I had to learn a little bit of vi to do something the other day. (Edit a Python file to install CentOS 7 on a MacBook Pro, specifically.)

What a terrible turd of a text editor. I already hate that part of my brain that knows anything about vi now.

I can’t wait to forget it all.

Yeah, I know it’s Facebook and I had to unblock their domain to even read this, but this is interesting.

It’s really just an extension of a standard sort of design that I’ve been reading a lot about lately, but amped up to 11.

We were able to build our fabric using standard BGP4 as the only routing protocol. To keep things simple, we used only the minimum necessary protocol features.

It’s actually a really simple network design though I know it looks byzantine and complicated. It’s awesomely scalable; I’m impressed. I’ll likely never need something like that, or even to design something 1/100 that powerful, but it does give me some ideas that I can use in networks that I’ll likely build.

I agree – this bothers me as well. It’s so much easier to punch down, and though unattractive men in society have done themselves no favors (GamerGate, etc.) they don’t really hold that much power. And since unattractive people are easy to hate, they make targets that are irresistible to just about anyone (the same is true of unattractive women, before anyone gets upset) including the Left, which really should know better.

But people are afraid of punching up, so they punch down. If you punch up – at the real people with power in society – they can and do punch back. Very hard. Sometimes hard enough to ruin your life forever, so I understand the fear. But there’s no victory to be had, or even any satisfaction, in punching down.

So punch up. This is why.

i really need people to stop talking about mras only in terms of fedoras/being bronys/how unkempt they are, etc. because there are dudes out here looking like hollister models who need to be held just as accountable for their creepy/misogynistic behavior

Some 27-year-old unemployed overweight dude in his mom’s basement yelling racial slurs in Halo v-chat and threatening Anita Sarkeesian on Twitter while certainly an asshole and while also certainly supportive of and contributory to patriarchy has scarcely more power than the people he rails against (which goes together, actually). He’s already been abandoned by society and knows it. That’ s part of the reason he’s so angry.

To end the Halo-screaming dude, you should really be working on dismantling capitalism and the entire system of patriarchy and similar tasks like that, not making fun of some dude who while vile became that way for a reason. And definitely not descending further into the identity politics hellhole, because that’s what the elite wants you to do as it assures them– absolutely fucking guarantees – that nothing useful will ever get accomplished.

I have sympathy I guess for people like the apocryphal basement dweller because I could’ve easily been him, if not for a few lucky breaks and my absolute ridiculous stubbornness.

In the Left, it’s only cool to body-shame, fat-shame and otherwise police using tactics you’d otherwise never countenance as long as it’s directed towards people you hate. I can’t get on board with that. I don’t like being a hypocrite, and that’d make me one.

I don’t punch much these days (metaphorically or literally) but when I do, I always try to punch up.

I know it’s terrible to hear, but I would put absolutely no stock in any eyewitness reports about the Michael Brown shooting – either by bystanders (friendly or otherwise) or Darren Wilson himself.

I know supporters of both sides will crucify me for this, but eyewitness testimony is utterly unreliable, and not because people are lying.

Did Michael Brown have his hands up? Was he turned away from the cop or towards the cop? What did he actually do?

Without video, we don’t know. We’ll never know. No matter how many eyewitnesses you think you have, it doesn’t matter.

In reality, eyewitness testimony is about as reliable as what your cat thinks about quantum mechanics. I would put more stock in astrology than in eyewitness testimony, especially since evidence shows the more traumatic the event or unexpected, the less accurate the memory.

I have a keyboard that I like pretty well, but I tend to type in the dark and my present one lacks backlighting. Its caps lock indicator LED has also failed. Though I am a touch typist, I sometimes like to have a look at the symbols as I don’t have those memorized as well. (How often do you really use the angle brackets?)

So as a reward for passing nine tech exams in a row all on the first try, I bought myself this keyboard, except the version with blue LEDs.

I won’t use 90% of the features there that she reviews, of course. I mainly care about the backlighting, build quality and having mechanical (but non-clicky) key switches, not making my LEDs behave like a snake. But the quality is supposed to be high so that’s why I ended up with the Ducky.

I’ll share my opinions about it when it arrives.

It’s always seemed really onerous the idea that you are only a “good” person if you get up early.

Though I don’t have a strong circadian rhythm and prefer to sleep in 2-3 hour cycles throughout the day (yes, I know I am weird), I am by very far the most productive between midnight and 4 am.

Always have been. Always will be. It’s why most of the posts here are written about that time.

