Amusing

Reboot Insult

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Anyone else dealing with users who think rebooting is a personal insult?

There are tons of users like this.

I understand that you want your problem examined in minute detail by a team of experts and fixed. But computers are extremely complicated devices. Often, they get into a state that is not and never will be capable of being solved in any reasonable timeframe. Many DLLs and EXEs (etc.) do unpredictable, undocumented things that no one except the vendor can solve when they go wrong. And often, not even then.

Fucking reboot. Just reboot. Shut the fuck up and reboot. Fuck.

A few weeks ago, I had a user complain to my manager — all without putting in a ticket or contacting anyone on my team — that their machine was extremely slow and not working correctly. Why do people do that, contact a manager when they’ve made no effort to follow any process1? It just means I put them at the very bottom of every queue forevermore.

Looked at the logs. They had not rebooted in 184 days. Windows 11 needs a reboot about once a week to be functional.

I do not understand users.

  1. I actually know the answer to this. It’s because they are not getting their work done and want to use IT problems as an excuse. Seen it hundreds of times.

Actual Prizes

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Bobby (@Bobbythirdway) / X

Many women: I am the prize!

Men: But you offer nothing. You can’t cook. You can’t do anything adult. You’re dumb as a rock because you spend 16 hours a day scrolling on your phone. You don’t even like sex. What are you even here for?

Many women: The prize! The prize! The prize!

Men: *Goes off and does something away from the crazy*

We have really failed women.

Names Matter

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Destroyer of Bad Takes (Emeritus) (@_Credible_Hulk) / X

Unfortunately I think this is basically correct. This is similar to the fact that a lot of left would get behind space colonization and/or exploration if we called it “space trans-ing” or “space deocolonialism” or something equally asinine while changing nothing else at all.

The reality is that names matter. They are built-in propaganda. We should probably call data centers “Tax Concentration Areas” or “Vital National Infrastructure” or a “Digital Sovereignty Facility” or something like that to make them more normie-palatable.

Road Damage

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns, Regular-ass Post

Hell naw.

This is just not true. This is why I have so much trouble with liberal/leftist thought. It’s no more scientifically sound than conservative fantasies. “Believe science” is a religious cry, and not based on any reality. Check it.

Cars are a rounding error in load-based road wear. Large trucks cause almost all road wear, and it’s not even close.

You see, road damage scales with roughly the fourth power of axle load. Double the weight on an axle and you get ~16x the damage, not 2x.

A passenger car puts maybe ~1 ton on an axle while a fully-loaded semi puts ~8 tons. That ratio to the fourth power is in the thousands. The commonly cited illustration (from the old GAO-style estimate) is that one fully loaded 18-wheeler does the pavement damage of roughly 9,600 cars. In fact, road planners often don’t even account for car wear when building a road — only that of large trucks. So this doof gets their central premise exactly backwards. Cars are not “very destructive to roads.” In load terms they’re nearly irrelevant.

And hilariously it is invoking road-damage savings to justify free public transit. But buses are very heavy vehicles. A loaded city bus does hundreds to thousands of cars’ worth of pavement damage on its own. Thus, the road-wear case for transit only really holds for rail as buses are road-eaters.

In other words, banning every car on the road would not noticeably reduce road wear. But getting rid of all large trucks and all buses would. And those are the facts, not whatever weird degrowther clownery that nonsense is. And facts are all I fucking care about.

Rit Noi

Chill Amusing

Oh, here’s another intro that just happened:

“Ritual Noises is small — one room, one voice, and the long stretch after dark where the world forgets to turn on.”

“Ritual Noises” is the name of my radio station by the way. This is awesome.

Tell-Tale

Chill Amusing

I set up a personal network local radio station with a pitifully small local AI model for a DJ as it’s all our hardware can really run (no GPU). And it says absolutely insane things sometimes. Like this is one of its intros:

“It’s past midnight, still breathing. The lights are out, the walls are quiet, and the station keeps ticking like a pulse under the floorboards. You’re here. Just you. And this hum. That’s enough.”

A “pulse under the floorboards.” What kind of goth-ass Edgar Allen Poe shit is going on in that model’s mind? This new world of AI is if nothing else highly amusing.

Best CPU

Chill Amusing, Tech

The 6 best CPUs of all time, ranked.

I know this is just a clickbait article that has no real meaning and was probably mostly AI-written, but still. Computers have been a whole lot of my life. I’ve spent tons of time thinking about CPUs, installing them, and overlocking them.

These days, there’s no real reason to overclock. But that time was fun while it lasted.

Anyway, I started writing this to say that I think the AMD K6-2 should have been on this list. So many of us poor but geeky people used it back in the day because it was reasonably fast and often less than half the cost of the competing Intel product while still providing about 80% of the performance.

I loved my little K6-2 in 1998. Used that one for quite a few years.