i thought my reason for getting banned on here was the funniest, but then i thought sridhar's reason for getting banned on here was the funniest but no. this is the funniest reason to get banned on here. baby site for babies lol
The best thing John Roberts has ever done is prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Supreme Court is a political institution and we should dramatically reduce its power over our government.
If you thought elaborately faking being good at videogames to impress a bunch of manchildren was embarrassing, consider elaborately faking that your mother loves you.
So uh, precisely the types of people the US economy is going to most need in the next 20 years as the crisis of aging Boomers overwhelming our care systems reaches its fevered peak
The post-Watergate reforms didn't rely on just norms. They relied on tenure protections (such as for inspectors general) and legislative veto mechanisms, among other things. The Supreme Court then sandbagged Congress and gutted all those on bogus unitary executive grounds, as Schiff alludes to.
We live in a time dominated by deeply unserious people making deeply unserious arguments in support of tragically serious results that serious people would have both avoided and known to avoid.
First, we denigrate, tariff, and threaten other countries.Next we deploy a thuggish state paramilitary force to arrest anyone they think looks foreign, frequently violating basic rights.Then we make travel a lot more expensive with a war of choice we can’t fix.Hey, why aren’t you coming here?
…totenkopf mussel “farmer” boy’s-boy will be…fine…gotta get with the maine curse program…yadda yadda…who likes president gavin
If you're a progressive and you say Gavin Newsom sucks, you're undermining Democrats and should be shunned. If you imply it centristly, well baby, that's just being the bearer of bad news!
…isn’t memorandum of understanding the sort of deal papers that don’t mean shit until they sign the actual papers that mean more than “we had a meeting about having a meeting at some as yet undetermined point with a view to seeing if there’s an agreement to be made at some yet more distant point”?
the thing about corporations and ethics is that it really shouldn't be that much of a thing where we ask "what is the most ethical corporation"we should have a functioning political system to regulate corporations (which are in fact *supposed to be* maximizing their flexibilty + profits)
I have said this before and I will say it again, but it is my firm belief that given the blatant and naked corruption exhibited by some members of the Roberts Court, decisions of the Roberts Court should not be treated as precedentially binding on later courts.
Guy posting joke that will immediately get him banned: the mods need a wedgie imoFailed United States congressman replying to a 22-month old post by a teenage tgirl who censored his name so he couldn’t name search it: bitch boy u better shut fuck up before i do a Grave Of The Fireflies to yuor ass
Scott MacFarlane on the FBI raid of Sen. Lucas’s home and office:There are going to be questions raised about how Fox News was there as the raid was undertaken. That type of thing is rare.…
just to emphasize again, closing Malacca means ‘taking a couple of extra days on a trip.’ the economist had a great recent graph on various straits and their relative levels of direness.
…most characteristics of maritime waterways most abundantly used as trade routes are…fairly settled…I know…crazy idea…but…anyway
…you know…the way they fix it so the pea isn’t under the shell you picked…or…same thing but call it three card monte…that guy who just won big…he’s part of the con…they aren’t really strangers to each other…you know…like that wasn’t necessarily his mum sticking up for him…forum baby kayfabe ass cosplay business titan fuckwit SNAFU all the way…sure…why *wouldn’t* everyone want to get in on that?
Hoo boy is public discourse about utilities confused. It would be very, very bad if Dem politicians convinced the public that the only reason power prices are going up is the greed of utility executives. The grid badly needs substantial new investments! We *need* to be spending lots more money!
This has to be the funniest question AND response I've ever seen in a poll. Less than half of Republican men think they could beat Trump in a fight. What a bunch of pathetic losers.
Sen. Coons: “Anybody brave enough to say that the Constitution of the United States prevents President #Trump from seeking a third term?
Anybody willing to apply the Constitution by its plain language in the 22nd Amendment?
Nobody..”
…is at home in a circus
Now's a great time to remind folx that if you want to think about what concept structures such as "magic" do for & to those thinking, talking, & working on "AI," then I have a paper for that— "Any Sufficiently Transparent Magic…" muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/articl… & you can read the working preprint here:
"AI" is and for a very long time has been a term used for obfuscation, occultation, and sleight of hand; but any sufficiently transparent magic is indistinguishable from technology.muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/articl…
When Grok takes the blame for generating CSAM while Musk and X refuse to do so, Grok is still very much “acting” as a man-made artifact doing something it was imbued by a human with the capacity to do
This too is part of the great blame-deflection shell game that Musk and his ilk are trying to bamboozle humanity with. Do not fall for it!
Sure, we don’t know 100% if Musk et al specifically intended to use Grok as as a blame absorption fire shield – but it is nevertheless DOING that right now, and with some success.
Whether intended or no, Grok remains a man-made artifact that is producing a RESULT of deflecting blame from humans.
And even if that’s not the specifically intended goal in this case (which again, remains highly unclear), that is a clear and obvious utility that LLMs offer to amoral human actors wishing to deflect blame for their actions elsewhere.
…exhibit #
Being a liability sponge is frankly the most utility LLMs can offer to businesses. So long as they maintain the lie that it's a black box & there's no laws against using unaccountable black boxes, even/especially in their (likely inherently & permanently) broken state, they're financially useful.
In fact, you'd never want AGI/super-intelligence, as it could actually ice out its owners. Being just a good enough to use as ablative armor in every lawsuit while leaving its owner unscathed is virtually the platonic use case if so allowed by the law.
I'm sure it's likelier this is bogus. But one downside of having such a nakedly corrupt DOJ is that even a hypothetical meritorious case is tainted. Suppose Lucas was taking bribes or whatever (again, I doubt it), it would *still* be corrupt and selective when they'd never go after a Republican.
…nobody said you’d *want* to solve parallel differential equations without a calculator when you grew up
Now that Anthropic is partnering with xAI, let me bring back this post from a few weeks ago, and remind you: NO COOKIE FOR DARIO www.anildash.com/2026/02/27/a…
Btw shit like this is why i never fully trusted Anthropic:If you're not actively resisting the kyricahical, hegemonic, carceral, militaristic, eugenic, white supremacist underpinnings of "AI," even when "that's where the research money is," then you're not really a "different" kind of "AI" company
i suppose carrying custom bottles of woodford reserve all over the world engraved with your name and role as FBI director (which you autograph and present as gifts to VIPs you meet in your official capacity) isn’t technically evidence of a drinking problem, but it raises several more questions
…you know…I maintain it’s mostly just the naturally excessive levels of bone deep obstinate bastard that are all that’s left between me & the utter conviction that reality is trolling me personally due to some peculiarly personal antipathy the roots of which I haven’t been made aware of…it…would make *more* sense most days
It remains absolutely crazy to me that our eldery president is very clearly getting some sort of regular IV treatment to the point that both hands are brusied & covered up & his admin has repeatedly lied about what causes that & our news media that hounded Biden for his age has mostly ignored this.
