Victory!

I recently built a computer, something I haven't done in eight years.

It was made out of boycotts, a team red build, my first since the Athlon I built circa 2000. For the last twenty years I've been loyal to Intel, Nvidia+EVGA, and Gigabyte, but all their recent failures and blaming of customers and corporate bullshit has rendered them dead to me.

So I went with an MSI motherboard, the hot new 9800X3D, and an RX 7900 XT, ostensibly to experiment with machine learning before the AI bros make me unemployable, but I discovered that Cyberpunk 2077 runs beautifully on Linux with Proton and Steam, so Microsoft is getting fucked, too!

But that's not why I'm here, writing this today, for I discovered in my new computer installation reverie that the file manager in Ubuntu is no longer riding the short bus. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are victorious over prissy opinionated software dumbfuckery, Nautilus has a sane and rational date format again!

In trying to find information about the fix, I discovered a dialogue that occurred three months after my experience with the regression, and hole-ee shee-it, to paraphrase Tim Minchin, pigeons had their holes filled. I hope he had a private tantrum when the fix was finally forced through.

And speaking of being right about everything all along, I sure did nail the mechanism of the reverse dog whistle. I drove by a Deplorean yesterday and had to resist the urge to sieg heil the driver, worried it would not be perceived as ridicule, thus putting me in the same category.

Weird coincidence

There's a quote repeated here that's making the rounds on social media: Women Impacted by Abortion Bans Share Gut-Wrenching Stories at DNC

It reminds me of a thing I did. Back when Houston was underwater, and the fascists were still legally impotent, I had a flash of inspiration:

Texas Blood

It's Gilead down in Texas
And all the internet snitch lines are down

It's Gilead down in Texas
And all the internet snitch lines are down

I've been tryin' to kill his baby
Lord sent me a clinic underground

Well, I'm killin' his baby
Lord, and I'm goin' back home to slay

Well, I'm killin' his baby
Lord, and I'm goin' back home to slay

Well, back home, he preaches on Sunday
Baby, our father will rue the day

The rot in academia

Netflix is promoting a cartoon about Mesoamerican child warriors, a rip-off of Kung-fu Panda, and I am reminded of this: Ancient Maya DNA shows male kids were sacrificed in pairs at Chichén Itzá. I'm wondering, how historically accurate is this cartoon? Are you sure you want to celebrate your ancestors?

What sticks is the money quote from co-author Dr. Christina Warinner:

Early 20th century accounts falsely popularized lurid tales of young women and girls being sacrificed at the site. This study, conducted as a close international collaboration, turns that story on its head and reveals the deep connections between ritual sacrifice and the cycles of human death and rebirth described in sacred Maya texts.

I'm still boggled at the phrasing. Is murdering boys less lurid than murdering girls? Do "deep connections" (ie. a superstition about twins) rationalize child murder? Why the fuck does she talk that way?

There seems to be a trend in anthropology where they've gone all in on Rousseauian noble savage bullshit. I've seen a lot of people reference The Dawn of Everything as if it were decades old established scientific consensus and not the three year old revisionist TED talk that it is.

They really, really want to believe that humans are innately peaceful, cooperative and egalitarian, and that feudal slave hierarchies are an invented ideology, strictly European and exported by colonial empires, despite the fact that they occured on every continent in prehistory.

They're not explicitly saying it, because then the agenda would be self-evident, but every fucking word is a rationalization of anarchist or communist ideology to sell to gullible children who think their "praxis" is going to topple fascist billionaires.

Nothing of value was lost

Since Lil' Ben Shapiro was brave enough to torch his cherished doll collection to protest women ruining his favorite toys, I figure I ought to step up and be willing to sacrifice just as much.

 

Ok, not really. I took that picture a month ago, and unlike the previous examples, I didn't actually throw them away (because this shit actually has value on eBay).

What prompted this was discovering that John Carmack caught the fascist brain worms, and learning that the founder of Mouse Systems is an antivaxer clown.

You are what you pretend to be

Which makes Scott Adams a pants-shitting, paste-eating, drooling imbecile.

There is a tendency among extremists to use feigned ignorance as a rhetorical device. They're very comfortable telling lies of omission to troll their opposition into engaging them.

