People Trapped by Their Decisions

This is an eye-opening take on a heartbreaking situation. The woman being interviewed in this video is fighting against the incursion of biological men in women’s spaces. She describes the people who are fighting against her have motivations they are not being honest about. While not public knowledge, they have transitioned their children, so they have to fight for “trans rights” until the day they die. She says she has become a “standing reproach” to these people, and likens them to the Japanese soldiers in WWII who would never surrender after the war was over. They are forever compelled to attack her, because to agree that she makes a good point — any point — would mean they were wrong, and lest they have to face the fact that they have done irreparable damage to the very ones they had responsibility to protect from such abuse.

I’m not here to get into any of that argument. I simply realized it has a wider application.

This was my last post to Facebook, before I deleted my account.

I can’t get into details… at least not yet… but imagine, for a second, the length, breadth, and depth of the betrayal that would lead someone to make such a post. That might be captured by the image of being stabbed in the back, face, and heart. Got it? OK.

Now imagine the “support” system that has to be in place for someone to have implemented such a betrayal, not just of a person or a family, but an entire mid-sized church. The friends and family that had to have colluded. Got it? OK.

The people who played a part in committing this betrayal are still going around telling people that they were falsely accused, that there’s “another side” to the story, lying about that “side,” and blaming the entire problem on others (including me, I’m sure), despite the fact that scores of us who know the details about what happened are crystal clear about it. We have the figurative and literal receipts proving “our” side. I helped dig them up. Over the past couple of years, I’ve often agonized over the question, “How can they be like this?”

That’s where the video comes in. When I watched it, it was an aha! moment. I finally realized that the people who worked to enable this giant betrayal, this… gargantuan rug-pull, this… 40-year-long con will never — can never — admit to any wrongdoing or their part in it. The soul-crushing disappointment of facing the reality of being such a narcissistic sociopath would be too much. So they are going to go to their grave sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling, ignoring the plain facts of the situation, and avoiding their own consciousnesses over their multiple, decades-long moral and ethical failings

They have to live in a headspace where they say things like I’m “misinformed,” because if I’m not, it has soul-crushing implications. They’ll live the rest of their lives in an ivory tower of their own imaginations, locked away from the generational spiritual and emotional harm they’ve inflicted on hundreds of people, including some of their closest, so-called friends, because to admit they’ve committed such grievous injury would be impossible to reconcile with their their supposed beliefs and ethos, and their carefully-curated public image.

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Streaming’s Second Paywall Problem

Out of Jim Carrey’s top 10 movies, 2 are free to stream, on 2 different services. Every other hides behind a rental. A second paywall, after paying for the streaming service.

My issue is that 80-90% of every movie you think, “Hey, that’s a good movie; let’s watch that,” is the same. All the good stuff is behind a second paywall.

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John Carmack on X: “I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am.” / X

Source: John Carmack on X: “I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am.” / X

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Another Example of People Trapped by Their Decisions

I’ve written about the phenomenon of people continuing to make bad decisions on something that is inherently and unambiguously wrong before. The original post was about church leaders committing crimes, and refusing to even acknowledge them, or the lying around their commission, even after being shown the literal receipts, but now that I’ve seen people continuing to double down on inexplicable, unsupportable behavior to try to keep their reputation intact, I’m starting to see it in other places too.

I really just goes to prove the old saying by Upton Sinclair: “It is hard to get someone to grasp a fact when their salary relies on not seeing it.” Just follow the money. Every time. Or “mammon,” as the case may be.

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Ban Them Too

Controversial take, I know, but ban them too, and for the same reason that you’d ban bots. If bots are disrupting the game balance or ruining the economy with some particular behavior, then the actual people doing that same behavior are too. I can already hear it: “But, but, they’re paying subscribers!” So are the accounts running bots. Why is it ok to disrupt the game with time and effort, but not with programmed automation?

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My Life in the Age of AI

I’m moving an application out of my Azure subscription into the corporate cloud. I’m trying to get assets stood up for production. I can’t pull a docker image from our repository to my web app service. Last week, I put in a ticket for this. I thought it was another whitelisting/firewall issue. I copied the error message I get in the logs, which has the timestamp, and suggested they could look at their logs for that timestamp to corroborate.

The ticket got picked up yesterday. “Still a problem?” “Yes.” It’s always still a problem.

Get a call this morning. “Please show me.” “But I sent the error in the ticket.” “Yeah, yeah, please share your screen.”

I can barely understand her. For part of the call, I can’t hear, because she’s scraping something around on the desk. The rest of the time, I can barely hear, because garbled call center chatter is cutting through the “background suppression” on her mic.

I do the thing. I watch in almost-horror as it works flawlessly this time. I know I will never understand what has just happened. Anathema to me. I need to know so that I don’t have to fool with this in the future. “OK, it worked this time. What changed?” Mumbles. She wants to end the call and close the ticket.

I decide it’s not worth the hassle of the language barrier and the technology friction on the off-chance that she could actually tell me why it wasn’t working before, and why it’s working now, so I tell her she can close the ticket and end the call.