The XAI/Anthropic deal is big in many ways, one of which is that it feels like an admission of defeat from Elon. Can't create a model good enough to compete with Claude so suddenly you've become a service provider for the company you accused of Destroying Western Civilization last month
im honestly kind of surprised elon can seemingly admit to himself by renting out his compute that grok isnt going to be the machine god. i guess in the end it was this or go all in on the gooning shit
…he’s a one-trick pony & the trick is that people throw money at the pony show like it’s little sebastian when actually…it’s a braying ass
elon puts on the fake mustache from saturday night live, plugs in a thumb drive, clicks and drags a folder on the desktop that says 'claude_final_final_real_DO_NOT_STEAL'
…it’s also…in line with all the other “must build out hyperscale capacity to meet all the demand that’s mostly us paying each other to use the vast majority of all the one another’s stuff we’ve swapped for big number talk & promises to backstop with billions we wouldn’t have to spend if the hordes were ravenous to bite our arms off with all that demand” closed möbius loop the money train is gauged for…like…he takes the piss more than most because that’s his not-clear-who-awards-these superpower the way orange foolius’ one weird trick is everyone expects him to be this fucked up
A former GOP strategist once made a comment about how Trump on the trail in 2024 was clearly mentally checked out because he was unable to give a stump speech and would ramble aimlessly but that ended up working in his favor because every speech was covered as a unique event while Harris' were not
🧵 Folks, I’m tired… and I know a whole lot of us are tired.Our party isn’t perfect. Our leaders aren’t perfect. But there are people right now putting everything they have into standing up in this moment. Constructive criticism matters. Accountability matters.
But if all you do is attack the Democratic Party while Black leaders are being targeted, Black voting rights are being dismantled, Black political power is under assault, and HBCUs are under attack, then don’t expect me to treat you any differently than I treat Trump and his MAGA acolytes.
You are coming after one of the last major institutions capable of protecting my community. At that point, you are not an ally. You are the opposition, and you’ll be treated as such.
as long as he still had the actual hardware he could have bought borrowed or stolen enough expertise to get back in the game, maybe. but not if the hardware is locked into a long term contract with someone else
…it’s not even that the tech…such as it is…is even intrinsically not useful…it’s just…what it is…& not what it’s being treated as…on purpose…to deliver profits rather than anything actually productive or the other sort of profitable to use…in a no-cost-savings-don’t-count-if-that-work-isn’t-done sort of a way…like…hiring a tv drunk narcissist with delusions of being the one that knocks to play on TV a position you need to actually fill with something other than stacked shite…for instance?
Just a reminder that all of this was set in motion by our supposedly moderate chief justice declaring in 2013 that southern states were so unracist that federal oversight was no longer necessary. This is his life’s mission, and he was never moderate.
It’s striking that the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais is in some ways worse than even the “pessimistic” predictions of folks writing about race.
Yet, not a single reactionary centrist has admitted that the alleged excesses of “wokeness” weren’t excessive. They were realistic.
The Supreme Court is basically copying the script that gave us Jim Crow and the New York Times and the Atlantic are running stories about “DEI” going too far and Kendi’s alleged over-reach.
It’s almost like they are providing cover or agree.
It’s easy to make fun of Rufo et al for cynically disinforming people about CRT, but it’s not that they don‘t understand it enough to know that it threatens their reactionary projects. They‘re not wrong to be afraid of it.
They need to convince people that CRT turns people into witches so they can delegitimize a powerful means of understanding and resisting white supremacy.
…I get it…how do you settle a thing…holy trinity…guns…money…lawyers…like…faith, hope & charity…or…whatever
Just a reminder that all of this was set in motion by our supposedly moderate chief justice declaring in 2013 that southern states were so unracist that federal oversight was no longer necessary. This is his life’s mission, and he was never moderate.
…tell me again the one about how dick dawkins dicked about turning claude into claudia until he hit now-I’m-a-believer & that’s because he’s a very clever man who definitely read past the turing bit of the test at least as far as searle…go on…I promise I’ll keep a straight face…if you can?
As a person who co-created a Spider-character for Marvel called Recluse who is a young Black Caribbean woman, THIS IS HILARIOUS!
…fair enough…I mean…fair’s fair
I am at the point of blocking anuone who takes issue with my characterization of this comment as "disparaging."Just FYI.I choose to only engage with people who can operate in a basic reality. Those are my rules. Sorry/not sorry.
no one talks enough about the class clown to serial poster pipeline
President Donald Trump’s abrupt reversal on his plan to help ships go through the Strait of Hormuz came after a key Gulf ally suspended the U.S. military’s ability to use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation, according to two U.S. officials.
…stuff that gets respect long-term…likely didn’t look that way from the off
Almost nothing (other than MAYBE some religious texts) was Dignified Literature when it came out. Especially not if you read it anywhere below the graduate level. Most stuff that we now think of as High Culture was at some point middlebrow at best
Homeric Epics weren’t epic when they were first told, they were Family Friday Night on ABC — entertainment for everyone. It’s why Lattimore is an inferior translation to later ones.
…anyway
Like the vast majority of spiders (certain Australian psychopaths excepted) the Brown Recluse does not seek confrontation and will only bite if threatened or trapped. To use words Kyle Rittenhouse will understand, Brown Recluses have a Castle Doctrine and abide by strict Stand Your Ground laws.
“certain Australian psychopaths excepted” is a shockingly common caveat in my life lately.
Case in point.
Australian authorities recently arrested #BenRobertsSmith for war crimes. Caitlin Chiaramonte and Matt Montazzoli analyze the difficulties of prosecutions of this kind. They conclude that accountability for war crimes in such cases is not guaranteed. lieber.westpoint.edu/built-withou…
All these "We Need a Greater Diversity of Viewpoints at Universities" ass clowns suddenly get real quiet when: Rutgers cancels graduation speech over speaker’s pro-Palestinian posts | US universities | The Guardian
the thing about corporations and ethics is that it really shouldn't be that much of a thing where we ask "what is the most ethical corporation"we should have a functioning political system to regulate corporations (which are in fact *supposed to be* maximizing their flexibilty + profits)
"Mr. Hegseth’s own trajectory demonstrates that confident and intelligent officers do not dissolve upon contact with competing ideas," former Marine Ryan Burke wrote: www.justsecurity.org/137831/hegse…
only had one student complain about their mark in my 25+ yrs of teaching. this year in the age of “AI”, it’s four, only one comes to discuss the feedback in person, others go straight to the higher powers to complain, and i spend a whole day having to write a justification of my academic judgment.
