To the men arguing that more women entering the tech industry is displacing someone (and the women arguing against this idea) – yes, that is true, women entering the tech industry probably does cause a displacement effect*. That someone displaced is usually male. That’s just simple economics and inarguable. More labor + roughly same number of positions == harder to get job, pay is lower.

But so what?

And I thought all you male libertarian laissez faire free market fetishists were all about that competition?

No?

Well guess what, motherfuckers, that’s competition right there.

Get used to it or shut up about your free market idolatry. Damn.

*It is much more complicated than this, but I don’t have time for a 5,000 word post nor do I care that much.

Of course major media outlets are censoring news about Ferguson.

These are capitalist organizations we are talking about. As such, they rely on advertisers to function.

Advertisers do not like controversy and do not like alienating racists, since open racists are 30-50% of their market.

All ya’ll were the ones who decided to embrace the corporate and closed platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et. al.

Now you have nothing to complain about save your own actions. This was expected behavior. Anything else would be surprising. Corporate censorship is the default state, not some anomaly.

Use and build open platforms and this doesn’t happen.

As much as people love to hate on Richard Stallman, he was right all along.

It’s increasingly looking like Margaret Atwood in her MaddAddam trilogy got it right about how future American and world civilization will structure itself: very rich oligarchs living lives of exorbitant luxury, a very tiny “middle class” who are basically their servants, and the impoverished rabble who are seen as utterly savage, base and expendable.

Everything points this way; nothing indicates another outcome is likely. In addition, something similar to that is how most human societies have been structured throughout post-hunter-gatherer history.

Just on the basis of the tendency of regression to mean, this is a likely outcome. The reality and already underestimated effects of climate change only make this far more likely, not less.

What a fucking great performance.

Talent isn’t always rewarded, but sometimes it really is. (Also, YouTube at 60FPS? LOVE IT.)

Yep – this is something that gets ignored when you hear how some display tech is “enough for anyone.”

There are plenty of people that can see flicker well above 60Hz (and I am one of them), and the variance is large in humans.

I can see flicker up until about 85Hz, and sometimes up to 100Hz if I am particularly alert and the conditions are right.

Now tell me again why no one needs this or that.

That’s the whole reason back in ancient times – the late 90s – I paid thousands of dollars for a Sony monitor that could do 1280×1024 at 100Hz.

It weighed nearly 100 pounds but it was so worth it.

Wow, sed is so powerful it’s basically impossible to use!

Much like iptables.

You know a Linux/Unix utility is fucked when there are experts in just that utility. People more obsessed with their tools than what they get done will always be a puzzle to me.

People who dream about murder may be more aggressive during waking hours, a controversial new study finds.

What if you frequently dream about your eternal war against the werewolves?

What then?

Watching all the liberals mumblingly defend Obamacare like it’s some great thing is pretty embarrassing.

For them, at least.

Sorry, I just can’t get behind a complete giveaway to insurance companies no matter if it helped some people.

So now we’re stuck with it and with little chance of anything better.

Good job, I guess?

Probably in 98%+ of the cases where someone claims they were “roofied,” they weren’t.

It was just alcohol. Anyone who knows how to pour too much alcohol into a mixed drink can “roofie” someone, especially someone who is not accustomed to having 4x-10x as much alcohol in the same size drink.

Most of the symptoms that people are claiming are a result of roofies are just alcohol poisoning, and not characteristic of rohypnol or any other similar drug.

And now some people who can’t read will think I am somehow excusing the rapes that occur afterward.

I’m not.

It’s a sign of the rape culture that we live in that a woman must claim some extenuating circumstance for her rape to “count.” My contention that the rape counts no matter what. It doesn’t matter if the woman is stone sober or passed the fuck out. It counts.

I just like knowing the truth of things, despite whoever it offends. I’ve found the truth is always better than the fiction.

If some people are helped by the fiction, that’s fine. It just doesn’t help me.

There is no shortage of tech workers.

Some more proof of this is that recruiters nowadays often won’t even consider you if you haven’t used the exact product version number of the tech that they want to hire for.

For instance, say that you are an expert on version 5. Version 5.1 comes out, which is 99.9% identical. Recruiters will only consider you if you’ve used (or are certified) on version 5.1, not 5.0, despite the differences taking less than 30 seconds to learn.

I first started looking into and getting hired for tech jobs in the late 90s, early 2000s, and it was so much easier to get a job then – even after the web bust.

There is absolutely no shortage of tech workers anywhere in the US.

Well, it looks like soon for the fourth time in my life I am going to watch all or part of a major American city burn to the ground.

Hope I’m wrong, and good luck, St. Louis. Glad I’m not there, though.

I only dimly remember my parents talking about the 1980 Miami riots.