From an early age, we’re taught that getting up early is good for us. Sayings like The early bird catches the worm and Early to bed and early to rise makes and man healthy, wealthy and wise are part of the culture and have a certain moralizing force. People who go to bed early and get up early are upstanding and productive. People who go to bed later and wake up later are degenerate and lazy.

Nowadays, however, there’s a growing body of thought to say this is not only wrong, but also counterproductive.

Most jobs that I have, if possible, while I do work at work, I am most productive at night in the hours I mentioned above.

So in one hour between say 1 am and 2 am, I tend to get as much done as I do in 3-4 hours during the official workday. That’s why I usually work at night even when I have a “day” job.

Of course, no company (usually run by Type A early-rise extroverts) ever sees it that way, so I can never work a sane (to me) schedule – so I have to work extra, but it also means that I tend to be far more productive than other people if I do this.

One of the reasons I don’t really care about elections – other than their irrelevance – is that there are only two issues that really matter right now, medium and long term.

Those two are:

1) Climate change and our response (or lack thereof) to it.

2) Access to information and who controls that information.

Since it’s not too likely that we’ll do very much about climate change, I don’t think about it very much.

But it’s still possible that we might fight and win a little bit for control of information, and that’s better than nothing.

That’s why I post long screeds here from time to time about how the internet and routing really work and things like that.

All the other issues hotly debated today – and even most that I complain and quibble about – are very tiny in comparison to those big two. Every other problem (or solution) will stem from the unfolding and ramifications of the paths we take on those two Big Problems.

The rest while I understand that they matter and are worth fighting for, really won’t change the course of history. The two above will.

So much for the idea that I’ve seen many Western feminists promulgate that Islam and Islamic countries with their restrictions on women’s behaviors “protects” women from rape. This is used as some sort of absurd kumbaya bullshit excuse for oppression in another ridiculous version of white liberal guilt, but it’s just not true.

Note that just as rape is underreported in most Western countries, it is also probably very severely underreported – by any measure used – in Islamic countries.

When so-called “literary” authors attempt to write fantasy of sf, all they tend to do is to make it boring rather than to improve it.

I expect more. Often lit authors are more facile with language and have greater skill at crafting a good sentence.

If they used this for good rather than evil it would actually better both genres.

But that’s usually not what happens. Instead, what results is an inept bricolage of clichés and utter dullness.

Like Hank Hill said of Christian rock, “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity any better, you’re just making rock ‘n roll worse,” lit authors delving into fantasy and sf often enter those fields without knowing any of the conventions, stereotypes or failed premises and then make fools of themselves.

Not really offering a solution, just wishing for better because I think it could be better.

This bothers me a lot, too.

This is something I’ve written about before– people dramatically overestimate the sample size needed to make responsible statistical conclusions.

It depends on what and how you are studying it how large your sample size needs to be – simplifying things greatly, when reading papers confidence interval, confidence level and standard of deviation are what matters.

To simplify things even more, you don’t need a very large sample size to determine with 99% confidence that decapitating a human will result in death because the effect size has little randomness.

What would that need, a sample size of five?

Anyway, more seriously, most people woefully overestimate the actual sample size needed for 95% confidence.

For instance, for determining with 95% confidence something with a variance of 0.5 and a confidence interval of +-5, you’d only need ~384 subjects. (Of course variance in many cases can only be determined after the study is done.)

So when someone claims, Oh, that can’t be right, they only interviewed 500 people! Well, no. For most purposes, 500 people is a whole fucking lot. It’s a huge sample size in almost all common cases.

Where studies and people often run into problems is that if the effect size is tiny, then even very, very large sample sizes do not produce valid results. (And beyond a certain point increasing sample size does very little.)

But that is a post for another time.

Note that I am not an expert in any of this, but I do read a lot of scientific papers and like to understand what I am reading well enough to have some sort of thoughts about it.

I don’t really care that women and girls (mostly) do the “duckface” thing in photos, but I’m curious about the sociological reasons for it and the origins.

Since I was as mentioned curious about it tonight, I looked through old pre-internet photos and I couldn’t really find any examples of true “duckface” as exemplified by nearly any casual photo (especially a selfie) of a woman between 15-28.

My pet theory is that it is a way of acknowledging and negating the absurdity of constant observation – even self-observation – and stating wordlessly that the viewer has no critique of the image that the image-taker has not already considered, and in fact that any such critique is itself just as absurd as the act of taking such a photo.

