It would have been cooler if he’d used CRISPR to create a seven-foot-tall version of his wife and called that one Big Wife.
Now that would have had flair, pizzazz, some originality. Billionaires are so unimaginative.
Day: August 14, 2025, 6:01 PM
Composing
Sysadmins thrown into customer calls – how do you stay composed?
I’m composed by nature, but it’s easy. When you don’t know something (which is always, always gonna happen on customer calls), say: “I don’t know the answer to that, but will find out and get back to you.”
Easy. Super easy. And then research with the relevant team, FAQ or whatever and actually follow up.
A junior of mine was shadowing me on a customer call once and was flabbergasted that I said, “I don’t know” to half a dozen questions. However, when I’d tried letting her have a crack at answering on another customer call, she couldn’t handle it and threw out tons of fabricated and incorrect responses that I later had to walk back. Or she otherwise flubbed them.
This is infinitely worse than just saying, “I don’t know.”
Because trust me, customers are always going to come up with some wild-ass crap ain’t nobody ever thought of before.
It’s fine to research and answer later. I do it with nearly every customer call and I know a fucking lot about a lot.
Baumed Out
Agreed, Baumol’s is not an adequate explanation; it only accounts for about 20% at most of this massive change. Not nearly enough, in other words.
Essentially, we just don’t want to offer the services and benefits we could vastly more easily provide now. Like most things in this world, it’s a choice. And we choose not to do so. For no good reason, either. Nearly all of what we once were able to do as a civilization we could do now and it would benefit everyone. But in the descent into zero sum thinking that has occurred for an enormous variety of reasons, people are convinced it’s more worthwhile to hurt their neighbor rather than to help them.
This, they incorrectly believe, will raise them up. The reality is that it drags them both down. As we’ll see soon enough.
Diminuendo
Gray Sabbath
Bus Halen
Boron Zeppelin
The Went-Wents
The Mashing Pumpkins
Blue Öyster Homeowners Association
Unsoundgarden
Joy Addition
Earth Wind & Smoke
Mildly Spicy Bell Peppers
OKTramp
Coldwork
Depeche à la Mode
Guns N’ Periwinkles
Odder Fodder
Why our broken food system remains a climate disaster: ‘broiling the planet to stuff our faces.’
Get this degrowther shit out of my face.
So I can stuff it with more pizza.
Easy and Pat
How do some girls manage to smell amazing all the time?
Easy: they’re robots.
Plant
Sydney Chandler does such an amazing job in Alien: Earth of duplicating the mannerisms of a child in an adult’s body.
(The backstory is that she’s a terminally-ill kid transplanted into a synthetic body. Since synths don’t grow, they migrate her consciousness into the body of fully-adult-mimicking synthetic body.)
She gives my favorite performance I’ve seen lately. Sydney manages to perfectly reproduce the gawky impulsiveness and awkwardness of a ten-year-old without overdoing it or seeming like an adult pretending to be a kid. She just gives total “kid” aura. It’s quite amazing.
Like, damn girl, leave some talent of the rest of us.
Let’s Talk About
There's this generally very female brained conception of sex as a low order, primitive, animalistic drive that as enlightened humans, we ought to discount as basic and beneath us rather than good and beautiful. The "men are dogs" trope. No, men aren't dogs, men have been given… https://t.co/52zQGboeC2
— LIZZY💥 (@LizzyStarrrdust) August 12, 2025
And a lot of women actually like sex too. Trust me on that.
But I think a lot of this discourse lately is from women (and some men) who do not actually enjoy sex and are disgusted by it. Which, to be fair, is increasingly common, especially in Gen Z. And a lot of those women who do abhor sex are feminists. There’s probably a connection there.
Regardless, anyone who sees men’s sexuality as default evil and deviant is my enemy.
Backwaters and Frontwaters
my basic view is that the future will look much more like the past than the present. we are at the end of a great historical abnormality: this level of cultural stability and homogeneity, and relative secularism is over. we’re going back to the basics of violence and divine faith
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) August 1, 2025
I basically agree with this. Europe will be Islamicized. It’ll be a backwater for 500 years, much as it used to be. The USA will go Christian dominionist and will resemble the pre-US 1730s and 1740s again, but for 300-500 years too. Also a horrible oppressive also-ran.
China is in decline, but probably will at least avoid being turned into a theocracy or theocracy-lite.
The future probably lies with Latin America and non-China Asian states (not India).
Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable and more sycophantic.
So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who’s Going to Restore it?
Fed’s Nightmare: CPI Inflation in Core Services Worst in 6 Months, Pushing Core CPI to Worst in 6 Months. Some Goods Prices Fell, Others Rose. It will only get worse from here.
Trump has turned FEMA itself into a disaster.
These West Virginians love Trump and food stamps—but they can’t have both.
BLS Commissioner Nominee’s Suggestion to Suspend Monthly Jobs Report Is ‘Like Gouging Our Eyes Out.’
Nonpartisan budget office: Republicans’ megabill will make the rich richer, poor poorer. Well, yeah, because that’s the point of it?
133-year old Kodak says it might have to cease operations.
Vladimir Putin Could Be Laying a Trap. Of course it’s a trap. Anyway, Russia thinks Alaska is Russian soil.
We live in a fascist nation. What now? Once they win elections, it’s already too late. Agreed. Probably no more meaningful elections at the national level in our lifetimes.
Softbank: 1,000 AI agents replace 1 job.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed. Agreed. Just should be eliminated.
AI is the most rapidly adopted technology in history. I’m no AI cheerleader, but liberals (as usual) are wrong about AI.