I hate programming so, so much.

I stopped renewing some of my certs because it felt like I was spending my entire life studying for damn certification tests or doing training, but I still have my CISSP and just renewed my CCNP as my two highest-level certs.

A lot of people have the CISSP and a lot of people have the CCNP. Very, very few have both together as each one of them is really frickin’ hard. I’m pretty proud of that.

Both are lovingly dedicated to my father who said I’d never achieve anything.

They’ve been getting away with this for forever. It’s gotta stop!

The problem is buying something so damn nasty as Pop Tarts. Buy crap, get crap. Seems obvious to me. Pop Tarts: a food so fucking nasty only an American could love it.

Natalie performed this live at the concert we went to in Spokane. It’s a good song even in studio form, but in concert it was really excellent. Just great, and much more powerful than this version.

Some people you can just see the intelligence in their eyes, emanating from how they look at the world. Natalie is one of those people. Reminds me of one of the greatest compliments anyone has ever paid to me. A friend of mine was looking at a photo of me and my date that was taken during a military ball I attended in the army. She said, “I can just look at your eyes in this photo and know how crazy smart you are.”

I didn’t know what she meant at first until I thought about Natalie and realized that, yeah, I did know.

If you don’t get what’s happening in the video, she’s receiving electric shocks to her face causing involuntary muscle movements; that’s not CGI.

Great news about American wealth.

Noah Smith is smart but because he is an economist, by nature of his chosen profession there must be worm-eaten parts of his brain. This wealth he is so enthusiastic about is an illusion; it’s meaningless. If the value of a house goes up but you can’t sell because interest rates are too high to buy another one, that’s not a true wealth gain. This is just paper wealth of no practical value. The same for your car, etc.

The reality is that inflation is causing real income to plummet while the job market looks rosy in the stats but in actuality is pretty dismal in most fields.

Most Americans have little savings and so if their real income falls de facto 20%, they are much poorer and rightly feel that way. Noah Smith’s numbers are crap and so is his reasoning.

Exact same house and land, five years apart:

But sure, inflation has been defeated.

My wife served me divorce after we return from a family vacation.

Having read more than a few like this, it’s interesting that if you swapped the genders the top-voted reactions would be much different.

This one: Wife abandons family. Man presumed to be at fault, wife given every excuse/justification with no evidence. (Maybe he is at fault, but this is not about blame.)

Gender swap: Husband abandons family. Man would still be presumed to be at fault, and a monster.

This is what I mean that the cultural conversation is largely controlled by women now. Obviously, I do not mean that women hold all positions of power. That’s clearly untrue. However, this means that now women’s narratives and priorities are the dominant ones in the cultural norm-setting sense.

Which is also obviously the case.

How far back in time could I theoretically travel before I would no longer be able to breathe the current atmosphere?

Another person answers fairly accurately. The answer is around 500 million years. (Adapted humans can survive on a bit less than 10% oxygen, though, so could go back further.)

There was some stupid book I was reading where a team went back a billion years into earth’s past with no protective gear. The O² percentage would’ve been around 2.5 percent then at sea level, meaning death within 5 minutes or so.

I did not keep reading that book.

It’s too bad how so much of Covid mitigation became a competition among the auto-déclaré “completely safe” clowns about who could mask the HARDEST, who could stay inside the LONGEST, who could be COMPLETELY SAFE FOREVER.

And that in large part made normal, non-mentally-ill people reject all of it. What a goddamn fuck-up.

One thing that makes America unique: we have more than zero people who can say things like, “This wasn’t my first mass shooting.”

USA! USA! USA!

What is the deal with so many bakeries that at first look interesting having predominantly scones?

Scones are the devil’s pastry. Begone foul dwimmerlaik, lord of bad hlaf!

Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market.

LOL. Intel lost the plot long ago. My laptop has an ARM CPU in it right now. And other than not having enough ports, it’s pretty great. It’s the only laptop I’ve ever used that both has amazing performance and lasts 15+ hours on a charge with continuous use.

(It’s a 13-inch MacBook Pro M2, 2022.)

The Case for Buying ‘Dumb’ Appliances. Smart appliances are everywhere—and you probably don’t need them.

Do not need them and definitely do not fucking want those spyware-ridden pieces of crap. It’s getting difficult to find anything that’s not “Smart,” where that means that corporations steal all your data for a slightly cheaper price with no way to opt out. No thank you. I really did think the future would be cooler. We all did.