Jessica

I have spent a not insignificant amount of time in mentorship conversations talking younger folks through the fact that they are not failures because they're not making the kind of money that everyone on Instagram and TikTok claims that they're making. This shit really does mess with people.

And why diverse perspectives are needed in that conversation - the worst case scenario you can think of will vary based on your privilege and experiences. This is why we get apps/tech that women immediately clock for potential misuse by abusive partners in ways the men who made them didn't consider.

It is *SO IMPORTANT* to be a Professional Suspicious Bastard.

OSINT/HUMINT - That friend of yours who can find out everything about the cute boy you saw in first period with just a name, or who can figure out who is behind the account bullying your brother by linking it to their other accounts has a skill that can be developed into a job, don't overlook it!

Measles was wiped out in the U.S. 25 years ago and now we’re already past 1,000 cases in February because vaccination rates dropped below the safety line. This is what happens when public health gets gutted and people stop trusting basic science.

Dropkick Murphys' free concert at the Alex Pretti memorial will stream online The stream, like the concert, will be free, but the band is encouraging viewers to donate to Minnesota organizations.

bringmethenews.com/minnesota-li...

If we have to pay to rent movies again on a subscription service, we should just reopen Blockbuster.

Immediately had a flashback to my trip to New Zealand, where I was floored when they rolled out the drink cart on my 45 minute flight between Auckland and Wellington. I didn't know what to do with myself when they also gave me breakfast. For free. On the cheapest ticket type they offered. 🤣

People do what you pay them to do.
You pay corporate executives to make stock prices go up, not to make better products.
You pay politicians to get re-elected, not to govern well.
You pay reporters to get a bigger audience, not to tell the truth.
And so forth.
Be aware of what you pay people to do

When it gets stuck the only option is to turn the car off and on again.

Last week, our car's screen hung on the message about keeping your eyes on the road while driving and not getting distracted by the screen. The notification blocks everything else on the screen, and even when it's not stuck, the option to dismiss it is in the bottom corner furthest from the driver.

Begging all of my email inboxes to stop separating out what they think is important. "Priority". "Focus". "Main". In 30 years you haven't managed to come up with a spam filter that actually sorts things accurately and effectively, why would I let you decide which of my emails I most need to see?

I am a luddite and to me there is a lot of joy in technology. In technology that we deploy for all our wellbeing. Solar panels and vaccines, high-speed rail and wikipedia.

But they joy stems from the feeling of being able to be part of humanity in an embedded, meaningful way. Not from buying shit.

not to say they are doing this on purpose but the ram shortage & price spike is certainly playing into the hands of people investing billions into tech aimed at first stealing and then selling every bit of information and knowledge ever created by mankind because they hate open source and open data

...this was not an isolated incident, and the behavior was not unique to that individual.

I was once tasked with coming up with a solution to address a risk that had existed for years because someone important read a random article about it and decided it was the most important thing until they heard how much it would cost and then they stopped caring pretty much immediately.

I do sometimes think that everybody who keeps insisting that this or that is a distraction has never worked a job under wildly reactive leadership where what you're working on may just be based on something someone whose title starts with a "C" read in a magazine that morning while taking a shit.

Tbh you're right and you should say it.

Fun fact you can do everything you want with just HTML tables and people liked that version of the Internet a lot better

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

Everybody’s talking about the destruction of consumer electronics and that’s bad, but basically everything in modern life has a computer in it. Hospitals, airports, transportation, shipping, medical devices, farm equipment, and point of sale terminals had a good run

Fun little update:

The $260 4tb SSD I wanted to buy 4 months ago is now:

$809 at retail price.

So I guess we just don’t get to afford computers now?

I’m in desperate need of good news, man. Watching society rapidly decay is exhausting.

WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out Hyperscalers are tearing hard drives out of the hands of manufacturers. Prices are therefore also rising for SSDs.

I saw a conspiracy theory yesterday that the goal is to eliminate all local data storage and push everything into the corporate cloud where it will be scraped to train A.I. (and exploit us)

And I'm having a difficult time dismissing it

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

I am cringe, and therefore I am free!

Going to Medieval Times is such a good litmus for a potential romantic partner - are you going to get into it with me and have a good time or are you gonna succumb to the "cringe"? I'd rather know early! 🤣

everyone with an IQ above paste could have predicted this would happen: anyway; these Meta glasses are ontologically evil and anyone who wears them is a creeping blood-worm who should be chased from society with stones and sharp sticks

Something something avocado toast something something deflection something something.

so discord? this is some horseshit & i do not trust it. fuck you and your AI age verification

“I’m mad I can’t understand Bad Bunny’s lyrics because they’re not in English”

my brother millions of metalheads around the world have been happily listening to incomprehensible Finnish shrieks and Japanese death grunts since we were teens, you’re just boring and racist