Year: 2025

Club Divide

Chill Books

I went to the book club. There were way too many people to have a good discussion. As I pretty much expected, I was the only dude. Men don’t read anymore. It’s become completely feminine-coded. Weird.

The facilitator (who was very good) said there were 10 different book clubs at that location before Covid and now there’s only one. That demonstrates how much sociability has declined since that time. Afterward, I suggested that it’d be worth dividing into separate meet-ups again as 20+ people is too many for an in-person book club. She agreed but said staffing was now an issue.

I’ll go to the next meeting, but mainly because it’s a book I intended to read anyway. After that, not sure. This group was not very intellectual and I think I need that to have a good time.

Chill Links

A mysterious new model currently in testing on Google’s AI Studio is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition but it is also showing signs of spontaneous, abstract, symbolic reasoning.

Pentagon Creating Amazon-Like Shopping Portal For Counter-Drone Equipment.

Post-apocalyptic life in American health care.

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing. This was always inevitable.

The Disguised Return of The EU’s Private Message Scanning Plot.

All Praise to the Lunch Ladies. Indeed. The lunch ladies were better to me than most of my teachers.

The era of salary negotiation is ending.

Slip Pill

Chill Evil

Yep, same. My at-that-time substandard social skills would now be in the top 10%. I’d be a social butterfly among Gen Z (were I of that cohort). And that’s all due to smartphones and social media causing complete generation degeneration.

Circa

Chill Amusing, Annoying

If the evidence weren’t so apparent in other people, I don’t think I’d believe in circadian rhythm. Because I just don’t have that.

It means no jet lag, so yay on that. But it means I am always — from the perspective of other people — maladapted for everywhere. The first time I stayed with a friend, she was aghast that I’d do things like go to sleep at midnight and get up at 2AM and then not go back to sleep till like 4PM for a bit.

She got used to it and realized nothing was wrong. Eventually. And no, it’s not insomnia. I always drift off in 5-10 minutes; I sleep and feel fine.

Just thinking today of all the ways I have trouble being like and relating to normies.

Lung Capacity

Chill Amusing, Killin' It

One of the great parts of having basically no capability for being embarrassed is when someone does attempt to embarrass you, it backfires horribly. At least for them.

It means I also have no stage fright, performance anxiety, or anything like that. To me a talk in front of two people is the same as one in front of two million. I just don’t care.

Cry Harder

Chill Political Economy

The H-1B visa program should be ended entirely. Its major purpose is to drive down wages of (mostly) tech workers and has nothing to do with talent. If this were not true, why would companies only post job ads in newspapers no one reads, or on the doors of offices of their campuses (rather than the internet)1?

It’s a scam, a fraud, and should not exist. I agree with Amanda Goodall, though — ending it will just mean more jobs sent overseas. To complement the elimination of the H-1B scam, any American company that sends a job overseas (or is doing work on American account overseas) should pay a 500% yearly tax on that job.

That would pretty much end that.

  1. This is done so they can claim they looked really really hard, but darnit, they just could not find an American for the role.

Chill Links

In 1990, in the last breaths of the Cold War, a delicious act of American subversion unfolded in Moscow. It’s long been forgotten. It shouldn’t be.

Australia’s Shock Defense Wake-up Call.

Microsoft’s $96.5 Million CEO Payday After 15,000 Layoffs Reveals a New Reality in Tech Jobs.

Three astronauts are stuck on China’s space station without a safe ride home.

World’s oldest RNA extracted from ice age woolly mammoth.

France remembers Bataclan attacks but knows enemy has not gone away. Best bet is to expel nearly all Muslims from Europe; might be the last chance.

“AI features” are the new bloatware.

Chinese hackers used Anthropic’s AI agent to automate spying.

Gen Z Degen

Chill Evil

For Gen Z, any meeting in person, especially at work or from a friend group, is extremely verboten. Also, to them, doing something for any romantic purpose — like taking a class because there’s a girl there you like — is to them automatically unethical and the worst thing in the world.

Of the top 10 ways people used to meet commonly, almost all of them are now considered harassment and abuse by that (completely mentally fucked up) generation. What did we do to them? How will they ever recover? To be honest, I don’t think they will. They are maladapted for everything thanks to social media, smartphones, developmental delays due to helicopter parenting and insulation from the real world. Also, Covid and the non-existent (according to Covidians) lockdowns did not help.

We really did that generation a disservice. We turned them into miserable Church Ladies without even the comfort of religion, degenerating by the light of a smartphone screen.

Arms and Harms

Chill Evil, Tech

This is true. And is not true of US tech companies, no matter what you’ve read. The Chinese tech companies are quite literally arms of the CCP; Microsoft is not an arm of the CIA.

Mental Frailty

Chill Evil

Definitely worse, and hardly anyone talks about it. Any woman that subjects herself to this is extremely mentally ill (And also undateable, not that this part matters to me. But it does to a lot of people!). Women’s mental health in the US has been destroyed by stimuli they are not prepared to handle.

Chill Links

With another record broken, the world’s busiest spaceport keeps getting busier. Sweet.

Trump’s 50-year mortgage would save you about $119 a month while doubling the interest you pay over the long run, UBS estimates.

Scientists watch supernova shockwave shoot through a dying star for 1st time.

A Confederacy of Toddlers. The Trump administration is a regime of troubled children. I concur with this even when I agree with what Trump & co. are doing.

The age of travel flexibility is over. Hotel cancellation has been canceled.

Plateau–Rayleigh instability.

This points, perhaps, to a problem in the way Americans have been framing the naked body all along. Although the newer convention, focused on safety and consent, stamps out some prejudices, it still rests on a narrow idea: that nakedness is by definition lewd.

Disney eyes a future where users help shape the story.

Another Major Tech Company Just Announced Thousands of Layoffs.