We Used to be a Civilization

Posted on September 6, 2024 by David K.
weirdsmobile.com

There were a handful of websites I found way back in the 2000’s that I liked, and kept on a short list to check every few days. This one stuck in my head because of the domain name, which I thought was terribly clever. I dug it up in the Internet Archive. It’s been taken over by some film company? Or something? I’m not clear if it’s run by the same people or not.

Another one was called “The Bassment” (sic), made by a guy who worked at SGI. It was named that way because he played bass, too. I can’t find it in the archive. It was run out of an Indy he had at his house, which inspired me to run my own web and email servers out of my house for 15 years.

There were others, like “Ze Frank,” who has moved to TikTok and YouTube (and probably others).

Anyway, I just wanted to capture the kind of free design that used to be prevalent on the internet before everyone started using “engines” and “templates” and “front ends.” And, no, the irony is not lost on me, sitting here using WordPress with a stock theme. And, sure, I started to rewrite another custom web site for my personal use, but I was using Bootstrap anyway. I readily admit that I’m not creative, but I used to at least try.

Graphics by FrontPage 97 and Image Composer

The web used to be a wild frontier of programmers and artists and writers who were exploring the new medium. Now, it’s just YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et. al., etc. There are very few personal sites left. It all got so boring. And for all the “AI” that’s supposed to be in “the algorithms,” TikTok and YouTube offer me 20 pieces of crap for every 1 thing I might have been interested in.

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More AI for all the Corporate IT Things

Posted on August 31, 2024 by David K.

Last month, I was talking about how I didn’t understand what my bluechip Fortune 250 is doing with AI. From AI for all the Corporate IT Things:

Well, it’s a good thing I don’t understand, because he’s not talking about using AI to fix IT. He wants to use “technology” to improve our “safety-ness.” Say wha..? Like, he wants to use AI to improve safety on the factory floor. Huh?! Are we going to buy Tesla robots to pull people’s fingers out of the way of presses?! I’m confused.

I sat in a Zoom call where someone discussed the first pilot program for our official corporate AI efforts. On the one hand, they’ve done exactly what they said they were going to do. They’re trying to use AI to try to reduce OSHA incidents. Surely that’s a noble effort, right? But on the other hand, I have trouble imagining a real-world scenario that would be less applicable to AI. I mean, first of all, safety incidents are already scrutinized with a microscope. Second of all, there are so relatively few, I don’t believe you can use AI to analyze them. There’s not enough data to establish patterns. On top of that, every incident is an outlier, and gets dealt with immediately, and not in a performative way, but, like, for real. New rules are put in place, guard rails are installed, etc. So these outliers are very, very unlikely to happen again. Ergo, the data is not statistically significant, and whatever else you know about AI, it’s ALL based on statistics. So I don’t get it.

The other thing that strikes me is that we’re using — er, “renting,” I’m quite certain, and at an exorbitant rate — an off-the-shelf AI product called GenAI by Palantir. You know, the love child of the so-called Five Eyes multinational intelligence conglomerate, and the company that spies on everyone, everywhere, all of the time. So we’re not using our company’s vast resources to invest in creating our own AI models. We’re just paying our contractors to learn how to operate someone else’s machine. In this golden age where instructions on how to create models are readily accessible, and the coding libraries to implement them proliferate, we’re eschewing the opportunity to create custom models that could help our specific business problems.

Over a year ago, I talked with people about what I think we could do with AI, but I didn’t get anywhere. In the past months, several other engineers have spoken to me about similar ideas. In the part of the company I inhabit, there is a glaringly obvious use for AI staring us in the face. The problem is that we don’t have all the data we need to make it work, and getting the owners of the systems we would need to tie together with our data to open up their databases to us is simply impossible from where we sit. That sort of thing is simply never going to happen without a strong, direct proclamation from the CEO, and, even then, getting those people to give up some of their “power” in the company so that someone else can have more is going to be fought up and down the org chart. So we seem stuck. The only things we can use AI for won’t matter, and the things that would make a difference will never be done.

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Saudi Arabia Outraged At Ben-Gvir’s Call To Build Synagogue Over Al-Aqsa Mosque | ZeroHedge

Posted on August 29, 2024 by David K.

Source: Saudi Arabia Outraged At Ben-Gvir’s Call To Build Synagogue Over Al-Aqsa Mosque | ZeroHedge

In recent years Saudi Arabia and Israel have been moving remarkably fast toward the restoration of official relations, in what’s been called a highly anticipated ‘deal of the century’ – but the Gaza war in the wake of Oct.7 have put these efforts on hold and looks to derail the initiative altogether.

This week tensions have escalated, given that Muslims see current Israeli policies toward Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem as very seriously threatening and an affront to their faith. Israel’s hard-line Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir this week went to so far as to call for a synagogue to be built atop Islam’s third holiest site.

