The majority of comedy works because there is truth in it. Sure, Idiocracy is prophetic, or we wouldn’t be discussing it today. Nobody discusses South Park’s “Bigger Longer Uncut” like Idiocracy because it doesn’t really engage this kind of truth.

What I cannot tell is if people have always been this moronic and we’re only more aware of it because of ubiquitous cell phone camera technology and the Internet’s capability to rapidly distribute awareness of dumbness that would have otherwise stayed regionally isolated.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”—George Carlin

It’s more “tragedy of the commons” eugenics than “evil corporate-governmental-white supremacy” eugenics.

I thought the movie was more nuanced than that—the “smart parents” of Idiocracy did not have smart children—they had zero children. The smart couple in fact were the ones doing “self-eugenics” to their own detriment.

Eugenics or not, evolution favors the population that produces the fittest offspring for the environment–not the smartest.

I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.

I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.

What if the only enabling factor to getting to Kardashev Type I is adoption of UTC for everything?

Yep, we’re doomed by the Great Filter.

I keep the keys in the hand that closes the door they lock. No keys, no close.

How about two batteries that can be ejected and swapped without powering off the device? We don’t need to wait for super-capacitors today.

iPhones… someday. :)

OpenBao https://openbao.org/

(making a note for myself.)

IBM’s management hierarchy is deeper than the Nine Circles in Dante’s Inferno, plus you get to use JIRA.

Oh that’s awesome. The drop-down arrow “disapeared” with my mental blinders-- I was thinking it was only a toggle for PDFs.

This is a useful take: I too will use LLMs for search-- but not for search for journal articles with data and evidence. LLMs too easily confabulate these.

LLM-as-search is fantastic when you want a no-bullshit statistical result for what you’re looking for when you’re wanting an overview or interactive tutorial.

I have the big SearXNG portal bookmarked ( https://searx.space/ ) but I don’t find that I ever reach for it that often. Not being able to cull lower quality sites is just a little bit of extra toil I’m happy to pay to go away.

Ok, you piqued me: Got a link to a guide on using Kagi for the fediverse?

One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.

StackOverflow initially had an interesting idea of putting metrics on things, and unfortunately humanity’s penchant for “what gets measured is gamed” was amplified and devolved into a hive of HOA Karens looking for infractions of the rules.

I’ll bet that if you “relaunched” a SO-like system and removed all human-visible “points” or “scores” you could achieve a less toxic environment. The only “ranking” is implicit based on your topical subscriptions.

Then again, you could “relaunch” the “relaunch” and “AlphaGo-ify” a bunch of AI agents to compose the dialogs and threads without any human interaction at all. I guess we’re on our way already to building Culture minds.

Absolutely doable.

I’ve switched to paid search with Kagi. Best standard feature is I can tell Kagi to block w3schools, mediumDOTcom and stackoverflow from my search results.

I don’t expect that from a month-old USB drive however. A month old USB drive that write-locks itself is a lemon.

SanDisk sells very pretty expensive plastic bricks that excel at disappointment and confusion (like when a USB flash drive decides to become permanently read-only).

Long Covid Symptoms

Check the long list of just the mental Long Covid (aka Post-Acute Squelae of COVID or PASC) symptoms:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8959835/

The ER Connection

Recent findings involve research with the endoplasmic reticulum that appears to go off the rails when over-stressed breaking the mitochondria within a cell robbing it of ATP production and increasing lactate (related to metabolic acidosis) in the body:

• https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2023/08/16/nih-mitochondria-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10140510/

My current reasoning is somehow to recover you’ve got to pace yourself just enough to encourage new mitochondria to form, but not so much that you experience PEM/crashing. The ME/CFS people have been discussing pacing for years. So:

Fail With

• staying in bed for weeks doing as little as possible (a very slow success?-- mitochondria aren’t encouraged to form)
• trying to train it away with exercise/exertion (a quick fail-- the stressed ER will break mitochondria and flood body with lactate and set you back with a slew of acidosis-caused symptoms that will take time for the body to resolve. e.g. kidneys excreting the acid, COVID diabetes from gluconeogensis of lactate into glucose in order to raise the body’s pH away from acidosis)

Possibly Succeed With

• small exertions (signal need for more mitochondiria) before PEM followed by “intense” resting, cold exposure (ice baths or cold showers) and kidney-friendly diets (see: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/chronic-kidney-disease-ckd/eating-nutrition ) to help the body process the acidity of lactate out to reduce ER stress.

This was a purposefully supplement-free/drug-free plan.