Month: August 2024

Chill Links

Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it.

Power-hungry AI data centers are raising electric bills and blackout risk. Absurd that we allow this.

Solar Photovoltaics with Battery Storage Cheaper than Conventional Power Plants. I remember when this was “impossible.”

UN Delegates Cheer As They Vote To Approve Increased Surveillance Via Russia-Backed Cybercrime Treaty.

Scientists find oceans of water on Mars. It’s just too deep to tap.

The many, many signs that Kamala Harris’ rally crowds aren’t AI creations. But Trump’s false accusation highlights problems with media trust in the AI age.

NIH study to pinpoint long Covid diagnosis comes up short. Researchers pored over lab results from more than 10,000 patients from across the U.S. but couldn’t find differences between patients with and without long Covid.

Childhood vaccinations will have prevented more than 500 million illnesses and 1 million deaths in US since 1994, CDC report says.

I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the Better.

Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win.

Spirit Aero CEO Shanahan to get $28.5 million ‘golden parachute.’

Hackers may have leaked the Social Security Numbers of every American.

A $150,000 House in 1988 Now Costs $707,500 Thank You Fed.

Record-setting heat waves are baking the Arctic region.

What Plan

Chill War

Russian assault on trenches goes bad, disembarked troops are immediately abandoned by their ride, and then subsequently gunned down by entrenched Ukrainian soldiers at close range.

Warning: People die in this.

I just cannot get over Russian tactics. What was the fucking plan here? Pull an APC right up to well-defended trenchline and immediately leave the troops you drop off exposed by hauling ass as quickly as possible? Never fire the main gun at all? It’s not even pointed at the enemy. I know a lot of that old Russian crap doesn’t work at all, but Jesus Christ, a literal child could have come up with a better assault plan than that.

Against an established, defended trenchline, even if they’d sent 30 dudes they all would’ve still died. There was zero suppressive fire and no cover or concealment.

To Ian Welsh, this is winning. To anyone who’s not a pitiful putzy Putin bootlicker, this is fucking psychotic insanity.

String

Chill Politics

It’s not surprising that when there are two 900-year-old candidates in the running for president who can’t seem to string two sentences together, they end up roughly tied.

And it’s also not surprising that when someone who isn’t a senile near-zombie emerges, she is more appealing than a weird pervy felon or a nursing-home-escapee hair-sniffer. I mean, fucking hell, that Harris is in the lead now isn’t some grand mystery that takes Hercule Poirot to solve. It has nothing to do with Harris’s policies or lack of them, or charisma or absence of same. It’s just that she can articulate a coherent statement without rambling, doesn’t look like she just wandered out of Shady Pines, and might actually live out her term.

That’s all. But that’s a lot.

Not So Alarming

Chill Regular-ass Post

I’m weird in a lot of ways, but what a lot of people find the strangest about me is that I can almost always wake up without an alarm within 5 minutes of when I intend to. And that’s no matter how sleepy I am. I set the time I want to spring up in my head and just wake up. I don’t know how; it just happens.

For more than a decade as a working adult, I didn’t even own an alarm clock.

Solving

Chill Tech

Working at a non enterprise level is weird.

I’ve swapped back and forth from enterprise to smaller orgs over the years. And it is certainly odd to go from working with the largest companies on the planet planning networks that serve 60,000 people to a smaller place where a user base of 60 people is considered huge.

At the smaller place, you’ll still do some complex networking and other stuff1 but you’ll also be pulled into calls with three people who have tried and failed for half an hour to help a salesperson unmute her headphones. Or you’ll have to crawl under the desk to plug back in an Ethernet cable someone kicked out of the wall. And then five minutes later, jump on a call with the Federal Reserve (happened to me a few months ago when I went to a physical office for a few in-person meetings). Even if none of the above is your job, it becomes yours because you’re the only one who can solve things.

  1. The difference is at a smaller org, you’ll be doing it all by yourself with no assistance at all. You either figure it out or it does not get done. At the larger orgs, I could have 10+ people to help me out when I got stuck.

Unseen

Chill Culture, TV Shows

What depicts the most terrifying encounter with alien life in fiction?

The aliens in the TV show Colony. They are nearly unseen (and that makes them all the scarier), shipping people off to slave colonies on the moon after having effortlessly taken over the planet. Their goals are unannounced and inscrutable, their power nearly infinite, and resistance against them only succeeds because they don’t care enough to do anything about it — until they do.

And their henchmen (and women) are other humans, part of the Vichy-style world government that they control. And the really terrifying part is that they seem to believe they are helping humanity.

Chill Links

Senator Wicker Unveils Major Defense Investment Plan. Good. Let’s do it.

In 2011, when many British rioters were poor non-white people, conservatives called them riffraff while the left defended them. Now that white rioters are attacking Muslims, the roles of prosecutor and defender are reversed.

A reckoning is coming for Florida’s condo owners as buildings face millions in repairs.

520-million-year-old larva fossil reveals the origins of arthropods.

Donald Trump isn’t fun anymore: How Kamala Harris stole the show — and extinguished his flame.

Kroger’s new dynamic AI pricing scheme is ‘corporate greed out of control’: critics.

Americans who locked in a job, home, and stocks are thriving. Everyone else missed out on their ticket to wealth.

How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points? Earth’s warming could trigger sweeping changes in the natural world that would be hard, if not impossible, to reverse.

The US Navy’s warship production is in its worst state in 25 years. Ugh.

Americans’ refusal to keep paying higher prices may be dealing a final blow to US inflation spike.

Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Rapid Offensive Across Border as Russians Fled.

Habitat for Humanity Helped Them Get Homes. An Insurance Crisis May Take Them Away.

Toto

Chill War

I do realize there are various conflicts in Africa occurring. And it’s not that I don’t care about them or that they don’t matter, but the fact is that they are just less relevant to my future and the future of any areas I am likely to be present in or have anything to do with. And if that’s racism, so be it.

But what happens in Ukraine might directly affect me one day, if for no other reason that if we do not get that right my country might be fighting Russia in Poland in 2030. What happens in Sudan almost certainly will not have such a major effect.

War is terrible wherever it occurs. However, I am only one person; I can only pay attention to those conflicts that are likely to intersect my and my country’s future.