Today, in Mark of the Beast news… You can’t fulfill the prophecy of Dan 9:24-27 until the Third Temple is rebuilt, and this goal is a prime motivator for a lot of Jews, even if Americans don’t realize what’s going on. I don’t think that this will happen without extraordinary circumstances, even for the Middle East, but we are living in extraordinary times. In a similar way that it took World War 2 and the Nazi concentration camps to reinstate the nation of Israel, it seems that it would take a third world war — involving Israel and, oh, I don’t know, say, Iran — to force the Muslim “world” to allow Israel to rebuild the Third Temple. I don’t think anyone doubts that this will eventually happen, and we seem to be inching closer and closer to it, in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Taiwan.

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Meat in Gelatin

Posted on August 19, 2024 by David K.

That’s gelatin — flavorless Jello — it’s encased in. One of the top 3 meals I ever had was at a converted 17th-century abbey in England, and part of the meal was rabbit “terrangue” — that’s what I remember it being called, but spellcheck has no idea — which was rabbit in gelatin. One of my roommates in college used to say he wanted meat-flavored Jello. I guess I actually had it.

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AI Apocalypse

Posted on August 16, 2024 by David K.

The Harris campaign is using a lot of AI image generation to beef up the size of their crowds in pictures of events, and they’re doing a full-blown media psyop to pretend that conservatives are going to vote for her. Two can play that game. I mean, at this point, anyone and everyone can. Nothing is real any more. Nothing. Unless you see it with your own eyes and hear it with your own ears, doubt it. Certainly don’t believe anything you see on the news or social media. I’m seeing stuff EVERY DAY that gets proven to be a complete fabrication within hours. It’s happening ALL THE TIME, and you don’t even know it. However much you THINK is happening, it’s MUCH worse than that. We are on our own. There’s no one coming to save us from this AI apocalypse. Certainly not the government. They’re already using it against us!

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Please Hang Up and Dial 911

Posted on August 9, 2024 by David K.

I woke up with a chronic pain about 3.5 years ago, which has never stopped. I’ve now seen about 22 doctors and clinicians, had 4 MRI’s, 3 ultrasounds, a CT scan, 4 different nerve blocks, and 2 surgeries. I don’t say any of this for sympathy, but to setup this half-joke/half-serious idea I just had. As you can imagine, I’ve made a LOT of calls to various doctors’ offices over the past few years. It would be fun to record a voicemail greeting so that when all of these people call me back and leave a message, they have to sit though a couple minutes of their own greatest hits that I have to listen to multiple times a week, like, “please listen closely as our prompts have changed,” and “leaving multiple messages will only delay processing and returning your call,” and my all-time favorite — because EVERYONE has this in their prompt — “if this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911.” I wish I had thought of this sooner.

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10X Video Gamers

Posted on August 9, 2024 by David K.

I get into arguments about the “myth” of the 10x software engineer, but “10x” people exist in every human endeavor, including, frustratingly, The Elder Scrolls Online. I can at least keep up among the best coders I’ve met, but I will never be competitive in ESO PVP.

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Windows Startup Buggery

Posted on August 7, 2024 by David K.

I have a PC. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I have a PC. I bought it for one and only one use: to play Elder Scrolls Online. To that end, I bought a SCUF Envision Pro controller. It does not work unless its Corsair iCUE software is running. The software will not start with Windows. There’s a checkbox in the software to make it do that, but it doesn’t work. I’ve tried toggling it back and forth several times. It just won’t work.

Frustrated with the situation, I decided to finally fix it.

The “startup” thing you can find in the Windows options only has toggles for programs that have registered with it. iCUE is not there. So I search for where the actual startup folder lives now. I have to google that, and find a howto to run “shell:startup” from a Windows Run box. This is stupid, but now I have the old-fashioned startup folder to put a link to the program.

So, now, where’s the program?

I search for the application in the Windows start menu. All this will give me are links to web pages talking about the application. (Launched in Edge, naturally, and I don’t care to see if I can fix that, because I know they’ll just change it back with the next update.)

I have to click another button to get to the actual list of applications installed on my system, and it’s not there either. That’s right: a proper link to a properly installed program simply doesn’t exist on the system.

I have an icon on the taskbar to run it. I thought you could right-click on a taskbar shortcut, and see where the program that it runs actually lives on disk. Nope. So I google again, and find where the taskbar shortcuts live. It’s buried under AppData under Internet Explorer. No, actually, I find where they live on Windows 10. Despite Windows 11 having been released for 3 years now, all my searches still bubble up references to Windows 10.

I finally find the new location. It’s been moved under Roaming, but it’s still related to the folders under Internet Freaking Explorer. I find the shortcut. The properties do not point to the executable, but there’s a right-click link that takes me to the application folder under Programs. This is a regression in usability. On the old shortcuts, you could put flags on the command they would run. But I digress.

I try to link the launcher application in my startup folder. The default action is to MOVE the file, which is about the last thing I want to do, but, hey, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and this isn’t my first rodeo. I press the modifier keys to find the one that makes a link, but it doesn’t work. I try again. Nothing. I link the actual application. That works.

For my own reference, I linked C:\Program Files\Corsair\Corsair iCUE5 Software\iCUE.exe in C:\Users\david\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.

