What grinds my gears

In my previous blog post about postmodernism I explained how in modernism a big emphasis was put into scientific accuracy, facts, evidence-based testable reasoning, and repeatable experimentation (as well as, on the political side, equal rights and the dismantling of royalty, nobility and all forms of inherited leadership, in favor of representative democracy). I also explained how postmodernism is a completely insane new ideology that makes no sense and pretty much discards all that in favor of, what effectively amounts to, superstitious beliefs about truths and facts being relative, and being whatever we want them to be (one concrete, practical and very widespread example of this being that "gender" is whatever the person wants it to be, and scientific testing has absolutely nothing to do with it.) In some sense, in some contexts, however, it might be more accurate to say that in postmodernist ideology it's not so much that truth is relative, as much as truth being...

During the 90's and the first decade of the 2000's, Valve was one of the biggest and most famous game developer corporations. Their first game ever, Half-Life, was not only hugely popular, but extremely innovative, influential, and a trend-setter. It was one of those fundamental games that does something new, in a manner that really works, and thus influences and defines how similar games are developed in the future. (For instance, while perhaps not the very first one, it was the first highly popular and highly influential game that used interactive cutscenes, ie. cutscenes where the player is still in full control of the playable character. It was also one of the first first-person shooters with a heavy emphasis on storytelling.) Counter-Strike, based on the Half-Life engine, was, again, one of the most influential games of that genre (ie. online "arena-style" multiplayer first-person shooter). Not the first one, of course, but one of the most influential ones, a...

At some point some feminist academic (or other type of author of feminist literature) came up with the term "mansplaining". It referred to one particular behavior: The kind where, in a conversation with several people, if there's a woman present, and some kind of technical or less-than-trivial term is used, one of the men will proceed, unprompted, to explain to the woman what the term means, because he assumes that she doesn't understand the term because she's a woman, and women don't understand technical subjects, or whatever the subject of the discussion is. It might also happen in an one-to-one conversation, with a man and a woman, where the man likewise simply assumes that the woman doesn't understand eg. technical terms because she's a woman, and proceeds to explain them when he uses them, in a rather patronizing manner. (This may be especially egregious if the woman is eg. working in the exact same field as the man, and the conversation is abou...

There are different approaches to creating an artificial intelligence. Two different approaches are what I would call "the chess engine method" and "the AlphaGo method". This is, obviously, the difference in approach between chess engines and AlphaGo, currently the strongest Go engine. Their difference is that the latter uses a self-learning neural network, while the former use explicitly programmed algorithms. Self-learning neural networks have of course been tried many times with chess engines, but they simply are too slow compared to manually coded highly optimized chess algorithms. Something like the current top 100 or so chess engines in the world are manually programmed, rather than using any sort of neural network. This means that every single aspect of how the engine functions has been specifically and intentionally programmed in, and manually optimized for speed and efficiency. Position evaluation, every search tree pruning rule, every search priority r...

The current generation of modern VR has now been around for over a year. Yet it has very little to show for it. Sales figures are absolutely abysmal. As I commented in a previous blog post , both PC VR headsets combined have sold in one year less units than a typical game console sells in its first week after launch. In fact, consider for example consoles like the Sega Dreamcast, or the PlayStation Vita. The former sold over 9 million units, and the latter about 10 million units. Yet both are generally considered commercial failures. The Wii U, at about 13 million units, is also considered at least a borderline commercial failure due to that number (especially considering that the Wii sold over 100 million units). Both PC VR headsets combined have so far sold but a small fraction of that, far less than 1 million units in total. In fact, you can throw in the PSVR sales into the sum as well, and it would still fall short by a long margin (even though the PSVR has so far sold more u...

This is not the case everywhere in the United States (as it probably depends on the state and perhaps even the city), but at too many places the police is incomprehensibly lenient when it comes to "protests". At most places (probably everywhere in the country), deliberately obstructing traffic is a crime, and will have you at the very least detained, perhaps even prosecuted. Except, it seems, if it's a group of people engaging in a "protest". Somehow that seems to elevate them above the law, and the police will not do anything to them. (YouTube is full of videos of people obstructing traffic, and the police just watching, doing nothing. At the very most they are perhaps calmly trying to solve the situation, but not detaining anybody. Not at all places, as said, but way too many.) If somebody were to disturb somebody's peace on the street, yelling at them, calling them names, following them, obstructing their path, and kept doing this for an hour, if the ...

