I will never buy wireless headphones (hate them and would lose them in two days, tops) and will never use a smartphone without a headphone jack unless my job absolutely forces me to do so.

Plus, they sound like garbage.

Will explore probably a flip phone for my next phone purchase with some sort of GPS device for directions. All I really use a smartphone for anyway is Google Maps. I haven’t installed a single other (cr)app on one in many years because I find them all pretty worthless and limited.

Probably something like this. Smartphones are of no use to me; they are distraction and annoyance devices, brain viruses, and already I need to grab as much time to think as I can.

On balance, I think smartphones made the world worse.

When I was a kid checking out nearly every book the library had, sometimes I’d choose books that hadn’t been checked out by anyone since the 1940s or 1950s.

My record was a book that hadn’t been checked out since 1929 (I think, could’ve been 1925). I believe it was a biography of Charles Darwin, though the old memory is a bit hazy for things that occurred ca. 1986.

Now I’m not much of a programmer but I took a look at the Kubernetes code and holy shit, man, what a mess. What a damn mess.

Nested if statements galore, no modularity at all, it’s nearly incomprehensible outside of that (and I can generally read code pretty well), and yeah…it’s about what I expected.

Further evidence that they are solving problems poorly that were already solved or were nixed as being too complex. I’d be embarrassed to work on a project like this.

At least there are comments? I guess that’s the one good thing I can say about that unholy mess.

Hilariously, Twitter is now displaying in Russian for me:

I did nothing to cause this on my computer or anywhere else. I have a US IP address.

It’s Putin! Gotta be.

Windows 10, from hell’s heart I stab at thee because from Microsoft’s butt you crap on me.

Fuck all the mooks and assclowns who have made computers and applications much less functional over the last seven years or so. Many things I used to do in seconds or minutes take twice as long now or are just impossible.

If the tradeoff is someone with the intelligence of a rutabaga can now use a computer, it was very much not worth it.

The future of Kubernetes is Virtual Machines. Agreed, sort of. Containers are insecure and difficult to use by default.

A bunch of young people with no experience slapped something together that resembled many bad ideas from 20-30 years ago. Kubernetes is by default insecure, wasteful, slow, and in general a terrible idea (unless you enjoy wasting time/money).

Doing all these absurd workarounds to make it function correctly is just a huge waste of everyone’s time. Containers might be the future, but it’s a bad future.

Part of this is just the tendency for any professional field to make anything they touch as complex as possible so that it keeps the barriers to entry high. That is not a little of what we are seeing here.

It’s cute to watch these people realize that Harry Potter was just a rather well-done rehash of British boarding school stories that have been popular for 200+ years — plus magic.

I’d read a few of them that were tucked in the back of the library as a kid so I was aware, but most people haven’t read the absurd number of things that I have.

No work is all that original and any work truly original is likely to be nearly incomprehensible.

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With a USB3 flash drive and SSD it’s faster to reinstall Windows on a new PC than it is to update the OS, drivers, applications, and clear out the bloat.

This isn’t 2005 anymore.
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— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) December 26, 2018

This is true, and I understand the technical reasons why this is the case. However it is ridiculous that I can install Windows 10 in 5-7 minutes and it often takes two hours to fully update it. That is just not acceptable.

“The loudness of pure tones and, to a lesser degree, of complex tones, also depends on the frequency. This is because the ear is inherently less sensitive to low- and high-frequency sounds. The ear is most sensitive to sounds in the frequency range of 1,000 to 5,000 hertz. For example, a 50-hertz pure tone at 78 decibels, a 1,000-hertz pure tone at 60 decibels, and a 10,000-hertz tone at 72 decibels all sound equally loud. (At very high sound levels, 80 decibels and above, the ear’s sensitivity does not vary as much with frequency as it does at lower sound levels.) One reason for this variation in sensitivity is that a considerable amount of low-frequency sound is produced inside our bodies by flowing blood and flexing muscles. The ear is less sensitive to low-frequency sounds, so these internal sounds do not ‘drown out’ the external sounds that we need to hear.”

–Inquiry Into Physics, 8th Edition by Vern J. Ostdiek and Donald J. Bord

How America’s diet has changed over time.

The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970.

Look at all them genetics making everyone fat. Strangely, the calories consumed matches fairly well the average weight gained.

Men are 17.6 percent heavier — which translates into a roughly 30-pound gain. “At 195.5 pounds, put five American guys in a room and you’ve gathered roughly half a ton of manhood,” Ingraham notes. In the same period, women’s weight shot up from 140 pounds to just over 166 pounds — an 18.5 percent increase.

Eating a lot more food with less physical activity (a minor contribution, but still important) shockingly leads to greater weights. Who would’ve guessed?

It’s a bit odd everyone is eager to grab onto the “genetics” explanation for food-related behavior, but when one attempts to explain any other human behavior with genetic ideas that’s just not even a notion capable of being entertained. I think I see a problem here.