What grinds my gears

If you have ever watched and followed the videogame speedrunning scene, you have probably seen it many times. While there are certainly exceptions, it's more the rule that whenever a speedrunner gets an extremely difficult world record in an extremely competitive speedrunning category of a popular game (and sometimes even when it's not so immensely popular nor competitive), they engage in an extreme over-reaction and start screaming like they are being murdered. And it's not even the more... let's say "effeminate" ones that are doing that. Almost all of them are doing that, with only few exceptions. I understand that when one has practiced and attempted a run of a particular game literally thousands and thousands of times, and the world record is  extremely  competitive and difficult, and when you are approaching the end at world record pace, heart rate and adrenaline skyrocket, and the speedrunner becomes extremely nervous and tense, and then actually achievi...

Recently a relatively random indie game was brought to the limelight because of a random and completely unnecessary piece of virtue-signaling within the game, in a scene where some kind of robot calls the female protagonist a "lass", and she retorts with "I'm a they, not a she" (even though the robot never uttered the word "she", but whatever). When people started digging a bit deeper, it turned out that this appears to be yet another " Concord "-like situation in many ways. While not identical, many details are very similar: Just like Concord, it was developed by a smallish indie game studio. And similarly to Concord, it took a whopping 7 years for the studio to develop the game (for Concord it was 8 years). The amount of content in the game is probably similar. It's not a game that should have taken 7 years to make by a competent team of developers. (I'm not at this moment aware of what the budget for the game was, but given a 7-per...

There have been numerous cases, all over the world, but most prominently in the United States, and most usually in casinos, where cops have wrongly arrested and charged completely innocent people based on a complete misconception that many cops (and sometimes other authorities) have. And that misconception is that machine facial recognition is extremely reliable and almost foolproof. Certainly more reliable than people's subjective estimations. Indeed, a lot of casinos in the United States (and sometimes some other establishments) have facial recognition software running that tries to detect people who have been banned from said casinos for one reason or another. When they ban someone, they take pictures, feed them to the software, and the software then uses facial recognition algorithms on all the live feed that they get from their hundreds of security cameras, and alerts the staff if there's a positive, ie. someone who has been banned potentially being back. The thing is, a l...

When the whole SKG movement started a year or two ago, the counter-arguments by the gaming industry were the same. Today, a couple of years and a huge amount of clarifications later the counter-arguments are still the same. It essentially boils down to: Gaming industry: "You can't force game publishers to keep their servers running forever." SKG: "Yes, and that's not what we are asking." Gaming industry: "But you can't force game publishers to keep their servers running forever." SKG: "Yes, agreed. You are correct. And that's why it's not what we are asking." Gaming industry: "But you can't force game publishers to keep their servers running forever." SKG: "AGREED! We are NOT asking for publishers to keep their servers running forever!" Gaming industry: "But you can't force game publishers to keep their servers running forever." SKG: "AGREED! YOU ARE CORRECT! WE ARE NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT...

Rupert Lowe, a member of the UK parliament, recently released the results of his team's investigation into the absolutely massive amount of abuse of underage girls in the country that has been going on for over two decades, with an estimated amount of victims of 250 thousand. And that's a  minimum  estimate, the ones that the authorities have records of. That's right. Not 250 victims. 250 THOUSAND victims. And that's the number of victims, not even the number of rapes. The number of rapes is probably in the millions, as many of these girls were abused for years and years. What's most shocking is that not only did law enforcement and social service workers not do anything about it even when directly reported by the victims themselves, in many cases they outright  helped the perpetrators . At some "safe houses" the staff literally provided children to the rapists, handing them over to them, fully knowing what the perpetrators were doing. In several cases whe...

Some time in 2019 an anonymous user in 4chan made this post, which got some popularity and has recently resurfaced and commented on by some youtubers: It defines the concept of "foundation myth" of a society, and posits that for all intents and purposes the second World War became such a thing for the modern west. It really is an insightful notion, as said war and, especially, the Holocaust, has indeed strongly shaped the western world and its policies, and it seems that it's almost always the underlying foundation and basis for many sociopolitical decisions that are made, as if it was our sacred duty to somehow keep "making amends" in one way or another because of it. As the post puts it, the Holocaust is for all intents and purposes considered sacred: You cannot mock it, you cannot doubt it, you cannot make light of it, you cannot dismiss it, you cannot consider it unimportant and irrelevant to modern sociopolitical decisions and how it shapes our society. Mon...

