UN-confirmed

In case anyone misread that, they mean the United Nations (UN) confirmed it.

Yes, it’s a genocide. Genocide is bad. It’s not that fucking complicated.

Also, people’s goals change and “secure” means something different.

When I was making half as much as I am now, I felt fairly secure. I could pay my rent, I had no credit card debt, and I had a few months’ worth of savings. Money was not a day-to-day worry. Most of my peers were in debt and/or living paycheck-to-paycheck so I felt like I was living large.

Now I am objectively more secure but I feel less secure because I am thinking about retirement, childcare, college funds, and elder care. I have nowhere near enough savings to retire in the foreseeable future. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

Canadian police seem pretty level-headed here.

“There was not a ding on the bus. He did a great job,” said McKenna said. “It’s comical but at the same time it’s serious. We’re thankful nobody was hurt.”

“We didn’t want to spook him,” he said. “We didn’t want to make this a tragedy.”

The problem here is education.

And I’m not just talking about “average joes” who don’t know the first thing about statistics. It is mind-boggling how many people with advanced degrees do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and will argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t affect results.

AI is not helping. Modern machine learning is basically a correlation engine with no concept of causation. The idea of using it to predict the future is dead on arrival. The idea of using it in any prescriptive role in social sciences is grotesque; it will never be more than a violation of human dignity.

Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in putting lipstick on that pig. At this point it is more lipstick than pig.

Other terms that made the shortlist of finalists for this year’s Word of the Year included “agnetic,”

Surely they mean “agentic”, right? Right???

I searched for “agnetic” to see if I was out of the loop and it’s kind of funny, kind of sad. I found a lot of what I guess is AI slop that took a typo and just ran with it. Like this one: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clash-intelligences-agnetic-ai-vs-agent-explained-robin-biwre

Agnetic AI is a newer conceptual framework that extends beyond the traditional agent-based model. The term “Agnetic” is derived from the word “magnetic,” signifying its dynamic, adaptive nature.

https://www.agnetic.ai/ also looks like slop, but it’s realllllly hard to distinguish between AI bullshit and traditional tech marketing bullshit.

Just saw this article today on ArsTechnica, which seems relevant: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/10/believing-misinformation-is-a-win-for-some-people-even-when-proven-false/

Well, telling time is one more feature than most jewelry has, and that’s what mechanical watches really are. That’s not even very expensive as far as watches go.

I sure wouldn’t buy one myself, but I won’t judge anyone for their taste in fashion accessories. In this case I will absolutely judge them, but for entirely different reasons.

Robots commuting to the moon.

Robots.

Commuting.

To the moon.

This is the most extreme case of affluenza I’ve ever seen. Let’s pray that it’s terminal.

This always sparks debate, and I can see why.

There are a million reasons you might need to stop. That’s why highways are designed with specific speed limits, so you have enough time to see hazards and come to a full stop if necessary. If you’re not prepared to stop unexpectedly, then you are a menace to society.

But it’s also dangerous to stop. That’s why most places have laws against stopping (or even going too far below the speed limit) unnecessarily. It’s a hazard.

Neither is an excuse for the other.

I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.

The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.

Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.

It could be a deepfake. A whole new class of conspiracy theory is now actually plausible.

I mean, I fully expect an administration as corrupt and dishonest as this one to spend the minimal time and money required to do such a thing for as long as they can get away with it.

Just wail til they become AI-generated-JavaScript-only shops. They’re gonna be vibing like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

I remember when some company started advertising “BURN-proof” CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened “buffer underrun” to “BURN”, and because, you know, “burning” was the entire point of a CD-R drive.

It worked though. Buffer underruns weren’t a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.

It’s a real post on Reddit. I don’t know what combination of screenshotting/uploading tools leads to this kind of mangling, but I’ve seen it in screenshots from Android, too. The artifacts seem to run down in straight vertical lines, so maybe slight scaling with a nearest-neighbor algorithm (in 2025?!?) plus a couple levels of JPEG compression? It looks really weird.

I’m curious. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!

King Of Ink Land King Body Art The Extreme Ink-Ite has written to his local MP to air his grievances.

Holy shit. That’s his legal name?!

For King of Ink Land, this is particularly tricky as the system believes he’s wearing a mask – but it’s actually his tattoo-covered face.

So is it first name ‘King of Ink Land’, last name ‘King Body Art The Extreme Ink-Ite’? Or is there a middle name in there?

The King of Ink Land, who is now considering using a VPN, was attempting to access a live webcam site when the issue arose.

Whoa whoa whoa. “The” King of Ink Land? That’s his name, not a title!

Godspeed, King of Ink Land. I sincerely wish you success in this fight.

It would be like taking your compiled machine code and editing it by hand because your compiler sucks.

Just use the right tool from the start.

I’m telling myself it’s Irish coffee.

SQLite would definitely be smaller, faster, and require less memory.

Thing is, it’s 2025, roughly 20 years since anybody’s given half a shit about storage efficiency, memory efficiency, or even CPU efficiency for anything so small. Presumably this is not something they need to query dynamically.

20 years ago I would have taken this as satire. Today, reality is far more absurd.

They clearly don’t understand what pride is about, or why it’s needed in the first place. I don’t go around showing my “straight pride” because there is literally nobody out there trying to make me ashamed of being straight. Never in my entire life have I felt unsafe because I was straight. I never had to worry about my family rejecting me if they learned I was straight. Being straight has never affected my housing security. I have not been subjected to verbal and physical assault because I am straight. Nobody has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been sent a brainwashing camp for being straight. There is not a single country on earth where it is illegal to be straight, and there never has been.

You cannot say any of those things about being gay. That’s why gay pride matters. These are not problems of the past. They are all problems today.

The concept is real. I mean, anyone who thought “vibe coding” would be a viable career path for long enough to actually have a career was just not paying attention to reality.

Right now it legitimately takes some expertise to get good results from AI coding. (Most people doing it now get, at best, convincingly passable results.) But the job of a “vibe coder” is much simpler than the job of a conventional programmer, and it will become increasingly simple to automate out the human’s role. It’s not like progress is going to suddenly stop. The fruit is hanging so low that it might as well be on the ground.