Silicon Valley Redneck

Google strikes again!

So, on my Android phone....

There's a screenful of app icons.  Actually, multiple such screens.

Across the bottom is a single row of app icons shared by all screens.  (I don't know what this is called, or maybe I could DuckDuckGo a solution to today's idiocy.)

Up until this afternoon, that row always contained the same five apps, with no apparent way to change them: Phone, Text, Gmail, Chrome, Camera.

Well.

As of this afternoon, the two on the left have gone dynamic, and I see no way to control what apps are there.  Very often, they're two of the same doggone thing.

Hello?  Mr. Google?  I would very much like to have Phone and Text in fixed locations again.  I don't like to have my apps rearranged at random.

Ah, how the Horsemen stick together!

I remember, back when Pestilence showed up, thinking that Famine and War would surely follow, most likely in that order.

Now War is having a little romp in one corner of Europe... and, while disruption of Ukraine's agriculture is surely reducing the next crop, Tsar Vladimir's shipping blockade is already preventing the previous crop from going to places where it's needed, notably the poorer parts of Africa and Asia.

The ensuing regional outbreak of Famine will lead to further mass migration (facilitated, no doubt, by various government-sponsored transnational organizations)....

Latest thing in the headlines: monkeypox.  Hmmm.  Monkeypox.  Monkeypox*.

Ah, right.  Famine will make people more susceptible to various flavors of Pestilence, and drive people, including infected ones, to migrate to places where there's promise of food, bringing Pestilence along with them.  Refugee resettlement programs will hastily spread them everywhere, because it's so much better to move people around than to try to help them in situ.

(Those desperate masses trudging northward through the Darien Gap?  Some of them trudged all the way from Africa and Asia; apparently they have the miraculous power to trudge on water.  Expect more of this, especially after our tax dollars dollars conjured out of thin air go to building a highway through the Gap.)

And, looking back to yesterday evening's post: Famine brings War, which only makes things worse.  Round and round it goes....

 

* (Does best impression of Petey Otterloop pondering a wasp on a manhole cover, while being unable to dig up the strip in question.)

No true haircut

This seems like a false trichotomy:

It quite literally provides the poor nations of the world with their daily bread - without which their populations can either starve, riot or overthrow their governments.

Er.

If said populations do riot and/or overthrow their governments, they'll still starve.  So it's not a choice as stated; in the circumstance postulated, starvation is inevitable, while rioting and insurrection are optional in the meantime.

... Riot hard enough, I suppose, and maybe there'll be enough food for the survivors...?

A lurking danger

U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 5 begins thus:

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members

Which has worked well enough so far, overall, and should continue to do so as long as a majority of each House is acting in good faith.

However.

Suppose... just for the sake of argument... that, by a simple majority vote, the House of Representatives determines that being a Party member in good standing is a required qualification for the position of Representative.  (Pick a party, any party.  Assume, if it helps, that the Potrzebie Party has somehow gained a majority in the House.)

Suddenly a temporary majority has become permanent one-party rule.  If the Potrzebie Party also controls the Senate at the same time, and likewise adopts such a rule there, that's the entire Legislative Branch forever controlled by one party - and by a party with enough party discipline to enact such a rule, which implies that removing an President, or other official, not of the Party would be a trivial matter.

Such an action would be completely nuts, and unspeakably destructive.  And yet... look at all the crazy things being done by politicians all over the world right now.  I don't think "acting in good faith" is a safe assumption, nor even "being minimally connected to reality".

Even the simplest things have user interfaces

As, come to think of it, Donald Norman expounded on in some depth.

This year, I decided to use store-boughten trellis netting for the various clambering legumes.  I'm now taking a break from setting up a few nets (15' long; 5' nominal height, though the T-posts I'm using only have 4' sticking up above ground).

The good: they're much easier to store and to carry around than the trellis material I used last year (which was salvaged hog wire).

The not-so-good: finding the corners is a pain.  The netting is made up of synthetic string, all white, all very similar looking, and it offers little in the way of clues as to what's a top or bottom, what's an end, and what's internal mesh.

Were I designing such a product for enhanced user experience, I'd make the perimeter strings conspicuously thicker than the internal mesh, and make the top and bottom strings a contrasting color.  (I'm not sure whether making the end strings a different contrasting color would be helpful, but it couldn't hurt.)

Or maybe make the horizontal strings a different color than the vertical ones?  Anything to help the user sort out which way is who.

