So: Fascism is bad The First Amendment is good Genocide is an actual fucking crime And also: It's appalling to be in 2025 where each of these is not, in fact, taken as part of the baseline shared reality anymore

Yes, it's hard to promote work stuff in the current environment. But the fam's gotta eat, and people still have to keep things running.

If you're looking for a respite from The Horrors but still have to deal with the little-h horrors of Broadcom and VMware licensing, I sum up what their latest changes mean for customers of Azure VMware Solution (and Amazon Elastic VMware Service!) over on the free-to-the-public Directions blog:

Overheard someone saying their doctor told them to skip the Covid vaccine this year since it’s so mild. If your doctor says that, you should probably get a different doctor. I have several friends down with it right now… and it sure as hell doesn’t sound mild and irrelevant to me.

Today is Monday, Sept 8 Good morning ❤️ eat take your meds hydrate tell your people you love them let them love you back We are here. This is real. Let's build a home for each other and fight like hell.

Haven't we all, Matt? Haven't we all?

Professor life, 2025: "Will I be able to make this deadline if the President invades the city?" Is a real thought I just had.

Can’t really put my finger on it, but I’m starting feel like it’s gonna be pretty soon now.

Geoduck.

LinkedIn has become as performative as the Instagram fitness influencer genre, and just as reality-based. The "thought leaders" feel like the consultants from the old late-90s UPS commercial...

I laughed so hard I thought I was going to cough up an organ. Every line is gold.

Just saw a LinkedIn profile with the subheading of "Securing Fortune 100 Brands in an AI-Powered Cyber World" Shut it all down.

I loved the smell of old books from childhood on. My grandmother's books. Old corners of the library. Outdated encyclopedias. 2nd-hand bookstores. Today, I took out a book that I remember buying in my teens. And it has. That. Smell. It makes me feel old but for once, it's a GOOD kind of old.

What Microsoft’s Blowout Q4 Could Mean to Enterprise Customers: www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/what-microso... #MSTech #MSLicensing

30, not including airline stopovers. But I've also driven the length of the west coast (Imperial Beach to Cape Flattery), coast to coast four times (one round trip and two one-ways), and along much of the east coast.

I briefly met Satya in a small-group setting in 2018; even then he was visibly excited by AI. I wonder if that's part of why MS shoves Copilot at users at every turn: that's he's convinced we just don't get it like HE gets it. But if we're MADE to use it, then we'll finally get it and be grateful.

No cheating, post your Lock Screen

I was on TWiT yesterday to talk about my experience (and CNET article) using T-Mobile’s new T-Satellite service. I grabbed @glennf.com and we drove 3 hours out of Seattle to the North Cascades to find a cellular dead zone where it would work. twit.tv/tnw/397

really nothing better than being able to entertain friends with food and drink

I'm old enough that my daily carry was once a Motorola Razr, Palm Tungsten, iPod, and Canon S410 in a Timbuktu Messenger with a 15" PowerBook. Social media was LiveJournal, Flickr, MoveableType, and RSS feeds. And overall, it worked without making me the product. Kinda miss that.

If I wanted to see screens of X or Truth Social, I'd be there. Stop.

Interstellar comet, take me away...

I imagined the Chatsubo in 1984. 41 years later I opened its door. Neuromancer is in production.

There's doom-scrolling, then there's spending thirty minutes browsing the performative cirque macabre of LinkedIn.

58 days. Thousands of tons of debris. A 150 feet long, 30 ft deep slide. All that plus hard work from our crews, with patience & flexibility from nearby residents & businesses, made this SR 11/Chuckanut Drive closure one for the ages. Read more on our blog: wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2025/06/sr-1...

The COUNT DOWN begins. SR 542/the Road to Artist Point reopens 8 AM, Fri, June 27. Our crews doing one last drive thru before opening the road to #ArtistPoint . We are grateful for all their hard work! The weather is heating up and the mountains are calling.

"i asked chatgpt" yeah well i went to the doctor, i went to the mountains, i looked to the children, i drank from the fountains there's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line and the less I seek my source for some definitive closer I am to fine

There's a lot of big news today/this week, but Apple just dropped a nuke of a paper about LLMs & LRMs, specially around "high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse." This is the biggest sign yet that if AI ever lives up the hype, it won't be via those approaches:

Went to Costco for gas and a few things (honest!) Three cars drove away with their gas caps still off. In the store, was nearly run into four times by people pushing carts while looking elsewhere. Not even a phone thing, and it's becoming alarmingly common. Are people just... not present anymore?

I've run a number of GenAI experiments on AWS bills. The recommendations are either flat out wrong or actively dangerous in every scenario I've been able to throw at them besides the trivial.

Writing a book is so goddamn difficult. It's a true test of strength and will power. So much doubt and frustration. It's also the greatest thing imaginable.

Accurate

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

Of course anybody who has done anything ever at any level of competency learns quickly that work is the entire point. The experience is key. Failure is learning. Effort is execution. AI shortcuts all of that. It's for people who care nothing for journey and everything for destination. It's empty.

To these gen-AI assholes, the IDEA is the sauce, it's the magic, it's the SPARK that will SET THE FIRE that will LIGHT THE WAY, and everything after that is just crass four-letter-word WORK, yuck. It's moving piles of dirt around. It's laying brick. Work is just the thing in the way of execution.

I'd wager that most of these companies who are saying "We are investing in AI" as they lay off thousands of people are *not* investing in AI. These people will not be replaced by AI. They're simply not being replaced AT ALL — they were hired for growth that never should have been forecasted.

So with all the hand-wringing about the mental state of someone who withdrew from the race and is no longer President, y'all are going to be extra-vigilant regarding the mental state of the office's current occupant, right? Right?

You can judge people by how they treat the "help" - the waitress, the barista, the retail clerk. Corollary: You can judge employers by how they treat their staff when times are tight or in disarray. It's easy to be magnanimous when times are good, after all.

The number of times I've murmured, "This wouldn't have happened with a PM," is too damn high.

This is an excellent thread. I have my own.

Fifth Element or RED

I raise you one cryptic text message from an unknown number

It was never purely one or the other, but at some point the balance shifted from "people wanting make things and make some money in the process" to "people wanting to make fast money and looking for a viable grift."

Condescending or not, there is value in understanding one layer below one’s comfort zone.

Inside you there are two wolves. One is active, the other one is on hot standby and becomes active if the first one fails or is taken down for maintenance. Add more wolves as necessary for increased redundancy load balancing. A quorum badger can be added for environments with multiple active wolves.