What grinds my gears

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 ...

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...