What grinds my gears

For some reason the developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution have decided to replace all the GNU core utilities, which are written in C, with replacements written in Rust. The problem? For an unfathomable reason they are rushing the publication of these new replacements even before they are ready. Indeed, the GNU core utils have a big bunch of automated tests that are run on them every time before a new version release. The Rust replacements developed by the Ubuntu developers fail hundreds of these tests. Some of the replacements fail  all  the tests for that particular utility. On top of that, many of the replacements written in Rust are significantly slower than the originals that are written in C. Some of the utilities run a whopping 17 times slower than the original C counterpart. Not 17% slower; 17 times  slower! Other utilities (such as sort ) can't handle files even nearly as large as the original C version, failing with files that the C version has no problems ...

A McDonald's restaurant calls the police because one client of theirs has been in the bathroom for over an hour. (The story doesn't tell what the actual concern of the restaurant workers was, but I think it's pretty safe to assume that they were concerned about the guy's health, in other words, they were worried that he might have suffered some kind of medical episode and was in need of help, and thus they called 911.) The cops arrive and order the guy to exit the bathroom and the restaurant. He does so. Now, because American cops have an insatiable ID fetish, they absolutely demand the guy to ID himself even though he had not committed any crime, nor did they suspect him of any crime. They just wanted to ID him. It was clear that something unusual was going on because the man is confused, has difficulties understanding what he's being told, doesn't seem to remember even basic things, and is visibly in a confused and dazzled state. At points he doesn't even ...

Recently I made once again the mistake of trying to talk to a far-leftist in an online conversation. Unsurprisingly, I only got absolutely vile toxic rhetoric thrown at me, the same vile defamatory talking points the far left has been regurgitating for over a decade now. Such conversations are completely fruitless. You simply cannot have an actual conversation with brainwashed psychopathic drones. Nothing you can say will ever, ever make them even thinking of reconsidering some things that they have been indoctrinated into believing. Anyway, I suddenly realized something. It's pretty obvious, of course, but actually it's not  really  all that obvious when you think about it. And it's related precisely to that "regurgitating the same talking points". Indeed, the exact same namecalling, defamatory accusations, conspiracy theories and spurious claims that they have been spouting for a decade. Something that pretty much all of them repeat blindly, just parroting what ...

Recently a huge controversy happened in the most recent TwitchCon (something that has greatly hurt the already low reputation of that company), where some random guy just casually and blatantly, in front of hundreds of people, entered the area of one of the female Twitch streamers and just went and grabbed her and tried to kiss her without any permission, until a few seconds later one of the streamer's own bodyguards quickly stepped in and aggressively shoved the guy away. (From the video it appears that said bodyguard was distracted with something else and didn't see the guy enter that reserved area, and it took him a few seconds to notice what the guy was doing, and quickly stepped in to protect his employer.) If that wasn't obnoxious enough, the guy then just quickly walked away and exited the building, in full view of hundreds of people, including "security" staff, who did nothing to try to stop him. And if  that  wasn't obnoxious enough, the streamer late...

I have written several blog posts about how Japan is about to commit the biggest mistake of its entire existence by opening up its borders for mass immigration (from the poorest countries in the world, obviously, because that's  always  how it goes for some reason). If Japan ever gets flooded with massive amounts of immigrants from poor countries, its safety, culture, cleanliness and status as the highest-trust society in the world will very quickly be destroyed. This worry was prompted by the fact that Japan had already started this process a year or two ago, and has already experienced the first symptoms, such as vandalized and burglarized vending machines (which is normally extraordinarily rare), disturbance of the peace at public places and in public transport (which is even rarer), and several other initial signs. This process had been primarily driven by Japan's then-Prime Minister who had apparently contracted the far-leftism cancer and mind virus. Well, what do you kn...

I have written before about the incredible length that some people will go in order to get scammed , sometimes even unwittingly becoming "partners in crime" with the scammers in order to rob... themselves! They will sometimes go to incredible lengths to hide their own activity, in a very similar way as a criminal would do, except that these victims are not robbing someone else's money, they are "robbing" their own money, and sending it to the scammers, avoiding every possible safety measure and hurdle along the way. Recently I saw a CNN investigative piece about these scams, and the opening was incredible: It showed a police officer having to physically stop an older scam victim from inserting more banknotes into a bitcoin machine, with the victim trying to forcefully, almost desperately, insert even more banknotes. The cop had to literally block the slit on the machine with his hand to stop the woman from doing so because she wouldn't listen. And when the c...

