http://ddhr.org/ http://ddhr.org/2025/11/23/twitters-marketplace-of-ideas/ Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:04:46
Enter Elon Musk, prominent Nazi.  Musk didn't like the marketplace so he simply bought it.  He changed the structure from "free and open" to "pay to win" so that paying customers would have their voices heard more.  Instead of good ideas rising to the top, bad ideas bought their way in.  On top of that, engagement became the new currency, so the bad ideas with the most engagement dominated the marketplace.  Twitter's marketplace of ideas is now a swamp of shit with the absolute worst people and worst ideas on the very top. 

Critics will say Elon had to do something to make Twitter profitable.  That sounds reasonable, but I have my doubts.  Tech companies absolutely don't need to make money.  Most corporations don't need to make money.  Private investments, stock buybacks, corporate restructurings, and mass layoffs are how pretty much all companies operate at what appears to be a profit.  It's all made up and doesn't matter at all.  The point is, Elon destroyed twitter because he's an awful lunatic attempting to curry favor with the most despicable human beings on the planet.]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/11/15/government-shutdown-2025/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:52:08
The only downside was that we weren't getting paid.  There was an expectation that we would get paid after the shutdown ended, and this was even codified as a law after a previous shutdown.  But I no longer have confidence in the government's ability or willingness to follow laws.  Working without pay is fine for a short time, but it brings up some interesting questions after a while.  Like, how long do I feel like working without getting paid, and how hard do I feel like working?  At what point should I consider a different job, preferably one that pays me?  Because as much as I like my job, at the end of the day, it's a job.  If I didn't have to work for a living, I wouldn't.  If I could devote my time to something while not getting paid, it wouldn't be my job. 

But the other interesting question was:  What the hell should I do with my time?  It's hard to predict when a government shutdown will end, so you don't want to make any big future plans or anything.  So I mostly did nothing with my newfound free time.  I played video games, watched TV.  Standard things I would do with my downtime in pseudo-vacation mode.  But after a couple weeks, I decided I should probably be productive in some form, so I did a few house projects that have been waiting around for months.  Again, even with two hours of work and a few hours of home improvement work, it's still a great work/life balance. 

Which, by the way, I think the last time I had this much free time in my life was when I was maybe 15 years old, before I started working a summer job.  After that point, it was work, high school, college, summer internships, and then a full-time job.  High school and college weren't easy, stress-free times for me, so I've basically been "on" for the past 28 years straight. 

The source of the government shutdown was a disagreement between the president's budget proposal and congress's acceptance of that bill.  Now that the furlough is over, government employees have been assured they will receive back pay both for the actual work they did and also for the work they didn't do, i.e. they'll be paid for not working.  As a taxpayer, this is an absurd situation.  But as a government employee who had no say in whether or not the government was shut down, it's a no-brainer.  Pay me what you owe me, bitch.  I signed up for this job, I've created a life based around receiving a certain annual salary.  A political disagreement is honestly not my fucking problem.  And honestly it's a weird situation, where it's unclear who benefits from a government shutdown.  Surely the government workers don't benefit, and neither do the businesses and restaurants and all manner of other trickle-down economic players who aren't receiving that routine flow of cash.  But also the taxpayers don't benefit because not only are those tax dollars still being spent, you're also not getting the work production value out of them.  As far as I can tell, the only people who benefit are the small-brained politicians who get to essentially take hostage the entire national economic apparatus to exercise their silly little power plays. #politics]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/11/08/football-shape/ Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:05:15 #sports]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/10/05/brief-history-of-windows/ Sun, 05 Oct 2025 09:44:03
Throughout its lifetime, Windows started out as a clunky add-on, became buggy, became the industry standard, fixed its bugs, became its true self, and then deteriorated into a worthless pile of garbage foisted on its global user base by techno-futurist zealots.  An operating system isn't the piece of technology people want to interact with.  When I use a computer, I want to use software, I want to write, create, learn.  The operating system is simply the skeleton that holds everything up.  If I have to fight with my operating system to force it to allow me to do what I want to do, it no longer has any value for me.  Windows has become a nuisance, a paper cut, a broken bone.  I guess it was inevitable, but it's still sad to see. #technology]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/08/28/figure-it-out/ Thu, 28 Aug 2025 19:14:00
Not all problems are solvable, and most of the rest of them are hard.  But with the amount of money we pay this guy and the level of intelligence he brings to the table (now questionable), I would've liked to have said one simple thing:  Figure.  It.  Out.  FIGURE IT OUT.  Find a way to solve this problem.  You're smart.  You have resources at your disposal.  You've done all this other complex work.  Figure it out.  Open your code editor and change the format string of the print statement from %3.3f to %3.6f.  Every single other person working on this program and in this entire industry knows this and knows how to do it.  Do it.  "Not possible" is not an option, especially at this level, and especially with this task.  Figure it out.]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/08/11/on-ai/ Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:32:45
I think most of the hate for AI comes (rightly) from the force-fed nature of it.  There's AI in search engines, shopping websites, browsers, documents, apps, operating systems, phones, home appliances, a toilet, etc.  Every website on the planet now has an AI-powered "assistant."  It's often more difficult to avoid AI than to just begrudgingly use it.  And that's the problem most people have:  There's no choice in the matter.  Tech companies are shoving this concept down our throats, and it all comes off as very Microsoft Clippy-esque -- that super annoying "assistant" in Microsoft Office programs that would try to guess what you doing (wrongly) and try to offer assistance (poorly), really only serving as a thing that got in the way of what you were actually trying to do.  People mostly want freedom to do things as they wish, to express themselves in whatever nonoptimal, convoluted means they see fit.  Technology that gets in the way of creativity is not only not helpful, it's detrimental. 

