Why The World Is Getting Weirder.

Some terrible ideas combined with some amazing ones; very odd piece. I don’t feel like a full examination and exegesis, but his ideas about the easy problems being solved causing the long tail of bizarre ones to appear more prominent is a really perspicacious insight.

Like most efforts, 10% of the effort gets you 90% of what you need — and the remaining 10% takes up 90% of your time.

Why Intel added cache partitioning in Broadwell and how it can increase performance by 1.3x to 3x.

To people who think computers aren’t getting any faster just because Moore’s “Law” is sort-of dead: LOL.

Don’t be mislead by the press, and the tech press is in general no better than any other. Read the people actually working in the field to know what’s really going on.

About Google Fiber and fiber to the door in general, I always hear, “Durrrr, no one needs that much bandwidth. There’s just no use for it.”

Well, first, that’s not true. Not many people need it, but quite a few do. Not everyone just clicks on Facebook spasmodically and drools.

Second, bandwidth is something that needs to be present before the real killer apps develop. Broadband allowed Skype and similar tools to exist, not the other way around. Broadband built Youtube, and so many more. Those never would have existed without the infrastructure being there first.

I remember hearing the same argument in the 1990s when the first reasonably fast connections became available — that no one needed that blazing, uh, fast 5Mb/s and that dial-up was good enough for anybody, dammit. (I also heard that the internet was a fad a lot.)

It all repeats. One benefit of experience (though I think the value of experience is over-estimated) is that you get to see the same people make the same mistakes over and over again, and you learn to avoid them.

Ok, ok, yes I did.

But today is particularly geeky. Compiling Samba from source.

Need a feature that the latest package in any distro doesn’t have.

So that’s how you got to do it when you need what you need.

It’s strange that the most important and relevant fiction of our era — that being sf/speculative fiction — has been the most ignored by the critical establishment (except for perhaps horror fiction).

Doesn’t really matter as it achieved cultural dominance over time anyway due to its relevance.

I don’t know enough about literary and critical history to say if this is a trend, but I do know that as novel-writing became more common and popular in the late 1700s and into 1800s, for nearly 100 years afterward this art form was spurned by the academic establishment as trivial and un-intellectual.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. I suspect that’s what we’re seeing here.

And when an sf work does become critically relevant, it is “promoted” out of its genre, though it really doesn’t differ from those things left in the genre ghetto (1984 and Brave New World being more well-known examples).

I almost can’t believe it myself — and I like zombies and the genre — but The Walking Dead is the best-written, most well-acted and generally the finest show on television.

This was not true of seasons 1 or 2 however — while there was some good episodes from that period, and even some great ones, it was incredibly uneven, sometimes outright bad and it treated women characters as useless appendages or background noise.

In Season 3 this started to change. That outing had some truly excellent episodes. Seasons 4 and 5, however, set the bar for what television could be — with characters like Carol and Michonne and Hershel and Sasha. Well, there are just too many to list and each one felt like a real person. Like someone you could sit down and have a chat with, not some cardboard creation moving around from scene to scene as the plot demands it. Which alas all too often is the case even in many shows that I like and watch avidly.

Whatever kind of strange magic happened on The Walking Dead in seasons 3-5 where a TV show transcends its genre, transcends what you thought TV could be, and achieves some sort of grim accession to a higher reality — well, I have not seen its like before.

The Walking Dead also does dread better than any TV show I’ve ever seen. It just does so many things right and has that rare quality that Lost had of actually watching its characters not with love or derision but with studied care.

And Carol? Best female character and perhaps best character ever in a TV series? The answer to that is yes, always yes.

I remember these days.

In 1980, the Apple II computer that sat on a desk in the corner of my dining room had my neighbors thinking that I was a complete freak. To hear them talk, you’d think I had a centrifuge on my kitchen counter. And it was not because the computer was in the dining room or because it was an Apple.

Another one of those huge cultural shifts that for some reason causes people to insist that how things are now is the way it’s always been.

But I remember when having a computer made you weird. Like, really really weird.

It was like having a nuclear reactor or as she points out as a centrifuge in your house. And people would say, “Why are you wasting your time with computers? You’ll never find a good job playing with those things. Learn some real skills.*”

So glad I kept playing with those useless computers.

*Almost a direct quote by several people to me when I was young.

This article got me thinking about why we need philosophy. Of late philosophy and its practitioners have been much-maligned as outmoded, contributing nothing to discourse, and better off not existing. I couldn’t disagree more and here’s why.

It’s absolutely maddening to see smart people like Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez study these statistics under the banner of equality of opportunity when they tell us nothing at all about how close we are to that ideal.

There are many, many things in the human world — the vast majority, actually — that science and mathematics can tell us nearly nothing about. Oh, sure, it can give vast amounts of data and numbers and all sorts of trivia (some of it even useful) but it can never, ever tell us what we should do or why we should do one thing and not another, or what outcome we should value or why it should have any worth at all.

Only philosophy and the humanities can do that.

Always, ever. Philosophy and the humanities is the core of what it means to be human.