The current Pope, Leo XIV, recently made a statement that the Catholic Church must strongly oppose the deportation of illegal migrants by the Trump administration. Oh, is that so, Pope Leo XIV? Well, why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and import all those illegal migrants into the Vatican? Or even some of them? It's so easy to be pro-immigration, particularly defending illegal migrants, when you don't have to see them in your own back yard. It's so easy when it's not you who has to carry the burden and see your own city being taken over by them. When it would come time to practice what you preach, suddenly all we get is excuses. Fucking hypocrite. 

For the longest time it used to just be "homosexuals" and then "gays" (for some reason "homosexual" fell out of use and is kind of considered an insult, and not used anymore, even though it is the most "official" term). The term "lesbian" was used if one wanted to be a bit more specific, but they too fell under that same umbrella. Then the "woke" social justice warriors started gaining a lot of power in society and with it came all kinds of wordplay. I still remember that for a relatively short period of time the first Holy Acronym was just "LGB", but the "T" was quite soon attached to it. It remained that four-letter acronym for quite some time, and in fact many people still use it to this day. However, over the years more and more letters started being attached to it, to the point that there basically is no one single "standard" Holy Acronym. The longest versions of the Acronym are outright  rid...

The Soviet Union was one of the darkest episodes in human history. It lasted for 70 years and was one of the most oppressive, authoritarian, totalitarian and  murderous  ideologies that have ever existed (the number of murders committed by the Soviet regime in peace time is estimated to be somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, mostly political prisoners, a number that absolutely dwarfs the Nazi Holocaust. Perhaps the only difference between the two is that the Soviets committed those murders in the span of 70 years, while the Nazis committed their murders in less than 5, which made the latter much more and horrendously "industrialized".) Yet, even people who fully know, understand and acknowledge this fact, and genuinely consider the Soviet Union to be one of the most horrendous things that ever happened to humanity, never ever to be repeated again, usually don't have much problem in at least having a rational and reasonable discussion and relatively neutral attitu...

Have you ever wondered why there's no antifa presence in the Nordic countries, especially in Finland and Norway? Especially Norway is quite notorious for pretty much zero antifa presence and activism. Why is that? Is antifa classified as an illegal terrorist organization there? Nope. Are people's fundamental constitutional rights being infringed upon there in order to stop them? Nope. Is some kind of suppression campaign being done behind the scenes by the government? Nope. The reason is pretty simple and straightforward: The Norwegian police enforces the law. That's it. It's that simple. The only and sole thing you need to do in order to get rid of antifa is to just enforce the law. That's it. You don't need anything else. Just apply the same law enforcement to them as to everybody else. Antifa can't survive if they aren't allowed to break the law. Whatever cops would do to an individual person, do to them in the same way. If they disrupt traffic, arres...

And now for something completely different. Yngwie Malmsteen is one of those "guitar gods" (at least in his own view), one of those very experienced and skillful "shredders" who play 20 notes per second on the electric guitar and play in extravagant tours for thousands of avid fans, and has been doing since the early 1980's, making him one of them with the longest career. Yet, many people outside his most rabid fandom just hate the guy. People who love and admire other great guitarists like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and many others. There's something about Yngwie that just rubs them in the wrong way, something that makes him different and dislikeable. And it's not just a few people hating him, but it's really common, and it's unlikely to be just a trend, a fad, some kind of unearned bad reputation that these people are just believing without reason and evidence, or as a meme (like what has happened with Nickelback.) Part of the criticism stems from...

I have written many times in this blog how the modern far left doesn't really have a set of values that they believe in. Instead, they will take whatever position is currently the prevailing narrative among them, and which gives them power and control over society. They will literally strongly support one position today and the exact opposite tomorrow, if that's what's trending among their ranks, and if it gives them power. They will also hold two completely opposite views at the same time (ie. doublethink), freely swapping between them at a moment's notice to whichever is more convenient for the current situation. They could literally flip-flop between two contrary position several times per minute, depending on the situation. There are countless examples of this that could be listed, but perhaps the most egregious and abhorrent one is their antisemitism. For the longest time the far-left heavily opposed antisemitism, for rather obvious reasons. However, like always, t...