By the way, though duckface looks ridiculous it is no more absurd than the factitious practice of smiling in photos where no smiling is or would be natural. Smiling looks more volitional, in other words, but it is absolutely just as contrived as duckface.

Duckface then is a way of acknowledging the artificiality of the construct of modern communication as mediated by Facebook, Instagram and others, and of implicitly commenting on the the omnipresent performative nature of existing in a constantly-surveilled society, especially one where much of the surveillance is self-administered and strangers are able to judge the validity and quality (on various axes) of your self-surveillance.

The pursed lips and deliberate nullification of attractiveness is a way of submitting to and rejecting these values and norms all at once.

Things I don’t care about:

1) The recent election.

2) What some Tumblr superstar who knows about two ounces of history thinks about cultural appropriation.

3) The street artist “Banksy” and whether he/she is a woman or man.

4) Disrupting the innovation or innovating the disruption or innervating the eruption or any similar Silicon valley buzzword bullshit.

5) How terrible some artist/actor/novelist/dancer/sports star is in real life. Most people are terrible. So what?

This list is clickbait idiocy. I regret reading it. I will probably regret writing about it.

Many of the items cited aren’t even emblematic of the South, just rural areas in general. The South is very large and diverse. Many of them apply only to some (very small) areas of the region.

The only one I noticed that is pretty universal is sweet tea; it is fairly easy to find someone who knows how to make good sweet tea in the South. It is nearly impossible to find outside the area.

Also, mosquitoes are only really bad and ubiquitous in Florida for the most part. By ubiquitous, I mean exactly what that word means. In Florida, they are around in great density nearly always, while in other regions they might be bad in specific areas at specific times but it is possible to get away from them.

In Florida (and parts of Georgia), they are everywhere just about all the time.

For instance I am in Tennessee now and I was told several times by locals that the “mosquitoes can get bad here.”

To a Tennessean, a bad mosquito problem is that you see one or two every few minutes and get bitten once or twice. This is the height of summer, by the way.

Now to a Floridian, that is the bare minimum. That is winter. That is what I as a Floridian call “no mosquitoes.”

Also, I’ve yet to find a really good rib or barbecue joint outside the South, so that is true, too.

Telling kids graduating high school what to study so that in 4-5 (or more years) they might get a good job doesn’t work.

But it’s very frustrating that Kurtzleben, and essentially our entire elite policy media, doesn’t go a step further: trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy. Jobs in petrochemical engineering have been exploding, because of a largely-unpredictable boom in American fossil fuel reserves. Becoming a contracting engineer for a construction firm was a great idea in 1999, but by 2005, was a very risky proposition. Going to law school was the epitome of mercenary self-interest until, suddenly, it was the epitome of laughable, deluded foolishness. Teaching kids how to code Python now, when they’ll be hitting the job market 20 years from now, is ludicrous, especially in a world where there’s every reason to think that tech firms will continue to have very low employee to market cap ratios and where computers might take over the bulk of coding. Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can. If you’re telling me that you know what every freshman should start studying in 2014 so that s/he can get a good job in 2019, I think you’re full of it.

The economy changes quickly. I know IT really well, so I’ll talk about that.

Roughly 80% of the day-to-day technologies and skills I relied upon to do my job in 2004 are now irrelevant or quickly being deprecated, or just weren’t used widely (or present at all) in the enterprise. There’s 20% of them that will basically never change – the core knowledge of the field such as binary math, etc.

So what does this mean?

Well, in general, universities tend to be behind in most IT/CS-related fields by 10-15 years. So if you get an MIS degree, by the time you get out of university you are likely to be 15-20 years behind the leading edge of tech (where the money is).

So you then have a lot of debt, and at least in IT are extremely far behind.  Yes, you are probably more likely to get a job than someone with no college degree, but if you didn’t get an internship and get some real-world experience, you are going to have problems because your knowledge is so archaic.

I realize this isn’t a real statistical analysis, etc., all the usual disclaimers idiotic pedants require hearing, &c., but looking at all these old photos of Silicon Valley really belies the notion that women were not present in tech history.

This of course and obviously means that the lack of interest by women in CS and related careers is due primarily to the putrid and misogynist culture that is present and is actually retrenching in that arena.

There are other factors, too, but that is the main one.

The woman with the huge “Trying to Think” poster is great, though. I need that.

Why, yes, I will help you find your start menu while I am trying to figure out how to redistribute OSPF and EIGRP routes from a network with 200 routers.