James 5:14,15 – “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.”
I’m standing on this promise, and holding God to His Word about it.
Source: Insights into Stack Overflow’s traffic – Stack Overflow
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen inaccurate data and graphs circulating on social media channels regarding Stack Overflow’s traffic. We wanted to take the opportunity to provide additional context and information on the origin of that data, the traffic trends we are seeing, and the work we’re doing to ensure Stack Overflow remains a go-to destination for developers and technologists for years to come.
They are responding to this graph, which I saw this on some aggregate social media site.
First, ChatGPT couldn’t have started making a difference at this time. It, along with other LLM’s, hasn’t really become useful till this year.
Second, it couldn’t have made that much of a difference that fast. Nothing does.
Third, who would take this graph out of context and overlay this trend line and blame it on ChatGPT? What’s the thinking? Who benefits? Was it for the lulz? Was it to drive mindshare about what “AI” is supposedly doing “for us?” “To” programming? Why has it been pushed in front of so many people that StackOverflow feels the need to set the record straight?
I can’t confirm one way or another that this actually happened, and I’m not going to even try. It is instructive that there is no doubt it could be true, and I’ll leave it at that.
This is yet another reminder that Reddit is a corporate-fronted deep-state psyop propaganda machine designed to manipulate a very, very specific demographic.
My PC — the PC I bought for precisely one game — came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, I hate Windows, and I expect it doesn’t like me much either, and that’s fine. For the sake of a game or two, I can live with it. One of the more annoying things I’ve found with Windows is their implementation of cloud storage, with their OneDrive.
I decided to make the effort to “break it” so that everything would just live on my local hard drive, and it made a dog’s breakfast out of the folder structure. It was only after this that it was revealed that folders like “Documents” actually live under a folder hierarchy with “OneDrive” in the path, and I don’t want to try to clean it up for fear of losing files. I don’t have anything worth keeping except the mods for ESO, but it would be a shame to lose them if Microsoft decided to lose its mind here.
First, I’ll admit that there is something to keep straight on Mac’s with iCloud storage enabled. On my MBP, I have this:
There are two locations for “Documents”, but one is “Documents – Local” and one is “Documents – iCloud.”
On my corporate Windows laptop, I have this:
I have two sets of folders mixed into the same namespace. I have no idea which is which. I have multiple links to Desktop’s and OneDrive’s.
Even worse, in the larger folder pane, EVERYTHING listed here is under ANOTHER “Desktop” folder, and ANOTHER “OneDrive” sits at the same level of “My Computer.”
How is anyone supposed to navigate this? How is anyone supposed to find anything? Windows search has NEVER worked. EVER. What were they — what was anyone — thinking!? This is madness.
The Pain Zone… is an enterprise data warehouse platform. At the small scale we operate at, with little loss of detail, a data warehouse platform simply means that we copy a bunch of text files from different systems into a single place every morning.
The word enterprise means that we do this in a way that makes people say “Dear God, why would anyone ever design it that way?”, “But that doesn’t even help with security” and “Everyone involved should be fired for the sake of all that is holy and pure.”
For example, the architecture diagram which describes how we copy text files to our storage location has one hundred and four separate operations on it. When I went to count this, I was expecting to write forty and that was meant to illustrate my point. Instead, I ended up counting them up three times because there was no way it could be over a hundred. This whole thing should have ten operations in it.
…
Almost every large business in Melbourne is rushing to purchase our tooling, tools like Snowflake and Databricks, because the industry is pretending that any of this is more important than hiring competent people and treating them well. I could build something superior to this with an ancient laptop, an internet connection, and spreadsheets. It would take me a month tops.
I’ve known for a long time that I can’t change things here. But in this moment, I realize that the organization values things that I don’t value, and it’s as simple as that. I could pretend to be neutral and say that my values aren’t better, but you know what, my values are better.
PS:
… I gave a webinar to US board members at the invitation of the Financial Times. Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.
Source: Get Me Out Of Data Hell — Ludicity
(Emphasis mine.)
That last part is really the kicker. Every middle manager in all the various IT organizational structures inside of a Fortune-sized public company are lying about things, whether by omission or by fact. They’re lying about what it is they do. They’re lying about their problems. They’re lying about their capabilities. They’re lying about their timelines.
They’re lying to people who are either don’t care, or aren’t equipped to understand how the things they’re being told are lies, even if they do care. They’re lying to build “kingdoms” in the company by justifying more people, more machines, and more software than is required to solve a problem. And not just by a little; by orders of magnitude.
Unless senior management — and I mean the guys right under the officers, because the officers are never going to care, and the upper-middle guys don’t have the political clout to do it — unless they are curious, concerned, and knowledgeable enough to ask illuminating questions to piece the veil, the lies will go unchallenged, and the technical debt will continue to grow with every new project, and every project that is introduced to fix one that just failed.
At some point, when your personal sensibilities and the demonstrated collective priorities of the organization repeatedly come into conflict, you have to make a decision if you’re in the right place. For instance, I currently have personal issues which make the “switching costs” prohibitive, but this is an extremely individualistic equation to balance.
Here’s a guy who filmed Indiana Department of Transportation workers for a half hour removing Trump signs, and (allegedly) leaving the Harris ones. It’s just one data point among many. Over the past week, my Twitter feed has become FILLED with stories of crazy election problems already. And it’s not just one or two crazy, hard-right, loud-mouthed accounts. It’s many different people, and from all the battleground states.
