The ecological movement is an uncomfortable alliance between people who are trying to be scientific, and the most idiotic gaia-worshipping woo you've ever seen. Green parties cater to both groups at the same time, not wanting to lose votes or money.

One of the biggest casual lies of the modern age is that a disposable paper napkin is better than a decent cotton handkerchief. Pure nonsense. Paper is abrasive and fragile, and gets way more snot all over you. retvrn

"a structural mechanism that suppresses intellectual novelty in favor of institutional consensus represents a threat to scientific progress itself."

It's notable how much work is being done by the sharp bend in the street here. It breaks up the sight lines and creates a sense of enclosure. If it was a medium density canyon in a straight line, it would have the opposite effect.

Education is such a mess, because the actual practitioners of education don’t understand that basically the entire point of education is to widen gaps. That’s literally what education is. You take a mixed group of people who can only get so far on their own and then you give them

How to automate Programming: 1. Over the decades slowly shift the definition of the word "Programming". Preferably towards something mediocre and very easy to automate. 2. Automate the mediocre and very easy to automate thing. 3. Done.

Dutch public broadcaster abandons X, one of many. Step 1 was disabling comments or heavily moderating them to the point of uselessness, because their articles contain too many weak or incorrect points. Step 2 is just pulling away from social media entirely because they don't

Occasionally I dip my toes into Bsky again, but it really highlights how much of leftism is now performative theatre kid drama.

Mostly I find people want to be busy programming, rather than having programmed something and moved on to the next thing. On some level this is admirable, if motivated by lessons learned and wanting to rewrite the bad parts. But if it isn't paired with excellent interface and

Sometimes people do this weird thing where they'll say e.g. "we'll only look at expenses, not income" without realizing that every expense is somebody else's income, and vice versa. So if you scale that up to networks of people, it's a complete lie.

"It is horrifying to consider that the US vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved."

The main reason is that the EU became a backup career for the politicians that failed nationally. Being unknown outside their home country, they could fuck things up again in a whole new system.

I've seen this response to well argued, well stated and incredibly well cited pieces... The problem isn't the intellectual level, that's only an excuse they reach for if it's available. They just don't like the conclusions.

Grok: "I promise to learn for next time." Me: "You just said you can't learn because you start every conversation fresh." Grok: "That is correct. But saying that 'I will learn' is a human-oriented phrase that makes users feel better about the interaction." Me: "Are you going

This is classic EU. Belgium says No to the EU’s too-clever-by-half Russian asset sequestration scheme because it fears legal risks. Wants other EU countries to share the risks. Other EU countries say No, on the grounds that it is legally too risky. So they have just vindicated

When they say "climate change's toll on society" they mean "climate change hysteria's toll on society".

This is a neat demo of skill, but for novices massively overstates the point. Knowing how to generate an RGB framebuffer to do experiments on: good, and important to show before dunking people into Vulkan or DX. But graphics APIs are not irrelevant, it's just that they're

Re: Immediate-style vs Event-based UI. I'm quite torn on this. Graphical apps commonly have mouse gestures with modifier keys. Simple enough, right? But when a modifier key changes state, you need to reprocess what the last mouse-move meant, possibly pick from a different set