After all this, I reboot on the spot to see if this will even work. It does. Whew. Twenty minutes of frustration after frustration to make crap software work the way I want it to on a crap OS. Something that should have worked by default. Something that, failing the previous, should have worked within the software’s options. Something that, failing both of these, I should have been able to figure out in Windows startup options. Something that, failing all 3 of these, I shouldn’t have needed a bunch of googling to figure out.

Why is this still a thing? Why is this “operating system” even still around? How is this the best we can do? This feels like something from 25-30 years ago. It’s utter nonsense, but this is what people have been conditioned to accept.

I moved to Macs about 10 or 11 years ago now, and I just can’t believe that people still put up with this crap. While I’m typing this out, my work laptop has just popped up a useless message about some “feature” in Teams that I will never use. Good grief! The popups now. Everyone in the Windows world is using them now. Open an application or go to a web site? Get 3 or 4 popups with a “tour” of features that — if they had designed the software intuitively and didn’t bury the icons and menus to begin with — you wouldn’t need in the first place. It’s all just so maddening.

I should just uninstall and reinstall the software. That’s the Windows way, right? But I’m afraid I’ll lose my settings. You wouldn’t think so, but, then again, I wouldn’t have thought I needed to do ANY of this.

UPDATE: Trying to figure out why my $200 controller couldn’t map one of the programmable buttons led me to finally discovering Corsair’s help forums. Among other things is a big thread about how the iCue software won’t launch at system start. Someone figured out that this stupid software just doesn’t put a link in the Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run like it should, and pointed out how to do that. Almost mercifully, my last comment about just giving up and reinstalling is moot, because it appears that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

For future historians, the problem with remapping is that the one button I bought the entire controller for — to remap the right index finger button to D-pad left, in order to put the ESO bar swap on a button I don’t have to take my thumb off movement for — doesn’t work, despite a dozen tries to reconfigure it. The G keys are mapped to keystroke combos, and they work fine. I don’t know if that’s because only these kinds of assignments work, and button remappings don’t, and I’m not going to figure that out. Anyway, and again for my own reference, it seems that:

Hooking up the controller with a USB cable gets the button remapping working again.

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Something is Coming

Posted on July 30, 2024 by David K.
Something is Coming

I feel this in my bones, and it’s been getting worse, quickly.

It’s not the economy.

It’s not COVID.

It’s not the vaccine.

It’s not illegal immigration.

It’s not DEI.

It’s not ESG.

It’s not AGI.

It’s not corporatocracy.

It’s not the uniparty in Washington.

It’s not the ticking time bomb of the national debt.

It’s not the deep state.

It’s not the wars in Ukraine or Israel, or the burgeoning war with China and Taiwan.

It’s the spirit of anti-Christ. These are the prophesied End Times. Literally.

I need a giant banner at the top of Twitter, constantly reminding me: It’s the last days, dummy.

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AI for all the Corporate IT Things

Posted on July 30, 2024 by David K.

I got an email with a link to a “town hall” about IT. I said to myself, alright, I dare you to tell me something interesting or actionable, and started watching the replay.

The CIO leads off, of course. His first slide is about DEIC, and celebrating/observing Black History Month and the Lunar New Year.

Sigh.

I mean, that’s great and all, but that’s 10 minutes we’re not talking about IT, which is what this meeting is supposed to be about, and which is all I care to hear about. I seriously doubt that people in, say, Europe or China care much about the US Black History Month, or that people in the US care about the Chinese Lunar New Year, for that matter. But, sure, let’s waste time pandering in the name of the current thing.

And then he says he’s able to relax, now that we know Taylor Swift was going to the at the Super Bowl. He doesn’t know what teams were going to play, but he spent a few minutes talking non-ironically about Swift being there.

Again, I mean, that’s great and all, but a half hour in, we’ve now spent thousands of man-hours not talking about IT.

When we finally get around to talking about, you know, information technology, and I find out that we’re apparently using AI to modernize our “corporate operating system.” I know a little about AI. I know a lot about how our internal procedures and organizational systems works. I do not understand how we can get AI to fix any part of this.

Well, it’s a good thing I don’t understand, because he’s not talking about using AI to fix IT. He wants to use “technology” to improve our “safety-ness.” Say wha..? Like, he wants to use AI to improve safety on the factory floor. Huh?! Are we going to buy Tesla robots to pull people’s fingers out of the way of presses?! I’m confused.

Next, we’re apparently going to minimize all “risks” to IT uniformly, without specifying or identifying what any of those “risks” are. So, at least we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. We’re going to do this by 1) reducing “new” findings, 2) eliminating repeat “findings,” and 3) closing “findings” faster. Well, that certainly seems simple. A little light on details, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

Then we’re going to “partner” with AI, and it’s going to help us be more “exponential.” Except that we’ve also been sent a company-wide email that says we’re not allowed to use AI for, well, anything!

After an hour and a half, I gave up watching. I just want to note that the leader of “transformation” just bought a new-fangled “Mac” and says he’s “challenged” to set it up.

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