Introduction In the beginning Steam was a product created by Valve to distribute their own games. After it turned out to be surprisingly popular (being pretty much the first viable online store application for the purchase and digital distribution of video games), they opened the platform for other game developer companies to sell and distribute their games. Steam became an absolutely enormous success, and to this day it's still by far the biggest such distribution platform on PC, regardless of all the competition that has spawned once this form of distribution of games turned out to be a very well working model. The problem with Steam, from the perspective of tons of game developers, especially indie ones, was that it was only open to certain manually-picked big corporations. Indie devs had no chance of getting their games sold on Steam. This was a big grievance for years. Thus Valve created the so-called Greenlight system, which opened Steam for anybody. In order to avoid ...

The regressive left is already felling down statues in the United States. It's only a matter of time before they start the nazi-style book burning. Big bonfires made of books and other art, just like the nazis. Mark my words, it's going to happen very soon. In fact, if and when that happens, I will edit this post and add a photo of it. On a rather different tangent, I have also another prediction (although, admittedly, perhaps not exactly as likely as the above.) In the near future the regressive leftist SJWs will start rooting for women to stop exercising and becoming obese. This prediction is inspired by something that happened recently in Australia. A company produced an ad campaign to encourage women to exercise and become fit and healthy. Two Australian feminist academics wrote an article criticizing the campaign, writing among other things: "In its attempt to motivate and empower women, the campaign material may unintentionally work with entrenched norms of...

In a previous blog post I explained the annoying problem with the PSVR and a 4k display . In summary: The PS4 Pro has an HDMI 2.0 output, which allows it to output to a HDMI 2.0 capable 4k display using a 3840x2160 resolution in RGB mode at 60 Hz. (HDMI 2.0 is also necessary if the 4k display supports HDR.) The PSVR processing unit box, which sits between the PS4 and the display, however, only supports HDMI 1.4. This means that if the PSVR is in use, the console can only use the display in YUV420 mode, which has reduced image quality (less vibrant colors, color artifacts), and without HDR. This is because HDMI 1.4 does not have enough bandwidth for RGB at 60 Hz. That blog post explains how it's a real pain in the ass to switch between using PSVR and using a direct connection between the PS4 Pro and the 4k display (for improved image quality), as it requires physically switching cables on both ends. It also explains that a simple HDMI switcher is not enough to deal with that p...

For the longest times the idea that freedom of speech is ending in the west sounded like just paranoia and a conspiracy theory. However, it has become clearer and clearer in just the past couple years that it's a real threat. Country after country, especially in Europe, is criminalizing "hate speech". The problem is that "hate speech" is such a vague umbrella term that almost anything can be categorizing under it. In reality it's just a convenient excuse, and it means anything that could be considered even remotely "right-wing" and "conservative". This includes things like criticism of unrestricted immigration policies, criticism of the crimes committed by immigrants, criticism of Islam (both the religion and the sociopolitical ideology and culture), criticism of feminism, the social justice cult and identity politics, and so on and so forth. In some western European countries, such as Germany and the UK, it has already gone so far th...

For years, the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver YouTube channel used to be one of the best channels in existence, and I was a subscriber and an avid follower. The show itself has much more content, and runs on HBO, and the YouTube channel only posts excerpts; individual stories. However, these used to be really, really interesting for the most part. It used to be one of the last bastions of actual investigative journalism, and many of their stories were extremely illuminating and interesting, and have taught me a lot. For example the story FIFA and the World Cup is one of the best pieces of journalism I have ever seen, even though it uses (as all their other stories) copious amounts of humor. I would recommend this video to anybody. The channel is (well, was) in fact full of very interesting stories about all sorts of sociopolitical issues, such as predatory lending, civil forfeiture, multilevel marketing, and so on and so forth. The show has always been quite left-leaning, ...

Salon.com is an online publication with a very heavy feminist leftist leaning. Recently they published an article: Dang - looks like those women-only "Wonder Woman" screenings were illegal . It seems that a movie theater in Austin, Texas organized showings of the movie Wonder Woman, where only women were allowed, and it turns out that this is actually illegal in that city. I want to highlight one particular paragraph in the article: "As it turns out, the complaints have at least some legal merit. Austin city equality codes ban any public accommodation — such as a movie theater — from limiting their services for individuals based on factors including race, color, sex, sexual orientation and gender identification. It’s a situation even Wonder Woman couldn’t fix." Fix. That's right "couldn't fix". Apparently, it seems that having equality laws that forbid discrimination against people based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation and gen...

