs that will no longer exist and sending the few remaining jobs off to the Third World?

How’s that going to work? It’s not, that’s how.

Always About Control

November 8, 2025, 12:57 PMNovember 8, 2025, 1:00 PM Chill Evil

It’s such a dumbass clownish piece-of-shit asinine idea that if you can customize the appearance of your software, somehow that will cause meemaw to send all her money to Nigeria.

First, she’s gonna do that anyway. Second, that increases security basically not at all while preventing knowledgeable users from doing what they want.

Which is actually the point. It was always about control. In the specific case I care about the most, the Firefox developers even specifically said they wanted to control what the users do because they knew the “right” way to use the browser and the “right” way is should look and operate.

Security was just the flimsy excuse. It was always about exerting power.

November 8, 2025, 12:35 AM Chill Links

This roof paint blocks 97% of sunlight and pulls water from the air.

10,000 generations of hominins used the same stone tools to weather a changing world.

Qantas releases first images of jet that will fly nonstop from Sydney to London and New York.

Welcome to Big Tech’s ‘Age of Extraction.’

The Lonely New Vices of American Life.

Boeing won’t face criminal charge over 737 Max crashes that killed hundreds of people. Of course not. Can’t hold any corporation accountable now could we?

Humanity’s Endgame. A new history of societal collapse by an expert in existential risk argues that our globalized society is edging toward the precipice.

Disposable

November 7, 2025, 5:40 PMNovember 7, 2025, 5:41 PM Chill Annoying

Yep. Women spiral into depression and, sometimes, suicide attempts if they experience even briefly 1/1000 the amount of rejection the average man does his entire life.

Women have no idea. The leitmotif of most men’s lives is rejection and disposability.

Just Change

November 7, 2025, 3:49 PMNovember 7, 2025, 3:53 PM Chill Annoying, Tech

Why can’t I “preview message” from a trace anymore? Is it because I’m shitty?

No, Microsoft has broken something completely yet again. Something that used to work rather well. It’s the Mozilla-Google-Microsoft way: take something that was working fine, destroy it, then tell you that the new way is better and that you “just hate change.”

I tried to use this tool last night and just gave up and found another method. I guess we’re in the “everything just gets roundly worse forever” stage of tech now.

Holiday

November 7, 2025, 10:55 AM Chill Amusing

I used to have that discussion all the time when I worked for a German company with an American subsidiary. When we’d have to send things or get input from the German side, I’d have to explain to my American colleagues that it was August, everyone was on holiday and no, we wouldn’t be hearing back from Helga probably for the entire month, and no, she doesn’t have a stand-in, and no, this was not unusual. They were all on a beach in the Med somewhere.

My American colleagues never quite understood as it seemed so outlandish to them.

Prefer Rents

November 7, 2025, 10:01 AM Chill Annoying, Clowns, Evil

Average liberal: Your preferences and tendencies are just what they are because you grew up in a certain social environment! If you’d grown up in Ghana or Thailand, they’d be totally different!

Average non-doof: Ok, what is your point here, exactly? That if everything had been completely different than it was, they’d be completely different? Brilliant. I commend your perspicacity.

(While there are some valid arguments around the Rawlsian veil of ignorance and the universal lot of humanity and the commonality therein, the average liberal is not making this argument and probably does not know who John Rawls even is; rather, they just want to give your shit and your country to some third-worlder because they “deserve” it more than you do.)

Book On Over

November 7, 2025, 5:03 AMNovember 7, 2025, 9:30 AM Chill Books

I’m going to a book club on November 15! In person, that is. I don’t do virtual events because they really suckkkkkkkkkkk. At least for me. If I wanted to be on yet another Zoom call I’d get a second job.

Naw, y’all, it’s got to be real if I’m gonna be part of the deal. Should be fun.

Definement

November 7, 2025, 4:47 AMNovember 7, 2025, 5:17 AM Chill Annoying, Gutter Philosophy

The quest for some constrained and denotative definition of “artificial general intelligence” is daft and pointless.

When does a 747 become a bird? When is a submarine a fish? When you ask an amorphous, unfocused question all your answers are disjunct from the set of possible paths to revealing the actual important questions, much less any answers.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader what the important questions are. But suffice it to say that though I believe some form of human-level machine intelligence is possible, we’ll never succeed in making a submarine into a fish, and we’ll also never accomplish the feat of transforming silicon and transistors into a human. A person, perhaps. But not a human.

Looking Forward

November 7, 2025, 3:41 AMNovember 7, 2025, 3:44 AM Chill Culture, Evil

This 1999 clip of Prince warning about the internet.

“Don’t let the computer use you.”

Prince saw what was ahead better than most of the “intelligent” commentariat. This was 1999 — smartphones and the malevolence of mainstream social media was still ahead of us. But he knew what evil was in store.