How mind-blowing do you find superposition?

Comics like this are clownish because the author also does not understand superposition but because he (or she?) has reduced it to math, thinks they understand more than they do.

But…the addition and existence of waves has consequences, real-world ones. One is that you cannot just treat those waves as any less than real though it doesn’t make sense classically. It’s certainly not true — in the sense that most people mean it — that a superpositioned particle is “in two places at once” or the usual facile lay explanations. However, the reason the idea and mathematics of superposition exists is that it is 100% true that what is happening is not the classical version of what a particle would do, or would effect.

In other words, those “waves” have real-world consequences and those wave additions — while actually a really simple equation and operation — are concomitant with causal effects on the universe that differ from a model and actuality where superposition does not exist.

STEM people are fucking idiots, mostly. They can do math but often understand little even in the mathematical context in which they operate. And in philosophy they are utter laughable dunces. “Water is just hydrogen and oxygen, man.” Sure, buddy.

If you listen to the modern pseudo-feminists and Twitter doofs, etc., it seems they believe an age gap is all that matters in a relationship — i.e, that if two people are not born on the exact same day, year, hour and minute, they can’t possibly have a single thing in common.

So fucking weird!

I think this became an obsession because age is eminently quantifiable and easy to understand, while characteristics and desires that actually make people compatible are far harder to conceptualize and observe. I’ve dated people much older than me and quite a bit younger (all above the age of majority) and it made no difference — other factors mattered far, far, far, far more.

In fact, the woman I dated who was closest in age to me was by far the worst relationship I’ve ever been in by a damn long shot. She was a horrible narcissist who, among other things, attempted to incite me into physically abusing her.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Whoever thought it was a good idea to force desktop OSes to have mobile phone UI/UX conventions so they are “unified” should be slapped so fucking hard they go into orbit around their home planet, Clowndia.

These things are not the same. Very much not! Why is it so extremely difficult to convince “design” doofshits of this?

Removing the headphone jack from all devices has nothing to do with the ability to make them thinner or to save money. That’s just a poor and clearly-obfuscatory excuse. No, that removal is an example of Foucauldian discipline and control as exercised by the tech industry. Despite being extremely unpopular and its banishment occurring for no technical reason, this immensely unwelcome action was done anyway. This is absolutely not accidental.

For the same reason, Firefox removed all customization possibilities and every OS maker (including most Linux window manager and GUIs) have followed along. That the trend is so widespread tells you that it’s has more to do with the desire to discipline rather than the oft-trotted-out “security” or other absurd canards that are leaned on when those wielding the authoritarian mindset are questioned.

Why this authoritarian urge, though? What is the goal? Insomuch as there is one, as a large part of it is just a reduplication of the dominant cultural leaning, it is to prepare you to accept intrusive tracking, pervasive advertising, and unskippable propaganda. It’s to set the glide path to dominate your mind and your actions.

When you look at your device that has no headphone jack and is less useful than one from 10 years ago, realize that this abridgement of capability has nothing to do with tech at all. It’s to tame you, control you, implant in your mind that you have no choice but to accept the scraps you are thrown. And it’s working quite well.

Try as they might, modern feminists have been and will be unable to convince me that grown-ass women are just helpless tiny little babies who bear no responsibility for anything. I have too many smart, capable, intelligent and courageous women as personal friends to believe that.

What the ever-livin’ fuck happened to feminism?

One arm muscle up by rock climber Magnus Midtbø.

Fuck. I didn’t even remotely think that was possible. It took me a couple of years to be able to do a two-arm muscle up.

I quit IT.

I understand this urge. I’m staying in the field myself but I truly do understand.

I can’t keep up with the tools I have to learn that pops up every 6 months. I can’t lie through my teeth about my qualifications for the POS Linkedin recruiters looking for the perfect unicorns. Maybe its the brain fog or long covid everyone talking about but I truly can not grasp the DevOps workflows; it’s not elegant, too many glued parts with too many different technologies working together and all it takes a single mistake to fck it all up

Yeah, DevOps and the terrible tech around that is just an enormous mess. It’s like if you welded together a tractor-trailer, a 737, a scooter, a bus and a Hot Wheels car and expected that to work well. Or at all. But that is where the industry is now — and as usual, with complete fucking bozos coming out of the woodwork telling you it couldn’t be any other way.