…to me?
so many angles to this state of things. am not saying i’m infallible, but making a senior academic do this, i don’t know what this means for the rest of my colleagues who can’t say, i’ve marked for 25 yrs and have never seen anything like this
So much for decades of accumulated intellectual and tacit knowledge in favour of formulaic feedback along a grid. One consequence of mass delusion facilitated by AI and privatised universities
…or…uh…them, I guess
"In their lives, those worlds have merged, blended. Political rhetoric that simmers online, divorced of all empathy and civility, flows offline. Horrific real-life violence has always been available to them: a Google search away, a reality they’ve been preparing for since grade school."
‘Whether it’s peace for our time or not, more inflation is baked in. That’s the message from the commodity versus Treasury ratio, which has surged higher, with both yields and crude still notably above their pre-war levels.’ blinks.bloomberg.com/news/stories…
How about checking with the Iranians before presenting peace as imminent based on something Trump says? There are multiple sides to this negotiation—always have been—and it doesn't work unless they both agree.How many times are you going to fall for the same lie? You're supposed to be journalists.
You cannot defeat these Samurai. Like the menswear guy, they have spent countless lifetimes debating the proper waist height on men's trousers or the actual layout of The Enterprise in Star Trek.
…nobody *has* to be will stancil…but…even if stancil wasn’t…there’d be one just the same & it would make all the same people crazy for the same reasons they all think are new & unique
The Stancil Death Cult is fascinating to observe as a cog sci / soc sci guyFor the uninitiated, what those people are doing is demonstrate their willingness to engage with any notion of social reality (however divorced from their own experience) for group belonging.
…while also broadcasting the heavy costs (harassment) associated to non-group belonging.Yes it is ripe for abuse, and it is very literally how cults are made“Power, Ritual, and Identity – A Cognitive Study of Conversion to the Unification Church.” doi.org/10.31219/osf….
…eh…between supposedly pro-trans-rights people trying to cancel anyone not coming for stancil with pitchforks & flaming torches…&…say…k-pop people spoofing the pre-registered numbers for campaign functions for MAGA…I don’t know how far any of us can trust our feel for where the line is for it being on the side of the angels…but I can see it like the line of a sundial under a blue & cloudless open sky when there isn’t an eclipse in sight?
…also…along with hoping josh takes the edge off…I know it doesn’t show…but…I really have tried quite hard not to go way more overboard with stuff that’s not even *in* this one…so…like…this was me getting up & choosing not-violence…however much it might not appear to be on account of all that being in the silent part that doesn’t show on the page…so…if I never get to the tunes part…I beg the court to please take the pleadings into account, I guess?
…speaking of pleading…I should clear the bar with @farscythe on account of there’s ren about midway in the track listing for the playlist…but…after the second time the interrupters interrupt the stream of hip hop with the leap of faith one…I…haven’t played through the EP hat-trick to vouch for what follows beyond my own…er…faith?
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…so…still trying not to let the smouldering fuse hit the barrel of gunpowder for today…but…the struggle is real…for realsies
Prediction markets are websites where insiders who know how things will play out monetize that knowledge without worrying about insider trading laws
This is a damning chart. Gonna have to dismantle these prediction markets posthaste. We need leaders who will do that
I was with you until I got to this part, which some part of my brain took as a challenge. I could think of ways to model this. (I don’t know how much insider trading there is, or how easy it is to turn a good model into a profit.)
…&…I don’t wager even whatever meagre wealth the world might consider to be in my gift on the basis of stuff that merely occurs to me absent interrogation, investigation or even introspection…much less make my living wagering other people’s…or that of nations…or corporate interests vast enough to trade the political sort & call it a cost of doing business…so…bucket-sized pinch of salt disclaimers & such…but…monkey see…monkey brain do pattern recognition
…it’s…not as neat as the famous 80:20 pareto paradigm…but
Well well well, if it isn't what I've been literally sayingwww.theinformation.com/articles/ant…
…that’s why statistics operate with the modifiers…you know…like…in a bell-curve scenario they even *call* a “normal distribution”…iirc…& math class was…before-email-ago…but…pretty sure your standard deviation when that was the margin your error maybe lurked in ran +/- 5%…which is to say…ok…you don’t have to believe me about the claim I’m not going to make that I remembered all of this but I checked because it kind of matters & this is not only true but if it sounds like a foreign language you should probably know that I know some weird people & some of them understand this stuff like breathing or catching that can of beer lobbed at you…only they could draw up that whole sequence either as a graphic or a vector matrix or a set of algebraic equations with weird letters you can’t find on the keyboard…with a pencil…in a power cut…by candle light…so…like…I am in fact relatively un-weird…even about this stuff
…yes…I know that makes me sound like it’s a touchy subject…I’m…trying to get at how hard it is to keep my promises even just to myself to not go all cruel & unusual about the imposition it is to implicitly request I not be banished from this place for being the antithesis of the life & soul of anything resembling a good time…even with the boring math bit…speaking of which…that 5%…you hit that because
A result is typically considered statistically significant if it falls beyond two standard deviations from the mean (corresponding to a 95% confidence level)
…so your give or take 5% part…that’s…the difference between “maybe signal” & “probably noise”…kinda sorta
…somebody do me a solid & crunch the numbers, would you…let’s see…1/10th of 1%…nets north of 2/3 of the upside
…&…ballpark…80%+ of the ozymandius spend-a-thon serves upwards of 2/3 of its demand-swamped supply of magic sand in a tranium pressing or whatever…to…2 horses…in the sink or swim derby from here to the other side of the money falls…with more riders than runners…all switching between the same horses as they go
…in a normal distribution…would those numbers hold statistical significance…in…I dunno…earnings season?
…maybe if we weren’t busy with all the dire fucking stupidity busting out like a syphilitic end-game & people had time to pander to weirdos like me by making that not be the sort of stuff it turns out it’s hard not be involuntarily pre-occupied by…I’d…come off less…salty…or…needs-salt-y…or…fuck…I dunno…like I smile sometimes & don’t need to visit any padded rooms with no door handles as a matter of urgency
…if someone would just cover all my bills I’d happily spend the rest of my days laying in hammocks reading comics somewhere they could ply me with high grade until I couldn’t type…maybe…consume passive entertainment in bulk quantities as an added sedative
…keep me in single-malts older than I am & I’d probably make do without most of the perks…I…might plead for more than my sustainable allowance of steak
…& access to reading material is a deal-breaker
…but I can definitely be bought off, is what I’m getting at…& if this thing that I’m told is the big boy economy is for real…then my price for being literally nobody’s fucking problem & then I die…is a fucking steal…however you pick your variables for that RoI equation
…anyway…as is dismally traditional at this juncture…apologies to them as knows they’re owed…you know who you are by now…at least I’ve very much been assuming that for what is otherwise a genuinely embarrassingly long time?
