Year: 2025

Flee Fly

Chill Evil

Well, that’s very sad — for the elderly people and for my friend who recently moved to Switzerland to get away from this shit and the constant state of fear she lived under due to North African and Islamic economic migrants.

Where will she have to flee to next?

Chill Links

How Venezuelan Gangs and African Jihadists Are Flooding Europe With Cocaine.

The self-driving taxi revolution begins at last.

Seeing a Molecule’s Quantum Shadow.

Modern cars are spying on you. Here’s what you can do about it.

You Want Microservices, But Do You Really Need Them? Only the hundred or so largest companies in the US need microservices. The others, it’s a huge waste.

The Printer Tracking Dot Scandal.

And mainstream sources, especially those targeted to women, didn’t address obvious things, like the fact that some women were more attractive than others, and that men predictably liked certain traits in women on average, like fit bodies, curves, natural-looking makeup and long hair (the fact that not ALL men liked these things was presented as proof that these generalizations meant nothing.).

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings. Clownish.

Target’s layoff push exposes corporate America’s cold new normal.

AI Hihi

Chill Tech

A common mistake I see is that people now believe that all AI is an LLM. However, there are tons of other types of AI (not an exhaustive list): search algorithms, game-playing agents, recommender systems, robotics control, computer vision, classic expert systems, optimization, etc. Many of those precede modern LLMs by 40+ years.

When people hear “AI,” they think ChatGPT. But I had a colleague who was working on AI email spam filtering back in the 1990s. So this stuff has been around a while.

Glancing

Chill Regular-ass Post

It’s a strange thing that I can look at an email for around 1-2 seconds and determine if it’s phishing and/or fraudulent just at a glance and many of the users I’ve worked with over the years couldn’t determine the same thing if they spent six months attempting to figure it out.

It is amazing sometimes the differences in people’s abilities.

Opportunity Cost

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Evil

It’s annoying to think about how much better and actually-used and useful Firefox could have been if the devs had concentrated on making it distinguishable from other browsers rather than attempting to shape it into a third-rate Chrome clone. That was never going to be a successful strategy as many, many people including me told them over the years. In fact, I even got banned from all of Reddit for laying out the case in very clear terms. (And no, I didn’t violate the Reddit TOS. I just got the ire of every Firefox dev because my predictions started coming true).

Firefox was the last bastion of the old internet. Now effectively dead; a walking corpse that’ll fall into the first pit it stumbles across. It could’ve been different and the path there was fairly clear, but the devs chose a direction that granted them the most power rather than empowering the users.

And that was their grave mistake.

Flat Out

Chill Oof

Hong Kong firefighters searching through 2000 flats like these to look for survivors.

One of the many reasons I dislike living in apartments or condos is that if a fire starts, you’re fucked. You can’t get out. By the time you know about the blaze it’s often too late.

In a house, you can just break out a window and jump out. Even if you’re on the second story, you might fracture your ankle or something but you’ll live. Good luck jumping from the 23rd floor of a tower.

Chill Links

The fight for local Windows accounts matters—here’s why.

For what he does say, i think Spengler is more or less right. Concur.

France joins Europe’s military service bandwagon.

A stranger messaged him on Facebook. It was the start of a nightmare that cost him $280,000 A dumbass does dumbass stuff and then the expected end result occurred. Also, in IT with only $280K in savings at 52?

A search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.

Is America’s jobs market nearing a cliff? Has already gone over, really, no matter what this article claims.

American Consumers Have Had It With High Car Prices.

Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors for America’s Commercial Fleet.

Only Forward

Chill Gutter Philosophy

As a wise friend once advised in a different context: there is no going back. If you know nothing else about how history and the evolution thereof functions you must know that any idea of return to the past is an invalid one and impossible due to the nature of humanity and reality itself. Retreating there cannot be done and attempting to do so is a fool’s errand that leads only to ruin.

Railroads didn’t disappear when that bubble popped. Neither did the internet in 2001. AI and all its implications, complications and dislocations will not either when the AI bubble deflates in 2027 or 2028. Quite the opposite — AI will get vastly cheaper as all those data centers are liquidated and it thus will be used far more.

There is no return. The past’s waves ripple outward forever and cannot be un-waved nor thoughts un-thought. Indeed, as an also very-wise cat once observed: what has been seen cannot be un-seen.

Contra Con

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Evil

I think this is accurate. Just as with the clownish anti-vax rightists where anti-vax beliefs can only prosper where there are safe, effective vaccines, the sort of sentiments that Alyssa expresses can only proliferate when people are safe and cloistered from most harms.

It’s a disease of prosperity and safety. In both cases. “Suicidal empathy” like many other symptoms of terminal civilizational decline will be largely wiped out in the world war that’s coming up in the next decade or so.

Everyone buckled in?