What is the most beautiful song you have ever heard?

Rameses B – “Bae Bae.”

What’s the wildest shit you’ve seen a girl pull out of her purse?

Nickel-plated Colt Python .357 Magnum Revolver with 6″ barrel.

It was a big fucking gun in a big fucking purse. North Florida, baby. No place like it on earth.

Whats one compliment you got that you remember till this day?

A very close friend of mine in high school told me that I could see everything about her so clearly that it was like my eyes were burning through right to her very soul.

She intended this as a compliment (despite how it sounds) but also said it was incredibly intense for someone to be able to do that. But I’d known her since kindergarten. I’d witnessed every step of her metamorphosis from an awkward, gawky shy isolato with a dead mom to a charismatic, extroverted and talented young woman. I’m not glad I grew up where I did, but I am glad I got to see that.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Am I allowed to be resentful of my guarded, introverted roommate?

This is why I make — for most people — a bad roommate. I don’t want to tell you about my life and don’t want to know about yours. I don’t want to do things together and don’t care what you’re doing (as long as you aren’t being noisy). I am just not naturally friendly and don’t want to be involved in most people’s lives.

The woman who wrote this sounds like a typical extrovert right clown who thinks others owe them time and attention. We do fucking not. Get over it.

I’ve noticed that even people who swore to mask “forever” aren’t doing that. The crazy done wore off a bit.

Other than female intrasexual competition (a big part of it), I think a lot of insane “any age gap is evil” crapola you see around is due to the fact that younger millennials and Gen Z really do have different mental ages than older people and generations at the same chronological age.

I saw two places today asserting that 25-year-old women were just “babies” and implying they could not consent to anything. So very fucking oddball.

Anyway, back to my main point. Just observing the behavior and life knowledge of a lot of Gen Z and younger millennial people, many of them truly do seem to be at 25-30 where my generation was mentally at 9-11 years old. That is not all their fault — part of it is due to pervasive helicopter and snowplow parenting, as well as being stunted by social media and excessive internet reliance.

So, all the “Any age gap is rape*” stuff is related to the fact that a Gen Z 26-year-old is about at the same level of maturity as an 11-year-old in 1987 (a Gen X-er). It makes more sense when you think about it in those terms. And I can actually see where they are coming from because too many Gen Z-ers truly are very far behind the maturity of other generations at the same calendar age.

*Somehow, they believe this even if it’s a platonic friendship.

Why are people so quick to label a healthy lifestyle as ‘disordered’ nowadays?

Not sure that veganism is healthy. That said, this inversion of sense has occurred because Fat Acceptance combined with food company propaganda and funding has won the day. Now, refusing to eat like an asshole so that you can avoid coming down with T2 diabetes by 35 is termed an “eating disorder.” Not snarfing three Big Macs per meal means (according to the FA nutters) that you’ll go into “starvation mode” and immediately, magically, unavoidably gain 100 pounds.

Part of it is also, of course, Tall Poppy Syndrome. Anyone who can’t muscle lard an elephant off the sumo mat must be brought down a notch. It’s an unbecoming combination of envy and jealousy that emerges when someone improves themselves. A lot of people then feel it’s their bound duty to take you down a notch.

When you are surrounded by food corp propaganda and people believing things as risible as the Fat Acceptance hogwash (and people who eat hog slop and call it “food”), not being a propaganda victim makes you anomalous. But I’ll go on ahead and continue my “disordered” lifestyle and somehow, mysteriously, I won’t lose my feet to diabetes at 50 and will be fitter than most 25-year-olds then too.

And y’all can do whatever stupid shit you’re gonna do anyway.

This is indeed sad.

I am shocked at how much things have changed in just a few years. When it comes to data center, networking, pretty much anything you can think of, the developers won. I personally don’t think it’s the panacea that everyone else seems to, but the writing is on the wall. There is no such thing anymore as a storage guy, a network guy, a systems guy, a voice guy, a wireless guy – things like wireless, Systems administration, much of cyber have been commoditized, and everything else is a glorified development position now.

