no no no you misunderstood. I said “fuck YOUR feelings”. MY feelings are very important and must be handled gently, like a tiny baby hummingbird
— America's Lounge Singer (@krang.bsky.social) January 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
‘America’s Lounge Singer’ Krang T. Nelson is… not a polished writer. But I’m tolerant of such, when there’s rich invective to be shared, so tales like the one excerpted below have raised my spirits on some difficult days:
I am old enough to remember when our tech overlords were just a bunch of scrappy young entrepreneurs who were actually going to save the nation. I know this statement sounds straight-up laughable in 2025, but back when I was in middle school guys like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg were actually held up as genuine societal saviors – true geniuses who were going to lead America out of our previous century of global dominance and into yet another Age of Glory. This was the era of the Unbelievably Sorkinized Facebook story, of the first iPhone, of apps themselves! Everything seemed possible (at least to my undeveloped child brain) – any problem we faced as a culture would be solved by a bit of ingenuity, coding, and gross looking guys in shitty little outfits and shitty little hairstyles who promised us they were only interested in solving those pesky problems that were holding us all back. Smash cut to now and we can see with absolute clarity that most of this so-called “innovation” or whatever was a bunch of the same Ivy League assholes finding a way to deregulate markets and destroy the world for their own enrichment. They were not interested in saving anyone, they don’t care about your problems, and they are very, very far away from being geniuses. In fact, they might be some of the dumbest people in the entire goddamn country.
Let me start out here by saying that there are many different kinds of intelligence – mathematical, spacial, linguistic, musical, artistic, etc. I myself am a Level 6 Empath with the North American Empath Guild. But most of the tech overlords in America nowadays seem to have just one specific kind of intelligence, which is How To Use Computer To Make Money. I’m not sure if any of them are full-stack developers or Java-fluent or even know how to write CSS – but they seem to understand labor law pretty well. What is so fascinating about our current crop of oligarchic computer guys is that they have literally *zero interest* in any information outside of that one, narrow field. They are so fucking incurious about the world they claim to have a superior mastery of, and they love showing their ass about it. They don’t care about art unless it can be packaged off as a piece of code and endlessly replicated for profit like NFTs. They don’t care about world politics until it threatens their ability to sell their bullshit products in country’s that actually regulate things for the safety and wellbeing of their citizens. They don’t care about labor markets or communities or families or creativity or anything really. They want you to live in the pod. They want you to eat the bugs. And they have no desire to comprehend how a bug-eating, pod-living society of AI-unemployed citizens might negatively impact them personally. It’s been said many times before, but Comp-Sci majors should be forced to take at least a full year of humanities courses. At gunpoint.
Being so very incurious and so very high on the smell of their own farts, the tech overlords have few places to turn to for information that reinforces their tight-as-an-asshole world view. After all, many journalists and interviewers actually understand things in a more comprehensive way than “how to make parking meters cost more money” or “how to replace air traffic controllers with chatbot”, and it is deeply upsetting for these guys to interact with someone who has a more holistic view of society than that. Even pre-Musk Twitter was often too hostile to them (and this was the era of Elon Musk getting Iron Man and Simpsons cameos – hardly an oppositional culture), yet they found themselves retreating from posting in general. In the post-Musk-Twitter world, all of that has changed – Twitter (I won’t call it X, it’s too stupid) has become their whole fucking world. And it shows! Not only are the top posts these days almost ALWAYS from some dickwad billionaire who is somehow connected to Paypal at some point, it’s where these guys get most of their information from, too. What this ends up looking like is a self-fulfilling dicksuck circle – the tech overlords interact with people who tell them that they are awesome (other overlords, Miles Ian Cheong-style dickrider types, sundowning retirees, racist 12 year olds), they have podcasts where they invite other dumb bitches who agree with them to nod and say “exacccccttttlllyyy”, and they get 100% of their opinions from posts.
As a frequent consumer of Posts myself, I am not in a great position to criticize their general consumption. But its important to use posts to more impactfully understand the world around you as it actually exists, not to completely reject it. The overlords have been post-poisoned into living in a completely fabricated reality, one dictated by the horde of shitheads they’ve amassed as their personal following…
In most ways, it’s no different than how Fox News warped the minds of our grandparents and now parents generations, but it is still somehow…kinda worse. For one, most Fox News grandparents do not have billions of dollars and endless time to turn their insane grievances and pants-shitting hysteria into actual policy – these guys do. But the internet is a dark and horrid place, and the depths of depravity on there can and will eventually make it’s way to these tech overlord freaks timelines. You can see how vulnerable their shitty, wet little brains are to this kind of input – Elon went from a Hillary supporter to a Nazi Party 2.0 booster in less than a decade thanks in part to Posts Poisoning. The future is bleak, but it’s going to get a lot bleaker while these botched-penis-implant motherfuckers hold so much sway over what we see online, and how that feeds the broader conversations offline. You cannot post them back into sanity or normalcy. There is an answer, though: seize their assets, burn their houses to the ground, and throw em in jail. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.
different-church-lady
Only by gullible idiots.
different-church-lady
That doesn’t sound simple at all.
