Here's what would happen in a functional system:

Seize PG&E's assets

Prosecute its board members & C levels for fraud, criminal neglect, and murder

Levy fines to subsidize the backlog of maintenance work which should begin immediately (omg job creation, what?) https://t.co/9Ifsm2JK4M

— 🍁🍂BOG WITCH AUTUMN🍂🍁 (@MissFruitypie) October 27, 2019

That is indeed what should have happened long ago in a sane world. In this one, though, we’ll just let them keep destroying a state and punishing those who attempted to hinder their fraud and negligence.

Welcome to the climate change future with large corporations bringing on the end of civilization that much faster.

Some clothes I didn’t care about stopped fitting long ago, but now some of my favorites are getting close to being unwearable due to my back and shoulders becoming so much thicker and broader.

The price, it is worth paying.

When I complain about modern UI/UX being worse, those (usually those who profit from the new paradigm) claim it’s just nostalgia or that I “hate change.”

But it’s not nostalgia at all and I don’t hate change. I embrace positive change and did so in UI for many years. What I hate is things being fucking broken. Why is it broken? becomes the natural question to ask.

In short, it’s broken because a few large companies have endeavored to transition every bit of technology into a consumption-only locked-down device. This is their goal, and their approach has been to remove anything useful, claim it’s “for the user’s own good” and then iterate that over time until only consumption-friendly features remain.

And, of course, to unleash loads of shill propaganda about bad users who “just hate change,” who object to UIs being stripped of all useful and non-consumption features because they need more than the ability to click on Facebook and drool into their Big Gulp.

And it’s worked a treat! Because, alas, propaganda works very well indeed. As all possibility of doing anything useful is removed (with Mozilla’s Firefox being a prime example of this trend), anyone who objects is just causing problems, and must be ejected from the discourse as “opposing progress.”

Well, fuck you and your progress. I need to get some goddamn work done.

p-Hacking and False Discovery in A/B Testing.

Explains (indirectly) a lot of Mozilla’s issues and their absolute shit understanding of statistical methods. Pointing this out was what I got banned from Reddit for, mainly. The one thing most people hate hearing more than anything is the truth.

Social operating system we theoretically need to transition to in order to avoid social, ecological, environmental extinction level event/s

— David Sarac (@davidsarac) October 25, 2019

It’s a good sign that I, and many other people, have come to the same conclusion: that there is and will be a fundamental phase transition of the human operating system. I call it “new minds” but it’s really a new sociocultural and philosophical framework that is developing and will be required to survive the next thousand years. If this transformation does not occur, we are not necessarily doomed from an extinction perspective, but might as well be, for there will be no progress and only regression.

I don’t know what these new minds will be like, exactly — but I can tell you by necessity it’ll be nothing like the world we now experience.

Computer Camp! Ooooooh yeah!!! pic.twitter.com/AAP0q941bh

— 👻Haunts4Coffee☕️ (@Hax4Coffee) October 11, 2019

I wanted to go to this so bad when I was a kid. My parents wouldn’t pay for it though, and wouldn’t let me ask my grandparents. I know now they could not afford it but that idea doesn’t press quite as heavily when you’re 8.

To not get fucked by the modern environment, you have to repress the natural human tendency to be irrational and spontaneous, and instead train yourself to be rational and structured at all times. Yuck.

— Preethi Kasireddy (@iam_preethi) October 24, 2019

Yep. Neoliberal “progressive” technocracy has overtaken and subsumed everything. Even people that I mostly disagree with can see that.

If this is progress, I want no part of it.

Now universities and corporations regulate their subject’s speech (even jokes), who they flirt with, who they date, and countless other minutia of daily life. They want us to interact like drones serving a giant machine, with humanity – and all its mistakes and wonders – squeezed out.

It bothers me that people are mostly fine with their lives being so tightly regulated — and most don’t even notice it. They think it’s natural, just the way things must be. The level of social control in the US truly isn’t that much different than in China. It’s just enforced differently. And yes, I do have direct experience with both countries.

When I say I have libertarian sympathies, this is what I mean: that people (not corporations) should have maximal freedom.

Even so-called liberals have been duped (and have duped themselves) with “protection from harm” justifications for removing essential freedoms, with the only real entities being protected nearly all of the time is corporations and their imperatives.

We live in a world that has a lack of beauty

We’ve delegated beauty to women, and the only form of beauty we can engage with is sexual beauty

But our buildings are ugly

Our bodies are ugly

Our clothing is ugly

We live in a post modern relativist hell of ugliness

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) October 25, 2019

Beauty makes no profit, so we are told its wrong to care about it. But living in a drab world of featureless gray is not how humans flourish. It is unworkable long term, even if all you care about is profit.

I’m not sure what the future holds. But I am certain that so-called progressivism nor conservatism, or any other conventional contemporaneous ideology, holds any keys to it or will be the dominant one in 50 years time.

MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Syrian Refugees to Tout Food Computers That Didn’t Work.

These are our “best and brightest.” People think I have a case of sour grapes when I mention that Ivy Leaguers (MIT is not Ivy League, but you know what I mean) don’t impress me, after having met more than a few.

They are, mostly, people who got lucky (i.e., had the right parents) and are good at parroting answers their teachers want to hear. It doesn’t take much to be smarter than the lot of them, and if I had been or were offered full-ride admission to MIT, Harvard, etc., I would turn it down without a second thought. I have better things to do with my time and that degree is meaningless to me.

Not sour grapes; proper time management skills.

Google mail isn't any better.

You would think that the world-renound search team would be able to find an email from my boss last month, but I guess not.

— Andy Hallberg (@Andrew_Hallberg) October 24, 2019

Search in email must be much, much harder than I realize, because neither Microsoft nor Google can seem to get it right, or even have it work half-decently. And it’s not just email. In Windows even the Start Menu search for the default items doesn’t work half the time, including on a fresh default install.

How this level of failure is possible, I don’t know. I’ve been using Outlook since 1997 and search has never worked correctly and I guess it never will. I’ve not used gmail since 2005, but search didn’t function then and it appears to still not be adequate for many people.

So, why is search so hard when there is known, predictable access to all the data? Do not enough users depend on it, so no one cares? Or is it just far harder than I suspect? I doubt the latter because I think I could throw together a simple guaranteed functional keyword search in PowerShell in few days over known data, and I am a crap programmer.