This is my life now. AI does almost all of the actual coding, and I try to get infrastructure setup like I’m trying to assemble a watch inside a closed box with someone else’s hands. Still challenging, to be sure, but not the kind of challenging that has lit my fires and made me love what I do for 30 years.

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A Tale of Two Games

Population of Fallout 76 (green) vs. Elder Scrolls Online (blue)

Last year, Microsoft slashed ZeniMax Online Studios to the bone, cutting an unreleased game that had been taking 7 years in development, and firing half the studio that was working on it. Although not fired, per se, the studio lead left right after. These moves apparently lit a fire under the butts of the people who remained. The Elder Scrolls Online announced and is releasing an overwhelming slate of new content and quality-of-life upgrades through the next couple of years, and the game’s population count is now starting to rebound. I think this trend will continue.

I’ve quit ESO. I’ve looked at several other games to replace it. Battlefield 6 was good and interesting, but the skill range is too high, and the sweats have run off all the casuals. I tried Warframe, which has a nice player count these days, but there’s no multiplayer end game to speak of. I tried Destiny 2, but even fans say it’s nigh impossible to get into as a new player, now that they deleted the first half of the content. Between the inscrutability of the systems, player counts being in the toilet, and Bungie in serious trouble after the release of Marathon, I’m giving this a miss pending better fortunes. I hate any game that’s all or nothing, which eliminates extraction shooters, like Arc Raiders, from consideration. Diablo IV and Path of Exile are too dark for my tastes. WoW is too cartoonish. Final Fantasy XIV is too furry. Guild Wars 2 looks interesting, but it’s PC only, and I just want to game on my console in my recliner. And that’s about it for MMO’s that I might be interested in.

So all of this continues to leave me with Fallout 76. Meanwhile, Bethesda Game Studios adds less content and more bugs with every release of Fallout 76. It’s in a bad place right now, and the player counts definitely reflect this. Bethesda fumbled the latest re-release of Fallout 4, which is still plagued with bugs, after many months. They fumbled Starfield’s original release, and now continue to fumble with Starfield for Playstation, which is also reportedly full of bugs. It seems they’re never going to get to The Elder Scrolls VI. I sure wish Microsoft would kick their rear ends in gear somehow. Given popular sentiment on the subreddit, I think the current trend with player counts in 76 will also continue unless something changes drastically. Their recent announcement about the next big patch clearly continues the decline.

Bethesda, please, make Fallout 76 great again. I find it almost inconceivable that I can’t find any games I want to play besides this one right now.

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    systemd birthDate Merge: Corporate Filings & Governance Failure – TBOTE Project

    Investigation into Amutable GmbH founding documents, undisclosed conflicts in the systemd birthDate merge, EUR 855K in undisclosed government funding, and $42.2M in corporate lobbying.

    Source: systemd birthDate Merge: Corporate Filings & Governance Failure – TBOTE Project

    The executive summary:

    On March 18, 2026, a first-time contributor submitted a pull request adding a birthDate field to systemd’s user record schema. A Microsoft employee merged it against 37 thumbs-down and 1 thumbs-up. The community submitted a revert. Lennart Poettering – who had incorporated a commercial Linux startup called Amutable seven months earlier – closed the revert without merging and locked the discussion. The entire sequence took 48 hours.

    This investigation pulled Amutable’s founding documents from the German Handelsregister. The corporate filings show three equal shareholders, no outside investors, and self-dealing exemptions that let any founder sign contracts between the company and their own personal entities. All three founders were employed at Microsoft when they signed the founding deed. A hidden shareholders’ agreement – referenced three times in the Articles of Association but never filed publicly – governs economic rights, IP assignment, and vesting terms the public cannot see.

    Three decisions put the birthDate field into systemd. Each was made by someone with a direct financial interest in the outcome. No one disclosed those interests. systemd has no conflict-of-interest policy, no steering committee, no community veto, and no disclosure requirements. The project that boots every major Linux distribution has less formal governance than a typical mid-size open source project.

    Amazing. Astounding, even. So good, old Lennart Pottering is a bad guy. Who knew? Was he always?

    From his Wikipedia page:

    Poettering was born in Guatemala City but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Hamburg, Germany. Poettering worked for Red Hat from 2008 to 2022. He then joined Microsoft. In 2026, Poettering left Microsoft to cofound Amutable, a company focused on integrity verification for Linux systems.

    What happened during his 4 years at Microsoft to make him leave and make this his whole identity?

    UPDATE: Looks like I stumbled into more conspiracy than I knew:

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    The Love/Hate for ESO Turns Once Again

    I’ve written extensively about ESO. I started during COVID with some IRL friends, took a break, came back for Oakensoul and Arcanist, took another long break, recently came back for subclassing, and now I think I’m well and truly done.

