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.

Gopher itself is spec’d out in RFC-1436. It’s not a particularly difficult protocol to implement. It’s easier than HTTP/1.1 (though not necessarily pre-1.0 versions; those are basic in an under-designed way, and I’d say the same about Gopher). I don’t know if that licensing fee claim holds up. People may have been worried about it at the time, but UMN never had a patent on it or anything, and RFC’s are public. If there were fees charged, it’d be the creators themselves charging them.

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.

I have the most boring “this edible ain’t shit” story. Tried a bunch, and it knocked me off to sleep for a good 10 hours. I think they had a lot of CBD in them. They were sold as sativa. While research says there’s no difference between that and indica, I suspect things labeled as one or the other tend to have other things in them, like CBD, which makes them live up to their reputation. There probably is no difference when you prepare them all the same under lab conditions.

Don’t start like that. Do your research, and start with a low dose and work your way up.

Later, on stuff labeled indica, I started having light forms of ego death. Not the melting into the universe that you might get from proper hallucinogens, but more like a feeling of becoming part of my environment. My tolerance levels are too high now to get that sort of thing, though.

Zombiecide has entered the chat.

Cats in the wild tend to share food with their friends. They must think we’re some rude ass motherfuckers when we push them away from our own dinner.

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.

I laughed out loud at the debate where he said Harris’ father was a “marxist professor of economics”. That is not a thing.

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.