SpaceUnit
Who is going to seize their assets and put them in jail? Batman?
TBone
Perfect place for this very short interlude
https://bsky.app/profile/abeljaimes.bsky.social/post/3lindupsvlc2j
TBone
@SpaceUnit: no, silly, Catwoman! Childless and covered in fur and dryer lint
Jeffro
shorter: “just because someone is smart at something…doesn’t mean they’re smart about everything”
alt shorter: “just because someone is rich…doesn’t mean they’re good, smart, or know much”
Jay
@different-church-lady:
Honoré de Balzac
Old School
Pretty sure I’ve seen that “my feelings must be handled gently” quote before today.
Edit: I guess it was Krang in 2018. (Twitter)
TBone
@Jay: now you’ve done it!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mvhFs2bdRpE
TS
So they are making sure that fewer and fewer humanities courses are available to take. Solves that requirement.
lynno
@different-church-lady: Never gonna happen. These children of Musk are all Snowdon 2.0 with realtime Intel to sell. They have all the personal info on FBI, the folks who took care of our nukes, and every government worker that they would consider has value….on multible thump drives.
Jay
@lynno: The Dog Boys are not billionaires and are expendable.
If the Rule of Law ever comes back.
RSA
@TS:
But wouldn’t that significantly degrade their earning potential? /s
It’s sad that so many degrees in STEM are seen as no more than credentials, as if universities are trade schools and nothing more. (To be clear, trade schools are important and we should have more of them. We shouldn’t recast universities in that role.)
WTFGhost
No offense, but… today’s coders are proudly ignorant of “Computer Science” and see no need for college. And part of it is Moore’s Law; computing power has expanded so much that you can write total *crap* for code, and it might still perform well, and mostly do the job that you want it to do.
I’m not saying that makes anything else that was said is *wrong* – just, “wow, now *that* is an assumption I wouldn’t have made, that they have college educations.” I’ve seen too many MySQL tables that couldn’t use more than 50% of their disk space, because their primary keys were effing HUMONGOUS. No computer scientist would do that, or allow that, but a SQL “coder” can (and OMG, *do* they!!!).
Um. We now return you to your normal misanthrope with lots of psych talk and other nonsense.
kindness
I’m so thankful to have never gotten a Twitter account. Seeing other people’s links is enough for me.
No One of Consequence
All of these bags of water walking around, talking as though they are made of wrought iron. Reality is going to be unkind, I predict.
-NOoC
Jay
https://nitter.poast.org/bungarsargon/status/1892659483806924994#m
WTFGhost
@RSA: Total agreement. You don’t know why we need ten English Lit professors arguing over whether Hamlet and Mom ever got down, but, there are students who just *have* to face those profs down, to prove they can do it. And some of them are *not* in the humanities (or pre-law – where argumentativeness is a virtue).
Going to college is to learn how your brain works, and how you can use it best, and to find out your strengths and weaknesses. It’s there to make you a more complete person.
And yes, college educated people tend liberal, just like reporters, and other people who are forced to deal with the world as it *is*, not as they wish it was. If soi disant “conservatives” weren’t so effing stupid, there’d be a lot more college grads willing to follow them.
Jay
https://nitter.poast.org/RonFilipkowski/status/1892644313198219627#m
Arclite
I have to hand it to Bill Gates. He was an asshole when he was a techbro, but after retirement he has really tried to make the world a better place.
Ohio Mom
Ohio Dad chose to go to Case Western because they had a reputation for insisting their engineering students take humanities classes and be well-rounded. Then a new president was installed and focused on making CW more or less a vocational school. Ohio Dad still feels cheated.
File this under, stories spouses have heard too many times.
RSA
This isn’t quite on topic, but speaking as a computer scientist, I sometimes draw an analogy to physics. Consider a shade tree mechanic who fixes his friends’ cars on the weekends. One of his friends got a degree in mechanical engineering and now works in the auto industry; he and she sometimes talk about the why behind engines. She took physics courses to get his degree, but a deep dive into theory wasn’t needed. Some of her physics professors, on the other hand, are very theoretical… But it’s all physics in the end, right?
