Mostly, yes.

I’d like to find a better way to phrase "why aren’t you . . . " questions. It carries an accusatory tone in text, even if you don’t intend that. The answer is almost invariably going to be either “I didn’t know it existed” or “because reason X”. Neither case justifies the accusatory tone. Maybe if the “I didn’t know it existed” answer was something so basic that they really should have known it existed, but probably not even then.

I have a bit of schadenfreude around this. For years, people said Europe was fine, and didn’t need to invest more in their military. “No, you silly American, we are just fine with the military we have because we don’t go invading other countries.”

Now here we are. Thing is, I wasn’t even talking from the perspective of Europe becoming warmongers like us. I wanted Europe to be armed well enough to handle what the US has been doing, and the US can draw down its military. Then we could put that money into healthcare and schools and shit, but Europe would have to pick up the slack (and also Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Australia). This is still a good idea.

Almost like they’re looking for an excuse to hang NATO out to dry.

I have seen SQL written by professional Oracle DBAs. What I learned is that I do not want to look at SQL written by professional Oracle DBAs.

One of the things they already did is build a database of people who can be stuck into appointed roles as sycophants. The people behind Project 2025 have said that database is useful regardless of Trump winning or not.

Truth, even though it still doesn’t make sense.

A while back, another team asked us to clean up some noisy logs, because it cost us $3k a year with our new logging provider. As we discussed it on a call, my boss pointed out that with the people we had on, that meeting cost more than $3k.

Cults work exactly like that. Not all members are going to be equally devoted.

Nah, saying you’ll do something to a pollster is different than actually doing anything.

Stochastic Terrorism means that out of 1000 people, 100 of them hate an ethnic group, 10 of them hate so much it rises to the level of violent rhetoric, but only 1 actually does violence. The good news is that MAGA is becoming deflated because Trump still doesn’t know what to do about Harris when his entire plan was about Biden. They’ll still vote for him, but being energized enough to do violence in his name is a different matter.

It never is. People don’t “slip up” that way unless they use it all the time when in private.

Except people take that method seriously all the time. All the objections I raised were one’s people have actually thrown back at me.

I’m tons of fun at parties. Everybody loves seeing my collection of bottles from defunct soda companies.

Given Putin’s theory that nations comprise a set of territory they’ve historically held–Ukraine and Alaska being “rightfully” Russia’s–he surely wouldn’t object to China taking this part, right? And Kaliningrad goes back to Germany? He’ll be good with all that, right?

It’s a shipping lane, so no.

It makes more sense if you start from the premise that there are “good people” and “bad people”, and bad people need to be punished to protect good people. The people who do the protections–like Joe Arpaio–can do no wrong. Even if they seem to do bad things, that’s just in the service of protecting good people.

This premise is bullshit, but everything follows from there.

You know, maybe we shouldn’t be taking estimation advice from a 1980s science fiction movie that amounts to a systematic method of lying.

Yes, I’ve used it before. Yes, you can hopefully have everything average out in the end. Yes, project managers demand estimates. None of these are good reasons to back up how fundamentally flawed it is.

Also, in practice, they’re usually only good at one or two of the things on the list (at best) and hack their way through the rest. As much as people make fun of overspecialization, it happens in every field for a reason.

Neither is all that great in practice.

Gopher has many problems as a protocol. The original versions of HTTP had much the same problems, such as closing the connection at the end of a transfer rather than having a length header or a signal that the connection is actually done. HTTP went on to fix most of those problems, but Gopher never got the chance. Gopher+ started fixing it up, but it was a victim of bad timing. The Mosaic browser was released shortly after Gopher+ and everyone started switching over. To my knowledge, nobody has ever implemented Gopher+ on either a client or server. Not even after over 20 years of a “revival” movement.

Gemini intentionally limits things, such as not having inline images. This is supposed to be done to keep out methods that have been historically used to track users, but things don’t work that way. I can just as easily send my logs to a data broker without using a pixel tracker if that’s what I want to do.

In the end, you can just use HTTP with a static web page, zero cookies, and no JavaScript. That’s what I ended up doing for my old blog (after offering a Gemini version for a while), including converting a bunch of YouTube <iframe> tags to linked screenshots so you don’t even get YouTube cookies.

Already exists.

Attempting to replace people in the workplace without changing society so that people can live without work.

Harris I think really did catch them off guard. Which is a bit surprising?

If we were talking about the GOP of 12 years ago, they would have been able to pivot to Harris much more easily.

Trump ate the brain of the party in an almost literal way. A lot of the people who knew how stuff worked–McCain, Paul Ryan, Dick Cheney, Romney–were all pushed away or were disgusted with Trump. Basically all the smart, Lawful Evil people. This cycle completed itself this past spring/summer, when Trump replaced all the internal GOP committee members with his own people. They were chosen for loyalty first, and competence a distant second.

That factor of loyalty first/competence later makes fascism fall apart in the long run. However, they can do a whole lot of damage while the failures work themselves out. If we could figure out a way to get them to speedrun this process, we’d have a very effective tool to fight fascism.

Maybe she’s into that. Or maybe she’s just attracted to power.