Leftist academics were adept at this. They would redefine common words, say something ridiculous in public with those words, and then chastise those who called out their deliberate stupidity, for common words mean something different in academia, and you, in your ignorance, presume the common definition. It was such an effective trolling tactic that the fascists invented a conspiracy theory around their slippery rhetoric, and are now targeting them specifically.

While the fascists have always loved their Big Lies, and their dog whistles, they've really come to embrace the passive-aggressive lie of feigned ignorance. It's the reverse dog whistle - we know what it means, they know we know what it means, everyone knows what it means, and yet they persist in denying it.

They'll keep on denying it, despite it making them look stupid. Performative stupidity is a loyalty signal, like the frat pledge eating the soggy biscuit - it demonstrates who is willing to go all the way. And if that freaks out disgusted onlookers: mission accomplished.

The thing the fascist trolls never quite comprehend is that we don't have to care. No one is obligated to engage with your trolling. No one has to prove your dog whistle, or that you're stupid, or that you're not really that stupid, just evil. You simply stopped mattering to people who matter. Buh-bye.

This is making the rounds on Mastodon: The Case For Shunning.

If only someone had made a social media website to facilitate that.

Doctorow was right

Oh, look, he coined a word for everything on the Internet going to shit: enshitification.

And as the Internet goes, so goes the world.

It all makes perfect sense, when expressed as moronic leftist contrarianism

 

First Eric Clapton, and now Roger Waters, I'm making some much needed space in my CD cabinet.

I was worried that Neil Young might be having boomer moments, and had a panic when I googled this:

‘SNL’: Russia Disinformation Campaign Ropes in Neil Young, Aaron Rodgers

But it was actually just Saturday Night Live poking fun at his ditching Spotify over their hosting alt-right mouthpiece Joe Rogan.

The Onion wanna-Bees straight-up stole the joke a month later to go full retard for Putin:

Neil Young Threatens To Leave Spotify Again Unless Vladimir Putin Backs Down From Ukraine

Opininated nobody whines about more successful opinionated nobody

It is often the case that the only value criticism has is to bring an audience to the thing being complained about.

I was struck by this blog article posted to Hacker News for two reasons:

One, he seems butt-mad that Jon Blow did a thing.

I mean, don't get me wrong, Blow is one of those people with the demeanor I call "home schooled", and it doesn't surprise me at all to find out that he is now an anti-vaxer loon and bitches on Twitter about "cancel culture". But he puts his time and money where his mouth is, and isn't afraid to tell the world to fuck off while he does his own thing with blackjack and hookers, so I give him the same limited respect I gave the TempleOS guy.

And two, I discover, I'm not alone in the wilderness!

Which is weird, because I've watched a dozen hours of his videos on the Jai programming language, and never seen a recommendation for the talk where he connects the shit state of software with the collapse of civilization.

Everything I thought would be happening one or two decades from now is happening now.

My recent obsession with retrocomputing, my advocacy for Right to Repair, my contempt for the software industry, and my contempt for the Internet in the age of social media, are all glommed together in the same place in my brain, and I finally understand why.

It's the pointless complexity, stupid.

And it isn't that things are unnecessarily complex, it's that things are also deliberately complex to obfuscate how control over systems is exercised. "Stallman was right" is more right now more than ever. The new normal is creating a brittleness in our infrastructure that will literally accelerate and exacerbate the collapse of civilization.

That blog also informed me about the Uxn project, which is very much about these themes.

I was already aware of Collapse OS. I'm surprised that none of my searches about stack-based virtual machines brought me to Uxn, since it is the approach I was taking in my half-assed attempt at an llvm knock-off for 8-bit and 16-bit computers.

Assholes are like people: everyone who believes in "opinionated software" is one

So I went to the Ubuntu daily download page for 22.04 to see if they made any progress on a bug that seems to crater performance in the window manager and makes it unusable.

The last amd64 build was on the 21st, and today is the 24th. Interesting, a broken build, or have they paused it to resolve it? Is that build newer than what I downloaded? I open the file browser...

"Sat"

Wait, what? Everything else is a date. When the fuck was Saturday? I ain't doing math if I don't have to. To the Google!

How to show full date and time in Nautilus/Files 3.6+ list view?