The idea I’m getting at is that physics has had millennia to differentiate itself into various fields of study, from the very theoretical to the very applied. Computing is still in its relative infancy. People in the broad field, from teenaged coders to Turing Award winners, are sometimes labeled with the same category. Eventually things may shake out.
BlueGuitarist
US Senator Tommy Tuberville:
“I wouldn’t be against them taking it from a Pentagon to a Trigon. Cut a couple sides off of it.”
WTFGhost
@different-church-lady: HEE! True, but, I also feared they’d be more TRANSFORMATIVE. E.g., I thought I’d need a Facebook account by now, for something. Thankfully, I was wrong.
That said: every major computing platform that isn’t open source wants to have the ability to track all of your data, and everything about you, maybe not today but they want that ability to hoover up information the moment you click through a too-long “license and privacy policy” notice.
Microsoft wants a Microsoft account, just to log in to an ordinary laptop or desktop. Apple wants an Apple ID. Google wants everything, including your entire genetic history, so it can start plotting to ensnare any potential children (I kid, Google lawyers).
We made TikTok illegal because having the stuff TT gathers puts the US in danger, if it’s in the hands of China. What moron thinks China isn’t buying this same information on thumbdrives in diplomatic pouches? But even if they weren’t, with TT, Google, Microsoft, Apple, all gathering such scads of information, without any real regulation, there’s an obvious, sitting right in front of our effing *faces* national security explosion just waiting to happen.
If we have any meaningful national security, now that Trump’s in office. You think he’s sent Putin the NOC list yet, or is he waiting for Putin’s next b-day?
(I would find it stunning if there were such a document as a “NOC list” since that would be a ridiculous security threat by its very existence. That said: would Trump make one, and send it to Putin? In a (ahem) New York minute (sorry guys – still, I agree, his parents share the overwhelming majority of the blame, by far, for bringing him into this world and… well, Imma not finishing that sentence.)
(okay, okay, “…and not raising him right” was the end of the sentence, but that RUINS the JOKE!)
TONYG
@different-church-lady: I think that the key phrase there is “when I was in middle school”. For myself, by the time these “geniuses” came along I was in my late forties, and I saw them for the frauds they are.
Dan B
@Arclite: I know people who have been close to Gates for years (decades?) who steered him towards compassionate liberalism. I’m very grateful to them.
Dan B
@BlueGuitarist: More evidence that Tuberville is the stupidest guy in the Senate.
NaijaGal
@WTFGhost: Marko Elez is a 25-year-old Rutgers computer science graduate and an unashamed racist. Many of the other DOGErs are CS majors. Some were hired directly from high school (to your point). As a computer science major from a liberal arts college (I had to take a year and a half of humanities), I agree with the original sentiment.
NaijaGal
@Arclite:
A good deal of thanks for that goes to Melinda.
TBone
@Jay: they’re a little late to the game
eclare
@Ohio Mom:
I’m a CPA. The best class that I took in college was on Russian lit, taught by a Russian immigrant. You learn to think on your feet when the final, the only test, is oral!
A Ghost to Most
I was writing computer network switch software when Bill Gates was just figuring out how to be a greedy bastard, thus setting the mold for techbros, and convincing me not to emulate him, or that fucking salesman Jobs.
TBone
@Jay: if anyone knows tiny-dicked
it’s that fucking guy.
TBone
@BlueGuitarist: Pythagoras weeps
WTFGhost
@NaijaGal: I bow to your superior knowledge.
sixthdoctor
@BlueGuitarist: Holy forking shirtballs, I thought you were mocking him but he actually said that. How does he not drown when it’s raining?
eclare
@Dan B:
His wife Melinda also probably had some influence over Bill. In a recent interview he said causing his divorce was his biggest regret in life.
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: Nice ! =-)
raven
The announcer making a plea for respect of each national anthem. . . and the US fans comply
eta. the Boston Pops on the ice!!!!
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: as always,
Yours in service!
PJ
@different-church-lady:
@different-church-lady:
i.e., the media
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Let’s start with Huntsville Tommy.
Jay
There is lots of valid criticism of the Gates Foundation, from how they invest, how they underspend, to how their projects have significant negative effects, and of course, Charter Schools.
ArchTeryx
@sixthdoctor: The living embodiment of Senator Claghorn, but not a tenth as funny.
