I hate to say this, but I’d rather Trump get re-elected than Biden. If Florida ever decides to register me (have tried twice now, both times nada) if it’s Biden vs. Trump, I will likely vote for Trump if he starts no new wars in the interim.
Biden is an evil bastard who has been consistently wrong about everything for his entire political career. There is no way I can vote in good conscience for someone so stunningly dreadful and loathsome, and consistently, provably so for many decades.
Many people despised the end of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I did not. I think they wished for some epic, climactic battle where all moral and plot questions are unequivocally answered. In my youth, I probably would’ve been more desirous of that too. Having the Tower defended by an insane king with nearly no followers, all of this occurring in a decaying, weirding world, seems now completely appropriate to me.
With the benefit of experience, life doesn’t proceed in a manner where you achieve all your goals in some decisive confrontation. Furthermore, the journey is all there is, really. In the books, the Tower (among other things) is a representation of birth and death, neither of which we by their very nature can recall. So reaching the Tower is a nullification of experience, of meaning, of purpose. Reaching the Tower means there is either no more left to do or that one must simply do it all over again — just as in the end of life and its beginning.
As a symbol the Tower is polysemic because not only is it the goal of different people for varying reasons, but because the goal of one person contains different meanings and imperatives at various stages. Nominally, the idea is to correct whatever’s wrong with the Tower that is causing the world to fracture and decline. However, the world’s splintering and the shirking of responsibilities and higher duties has (as the book implies) the reverse causality than the characters expect — you don’t fix the Tower and that rights the world, rather you right the world and the Tower takes care of itself.
The ending of the Dark Tower series delivered a more ambiguous moral message than many wished for, though through all of the books the morality is not Manichean at all. It’s not clear why they were expecting anything other, given the rest of the series. Nevertheless, there is a moral clarity of sorts, just not one they were seeking. It is this: that how you treat your paramours, your loves, your compatriots, your friends, your traveling companions, even your enemies is more important than your ambition and your objectives. Else, you have to keep doing it until you get it right.
Everyone who had anything to do with the extortion of diabetics for insulin should have all their assets seized, have their citizenship revoked, and be sent to whatever country will take them and allow an equal number immigrants in their place.
If no country will take them, just strap some surplus parachutes on them and push them out the aircraft door over Somalia. Good luck!
The world in which IPv6 was a good design.
IpV6 was designed in the late 1990s and early 2000s when no one had any clue what the internet would be like in the future. It’s a pie-in-the-sky design instead of something tested and subjected to the rigors of the real world.
It’s like me attempting to design a product for someone to use in 2045. In other words, pretty much a terrible idea.
This article is also good. IPv6 is a fundamentally bad design that doesn’t deal with any problems we actually have but rather with problems people had in 1995. And that is why it’s been such a failure.
I am not defending the insulting Gold article, but this speciousness is equally delusional.
It matters whether Gold used to be fat. If she didn’t, she’s really just a horrible person. If she did, she makes me sad, and is also a pretty horrible person. A lot of formerly fat or temporarily not-fat people hate on fat individuals with an extra intense fervor because they need to justify all the suffering they’ve gone through to force their bodies into a shape it doesn’t want to be.
I don’t give a fuck what shape my body wants to be. I’ll make it the shape I want it to be. And I didn’t suffer even a little bit to do it — I ate higher-quality food that made me feel fuller, and I enjoy working out a great deal.
And “temporarily non-fat?” No, I will never be fat again. Lost weight a decade ago and didn’t put any of it back on. In fact, due to working out, I am currently not able to eat enough consistently to gain any more muscle — the main reason I haven’t set any new personal lifting records recently. Weighed myself and I am down to 159 pounds, when I was attempting to get to 170 pounds. Dammit. (But the difference between me and the FA people is that I will work to correct this and will hit my goal.)
I agree that the Gold article is pretty bad. But the strange denial of reality in the Fat Acceptance community is arguably just as bad, and is as Gold points out harmful to many, many people.
The amount of lies people tell themselves to allow them to believe they have no control over their body or their life at all is really shocking when you think about it. Sure, it isn’t easy, but if you don’t exert some control, no one else will. Carpe tibi!
Keeping all of our culture locked up in vaults for stupid and anti-human copyright reasons leads to disasters like this.
The archive in Building 6197 was UMG’s main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released.
