Burnt Offering

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Something else I’ve noticed about Gen Z and younger Millennials: they are extremely concerned with their “boundaries” and telling you all about them, but not at all interested in what they themselves have to offer in a relationship.

This is a symptom of how terrified they are of, well, everything and how closed off from the world they are. There is nothing wrong with boundaries as we used to think of them back in the 1990s. However, the version of those bounds now is designed to prevent any risk, stand in the way of closeness, and to forestall even the possibility of vulnerability.

Those aren’t “boundaries,” unless you consider four walls in a 6×8 cell with bars for a door to be a safe haven. No, all they’ve done is created a prison with a more PR-friendly name.

Nuking

Chill Amusing

For the first time, ChatGPT made me laugh. I don’t usually talk with it (rather, I tell it to give me something), and I’ve disabled most of its suggestions and conversationalness. But I started it in this case. And it gave me a response that made me actually laugh out loud. I’m in green above. Below that is ChatGPT.

“The ‘nuke the doghouse’ era is over.”

That’s good stuff.

Chill Links

Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls.

It was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?

Your Phone Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Portal to the Otherworld.

New dark patterns added to Windows 11 in 2025.

Seeing like a software company.

Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn’t an example of it.

A ‘great unmasking’ on X is arming Americans with digital borders. The social media platform’s move to show users’ location is a great step toward online transparency.

The common vaccines that can prevent chronic disease or some cancers.

Parent

Chill Clowns, Evil

Mozilla and Firefox dev idiocy example number eleventy billion.

Used to, you could have an extension that allowed the parent menu item in a right-click menu to trigger a click. Extremely useful for a search tool (etc.) that had sub-menus. Saved loads of time and just made things easier.

But not allowed anymore because it might confuse dear old Gramma. Even though she doesn’t know how to use her computer in any other way anyway and this change helps no one. Just another Mozilla dev power trip.

Clown-level crap like this is why Mozilla lost.

Filt Flit

Chill Tech

Those who say AI is not useful just don’t know how to use it. Simple as that. I wrote the below filtering and search improvement tool for our internal search engine’s web interface mostly using AI. Not even an agent — just plain ChatGPT.

None of what you see above save the search box existed prior to me and the AI constructing it. It’s all local CSS and JavaScript, by the way, but it provides advanced filtering and some additional search capabilities to an application that had zero of that before. It even uses local browser storage to remember the state of whether the filter bar is hidden or not (button not pictured). In other words, this isn’t some trivial application. Though they are not the most efficient, there are over 1,000 lines of code that allows the above to function, including some UI improvements not shown in this screenshot. (The “Quote” button toggles the result between quoted search and not, and the filters and chips filter the results returned. There are also dropdowns that do the same. The tool detects file extensions and file types dynamically and counts them.)

And sure, I could’ve written all this myself. With the LLM, I did it in 4-5 hours between its code, my own, and tweaking the outputs. If I’d attempted to it all myself sans LLM assistance I think it would’ve taken me minimum 80 hours and more likely 150-ish. That said, I am not a good programmer; a decent one could’ve probably done it in 20-30 hours from scratch.

In short, this is something extremely useful to me that I probably would not have attempted without LLM assistance. The time investment simply would’ve been too large. This will be true for wide swathes of the economy. Expand in your mind on the possibilities from there.