Annoying

Not Even Wrong

Chill Annoying

Rona Dinur (@RonaDinur) / X

This is something that I’ve debated with a couple of friends about. My position is that most social phenomena are too multicausal, too contingent on unknown factors and too multivariate to model. On the other hand, they generally argue that having any analysis is “better than nothing.”

I do not agree. Often, a “scientific” analysis produces false certitude and absurd conclusions that are then taken as truth while in no way resembling reality — and in fact, that in many cases that are farcically absurd on their face. One good example is the “scientific” contention that there are no differences between generations. There are many more.

Knowing is better than not knowing of course. But false knowing is even worse than either of those.

Hacker Brain Lacker

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Political Economy

It’s unusual that there is one person in this Hacker News comments thread who actually understands how housing market pricing works.

US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes | Hacker News

Typically, there is no one. Observationist is correct. Institutional investors deliberately act as market makers because they have more analysis, more money, more ability to hold, and greater resources in general. In the housing market — which is small-volume and illiquid with high transactions costs — this matters a lot.

Literally every other person in the entire comments has zero idea how pricing in the housing market functions nor how institutional investors can and do manipulate it despite purchasing a relatively-small percentage of available stock.

I’m always surprised by how fucking dumb the “smart” people at places like Hacker News in fact are.

Compet

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Best to just ignore that shit; it’s just female intrasexual competition at work. Yes, it’s mostly unconscious (she does feel genuinely affronted), but that’s that’s still what it is. There are many women who do wish to self-infantilize, though. No idea why. Easier than taking any form of responsibility or being held accountable, I guess.

Good gig if you can get it. Men can’t.

It’s Nukin’ Season

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Rant

Definitely. I’m one of those who grew up with constant prep for war (and nuclear war) with the Soviets. The younger people who don’t recall any of that have a vastly different mindset when it comes to many political and social topics. Scientists can prevaricate and dissimulate all they like, but that’s a very huge and extremely substantive generational difference there.

Lock-out

Chill Annoying

I mean, yeah, obviously. There’s no other country in the world — except Somalia, maybe — where I could just show up with no documentation and no authorization to be there and get a bank account and send my kids to public schools. None. The US is the only one where that is possible.

And it shouldn’t be. No matter my other disagreements with the right, if the left wants to retain any form of welfare state, it should keep the above in mind.

Forcework

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025?

It did. This dude just doesn’t know how to account for it. Look in the wrong place, you won’t find anything. And most people right now are looking everywhere but the right place due to mulish stupidity.

AI is all over the place. My company uses it extensively, to great effect. Recently a project was completed that sans AI would’ve taken perhaps 700 person-hours. With AI, it took maybe 150. This is typical now. And this is happening everywhere. Did it directly replace a person? No. Did it allow that individual to do far more far more quickly? It sure as fuck did.

Considering that in the business world a 10% improvement is highly praised, a 467% improvement is pretty dang impressive.

So, yes, AI is everywhere and that is increasing all the time, inexorably. Just because this clown doesn’t know where to look (or how to look) doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Degrow All Over

Chill Annoying, Evil

I’m not sure that’s quite right. I mean, certainly, the phenomenon occurs but the etiology of this sociocultural disease is not quite the correct one for either the right or the left.

For libs, it’s the desire to performatively signal that you’re against anything or anyone exceptional or that will contribute in any way to climate change (which they are usually wrong about anyway). For the right, being degrowth means you are for tradition and returning to some mythical past. Also usually performatively, as the right-wing degrowther neither understands the past they wish to retreat to nor the current aim of any project or idea.

And the libertarians are just being even worse clowns than those two because anything that has a hint of “government” in it they automatically despise; they prefer to be oppressed by corporations.

The Ramp-up

Chill Annoying, Tech

Back to this. IPv6 makes sense if you have more than a few hundred thousand endpoints and a large engineering staff to manage it all. It’s tons more complex and fiddly than IPv4, so if you have, say, three full-time network engineers for IPv4, if you put in IPv6 you’ll need around a dozen (or one me, but I am rare).

It then does in fact totally make sense! Since IPv4 will always be around and IPv6 is as mentioned vastly more complex and often poorly implemented in hardware, you’ve just increased the difficulty of managing your network 50-fold at least. But some other problems do in fact go away.

Which is why mobile providers use IPv6 — they have the large full-time networking staff to handle it and millions of endpoints which makes even poorly-designed IPv6 a sensible choice.

And all of the above is exactly why no one else should use it.

Creditable

Chill Annoying, Clowns

It’s weird how in academia, if you have a PhD you can research any old boring-ass useless crap and people will give you plaudits for it, but if you don’t have a PhD or are not in academia at all you could turn up the explanation for the existence of the universe and create antigravity and no one would pay attention nor credit you.

In general, academia kind of sucks.

Problem Lies

Chill Amusing, Annoying

A lot of women: Sex is all men want and all they care about.

Same women: I only provide sex, have no other interests or personality, and these men don’t want me! That means they’re evil!

As with male incels, they never seem to to realize the problem is with them.