Love it when a vendor sends me a VPN sheet with an invalid subnet on it.

192.168.3.18/30

This is not a thing that can exist due to the way binary works! It just can’t!

What it should be is: 192.168.3.16/30. That leaves two free IPs in the range as a /30 is really tiny.

The reason is that in binary for a /30, the first 30 bits are masked out, like so:

nnnnnnnn.nnnnnnnn.nnnnnnnn.nnnnnnhh

Leaving the last two bits as valid for hosts on that subnet. Two bits in binary: four possible combos (two to the second power, the first IP in the range is the subnet ID and the last is the broadcast address). Tada!

(Note that this is only a partial, non-exhaustive explanation, and omits very many necessary details required for a full understanding.)

I heard a sob from my boyfriend so I went over to ask what was wrong and he replied, “today is awful” and handed me this pic.twitter.com/FTYcaQtGJk

— ✨ ✨ @ PINNED (@STRAWBUNNlES) March 5, 2019

I agree. Finding a Pop Tart in your hand is an awful, traumatizing experience. A Pop Tart is the paragon of pseudo-food, the epitome of simulation triumphing over the real. It’s a non-food, an excreted horror of nauseating synthesized non-sustenance fit not for consuming for nutrients but for illusory satiety in a culture beset with obesogenic exultance in the primacy of artificial food — and thought.

If you eat Pop Tarts, you have left the path of wisdom and are approaching the self-destruction of the average heroin addict. Not necessarily because of their lack of nutrition, but because the cognitive devaluation of the self that occurs when one commits such acts of consuming extruded non-food that resembles nothing found anywhere in a true culture that values itself. Every example even lacks a particular flavor. It is a referent to nothing — it points to no food which it truly resembles. The flavor of Pop Tart no matter what is on the box is: Pop Tart.

We cheapen and debauch ourselves when we consent to consuming such debased fodder, and in doing so we assent also to manipulations in other arenas of the cognoscible and the subsequent reduction thereof. Pop Tarts are the nullification of the real, an abolition of the interconnection of humanity to its physical and mental sustenance, the annihilation of association to and with the idea of food as anything more than a generic chip-like module one inserts first into a toaster then into a mouth with no thought as to how one is not consuming a good but rather an ideology.

I’m not so impressed when some guy with a 290 pound body weight can bench 300+ pounds. That only makes sense. Sure, it’s a lot of weight, but relatively not.

However, when a woman with a bodyweight of 132 pounds benches 315 that is fucking something.

I stand in awe.

He was part of a small and informal but intense online community that scolded writers who ran afoul of these values in their work or online. Now, Jackson has been demonized by the community he once helped police.

Shocking! Ok, not. This is how it works, and it has nothing at all to do with sensitivity or equality — it’s the “job wars” as noted on Clarissa’s Blog.

Both Jackson and Zhang are people of color who now see their careers hobbled in an industry that claims to be laser-focused on diversity.

I would laugh but it’s all so pathetic, and in extremely predictable ways. Diversity matters, but none of this is helping the goal of diversity. In fact, exactly the opposite: it is designed to drive people away with capricious demands and calls to “cancel” where the real but ever-unstated goal is to eliminate threatening competition.

This is the same thing that is happening in other ways in the dating market and with what #metoo has become, for instance. It will only get worse.

I was considering banishing from my reading list all blogs and twitter feeds that are climate change deniers, but then realized under my more-accurate definition of climate change denial that’d be just about everyone.

So I discarded that idea….

I can’t wait as I get more muscular and then fairly ripped someone will say, “I wish I had good genes like you.” It is 100% inevitable that it will occur.

And then I’ll unkindly inform them that MOTHERFUCKER MY GENES WAS FIGHTING ME EVERY STEP OF THE WAY.

Get out of here with that “genes” shit. Genetics is the excuse that people fall back on for why they aren’t doing something, anything, to help themselves.

This is cute, but I’m surprised no one on Tumblr had a meltdown because there is five year age difference between Janelle Monae and Kristen Stewart. Usually any couple with more than 1-2 year age differential is heavily criticized there.

Once, I saw a man in in his late 40s criticized as a “pedophile” for dating a woman in her early 30s — which is truly repulsive because it minimizes the true harm and vileness of pedophilia, thus causing yet greater harm.

Good job, Tumblr.

