January 7, 2025, 12:20 AM Chill Links

Chinese Vessel Cuts Taiwan Internet Cable in Apparent Sabotage. Practicing for blockade/invasion and testing things.

Pitchlea

January 6, 2025, 11:31 PM Chill First Ten

Summering

January 6, 2025, 11:28 PM Chill Movies

You know this was an effective film as I’m still angry about what Tamsin did to Mona — and I watched that movie like four or five months ago.

Fuck you, Tamsin! You suck! 😉

Papering

January 6, 2025, 11:10 AM Chill Annoying

I hate books on paper so, so much.

Not being able to change the font size is an absolute dealbreaker. I cannot believe I ever read books like that. But I did. A whole fucking lot of them.

Could not do it now, though.

The Problem Is Not Cost

January 6, 2025, 11:03 AMJanuary 6, 2025, 11:03 AM Chill Political Economy, Prediction

Yup. And it’d only cost around $100 billion to fill the desert¹ with enough solar panels and batteries to power the entire United States year-round forever.

The problem is not cost. Nor even what is possible. The problem is will. We could do so much more than we have done. And we should. The future does not belong to faint-hearted, anemic degrowthers cowering before the god of lost causes and reveling in their prostrate servility. The degrowthers claim that tech will not allow us to survive what is coming. But that is completely wrong. In fact, it is the only thing that will.

We undertake insanely ambitious projects or we die. It’s as simple as that.

As I’ve said before, we must become the gods that we pretend to be.

Or somewhere, if the desert is gone.

Lose 11

January 6, 2025, 10:10 AMJanuary 6, 2025, 10:15 AM Chill Tech, Trynabe Funny

Upgrading clients to Windows 11 is like trying to sell sand at a beach!

How to sell the Win 11 clowngrade to end users (who in reality have no choice anyway):

“With Windows 11, China, the NSA, Microsoft, random advertisers as well as Russian hackers have a complete backup of your system, adding resiliency and redundancy. Nothing will ever get lost.

And with the new built-in AI features, you too can spout fictional and outlandishly wrong information all over the internet and to your company’s management with merely a few clicks. With the added lack of configurability and customizability, you’ll never have to worry about having anything work as you like it or correctly. It’s a net Win (get it) for everyone who matters.”

What’s the Dyl?

January 6, 2025, 9:29 AMJanuary 6, 2025, 9:31 AM Chill Music, WTF

Try as I might, I never have and still do not see what’s so special about Bob Dylan. His appeal is completely lost on me, both musically and as a celebrity apart from that.

I feel like Dylan about some people do about Taylor Swift, I guess.

Did Believe

January 6, 2025, 4:10 AMJanuary 6, 2025, 4:11 AM Chill Annoying, Lying Liars

Did the overlords of media outlets and Reddit (et al.) really believe that suppressing views critical of the health care industry would actually help? I mean, what is even the point of that?

This suppression just increases anger and causes people to hate the system even more. But I guess it temporarily makes the advertisers happy enough to spend another buck.

January 6, 2025, 1:26 AM Chill Links

When someone says “He’s really angry” what they really mean is “I feel angry when I read his writing.”

Domestic Theatrical Market Summary for 2024.

Species concepts in conservation biology.

It Was Never About Artificial Intelligence.

Bluesky Won’t Save Us. Like radiation, social media is invisible scientific effluence that leaves us both more knowledgeable and more ignorant of the causes of our own afflictions than ever. Social media is for most people a Level 1 cognitohazard.

We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is, and it always will be the economy, stupid.

Enough With the Land Acknowledgments. Yeah, that is some absolutely moronic bullshit.

Russia Targets West With Drones, Exploding Parcels and Sabotage. We are already at war with China and Russia, but only they realize it.

Linde showed a photo of the scrawled letter from Allison’s cellmate. This incarcerated stranger, she said, had easily diagnosed dementia before any doctor did. That’s damning.

An Analysis of 2023 Layoffs.

Obama wasn’t a moderate defender of norms. He was a coward.

Government Needs to Waste More.

Tadate

January 5, 2025, 7:16 PMJanuary 5, 2025, 7:19 PM Chill Regular-ass Post

Unless aliens kidnap my partner (or me¹) there’s not a chance I’ll be in the dating scene soon, but if I were I’d definitely go somewhere overseas if I wanted to subject myself to that hell again.

There are a few advantages to that approach. It automatically makes you unusual and exotic, and depending on the country the women haven’t been as utterly poisoned by social media. I’d concentrate on somewhere with low social media use, low tattoo prevalence and low obesity.

Then I’d learn the language (relatively easy for me, if I want to do it²) and make it happen.

American women are basically undateable now due to social media-induced mental illness, tattoos, ridiculous levels of entitlement and obesity. It’s just about a crime to do that to yourself.

Green alien girls are a-ok with me.
Though I dislike talking to people in general, so I’m far better at learning to read languages.

Back Hold

January 5, 2025, 7:56 AM Chill Amusing, Annoying

Indeed. And then I really piss ’em off by saying things like, “You’re only constrained by yourself. No one is actually holding you back.”

I make friends wherever I go.

Ad Del

January 5, 2025, 1:26 AMJanuary 5, 2025, 1:27 AM Chill Killin' It, Tech

Why I Switched to macOS After Using Windows for Nearly Two Decades.

Windows is a spyware-infested ad delivery system. Linux is ok but still not all that usable (and I use it daily in two different VMs, so yes I do know).

MacOS is the best of a bunch of bad choices. I also just bought an M4 Mac Mini and while it has less memory than my old system, it’s absurdly fast. Apple has really been killing it with their own chip design, which I did not expect when they initially announced their intent.

The M4 Mini is around twice as fast as my old system, and I had a high-end 2020 iMac previously. Pretty impressive. And unlike with Windows 11, I don’t see the first fucking ad anywhere in the OS.

Hide U

January 5, 2025, 1:25 AM Chill Evil

Re scams, I think Microsoft/Safari are doing users a disservice by hiding URL paths….

Of course it does. But the whole point of hiding the URL was so that it’s not clear when you’re on a scammy advertising site or area of a site or the address you intended to visit.

In other words, it was done to enable scamminess. Which is the dominant mode of the economy today — so hiding URLs fits right in.