( Senator Claghorn, a radio character, was the direct inspiration for Foghorn Leghorn. Tuberville has all the same Big Words, same loud mouth, half the brains. )
cain
@Arclite: No, he’s still an asshole. He’s been working hard to destroy public education.
cain
As a person with 2 degrees in comp sci – I must agree that some of these folks do not have empathy. I loved taking humanities courses especially history. Took history classes in American and Japanese history. Also in creative writing.
It’s probably why I’m not a programmer but I help build ecosystems around open source.
It bugs me that I’m 2 degrees of separation from Peter Thiel.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@different-church-lady: simple is not the same as easy
TBone
As loneliness is to solitude.
Martin
@different-church-lady: One slacker from Hawaii pulled it off. Not too hard. But there are consequences.
TBone
@Martin: I’m willing to gamble on that, and I don’t gamble as a rule.
NaijaGal
@Jay:
This is true but I will be forever grateful for the Gates Foundation’s contribution to polio eradication efforts in Nigeria. It meant that there was a network of trained people ready for biosurveillance and transmission chain tracking who switched gears/focus when Ebola came around. Nigeria contained its Ebola outbreak in 93 days thanks to this, which is no small thing for a population of ~200 million people (at the time).
Martin
@WTFGhost: So, as an actual expert in how such programs get accredited – the accrediting body does require a full year of humanities and social science for all engineers/computer scientists. What’s more the accrediting body requires coverage (and evidence) of professional ethics, how your work impacts society, how you have incorporated diversity and inclusion in design, and a host of other things.
Not all CS programs are accredited (that should change), and not all faculty teaching these programs give a fuck about actually doing those things well, but the folks overseeing the discipline are actually trying to do it.
Starfish (she/her)
@Martin: Some CS programs are housed with engineering while others are housed with arts and sciences (and come with more language requirements.)
TBone
@Jay: 🎶💀
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lCMUkqpI7o&list=PL8D5A65C8DF64ACC4&index=3&pp=iAQB8AUB
Jay
@NaijaGal:
They do some good things, they do some questionable things, they do some bad things. They are a bit addicted to Capitalism and Libertarianism.
different-church-lady
@WTFGhost: I find it astonishing that anyone thinks my data is worth anything.
TBone
PSA The Defiant Ones is on TCM at 10pm EST
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defiant_Ones
Shalimar
On a positive note, I heard Jeff Bezos will be the villain in the next Bond movie.
Or maybe it was that he will own the next Bond movie. In which case the villain could be a South African drug addict who uses his cat as a combat helmet.
Shalimar
@different-church-lady: My data only has value as a sleep aid.
TBone
@Shalimar: FTFY
Shalimar
@TBone: Bond movies have a shock value. no one is shocked by the kid anymore.
eclare
@different-church-lady:
Same here, regarding my data. You want to listen to 80’s and 90’s music? Knock yourself out.
Shalimar
@eclare: try listening to ragtime occasionally so they get you confused with a 150-year-old social security recipient.
different-church-lady
@Shalimar: I had no idea being dead was so lucrative.
Chris
Dear God, who the fuck was ever dumb enough to believe this?
Look, I’m not telling anyone I told them so. I’m not saying I had any idea how bad Musk et al was going to turn out back in 2012 or 2014; I didn’t. I just thought he was, y’know, a capitalist: with all the mediocrity and managed expectations that implied. A cut above the rest? Maybe? His Tesla thing seemed like a plus; anything that nudged along a conversion to electric vehicles was a good thing, though it’s not like he invented the concept, or like he was ever going to convert the entire U.S. car industry to it. His SpaceX thing seemed like a minus; yet another milestone on the road of America privatizing itself to death, another function that the government should be doing itself sent to the private sector. Overall verdict? … Meh? He wasn’t a Koch or a Scaife or an Adelson or a Murdoch, and that was a refreshing. But he wasn’t Tony fucking Stark, either. There are no Tony Starks. Tony Stark the genius inventor who single-handedly invents, designs, builds, and mass-produces technologies that save the world and lead it into a new golden age is as much a child’s fantasy as Iron Man the superhero who punches alien whales in the face.
America was never going to be led into any “Age of Glory” by capitalists. It never has before, either. It says so many bad things about our people and our national myths that anybody ever actually believed the Silicon Valley crowd were some kind of savior-prophets.
Lyrebird
@WTFGhost: Thank you for that!