Theoretically, this netting can maybe be packed up at the end of the season to be used again... though I'm not sure how it'll hold up to UV exposure.  I probably won't bother; methinks I'll look for other options that are a little easier to use and more practical to reuse.

Of tomatoes with letters after their names

Look up just about any modern breed of tomato, and you'll find a string of letters after its name.

These denote resistance to various diseases: Verticillium Wilt, Fusarium Wilt, Nematodes, Tobacco Mosaic Virus, and so on.

What I want to know is: where are the varieties that are resistant to the ravages of bunny rabbits?

(And, while we're at it, I'd really like to see some rabbit-resistant strains of artichoke.  The bunnies do seem to go for tender young artichoke leaves.)

Maybe I should try dusting the pants with cayenne pepper.  Sprinkling it around the periphery of the garden doesn't keep the lagomorphs out, but perhaps putting it directly on the plants would deter nibblage.

"Some days, you just can't get rid of a ____"

Randomly noted on the 'Net:

COBOL is the new hotness!

... Didn't the Institutions learn their lesson yet?  Apparently not.

Also in lessons not learned: the lyrics to "Hacker Jack and the Y2K" seem to have been stored on a single site which no longer exists.  I can remember a few lines (tune: "Captain Jack and the Mermaid").

Hacker Jack was an old man who cared not for C.
    All the young coders tell him COBOL is dead.
He had no use for Java or even VB.
    Oh, tell him, young coders, go and tell him for me
    That his language is dead and it always shall be.

This dating from 1999 or thereabouts, of course Hacker Jack finds himself dragged out of retirement to fix all the banking software to use 4-digit years, or whatever hack was used to deal with the turn of the century.  Er.  If it ended up being a hack to keep using 2-digit years and avoid changing all the databeese, are we going to have another problem around 2050ish?

Ways to describe an object

So, that loon who attacked Dave Chappelle?

He had, apparently, some sort of maybe-weapon-like thing in his pocket.  At least one early report said he had a knife and a gun.  Others described it as a toy gun with a knife in it, or even a toy gun that shot knives.  I just saw it described as "a replica handgun built into which was a folding knife."

I saw a photo of the object in question last week.  It was a novelty folding knife with a vaguely-gun-shaped handle.  That's all.

Coming next week: toy guns with flamethrowers built in!  (Or maybe they're novelty cigarette lighters; anyone remember those?)

Another word: "Conventional"

Conventional agriculture.  Conventional medicine.

It means modern.  The new hotness, the non-conventional approach that will surely save us all, means a return to medieval methods - with, generally, an entirely false understanding of how those methods worked, whether they worked, whether anyone actually used them back in the day, and whether they'll scale.  Also, large amounts of superstition tend to be involved.

(See also: what did Socialists use before candles?)

Word of the weekend: "Supermoon!"

Supermoon! is of course the plural of Supermoo!, the Caped Cow.  Fighting for bovine freedom!

Sunday night they'll be out in force, riding around in their sporty little Mitsubishis and/or running a Java-based IDE on vintage Data General hardware.

No, I'm not awake yet.  Why do you ask?

Also, you may wonder how there can even be more than one Supermoo!.  Well, back in 1993 there was an accident involving a neon sign, or possibly a Dodge Neon.

And a happy Friday the 13th...

Had to run a couple of errands this morning.  Nothing big on the shopping list, so it's an occasion to exercise the Venerable Prius.

Oops.  Battery is dead.  As in, not even unlocking the doors.  I don't feel like doing a jumpstart just now, so leave that for later (note to self: call the dealer about that new battery Real Soon Now).

Swap Prius key for truck key.  Get in truck; start; shift to reverse...

BEEEEEEEEEP!  Wot?  Continuous beep, but only in reverse.  Sounds like the Car Proximity Warning System, but I'm definitely not about to hit anything - not even tall grass.

Oh.  That incident with the tractor, the tiller, and the garden hose?  At one point, I was backing up, sufficiently preoccupied with what was behind me that I didn't keep track of where the edges of the loader bucket were.  Scraped a little bit of paint off the corner of the rear bumper, which will call for a bit of touching up sometime soon (matching paint on order).  Looks like I also scraped off the bezel of the plastic retainer that holds the parking sensor in place.  I believe the sensor is still present, and connected, but is seeing the inside of the bumper and getting all frantic about an imminent collision.

Replacement retainers for parking sensors are cheap, but I went ahead and ordered an entire new sensor just in case; they're nowhere near as expensive as one might expect.  Now there's just the fiddly detail of getting the sensor back where it belongs, a process which ordinarily seems to involve removing the bumper.  (Why does a $20 part cost $500 if you have the dealership install it?  Labor cost for removing & replacing the bumper!)  I'll take a look with an endoscope sometime soon and see what things look like, and whether there might be some way to fix it without bumper removal.

