I need to post here more frequently. I've been sitting on some funny shit for months.
I like reading Ken Shirriff's website,
Righto, but he wrote something that marked him as the kind of person I wouldn't really want to be around earlier in the year:
https://www.righto.com/2025/01/its-time-to-abandon-cargo-cult-metaphor.html (
archive)
Here's the conversation on
Hacker News about the article, but I'm not going to focus on that this time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675025 (
archive)
Ken Shirriff proudly marks himself as someone who wants to dismantle language, through destruction of idioms, metaphors, and analogies. I'll continue to read his technical articles, but I no longer care for him as much as I once did. This is no different than those malicious faggots who want to change
Man-in-the-Middle to
Monster-in-the-Middle,
Person-in-the-Middle, or some other ridiculous shit, since yucky men must be removed from all observations. I'd literally rather kill two birds with one stone than say
feed two birds with one scone like some dipshit.
Anyway, I'll summarize Ken Shirriff's article as succinctly as possible:
Checkmate, racists, the natives believed their ancestors to have made everything the Europeans had truly made, but that the Europeans had stolen from them as they worked in a volcano, but if they killed all of the Europeans they'd get it back and become white themselves, and actually this is all Whitey's fault anyway.
It's a wild read, and he's still wrong, but I'm not going to bother rereading the entire article to point out exactly why. I'm sure Ken would much prefer for white people to act so stupid so that some metaphor could be constructed about their behaviour, but unfortunately for Ken it's his behaviour exhibiting such madness and he doesn't even know it.
I also stumbled upon this recently while reading about that recent bullshit with Ycombinator darling Flock:
https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955 (
archive) (
nitter)
Here's the headline:
AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America
Here's the conversation Garry Tan, CEO and president of Ycombinator, had with a stranger on Twitter:
Garry Tan said:
Flock Safety currently solves 700,000 reported cases of crime per year, which is about 10% of reported crime nationwide
And they're just getting started
Jordan said:
this is pretty dystopian man, idk
Garry Tan said:
You're thinking Chinese surveillance
US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
It's hard to tell if Garry's serious, but I think he should be killed with a brick either way, along with most of the other
people involved with Ycombinator and
Hacker News. These stupid motherfuckers brag about civil disobedience and other shit, but it's okay, now that we've reached the end of history we don't need people to be able to violate the law.
I'd like to bring attention to when Garry Tan
was begging Uncle Sam to bail out his buddies who disregard the law and don't pay taxes, for innovation's sake!
Lastly, I was reading about the European Union forcing Apple to let other headphones work with its phones, which defeats the entire point of removing a standard port of course, and this fucking lunatic went on a rant that I must record here. I caught it just before it was flagged, but that means an archive hardly matters:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46363968 (
archive)
hopelite said:
I don’t see it as a matter of defending Apple, it’s really a matter of technical understanding and competence.
There are many reasons to criticize Apple, but wanting to not only control the exceptional ecosystem where everything just works as seamlessly as possible, but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
What I don’t think dawns on people is that this is an example of an intersection between what some call capitalism and communism mindsets, or it may be far more accurately described as the ants and the grasshoppers, the freeloader problem.
People like the iPhone for its having worked extremely hard to make its devices work really well, but those same people don’t understand how and why that behavior they like actually came about, so they start trying to “improve” things they don’t have the foggiest understanding about.
It’s a typical narcissistic type behavior and mindset of self-importance, that now that the hard work has been accomplished they’re here to take over and improve things they don’t understand and weren’t involved in creating.
It seems to be a mindset that totally infected and is spreading all throughout the whole West for whatever reason. People simply have no idea how what they inherited was created, let alone even know how to keep it going, not to mention fix anything.
Just alone the fact that it’s EU bureaucrats imposing these things makes it extremely unlikely that it is a good idea, considering not a single consequential tech company has been produced as a function of the EU. It is that obnoxious EU technocratic know-it-all hubris that keeps them even understanding just how little they actually know, which is so dangerous and reeks of malicious jealousy.
At least in the USA, the idiots in Congress are accountable to a constituency that elected them, and they tend to be able to discern that they simply don’t know enough to interfere with how Apple (for example) is doing what it does to produce the world’s best devices and services.
Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators, it is confident it knows more than Apple about how to do what all of Europe cannot seem to actually accomplish. Europe has not even been able to emulate what the Asians have done by forking Android, but here they are, wagging their fingers telling people how it is. Why do Europeans not get tired of that pathetic attitude?
Frankly, I wish Apple had the non-binary balls to simply just cut off all iPhones in Europe rather than bend to EU despot dictates.
At least I can hold onto the gleeful spite that Apple may just use this as an opportunity to push people into buying more Apple products by demonstrating that, e.g., “your use of non-Apple headphones has caused your phone battery to drain 10% faster and damaged the battery by 5%”. It’s perfect advertisement… brought to you by the idiots in the EU bureaucracy playing tic-tac-toe strategy against grand masters.
I nominate this guy for the first brick. At least the archive saved some of the responses, surprisingly not all of them calling him a fucking moron:
tt24 said:
Your comment is absolutely spot on, no notes. Wish your attitude was more popular and prevalent around here. My guess is that before 2017 or so it used to be.
llmslave2 said:
You're getting downvoted but it's absolutely true that people simply don't want to (or are incapable) of considering second and third order effects that arise from applying interventions on systems that they do not understand.
I hate anyone who thinks preventing corporations from doing whatever they want to everyone on Earth to be Communism. Just fuck these
people.
I share a world with people this fucking stupid. The ancients were right, the natural born slave exists, and hopelite is certainly one. The absurdity of calling someone a narcissist because he doesn't think a corporation should get to control the world through a fucking phone is just great. He's accusing people who disagree with Apple of fascism. Everything is fascism these days. He gets bonus points for his Tomlinsonian use of "child" in his rant.