I can’t comprehend how people like Zuckerberg or Gates are considered techies, when they are businessmen. Gates spotted trends and was willing to steal other’s good work and use tons of lawyers to protect the theft.
TBone
@Shalimar: when opportunity knocks
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EnseiOJ2jGQ
This was on TCM earlier tonight
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9E-01dK5zQ
Shalimar
@different-church-lady: You haven’t taken even 1% of the drugs Elon has, I’m guessing.
Leto
Dear guy who just made my burrito: have you ever been to Earth???
If you’ve never read this before, well… enjoy.
Chris
@different-church-lady:
I really should read the comments first. This, exactly.
Chris
@Jay:
“The great fortune is the great crime.”
Me.
Jay
@different-church-lady:
Wait until you see what the lawyers for the Dead Warren Commissioners bill out.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/congresswoman-wants-speak-dead-jfk-231207912.html
different-church-lady
@Shalimar: I’m guessing half even that little would kill me.
TBone
@Leto: aha! Thank you!
TBone
No comment but I’m itching to make it…nope no naw no way.
Shalimar
@Chris: I didn’t know how bad Musk was back in 2012 or 2014 either, but that is only because I didn’t know his background with PayPal. If I had read more and known he was the worst of that batch of evil assholes, I could have predicted his path forward.
TBone
@Leto:
SO stolen!
different-church-lady
Good news: The Turtle is retiring.
Bad news: he’s not yet burning in hell.
Chris
@WTFGhost:
Other than the military, college is also our country’s main institution that takes a bunch of newly minted adults from the four corners of the country and a vastly different set of cultural heritages, class backgrounds, etc, throws them all together, and expects them to form connections with each other. Even if you don’t study abroad, even if you don’t go out of state, even if you don’t finish, it’s still one of the best places in the world at teaching the simple lesson that not everybody’s like you, and you need to get along with them anyway. (Something far too many people never learn).
Bluntly, university could actually be the four-year-summer-camp that its dumbass critics accuse it of being, and it still would be worth every penny for that experience alone.
TS
@Ohio Mom:
Thank you for cheering up my day – I have heard so many of those stories.
Eric S.
@Martin: it’s been 30+ years since I graduated with a CIS but I don’t recall ethics in my comp sci classes. I suppose it was a section in some classes I don’t recall. When did this requirement go in to effect?
VeniceRiley
@different-church-lady: I assume it’s a meta data thing. You’re in a grouping of people like you. It’s how they manipulate masses, and pick out anomalies.
Jay
@Shalimar:
Felon Husk was no surprise to me. Who the hell takes their Canadian family to Botha’s South Africa, then flees back to Canada, when Apartheid fails? Oh yeah, a Canadian Nazi who wasn’t hung during WWII.*
He wasn’t even a somebody when I had my fill of soutpeil’s, (literally, Afrikaner for salt dicks).
*Yes, we had a Canadian Nazi Party, no you can’t see membership lists, they are still classified to protect the guilty.
Chris
@cain:
Even the “best” billionaires are still just a reminder of the Clement Attlee principle:
“Charity is a cold, gray, loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money on a whim.”
azlib
I guess I was lucky. I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science, but my BA was in Psychology. I find working with computers and networking rewarding, but they are not everything and will not solve all our problems. And don’t get me started on AI or Cryptocurrency and what I think about those ridiculous bubbles. Dutch tulips anyone?
Aziz, light!
Yes I need some brave boys and girls who aren’t afraid to live outside the laws of gravity. Folks who like to live in tubes and push buttons. People like YOU!
Chris
@Lyrebird:
This goes all the way back to Thomas Edison, the original Elon Musk. Everyone thought he was a real-life Artemus Gordon, steampunk-wizard-inventor. Actually was mostly just really good at taking credit for what a bunch of other people did.
Chris
@Shalimar:
Yeah, most of us just didn’t know much about the guy beyond the public image, unless we were into tech. But even with nothing but the public image, anyone who bought this savior-of-the-planet crap was still nutty as a fruitcake.
Jay
@azlib:
AI or Cryptocurrency are great way to spot the scammers, the gullible, the soon to be fleeced, the conmen, almost as good as a MAGgot hat.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/17/argentinia-opposition-impeachment-milei-cryptocurrency-collapse
Classic rug pull, with a twist,
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/02/18/libra-token-s-co-creator-bragged-of-sending-money-to-argentine-president-milei-s-sister
Gin & Tonic
@Chris:
I’ve brought him up here before, but from everything I know, Michael Dell seems to be a decent person. At least you don’t see his mug every time you turn around.