Ah, good, there is a solution, probably a setting in the application, or even better, a global setting in Gnome.

What, no? They just straight-up made it dumb, and removed all configurability? Almost a decade ago? And it is still retarded? What the fucking fuck!

People complained in the "bug" report, and it even broke localization, but they still went through with it, and the stupid anti-functionality is still there.

Why must everything in this world turn to shit? Why are people choosing to make it shit?

Walt Whitman, Improv'd

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,
Until I shat myself,
Because I was actually sick,
And not just discomfort'd by the depth of my ignorance.

Comic Book Guys

See if you can determine what is missing here:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

If you guessed "how to actually get a list of files in a single directory", you win the prize!

For the record, this is what I've come up with:

find dir -maxdepth 1 -name 'somefilter' -printf "%f\n"

If you don't want newlines, replace it with \0 for maximum protection against Unix shell fuckwittery.

But what is even stupider than Bash is this Comic Book Guy bullshit linked on the page. Even in their cherry picked examples there are opportunities to teach something interesting, but they'd rather whine about stupid people asking the wrong question than the one that matches the cookie-cutter answer they've already memorized.

People like this are the bane of Stack Overflow. They don't understand the more technically arcane questions, and shit their whys and don'ts instead of simply keeping their ignorant mouths shut.

Herpitus derpimus

The three shibboleths for identifying the stupidest people who believe they are smart on the Internet:

1. "correlation is not causation"
2. "[citation needed]"
3. "biased"

Sue me, you little prick, I fucking dare you

Apparently links from blogs are now bad Googlejuice so SEO scum are going around threatening people into removing the very spam they injected into comment systems. Well, now they've threatened a woman who was actually praising their client with free advertising ten years ago:

http://www.bigpinkcookie.com/2012/07/18/dear-guardlex-youre-doing-it-wrong/

I guess they need to threaten the Wayback Machine next, because you can get the original link from its archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070627025512/http://www.bigpinkcookie.com/2001/07/27/specs-similar-to-mine/

The client of clueless SEO fuckwit Jacob Getman is eyeglasses.com. That's right, eyeglasses.com is enganged in search engine optimization fuckwiterry, and now their reputation is being destroyed by Jacob Getman.

For the noobs who don't get it

No sir, I don't like it

I googled my blog name because I always forget which blog host it is on, and the first hit was a Twitter account that no longer exists. So I grabbed it for myself.

What I want to know is, how the fuck does Twitter know who I know?

This social networking thing getting out of hand, and the promiscuity of all that data is making me feel a little itchy.

Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming

Crickey!

Someone's really stealing my shtick:

That so many groups have projected their issues onto “Avatar” suggests that it has burrowed into the cultural consciousness in a way that even its immodest director could not have anticipated. Its detractors agree that it is more than a humans-in-space odyssey — even if they do not agree on why that is so.

Guess I should have written my psychoanalysis of all the whiners while it was still relevant.

Calgon, take me away!

Damn, leave it to some prissy lit-crit wanker to ridicule Avatar good:

Where the movie goes wrong, then, is in making the sociopathic immaturity of a spoiled Western brat into the ideal form for the child-human that it wants anti-modernity to be. After all, while even your Rousseauvians understand the noble savage as a contradiction of modernity, as a cleansing bath washing away its discontents, the Na’vi only confirm Sully’s most childish presumptions of privilege: their world turns out to be nothing but toys to play with, nothing but one long summer camp fantasy of being the fastest, bestest, most awesomest ninja-Indian ever, and then a big giant womb to hide in when it all gets to be a bit much. There are no consequences there, nothing you can do to make mommy stop loving you (though Lord how he tries!). Like toys and parents to a three-year old, it is unthinkable that they say no or exist without you, and all they can ever ask is that you play with them.

Free government money programs THAT YOU'RE ELIGIBLE FOR!

Killing blue people and taking their shit is immoral because it violates property rights:

In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need "Unobtainium," I turned to a libertarian friend and said, "This is the Kelo decision." Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a "grander" project.

Zor-BEEZ!

Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

Oh, yeah, Bobo? Did you actually ask any Na'vi what they though of the movie? Or you taking it upon yourself to speak for them, in perfect harmony with your colonial condescension? Offensive, indeed.