Sadly, the brown recluse bite will not take out Rittenhouse. If he’s getting medical attention they’ll excise the necrotized flesh and he’ll be fine. Kudos to the spider, though. Out here doing her best to take out the trash.
Those bites can be pretty damn bad, though, hopefully the spider got him good.
The other thing is that it kinda sounds like his benefactors don’t need him/are forgetting about him, and once that happens, his life is going to go real fucking bad until he dies accidentally shooting himself in the gut while teaching a gun safety class.
Yeah, the bites can be rough. I worked with a guy years ago who got bit on the back of his hand. They ended up taking out a pretty big chunk of his hand and he spent a few days in the hospital. Ultimately he was fine, but he damn sure wore gloves when working outside after that.
The Will Stancil thing, boy, I dunno, man, people ain’t right in the head. And even though I think he has plenty of bad/stupid takes, he’s not the “people” I’m talking about.
Yeah, getting a little tired of people deliberately misinterpreting what he writes. I mean, yes, he’s annoying as fuck, but one reason I follow him is that he focuses on facts. His viewpoint is usually worthwhile even if, as I sometimes think, he doesn’t have a solid grasp of human interaction.
It’s not even his takes (middling) or his personality (somewhat off-putting), like on Bluesky he’s treated like he’s New York Times-level transphobic, but if anyone asks why, they just get screamed at for asking. That’s a pretty reasonable question given the evidence I’ve ever seen about it is one or two maybe-possibly half-questionable posts from years back. Unless he’s got a Musk-level burner that these people know about but won’t discuss, the heat he gets is insane.
…I’ve been trying to steer clear of the whole thing…but…at one point the thing where he both let some journalists do ride-along stuff when other ones were writing think-pieces about how simultaneously the resistance to ICE had to be spec-ops grade counter-insurgent antifa or they wouldn’t be using the incredible op-sec measures that they learned managing the library board phone tree or making the shift-rota balance through the period from black friday to new years…& such…he also wrote up a “some friends did this but they stopped now & said it was ok to mention it” thing about why playing app-based lonely hearts while on chicago-ICE deployment might be a stupid game with some predictably stupid prizes available to the unwitting…&…well…at least one otherwise pretty level headed person I saw get to the point of likening him to the guy who’s a liability to your women’s rights activist group you need to cut bait on to get anywhere
…the part where if you’re feeding a stancil-based conflagration you’re almost definitionally working counter to the interests you espouse makes it real easy to accidentally live long enough to be the villain in your own story…& at that point you’re mad at ali baba for not playing for team #40thieves
…&…this is why some of us learned to lurk…under most circumstances you’d never know I fell off that wagon this hard…but…he probably hates trans people about as much as he compromised op-sec on an antifa honey-pot…not like…I dunno…the harry potter lady finds it harder to be nice about them than she does about the wizard of earthsea…either way…for the numbers of supposedly-people putting in the work they do to put up this much stancil-adjacent getting-a-word-in-edgewise…by the numbers…if they’re all real people who genuinely don’t have better things to be doing with their time…&…they think they’re busy being part of some sort of solution?
And people were like “hurrrr he’s taking too much credit” and it’s like OK he does post too much, fair, but also he repeatedly said he was just helping and documenting and he was quite literally on the ground doing the thing, like in his car following ICE operations, taking photos and video (like journalists used to do!) and I know that both because he posted it but also that other people posting about it got a shit-ton of pictures of him in his car doing it!
I detest false allies, but I also get tired real fast of advocates who are looking for any excuse to shit on potential allies over the smallest of differences. (So basically, you know, the left.)
…bit like how I both tend to steer clear of stuff about obama…& figure might be part of why he & his tend to keep their distance…albeit some of the ways they do that lose some in translation…he was mostly as charming as ever with colbert…but…I get where these folks are coming from…kinda?
So sick of this anti-intellectual bullshit from Democrats and it’s WILDLY irresponsible in the middle of a full-on GOP war against colleges and universities
But also so typical for Democrats to actually help the GOP with their stupid ass wars
…when the bit they’re hopping about is like one of these
Obama: "What I'm more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we're not in a college seminar? Can you talk in plain English to folks? And not have a bunch of gobbledygook around it. Just talk like normal people talk. 'The rent is too high.'"
…which that one was by way of a for instance…but it might also be an instance of “would help to spell out the quiet part loud”…in that it seems like if you’re “democrats” in that sentence…& that’s your speaker…that is not a term standing in for your regular-people type democrats, surely?
…that’s people trying to get party-affiliated time-of-day+ out of mr superfly elder statesman…trying to $10 word their way to justifying the hundreds an hour they charge out their time at against the whole faustian opportunity cost…&…in that context…it’s not really the same statement as the one the righteous indignation would be jumping off from…& one of the replies to that one that calls it a death cult was
Someone used the term decentralized high control group to describe these dynamics and yeah, that.
…shall I compare a rose by another name to an orange or be pricked upon the thorn of my own petard & stuff
Will I say this from experience as someone who went through something similar to what you're going through back on Twitter (albeit on a smaller scale): there is no amount of explaining yourself that will work, you need to stop namesearching/engaging/reading replies, you can't win, I'm sorry
I truly hate to say it as I remember how insane it made me feel but there's just literally nothing you can do, aside from blocking people systematically and also trying to touch grass when you can, it fucking sucks and I'm sorry but yeah, there's nothing else to it, you should take care of yourself!
".. . Most of the systems lose money. They trade too much. They make wildly different decisions when given identical instructions."@bloomberg.com http://www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
I’m standing with colleagues and advocates in Albany to defend reproductive freedom in the wake of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA decision. The attempt to roll back access to Mifepristone is not about safety, it is about control. In New York, we are making it clear: we will protect patients, we will protect providers, and we will not allow medically unnecessary barriers to stand in the way of care. I am proud to support legislation by @shelleybmayer @karinesreyes87 and others that safeguards access to medication abortion and strengthens privacy protections for those providing and receiving care.
…&…I may know less than diddly knows bo…but…something, something…might be the ballgame?
You know what would be really fucking transformative in 2026? Electing statehouses in Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania that will join the Interstate Popular Vote Compact, and designate their EC to the outright winner of the popular vote. That’s a better use of resources than navel gazing at 2028
The Obama thing was only mildly disappointing because it was so completely expected. He’s a rich guy surrounded by other rich guys who talk about rich guy stuff and it’s conventional wisdom there that Kamala Harris ran on a platform of birthing people, transgender identity and microaggressions. Does it matter that we have video and text from that time? No. Not really.