NB: If you happen to know for a fact that he keeps dismembered kittens in his basement freezer, please don’t tell me.
Dan B
@Jay: At one time there were some members of Mars Hill Church, very new age conservative, who’d gotten into high positions in the Gates Foundation. They may have been the source of the charter schools.
Bill Arnold
@different-church-lady:
The techie visions are of complex individual-level predictive models of behavior built from everything known about a person, including interactions with media and other communications.
Such models could be monetized, e.g. for bespoke AI-created individual-targeted marketing campaigns to separate persons from some or all of their assets. Or to manipulate their behavior/beliefs.
PatrickG
As a CompSci graduate myself, I’m still proud that I snuck in a year and a half of humanities before I got called out and told to stop.
If I’d known then what I know now, two courses in Greek Tragedies (34A/B) and one in Roman Law (107D) would have been easier to defend, thank you very much.
Also: those who can’t remember course numbers are doomed to repeat the class. Santayana, probably?
Jay
@Dan B:
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/bill-gates-among-billionaires-fuelling-u-s-charter-schools-movement/article_3222f172-d1e5-5eab-9b4e-c5083097463b.html
All told, over several billion, (yes, with a B) for charter schools along with major campaign funding to separate property taxes from Public School funding.
Searcher
Now, engineers and their cousins, CS majors, have well known… limitations, but I want it noted for the record that Elon Musk was an econ major and Peter Thiel has a law degree.
You can’t blame this all on us.
Gin & Tonic
@PatrickG:
Way OT, but has anyone actually ever read anything of Santayana’s, or even know anyone who has? I’ve read philosophers he taught or influenced, but have never read anything written by him.
brendancalling
that was a GLORIOUS rant.
Martin
The other big part of college – at least residential programs, is that you are forced to interact with, sometimes live with people from other backgrounds, other countries, other religions, etc. Tolerance is something you learn and practice, and universities are very cognizant of that. Diversity is important to learning.
JGreen
@Gin & Tonic:
Well, he was the one who wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, but what book or paper that comes from, I don’t know. And I don’t know anything else he wrote.
Chris
@Gin & Tonic:
No, but I’ve heard his name a lot. Every time I listen to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire, mainly.
sentient ai from the future
@Bill Arnold: i wonder how well those multi tensor models predict my behavior when one of my organizing principles is “avoid using things that track me”
Belafon
This right here is why I don’t trust trade schools. Everyone needs a college level understanding of history, government, and literature.
UT Dallas, BTW, still forces nearly two years of humanities.
VFX Lurker
@Leto: Thank you for sharing that. Hilarious.
Bill Arnold
@sentient ai from the future:
Good question. Probably not well.
I, too, try to make myself unpredictable by such methods.
e.g. the very best text compressors (too big to be practical) are built with large language models. Try to write such that completions/autopredict are usually incorrect, even if trained(or finetuned) on your own output.
Jay
@Belafon:
My first post high school, school, was a Trade School. That was 3 years after I graduated from High School, because Reaganomics killed the Universities but “factories” needed trained workers, ( too cheap to train them, themselves).
Here in BC however, History, Social Studies and Civics are each mandatory courses in Grade 8 to Grade 12.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
OT: Was catching up on some of today’s threads. Reading John’s post, I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared as I am now in my entire life. And I think John is probably right. I don’t think anything that is happening right now is going to lead to anything good. Never in my wildest dreams did I think things were going to go to shit this quickly. At most, I thought we’d be here in a year or two. Not 1 month. My boss was a fucking idiot for insisting “nobody is going to go to jail”.
It’s disturbing to me that some of the checks and balances have fallen apart so fast.
My preparations include getting a certified copy of my birth certificate from my birth state’s Vital Statistics to send to the State Department to apply for a passport.
I also made the extraordinary decision to begin researching buying a 9mm pistol for home defense, mainly Smith & Wesson. I’m not somebody who likes guns so this is not an easy choice for me, but recent events have convinced me it may be necessary. I hope I have never have to use it.
I’m definitely not on the top of anybody’s lists like trans, gay, disabled, POC, etc are, I’m a white guy, but I’m not rich and I do consider myself ace (asexual). How do I know this regime won’t eventually decide to come after me for being childless and single? Or for being a union member? Or for being a Dem according to state voting records? That’s public information.