Some time ago I watched a YouTube video (which I can't find anymore; I really should get a habit of bookmarking these things...) apparently by a flat earther, and it was both hilarious and utterly confusing, to the point that I'm not even sure if it was satire (Poe's law is in full effect here). The video started with the guy filming himself driving a car to a construction site (I'm not sure if he works there or were visiting a friend; as said, the video is utterly confusing). He blabbers on and on and on about some vague things, and it's hard to get a grasp what exactly his point is, what he's trying to say. And if I remember correctly, this went on for like 10 minutes, so it was really long, just rambling mostly disconnected incoherent things. It's hard to explain the exact nature of this rambling without the video or a transcript, but it was the kind of rambling of a person who is apparently trying to make a point about something (a flat Earth in this c...

Author credits, oftentimes even extremely long end credits, are ubiquitous in video games. (Some video games go to absolutely ridiculous extents with this. For example, you wouldn't believe how long the end credits scroll of Assassin's Creed 3 is. It goes well over a half hour of slowly-scrolling credits, that cannot be skipped nor interrupted in any way, other than killing the game from the Windows task manager.) It might be a bit surprising, but this hasn't always been so. In fact, in the late 70's and early 80's, sometimes even throughout the 80's, many game developer companies had a strict policy that the creators of a video game (programmers, graphic artists, etc.) could not put their names in the games they created. It was strictly forbidden. Atari was perhaps the most infamous example of this, in the early 80's. It is, in fact, one of the major reasons why another company, Activision, was created (and which exists to this day.) A group of disgrun...

The European press has become more and more silent about the flood of African and Middle-Eastern immigrants entering Europe. This has given many people the false notion that the amount of immigrants has decreased significantly. Yet it's not true. It is still estimated that the amount of African and Middle-Easter economic migrants entering europe every single day is in the thousands. The estimate of the total number of immigrants entering Europe this year alone is between 500 thousand and a million. And there is no end in sight. It's not like the amount of immigrants trying to and entering Europe has decreased over time. At some places (such as Italy and Greece) it has, on the contrary, only gotten worse. Even the European press has long ago stopped even pretending that these immigrants are Syrian refugees. For quite many months the press kept up the pretense that they are, but to my understanding by this point the majority of the press doesn't even bother anymore, and ...

On February I wrote a blog post about how illegal immigrants are abusing a loophole in Canadian law to enter the country illegally yet still get refugee status. In summary: A person entering Canada from the United States cannot legally get refugee status because both countries have signed an agreement that they consider each other peaceful countries (which, in terms of refugees, means that a person crossing the border cannot be a refugee because he's not fleeing a dangerous country). This is completely official. If a person tries to enter Canada from the United States using an official border crossing point, requesting refugee status in Canada, he will be turned back, because there's no legal basis for the request. However, there's a loophole in Canadian law that if the person crosses the border illegally, he can be given refugee status, and thus can stay in the country indefinitely (at taxpayers' expense, of course). Rather than fix the loophole, Justin Trudea...

The so-called "Miranda warning", or "Miranda rights", has been popularized by Hollywood movies and TV series. It's that archetypal "you have the right to remain silent; anything you say may be used against you in a court of law" speech. The problem is that Hollywood has made it so archetypal that it has caused a lot of misconceptions about it. The most typical use of it in movies and TV series is when a suspect is being arrested. It's a trope, a cliché , that the arresting officers will read the suspect their rights. However, this is just played for drama (and most often simply because it has become so ubiquitous), and has little to do with actual reality, even in the United States. Because of this, most people think that the police has to "read your rights" when they arrest you, or else the arrest is illegal. This is a complete misconception, created by Hollywood, and is completely false. Sometimes police officers will "read ...

I watched an interesting YouTube video about car dealership advertising in Alberta, Canada: W5: Undercover shoppers test Calgary car dealerships . While this documentary only examined car dealerships and their advertisement in Alberta, the same kind of tactics are probably being used all over the world (to a higher or lesser extent, depending on how strict and how strictly enforced the local laws are). Some prominent examples in the video: A particular individual car is advertised in a newspaper at a significantly reduced price (compared to its MSRP). However, when the customer arrives asking for that car, unfortunately it has already been sold. But they can sell another car of the same model but, of course, they also unfortunately can't offer it at such a reduced price. They still will offer it at a discount, just not that much. A week later, the exact same car (with the same stock number) that was allegedly "already sold" appears in a new ad. A car is advertised...