When of course it certainly could be another way, because we used to have tech that worked better, much more safely and more quickly doing the exact same thing for vastly less cost. Why that tech was abandoned is too long to explain here but it basically came down to the imperatives of the cloud hosting companies, that my industry tends to forget hard-learned lessons every decade or so as new people flood in, and that everyone feels the need to make their mark, even if it is with trash tech discarded for a very good reason in the past.

IT is also the only field that if you don’t make a huge effort to keep updated and current (meaning constant learning, training and certs), most of your knowledge and abilities are completely outmoded and useless in 2-3 years.

Leaving makes sense for anyone who can’t hack that. Working in my field is a constant sprint to do nothing but inevitably fall ever-further behind.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Ima have to learn to read Russian I guess.

We, Microsoft, are deprecating NTLM, and want to hear from you.

Holy crap, this is going to break half the world. Deprecating NTLM is like banning all the standard locks on all doors and mandating that you can only use biometric-based locks that scan your iris — and then just hoping people can do it. This is going to suck if they actually try to enforce this and do in fact take away NTLM.

I don’t feel like writing a whole long post about NTLM — what it is and does — but Microsoft is going to nuke a whole lot of shit when they do this. Currently, the documentation for how to transition away from NTLM is terrible and nearly-unusable, many applications and devices do not support Kerberos (the newer alternative to NTLM), and many companies will not be able to comply with this at all for at least 15-20 years.

This is going to break a vast amount of stuff. I need to schedule a very long vacation when Microsoft does this craziness. Don’t want to be anywhere near this pointless disaster.

This is yet another example of fake security that makes many, many things harder or impossible to use for extremely little gain. It just makes life roundly more difficult “for your own good.” Really, though, it is being done so you have to buy more Microsoft products and get further locked in to their ecosystem.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

When I got out of the military I was lucky I didn’t need a job — as I’d made a lot of money in the stock market — because all of this is true:

Typical interviews would be like:

Interviewer: We are looking for someone with office experience.

Me: I worked in an office for nearly five years, creating press releases, reporting stories, escorting reporters and dignitaries, conducting public relations worldwide, and researching relevant topics for command.

Interviewer: So you didn’t work in an office because you were in the army.

Me: I just told you I worked in an office nearly every day. I just did a lot of other stuff too. I generally worked 12-16 hour days.

Interviewer: But how could you work in an office and be in the army?

—

Interviewer: Describe your experience with budgeting.

Me: For the last two years of my career, I was responsible for a $180,000 budget that covered all training, deployment, equipment and miscellaneous expenses.

Interviewer: So buying guns and stuff?

Me: What, no? I’m talking about computers, office equipment, that sort of thing.

Interviewer: So who bought the guns?

Me, shaking my head: The gun buyer??

—

Interviewer: Have you ever managed people?

Me: For the last three years of my military career, I was team lead (not what it’s really called in the military) for all the journalists and public affairs staff in my office.

Interviewer: No, I mean managed people when they didn’t have to do what you say.

Me: That’s not really how the military works. Anyway, I worked with paratroopers only — no paratrooper just does what anyone says, or they wouldn’t be paratroopers. I actively managed five to seven staff for those three years.

Interviewer: So they just had to listen to you.

By the way, those conversations above were all real as best as I recall them. Civilians are utterly clueless about the military and how it works. So much so that it’s comical — except when you’re looking for a job and those bizarre and hilarious misconceptions bite you right in the ass.

Yeah, this person has experienced the horrible trauma that is tech support:

I think my record for telling someone how to find their Windows start menu on a single call is right around 10 times — where they actually found it, anyway. More than a few never could. And this was the era when it actually said “Start” on it as plain as could be. Apparently using a computer prevents many people from tasks like reading or having a functioning brain.

No one could ever explain to me why I should give someone a pass for supposed lack of technical ability when they can’t find the word “Start” on a screen that looks like this (this is Windows 98 SE):

Is Canada to become a poor country?

I doubt it, but its housing situation is an enormous drag on the entire economy and is a deadweight loss. This makes everyone poorer than they otherwise would have been — even those who got “richer” from housing wealth (definitionally, that is what a deadweight loss does).

We’d been considering immigrating to Canada but have pretty much thrown that out the window due to the state of the Canadian housing market in any desirable and non-frigid city. Our standard of living would be worse and would be in decline, as are most Canadian people’s (no matter what the official stats say).

The US isn’t doing well at housing either — but Canada’s mismanagement of it is a whole other thing that I want no part of.