What grinds my gears

Rust is a programming language introduced a couple of decades ago. From a programming language design point of view it's relatively unremarkable, even ugly, lacks quite many features that most other programming languages have (such as inheritance), uses horrendous naming schemes especially for its standard library, and is not very different from the literally hundreds and hundreds of similar languages that have been  invented in the past 40 years. However, if you were to listen to the Rust cult, it's the Second Coming of Christ. And the strangest thing is that a lot of program development companies and communities are rushing to replace everything they have with Rust code, for no discernible reason. It's literally like a religion. There was, for example, a recent speech given at a conference related to a large open source software project (I think it was related to Wayland, or Ubuntu, or something like that), where the presenter sounded more like a preacher than a programme...

As I have commented many times in this blog, most flat-earthers seem to have the cognitive capacity of a 7-year-old. This is not just a random insult and spurious defamation. I'm being 100% serious. They seem to be, in many aspects, stuck at the 7-to-10 years old level of intellectual, mental and cognitive capacity, while having the life experience of an adult (this life experience being about the only thing that allows them to function in society acceptably well.) One good example of this is how many of them seem somehow incapable of understanding the concept of "force", and they have the same misconception about it than a friend of mine had when we were about 12 or so: And that's that they think that a "force" being applied to an object towards a certain direction means that the object has to  move  towards that direction (and, thus, if the object doesn't move to that direction, or moves to some other direction, that means that there is no such force.)...

I started watching the British TV series "Black Mirror" on Netflix, and noticed a curious abundance of black actors in the series. Most (if not all) episodes of the series take place in the UK, so the amount of black people in the series is quite disproportionate to the real demographics of the UK (even to this day, and especially in 2011, when the first season was made.) My problem is not with black people appearing in such a TV show. Of course leftists would never believe me, but I can genuinely say that I'm not some kind of racist who hates black people and doesn't want to see them in movies and TV. Heck, some of my all-time favorite actors are black (and that's because those particular actors are so charismatic and badass .) The problem is not the skin color of the actors, or even their abundance. Heck, I would be completely fine if the entire series had nothing but black actors and nobody else. The problem is that I know  why  there are so many black actors: ...

For some unfathomable reason the citizens of New York City elected one Zohran Mamdani as their mayor. What's peculiar about him, and the very reason why they voted for him, is that he is very openly and blatantly socialist and communist, preaching the virtues of socialism and collectivism , denigrating capitalism, and making all kinds of asinine promises, like free bus rides for everybody, "taxing the rich", lower rent, and so on. New Yorkers got bamboozled by him on many fronts, and some of the frauds were clear even before he got elected, as pointed out by many politicians and experts. Most prominently, he cannot raise taxes on the rich because he is a city mayor, and income tax is decided at the state level (by the New York State Senate in this case), not at the city level. He literally cannot raise those taxes. So that was just an outright lie from the get-go. So what did he do instead? Well, he increased taxes that the city  can  legally raise, and that would be cit...

I have been writing for over 15 years now how American universities are pumping out thousands and thousands of brainwashed drones who have been trained in political activism and who are going to get into all positions of power and take over every institution, every organization, every company, and enforce their insane political activism. Well, what do you know, we are already seeing the results of this, not only in the fact that almost all of the major corporations have been completely invaded (and thus are engaging in a massive amount of illegal racial discrimination), but there are brainwashed drones in all positions of power now, all the way up to the Senate, as well as several city mayors. One of their openly stated goals is "tax the rich". To raise the taxes for the richest people to egregious levels. They appear to live in this illusion that the richest people in the country are somehow stuck in their current place of living. As an example, the mayor of New York, who is...

Did you know that if you are a citizen of the UK and you have purchased anything on Valve's Steam platform, you are probably right at this moment suing Valve? Oh, you didn't know that? This is news to you? Nobody informed you or asked you? Well, turns out that UK laws are absolutely insane. Indeed, there's an ongoing class action lawsuit against Valve, and you are likely one of the litigants even though nobody asked you, or even told you about it. Is this, once again, the UK government being the tyrants that they have demonstrated again and again to be? Surprisingly, no. It's not the UK government. And this is what actually makes it ten times crazier: It's an individual person, named Vicki Shotbolt, who all by herself, as an individual person, has dragged you into a lawsuit against Valve, without asking you, without informing you, without anybody telling you. You can "opt out" of the lawsuit, because nobody has told you, you are likely not even know you ne...

Sometimes even smart people get bamboozled and misled by some conspiracy theories, and that's because those are often presented like outright scams: The people behind the creation of the conspiracy theory, if they are talented enough and know what they are doing, concoct this elaborate picture of something in a way that sounds extremely believable, if the subject matter is new to you. They essentially present a "here are all the facts, you decide" piece of work which has been carefully designed to sound competent, complete and reliable... while in fact it engages in an enormous amount of cherry-picking, selection bias, hiding evidence that contradicts the conspiracy theory (or sometimes even presenting said evidence but distorted in a manner that makes it appear to actually support the conspiracy theory), and outright fabricating "facts" that are not true. Almost nobody is immune to this any more than they are immune to scams in general. Even the smartest and sa...