This is not to diminish science or math at all — quite the opposite. The data and insight they provide is vastly important and has improved human life immeasurably. They give us all more choices. However, they offer minimal insight into anything beyond their sphere, despite the oft-attempted overreach perpetuated by many in both fields.

Joss Whedon is accused of fetishizing teenage girls for writing a few shows with young women in them.

Benh Zeitlin is accused of fetishizing African American poverty for writing a movie with poor black people in it.

So odd. The liberal consensus is coming to the conclusion that you should not write about anyone who is not 100% exactly like you in every way.

The fact is that if Joss Whedon hadn’t written a show (Buffy) with relatively-realistic nuanced young women in it, that show and those young women simply would not have been on the air, period.

It’s not like in Whedon’s absence that the sociopolitally-approved woman director would’ve emerged magically from clouds of mist and written Buffy and all would’ve been well in PC-land.

Nope. No Buffy without Whedon. Same is true of Benh Zeitlin’s film. No Hushpuppy.

Now, should we be working on changing this? Of fucking course. But so many liberals spend so much worthless time demanding spotless PC perfection they don’t realize that in their perfect world, nothing good would ever happen.

Is Joss Whedon a perfect writer, a perfect director? God, of course not. But Buffy is a better-written show and one that takes its young characters more seriously than many that women have written and directed. In other words, it doesn’t take a penis to write about men and it doesn’t take a vagina to write about women — even young women. I mean, duh. (That it is somehow perverse for a man to write about a young person is just…I can’t even make sense of this.)

The liberal tendency to self-immolate I will never understand, I don’t think.

XFCE is the last desktop standing — as I’ve noted before — that just works correctly.

I think about all of the user-hostile design out there very frequently, for a few reasons. One is that I use these aggressively terrible designs often now as I have no choice, and because the move to these antagonistic interfaces mirrors the increasing trend to authoritarianism in society.

There’s all of that, and I’m also interested in the rest of the sociological underpinnings and ramifications to this trend that started in around 2010.

What’s particularly interesting to me about all of the user-hostile design out there is that it’s “data-backed” but if you actually look at the data gathered — for instance by Mozilla, which I studied closely — it’s clear that they have no idea what data they should gather, how they should interpret the (poor) data they did gather, and how they were completely not in possession of any logical or considered model of what they should attempt to achieve with their, uh, analysis.

Gathering the data in Mozilla’s case, Microsoft’s case and nearly every other case out there is just an attempt to put a scientific-sounding patina on something the companies and/or their designers already wanted to do anyway.

Why? Money, sometimes, but a lot of the time I think it’s just about the thrill of power, especially in Mozilla’s case.

When you can disrupt 100 million people’s work flow and make them vassals to your will — for a nerdy, douchey programmer who has never had any real taste of power before and probably can’t partake any other way, this must be fucking intoxicating.

Now when another massacre occurs in the US, I don’t really click on the link to read about it.

There are so many, they all blend together. Let me guess, aggrieved (usually) white male with access to more guns than sense kills a bunch of people?

Another day, another preventable tragedy.

If everyone gets fat all at once, there has to be more of an explanation than lack of willpower (though I think cultural issues/cultural change also play a part, very much so).

This study demonstrates that people during the 1980s had an easier time not getting fat while eating the same amount of calories.

Though I think the study is onto something, a caveat: I can’t access the paper and I’m not paying $31.50 to do so, but the people involved in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey all self-reported their calorie counts. This is notoriously unreliable (vast, vast majority of people under-report, a few people like me over-report) — but that doesn’t invalidate the study. I don’t know if they controlled for it or anything. Just wanted to bring it up as I like having all of the evidence, even if it proves wrong (or right) everything I thought I knew.

That said, I suspect the study is onto something because as I noted above there is no real explanation for why obesity blasted off like an Atlas V around 1990 or so.

My guesses about why this happened, in order of contribution:

1) Some change in environment — chemical exposure being most likely.

2) Food getting cheaper overall.

3) Changing cultural norms around obesity combined with identity politics (complete cultural triumph of neoliberalism in every sphere around that time, asserting the primacy of individual and their preferences).

4) Increasing societal precariousness causing willpower transfer to more difficult things, away from controlling food intake.

5) Better medical treatments allowing older obese people who would’ve formerly died early to live longer, thus reflecting more obese people in the numbers.

Change the order as you like. I suspect there is no single factor, and I’d really like to see some scientific investigation into why obesity is so much more prevalent, combined with the FA people shutting their traps and actually helping with that effort.

This might not be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of, but it’ll sure do till I remember what that stupidest thing actually was.

Being proud of breaking a chair is pure farcical lunacy.

What’s next, being proud of your having your foot depoditated (I just made that word up) when you are 50 due to diabetes?

Don’t laugh. It’s almost guaranteed to happen. When a movement goes fucking barking at the moon Olanzapine-snarfing crazy, it usually goes all the way.

Wow, I did not know that Lynn Margulis had gone completely scientifically nuts, basically.

Proves that extremely intelligent people tend to make the largest mistakes.

Her discoveries can never be diminished; she did what she did. But wow, she is gone.