Gen Xers were also raised with a staggering amount of nihilism because we were taught as children that we were GOING to die in a horrific nuclear war. The survivors were the unlucky ones. Imagine an entire generation taught that they would be lucky to die.

— Jennifer Goodland (@BigYearColo) December 8, 2019

Gen Xer here, and this is absolutely accurate. I think that’s why we feel so much in common with millennials and Gen Z — though the cause of the hopelessness is different, the base feeling is the same.

I remember being told by a teacher, after asking about the nuclear sigils I’d seen on a building, that it was pointless to evacuate to the nuclear shelter they symbolized because we’d all die anyway, being so close to important military targets. Yep, a teacher, in 3rd grade, telling students that they’d die in a nuclear conflagration — and this was not unusual at all during that time in the mid-1980s.

But I wouldn’t blame her — this was in the air everywhere during that time. It was just assumed we’d all die in nuclear fire, by nearly everyone. It’s amazing society continued at all. It really is.

It’s exceedingly odd when you think about it that we build things like Twitter and Slack that don’t even work as well as BBS chat rooms from the mid-1980s.

All this “advanced” technology and we can’t even make it as functional and interesting as what we had when computers were 1/100,000 as fast.

Where the Frauds Are All Legal.

I’m not the only one who has realized that the medical establishment operates as a criminal enterprise. Not just like one but as one.

How anyone can defend this I have no idea. Literally almost anything else would be better than what we have now and the truth is that the system will have to change. Those who are against any form of change will be steamrolled by the force of history.

I like this mainly because it’ll piss off the Fat Acceptance losers. But also, it’s funny:

🔥BEST FAT BURNING SECRET🔥

💢ULTIMATE INTERMITTENT FASTING RECIPE 💢 #Keto or #Carnivore Or Any Diet… IT WORKS

keep it stupid simple, eat less move more! pic.twitter.com/GK3q8o11R4

— CARNIVORE 🦍🥩🍖🍗🥓 (@carnivorerilla) December 7, 2019

AWS Outposts Now Available.

Ha, that’s great. I thought this was a joke at first but it’s not April Fool’s Day. If you don’t understand what this is, it’s basically creating a baby AWS datacenter extension in your local datacenter.

In other words, we first had remote compute (1960s-1970s), then we went to local (1980s-2000s), then cloud/remote compute again (2010s). And now because cloud performance is often unacceptable (always be limited by the speed of light), local is starting to make a comeback. I knew this would happen, by the way. Light goes as fast as it goes and that’s it.

can we talk about actually why the peloton ad is so bad? the answer isn’t sexism, or that it’s hard to convey an inner journey in an ad

the problem is copywriting

THREAD pic.twitter.com/4RvqVsElQf

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) December 5, 2019

People made a lot of presumptions about the scenario that were not at all justified, all based on their own manias and misapprehensions. Many people would be overjoyed to receive a gift like that, even as a surprise.

However, the Peloton ad was written as some oddball pastiche of POV porn, first person shooter, and bad horror movie without any actual horror elements — that’s why it’s a failure. That said, it probably did not read that oddly to millennials and particuarly Gen Z, as that sort of self-objectification is normal and even de rigeur for those generations.

how to gauge my daily pretension levels:

Do I say that last night I saw…

A.) “a movie?”
B.) “a film?”
C.) (pronounced with a mid-Atlantic accent) “a picture?”

— Torrey Peters (@torreypeters) December 5, 2019

Agog that you’d presume to allow such proletarian simplisms to pass your lips.

As for me, last evening, I beheld le cinéma.

maybe i’m reading too much in and I don’t understand math but does this mean task manager is just doing a point-in-time reading at each refresh? Less leading, if you know: how’s it getting that data?

— Chris 🌈🌟 (@tuba_man) December 3, 2019

There’s not much math directly involved, but yes this is what it means, mostly. There are many programs running on a modern PC. Note that in the next phase of this post, I am simplifying greatly, and not using proper industry terms to make this more comprehensible. That said, programs operate in “time slices” that they request from the CPU (remember, eliding a lot here!*) The CPU has a clock speed, say 2.5Ghz. That means each second, it can do 2.5 billion things.**

There is no way to represent the complexity of what the CPU might be doing here in the task manager, or anywhere else. It simply occurs too quickly for human comprehension. Even 1/1000 as fast as modern computers operate would be too rapid.

In the task manager, and anywhere else, all that you see is sampled and “smudged,” meaning that some important events (like CPU spiking) that might happen for a few milliseconds show up for longer than that in the task manager so they can actually be visible. There’s more going on than this, too, but it’s all a hack to make the opaque and incomprehensible transparent and understandable. The amazing part is that it works well enough to be usable given the disparity between human and computer speed.

*This is not how a computer actually works. There are at least three layers between what I am saying here.

**A very, very extreme simplification in at least six different ways.