What grinds my gears

In my line of work I sometimes need to write technical or other types of documents. I was once tasked with writing what was essentially an explanation and tutorial on a particular task in a particular embedded system scenario using certain libraries, as I had been working on that and they wanted me to write a clear tutorial and specification of how it was done, for others employees who may need to work on the same or similar things. The document ended up being, if I remember correctly, about 30 to 40 pages long, and I took particular care to make it as clear and legible as possible, paying special attention to its layout. I added page breaks if needed to make sections, sub-sections, tables, lists and code samples be all contiguous on the same page if needed, or if eg. a code sample was so long that it necessarily needed to be on two pages, I made certain that the page changed at a clear logical place in the code (rather than being, for example, between an "if" line and its bo...

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and not only is he very openly and brazenly socialist, but he ran his campaign on very socialist promises, like promising free public transport and free food, and to "tax the rich". Unsurprisingly, when the actual reality of the economy of the state of New York hit, it turned out that creating his Socialist Utopia isn't actually as easy as he promised. He can't increase income tax (because that's decided at the state level, not at the city level, and the New York State Senate has clearly indicated that they have zero intent in raising income taxes), running free public transport actually requires money that the city doesn't have, and trying to build new state-owned Socialist grocery stores is not only enormously expensive but also very inefficient, and would be a constant money sink. (Such a construction project is also likely to last longer than his 4-year term as mayor. It assumes that he will be eternally re-ele...

Many critics of the modern far-left have coined the term "suicidal empathy" to describe what's happening particularly in Europe and many parts of the United States and Canada. And that's the obsession that far-leftists have about "multiculturalism" and bringing in as many people from distant foreign lands as possible (nothing is "too much" for them, no matter how many millions we are talking about), and extremely fiercely and rabidly defending this practice to the point that the problems, especially the crime statistics among immigrants, are routinely censored, hidden, diminished and denied, and anybody who would want to shed some light on the issue is demonized, attacked, vilified and harassed. Most of them go so far as to defend the immigrants even when they themselves are victims of that crime, even the most heinous forms of it (ie. sexual assault and rape). The fact is that Europe is committing societal suicide. In most countries the people in ...

I have written previously about the YouTube channel "Veritasium", which is one of those huge education channels with millions of subscribers and tens of millions of views per video, which publishes videos mostly related to educational content such as history, technology, science and other similar content. In that previous blog post I comment on how I lost brain cells because of the absolutely and utterly stupid comment the author made towards the beginning of one of his recent videos. I would like to write about something else I have noticed about the channel over the years, as I have noticed somewhat of a change in more and more of the videos in recent years. I call that phenomenon the "Numberphile syndrome". A term I came up with, but it refers to what happened to another enormously popular YouTube channel, "Numberphile". You see, the Numberphile channel, which is an education channel about mathematics, became enormously popular very quickly when it was...

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...

Rupert Lowe, a member of the UK parliament, recently released the results of his team's investigation into the absolutely massive amount of abuse of underage girls in the country that has been going on for over two decades, with an estimated amount of victims of 250 thousand. And that's a  minimum  estimate, the ones that the authorities have records of. That's right. Not 250 victims. 250 THOUSAND victims. And that's the number of victims, not even the number of rapes. The number of rapes is probably in the millions, as many of these girls were abused for years and years. What's most shocking is that not only did law enforcement and social service workers not do anything about it even when directly reported by the victims themselves, in many cases they outright  helped the perpetrators . At some "safe houses" the staff literally provided children to the rapists, handing them over to them, fully knowing what the perpetrators were doing. In several cases whe...

Some time in 2019 an anonymous user in 4chan made this post, which got some popularity and has recently resurfaced and commented on by some youtubers: It defines the concept of "foundation myth" of a society, and posits that for all intents and purposes the second World War became such a thing for the modern west. It really is an insightful notion, as said war and, especially, the Holocaust, has indeed strongly shaped the western world and its policies, and it seems that it's almost always the underlying foundation and basis for many sociopolitical decisions that are made, as if it was our sacred duty to somehow keep "making amends" in one way or another because of it. As the post puts it, the Holocaust is for all intents and purposes considered sacred: You cannot mock it, you cannot doubt it, you cannot make light of it, you cannot dismiss it, you cannot consider it unimportant and irrelevant to modern sociopolitical decisions and how it shapes our society. Mon...

