I cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on (but I’m not terribly involved). I can tease out that he was disruptive, but I cannot figure out in what manner he was so.

Still, this feels like a Grade-A old school Internet community meltdown from the early 90s.

Actually, more context: my Floridian spouse is weirded out that I wear shorts in the cold, but I picked that up in a cold climate on a farm: my legs don’t get cold, and wearing pants to throw hay at cows doesn’t really check out.

It’s always amused me that there is this bizarre (to me) subculture that is militantly anti-shorts. It’s always someone from like Scotland or New Hampshire. My dude, I’m not wearing pants in Florida from April to October unless I have a funeral, wedding (maybe!), court appearance, or in-person business event. And I’m only wearing socks if God appears and instructs me to do so in person–which, given I am entirely unreligious, isn’t much of a risk.

Walmart is another weird one. They have phone payments but only using their app. Which is some real “company town” BS.

I am similarly cis gender, straight male (much to my more fluid spouse’s amusement and dismay). I’ve just found the fem- voice actors to be better. Femshep, the female lead in Ghost Recon Wildlands, etc. Or maybe it’s that the brah actors for the male characters sound so consistently dumb. And now it’s just a thing I do.

PS. I hope you love yourself.

My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”

Keeping in mind that “knowing and believing what they do” is itself a perilous notion because one of them might be a “Post-Madrid 1933 purple throated” Marxist while another might be a “Modernist new path” Marxist (I made those terms up). I mean I know “lol factions” is an old discussion with the farthest left, but they can’t even agree with each other.

That’s what I enjoy about kagi: because I can block and rank sources, I get to do some reverse-SEO, and the results are really good with remarkably few adjustments.

I’ve switched to another email/calendar service, and I don’t use Google Search (kagi ftw) … but I can’t get rid of my Workspace account because I’m the admin for the rest of the family (who won’t leave gmail). Still, anything that further fragments Google’s information about me is a net plus.

Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer “don’t these people have jobs?!?” way, but more … what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.

I mean, a liter is very close to a quart, so it’s not like we’d be asking people to adjust their mindset completely. And ditching US measures means we could finally, once and for all, dispense with the nonsense of having a dry and a wet “cup” measure.

As for converting records, well, it would be trivial to display a converted value in whatever EMR system a practice uses while noting the values are converted and allowing display of the uncoverted data for validation. (Which brings us to the EMR discussion.)

One of the more annoying things about living in Florida is that we have closely related animals that are nearly identical, but they don’t have glow-butts. (At least not down in the bottom half of the state.)

I’ll wait for someone from like Lakeland to say they have them.

Pretty sure the motivation here is more along the lines of “double tap so they don’t get up.”

Birds. Servers are big, strong, imposing birds. Mobile devices are small and flitting birds. Things in between are birds in between. I’ve put some thematic value on some of the bird names (a showy bird for media, etc.).

Let me give an example: I have a friend on Bluesky. He’s as middle of the road as it’s possible to be (and I say that in an entirely neutral way; it makes him neither better nor worse than anyone). He’s nice, and a good person. But he’s aggressive, disruptive, a fight-picker, and a single-issue conversationalist on social media. Bluesky seems to have a disproportionate number of people who are very nice, well-meaning, but aggressive and disruptive. I left Bluesky to exit an echo chamber for something more serene. I think that’s one thing the loud folk don’t quite get, regardless of their ideology: not all of us are here to yell and throw things all the time.

I never sorted out what the answer was but I’m almost certain it was a gnome issue, possibly a conflict. I did manage to completely hose my system through troubleshooting, but, hey, I just grabbed an earlier version of my nix config, typed one command, and was back up and running in an earlier state. NixOS is weird and troublesome to learn but goodness it’s useful.

I have been entertaining myself by reading this post out loud. It sounds like I’m having a stroke over and over.

It’s a great suggestion (even kidding – though Doc Brown asking about the strength of gravity in the future crossed my mind), but that’s exactly why I don’t think it’s a hardware issue. It’s going to end up being some weird kernel/gnome conflict triggered by one specific flatpak.

Yeah, I will definitely try another live iso. The ONLY possible lead I have is that in btop there’s a .gnome-session entry that pops to the top of the list when the pause happens, but (a) the peak displayed CPU usage is like 10%, and (b) I can’t figure out what it is. So I’m going to try both a KDE session and maybe a new user just to see if there might be something config-related. Though, again, I didn’t change anything in my nix config.

Part of my issue is that I’m not even sure how to describe what’s happening to search to see if it’s a known issue in recent kernels, gnome, etc. I keep descending into insane metaphors, like “it’s sort of like when the cat is about to throw up a hairball and everything pauses while the horror unfolds in front of you.”

I haven’t updated firmware. And because I’m just going to be That Guy this week, I had done a garbage collection cleanup the day before this nonsense started.