Year: 2025

Chill Links

The Universal Weight Subspace Hypothesis.

The Lost Automats and Cafeterias of NYC.

Horses.

Trials Avoid High Risk Patients and Underestimate Drug Harms.

Traditional gender roles won’t get men what they want. The tried and true is tried but not true.

The death and rebirth of attention.

More than 75% of homes across the U.S. are unaffordable, study finds. A lot of our political problems stem from this fact alone.

20 Signs There's An Affordability Crisis In America.

As AI wipes jobs, Google CEO Sundar Pichai says it’s up to everyday people to adapt accordingly: ‘We will have to work through societal disruption.’ Easy for someone worth hundreds of millions to say.

Nimda. Those were some bad days.

How oxygen first reached Earth's oceans.

AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals.

Pick Your Financial Crash.

The Sun Survived a Close Call With 2 Massive Stars 4.4 Million Years Ago, Data Shows.

Over 250 people quarantined in South Carolina as measles outbreak rages.

CISSP

Chill Tech

Failed CISSP.

That cert has a 50% fail rate. Study more and take it again. It’s the hardest non-math exam I’ve taken and is a lot more difficult than most expect. I passed it first try but it was very challenging.

But here’s a tip without breaking NDA: The most technical answers on the exam are usually wrong. And that’d because it’s not a test of technical skill, but rather what’s the best overall solution for the security and health of the company itself. In other words you must think like a member of the executive leadership team, not like someone doing sysadmin stuff.

That tip will almost always eliminate 1-2 of the answers right from the jump.

Army Times

Chill Clowns, Evil

No, you fuckwit, some of us are just actually introverts. Jesus Fucking Christ I can’t even with these typa dipshits.

My introversion has nothing to do with unwanted emotions. In the army, people thought I was funny. Thought I was cool. I had many friends. More friends than I’ve ever had anywhere else. And you know what? I still needed a lot of alone time to recover from hanging out. No matter what. I know it’s so so hard for extroverts to accept, but introverts actually do exist.

Why are extroverts like this? What the fuck is wrong with them?

Func Up

Chill Annoying, Clowns

I suspect now that I’ve written add-ons that are at the edge of what Firefox is capable of doing, the clown-ass motherfuckers who call themselves “developers” in charge of the application will find out and nuke all that functionality.

Can’t have anything actually useful, can we? Of course not.

One of the reasons I haven’t written much about what my add-ons actually do is because I am fairly sure a few of those doofs who banned me from Reddit due to criticism of Mozilla still stalk this blog.

Stigpa

Chill Annoying, Evil

Women stigmatizing completely normal male sexuality is also a (dark triad) variant of female intrasexual competition. It’s an attempt to stymie men who might otherwise not desire them, to limit their range of options.

No, none of this is conscious (for the most part). In fact, most human behavior is not — and is far more effective if it remains that way. But that is what is occurring nonetheless.

Iconic

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Where do they go to find dipshits like this?

Basic UI: A menu entry that includes text and a visual element (photo, icon, symbol) is more distinguishable and can be identified more quickly than one with only one of those items.

It seems we’ve just chosen to ignore 50+ years of UI/UX research and lessons and sprint headlong towards the clown crap this crappy clown wants. I cannot understand it. He’s simply wrong. Not as a guess or a preference or an opinion, but just objectively incorrect about how human brains, vision systems and UI/UX work and what they’re even for.

Icons and/or symbols increase the distinguishability and legibility even if the icon isn’t by itself enough to know what a menu items does. People do not do their homework anymore and they don’t know anything. It’s all just unwarranted guesses and out of left field completely-unresearched assumptions.

From my perspective, no matter what a lot of people’s IQ actually is, most people seem to have the intelligence level of a lead-poisoned toddler. Are people even trying anymore? Doesn’t appear so.

Chill Links

See How a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Could Unfold.

Amazon Releases AI Agents It Says Can Work for Days at a Time.

Bag of words, have mercy on us.

How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices.

CATL Expects Oceanic Electric Ships in 3 Years.

The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It’s Going to Be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy.

Have you tried switching it off and on again? Mechanisms and therapeutic prospects of resetting homeostatic set points in medicine and neuropsychiatry.

The association between allostatic load and brain: A systematic review.

China’s trade surplus for the first 11 months surpassed the $1 trillion mark, at nearly $1.08 trillion.

Enshittification is the business model.

Libraries and museums get federal funding back after Trump cuts.

The power crunch threatening America’s AI ambitions.

In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months.

Europe is under siege.

Hegseth declares end of US 'utopian idealism' with new military strategy.

How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration.

Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country.

Extent

Chill Cool

With the help of (mostly) ChatGPT, I’ve now created 12 Firefox add-ons. They do exactly what I want them to do and help me every day. Sans ChatGPT, I could’ve eventually created them all, of course. They are not technically out of my reach, given enough time. However, I spent a total of about 18 hours or so on those add-ons. If I’d had to write all the code myself (and again, I am a bad programmer), I never would’ve done so as it would’ve taken me 300-500 hours. Huge difference.

In other words, ChatGPT allowed me to create 12 extensions that make my life noticeably better that even if I were technically capable of doing so without that tool, in practical terms I never would’ve done it due to the high time cost.

And that my friends is what we call a win.