One thing that the modern far left just loves to do is wordplay: Change the meaning of words, misuse words, use words in (deliberately) confusing ways, and of course and most prominently, ban words and replace them with other words or invented neologisms. In many cases, while this wordplay is almost always completely idiotic, at least it makes  some  semblance of logic. Even if their arguments are wrong and idiotic, at least they can present the semblance of an argument or rationalization about why they are changing the meaning of a word, or banning it, or replacing it with a neologism. Sometimes these neologisms are outright dehumanizing and insulting, but at least there's some twisted logic behind them, some twisted rationalizations. However, sometimes there just aren't. Sometimes they just invent neologisms with no rhyme, reason, explanations or rationalizations. One that baffles me the most is something they have been using for a few years (and which, astonishingly, has ac...

Recently Ryan Breslow , the CEO of the software company Bolt Financial , told in an interview that he got rid of the entire HR department. When asked why, he said that said department was doing nothing but  creating  problems that didn't exist, all of which disappeared when he just fired the entire department. Of course he didn't dare to say it directly, but I believe it's pretty safe to assume what kind of people were employed in that department: Far-leftist activists who were doing nothing but bossing people around, creating all kinds of insane rules and trying to enforce those rules on the workers, and inventing and fabricating "problems" in the workplace to justify their existence, activism and rules. I could well imagine that the actual competent productive workers breathed a sigh of relief when those trouble-making busybodies were gone. Also Meta (formerly Facebook) recently fired 22% of their personnel in order to, according to their own words, "run th...

For many decades in the very recent past (as in, even up to the 2000's), and possibly even to this day, there was quite a slavery problem in several Middle-Eastern countries. I don't know if it's still the case today (because the issue has been brought up in international media and light shed on the problem internationally), but for example Qatar had actual bona fide slavery for decades, up to at least the early 2000's, and possibly even to this day. It worked like this: Many factory owners would import workers primarily from sub-Saharan Africa (which makes it extra ironic and blatant), confiscate and keep their travel and identification documents, and keep them working in the factories for inhumanely long hours (usually 12 hours and even more), and sleeping in absolutely deplorable conditions in what usually amounted to little more than warehouses stuffed with beds. Doors of both the factories and the sleeping quarters were almost always kept locked to stop them from l...

There has been a relatively recent trend of alphabet people "fleeing" so-called "red states" in the United States and move to more "blue states", and especially to the city of Seattle, which has been one of the most far-leftist cities in the entire country for over ten years now. They allege "persecution" in states like Texas which, according to them, are eroding their "trans rights". Are they really being persecuted in states like Texas by the government? Are they being jailed, or discriminated against, or in other ways mistreated by the government? Nope. (That's actually impossible because it would very quickly lead to a Federal lawsuit and the Federal government intervening.) Are they perhaps being persecuted, harassed and assaulted by citizens? Not really either. (If they were, you would see it blasted from every single news outlet 24/7. The far-leftist activist journalists would be all over it. Yet, nothing. Pretty much cricket...

With the proliferation of free AI tools that can be used to generate video material (something that, quite sadly, YouTube is still outright supporting and promoting) YouTube has been flooded by such videos. And the thing is, AI tools have become so astonishingly good that they can give the outwards illusion of a high-quality high-production-values video, at least judging from the thumbnail, description and the first few seconds of the video. For the longest time it used to be that that "professional look" required actual work, actual effort, actual talent. Good thumbnail pictures (that are not just a random frame from the video proper) required work and knowledge to produce. The contents of the video itself, if it wasn't just someone talking to the camera, required at least some production values, relatively good camera and filming equipment or, if it was some kind of animation or presentation using eg. vector graphics, clip-art or outright hand-drawn animation, it requir...

Many flat-earthers somehow seem to think that this is such a great "gotcha" question that proves their flat Earth delusion, and which they often present in debates: "Do airplanes need to constantly pitch their nose down to follow the curve of the Earth?" And the answer to that question is a big fat YES! Yes, yes, yes, yes, a thousand times YES! Yes they do! That is the  only  correct answer. There are no "buts". By this point I'm getting sick and tired of the vast majority of debunkers and, incredibly, even some airplane pilots answering something other than a clear unambiguous "yes". Astonishingly, and sadly, some of them, sometimes even some airplane pilots, outright answer with "no", which is just mind-boggling, and goes to show that even experienced professional airline pilots don't know every single detail about their own profession and specialty, even though they really should. I'll explain why I think that misconcepti...

Something quite strange has been happening in the Linux development community over the past few years. It's not one single thing, but a number of things, every one of them bad on its own, but the situation being all the worse because of the sheer number of changes in said community. For almost three decades the Linux development community, especially the Linux kernel development team, have been very careful and conservative in the sense of how they approach the development work and what kind of tools, languages and technologies they adopt for said work. In fact, the Linux kernel itself has had for a couple of decades one of the strictest rules in existence for any major software project in terms of the requirements for its code and accepting patches and updates. Yet, all of this has been radically changing in the span of just a few years. The Linux development community at large, including the Linux kernel development team, for some unfathomable reason has been rushing to adopt eve...