I have written previously about the extremely strange phenomenon that happens in many parts of the United States, and that's how government officials and law enforcement officers refuse to do anything to illegal squatters , in other words, people who have invaded an unoccupied house and are living there illegally, without paying rent or anything. In the vast, vast majority of other countries (particularly the free democratic ones), such people would be removed and arrested by police probably within the hour. Not in many parts of the United States, though. Because of some extremely strange contrived set of laws, it appears that city officials and the police forces can't legally do anything to squatters without a court order, and even more strangely, getting that court order seems  extremely  difficult. There are documented cases of home owners trying  for years  to get rid of illegal squatters in their premises, without success. The police will do nothing about them, ...

Remember about four years ago when the American left, including all the leftist politicians, were up in arms about "insurrection", how absolutely horrendous of a crime it is, how the so-called "insurrection" was literally the worst event that has ever happened in the entire history of the United States (I'm not even making that up), and how every single person even remotely involved must absolutely be prosecuted in the harshest of terms (so much so that corrupt judges sentenced innocent people into astonishingly long sentences for no crimes whatsoever)? The horrors of "insurrection" was the constant talking point for several years. They kept pounding on it again, and again, and again, pretty much non-stop, trying to make it true via sheer repetition. Multiple kangaroo court congressional hearings were held about it, as the Democrats were trying to push really, really hard into making it an actual "insurrection" and trying to somehow throw Tru...

For quite a long time, pretty much as long as what can be called "primary school" has existed, pretty much everywhere in the world, students were not just taught to read, write and things like mathematics, history, geography and other theoretical stuff, but a quite big portion of the curriculum was dedicated to teaching them practical skills: How to cook, how to do woodwork, how to repair stuff at home, how to sew a button or a torn cloth, and so on and so forth. This was very common in the vast majority of schools up to some time in the 1970's or 1980's, give or take, depending on the country. In fact, it's  still  the case in some countries, although perhaps to lesser extents than it was in the past. Then something happened in many countries. There formed this strange mentality that teaching such practical everyday skills does not belong to school. That primary schools are nothing but preparation for high school and university, and you don't need to know how...

American far-leftists are complete psychopaths , every single one of them. They also cannot open their mouths without lies pouring out . Pretty much everything they say, when it's not pure hatred and racism, is a lie. The complete list of lies that they have promoted during the last ten years would be really, really long. However, their latest prominent lie is so incredibly obnoxious that it's just astonishing. They feel absolutely no shame about lying about it, no matter how clear it is that it's not true. What is it this time? The claim that "Donald Trump shut down the government", or the Trump administration, or the Republicans (but most importantly Trump himself.) If you guessed that he did no such thing, you would be 100% correct. Neither Trump, nor his administration, nor anybody in the Republican Party shut down the government. It's the  Democratic Party  that shut down the government, just like they did 8 years ago. They, and only they, did that, and t...

Some time ago, perhaps 10 to 15 years ago, the police forces in the United Kingdom, for reasons unknown (I have never seen anywhere how or why it started), started becoming a speech police: They started policing people's "wrong" opinions online. Since then it has only escalated more and more. What started by just a dozen or so incidents per year quickly escalated to several hundreds of arrests per year, to several thousand arrests per year, and there has been no end in sight to this escalation. It has become so bad that, I kid you not, the UK police is making over 30 arrests  every day  for things that people have said online. That's something like ten thousand arrests per year. And that's just the number of arrests; the number of times that the UK police goes to harass people at their homes, sometimes even in the middle of the night (literally!), is even higher. They investigate, harass and arrest literally tens of thousands of people every single year, while at ...

On the first days of Russia's full-scale invasion attempt of Ukraine, they occupied the city of Chernobyl. Yes, exactly  that  Chernobyl. The logic behind this beggars belief. It's a mind-bogglingly stupid move. It shouldn't be any surprise to anybody that the Pripyat area, including Chernobyl, has no military value. There are no military bases there, or is there anything of military strategic value in the area, for rather obvious reasons. It is, for all intents and purposes, a radioactive toxic wasteland with zero value. The land has no value, and there is no military value to the area either. What makes the invasion of Chernobyl particularly stupid is that the soil, especially in the so-called Red Forest, is still radioactive, and driving tanks on it disturbs the soil and releases huge radioactive dust clouds. (Yes, tourists visited Chernobyl all the time prior to the invasion, but these visits were extremely controlled, and one of the strict rules for any visitor is to n...