    It’s the combat. I just can’t get away from the fact that I don’t like it. I’m not great at it. Passable, not great. But here’s the revelation: I don’t think I’d enjoy the game even if I was good at it. The combat is just not interesting to me. It never was. In all the roughly 5,000 hours I’ve put into it, I’ve never thought it was fun. It was just something to be endured while questing and grinding.

    (And the one non-combat thing to do in the game is Tales of Tribute, but I truly despise it, and do not believe a collectible card game has any place in an MMO.)

    Zenimax Online has made stunning announcements about new content, systems, quality of life upgrades, and game modes coming to the game over the next couple of years. That’s great. Great for the long-term prospects of the game as a business, and great for the people who like it.

    Unfortunately, all this does is make my OCD tingle. There will be thousands of hours of content added as well as thousands of new achievements to earn. The thought of it is overwhelming, and the reason has taken me years to articulate: I want to complete the content, but I can only do that through the combat I don’t enjoy. This is why it feels overwhelming to me. I don’t enjoy the process.

    That was my reason for leaving last time. I was obsessed with grinding out achievements at the expense of the terrible combat, and it was hurting my mental health. Once all of this new content lands, the problem would be multiplied for me.

    Perfect example time. I decided to try veteran Vateshran Hollows. I’ve done it several times on regular, but never cleared it on vet. I figured with all the power creep from subclassing, I’d have a pretty good shot at it. Since coming back, I got everything leveled and got all new meta gear, so I followed Hyperiox’s guide on making a solo build, and went in. It was 2 hours of frustrating grind. After 17 deaths and the third wipe on the final boss due to some mechanic of one particular enemy that I wasn’t understanding, I just quit. I simply closed the game. Then I went to Steam and turned off auto-renew on ESO+.

    (I logged back in to remove all my items in the guild store so they wouldn’t expire and then be deleted in emails I never open, because I had a couple million-gold items up for sale.)

    The start of these sweeping changes landed yesterday. I successfully ignored my curiosity to log in and look at them.

    Some people like the process of getting your head bashed in for a couple of hours, reading a guide and watching a video, and then trying again, until they’ve mastered all 50 different fights in a particular dungeon. I could do that. I was already very close on the first try. But what I finally realized is that I don’t enjoy that, and never will, and I’m tired of pretending that I do. The endless click-click, click-click, click-click metronome mini game of keeping all your skills up while interleaving light attacks, poorly, with a LOT of misses of the 50ms window while also moving, dodging, and blocking. A run of the thing is about an hour, once you know what you’re doing. (The speed run time limit is 45 minutes.) That sounds more manageable, but who knows how many runs it would take for me to get to that kind of time, memorizing every boss, and every attack pattern, and every mechanic.

    And then I realized that you need to clear it ten times to unlock all the perfected weapons.

    This was the final straw for me. I don’t enjoy this combat. I don’t enjoy the grind. I don’t enjoy the process. So, for the third and, I think, final time, I’m retiring.

    I’m just quiet quitting this time. Last time, I made announcements with my guilds. This time, I’m just going to let it fallow. Making announcements makes people uncomfortable, regardless of my autistic need to put a cap on it. People come and go all the time. I finally figured out that it’s part of the unwritten community rules to not talk about it, so there’s no pressure either way. So I can only blog about it. Sorry, world.

    I like the thought of doing content with other people now, instead of just playing single-player games. That was the best part of ESO, running dungeons and trials with guilds. I’ve looked around at a lot of replacements. I’ve heard the skill ceilings are quite high in both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV, so that puts me off of them. I want to like Destiny 2. The gunplay seems to be the right style of combat for me. But everyone agrees that the game is not in a good place right now, and it’s famously inscrutable to new players. I’ve played a few hours, and it’s not clicking. Bungie is promising a refresh, but it’s been pushed several months, due to having their hands full with Marathon, I’m sure. So I’m going to keep an eye on this.

    I still love Fallout 76, bugs and crappy RNG and all.

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    Back to the Wharghabl

    I’ve reactivated my twitter account, just shy of deletion. I did it to keep up with AI developments and tech news in general. And, boy, what a time to return to watching this scene in real time, with the Oracle layoffs, and the leaking — and immediate rewrite — of Claude’s “harness.”

    Even though I can’t bring myself to not follow a few key politicians (Thomas Massie, Rand Paul), I will try to minimize political content in my feed by not engaging with any of those posts.

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    Yes, It Really Is That Bad

    Outrage as Oracle makes thousands of foreign-worker requests amid layoff bloodbath

    According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, Oracle filed for roughly 3,126 petitions to employ H-1B workers in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Employers must submit the paperwork when seeking to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology. Some 436 of those petitions were filed this year alone.

    Amazon, which in January said it would axe 16,000 corporate employees, has filed for some 2,675 H-1B petitions during the same two-year fiscal period. That came on top of news in October that the retail giant was axing 14,000 corporate workers.

    According to AI search results, there were 245,000 tech layoffs last year. We’re already at 90,000 this year. Someone on TikTok referenced 340,000 layoffs from the government sector as well. But, sure, the unemployment rate is just 4.4%. Something, something, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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