Turning everyone into a developer is a fucking terrible idea. But he’s right — the developers have won. Even though those developers most often have not the first fucking clue how anything works. It’s comical. “Oh, I’ll just spin up a thousand VMs because I don’t feel like optimizing my code. It’s an infrastructure issue.” Then they get the $200,000 AWS bill and wonder why it costs so much.

Then someone who actually knows anything about anything (me) will both have to troubleshoot their terrible code and fix their infrastructure fuck-ups. IT got a whole lot worse when developers achieved dominance. They are both clueless and arrogant (in general) — a terrible combination.

What is your longest time of continuous uninterrupted reading?

Around 19 hours. I was 11 or so. There was no food in the house so I had nothing else to do. And I can stay up for a really long time. My next-nearest was not even close to that. Maybe 6ish hours.

Do Tech Managers Need to Be Developers First? Balancing Technical Expertise with Leadership Skills.

No, they do not need to be developers. I am not a developer, have never been a developer, and am a good tech manager. On 360 reviews my people give me the highest ratings (and not because I threaten to tase them).

This is fucking absurd. And most developers in my experience have zero leadership skills of any kind. Many of them can’t do anything beyond code — can’t even find their own IP address for instance or meet with a customer without saying weird shit.

For that matter, many project managers are far better at managing people than the vast, vast majority of devs. What a buncha clown crap.

Stop Closing Your iPhone’s Background Apps.

LOL. As a commenter points out, this article is full of bad advice. My guess is that Gizmodo is being paid by app makers to peddle this sort of propaganda, since apps do run persistently in the background and this does use resources (and does cause issues).

After all, you can’t steal data if the app ain’t running in the background. And on my phone, the battery definitely lasts longer if I shut down all background apps. Since stealin’ data is the entire goal now, of course app makers promulgate bogus crapola like this. Don’t buy into it. All lies.

Found out I’m being paid significantly less than the new grad hires.

In general, with rare exception, the only way to get a large raise is to jump jobs. Most companies budget very little for raises, but do budget at market for new hires. It’s moronic but that’s the way it is.

With one exception which I negotiated hard for (and they realized they’d’ve had to hire 3-4 people to replace me), the only time I’ve gotten really large raise is going to work somewhere else. By going elsewhere every 3-4 years, I’ve often gotten 30%-80% raises. If I’d stayed, I would’ve gotten 3%-5% raises. Loyalty is worth absolutely fucking nothing.

I like where I work now, but if I were to leave I could easily make 20%-40% more. Yes, even in this relatively bad market. That’s because I have an unusual combination of skills, certs, and I interview extremely well. Also, I don’t actually need to work. I keep that all in my back pocket at all times if I need it. If I get too frustrated, I go. You’re lucky to have me, not the other way around.

If that sounds arrogant…well, that’s why I get paid big $$ and others tend not to (even in my same field). But you have to be able to walk the walk. And I don’t just walk — I strut.

Sometimes, the best way to clarify things is to put them in economic terms. I was thinking again today about how much someone would have to pay me to actively use Facebook.

I think I’d do it for $20,000 a month. That’s enough where I could hold my nose and get it done.

I spent 4 months making a video about the crazy scale of Black Holes using VFX.

Too bad half the science and contentions are either wrong or dubious — in a large black hole, for instance, spaghettification would not occur nearly instantly. In fact, in a large enough black hole it might occur so far in the future that it’s meaningless to even discuss.

The event horizon of a black hole is not a physical barrier. It’s a real thing in the sense that it’s the limit of where light can escape, and where space becomes time-like and conversely, time becomes space-like. That, in layman’s terms, means that once you pass the EH the only direction you can move is toward the singularity no matter how fast you go. However, from the perspective of someone falling into a very large black hole, nothing changes. It’s only for the external observer — the one not falling in — that something changes.

In fact, it’s theoretically possible to enter an extremely large black hole and not realize it — that is, until you attempt to leave and the more energy you expend, the more quickly your course diverts to the singularity at the center as all space is curved toward it. Or to put in a very casual terms, in a black hole, all roads lead to the singularity.

Should’ve done more research. This stuff actually is not that hard.