A whole era of history, just gone because of corporate greed. This is why I am largely against copyright and why this era will have very little left to remember it by. Over time, with no backup and no accounting for it, disasters and mistakes will inevitably and incrementally destroy our collective cultural history.
The future of the world is the invisible hand punching us all in the face…forever.
A Premium Version of Firefox Is Coming—Would You Pay for It?
I would pay for it if it allowed me to control my own browser, which this does not. Mozilla shot itself in the face and now is looking for alternatives to change the past. But the past is fixed. They made bad decisions, lied about the reasons for making them and their direction to avoid immediate user revolt, and are now facing the consequences.
Everyone (in IT) should be a programmer is a terrible idea.
Making a networking expert a reluctant (and potentially bad) programmer makes as much sense as over-promoting him and making him a suboptimal boss (some people, myself included, just aren’t good at managing others).
If you need a custom-tailored network automation solution, pair a networking expert (who knows what needs to be done) with someone with programming skills who can translate those needs into running code – the networking expert becomes just another subject-matter expert (SME) working with the programmers to document the business needs (of networking department).
There are some people who can be networking experts at my level or above and expert programmers. And by “some,” I mean maybe in the range of 1/100th of 1 percent of IT people involved in networking, because that basically requires a beyond genius level of talent. I’ve only ever met one programmer who was a decent level system admin and even they weren’t a great sysadmin, merely a good one. Given that enterprise-class networking is about an order of magnitude more difficult than being “just” a sysadmin, the likelihood of someone being an acceptable programmer and a networking expert at the same time is just vanishingly small. There’s just not enough time in the world to pursue both to an expert level. Only an MBA could believe anything different.
I do a lot of scripting, of course, but I don’t consider scripting programming, because when people like me write scripts it’s mostly for our own use. Programming, through, is writing software intended for other people to use. The reason is that even the scripts I write presuppose expert-level knowledge of the domain for which the script is written. Sure, some of my scripts are very complex with functions, error-checking, arrays, and other more advanced features, but I or my close team are generally the only ones able to use them. That’s why I don’t really consider it programming because it’s not an expert-level full practice, but tools for domain-specific use only that can’t truly be released.
Becoming a programmer wouldn’t make me a better networking expert; quite the opposite. Then I’d be a bad networking expert and a bad programmer, which helps no one.
What is your least favorite song? Don’t explain. List only one.
I’ll start. “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey
— Chase Kerby (@ChaseKerby) June 9, 2019
“Your Body is a Wonderland” by John Mayer.
This person has noticed something I realized fairly recently as well, where he mentioned “kubernetes’s insane complexity proliferating #devops.”
Kubernetes is IT’s alternate path to having the a kind of sorting that other professions have, except instead of by degrees or other credentials (as those are less relevant in IT), they’ve chosen complexity. Probably only 10% of extant IT people have a hope of understanding the needless and valueless complexity of Kubernetes and related tech. That is a feature, not some accident.
While I agree that something like Kubernetes (though designed in a much saner way) does have its uses, most of those using it don’t actually need it. At least 90% of its real-world use would be better-served by a standard HA setup and a DR site or two.
It’s only picked up so much use because the drive in IT to professionalize and Kubernetes is one way to sort out those who can handle something utterly pointless but extremely convoluted from those who prefer sensible solutions. Kubernetes and related is credential-like in that respect and that, mainly, is its entire purpose.
The crushing cost of rent. pic.twitter.com/qLql6ixy73
— Sri Thiruvadanthai (@teasri) June 7, 2019
My partner and I both make good incomes and even we have noticed how much rent has increased (even for comparable properties) in the last decade. I can’t imagine what those at the median and below are going through.
The left’s idea to just roll back all modernity and live in imagined harmony with the planet will not sustain 7 billion people. Nor will it sustain even a billion.
The problem is — at least one of them — is that no one has any good or workable ideas. Some are better than others but all of them are fairly terrible. I also don’t have any good ideas, but I know what the left is proposing won’t work, in any of its incarnations, and the right’s pseudo-proposals are even worse still.
Those who believe in open borders think that drinking a thousand liters of water at a time is just the same as drinking one.
Google’s Stadia Is About to Crash Against ISP Data Caps.
Funny, I had people coming out of the woodwork a few years ago telling me, “250GB is enough for anybody and always will be!”
This was so obviously false and delusional that I was shocked that anyone could believe this, but believe it they did. But if you’re depending on human foresight you will always be disappointed.