One thing that the modern far left just loves to do is wordplay: Change the meaning of words, misuse words, use words in (deliberately) confusing ways, and of course and most prominently, ban words and replace them with other words or invented neologisms. In many cases, while this wordplay is almost always completely idiotic, at least it makes  some  semblance of logic. Even if their arguments are wrong and idiotic, at least they can present the semblance of an argument or rationalization about why they are changing the meaning of a word, or banning it, or replacing it with a neologism. Sometimes these neologisms are outright dehumanizing and insulting, but at least there's some twisted logic behind them, some twisted rationalizations. However, sometimes there just aren't. Sometimes they just invent neologisms with no rhyme, reason, explanations or rationalizations. One that baffles me the most is something they have been using for a few years (and which, astonishingly, has ac...

Recently Ryan Breslow , the CEO of the software company Bolt Financial , told in an interview that he got rid of the entire HR department. When asked why, he said that said department was doing nothing but  creating  problems that didn't exist, all of which disappeared when he just fired the entire department. Of course he didn't dare to say it directly, but I believe it's pretty safe to assume what kind of people were employed in that department: Far-leftist activists who were doing nothing but bossing people around, creating all kinds of insane rules and trying to enforce those rules on the workers, and inventing and fabricating "problems" in the workplace to justify their existence, activism and rules. I could well imagine that the actual competent productive workers breathed a sigh of relief when those trouble-making busybodies were gone. Also Meta (formerly Facebook) recently fired 22% of their personnel in order to, according to their own words, "run th...

For many decades in the very recent past (as in, even up to the 2000's), and possibly even to this day, there was quite a slavery problem in several Middle-Eastern countries. I don't know if it's still the case today (because the issue has been brought up in international media and light shed on the problem internationally), but for example Qatar had actual bona fide slavery for decades, up to at least the early 2000's, and possibly even to this day. It worked like this: Many factory owners would import workers primarily from sub-Saharan Africa (which makes it extra ironic and blatant), confiscate and keep their travel and identification documents, and keep them working in the factories for inhumanely long hours (usually 12 hours and even more), and sleeping in absolutely deplorable conditions in what usually amounted to little more than warehouses stuffed with beds. Doors of both the factories and the sleeping quarters were almost always kept locked to stop them from l...

There has been a relatively recent trend of alphabet people "fleeing" so-called "red states" in the United States and move to more "blue states", and especially to the city of Seattle, which has been one of the most far-leftist cities in the entire country for over ten years now. They allege "persecution" in states like Texas which, according to them, are eroding their "trans rights". Are they really being persecuted in states like Texas by the government? Are they being jailed, or discriminated against, or in other ways mistreated by the government? Nope. (That's actually impossible because it would very quickly lead to a Federal lawsuit and the Federal government intervening.) Are they perhaps being persecuted, harassed and assaulted by citizens? Not really either. (If they were, you would see it blasted from every single news outlet 24/7. The far-leftist activist journalists would be all over it. Yet, nothing. Pretty much cricket...

With the proliferation of free AI tools that can be used to generate video material (something that, quite sadly, YouTube is still outright supporting and promoting) YouTube has been flooded by such videos. And the thing is, AI tools have become so astonishingly good that they can give the outwards illusion of a high-quality high-production-values video, at least judging from the thumbnail, description and the first few seconds of the video. For the longest time it used to be that that "professional look" required actual work, actual effort, actual talent. Good thumbnail pictures (that are not just a random frame from the video proper) required work and knowledge to produce. The contents of the video itself, if it wasn't just someone talking to the camera, required at least some production values, relatively good camera and filming equipment or, if it was some kind of animation or presentation using eg. vector graphics, clip-art or outright hand-drawn animation, it requir...

Many flat-earthers somehow seem to think that this is such a great "gotcha" question that proves their flat Earth delusion, and which they often present in debates: "Do airplanes need to constantly pitch their nose down to follow the curve of the Earth?" And the answer to that question is a big fat YES! Yes, yes, yes, yes, a thousand times YES! Yes they do! That is the  only  correct answer. There are no "buts". By this point I'm getting sick and tired of the vast majority of debunkers and, incredibly, even some airplane pilots answering something other than a clear unambiguous "yes". Astonishingly, and sadly, some of them, sometimes even some airplane pilots, outright answer with "no", which is just mind-boggling, and goes to show that even experienced professional airline pilots don't know every single detail about their own profession and specialty, even though they really should. I'll explain why I think that misconcepti...

