Ex-fucking-actly. The point of anyone in IT is to try their hardest to get their environment to a point where maybe, just maybe they aren’t even needed. Then that lets you bring TRUE value to your employer and focus on the real important things that staff need.

— Shane Bryan 💬 (@ShaneBryan_IT) April 2, 2019

Indeed. I try to build systems so simple and reliable that a Level 1 helpdesk person can follow a document and fix 90% of problems that occur — but the problems happen so infrequently it’s almost never needed. That is in contrast to the “Kubernetes” mindset of IT where systems are so complex that it takes a team of engineers with dozens of people to even troubleshoot a problem, much less fix it.

The latter is looked at as more intelligent and innovative, when in reality it takes much more insight and understanding to do the first option, but it’s all loaded in planning and deep understanding at the front end.

There’s a reason I didn’t link to or write about that New Yorker story about the K-T boundary “discovery.” Smelled like bullshit to me. And seems like that is in fact the case.

Same reason I never wrote about Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos on this or any other blog. Seemed like a cockamamie grift the first time I ever heard about it. And as we all know, it was.

I don’t get it right all the time, but in the market having a good BS detector is key. It’s not doing the smartest thing all the time that is most important, but not doing the stupidest thing possible is absolutely vital. Most people cannot even pass that test.

Glad to know my BS detector is still firing on all warp cores.

President Trump says Democrats and environmental wackos are waging a war on beef. But corporations, not politicians or activists, are leading the post-meat revolution.

Told you so. This is what is going to happen: Moral and utilitarian objections of environmentalists and vegetarians will be co-opted by corporations to sell you an inferior product at a higher price, meanwhile claiming erroneously that you getting gouged for a worse product is helping to save the earth. This will not be the case, of course, because these meatless burgers and such rely on destructive, fertilizer- and pesticide-intensive industrial agriculture.

Meanwhile, a shaming campaign will develop that gradually but successfully pushes people away from meat to these much higher-margin pseudo-earth-friendly products that offer no benefit to anyone except the corporations peddling them (and are actively harmful to people like me attempting to stay fit).

This was as predictable as the sun rising in the east and water having two hydrogen atoms. I cannot believe so many people are falling for it.

Every piece of art is embedded in a cultural and social context. The more extreme versions of postmodernist attempt to sever art completely from this context only serves to heighten the need for that context by embedding it in a moment and time so completely that outside of that moment and that known context, it cannot be understood at all. In other words, both the contemporaneity and the novelty are the point — the object or artefact is an afterthought. Thus, I’d argue that all postmodern art should be destroyed like a mandala soon after its creation, not because it is meaningless or loathsome as some would argue, but because its animus evaporates outside of the occasion of its immediate context and comprehension.

It wasn’t the one I was looking for, but the scene in True Lies where Schwarzenegger arrives in a Harrier and then uses the plane’s 30mm cannon to pan across the floor of the skyscraper is really well-done, especially considering how clunky a lot of the other setups in the movie are.

If you ignore the terrible 90s cinema score, it’s a short, tight bit that realistically shows how absolutely devastating a 30mm cannon is (that is a totally different beast than a rifle or even a “normal” machine gun), and is also dramatic and effective.

In reality, though, a Harrier can only hover for about 90 seconds before its reserve of cooling water is depleted and then the engine basically melts down. In the movie, it hovers for multiple minutes. So not very realistic in that sense, if you know a lot about Harriers.

I could not find a definitive answer, but I am not sure the Harrier can actually fire that big fucking gun while hovering. The 30mm cannon produces so much thrust (more than the engine, I think) that I suspect it’d destabilize the plane while hovering or at least push it back quite a lot.

But still, the scene really works and watching parts of True Lies, you can see where the Wachowskis picked up ideas for a little movie that came out five years later called The Matrix.