I don’t remember of course the 1977 NYC blackout riots at all so I didn’t count those.

The problem is that when people write about cultural appropriation, they almost always know nothing about history, or culture.

Let’s look at the symbol of the raised fist.

Oh, wait.

The human hand has been used in art from the very beginnings, starting with stunning examples in Neolithic cave paintings. Early examples of the fist in graphic art can be found at least as far back as 1917 [1], with another example from Mexico in 1948 [2]. Fist images, in some form, were used in numerous political graphic genres, including the French and Soviet revolutions, the United States Communist Party, and the Black Panther Party for Self-defense.

1917. Pretty sure there were no Black Panthers in 1917.

To me, the raised fist means “socialism” because that’s where I’ve seen it used most in my readings and meanderings through history. The Black Panther party adopted it –wait, I mean appropriated it – from this source.

It was actually popularized during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and was used very widely after that all over the world. There is also some evidence that the “raised fist” might have been used in something similar to its current context as early as Assyria.

The feminist version of the raised first salute was first used in the 1969 protest of the Miss America pageant.

What’s weird about all the crying about cultural appropriation is that how little so many people who jump up on their soapbox and jabber about it know about culture or history.

I’m of the opinion that if you think you are in the position of telling other people what to do, you should know something about it first.

But hey, that’s just me.

Ah, you youngsters.

People who have been on the internet for 4+ years and haven’t had their humor devolve into Dadaist, surreal garbage impress me.

Some hipster cred for real here. I first used the internet in 1986, but I didn’t use it regularly until 1995. I used it in 1986 as part of some project to allow so-called “gifted” kids to connect with others around the world.

It was also the first time I’d used what we’d now call a chat room. Back then they didn’t have a name, I don’t think.

However, I was using BBSes of one sort or another from ~1984 on, especially when my comparatively-rich grandparents would allow me to log on when I visited.

Most of what people think is “new” on the internet I’d seen or done on BBSes by 1986. Many of the things that “brilliant” entrepreneurs are “inventing” had been done by 1988 on said BBSes.

It’s funny to watch it all cycle back.

I don’t yearn for a return to those times. The internet is far better, and vaster. But it is odd to see some arrogant 25-year-old “create” something that I used 30 years ago in a nearly-identical form. It’s just on a lot larger scale now, of course.

And computers are so much faster.

FidoNet was pretty awesome back in its day, though. Getting an email then felt like an event. Now it feels like a chore, most of the time.

It seems a common trend now in all software projects that when something new is introduced, it must be inferior to the old system.

Oh, the developers will claim it’s superior, but it usually removes options, removes capabilities or the information is just presented in an incompetent way.

Here’s yes another example. Since “net-tools” is deprecated in Linux – which includes the common utility “ifconfig” – I’ve been using the replacement tools “ip” and related.

Though it is claimed far and wide that the replacement tools are superior and more powerful, every use case I’ve found places them as much inferior – and not just because I am used to the old way.

In every case, they are harder to use, give less and more poorly-formatted information and are just generally terrible.

For instance, this is the output of ifconfig. I often care about how much data an interface has sent or received and that is easy to see in a human-readable format:

It’s easy to see that the interface on my server has transmitted 475.9GB of data since the last time it was brought up.

Now here’s the, uh, “equivalent” output from ip, specifically the “ip –s link” command.

What’s that you say, you can’t read a bunch of numbers all jumbled together with no commas or human-readable indication of how much data has been sent? And what’s the IP address? Who fucking knows?

Well, I actually can read that, because I am so used to looking at this shit but even for me it’s much faster just to have it in GB already so I don’t have to spend the next second figuring out what unit I’m looking at.

And that’s true with every tool in the “ip” suite. Even if it’s nominally more powerful, it’s only more powerful in the strictly technical sense. From the usability perspective, it’s utterly pathetic and designed by guttercrud halfwits.

I grew up in a time where you looked forward to every release because it was guaranteed to be better, where every major release really improved your tools and the power of your platform.

No more. Now I dread each new release, knowing it will be worse, that required features will be removed, that ease of use will be thrown in the garbage to suit someone’s megalomania.

Bottom line is, geeks should be allowed to write all the code they want.

But they should never be allowed to design anything, ever.

Modern device I hate the most: Smartphones.

Modern device I like the most: High-resolution displays.

Smartphones make everything worse. They make the web worse. Their rise is responsible for “apps.” Windows 8 was largely a response to smartphones. Smatphones makes computing worse, make work worse, make life worse.

Smartphones mean everyone thinks they should be able to contact you in every way all the time.

For this reason, most of the time I leave my phone behind. Screw all that.

I hate smartphones and everything about them. I wish they’d just disappear.