Something quite strange has been happening in the Linux development community over the past few years. It's not one single thing, but a number of things, every one of them bad on its own, but the situation being all the worse because of the sheer number of changes in said community. For almost three decades the Linux development community, especially the Linux kernel development team, have been very careful and conservative in the sense of how they approach the development work and what kind of tools, languages and technologies they adopt for said work. In fact, the Linux kernel itself has had for a couple of decades one of the strictest rules in existence for any major software project in terms of the requirements for its code and accepting patches and updates. Yet, all of this has been radically changing in the span of just a few years. The Linux development community at large, including the Linux kernel development team, for some unfathomable reason has been rushing to adopt eve...

In the UK, not only are cops infamously looking the other way while foreigners are sex-trafficking and raping teenage girls, not only is there a clear two-tier policing system where the population is divided into two very distinctive tiers based on ethnicity, with one being policed much more leniently than the other, and not only are the cops making Gestapo-style raids on people's homes because of posting mean words online, but now the cops will even be complicit in your murder if you happen to be of the wrong ethnicity. Not some kind of figurative or metaphorical "murder", but  literal  murder. Indeed, recently a Sikh man, who is on the privileged tier of people who are allowed to carry knives around even though the rest of the population aren't, stabbed an English man. When the cops arrived, the Sikh man alleged "racism", and even though the English man was clearly bleeding from his upper body and was in clear distress and saying that he couldn't breat...

I previously wrote about the motte-and-bailey fallacy , and how feminism, particularly 10+ years ago, was rife with it. And one of the most perfect examples is: If you criticize feminism and its excesses and abuses, the standard reply (particularly back then) was: "So you don't support women's rights?" In other words, with an accepting audience "feminism" has a huge amount of tenets, dogmas, ideologies, agendas and goals, many of them rather destructive ones (ie. the "bailey"), but when criticized feminists would retreat to the "motte" with "oh, so you don't support women's rights? Feminism is just about women's rights and nothing else." Here's another perfect example: Abortion. The modern western world has been by far and large socially engineered and brainwashed into supporting abortion no matter what, no matter the circumstances. Heck, a lot of people think it's "a basic human right", believe it ...

A lot of terms that originally had, and in fact even today have, a particular meaning often get misunderstood and used incorrectly, with the incorrect meaning in a context that doesn't fit. One that's gets misused a lot nowadays is "gaslighting". Curiously, in my experience it gets misunderstood and misused by all sides, not just the far left (which loves misusing words and change their meaning to suit their agenda.) A lot of people seem to think that "gaslighting" is synonymous with "deceiving", in other words, making someone believe something that's not true, to have them have an incorrect belief about something. While "gaslighting" is a  form  of deception, of making someone believe a falsity, it's not the generic term for it, nor a synonym for it. It's a very  specific  form of such deception. In particular, "gaslighting" is making someone doubt his or her own memories about something, with the end goal of having...

Christopher Nolan is one of the most famous film directors in the world, up there with the greatest and most famous of them. He is best known for highly successful movies such as Memento , The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception , Interstellar and Oppenheimer . While his writing/directing style might not be exactly as recognizable and unique as eg. that of Quentin Tarantino, it's still quite much so, and he is famous for it (a style that he most clearly demonstrates in Inception and Interstellar .) In the context of this post and his most recent upcoming movie, his previous movie,  Oppenheimer , is quite notable: It's a historic docudrama that depicts the eponymous historic person and the development of the atomic bomb as historically accurately as possible, with only very slight deviations from actual historic events for the sake of drama. The movie prides itself for its historic accuracy, and isn't pushing any political agendas or sugar-coating anything. It is, thus, incomp...

There are not enough words in the English language to describe how absolutely despicable and abhorrent of a grifter Anita Sarkeesian is. Over ten years ago she knew nothing about video games and, in her own words, actually hated video games, but only nominally entered the gaming sphere for one purpose, and one purpose only: To invade the entirety of the video game development industry and to change it to become a propaganda piece for her far-leftist "feminist" "progressive" agenda. And she is still at it, to this day, as has been seen numerous times. For some unfathomable reason she is being used as a consultant by many video game developers, she is giving private lectures to said developers (some of these videos have been leaked online) and she is engaging in all kinds of activism. If you are a gamer, she despises you. If you oppose or criticize what she's trying to do, you are an "asshole" according to her (yes, her own literal words.) According to h...