Hm.  Parking sensors, turning out to be fairly cheap, might make good robot bits.  Gotta keep that in mind, for my copious free time.

Anyway, the Prius has now been jumpstarted and run for a while.  I even got a little bit of gardening in, though at 80°F, 60% humidity, and winter-length hair, conditions are suboptimal for manual labor just now.

Update:  I thought I'd make a Home Depot run, in search of some drip-irrigation bits, but it looks like there are thunderstorms on the way, and this is a very unlucky day to be hit by lightning.  Maybe I should remain indoors for now, and go shopping in the morning.  (Also, sometime soon, when we're not having thunderstorms, I need to refill several gas cans.  Supply on hand is running low, and prices are rising again.  That lawnmower is a thirsty beast, especially when I'm trying to keep somewhere around 4 or 5 acres mowed.  No, I'm not observing No Mow May... except for the other 70% or so of the land, which gets mowed June-ish and October-ish.

Woop.  Lightning within 4 miles.  Sounds like staying home was the right decision.

Update 2:  The rain which is now falling is doing so with 83% probability.  For rain that's only 83% probable, it certainly is intense.

In other what-could-go-wrongery: I'm reminded that "V6 hotend" is not a particularly meaningful concept, and that trying to assemble a frankenhotend is unlikely to work.  I'm trying to get a hotend with an all-metal heatbreak and a 3mm cartridge thermistor onto the machine with minimal other alterations; the Spider would suit me just fine, if only I could get the extended fan duct for it, or an STL file for same.

Yeesh!  We were supposed to get a little rain overnight, maybe.  Currently at 0.33" in the last... 20 minutes, maybe?  Glad I fetched the mail earlier.

Well, there's your problem!

Rand Paul, on the bill to throw $40 billion at Ukraine:

All I requested is an amendment to be included in the final bill that allows for the Inspector General to oversee how funds are spent.

And you don't see this as being a deal-breaker?

If there's oversight, how are the crooks in Washington going to get their kickbacks from the crooks in Kyiv?

Helping the Ukrainians block Russian imperialism is fine, but using it as an excuse for flinging vast amounts of Other People's Money around with no accountability is not.  Alas, the attitude in Congress nowadays is "agree on the bottom-line number, and don't worry about where the money goes or how it's spent."

A little reminder regarding Great Men

Had the suits at IBM not been a bunch of male chauvinist pigs, Bill Gates would be a mere footnote in the history of computing.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi and all that.

Shibboleths, class divisions, and neopronouns

This item at RedState conjures a thought.

Quoth the author: "... our contemporary concept of gender identity isn’t the product of sex."

Well, it certainly isn't tied to biology, nor to grammatical gender.  None of these things are sexes nor genders, and most of them bear no relation to pronouns.

So what is it?

It's a way of telling the in-group from the out-group*.

It's part of a big push to turn the younger generation into a distinct social class, or a cult, with elaborate rituals and social conventions utterly incomprehensible to outsiders such as their parents.

Compare to the social rituals and speech conventions at any Imperial Court ever.  The courtiers are a breed unto themselves, with no purpose but to flatter the Emperor and to belittle anyone lacking the dress and manners of the Court; having no constructive work to be doing, and being a closed group, they have unbounded time to polish their distinctive manners.

This whole thing is about sowing divisions, primarily between the new generation (and its State-empowered handlers) and the old.  Producing a crop of castrati is incidental.  And!  Note how this aspect ties in neatly with the push to eliminate all vestiges of the parents' culture from the schools?  No more books from the before-time.  No history as we know it; all history must be invented anew.  Math must be reinvented, or preferably abolished.  There must be no commonality between the old generation and the new!

 

* One customary way of telling the innies from the outies is via mutual omphaloskepsis; however, this is impractical in winter.

Wait, did this economic control system come from Boeing?

It's kinda like global financial markets are equipped with some sort of Market Characteristics Augmentation System, and when the sensor that's supposed to measure the velocity of money goes wonky the MCAS starts messing with the pitch trim.

It's not entirely running away in one direction, though.  Maybe the sensor is intermittent, and the pitch trim adjustment sometimes runs away in one direction, sometimes in the other, and every once in a while it will function normally for a while?

Hey, this explanation makes at least as much sense as anything I see in the purported financial news.