There is one thing that flat-earthers just cannot explain in any way, shape or form, not even with made-up claims, not with pseudoscience, not by throwing fancy terms at it and pretending it "explains" it, and they can't even deny that it happens. This one counter-argument is completely impervious to all flat-earther arguments. And that is: How is science able to predict every single solar eclipse years and even decades ahead of time, to the accuracy of seconds, and the exact places where there will be full and partial eclipses? Even they cannot deny that it happens. They can deny the validity of photographs, video, scientific tests and measurements when it comes to other topics. They can even argue about the nature of solar eclipses themselves (ie. what they are and what causes them). However, the predictions are so utterly and clearly undeniable that even flat-earthers and their kindergarten-level IQ can't deny that it happens: Every single time that science has pre...

This slide is from a 2023 presentation by the famous video game development company Activision Blizzard: Let's put aside for a moment the racial discrimination in hiring that's quite clearly happening in that company. Here Activision Blizzard is meticulously observing and documenting the race of their employees. They are paying members of their staff to observe, research, classify and document people by their race, compartmentalizing them based on that innate trait. Activision Blizzard: Do you know what that's called? It's called racism. Pure, unadultered,  bona fide  racism, plain and simple. In an actual non-racist environment it shouldn't matter what people's "race" is supposed to be. It plays no role. People would not be classified nor compartmentalized by it. And especially it wouldn't be something that's meticulously researched, documented and charted. Activision Blizzard, you are a racist company, plain and simple. There's no way aro...

I have written about this very subject before, but I think it deserves repeating because I see it on YouTube pretty much every single day, and to this day I have absolutely no idea why they behave like they do. If you are in the United States, try going all on your own, alone, for example to a car of local law enforcement of federal agents, and damage the car in their full view, like slashing a tire or breaking a windshield wiper. What happens? You'll be arrested in a millisecond. You'll be lucky if they don't shoot you. However, gather 50 people to accompany you, to show slogans and be all angry at the cops, and then go and damage their car. What happens? In most cases, nothing. Perhaps one of the cops  might  shove you aside, but that's it. No arrest, nothing. This is not hyperbole or just hypothetical.  It happens all the time . Nowadays it happens many times a day. In the vast, vast majority of cases the result is the same: No arrests. The cops  refuse  to e...

Donald Trump recently made essentially a PSA in one of his speeches warning pregnant women from taking Tylenol, as it can be harmful to the fetus. Tylenol is the most common brand name in the US for over-the-counter pain and antipyretic medication containing paracetamol. Cue a bunch of pregnant leftists on TikTok deliberately taking Tylenol just out of spite. One of them says in the video that she believes in medical science rather than an old man who knows nothing about medicine. The kicker? Trump's announcement was precisely based on medical publications and a medical consensus. And, in fact, the manufacturer of Tylenol themselves warn against pregnant women taking it, precisely for the reason Trump mentioned. It can be harmful to the child. These leftists with terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome simply  assumed  that if Trump says it, then it must be false and against medical science, without so much as doing a quick and simple google search on the subject. They just  ...

As I wrote before, while they have shown it quite clearly for the past 10+ years, recent events have truly opened it for everybody to see: Far-leftists are complete psychopaths who do not value human life and who are incapable of feeling true empathy towards another human being, not at the instinctual level nor even at the intellectual level (ie. even after having consciously fully processed the situation, being able to make fully intentional conscious decisions, and are no longer reacting based purely on first instincts.) They  pretend  like they care about human life (although even then only  some  human life), but that's only as long as those people are useful for their agenda; the very second that those people stop being useful and step outside the tight boundaries of the doctrine, they turn on those people and start attacking them, showing that in fact they didn't really care about them in the first place. However, a recent video by Matt Walsh made me realize s...