…I dunno as “read” is a term I’d use for something scratched out that illegibly
…I know jon stewart wrung a full bit out of the way the sharpie signature routine doesn’t really resemble the living nemesis of the autopen’s given moniker or john hancock or whatever…but…you’d think the author of that suicide note was…a…doctor or something
…I never corresponded with the skeevy shitstain so I don’t have a means of comparison…but…surely handwriting analysis would have enough material to render a qualified opinion on it having at the very least been competently counterfeited…like…I don’t think it takes a conspiracy to see a guy that messes with kids get dead in prison necessarily…but…if you’re going to fiddle the footage enough to get that foot in the door because he’s on suicide watch that wasn’t watching when it wasn’t in the room but it happened…or…whatev’s…at least basic competence in the “he left a note” garnish is…not a high bar…I’m not doing the falling down thing where I hold the sandwich in one hand & wave a machine gun at the picture while asking if the guy behind the counter can spot the difference…just
…we know how his email made it look like he had regular lobotomies but if you picked up a pen & didn’t cross nothing out & you were writing the last thing you wanted to say from beyond the veil…would it kill you to print that stuff in all caps & not just assume everyone speaks spider-shat-itself script?
…I mean…signs point to “allegedly, yes”…but…it’s a little…ripe?
I always love the red state narrative that Seattle & Portland are dystopian hellscapes from people that have never been there. You see on Reddit & other places all these tourists asking “is it safe (insert place here)?” Then they are shocked when they get here. Speaking of bad tourists, I have it on good authority that this guy not only got arrested but got some local justice (in Hawaii we called it “dirty lickins”)
…&…it’s not my book to bang or nothing…but…there’s the one about the fatted calf that bites the dust when the prodigal son gets all the bizarro-consequences & such & we all learn about unconditional love…& there’s the one where the whole drenched mass of beef goes up like a torch when nobody else can magic up a sacrificial pyre in the clutch…&…the one about the golden idol…&…they’re all “different” bits of “the good book”…but…what bill hicks referred to as the “wacky fire & brimstone revelations ending” notwithstanding…is this not…even according to the fashion at the time…& allowing all appropriations of a cultural persuasion on an a priori basis by pre-arrangement…still…a bit fucking much?
You’ll be shocked to hear that this golden calf was commissioned by cryptocurrency investors to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT.🎁 link:www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/t…
oh hey the interrupters..nice! cleared the bar before i even got to ren..lol
anyways… seems the uae didnt take kindly to the usa kicking shit off without so much as dropping them a courtesy call first
who could have seen that coming?
after all..europes been nothing but helpful since last time they kicked shit off without so much as a courtesy call…
Despite this exact dynamic happening easily two dozen times at this point, traders are going to do the exact same thing the next time Trump claims baselessly that a deal is around the corner
Trump was supposed to have an on camera event with the president of Brazil at 11:15am today. It is now nearly 2pm. The president of Brazil is at the White House. But nobody knows what's going on.
if it seems like i post a lot about renewable energy lately, yes it's because i am betting the entirety of what hopes i have left for a better world in my lifetime into that basket
Surprising amount of decolonial scholarship out there that goes “unlike the regressive binarist West, this non-Western culture celebrates women <3 (as mothers. moms. life givers a.k.a babymakers. exclusively. don't ask what happens to women who don't want kids. those don't exist. not a thing.)"
like sometimes I just have to put the anthropology paper down and go "is anybody else seeing this" out loud
non-patriarchal society is when you have no choice but to have kids and fuck men but we give you a gold star
I'm not actually a curmudgeon who wants to find a problem whenever I see people talk about the possibility of non-patriarchal social orders. I'd quite like to study any! But when the standards for "non-patriarchal" are so clearly nonsensical and frankly incoherent, it's a cause for concern.
it's basically impossible to ignore when you recognize what's going on."unlike decadent western feminists, based trad cultures celebrate womanhood! … by coercing women into being wives and mothers, caretakers and homemakers. But it's all cool because it's trad and they respect them, honest!"
There’s a lot of folks on here who are more than happy to talk to you about our experiences if you need anything. Any place where there has been an ICE Occupation doesn’t want others to have to suffer what we did.
Minnesota did not go through all that to have people who live elsewhere do a weird one-up thing. It’s not a competition and we’re all in it togetherResistance will look different in New York just like it did in Chicago and LA. We learned from those before us and we’ve got your back too ✊
the thing that is qualitatively different about the Trump II presidency, different from even Trump I, is the abandonment of any attempts at mobilizing popular legitimacy. Instead, it is wants elite support and popular indifference as enabling conditions.
…like
because the douchebag in charge loves himself so much has really feels like he can make the american people support this bullshit thru the power of his personality *alone*, and very little patriotic propaganda has been distributed
…on that basis…I dunno…do I…does…anybody…or is it everybody…it’s america’s world and the rest of it just lives there & better kick back up the chain so king-shit of the dog-pile gets a taste of every-fucking-thing…because…cue sighing & rolling of eyes…this stuff…basically par for a certain course that the boy set by the cut of his jib…right or wrong…colors on the mast & all that
The idea that Will Stancil's one bedroom apartment means he "lives in better conditions than most 30-40 year old Americans" is not borne out by Census data.In 2024, 57.9% of Americans age 30-34 and 65.8% of Americans age 35-39 owned their homes. Roughly 85% of owned homes are single family houses.
…where it seems to jump like several studios of shark tanks all at once without even a motorcyle…or johhny blaze much less the fonz…is…to see the disconnect between how this lands
I dunno guys, the internet has very few joy laws but reposting this whenever it comes across your feed is one 🤷🏾♀️ It’s not just nostalgia, it’s as good as you remember.
…&…this…as a caption/comment/response/quote of the exact same point of reference
it occurs to me that this might be the exact moment that American culture peaked, future historians will regard it as the precise high-water mark
HEY I DUNNO IF YOU REALIZE IT BUT WILL STANCIL IS A MONSTER AND IT’S NOT COOL THAT YOU POST HIM HERE HE BROUGHT ICE TO MINNESOTA AND CANCELLED THE ORIGINAL STAR TREK AND CAUSES SUN SPOTS
…why stop digging when you’ve been at it so long you must surely be headed up again by now?
…I…like hannah fry…I strongly suspect that where a great many things that include most of math & science are concerned she is both smarter than me & more knowledgeable…not to mention better read & more up on the current literature
…but…all the “she came up with this”…”built a shop”…added jeopardy if you suggest you might switch it off for failing a task…all that stuff…just…there is no “her”…the thing they refer to as “cass” & thus “her” & attribute stuff to like an intern run amok…is a wildly expensive method for…clippy…& the part where they mention fairly early on about it not being free to run?
