Before all ya’ll get your hopes up about Bernie Sanders ever being president, here’s why it’ll never happen.

Yeah, I don’t want Hillary to be president either, for as much as it matters to me either way. She’ll be George W. Bush part VI and continue to hand over the country to banksters and fight some more wars here and there.

But Bernie is not going to be nominated. It will never, ever happen. The link above explains why.

Meet the Robin Hood of Science.

Alexandra Elbakyan, my fucking hero. Been meaning to write about her for a while now. Because of her work I’ve been able to access and read things I would’ve had no easy way to — and so have hundreds of researchers with funding too poor to pay extortionate fees. I do have a friend or two in academia with access to most things, but I don’t like to bother them all the time when I want something.

Not everyone has that advantage, though.

People like her should win the Nobel Peace Prize. Elsevier and other scam companies should be burned to the ground.

Alexandra E. rules.

I am not opposed to encryption in itself. Quite the opposite.

But Mozilla and Google and others are using encryption as a cudgel to force people into services they don’t and can’t control. This isn’t a side effect. This is the intended result.

Expect to see more of this bamboozlement sold as “security” when in reality it’s much less secure from a number of important threats — including from the companies themselves who now control all of your data.

True security would be empowering people to have control of and say over their own data, all the time. What these large companies are doing is just using a nimiety of pseudo-security to make it too difficult for even someone technically-competent to be able to provision and operate their own services without lots of time invested and unnecessary work.

For the same reason in other spaces, it’s why large companies actually like regulation — it eliminates competitors in their arena who do not have the resource base they do to comply with them.

I wanted to elevate my comment (slightly edited) to the front after a reader complained that I didn’t report any actual calorie numbers for my consumption posts:

I don’t track calories at all, sorry, not even approximately. Calories reported on manufacturer’s labels are notoriously wrong and I neither measure my food by weight or track by calorie. Only by what you see above.

And yet I still managed to get rid of and keep off 25%+ of my body weight for over five years.

So I do what works for me. If you want actual numbers, you’ll have to track yourself. But I guarantee it’ll be off by a lot and be misleading. Also many of the things I eat I have no way to estimate the calories as they aren’t the types of places who post this (small bakeries, etc.), and any estimate I’d make independently would be off by 30% or so, at least. Perhaps more.

That said, I changed the post to make it more accurate. The only way to truly track calories relatively accurately for anyone would be to purchase or somehow gain use of a laboratory-grade calorimeter, use it on an exact duplicate of the food you intend to eat, and then eat the non-destroyed dupe. And then — even then — it is not well-known how every body responds to each food eaten, how calories are processed by the same person at different times (hormonal and diurnal changes, etc) nor how differing compositions of foods with the same calories as measured by a calorimter will be processed and perhaps stored differently. Nutrition science just is not very solid. Wish it was, but it isn’t.

That said, calories in, calories out is still the way to lose weight. Judge what to eat by how your body responds to it, with self-experiment, is my advice — not that you sought any. Calorie counting in most cases probably is not helpful and is going to be wrong by at the minimum 20%, and most likely 30%+. Which is exactly why I did not even attempt to report calories and have never tracked them and never will.

That was the end of the comment. One seeking certitude where there is none will never find it. QED.

Yet another reason for diversity in tech: there would be no lack of small phones if 50% of phone designers and engineers were women.

But in bounding after large screens, phone makers seemed to ignore the usability issues that accompany them. Small studies have shown before that 4.3 inches is about as big as a phone can get before people start struggling to use it. The time to operate the phone slows down significantly because one-hand use is awkward—and that’s for average men’s hands. Assuming a normal distribution, for half of men and most women, a phone bigger than 4.3 inches—like the current smallest iPhone—is too big.

I have pretty large hands, and even with that being true anything beyond 4 inches I find unusable. A phone with a 3.7 inch screen would be perfect for me.

I know, some women choose large phones on purpose. A few times in public I’ve seen a woman with a 6+ inch phone hold it up to her face and it’s so large that it nearly covers her whole head. This is kind of funny because it looks like some Alice in Wonderland tableau.

But most women — like my partner — would choose smaller phones if any were for sale.

As would I. So in other words phone makers are not just ignoring half the market — they are probably ignoring 60% or more of the market.

What’s that about the omniscalar efficiency of capitalism again?

I’ve seen loads of articles lately about how the world isn’t changing at all — that none of the advances since the 1920s have really mattered in any way. That technology is and has stagnated. In some ways, I agree with some of this but in most ways I think it’s utterly delusional and extremely harmful to what happens next, bad or good.

These misguided ideas are all of a piece with the people who just can’t see social change no matter how quick or how drastic (and these people are the vast majority).

Sure, if you are just talking about physical characteristics of reality and meeting basic human needs (food, water, housing) then yeah, we pretty much got there by the 1930s.

But are humans — and is modern society — just an epiphenomenon of basic needs being met? Is that all that matters, all that is consequential to a life? To a society? To a polity?

