Month: January 2025

Rolling In the Conference Room

Chill Annoying, Clowns

How many jobs are really just One Job?

These days, none. All the executive assistants, secretaries, even the junior team members have been wiped out. I’ve had similar jobs all throughout my IT career 1 and when I started more than 20 years ago, I had an assistant. That’d be unheard of now. I also only had 2-3 actual roles. The expectations were much smaller back then even at a similar career level.

Now I have somewhere between 20-30 roles. This seems to only getting worse. One of the reasons jobs are so much more cognitively demanding now is that most people can be ok to good at a few things, but it takes a whole different breed to be competent at 20+.

But that’s what the corporate types are demanding these days.

  1. I was doing basically what I am doing now by the time I was 26.

Over Time

Chill Clowns

So strange how the feminist project of the past decade or more has been to re-infantilize women and revert progress back to the 1950s or before. Do all movements trend toward conservatism over time?

I really do believe that soon feminists will be calling for a male relative to accompany women everywhere.

Gram

Chill Tech

Yep. I’m not much of a programmer, but even I could write a program that would work fine for years. Do exactly what it was supposed to. And then, when some date or other trigger is hit, it’d assemble from random innocuous-looking code another program that nuked your computer and everything it could reach on the network. This isn’t even that hard 1.

  1. In fact, it’s basically how a lot of ransomware works today.

Chill Links

Labor Market Dynamics Retighten, Job Openings Jump Again. Fed Faces Scenario of Solid Job Market, Re-accelerating Inflation.

The Gambling Industry’s Sly New Way To Suck Money From Desperate Americans.

Cost Of Navyโ€™s Newest Arleigh Burke Destroyers Is Ballooning.

Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity.

This could be the beginning of the end for fire insurance in California.

Archaeologists just mapped a Bronze Age megafortress in Georgia.

Itโ€™s remarkably easy to inject new medical misinformation into LLMs. Changing just 0.001% of inputs to misinformation makes the AI less accurate.

The Economics That Define Social Media.

Los Angeles Fire Damage Likely to Be Costliest Blaze in U.S. History.

Demonstration

Chill Trynabe Funny

To all the mature men who are age 30 and above, please share one harsh truth about life you have accepted so far ?

All I’ve learned is that no matter how many times you attempt to summon a demon, it’s usually a dud reject demon who can only do stupid stuff like carve a pumpkin really fast or make a squirrel dance.

One time, one of the more powerful demons did kill someone who accidentally crossed the summoning barrier in a really hilarious manner (turned him into a fly and fly swatter and made him swat himself, sorry Dan’s wife!) but other than that, the whole demon summoning thing is a total bust.

I think that fly swatter gag demon might have been Alex Trebek, before. He made us phrase our pitiful begging to avoid eternal damnation in the form of a question.

Anyway, demon summoning: harsh truth is you should avoid.

Caused

Chill Oof

Drone shot of a Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where houses start at about $5 million:

Climate change didn’t cause this, in the sense that most people mean “cause1,” but it made this outcome vastly more likely.

It only takes looking at insurance rates to understand that cimate change and its effects are real. Underwriters and actuaries do not fuck around — they need to deal with the world as it is, not as some dipshits imagine it to be.

  1. And most people, even most scientists, have a poor understanding of causality.

Lec

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Stripped the server rack this week as it’s simply not viable with UK’s electricity prices any more… [F] in chat. No idea what to do with all these besides scrap them.

Those are old and inefficient drives, but I don’t know how anyone lives in the UK with those sort of electricity prices. That is a preview of the future the degrowthers wish for us. And I want absolutely no part of that.

We should be aiming for absurd energy abundance, not austerity. In reality (as we’ve already seen in the UK) austerity does not work and cannot work. It is a philosophy of failure and ennui. It will not save the planet and in its extreme cases will lead billions into starvation.

Degrowth is another form of death wish, no different than the climate deniers. Both are clownish idiots.

Chill Links

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew.

Physicists magnetize a material with light.

Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry.

The surveillance octopus tightens its grip on immigrantsโ€”and everyone else.

Mortgage rates hit highest level since July, crushing application demand.

Trudeau was a poor steward of Canada’s economy.

What Tariffs Can and Canโ€™t Do.

You Are Still Not Worried Enough About Foreign Influence Operations. They’re real. And they matter.

The X-ification of Meta.

Careerless

Chill Annoying, Tech

Microsoft is planning job cuts and focusing more on underperforming employees.

Do read the comments. If you were planning to go into tech, I’d advise against. It’s probably only going to get worse. MBAs are convinced they can replace people with AI so they are going to try that. It won’t work because they are clueless (whether we’re talking about AI or MBAs), but that doesn’t matter.

If it is enough to get a bonus, an MBA type will do it. And are in fact doing it.

The decline of tech as a career has happened slowly but is now unstoppable. It doesn’t affect me as much luckily because no AI, H-1B, fleet of underpaid Indians nor any combination thereof can replace me, but tech used to be a good path — one of the few remaining. Now that’s changed and junior people should avoid it unless it is a true passion.