And frankly, anybody can become disabled if they suffer a bad enough accident or have bad enough luck they develop a bad condition like cancer, diabetes, or other genetic disorders
Even if I’m not personally targeted, there’s always the possibility that civil order could break down due to some crisis, probably of the administration’s incompetent making
It’s nuts that it’s come to this
Elizabelle
Timill mentioned on the previous thread that Kevin Drum is still with us, and posting.
Had to laugh at his 2nd most recent post: had a few choice words for President Musk and King Trump:
Elizabelle
In moderation for previous comment. Maybe a word used sarcastically? Anyway, thanks if you clear the comment.
Ebony
@cain: So you are not a programmer, because you have empathy? Judging all programmers for the actions of a few admittedly powerful programmers, shows that your empathy is limited.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Train up on safety and it’s use.
Harden your home, cameras, lots of cameras, I prefer 12 gauge shotguns.
Ebony
So all tech people are evil, loser nerds? Why isn’t there any rants about business people, lawyers, academics, military, and the working class that supported Trump? Humanities are not going to save us. What’s the excuse are you going to give for all of those Federalist Society lawyers or for the Heritage Society think tank workers that came up with Project 2025. As a programmer, I refuse to be a sin goats.
sentient ai from the future
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): i am sticking with not owning a firearm, but i’m also comfortable enough around them to know that i need to practice shooting them in order to be a decent shot, and i am weighing the options for introducing the transgender preteen to target shooting.
Ebony
@Searcher: How dare you bring facts into this and ruin a shoddily written rant!!!! /s
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Aside from cameras, long screws through the door flames and hinges into multiple studs, steel doors with kickplates, drop bars, one at knee height, one at shoulder height, security films on the windows, set up one safe room in the house.
That way they can’t kick, jimmy or slam the doors, to gain entry, can’t break windows to gain entry, ( or shoot through them with a pistol or toss in a firebomb).
The safe room is defensive position #2.
If things go sideways, sandbag all the exterior walls up to windowsill height.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Canada beats U.S. 3-2 in overtime. That was one of the best hockey games I’ve watched. Good on Canada.
Origuy
I got a BS in Computer Science at UIUC in 1978. The database class I took is mostly obsolete, and nobody writes compilers from scratch anymore, but Shakespeare hasn’t changed (although some of the interpretations have) and the Buddhist and Hindu mythologies are the same. I’ve forgotten all of my German and they dropped a letter from the alphabet since I took it, though.
NotMax
Hope the U.S. team has packed for Guantánamo.
//
NotMax
#116 fix.
@Old Dan and Little Ann
Hope the U.S. team has packed for Guantánamo.
//.
Jay
@NotMax:
It’s not Canadians vs. ‘Merkans.
It’s members of Canadian NHL Teams vs members of US NHL Teams, so the ruZZian’s, Swedes, Finns and Canadians that form most of the US Team will be okay, if they can get to an airport or border in time.
NotMax
Could it be any more symbolic?
SS United States leaves Philly, birthplace of America, on journey to be sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
ArchTeryx
@Leto: That has got to be one of the most righteous rants I’ve ever read in my life. Also one of the funniest, especially the add-on rant about using a fork to eat your burrito.
As horrible as this day has been, I just about died laughing.
Jay
@NotMax:
Oh you are in deep trouble now, kiddo.
Dolt47 Morons wrote the “Gulf of America” in such a way, that it only includes the US continental shelf.
So it only depends on where they sink it.
You might have a defense, just kidding, have you seen the Morons in AG posts, the White Supremacist Court and Justice?
Kayla Rudbek
@Leto: and here I thought this was going to be about John Scalzi’s burrito abominations before I clicked on the link. There is someone else out there who can screw up burritos just as badly as Scalzi can, in a totally orthogonal manner to Scalzi’s approach of “clean out the refrigerator and put all the leftovers into a tortilla and call it a burrito”.
ETA: Scalzi is a great writer and a good person, he just has the same “don’t waste food” attitude as my late grandfather the Depression survivor. I would bet that we could get Scalzi to make an MRE burrito if someone bought him MREs.
Ron
@Jay: the mini tournament was called the four nations faceoff. It was team USA vs Team Canada in the final. Sweden and Finland also had teams.
cain
@Lyrebird: He used to have some article about “The Road Ahead” and he was consistently wrong.
cain
@Ebony:
How empathetic your response is as well. I salute you.
I’m not a programmer because I’m terrible at it. I’m ADHD, and so I constantly make mistakes and it takes me 3x times to write code others do. That said, the final output is pretty damn good.
Making the link to programmer as lack of empathy is an interesting leap of logic. Given that I spend all my time helping programmers, I know this is not true. My value is helping building a community around a codebase and building an empathy in how we all work together.
