Basically every time I open Twitter now the first thing I see is AOC windmill-dunking on some Beltway doofus. A much improved app experience https://t.co/aWzMWyJYmi

— Chase Woodruff (@dcwoodruff) January 8, 2019

Aye. It’s pretty refreshing. The narrative is that she’s unintelligent because she occasionally gets a fact wrong (that’ve usually been widely misreported in the press for many years). This is by the same people, of course, who’ve been getting all the facts wrong for the past 30 years. About the major things, though, she’s dead right and much more knowledgeable than her interlocutors.

People, even those operating in good faith, are more reacting to her tone and approach than anything. She doesn’t act or speak like a politician, and it turns out that many people are only comfortable with politicians who are trying to hoodwink them, no matter what they say they want. She’s moving, nearly all by herself, the Dems away from corporate centrist warmongering. She’s truly only an FDR liberal, not some kind of mega-communist, but since the Overton window has been shifted so much to many people her ideas seem outlandish when in 1960 they’d have just seemed normal.

The establishment narrative is turning hard against her because she and her ilk are going to make rich people less rich. That’s all of what you’re seeing now.

Software developers/engineers are not phone, laptop, WiFi routers or any gadget repairers 🙄 https://t.co/Ld94xRW6ys

— Ada Nduka Oyom (@Kolokodess) January 5, 2019

By the same token, I’m an infrastructure designer and CTO. I don’t know a thing about your smartphone or how to do anything on it, especially if it’s an Android. I don’t know how to recover photos, don’t know what the name of that app was that you used two years ago, and I don’t know which app has malware in it. I know nothing about phones.

Absent a societal collapse, I never thought I’d live in an era of computing where I’d observe everything getting worse and backsliding into brokenness.

Guess it was inevitable with corporate dominance and many low-knowledge, low-intelligence users. But damn is it ever disappointing.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Singlehandedly Shifting the Overton Window.

Yup. All the stuff that Democrats have said is impossible for a decade, one woman is doing almost all by herself. And it’s not even that AOC is so great (though she is pretty remarkable), but rather that the Democrats have been so very terrible for so long.

Large Layer-2 Domains Strike Again.

Supposedly it was a problem with the management network used by their optical gear, but it looks a lot like a layer-2 network spanning 15 data centers and no control-plane policing on the managed devices… proving yet again that large-scale layer-2 networks are a really bad idea.

Yes! I had to argue against a stretched L2 at a previous job and almost lost that one. What happens when you stretch layer 2 all over the place? Congratulations, you’ve just created one big broadcast domain and that means when one datacenter goes down, in many cases, they all go down.

“But having one big stretched Layer 2 network makes management so easy!” you cry. It sure does. And that’s part of the problem! It virtually virtualizes (my usage is very deliberate here) what in reality is complex and discrete — so you can no longer monitor and police what in truth are real-world boundaries that actually matter a great deal.

Stretched L2 does have its uses. Sure it does. But it shouldn’t be used to thoughtlessly abstract away complexity when the complexity should be completely visible.

Astronaut Accidentally Calls 911 from Space.

Well, it’s nice to know that when I’m in space and I have a Space Emergency I can just call 911.

“Hello, 911, there’s some space goo in the airlock and it’s glowing very blue. Also, for some reason even in space, lasers are making a ‘pew, pew’ sound.”

For years, I swallowed all the theories about fat, believing I could be obese and fit. Here are five dangerous myths, debunked.

Amazed this article got published. One of the few sane ones I’ve seen in a mainstream publication. Actually saying that HAES and “fat but fit” isn’t really a thing used to be punishable by journalistic death.

9/ But raise a generation deprived of any sense of secrecy and no social safety net yet the belief anyone can rise on any given day, and the tools of shame and status are much less effective. Digital natives *do not give a shit* about how older people view them.

— John Rogers (@jonrog1) January 4, 2019

Yes! I saw this at my previous job, where there were many young (almost all women) interns. There was a whole department of nearly all older women that was just utterly disdainful and contemptuous of these interns and treated them very poorly, and it just rolled off their backs like it was nothing. Most people from my generation would’ve been freaking out and in tears every day. Not the interns, to their great credit.

But I think these interns just implicitly understood that the older generation had already screwed them over, were attempting to do it again, and that it was their last Boomer hurrah before declining into cultural irrelevance.

I hung out with the intern gang as a group fairly often because I was mentoring one of them and it was hilarious and sad to hear them talk about older people and all the irrelevant crap they were consumed with. Not a bit of it mattered to these interns because they were heading into a much more precarious world. (Sample quote: “What does it matter if crazy lady from PMO gets me fired? I can’t pay my student loans either way.”)

So, indeed, millennials and younger don’t really give a single crap about the opinions of the people who screwed them over and are attempting to do it even more.

Did you know that AOC was once in high school or college or something and had fun? So scandalous! And she even danced. Will the moral outrages never end?

The Republicans are giving her a great reputation and harming themselves more than they’re hurting her, by far. It’s hilarious to watch. I think they detest her so much because she’s both attractive and savvy to the modern clime in ways they’ll never be. (That’s why a lot of Dems dislike her too.)

What also makes me angry at the Dems, though, is they’d just as quickly abandon her if it turned out in her past she’d been a sex worker of some type. You know it’s true. So there’s no lack of hypocrites here.