This song is only 11 days old but sounds so very 1990s — and I mean that as a compliment. If Lush, Throwing Muses and The Breeders got Crispred together, this is what would result.

Removing the headphone jack from all devices has nothing to do with the ability to make them thinner or to save money. That’s just a poor and clearly-obfuscatory excuse. No, that removal is an example of Foucauldian discipline and control as exercised by the tech industry. Despite being extremely unpopular and its banishment occurring for no technical reason, this immensely unwelcome action was done anyway. This is absolutely not accidental.

For the same reason, Firefox removed all customization possibilities and every OS maker (including most Linux window manager and GUIs) have followed along. That the trend is so widespread tells you that it’s has more to do with the desire to discipline rather than the oft-trotted-out “security” or other absurd canards that are leaned on when those wielding the authoritarian mindset are questioned.

Why this authoritarian urge, though? What is the goal? Insomuch as there is one, as a large part of it is just a reduplication of the dominant cultural leaning, it is to prepare you to accept intrusive tracking, pervasive advertising, and unskippable propaganda. It’s to set the glide path to dominate your mind and your actions.

When you look at your device that has no headphone jack and is less useful than one from 10 years ago, realize that this abridgement of capability has nothing to do with tech at all. It’s to tame you, control you, implant in your mind that you have no choice but to accept the scraps you are thrown. And it’s working quite well.

Try as they might, modern feminists have been and will be unable to convince me that grown-ass women are just helpless tiny little babies who bear no responsibility for anything. I have too many smart, capable, intelligent and courageous women as personal friends to believe that.

What the ever-livin’ fuck happened to feminism?

One arm muscle up by rock climber Magnus Midtbø.

Fuck. I didn’t even remotely think that was possible. It took me a couple of years to be able to do a two-arm muscle up.

I quit IT.

I understand this urge. I’m staying in the field myself but I truly do understand.

I can’t keep up with the tools I have to learn that pops up every 6 months. I can’t lie through my teeth about my qualifications for the POS Linkedin recruiters looking for the perfect unicorns. Maybe its the brain fog or long covid everyone talking about but I truly can not grasp the DevOps workflows; it’s not elegant, too many glued parts with too many different technologies working together and all it takes a single mistake to fck it all up

Yeah, DevOps and the terrible tech around that is just an enormous mess. It’s like if you welded together a tractor-trailer, a 737, a scooter, a bus and a Hot Wheels car and expected that to work well. Or at all. But that is where the industry is now — and as usual, with complete fucking bozos coming out of the woodwork telling you it couldn’t be any other way.

When of course it certainly could be another way, because we used to have tech that worked better, much more safely and more quickly doing the exact same thing for vastly less cost. Why that tech was abandoned is too long to explain here but it basically came down to the imperatives of the cloud hosting companies, that my industry tends to forget hard-learned lessons every decade or so as new people flood in, and that everyone feels the need to make their mark, even if it is with trash tech discarded for a very good reason in the past.

IT is also the only field that if you don’t make a huge effort to keep updated and current (meaning constant learning, training and certs), most of your knowledge and abilities are completely outmoded and useless in 2-3 years.

Leaving makes sense for anyone who can’t hack that. Working in my field is a constant sprint to do nothing but inevitably fall ever-further behind.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Ya amo a Bratty.

Ima have to learn to read Russian I guess.

We, Microsoft, are deprecating NTLM, and want to hear from you.

Holy crap, this is going to break half the world. Deprecating NTLM is like banning all the standard locks on all doors and mandating that you can only use biometric-based locks that scan your iris — and then just hoping people can do it. This is going to suck if they actually try to enforce this and do in fact take away NTLM.

I don’t feel like writing a whole long post about NTLM — what it is and does — but Microsoft is going to nuke a whole lot of shit when they do this. Currently, the documentation for how to transition away from NTLM is terrible and nearly-unusable, many applications and devices do not support Kerberos (the newer alternative to NTLM), and many companies will not be able to comply with this at all for at least 15-20 years.

This is going to break a vast amount of stuff. I need to schedule a very long vacation when Microsoft does this craziness. Don’t want to be anywhere near this pointless disaster.

This is yet another example of fake security that makes many, many things harder or impossible to use for extremely little gain. It just makes life roundly more difficult “for your own good.” Really, though, it is being done so you have to buy more Microsoft products and get further locked in to their ecosystem.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Please, experience the awesomeness that is Baby Queen for yourself.

She understands the overarching point Nietzsche was making better than most PhD-ed philosophers.