The worst case for COVID is that we get semiannual mutant escape pandemics which kill about 1% of victims, until we get better vaccines with universal worldwide rollout faster than the infection/mutation loop, OR a wide-spectrum vaxx/antiviral. Could be decades …

/1 https://t.co/5IUd1qY5EB

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 19, 2021

The usual suspects being idiots and wanting to take away more and more. They really get their rocks off on this, don’t they? It’s becoming increasingly clear by the way that Omicron is milder than other variants, though the science isn’t solid yet.

These goofuses are particularly obsessed with making sure no one travels, which is just an odd thing because even during the Middle Ages the Black Plague spread just fine with much less travel going on.

When I say "unrecognizable" I mean travel will larely be curtailed. An entire generation of elderly politicians and oligarchs will have run out of luck and died, gasping, on ventilators. COVID will have destabilized intergenerational relations, politics, and economics.

/5

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 19, 2021

By the way, Stross’s back alley epidemiology is not really what’s happening. But that doesn’t matter — all they care about is making sure that you don’t get to do the things you want to do. The pandemic is not the actual reason; it was just a good entrepôt to that longstanding and deeper wish.

Many of us made major life choices presuming an implicitly promised degree of mobility and ease of travel that is no longer available and which might not be the norm in the foreseeable future.

We need to look squarely at the question of whether or not we are where we want to be.

— Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈🏴 (@leahmcelrath) December 18, 2021

Ha. No. I am going to travel wherever I want until people like this attempt to stop me. And even then, I am still going to try and resist these types as much as I can, including violently.

The pandemic is just their excuse. If not that, it would’ve been climate change or some other bullshit malarkey. Leah and people like her are just fucking itching to take away pleasures and possibilities from people. They yearn for it in a way that I will never understand and don’t want to understand.

(To be clear, I am triple-vaccinated and I wear my mask when traveling. I also believe climate change is real and will be devastating. I don’t however think this should be used to remove the pleasures of being of being human and having the tech to do what we want.)

It’s also where I learned about Miller’s Law, which is kind of foundational for my attempts at user interviewing: "In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true, and try to imagine what it could be true of."

— Actually, (@eaton) December 18, 2021

I learned this working helpdesk. Most users have extremely bad models for what a computer does, how their own applications work, and often even for their own daily work processes. Being on helpdesk is about learning so much more than fixing a complex machine — instead, it encompasses deeply learning how the company itself works, what each piece of software does, how the average person uses it, what its failure cases are (in the technical and business sense), and on top of that understanding exactly how the model the user is instantiating to gravely misapprehend all of that is flawed. Often, it is impossible to correct the user’s utterly and multi-tieredly flawed model, but understanding why they think what they do and what they are are attempting to achieve is paramount to any sort of viable and long-lasting fix.

Being on helpdesk, in other words, is not an easy job. Not if you are in any good at it.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

What's an article of clothing/fashion/style you want to wear but don't because it would feel like you're "obviously doing an unusual thing"?
I'm on team capes, here

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) December 18, 2021

I’m definitely with Aella here. One of the main reasons I must conquer the galaxy is that I can then justify wearing a cape at all times.

Hey, it’s a good reason.

That’s someone who has lived, right there.

Not many people know this but when it’s good, my favorite genre of music is country. Like most things the vast majority of country is not in fact good. But nothing moves me like country; nothing has the mix of melancholy and power when it’s done well.

Country like Morgan’s feels like my life; it’s what I’ve lived too. Nothing else suffices.

Really nice performance. And how can an actual living human being have such big eyes?

Perfect performance.

Reminded of early pandemic days, when Mr Farish and I shared a home office. I genuinely couldn't understand why he was constantly bad-mouthing his colleague Jason all of the time to his team… https://t.co/fQ2PvkE3oZ

— Kelsey Farish (@KelseyFarish) December 17, 2021

JSON sucks so fucking much. I hate it and it should never be used anywhere. It’s just terrible, and inappropriate to the problems it has been applied to by people who think a good technical solution is always the most complex and pointlessly verbose possible way to do something.

If I were designing a system to be the worst way to achieve a goal, something like JSON is what I’d come up with. The IT world has degraded so sharply in the past 10 years and while JSON is only a small part of that, it’s a particularly egregious example.

JSON is what you get when you have a bunch of programmer bros who’ve never seen the sun or ever touched a woman design something. We should have less of that, and more of something else.