Huh, I had no idea that Stephen Wolfram and I have much in common in the mathematical realm.

Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division and didn’t learn his times tables until he’d hit 40. Indeed, the inspiration for Wolfram|Alpha, which he released in 2009, started with Wolfram’s own struggles as a math student. Growing up, Wolfram’s obsession was physics. By 12, he’d written a dictionary on physics, by his early teens he’d churned out three (as yet unpublished) books, and by 15 he was publishing scientific papers.

Despite his wunderkind science abilities, math was a constant stumbling block. He could come up with concepts, but executing calculations was hard. His solution was to get his hands on a computer. By programming it to solve equations and find patterns in data, he could leave the math to the machine and focus his brain on the science.

According to STEM people, folks like Stephen Wolfram and I don’t exist — that is, high IQ people who are atrocious at math.

Yet here we are. I’m sitting right here.

There is not a concept in math I cannot understand. Often I understand the concepts and implications thereof better than those who are able to work out the problems. They call me dumb. Meanwhile, they have no clue what they are actually doing.

But ask me to “solve for x?” Might as well forget it, because it won’t happen.

This is something I’d also been thinking about a lot — those who are good at the minutiae of how to plug terms into equations and such are soon to be outmoded. Relegated to desuetude. Computers already are and will be so much better at it that humans who waste their time learning such things will be left far behind in the near future.

Wolfram seems to agree.

Wolfram never planned for his tool to become highbrow CliffsNotes, but he’s not too concerned about it, either. “Mechanical math,” Wolfram argues, “is a very low level of precise thinking.” Instead, Wolfram believes that we should be emphasizing computational thinking—something he describes as “trying to formulate your thoughts so that you can explain them to a sufficiently smart computer.” This has also been called computer-based math. Essentially, knowing algebra in today’s technology-saturated world won’t get you very far, but knowing how to ask a computer to do your algebra will. If students are making this shift, in his mind, they’re just ahead of the curve.

“Mechanical math” which is what I call “operational math” I am admittedly very bad at. Besides that, though, it always seemed such a huge waste of time to me. Why bother with this when I could be pondering something that mattered? Couldn’t a machine do this worthless rote work that achieves nothing?

This is going to sound arrogant as all hell, but the future is people like me: those with good conceptual understanding in many areas, with decent to high social skills* who can understand business and business people, and who are also good writers, communicators, and inter-area mediators who can sit in front of a computer or AI and instruct it how to solve a problem at a high level in its own terms of comprehension.

The future ain’t working out musty equations on paper the same as in 1680. That is already over, done, gone, not coming back, ever.

*It took me many years of hard effort to achieve good social skills. The paradox of this is that if you have poor social skills, you are heavily penalized for this and then they tend to atrophy ever more over time until your every effort to improve only makes you a bigger creep, jerk or loser in the minds of those with high social skills. It took me just herculean effort to break this impasse.

The sad fact is that Chromium/Chrome is technologically a better, more stable browser than Firefox, but millions of people stay on Firefox because it offers customizability via extensions.

Remove the usefulness of those, though, and there is no reason to use Firefox.

QED.

I am so angry that I will no longer in any browser be able to prevent it and websites from doing things that are harmful to me and dangerous to my privacy.

Which is of course the goal — that is the whole reason Firefox’s “Web Extensions” are a thing.

Google won, but Mozilla doesn’t realize it. The best kind of victory is when your foe is so defeated that they adopt your outlook and worldview and think they also somehow won. Google achieved such a victory over Mozilla with Chrome.

I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but I would not at all be surprised if there weren’t some shady deals between Google and Mozilla that brought this about. Killing Firefox would be very, very good for Google.

If there is no alternative to Google’s adware and malware (Chrome) or Microsoft’s adware (Windows 10/Internet Explorer/Edge), then people will tend to choose the faster one with a name they trust more. That’d be Google.

Some alternatives to experiment with, to get away from Mozilla’s terrible decision-making:

Brave.

Vivaldi.

The age of user customization of software is over, though. General computing will be taken away not long after (as is already occurring).

Now it’ll just be choosing among the best of a bad bunch. I would say choose wisely, but there is no such choice.

Most Firefox extensions I (and others) want to use:

I will be using Chromium, but it’s so inelegant compared to Firefox in many ways.

Sad to see an organization destroy itself when it’s so preventable, but the people in charge don’t understand their own market or what made the product successful in the first place.

It’s interesting that smart people of this kind make very predictable, repeatable mistakes. I can observe this, but don’t know why, exactly.

(By 2025, Mozilla will be 1/20 its current size, Firefox will be stagnant like Thunderbird, and not long after, will switch to Blink like Opera, completing the transition to Chrome which has been the goal the past few years.)

Good summation of Mozilla’s bad decisions (not written by me):

Company like that has no future.

I’d have to make about $400,000 a year in the Silicon Valley area to have the same standard of living as where I currently reside.

So for a whole variety of reasons, I will never live there.

The Handmaid’s Tale is the scariest TV show I have ever seen due to its utter plausibility. It feels more like an account of future history carried back in time somehow than a TV show.

Sweden is conducting an interesting natural experiment (interesting from a distance, anyway) in what happens when a society decides to self-destroy via liberal ideology.

This societal self-mutilation has occurred by way of right-wing and hybridized ideologies and tendencies in the past to Western societies, but this is a new mode of dissolution altogether for a Western democracy.

I’m just sorry about what’s going to happen — is already happening — the women of Sweden as a result.

Experiments with open borders don’t always work out.

Sweden’s Bråvalla music festival cancelled next year after sex attacks.

If it’s racism to observe that certain cultures treat women much, much worse than others, then I am a racist and proud to be. The left has made a huge, incalculably large mistake in supporting the rights of refugees and economic migrants over the rights of women. And yes, they are in conflict often as we see here.

Notice in every media article the provenance of the rapists and assailants is unmentioned. But that is of course a glaring omission that only highlights the issue.

Fellow liberals can pretend — will pretend unto the demise of their own culture and institutions as we see here — that everyone always is exactly identical, but that is not how the real world works.

Expect much more of this sort of thing across much of Europe where large numbers of economic migrants (most are not refugees in the sense that the UN and others use the word) have been taken in. In some cities in Europe, it will not be safe for women to be on the streets alone in the near future. In some cities, it already is not.

One reason I do not align with the liberal coalition though I am far to the left of almost all of them in many ways is that I absolutely do not support the abridgments of the rights or liberties of women already resident in one place so that economic migrants can assert their own culture’s rights to assault and demean them.

And yep, for me this has nothing to do with race — I do and will treat the same every Chad and Brock in every frat house in the country.

One thing I love though is Automator on the Mac.

Every OS should have a tool like this.

Makes other OS automation tools look like a complete joke.

People have wondered why I fucking hate Matt Yglesias and people like him.

Well, this is why I fucking hate Matt Yglesias and people like him:

Matt Yglesias is the epitome of the filter-bubbled liberal who has absolutely no idea of anything outside of Washington D.C., and it shows in everything he writes.

Yes, sometimes, he is accidentally right. “Sometimes” and “accidentally” ain’t good enough.