…there’s different sorts of “free” with tech…same with “run”…not all runs have runtimes even if they all take time to run or whatever…like…resources…so…things that don’t add a lot of load…are light…stuff that does add but not in your interests or because you asked it to particularly if you would definitely say no if you could find a place it would let you tell it…that’s bloat
…long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth & MS-DOS wasn’t basically banquo’s ghost…as database stuff went…access was pretty nifty
…lots of businesses don’t update something when they see that as “fixing” a thing that “ain’t broke”…like lots of places didn’t want to stop using windows XP…not a conspiracy or even necessarily dumb in & of itself…just…one of the ways market share works in the one-in-every-back-office sense that worked pretty great for the xerox lot until it didn’t
…but that “& every time it sends all of it all over again like it’s starting from scratch” thing they say about how the chargeable token supply is rigged to spin its wheels…iirc…that’s kind of how access dealt with changes to your database…so…you throw in a little light network access…maybe in a small office that doesn’t have a need or a budget for a server even if that old PC tower sitting in the corner gathering dust could technically do that for free the other side of an inevitably frustrating interlude of uncertain duration…because…unix…but…never mind that…get the consultants in…hook yourself up a new slice of overhead on a subscription to their recommended geek squad…those lads’ll have you up to your eyballs in switches & practically finding space for the racks by the time you finish letting them sign you up to how microsoft would have that work if your work was the sort that happened in a big building with an IT pit in the basement that has no windows & is inhabited by weird creatures that delved too deep…& your workstations will be thin clients & people will say “lean” a lot
…but…you’ll still be choking the whole thing with that access database nobody seems to want to import into something with a SQL backend that…became popular among other reasons on account of specifically not handling incremental changes by overwriting the entire file like we’re trying to prove a niche philosophical theory about how quantum reality works…so…all the way through all of that…you’ll be making the smart business moves…because the people who decide what those are…know what works…& how to reboot the POS machines when that stands for the other thing & the lunch rush is peaking just as those experience a sudden downtime…because that’s presumably why the new manager you hired to replace the new manager you hired that you were inclined to because you were the new money the guy whose whole thing it used to be brought on to be young & hungry &…willing to invest…calls someone who won’t turn up for an hour or more to “fix” it over & over without ever either watching or asking what the steps are that correct it for future reference & whether that might be a variation on the classic “have you tried turning it off & on again?”
…has to be that way…that’s why they paid more for the next one than the last one…like with the geek squad(s)…& the IT hardware…&…whatever the *actual* underlying opportunity cost was of never re-examining the option to update…not to mention do wildly overdue upkeep in a GI:GO sense on the thing…the database…of which I swear I once heard someone say…with no trace of discernible irony by intent…”that’s the only thing that actually works”
…hmm…there are a number of places I’ve wound up doing this or that…enough that I seldom think about very nearly any of them as a rule on what you’d call an average day…but…some of them may not be exactly the sort of rewarding to work in you’d want in a sense where you get to spend those…while also teaching you remarkable things about innocuous sayings like “a wealth of experience”
…funny thing, though…that place…it wasn’t the one about how “you just can’t get the staff these days”…like…they *had* the staff…but the nearer you got to the people calling the shots the higher the underpants gnome quotient got…like…when the owner came in…they’d have to call out (& pay for) engineers to fix the stuff he tweaked to correct perceived failings with…but the reason the people that went there & spent money did that was almost entirely down to the contribution of the disposable components of “the staff”…but…for all I know they still use that access database to this very day…it would not surprise me even a little bit…so…funny story…’cos it’s true…I don’t write the rules
…at some point if anyone finds a copy I’d be interested in getting to finally read them, though…I…have had a few questions about…some…stuff…for…a bit?
…so…still trying not to let the smouldering fuse hit the barrel of gunpowder for today…but…the struggle is real…for realsies
…&…I don’t wager even whatever meagre wealth the world might consider to be in my gift on the basis of stuff that merely occurs to me absent interrogation, investigation or even introspection…much less make my living wagering other people’s…or that of nations…or corporate interests vast enough to trade the political sort & call it a cost of doing business…so…bucket-sized pinch of salt disclaimers & such…but…monkey see…monkey brain do pattern recognition
…it’s…not as neat as the famous 80:20 pareto paradigm…but
…that’s why statistics operate with the modifiers…you know…like…in a bell-curve scenario they even *call* a “normal distribution”…iirc…& math class was…before-email-ago…but…pretty sure your standard deviation when that was the margin your error maybe lurked in ran +/- 5%…which is to say…ok…you don’t have to believe me about the claim I’m not going to make that I remembered all of this but I checked because it kind of matters & this is not only true but if it sounds like a foreign language you should probably know that I know some weird people & some of them understand this stuff like breathing or catching that can of beer lobbed at you…only they could draw up that whole sequence either as a graphic or a vector matrix or a set of algebraic equations with weird letters you can’t find on the keyboard…with a pencil…in a power cut…by candle light…so…like…I am in fact relatively un-weird…even about this stuff
…yes…I know that makes me sound like it’s a touchy subject…I’m…trying to get at how hard it is to keep my promises even just to myself to not go all cruel & unusual about the imposition it is to implicitly request I not be banished from this place for being the antithesis of the life & soul of anything resembling a good time…even with the boring math bit…speaking of which…that 5%…you hit that because
…so your give or take 5% part…that’s…the difference between “maybe signal” & “probably noise”…kinda sorta
…somebody do me a solid & crunch the numbers, would you…let’s see…1/10th of 1%…nets north of 2/3 of the upside
…&…ballpark…80%+ of the ozymandius spend-a-thon serves upwards of 2/3 of its demand-swamped supply of magic sand in a tranium pressing or whatever…to…2 horses…in the sink or swim derby from here to the other side of the money falls…with more riders than runners…all switching between the same horses as they go
…in a normal distribution…would those numbers hold statistical significance…in…I dunno…earnings season?
…maybe if we weren’t busy with all the dire fucking stupidity busting out like a syphilitic end-game & people had time to pander to weirdos like me by making that not be the sort of stuff it turns out it’s hard not be involuntarily pre-occupied by…I’d…come off less…salty…or…needs-salt-y…or…fuck…I dunno…like I smile sometimes & don’t need to visit any padded rooms with no door handles as a matter of urgency
…if someone would just cover all my bills I’d happily spend the rest of my days laying in hammocks reading comics somewhere they could ply me with high grade until I couldn’t type…maybe…consume passive entertainment in bulk quantities as an added sedative
…keep me in single-malts older than I am & I’d probably make do without most of the perks…I…might plead for more than my sustainable allowance of steak
…& access to reading material is a deal-breaker
…but I can definitely be bought off, is what I’m getting at…& if this thing that I’m told is the big boy economy is for real…then my price for being literally nobody’s fucking problem & then I die…is a fucking steal…however you pick your variables for that RoI equation
…anyway…as is dismally traditional at this juncture…apologies to them as knows they’re owed…you know who you are by now…at least I’ve very much been assuming that for what is otherwise a genuinely embarrassingly long time?
If you can’t spot the sucker at the table then it’s you. Same applies to prediction markets.
Exactly. This is just Las Vegas writ large. The house always wins and the house ain’t you.
