Day: August 9, 2019, 3:05 PM

The Way

Chill Regular-ass Post

Good advice. I was forced to do this after I realized that about 60% of users couldn’t even tell you the name of the application they most commonly use. How this is possible I don’t know and it still boggles my mind. However, if you ask a user what they were using when a problem occurred, most of them will say something like “Microsoft.” Yes, just Microsoft. Or “Adobe Windows” when they are actually using Microsoft Excel.

So when I did a whole lot of support I just asked the user to show me what they are attempting to do as they have almost no information about any of it other than rote procedure.

Doing this type of support reinforced that most people just don’t think very much about anything. Again, that assumption of similarity bias. I tend to think about tons of things all the time and I like to know details. Most people just don’t, it turns out. And these are the people who vote.

Valid

Chill Uncategorized

This is a valid switch in PowerShell commands:

Screen Shot 2019 08 09 at 2 41 58 PM

Yeah, just throw the Ass switch in there, it’ll poop out what you need. Ok, it’s really “AsString” but as in many command shells, you can shorten it if it’s a unique parameter in that position.

So of course I did. From here on out, I will refer to getting data by string in PowerShell as “grabbing ass.”

Spelling Out

Chill Regular-ass Post

This is part of the left’s belief in the magical power of words. Perhaps they read too much Harry Potter when they were young.

Words do have power, but just not the magical and implausible ones much of the left believes in.

New Minds

Chill Uncategorized

Social media and smartphones are probably the worst tech to happen to society over the last two decades. Humans just aren’t cognitively capable of handling them and at a large scale, society is not. I am not sure, though, how permanent that is. How well will we adapt? There will always be the shape of the new that is unpredictable by people molded by the antiquated and obsolete — as we can easily see by the Boomers and their increasingly hilarious but harmful irrelevance and cluelessness.

I mentioned earlier that Aurora (among a few others) has obviously been thinking about some of the same things that I have. I wasn’t exaggerating. There’s a reason I think she called her album A Different Kind of Human. To face what’s happening and what’s going to occur with climate change and further technological advance, we will need and will become regardless different sorts of human beings. Our old minds are increasingly no longer functional in this new era. The error conditions are too unbounded and they are not easily recoverable with our old ways of thinking and being in the world.

To people who claim that human nature is invariant, etc., parts of it certainly are. However, humans are also extremely transformable and to argue that a 10th century Polynesian and a 19th century British industrialist are the same is absurd. Thus, obviously we can have very different cultural frames that are both completely compatible with some unknown but extant human nature.

Some small amount of these new minds are being installed now, mostly in the young. It’s an inevitable process but it’s not guaranteed. If not enough occur in the world, we’re probably done long term. It’s a nearly-invisible transmutation that is vital to our survival but most will have no clue it is occurring, or must occur.