Hot Links, Cool Treats (in no particular order)

When the next performance review cycle comes around, these old goals get dredged up and compared against how reality shook out. A good manager might go “Well, I see what you were going for and you were well on your way, but circumstances changed and I can sorta morph one into the other… You’re fine.” A less good manager might say “BZZZZT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT.” Either way, you have to figure out how to artfully contrive 250 punches into more than one goal on this worthless sheet.

The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach

And I've been thinking: maybe this is my Curmudgeon Era. Not in the nostalgic, “things were better in my day" way. More in the "I refuse to be gaslit by modernity" way.

I'm entering my curmudgeon era

I don’t care how well their ‘AI’ works – or if you found a fancy fun use-case. It fucks me up watching peers treat this tech from people who want to eradicate me as a future worth considering. I don’t want any of this.
I don’t need an agent, I want to maintain my own agency.

Tech continues to be political

your path for achieving success is two fold: 1. play great. 2. in all things, be easy to deal with.

- Danny Barnes’ "how to play in someone else’s band {gain twenty years of road experience with a five minute read}"

The more common the problem, the better. Design systems should prioritize the mundane.

- Jeremy Wagner’s "Make it boring"

When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

- Bill Watterson’s "SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED"

No, we Erisians seldom pray, it is much too dangerous. Charles Fort has listed many factual incidences of ignorant people confronted with, say, a drought, and then praying fervently -- and then getting the entire village wiped out in a torrential flood.

- Malaclypse the Younger’s and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst’s "Principia Discordia"

But voting with your dollars has some obvious deficits. The first one is that you can’t shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. [...] The next one is that dollars are not evenly distributed.

- Cory Doctorow’s "Amy’s Kitchen, a case-study in the problems with consumerism"

Official MW2 literature is full of quotes from Martin Luther, Aeschylus and even Albert Einstein on the horridness of war. [...] But this ironic self-awareness is as vapid, as platitudinous, as passive, as the myth of duty the game itself propounds.

- Joshua Casteel’s "Gaming and Reality in Modern Warfare"

Things like math and logic and writing and physics and drawing and all kinds of things got way easier after I had started learning to code. The same goes for the spiritual or psychological experience. Coding (probably better known as meta-thinking, thinking about thinking) is an amazing foundation for other fields.

Everyone, learn how to code

The biography is, of course, a very old form. It is a long and often gruesome tradition. For most of the history of the genre, biography was usually a way of writing less about life and more about death. [...] But this is what happens when we start writing the lives of the living. We become sycophants. ...

Very Ordinary Men

Remember what I wrote above about psychics frequently having conned themselves, that many of them aren’t even aware of their own scam? The same applies here. I think this is an industry that didn’t understand what it was doing and, now, doesn’t understand what it did.

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

This is a mistake. To say that an organisation is institutionally discriminatory makes no comment on the character of its employees, merely the pattern of its outputs. Not everyone who controls trans healthcare is a frothing bigot[...]. My issue is with the outputs of the system they manage.
[...]
Colonel Korn wanted to sidestep all that and just focus on “the facts” about the upcoming changes. However, as I tried to make clear to him, there are no neutral facts. I cannot communicate facts without attending to the context in which people interpret both their content and importance; nobody, no matter how good they are at communicating, could do this job and achieve the outcome he wants. If I made videos explaining the upcoming changes it would not make trans people trust the NHS more; it would make trans people trust me less.

My Doctor Emailed Me Back

They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture and consider ourselves cured. They like exoskeletons, which none of us use. They would never consider cyborg those of us with pacemakers or on dialysis, those of us kept alive by machines or made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or anti-depressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image.

Common Cyborg