What grinds my gears

Because of the recent solar eclipse, flat-earthers all over the internet are once again making tons and tons of social media posts and videos about how the eclipse is not caused by the Moon being in front of the Sun and yada yada yada, making up all kinds of random stuff using completely made-up arguments and blurry photos. Yet, once again, I have not seen a single mention, a single comment, a single reference to, a single explanation attempt, a single excuse, not even a vague hand-wave or dismissal, nothing, not a peep, about the one question that they just have zero answers to. From the thousands and thousands and thousands of posts and videos, I have yet to see a single one that tackles this problem, mentions it in any way, and much less tries to explain it. And that is: How exactly are scientists able to predict solar eclipses literally decades in advance, to the accuracy of seconds, and where the path of totality and partiality will be, to the accuracy of meters? Indeed, scientist...

I recently saw a YouTube video that was a sort of interview of a player who had started playing Star Citizen and had spent a whopping 11 thousand dollars on that game in one year. Not even going into the quality and state of the game, even if it were the best and most polished game in existence, spending 11 thousand dollars on it is just completely insane. I am quite an avid gamer myself, and have been buying video games for over 30 years now. I did a rough estimate of how many games I have ever purchased and how much money I have spent in total on them during these 30 years, and it's in fact somewhere on that same ballpark, actually. Maybe a bit more. Say, very roughly somewhere around 12 thousand dollars in total, ie. about 400 dollars a year. I think about 400 dollars a year in video games is quite moderate. I very, very rarely buy full-priced 60+ dollar games, and almost always wait for a significant discount. During those 30 years I have, perhaps, bought about 20 or so games a...

I have come up with the theory that when it comes to political activism there are, roughly speaking, two types of activists: "Genuine" and "dogmatic".  "Genuine" in this context does not necessarily mean "good", as in doing political activism for a good cause. Many activists are completely genuine but advocating for absolutely detrimental policies. By "genuine" I mean that the activists are fighting for a specific cause, to correct a specific wrong (at least in their view) and, most importantly, if that "wrong" is corrected, they will be content and stop their activism. Problem fixed, it does not exist anymore, thus there's no need to do any more activism, and they can go on with their lives. The vast majority of this kind of activism is for a good cause, some is for a rather irrelevant cause, and sometimes, as mentioned, it might actually be detrimental. But the crucial point is that it's a cause that the activists ge...

I happened to stumble across one of those "1950's ads that didn't age so well" videos on YouTube. Some of the ads in question have indeed not aged well at all. Such as a medical doctor (or, at a minimum, someone claiming to be) exalting the virtues of smoking a particular brand of cigarettes. Or an ad showing medical research results about how a particular brand of cigarette is good for the throat and sinuses. Or an advertisement about a beauty product containing actual radioactive radium (with the ad prominently stating that fact, and claiming that it's not dangerous in such low doses.) The same video, however, also had a couple of ads that showed an archetypal 1950's happy housewife doing something nice for her husband, like for example preparing and serving him coffee (of the particular brand being advertised, of course.) And... that's it. There was nothing more to it in those ads than that. Both had the actress talk about how she wanted to make her hus...

In June I wrote a blog post about how " AI might destroy the Linux kernel ", where I pointed out how the Linux kernel has, during the past months, been absolutely flooded with AI-generated merge requests for patches, fixes, new features and new drivers, with literally thousands and thousands of such AI-generated code being submitted for review every single month. And the pace isn't slowing down. On the contrary, it's only getting worse and worse. I posited that this will be absolutely detrimental to the development and quality of the kernel development because of two possible approaches that the maintainers could take, neither of which is very good: Either 1) they start reviewing every single merge request for validity, which will grind the actual kernel development pretty much to a halt because there are so many of them, or 2) they will become sloppy and start accepting merge requests with only cursory reviewing and supervision, which may introduce bugs, degraded per...

There exist quite some conspiracy theories about statins, about how dangerous they might or might not be, and people having these doubts about their safety and efficacy include some doctors of medicine. However, this blog post is not about that. I don't know if they are safe and beneficial or not. Maybe they are. But this is not about that. Recently I had a routine blood checkup with an employer-provided health benefit physician, and almost all blood levels related to obesity were above recommended levels and good cholesterol was below recommended levels. In a followup phone consultation the doctor  immediately  suggested statins, and gave a spiel about them that almost felt rehearsed. He gave several points and several arguments, literally like a rehearsed speech. I'm not even kidding. What's most curious about it is that he had never seen me personally and, most importantly,  he didn't ask a single question  about my health and life habits. He didn't even ask abou...

One of the most fundamental principles of freedom of speech is the right to make public reviews of commercial products. In pretty much every single country where there's a right to free speech (and probably even a few that don't), product reviews are an  extremely  protected form of speech. It doesn't matter if they are positive or negative. The idea behind this protection is, of course, pretty simple: It's a form of consumer protection. Consumers have the right to know what they are buying by being able to know about the experiences that others have had with the product. If there's some kind of flaw or negative aspect to a product, consumers have the right to know before buying. Sellers and manufacturers cannot be expected to reveal every single aspect of their product, so protecting the right of people to publish their own reviews is extremely important. Which, of course, means that in most countries a company trying to sue a reviewer for giving a negative review ...