Sadly, the brown recluse bite will not take out Rittenhouse. If he’s getting medical attention they’ll excise the necrotized flesh and he’ll be fine. Kudos to the spider, though. Out here doing her best to take out the trash.
Those bites can be pretty damn bad, though, hopefully the spider got him good.
The other thing is that it kinda sounds like his benefactors don’t need him/are forgetting about him, and once that happens, his life is going to go real fucking bad until he dies accidentally shooting himself in the gut while teaching a gun safety class.
Yeah, the bites can be rough. I worked with a guy years ago who got bit on the back of his hand. They ended up taking out a pretty big chunk of his hand and he spent a few days in the hospital. Ultimately he was fine, but he damn sure wore gloves when working outside after that.
If he’s getting medical attention they’ll excise the necrotized flesh and he’ll be fine.
I clearly don’t understand how to use these fucking function tabs.
I mean, you made me laugh. Twice.
The Will Stancil thing, boy, I dunno, man, people ain’t right in the head. And even though I think he has plenty of bad/stupid takes, he’s not the “people” I’m talking about.
Yeah, getting a little tired of people deliberately misinterpreting what he writes. I mean, yes, he’s annoying as fuck, but one reason I follow him is that he focuses on facts. His viewpoint is usually worthwhile even if, as I sometimes think, he doesn’t have a solid grasp of human interaction.
It’s not even his takes (middling) or his personality (somewhat off-putting), like on Bluesky he’s treated like he’s New York Times-level transphobic, but if anyone asks why, they just get screamed at for asking. That’s a pretty reasonable question given the evidence I’ve ever seen about it is one or two maybe-possibly half-questionable posts from years back. Unless he’s got a Musk-level burner that these people know about but won’t discuss, the heat he gets is insane.
…I’ve been trying to steer clear of the whole thing…but…at one point the thing where he both let some journalists do ride-along stuff when other ones were writing think-pieces about how simultaneously the resistance to ICE had to be spec-ops grade counter-insurgent antifa or they wouldn’t be using the incredible op-sec measures that they learned managing the library board phone tree or making the shift-rota balance through the period from black friday to new years…& such…he also wrote up a “some friends did this but they stopped now & said it was ok to mention it” thing about why playing app-based lonely hearts while on chicago-ICE deployment might be a stupid game with some predictably stupid prizes available to the unwitting…&…well…at least one otherwise pretty level headed person I saw get to the point of likening him to the guy who’s a liability to your women’s rights activist group you need to cut bait on to get anywhere
…the part where if you’re feeding a stancil-based conflagration you’re almost definitionally working counter to the interests you espouse makes it real easy to accidentally live long enough to be the villain in your own story…& at that point you’re mad at ali baba for not playing for team #40thieves
…&…this is why some of us learned to lurk…under most circumstances you’d never know I fell off that wagon this hard…but…he probably hates trans people about as much as he compromised op-sec on an antifa honey-pot…not like…I dunno…the harry potter lady finds it harder to be nice about them than she does about the wizard of earthsea…either way…for the numbers of supposedly-people putting in the work they do to put up this much stancil-adjacent getting-a-word-in-edgewise…by the numbers…if they’re all real people who genuinely don’t have better things to be doing with their time…&…they think they’re busy being part of some sort of solution?
…gotta ask…what the fuck is their problem?
And people were like “hurrrr he’s taking too much credit” and it’s like OK he does post too much, fair, but also he repeatedly said he was just helping and documenting and he was quite literally on the ground doing the thing, like in his car following ICE operations, taking photos and video (like journalists used to do!) and I know that both because he posted it but also that other people posting about it got a shit-ton of pictures of him in his car doing it!
I detest false allies, but I also get tired real fast of advocates who are looking for any excuse to shit on potential allies over the smallest of differences. (So basically, you know, the left.)
…bit like how I both tend to steer clear of stuff about obama…& figure might be part of why he & his tend to keep their distance…albeit some of the ways they do that lose some in translation…he was mostly as charming as ever with colbert…but…I get where these folks are coming from…kinda?
…when the bit they’re hopping about is like one of these
…which that one was by way of a for instance…but it might also be an instance of “would help to spell out the quiet part loud”…in that it seems like if you’re “democrats” in that sentence…& that’s your speaker…that is not a term standing in for your regular-people type democrats, surely?
…that’s people trying to get party-affiliated time-of-day+ out of mr superfly elder statesman…trying to $10 word their way to justifying the hundreds an hour they charge out their time at against the whole faustian opportunity cost…&…in that context…it’s not really the same statement as the one the righteous indignation would be jumping off from…& one of the replies to that one that calls it a death cult was
…&…you know
…shall I compare a rose by another name to an orange or be pricked upon the thorn of my own petard & stuff
…but
…then again
…nvm?
…there’s
…that zohran lad…&…here & there…one or two others…who
…don’t seem to stutter through the bits some struggle with
…&…I may know less than diddly knows bo…but…something, something…might be the ballgame?
The Obama thing was only mildly disappointing because it was so completely expected. He’s a rich guy surrounded by other rich guys who talk about rich guy stuff and it’s conventional wisdom there that Kamala Harris ran on a platform of birthing people, transgender identity and microaggressions. Does it matter that we have video and text from that time? No. Not really.
Is there anyone who actually believes this?
Jeffrey Epstein’s purported suicide note is released by court order
It sure read like someone else’s writing style, #justsaying
I posted the same thing on Bluesky, and so did a ton of other people. Somebody needs to test the paper for spray tan residue.
…I dunno as “read” is a term I’d use for something scratched out that illegibly
…I know jon stewart wrung a full bit out of the way the sharpie signature routine doesn’t really resemble the living nemesis of the autopen’s given moniker or john hancock or whatever…but…you’d think the author of that suicide note was…a…doctor or something
…I never corresponded with the skeevy shitstain so I don’t have a means of comparison…but…surely handwriting analysis would have enough material to render a qualified opinion on it having at the very least been competently counterfeited…like…I don’t think it takes a conspiracy to see a guy that messes with kids get dead in prison necessarily…but…if you’re going to fiddle the footage enough to get that foot in the door because he’s on suicide watch that wasn’t watching when it wasn’t in the room but it happened…or…whatev’s…at least basic competence in the “he left a note” garnish is…not a high bar…I’m not doing the falling down thing where I hold the sandwich in one hand & wave a machine gun at the picture while asking if the guy behind the counter can spot the difference…just
…we know how his email made it look like he had regular lobotomies but if you picked up a pen & didn’t cross nothing out & you were writing the last thing you wanted to say from beyond the veil…would it kill you to print that stuff in all caps & not just assume everyone speaks spider-shat-itself script?
…I mean…signs point to “allegedly, yes”…but…it’s a little…ripe?
