That’s because podcasts are fucking terrible. Just a trash format.
Day: August 5, 2025, 7:25 PM
Babel
When you declare war against reality, information and physics, those three always win.
As the Trumpists (and unfortunately all the rest of us) are going to find out over the next few years.
Chem
I love this old meme. So true.
Chair the Motion
In IT, I have been in charge of chairs.
Yes, chairs. Definitely an important piece of information technology if there ever was one.
Not Happening
What’s an IT “truth” which other departments assume, that really annoys you?
That anything that uses electricity, or that has any moving parts, is IT’s responsibility to provision, troubleshoot, replace and maintain.
I know it’s because we have the only population with methodical and reliable troubleshooting skills but Karen, nope, I’m not gonna fix the coffee maker. And I’m not gonna unjam your stapler and definitely will not help you do your own team’s job, either.
Baseline Bassline
Or any assorted crap you find on the internet. AI is no different than any other tool. You don’t just copy and paste code snippets or scripts of unknown function or provenance and hope for the best, no matter where they come from.
My question is after this screw-up, why did it take six entire weeks to diagnose and fix? This is something I (or honestly, anyone competent) could’ve figured out in a part of an afternoon once the junior put the bad PowerShell in the SCCM baseline.
Not a hard problem. Not with all the evidence already available and easily gathered. Most people are incredibly poor troubleshooters.
Lax
What do you think about the ‘mental load’ in relationships?
Women are more neurotic by nature on average so it’ll always be a problem. This isn’t lobbing some accusation. It’s just true, like the Moon is up there in the sky and that birds have wings.
Some compromise could be made by men caring more and women laying off a bit (or a lot), but probably won’t be.
Fortunately, my partner is one of the least neurotic people in general I’ve ever met so we work together perfectly. And, well, my nickname in the army was “Chill” so that gives you some idea of how I tend to be most of the time.
I did have an ex-girlfriend ask me many years ago about some trifling matter, “How can you just not care?”
And I answered, “I look at it and think, I just don’t give a crap” and then never think about it again. Easy.
Dip In
New article by me!
Cardiovascular disease mortality rates have declined by around three-quarters since 1950, but we rarely hear about it.
I explore some of the reasons behind the decline. pic.twitter.com/8oUIVoxUZB
— Saloni (@salonium) August 4, 2025
And all as a result of the evil science that Trump and the MAGA dipshits are busy destroying.
Man Up Man Down
Men, why it is so easy for you to detach and not give a f?
Men are punished by men and even more by women for showing any emotion.
So I think we just learn not to feel things over time; those emotions drift away like smoke in the wind. Being detached just becomes normal over time.
Adamantly Wrong
It feels sort of wrong to criticize it as I have not read it and will never read it, but Ada Palmer has a deeply stupid book out arguing that the Renaissance was fake.
Fucking Christ.
No one — literally no one — believes that the Renaissance was some golden age. When your entire work is arguing against a straw man why write it in the first place? Most educated people know that time period was one of conflict, massive social change, and unrest. The era also saw huge innovations in art, proto-science and political organization. In fact, there was far more change in a roughly 200 year period than there had been in the previous thousand years of Western civilization.
In a tortuous series of events, this denial of the obvious is at least partly (perhaps wholly) the result of broken academic anti-racism crusades. Here’s how it happened: To fight racism, scholars who wanted to keep their jobs started believing two things:
1) That if there is a continuous gradation, then there is no difference between any two items in the distribution. In their view, a mountain is the same as a molehill with no relevant distinctions1. One can see how this specious line of thinking could be used to battle racism (and it was).
2) That no culture should be judged for any reason, no matter how vile.
Combine these two and you get wacky-ass shit like believing the Western Roman empire never fell and that the Renaissance was fake news. This, however, is a terrible way to do scholarship or to understand the past. Under this chowder-headed view, nothing of consequence has ever happened and no culture is better than any other.
Both obviously extremely false assertions.
Repascere
As I’ve observed before, if you think you hated Pax Americana just wait till it’s gone. And it’s going.
(Most of you are gonna be totally fucked.)
Nine K
AITA for telling a stranger to mind their own business?
Maybe it’s just my remnant North Florida showing, but if some stranger was taking photos of my dog and possibly my kid in my yard I’d certainly tell them to mind their own business. Why do so many people think that’s so outré? Is it because there is a dog involved and all the canine cultists showed up? (You know, the ones who value dogs over people.)
Back in my day, that sort of behavior where I grew up would get you some warning shots and perhaps actually shot.
I don’t think that’s warranted and I do not behave that way myself any longer, but just letting you know where I’m coming from (figuratively and literally).
If someone is taking pictures of pets and family members in my own yard, you’re damn right I’m telling them to fuck off.
How is that controversial?
No Pass
Passkeys are just passwords that require a password manager.
And are a huge scam that a lot of propaganda victims fell for and will fall for.
All about vendor lock in and data thievin’. As usual.
Stuck Home
It’s weird to think if it were up to the Covidians, the world would still be halted and we’d be stuck at home to this day.
Panambomb
As I’ve pointed out before, something did happen!
The journalist who uncovered it all was assassinated by car bomb. It is comparatively rare for rich people in the West to resort to outright murder. Usually, it’s just intimidation and loss of professional position and/or fake sexual assault accusations and the like. That Daphne was assassinated in an obvious way shows how very much trouble she caused the plutocrats.