No, of course not. This is obviously wrong. And pretty damn stupid.

To be clear, I’m not aligning myself with the singularity nuts or the Extropians or any of these also-delusional groups. They are just as useless for having any cogent thoughts.

Nor am I walking a middle ground. No, I am forging a new path that takes into account that what matters to most modern, non-impoverished humans is not some basic meeting of physical needs but in the informational spaces in which that person dwells and who controls, influences and corrupts those.

One of the reasons in fact for the narrative that nothing done since the 1920s matters is so that those who very much realize that is false can successfully monopolize and dominate what has become nearly — and in some cases more — important than food, water and housing.

We live in an information society. Yes, that is a cliché but no one repeating that cliché seems to actually know what it implies.

And technology of late has made the control of information the most important factor in success and flourishment on the micro and the macro scales.

Pretending that none of the absolutely amazing and information-space-enlarging technologies coming to fruition in the last 30-50 years — as Ian Welsh and most others do — don’t matter at all is so damn dangerous I don’t even have words for it.

(Also, I am glad I’m not an academic, because I don’t care about being published or even being widely read. But I do care about coming up with original ideas with no one’s sanction (yes, I intend both meanings of that contranym) and being able to call the stupid “stupid,” which unless you are very famous you cannot do in an academic paper.)

This is a clean, unused Windows 10 install and it exfiltrates massive amount of data.

I also discovered the same thing in my own analysis which I never posted due to lack of time to write it up (would’ve involved several hours of work). This is contra all those who said, “If you turn off all the options, it doesn’t send any data!” They were of course completely deluded and wrong. As wrong as could be.

Here is the roughly 8-hour network traffic analysis of 5508 connection attempts of an unused, base install of Windows 10 Enterprise (NOTE: I did not remove any 192.168.1.x home network IP addresses from the analysis).

3967 connection attempts to 51 different Microsoft IPs, too, all on an unused install. Just imagine what happens if you use the damn thing.

Those who say that Windows 10 does not steal all your data are completely mistaken (of course many of those who claim that on internet forums are probably paid to do so).

Tumblr SJW blog/insult generator:

https://tumblr-argument-generator.lokaltog.net/

Pretty damn funny as I can’t tell the algorithmically-generated versions from some actual Tumblr blogs I’ve visited.

This article is way out of touch. At first I was interested. Then just annoyed.

Now, there isn’t anything particularly unusual about young white kids identifying with hip-hop culture. That’s been happening since the beginning. But the performance of hip-hop culture as a normalized part of white identity is fairly unusual.

That’s been happening since the 1990s. Probably since the 1980s, but went mainstream in the 90s. Vine and the internet had nothing at all to do with that.

The part about black contributions being downplayed or minimized is correct, though, and has been happening since forever.

If Twitter implements this, the few Twitter feeds I pay any attention to will be deleted from my bookmarks and I won’t go back there again.

An algorithm-tampered timeline is completely useless and is another concession to the moron contingent — the same ones who can’t stay off Facebook — and not something that I’ll find usable even as an observer (I do not and never will have a Twitter account myself).

Like Firefox, Twitter seems hellbent on destroying its one (in this case, small) advantage over other services.

Good luck to them with that.

For reference, this is how goddamn clueless the Twitter engineers are about their own product. Comically idiotic.

I dug up a copy of my high school transcript from 22 years ago.

Looking over it, it made me recall my English teacher in 11th grade who was an intellectual Lilliputian but presided over us like some sort of combination of Socrates and Dolores Umbridge.

Near the end of the first semester’s final grading period she and I got into a huge falling out over various things related to my supposed use of verboten materials in writing assignments (none of which was true — I just intimidated her intellectually) and other issues, and she told me in class and in front of everyone that no matter how well I performed or what I did, I’d never get more than an 85 in her class again.

I said, “Do I strike you as someone who is concerned with my grades? Did I really make that impression on you?”

Of course that didn’t help matters. But she kept her word; I never made above an 85 again in a grading period that she controlled:

Note the 87 on the final exam (she did not grade those so she couldn’t fudge them) and that I somehow got an 81 average despite 85, 85 and 85 and 87 actually averaging to an 86. That’s because she didn’t grade and report my exam, but she did report the final grade — so as some final slight, she reported it as an 81.

Normally I’d ace an English final exam but did the minimum possible on that one as I knew no matter what she’d destroy my grade so I spent about 10 minutes on that one and left. Still got an 87, so eh. Not bad for 10 minutes of work.

Damn, she was a terrible teacher. Yes, I was an arrogant prat but I was honestly interested in learning. That was what my crack about my grades was all about. And why I trashed her and the class leading to the result of “you shall pass, but only with an 85.” Because there was no learning going on in that classroom of any kind and I was angry and disappointed about it.

But she was a cloven-footed demon, truly, and there was nothing I could learn from her.

Light travels one foot a nanosecond, or thereabouts.

One day we should talk about how that places hard limits on computing. And why.

One day.