I always love the red state narrative that Seattle & Portland are dystopian hellscapes from people that have never been there. You see on Reddit & other places all these tourists asking “is it safe (insert place here)?” Then they are shocked when they get here. Speaking of bad tourists, I have it on good authority that this guy not only got arrested but got some local justice (in Hawaii we called it “dirty lickins”)
…heh
…I can admit it…I did laugh
…but…you know…probably a me-problem, I expect…somehow they’re never the problem
…&…it’s not my book to bang or nothing…but…there’s the one about the fatted calf that bites the dust when the prodigal son gets all the bizarro-consequences & such & we all learn about unconditional love…& there’s the one where the whole drenched mass of beef goes up like a torch when nobody else can magic up a sacrificial pyre in the clutch…&…the one about the golden idol…&…they’re all “different” bits of “the good book”…but…what bill hicks referred to as the “wacky fire & brimstone revelations ending” notwithstanding…is this not…even according to the fashion at the time…& allowing all appropriations of a cultural persuasion on an a priori basis by pre-arrangement…still…a bit fucking much?
I’m with Ted!
oh hey the interrupters..nice! cleared the bar before i even got to ren..lol
anyways… seems the uae didnt take kindly to the usa kicking shit off without so much as dropping them a courtesy call first
who could have seen that coming?
after all..europes been nothing but helpful since last time they kicked shit off without so much as a courtesy call…
clearly the uae is just unreasonable
*bangs head on table*
…it’s
…not
…me
…that’s
…doing
…fucking
…any of this
…but
…like
…for real…I dunno who screamingnope/six am six pack would be from adam…or who this implies they’d be asking…but
…on that basis…I dunno…do I…does…anybody…or is it everybody…it’s america’s world and the rest of it just lives there & better kick back up the chain so king-shit of the dog-pile gets a taste of every-fucking-thing…because…cue sighing & rolling of eyes…this stuff…basically par for a certain course that the boy set by the cut of his jib…right or wrong…colors on the mast & all that
…where it seems to jump like several studios of shark tanks all at once without even a motorcyle…or johhny blaze much less the fonz…is…to see the disconnect between how this lands
…&…this…as a caption/comment/response/quote of the exact same point of reference
…if it’s not some form of mass-induced localised insanity…how else does anyone explain that part?
HEY I DUNNO IF YOU REALIZE IT BUT WILL STANCIL IS A MONSTER AND IT’S NOT COOL THAT YOU POST HIM HERE HE BROUGHT ICE TO MINNESOTA AND CANCELLED THE ORIGINAL STAR TREK AND CAUSES SUN SPOTS
…why stop digging when you’ve been at it so long you must surely be headed up again by now?
…I…like hannah fry…I strongly suspect that where a great many things that include most of math & science are concerned she is both smarter than me & more knowledgeable…not to mention better read & more up on the current literature
…but…all the “she came up with this”…”built a shop”…added jeopardy if you suggest you might switch it off for failing a task…all that stuff…just…there is no “her”…the thing they refer to as “cass” & thus “her” & attribute stuff to like an intern run amok…is a wildly expensive method for…clippy…& the part where they mention fairly early on about it not being free to run?
…there’s different sorts of “free” with tech…same with “run”…not all runs have runtimes even if they all take time to run or whatever…like…resources…so…things that don’t add a lot of load…are light…stuff that does add but not in your interests or because you asked it to particularly if you would definitely say no if you could find a place it would let you tell it…that’s bloat
…long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth & MS-DOS wasn’t basically banquo’s ghost…as database stuff went…access was pretty nifty
…lots of businesses don’t update something when they see that as “fixing” a thing that “ain’t broke”…like lots of places didn’t want to stop using windows XP…not a conspiracy or even necessarily dumb in & of itself…just…one of the ways market share works in the one-in-every-back-office sense that worked pretty great for the xerox lot until it didn’t
…but that “& every time it sends all of it all over again like it’s starting from scratch” thing they say about how the chargeable token supply is rigged to spin its wheels…iirc…that’s kind of how access dealt with changes to your database…so…you throw in a little light network access…maybe in a small office that doesn’t have a need or a budget for a server even if that old PC tower sitting in the corner gathering dust could technically do that for free the other side of an inevitably frustrating interlude of uncertain duration…because…unix…but…never mind that…get the consultants in…hook yourself up a new slice of overhead on a subscription to their recommended geek squad…those lads’ll have you up to your eyballs in switches & practically finding space for the racks by the time you finish letting them sign you up to how microsoft would have that work if your work was the sort that happened in a big building with an IT pit in the basement that has no windows & is inhabited by weird creatures that delved too deep…& your workstations will be thin clients & people will say “lean” a lot
…but…you’ll still be choking the whole thing with that access database nobody seems to want to import into something with a SQL backend that…became popular among other reasons on account of specifically not handling incremental changes by overwriting the entire file like we’re trying to prove a niche philosophical theory about how quantum reality works…so…all the way through all of that…you’ll be making the smart business moves…because the people who decide what those are…know what works…& how to reboot the POS machines when that stands for the other thing & the lunch rush is peaking just as those experience a sudden downtime…because that’s presumably why the new manager you hired to replace the new manager you hired that you were inclined to because you were the new money the guy whose whole thing it used to be brought on to be young & hungry &…willing to invest…calls someone who won’t turn up for an hour or more to “fix” it over & over without ever either watching or asking what the steps are that correct it for future reference & whether that might be a variation on the classic “have you tried turning it off & on again?”
…has to be that way…that’s why they paid more for the next one than the last one…like with the geek squad(s)…& the IT hardware…&…whatever the *actual* underlying opportunity cost was of never re-examining the option to update…not to mention do wildly overdue upkeep in a GI:GO sense on the thing…the database…of which I swear I once heard someone say…with no trace of discernible irony by intent…”that’s the only thing that actually works”
…hmm…there are a number of places I’ve wound up doing this or that…enough that I seldom think about very nearly any of them as a rule on what you’d call an average day…but…some of them may not be exactly the sort of rewarding to work in you’d want in a sense where you get to spend those…while also teaching you remarkable things about innocuous sayings like “a wealth of experience”
…funny thing, though…that place…it wasn’t the one about how “you just can’t get the staff these days”…like…they *had* the staff…but the nearer you got to the people calling the shots the higher the underpants gnome quotient got…like…when the owner came in…they’d have to call out (& pay for) engineers to fix the stuff he tweaked to correct perceived failings with…but the reason the people that went there & spent money did that was almost entirely down to the contribution of the disposable components of “the staff”…but…for all I know they still use that access database to this very day…it would not surprise me even a little bit…so…funny story…’cos it’s true…I don’t write the rules
…at some point if anyone finds a copy I’d be interested in getting to finally read them, though…I…have had a few questions about…some…stuff…for…a bit?