What grinds my gears

In my line of work I sometimes need to write technical or other types of documents. I was once tasked with writing what was essentially an explanation and tutorial on a particular task in a particular embedded system scenario using certain libraries, as I had been working on that and they wanted me to write a clear tutorial and specification of how it was done, for others employees who may need to work on the same or similar things. The document ended up being, if I remember correctly, about 30 to 40 pages long, and I took particular care to make it as clear and legible as possible, paying special attention to its layout. I added page breaks if needed to make sections, sub-sections, tables, lists and code samples be all contiguous on the same page if needed, or if eg. a code sample was so long that it necessarily needed to be on two pages, I made certain that the page changed at a clear logical place in the code (rather than being, for example, between an "if" line and its bo...

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and not only is he very openly and brazenly socialist, but he ran his campaign on very socialist promises, like promising free public transport and free food, and to "tax the rich". Unsurprisingly, when the actual reality of the economy of the state of New York hit, it turned out that creating his Socialist Utopia isn't actually as easy as he promised. He can't increase income tax (because that's decided at the state level, not at the city level, and the New York State Senate has clearly indicated that they have zero intent in raising income taxes), running free public transport actually requires money that the city doesn't have, and trying to build new state-owned Socialist grocery stores is not only enormously expensive but also very inefficient, and would be a constant money sink. (Such a construction project is also likely to last longer than his 4-year term as mayor. It assumes that he will be eternally re-ele...

Many critics of the modern far-left have coined the term "suicidal empathy" to describe what's happening particularly in Europe and many parts of the United States and Canada. And that's the obsession that far-leftists have about "multiculturalism" and bringing in as many people from distant foreign lands as possible (nothing is "too much" for them, no matter how many millions we are talking about), and extremely fiercely and rabidly defending this practice to the point that the problems, especially the crime statistics among immigrants, are routinely censored, hidden, diminished and denied, and anybody who would want to shed some light on the issue is demonized, attacked, vilified and harassed. Most of them go so far as to defend the immigrants even when they themselves are victims of that crime, even the most heinous forms of it (ie. sexual assault and rape). The fact is that Europe is committing societal suicide. In most countries the people in ...

I have written previously about the YouTube channel "Veritasium", which is one of those huge education channels with millions of subscribers and tens of millions of views per video, which publishes videos mostly related to educational content such as history, technology, science and other similar content. In that previous blog post I comment on how I lost brain cells because of the absolutely and utterly stupid comment the author made towards the beginning of one of his recent videos. I would like to write about something else I have noticed about the channel over the years, as I have noticed somewhat of a change in more and more of the videos in recent years. I call that phenomenon the "Numberphile syndrome". A term I came up with, but it refers to what happened to another enormously popular YouTube channel, "Numberphile". You see, the Numberphile channel, which is an education channel about mathematics, became enormously popular very quickly when it was...

A public swimming pool in the municipality of Porrentruy, Switzerland, recently banned all foreigners from entering due to the chronic massive amount of crime and unrest happening there year after year. Can you guess what happened  immediately  after the ban? Sexual assaults dropped to zero. Violent crimes dropped to zero. In fact,  all  crimes dropped to zero. Police incidents overall dropped to zero. Noise levels dropped near zero. Unruly behavior dropped to zero. The swimming pool area became  extremely  quiet, tranquil, peaceful and clean. And that was not because the place became desolate and abandoned. In fact, the exact opposite: Ticket sales surged, and the place became one of the most popular (and profitable) public swimming pools in the country, almost overnight. Let that be a lesson to all of Europe. Let it also be a lesson and warning to Japan and South Korea. Learn from the mistakes of other countries before you yourselves commit those same mis...

I wrote in 2019 how I got banned from editing Wikipedia even though I did not break any of their rules, and only and solely because they didn't like me pointing out their political bias. That blog post has full details of how this bias manifests. This is, of course, not an isolated case. The amount of people that the mob that administers Wikipedia is huge. Recently, however, they banned a rather high-profile person, and for the exact same reason: He wanted Wikipedia to be, once again, more politically neutral, like it was in the beginning. And who was this person who got banned? Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia. That's right, a co-founder was banned from his own platform, for the huge sin that he wanted Wikipedia to become politically neutral. According to my experience, such bans are rarely if ever done by wide consensus among the administrators (very much unlike they always claim). Instead, there's plenty of evidence, and my case is an example of that (b...

There are myriads of stories of people recounting their experiences with unusual coworkers, sometimes extremely unpleasant ones. Here's mine. I work for a tech company that, besides doing its own research&development, provides consulting services for other companies (which is actually pretty common here, among most tech companies). "Providing consulting services" is just a fancier way of saying, essentially, "renting expert developers". (This is a service that's quite on demand. If a company can't find anybody with enough expertise to outright hire, they will seek such a developer from another company, even if it's more expensive. The advantage is that the "consultant" is almost guaranteed to be competent and an expert on the subject matter, and it's much simpler and easier for the company to temporarily "rent" him than to actually hire someone, which comes with a whole swamp of legal obligations here.) I was one time ...