I defend my open source developers every day against attacks by entitled people for having the temerity to write code and give it away for free. I am valued, and loved for the work I do.
cain
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Consider switching to an open source operating system like Linux.
You can’t trust U.S. based tech corporations. Open source code is your last line of defense against this kind of bullshit. We aren’t going to cave against the feds.
cain
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Fascist regimes don’t last long. To keep the outrage going they have to keep finding new groups to be pissed at.
Already you see more and more folks are being isolated. Eventually, it’s going to be a white male about 55 years old who owns god, isn’t a govt worker and owns a business of over 500 people.
sab
@Ohio Mom: I wondered about that. I went elsewhere for undergrad but to Case Western for my graduate work, and I was very underwhelmed by the Case kids’ writing and reasoning. I was in accounting and business. The Case kids were mostly accounting undergrads moved up to grad level.
Their writing and reading (and thus probably reasoning ) skills were appallingly deficient. They couldn’t read and counter a WSJ editorial. They couldn’t even read it.
Sorry for your spouse, but I shared his shock when I got there.
sab
@Ebony: Been beating up on you later because of “pre-law.” I have a law background and as far as I know that is not a thing. There isn’t even coursework much less a major. In UK Law is an actual undergraduate course, and if you didn’t make it into that you can still minor in it in hopes of getting accepted into the career.
USA law schools don’t care what your major is. Law students weigh heavily on the humanities but nobody holds that against them. What were your grades? What were your LSATs? Can you write? Will your daddy contribute heavily to our school?
sab
@sab: This pre-law thing got me worked up because I saw it on tv. I was ” What! Huh!” until I realized it was Hallmark and thus utter fictional nonsense.
But Ebony had a valid point. We are beating up on the coders and computer science people, when the guys who are really making waves and fucking up are the salespeople with peripheral computer skills. Elon and others.
The coders plugging away are not doing this or directing this.
Matt McIrvin
@PatrickG: I went to a liberal-arts school with complicated distribution requirements to keep the technical majors “well-rounded”.
But the broad idea was that classes were divided into three “areas”–Area 1 was arts and humanities, Area 2 was social science, history and government, Area 3 was physical/biological sciences and math. You had to get a certain number of credits in all three areas, and you had to do a sequence of related classes outside your major area–it could become a minor, but didn’t have to be. (Mine was French literature!) My daughter’s college has something similar.
I had my complaints about these requirements, but mostly that the rules were too complex and micromanaging (only certain specified classes counted for these requirements) and it made the courses you needed too tricky to get. They would have been fine with just a little loosening.
But when I got to grad school I realized that some engineering schools had nothing like that, and the students had basically taken nothing but courses related to their concentration for four years. My school actually had a cap on the number of credits you were allowed to count toward graduation in your major (and I exceeded the cap, but I’d gamed it out so it didn’t matter). Some of these schools had a minimum that was higher than the cap at mine.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: When I was TAing, I recall some students who described themselves as pre-law, though this wasn’t a concentration.
There wasn’t such a major as “pre-med” either, but those students were a very distinct bunch since they were slotting themselves into courses that were in some cases specifically contrived to satisfy the entrance requirements for medical schools. That was, in fact, my meal ticket through grad school–they kept giving me an intro physics class that I can only describe as Electromagnetism for Pre-Meds. Never was there a more infelicitous marriage of tricky course material and students who were completely uninterested in it, but really critically needed a decent grade. I used to remind myself that they might be holding a scalpel over me someday.
AM in NC
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, my husband ready him in grad school and thought he had some interesting things to say.
AM in NC
@Leto: Tears literally running down my face from this. Thank you!
Chris
@sab:
Based on the OP, it seems like the part of computer culture that does the most to fuck up people like Musk and Zuckerberg is the user end where they’re sitting on their laptops getting progressively higher and higher on their own products, rather than the creator end of whatever they had to do with making the products.
(Again, see Thomas Edison analogy. They’re not the techies actually inventing or building the stuff, they’re the owners getting rich off of their work. Capitalism’s the same in every field, in the end).
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: My experience in the industry (in the Northeast, not Silicon Valley) is that while there are a fair number of libertarian-right code monkeys, the majority of them who express opinions are either very liberal, or sort of NPR-centrist types.
This recent behavior among the billionaires has this undercurrent of contempt for their employees.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: That cohort was the whiniest bunch of students I ever had to teach.
Sketchy math skills but wanted an A because their GPA was 4.0.