But also, people hate AI because it sucks.  If you look carefully (or not that carefully), you see it used everywhere -- to create movies, commercials, viral videos, art, etc.  And that's mostly fine, aside from how bad it is at times.  The problem is that humanity already isn't good at determining what's true and what's not, what's fake and what's real.  And as these tools improve, and as more and more people gain access to them, it's concerning to imagine the world we'll be living in with ubiquitous AI-generated viral media available constantly, instantly, and universally. #technology]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/05/03/cte-brain/ Sat, 03 May 2025 08:18:46 Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a brain disease achieved by getting hit on the head a lot, and it's usually found in football players and boxers.  Some of the symptoms include impulsive behavior and aggression. 

It's a real thing, and I don't mean to make light of it.  But there's a pattern of behavior I've noticed in certain public figures in recent years that suggests something similar is happening to otherwise healthy people.  There was the football player Antonio Brown who walked off the field (i.e. quit) mid-game in a pretty dramatic fashion (though that might've actually been CTE).  There was the Dilbert creator Scott Adams who used to post benign little things on his blog and Twitter, but who has since devolved into a racist and an extreme fear-mongerer.  There's also Jordan Peterson, who achieved notoriety with a fairly benign self-help book, but who has since become an aggressively annoying Twitter personality.  Add to this list JK Rowling, who earned a billion dollars as a young adult author, but whose entire public life now consists of degrading transgender people for some reason.  And then there's Elon Musk, who used to be an awkward nerd but has since become a Nazi.  Also, Donald Trump. 

You could claim these people are just doing things for attention.  Or maybe that's how these people have always been, and social media has simply allowed them to be more visible about it.  But I think it's something else.  It might be that, similar to CTE, social media has altered peoples' brain to make them act more impulsive and aggressive.  Or it might be drugs (Elon) or supplements (Adams -- men that old shouldn't have abs).  I don't know what it is, but I don't like it, and I think social media should be abolished and people should have to obtain a license to use the internet. #psychology]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/05/03/autism-spectrum/ Sat, 03 May 2025 08:08:18 everyone is on this spectrum, similar to the spectrum of gender or sexuality.  You can't be on or off the spectrum; you're on it.  If this is the case, most people are on the low end of the spectrum, i.e. not very autistic.  The people we think of as "having autism" are on the high end.  That leaves a whole bunch of people in the middle, which would maybe help explain people with difficulty making eye contact, sensory sensitivities, and things like that.  In other words, I think we're all a little autistic. #psychology]]> http://ddhr.org/2025/05/03/mirror-bacteria/ Sat, 03 May 2025 07:55:38 People I (Mostly) Admire podcast episode introduced me to the concept of mirror bacteria (or mirror life) which is the idea that biology uses molecules of a specific chirality, i.e. molecular formations that are either right-handed or left-handed.  The same chemical can exist in either form, but all biology tends to use molecules of a specific handedness, e.g. proteins are exclusively composed of left-handed amino acids.  There's a scary idea out there that if left-handed bacteria suddenly evolved or were created in a lab, the human immune system would be unable to defend itself because it evolved to recognize right-handed bacteria only. #science]]>