I’m really stuck with what OS I can use in the future.

With MacOS removing subpixel anti-aliasing, when the version I am on becomes too unsupported I won’t be able to effectively use that any longer and won’t be able to upgrade because the fonts look like hot garbage and nuke my eyes.

Windows 10 isn’t an option and Linux is even worse. I’m guessing then in a year or two I will use the computer less then as no OS will be worth using and so I will just read more books.

Still not sure why Apple had to destroy their desktop OS, and one of their main advantages, but Jobs is gone and the bozo explosion is in progress there.

The world has become too complex for "experts" to have the influence and relevance they once had.

And it seems all of us understand this….except for the experts.

— Jack Murphy (@jackmurphylive) March 5, 2019

Experts are great if you need expertise in the very very VERY specific 0.000001% of human knowledge they have any idea about.

But if you don’t require that, experts are worse than useless and most likely attempting to rob you. Because of course the problem with experts is that they know a great deal about very little, but believe that they have an abundance of knowledge about much more because of their mastery of one infinitesimally tiny area of human experience.

Almost no one (expert or not) is even passable at systems-level thinking, and experts almost to a one are worse than anyone else, even non-experts. STEM training and the like causes you to be far inferior as a systems-level thinker, as it’s designed to do this (among other things), while it convinces you that your mastery of one area leads to intuitive comprehension of all others.

So if you have glioblastoma and you need an expert on this, depend and rely on the expert on glioblastoma-specific information only. But I wouldn’t even depend on them for advice or any true knowledge on migraines, much less any other topic.

Lately, I am obsessed with systems thinking because I believe that is a hugely unappreciated and understudied area, and one where I can use my innate skills to really upgrade my own understanding.

Dear artists AND scientists: I will throw away your life’s work without regret if you are terrible to other people. I will re-derive it from first principles.

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) March 5, 2019

This way, the abyss. This attitude, as much as I like Emily, is just moronic and counterproductive. It doesn’t make anything or anyone better; it’s just virtue signaling.

The problem is, of course, that moral standards change over time, and sometimes very quickly, and not in ways that are predictable or obvious. The whole idea of jettisoning the past is attractive, especially in the context of the neoliberal mindset, but it is dangerous because in the future all of what we do and are now will be seen as problematic and tossed away just as cavalierly.

This discarding of the past leads to an ahistorical ever-present now where we must “re-derive” everything, which is an enormous waste of time and also impossible, and rather than grapple with moral quandaries or imperfection we instead just plaster over it, pretend it never happened, and invite the same mistakes again and again.

People can usually identify a problem but their solutions are often the worst of any that are available. This is yet another example.

kuberbetes is just websphere for millennials. I shan't be reading any replies,

— Dross Whedon (@moonpolysoft) March 4, 2019

Ah, shit, I’d nearly forgotten all about Websphere! Dead on. We keep reinventing the wheel, somehow attempting to make it more wheel-like while not realizing more than wheels might be needed.

SpaceX successfully rockets Crew Dragon ship for astronauts into space.

I was there to view this launch from as close as you can get. Even with all the waiting in queues, the standing around and the security theater, it was worth every moment of inconvenience and annoyance to stand across the lagoon and watch that violent candle punch its way into the sky.

It’s easy to see why so many — liberals and conservatives alike — are opposed to projects like this, are offended in a deep sense by their very existence. Hearing the palpable excitement and the cheers of the SpaceX employees and NASA staff over the audio feed as the rocket flawlessly ascended into the exosphere, the moment of triumph had united all of us into a collective assemblage, a unit that could threaten existing orders, could take unified action, could become a common polity.

Instead of the reasons people profess to believe something, I attempt to discern the true rationale behind their ideological approach. And in this case, our current social acculturation simply demands that we disavow collective actions like these, that we disdain anyone or anything who wishes to transcend our individual limitations, who wants more than to have us as pawns hopping around a chessboard, doomed to be picked off the forces of economic “reality.”

No, SpaceX and NASA isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But the nitpicks and remonstrances of the apathetic naysayers reveal more than they know: that they want us to stay earthbound in reality and in philosophy, with no dreams, no aspirations, nothing but Jackson’s “conditions of absolute reality.”

This is not how humans live. This is not how I live or can live. I reject and deny these conditions, just as the launch did. Just as we all should.