This article is full of dumb.

My response: I want to like physical books, but I just can’t.

They are so heavy that when I move I nearly break my back. When I go on a trip, I can only carry a few of them. I can carry thousands of ebooks if I want.

Physical books are smelly and they decay. They also attract bugs and take up far too much space  in the house. And I don’t like displaying what I read to other people as I want as many as possible to know as little about me as possible, so ebooks are much more private.

Copying text out of a physical book is a slow, manual process. It’s a few clicks in an ebook.

Some old people and their adoration of antiquated, inferior technology mystify me.

Stacked correctly, physical books are pretty bulletproof and as an American that is important.

So there’s that, I guess.

First time I’ve ever had the vision deficits of a migraine without the pain.

I can barely see what I am typing. Fovea centralis acuity totally diminished with significant blind spots.

Odd. I’m usually in so much pain at this point that I can’t even type. No pain, though, just visual impairment.

At least not a stroke as no sign of cognitive impairment. Well, no more than normal that is.

This doesn’t match my experience at all.

Specifically, this part.

“Imagine you’re in a meeting and someone plops a big box of doughnuts on the table,” Mann said. “To resist this doughnut, it’s not a one-time thing. You resist it when you first notice it, and you resist it every time you look up and see it again. I know I’d be tempted every time I looked up!” Resisting the doughnut, in other words, requires not just one act of self-control, but many — not to mention that each time you resist, it gets a little more difficult to do so, as self-control is thought to be a limited resource.

Do normal people really work this way? I am a stubborn, stubborn motherfucker so I guess I just don’t think like this at all.

When I decide something, it’s decided. If I decide not to eat the donut, I don’t eat the donut. Simple as that.

I truly do think having military experience helps with that sort of thinking and control. And just being naturally stubborn to start with.

For as similar as humans truly are, things can seem awfully different. I just can’t imagine being so, for lack of a better word, weak.

Many scientist types believe that if you can’t locate something with a scientific study (etc.), that it doesn’t exist.

Given the reproducibility of much of science — that is to say, low — even if you can locate something statistically, there’s still a very high chance it doesn’t exist.

I am no enemy of science. Quite the opposite.

Despite much of my writing here, I think as I age I’ve come to appreciate nuance and doubt more, that’s all.

I’m trying to figure out Mozilla’s reasoning for attempting to move to SSL everywhere.

I don’t buy their justification that it is to make users more secure. This is only a marginal concern for them I believe.

My guess is that since SSL and setting it up is rather difficult (and impossible for the average user) that it’s a covert attempt to make it harder for non-advanced users to avoid cloud services and large corporations. It’s an effort to push more people into NSA-friendly data centers and cloud “solutions.”

Having wasted too much of my life on dealing with SSL and its issues as an IT professional, I can tell you that the average user stands no chance of configuring it correctly.

So they won’t bother.

Not everything needs to be encrypted. It often offers no benefit and only additional complexity and compute overhead (and it’s therefore slower), but like IPv6 it’s something pushed by clueless engineeritis infectees despite being the wrong solution to an irrelevant problem. In most cases, anyway.

One of the benefits of the web — and what caused it to grow so explosively — was its openness and just how easy it was.

Requiring HTTPS everywhere is yet another step in the long path to destroy all that.

Google has fully committed to the world of Idiocracy.

Guess there’s nothing to really be done. But surely there must be a large enough market for things that are actually useful.

What do Googlers themselves use? Also I always wonder, do the Gnome 3 developers actually use Gnome 3? If so, how?

The new Google Maps is just terrible. Really a complete failure of design and performance.

But fear not. I know how to get to the old Google Maps despite the option to return to classic maps being removed from the interface.

It’s here.

Ain’t I just the best?

On my very quick machine (well, any one of them) the new Google Maps is so slow that actions that once took a less than a second now take 10-20 seconds. Same on my partner’s machine.

Not talking about actual use — just waiting on something to load. No, use is a whole other level of wishing for the Stygian pits.

Did no one test this? How did this even leave alpha? What is the goal and purpose?

More skinny-shaming of sorts. Not hard to find these days.

Someone who is completely normal-looking is now seen as an “unhealthy body image.”

I’ve dated a half-dozen women who’ve had very similar bodies to the woman on the bag. That woman is probably, what, about 5’3″ and 120 pounds or so? (Hard to tell exactly without scale, but can judge roughly by limb length vs. head size, etc.) That would put her with a BMI of ~21. Which is completely in the normal range and what everyone should strive for. (A BMI in or near the normal range, not a BMI of 21.)

If all the effort spent spewing ignorant shit were spent losing weight, these people who hate anyone who’ve not failed as hard as they have would be a whole lot healthier.

Damn I hate those idiots.

What’s weird is someone can believe something completely ridiculous like this but I bet she has something like ‘Won’t date any man under 6’2″‘ in her OKCupid profile and will vituperatively and offendedly tell you that’s “different.”

But it’s much, much easier to change your weight than it is to change your height.

I just can’t leave those fuckwits alone because more than just about any other group in America — even including the Tea Partiers/climate change deniers — they embody the early-apocalypse American self-delusional mindset.

Big Data is like numerology for smart people.

Why People Like Moonrise Kingdom.

Great film. I think he’s right. Wes Anderson made a great film by accident, and despite his own proclivities.

Many of his films are good. But they never seem to exist in any sort of reality similar to our own. They are too clever by half.

Moonrise Kingdom is just clever enough. And it is charming without being cloying as all too many of Anderson’s films turn out to be. Lately I’ve been trying to be less clever myself. It only annoys people, including me.

That said I wonder why we choose to police each other so much. Probably relates to our evolutionary past. But no way to prove that. Would need a time machine.

I think Kimmy Schmidt from Tina Fey’s new show had the best reaction to that lately.

I don’t write much about Baltimore, Ferguson etc. not because I don’t care but because I don’t think it matters what I or anyone else writes, says or does.

I have little to contribute anyway, but I think that toppling the impending (and increasing) neoliberal police state is quite unlikely short of complete collapse — which may well come a a result of climate change.

But until that time if it occurs nothing will improve in any substantive way.

People actually like Pop Tarts.

This is amazing to me.

Anyone who has ever had a real tart or fried pie is absolutely appalled at those horribly sawdust-y turds.

They are amazingly, shockingly bad.

Powerwall.

Is Tesla the only American company doing anything at all innovative these days? Seems so.

It’s funny that people disparage Elon Musk and Tesla for having big, impractical difficult dreams.

People and corporations used to be praised for such things.

Now most people just attempt to grind them into dust. The neoliberal mindset infects us all, it seems.