Clippy was the first popular (as in many people saw it) instance of ceding computing to the droolers, yet it also causes feelings of nostalgia because at least Clippy could be banished, never to be seen again, while modern software and computers are just permanently broken. Firefox and such can no longer be fixed. Same with Windows 10 and now even MacOS.

Americans are the only people in the world who will tell you something is “impossible” and “could never happen” when it’s already happening all over the world and has been for years.

Examples: Public health care, free college, renewables, etc.

Blows my fucking mind.

I think cilantro tastes like soap and I still love it. What does that make me? Maybe I have another gene that cause me to love the taste of soap.

You’re Only as Old as You Feel. Simply asking people how old they feel may tell you a lot about their health and well-being.

Not surprising. Before my intense working out started again, I felt about 35. Now I feel about 26.

When I was fat 10 years ago, I felt 50.

I notice that email programs in general are pushing fucking worthless conversation view hard now. I wonder why? Outlook (on Mac) auto-switches to it now regularly, and I have to constantly change it back. Absolutely impossible to find anything that way.

But I do wonder why it’s being pushed so hard? Certainly it’s not to benefit the users; absolutely no one cares about that, not even the users, who are utterly clueless anyway for the most part.

2009: Wow, smartphones are amazing, we're interconnected and literally have all the worlds knowledge at our fingertips

2019: Idiocracy is real. Every day I watch society disintegrate and descend deeper into the Pit.

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) October 16, 2019

Pretty much my reaction, too. I can’t believe how much we’ve squandered, and how quickly. We’ve laid waste to our own society and our own minds for “convenience” that’s not even real.

Disaster Recovery Faking, Take Two.

That is why you don’t use stretched VLANs. MBA types (and poor infrastucture engineers) say, “But it’s the same!” Sure, it’s the same and that’s the whole damn problem. Making things “the same” in a disaster recovery scenario is not what you are going for.

Routing and DNS exist for a reason, and they work. Freakin’ use them. All of this layer 2 stretched across half the continent means a world of pain when you actually need anything to work. Looks pretty on paper and to the MBAs, but in practice your DR becomes all disaster and no recovery.

And just wait till spanning tree has a problem and it’s all layer 2. That’ll be a whole other level of pain for you to enjoy!

Blood fills Iowa family’s basement.

How many times do I have to tell everyone, when summoning demons one simply must have a proper containment grid. This can happen — and worse — in an incompetent summoning. They probably used steel instead of silver in their grid. It’s a risk.

I think a lot of men avoid watching movies featuring women not because they don’t feel empathy for and identify with women, but because they do feel those things — and it scares them because that’s unmasculine.

I just mashed a bunch of database dumps together at work and I just simply couldn't have done it "properly." I did it in Excel, and it was a pain in the ass, but I got the right data out of it. There's no reason Excel *isn't* the right tool except that it isn't trying to be.

— 🎃Utterly dispassionate documentary hog slaughte🎃 (@gravislizard) October 15, 2019

Agreed. Excel is often not the right tool for the job, but a lot of the Excel hate is just snobbery against a tool that allows people to do something they otherwise could not.

Doing something in code often take 100x as long as just doing it in Excel, and even that is going to have bugs. Sure, if it needs to be reproducible code is the way to go, no question. But recognize that path is going to take at least two orders of magnitude longer. And, Jill from accounting is never going to spend all the time slogging through C# or R so that she can spend years learning something that she can already do in Excel in 10 minutes.