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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • I don’t think their hand is really that strong, as much as they’ve been trying to convince people it is. Their media is powerful, the image they project is powerful. They have convinced us to fear of a massively powerful military-backed surveillance state, as we should, but is that really something they can achieve? Only with a lot more apathy and cowing to authority than they’re actually going to get, I think. Americans (and even the military is made up of Americans) are an unruly bunch at the best of times, and the powers that be might think they have enough money and enough security in place to protect them as their popular support dwindles and the MAGA wave they rode to power begins to realize that these authoritarians are not giving them back “muh freedumbs” like they promised but are in fact taking more of them away. As the famous quote goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The regime has been ignoring and laughing at protests like 50501 and No Kings. They will have to fight eventually. Would the current regime survive more LA riots? Vietnam war protests? Another million man march? Probably. That’s obviously what they’re preparing for, as they should. But how far are they actually going to be able to go? And how far will the resistance go? I agree, we’ll see once the cards are all on the table. But I think there’s still plenty of room for hope that the actual future isn’t going to be as bleak as it may seem right now.


  • Interesting analogy, and a great point. I think it’s a lot like poker. They place their bets, we place our bets. They raise the stakes, we raise the stakes. Eventually one of us is either going to fold or we’re both going to end up going all in, and then we’ll finally end up seeing what our hands end up being once that happens. Are any of us prepared to fold on this? I’m not. Are they prepared to fold? I don’t know. Are they bluffing or are they holding all the right cards? I don’t know. If it comes to that, I guess we’ll find out.




  • As long as we’ve got some vestiges of free speech and free association available to us we need to do what we can to organize and sow the seeds of resistance. They’re not coming for us yet, although I suspect they likely will eventually. But if you’re already too afraid that they’ll be coming for you to do what needs to be done, then they’ve already won. And I don’t think they have. Resistance is the only choice that makes sense. But as you said, it’s just my opinion. I’m allowed to share my thoughts and opinions though, at least for now, and I will do so.


  • Without understanding the root cause of why the immune system became misinformed in the first place, and without knowing whether that cause still exists or has even become worse, you’re playing a very dangerous game telling it to forget everything it knows and just blindly hoping it will make better choices the next time around, treating it as if it were just a random outcome and gambling with people’s health. Imagine trying to treat someone with arthritis and after treatment their autoimmune situation gets even worse and they become diagnosed with MS, so you treat it the same way again and it becomes a very aggressive form of MS. That violates the hippocratic oath to do no harm, which is why there really isn’t much interest in such approaches unless they’ve been proven reliable and safe in carefully controlled studies, which your proposal hasn’t been (and presumably wouldn’t be able to be).





  • That is kind of the UNIX philosophy at work and you’ll find that in a lot of open-source and self-hosted projects. The goal is to do one very specific thing really well in a small and streamlined package that integrates into other processes in a clear, defined and transparent way, not to be one of these super-convenient but bloated “it does everything and the kitchen sink” behemoths. It’s a different style of software development but it’s popular in the open source community for a lot of reasons, for example it’s a lot more maintainable by a single person or small team with limited time. You’ll find most of these large complex open source projects are organized and developed by companies (like Pangolin is), while the smaller UNIX-style projects are often written by individuals or very small teams volunteering their spare time. There are tradeoffs in either direction, but for self-hosting I think following the UNIX philosophy has a lot in common with a typical goal of self-hosting, reducing your dependence on for-profit companies that have a financial incentive to enshittify or otherwise try to squeeze money out of you.





  • A fair government will regulate fairly. A corrupt government will regulate corruptly. Unfortunately it’s not within living memory of any Americans to have a non-corrupt government, so they hate all regulation since all regulation they are familiar with is corrupt pork barrel politics and industry protectionism. They are, of course, missing the target. The corruption is the problem, not the idea of regulation on its own.

    The more innocent bystanders they kill as a consequence of the rampant corruption of their government, the happier they are because they think it means they’re killing the corruption. Meanwhile the corruption is having a great time looting the pockets of the dead and dying.


  • CPU thermal protection is pretty solid nowadays. I’m also old, and I too remember Athlons you could actually cook on, but in my general experience I’ve found they did learn from that and the thermal protections are not exactly a complex system. It’s basically math, as far as calculating how much power is going in to how quickly it can heat up to where the thermal sensor is placed, and they simply shut it down before it’s mathematically possible for the heat to reach a damaging level. It’s very hard now to actually destroy a CPU due to internal overheating, at least any of the ones I’ve had various “incidents” with. They aggressively throttle down and shut down and are perfectly fine once properly cooled.



  • That review hit the nail on the head: Why do all these people feel like they have to hide if they aren’t doing anything wrong?

    They know what they’re doing is wrong. They are doing it anyway. They want you to believe they are “just following orders” or “just following the money” but they know what they’re doing. They are not your neighbor, your family, your coworker. Maybe they were once, but they’ve sold their soul and they are not that anymore.

    These people are irredeemable. They are the enemy of every good person on the planet, and the sooner everyone accepts that, the sooner we can do what is necessary to stop them. Fascism comes in all shapes and sizes and colors, it wears all sorts of flags and clothes, but it’s still fascism down to the roots, it will kill or convert everything it touches into a tool for its own use, and it will use those tools to destroy everything good and kind in the world. Nevermind the woke mind-virus, this is the fascist mind-virus and it’s absolutely real, we’ve seen it before, and we’ve seen what it can do.

    We must fight it again. They want us to feel helpless and hopeless, but we’re not. We won last time, and we will win again. But be prepared to fight hard, because we’ll need to.



  • As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)