Like with so many American social justice organizations that are a century old, give or take, also the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) started as relatively good and reasonable but turned into a complete far-leftist propaganda machine during the last 20 or so years, and par for the course, they have been spouting far-leftist propaganda, distortions and lies ever since. But since the ADL still mostly carries its old reputation, ie. it's riding on its own past, most leftist publications and people just love to cite it as a "credible" source (including, obviously, Wikipedia.) Of course for about 20 or so years the ADL has been as reliable of a source for politics as a refund scammer is for the status of your refund. One of the latest pieces of propaganda that they have published is some statistics about mass shootings in the United States, which points out that over 75% of them have been committed by far-right extremists. Well, that's some compelling evidence about how viol...

Some time ago I saw a video (unfortunately I can't find it anymore to link to it) of some leftist talking about how in many African tribes their concept of time was quite different from the western world. Something about not even having the concept of a "future" and everything being thought of and talked about in past terms. Unsurprisingly, this wasn't presented as some kind of curiosity about an antiquated culture and belief system, and most definitely not as some form of criticism. Indeed, in a very modern leftist fashion she was presenting this as if it were a completely valid alternative and perhaps even a better system than this concept of "time" of ours. At least something to consider as a legit alternative, or something. Of course she's not the only one talking about that, as it has been a far-leftist talking point for quite many years now. Somehow strict timetables, being on time, planning for the future, organizing things to happen in the future...

Some time ago VISA, Mastercard and PayPal, as well as some intermediaries, received a huge backlash because they abused their power to censor online digital distribution platforms of video games. There was, unsurprisingly, a huge controversy, and their helplines were absolutely flooded by furious people. Yet, rather than backing down and ending this censorious abuse of power... they are still continuing it! Nothing has changed! They are still demanding those platforms to censor games, regardless of all the backlash. I suppose they are just playing the long game and waiting for the storm to pass, waiting until people stop caring. But the question still remains: Why? What exactly do they have to gain with this? What's the end goal? They have got a huge loss of reputation due to their actions. What's the upside that compensates for that? What is it that they are trying to achieve? How does it benefit them so much that it's worth the loss of reputation? What's the long term...

Some time ago a new web animation series took the internet by storm: The Amazing Digital Circus. The pilot episode has, as of writing this, 394 million views on YouTube. The second episode has 166 million views. While the subsequent episodes don't have as many views as the pilot, we are still talking about nearly 100 million views each. This is an astonishing amount of views per episode, and speaks quite clearly about the success and popularity of the series. The series is so notable and popular that, unsurprisingly, it has got its own Wikipedia page, IMDB page, tvtropes page, and so on. The series was produced and created by the company Glitch Productions, stylised as "GLITCH" (eg. on YouTube). While the series is wacky and somewhat abstract, it's surprisingly enjoyable, and at points has quite deep character development. Even with all the wackiness and abstraction, it's still surprisingly easy to follow what's happening (something that's greatly helped b...

Some people have made the claim, perhaps even observation, that if you make a statement that says something about the average of a group, and the person you are talking about gives a counter-argument by presenting an exception (as if that exception discredited the claim), then you are dealing with a low-IQ person. For example, if you say "on average Asian people are shorter than Americans", and the other person objects to it with "but there are very tall Asian people" (or any variant of that), as if that were a counter-argument to the claim, it quite clearly shows that the person doesn't understand what "on average" means. Such people might even, at some level, know what averaging is, and might even know how to calculate an average (eg. they are able to calculate that the average of 2 and 6 is 4), but somehow their comprehension of what an "average" means or implies does not seem to go beyond the mechanical mathematical calculation (assuming ...

I have written about this before, but it's just something that boggles the mind. It's also a bit surprising. It's not surprising that the leftist started the rhetoric. What's more surprising is how many people just believe it wholesale without question, without skepticism, without thinking about it, without doing any kind of research. Before Donald Trump became the presidential candidate for the Republican Party for the first time sometime in 2015, he was widely considered just a somewhat eccentric, a bit quirky and maybe a bit silly multi-billionaire. He had starred in some reality TV show, and made guest appearances in others, as well as some movies and, if I remember correctly, even the WWE at one point. As far as I know, nobody considered him somehow particularly evil, or racist, or anything like that. He was not known for that kind of thing. He was just like most other billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer (perhaps even the closest mat...