What grinds my gears

Consider this analogy: A tribe of a couple hundred people live in isolation, their level of technology being that of the Stone Age: They live in straw huts, every day they hunt and gather for survival, and that's it. Their most advanced technology is some wooden spear sharpened with a rock. The entire tribe regularly suffers from famine because there's so little to hunt and gather, and overall their living conditions are very poor. Then two of them put their heads together and start thinking about how they could make their own lives better. They start thinking, they start tinkering, they start developing, they start testing and experimenting. After years of this kind of work they start to slowly developing for themselves a farm where they cultivate plants and raise domesticated animals. They develop tools for this purpose, they develop better buildings and better infrastructure. It takes years and years, and it's a lot of work, but over time it starts paying off: Their cult...

Recently Destin Sandlin, the owner and author of the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay (one of the biggest channels of its content category) made a video about the so-called "Johari Window" . Said "window" is a sort of classification about knowledge about oneself, as an individual person, about your personality traits, behavior, customs, beliefs, and other personal characteristics, divided into four categories: Things that you know about yourself which is also known to others. Nothing to hide here. Things that only you know about yourself, which you have never revealed to others, and which others have no way of knowing about you. Things that you don't know about yourself but which others do, as they can see things about you that you yourself don't even notice. In other words, personal characteristics that you are unaware of, but which others have noticed and can see. Things about yourself that you are unaware of and which nobody else knows or has noticed eithe...

For some reason for a couple of years now videos about "owning" video games pop up at semi-regular intervals. And, so far, I have not seen a single one that actually handles the subject correctly. It has become really tiresome to see authors, even those who should know better, talk about the ownership of video games and very explicitly and directly comparing it to ownership of physical objects. Indeed, just recently I saw once again such a video, where the author (who is the kind of educated person who should know better) explicitly made the stereotypical comparison with "imagine if you buy a hammer, and later the manufacturer comes to your home and takes it away." He also explicitly talked about how video games "have become" license-based (or at least attempted to, by the publishers), as if they had not been in the past and this were a new thing that the gaming industry is trying to introduce into the mix. Sigh. The sheer ignorance is so tiresome by this ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently made a post about how they are leaving X/Twitter in favor of other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Mastodon and TikTok. They made a long post about their reasoning for it, and it just doesn't make any sense. They talk about how small businesses might use Instagram or someone's "abortion fund" might use TikTok to spread information, or how "you're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community" and a bunch of other weird justifications. None of that makes any sense because they are writing as if using Twitter was somehow mutually exclusive with using all those other platforms. As if, unless they leave Twitter, they can't use those other platforms to communicate with people. Which, of course, is completely asinine. There's absolutely no reason why they can't duplicate their posts an all social media platforms, including Twitter. Posting on Twitter does not somehow exclu...

The title of this blog post is probably not a surprise to anybody, but it's still a horrifying fact of American policing: The vast, vast majority of American police officers have zero or extremely minimal training in how to deal with a citizen having a mental health crisis. This is particularly bad and scary because cops get constantly called to such situations, and thus they go there with no idea how to handle it. And, thus, they usually just handle it like they have been taught to handle dangerous people who are a potential or actual danger to the cops: In other words, with violence and sometimes lethal force. I don't know what the numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised that, given the size and population of the country, cops are being called to people having a mental health crisis probably several times every day. Given how prevalent this situation is, one would think that they would have extensive special training for it. But no. They don't. Or, at least, extremel...

Flat-earthers tend to have very childish notions about pretty much everything, and how space rockets work is no exception. A 10-year-old child often wonders why space rockets don't go straight up rather than making a curve that ends up with the rocket flying almost horizontally. Wouldn't it be easier to just go straight up? And, of course, flat-earthers can't understand it either because they are at the same intellectual level. Well, I'll try to explain it as simply as possible: Space rockets, even those that end up launching probes or space capsules away from Earth, need to get into low-Earth orbit first. Why? Because getting to space requires an absolutely humongous amount of fuel, and the main rocket booster (the biggest cylinder) and the auxiliary boosters (the slightly smaller cylinders on the sides) have only a limited amount of fuel in order to get to space before running out of fuel. In other words, the big rocket booster does not have enough fuel to go on forev...

A few weeks ago King Charles III of the United Kingdom made several speeches about Ramadan, and even organized events and banquets for Muslim dignitaries explicitly celebrating that festivity. Can you guess how many speeches he has given about Easter, even though such speeches have been a tradition for the British royalty for decades, perhaps even centuries? Zero. Not one single speech. Not even a social media post. Nothing. When it comes to the King of the United Kingdom, this is not just a small thing. He has advisors, he has family members, he has an entire staff organizing every single public appearance, every single speech, helping him with every single decision he makes, and who understand how important each public appearance is, and what kind of signals such public appearances and speeches give to the public and the world at large. Both the King himself and especially his staff are hyper-aware of the signals they are giving when he gives or does not give particular speeches for ...