The New MicroCenter in Indy

What is going on?

I went to the new MicroCenter in Indy, and was immediately confronted with this when I walked through the front door. Is this the checkout line? Do I have to grab tickets to inventory, and get them fulfilled at this counter?

No. I asked a girl standing close by what I was looking at, and she said some “YouTubers” were live-streaming doing builds. Sheesh. Seriously? What’s hard about building a computer, especially these days? I’d like to see these guys navigate the dip switches and slots and interrupts we used to have to deal with.

When I checked out, the streamers had people whooping and hollering for some reason. I just wanted to go home, where I spent the next 4 hours configuring what I bought. Story forthcoming…

Get a Job Doing Software Development, They Said

It’ll be fun, they said.

Every day, it seems, I bang my head on the wall. Today? Tower — a normally-great git frontend on Mac — decided to throw up its hands and refuse to work on my work laptop, running Windows, of course. It’s trying to use AskPass.exe, which doesn’t exist. Did it get cleaned out by my company’s “security” scanning? I mean, there are only about 30 different scripts that run on login, to make sure I don’t do anything they don’t want me to do. Did one of them do something here? Why would that file go missing, all of a sudden?

So I go to Tower’s over-engineered, Apple-product-pages-inspired mess of a web site, and try to download an installer. No, instead, I get the same single run-in-place executable 3-times. Do they not have an installed version any more?

Is this a problem with git? Did git for Windows take a dump?

Is this even a problem with that file being gone, or is this a spurious error message? Lots of Stack Overflow questions seem to indicate that this happens with Visual Studio, but the file reference is clearly not in any Visual Studio installation location. It’s obviously trying to reference something in Tower’s files. And, of course, I can’t find a single reference in Google to this. Once again, I’m the only person in the entire world with a particular technical problem.

So I sent a request for support from Tower, then installed GitHub Desktop, got my new branch pulled, and moved on. But, dang.

Why does this stuff need to be like this? And why does it need to be like this so often?

Behind the Investigation: Patient Dumping

WAVE News troubleshooter John Boel investigates after multiple reports of patients being dumped out of Louisville hospitals.

Source: Behind the Investigation: Patient Dumping

Not one, but two! hospitals in Louisville have been caught literally dumping people just off their property to get rid of them. Apparently, this is not isolated! Sure, blame the hospitals for their part, but I really blame the insurance companies, for taking all the profits from the hospitals and doctors. The reporter here claims the hospitals have been sued for a couple million when caught, but that’s probably cheaper than providing the care at their own expense as legally required for the uninsured, given the prices that the insurance companies have driven up astronomically.

White House urges reauthorization of Section 702 spy powers

While there may be only three cases of intentional misconduct reported, the briefing does seem to gloss over the hundreds of thousands of instances of FBI misuse between 2020 and early 2021 alone — as well as the time and effort it takes to declassify these top-secret disclosures to give the public any insight into how these surveillance powers are being abused.

Source: White House urges reauthorization of Section 702 spy powers

Once and yet again, the UK press is doing the job the American press won’t or can’t do.

Runaway American “Capitalism”

The promise of Capitalism was, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your doorstep.” However, when people build better mousetraps these days, the mousetrap market leader just buys them, ruins the product, and forces people back to using the sucky mousetraps that led to the better one in the first place. We desperately need a new era of trustbusting the robber barons.

No Matter What Trump Does, Evangelicals Still Love Him

White evangelicals’ fascination with Trump won’t be the last time a large subset of the American public becomes enthralled by an authoritarian and incompetent politician.

Source: No Matter What Trump Does, Evangelicals Still Love Him

The better question is: What does this say about the state of American politics, that Trump is still somehow favorable in the minds of, say, a third of the country, compared to the rest of the field?

X marks the motivated reasoning

 

So forgive me if I can’t even get marginally excited for this latest kerfuffle over the new X branding. Primarily because of just how utterly removed the discourse around it is from a good-faith assessment of the merits of the particulars. It’s all turned into an endless proxy war, and every argument is wielded only in service of yet another petty ideological skirmish.

Source: X marks the motivated reasoning

The State of Javascript Development

Mocked in this article:

The pain is barely tolerable when you reach dependencies. So, so many of them. There’s left-pad, the legendary tiny package that broke all internet, collectively causing the amount of pain and drama comparable to the destruction of Alderaan.

Discussed here:

The Javascript Front End Developer Experience

I know just enough about the Javascript frontend world to understand that this is a good description of what it entails. When people try to gaslight me about how great Javascript is, pointing to Stack Overflow’s consistent top-tier ranking of the language, I know this is the part that isn’t being said out loud.

I’m just sitting over here enjoying the fact that my app isn’t big enough to warrant separating the front end from the back, and I can blissfully get away with server side rendering built into Rails, with bits of Javascript in the page, only for convenience.

Reddit’s average daily traffic fell during blackout, according to third-party data | Engadget

Compared to the website’s average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop.

A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years.

Source: Reddit’s average daily traffic fell during blackout, according to third-party data | Engadget

Well, so much for a “blackout.” I suppose it depends on how sensitive Reddit’s revenue is on these numbers, but given that they haven’t backed down from any of the behavior that led to this, my guess is “not much.”