Strangely, every story seems to only favor one side. Now, maybe that’s just my algorithm’s bias, so if anyone has stories FROM THE LEFT about, oh, I don’t know, a person voting in elections where the person said they never voted, or many dozens of voting “residences” for a single person, I’d actually love to hear about them. These would be headline news in the mainstream media, and I’m not seeing them.
Turns out that there are many, many ways to cheat our elections. It’s not just about hacking the voting machines, though, as a “computer guy,” this is the biggest issue of all, and it’s already been proven times! No, the “beauty” of this situation is that you can hide cheating at many different levels, in many different ways, and in many different regions, as needed.
Because of the issues last time — I mean, boarding up windows so observers couldn’t see!? — finding thousands of votes all for one person in the dead of the night!? — people are watching very carefully this time around, and it’s becoming more and more clear every day that our elections are susceptible to all sorts of shenanigans, and are in danger of being a disgraceful joke.
UPDATE: I sent this to a friend who works for INDOT. He sent it up the chain, and was told, yes, it was real, and that the Commissioner was already involved. Although crews are supposed to remove such temporary signs in easements to work — and whether or not they were, in fact, being selective about it — the optics from this are apparently bad enough that they have been told to leave all political signs alone until after the election.
According to Klippenstein, Musk sent a message in which he said, “I’ve asked X Safety to unsuspend him, even though I think he is an awful human being… Important to stay true to free speech principles.”
Source: Musk’s X blocked links to JD Vance dossier after hearing from Trump campaign – Ars Technica
Klippenstein revealed Vance’s social security number in an opposition “dossier” he posted to Twitter. He was suspended. He redacted the personal information, and was reinstated.
Saved you a click, and talk about burying the lede!
Boo, Ars. Boo!
People are starting to wake up. This notice needs to be expanded to include all printed media, broadcast, movies, streaming, video gaming, and even tabletop role playing. The billionaires in question are at the top of companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, which collectively own a controlling stake in almost every single company in the US. Larry Fink has become the poster child of this effort, because he literally said the quiet part out loud.
The next time you wonder why your favorite entertainment started being terrible all of a sudden, realize that these investment companies directed that to happen, and they’ve got more money than God to lose on spreading their messaging. It has become a complete top-down reprogramming of society. The only major platform/channel standing apart from this is Twitter, and that’s why they hate Elon Musk.
The right-wing of America is having a real “moment” about this topic all over social media, and I’m going to point out the obvious problem with this idea. You can take it or leave it. After several days of making this argument on Twitter, I find a lot of people are leaving it. Still, I do what I can.
Let’s get a couple things out of the way up front. Yes, we can “seed” clouds to cause precipitation. That’s been around for a long time. That’s just chemistry and thermodynamics, and it only works in ALREADY-FORMED weather patterns.
And, yes, there are patents for inventions that would seek to control the weather. So what? There are also patents for teleporters, anti-gravity, telekinesis, ESP, and contacting the spirit world. Getting a patent just means you’re the first to seek legal protection for an idea, not that the invention works now, or that it will EVER work in the future. Even if you think that a patent proves an idea not only works in theory, but is evidence of a working invention, do you think the government would put a weather control device’s method of operation in the public view for others to understand and copy? Do you think other countries would respect that copyright under threat of a patent infringement lawsuit?
This isn’t a question of technology. Well, it IS, but that’s secondary. This is primarily a question of ENERGY.
Hurricanes are caused by the air in the northern and southern hemispheres moving in opposite directions. (If you study mechanics, you can see the reason why this happens in the equations.) These opposing bodies of air move past each other and get mixed, making planet-sized eddy currents. That’s why they only happen on the equator. If you are going to create a hurricane — or direct it, or intensify it, or diminish it — you will need to influence the way the air is moving in BOTH hemispheres, and redirect it to your liking. And then, if could manage THAT, and no matter what sort of machine you think might do that job, you’re going to need to POWER it.
Meteorologists have done the math, and the amount of energy in a hurricane is roughly equivalent to the total output of all of mankind right now. EVEN IF you could produce this much energy for the job, you’d still have to APPLY it to the atmosphere of the entire globe, within HUNDREDS of miles north AND south of the equator. You can’t just stop the air moving in some area to put it somewhere else, and create a void. You’re going to have to control basically the whole thing.
Weather patterns are the movement of a literal astronomical amount of air and water, and are produced by 1) the rotation and orbit of the planet (moving the air mechanically), 2) the heat from the planet’s core and the sun (causing expansion and contraction of air with the temperature over nights and days), and 2) the interaction with the gravity of the moon (causing rising and falling tides, increasing and decreasing pressure on the air above). These forces are MAGNITUDES larger than anything mankind can control.
Lastly, yes, the government has always been DECADES ahead of the private sector in any sort of technology that could be used as a weapon. But let’s be clear: they are only ahead in the PRACTICAL APPLICATION of the technology. They are not BREAKING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS or inventing new ones. Even if you believe the government has created some secret satellite-based raygun to produce these kinds of pressure and heat differentials to influence the atmosphere over most of the globe, there’s no way they could power it. This would be WELL beyond all known or even theorized physics. It’s simply not possible.
