This is a valid switch in PowerShell commands:

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.”

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.

The new song from Aurora is seriously great. Just audio but wow:

“And we become night time dreamers
Street walkers, small talkers
When we should be daydreamers
And moon walkers and dream talkers”

I found someone who wants to conquer the galaxy, too. In another post, I’ll have more to say about the diminution of dreams that she’s obviously also thinking about, this utterly cowardly abridgment of aspiration that is emblematic of our era.

I might be a grumpy curmudgeon, but I’ll also always be a daydreamer, a moon walker and a dream talker. Nice to know that others are obviously pondering the same sorts of things I’ve been thinking about lately. 

Aurora, I hear you, sister.

Greta Thunberg is the only climate change non-denialist out there in the mainstream, and even she’s probably not radical enough.

Because people haven’t evolved to think about problems like this, they have no fucking idea what’s coming or how intractable it’s going to be given our past choices. Part of it is that no one, really, has any handle on proper systems thinking and thus they are using Crayolas on the Sistine Chapel. And another part is that people just don’t want to know.

Price history for a house I was looking at:

Note the 50% price decrease until it sold. This is a house in Florida, so it’s a bit above the median and as listed at the original price was in the mid-high end of the market.

So in the market segment I care about, prices are going nothing but down already.

Turkmenistan leader appears to defy death rumors by doing donuts around flaming pit.

Well, that’s one way to do it, I guess. A press release is just fine for most people but if you’ve got a rally car and a flaming pit, that works too.

One time I tried to explain Kubernetes to someone.
Then we both didn’t understand it.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 6, 2019

The complexity is the point. A lot of this is the professionalization of IT, which is happening to make the field needlessly complex to keep out the riffraff. Some of what Kubernetes achieves is valuable (though little of it is innovative), but the problem is the whole cognitive, cultural and real-world technological framework around it.

Something far less complex but more useful could’ve been created with vastly less effort, but the goal is not that, so that’s not what occurred.

I gaze out into my yard
In disbelieving surprise
At 30-50 feral hogs
As their tusks, they rise

Does their hogginess upset me?
Will it be my children’s doom?
Emerging 3-5 per minute
Through the forest gloom

That’s why I need my guns
To make sure those hogs die
As I spray bullets over my kids’ heads
Just watch the 5.56mm fly

Do you want me to go full auto?
Lowered head and crazed eyes?
Shell casings falling like teardrops
Those hogs, now their tusks don’t rise

(With apologies to Maya Angelou.)